Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  What happened to the poison? Devlin later wrote that after Gottlieb handed it to him, “my mind was racing. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. It would have been murder … My plan was to stall, to delay as long as possible in the hope that Lumumba would either fade away politically as a potential danger or that the Congolese would succeed in taking him prisoner.” To secure the poison, Devlin wrote, he locked it inside his office safe, where it would lose potency. Gottlieb, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its “viability” and then dumping it into the Congo River.

  The CIA achieved its objective in the Congo unexpectedly and elegantly. Eisenhower had ordered the Agency to kill Lumumba, and he had been killed. Although CIA officers worked closely with the Congolese and Belgians who did the deed, they did not participate in or witness the execution. Gottlieb’s lethal kit turned out to be unnecessary. Nonetheless he returned to Washington with a new credential. He had not poisoned the leader of a foreign government, but he had shown once again that he knew how.

  * * *

  YES, THE GANGSTER “Handsome Johnny” Roselli told an inquiring CIA man, he had associates in Cuba who could kill Fidel Castro. No, he didn’t like the idea of trying to gun Castro down gangland-style, or using a sniper to do the job. The shooter would almost certainly be killed or captured. Roselli said he would prefer something “nice and clean, without getting into any kind of out-and-out ambushing.” He and his Mafia partner Sam Giancana offered the CIA a counter-proposal: give us poison that takes time to kill, so our assassin can escape before Castro falls ill and dies. Senior officers at the CIA liked the idea. Sidney Gottlieb had a new assignment.

  On May 13, 1960, after hearing a briefing from Allen Dulles, President Eisenhower ordered Castro “sawed off.” He did not use what CIA security director Sheffield Edwards later called “bad words,” but everyone present understood this as a presidential directive to remove Castro from power by any means including assassination. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. Since it would entail making poison and devices by which it could be delivered, Bissell turned to what had been the Technical Services Staff, now renamed the Technical Services Division. Sidney Gottlieb was the man for the job.

  At first Gottlieb and his small corps of chemists concentrated on ways to cause Castro’s downfall by non-lethal means. They came up with two options. The first grew from Gottlieb’s long fascination with LSD. As part of his work directing Operation Midnight Climax, he had planned an experiment, ultimately canceled because of weather conditions, in which an aerosol laced with LSD would be sprayed into a room of unsuspecting partygoers. He had tested such an aerosol at George Hunter White’s “pad” in San Francisco. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. If Castro became disoriented and incoherent during one of those speeches, he would presumably lose popular support. After some discussion, this idea was discarded as impractical. The CIA never sent aerosolized LSD into Cuba.

  Gottlieb’s team then came up with an even stranger scheme. They persuaded themselves that part of Castro’s appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hair—specifically, his beard. If the beard fell away, they thought, so might Castro’s power. Finding a chemical that would make a beard fall out was just the kind of challenge Gottlieb enjoyed. He chose a compound based on thallium salts. A bit of brainstorming produced the outlines of a plot. The next time Castro traveled outside Cuba, thallium would be sprinkled into the boots he would leave outside his hotel room to be shined; his beard would then fall out, leaving him open to ridicule and overthrow. Gottlieb’s scientists procured thallium and began testing it on animals. Before they could go further, though, they confronted this idea’s obvious weaknesses. No one knew when Castro would travel, and even if he stayed at a hotel the CIA could penetrate, his security detail would probably not allow his boots to be handled by unknown outsiders. Besides, the idea that Castro’s charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. This plot was also aborted.

  Destroying Castro without killing him soon came to seem impractical. Gottlieb and his scientists turned their thoughts to assassination. Their first idea was to taint a box of cigars and pass them to operations officers who could find a way to deliver them to Castro. The CIA inspector general who later investigated this plot reported that an Agency officer “did contaminate a full box of fifty cigars with botulinum toxin, a virulent poison that produces a fatal illness some hours after it is ingested. [Redacted] distinctly remembers the flaps-and-seals job he had to do on the box and on each of the cigars, both to get at the cigars and to erase evidence of tampering … The cigars were so heavily contaminated that merely putting one in the mouth would do the job; the intended victim would not have to smoke it.” The report names Gottlieb as a co-conspirator, although without specifying his role.

  “Sidney Gottlieb of TSD claims to remember distinctly a plot involving cigars,” it says. “To emphasize the clarity of his memory, he named the officer, then assigned to [the Western Hemisphere Division], who approached him with the scheme. Although there may well have been such a plot, the officer Gottlieb named was then assigned in India and has never worked in WH Division nor had anything to do with Cuba operations. Gottlieb remembers the scheme as being one that was talked about frequently but not widely, and as being concerned with killing, not merely influencing behavior.”

  The poisoned Cohiba cigars—Castro’s preferred brand—were passed to Jacob Esterline, a CIA officer working on the anti-Castro plot. No way was ever found to deliver them. They remained in a CIA safe. Seven years later, one was removed for testing. It had retained 94 percent of its toxicity.

  These first bumbling attempts hardly satisfied Bissell. He decided to consult professionals with more experience in murder. That led him to “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, who along with other powerful gangsters had become rich through gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing in Cuba. They were determined to destroy Castro before he could carry out his promise to rid the country of crime and vice. Roselli had a web of contacts in the Havana underworld, which made him an ideal partner for the CIA.

  Roselli’s suggestion that the assassination be carried out by poison came at an opportune moment. He had never heard of Gottlieb—no one had—but he correctly presumed that the CIA must have someone on its payroll who made poison. Stars were aligning. The CIA had made contact with gangsters who wanted Castro dead. The gangsters wanted poison. Gottlieb could provide it.

  Finding ways to kill Castro without using firearms—and, at some points in the plotting, also to kill his brother Raúl and the guerrilla hero Che Guevara—became one of Gottlieb’s main preoccupations after his return from the Congo. The challenge tested his peculiarly creative imagination. It rose to the top of his priority list for the same reason it rose to the top for Bissell and Dulles. This assassination had been ordered by the president of the United States.

  From Eisenhower, the chain of command was short and direct. He gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. Bissell turned to the redoubtable Sheffield Edwards, who as head of the Office of Security was keeper of the CIA’s deepest secrets. Edwards chose an intermediary who could approach Mafia figures without being clearly tied to the CIA: Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent who had become a private detective and worked for the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Maheu became the conduit through which the CIA passed instructions and devices to gangsters who were to assassinate Castro.

  Gottlieb’s role was to provide the means of killing. Through the partnership agreement known as MK-NAOMI, he had access to scientists at Fort Detrick. Together they conceived a series of ways to assassinate Castro. These included, according to a Senate investigation conducted years later, “poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.”

  Plotting against Castro did not end when
Eisenhower left office at the beginning of 1961. His successor, John F. Kennedy, turned out to be equally determined to “eliminate” Castro. The spectacular collapse of the CIA’s 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified his determination. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, relentlessly pressured the CIA to crush Castro and repeatedly demanded explanations of why it had not been accomplished. Samuel Halpern, who served at the top level of the covert action directorate during this period, asserted that “the Kennedys were on our back constantly … they were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro.” Richard Helms felt the pressure directly.

  “There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the President, Bobby Kennedy—who was after all his man, his right-hand man in these matters—to unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found,” Helms later testified. “The Bay of Pigs was a part of this effort, and after the Bay of Pigs failed, there was even a greater push to try to get rid of this Communist influence 90 miles from United States shores … The principal driving force was the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. There isn’t any question about this.”

  For nearly four years, pressure from the White House kept Gottlieb, as well as his CIA superiors, fully focused on killing Castro. The idea of using a sniper to carry out the deed remained active, but it never seemed truly realistic. At one point the Technical Services Division considered crafting what would appear to be a rare seashell, placing a bomb inside, and planting it in an area where Castro liked to scuba dive. This plan was also rejected as impractical. According to a CIA report, “None of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed amount of explosive. The midget submarine that would have had to be used in emplacement of the shell has too short an operating range for such an operation.”

  What remained was poison. Gottlieb and his colleagues were tasked with making it and imagining how it could be delivered.

  One of their ideas was based, like the aborted exploding-seashell plot, on Castro’s documented love of scuba diving. President Kennedy had chosen a lawyer named James Donovan (the same man Tom Hanks would play in Bridge of Spies) to negotiate the release of Cuban American prisoners who were captured during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA came up with the idea of giving Donovan a tainted diving suit to present to Castro. Preparing such a suit was precisely the kind of assignment for which the Technical Services Division had been created.

  “TSD bought a diving suit, dusted it inside with a fungus which would produce Madura foot, a chronic skin disease, and contaminated the breathing apparatus with a tubercle bacillus,” a CIA officer wrote years later. “The plan was abandoned when the lawyer decided to present Castro with a different diving suit.”

  These failures brought the CIA, the Technical Services Division, and Gottlieb back to Roselli’s original idea: make poison and find a way to feed it to Castro.

  According to the official summary of a later interview with Cornelius Roosevelt, who then headed the Technical Services Division, “four possible approaches were considered: (1) something highly toxic, such as shellfish poison to be administered with a pin (which Roosevelt said was what was supplied to Gary Powers); (2) bacterial material in liquid form; (3) bacterial treatment of a cigarette or cigar; and (4) a handkerchief treated with bacteria. The decision, to the best of his recollection, was that bacteria in liquid form was the best means [because] Castro frequently drank tea, coffee, or bouillon, for which liquid poison would be particularly well suited … Despite the decision that a poison in liquid form would be most desirable, what was actually prepared and delivered was a solid in the form of small pills about the size of saccharine tablets.”

  The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. Evidence suggests that it arranged to smuggle rifles and at least one silencer into Cuba for this purpose. Nonetheless the idea of using poison remained the most appealing option. During 1961 and 1962, intermediaries working for the CIA passed several packets of Gottlieb’s botulinum pills—called “L-pills” because they were lethal—to Mafia gangsters for delivery to contacts in Cuba. One batch could not be used because the Cuban official who was to place the pills in Castro’s food was transferred to a post in which he no longer had access to the Cuban leader. Pills from another batch were to have been slipped into Castro’s food or drink at a restaurant he frequented, but for unknown reasons he stopped visiting that restaurant.

  Choosing the poison was not Gottlieb’s only contribution to the Castro assassination project. He and his staff also produced two devices for delivering it. The first is described in a CIA report as “a pencil designed as a concealment device for delivering the pills.” More elaborate was what the report calls “a ballpoint pen which had a hypodermic needle inside, that when you pushed the lever, the needle came out and poison could be injected into someone.” According to another description, the needle was “designed to be so fine that the target (Castro) would not sense its insertion and the agent would have time to escape before the effects were noticed.” The date on which a CIA officer in Paris handed this pen to a Cuban CIA “asset” is poignant: November 22, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated.

  Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, continued to use political and economic means, including sabotage and other forms of covert action, to undermine Cuba’s revolutionary government. He also, however, concluded that “we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” and put an end to assassination plots. One Cuban agent who had received firearms and explosives from the CIA remained in contact with the Agency until 1965, but he never carried out an attack. Talk of murder by chemicals ceased. Making poison to kill foreign leaders would never again be part of Gottlieb’s job.

  11

  We Must Always Remember to Thank the CIA

  “Capture green bug for future reference,” Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce wrote during one of her LSD adventures. “Do you hear the drum?”

  That kind of fractured unreason flashes through the minds of many LSD users. Observing it ultimately led Sidney Gottlieb to conclude that LSD is too unpredictable to be the “truth serum” or mind control drug for which he had so relentlessly searched. Reluctantly he filed it away with heroin, cocaine, electroshock, “psychic driving,” and other failed techniques. But it was too late. LSD had escaped from the CIA’s control. First it leaked into elite society. Then it spread to students who took it in CIA-sponsored experiments. Finally it exploded into the American counterculture, fueling a movement dedicated to destroying much of what the CIA defended and held dear.

  Among the first LSD parties held outside the CIA were those that Dr. Harold Abramson, Gottlieb’s favorite physician, threw at his Long Island home on Friday nights. At first he invited only a handful of other doctors. News spread. The guest list widened to include other New York professionals. Invitations were much sought after. “Harold A. Abramson of the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory has developed a technique of serving dinner to a group of subjects, topping off the meal with a liqueur glass containing 40 micrograms of LSD,” Time reported in 1955. By the late 1950s, according to the novelist Gore Vidal, LSD had become “all the rage” in New York’s high society.

  Clare Boothe Luce, a former ambassador to Italy who was married to the publisher of Time and Life magazines—and who had carried on an extended affair with Allen Dulles—got her LSD from Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist who had worked at Edgewood Arsenal. The film director Sidney Lumet was another early experimenter. So was the swimmer-turned-actress Esther Williams. The first celebrity to speak publicly about LSD was Cary Grant, the debonair exemplar of 1950s masculinity. He gave a series of interviews to a Hollywood gossip columnist, Joe Hyams, and another to Look magazine that became the basis for a glowing profile headlined THE CURIOUS STORY BEHIND THE NEW CARY GRANT. After taking LSD more than six
ty times, Grant said, he had found a “second youth” and come “close to happiness” for the first time in his life.

  “After my series came out, the phone began to ring wildly,” Hyams later recalled. “Friends wanted to know where they could get the drug. Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD … In all, I got more than 800 letters.”

  As LSD leaked into high society, it was also being discovered by groups of young people. Volunteers who took it in experiments at hospitals and clinics, many of them secretly funded as MK-ULTRA “subprojects,” raved about their experiences. That led their friends to clamor for LSD just as eagerly as their social betters.

  “Researchers were growing lax in controlling the drug,” according to one academic study. “They began to share LSD in their homes with friends … The drug was spreading into the undergraduate population.”

  Among the students who took LSD in these early experiments was a budding novelist named Ken Kesey, who was studying creative writing at Stanford. In 1959, after hearing that volunteers were being given mind-altering drugs at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital, Kesey signed up. The experience thrilled him—so much so that he not only repeated it as often as possible but took a job as a night attendant at the hospital. That gave him access to offices where LSD was kept. He helped himself. Soon he began sharing with friends. His home, according to one study of his career, “turned into a twenty-four-hour psychedelic party as friends and neighbors got high and danced to loud, electric rock music.”

  At the VA hospital, Kesey gathered material for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a brilliantly constructed celebration of non-conformity that became one of the first counterculture bestsellers. With the money he earned from royalties, Kesey bought a new home and began throwing “acid tests” at which he served LSD to a wild roster of guests including poets, musicians, and bikers from the Hells Angels gang. Sometimes he mixed it into bowls of punch—just as Gottlieb was said to have done at CIA parties.