Belgraders

Even if you ’ re somewhere for decades , you only get the briefest glimpses of most people ’ s lives .
Traveling , this is even truer .
A glancing brush on the sidewalk can still resonate , however .
Walk-ons and extras all , we still deserve to be read .
In Joyce ’ s “ The Dead , ” the coat girl has but two lines , but who can forget this declaration , delivered with “ great bitterness , ” “ The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Such , Such Were the Joys , ” there is this frightful sketch , “ There was a new boy named Bachelor , a pretty , mother ’ s darling of a boy , who came a little while before I left .
The first thing I noticed about him was the beautiful pearly whiteness of his teeth .
By the end of that term his teeth were an extraordinary shade of green.
” Belgrade in summer is hotter than I expected .
Passing Caffe Loža , I noticed an “ OLD @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Square ” license plate among its decoration , so I entered .
Inside , I saw pictures of a San Francisco streetcar , the Titanic , Uncle Sam , James Bond and even Mark Twain , etc.
, but no Marilyn Monroe , Elvis or James Dean .
Love Like Hate : A Novel Linh Dinh Best Price : $ 5.10 Buy New $ 11.14 Not all minor temples to America are the same .
What really set Caffe Loža apart , though , was a mural of John Trumbull ’ s General @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wow , look at that !
” I said to the young waiter .
“ I know , but why is it on this wall ?
!
” “ I don ’ t know how to explain , but Loža is , ah , like a political organization.
” Washington was a Freemason , I think he ’ s trying to say .
Since I was the only customer , we had time to talk , though he couldn ’ t help but look down at his phone often .
Real life can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Practicing English , he asked me basic questions , “ How long have you been in Serbia ?
” “ What do you think of Serbia ?
” “ Do you like Serbian food ?
” “ I like Belgrade very much , ” I said .
“ People here are very relaxed , and there are cafes and bars everywhere.
” “ Here , everybody drinks every day , ” he smiled .
“ After work , I go to see my girlfriend , then I go drink beer with my friends.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ place here , a beer is only 150 dinars [ $ 1.41 ] .
” I ’ m assuming he ’ s living with his parents , so pays no rent .
It ’ s common to have three generations under one roof .
During the Socialist years , two families routinely shared one apartment .
There are no trash days in Serbia .
You take garbage to public dumpsters .
The destitute dig through these to scavenge glass bottles and aluminum cans .
I doubt they can afford to drink every day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , old people collect cardboard boxes to resell .
White haired and bent over , they push laden carts down busy streets .
Even when clearly visible , bottom dwellers are not quite seen , not until you become one of them , usually .
Just launched into adulthood , the Caffe Loža waiter anticipates an infinity of conquests and adventures .
He ’ s already run around a bit .
Rome , Moscow , Vienna… Last year , he took a two-week vacation to Turkey .
“ Serbs , Turkish , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is very nice , the food is great , and the people are very nice .
It is the cheapest vacation .
Many Serbs go.
” Belgrade A Cultural Hi ... Norris , David A Best Price : $ 14.50 Buy New $ 20.95 He ’ s been to Hungary three times .
“ Hungary , I don ’ t like .
Serbs don ’ t like Hungarians too much… ” He paused to think about it and reload his English .
“ We ’ re Orthodox .
They ’ re Catholics .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ problem .
We ’ re close to Russians.
” “ They ’ re Orthodox , and Serbs also don ’ t like Bulgarians , right ?
” “ Neighbors are like that .
Everywhere , you have neighbors hating each other .
Well , not always , but usually.
” “ Vietnam invaded Cambodia , took a lot of their land.
” He tried to go to the US , but couldn ’ t get a visa , so with much regret , he hasn ’ t had a chance to frolic on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Magnificent Mile , Vegas Strip , Route 66 , Times Square or Fifth Avenue , etc.
, but at America ’ s current rate of self-destruction , these hyped icons will be no more than desolate , smoldering ruins by the time he gets there , even if it ’ s next year .
I waited for Novak “ by the horse , ” what locals call the equestrian statue of Knjaz Mihailo .
Amazingly , he had no problem singling me out .
Disregarding social distancing guidelines , we shook hands , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ microbrew pub .
Sixty-years-old , Novak grew up just around the corner .
“ I was a poor kid in a rich neighborhood .
That affected me .
During Christmas break , my friends would go skiing .
During summer vacation , they ’ d go to the seaside or overseas .
When they asked me what I did , I said , ‘ I fished on the Danube.
’ ” Novak laughed .
“ My girlfriend asked , ‘ Why do you keep wearing these old pants ?
’ She didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ buy new clothes.
” A top math student , Novak studied electrical engineering in college , then got a pretty good job .
Still , “ I ’ d see someone driving around in a Porsche or a Mercedes Benz .
Even with my high salary , by local standards , it would have taken me two years just to buy a Yugo !
” He had already visited the US in 1977 .
“ I had two half sisters in New Jersey , in Netcong .
It ’ s about an hour @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a supermarket , and her husband was a schoolbus driver .
When I was there , they had a huge barbecue and invited all their coworkers .
My brother-in-law said to me , ‘ Look at all this meat !
Isn ’ t America a paradise ?
’ It ’ s nice enough , I thought , but I could never , ever live here.
” The Serbs : History , My ... Judah , Tim Best Price : $ 15.48 Buy New $ 14.54 With his career at an impass and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ US in 1989 .
“ My sister suggested I pay two thousand bucks to marry this ‘ nice ’ Mexican woman with four kids , but I pointed to my forehead and said , ‘ If I can ’ t use this head to stay , I ’ m not going to use the other one.
’ ” Advised by an immigration lawyer , Novak then sent out hundreds of resumes .
“ I had never done this before .
It was a big shock for my vanity .
Many places doubted my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you have real computers in… what is that country again ?
” Finally , Novak got hired by a Manhattan consultancy .
“ I started at $ 34K , then moved up to 40K .
Although they treated me well , they also got a great deal because they were pimping me out at $ 117 an hour !
” Novak would then work for a handful of Fortune 500 companies .
He married a Serbian in New York , and they had two daughters .
In 2006 , Novak was sent to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
His marriage collapsed .
Ending up in North Carolina for work , Novak dated a black Army veteran .
“ She often used military slogans in her speech , such as , ‘ Lead , follow or get out the way.
’ ” Worse , her relatives didn ’ t exactly warm up to Novak .
“ They liked the ‘ weird Serb part , ’ but not the ‘ white ’ part.
” The South had its comforts .
Novak loved the food , “ Nice and greasy , works for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shared the North Carolinian ’ s fondness for beer .
In 2016 , Novak returned to Belgrade , to the very apartment he grew up in .
As we walked around , he evoked memories and associations everywhere .
Momo Kapor lived two blocks from here .
Ivo Andrić lived there .
This shop with colorful ties was owned by the first openly gay man in Belgrade .
It was a big deal then .
This was the first Chinese restaurant .
Although it was run by the government , it did have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opened , there was a line out to here .
There was a bar here , Dobra Kapljica .
When I was three-years-old , an uncle would take me here and have me drink the beer foam .
He also showed me how to bang on the table to ask for another beer .
For about a year during the 90 ’ s , inflation was so high that as soon as you got paid , you would run out to exchange it for some foreign currency , or you ’ d run @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At a restaurant , you had to pay at the beginning of a meal , because it would cost more at the end of it .
Too many Serbs prayed to become billionaires , and it actually happened .
Five billion dinars would get you one sardine out of a can .
When the Americans bombed Belgrade in 1999 , they would sometimes announce their targets .
Knowing Branko ’ s Bridge would be hit , hundreds of university students converged on it every night , so it was actually spared .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public relation disaster .
Here is the Monument of Gratitude to France , erected after World War I .
As you can see , there are French and Serb soldiers , with different hats .
When NATO bombed Belgrade , it was covered in a black cloth .
At the Belgrade Zoo , there ’ s a small archway called “ Monica ’ s Strait , ” and there ’ s a viper named Madeleine , after Albright .
When I was 13 , my mother took me here for basketball practices .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ when you mother takes you to basketball practices .
I was laughed out of the court .
How people curse is revealing .
Novak shared with me some Serbian invectives , “ Go fuck your own picture , ” “ I ’ ll fuck your bloody child , ” “ May you kiss your father ’ s cold forehead ” and , to a woman , “ May you find the taste of cocks disgusting.
” When someone farts , you can slap him with , “ May that be the music at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t sound too bad… Time for a joke ?
Postcards from the End ... Linh Dinh Best Price : $ 7.22 Buy New $ 12.95 “ I heard this from an army major .
It ’ s a part of the army ’ s brainwashing .
Different nationalities were asked how many watermelons they could carry .
Modest , the Hungarian said , ‘ I can carry one , ’ then the Romanian said , ‘ I can carry two , one under each arm.
’ “ The Bulgarian , he said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ Everyone objected , ‘ How can you carry three ?
!
’ ‘ Easy , one with each hand , and one on my cock.
’ “ Then the Serb said , ‘ I can carry five !
’ ‘ That ’ s impossible !
’ everyone shouted .
‘ It ’ s easy .
I can carry one under each arm , and the Bulgarian on my cock.
’ ” In 2016 , Novak returned to Belgrade to retire , only to resume working after a trip to Thailand .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ semester , I visited her and fell in love with Thailand.
” Although Novak managed to get a well paying job there , he only lasted a year .
“ I got bored .
How can you be bored in a city of ten million people ?
I don ’ t know , but I got bored.
” Back in Belgrade , he ’ s still restless , however .
“ I may have a job offer in Hanoi.
” “ Hanoi is OK , but if you got bored with Bangkok… ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a year to decide.
” Before me , Novak had met just one Vietnamese .
“ I had a coworker , called Vu .
He was always very tense , I don ’ t know why .
Our boss was British , real tight upper lip .
The company won a massive project that would take at least six months to complete , and the boss turned to Vu and said , ‘ I ’ m sure Vu can get it by tomorrow ’ The next morning , Vu came in looking like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ memory .
“ Vu was profusely apologizing to the boss , ‘ I ’ m sorry , I ’ m sorry , but I just couldn ’ t get it done.
’ ” By now , we were having dinner at Vuk .
“ This place is very old fashioned .
The waiters are first-rate .
For most of them , it ’ s a lifelong profession.
” We finished our meal with some gibanica .
“ My mother told me that during World War II , the chetniks would show up at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When my grandpa gave them a burnt one , he almost got his throat slashed !
” “ Well , if you ’ re armed and have all that power .
He pissed off their commander.
” “ Someone higher up in the village intervened .
” War needs psychopaths , simple as that , for temperate folks don ’ t care to witness spilled entrails , inhale charred human flesh or have hot shit running down their pants .
Even in a donnybrook , would you rather have toxic pricks or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ survived the last war here , but barely .
A Serb in Croatia , she fled to Belgrade , but has been homeless for 28 years .
This night , Savka was a DJ at Kandinsky Bar , and she played Led Zeppelin , AC/DC , Rush , Elton John , Beatles , Bowie , Dylan and R.E.M.
, etc .
“ This is what I listened to in high school.
” One moment , you ’ re immersed in calculus , then suddenly , you ’ re running for your life and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , though you ’ re relieved to not be punctured , shredded or crushed .
Only figuratively destroyed , you push forward , and before you know it , your pitiful role is almost over , so that , finally , you ’ ll be equal to everybody else .
Still , Savka flashed the biggest smile , showing nothing but joy , toughness and gums .
The bright bar had people of all ages , plus a lounging dog .
The NO SMOKING sign was clearly meant as a joke , for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bathroom , there were six poems , pinned to a corkboard .
A nine-year-old boy wore a “ GOOD VIBES ” T-shirt .
Here and now , at least , life ’ s normal , and that ’ s more than good enough .
Maskless , Serbian smiles blossom .
As published at Smirking Chimp , OpEd News , Unz Review and TruthSeeker , 9/4/20 .
The Best of Linh Dinh

Even if you’re somewhere for decades, you only get the briefest glimpses of most people’s lives. Traveling, this is even truer. A glancing brush on the sidewalk can still resonate, however. Walk-ons and extras all, we still deserve to be read.
In Joyce’s “The Dead,” the coat girl has but two lines, but who can forget this declaration, delivered with “great bitterness,” “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”
In Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys,” there is this frightful sketch, “There was a new boy named Bachelor, a pretty, mother’s darling of a boy, who came a little while before I left. The first thing I noticed about him was the beautiful pearly whiteness of his teeth. By the end of that term his teeth were an extraordinary shade of green.”
Belgrade in summer is hotter than I expected. Passing Caffe Loža, I noticed an “OLD ROUTE 66” sign and “Times Square” license plate among its decoration, so I entered. Inside, I saw pictures of a San Francisco streetcar, the Titanic, Uncle Sam, James Bond and even Mark Twain, etc., but no Marilyn Monroe, Elvis or James Dean. Love Like Hate: A Novel Linh Dinh Best Price: $5.10 Buy New $11.14 (as of 10:10 UTC - Details)
Not all minor temples to America are the same. What really set Caffe Loža apart, though, was a mural of John Trumbull’s General George Washington Resigning His Commission!
“Wow, look at that!” I said to the young waiter.
“It’s George Washington.”
“I know, but why is it on this wall?!”
“I don’t know how to explain, but Loža is, ah, like a political organization.”
Washington was a Freemason, I think he’s trying to say.
Since I was the only customer, we had time to talk, though he couldn’t help but look down at his phone often. Real life can’t command his complete attention.
Practicing English, he asked me basic questions, “How long have you been in Serbia?” “What do you think of Serbia?” “Do you like Serbian food?”
“I like Belgrade very much,” I said. “People here are very relaxed, and there are cafes and bars everywhere.”
“Here, everybody drinks every day,” he smiled. “After work, I go to see my girlfriend, then I go drink beer with my friends.”
“Every day?!”
“Every day.”
“But that’s expensive.”
“Not really. Almost every place here, a beer is only 150 dinars [$1.41].”
I’m assuming he’s living with his parents, so pays no rent. It’s common to have three generations under one roof. During the Socialist years, two families routinely shared one apartment.
There are no trash days in Serbia. You take garbage to public dumpsters. The destitute dig through these to scavenge glass bottles and aluminum cans. I doubt they can afford to drink every day.
In Hong Kong and South Korea, old people collect cardboard boxes to resell. White haired and bent over, they push laden carts down busy streets. Even when clearly visible, bottom dwellers are not quite seen, not until you become one of them, usually.
Just launched into adulthood, the Caffe Loža waiter anticipates an infinity of conquests and adventures. He’s already run around a bit. Rome, Moscow, Vienna… Last year, he took a two-week vacation to Turkey.
“Serbs, Turkish, we have an ugly history, but Turkey is very nice, the food is great, and the people are very nice. It is the cheapest vacation. Many Serbs go.” Belgrade A Cultural Hi... Norris, David A Best Price: $14.50 Buy New $20.95 (as of 02:51 UTC - Details)
He’s been to Hungary three times. “Hungary, I don’t like. Serbs don’t like Hungarians too much…” He paused to think about it and reload his English. “We’re Orthodox. They’re Catholics. Orthodox and Catholics, there is a problem. We’re close to Russians.”
“But Serbs don’t like Romanians.”
“No,” he laughed.
“They’re Orthodox, and Serbs also don’t like Bulgarians, right?”
“No,” he laughed even harder.
“Neighbors are like that. Everywhere, you have neighbors hating each other. Well, not always, but usually.”
“Like China and Japan.”
“Or Cambodia and Vietnam. Cambodians really hate Vietnamese.”
“Why?”
“Vietnam invaded Cambodia, took a lot of their land.”
He tried to go to the US, but couldn’t get a visa, so with much regret, he hasn’t had a chance to frolic on Waikiki Beach, Sunset Boulevard, the Magnificent Mile, Vegas Strip, Route 66, Times Square or Fifth Avenue, etc., but at America’s current rate of self-destruction, these hyped icons will be no more than desolate, smoldering ruins by the time he gets there, even if it’s next year.
*
I waited for Novak “by the horse,” what locals call the equestrian statue of Knjaz Mihailo. Amazingly, he had no problem singling me out. Disregarding social distancing guidelines, we shook hands, then went around the corner to a microbrew pub.
Sixty-years-old, Novak grew up just around the corner. “I was a poor kid in a rich neighborhood. That affected me. During Christmas break, my friends would go skiing. During summer vacation, they’d go to the seaside or overseas. When they asked me what I did, I said, ‘I fished on the Danube.’” Novak laughed. “My girlfriend asked, ‘Why do you keep wearing these old pants?’ She didn’t know we had no money to buy new clothes.”
A top math student, Novak studied electrical engineering in college, then got a pretty good job. Still, “I’d see someone driving around in a Porsche or a Mercedes Benz. Even with my high salary, by local standards, it would have taken me two years just to buy a Yugo!”
He had already visited the US in 1977. “I had two half sisters in New Jersey, in Netcong. It’s about an hour west of New York. One worked at a supermarket, and her husband was a schoolbus driver. When I was there, they had a huge barbecue and invited all their coworkers. My brother-in-law said to me, ‘Look at all this meat! Isn’t America a paradise?’ It’s nice enough, I thought, but I could never, ever live here.” The Serbs: History, My... Judah, Tim Best Price: $15.48 Buy New $14.54 (as of 02:51 UTC - Details)
With his career at an impass and war impending, Novak returned to the US in 1989. “My sister suggested I pay two thousand bucks to marry this ‘nice’ Mexican woman with four kids, but I pointed to my forehead and said, ‘If I can’t use this head to stay, I’m not going to use the other one.’”
Advised by an immigration lawyer, Novak then sent out hundreds of resumes. “I had never done this before. It was a big shock for my vanity. Many places doubted my qualifications. Some asked: “Did you have real computers in… what is that country again?”
Finally, Novak got hired by a Manhattan consultancy. “I started at $34K, then moved up to 40K. Although they treated me well, they also got a great deal because they were pimping me out at $117 an hour!”
Novak would then work for a handful of Fortune 500 companies. He married a Serbian in New York, and they had two daughters. In 2006, Novak was sent to Paris, where he stayed until 2013. His marriage collapsed.
Ending up in North Carolina for work, Novak dated a black Army veteran. “She often used military slogans in her speech, such as, ‘Lead, follow or get out the way.’” Worse, her relatives didn’t exactly warm up to Novak. “They liked the ‘weird Serb part,’ but not the ‘white’ part.”
The South had its comforts. Novak loved the food, “Nice and greasy, works for me every time,” and he shared the North Carolinian’s fondness for beer.
In 2016, Novak returned to Belgrade, to the very apartment he grew up in. As we walked around, he evoked memories and associations everywhere.
Momo Kapor lived two blocks from here. Ivo Andrić lived there. This shop with colorful ties was owned by the first openly gay man in Belgrade. It was a big deal then. This was the first Chinese restaurant. Although it was run by the government, it did have a Chinese cook. When Starbucks first opened, there was a line out to here.
There was a bar here, Dobra Kapljica. When I was three-years-old, an uncle would take me here and have me drink the beer foam. He also showed me how to bang on the table to ask for another beer.
For about a year during the 90’s, inflation was so high that as soon as you got paid, you would run out to exchange it for some foreign currency, or you’d run to the store to buy whatever. At a restaurant, you had to pay at the beginning of a meal, because it would cost more at the end of it. Too many Serbs prayed to become billionaires, and it actually happened. Five billion dinars would get you one sardine out of a can.
When the Americans bombed Belgrade in 1999, they would sometimes announce their targets. Knowing Branko’s Bridge would be hit, hundreds of university students converged on it every night, so it was actually spared. The Americans couldn’t afford such a public relation disaster.
Here is the Monument of Gratitude to France, erected after World War I. As you can see, there are French and Serb soldiers, with different hats. When NATO bombed Belgrade, it was covered in a black cloth.
At the Belgrade Zoo, there’s a small archway called “Monica’s Strait,” and there’s a viper named Madeleine, after Albright.
When I was 13, my mother took me here for basketball practices. You know you’re a nerd when you mother takes you to basketball practices. I was laughed out of the court.
How people curse is revealing. Novak shared with me some Serbian invectives, “Go fuck your own picture,” “I’ll fuck your bloody child,” “May you kiss your father’s cold forehead” and, to a woman, “May you find the taste of cocks disgusting.” When someone farts, you can slap him with, “May that be the music at your funeral.” A twelve-trombone send-off doesn’t sound too bad…
Time for a joke? Postcards from the End... Linh Dinh Best Price: $7.22 Buy New $12.95 (as of 05:45 UTC - Details)
“I heard this from an army major. It’s a part of the army’s brainwashing. Different nationalities were asked how many watermelons they could carry. Modest, the Hungarian said, ‘I can carry one,’ then the Romanian said, ‘I can carry two, one under each arm.’
“The Bulgarian, he said, ‘I can carry three!’ Everyone objected, ‘How can you carry three?!’ ‘Easy, one with each hand, and one on my cock.’
“Then the Serb said, ‘I can carry five!’ ‘That’s impossible!’ everyone shouted. ‘It’s easy. I can carry one under each arm, and the Bulgarian on my cock.’”
In 2016, Novak returned to Belgrade to retire, only to resume working after a trip to Thailand. “My daughter was in Bangkok for a semester, I visited her and fell in love with Thailand.”
Although Novak managed to get a well paying job there, he only lasted a year. “I got bored. How can you be bored in a city of ten million people? I don’t know, but I got bored.”
Back in Belgrade, he’s still restless, however. “I may have a job offer in Hanoi.”
“Have you been there?”
“No.”
“Hanoi is OK, but if you got bored with Bangkok…”
“It will take me at least a year to decide.”
Before me, Novak had met just one Vietnamese. “I had a coworker, called Vu. He was always very tense, I don’t know why. Our boss was British, real tight upper lip. The company won a massive project that would take at least six months to complete, and the boss turned to Vu and said, ‘I’m sure Vu can get it by tomorrow’ The next morning, Vu came in looking like a wreck.” Novak chuckled at the memory. “Vu was profusely apologizing to the boss, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t get it done.’”
By now, we were having dinner at Vuk. “This place is very old fashioned. The waiters are first-rate. For most of them, it’s a lifelong profession.”
We finished our meal with some gibanica. “My mother told me that during World War II, the chetniks would show up at a house and ask for a gibanica. When my grandpa gave them a burnt one, he almost got his throat slashed!”
“That’s absurd!”
“Well, if you’re armed and have all that power. He pissed off their commander.”
“So what happened?”
“Someone higher up in the village intervened. ”
War needs psychopaths, simple as that, for temperate folks don’t care to witness spilled entrails, inhale charred human flesh or have hot shit running down their pants. Even in a donnybrook, would you rather have toxic pricks or pensive sissies on your side?
*
Savka survived the last war here, but barely. A Serb in Croatia, she fled to Belgrade, but has been homeless for 28 years.
“Twenty-eight years?!”
“Yes, 28 years,” she smiled, showing no front teeth.
“Were you a student then?”
“Yes.”
“What did you study?”
“Math.”
This night, Savka was a DJ at Kandinsky Bar, and she played Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Rush, Elton John, Beatles, Bowie, Dylan and R.E.M., etc.
“You like?”
“This is what I listened to in high school.”
One moment, you’re immersed in calculus, then suddenly, you’re running for your life and scrounging for everything, like an animal, though you’re relieved to not be punctured, shredded or crushed. Only figuratively destroyed, you push forward, and before you know it, your pitiful role is almost over, so that, finally, you’ll be equal to everybody else.
Still, Savka flashed the biggest smile, showing nothing but joy, toughness and gums.
The bright bar had people of all ages, plus a lounging dog. The NO SMOKING sign was clearly meant as a joke, for there were ashtrays all over. In the bathroom, there were six poems, pinned to a corkboard. A nine-year-old boy wore a “GOOD VIBES” T-shirt.
Here and now, at least, life’s normal, and that’s more than good enough. Maskless, Serbian smiles blossom.
As published at Smirking Chimp, OpEd News, Unz Review and TruthSeeker, 9/4/20.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
The Best of Linh Dinh


lewrockwell--2020-09-10--Gates Foundation Is Also Destroying Africa’s Food Economy

The same Gates Foundation which is behind every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic from financing much of the WHO budget , to investing in favored vaccine-makers like Moderna , is engaged in a major project in Africa which is destroying traditional small farmer production of essential food crops in favor of monoculture crops and introduction of expensive chemical fertilizers and GMO seeds that are bankrupting small farmers .
The project , the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa ( AGRA ) , is directly connected with key global institutions behind the World Economic Forum ’ s Great Reset .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Rockefeller Foundation and related tax-free undertakings of one of the world ’ s most influential families , it is clear that in key areas the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has inherited the Rockefeller agenda from the medical industrial complex to education to agriculture transformation .
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , working in tandem with the closely allied Rockefeller Foundation , is not only at the center of the orchestration of unheard-of severe economic lockdown measures for the much-disputed COVID-19 illness .
The Gates foundation is also at the very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to transform world agriculture into what they call “ sustainable ” agriculture .
A keystone project for the past 14 years has been Gates ’ funding of something called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa or AGRA .
Markets and States in ... Bates , Robert H. Best Price : $ 15.12 Buy New $ 23.33 When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation founded AGRA in 2006 , joined by their close ally , the Rockefeller Foundation , they proclaimed their goal was to “ tackle hunger in Africa by working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Africa through the promotion of rapid , sustainable agricultural growth based on smallholder farmers.
” AGRA promised to double the agricultural yields and incomes of 30 million small-scale food producer households by 2020.It is now 2020 and it has been a total failure in this regard .
Notably , AGRA deleted these goals in June 2020 from its website without explanation.Based on what they have done we can assume that was never the true goal of Gates and Rockefeller foundations .
In a 2009 speech in Iowa promoting his New Green Revolution for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The next Green Revolution must be guided by smallholder farmers , adapted to local circumstances , and sustainable for the economy and the environment.
” The Gates Foundation proclaimed that the AGRA “ is an Africa-based and African-led effort to develop a thriving agricultural sector in sub-Saharan Africa.
” Sounds very nice .
Reality is quite different .
To further that “ Africa-led ” impression , Gates hired the former UN Secretary General , Ghana ’ s Kofi Annan .
Annan had just retired amid an Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal at the UN @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be the front face , the chairman of AGRA .
In reality the Gates Foundation ran things , with their guy , Rajiv “ Raj ” Shah , directing implementation of policies in African target countries .
When initial attempts to push Monsanto GMO seeds and pesticides on GMO-free African farmers met with great resistance , they shifted instead to sell conventional but Monsanto-owned seeds along with costly chemical fertilizers and pesticides .
Suspiciously , the Gates Foundation and AGRA have been anything but open and transparent about what they have accomplished in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The model they have pushed in 13 African countries has significantly worsened the food self-sufficiency of small farmers and instead created debt traps in which small producers are forced to take on heavy debt to buy expensive patented seeds , are forbidden to use own seeds or mixed crops , and forced to produce cash crops in a monoculture for export .
AGRA has received more than $ 1 billion dollars from mainly the Gates Foundation , with USAID and the UK and German governments adding smaller sums .
The Guarded Gate : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : $ 7.69 Buy New $ 10.00 In a new detailed report evaluating results country-by-country , the reality of the Gates Africa agriculture project shows alarming , but not surprising , results .
The report is called False Promises : The Green Revolution in Africa .
It was prepared by a group of African and European NGO ’ S in collaboration with Timothy A .
Wise , Senior Advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy of Tufts University .
The report concluded , “ yield increases for key staple crops in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ low as during AGRA .
Instead of halving hunger , the situation in the 13 focus countries has worsened since AGRA was launched .
The number of people going hungry has increased by 30 percent during the AGRA years… affecting 130 million people in the 13 AGRA focus countries.
” That is no minor failure .
In an approach that is little different from the 19th Century racist European colonial practices , the Gates Foundation and its AGRA have seriously harmed small-scale food producers by subjecting them to high levels of debt .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ producers were unable to repay the loans for fertilizer and hybrid seeds after the first harvest .
AGRA projects also restrict the freedom of choice for small-scale food producers to decide for themselves what they want to grow .
AGRA forces them to a one-sided cultivation of mainly maize for export markets , what global agribusiness wants .
Not surprising as Bunge and other international grain cartel companies are involved with AGRA .
Traditional climate-resistant and nutrient-rich crops have declined in alarming degrees in many cases .
The study found that for millet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fodder grain favored for 7,000 years due to its productivity and short growing season under dry , high-temperature conditions , AGRA has produced disaster .
The report notes , “ millet production fell by 24 percent in the 13 AGRA focus countries from 2006 to 2018 .
Moreover , AGRA lobbies governments on behalf of agricultural corporations to pass legislation that will benefit fertilizer producers and seed companies instead of strengthening small-scale food production.
” Rather than help local small farmers to improve their yield per acre , the AGRA merely repackages the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and India for Africa , home to some of the world ’ s richest farmland soils .
That Green Revolution of the 1960s , initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation , introduced industrial large-scale agriculture mechanization and introduction of chemical fertilizers and seeds from multinationals which went to the benefit of large farmers and destroyed much of the economy of small producers .
That predictably bankrupted countless small producers .
The result was that while select wealthy producers thrived , millions of poorer farmers were forced to flee to the cities where they settled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact was a major aim of the first Green Revolution as it created a cheap workforce for the globalization drive of manufacture that was to follow .
American Vinyl No Bill ... Buy New $ 5.99 The Gates and Rockefeller foundation-led AGRA in Africa is little different .
In 14 years , AGRA in Africa has influenced member governments to promote buying of multinational companies ’ commercial seeds every year and expensive chemical fertilizers , by promising grand gains that do not materialize .
In the process traditional small farmers or farming communities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seeds .
This is the same dependency model Monsanto and agribusiness has used with patented GMO seeds in the USA .
The Gates Foundation is a significant shareholder in Monsanto , now part of Bayer AG .
AGRA has done little or nothing to protect small farmers from being bankrupted by subsidized EU or USA imports .
Instead their traditional food crops are being displaced by monoculture maize production for international export , leaving African countries more than ever dependent on more imported foods .
The Gates AGRA is succeeding , but not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it has made African food production more globalized and dependent than ever on the will of global multinationals whose aim is cheap inputs .
Under the ruse of giving farmers a “ wider choice ” of patented high-yield seeds ( most for maize ) , they in fact limit a farmer ’ s choice .
He must buy those seeds and is forbidden to reuse his own indigenous seeds .
If at harvest time farmers are unable to sell his AGRA-mandated maize to repay his debt for seeds and fertilizer , they often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or to incur even more debt-a classic colonial debt slavery model .
The Gates Foundation has promoted AGRA as an “ African initiative ” and put itself as far as possible in the background .
The new chairman of AGFA since August 2019 is Hailemariam Desalegn , Former Prime Minister of Ethiopia .
Desalegn , former chairman of the Chair of the Ethiopian People ’ s Revolutionary Democratic Front ( EPRDF ) , the dictatorial ruling party where WHO head Tedros was also a Politburo member , was forced to resign in 2018 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ members of AGRA include two leading executives of the agribusiness giant , Unilever , and two senior officials of the Gates Foundation , as well as from the Rockefeller-founded CGIAR- Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research .
Other board members include a member of the Rockefeller Foundation trustees and a former Africa partner for the French bank , Rothschild & Cie .
War Against the Weak : ... Black , Edwin Best Price : $ 22.68 Buy New $ 23.29 As well , the new President of the Rockefeller Foundation , the founding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Rajiv J. Shah , is on the AGRA board .
Shah left his earlier position with the Gates Foundation and was named USAID director under Obama .
USAID not surprisingly became a partner of AGRA.In 2017 Shah moved from USAID to be tapped as President of the Rockefeller Foundation .
Small world .
The same Rockefeller Foundation is deeply involved in the World Economic Forum Great Reset .
Shah just released a Rockefeller report , Reset the Table : Meeting the Moment to Transform the US Food System .
It is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” of the food system being prepared by the circles around Gats and Rockefeller and the UN .
More on that another time .
Since 2014 the President of AGRA has been a controversial Rwandan former Agriculture Minister under the corrupt Kagame dictatorship .
Agnes Kalibata also is a member of the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum , the International Fertilizer Development Corporation ( IFDC ) , based in USA .
In December , 2019 , just before the public alarm over outbreak of a “ novel coronavirus ” in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ AntónioGuterres , named Kalibata to head the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit .
In response some 176 organizations from 83 countries , wrote to Guterres to repeal her appointment .
Their letter stated , “ Founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation , AGRA ’ s efforts have centered on capturing and diverting public resources to benefit large corporate interests .
Their finance-intensive and high input agricultural model is not sustainable beyond constant subsidy , which is drawn from increasingly scarce public resources .
Since 2006 , AGRA @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an untapped market for corporate monopolies controlling commercial seeds , genetically modified crops , fossil fuel-heavy synthetic fertilizers and polluting pesticides.
” In her defense 12 voices wrote to Guterres urging him to stand firm .
Eleven of the 12 had links to the Gates Foundation .
Their voice prevailed .
During the global grain crisis of the mid-1970 ’ s then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger , another Rockefeller protégé , allegedly declared “ Who controls the food controls the people.
” The globalization of world food production and creation of agribusiness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and today with the Gates Foundation taking a more visible lead , is perhaps the most threatening factor to world health and mortality , far more than any coronavirus has shown .
Notably the same people promoting fear and lockdowns for that putative virus are busy reorganizing world food production in an unhealthy manner .
It seems to be no coincidence as Bill Gates is a known advocate of eugenics and population reduction .
The views of the authors do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the editorial board .
Republishing of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ NEO .

The same Gates Foundation which is behind every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic from financing much of the WHO budget, to investing in favored vaccine-makers like Moderna, is engaged in a major project in Africa which is destroying traditional small farmer production of essential food crops in favor of monoculture crops and introduction of expensive chemical fertilizers and GMO seeds that are bankrupting small farmers. The project, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), is directly connected with key global institutions behind the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.
If we know the actual history of the Rockefeller Foundation and related tax-free undertakings of one of the world’s most influential families, it is clear that in key areas the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has inherited the Rockefeller agenda from the medical industrial complex to education to agriculture transformation.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working in tandem with the closely allied Rockefeller Foundation, is not only at the center of the orchestration of unheard-of severe economic lockdown measures for the much-disputed COVID-19 illness. The Gates foundation is also at the very center of the UN Agenda 30 push to transform world agriculture into what they call “sustainable” agriculture. A keystone project for the past 14 years has been Gates’ funding of something called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa or AGRA. Markets and States in ... Bates, Robert H. Best Price: $15.12 Buy New $23.33 (as of 02:53 UTC - Details)
AGRA Fraud on Africa
When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation founded AGRA in 2006, joined by their close ally, the Rockefeller Foundation, they proclaimed their goal was to “tackle hunger in Africa by working to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa through the promotion of rapid, sustainable agricultural growth based on smallholder farmers.” AGRA promised to double the agricultural yields and incomes of 30 million small-scale food producer households by 2020.It is now 2020 and it has been a total failure in this regard. Notably,AGRA deleted these goals in June 2020 from its website without explanation.Based on what they have done we can assume that was never the true goal of Gates and Rockefeller foundations.
In a 2009 speech in Iowa promoting his New Green Revolution for Africa, Bill Gates declared, “The next Green Revolution must be guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.” The Gates Foundation proclaimed that the AGRA “is an Africa-based and African-led effort to develop a thriving agricultural sector in sub-Saharan Africa.” Sounds very nice. Reality is quite different.
To further that “Africa-led” impression, Gates hired the former UN Secretary General, Ghana’s Kofi Annan. Annan had just retired amid an Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal at the UN involving his son. Annan was to be the front face, the chairman of AGRA. In reality the Gates Foundation ran things, with their guy,Rajiv “Raj” Shah, directing implementation of policies in African target countries. When initial attempts to push Monsanto GMO seeds and pesticides on GMO-free African farmers met with great resistance, they shifted instead to sell conventional but Monsanto-owned seeds along with costly chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Suspiciously, the Gates Foundation and AGRA have been anything but open and transparent about what they have accomplished in 14 years. For good reason. The model they have pushed in 13 African countries has significantly worsened the food self-sufficiency of small farmers and instead created debt traps in which small producers are forced to take on heavy debt to buy expensive patented seeds, are forbidden to use own seeds or mixed crops, and forced to produce cash crops in a monoculture for export. AGRA has received more than $1 billion dollars from mainly the Gates Foundation, with USAID and the UK and German governments adding smaller sums. The Guarded Gate: Bigo... Okrent, Daniel Best Price: $7.69 Buy New $10.00 (as of 02:53 UTC - Details)
False Promises
In a new detailed report evaluating results country-by-country, the reality of the Gates Africa agriculture project shows alarming, but not surprising, results. The report is called False Promises: The Green Revolution in Africa. It was prepared by a group of African and European NGO’S in collaboration with Timothy A. Wise, Senior Advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy of Tufts University. The report concluded, “yield increases for key staple crops in the years before AGRA were just as low as during AGRA. Instead of halving hunger, the situation in the 13 focus countries has worsened since AGRA was launched. The number of people going hungry has increased by 30 percent during the AGRA years… affecting 130 million people in the 13 AGRA focus countries.” That is no minor failure.
In an approach that is little different from the 19th Century racist European colonial practices, the Gates Foundation and its AGRA have seriously harmed small-scale food producers by subjecting them to high levels of debt. In Zambia and Tanzania, small-scale food producers were unable to repay the loans for fertilizer and hybrid seeds after the first harvest. AGRA projects also restrict the freedom of choice for small-scale food producers to decide for themselves what they want to grow. AGRA forces them to a one-sided cultivation of mainly maize for export markets, what global agribusiness wants. Not surprising as Bunge and other international grain cartel companies are involved with AGRA. Traditional climate-resistant and nutrient-rich crops have declined in alarming degrees in many cases.
The study found that for millet, an indigenous and vital cereal and fodder grain favored for 7,000 years due to its productivity and short growing season under dry, high-temperature conditions, AGRA has produced disaster. The report notes,“millet production fell by 24 percent in the 13 AGRA focus countries from 2006 to 2018. Moreover, AGRA lobbies governments on behalf of agricultural corporations to pass legislation that will benefit fertilizer producers and seed companies instead of strengthening small-scale food production.”
Rather than help local small farmers to improve their yield per acre, the AGRA merely repackages the 1960’s Green Revolution in Mexico and India for Africa, home to some of the world’s richest farmland soils. That Green Revolution of the 1960s, initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation, introduced industrial large-scale agriculture mechanization and introduction of chemical fertilizers and seeds from multinationals which went to the benefit of large farmers and destroyed much of the economy of small producers. That predictably bankrupted countless small producers. The result was that while select wealthy producers thrived, millions of poorer farmers were forced to flee to the cities where they settled in urban slums. But that in fact was a major aim of the first Green Revolution as it created a cheap workforce for the globalization drive of manufacture that was to follow. American Vinyl No Bill... Buy New $5.99 (as of 05:21 UTC - Details)
The Gates and Rockefeller foundation-led AGRA in Africa is little different. In 14 years, AGRA in Africa has influenced member governments to promote buying of multinational companies’commercial seeds every year and expensive chemical fertilizers, by promising grand gains that do not materialize. In the process traditional small farmers or farming communities are forbidden to use farm-saved or -bred seeds.
This is the same dependency model Monsanto and agribusiness has used with patented GMO seeds in the USA. The Gates Foundation is a significant shareholder in Monsanto, now part of Bayer AG. AGRA has done little or nothing to protect small farmers from being bankrupted by subsidized EU or USA imports. Instead their traditional food crops are being displaced by monoculture maize production for international export, leaving African countries more than ever dependent on more imported foods. The Gates AGRA is succeeding, but not in its cosmetic stated goals. Rather it has made African food production more globalized and dependent than ever on the will of global multinationals whose aim is cheap inputs. Under the ruse of giving farmers a “wider choice” of patented high-yield seeds (most for maize), they in fact limit a farmer’s choice. He must buy those seeds and is forbidden to reuse his own indigenous seeds. If at harvest time farmers are unable to sell his AGRA-mandated maize to repay his debt for seeds and fertilizer, they often are forced to sell their precious cattle or to incur even more debt-a classic colonial debt slavery model.
Dubious Leadership
The Gates Foundation has promoted AGRA as an “African initiative” and put itself as far as possible in the background. The new chairman of AGFA since August 2019 is Hailemariam Desalegn, Former Prime Minister of Ethiopia. Desalegn, former chairman of the Chair of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the dictatorial ruling party where WHO head Tedros was also a Politburo member, was forced to resign in 2018 following mass protests.
Less public board members of AGRA include two leading executives of the agribusiness giant, Unilever, and two senior officials of the Gates Foundation, as well as from the Rockefeller-founded CGIAR- Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Other board members include a member of the Rockefeller Foundation trustees and a former Africa partner for the French bank, Rothschild &Cie .
War Against the Weak: ... Black, Edwin Best Price: $22.68 Buy New $23.29 (as of 02:53 UTC - Details) As well, the new President of the Rockefeller Foundation, the founding perpetrator of the AGRA agenda,Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, is on the AGRA board. Shah left his earlier position with the Gates Foundation and was named USAID director under Obama. USAID not surprisingly became a partner of AGRA.In 2017 Shah moved from USAID to be tapped as President of the Rockefeller Foundation. Small world. The same Rockefeller Foundation is deeply involved in the World Economic Forum Great Reset. Shah just released a Rockefeller report, Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the US Food System. It is a precursor to a major global “reset” of the food system being prepared by the circles around Gats and Rockefeller and the UN. More on that another time.
Since 2014 the President of AGRA has been a controversial Rwandan former Agriculture Minister under the corrupt Kagame dictatorship. Agnes Kalibata also is a member of the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum, the International Fertilizer Development Corporation (IFDC), based in USA.
In December, 2019, just before the public alarm over outbreak of a “novel coronavirus” in Wuhan China, UN Secretary General ,AntónioGuterres, named Kalibata to head the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. In response some 176 organizations from 83 countries, wrote to Guterres to repeal her appointment. Their letter stated, “Founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, AGRA’s efforts have centered on capturing and diverting public resources to benefit large corporate interests. Their finance-intensive and high input agricultural model is not sustainable beyond constant subsidy, which is drawn from increasingly scarce public resources. Since 2006, AGRA has worked to open up Africa—seen as an untapped market for corporate monopolies controlling commercial seeds, genetically modified crops, fossil fuel-heavy synthetic fertilizers and polluting pesticides.” In her defense 12 voices wrote to Guterres urging him to stand firm. Eleven of the 12 had links to the Gates Foundation. Their voice prevailed.
During the global grain crisis of the mid-1970’s then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another Rockefeller protégé, allegedly declared “Who controls the food controls the people.” The globalization of world food production and creation of agribusiness, first guided by the Rockefeller Foundation and today with the Gates Foundation taking a more visible lead, is perhaps the most threatening factor to world health and mortality, far more than any coronavirus has shown. Notably the same people promoting fear and lockdowns for that putative virus are busy reorganizing world food production in an unhealthy manner. It seems to be no coincidence as Bill Gates is a known advocate of eugenics and population reduction.
The views of the authors do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the editorial board.
Republishing of the articles is welcomed with reference to NEO.


lewrockwell--2020-09-10--MKULTRA and the CIA’s War on the Human Mind

[ Review of Stephen Kinzer , Poisoner in Chief : Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control ( New York : Henry Holt and Company , 2019 ) ] The Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) has a fearsome reputation .
The author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations , the CIA is notorious for waterboarding , “ extraordinary rendition , ” regime change , kidnapping , narcotics smuggling , financing of guerrilla wars , and many other unsavory activities around the world , including against Americans , even inside the United States .
But “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The CIA has failed at least as often as it has succeeded , and sometimes the failures are so flagrant—such as sending thousands of anticommunist guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines in Korea , Eastern Europe , China , and Southeast Asia during the Cold War , where nearly all of them died—that CIA insiders wryly refer to their organization as “ Clowns In Action.
” Which is it ?
Is the CIA a dastardly menace or a hotbed of horrible mistakes ?
If Stephen Kinzer ’ s new book , Poisoner in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ answer is both .
Poisoner in Chief : Sid ... Kinzer , Stephen Buy New $ 14.79 A veteran reporter on foreign conflicts such as those in Rwanda , Guatemala , Nicaragua , and Iran , Kinzer is a former New York Times correspondent and , most famously , the author of the 2006 bestseller Overthrow : America ’ s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq .
In his latest effort he brings his analytical skills to bear on perhaps the most disturbing CIA project of them all : MKULTRA , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a method for controlling the human mind .
“ History ’ s most systematic search for techniques of mind control , ” Kinzer writes , was a by-product of World War II .
At the end of 1942 , a University of Wisconsin bacteriologist named Ira Baldwin— “ America ’ s first bio-warrior ” and a part-time Quaker preacher—was loaned to Washington ( with the blessing of the University of Wisconsin president ) in order to set up and run a bioweapons program for the United States military ( p. 16 ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Baldwin lab cranked out bioweapons for possible use against Allied enemies .
In one of Baldwin ’ s bigger projects , shipment of tons of anthrax spores , ordered by Winston Churchill for potential use against the Nazis , was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost ready for delivery when the Germans surrendered on May 7 , 1945 ( p. 19 ) .
For many , even for Quaker preachers , World War II cleared away the last of the psychological hurdles against unleashing bioweapons against an enemy .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of how the targeting of unsuspecting populations was later justified by the bigger war , the Cold War , which followed the demise of the Third Reich .
The ruined Third Reich provided much of the original brainpower for MKULTRA .
Immediately after World War II , the CIA—formed out of the Office of War Information in 1945—was faced with a choice .
The Germans and the Japanese had been conducting advanced experiments on germ warfare and other forms of biological weaponry .
Should the Allies prosecute as war criminals the scientists involved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as expert advisors ?
With the Cold War starting and the Soviets looming as an unpredictable enemy , the CIA , with the tacit approval of the few members of the United States Congress who were allowed to know even the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency , decided to make use of the bioweapon expertise of erstwhile foes in order to counter the new adversary in Moscow .
OVERTHROW Kinzer , Stephen Best Price : $ 4.29 Buy New $ 14.88 For example , Kurt Blome , the Nazis ’ director of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been championed by Heinrich Himmler , was acquitted , by American political fiat , at the Doctors ’ Trial in Nuremberg in 1947 and sent to work—as part of Operation Paperclip designed mainly to bring German rocket scientists to the US—at Camp Detrick ( pp .
20–24 ) .
It was at Camp Detrick that Blome encountered a rising star in the CIA , Sidney Gottlieb .
Gottlieb , a bacteriological specialist who had been a star student of Ira Baldwin ’ s at Wisconsin , is the main figure in Kinzer ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ synonymous with MKULTRA .
Under the direction of Gottlieb , the CIA ’ s laboratories at Camp Detrick transitioned from R & D on bioweapons—often using unwitting American subjects , such as in 1950 when a US Navy minesweeper “ specially equipped with large aerosol hoses ” spent six days spraying the Serratia marcescens bacterium into the San Francisco fog , infecting some eight hundred thousand people ( pp .
37–38 ) —to drugs which could be used for mind control .
( MKNAOMI , MKULTRA ’ s sister CIA project , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which the CIA and the US government could use in various operations . )
Gottlieb provided the big ideas into which to fit Blome ’ s nefarious knowledge of mass murder by bacillus .
Gottlieb became , virtually overnight and with the help of former Nazi doctors , America ’ s “ poisoner in chief.
” The CIA ’ s mind control program , which was assuming a bigger and bigger importance as fears of Soviet brainwashing grew in the US , was originally called Operation Bluebird and was personally overseen by CIA @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At first , the Bluebird team experimented with “ hypnosis , electroshock , and sensory deprivation , ” along with drugs like sodium amytal , at CIA sites in “ secret prisons in Germany and Japan , ” looking for a way to extract information out of POWs and captured spies ( pp .
44 , 48–49 ) .
But Dulles was unsatisfied with the results and decided to give the young CIA recruit Sidney Gottlieb control of Bluebird ’ s updated iteration : Operation Artichoke ( pp .
51–52 ) .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it took to get prisoners to divulge military and state secrets to the CIA .
The Cold War would brook nothing short of full-scale war against the human mind .
Dulles became deputy director of central intelligence three days after launching Artichoke in 1951 , and Gottlieb , invisible to the outside world , was given virtually unlimited rein to carry out any experiments thought necessary to achieve mind control ( p. 51 ) .
This drive to achieve total operational control over the human psyche eclipsed all reality and tactical limitation .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the race to the mind control method , many in the CIA thought , the entire American population lay vulnerable to mental enslavement by the Soviets .
Dulles , Kinzer writes , despite a disastrously unsuccessful three-year “ Artichoke ” attack on a Bulgarian political prisoner named Dmitri Dimitrov , “ had convinced himself not only that mind control techniques exist but that Communists had discovered them , and that this posed a mortal threat to the rest of the world ” ( pp .
52–53 ) .
The Brothers : John Fos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 3.88 Buy New $ 7.77 Mind control was the pressing need , but nothing brought it within reach .
Technique after technique , drug after drug , was tried on prisoners , but to no avail .
In frustration , Artichoke agents under Gottlieb upped the ante , turning to marijuana , cocaine , and then heroin as possible catalysts of CIA-directed , anti-Soviet brainwashing .
As part of Artichoke , a University of Rochester psychology professor was given a grant by the US Navy to test heroin on his students .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ elusive as ever , despite the massive dosing of the Rochester student population with opiates .
Nothing seemed to have the potential to crack open the mind for the CIA ( p. 59 ) .
Someone in Artichoke suggested using mescaline after the other narcotics failed , and this gave Sidney Gottlieb an idea .
He remembered hearing about a drug called LSD which Dr. Albert Hofmann had discovered during an experiment at Sandoz laboratories in Basel , Switzerland , in 1943 .
Lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD ) , an ergot enzyme @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Dr. Hofmann found when he ingested some and recorded the drug ’ s effects .
Washington learned of Hofmann ’ s discovery in 1949 , and one of the chemical specialists in the US military complex told Gottlieb of the new substance ( pp .
34–35 ) In 1951 , Gottlieb asked Harold Abramson , who had been a physician in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War II , to administer LSD to him .
Gottlieb experienced the same psychedelic state as Dr. Hofmann had described .
Other subjects were tested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them wittingly , and all seemed to exhibit similar reactions .
LSD most definitely altered the mind ( pp .
60–61 ) .
Gottlieb was convinced that he had found the magical drug which would allow the CIA to control the psyche , and therefore to beat the Soviets at ( what Allen Dulles , Gottlieb , and many others at CIA thought , at least , was ) the Soviets ’ own game .
The experiments on human subjects followed rapidly after Gottlieb ’ s conversion to belief in the powers of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ death , often by murder .
One study quoted by Kinzer reports that The CIA carried out similar experimentation and executions in Korea and Germany ( p. 64 ) .
Gottlieb was usually personally involved .
The Devil ’ s Ches ... Talbot , David Best Price : $ 4.05 Buy New $ 8.05 Throughout the 1950s the experimentation continued .
An American artist named Stanley Glickman was lured to a bar near his studio in Paris by CIA agents in 1951 and a chemical was slipped into his drink .
Glickman began @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a state of panic and remained in his Paris apartment for the next ten months in paranoid hiding until his family came to take him home , and then he spent the rest of his life as a near invalid .
The chemical which the CIA had slipped into Glickman ’ s drink was almost certainly LSD , and Glickman , Kinzer suggests , had been chosen by the CIA because he had just recovered from hepatitis and the Artichoke team was conducting an experiment on the effects of hepatic infection on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) Things got worse from there .
In 1952 , the CIA commissioned underworld denizen and former vice cop George Hunter White to run a human-subjects experiment site at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village , New York ( pp .
74–75 ) .
White ’ s job was to bring to the CIA ’ s apartment “ expendables ” on whom Gottlieb and his team could test LSD .
White “ knew the whores , the pimps , the people who brought in the drugs , ” as one of Gottlieb ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this made him invaluable for procuring the “ drug users , petty criminals , and others who could be relied upon not to complain about what had happened to them ” when the CIA ’ s experiments were finished ( pp .
76–77 ) .
Many of these “ expendables ” suffered nervous breakdowns , and some died .
In order to keep the supply of LSD flowing , CIA agents went to Basel , where LSD had been discovered , and tried to buy all the LSD in stock .
Allen Dulles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for it ( p. 86 ) .
Sandoz held the patent for Hofmann ’ s 1943 discovery , but Sandoz wanted nothing to do with the troublesome substance and so Gottlieb , freed of any need to scruple over IP infringement , tasked US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly with making LSD in the States ( pp .
85–86 ) With their mind control serum in production , MKULTRA agents could focus on how to dose experimental subjects .
The CIA even hired a professional magician , John Mulholland , to teach Gottlieb and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unsuspecting subjects ’ drinks and food without being detected ( pp .
89–94 ) Gottlieb recruited a Kentucky addiction specialist , Dr. Harry Isbell , to test LSD and new mind-altering drugs on prisoners and patients .
More lives were destroyed ( pp .
94–96 ) .
Among the victims of another of Gottlieb ’ s agent-doctors was none other than James “ Whitey ” Bulger , the mafioso who , along with “ nineteen other inmates ” at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary , beginning in 1957 “ was given LSD nearly every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told what it was ” ( pp .
98–99 ) .
Bulger was plagued for the rest of his life with nightmares , suicidal thoughts , and “ deep depression ” ( p. 98 ) .
Bulger , who had been told that he was taking part in experiments designed to find a cure for schizophrenia , did not learn the truth about what had happened until 1979 ( pp .
263–64 ) .
The Search for the u20 ... John Marks Best Price : $ 6.33 Buy New $ 17.85 The human @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continued to mount .
One of Gottlieb ’ s closest associates in the project , Frank Olson—a bacteriologist trained at the University of Wisconsin who had also been recruited for the CIA by Gottlieb ’ s mentor Ira Baldwin—began to express doubts about what the MKULTRA team was doing .
He told his wife that he had made a “ terrible mistake ” in his work ( p. 114 ) .
He shared his misgivings with his CIA colleagues as well .
Olson ’ s conscience appeared to be getting the better of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the team .
In late 1953 , Gottlieb surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD at a backwoods MKULTRA gathering , “ Deep Creek Rendezvous , ” outside Camp Detrick ( p. 113 ) .
Olson spiraled into a frightening disorientation , and early in the morning on November 28 , 1953—a few days after Thanksgiving—Olson “ fell or jumped ” from a window of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan , dying few moments after hitting the concrete below .
Another MKULTRA agent , Gottlieb ’ s lieutenant Robert Lashbrook , was the only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ fell or jumped ” ( pp .
120–21 ) .
Lashbrook told the New York City police that Olson had jumped out of the window and Olson ’ s death was originally designated a suicide , but the Olson family eventually grew suspicious and an investigation was carried out , including a new autopsy on Olson ’ s body .
The forensic pathologist , after a month ’ s examination of the corpse , declared : “ I think Frank Olson was intentionally , deliberately , with malice aforethought , thrown out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) .
Wounds on Olson ’ s body were consistent with methods taught in CIA manuals for incapacitating people and then killing them in order to make their deaths look self-inflicted .
Gottlieb and MKULTRA were shaken by Olson ’ s demise , but they carried on with their work .
They spent the next few years looking for magic mushrooms in Mexico ( 157 ) ; arranging suicide capsules for American agents , including U-2 pilot Gary Powers ( who chose not to use his when he was shot down over the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) ; attempting , at the order of then attorney general Robert Kennedy , to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro ( after exploding cigars and exploding conch shells were ruled out , Gottlieb tried with a wetsuit laced with fungi and bacteria ) ( p. 184 ) ; and hooking Allen Ginsberg and other radicals on LSD ( pp .
188–90 ) .
Gottlieb personally delivered to the American embassy in Leopoldville in the Congo poisons that Gottlieb had developed to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba , but the Belgians and the Africans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
176–80 ) .
Gottlieb ’ s career brought ruin and suffering to untold numbers of people , many of them innocent .
He retired from the CIA in 1973 after receiving the Distinguished Intelligence Medal ( p. 211 ) .
Lifelong devotees of folk dance , Gottlieb and his wife , Margaret , moved to the countryside in rural Virginia and attempted to blend in with the small community there , volunteering , dancing , and experimenting with radical ecology .
However , “ investigative reporter Seymour Hersh , who had won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lai massacre in Vietnam , ” learned of the MH-CHAOS program targeting Americans , and the Congress was forced to act .
Gottlieb ’ s career , long a well-kept secret , was being brought into the open , and his retirement would therefore be far from peaceful .
Operation Paperclip : T ... Jacobsen , Annie Best Price : $ 9.51 Buy New $ 12.83 But there were still many who tried to cover up what Gottlieb and the other MKULTRA agents had done .
In 1975 , after the outcry caused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ford deputized Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to chair a commission on the CIA .
The new CIA director , William Colby , was remarkably frank .
Colby informed the Rockefeller Commission that “ the CIA had conducted LSD experiments that resulted in deaths .
Later he referred to assassination plots ” ( p. 216 ) .
Nelson Rockefeller , attempting to prevent the CIA director from revealing too much , buttonholed Colby later : “ Bill , do you really have to present all this material to us ?
” ( p. 216 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wake of the Church Report on further American intelligence excesses , Senator Edward Kennedy , Robert ’ s brother , spurred on by some documents which had been discovered as the result of a FOIA request ( Gottlieb had ordered all MKULTRA files burned , but some undetected copies remained ) , called Admiral Stansfield Turner to testify before Congress on MKULTRA .
The walls were closing in .
Gottlieb himself was eventually forced to testify—albeit in a closed-room setting his lawyer had helped arrange—but Gottlieb essentially pleaded amnesia ( nearly all of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some version of “ I do not recall ” ) and the matter seemed to end there .
Still , the skeletons in Gottlieb ’ s closet would not go away .
In 1984 Gottlieb agreed to meet with the family of Frank Olson , the former MKULTRA colleague who had “ fallen or jumped ” from his Manhattan hotel room in 1953 .
Eric Olson , Frank Olson ’ s son , was unconvinced by Gottlieb ’ s explanation for the “ accident , ” and , after Frank Olson ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ away , ordered Frank ’ s body exhumed in 1994 .
As information about MKULTRA built in the public ’ s awareness , other cases were reopened , including that of Stanley Glickman .
( 257 ) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble .
Gottlieb pushed back the trial for Glickman ’ s murder as long as he could , and then , in early March , 1999 , Sidney Gottlieb died .
Like Frank Olson , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the death had been a suicide ( p. 259 ) .
Stephen Kinzer ’ s Poisoner in Chief is a highly readable , thoroughly researched introduction to the life and work of one of America ’ s most unknown , and yet infamous , government agents .
Kinzer is to be thanked for his plainspoken , courageous book .
Even those who have studied the CIA and the various schemes and crimes which “ the Agency ” has committed over the past seventy-five years will be surprised by some of the information Kinzer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a rendering of just some of the lives ruined by just one CIA program , MKULTRA , is a sobering revelation .
Family of Secrets Russ Baker Best Price : $ 1.93 Buy New $ 8.85 Sidney Gottlieb , the person directly responsible for much , if not most , of the MKULTRA devastation over more than twenty years , remains as mysterious at the end of Kinzer ’ s volume as at the beginning , however .
By all accounts Gottlieb was a good student from a stable family .
Kinzer speculates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rejected for military service in World War II—Gottlieb stuttered and had a clubfoot—left him unsatisfied and impatient to prove his patriotism , an urgent task for the son of immigrant Jews ( p. 50 ) .
Gottlieb was heavily involved in New Age mysticism and meditation and appears to have expended considerable energy psychologically compartmentalizing his “ work , ” so there are indications that he was aware that the experiments he and his MKULTRA team were carrying out were , at best , unethical , and objectively speaking often outright crimes .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ endeavors , and the explanation that Gottlieb , Allen Dulles , and many others in the CIA gave—to themselves and to each other , and to the world around when pressed—makes the most sense .
They had a country to defend , they faced an enemy of unprecedented cruelty in the Soviet Union , and they were willing to do whatever it took , even sacrificing innocent people , to keep Americans as a whole from falling under the spell of communist mind control .
Note : The views expressed on Mises.org are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

[Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019)]
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a fearsome reputation. The author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations, the CIA is notorious for waterboarding, “extraordinary rendition,” regime change, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling, financing of guerrilla wars, and many other unsavory activities around the world, including against Americans, even inside the United States.
But “fearsome” does not mean “flawless.” The CIA has failed at least as often as it has succeeded, and sometimes the failures are so flagrant—such as sending thousands of anticommunist guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines in Korea, Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War, where nearly all of them died—that CIA insiders wryly refer to their organization as “Clowns In Action.”
Which is it? Is the CIA a dastardly menace or a hotbed of horrible mistakes? If Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief, is any indication, the answer is both. Poisoner in Chief: Sid... Kinzer, Stephen Buy New $14.79 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details)
A veteran reporter on foreign conflicts such as those in Rwanda, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iran, Kinzer is a former New York Times correspondent and, most famously, the author of the 2006 bestseller Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In his latest effort he brings his analytical skills to bear on perhaps the most disturbing CIA project of them all: MKULTRA, the top-secret, long-running effort to find a method for controlling the human mind.
“History’s most systematic search for techniques of mind control,” Kinzer writes, was a by-product of World War II. At the end of 1942, a University of Wisconsin bacteriologist named Ira Baldwin—“America’s first bio-warrior” and a part-time Quaker preacher—was loaned to Washington (with the blessing of the University of Wisconsin president) in order to set up and run a bioweapons program for the United States military (p. 16). Based out of Camp Detrick in Maryland, the Baldwin lab cranked out bioweapons for possible use against Allied enemies. In one of Baldwin’s bigger projects, shipment of tons of anthrax spores, ordered by Winston Churchill for potential use against the Nazis, was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost ready for delivery when the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945 (p. 19).
For many, even for Quaker preachers, World War II cleared away the last of the psychological hurdles against unleashing bioweapons against an enemy. Kinzer’s book tells the tale of how the targeting of unsuspecting populations was later justified by the bigger war, the Cold War, which followed the demise of the Third Reich.
The ruined Third Reich provided much of the original brainpower for MKULTRA. Immediately after World War II, the CIA—formed out of the Office of War Information in 1945—was faced with a choice. The Germans and the Japanese had been conducting advanced experiments on germ warfare and other forms of biological weaponry. Should the Allies prosecute as war criminals the scientists involved with such projects, or hire them as expert advisors? With the Cold War starting and the Soviets looming as an unpredictable enemy, the CIA, with the tacit approval of the few members of the United States Congress who were allowed to know even the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to make use of the bioweapon expertise of erstwhile foes in order to counter the new adversary in Moscow. OVERTHROW Kinzer, Stephen Best Price: $4.29 Buy New $14.88 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details)
For example, Kurt Blome, the Nazis’ director of biowarfare research and development whose work had been championed by Heinrich Himmler, was acquitted, by American political fiat, at the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg in 1947 and sent to work—as part of Operation Paperclip designed mainly to bring German rocket scientists to the US—at Camp Detrick (pp. 20–24).
It was at Camp Detrick that Blome encountered a rising star in the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb, a bacteriological specialist who had been a star student of Ira Baldwin’s at Wisconsin, is the main figure in Kinzer’s book. His career is virtually synonymous with MKULTRA. Under the direction of Gottlieb, the CIA’s laboratories at Camp Detrick transitioned from R&D on bioweapons—often using unwitting American subjects, such as in 1950 when a US Navy minesweeper “specially equipped with large aerosol hoses” spent six days spraying the Serratia marcescens bacterium into the San Francisco fog, infecting some eight hundred thousand people (pp. 37–38)—to drugs which could be used for mind control. (MKNAOMI, MKULTRA’s sister CIA project, was also tasked with finding poisons and biotoxins which the CIA and the US government could use in various operations.) Gottlieb provided the big ideas into which to fit Blome’s nefarious knowledge of mass murder by bacillus. Gottlieb became, virtually overnight and with the help of former Nazi doctors, America’s “poisoner in chief.”
The CIA’s mind control program, which was assuming a bigger and bigger importance as fears of Soviet brainwashing grew in the US, was originally called Operation Bluebird and was personally overseen by CIA higher-up Allen Dulles. (47) At first, the Bluebird team experimented with “hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation,” along with drugs like sodium amytal, at CIA sites in “secret prisons in Germany and Japan,” looking for a way to extract information out of POWs and captured spies (pp. 44, 48–49). But Dulles was unsatisfied with the results and decided to give the young CIA recruit Sidney Gottlieb control of Bluebird’s updated iteration: Operation Artichoke (pp. 51–52). The goal of Artichoke was to do whatever it took to get prisoners to divulge military and state secrets to the CIA. The Cold War would brook nothing short of full-scale war against the human mind.
Dulles became deputy director of central intelligence three days after launching Artichoke in 1951, and Gottlieb, invisible to the outside world, was given virtually unlimited rein to carry out any experiments thought necessary to achieve mind control (p. 51). This drive to achieve total operational control over the human psyche eclipsed all reality and tactical limitation. If the US didn’t win the race to the mind control method, many in the CIA thought, the entire American population lay vulnerable to mental enslavement by the Soviets. Dulles, Kinzer writes, despite a disastrously unsuccessful three-year “Artichoke” attack on a Bulgarian political prisoner named Dmitri Dimitrov, “had convinced himself not only that mind control techniques exist but that Communists had discovered them, and that this posed a mortal threat to the rest of the world” (pp. 52–53). The Brothers: John Fos... Kinzer, Stephen Best Price: $3.88 Buy New $7.77 (as of 12:25 UTC - Details)
Mind control was the pressing need, but nothing brought it within reach. Technique after technique, drug after drug, was tried on prisoners, but to no avail. In frustration, Artichoke agents under Gottlieb upped the ante, turning to marijuana, cocaine, and then heroin as possible catalysts of CIA-directed, anti-Soviet brainwashing. As part of Artichoke, a University of Rochester psychology professor was given a grant by the US Navy to test heroin on his students. The control of the mind remained as elusive as ever, despite the massive dosing of the Rochester student population with opiates. Nothing seemed to have the potential to crack open the mind for the CIA (p. 59).
Someone in Artichoke suggested using mescaline after the other narcotics failed, and this gave Sidney Gottlieb an idea. He remembered hearing about a drug called LSD which Dr. Albert Hofmann had discovered during an experiment at Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, in 1943. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), an ergot enzyme, produced extraordinary and disturbing psychological effects, Dr. Hofmann found when he ingested some and recorded the drug’s effects. Washington learned of Hofmann’s discovery in 1949, and one of the chemical specialists in the US military complex told Gottlieb of the new substance (pp. 34–35) In 1951, Gottlieb asked Harold Abramson, who had been a physician in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War II, to administer LSD to him. Gottlieb experienced the same psychedelic state as Dr. Hofmann had described. Other subjects were tested, as well, not all of them wittingly, and all seemed to exhibit similar reactions. LSD most definitely altered the mind (pp. 60–61). Gottlieb was convinced that he had found the magical drug which would allow the CIA to control the psyche, and therefore to beat the Soviets at (what Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and many others at CIA thought, at least, was) the Soviets’ own game.
The experiments on human subjects followed rapidly after Gottlieb’s conversion to belief in the powers of LSD. These experiments often ended in death, often by murder. One study quoted by Kinzer reports that
in 1951 a team of CIA scientists led by Dr. Gottlieb flew to Tokyo….Four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians were secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants and stimulants….Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. (p. 64)
The CIA carried out similar experimentation and executions in Korea and Germany (p. 64). Gottlieb was usually personally involved. The Devil’s Ches... Talbot, David Best Price: $4.05 Buy New $8.05 (as of 07:00 UTC - Details)
Throughout the 1950s the experimentation continued. An American artist named Stanley Glickman was lured to a bar near his studio in Paris by CIA agents in 1951 and a chemical was slipped into his drink. Glickman began to hallucinate wildly. He fled in a state of panic and remained in his Paris apartment for the next ten months in paranoid hiding until his family came to take him home, and then he spent the rest of his life as a near invalid. The chemical which the CIA had slipped into Glickman’s drink was almost certainly LSD, and Glickman, Kinzer suggests, had been chosen by the CIA because he had just recovered from hepatitis and the Artichoke team was conducting an experiment on the effects of hepatic infection on the efficacy of LSD (pp. 66–67)
Things got worse from there. In 1952, the CIA commissioned underworld denizen and former vice cop George Hunter White to run a human-subjects experiment site at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York (pp. 74–75). White’s job was to bring to the CIA’s apartment “expendables” on whom Gottlieb and his team could test LSD. White “knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs,” as one of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA colleagues later explained, and this made him invaluable for procuring the “drug users, petty criminals, and others who could be relied upon not to complain about what had happened to them” when the CIA’s experiments were finished (pp. 76–77). Many of these “expendables” suffered nervous breakdowns, and some died.
In order to keep the supply of LSD flowing, CIA agents went to Basel, where LSD had been discovered, and tried to buy all the LSD in stock. Allen Dulles authorized a $240,000 outlay to pay for it (p. 86). Sandoz held the patent for Hofmann’s 1943 discovery, but Sandoz wanted nothing to do with the troublesome substance and so Gottlieb, freed of any need to scruple over IP infringement, tasked US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly with making LSD in the States (pp. 85–86) With their mind control serum in production, MKULTRA agents could focus on how to dose experimental subjects. The CIA even hired a professional magician, John Mulholland, to teach Gottlieb and his agents how to deliver LSD into unsuspecting subjects’ drinks and food without being detected (pp. 89–94)
Gottlieb recruited a Kentucky addiction specialist, Dr. Harry Isbell, to test LSD and new mind-altering drugs on prisoners and patients. More lives were destroyed (pp. 94–96). Among the victims of another of Gottlieb’s agent-doctors was none other than James “Whitey” Bulger, the mafioso who, along with “nineteen other inmates” at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, beginning in 1957 “was given LSD nearly every day for fifteen months, without being told what it was” (pp. 98–99). Bulger was plagued for the rest of his life with nightmares, suicidal thoughts, and “deep depression” (p. 98). Bulger, who had been told that he was taking part in experiments designed to find a cure for schizophrenia, did not learn the truth about what had happened until 1979 (pp. 263–64). The Search for the u20... John Marks Best Price: $6.33 Buy New $17.85 (as of 02:00 UTC - Details)
The human toll of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA experiments continued to mount. One of Gottlieb’s closest associates in the project, Frank Olson—a bacteriologist trained at the University of Wisconsin who had also been recruited for the CIA by Gottlieb’s mentor Ira Baldwin—began to express doubts about what the MKULTRA team was doing. He told his wife that he had made a “terrible mistake” in his work (p. 114). He shared his misgivings with his CIA colleagues as well. Olson’s conscience appeared to be getting the better of him, and he became a liability to the team.
In late 1953, Gottlieb surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD at a backwoods MKULTRA gathering, “Deep Creek Rendezvous,” outside Camp Detrick (p. 113). Olson spiraled into a frightening disorientation, and early in the morning on November 28, 1953—a few days after Thanksgiving—Olson “fell or jumped” from a window of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, dying few moments after hitting the concrete below. Another MKULTRA agent, Gottlieb’s lieutenant Robert Lashbrook, was the only other person in the room when Olson “fell or jumped” (pp. 120–21). Lashbrook told the New York City police that Olson had jumped out of the window and Olson’s death was originally designated a suicide, but the Olson family eventually grew suspicious and an investigation was carried out, including a new autopsy on Olson’s body. The forensic pathologist, after a month’s examination of the corpse, declared: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window” (p. 250). Wounds on Olson’s body were consistent with methods taught in CIA manuals for incapacitating people and then killing them in order to make their deaths look self-inflicted.
Gottlieb and MKULTRA were shaken by Olson’s demise, but they carried on with their work. They spent the next few years looking for magic mushrooms in Mexico (157); arranging suicide capsules for American agents, including U-2 pilot Gary Powers (who chose not to use his when he was shot down over the Soviet Union) (pp. 172–75); attempting, at the order of then attorney general Robert Kennedy, to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (after exploding cigars and exploding conch shells were ruled out, Gottlieb tried with a wetsuit laced with fungi and bacteria) (p. 184); and hooking Allen Ginsberg and other radicals on LSD (pp. 188–90). Gottlieb personally delivered to the American embassy in Leopoldville in the Congo poisons that Gottlieb had developed to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, but the Belgians and the Africans beat the CIA to it (pp. 176–80).
Gottlieb’s career brought ruin and suffering to untold numbers of people, many of them innocent. He retired from the CIA in 1973 after receiving the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (p. 211). Lifelong devotees of folk dance, Gottlieb and his wife, Margaret, moved to the countryside in rural Virginia and attempted to blend in with the small community there, volunteering, dancing, and experimenting with radical ecology. However, “investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam,” learned of the MH-CHAOS program targeting Americans, and the Congress was forced to act. Gottlieb’s career, long a well-kept secret, was being brought into the open, and his retirement would therefore be far from peaceful. Operation Paperclip: T... Jacobsen, Annie Best Price: $9.51 Buy New $12.83 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details)
But there were still many who tried to cover up what Gottlieb and the other MKULTRA agents had done. In 1975, after the outcry caused by the Hersh reporting, President Gerald Ford deputized Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to chair a commission on the CIA. The new CIA director, William Colby, was remarkably frank. Colby informed the Rockefeller Commission that “the CIA had conducted LSD experiments that resulted in deaths. Later he referred to assassination plots” (p. 216). Nelson Rockefeller, attempting to prevent the CIA director from revealing too much, buttonholed Colby later: “Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?” (p. 216).
In 1977, in the wake of the Church Report on further American intelligence excesses, Senator Edward Kennedy, Robert’s brother, spurred on by some documents which had been discovered as the result of a FOIA request (Gottlieb had ordered all MKULTRA files burned, but some undetected copies remained), called Admiral Stansfield Turner to testify before Congress on MKULTRA. The walls were closing in. Gottlieb himself was eventually forced to testify—albeit in a closed-room setting his lawyer had helped arrange—but Gottlieb essentially pleaded amnesia (nearly all of his answers to questions about MKULTRA were some version of “I do not recall”) and the matter seemed to end there.
Still, the skeletons in Gottlieb’s closet would not go away. In 1984 Gottlieb agreed to meet with the family of Frank Olson, the former MKULTRA colleague who had “fallen or jumped” from his Manhattan hotel room in 1953. Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, was unconvinced by Gottlieb’s explanation for the “accident,” and, after Frank Olson’s widow and Eric’s mother passed away, ordered Frank’s body exhumed in 1994. As information about MKULTRA built in the public’s awareness, other cases were reopened, including that of Stanley Glickman. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. Gottlieb pushed back the trial for Glickman’s murder as long as he could, and then, in early March, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb died.
Like Frank Olson, it was not officially revealed whether or not the death had been a suicide (p. 259).
Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief is a highly readable, thoroughly researched introduction to the life and work of one of America’s most unknown, and yet infamous, government agents. Kinzer is to be thanked for his plainspoken, courageous book. Even those who have studied the CIA and the various schemes and crimes which “the Agency” has committed over the past seventy-five years will be surprised by some of the information Kinzer relates. To see in one volume a rendering of just some of the lives ruined by just one CIA program, MKULTRA, is a sobering revelation. Family of Secrets Russ Baker Best Price: $1.93 Buy New $8.85 (as of 05:45 UTC - Details)
Sidney Gottlieb, the person directly responsible for much, if not most, of the MKULTRA devastation over more than twenty years, remains as mysterious at the end of Kinzer’s volume as at the beginning, however. By all accounts Gottlieb was a good student from a stable family. Kinzer speculates that perhaps Gottlieb’s having been rejected for military service in World War II—Gottlieb stuttered and had a clubfoot—left him unsatisfied and impatient to prove his patriotism, an urgent task for the son of immigrant Jews (p. 50). Gottlieb was heavily involved in New Age mysticism and meditation and appears to have expended considerable energy psychologically compartmentalizing his “work,” so there are indications that he was aware that the experiments he and his MKULTRA team were carrying out were, at best, unethical, and objectively speaking often outright crimes.
But Gottlieb was hardly alone in his endeavors, and the explanation that Gottlieb, Allen Dulles, and many others in the CIA gave—to themselves and to each other, and to the world around when pressed—makes the most sense. They had a country to defend, they faced an enemy of unprecedented cruelty in the Soviet Union, and they were willing to do whatever it took, even sacrificing innocent people, to keep Americans as a whole from falling under the spell of communist mind control.
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.