JAMES PENNER: Before you wrote Poisoner in Chief, many people had never heard of Sidney Gottlieb. The Wikipedia page on him was pretty brief, for example. How did you stumble across him? And why did you decide to write a biography about him?
STEPHEN KINZER: First of all, your comment that not very many people know about Sidney Gottlieb is an understatement. Sidney Gottlieb lived his entire life in total invisibility. My book is essentially the biography of a man who was not there. That’s what made writing it quite demanding, but also interesting and challenging at the same time. Let me put it his way: I think I have discovered the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century, unless there was somebody else who operated a network of torture centers, lived in absolute secrecy, and had what amounted to a license to kill issued by the United States government. He is so obscure that, while I was writing this book, I happened to run into a retired director of the CIA at a local café. And I went up to him and said, I am writing a book about a figure in the CIA. And he said, Who’s that? And I said, “Sidney Gottlieb.” And he said, “Never heard of him.” Wow. This was a former director of the CIA. And I believe him. I think he was telling the truth. He probably had never heard of him.
I wrote a biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, the Secretary of State and the CIA director, respectively, in the 1950s. In the course of writing that biography, I wrote about the Dulles brothers’ effort to assassinate the prime minister of the Congo in 1960. As a part of the assassination plot, the CIA actually sent poison to the Congo; it was delivered to the CIA station chief there. As I filed that detail in the back of my mind, I began to wonder about that story. So, wait a minute now. The CIA made poisons to kill a foreign leader, so it must have been done by a person, a scientific expert, not just a CIA agent. Somebody at the CIA was making poisons. And then I discovered that this man was Sidney Gottlieb, and it soon dawned on me that the one thing that you could find out about Sidney Gottlieb — that he was the poison maker — was actually not the most important thing. Making those poisons was just the job of a sophisticated pharmacist. If it hadn’t been Gottlieb, someone else could have done it. But I came to understand, as I was poking around in the Gottlieb story, that there was another piece that was way bigger than the poison piece, and that was MK Ultra. Once I understood the dimensions of what that was and how little was publicly known, I realized that this is the great untold story, and untold stories are what I am always looking for.