The bestselling author of The Brothers and All the Shah's Men tells the astonishing story of the man who directed the CIA's secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and '60s.
Stephen Kinzer is the author of nine books, including The True Flag, The Brothers, Overthrow, and All the Shah's Men. An award-winning foreign correspondent, he served as the New York Times bureau chief in Nicaragua, Germany, and Turkey. He is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and writes a world affairs column for the Boston Globe. He lives in Boston.
"Winding through the spy-loving Eisenhower-Kennedy years, Kinzer's
book is a Tarantino movie yet to be made: it has the right
combination of sick humor, pointless violence, weird tabloid
characters, and sheer American waste. It is also frightening to
read . . . [and] compelling, not least in the way it illustrates
how the law of unintended consequences in covert action can work
with an almost delirious vengeance." --Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
"Absolutely riveting. Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief reads like
a spy thriller--but his revelations about the macabre career of the
CIA's Sidney Gottlieb are deeply disturbing. Kinzer's work
underscores once again the narrative power of biography to unearth
our collective history." --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning
coauthor of American Prometheus, author of The Good Spy, and
executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography "Stephen
Kinzer has done a great public service with this absorbing and
informative portrait of the life and career of Sidney Gottlieb, a
CIA scientist who was the Agency's Dr. No in the Cold War--a
producer of poison pills, poison darts, and leader of the hunt for
the perfect killing machine, a la the Manchurian Candidate. It's
all in the bone-crunching detail, and Kinzer, a master of American
perfidy, has done it again." --Seymour M. Hersh, author of Chain of
Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib and Reporter: A Memoir
"Kinzer's retelling of the MK-ULTRA story is unsparing in its
gruesome details, but not overwrought . . . Gottlieb has previously
been treated as a historical footnote, but Kinzer elevates him to
his proper place as one of the C.I.A.'s most influential and
despicable characters." --Sharon Weinberger, The New York Times
"Poisoner in Chief is a biography of Dostoyevskian proportions.
Gottlieb emerges as a tortured soul, penned in by personal
compunction and a twisted sense of patriotism." --Los Angeles
Review of Books "This [book] connects dots between former Nazi
torturers, Oregon author Ken Kesey, Boston mobster Whitey Bulger
and an obscure CIA chemist who qualifies as the ultimate James Bond
villain. . . . Kinzer's startling reportage on Gottlieb's amok
research in secret, international detention cells can't help but
evoke more recent memories of Abu Ghraib and the like." --Seattle
Times "A stranger-than-fiction account of the CIA's efforts in the
1950s, '60s, and '70s at developing mind control and chemical-based
espionage methods, and the chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, who
spearheaded the effort . . . The nigh-unbelievable efforts he led
are vividly and horrifically recreated in this fascinating
history." --Publishers Weekly "It's an awful story, told fast and
well . . . Kinzer has put together a revolting look at the
champions of freedom in the USA." --San Francisco Review of
Books
"A bustling narrative that sets MK-Ultra in its institutional
framework of federal government, the military and the intelligence
services, swerving all the while between madcap farce and grim
atrocity." --Mike Jay, London Review of Books "He's been called Dr.
Death, Washington's 'official poisoner, ' and a mad scientist. But
Sidney Gottlieb never became a household name . . . Now, pulling
together a trove of existing research, newly unearthed documents,
and fresh interviews, Kinzer puts the fetid corpus of American
Empire back under a microscope. It isn't pretty--but it is
instructive." --Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, The American Conservative
"The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government
are the nation's bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies .
. . The best window we have into this shadow world comes with
historical accounts of its crimes, including those in Stephen
Kinzer's new book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA
Search for Mind Control." --Chris Hedges, Truthdig "Stephen Kinzer
tells the story of Gottlieb, a chemist obsessed with finding a way
to control the human brain, no matter how many innocent minds he
destroyed in the process." --Larry Getlen, New York Post "Stephen
Kinzer takes the unusual approach of making Sidney Gottlieb,
MK-Ultra's program manager, the central figure of the story . . .
Reflecting on Gottlieb's culpability, Mr. Kinzer is careful to
place his story in historical context . . . The reader will have to
decide how far to venture into this dark thicket." --The Wall
Street Journal "Stephen Kinzer has written books about civil wars,
terror attacks, and bloodycoups, but his latest might be his most
alarming. . . . Though the events recounted in Kinzer's Poisoner in
Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control took
place a half-century ago, they're scandalous in a way that
transcends time." --The Daily Beast
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