Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra And Brainwashing's Mystery Man

By | January 7, 2020

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Sidney Gottlieb. Courtesy the CIA, via npr.org

In the Cold War years, we didn't even know about it: MKUltra, directed by Sidney Gottlieb of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). MKUltra aggressively researched mind control -- or "brainwashing" -- using human subjects as guinea pigs. The best-known experiments involved LSD, although that's not Gottlieb's only legacy. He was also involved in assassination attempts of foreign leaders.

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Sidney Gottlieb, left, and his attorney, appearing at a Senate hearing in 1977. Source: dailytelegraph.com.au

Sidney Gottlieb, the child of Hungarian immigrants, was born on August 3, 1918. After getting a doctorate in biochemistry from California Institute of Technology in 1940, he married Margaret Moore, who had been born in India.

The secretive scientist who only had one known picture of himself was hired in 1951 by Allen Dulles, who would later become the head of the CIA and two years later, Gottlieb was running MKUltra, named for the ultra-sensitive activities they were participating in. For twenty years, he was the senior scientist. The C.I.A., convinced that its enemies had developed a method to control human minds, developed MKUltra to find its own techniques until the 1960s, inspired by the work of Japanese and Nazi scientists. This mind control research was dubbed “Artichoke.”