In Project Mind Control<\/em>, John Lisle reveals inside story of the CIA\u2019s secret mind control project, MKULTRA. Read on for a featured excerpt. On September 25, 1980, Rosanna Del Guidice arrived thirty minutes early to an office building in downtown Boston. Inside were cubicles, a small dining area, and, most importantly, a conference room where the depositions occurred. Rosanna was a court reporter. By typing on a stenograph machine, she converted the spoken word into written text as fast as her clients could talk.<\/span><\/p>\n Rosanna had always dreamed of being a teacher, but when she learned that teachers made \u201cgarbage<\/span> money,\u201d as she said in a later interview, she changed career plans. She briefly worked as a legal secretary making $1.63 an hour. On seeing an ad for a court reporting school offering its graduates six times as much, she enrolled against her father\u2019s advice, graduated in 1972, and became one of the few female court reporters in New England.<\/span><\/p>\n The work was overwhelming, at least in the beginning. Rosanna cried after her first deposition because she couldn\u2019t keep pace with the attorney\u2019s relentless questions. \u201cI didn\u2019t know anything about the setup,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what the hell I was doing. That\u2019s how it all started.\u201d For the rest of the year, \u201cI prayed my way through half of the depositions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Pretty soon, however, she gained enough confidence to become one of the fastest and most trusted court reporters in the industry, despite the discrimination that she faced as a woman. Attorneys would often ask her to do clerical work, something that they never asked of the male court reporters. \u201cI don\u2019t make copies,\u201d she would tell them with a straight face. \u201cGet your secretary in here.\u201d In fact, she often earned twice as much money as the attorneys did for the day\u2019s work.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1978, Rosanna experienced one of her most memorable days on the job. The case involved a group of photofinishers\u2014the people who develop photographic film\u2014who were suing the Kodak film company because their customers kept returning photos with red-eye. The photofinishers maintained that the problem was with Kodak\u2019s equipment, and therefore Kodak should be held financially responsible. Kodak maintained that the problem was with the photofinishers\u2019 development process, not the equipment, and therefore, the photofinishers should be held financially responsible. Millions of dollars were on the line.<\/span><\/p>\n A Kodak attorney had told the company\u2019s scientists to keep their mouths shut during their depositions, but one elderly scientist slipped up and accidentally revealed that he had known about a problem with Kodak\u2019s equipment. On hearing this, the attorney demanded to adjourn the deposition, an obvious attempt to silence the scientist. The photofinishers\u2019 attorney yelled, \u201cYou\u2019re not taking a break now, we\u2019re in the middle of questioning!\u201d Each side began shouting obscenities back and forth. In the heat of the moment, the Kodak attorney grabbed his counterpart by the necktie and dragged him across the conference table, leading to an all-out brawl. Rosanna, caught in the middle of it, clutched her stenograph machine and ran out to the hallway. \u201cI\u2019ll never forget it to the day I die,\u201d she said. \u201cThe old scientist blew the case, all because he told the truth!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n Rosanna had arrived at the Boston office building thirty minutes early to arrange the conference room just how she liked it. She positioned herself at the head of the heavy wooden table. To her left would sit the attorney asking the questions; she wanted him as close to her ear as possible. To her right would sit Sidney Gottlieb, the deponent, whom she would turn to face. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how much I learned to read lips. You can\u2019t miss a beat.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n At 10:00 A.M., Gottlieb entered the conference room. Small in stature and with stark white hair, he didn\u2019t want to be there, but he had no choice. Weeks earlier, a U.S. marshal had handed him a subpoena requiring him to provide a deposition in an ongoing case. Seven prisoners from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary were suing the government for using them as guinea pigs in secret drug experiments. One prisoner described his experience in Atlanta as involving \u201chorrible<\/span> periods of living nightmares.\u201d Another<\/span> tried to kill himself by hanging, burning, and chewing off his own arm.<\/span><\/p>\n Once the attorneys arrived, everyone sat in their respective seats. Rosanna swore in Gottlieb and the deposition began. Attorney Thomas Maddox initiated the direct examination.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cDr.<\/span>\u00a0Gottlieb, you understand I represent Mr. Don Roderick Scott, who was an inmate at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in the late 1950s; is that correct, sir?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Gottlieb, a stutterer whose condition worsened when he was nervous, shook his head up and down.<\/span><\/p>\n Maddox intervened, \u201cYou need to answer something verbal, so this young lady\u2014she can\u2019t record nods.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI do,\u201d Gottlieb said. \u201cI am trying to say yes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Maddox next asked Gottlieb to describe his educational background.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWell, my PhD was from Cal. Tech\u2026in something called bio-organic chemistry.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Maddox then skipped to the crux of the issue: \u201cWhen did you first begin your association with the Central Intelligence Agency?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n Over the next three years, Gottlieb sat for four additional depositions conducted by legendary civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh and his young law partner James Turner. All four depositions took place in Culpeper, Virginia\u2014one at a Holiday Inn, the other three at the Boxwood House Motel. The five total depositions lasted a combined twenty-five hours and consist of 823 pages of material. Many of Gottlieb\u2019s colleagues sat for depositions of their own, as did many of their victims, constituting thousands more pages.<\/span><\/p>\n These newly discovered depositions provide a window into Gottlieb\u2019s and his colleagues\u2019 inner thoughts about their participation in some of the most controversial projects ever undertaken in the history of the CIA, projects that involved sex, drugs, torture, hypnotism, electric shocks, chemical comas, sensory deprivation, and assassination attempts. In short, the depositions represent a foray into the minds of those who perpetrated, as well as those who suffered, these infamous acts.<\/span><\/p>\n Upon rereading the transcript of Gottlieb\u2019s first deposition, Rosanna said that he had revealed \u201ca<\/span>\u00a0lot more than I would have expected.\u201d While most people tend to conveniently forget their memories whenever they have an incentive to do so, Gottlieb, to her surprise, \u201cwas pretty open. His answers were so long. I was fascinated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Paul Figley, an attorney for the Department of Justice, had been present at another of Gottlieb\u2019s depositions and reached a similar conclusion. In an interview, he said that Gottlieb \u201cwas<\/span> going to tell the story that he wanted to tell. He had retired at that point and was going to do whatever he wanted to do, maybe what he had done his whole life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When asked whether Gottlieb had provided more information than was advisable from the perspective of a defense attorney, Figley took a long pause. \u201cHe was not as\u2014\u201d Another pause. \u201cI didn\u2019t have as much control over him as I would have liked.\u201d He continued:<\/span><\/p>\n In a deposition setting, what you really want if you\u2019re defending is for your client to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the question that is asked, and not to then go on and say, \u201cThis might be of interest to you\u201d or \u201cWhen I did that I thought . . .\u201d It just opens up more areas and will lead to more rocks that people will have to turn over and see what\u2019s underneath. He was not the kind of witness that if you\u2019re defending a case you want to have because you don\u2019t know what he\u2019s going to say.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n From the defense\u2019s perspective, Gottlieb\u2019s depositions were a disaster. From the historian\u2019s perspective, they\u2019re a gold mine.<\/span><\/p>\n Sidney Gottlieb had a number of unusual<\/span> quirks. Most noticeably, he walked with an awkward limp, the result of two clubfeet. He also talked with a stutter. It wasn\u2019t too pronounced\u2014unless he was nervous\u2014but when he was young, it gave his classmates yet another reason to tease him. From an early age, Gottlieb felt like an outsider.<\/span><\/p>\n His other quirks were self-inflicted. Throughout his life, he was known to drink goat milk, tinker with gadgets, and perform unusual dances to folk music.<\/span><\/p>\n Born in New York City on August 3, 1918, to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Hungary, Gottlieb was an extremely bright child. When his older brother, David, built a makeshift laboratory in the basement of their brick house, Sidney developed a lasting love for science. He attended elementary and high schools in the Bronx, then jumped between colleges\u2014City College of New York, Arkansas Polytechnic College, the University of Wisconsin\u2014where for once in his life he apparently fit in. The Arkansas yearbook called him \u201ca<\/span>\u00a0Yankee who pleases the southerners.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n At the University of Wisconsin, Gottlieb studied under the renowned bacteriologist Ira Baldwin. \u201cMr.<\/span>\u00a0Gottlieb is a very high type of Jewish boy,\u201d Baldwin wrote in a glowing letter of recommendation. \u201cHe has a brilliant mind, is thoroughly honest and reliable, and is modest and unassuming.\u201d Baldwin also mentioned that Gottlieb had \u201ca slight speech impediment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n After earning a bachelor\u2019s degree in chemistry in 1940, Gottlieb enrolled in graduate school at the California Institute of Technology. Young, trim, and talented, he not only excelled in his coursework but also met the love of his life, Margaret Moore, who was studying preschool education at nearby Whittier College. Margaret had grown up in India, where her father was a Presbyterian missionary. To her father\u2019s chagrin, she was a freethinker who questioned the morality of missionaries as well as the claims of Christianity.<\/span><\/p>\n Although Gottlieb and Margaret had been raised in completely different cultures on completely different continents, they shared the same eccentric spirit. In 1942, they married in a small civil ceremony. Margaret\u2019s mother, accustomed to her daughter\u2019s rebellious ways, wrote to her relatives, \u201cIf<\/span>\u00a0they have Each Other, they are indeed fortunate in this world full of sorrow.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n The United States had just entered World War II, and like many young American men, Sidney Gottlieb felt a sense of patriotic duty to fight for the country that had given his immigrant parents a second start at life. As soon as he earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1943, he tried to enlist in the Army. His limp, however, disqualified him from service. \u201cI<\/span>\u00a0wanted to do my share in the war effort,\u201d he later said, \u201cyet I couldn\u2019t convince anyone that I would not be hampered in my performance.\u201d The rejection was one of the major disappointments of his life because it seemed to legitimize his long-held belief that he was an outsider. Gottlieb may have been unconventional by nature, but he nevertheless craved acceptance.<\/span><\/p>\n Over the next eight years, Gottlieb worked brief stints at the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Research Council, and the University of Maryland, mostly developing tests to detect drugs in the human body. The jobs, he said, \u201cbecame<\/span>\u00a0repetitive and sometimes pretty monotonous. I needed more of a challenge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Meanwhile, his personal life was full of excitement. He and Margaret soon had their first two children, both girls. The family of four (eventually six with two more little boys) moved into a remodeled former slave cabin in Virginia that had no water, electricity, \u201cor<\/span>\u00a0any of that fancy stuff,\u201d Margaret wrote in an autobiographical essay. \u201cIt sat under three very magnificent oak trees, and when I saw it, I said, \u2018This will be my home.\u2019 Sid, having grown up in New York City, thought I was nuts, but I persuaded him that I knew how to live this way.\u201d Despite his initial skepticism, Gottlieb quickly adjusted to the primitive lifestyle. \u201cSid is pitching in more than he ever has before and he\u2019s wonderful. I feel guilty sleeping when he has to milk the goats.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Once his family was settled, Gottlieb began looking for a new job that was both intellectually stimulating and of service to his country. He might have been prevented from fighting in World War II, but his sense of patriotism was as strong as ever, especially at the outset of the Cold War.<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n The United States and the Soviet Union had shared an uneasy alliance during World War II. After the war, their alliance crumbled, prompting the onset of the Cold War, a decades-long period of geopolitical tension between the two countries. Contributing to the tension was the fact that many aspects of Soviet society\u2014atheism, communism, slave-labor gulags, the dissolution of democratic institutions\u2014seemed incompatible with American values.<\/span><\/p>\n Several other important world events further heightened the sense of tension. For one, the Soviets blockaded West Berlin in an attempt to extend their control over Germany. They also detonated their first atomic bomb, ending the American nuclear monopoly. Moreover, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Chinese Nationalists in their civil war, and Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, initiating the Korean War.<\/span><\/p>\n Many Americans feared that Communists would next try to overthrow the government of the United States. As a result of this \u201cRed Scare,\u201d blacklists, loyalty oaths, and book bans spread across the country. (The children\u2019s story <\/span>Robin Hood<\/span><\/i> was a notable target because it glorified stealing from the rich to help the poor.) Congress even passed anti-Communist legislation, such as the McCarran Internal Security Act, which barred suspect individuals from obtaining citizenship, holding passports, working in government jobs, and, in some cases, traveling to and from the country. At the state level, the Texas legislature made Communist Party membership a felony punishable by twenty years in prison. Governor<\/span> Allan Shivers hesitated to sign the bill because of the punishment; he thought that the death penalty was more appropriate.<\/span><\/p>\n Conservative politicians capitalized on the Red Scare. In a gambit of political theater known as McCarthyism, they would accuse anyone with even the most tenuous connection to left-leaning causes of being a card-carrying Communist. The sensational nature of the accusations, regardless of whether they were true, generated fear, which generated press coverage, which generated votes for the politicians on Election Day. Journalist George Reedy joked that the eponymous Wisconsin politician Joseph McCarthy \u201ccouldn\u2019t<\/span>\u00a0find a Communist in Red Square. He didn\u2019t know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx.\u201d Nevertheless, McCarthy recognized an opportunity to advance his political career when he saw one, even if it meant that he had to invent an enemy to fight.<\/span><\/p>\n Politicians weren\u2019t the only ones exploiting the Red Scare. If the Navy wanted new ships, it exaggerated the threat of Soviet ships. If the Air Force wanted new bombers, it exaggerated the threat of Soviet bombers. The<\/span>\u00a0CIA once bought thousands of subscriptions to <\/span>The Daily Worker<\/span><\/i>, a Communist Party mouthpiece, in an effort to inflate the apparent circulation of the newspaper. If the Soviet Union was seen as powerful, the logic went, then Congress would give the military and the intelligence community more money to help defend the United States. And it worked.<\/span><\/p>\n A good portion of the Red Scare was manufactured for the benefit of a few individuals, companies, and organizations, but there still existed many people, for many good reasons, who believed that the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States. Sidney Gottlieb was one of them.<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n At the height of the Red Scare, Gottlieb\u2019s patriotism drove him to apply for a job at the CIA, where he thought that his scientific expertise would compensate for his physical shortcomings. The CIA had been created in 1947 to coordinate American efforts to gather and analyze intelligence. President Harry Truman noted that the original CIA \u201cwas<\/span>\u00a0not intended as a \u2018Cloak & Dagger Outfit\u2019\u201d that engaged in sabotage, assassinations, and other covert operations. Rather, it was \u201cintended merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world,\u201d though that would soon change.<\/span><\/p>\n Enabling the change was a series of laws that gave the CIA an unprecedented lack of oversight. Most notably, the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 gave the CIA the ability to spend unvouchered funds and freed it from disclosing to Congress who its employees were and what they did. In other words, CIA personnel were emboldened to engage in covert operations because nobody was looking over their shoulders.<\/span><\/p>\n During the Red Scare, it was easy for those personnel to rationalize the need for covert operations. A government report on the CIA from the 1950s best summarizes their philosophy: \u201cIt<\/span>\u00a0is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.\u201d Put simply, desperate times call for desperate measures.<\/span><\/p>\n Reflecting on the trajectory of the CIA, Truman lamented, \u201cFor<\/span>\u00a0some time I have been disturbed by the way [the] CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.\u201d In time, nobody would become more intimately acquainted with troublesome CIA operations in explosive areas than Sidney Gottlieb.<\/span><\/p>\n But in the summer of 1951, Gottlieb didn\u2019t know much about the CIA. All he knew was that it was a place where he might repay the debt that he felt that he owed to his country. And to his good fortune, the CIA was looking to hire brilliant scientists like himself. The development of atomic bombs had shown that science was now an integral part of national security. The CIA needed someone like Gottlieb to explore the frontiers of knowledge and find new ways to win the Cold War, no matter how odd or esoteric.<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n Gottlieb was culturally, but not religiously, Jewish. Like so much else about his life, he would try to keep his beliefs shrouded in mystery. Margaret, on the other hand, was more forthcoming about her and her husband\u2019s New Age sense of spirituality:<\/span><\/p>\n I<\/span><\/i> am impatient when I hear people equate being \u201cgood\u201d or \u201creligious\u201d with being Christian. There are many \u201cgoods\u201d and many religions, and a Muslim\u2019s way to God is very similar to ours, and so is a Hindu\u2019s or a Buddhist\u2019s, and I can\u2019t see that Christianity is more full of love or less full of fears and superstitions\u2026Is there a God? There is certainly a Force or a Source that all mankind (and maybe animals too) feels. It amazes and delights me that peoples who have not known of each other\u2019s existence on the earth have come to very similar questions and to similar answers down through the ages since our very beginnings. There is Something that we all sense and are familiar with. Please let us not say, \u201cMy way is the only way.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Given Gottlieb\u2019s unique background and unorthodox beliefs, he once again felt like an outsider at the CIA, an organization whose workforce of affluent Ivy League graduates was often summarized as pale, male, and Yale. Gottlieb spent his first two years in the CIA working as a chemist for what was then called the Office of Policy Coordination, the division responsible for conducting covert operations abroad. While reminiscing in his depositions about this early work, he said that he had been involved in the \u201cmore<\/span>\u00a0classical application of chemistry to the intelligence field, things like secret writing, the use of chemistry in the printing process, areas like that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In 1953, he became the head of the Chemical Branch of the CIA\u2019s Technical Services Staff (TSS). What did the TSS do? During one of Gottlieb\u2019s depositions, attorney Thomas Maddox asked him, \u201cDid<\/span>\u00a0[it] produce the gadgets and things we have associated with James Bond?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the right idea,\u201d Gottlieb said. \u201cYou are in the right ballpark.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But both Maddox and Gottlieb knew that the TSS did much more than produce clever gadgets. Under Gottlieb\u2019s direction, it conducted some of the most notorious projects in American history.<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout his depositions, Gottlieb stressed that in order to understand his work, it was necessary to understand the context in which it was done. At the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA had feared that Communist powers like the Soviet Union and China possessed methods of mind control powerful enough to manipulate a person\u2019s beliefs and behaviors. One reason why the CIA feared such a thing was because Russian scientists had pioneered the field of behavioral conditioning. Back in 1897, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had shown that by ringing a bell every time that a dog ate, he could condition the dog to salivate at the sound of the bell alone. Surely the Soviets had since extended<\/span>\u00a0Pavlov\u2019s work to include human subjects.<\/span><\/p>\n Another reason was because in the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had held a series of show<\/span>\u00a0trials in Moscow to remove his political opponents from power. Strangely, many of the defendants begged to be found guilty of the false charges levied against them. Yuri<\/span>\u00a0Pyatakov even prostrated before Stalin and asked for the honor of shooting his fellow defendants. (Perhaps his plea fell on deaf ears because his ex-wife was among the group.) Why were the defendants behaving so bizarrely? Had they been drugged? Had they been hypnotized? Had they been subjected to some other form of mind control?<\/span><\/p>\n Then, in 1948, Cardinal<\/span>\u00a0J\u00f3zsef Mindszenty, leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary and a vocal critic of the country\u2019s new Communist regime, was arrested on charges of treason. Again, the charges were obviously false. The Communists were simply trying to silence one of their most influential critics. But at a show trial six weeks after his arrest, Mindszenty had somehow changed. He wasn\u2019t his fearless, outspoken self. Instead, he appeared cold and unemotional. He didn\u2019t even recognize his own mother when she came to visit him. Strangest of all, he confessed to the false charges. The image of this downtrodden priest, once so full of conviction, confessing to crimes that he didn\u2019t commit caused many CIA personnel to wonder whether he had been subjected to mind control. \u201cSomehow<\/span>\u00a0they took his soul apart,\u201d said one intelligence officer.<\/span><\/p>\n In reality, Mindszenty confessed because he had been subjected to the more traditional methods of coercion: fatigue, hunger, torture, and isolation. Yet nobody in the CIA knew this for sure. Out of an abundance of caution, they assumed the worst. Maybe the Communists had perfected mind control. The recent success of dystopian novels like Aldous Huxley\u2019s <\/span>Brave New World<\/span><\/i> and George Orwell\u2019s <\/span>Nineteen Eighty-Four <\/span><\/i>certainly made it seem possible.<\/span><\/p>\n The Communist threat of mind control was considered so real that a CIA memo from the early 1950s recommended that all overseas employees based near the Iron Curtain avoid hospitalization, medical attention, and psychiatric treatment of any kind unless conducted by \u201cfully<\/span>\u00a0authorized and trusted institutions and doctors.\u201d The enemy might strike at any unguarded moment.<\/span><\/p>\n Such a fear wasn\u2019t as strange as it sounds, and Gottlieb knew that it sounded strange. \u201cAll<\/span>\u00a0of this might seem farfetched now,\u201d he said in his depositions. \u201cBut I would beg you to try to live in another context, namely that of 30 years ago, when it was\u2014\u201d He paused. \u201cThings were thought possible then.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 2025 by John Lisle. All rights reserved.
<\/strong><\/p>\nPrologue<\/b><\/h3>\n
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1: The Outsider<\/b><\/h3>\n
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<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n