science

Poisoner in Chief

Poisoner in Chief is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Poisoner in Chief rather than just read about it. In short: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control is a 2019 book by The New York Times journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer. The book contains untold stories of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chemist called Sidney Gottlieb, who tried to "find a way to control the human brain".

Key takeaways

Poisoner in Chief belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Poisoner in Chief to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Poisoner in Chief from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control is a 2019 book by The New York Times journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer. The book contains untold stories of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chemist called Sidney Gottlieb, who tried to "find a way to control the human brain". In 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles appointed Gottlieb to "run the covert program". In Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer explains the MKUltra program, which was developed by Gottlieb, and described how drugs such as LSD help the CIA to control the minds of enemies.

Title Gottlieb was the CIA chief chemist, who helped the CIA if it needed a poison. and he prepared a poison kit to be used in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, former Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Background During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA imagined communists discovered "some kind of a drug or a potion or a technique that would allow them to control human minds". At that time, many movies and books referred to control minds so the CIA decided to obtain the technique of controlling the mind. The CIA started and ran the MKUltra project for 10 years. According to The Guardian, Gottlieb was known as "the CIA's chief poison-maker". In 1955, R. Gordon Wasson decided to participate in a sacred Indian ceremony that was held in southern Mexico and called "pathway to the divine". According to Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind and some others, Wasson's trip played an important role in "promoting mind-bending drugs and the accompanying cultural revolution". Poisoner in Chief provides information about this trip and the life of Wasson; he explained how the CIA supported the financial cost of the trip without knowing Wasson. Gottlieb, who "was the brains behind the eventual CIA program", managed Wasson's trip.

Context In 1952, Gottlieb formed a group of chemical scientists in one of the CIA's "black sites" located in Munich. They injected drugs into the prisoners and killed them after interrogation. Kinzer wrote; "Gottlieb and his chemical warriors believed they could transform a persistent legend into reality". The group was called MK-ULTRA; Kinzer details of the group's career. He has also used previous research by John Marks and the director of the Senate committee Frank Church. While the MK-Ultra project led to the deaths of prisoners, Gottlieb found mind control to be impossible. After closing this project, he worked on another CIA project associated with making "poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use". According to Kinzer; "In one [mock interrogation], a military officer swore never to reveal a secret, revealed it under the influence of LSD, and afterward forgot the entire episode ... Gottlieb came to believe that [LSD] could be the key to mind control. He was the first acid visionary." Gottlieb employed US doctors to do more experiments on the effects of LSD. For instance, The Paul Hoch of New York Psychiatric Institute collaborated with him. Kinzer describes Gottlieb as "a chemist with a deep-seated interest in mysticism" and "the first person the United States government ever hired to find ways to control human minds". Gottlieb, who was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, played a vital role in establishing the agency in the 1950s and 1960s. Gottlieb was supported by Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, who "believed deeply in mind-control experiments". According to Dutch writer and activist Alex de Jong, some of the experiments mentioned in the book are surreal. For example, an experiment was performed on mentally handicapped children, to whom they fed "cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium". Kinzer spent several years on research into MK-Ultra; he described it as the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control". Kinzer collected information by wide investigating, interviews, and unpublished reports that were released when Gottlieb died. Gottlieb did experiments on American citizens and used techniques of torture and testing that were applied by Nazi Germany.

See also Timeline of United States military operations The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

References

External links Presentation by Kinzer on Poisoner in Chief, October 3, 2019, C-SPAN

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Poisoner in Chief

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Poisoner in Chief claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Poisoner in Chief before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Poisoner in Chief ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Poisoner in Chief

In research: Poisoner in Chief appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Poisoner in Chief in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Poisoner in Chief is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2019 non-fiction books, Books about foreign relations of the United States, Books by Stephen Kinzer, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Poisoner in Chief outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Poisoner in Chief in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Poisoner in Chief means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Poisoner in Chief out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Poisoner in Chief in simple terms?

Why does Poisoner in Chief matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Poisoner in Chief?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Poisoner in Chief.