- Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, whose controversial
experiments with LSD and other drugs on behalf of the Central Intelligence
Agency brought him into the congressional and public scrutiny in the 1970s,
is dead at 80.
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- His death came at the end of a month-long
bout with pneumonia. He was admitted to the University of Virginia Medical
Center in Charlottesburg on Feb. 14, and on Mar. 5 he lapsed into a coma
from which he never recovered. He died Saturday.
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- Gottlieb, born August 3, 1918, was the
CIA's real-life "Dr. Strangelove" -- a brilliant bio-chemist
who designed and headed MK-ULTRA, the agency's most far-reaching drug and
mind-control program at the height of the Cold War. Though the super-secret
MK-ULTRA was ended in 1964, a streamlined version called MK-SEARCH was
continued -- with Gottlieb in charge -- until 1972.
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- WorldNetDaily reported on these programs,
and Gottlieb's role in them, in November 1998 after discovering that Terry
Lenzner -- Clinton's personal private eye -- revealed, in a deposition
to Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, that he had sued the Senate to keep
Gottlieb's name from appearing in the Church Committee Report on Assassinations.
Lenzner arranged for Gottlieb to testify under the name Joseph Scheider.
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- At the time of his death, Gottlieb and
the CIA were the subjects of two legal actions.
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- Gottlieb was scheduled to appear and
answer civil charges that he had personally spiked the drink of artist
Stanley Glickman with LSD, in Paris in 1952 -- presumably as one of many
mind-altering MK-ULTRA experiments on unwitting subjects. Gottlieb denied
the charges.
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- Glickman claimed he had been invited
to join several fellow-Americans (who were unknown to him) at a cafe, and
that one of these insisted on pressing a liqueur on him as he attempted
to leave. The young artist suffered an extreme hallucinatory experience,
and remembered being forced to undergo other experiments at the American
Hospital where he was taken. He never fully recovered, and he completely
lost his ability to paint.
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- Glickman originally filed the suit in
1981, but the courts repeatedly rejected it. When he died in 1992, his
sister Gloria Kronische continued the action as executor of his estate.
The case had languished in the courts for 17 years, but in Sept. 1998,
a federal District Court of Appeals unanimously ruled to allow it to proceed
to a jury trial. A date was set for Jan. 3, then postponed till Feb. 16
-- and postponed yet again until Mar. 22, pending Gottlieb's recovery.
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- Sidney Bender, attorney for Glickman's
estate, told WorldNetDaily that the case will proceed -- "Absolutely."
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- "His [Gottlieb's] estate simply
gets substituted for the defendant himself," Bender explained. "It
will be the estate of Stanley Glickman against the estate of Sidney Gottlieb."
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- Besides the civil action arising from
Glickman's charges, a New York grand jury has been looking into the strange
death of Frank Olson, an Army scientist, who was given drinks laced with
LSD at a CIA-Army retreat in 1953. Gottlieb, in later testimony before
Congress, admitted ordering the drinks to be spiked. When nine days later,
Olson fell from the window of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, where
he had been taken, his death was ruled a suicide.
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- Recently uncovered evidence (not connected
to Gottlieb), strongly suggests murder. A second autopsy, demanded by Olson's
two sons in 1994, revealed that Olson had received a blow to the head before
hurtling through the closed window.
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- WorldNetDaily has not been able to determine
the status of the grand jury investigation.
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