Poisoner in Chief
Thirteen miles above the Ural Mountains, an orange flash lit the sky one spring morning in 1960. A Soviet anti-aircraft missile had found its target, an aircraft that began tumbling wildly. Both wings blew off. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, managed to eject and open his parachute. Powers was on one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s most secret missions. He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. Floating down, he later wrote, he imagined the “tortures and unknown horrors” that might await him in captivity. Fortunately, Powers had a way out. Around his neck, like a good luck charm, hung a silver dollar he had been given. Hidden inside was a pin coated with poison. The coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends.
Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. He stuttered. But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. He obtained a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1943. The Selective Service ranked him 4F, but he found work doing research at federal agencies and universities in the Washington, DC, area. He lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. This evolved into MK-ULTRA, a program Gottlieb headed starting in 1953. His shop’s main mission was developing mind control tools—one study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25—LSD—for that use. MK-ULTRA also served other CIA needs, such as making assassination weapons.
In the 1950s, as part of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had had agents search the world for natural poisons. Enthralled by new chemicals, he sent promising samples to what had been upgraded to Fort Detrick. Several proved to be deadly.
Gottlieb, now chief of research and development for the Technical Services Staff, had an unmatched knowledge of poisons, which made him the ideal candidate for a delicate assignment. CIA deputy director for plans Richard Bissell, who ran the U-2 project, believed that since his planes would fly at improbably high altitudes, Soviet air defense systems would not be able to shoot them down or even track them by radar. Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. The U-2 squadron and its mission—to photograph Soviet military installations—were among America’s most classified secrets. If a plane was lost and its pilot, in Agency jargon a “driver,” fell into enemy hands, much trouble would follow. Bissell asked the Technical Services Staff to provide his pilots with a way to commit suicide if captured.
The chemists reminded Bissell how Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering had slipped a glass ampule filled with liquid potassium cyanide into his mouth, bit down on it, and died within 15 seconds, cheating the hangman at Nuremberg. Bissell ordered six such ampules. Making them was no great challenge. Gottlieb chose a poison, and a Special Operations Division officer at Fort Detrick made the ampules. One was handed to the pilot of the first U-2 mission as he prepared to take off from an American base at Wiesbaden, Germany,
