[SOFT MUSIC]
RICHARD BOUCHER: Ladies and
gentlemen, good afternoon.
I am not Stephen Kinzer.
I am Richard Boucher, and
I teach classes here, too,
at Watson.
And it's an enormous
pleasure for me
to be able to introduce
Stephen Kinzer to you.
He's a professor here at Brown,
writes a column for the Boston
Globe, writes books and articles
for a lot of other places,
and is, in his previous life,
a New York Times correspondent.
He was a New York
Times correspondent
in Eastern Europe and Berlin
after the fall of the Wall.
He's spent a lot of time
writing about Turkey,
got to know a lot of people
who are currently in jail.
And prior to that, covered
Nicaragua and other events
all over the world.
So it's really
exciting to have him
here at Watson as a teacher, as
a professor for the students,
and also having a chance to
talk to him today and hear
about his latest book.
I usually tell my
students that my job here
is to correct any
misimpressions they
might have gotten by taking
Stephen Kinzer's classes.
He teaches about
American intervention
all over the world and some
of the less honorable things
that we've done in the past.
And I try to correct
those misimpressions,
but frankly, it's
not a fair contest.
He doesn't play fair.
He does his homework.
He learns all the
facts, and then he
writes books about them.
And he's been prodigious in
putting out a series of books
on foreign policy issues
that are really incredibly
insightful and timed to
very specific moments
of our history, whether
it's Iran or Nicaragua,
or the Dulles
brothers in the 1950s,
or the debate over
interventionism in the 1990s.
These are really good
books that tell a story--
not always a story that we
want to hear in the detail
that he has figured it out,
because some of the details
are pretty messy, but they're
really instructive about US
foreign policy.
I have read several of them.
I have even bought one or two.
Hopefully, we'll--
no, I got them.
I bought the audio
version, I guess.
That's right.
I listen to one or two on audio
and read one or two on paper.
But I encourage you
all to do the same.
And with that, I'm
going to say there
will be books to buy and
to get signed afterwards,
out on a table there.
And finally, that when you have
questions for Professor Kinzer,
if you would please
use the microphones
so that your words can be
immortalized and recorded
and sent out to audiences
all over the world.
So with that, it's
an enormous pleasure,
and I turn the floor
over to Stephen Kinzer
to talk about his latest book.
[APPLAUSE]
STEPHEN KINZER: Thank
you, Mr. Ambassador.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
STEPHEN KINZER: Well, after
what I've been writing about,
I don't take bottles of water.
[LAUGHTER]
I discovered a memo written
by the chief of security
of the CIA in
December of 1954 based
on what he had heard about
MK Ultra experiments,
and he advises all
CIA employees not
to try the punch bowls at
Christmas parties this year.
So I'm going to keep that
in mind as I look at this.
Well, because of the
circumstance being here,
really, on my home court, I want
to do something a little bit
different.
I need to start with the
very end of my book--
the acknowledgments,
the last few pages.
, Actually the acknowledgments
section begins with my favorite
line in the whole
book, which is,
everything in this book is true,
but not everything that's true
is in this book.
I'm painfully aware
that I've only
uncovered a very small
portion of this story.
But the other reason I want to
start with the acknowledgments
has to do particularly
with Brown.
So when I started working on
this project a couple of years
ago, I did something that I had
heard professors sometimes do,
but I had never done myself--
and that was see if I had any
students who wanted to help me
as research assistants.
And sure enough, a
good group turned up,
and I assigned them
each little pieces.
Some of them were more
useful than others.
A couple of them
turned up documents
that, although I probably
wouldn't admit it in public,
I'm not sure I would
have found at all,
and thereby made a real
contribution to the book.
So just to honor them--
some number of them
have graduated.
But I just want to
read their names.
Many of you are are students
will know some of them.
And since they were
such a help to me, maybe
in addition to simply
listing their names
in the acknowledgments,
I can read them here
on their home court.
So they were, Sarah Tucker,
Andy [? Girth, ?] [? Han Sol ?]
[? Hong, ?] Isaac [? Lee ?]
[? Yang, ?] [? Brashti ?]
[? Branbat, ?] Oliver
[? Herman, ?] Fiona
[? Bradley, ?] Dan
[? Steinfeld ?] Isabelle
[? Paolini, ?] Sean
[? Hyland, ?] Brandon
[? Chin, ?] Vladimir
[? Borovin, ?] and Michelle
[? Shine. ?]
So I'm indebted to all of them.
And it was actually a
special layer of fun
for me to be able to work
with some really bright Brown
students who took seriously
some of the work we did.
And there's one of those people
I just mentioned right there.
Thank you, [? Andy. ?]
So this is my 10th book.
And I've devoted
much of my career
to trying to discover
what's behind the facade
of public diplomacy and
public politics that we see.
In that research, I
have come across quite
a bit that's surprising,
some things that
may have shocked some people.
But this is the first
time I've been shocked.
I still can't get
over what I discovered
when writing this book.
I cannot believe this happened,
and I cannot believe this guy
existed.
I think I discovered the
most powerful unknown
American of the 20th century,
unless there was somebody
else who operated in
complete invisibility,
carried out extreme
experiments on human subjects
across three continents,
and had a license to kill
issued by the US government.
So my book has been a
thrilling but very disturbing
few years of immersion into a
very dark and a little known
chapter of American
Cold War history.
Sidney Gottlieb is
completely unknown.
MKUltra not quite so completely.
It's an expression
people would understand.
But certainly Gottlieb's role
in it and Gottlieb's existence
would be something that
nobody would have noticed up
until this book came out.
While I was working
on this book,
coincidentally, I ran
into a guy who had been
the former director of the CIA.
And I said to him, I'm
writing the biography
of Sidney Gottlieb.
And he said, I
never heard of him.
And I believe him.
During the course
of this research,
I was working with the CIA
on a number of projects,
trying to extract little
tidbits of information.
And one of the few
successes that I had
was that the CIA agreed to
release to me something that
had never been
released before, which
was a photograph of
Gottlieb as he looked when
he was working for the CIA.
There had been recreations
of some of his work,
but nobody ever knew what
he really looked like.
So I was very excited about
this and called my publisher,
and said, OK, we've got it now.
We've got the cover picture.
Nobody else has ever
had this before.
And they thought this was great.
They shared my enthusiasm.
But after just a
couple of hours,
I got an email back saying,
you know, we talked about it,
and we changed our mind.
Actually, we don't
like your idea anymore.
We can't put the picture
of this guy on the cover,
because nobody knows his name.
Nobody knows his face, either.
Nobody's going to
know who it is.
So instead they just have this
very obscure black silhouette
on the cover, which actually
is probably more appropriate,
since even at the CIA,
Gottlieb's work was completely
unknown.
So that great photo that I
had a few hours of excitement
after receiving is
now comfortably lodged
inside the book in
the photo insert.
So let me take you back to
the time that MKUltra began
and try to explain
to you what it was
and what Gottlieb's
role in it was.
MKUltra, very simply,
was a CIA project
aimed at finding the
secret of mind control.
The CIA wanted to figure
out how they could create
a truth serum, or an amnesiac,
or a substance or potion that
would make a person act
after being programmed.
And in the early
1950s, Allen Dulles,
who had just taken over
as director of the CIA,
decided to hire a chemist
from outside the agency
to direct this project.
And he went to a
person very different
from the kind of people that
populated the early CIA.
He was different in
two important ways.
First of all, most of the
people in the early CIA
were rich kids who
were aristocratic,
silver spoon products
of the same prep schools
and investment
banks and law firms.
Sidney Gottlieb
wasn't like that.
He was 32 years old.
He was the son of Jewish
immigrants in the Bronx.
Father owned a sweatshop.
He had a limp.
He stuttered.
He was very different
from everybody else
that he came to work for on
a Friday the 13th in 1951.
And he was also
different in another way,
which was his private life.
So he must have been unique,
not only among CIA officers
of the early '50s, but among
all federal bureaucrats
in Washington at that time--
he was a kind of a proto-hippie.
He lived in an eco-house in the
middle of the Virginia woods
that had no running water.
He meditated with
candles around him.
He studied Buddhism.
He grew his own vegetables.
He milked his goats before dawn
in the morning to make yogurt.
So this person
who wound up being
the most prolific American
torturer of his generation
was also somebody who
considered himself to be
a deeply spiritual humanist.
That alone makes him a
particularly interesting person
to have taken on this job.
So with a scientist's mind,
Gottlieb began his program
after having been
given what amounts
to a ridiculously
daunting assignment, which
was find the potion or the pill
that will allow us to control
people's minds so that
we can defeat communism
and control the world.
His first step was to conclude
that before you could find
a way to insert a new mind
into somebody's brain,
you first have to blast away
the mind that was in there.
And Gottlieb spent 10 years
experimenting on human beings,
trying to find the best way
to destroy a human mind,
destroy a human spirit,
and destroy a human body.
These were the most extreme
experiments ever carried out
by any officer or agency
of the US government.
And as I mentioned earlier,
Gottlieb had, effectively,
a license to recruit
human subjects at will
outside the United States.
And inside the US,
he had other sources,
which I'll get to in a moment.
So, also with his
trained scientist's mind,
like a good Cal Tech
graduate, Gottlieb
began by asking himself, what
existing research is there
out there?
Who has already conducted
intense experiments
aimed at destroying human
minds and souls and bodies?
Well, the obvious answer
was the Nazi doctors
who had worked in the
concentration camps
and their Japanese
counterparts who
had conducted experiments
that were actually even more
grotesque than the ones that
went on in the Nazi camps.
So MKUltra wound up
recruiting a number
of Nazi doctors and their
Japanese counterparts
to come in and
advise them on what
they had learned in
their experiments
in concentration camps.
So they had, for
example, carried
out very extensive
experiments with mescaline
on prisoners at the
Dachau concentration camp.
What were the doses they used?
How much mescaline
will kill someone?
We don't know.
We're not going to
be able to find out.
But they would know.
So some of these doctors
worked with American CIA teams
in Europe or in East
Asia, and Gottlieb
traveled to both of
those places regularly
to oversee those experiments.
Others came to
the United States,
and actually came to work
at Fort Detrick in Maryland,
where Gottlieb had
his scientific base.
I found a protocol, for example,
of two former Nazi party
members who had been
concentration camp
experimenters who
came to Fort Detrick
to give a lecture on sarin,
the toxic poison gas.
And they explained all the
ways that it can be used,
and what kinds of
dosages you need.
And I was struck by one
line in the protocol.
It says, we discovered
that the age of the victim
does not change
the amount of sarin
that you need to achieve
the fatal result.
So you can just imagine what
experiments they would have
had to conduct in order to come
up with conclusions like that.
And these were
lectures that were
delivered to the CIA
chemists and their co-workers
at Fort Detrick.
In the course of my
research for this book,
I visited what I think is
the first CIA secret prison.
It's in a beautiful
chalet in Germany
that looks like it
should be a B and B.
And the young German
businessman who owns it
took me down into the basement.
He's now renovated it with some
lovely apartments upstairs.
And he showed me
the store rooms.
He said, these are the
rooms where the CIA doctors
experimented people to death
using the same techniques
that the Nazi doctors used
right down the road here
in concentration camps,
and with the presence
and active cooperation of
those very same doctors.
He also told me, the older
people who live around here all
know the history of this house.
And in fact, I found an
article in Der Spiegel,
the German magazine, saying
about this house-- it says,
this was the CIA torture house.
There were deaths, but
the number is not known.
So this guy told me, the people
around here have said to me,
they buried the bodies in
the forests around here.
And those places are now all
covered up with shopping malls
and apartment blocks.
So everything worked
out in the end.
So who were the subjects
of these experiments?
Well, they were two
different groups,
because Gottlieb carried out
experiments inside the US
and outside the US.
Inside the US, his
favorite subjects
were prisoners, for
obvious reasons.
He carried out some
intensely brutal experiments
inside prisons, and
the inmates were never
allowed to have any
idea of what it was
that was being given to them.
And we don't even know
the details today,
since many of those protocols
were later destroyed.
But we've picked up
enough to get an idea.
For example, I came across one
experiment at the US prison
in Lexington, Kentucky, in which
seven African-American inmates
were segregated into a cell
and fed triple doses of LSD
every day for 77 days.
So this was an effort to
see if that kind of overdose
would destroy a human mind.
And you can guess
the answer is yes.
Yes, it can.
So Gottlieb was unendingly
inventive in coming up
with different combinations
of drugs and other techniques.
He was fascinated with
LSD, and he used it himself
more than 200 times,
by his own account.
I sometimes used to wonder,
when I was working on this book
and coming across the
descriptions of some
of these astonishing
and horrific experiments
that he oversaw, did he come
up with some of these ideas
while he was tripping on LSD?
Recently, I did
an interview here
at Watson, remote
with Terry Gross,
on the Fresh Air program.
And she asked me
a question which
was even more bizarre than that,
that had never even occurred
to me.
She said, do you
think he could have
been tripping while
he was actually
observing the torture sessions?
I can't even wrap my
mind around that one.
Outside the United States,
Gottlieb's experiments
were even more intense,
because there, he
didn't have what they charmingly
described as the disposal
problem.
These experiments were
carried out mostly
in Germany, although also in
some other European countries.
And of course,
Germany was a place
that the US thoroughly
dominated after World War II.
Others were carried out in Japan
and the Philippines and South
Korea.
And Gottlieb, as I said,
would travel to these places
to oversee many of
these experiments.
The subjects in
those experiments
were people who were
called expendables.
I've learned a
whole new lexicon--
not such a pleasant one--
in writing this book.
So expendables could
be either suspected
enemy agents or
refugees who didn't
seem to have any
connection to anybody,
and therefore wouldn't be missed
if they never appeared again.
In East Asia, many
of the subjects
were captured North
Korean prisoners
of war, who could easily be
disposed of if experiments went
wrong-- or if they went right.
And it was in these
experiments that Gottlieb
and his small group
of chemists were
responsible for a
number of deaths.
We don't know how many.
And they were the results of
these intense combinations
of drugs and other torments
that Gottlieb conceived.
So for example, I
found one that I
believe took place in
this very secret prison
that I found in Germany.
I have a picture
of it in my book.
Not the experiment, just
the outside of the building.
So the idea was,
according to the protocol,
to take your expendable
or expendables
and inject them with
overdoses of sedatives
to put them into a deep coma.
Then you inject them
with massive overdoses
of barbiturates to
make them hyperactive.
And when they're in the
transition phase between coma
and hyperactivity, you apply
overdoses of electric shock
and flashes of strobe
lights inside a container
that's like a coffin--
like sensory deprivation.
So these are the kinds of things
that Gottlieb would come up
with as ways of trying
to figure out how do you
destroy a human mind.
He spent 10 years conducting the
most heinous experiments that
have ever been conducted with
the official approval of the US
government.
And at the end, he
reached what might be
described as a duel conclusion.
Number one, yes, it is possible
to destroy a human mind.
And he left a trail of
victims who were devastated
for the rest of their life.
Number two, no, it is not
possible to insert a new mind
into that void.
You cannot make a person who is
fundamentally opposed to murder
go out and murder someone, much
less later on to forget that he
ever did it.
So all of that
suffering actually
was aimed at producing a goal
that Gottlieb finally concluded
was a myth.
Mind control, he finally
concluded, is a myth.
Now I said that Gottlieb
was fascinated with LSD.
He was really the
first acid guru.
Yeah, he and his men believed,
as one of his chemists put it,
that LSD could be the key that
would unlock the universe--
that would be the
mind control drug.
Of course, in the
end, he was forced
to conclude that
LSD-- as he put it,
surprise-- is too unpredictable
to be used as a reliable mind
control drug.
But that took him
years to conclude.
So in 1953, Sidney
Gottlieb persuaded
the CIA to buy the entire
world's supply of LSD.
They spent $240,000 for
it, and it was brought home
in a package from the
Sandoz Chemical Company
in Switzerland.
And Gottlieb did two
things with that LSD.
One is that he
apportioned it out
to the people conducting these
horrific experiments in the US
and abroad.
But he also had another use
for it that was non-coercive.
He wanted to find out how
ordinary people would respond
to LSD in a clinical setting.
So he set up two bogus
medical foundations
that contacted hospitals and
clinics around the United
States and tell them, we
have a new psychoactive drug.
We want to test
it on volunteers.
We pay you to do this, and then
we give you the LSD for free.
All you have to do is advertise
in the campus newspaper
or wherever you
want for volunteers
and then write down notes
about how people respond.
So overnight, given the
amount of money available,
there was a sudden
burst of interest
in investigating this
new psychoactive drug,
and the experiments began.
People would come in as
volunteers and take LSD.
So who were among the very
first people to participate
in these experiments?
One of them was Ken Kesey.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest was the product of this.
So he went to the VA
hospital in Menlo Park
as soon as he heard
about the LSD.
He loved it, and he
started telling his friends
to go volunteer.
Then he got a job at
the hospital, which
later became the
basis for that book,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
But I found out in my
research that that was not
the reason why he got the job.
That was just a felicitous
result of him spending time
in the hospital.
As he later said, his real
reason for getting the job
was so that he could steal the
LSD out of the medicine chest
and give it to all his
friends, which is what he did.
Not far away at Stanford,
one of the first participants
was Allen Ginsberg.
He also got his first
LSD from Sidney Gottlieb,
from MKUltra, from the CIA.
He listened to Tristan und
Isolde on his headphones
while taking his first LSD trip.
Robert Hunter, the lyricist
for the Grateful Dead
who just died last week,
was an early experimenter
at that same
Stanford experiment.
He got the LSD, brought it home
to the rest of the Grateful
Dead, and the rest is history.
Even Tim Leary was turned
on by Sidney Gottlieb,
although, like all
these other people,
he didn't realize that
until decades later.
So Tim Leary's first interest
in psychoactive drugs
came when he read an
article in Life Magazine
about some Americans
who had gone to Mexico
and found the magic mushroom.
He was riveted by this.
He went to Mexico.
He found the magic mushroom.
He tried it.
He loved it.
And that set him
off on the career
of being the Pied Piper
of the LSD movement.
What he didn't know and
could not have known
is that that expedition
to find the magic mushroom
was paid for by Sidney Gottlieb.
He, too, was looking for
any psychoactive substance
in the world.
So when he got wind of the
fact that people were looking
for the magic
mushroom, he had one
of his bogus medical foundations
call them and say, sure,
we'll support you.
These people all
realized later on
that they had first been
turned on by Sidney Gottlieb.
And the irony, of course, is
that the drug that Gottlieb
thought would give the CIA the
power to control people's minds
wound up fueling a
generational rebellion that
was aimed at destroying
everything the CIA stands for.
That might have been
one of Gottlieb's most
unpredictable,
unwished-for legacies.
He's an unwitting godfather
of the LSD counterculture.
I found an interview
with John Lennon.
And he was asked about LSD.
And he said, we must always
remember to thank the CIA.
If he had known more--
if he had known what's in my
book-- he would have said,
we must always remember
to thank Sidney Gottlieb.
So I came across so
many fascinating pieces
of the Gottlieb story.
And it makes you wonder how he
was able to function this way.
How was he able to do this?
First of all, he had
almost no supervision.
He was told to go out and
do whatever he had to do.
And the CIA officer who
was essentially guiding him
through his whole career,
Richard Helms, and the boss
of the CIA during that
period, Allen Dulles,
were really the only ones who
had a pretty good idea of what
he was doing.
But that did not lead
them to want to know more.
They knew that what
Gottlieb was doing
was extreme, that it was bloody,
that it involved torture,
and that it probably
involved deaths.
But that did not
lead them to say,
I want to see some documents
before you continue this.
In fact, it had
the exact opposite.
Knowing that much
led them to say,
I don't want to know anymore.
It has to be done.
National security demands it.
We've got Sidney doing it.
Don't tell me anymore.
And I think this is obedience
to a culture that probably
permeates not just the CIA, but
other secret services as well.
Ignorance is an asset.
You don't want to know too much.
And I think that's one
reason why Gottlieb
was allowed to go off
and carry out experiments
that were this extreme.
Naturally, that also gave the
CIA the excuse later on to say,
it was one crazy guy.
We didn't know
what he was doing.
We had problems of supervision,
as William Colby put it.
So that, I think, is
one reason why Gottlieb
was allowed to do this.
But it didn't go unchallenged,
because in 1953, one
of the members of
Gottlieb's little group
suddenly had an
attack of conscience.
A chemist named Frank Olson
spent part of that summer,
as the MKUltra people did,
traveling and watching
these extreme experiments.
And Olson was in
Europe and apparently
witnessed several
experiments in which people--
expendables, as we
charmingly call them--
were tortured and
possibly tortured
to death by toxins that he
himself, Olson, had developed.
This really began
to weigh on him.
He told people he was very
uncomfortable with this.
He didn't want to continue.
When he got back
to the US, he even
told people in the CIA,
his own colleagues,
that he wanted to
quit, to quit the CIA.
This person knew some of the
deepest and darkest secrets
of the Cold War.
He had been in the inner
circle of army chemists
since the end of the
Second World War.
Not only did he
know about MKUltra,
or whatever the
United States did
that had to do with
germ warfare in Korea.
If there was anything,
he would certainly know,
because that was his job.
So he came back from Europe
in 1953 with his doubts.
He spoke about them.
At one point, we later learned,
he even asked a friend,
do you know a good journalist?
And on a November
evening in 1953,
he went out a 13th floor window
of a hotel in New York City,
plunging to his death
in what was then
described as the suicide
of an army scientist.
He was not working for the army,
and that it was a suicide now
seems less and less possible.
The family, decades later,
had the body exhumed
and found a big bruise
right on Olson's forehead.
And since then, a document--
we call it an
assassination manual.
It's an eight page
memo from Gottlieb.
It's about how to kill people.
And it does say in that
document one of the best means
is a fall from a
great height, but you
need to stun the guy by hitting
him on the forehead first.
So all of this has led
to one of the enduring
mysteries of the Cold War,
and the family is still
eager to pursue that case.
Gottlieb carried out all
kinds of bizarre projects.
He had one in San Francisco
in which he actually
opened a bordello.
He had one of his agents
recruit a string of prostitutes
who would bring men back
to this apartment and dose
them with whatever drug
Gottlieb had sent in that week
so that his agent could observe
whether sex and drugs together
had some special
effect on people,
depending on the drug and
the different circumstances.
And Gottlieb's agent would
sit behind a one-way mirror
on his portable toilet, drinking
Martinis out of a pitcher
and taking notes
about what he saw.
Look, this was your
tax dollars at work,
trying to find a way
to stop communism.
And the name of that operation
was Operation Midnight Climax.
[LAUGHTER]
So I told you that Gottlieb's
MKUltra project wound down
after about 10 years.
It didn't actually
come to a specific end,
but it petered out around
the late '50s, early '60s.
And by then,
Gottlieb had taken up
a new job or a new
assignment, which
becomes the title of my
book, Poisoner in Chief.
He was the CIA's chief chemist.
He knew more about toxins than
anybody in the United States--
probably more than
anybody in the world.
His freezer at Fort
Detrick in Maryland
was definitely unique from the
poisons that he'd extracted.
He was finding ferns and
mushrooms and leaves.
He was bringing home the gall
bladders of African crocodiles
to dissect them and
take the toxins out.
And in May of 1960,
President Eisenhower
told Allen Dulles and
his covert action chief
that he wanted Fidel Castro,
as he put it, sawed off.
So, famously, the
CIA sent an envoy
to meet with two mafia
gangsters, and told them,
we want to hire you to go
gun down Castro in Havana.
And those guys told
them, essentially,
you've been watching
too many movies.
That's a terrible idea, because
the guy would never escape.
But you must have somebody
that makes poison.
Why don't you get us
some poison, and maybe
we can get it close to Castro?
Well, they'd never heard
the name of Sidney Gottlieb.
And the CIA envoy
who had come to him
undoubtedly had never
heard of Gottlieb either,
but they were right.
Yeah, there was a guy at
the CIA who made poison.
And he got the job.
So Gottlieb obtained a
box of 50 Cohiba cigars,
the favorite brand
of Fidel Castro,
and poisoned every one
of them with botulinum--
one of his favorite poisons.
It was so strong
that you would just
have to put it in your
mouth and you would die.
You wouldn't have to
light it up or smoke it.
That obviously
didn't get to Castro.
And then Gottlieb was asked to
prepare something he had done
in the past, which is L-pills--
another part of the
lexicon I've now learned.
L means the lethal.
L-pills.
Those were supposed to be
dropped into Castro's tea,
or whatever he was
about to consume.
Obviously, they didn't
make it, either.
Gottlieb also even conceived
of and developed a wet suit
that was to be
given to Castro, who
was a scuba diving enthusiast,
and was coated on the inside
with a fungus that would
quickly eat away his skin
and kill him soon
after he put it on.
As we know, he never put
that suit on, either.
During that same summer,
President Eisenhower
made a second
assassination order.
He asked for the assassination
of Patrice Lumumba,
the prime minister of the Congo.
In this case, Sidney Gottlieb
not only made the poison--
he made a whole poison kit.
He had the vial of botulinum.
He'd invented a
hypodermic syringe,
which had a super strong but
microscopically tiny hypodermic
needle, so that if you got
stuck with that in your thigh,
you wouldn't even notice
that anything had stuck you.
And he had used a version of
this to poison wine bottles
through the cork, because
you couldn't detect
that anything had
gone through the cork,
it was so small and powerful.
By some accounts, he even had
a tube of poison toothpaste.
He had the accouterments,
like the mask and the gloves.
And he made this poison kit.
And he personally
carried it to the Congo.
This made him undoubtedly the
only American ever to carry US
government-manufactured
poison to another country
with the goal of assassinating
the leader of that country.
By his own account, he presented
it to the CIA station chief,
and he told the
station chief what
he was supposed to do with it.
And the station chief
replied, Jesus H. Christ,
who ordered this operation?
And Gottlieb replied,
President Eisenhower.
So Lumumba was
assassinated or executed
by a squad of Belgian
and Congolese officers
before that poison
could be administered.
But nonetheless,
the whole project
of being part of what was
called the Health Alteration
Committee at the CIA
further underlined
Gottlieb's credentials
and made him
even more of a popular figure.
So those of you who've seen that
movie called Bridge of Spies
might remember the scene in
which the U-2 two pilots are
being briefed on their
flight over the Soviet Union.
And in that scene, they're
presented with a suicide tool.
This is a real thing,
and I have a photo
of the actual one in my book.
So the Americans who were
directing the U-2 project--
and Gottlieb was
involved in this--
were worried that one of the
pilots would be captured,
so they gave him
a suicide device.
Around the neck of Gary
Powers, the CIA pilot
who was shot down in 1960, was
a necklace with a silver dollar.
Gottlieb had drilled a hole in
the side of the silver dollar.
In that hole was a sheath.
In that sheath was a pin.
And on the top of that pin
was a tiny little gob of goo
that would kill
you in 15 seconds
if it touched your
skin anywhere.
It's a toxin, I learned,
called saxotoxin,
which is in the distillate
that Gottlieb concocted,
able to kill 5,000
people with one gram.
And he manufactured
this by extracting
minute amounts of toxin from
thousands of Alaskan butter
clams.
That's what he
and his scientists
spent their time doing.
So they were quite
creative in their own way.
Later on, in the 1960s, as
Gottlieb continued his rise
up the CIA, he got
one of the top jobs.
He became the chief of the
Technical Services Staff, which
is the organization that makes
all the tools that spies use.
So if you've seen those Bond
movies or read those books,
there was a guy named Q
who makes all the spycraft.
That was Gottlieb.
He held that job
for seven years,
longer than anybody
else in CIA history.
And he was just as
imaginative then as he
was in his earlier assignments.
Of course, he made
not-normal things
like cameras that could fit
into a cigarette lighter.
But he made other
amazing devices.
One that I didn't want
to look into too deeply
was a prison escape kit
that was so miniaturized,
it could fit into a
rectal suppository.
One that I did see was an
L-pill device that he crafted--
these were all made specifically
for particular assignments--
an L-pill that was given
to an agent working deep
inside an enemy country.
I presume it was
the Soviet Union.
This was, of course, a Soviet
agent, who, if captured,
would not enjoy
diplomatic immunity,
and he would only do the
work if given a suicide pill.
So Gottlieb could make the
pill, but how do you deliver it?
You can't tell
your interrogator,
excuse me, I've got
to check my pills,
see if I can pop one
while we're talking, here.
So he crafted a
pair of eyeglasses
with this agent's prescription.
And in the little piece
that fits around your ear,
he had inserted the L-pill,
so that the person wearing
the glasses could pretend, if
under intense interrogation,
to be sweating and very nervous,
and take off his glasses
and start to chew on the end.
And then he would suddenly
fall over and die.
This was Gottlieb's
imagination at work.
Gottlieb retired
from the CIA in 1973
because Richard
Helms was resigning,
and Helms had been his main
protector over all the 20 plus
years he'd been at the CIA.
When Nixon removed Helms
as an indirect consequence
of the Watergate
scandal, Gottlieb
couldn't stay, because
MKUltra and his past
could no longer be protected.
On their way out,
Helms and Gottlieb
decided that they should destroy
all the records of MKUltra.
And the protocol from
the CIA Records Center
out in Warrenton,
Virginia, shows
that Gottlieb himself
went out there
to supervise the destruction.
And an archivist writes,
seven crates of documents
were destroyed over
my stated objections.
Destruction of federal
property is a felony,
and as a matter of fact, the
FBI, at one point later on,
tried to find Gottlieb
guilty for this,
only to find out
that he had cleverly
arranged to confess
this in a secret hearing
before a senate investigator
after being granted immunity
from prosecution.
So with that destruction,
a huge archive was lost.
Later on, other documents--
we found a whole trove of
expense account reports
from MKUltra operatives
and several other pieces
have emerged.
But when I said at the beginning
not everything that's true
is in this book, a
lot of what's true
is in those destroyed documents.
So then Sidney Gottlieb, who
was still in his mid-50s,
decided he wanted to go out
and spend the rest of his life
being the Sidney Gottlieb that
he always thought he was--
the deeply
compassionate humanist.
So he and his wife sold
all their belongings,
including their eco-cottage.
They got on a freighter.
They wanted to spend the rest of
their lives traveling the world
and helping people
that suffered the most.
And sure enough,
in 1975, they were
working at a hospital for
leprosy patients in India
when Sidney got a most
unwelcome telegram
from the general counsel of the
CIA, telling him, in essence,
I have bad news for you.
Somebody has figured
out that you exist,
and they want to talk to you.
That somebody was
the Church Committee
that was investigating the CIA.
So sure enough, Gottlieb,
who had lived his life
in total anonymity, had to face
this shocking prospect of going
to Washington and testifying.
Well, he did have
to testify twice.
However, he was able to
do it in closed rooms.
He was treated
very deferentially.
And also, the senators
and investigators
who questioned him
really didn't know
the right things to ask him.
They could not penetrate
the heart of his mystery.
They didn't know nearly
what's in my book.
And besides that, they were
facing so many other CIA
abuses.
They had to pick and choose.
And MKUltra was dismissed as a
kind of boys-will-be-boys crazy
project on the side and not
as important as some of these
other projects.
So most of the
questions to Gottlieb
were about his involvement
in the assassination plots
in which he had
essentially functioned only
as a pharmacist.
Nobody understood, really,
what he had done at MKUltra.
Then Gottlieb went on to get
a graduate degree in speech
therapy so he could help and
counsel children who stutter,
as he did.
He volunteered at the hospice.
He acted in local plays.
He was on the planning board.
He wore his Birkenstock
sandals around town.
He was seen as an ideal citizen.
But as I point out at
the end of my book,
people who know him during
this part of his life
say that he was
clearly troubled.
He was weighed down.
Seymour Hersh went out to
visit him during this period
and said to me, he
was wracked by guilt.
He was a destroyed man.
If he had been Catholic, he
would have gone to a monastery.
The rabbi who knew
him then said,
maybe, in retrospect,
he was just as puzzled
by what he had done
as we were, who began
to learn a little bit about it.
Toward the end of
his life, a wall
started to close in on Gottlieb.
The family of Frank
Olson, the guy
that had gone out of the
13th floor window in 1953,
never stopped coming after him.
And waves of new investigations
pointed more and more
toward Gottlieb.
In addition, during
the '70s and '80s,
after the first MKUltra
revelations came out
as a result of the
Church Committee
investigation, a small number of
people who had been victimized
in Gottlieb's experiments
slowly began to put it together
and began to think, that's
what happened to me.
And a few of these
actually launched lawsuits.
So one of these
guys was a fellow
named Stanley Glickman who
Gottlieb had poisoned with LSD
in a bar back in the 1950s.
I learned, in my
research, that people
who have hepatitis sometimes
have very extreme reactions
to LSD, and apparently,
Gottlieb was
interested in
experimenting on this.
So this guy did have hepatitis.
He was lured into a bar.
He was given this drug by
a man with a club foot.
And then his life
completely fell apart.
He never painted again.
He was an art student.
He never had a
romantic relationship,
and he became a street
person in Greenwich Village
for the rest of his life.
More than 20 years
after this happened,
his sister was watching TV
when the Church Committee
reports came on, and she
called her brother and said,
this was you.
Remember?
The drink?
The guy with the club foot?
The everything?
That was it.
So they started a
lawsuit, and they actually
named Gottlieb as a defendant.
Needless to say, the CIA
intervened, and the court case
dragged on and on and on.
The guy finally
died in the 1980s,
but the sister would
not give up the lawsuit.
And finally in 1999,
after almost 20 years
of pursuing that case, it was
just about to come to trial.
And Gottlieb was
a named defendant
who would have had to
stay and get on the stand
and testify under oath not
just about this program,
but about the whole
MKUltra project.
And just as the court case was
about to open, Gottlieb died.
I later went to visit the
lawyer, now well into his 90s,
living on Long Island, who
followed this case for 20 years
and shared his entire garage
full of papers with me.
And he told me, Eric Olson,
the son of the guy that
went out the window,
came to visit me right
after Gottlieb died.
And we toasted to
Gottlieb's death.
And we found out that
we had both reached
the same conclusion--
he killed himself.
He didn't want to be the vehicle
by which all of this came out,
and by which great damage might
be caused to the institution
that he'd spent his
whole career serving.
Nobody knows that this is true.
He was immediately cremated.
And besides, he was
renowned as an expert who
not only could create poisons,
but poisons that could never
be detected in any autopsy.
So looking back on
Gottlieb, I think
he does have some things
to say to us today.
First of all, of
course, when you
begin to realize
what can be done
behind the veil of
secrecy, then you wonder,
did I miss another Gottlieb?
Or are there Gottliebs now?
And technology is so
much further advanced now
than it was then.
Are there other people who
have this kind of power
or more on a completely
different scale right now?
And will it be 50 years later
that somebody would also
be standing here, looking
back and telling us this?
You can't answer that,
but this work certainly
does raise that question.
Gottlieb's work also
definitely lives in the memos
that he wrote about how
to interrogate people.
This was one of my
student's projects.
I asked her to find out, is
there a connection between
the famous memo that Gottlieb
wrote back in the '50s about
how to break a suspect--
how do you make a
person lose all contact
with the outside world, become
totally reliant on you--
to find out if there is
a connection between this
and future efforts by the United
States to do the same thing?
And sure enough, she came
back with information
showing that Gottlieb's
ideas about how
you break a human
mind and spirit
were later reflected in the
memos used in the Phoenix
program in Vietnam,
in manuals that
were given to Latin American
police forces during the 1980s,
and in manuals that were
used for people in Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo.
And in some cases, the
phrases are coming right
from Gottlieb's memos.
So these techniques
of what we now
call extreme
interrogation definitely
trace their origin
back to Gottlieb.
In a larger sense, I think
Gottlieb speaks to us today
because he felt that the
extremity of his work
was made necessary by the
urgency of the threat.
He said, in one of his pieces
of congressional testimony,
I want everybody to know
that I found this work very
difficult and very unpleasant.
And you couldn't
understand it unless you
understood the climate
that we were working in.
So he and his colleagues
at the CIA in those days
were told, of course,
America always
obeys all kinds of legal
and ethical and moral rules,
but there once in a while comes
a rare, exceptional moment when
the threat to us is so intense
that, very reluctantly, we
must put those aside for
just a short period of time.
Actually, that sounds
quite familiar to what
we're hearing today.
We're under such threat that
certain civil liberties have
to be curtailed,
and certain kinds
of things we wouldn't do
under other circumstances
have to be allowed.
In a larger sense,
commitment to a great cause
is perhaps the most
profound motivation
for committing immoral acts.
Patriotism is among the most
transcendent and seductive
of causes, and Gottlieb was
very much caught up in that.
He had not been allowed
to serve in World War
II because of his club foot.
He was desperate for a way
to serve the United States.
Gottlieb, in the end,
was a strange combination
of contradictory archetypes.
He was an outlaw who
also served power.
He was a gentle-hearted
torturer.
He was a creator who
was also a destroyer.
And in the end,
his story gives us
what I find to be
a disturbing way
of understanding our country
and understanding ourselves.
I think I'll leave it there
and have another drink.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I'll be happy to
take some questions.
So you heard you're supposed
to come to the microphone,
but other than that,
there are no restrictions.
AUDIENCE: So this all
starts kind of right
after the Korean War.
And there's this enormous
hysteria about brainwashing--
about the North Koreans
brainwashing American soldiers
and getting them to confess.
Is that where the
program came from?
And is that why it was
perpetuated through Vietnam
and other times?
STEPHEN KINZER: So this is
a very interesting question
that I asked myself
when writing the book.
So in the end, it was concluded
mind control is a myth.
They should have been able to
think of that at the beginning.
What made them
think that there's
such a thing as mind control?
That's a big question
that I kept asking myself.
And I think there are
two sets of answers.
There were a couple of incidents
that the CIA misinterpreted,
given the climate of the time.
The first came in
1949 in Hungary,
when the Roman Catholic
prelate, Cardinal Mindszenty,
was put on trial by the
Communist authorities.
He confessed to crimes that he
obviously had not committed.
He had a glazed look in his
eyes, spoke in a monotone.
The CIA immediately decided
he's been brainwashed.
And they decided, as a
result of this observation,
that the Soviets had discovered
the key to mind control.
That made it so urgent
that we do the same.
Now, it later turned out that
Mindszenty, the cardinal,
had been coerced by
the very same methods
that people have been using
for hundreds of years.
He was isolated.
He was beaten.
He had repetitive interrogation.
There was no drug,
but the CIA was
conditioned to believe that.
Oddly enough, the
word brainwash was
invented by a CIA propagandist.
And it was used to
promote the idea
that people who had
dissenting or unusual ideas
in American society must
have been brainwashed.
And I can understand
why they might
have wanted to
create this fantasy,
but the strange thing
was they themselves then
fell for their own fantasy.
The other episode
happened with Korea.
So after the Korean War ended,
several thousand Americans
who had been held prisoner
in Korea came home.
And it turned out
that a number of them
had signed statements
criticizing
aspects of American life--
in some cases, had
confessed to war crimes,
including dropping germ bombs
on North Korea, which we
swore that we had never done.
So the explanation
also came out.
How could any of our
strapping young men
write things like that,
say things like that?
Answer: they were brainwashed.
And there's actually an
interesting footnote to this.
I found one memo trying
to figure out how
the brainwashing had happened.
It said that while the
prisoners were being transported
from North Korea across China
to release points in Europe,
several of them
reported that they'd
gone through kind
of a blank area
where they might
have been poisoned.
And that was in Manchuria.
That's where the
name of Manchuria
became associated
with all of it.
So there were a
couple of episodes
that electrified
people at the CIA,
and as I said, that
they misinterpreted,
allowing them to reach a
conclusion that actually was
not true-- that the
communists, as we call them,
had found the secret
to mind control.
But I don't think that's enough.
I feel that their minds
must have been fertilized.
They were open to
this crazy idea.
Why?
I think it was because
of fiction, because
of the stories and the
movies and the books
these people absorbed
as they were growing up.
There was Edgar Allan Poe
stories, Sherlock Holmes
stories, Gaslight,
movies about Svengali,
people who go out and kill
because an evil psychiatrist
has hypnotized them.
And I think these
CIA guys consciously
or unconsciously
internalized this fantasy
and concluded that what
fiction writers could imagine,
science could make real.
And the interesting
footnote to this
is that as after MKUltra
became known to the public,
beginning in the 1970s, it
spawned a whole new genre
of fiction, books, novels,
movies like Spotless Mind,
Bourne Identity, Men in Black.
All of these have mind control
or mind washing as a theme.
So a CIA project that
was nurtured by fiction
ultimately wound up nurturing
a whole new subgenre of fiction
itself.
So the question was
about the Sandoz Chemical
Company in Switzerland.
Why did they discover LSD?
What were they doing with it?
So LSD was discovered
by accident.
A chemist who had been--
I read his autobiography.
He said as he started
out his research,
I looked ecstatically
forward to the prospect
of spending my lifetime
investigating the ergot enzyme.
I love what people
get interested in.
But as he was experimenting
with the ergot enzyme,
he was testing the
25th permutation
of one combined medical
chemical property,
and he started feeling dizzy.
Apparently, he had ingested
it through his fingers.
Then he came back and
tested it on himself
and he quickly came
to realize that this
was an astonishing
substance, because
in such tiny
quantities, it could
have such an intense effect.
So he imagined it as
a tool that could be
used to treat mental illness.
The Sandoz people were never
very comfortable with it.
He actually called his
autobiography LSD, My Problem
Child.
Sandoz wanted to get rid of it.
They weren't comfortable
with the situation.
So when Gottlieb came to buy
all the LSD that they own,
they were happy to sell it.
And then one of
the things Gottlieb
did to assure his
permanent supply
was to go to an American
pharmaceutical company, Eli
Lilly, send them some, and ask
them to reverse engineer it,
which they finally did
after a number of months,
and we're able to
manufacture it in what
they called tonnage qualities.
And it wasn't too
many years after
that that a couple of
chemists out in California
were able to also
reverse engineer it.
And the next thing you know,
you had the Grateful Dead.
AUDIENCE: So thanks so much for
a really, really interesting
talk.
The first time I heard
about MKUltra was actually
in a class, psychology
undergraduate class
I took from Phil Zimbardo,
called the Psychology
of Mind Control.
And the argument he
made-- and I never
heard about Sidney
Gottlieb, but it
was about the
program in general--
and the argument he
made was that they
were in search of a
Manchurian Candidate,
but the only people whose
minds they ended up controlling
were their own.
In other words, the only
people that they persuaded
were themselves about
the ability to persuade,
as well as basically creating
a cult within the CIA
around these particular
kinds of beliefs.
So I'm really curious about your
perspective on his argument.
And the second question
I had that was just
raised about your
response to the question
about the Chinese
communists is, I
know that Robert Lifton
did a bunch of interviews
with those American POWs out of
the Chinese concentration camps
and wrote their really
famous book on thought reform
and psychology of totalism.
And I'm wondering if he
worked with Gottlieb,
or Gottlieb knew about his work,
or if you have any information
about Lifton's role in this.
I mean, I think Lifton
is still alive--
he's, like, 105 or
something, but I'm
curious if you had a chance
to interview him or talk
to him about his
involvement in this,
because he was so
centrally involved
in the interrogations
of the American POWs
in the Chinese camps.
STEPHEN KINZER: He was.
And Lifton also was involved in
other experiments at Harvard.
But a number of these,
as far as I could tell,
were not-- they came later
and were not directly
connected to MKUltra.
The Ted Kaczynski episode at
Harvard was also part of this.
So I don't have him
in my book, and I
don't go into the details
on the Korea thing.
But I definitely think
that he is onto something
when he's essentially saying
that mind control could
be something much bigger
than just the control
of individual minds.
Regarding the
Manchurian Candidate,
it's really a very
interesting story.
First of all, I
think the description
that you gave is
amazingly accurate.
It's true.
The only ones who really
believed this stuff was
possible was the people inside.
They consulted other
people-- like, for example,
at the Menninger Clinic.
They consulted the Menninger
brothers, leading psychologists
who ran this famous
psychoanalytic institute,
and they both told
them, this is nonsense.
You're barking up a crazy tree.
This is never going
to result in anything.
But since that wasn't
the right answer,
that was just filed away.
And there were other people,
writing in places like Argosy
and True Magazine who told
them, yes, it was true.
So they loved that stuff.
One of these guys, they
actually hired as a consultant.
So I just want to mention a
little bit about the Manchurian
Candidate, though, specifically.
I found a very interesting
memo that remarked about this.
And I believe that
the author of this
actually commented on it
during a senate hearing.
So the book of the
Manchurian Candidate
was the first time that
masses of Americans
were exposed to the
idea of brainwashing.
But it came out just at the
time when inside the CIA,
chemists were reaching the
conclusion that mind control is
a myth and there can never be
any such thing as a Manchurian
Candidate.
So this guy, this
chemist, actually
says that that book and movie
caused us a lot of problems,
because just as we discovered
that something couldn't happen,
the whole world began
to believe that could.
AUDIENCE: I'm wondering to what
extent you attribute this--
I think I would call it evil--
to personalities
and individuals,
and to what extent
you would say it's
institutional through the way
we've arranged our government.
STEPHEN KINZER:
That's a question
I sometimes give to my students
at the end of the semester.
How important were individuals,
as opposed to forces?
A couple of people can
remember that question.
If Sidney Gottlieb
had not existed,
there still would
have been an MKUltra.
But I think it might not
have been so extreme.
I don't know if
Gottlieb was a sadist,
but he might as well have been.
So I think, in that sense,
he did shape the program.
But as I said, given the climate
of the times and the stimulus,
it would have it would
have happened in any case.
As for personalities, I believe
that Allen Dulles probably
discussed this with his
brother, the Secretary of State,
with whom he met almost
every Sunday for brunch.
John Foster Dulles also
met almost every day
when he was in Washington with
the President of the United
States.
And I am assuming
that Eisenhower
had a general idea,
knew just as much
as Allen Dulles
wanted to tell him,
which was all that
he wanted to know.
But I also think that there's
an aspect of this story that
plays out later on.
So in 1975 came a development
in the Frank Olson case.
So that guy went out
the window in 1953--
suicide of an army
scientist, and the family
was told he fell or jumped
from a window, which
is kind of an odd phrase.
It wasn't until 22 years
later that the CIA admitted
that actually, they had played a
role in driving him to suicide,
because they had poisoned
his drink with LSD
just a week before he
went out the window.
And obviously, he had
had a terrible, bad trip,
and it was all our fault,
and we're so sorry.
We never realized that LSD
would have this effect on him.
He obviously was very
disturbed anyway.
Once Gottlieb put the LSD in his
drink, it just sent him crazy.
And we actually bear
responsibility, in a way,
for his suicide.
So the President of
the United States
invited the Olson family into
the Oval Office to apologize--
something that has never
happened before or since.
And then President
Ford sent them
to see William Colby, the
new director of the CIA,
and to share with
them whatever he knew.
And Colby said to
them, as I mentioned
earlier, some of our people were
out of control in those days.
There were problems
of supervision.
It was all Sidney.
Now we realize.
We never should have let
that one crazy guy go off
on his own.
And I think it's
perfect deniability.
In a way, it is true.
He went off on his own.
But they allowed him
to go off on his own,
to do all these things,
specifically so that later on,
22 years later, a
future CIA director
could say he was out of control.
So I think that's
a way of trying
to avoid institutional
responsibility and probably
quite successful
AUDIENCE: What do you think
is the moral distinction
between people who,
as you pointed out,
are committed to a
cause and thereby commit
all kinds of morally
reprehensible acts,
and people who are committed to
making a profit, who will hide
the data regarding the
lethality of their products,
like Teflon, or like
nicotine, or whatever.
STEPHEN KINZER: I think
there's a great similarity.
I think it's easy to lose sight
of this great moral question.
Is there a limit
to how much evil
you can do in
pursuit of what you
think is a good cause
before the evil begins
to outweigh the good?
I think this is something
that Gottlieb definitely
lost sight of.
Nonetheless, I think that
the officers in the early CIA
took a sort of pride in being
callous about human life.
It was a way to show
how macho you were.
And it would have seemed
very naive and sentimental
to complain about the
excesses of MKUltra,
given the threat, as we
were made to believe it.
The loss of a few lives, or the
loss of a few hundred lives,
would seem completely
insignificant.
And that's why I
say you get lost
in this moral wilderness
when you stop asking yourself
if there's ever a time when the
bad can outweigh the good got.
OK, one last one.
AUDIENCE: In the
prisons, recruits
who came from the prisons.
And some probably 10
years later, Richard Leary
was also recruiting inmates--
STEPHEN KINZER: Tim Leary.
AUDIENCE: Tim Leary for
his LSD experiments,
including the prison in
Massachusetts, Norfolk Prison.
And shortly after that,
after he left Harvard,
the FBI was in pretty
hot pursuit of him.
And he left the country.
And he always seemed to be
one step head of the FBI.
And I wondered whether
there was any evidence
of correspondence--
ongoing correspondence--
between Gottlieb
and Timothy Leary,
and whether, in fact,
the CIA might have said,
hands off this guy.
STEPHEN KINZER: I don't believe
that Gottlieb and Leary would
have had any
contact, and I don't
believe that Tim
Leary would ever
have figured out that there
was such a person as Sidney
Gottlieb.
He would have known by the
time he died, certainly,
that the CIA was behind this.
And I have a quote
in my book where
he says the CIA was behind
the whole counter-culture LSD
movement.
But I don't think he
would have ever understood
that there was a Gottlieb
or that there was
one person behind all of this.
But you're right
that he seemed to be
one step ahead of the law.
And actually, his experience,
as I read about it
in researching this
book, led me to an idea
that I think I want to
propose to my publisher.
I discovered that when Tim
Leary was in jail at one point,
some of his confederates in
the Weathermen managed to--
they visited him
in jail and they
brought him a Bible for
his spiritual solace,
and told him quietly that the
Bible had been soaked in LSD so
that he'd only had to
rip off a half a page
and he was done for the day.
So I'm thinking could we
publish maybe a special edition
of my book?
And people would really say it's
really a trip and a half now.
I don't have those, but I
have others to sign outside.
Thank you all very much.
[APPLAUSE]
