In 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles appointed Gottlieb to "run the covert program". White would sit on the lavatory, martini in hand, watching prostitutes give CIA designer drugs to their unsuspecting clients. In the early 1960s, the CIA even helped set up a company to scour the Amazon for potential new drugs, the Amazon Natural Drug Company. Linda McDonald was typical of Camerons victims, who tended to be women. "No other American ever wielded such terrifying life-or-death power while remaining so completely . I thought in 1978 when our books were appearing, when we were doing media work all over the world, that we would finally get the story out, the vaults would be cleansed, the victims would learn their identities, the story would become part of history, and the people who had been injured could seek recompense, recalled Alan Scheflin. As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. What I really mean is that I hate them. In 2017, he was portrayed by actor Tim Blake Nelson in Errol Morris . And when I say afraid thats just a word I use. Alexander CockburnsGuillotined! Perhaps the most infamous experiment in Louisville came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black male heroin addicts for seventy-seven straight days. Degrowth or Debunk: Do Degrowth proponents have a strategy? On March 7, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb, who over a period of some two decades oversaw much of the CIAs research and at times operations involving mind control and poisons, died at the age of 80. As was demonstrated in the Olson affair, Gottlieb had powerful friends inside the Agency, notably Richard Helms, at that time deputy director for covert operations. American chemist and spymaster. Sidney Gottlieb. Cameron used a variety of exotic drugs on his patients, once slipping LSD to an unsuspecting woman fourteen times over a two-month period. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. At least 40 wives of those enrolled had been diagnosed with the disease, and . Lobotomies were another area of intense interest for Dr. Cameron, who instructed his psycho-surgeons to perform their operations using only mild local anesthetics. Get email notification for articles from David B. If Sidney Gottlieb's parents hadn't fled Hungary in the early 20th century, we can assume that his life, like that of millions of other European Jews, would have ended in one of the extermination camps built by Nazi Germany. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of naturally occurring aquatic poisons that, according to one study, "surpass by many times such known substances as strychnine, curare, a range of fungi toxins, and . It was always intended as an operational program, and by the early 1960s these techniques were being fully deployed in the field, sometimes in situations so vile that they rivaled in evil the efforts of the Nazi scientists in German concentration camps. The CIA doctors back at Langley looked on with some amazement at this research, since its own experiments with a similar sensory deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe psychological reactions in subjects locked up for less than forty hours. Estabrooks was a Rhodes scholar who had trained in psychology at Harvard with Gardner Murphy. Loguey was sent to Cameron by his family doctor, who believed that a persistent pain Loguey complained about in his leg was psychosomatic. Their house was a former slave quarters, and Gottlieb rose every morning before sunrise to milk his herd of goats. This is a field with which I am familiar through formulating guidelines for the technique used by the US in two world wars. In 1951, Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. Nation Feb 18, 2020 3:10 PM EST. Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a source of inspiration in the counterculture movement, was first exposed to LSD and other psychedelic drugs as a part of the MKUltra project while still a graduate student at Stanford University. A more ambitious project was described in a CIA memo as follows: We thought about the possibility of putting some [LSD] in a city water supply and having citizens wander around in a more or less happy state, not terribly interested in defending themselves., This was certainly a hazardous time to be at any public function attended by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and his associates. Shortly after he left the CIA, Gottlieb went to India, where for 18 months he managed a leper hospital. Directed by Sidney Gottlieb, experiments took place across America in colleges, prisons, and mental institutions, as well as internationally in Canada and Europe. One mental patient in Kentucky was given LSD for 174 consecutive days. He also had a club foot. All of these activities made the Technical Services Division a vital partner of the covert operations wing of the Agency. Gottliebs death, on this date in 1999, was from unspecified causes. He was born in 1918 the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, but never adopted the faith; indeed much of the rest of his life was a search for religious fulfilment, via agnosticism, Christianity and even Zen Buddhism. This essay is adapted from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press. Cameron was eased out of his post at Allan Memorial in 1964 and died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967 at the age of sixty-six. Ed was an original subscriber to CounterPunch and never failed to praise us when we got things right and shame us when we screwed up. By that point, 28 of the participants had died from syphilis, and 100 more had passed away from related complications. He died from complications of MS. Mr. Gottlieb was born in Norfolk on September 24, 1932, and lived his entire life in the area. At the end of it all, just as the conspiracy theorists would have predicted, Gottlieb himself pronounced that the entire exercise had been a waste of time. Although most of the patients did not die from the effects of the plutonium injections, the government's secrecy and willingness to subject its own citizens to such experiments raised suspicion from many. Olson was a 43-year-old civilian germ-warfare researcher for the U.S. Army who was also a CIA employee and an unwitting recipient of CIA acid. From the early 1950s through most of the 1960s hundreds of American citizens were administered mind-altering drugs. Well-known is the journey of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb to the Congo, where his little black bag held an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumbas toothbrush. Gottlieb urges federal government to surge vaccines to Michigan. The C.I.A., convinced that its enemies had developed a method to control human minds, developed MKUltra to find its own techniques until the 1960s, inspired by the work of Japanese and Nazi scientists. Despite the fact that Kennedys subcommittee had Whites records, which documented Lashbrooks visits to Bedford Street, Lashbrook received no challenge from the subcommittee when he insisted that he had never gone anywhere near the CIA safehouse. Sidney Gottlieb (Bronx, 3 de agosto de 1918 - Condado de Washington, 7 de maro de 1999) foi um qumico norte-americano mais conhecido pelo seu envolvimento com a CIA - Central de Inteligncia Americana, no programa ilegal de pesquisa em seres humanos denominado Projeto MKULTRA.. O nome de nascimento de Sidney Gottlieb Joseph Scheider.Em 1951 ele foi admitido na CIA como perito em . The officers also told colleagues of Thornwell that the black man had been sleeping with their wives and girlfriends: several of these men beat up Thornwell in a jealous rage. On Nov. 28, 1953, Dr. Frank Olson died on impact after falling 13 floors from his room in the Statler Hotel in New York City. I hate their voices, I hate their eyes, I hate the way they laugh. As director of TSD, Sid was like the character "Q" in the James Bond movies. All of these San Francisco sessions were filmed and tape-recorded, in another eerie parallel with Nazi research: Himmler had recommended to the doctors conducting the Dachau experiments in cold water immersion that perhaps the subjects be revived by animal warmth, meaning sex with prostitutes held in a special building at Dachau. He had not told new agency director John McCone about the program, and he double-crossed Earman on a promise to do so. The new personality talked Communist doctrine and meant it. Estabrooks and the army contrived to have the Marine given a dishonorable discharge and encouraged him to penetrate the Communist Party. Within Technical Services MK-ULTRA projects came under the control of the Chemical Division, headed from 1951 to 1956 by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a New York Jew who received his doctorate in chemistry from California Tech. Gottlieb retired in 1972, having concluded that all his work had been useless. Loguey was duly diagnosed as a schizophrenic by Cameron, which rendered him immediately available as a guinea pig for Camerons CIA project. He died in 2008 at the age of 102 . Gottlieb was the first LSD maven, the original acid visionary. . Laurent Guynot, a Ph.D. historian and engineer, is the author of From Yahweh to Zion, the best book ever written on the so-called "Jewish question."As he explains in the video below, Dr. Guynot discovered the JQ through the study of the two biggest "deep events" in U.S. history: 9/11 and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers (which must be seen as two prongs of a single . Virginian-Pilot, March 20, 2002 NORFOLK - Melvin Sidney Gottlieb, son of Nellie Rabinowitz Gottlieb and the late Alex Gottlieb, died on March 18, 2002, at Beth Sholom Home. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. He was a somewhat bizarre-looking figure, 200 pounds, 5-feet-7-inches tall and bald. These Bluebird interrogations continued throughout the Korean War. Green, This Day / U.S. Apologizes for Hitler Insult, This Day in Jewish History / Gur Founder Dies. The CIAs Office of Security, headed at the time by Sheffield Edwards, developed a hypnosis project called Bluebird, whose object was to get an individual to do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.. In fact, he taught us all how to read to read between the lines, through the bullshit and beyond the imperial dogma. The LSD safehouse program continued in both New York and San Francisco until 1963, when the CIAs new Inspector General, John Earman, stumbled across the enterprise. His death was announced on Friday by the . Annette, un poema eroico as it's meant to be heard, narrated by Chiara Francese. Connoisseurs of CIA denials should study Lashbrooks performance in 1977, when he was questioned during Ted Kennedys senatorial probe. 2022-06-30; wreck on 1942 crosby, tx today After a few days of observation, Cameron had diagnosed McDonald as an acute schizophrenic and had her transferred to the medical torture chamber he called the Sleep Room. For the next eighty-six days, McDonald was kept in a near comatose state by the use of powerful narcotics, and awakened only for massive jolts from Camerons electro-shock machine. From the beginning, MK-Ultra's mind-control experiments were conducted with great secrecy in part because the CIA was well aware of the dubious ethics involved. Gottlieb hailed this triumph as a key breakthrough that would enable the CIA to buy the drug in tonnage quantities. Such large amounts were not of course required for interrogation: Gottliebs aim was instead to have the ability to incapacitate large populations and armies. Instead his patriotism would find its outlet in the CIA, where the war had never ended. Its subjects, almost all of them unwitting, were society's outcasts: prostitutes and their clients, mental patients, convicted criminals - people, in the words of one of Gottlieb's colleagues, "who could not fight back". The Agency eventually agreed to a settlement, paying out $750,000 but the CIA still maintains it was not culpable for Camerons actions. This rivaled anything in Dachau. Source: (npr.org), Richard Helms, Gottlieb's supervisor. This time Whites surveillance post was a small bathroom, with a two-way mirror allowing him to peer into the main room. On March 7, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb, who over a period of some two decades oversaw much of the CIA's research and at times operations involving "mind control" and poisons, died at the age of 80. A CIA report on the project says that, among other things, Artichoke was meant to investigate the theory that agents might be given cover stories under hypnosis and not only learn them faultlessly, but actually believe them. Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturerthe agency's "poisoner in chief.". The Artichoke scientists deemed the interrogation profitable and successful. They noted that post-hypnotic suggestion had left the subject completely confused with a severe headache and a vague and faulty memory of the interrogation. His brainstorms included a poisoned cigar, shoes infused with the highly toxic thallium, and a TV studio sprayed with LSD. Richard Prince was given CIA money for research on folk medicine and faith healing among the Yoruba people in Nigeria. The author of the Bender-Gestalt used her CIA money to pump hallucinogens, including LSD, into children between the ages of seven and eleven. The son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Gottlieb excelled in the sciences at City College. The Current TikTok Ban Doesnt Go Far Enough. Gottlieb was involved in assassination attempts during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, developing unconventional weapons, including a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, poison gifts for Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a leader in the Congo. An international commission in 1952 concluded that the charges had merit. LOS ANGELES Sidney Poitier, the renowned actor, director and activist, died of a combination of heart failure, Alzheimer's dementia and prostate cancer, according to his death certificate . In fact, US military and intelligence agencies had been dabbling in mind control research for more than forty years. Sidney Gottlieb[97] was a Jewish-American chemist who joined the CIA in his early 30s and within two years was appointed by Allen Dulles the designer and head of the agency's vast and top-secret MK-ULTRA program, which was initiated to explore mind control, human programming, assassination and much more. First, he put his patients into a prolonged sleep by injecting them with a daily mixture of Thorazine, Nembutal and Seconal. With his wife Margaret, he spent 18 months in India running a leper hospital. There Thornwell was secretly given LSD over a period of several days by army and CIA interrogators, during which he was forced to undergo extremely aggressive questioning, replete with racial slurs. This nominally private enterprise was run by an old CIA hand named J. C. King, who had headed the CIAs Western Hemisphere Division during the Bay of Pigs and was officially moved out of the Agency shortly thereafter. But it never assisted in diagnosis or paid any hospital bills, or in any other way took the slightest responsibility for what it had done. White called this enterprise Operation Midnight Climax. Because of the secretive nature of his work, we have no idea how many people died or had their lives destroyed by his experiments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZlvWIUeA1Y, Body and Shadow by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Comment Cest by Michael Mantler, Himoko Paganotti and the Max Brand Ensemble, Difficult Women: a Memoir of Three by David Plante, Marx, Capitalism and the Madness of Economic Reason by David Harvey, Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa by Stephanie Ordering, Jean Rhys: You want to know what Im afraid of? For twenty years, he was the senior scientist. After getting a doctorate in biochemistry from California Institute of Technology in 1940, he married Margaret Moore, who had been born in India. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s **ination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. Of course Im afraid of them. He once locked a woman in a small white box for thirty-five days, where she was deprived of all light, smells and sounds. My medical file even says I took my guitar with me. It worked beautifully for months with this subject, but the technique backfired. . In 2017, he was portrayed by actor Tim Blake Nelson in Errol Morris' Wormwood.But Kinzer's book, the first proper Gottlieb biography, includes fascinating new facts about the end of his career and fresh details about disturbing episodes he orchestrated. The CIAs Bluebird project, which investigated hypnosis and other techniques in the early 1950s, was headed by Morse Allen, a veteran of Naval Intelligence and a specialist in techniques of interrogation. They would also hand out doctored cigarettes. The well-known psychiatrist Loretta Bender was also a recipient of MK-ULTRA funds. MK-ULTRA was never designed to be pure research. how did sidney gottlieb die. Gottlieb asked White to establish a CIA safehouse in New York, invite suitable subjects to party there, drug them covertly and then review their behavior. Ken Kesey. 2011-08-10 20:32:02. Mr. Gottlieb ''had had a real . Then there are the endless potions directed at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela in Paris on November 22, 1963. Gottlieb, born on August 3, 1918 in New York, was raised in an Orthodox home by Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Sidney Gottlieb Biography. It was the normal habit of Gottlieb and his CIA colleagues back in Virginia to test all materials on themselves, but more than 800 different compounds were sent over to Isbells shop for the addicts to try first. In 1953, Dr. Abramson was given $85,000. The secretive scientist who only had one known picture of himself was hired in 1951 by Allen Dulles, who would later become the head of the CIA and two years later, Gottlieb was running MKUltra, named for the ultra-sensitive activities they were participating in. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a 44-year-old physician, was confirmed by the Senate this week in a 57-42 vote. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist at the head of MKUltra . This had the double utility of squelching the charges of germ warfare and also of justifying the Bluebird program. Hundreds of people were thus unknowingly dosed, and there is no way of knowing how many psychological and physical traumas the CIA was responsible for. He also volunteered at a hospice. Meads former husband, medical anthropologist Gregory Bateson, was given CIA-procured LSD by Harold Abramson. They were testing a weapon; for their purposes, they might as well have been in a ballistics lab. But the Olson disaster reduced their enthusiasm for self-testing, and so did another mishap that occurred when an unwitting CIA officer had a dose of LSD slipped into his coffee at the Agencys offices on the Mall in Washington, D.C. how did sidney gottlieb die. However, Gottlieb died in 1999 . Afraid of them? Every detail could be made to sink in. The electrodes were removed, the patients were shot and their bodies burned. He wanted the patients awake so that he could chart the minute changes in their consciousness the deeper the scalpel blade sliced into the frontal lobe. Despite his physical affliction he was an ardent square dancer and exponent of the polka, capering across many a dance floor and dragging visiting psychiatrists and chemists on terpsichorean trysts where appalling plans of mind control were ruminated amidst the blare of the bands. The hypnotic courier, on the other hand, provides a unique solution. Estabrooks related in matter-of-fact detail his role in hypnotizing intelligence officers for dangerous missions inside occupied Japan, describing how through hypnosis he had locked information inside the mind of unwitting soldiers, information that could only be retrieved by Estabrooks and other designated military psychologists. Gottlieb himself said that the creation of MK-ULTRA was inspired by reports of mind-control work in the Soviet Union and China. Eventually Thornwell turned to the intelligence officers for help in escaping this harassment. Early years and education. 10. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and bidding of the All Highest.. These people, supposedly being delivered from their drug habits, were awarded heroin and morphine in amounts relative to the nature of a particular research task. Its cruel, its idiotic, its unspeakably horrible. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturerthe agency's "poisoner in chief." As head of the MK-ULTRA mind. (AP) One of the jurors who convicted notorious crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger says she regrets her decision after learning that he was an . Gottliebs colleagues at Army Intelligence were conducting their own experiments with LSD, called Operation Third Chance. This is MK-Ultra and its real victims. Using CIA and Rockefeller funds, Cameron pioneered research into the use of sensory deprivation techniques. Gottlieb then gave the green light for CIA station officers in Manila and Atsugi, Japan, to begin the operational use of LSD. Posted in Crime, Policy, Science, War | 2 Comments These studies indicate that from the CIAs earliest days it has had a keen interest in developing methods of social control over potentially disruptive elements in American society. As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. In the divisions laboratories and workshops researchers labored on poisons, gadgets designed to maim and kill, techniques of torture and implements to carry such techniques to agonizing fruition. During his studies in California, Gottlieb met Margaret Moore, the India-born daughter of Christian missionaries, whom he married in 1942. The top-secret project led to the death of many people, countless lawsuits, and the Presidential Order for Transparency. But it turned out to be an exceedingly hot day and the party-goers kept the windows open, allowing breezes off the Pacific to swirl through the room, thus dispersing the LSD. The public disclosure of the MKULTRA program in the 1970s during Senate investigations of CIA activities and the program's further exploration in John Marks's 1978 book The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control had both political and cultural ramifications. During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK . His new book is The Big Heat:Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. In 1968, in the year of Sidney Gottlieb's passing, on April 4th, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader, was shot and killed by an assassin in Memphis. In the midst of their MK-ULTRA researches, the CIA had concluded that since prisoners had lawyers who might turn ugly, it was probably not a good idea to use them as human guinea pigs. He completed his doctorate in biochemistry at California Institute of Technology. Andrew Pulver. Furnished with $300,000 from Allen Dulles, Gottlieb started farming out research to characters such as Harold Abramson, Olsons nemesis. Sidney Poitier, whose groundbreaking acting work in the 1950s and 60s paved the way for generations of Black film stars, has died aged 94. Noting the apparent tolerance of the subjects to this incredible regimen of lysergic acid, Isbell explained in chilling tones that this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type. In another eerie reprise of the Nazi doctors Dachau experiments, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected with psilocybin, rectal thermometers inserted, lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and joints whacked to test neural reactions. This answer is: A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a . The doctor assured her husband that Cameron was the best there was and would have her back home and healthy in no time. Gottlieb believed that, to control minds, he would have to blast away the existing mind and then insert a new one. And Im very much afraid of the whole bloody human race. Your own man may have unquestionable loyalty but his judgement is always open to question. The cooperation of the Narcotics Bureau was secured by a deal whereby the bureau could use the apartments for drug stings during CIA down time. But the mild-mannered meditator also had a covert killer side to him. Another early recipient of Gottliebs money was Dr. Harris Isbell, who ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Helms told McCone that positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing., McCone put a freeze on CIA-sponsored testing at the safe-houses, but they remained open for George Whites use with the CIA paying the bills until 1966, when White retired. Prisoners were also given LSD, notably Whitey Bulger, who volunteered for what he thought were experiments to find a cure for schizophrenia. Gottlieb's inventiveness also ran to a variety of assassination plots against various foreign targets. So the Agency offered to buy Sandozs entire production run of LSD for $250,000. He was also a lusty drinker with a preference for straight gin. Whites diary records that Lashbrook visited the apartment on numerous occasions, delivering drugs and watching the human guinea pigs through the two-way mirror. The same year, Gottlieb concocted a blend of viruses to be injected into the toothpaste of Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba, but by the time he delivered it personally to the CIA bureau in Kinshasa, the freedom fighter had already been deposed in a coup. Source: (whyy.org), Ken Kesey, one well-known subject. The potential for military intelligence has been nightmarish, Estabrooks wrote. Gottlieb, born on August 3, 1918 in New York, was raised in an Orthodox home by Jewish immigrants from Hungary. The names Fanny Bender Gottlieb and Louis Gottlieb are also cited on . On page 56, Marks noted that Sidney Gottlieb, longtime head of the MK ULTRA program, "refused to . Nothing satisfied Cameron quite like the use of electro-shock therapy, which he believed could wipe the mind clean, allowing him to purge his patients of their disease. In 1951, he was recruited by the CIA, where he was appointed head of the technical services staff of the chemical division. He sat on numerous boards and was a contributing editor to dozens of journals. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave tacit approval, in March 1960 Gottlieb also got going on developing methods for surreptitiously assassinating Fidel Castro, head of the pro-Soviet regime dug in some 140 kilmometers off the coast of Florida. Born with a clubfoot and afflicted with a severe stammer, Gottlieb pushed himself with unremitting intensity. But CIA documents reveal that an ulterior motive was the identification of promising young foreign agents. According to documents obtained by TMZ . By 1952 the CIAs scientists began to test their techniques on what a CIA memo described as individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants, subjects having known reasons for deception. As one CIA psychologist told John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a pioneering investigation into these activities in the late 1970s, one did not put a high premium on the civil rights of a person who was treasonable to his own country. One suspected double agent was taken to a thoroughly isolated CIA safehouse in rural Germany, far removed from surrounding neighbors. The man was told that he was to undergo a series of routine medical and psychological tests as condition of his employment. Advertisement. Gottlieb died in 1999, leaving us to try to piece together the things that he did during his secretive career. The safehouse became a working lab for the CIAs Technical Services Division, fitted out with two-way mirrors, listening devices and concealed cameras. Gottlieb and his wife, a fundamentalist Christian, lived on a farm in the Shenandoah Mountains in northern Virginia. And in the context of the time, who could argue?". Although, of course, he never knew that name. In one experiment, a female CIA security officer was hypnotized and provided with a new identity. John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. In one case, he claimed that he had created a new personality in a normal Marine. After these mishaps, Gottlieb became persuaded that the best course was simply to test the hallucinogens on a random basis at public gatherings, or to pick out street people and induce them to swallow a dram of whatever potion was under review that day. June 11, 2022 . The best-known experiments involved LSD, although that's not Gottlieb's only legacy. Codes can be broken. When CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb died in 1999 at the age of 80, the New York Times described him as 'a kind of genius.' Others were less circumspect. James Earl Ray was apprehended and plead guilty to shooting Dr. King. The experiment failed. He was also involved in assassination attempts of foreign leaders.