The chemists’ first response was to recall for Bissell how the Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering had cheated the hangman at Nuremberg. Goering had slipped a glass ampule filled with liquid potassium cyanide into his mouth, bit down on it, and died within fifteen seconds. That story appealed to Bissell. He ordered six ampules like the one Goering had used. Making them was no great challenge for Gottlieb. He chose the appropriate poison, and a Special Operations Division officer at Fort Detrick made the ampules. One of them was handed to the pilot of the first U-2 mission as he prepared to take off from an American base at Wiesbaden, Germany, on June 20, 1956. President Eisenhower authorized several more flights in the weeks that followed. Each pilot carried one of Gottlieb’s ampules.
One of those pilots, Carmine Vito, took off from Wiesbaden at dawn on July 5 and flew into near disaster. His fellow pilots called Vito the Lemon Drop Kid because of his habit of sucking on lemon lozenges. Once he was airborne, he reached for one and popped it into his mouth. He noticed that it felt unusually smooth and had no taste. After spitting it out, he saw to his horror that he had grabbed his cyanide-filled ampule instead of a cough drop. He survived only because he had not bitten it. After returning from his mission, he reported his brush with death. The squadron commander ordered that henceforth the ampules be packed inside small boxes. For the next four years, U-2 pilots tucked those boxes into their flight suits. There were no more near misses.
Because of the extreme sensitivity of U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. Bissell and his boss, Allen Dulles, assured the president that the planes were practically invulnerable. Despite this assurance, Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. He was due to meet the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a much-awaited summit in Berlin two weeks later and did not want to risk disrupting it. Finally he was persuaded that the risk was minimal and gave his approval.
By this time, Gottlieb and his partners at Fort Detrick had come up with a new suicide tool. Rather than continuing to supply cyanide ampules for distribution to U-2 “drivers,” as the pilots were called, they designed and produced one of the most remarkable devices ever to emerge from a CIA workshop. It was a suicide tool hidden inside a silver dollar. Only one was made, since all agreed that if it ever had to be used, that would mean disaster had struck and the U-2 program would have to be abandoned.
That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. Each “driver” was given the silver dollar before taking off.
“Inside the dollar was what appeared to be an ordinary straight pin,” Francis Gary Powers later wrote. “But this too wasn’t what it seemed. Looking at it more closely, we could see the body of the pin to be a sheath not fitting quite tightly against the head. Pulling this off, it became a thin needle, only again not an ordinary needle. Toward the end there were grooves. Inside the grooves was a sticky brown substance.”
That substance was a paralytic poison called saxitoxin that can be extracted from infected shellfish. It is related to the algae that cause red tide and other waterborne infections. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, it can kill within seconds.
Powers was flying over what is now the Russian city of Yekaterinburg—coincidentally, the city where a Bolshevik firing squad had executed Czar Nicholas II and the rest of Russia’s royal family in 1918—when his plane was rocked by the exploding missile. Soviet military commanders, frustrated by their inability to stop U-2 overflights, had been steadily improving their air defenses in ways the CIA had not detected. The attack that blew Powers out of the air came so suddenly that he did not have time to hit the button that would destroy the plane’s fuselage. As he fell, his thoughts turned frantically to the suicide pin he was carrying. Should he use it?
A scene in the 2016 film Bridge of Spies depicts the pre-flight briefing that a CIA officer named Williams gave to Powers and his fellow “drivers” inside a hangar at the Peshawar base.
WILLIAMS: It is imperative that these flights remain a secret and this equipment does not fall into enemy hands.
POWERS: And what about us?
WILLIAMS: I don’t know if you’re kidding, Lieutenant. I’m not. What you know about the plane is as secret as the plane itself. If capture is a foregone conclusion, you go down with your plane. If you think you can ditch and get away—if you’re close enough to a border—fine, you know the ejection protocol. But if you ditch [he opens a balled fist to show a silver dollar], you bring the dollar with you. There’s a pin inside. [He withdraws the pin.] Scratch your skin anywhere. It’s instantaneous. If you think you are about to be captured, you use it. Drivers, you understand me? Spend the dollar.
That dramatic scene was pure invention. In fact, “drivers” were given no clear instructions on how to react if shot down. Powers later testified that the choice of whether to use the suicide pin was left “more or less up to me.” He decided not to.
When CIA air controllers lost contact with Powers’s plane, they presumed he was dead and that his plane had been vaporized. Hurriedly they concocted a cover story: a research plane studying high-altitude weather patterns over Turkey had run into trouble, the pilot had lost consciousness due to lack of oxygen, and the plane had continued on autopilot, lamentably straying deep into Soviet airspace.
“There was absolutely no—N-O, no—deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been,” a State Department spokesman told reporters.
The CIA and President Eisenhower presumed the episode would end there. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. In a dramatic speech to the Supreme Soviet a week after the shoot-down, he revealed that large sections of the U-2 had been recovered and that Powers was alive and in custody. Then he held up an enlarged photo of the poison needle.
“To cover up the tracks of the crime, the pilot was told that he must not be taken alive by Soviet authorities,” Khrushchev told his comrades. “For this reason he was supplied with a special needle. He was to have pricked himself with the poisoned needle, with a result of instantaneous death. What barbarism!”
In the most humiliating moment of his presidency, Eisenhower was forced to admit that he had authorized his spokesmen to lie about the U-2. His planned summit with Khrushchev collapsed. Powers was put on trial in Moscow. “If the assignments received by Powers had not been of a criminal nature, his masters would not have supplied him with a lethal pin,” the prosecutor said in his opening statement. Among witnesses at the trial was a professor of forensic medicine who had been assigned to evaluate the pin. His testimony constitutes the most detailed analysis of one of Gottlieb’s tools that has ever been made public.
The following was established during the investigation of the pin. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. It is 27mm long and 1mm in diameter. The pin is of an intricate structure: there is a bore inside it extending its entire length except for the sharpened point. A needle is inserted in the bore. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. On the sharpened point of the needle are deep oblique furrows completely covered with a layer of thick, sticky, brownish mass.
An experimental dog was given a hypodermic prick with the needle extracted from the pin, in the upper third part of the left hind leg. Within one minute after the prick the dog fell on his side, and a sharp slackening of the respiratory movements of the chest was observed, a cyanosis of the tongue and visible mucous membranes was noted. Within 90 seconds after the prick, breathing ceased entirely. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. Within 20 seconds after the prick, death set in from respiratory paralysis …
Thus, as a result of the investigation it was established that the substance contained on the needle inside the pin, judging from the nature of its effect on animals, could, according to its toxic doses and physical properties
, be included in the curare group, the most powerful and quickest-acting of all known poisons.
In fact, Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Saxitoxin 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 potassium cyanide.” The lethality of Gottlieb’s suicide pin and the inability of a leading Russian toxicologist to identify the substance with which he had tainted it were testimony to his talent.
Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. He faced a burst of criticism for failing to use his suicide pin, but after emotions cooled he was praised for his service. The CIA awarded him a medal. Allen Dulles said he had “performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.”
Gottlieb could not be publicly linked to the episode, but it burnished his reputation within the CIA. He was already the CIA’s master chemist. He had, according to one of his colleagues, prepared poison that the compromised CIA officer James Kronthal used to commit suicide in 1953. Two years later he compounded a dose intended to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China. By crafting the lethal pin that was given to U-2 pilots, he solidified his position as poisoner in chief.
* * *
AS HE WALKED through the African heat and stepped into an airport taxi, “Joe from Paris” could not avoid reflecting on the war into which he was plunging. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. It immediately fell into violent chaos. Mutiny in the army set off riots, secession, and government collapse. The United States and the Soviet Union watched with active interest. A Cold War showdown loomed. Joe from Paris arrived carrying America’s secret weapon.
The CIA station chief in Leopoldville, the Congolese capital, was expecting him. A couple of days earlier he had received a cable from Washington telling him that a visitor would soon appear. “Will announce himself as Joe from Paris,” the cable said. “It is urgent you should see [him] soonest possible after he phones you. He will fully identify himself and explain his assignment to you.”
Late on the afternoon of September 26, 1960, the station chief, Larry Devlin, who had a cover job as a consular officer at the American embassy, left work and headed toward his car. A man rose from his chair at a café across the street. “He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time,” Devlin wrote later. Joe from Paris was Sidney Gottlieb. He had flown to the Congo on one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary courier missions. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. It was poison to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
Gottlieb approached Devlin and extended his hand. “I’m Joe from Paris,” he said. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. After they were underway, Gottlieb told him, “I’ve come to give you instructions about a highly sensitive operation.”
By the time Gottlieb landed in the Congo, he could look back on almost a full decade at the CIA. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on “expendables,” strengthened his credentials. The research and development job he was given after his return made him one of the chief imaginers, builders, and testers of devices used by American intelligence officers. He assumed it without surrendering control of MK-ULTRA. During this period he was also part of an informal group of CIA chemists that became known as the “health alteration committee.” They came together early in 1960 as a response to President Eisenhower’s renewed conviction that the best way to deal with some unfriendly foreign leaders was to kill them.
At mid-morning on August 18, 1960, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell made an unscheduled visit to the White House. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. “Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government,” it said. “Anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and therefore may be little time left.” This cable seemed to confirm deep fears that Prime Minister Lumumba was about to deliver his spectacularly rich country to the Soviets. After reading it, according to the official note taker, Eisenhower turned to Dulles and said “something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated.”
“There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds,” the note taker wrote, “and the meeting continued.”
As soon as Bissell returned to his office, he sent a cable to the Leopoldville station asking officers there to propose ways of carrying out Eisenhower’s assassination order. They considered using a sniper with a high-powered rifle—“hunting good here when light is right,” one officer helpfully wrote—but ultimately ruled out that option because Lumumba was living in seclusion and no reliable sniper was available. Poison was the logical alternative.
Gottlieb’s entire career had prepared him for this assignment. He had founded the CIA’s Chemical Division and become the Agency’s pre-eminent expert on toxins and ways of delivering them. As director of MK-ULTRA, he had tested drugs on prisoners, drug addicts, hospital patients, suspected spies, ordinary citizens, and even his own colleagues. He had already compounded lethal poisons. For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple.
Bissell told Gottlieb that pursuant to an order from “the highest authority,” he was to prepare an incapacitating or fatal potion that could be fed to an African leader. He did not name Lumumba. Given that summer’s news, though, Gottlieb could hardly have doubted who the intended target was.
“Gottlieb suggested that biological agents were perfect for the task,” the science historian Ed Regis wrote in his description of this plot. “They were invisible, untraceable and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. The target would get sick and die exactly as if he’d been attacked by a natural outbreak of an endemic disease. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. This was entirely acceptable to Bissell.”
After receiving his assignment, Gottlieb began considering which “lethal or incapacitating germs” he would use. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo. They turned out to be anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. Gottlieb began looking for a match: Which poison would produce a death most like the one those diseases cause? He settled on botulinum, which is sometimes found in improperly canned food. It takes several hours to work but is so potent that a concentrated dose of just two one-billionths of a gram can kill.
Working with partners at Fort Detrick, where he stored his toxins, Gottlieb began assembling his assassination kit. It contained a vial of liquid botulinum; a hypodermic syringe with an ultra-thin needle; a small jar of chlorine that could be mixed with the botulinum to render it ineffective in an emergency; and “accessory materials,” including protective gloves and a face mask to be worn while conducting the operation. In mid-September Gottlieb told Bissell that the kit was ready. They agreed that Gottlieb himself should bring it to Leopoldville. He became the only CIA officer known to have carried poison to a foreign country in order to kill that country’s leader.
Less than an hour after Gottlieb and Devlin met in front of the American embassy in Leopoldville, they were sitting together in Devlin’s living room. There Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin exclaimed. “Who authorized this operation?”
“President Eisenhower,” Gottlieb replied. “I wasn’t there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.”
Both men paused to absorb the weight of the moment. Devlin later recalled lighting a cigarette and staring at his shoes. After a while Gottlieb broke the silence.
“It’s your re
sponsibility to carry out the operation, yours alone,” he told Devlin. “The details are up to you, but it’s got to be clean—nothing that can be traced back to the US government.” Then he handed over the poison kit he had made and carried across the Atlantic.
“Take this,” he said. “With the stuff that’s in there, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated.”
Gottlieb coolly explained to Devlin what was in the poison kit and how to use it. One of Devlin’s agents, he said, should use the hypodermic needle to inject botulinum into something Lumumba would ingest—as Gottlieb later put it, “anything he could get to his mouth, whether it was food or a toothbrush.” Devlin later wrote that the kit also included a pre-poisoned tube of toothpaste. The toxins were designed to kill not immediately, but after a few hours. An autopsy, Gottlieb assured Devlin, would show “normal traces found in people who die of certain diseases.”
Rather than return to Washington after delivering his poison kit, Gottlieb remained in Leopoldville. While he waited, Devlin found an agent who was thought to have access to Lumumba and could, as he wrote in a cable to Washington, “act as inside man.” Finally, ten days after arriving with his kit, Gottlieb felt confident enough to fly home. He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, “certain items of continuing usefulness.”
The agent Devlin hired to slip Lumumba a tube of poisoned toothpaste, or to poison his food, proved unable to penetrate rings of security. Devlin began exploring other options. He knew that the Belgian security service was just as determined as the CIA to eliminate Lumumba. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. On November 29, after Lumumba fled from what he believed was mortal danger in Leopoldville, his enemies found and captured him. For six weeks he languished in a remote jail. On January 17, 1961, a squad of six Congolese and two Belgian officers took him out of the jail, brought him to a jungle clearing, shot him, and dissolved his remains in acid.
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