As Sidney Gottlieb rose into the top ranks of the CIA during the 1960s, his family life remained rich. He expanded his Virginia cabin into a split-level house with large windows and modern conveniences. It was set far back from the road, in a forested glen at the end of a long gravel driveway. The grounds were built around a large swimming pool. On some summer weekends, dressed only in shorts, Gottlieb would sit cross-legged near the diving board and meditate.
In his late forties, Gottlieb was trim, fit, and handsome, with penetrating blue eyes. He rose before the sun and enjoyed being outdoors. When weather allowed, he spent hours gardening and working on his property. He liked to swim—whenever he arrived at a hotel, he headed for the pool—and developed an interest in sailing. He played tennis. Hours under the sun gave him a ruddy tan.
Gottlieb’s four children—two boys and two girls—were no more or less troublesome than other teenagers. His wife sprinkled her letters to relatives with reports about rowdy sons and sullen daughters. She wanted them to think freely and nourish their spirituality.
“The way we thought about our children’s upbringing in spiritual matters was that it was very important,” Margaret Gottlieb wrote years later. “But since Sid and I came from such very different but very strong religious backgrounds, we wanted to give them the tradition of each and some knowledge of how all mankind has related to the subconscious, to the need to understand what is out there beyond. We always went to the Passover celebration at Sid’s home … We spent two years in Germany and by the time we came home, Sid’s father was sick and then died, so we didn’t go home anymore … We feel that it is very important to be connected to age-old tradition, to feel that you are part of a large community—your family, your neighborhood, your school, your town, your church. I wanted my kids to have an acquaintanceship with the Bible, to have the sound of it in their ears. I wanted them to have great music, great poetry, great books, old folk tales, to have heard about folk customs, to know how their ancestors lived, moved and spoke.”
The elder son, Peter, was seventeen years old when, in the summer of 1966, he brought home a girlfriend. She was one of his classmates at James Madison High School. Half a century later, she looked back over their romance. She remembered it as “kind of like going steady, puppy love, very innocent.” Her recollections provide a uniquely intimate view of the family.
The girlfriend, who in an interview asked to be identified as Elizabeth, was delighted to fall into the Gottlieb orbit.
“I was a smart kid, but I came from a very Catholic background, a big family where everyone was preoccupied with the daily struggles of life,” she said. “The Gottlieb family dynamic was so different from what I experienced growing up. They would have discussions about politics and what was happening in the world. They had so many more books—Sidney had a library in a den off the eating area. And they were so much more frank and open with each other than I was used to. I remember a time when one of Peter’s sisters yelled, ‘Oh shit! I’ve got my damn period again!’ And I thought, ‘Well, this is different.’”
Elizabeth recalls Sidney and Margaret emerging one evening in full Bavarian costume. He wore knee-length leather breeches with suspenders, and she wore an embroidered dirndl. They were on their way to an evening at one of their dancing clubs. “This was real folk dance,” Elizabeth said, “not square dance.”
The summer was a revelation for Elizabeth in several ways. “There was no religious feeling in that household, but I would say that Sidney had mystical leanings,” she said. “So did his wife. They would talk about esoteric subjects that never came up at my dinner table at home. I remember feeling kind of entranced by their whole dynamic as a family. It was exotic. They were very unusual people. He meditated, but they weren’t wackos or anything like that. There was something I just couldn’t put my finger on.”
Toward the end of Elizabeth’s summer romance, that “something” came suddenly into focus.
One day that summer, we were out at the house swimming. The parents had gone to the store to buy food for dinner and Peter goes, kind of conspiratorially, “Come here. I want to show you something.” He takes me into his father’s den, his library, and says, “Turn around.” He did something—he didn’t want me to see what he did—and the wall of books opened up. Behind it was all this stuff. Weapons—I couldn’t tell which kind, but guns. There was other stuff back there. It was like a secret compartment. I asked him, “What is that for?” He closed it back up quickly and said, “You know, my father has a price on his head.” I said, “Why? Is he a criminal?” He said, “No, he works for the CIA.” Then he said, “You know, my dad has killed people. He made toothpaste to kill someone.” Later on he told me, “Don’t tell anyone that you were in there, and don’t ever tell anyone you know that my father kills people.”
Looking back, Elizabeth concluded that Margaret Gottlieb “had to know” what her husband did for a living. “I also think all the kids knew about the secret compartment,” she said. “You just got a sense that there were certain things they knew they had to follow, kind of unspoken protocols. You had to honk your horn when you arrived at the bottom of the driveway. Guests could come over, but only at certain times. There were little rules that had to be followed. This explains what was behind that wall of books. There probably was a worry about security, and someone coming after him.”
SILENT CIA OFFICERS watched intently as a veterinarian anesthetized a gray-and-white cat on the operating table of a modern animal hospital. When the first incision drew blood, one of the spectators—an audio engineer from Gottlieb’s Technical Services Division—felt faint and stepped back to sit down. The others followed the vet’s every move. He implanted a tiny microphone in the cat’s ear canal, connected it with ultra-fine wire to a three-quarter-inch-long transmitter at the base of her skull, and added a packet of micro-batteries as a power source. Then he sewed up his incisions. The cat awoke and, after a recovery period, behaved normally.
“Acoustic Kitty” was conceived as the CIA’s answer to a nagging surveillance problem. Bugging devices that its officers placed in foreign embassies often picked up too much background noise. Someone—a case officer or a “tech” from Gottlieb’s shop—observed that cat ears, like human ears, contain a cochlea, a natural filter that screens out much of that noise. Why not try to turn a living cat into a surveillance device? Even if it proved unable to filter out background noise, it would allow “audio access” to targets who allowed cats to wander through their offices or conference rooms. This idea led to many months of experimentation and, ultimately, the creation of “Acoustic Kitty” in a CIA-contracted operating theater.
This cat was a miracle of technology. After the operation, she showed no outward scars, walked normally, and could do everything other cats did. The microphone and transmitter implanted within her worked perfectly. Finally her CIA handlers brought her to a park for a test mission. They pointed her in the direction of two men lost in conversation, supposedly with this command: “Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else—not the birds, no cat or dog—just those two guys!” Any cat owner could guess what happened next. The cat took a few steps toward the men and then wandered off in another direction.
“Technically the audio system worked, generating a viable audio signal,” according to one report of this experiment. “However, control of the cat’s movements, despite earlier training, proved so inconsistent that the operational utility became questionable. Over the next few weeks, Acoustic Kitty was exercised against various operation scenarios, but the results failed to improve.”
This aborted project was part of a CIA effort to test the value of animals—birds, bees, dogs, dolphins, and others—for electronic surveillance. No one considered it a failure. The official directive that ended it in 1967 concludes that further attempts to train animals “would not be practical,” but adds: “The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it.”
In an earlier era, that would have been a tip of the hat to Gottlieb and his fellow craftsmen-scientists at the Technical Services Division. It still was, but the “Acoustic Kitty” project was not run by Technical Services alone. Officers from the new Directorate of Science and Technology, which steadily expanded into what had been Gottlieb’s domain, were also involved. Technical Services was able to remain autonomous—and to protect MK-ULTRA secrets—thanks to the vigilant patronage of Richard Helms. Nonetheless its mandate narrowed. Projects that would in the past have been its responsibility were transferred to the new directorate. Among them were “behavioral” experiments involving induced amnesia, implanted electrodes, and the cultivation of false memory.
With many of Gottlieb’s responsibilities assigned to other CIA officers, MK-ULTRA ceased to exist as an active project. In 1964 the cryptonym was officially retired. A new one, MK-SEARCH, was assigned to its successor project, whose purpose was “to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior in a predictable manner through the use of drugs.” The work Gottlieb had pioneered would continue, but in a more conventional scientific environment and stripped of its most brutal extremes.
If the demise of MK-ULTRA troubled Gottlieb, his concern was wiped away by the fortuitous results of unexpected turmoil at the top of the CIA. John McCone resigned as director in 1965. The tenure of his successor, Admiral William Raborn, was brief and unhappy. When Raborn resigned in 1966, President Johnson chose Richard Helms to succeed him. Gottlieb’s bureaucratic godfather had reached the top. The result was not long in coming: Helms named Gottlieb chief of the Technical Services Division. The chemist whom some colleagues called “that clubfooted Jew” was now master of the CIA tool shop and its network of subsidiaries around the world.
ON FEBRUARY 14, 1970, a fiat from the White House shook Sidney Gottlieb’s world. President Nixon, declaring that he feared the outbreak of a global pandemic, ordered government agencies to destroy their stores of bio-weapons and chemical toxins. Army scientists dutifully complied. Gottlieb hesitated. He asked the chief of his Chemical Division, Nathan Gordon, for an inventory of CIA stocks. Gordon reported that the CIA’s “health alteration committee” medicine chest at Fort Detrick contained ten biological agents that could cause diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, equine encephalitis, and anthrax, as well as six organic toxins, among them snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison. Both men were disturbed at the prospect of losing this deadly pharmacopeia. Gordon suggested that it be secretly moved out of Fort Detrick. He even found a research center in Maryland willing to warehouse it for $75,000 a year.
A couple of days later, however, Gordon and Gottlieb met with Richard Helms and Tom Karamessines, the CIA’s deputy director for plans, and agreed that the Agency had no realistic option other than to follow the president’s order and destroy its stock of poison. It did so—but one batch, the paralytic shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction. This was one of Gottlieb’s prize poisons. Fabricating it had required extracting and refining minute amounts of toxin from thousands of Alaskan butter clams. The resulting concentrate was so strong that a single gram could kill five thousand people. Gottlieb had used it to make “L-pills” for agents who thought they might have to kill themselves, and to coat the suicide needle given to pilots of the U-2 spy plane.
Two canisters containing nearly eleven grams of this poison—enough to kill 55,000 people—were in one of Gottlieb’s freezers. Before army technicians could remove them, two officers from the Special Operations Division packed them into the trunk of a car and drove them to the navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, where the CIA maintained a small chemical warehouse. Nathan Gordon later testified that he ordered this operation himself, without consulting Gottlieb. He said he had never seen a directive requiring the destruction of toxins, and in any case believed that the CIA should keep some on hand in case “higher authority” should ever need it. By the time the eleven grams of shellfish poison were discovered and destroyed in 1975, Gottlieb had retired.
The seven years during which Gottlieb ran Technical Services—he was its longest-serving chief—were a period of frenetic global activity for the CIA. Its officers ran operations every day, in almost every country on earth, and required an endless array of tools and devices. Gottlieb’s men and women provided them: individually tailored disguises to help officers evade surveillance; cameras hidden inside key chains, tie clips, wristwatches, and cigarette lighters; a thumb-sized single-shot pistol; a pipe that concealed a radio receiver; cars with secret compartments in which agents could be smuggled out of hostile countries; and a compressor that squeezed Soviet currency into tiny packets so large amounts could be passed in small containers.
Gottlieb’s “concealment engineers” also crafted a remarkable device intended to entrap Philip Agee, a retired CIA officer who had become a fierce critic of the Agency. In 1971, when Agee was in Paris working on a tell-all book, he met a woman later described as “a blonde, bosomy and wealthy heiress of an American businessman in Venezuela.” She encouraged his work, gave him money, lent him her apartment as a work space, and gave him a portable typewriter. Being a trained covert operative, Agee quickly discovered that the typewriter was crammed with tiny electronic devices, including microphones, a transmitter, and fifty miniature batteries. The woman who gave it to him turned out to have been a CIA officer. It was well crafted, an exemplar of Gottlieb’s art. Agee found it so ingenious that he featured it on the cover of his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary. The lining of the typewriter lid is peeled back to reveal the battery array concealed beneath.
Some of the requests for exotic devices that Gottlieb received from operations officers had a peculiar origin. He ran Technical Services at a time when spy-versus-spy television shows like Secret Agent, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, I Spy, and Mission: Impossible were immensely popular. The craze for James Bond movies exploded at the same time. Scriptwriters competed to invent the most outrageously imaginative gadgets for their fictional spies to use. Real spies took notice. Operations officers would become intrigued by a gadget from a TV show or film, and ask whether it could be made to function in real life. These inquiries were so persistent that for a time Technical Services added extra officers to its telephone switchboard on the morning after each episode of Mission: Impossible was broadcast. Officers who had been intrigued by some piece of spyware they saw on the show would call to ask: “Could you do that?” Gottlieb’s crew took each of these orders seriously, and they filled more than a few.
Inevitably, given the era, Gottlieb and his Technical Services Division became deeply involved in the Vietnam War. The CIA station in Saigon was enormous and included a contingent of officers from Technical Services. One of them later estimated that equipment produced by Gottlieb’s officers was used in “thirty to forty missions a day in Laos and Vietnam.”
Engineers from Technical Services designed a portable “triple-tube rocket launcher” for commandos to use in destroying enemy fuel depots. Another team built a wooden superstructure to be fitted around a high-powered patrol boat so it would look like an innocent junk. Forgers made false documents for Vietnamese agents. Engineers designed sensors to be placed along the Ho Chi Minh trail, where they could be used to guide bomb strikes. They also produced mini-transmitters to be hidden in the stocks of rifles that would be abandoned on battlefields in the hope that enemy troops would recover them and become easier to track. One team invented an advanced compass for use by covert teams operating inside North Vietnam. It looked like a cigarette pack but contained miniaturized maps that were dimly backlit so they could be used in night operations.
“Throughout 1968, Dr. Gottlieb continued to preside over his empire of scientists who still prowled the backwaters of the world seeking new roots and leaves which could be crushed and mixed in the search for lethal ways to kill,” according to one study of American intelligence during this period. “In their behavior laboratories, the psychiatrists and psychologists continued experimenting. Once more they had turned to an earlier line of research: implanting electrodes in the brain … An Agency team flew to Saigon in July 1968; among them were a neurosurgeon and a neurologist … In a closed-off compound at Bien Hoa Hospital, the Agency team set to work. Three Vietcong prisoners had been selected by the local station. How or why they were chosen would remain uncertain. In turn each man was anaesthetized and, after he had hinged back a flap in their skulls, the neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain. When the prisoners regained consciousness, the behaviorists set to work … The prisoners were placed in a room and given knives. Pressing the control buttons on their handsets, the behaviorists tried to arouse their subjects to violence. Nothing happened. For a whole week the doctors tried to make the men attack each other. Baffled at their lack of success, the team flew back to Washington. As previously arranged in case of failure, while the physicians were still in the air the prisoners were shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned.”
While this experiment was failing in Vietnam, another one in Israel also failed. The Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, had an intimate connection to the CIA through James Jesus Angleton, the CIA officer who managed their relationship, and the two services often shared intelligence. As head of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, Angleton knew much about MK-ULTRA. Mossad was curious about one of the central MK-ULTRA goals: creating a programmed killer. Mossad officers thought this technique might help them assassinate the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. “The Israelis spent three months in 1968 trying to transform a Palestinian prisoner into a programmed killer,” according to a study of Mossad’s assassination program. “Within five hours of being released to carry out his mission, he had turned himself in to the local police, handed over his pistol and explained that Israeli intelligence had tried to brainwash him into killing Arafat.”
Gottlieb’s operation reached a peak of activity during the late 1960s. His ability to oversee a worldwide network of officers—informed by his years running MK-ULTRA—secured his reputation as a skilled administrator. He worked hard, happy with five hours of sleep each night. At lunchtime he snacked on food he brought from home, usually raw carrots, cauliflower, or other vegetables, homemade bread, and goat milk. He was known as a compassionate boss who made a point of mixing with his subordinates. “Gottlieb’s personal attention to the TSD ‘family’ became legendary,” one of his successors reported. “He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, liked to show off folk-dance steps, and remembered names, spouses’ names, birthdays, and hobbies.”
“It sounds hokey, but he had a touch with that kind of thing,” said a chemist who worked for him. “It came across as, ‘The boss knows me.’”
By the early 1970s Gottlieb had secured his place as one of the CIA’s veteran leaders. Suspicions that followed him during his MK-ULTRA days seemed to have dissipated. His management style won him many admirers. So did his willingness to bend with the bureaucratic winds. His MK-ULTRA past might have threatened his position, but with Helms in place as director of central intelligence the past was safely secret.
That secrecy began to unravel in the pre-dawn hours of June 17, 1972. A security guard at the Watergate complex in Washington noticed a piece of tape over a door lock at the office of the Democratic National Committee. He called the police. Several intruders were arrested. They turned out to have connections to the White House and the CIA. Gottlieb’s Technical Services Division had prepared false identity papers for two of them, Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, and had provided Hunt with implements of espionage including a speech alteration device, a camera concealed in a tobacco pouch, and a wig-and-glasses disguise. The Watergate break-in led to a series of discoveries that shattered American politics, leading ultimately to President Nixon’s resignation. It also set off the chain of events that ended Gottlieb’s career.
Eager to contain the political damage of Watergate, Nixon sought help from the CIA. Helms refused to create a cover story that would exculpate the White House. On February 1, 1973, Nixon fired him. Suddenly Gottlieb’s protector was gone. He was alone and vulnerable.
As Helms was packing to leave, he summoned Gottlieb for a farewell. Their talk turned to MK-ULTRA, now fading from memory but still alive in files that documented years of experiments and interrogations. They made a fateful decision. No one, they agreed, could ever be allowed to see those files. They would certainly cause outrage if made public—and could also be used as evidence to prosecute Gottlieb and Helms for grave crimes.
“Early in 1973, Dr. Gottlieb, then C/TSD [chief of the Technical Services Division], called [redacted] and me to his office and requested that we review our Branch holdings and assure him that there were no extant records of the drug research program which had been terminated many years before,” a CIA psychologist wrote in a memo two years later. “Dr. Gottlieb explained that Mr. Helms, in the process of vacating his chair as DCI, had called him and said, in effect, ‘Let’s take this with us’ or ‘Let’s let this die with us’ … There were no relevant investigations taking place at the time, and no relevant caveats on reduction of files. Mr. Helms seemed to be saying, ‘It was our bath; let us clean the tub.’”
In one of his last acts as director of central intelligence, Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA records destroyed. The chief of the CIA Records Center in Warrenton, Virginia, was alarmed. He called Gottlieb and asked for confirmation. Gottlieb took the matter seriously enough to drive to the Records Center, present the order in person, and insist that it be carried out forthwith. On January 30, 1973, seven boxes of documents were shredded.
“Over my stated objections, the MK-ULTRA files were destroyed by order of the DCI (Mr. Helms) shortly before his departure from office,” the chief of the Records Center wrote in a memo for his file.
Around the same time, Gottlieb directed his secretary to open his office safe, remove files marked “MK-ULTRA” or “Secret Sensitive,” and destroy them. She did as she was told. Later she said she had made no record of what she destroyed and “never thought for a moment to question my instructions.” With these blows, a historic archive was lost.
Helms’s successor, James Schlesinger, arrived determined to make changes. “Schlesinger came on strong,” one of his successors wrote in a memoir. “He had developed some strong ideas about what was wrong with [the CIA] and some positive ideas as to how to go about righting those wrongs. So he arrived at Langley, his shirttails flying, determined, with that bulldog, abrasive temperament of his, to implement those ideas and set off a wave of change.”
Gottlieb was an obvious target. By CIA standards he was a grizzled veteran, having joined the Agency just four years after it was founded and served for twenty-two years. The program with which he was most closely associated, MK-ULTRA, was no longer well regarded. He had been a Helms protégé, and the Helms era was over. Finally, he was tainted by the fact that his Technical Services Division had collaborated with the Watergate burglars.
Immediately after taking office, Schlesinger changed the name of the Technical Services Division. It became the Office of Technical Services. Gottlieb was still the chief, but he must have anticipated what was coming.
One afternoon in April, Schlesinger telephoned John McMahon, an experienced CIA officer who had worked on the U-2 project. He asked McMahon to be at his office the next morning at 9:30. When McMahon appeared, pleasantries were brief.
“I’ve got a job for you,” Schlesinger told him.
“What’s that?” McMahon asked.
“I want you to go down and run OTS.”
“I don’t know anything about OTS.”
“I want you to go down there and run it anyway. Make sure you know what’s going on.”
With that, Gottlieb was out and McMahon was in. There remained only the question of when to make the change. Schlesinger, not a patient man, brushed off the idea of waiting until the first day of May. Instead he looked at his watch and asked, “How about 10 AM?”
“We drove down to OTS,” McMahon recalled years later. “I walked in and said, ‘Hi, I’m your new leader.’ It was a very awkward occasion.”
For Gottlieb it was more than awkward. He might have sought to remain at the CIA in a reduced capacity, but that would have suited neither his wishes nor those of the Agency. A clean break was best for all.
Before departing, Gottlieb was asked to write a memo listing the kinds of help Technical Services was giving to other government agencies that carry out covert operations. It describes one aspect of the work he had been doing for more than a decade.
Department of Defense: Documents, disguise, concealment devices, secret writing, flaps and seals, counter-insurgency and counter-sabotage courses.
Federal Bureau of Investigation: At the request of the FBI we cooperate with the Bureau in a few audio surveillance operations against sensitive foreign targets in the United States.
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs: Beacons, cameras, audio and telephone devices for overseas operations, identity documents, car-trailing devices, SRAC [short-range agent communications], flaps and seals, and training of selected personnel responsible for the use thereof.
Immigration and Naturalization: Analyses of foreign passports and visas, guidance in developing tamper-proof alien registration cards, [redacted].
Department of State: Technical graphics guidance on developing a new United States passport, analyses of foreign passports, car-armoring and personnel locators (beacons) for ambassadors.
Postal Services: The office of Chief Postal Inspector has had selected personnel attend basic surveillance photographic courses, has been furnished foreign postal information and has been the recipient of letter bomb analyses … We also have an arrangement with the Post Office to examine and reinsert a low volume of certain foreign mail entering the United States.
Secret Service: Gate passes, security passes, passes for presidential campaign, emblems for presidential vehicles, [and] a secure ID photo service.
US Agency for International Development: We furnish instructors to a USAID-sponsored Technical Investigation Course (counter-terror) at [redacted].
White House: Stationery, special memoranda, [and] molds of the Great Seal have been furnished.
Police Representing Washington, Arlington, Fairfax and Alexandria: During the period 1968–1969 a series of classes reflecting basic and surveillance photography, basic audio, locks and picks, counter-sabotage and surreptitious entry were given to selected members from the above mentioned cities.
Sidney Gottlieb retired from the CIA on June 30, 1973. Before departing he was awarded one of the Agency’s highest honors, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. CIA officers receive this award “for performance of outstanding services, or for achievement of a distinctly exceptional nature.” As protocol dictates, the ceremony was private and Gottlieb had to return the medal after holding it for a few moments. The citation that accompanied it has not been declassified.