So far from the test in the count of rebel of a comparative games that we're playing 3 out of the if it is the case that tests are driven by your socio economic circumstances your family background we have any quality then we'll always have these relative gaps but if it is the case that children like myself like Professor Kennedy who came from a certain background you know we both were solidly middle class but I came from schools where they were not as strong our tests are after 2 tests were not as great but we had a lot of potential in people invested in the US and they kept us on the trajectory of higher mobility and then we were able to thrive and I'm more interested in that experience I'm actually tired of the narrative of testing because we know the test are innately not fair and yet we keep using it so my thing is how do we keep kids sustained on the trajectory of mobility and overall sustained good well being well you know hopefully through the rest of our of our series this month we're going to take a look at some examples in schools and communities in other parts of the country that are doing just that even if they're just doing it locally so on that you know I've got to wrap up this conversation today Prudence Carter dean of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Education coeditor of closing the opportunity gap what America must do to give every child an even chance Carter thank you so much for being with us thank you for having me and Professor Irom X. Kendy executive director of American University's anti-racist Research and Policy Center His latest book is how to be a nit a racist Professor Kennedy thank you so much thank you for having me on the show and every Monday this month we're going to have a special series so stay tuned for that a magnet everybody this is important. On point is a production of W P U R Boston and N P R. Point comes from the listeners of. And home advisors matching homeowners with home improvement professionals for a variety of home projects from minor repairs to major remodels homeowners can read reviews of local pros and book appointments on line at Home Advisor. And Geico offering auto insurance coverage for cars trucks or S.U.V.s and providing 247 customer service more information on auto insurance at Geico dot com or 180947. At Connecticut Public Radio your support makes high quality local news possible thank you in Indiana mental health needs for skyrocketing at the same time there was a chronic shortage of providers one Indiana Medical Center though has found a workaround. Are you doing today tell us psychiatry in my life see I married the risk Ellie that story this afternoon on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from N.P.R. News. This afternoon at 4. Red Lake County Minnesota called once in the pages of The Washington Post the worst place to live in America the guy who wrote that he lives there now some more time than we spend out here at the harder it is for us to imagine ever moving back to D.C. Ever trying to make that. Work for us and get. Around marketplace. Join us tonight at $630.00. Or from W.H.Y. WHY in Philadelphia I'm Terry Gross with. Today the CIA secret experiments with. DRUG. To control the. Universities and research centers. Program known as. The Godfather. But many of the drug experiments were conducted in American prisons and detention centers in Japan Germany and the Philippines. Live from N.P.R. News in Washington I'm Lakshmi saying a European physician who prescribes abortion pills to American women over the Internet is suing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration N.P.R.'s Sarah McCammon reports the lawsuit was filed after the F.D.A. Issued a warning letter earlier this year since last year Dr Rebecca gone Prince has been prescribing abortion pills to women in the United States over the Internet through her organization called aid access which is based in Austria Gompertz received a letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in March ordering her to stop anything you know chin juice and it's very it can form of intimidation that it's quite severe and so I think it's very and again a lawsuit being filed on Congress bath accuses federal officials of seizing some of the abortion drugs and asked a federal court to block any prosecution of gone birds or her patients the F.D.A. Declined to comment on potential regulatory actions but said in a statement that the agency is concerned about women's health and safety when using abortion drugs illegally obtained online Sarah McCammon N.P.R. News the U.S. Coast Guard is trying to rescue 4 missing South Korean crew members who have been trapped inside a cargo ship since it overturned yesterday and caught fire off Georgia's coast according to multiple news reports the Coast Guard has located the victims a salvage crews know drilling a hole through the hall to make contact with Tenet Lloyd Heflin tells the Associated Press early indications are that the crews on board and OK The Taliban say as far as they're concerned they have an agreement with the United States that would end America's longest war however the state of negotiations remains unclear after another U.S. Service member was killed in a Taliban bombing in Kabul President Trump announce he canceled a secret face to face meeting with senior Taliban leaders a Camp David we have more from N.P.R.'s The Taliban spokesman told N.P.R. That they'd already signed the copy of the agreement which they'd reached with the United States and that handed over to officials from the Gulf state of Qatar who have been hosting the talks. In our view it only remains to be signed in a ceremony in the presence of international witnesses in the media so far that we are ready and that is clear to all and Shaheen says insurgents were ready to begin talks with other Afghans that would create or are not more severe for us to enter into negotiation to talk about the future of the deal would have seen a phased out withdrawal of American troops but other Afghans argue it would have weakened their national security forces and in bold in the insurgents making them less likely to compromise in those talks they've said negotiations needed to include the Afghan government not just the Taliban and the United States they had aid N.P.R. News Islam about the Dow Jones Industrial Average is that 59 points since the Open at 26856 This is N.P.R. . President trumps honoring the 1st responders of last month's deadly shooting in Dayton Ohio moments ago he presented the public safety officer medal of valor to 6 officers they responded to the mass shooting Aug 4th and he claimed 9 lives and left more than 2 dozen people enter the officers confronted the shooter within 30 seconds preventing what likely would have been even more pledge Chad in the latest setback to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson one of his cabinet secretaries has resigned saying she now believes Johnson is trying to crash the country of the European out of the European Union without a deal N.P.R.'s Frank Langfitt has more. Work and Pensions Secretary resigned not only from Johnson's cabinet but also from the Conservative Party Rudd said she objected to Johnson's expelling 21 members of parliament from the party for voting against him last week on Bracks that in an interview with London's Telegraph newspaper Rudd called the expulsions a quote act of political vandalism was a departure comes after a dreadful week or so for the prime minister Johnson lost his 1st 3 parliamentary votes parliament passed a law blocking him from taking U.K. Out of the E.U. Without a withdrawal agreement and Johnson's brother Joe also resigned as a minister in his government saying he'd been quote torn between family loyalty and the national interest Frank Langfitt N.P.R. News London British Airways is canceling nearly all of its flights through tomorrow affecting as many as 195000 travelers because of a pilot strike the airline says it amended its schedule because they had no way of predicting how many pilots would show up for work or which aircraft they were qualified to fly the pilots are fighting for higher pay I'm Lakshmi saying N.P.R. News Support for N.P.R. Comes from N.P.R. Stations other contributors include a math Mazie I'm committed to building math success critical thinking and problem solving skills teaching students face to face and more than 1000 franchised locations more at math Amazing them dot com. September isn't a time when most people are thinking about elections but the September 10th primaries could mean changes in who's running Connecticut cities I'm John Dankosky And I'm Colleen McEnroe what happens in those cities has a big impact on the lives of everyone in the state join us for a special primary night coverage from Connecticut public on radio and T.V. We'll be bringing you the results and analysis from Hartford New Haven in Bridgeport and let you know what's happening in other cities and towns around our state join us at 8 pm on Tuesday September 10th are in Connecticut Public Radio television and online. This is FRESH AIR I'm Terry Gross You may have heard stories about the CIA's secret experiments with L.S.D. There which sixty's counter-culture luminaries like Ken Keyes Ian Allen Ginsberg were 1st introduced to the drug there's a lot more to the CIA's experiments with L.S.D. And some of it is pretty horrifying my guest journalist Stephen Kinzer has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program which was known as M.K. Ultra L.S.D. Was just one of the mind altering drugs that were tested in the program to see if and how they could be weaponized to control human behavior many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments are subjected to what amounts to psychological torture the M.K. Ultra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1963 he ran it until it was shut down in the early sixty's Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist creating poisons and innovative ways of syrup to administering them he also became head of the CIA program that creates high tech gadgets for spies to use Stephen Kinzer new book is called poisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control one of kynges previous books was about the Dulles brothers Allan and John Foster Dulles Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years M.K. Ultra was in operation Stephen Kinzer Welcome back to FRESH AIR Let's start with what was the mission of M.K. Ultra. During the early period of the Cold War in the late forty's and early 1950 S. The CIA became paralyzed with a fear that communists had perfected some kind of a drug or a potion or a technique that would allow them to control human minds and this was actually a greatly exaggerated fear but. Played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century we were fed a lot of books and movies about the idea of mind control that you could hypnotize someone or give someone a drug that would make them do something that otherwise they would never do. And seized by this myth the CIA not only believe that communists had approached or reached this holy grail but that the CIA should also find out a way to do it so M.K. Ultra was a project lasting up to 10 years in which the CIA sought to find ways to control the human mind they wanted to be able to have a truth serum that would make prisoners say everything they knew also an amnesiac that would make people forget what they had done and most important a technique or a drug that would allow the CIA to direct agents to carry out acts like sabotage or assassination and then for a get who had ordered them to do it or even that they had carried out the actions at all so M.K. Ultra was the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control so L.S.D. Was created in 1943 by Dr Albert Hofmann at the San Dimas laboratories. How did the CIA find out about L.S.D. . As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind CIA scientists became aware of the existence of L.S.D. And this became an obsession for the early directors of M.K. Ultra actually the M.K. Ultra director Sidney Gottlieb can now be seen as the man who brought L.S.D. To America he. As the unwitting godfather of the entire L.S.D. Counterculture in the early 1950 S. He arranged for the CIA to pay $240000.00 to buy the world's entire supply of L.S.D. He brought this to the United States and he began spreading it around to hospitals clinics prisons and other institutions asking them through bogus foundations to carry out research projects and find out what L.S.D. Was how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control now the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking L.S.D. In many cases sounded very pleasurable they told their friends about it who were those people can Keyes eat the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest got his L.S.D. In an experiment sponsored by the CIA by M.K. Ultra by Sidney Gottlieb so did Robert Hunter the lyricist for the Grateful Dead which went on to become a great purveyor of L.S.D. Culture Alan Ginsburg the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using L.S.D. Got his 1st L.S.D. From Sidney Gottlieb although of course he never knew that name so CIA brought L.S.D. To America unwittingly and actually it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended even Timothy Leary who turned a lot of people on to L. As did he and help guide them through trips he found out about L.S.D. . Because of signal he wasn't. art of one of the experiments but what's the connection you're absolutely right tim leary who became the great guru of l.s.d. 1st came across psychedelics through sydney gottlieb although like all these other people you'd never heard god leaves a name because god lead live didn't complete invisibility so kim a leary's interest in psychedelic drugs was sparked by an article that appeared in the life magazine in 1957 it was about a couple of americans who had gone to mexico and found the magic mushroom that produces hallucinations leary was fascinated by this he later went to mexico and before you ever tried l.s.d. He was using those magic mushrooms what he did not know and had no way of knowing is that that expedition to mexico that produced the life magazine article was paid for by said the god leave and the cia it was part of his effort to test all kinds of substances including naturally occurring ones like shrubs and trees and barks and mushrooms and fish parts and animal pieces as possible tools for mind control so it's not surprising that later on in life tim leary said the entire ellis d. Movement was started by the cia if he had known better he would have said it was founded by the cia and in particular sydney godly so just so i understand this correctly so the cia basically said phony philanthropic foundations which then funded university and college research and it's do those research experiments that people like ginsburg and keys ian robert hunter got introduced to l.s.t. And the university reach arched researchers had no idea that their research was actually being funded by the cia i think that's largely correct so stanford university He was running a program in which they asked for volunteers to come in and try this new substance Allan Ginsburg was one of the volunteers so was Robert Hunter a similar set of experiments was going on at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital that's where Ken Keyes he took L.S.D. For the 1st time he was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the L.S.D. To give it to his friends that became the basis for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest So all of these original strands that came together in the sixty's to produce this great countercultural revolt based around L.S.D. Can be traced back through these bogus foundations to the CIA and ultimately the director of M.K. Ultra Sidney Gottlieb. Now there's a much darker side to this program because a lot of people who are being experimented on they were prisoners I mean they had no idea what they were being given one of those prisoners was the famous gangster Whitey Bulger who was serving time then for hijacking a truck and he was in the Atlanta penitentiary so he actually wrote something describing his experience can you give us a summary of what he said. Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteer for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment he was given L.S.D. Every day for more than a year he later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long term reactions to L.S.D. Was essentially could we make a person loses mind by feeding him L.S.D. Every day over such a long period Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences which he described as quite horrific he thought he was going insane he wrote I was in prison for committing a crime but they committed a greater crime on me and towards the end of his life Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him now that doctor later died a natural death so Bulger didn't get to carry out his wish but Bulger was one of many prisoners across America who unwittingly were fed huge doses of L.S.D. And the reason for this was very simple Godley wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds and he realized it was a 2 part process 1st you had to blast away the existing mind 2nd you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void but he didn't get too far on number 2 but he did a lot of work on number one trying to find out how to destroy the mind of a human being and that was the purpose of experiments that he carried out in prisons in the. Out of states and at secret detention centers in Europe and East Asia and he worked with some pretty high class torturers too from one of the Nazi doctors and the chief Poizner from Japan during World War 2 How did they end up in his program. One of the most remarkable discoveries that I made in the research for this book is that the CIA mind control project M.K. Ultra was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps not only was it roughly based on those experiments but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionist and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research for example Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the dock concentration camp. And the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether Mescal in could be the key to mind control I was one of their big avenues of investigation so they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like Saharan which is still being used Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Dietrich in Maryland which was the center of this project to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from Saron and was there a difference in how long it took to die if you were a small child or an infant whether you were an elderly person or they were a healthy middle aged person the only way to know this would be to have killed all those people the CIA was eager to get this kind of information and actually one of the things that is the most bizarre about the fact that we relied on Nazi doctors. Is that Sidney Gottlieb himself was Jewish and his parents had emigrated from Central Europe in the early 20th century if they had not emigrated Sidney Gottlieb might well himself have been brought up in Central Europe forced into a ghetto brought to a concentration camp and become the subject of one of these grotesque Nazi medical experiments Nonetheless he didn't seem to have any problem working as a CIA officer with the doctors who conducted those experiments you know I found that pretty hard to understand. But you know Also Kurt Blome one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb was on trial in Nuremberg he was acquitted but he was one of the Nazi doctors who was tried and the Nuremberg Code established that if you were conducting experiments that the person you were experimenting on needs to give informed consent and of course M.K. Ultra totally violated the Nuremberg Code but apparently the U.S. Never signed on to that never adapted that. If the United States had used the Nuremberg Code domestically Sydney Godley would never have been able to do what he did there couldn't have been M.K. Ultra what Sidney Gottlieb did is exactly what we sentenced Nazi doctors to death after the 2nd World War for doing in concentration camps Well let me reintroduce you here if you're just joining us my guest is Stephen Kinzer his new book is called poisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control We'll be right back after a short break this is FRESH AIR. I'm Peter O'Dowd when you meet a stranger how quickly you to pass judgement and his new book author Malcolm Gladwell says Your opinions are probably wrong because swagger into our confrontations with strangers with the confidence that we could make sense of the. Town is talking to strangers next time on here and. Join us this afternoon at 2 this is FRESH AIR And if you're just joining us my guest is Stephen Kinzer we're talking about his new book poisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control Gottlieb created the M.K. Ultra program which experimented with psychoactive drugs like L.S.D. To see what the effects were with the goal of learning if L.S.D. Could be weaponized as a form of mind control it wasn't just a question of administering these super high doses of L.S.D. For very extended periods of time there was also like questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses tell us about that. God leave and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia particularly in Japan and Germany in the Philippines which were largely under American control in the period of the early fifty's and therefore godly didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places he carried out his most extreme experiments some undoubtedly fatal We don't know how many people died but a number did and many lives were permanently destroyed so what you found in these your experiments was a confluence of 2 interests both that preoccupied the CIA number one was Gottlieb's desire to find the key to mind control which the CIA considered its absolute greatest project and most important priority 2nd CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called expendable they would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of not just drug potions but other techniques like electroshock extremes of temperature sensory isolation all the mean time bombarding them with questions trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego so these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it and that made God leave although in some ways a very compassionate person certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation. And were there any guidelines in effect in the US that would have made it illegal had people known what he was during this is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Gottlieb's story he operated almost completely without supervision he had sort of a check off from his titular boss and from his real boss Richard Helms and from the CIA director Allen Dulles but none of them really wanted to know what he was doing this guy had a license to kill he was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted even up to the level of it being fatal yet nobody looked over his shoulder he never had to file serious reports to anybody I think the mentality must have been this project is so important. Mind control if it can be mastered is the key to global world power that the idea of it disturbing a few lives or losing even a few 100 lives could not be seen as important enough to outweigh that imperative only when you get caught up in a cause like that that allows you to put aside conscience and all other moral considerations and even serious scientific considerations can you allow yourself to get caught up in a situation like this where one person is allowed on his own whim to go out and torture and kill people and the people who might be supervising him really don't want to hear about it for reasons that have to do with the old CIA code which is the code of all secret services the less you know the better you're not implicated as a result of this godly was allowed to work for 10 years without anybody supervising him or even really being aware or wanting to be aware of what he was doing. So before. Sydney got start experimenting with L.S.D. He ran CIA experiments with marijuana cocaine heroin Mescal in. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. He was trying everything he not only use the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives one of the techniques they tested in Europe was to sedate a person to the coma state and then feed him extreme doses of stimulants and then when the person was in the transition phase between comatose and hyperactive they would electroshock him with a very high doses hoping that maybe this combination would be the thing that could blow away a person's mind so. The CIA and Gottlieb in particular were limited only by their own imagination God leaves imagination ran wild he himself used L.S.D. By his own estimate about at least $200.00 times so his magination was very fertile and under the conditions of his employment he was allowed to pursue any form of experimentation that he could imagine. My guest is Stephen Kinzer his new book is called poison or in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA's search for mind control after a break we'll talk about how Gottlieb thought L.S.D. Could be weaponized to weaken world leaders and how he created poisons that could be used to assassinate them I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR. The new power Family Foundation supports W.H.Y. Wise fresh air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation Support for N.P.R. Comes from this station and from Progressive Insurance with the name your price tool offering a range of coverage and price options to choose from now that's progressive more it progressive dot com or 1800 progressive. And from the Main Office of Tourism with wild landscapes and rugged coasts to inspire original lifestyles and authentic adventures Maine offers travelers an opportunity to discover their very own main thing visit Maine dot com. Next time around as we know there from Netflix's she's got a habit actor finished we ask her about attending the famed La Guardia High School and about her new series godfather of Harlem then we put our music knowledge to the test with a quiz about hip hop samples so join me Ophira Eisenberg on N.P.R.'s ASK ME ANOTHER the answer to life's funnier questions. Listen Sundays at noon. Let's face it you're busy and when you're busy you don't always have time to catch your favorite on your show I'm listing all potential host of Connecticut Public Radio live if you can listen to the show live mornings at 9 or evenings at 7 you can subscribe to our podcast find us on Apple podcast staterooms Spotify or any pod cast. This is FRESH AIR I'm Terry Gross let's get back to my interview with Stephen Kinzer about his new book prisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control in the fifty's and early sixty's Gottlieb headed the secret CIA program M.K. Ultra which conducted experiments to see if L.S.D. And other mind altering drugs could be weaponized as a form of mind control. Was also the CIA's chief chemist creating poisons and unusual ways of syrup to administering them should they be needed to kill enemies including world leaders and he headed the program that created high tech gadgets for spies. And one of the uses Gottlieb envisioned for L.S.D. Was that you could slip it to an unfriendly world leader and their behavior would be so erratic and weird that they'd lose popularity or they'd be thrown out of office because they would appear to not be able to function normally anymore. You're right so God really was the chief CIA chemist in that capacity he was also the chief poison maker so he made the poisons to kill Joe and live feed all Castro but but he wasn't only involved in making poisons to kill people he was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways he made a list of the ways you thought he thought drugs could be used to affect behavior could you find a drug that would alter a personality structure in a way that would allow the operator to take control of another person's behavior could you produce shock and confusion or physical disablement at one point he came up with the idea of using a spray can full of L.S.D. To pollute the studio in which feed El Castor oil was going to give a radio speech. And then presumably Castro would become disoriented and as you say lose popularity and fall from power this is the level of bizarre plots that he became involved with when he was hired as part of a separate aspect of his job besides M.K. ULTRA to be the person who devised toxins and psychoactive substances to be used in covert operations by CIA officers around the world so this is just a little side bar that I found very interesting as somebody who listens to a lot of jazz the people who Sidney Gottlieb hired included George Hunter White who directed a lot of the M.K. Ultra experiments and he had been a narcotic agent and led the narcotics bureau's campaign against jazz in New York City he spied on musicians and entrap them including Billie Holiday. And Billie Holiday being busted was a turning point in her career because she couldn't get a cabaret license there are places she couldn't perform and it was a really tragic thing for her and that's this guy. George Hunter White was one of the key operatives of M.K. Ultra and he stands out even in this extremely bizarre M.K. Ultra cast of Nazi doctors and torturers and obsessed chemists So George Hunter white as you say was a narcotics agent in New York but he was a kind of narcotics agent who not only lived at the edge of the law he crossed over a lot he used all the substances that he confiscated from people his his the use of alcohol and narcotics was legendary but he was also a cop who did pursue jazz figures including Billie Holiday he had a special dislike for her because he said the way that she flaunted her furs and her big cars was offensive to him. In the early 1950 S. Gottlieb hired this guy George Hunter white to run a safe house Forum in New York City to which Pete. Well would be lured off the street and then given L.S.D. So a CIA officers could watch them from an adjoining apartment through a one way mirror later White was moved to San Francisco where he set up one of the craziest M.K. Ultra projects that was known inside the agency as Operation midnight climax this was an operation in which white would assemble stable of prostitutes who would bring their men back to an apartment that the CIA hired and furnish feed them L.S.D. And George trying to write would sit in an adjoining apartment sitting on a portable toilet drinking pitchers of martinis while watching people having sex under the influence of L.S.D. With the They'd idea that this was somehow going to help the United States defeat Communism so these are the kind of people that naturally gravitate to a project like this one when the men were having sex with prostitutes and were unknowingly given doses of L.S.D. Were they then asked questions to see what their answers would be like under a listing exactly so white and the people who worked with him would prep these prostitutes and they would say you want to find out under what circumstances under what combination of sex and drugs men would be most likely to reveal secrets so we want you to stay with the guy after the thing is over and talk to him and try to draw him out about his work and ask him for example you know that plane you've been working on so how high does it fly really and the idea was to try to draw out information and to see whether drugs could make people talk and of course they found out things that are very obvious that people will talk men will talk after Sex and the people who were observing these experiments like George Hunter White had no background in psychology or anything that would allow them to assess these situations in a clinical way everything was very slapdash. Asked as or so and not surprisingly no serious results ever came out of this except the fact that we can now sit here and talk about the fact that our tax dollars were used to pay for a bordello run by the CIA in San Francisco to which unwitting men were brought Fed L.S.D. And used as experiments and in Sydney Gottlieb's campaign to try to figure out how to penetrate the human mind so it could be controlled in the interests of the United States government and its covert projects around the world well there's plenty more to talk about but we have to take a short break here if you're just joining us my guest is Stephen Kinzer his new book is called poisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control We'll be right back this is FRESH AIR. A new school year means new stuff folders notebooks pencils and of course a backpack to carry all of it maybe the last bell rang for you years ago but MORNING EDITION is like your book back right we pack a lot in from politics to arts world events reporting on the environment and stories about the issues you care about so never stop learning listen to MORNING EDITION from N.P.R. News. And weekday mornings from 5 to 9. Support for N.P.R. . And from capital. Of credit card. For a range of customers from foodies to travelers. What's in your wallet credit approval required capital one bank USA. With its skills tests built for employers who want to see a deeper sense of the person behind the resume learn more it indeed dot com slash N.P.R. This is FRESH AIR And if you're just joining us my guest is Stephen Kinzer his new book is called poisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control created the M.K. Ultra program which experimented with psychoactive drugs like L.S.D. To see what the effects were with the goal of learning if L.S.D. Could be weaponized as a form of mind control so saying they got leaves M.K. Ultra program was ended in the 1960 S. Why was it. After all the experiments that led to deaths in unknown numbers around Europe in Asia and led to unknown torments across the United States Gottlieb who was in the end Sciences was forced to reach the conclusion that he had failed. Mind control he finally came to conclude is a myth it was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed of the young age but once you got to see if you could transfer those fantasies from the realm of fiction to the realm of reality they broke down so godly finally had to admit he never could find a way to control human minds and what skeptics had said at the beginning which is that you cannot program a person to do something that he or she is basically and deeply and morally opposed to doing and make them go out and do it he had to waste the know numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. So what did he do after the M.K. Ultra program was ended because he stayed in the CIA God lead had a long career after M.K. Ultra ended and he went on to become the head of the technical services staff which is the part of the CIA where they make the tools the gizmos the gadgets that spies use so if you remember Q. From those James Bond movies that was Gottlieb and he spent years at the head of that operation and he made an astonishing variety of covert tools from all those things you see on T.V. Like cameras that you can fit inside a cigarette lighter or a clip all the way to more bizarre things like a rubber boat a car with a secret compartment to smuggle agents out of foreign countries a compressor for foreign currencies you could pack a huge amount of it into a small container and even a jailbreak kit that could be contained in a wreck Tilsa positon Ari he invented a I knew her and I guess I can't envision that exactly yeah. He had a series of tiny tools that would have not lived and other devices that would allow you to break through solid walls all Commenee a chair ised this was just a piece of his genius he invented a hyper thin hyper Demick needle so that you could poison a bottle of wine through the cork without leaving any trace in the cork his imagination was just as fertile when he was inventing spy tools for CIA officers as it had been earlier when he was trying to devise ways of finding mind control techniques you describe him as the poisoner in chief and that's not just about the L.S.D. Experiments he actually created and found ways to administer poison and described that part of his job. As the chief CIA chemist it was logical that Gottlieb be consulted whenever the CIA needed a poison or a toxin and this became part of his work during the late 1950 S. An intern 19 $160.00 in the mid fifty's the United States set out on a project to kill Prime Minister Joe an ally of China while he was visiting Indonesia Gottlieb actually made a potion that was supposed to be put in a rice bowl that Joe and I would eat from and actually this poison was only going to work after a day or 2 the idea was that Joe would be back in China on the poison wouldn't be able to be traced back to the CIA later on when the CIA became obsessed at the order of the White House in killing field L. Castro it was Sidney godly who made all the poison pills the poison potions even the poison wetsuit that was supposed to be given to Castro in 1960 President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The prime minister of the Congo Sidney Gottlieb was given the job of making the poison among a very very bizarre things about Sidney Gottlieb is after leaving the CIA he pursues a spiritual life he and his wife go to India they try to work with the poor or were they working with people who have leprosy it is so hard to reconcile the different parts. Of personality an Orthodox Jew who works for the Nazi doctors on the CIA drug experiments somebody who is like ruined lives who's created poisons and then these like really horrible experiments on people but feels like he himself is a very spiritual person. This is one of the things that makes the God leave stories so fascinating so godly really lived a jackal and hide life we already talked about the things that he was doing in his day job but what was he like outside of work actually he was a very gentle compassionate humanist he lived in an eco cabin in the woods with no running water he grew is own vegetables he meditated he studied Buddhism and wrote poetry he got up before dawn to milk as goats he ate yogurt at work and preached the benefits of natural living way back in the 1950 S. Later on he built himself one of the 1st solar homes in Virginia so he was kind of approach 0 hippie and he traveled between these 2 worlds of spiritual meditation and then torturers experiments I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life you wonder how could he have reconciled this maybe he was thinking that he was a extreme individual list and he was fighting a global force that wanted to crush all individual Islam in the world and therefore anything was justified. Right in the long run in the cosmic sense I think you can say that commitment to a cause always gives you the justification for immoral acts and patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes because it posits the nation as a value it so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous so caught up in that mentality of the age and maybe by his own personal desire to be of service to the United States because as a result of his handicap he had been refused the chance to serve in World War 2 Gottlieb felt that he could put aside. The normal pull of conscience and morality I don't think he ever faced the question or answer the question of whether there are limits to the amount of evil you can do in a righteous cause before the evil begins to outweigh the wrecked righteousness. So significantly worked in secrecy that secrecy was partially shattered by the Church Committee a committee the Senate committee from the 1970 S. That was chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church and was tasked with investigating abuses committed by intelligence agencies and Gottlieb was called to testify so how much did the committee find out about what Gottlieb had really done . Godley was living in India working in a hospital for leprosy victims when he got a note from the CIA saying somebody has figured out who you are and that somebody is the Church committee that's investigating the CIA and they want to talk to you so the anonymity in which Gottlieb had lived his whole life was suddenly under threat Gottlieb had to come back to the United States he did testify at 2 rounds of hearings one under cover that is under a pseudonym in US private room another under his own name but also in a private room and the senators were able to ask him some probing questions but really they didn't know anything about him calle trust if they had known anything like what's in this book Gottlieb would have been questioned much more seriously but the Church Committee was focused on a number of other abuses that the CIA had been accused of like domestic spying assassination plots in which Gottlieb had played essentially only the role of a pharmacist they didn't know what he had done abroad they didn't know what he had done in prisons inside the United States his lawyer had arranged for him to be granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony Nonetheless he didn't reveal anything and he claimed essentially to have forgotten everything that he had spent his whole CIA career doing so he forgot who was boss was he forgot who was deputy was he couldn't remember what part of the CIA He had worked in and the Church Committee investigators didn't press him hard enough they didn't know what to ask and so essentially although his anonymity was briefly shattered he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. Try to destroy evidence of programs that he headed what did he do to try to destroy the evidence of and chaos. The end of Gottlieb's career came in 1972 when his patron Richard Helms who was then director of the CIA was removed by Nixon once Helms was gone it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what godly had been doing so as they were both on their way out of the CIA They agreed that they should destroy all records of M.K. Ultra Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and order the archives to destroy boxes full of M.K. Ultra records and he wrote in his report that these records were destroyed over my stated objections so the records of M.K. Ultra were destroyed as Gottlieb was. Leaving office however it turns out that there were some found in other places there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed and various other pieces of paper remain so there's another file out there to reconstruct some of what he did but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early seventy's was quite successful Well Stephen Kinzer thank you for this book I found the revelations and really remarkable thank you for talking with us thank you. Stephen Kinzer is the author of the new book prisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search from Mind Control This is FRESH AIR. We go deep. Political. Favor legalization or recreational marijuana. What about marijuana. For adults maybe that wasn't the best example but I guarantee you there are some Listen this afternoon support comes from planned Mark community theater at the Thomas. 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This is FRESH AIR the most awaited book of the fall season perhaps of the entire year has been Margaret Atwood sequel to The Handmaid's Tale It's called the testaments and our book critic Maureen Corrigan has this review now that it seems like we're living in a society that I find myself thinking of as Gillie ad light how could the testaments Margaret Atwood's highly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid's Tale possibly convey the same degree of shock as its predecessor the answer is it can't when The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985 American women's reproductive rights seemed relatively secure and global climate change was relegated to disaster movies but the Baron and repressive fundamentalist regime of the Republic of Gilliatt formerly most of the United States that Attwood summoned up so vividly in The Handmaid's Tale has turned out to be not so outlandish after all hence the popularity of the current Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss as the hand made offer it while The Handmaid's Tale may not be an exact reflection of how we live now it no longer feels as reassuringly improbable as it once did. In the testaments Atwood explicitly wears the mantle that The Handmaid's Tale conferred upon her that is literary social critic and seer extraordinary. A curious difference between the 2 novels however is that rather than taking readers on another descent into nightmare Atwood here foresees the possibility of hope hope that the forces of resistance and sisterhood will eventually triumph over massage any power mongering and the despoiling of the planet it may take a century or 2 Atwood cautions to reach the light at the end of the Gilliatt tunnel but reach it we will. the testaments opens about 15 years after the end of the handmaid's tale when as readers will remember our narrator off thread was about to escape gilly add into wiser a deadly trap or the free them of canada in interviews at would has confess that the challenge of recreating offer its voice so hollow and hypnotic was a creative stumbling block to writing a sequel to the handmaid's tale she's solves that problem in the testaments by dividing the narration among 3 distinct characters agnus who grows up and gilly add as the daughter of an important commander daisy a passionately anti gilly add active his teenager who lives in canada and aunt lydia whom at woods readers will remember unfond lee from the handmaid's tale aunt lydia is a gender norm in force or one of the class of ants a ken to high ranking prison matrons who preside over births executions and the training of handmaids but early in the testaments we discover that beneath her righteous goal goal gilly add demeanor and what at would calls her smug wrinkly old turnip smile aunt lydia is a c. Then fury in her retrospective narration we hear about the brutal process by which aunt lydia who in her former a life served as a judge was molded into an ant for decades now she's been out for vengeance a mass saying and scribbling down the secrets sins of gilly add she knows that as another character says beneath its outer show a virtue and purity gilly ad was rotting Atwood has always been a deft suspense writer novels like Alias Grace The Blind Assassin and even cats I attest to her talent for quickening readers heart rates the testaments is all about suspense it's plot driven whereas The Handmaid's Tale was a novel a vision voice and mood that mood oppressive and claustrophobic was a product of off Fred's inforce stillness she spent most of her time with her eyes cast down indoors in small rooms waiting to be summoned for the monthly ritualize sex ceremony with the commander here our characters are on the move their paths and stories ingeniously intersect as in a Victorian novel and at the end there's even a thrilling cinematic chase scene what the testaments lacks in the eeriness it gains in entertainment at would herself seems lighter even a little frivolous here for instance she bestows goofy names on some of the aunts like Aunt S. Day and Aunt Sarah Lee and has them sit down for T.V. In the Schlafly cafe dare.