New Books in the History of Science John Lisle, "Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves.
Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous—even deadly—experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory deprivation, and steering the movements of animals via electrodes implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods of mind control that could turn someone into a real-life “Manchurian candidate.”
In conjunction with MKULTRA, Gottlieb also plotted the assassination of foreign leaders and created spy gear for undercover agents. The details of his career, however, have long been shrouded in mystery. Upon retiring from the CIA in 1973, he tossed his files into an incinerator. As a result, much of what happened under MKULTRA was thought to be lost—until now.
In Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA (St. Martin's Press, 2025) historian John Lisle has uncovered dozens of depositions containing new information about MKULTRA, straight from the mouths of its perpetrators. For the first time, Gottlieb and his underlings divulge what they did, why they did it, how they got away with it, and much more. Additionally, Lisle highlights the dramatic story of MKULTRA’s victims, from their terrible treatment to their dogged pursuit of justice.
The consequences of MKULTRA still reverberate throughout American society. Project Mind Control is the definitive account of this most disturbing of chapters in CIA history.
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