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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: John Lisle, "Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
Description: 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 l...