REVIEWED BY JOHN LISLE
New York: Henry Holt, New York. 2019. 368 pp. $30.00 ISBN-13: 978-1250140432
Sidney Gottlieb, an outcast chemist with a limp and a stutter, was the man in charge of orchestrating the troubling experiments known as MKULTRA-the CIA’s Cold War “mind control” program that distributed LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting victims. Additionally, Gottlieb concocted poisons for the assassination of foreign leaders. Best selling author Stephen Kinzer’s new biography of Gottlieb, Poisoner in Chief, is the best written and most accessible account of MKULTRA and Gottlieb’s other morally-questionable exploits available. Despite having some flaws-namely little new material- the book is one of the few on the subject that doesn’t fall prey to the abundant conspiracy theories surrounding MKULTRA