Sidney Gottlieb: the chemist who ran it, and then burned it

Sidney Gottlieb ran MKULTRA from its authorisation in 1953 until it wound down. He was a chemist with a doctorate from Caltech, head of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, and by every account an unusual figure inside the agency — he had a club foot and a stutter, lived on a farm outside Washington, raised goats, and rose before dawn to milk them.

He is the single most consequential individual in the programme, and one of the least visible.

What he was responsible for

The scope of the drug work: the acquisition of LSD in quantity, the distribution of it to contracted researchers, the decision to test on unwitting subjects, and the safe houses where that testing was done.

Technical Services also made the agency’s devices, and Gottlieb’s remit extended well beyond behavioural research. He was involved in preparing poisons for assassination attempts — the plot against Patrice Lumumba, and the schemes against Fidel Castro, both examined by the Church Committee.

The destruction

In 1973, with the Watergate investigations closing in and Richard Helms leaving the directorship, Helms ordered the MKULTRA files destroyed. Gottlieb supervised it. He was retiring the same year.

That act is the reason almost nothing can be said with confidence about what the programme actually did, as opposed to what it proposed and paid for. It is also, in itself, one of the more informative facts about the programme — records are destroyed by people who have formed a view about how they will read.

What he said afterwards

Gottlieb testified before Congress in 1977 after the surviving financial records surfaced. He confirmed the destruction. He described the programme as a product of its time and of a genuine fear about Soviet and Chinese capability.

He also said, in substance, that the work had produced nothing useful — that the search for a reliable means of controlling behaviour had failed. That assessment from the man who ran it is consistent with what the surviving internal documents say, and it is the part of his testimony least often quoted.

The front foundations

The mechanism that let MKULTRA reach into eighty institutions without those institutions knowing is worth setting out, because it is the structural core of the programme.

Money was routed through ostensibly independent bodies — most notably the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation among others — which made grants in the ordinary way.

A researcher applied to a foundation, received a grant, published in the usual journals and reported to the usual committees. In many cases nobody at the university knew where the money originated.

Why he was never prosecuted

He was granted immunity for his 1977 testimony. Civil suits were brought and largely failed, in part because the destruction of the records made specific harms impossible to trace to specific decisions.

That is a closed loop worth naming plainly: the destruction of the evidence protected the person who destroyed it.