Stephen Kinzer’s presentation of his latest, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, brought some of the darkest tales of the 20th century to a perhaps somewhat unsuspecting audience at South End library on October 25. They were not alone. “Poisoner in Chief is my tenth book,” Kinzer confessed. “I tried to devote my career to figure out what lies behind the public facade we see. For the first time, I’ve been shocked by what I found. I can’t believe what’s in my book. What I stumbled on is the most powerful unknown American in history who had a license to kill from the US government.”

A former New York Times bureau chief in Nicaragua, Berlin and Istanbul, and current world-affairs columnist at the Boston Globe, Kinzer described the hair-raising tale of Sidney Gottlieb, hired by the CIA in the early1950s to be their chief chemist in charge of fining the key to mind control. The MK-ULTRA mind control project took place in the 1950s and 60s under CIA chiefs Allen Dulles and, later, Richard Helms. It involved brutal experiments on unsuspecting prisoners in the US and Europe. The purpose was to prove that by destroying people’s minds, they could replace it with one that could be controlled for whatever purpose the CIA had in mind.

The CIA fantasy that this could be accomplished, Kinzer said, derived from the fear of Communism, and specifically the treason trial of Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty in Budapest in 1949, who confessed to crimes he had not committed when he was either under the influence of some mysterious mind‐bending drug, or in a posthypnotic trance. This electrified the CIA and made them believe that the Communists had a key to mind control. The CIA decided that the US needed it for national security purposes and, they hoped, to defeat Communism. To this end, the CIA under Gottlieb’s direction, used research the Nazis had done in concentration camps, and even hired former Nazi doctors to work on the project. During the research for his book, Kinzer visited one of those CIA prisons in Germany where, in the basement, CIA doctors and Nazis carried out experiments on prisoners. Now a “lovely chalet” renovated by its new owner, Kinzer found the goings-on were known among the local population and even written up in the German news magazine at the time, Der Spiegel.

In a recent interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Kinzer described how Gottlieb brought LSD to America, purchasing all of it from its pharmaceutical producer in Switzerland. Assisted by funds from phony foundations, Gottlieb asked various institutions around the world, including hospitals and prisons, to use LSD on those under their control, for national security purposes. One of them was Whitey Bulger who received LSD every day for a year when in Federal detention. Experiments were also conducted in Kentucky where a number of African Americans were given three daily doses of LSD for 77 days to help destroy their minds, an effort in which the CIA succeeded, Kinzer said dryly. But they were not the only victims: A Gottlieb colleague, the bacterial warfare scientist Frank Olson, who had expressed doubts about the program and was considered a whistleblower risk, was found dead at the bottom of a 10-story New York hotel in 1953, ostensibly from suicide; his family later discovered he had received a severe blow to the head and might have been thrown out the window.

LSD was also distributed by the CIA to others, who took it of their own free will. John Lennon, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and Ken Kesey, who later wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, all obtained their first doses of LSD from the CIA. Lennon would say, “We always have to remember to thank the CIA.” After ten years, Gottlieb concluded that it was possible to destroy human minds, but not to replace them with new ones. He then turned to finding new poisons, and gizmos to dispense them, to use on those not aligned with US policy, including Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and others.

When CIA director Helms was fired by Richard Nixon in 1973, he told Gottlieb that all records of his work needed to be destroyed. “No one can know,” Helms said. Seven crates of documents were removed over the stated objection of those in charge of CIA archives and discarded. But Kinzer found a lot of information in another archive, specifically, the CIA‘s expense accounts, as well as in letters Gottlieb’s wife wrote to her father, among other sources. Since Gottlieb’s death in 1999, moreover, it has become even more possible to piece together his astonishing career of 22 years in the CIA. Kinzer was able to draw on newly available documents and additional original interviews to write Gottlieb’s biography, although he jokingly prefers to say he was “on an LSD trip and saw Sidney Gottlieb there.”

Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and the acclaimed author of a dozen books including The True Flag, The Brothers, Overthrow, and All the Shah’s Men, was introduced by former Boston municipal judge, Herb Hershfang, who described the longtime South End resident as “a jewel.” He related how Kinzer gave up a scholarship from New York University to work for former governor Michael Dukakis and, at 21, became the youngest elected member of he South End’s Ward 4 committee. Kinzer’s passion for finding out not just the “who, when and where” but the “how did we get there and why” led him to quit the New York Times and become an author of books that delved deeply into the political role of the United States abroad, Hershfang said. He pointed with admiration to the 43 pages of notes at the end of Poisoner in Chief, a book he said he found “spell-binding.” Referring to Kinzer’s extraordinary skills as an investigative journalist, Hershfang quipped that, “while we have no proof that living among us has produced it, would also be hard to argue it harmed him.”

Sidney Gottlieb was different from other CIA operatives who, Kinzer said, were for he most part “silver-spoon aristocrats.” Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. He stuttered, and had a limp. Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. After he left the CIA, he devoted himself to improving the lives of the poor, including those with leprosy, in Asia and Africa. He may have been the “most gentle torturer of the 20th century,” Kinzer said sarcastically.