CIA “Fitness Report” and Deposition of Sidney Gottlieb

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U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, "Fitness Report" of Sidney Gottlieb, Secret, June 16, 1958, 5 pp.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32730-document-15-us-central-intelligence-agency-fitness-report-sidney-gottlieb-secret

Date
Jun 16, 1958
Description
A CIA "Fitness Report" evaluates the first six months of Sidney Gottlieb's stint as a CIA case officer in Europe. Characterized as "very mature" and "highly intelligent," the evaluation notes that Gottlieb's "entire agency career had been technical in nature" before this new assignment, his "first indoctrination to operational activities." Gottlieb displayed a "keen desire to learn" and a "willingness to undertake all types of operational assignments" despite being "considerably senior in age and grade to other officers at the branch." Gottlieb's "only apparent weakness," according to the evaluation, "is a tendency to let his enthusiasm carry him into more precipitous action than the operational situation will bear."

PDF HERE:  https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/1958-06-16-Gottlieb%20Personnel%20File%20Kinzer%20Donation-ocr.pdf

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Deposition of Sidney Gottlieb, PhD, in Civil Action No. 80-3163, Mrs. David Orlikow, et al., Plaintiffs, vs. United States of America, Defendant, May 17, 1983, 174 pp.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32736-document-20-deposition-sidney-gottlieb-phd-civil-action-no-80-3163-mrs-david-orlikow

Date
May 17, 1983
Description
This is the second of three depositions of Sidney Gottlieb by attorneys representing Velma "Val" Orlikow, a former patient of the Allan Memorial Institute, where CIA-backed staff performed horrific experiments on psychiatric patients during the 1950s and 60s.

Asked whether he was involved in "domestic field experimentation" with LSD, Gottlieb said, "If by what you mean 'field experimentation', is experiments that involve – that are taking place outside of Washington, D.C., and if by my personal involvement, you mean, was I aware of them or did I have something to do with their instigation, the answer is yes." When Gottlieb is shown a document indicating that he had personally conducted an interrogation, he claims confusion before admitting that he had indeed been involved in "between one and five" interrogations.

Gottlieb nevertheless denies that the CIA intended to develop techniques to improve U.S. interrogations. "The primary objective of developing new techniques for interrogation ... It has to do with the difference between something I have always objected to, namely, that this whole program wanted to create a Manchurian Candidate. The program never did that. That was a fiction, as far as I am concerned, that Mr. Marks indulged in and this question you are asking has to do with that and this is a sensitive area in my mind."

Asked whether the CIA had tried to identify "techniques of producing retrograde amnesia," Gottlieb said it was something that they "talked about," but that he could not "remember any specific projects or specific research mounted in response to that question." Asked if the CIA ever used "psychosurgery research projects," Gottlieb said his "remembrance is that they did."

Gottlieb also describes the role played by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which he says "was to act in a security sense as a funding mechanism so that the involvement of CIA's organizational entity would not be apparent in projects that we were funding." The Geschickter Fund operated much the same way, according to Gottlieb: "It was made as a mechanism to funnel funds for research activities where CIA didn't want to acknowledge its specific identity as the grantor."

Gottlieb evades most of the questions about the most important issue before the court in the Orlikow case: the extreme "psychic driving" and "depatterning" experiments conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute. Again and again, Gottlieb claims to not remember key events and details about the CIA's relationship to Cameron's terrifying experiments.

Gottlieb is somewhat more forthcoming about his knowledge of MKULTRA projects in the U.S., including experiments conducted by Dr. Harris Isbell of the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, which Gottlieb said he visited "at least three or four times." Gottlieb said Isbell did "some of the early and basic work between dose and response of LSD" on prisoners from the Narcotics Division Hospital. Gottlieb also says he was aware that Isbell offered inmates drugs in exchange for their participation in the project. Asked whether reports that Cameron kept some subjects on LSD for 77 consecutive days was "consistent with the research he was conducting," Gottlieb said it was, noting that Cameron "had some interest in the quantum effects of LSD, repeated ingestion." Asked about files on the CIA safehouses run by narcotics agent George White, Gottlieb replies, "They were all destroyed. They don't exist anymore," adding, "They were specifically destroyed when the files were destroyed in '72, '73." Asked about White's purported use of "prostitutes to test methods of slipping drugs to unwitting persons," Gottlieb said, "the involvement of prostitutes in the West Coast activity had to do with the MO, the modus operandi of this whole drug culture."

The plaintiffs' attorneys also ask Gottlieb about the CIA's work with Dr. Carl Pfeiffer of Emory University, who performed drug experiments on prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary and elsewhere, and Dr. Harold Isbell of the National Institutes for Mental Health, who had conducted drugs tests on patients at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky.

PDF HERE: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/1983-05-17%20Kinzer%203-3-ocr.pdf