THE COLDEST WARRIOR

Sid Gottlieb experimented with brainwashing, injected toothpaste with
toxins, dosed unsuspecting Americans with LSD-all in the name of defending
the free world. Which raises an uncomfortably relevant

We cannot afford methods less ruthless than those of our opposition.- John
Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named
Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. Three decades earlier
he had promised a widow named Alice Olson that if ever she wished to see
him she need only pick up the phone.

Now, out of the blue, she had called to redeem the pledge, asking if she
and her two sons could come to his remote retreat in Rappahannock County,
Va. What she wanted was answers-answers to what really happened to her husband.

The fate of Frank Olson, long stamped 'Top Secret,' was a dark and
cautionary tale of the Cold War. On November 19, 1953, Olson, a 43-
year-old scientist at Fort Detrick, had joined other government researchers
at Deep Creek Lodge in Western Maryland. There, an unseen hand had slipped
70 micrograms of LSD into his glass of Cointreau and the glasses of others.
The meeting soon degenerated into hours of drug-induced hilarity. But days
after, Olson was said to be sullen and withdrawn. A government official had
escorted him to New York to 'take care of him'-words his son Eric would
later use with grim irony. Shortly after 2:30 on the morning of November
28, 1953, Olson's body was discovered, bloodied and broken, on the pavement
of Manhattan's Seventh Avenue, clothed only in underpants and a T-shirt.The
government asked the family to believe that he had hurled himself through a
closed window on the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel, while a government
scientist assigned to keep an eye on him had slept in the next bed.

Soon after Olson's death, Gottlieb, posing as a Pentagon employee, paid his
respects to Alice Olson at her home in Frederick. He said if ever there was
anything he could do, just give him a call.

That visit unnerved her. Her coffee cup rattled in her hand. Twenty- two
years later, on June 11, 1975, she inadvertently discovered from a
Washington Post article describing her husband's death-without naming
him-that Frank Olson had been an unwitting guinea pig in an experiment in
mind control conducted by the CIA. Olson's sons, Eric and Nils, would reach
an even darker conclusion-that what happened to their father was no
accident. Only the man who headed the CIA's LSD program knew the whole
story. That was Sidney Gottlieb.

That sunny Virginia day in 1984, Gottlieb was anxious about the impending
visit. So were the Olsons. From the headlines, Gottlieb had emerged as a
kind of Dr. Strangelove. He had overseen a vast network of psychological
and medical experiments conducted in hospitals, universities, research
labs, prisons and safe houses, many of them carried out on unsuspecting
subjects-mental patients, prostitutes and their johns, drug addicts, and
anyone else who stumbled into the CIA's web. Some had been subjected to
electroshock therapy in an effort to alter their behavior. Some endured
prolonged sensory deprivation. Some were doped and made to sleep for weeks
in an attempt to induce an amnesia-like state. Others suffered a relentless
loop of audiotape playing the same message hundreds of thousands of times.

As the CIA's sorcerer, Gottlieb had also attempted to raise assassination
to an art form. Out of his labs had come a poisoned handkerchief designed
to do in a Libyan colonel, a bacteriological agent for a Congolese leader
and debilitating potions intended for Cuba's Fidel Castro. (None of these
toxins are known to have found their mark.) Hounded by reporters,
congressional investigators and his victims, Gottlieb had virtually
vanished from Washington in the mid-1970s. And now, there was a knock at
his door.

I began my quest in Washington, Va., population 192. 'Little Washington,'
it's affectionately called to set it apart from the more querulous
Washington an hour east. It is an idyllic landscape of hills and meadows
and clear brooks. People here dote on history, but not one another's past.
For Gottlieb, it was less Elba than Brigadoon. I stayed in an inn a pasture
away from the modest brick bungalow on Mount Salem Avenue where Gottlieb
passed his final year. I walked across the damp field to his back yard, the
air heavy with honeysuckle. A sundial lay on the ground beside an herb
garden. A tiny Oriental warrior stood watch. A wooden ramp was put in to
make Gottlieb's final comings and goings easier. This was archaeology,
sifting through the artifacts of another man's life.

Who was Sid Gottlieb? Early on I discovered that someone else had already
spent a lifetime asking that very question. That was Gottlieb himself.

He was born August 3, 1918, in New York City, to Louis and Fanny Gottlieb,
Hungarian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. Gottlieb was born with two
clubfeet. A cousin, Sylvia Gowell, recalls that when the blanket covering
his feet was first removed, his mother screamed. For years he was unable to
walk and was carried everywhere by his mother. Three times he underwent
surgery. Like his father, Louis, and brother David, Sidney stuttered.
Gottlieb studied Hebrew, was bar mitzvahed, and distinguished himself as a
student. His father ran a sweatshop, and later worked as a tailor. His
father's struggles doubtless helped mold his son's socialist vision of the
world.

At the University of Wisconsin, Gottlieb and roommate Stanley Mehr were
active in the Young People's Socialist League. In 1940, he graduated magna
cum laude with a degree in agriculture. His senior thesis: 'Studies on
Ascorbic Acid in Cowpeas, Vigna Sinensis.' Three years later, Gottlieb
earned a doctoral degree in chemistry from the California Institute of
Technology. There he met his wife, Margaret Moore, the daughter of a
Presbyterian missionary.

The couple moved to Washington, where Gottlieb went to work for the
Department of Agriculture. In the summer of 1944, while Mehr was in Europe
in the Army, he received a letter from Gottlieb boasting that his wife had
produced eight ounces of milk for their baby. Mehr wondered how Gottlieb
had measured the output of milk. He put the question to him in a letter.
Replied Gottlieb, he simply weighed the infant before and after nursing.
Vintage Gottlieb, ever the scientist.

In 1951, after jobs with the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug
Administration and the University of Maryland, Gottlieb joined the CIA.
John Gittinger conducted the agency's initial assessment of Gottlieb and
recalls, 'He always had a certain amount of 'guilt'-if you want to use that
word-about not being able to be in the service during World War II like all
his contemporaries because of his clubfoot, so he gave an unusual amount of
patriotic service to make up for that.'

Mehr remembers the day Gottlieb told him he had joined the CIA. 'I was
shocked,' recalls Mehr. 'How in the hell would they accept someone who was
a socialist?' he asked Gottlieb. 'Do they know you are a member of the
Young People's Socialist League?'

That, said Gottlieb, was the first thing he told the agency. CIA Director
Allen Dulles 'was astute enough to know that no one hated Communists more
than socialists,' observes Mehr.

At the time Gottlieb joined the agency, he and his wife owned 14 acres on
Beulah Road near Vienna, Va. They lived in a log cabin that had neither
running water nor an indoor toilet. Gottlieb rigged up an outdoor shower,
using a 50-gallon metal drum filled with icy cold water from a well. Over
time, Gottlieb modernized the house. The family sold Christmas trees and
goat's milk.

Given his background, Gottlieb was assigned to the CIA's chemical group. He
secretly worked out of a brick building catty-corner to the Department of
Agriculture on 14th Street. It was years before Mehr, an Agriculture
employee, discovered that his friend worked across the street.

Gottlieb was held in high esteem at the agency. 'Sid kept us from doing
crazy things when some of our case officers had crazy ideas,' recalls Sam
Halpern, former executive assistant to the head of clandestine operations.
One scheme Gottlieb is said to have helped nix was a 1960 plan to expose
Castro to an aerosol spray of LSD. Gottlieb argued that LSD was too
unpredictable, that Castro might take some action inimical to the United
States. 'Very resourceful, very intelligent and completely loyal to the
activity we were in,' says James Drum, Gottlieb's former boss.

The origins of Gottlieb's research into drugs and mind control date back to
the Korean War. American POWs appeared inexplicably compliant in the hands
of the enemy. Amid Cold War hysteria, reports circulated of POWs being
doped and 'brainwashed.' Intelligence reports suggested the Communists were
sinister puppet-masters holding sway over innocent Americans-the
'Manchurian Candidate' syndrome.

'The impetus for going into the LSD project,' Gottlieb would later
acknowledge, 'specifically rested in a report, never verified, I must say,
but it was there, that the Russians had bought the world supply' of LSD.
What kind of threat was this?'Somebody had to bell the cat and find out,'
says Halpern. 'That's how we all looked at it. We were all stumbling in the
dark.' So the CIA launched its own research. The most notorious project was
MK-ULTRA, created in 1953. It was, in Gottlieb's words, intended to explore
'various techniques of behavior control in intelligence operations.' It
funded an array of research, including electric-shock treatments, hypnosis
and experiments designed to program or deprogram a subject's memory.
Sometimes research bordered on the ludicrous. A top magician was retained
to help the agency practice sleight of hand, in part so that researchers
could slip LSD to the unsuspecting. Another trick: swizzle sticks
impregnated with the hallucinogen.

Gottlieb had primary say over the direction and funding of the program. It
was Gottlieb who decided to give doses to the unwitting. He even approached
agency colleagues asking for permission to dose them without notice. Many,
including Halpern, declined. In most instances it was not Gottlieb, but
rather a network of researchers on contract to the CIA who actually
administered the drugs. Gottlieb would later claim that he could not
personally be held accountable for any abuses, that he trusted in the
professionalism of the researchers.

By distancing himself from the specifics, he had hoped to immunize himself
and the agency. Gottlieb justified giving psychedelics to the unwitting on
the grounds that to do otherwise would skew the results. If the subject did
not know what was happening, he might well imagine that he was losing his
mind and unravel. That might undermine his capacity to resist interrogation.

Gottlieb himself told friends that he personally took LSD more than 200
times. He would lock himself in his office and record his every sensation.
It was not always clear where he drew the line between research and
recreational drug use. He once described how LSD affected him: 'I happened
to experience an out-of-bodyness, a feeling as though I am in a kind of
transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body and it is shimmering,
and I have a sense of well-being and euphoria for most of the next hour or
two hours, and then it gradually subsides.'

Gottlieb was present that night at Deep Creek Lodge when Olson,
unsuspecting, sipped his LSD-laced Cointreau-but nobody has ever proved
that Gottlieb's own hand mixed the drug with the drink.

Yet there is little doubt that he had approved the experiment.

'He was a wild man,' remembers covert operative Eloise Randolph Page, once
chief of the CIA's scientific operations branch. Page remembers John
Schwab, the scientific director at Fort Detrick and Olson's superior,
telling her he blamed Gottlieb for Olson's death. Shortly afterward, Schwab
told her, 'As long as I am head of Fort Detrick, Sid Gottlieb will never be
allowed inside the gates.'But despite a formal reprimand, Gottlieb's career
continued to evolve. Early in 1957 Gottlieb temporarily moved from
technical support to espionage. 'I propositioned him,' recalls William
Hood, a veteran operative. 'I said, 'You don't understand much of what goes
on in the boonies where the work is being done. If I get a job overseas,
why don't you come along and look at it from the inside out?' 'Gottlieb
liked the idea. For months he studied the tradecraft of spying. In
September 1957, he and his family moved to Munich. For two years, he worked
under cover, running foreign agents. One CIA officer recalls his help in
the case of a chemist who had escaped from East Germany. For months the CIA
had debriefed the chemist in a safe house. He claimed that he had provided
technical support to Communist intelligence services, but CIA headquarters
was not convinced that he was who he said he was. So Gottlieb was asked to
interrogate him. Within a single session, the officer recalls, Gottlieb
established that the chemist was telling the truth, and, in so doing,
exposed a system of 'secret writing' then in use by 'the other side.'

As chief of base in Munich, Hood was both Gottlieb's superior and his
friend. But Hood and Gottlieb had differences when it came to the subject
of drugs. 'Sid and I had a long debate about the use of drugs in
interrogations,' recalls Hood. 'He thought that-I hope I'm not slandering
the poor bastard-that it would be possible with the right drug . . . I
don't know what part of the brain screens indiscretions, but that it could
be suspended somehow, and that under some euphoria a person might be
responsive to whatever questions were asked.'

At the time, Hood's objections were more technical than moral: 'My view was
that 'seeing was believing.' He wasn't going to move me unless he came up
with a wonder drug of some kind, and I wasn't going to stop him from
continuing his research.'When the full extent of Gottlieb's drug research
came to light decades later, Hood was stunned. 'I do think he was entirely
out of line with some of the stuff they were doing,' says Hood. Still, he
defends his friend. 'It's the kind of thing I don't think anyone could
understand unless they had been involved in it,' he says. 'Intelligence
services should not be confused with the Boy Scouts.'

Ultimately, however, even Gottlieb gave up on LSD. In 1961 or 1962, in what
came to be known as the 'Gottlieb Report,' he concluded that as 'an
intelligence tool-it was inherently not effective.' Beyond that, he noted,
'there was a large disinclination on the part of the American intelligence
officers to use it-they found it distasteful and strange. They had moral
objections.'

In the fall of 1960, Gottlieb was secretly dispatched to Leopoldville, the
Congo. On September 19, 1960, a message went out from CIA headquarters
classified 'Eyes Only.' It was to Lawrence Devlin, the CIA's station chief,
advising him that he would be receiving a visitor-'Joe from Paris.' Days
later, Gottlieb intercepted Devlin near the U.S. Embassy. Devlin recognized
him at once. Gottlieb was familiar to Devlin and other operatives who had
come to rely upon him for the exotica of spycraft-recording devices, hidden
cameras, bugs, invisible ink, whatever was needed for a 'tech op.' Gottlieb
was to Devlin what 'Q' was to James Bond.

The two got into Devlin's Peugeot 403 and drove to a safe house. Devlin
turned up the volume on a radio while Gottlieb delivered his instructions.
What Gottlieb said left Devlin dumbfounded: Devlin was to assassinate
Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic leftist leader. 'Jesus Christ!' Devlin
thought. He had long worried about Soviet efforts to gain a foothold in the
Congo and had lobbied to get rid of Lumumba. But this was not what he had
in mind.

Gottlieb carefully withdrew a small kit containing a deadly toxin- whether
it was anthrax, tuberculosis or tularemia, Gottlieb could not later recall.
It was con-cealed within a tube of toothpaste. Gottlieb also set out a
hypodermic syringe-in case the toothpaste scheme failed-as well as rubber
gloves and a gauze mask. 'And just who authorized such a mission?' Devlin
asked. 'The president,' said Gottlieb. 'And how do you know that?' pressed
Devlin. 'Richard Bissell,' answered Gottlieb, naming the head of covert
operations.

Devlin now says Gottlieb showed no reluctance. But Devlin says he had no
intention of carrying out the assignment. Late one night, soon after
Gottlieb returned to Washington, Devlin tossed the bacteriological agent
into the Congo River, where it was carried over the cataracts and
disappeared. Four months later, Lumumba was killed, apparently by a rival
faction.

Devlin never blamed Gottlieb for the unsavory assignment. 'I thought he
[Gottlieb] got a bum rap for things his seniors knew were done,' he says.
'He was acting under instructions from his superiors.' Then he pauses.
'But, as we both know, as indicated by the boys who got hung at Nuremberg,
that is no excuse.'Gottlieb would later be held answerable before public
tribunals, but the private trials were most painful. His daughter Rachel
married Joel Samoff, a noted scholar of African affairs. Samoff feared that
Gottlieb's notoriety in Africa would impede his own scholarship and make
him a pariah on that continent. That animosity, say Mehr and other Gottlieb
friends, strained Gottlieb's relationship with Rachel.'I am not interested
in talking about my dad,' says Rachel. 'I don't want to be connected with
that history.'

In 1966 Gottlieb was named CIA chief of the technical services division.
His oversight was far-ranging. He supervised some of those who secretly
opened Americans' mail. He saw to it that a psychological profile of the
skipper of the Pueblo, the intelligence vessel captured by North Korea in
1968, was prepared for the president. His staff briefed the president's
medical personnel, prior to overseas trips, on the perils of an LSD attack.

In 1973, after two decades in the CIA, 55-year-old Gottlieb retired from
the agency. Prior to retirement he had been awarded the Distinguished
Intelligence Medal, one of the CIA's highest honors. He and his wife sold
their house in Vienna and most of their possessions. In May 1974, with two
suitcases, they commenced a two-year worldwide trip across Asia and Africa.
For months, Gottlieb volunteered in an Indian hospital. In July 1975 he and
his wife began an overland bus tour of the Mideast. A month later, Gottlieb
received a letter in Istanbul informing him of impending congressional
investigations of CIA covert operations.

That was the beginning of a series of front-page exposes revealing a long
list of CIA abuses. Americans were horrified. The war in Vietnam had just
ended. It was the era of post-Watergate revelations, a time of revulsion
and reform. It was also a time when the Olson family was offered some
measure of relief. On July 21, 1975, President Gerald Ford personally
apologized to the Olson family. Three days later, CIA Director William
Colby handed the family previously classified documents. A year later
Congress provided the Olsons a financial settlement of $750,000.Sid
Gottlieb had not been forgotten. He would be needed to testify, the
Istanbul letter informed him. Two days later Gottlieb returned to the
United States. He soon accepted a grant of immunity to testify before a
Senate committee. Unlike other witnesses, Gottlieb was allowed to testify
in private sessions. He had a weak heart, it was argued, and could not
stand the stress of public hearings.

Gottlieb did not allow himself any show of emotion, but inside he seethed.
He bristled at the long-ago reprimand he had received from Dulles in the
aftermath of the Olson episode. 'You exercised poor judgment in this case,'
Dulles had scolded. Gottlieb had reluctantly conceded that LSD may have
triggered what he called 'the suicide' but argued that 'it is practically
impossible for this drug to have any harmful effects.' Later he asserted,
'Lots of people get depressed.'

But it was not the criticism that had stung most. In a 1983 deposition in a
civil suit, Gottlieb would note: 'I remember feeling: 'Why don't these
people talk to me?' ' In testimony before a Senate committee, he admitted
that 'the specter of the suicide had haunted me many, many times since
November 1953.' He had considered quitting the CIA and taking up the study
of psychiatry 'to better understand the meaning of this tragic incident.'

But Olson's death didn't end CIA-funded experiments with LSD. Indeed,
according to records made public in the mid-'70s, the funding and scope of
that research expanded. Many of the details will likely never be known.
Gottlieb had destroyed the MK-ULTRA files just before retiring. The records
might be 'misunderstood,' he had said.

Among family and friends, Gottlieb blamed the CIA for failing to protect
him. In depositions, he revealed that he had urged the agency not to
release his name. 'I became aware after a while that the names of
essentially everybody but myself were deleted, but mine was left in, and I
asked my lawyer to object to that practice,' said Gottlieb. It did no good.
Gottlieb felt he had been made a scapegoat.

Margaret Gottlieb viewed the press and Congress with a measure of contempt:
Her husband, patriotic to a fault, had been treated no better than a war
criminal. As the hearings pressed on, Gottlieb might well have reflected on
the very different path taken by his brother David. Both were brilliant
researchers with PhDs. Both investigated plants for their medicinal
properties. Both were severe stutterers. But while Sidney had turned his
talents to searching for deadly toxins and potent hallucinogens with which
to do the CIA's bidding, David had become co-discoverer of lifesaving
antibiotics. Today, on the campus of the University of Illinois, where
David Gottlieb was a professor, a bronze plaque celebrates his achievements.

Outwardly, Sidney Gottlieb appeared unfazed by events. 'He certainly didn't
express it, but we don't know what went on inside this guy,' recalls David
Gottlieb's widow, Amy Zahl Gottlieb. 'Don't forget he was used to keeping
his feelings to himself, away from his family.' But there is little to
suggest that Gottlieb was racked by guilt. He had done what the nation had
asked of him. He wrote off the criticism as demagoguery and hypocrisy. Some
of the schemes for which he and the agency were blasted-for example,
assassination scenarios against Castro euphemistically called 'executive
action' capabilities- originated in the Oval Office of President John F.
Kennedy. A little more than a decade later, brother Ted, the senator, was
grilling Gottlieb for those very actions.

'Sid was being crucified,' says Ken Fienup, a close friend. 'He was doing
things that at the time were considered necessary and proper by our
government.' Fienup draws an analogy to his own career as an engineer who
worked on dams, once widely viewed as of great social benefit and now seen
by many as an affront to nature. It was as if history were a game of
musical chairs, and Gottlieb had been caught standing when the music stopped.

Other friends share that view. 'I don't think Sid was particularly
apologetic about things,' says Mehr. 'I don't see why he should have been.
I mean this was the Cold War-W-A-R.'

But a congressional committee headed by Sen. Frank Church rejected such
arguments. In the epilogue to its report, the committee concluded, 'The
United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as
important as ends. Crises make it tempting to ignore the wise restraints
that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are
wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.'

After the congressional hearings, Gottlieb and his wife moved to California
to reassemble their lives. Gottlieb enrolled at San Jose State University
and earned a master's degree in education with a focus on speech pathology.
In 1980, he moved back east, to Rappahannock County. No longer cast as the
malevolent CIA scientist, Gottlieb was free to reinvent himself, to indulge
his passions for farming and his socialist's interest in communal living.

Gottlieb had become more withdrawn. In college he had ribbed Stanley Mehr
for quoting the Matthew Arnold poem 'Dover Beach,' dismissing it as
pessimistic. But in his last years, Gottlieb recited it to Mehr, having
committed the spectacularly dark final lines to memory:

. . . for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Even as his health deteriorated, he faced additional lawsuits from the
ghosts of his past. In 1952 Stanley Milton Glickman was an artist living in
Paris. Years later, Glickman would remember an American with a clubfoot who
had slipped LSD into his drink at a cafe, leaving him with recurrent
hallucinations-in essence, driving him mad. In the early '80s, Glickman
sued Gottlieb. When Glickman died in 1992, his sister continued the suit.

There was no evidence placing Gottlieb in Paris at the time, nor any other
evidence linking him to Glickman. When Gottlieb died, the suit was brought
against his estate. In time, even the judge passed away. Finally, in
1999-two months after Gottlieb's death-the suit was dismissed. Gottlieb's
estate prevailed.

'I just feel badly with what he had to put up with in the latter part of
his life,' recalls Mehr. 'He gradually became depressed, and it's hard to
say how much was due to his heart ailment and how much was due to the
endless lawsuits. He was not the same man the last few years of his life.'

When he died on March 6, 1999, secrecy descended once more. The Clore
English Funeral Home in Culpeper declined to disclose details of final
arrangements, not even the disposition of his ashes. The local paper, the
Rappahannock News, observed his passing with one terse paragraph. The last
line read, 'Services will be private.'

'It was the shortest obituary in history,' remembers editor Barbara
Wayland. The family had feared refueling old controversies. Nonetheless,
old recriminations resurfaced almost immediately. Major newspapers through
the United States and abroad dredged up the lurid details of Gottlieb's CIA
past. His obituary in the Times of London began, 'When Churchill spoke of a
world 'made darker by the dark lights of perverted science' he was
referring to the revolting experiments conducted on human beings by Nazi
doctors in the concentration camps. But his remarks might with equal
justice have been applied to the activities of the CIA's Sidney Gottlieb.'
The Guardian of London headlined its obituary 'The Real Manchurian
Candidate.' The Toronto Sun's obituary ran under the headline 'CIA Acid
Guru Dies.'

Such accounts found their way back to Rappahannock County. 'People were
tearing their hair out and beating their breasts saying he was evil
personified, and how could they reconcile that with the man they knew?'
recalls Lois Manookian, a close friend of Gottlieb's.

Many rallied to Gottlieb's defense. Bob Scott wrote a letter to the
Rappahannock News. 'The big city newspapers were not able to know the Sid
Gottlieb we knew so well,' Scott wrote. 'Sid Gottlieb personified the
spirit of the selfless servant.' For others, it was more difficult coming
to terms with the news. 'What we read about him was not the man we knew,'
says Kathy Clements, who ran the hospice.'It was hard for me to square that
up with the person I knew,' recalls the Rev. Phillip Bailey. 'It just kind
of floored me that he would have been involved in anything that would have
endangered people without them knowing it. He was a very gentle, caring
person.'

Says attorney Frank Reynolds, 'If he did the things that he did-that they
say he did-how do I put this? If he did the things he did, it requires an
ability to put research above other things and it sure looked to me like he
put human things above other things in the time I knew him.'

Many have reached the same inexorable conclusion, the one articulated by
Rose Ann Sharp, who worked in the preschool where Gottlieb volunteered: 'I
always thought that a lot of Sid's later life was spent atoning, whether he
needed to or not, for how he had been exposed publicly as some sort of evil
scientist.'

'I felt that he was on a path of expiation, whether consciously or
unconsciously,' agrees Rabbi Carla Theodore. In part she came to that
conclusion after the revelations of Gottlieb's CIA past, but there were
earlier hints. Theodore remembers him commiserating with a friend who said
she had a past that had to be kept hidden.

'I, too, have done things I really regret,' Gottlieb told her. 'But I am
learning to keep it to myself.' For a time, Gottlieb told Theodore, his own
adult children were not speaking to him. 'There were enough cries of horror
from near and far,' says Theodore. 'It was an extremely big fact of his
past. Somehow he was living around it. It was there like a pink elephant.

'I once asked him if I could talk to him about it, and he said, 'Yes, not
many people asked.' But the thing was, his answers were so defended that I
gave up after a few minutes. It was a barrier. I wasn't going to get the
truth. He was a delightful person to interact with, but at the same time I
feel he grieved and suffered and that that was always there. Maybe in
retrospect he was as puzzled by what he had done as we were who heard about
it.'

Says Lois Manookian, 'He had given his heart and soul to the CIA, and
because he made some mistakes, he suddenly found himself to be a national
demon.'But 'he was always the same person,' insists Manookian. 'He did not
become a different person 20 years ago. He was a man of great honor and
great integrity.'What Manookian saw in Sid Gottlieb was a man of deep faith
who sometimes put it in the wrong place. 'He was not a monster but a man,'
says Manookian, 'He was, and is, us, and we didn't want to see it.'

In the end, his life, like many, was riddled with contradictions. He rarely
spoke of the CIA, and when he did, he sometimes uttered what would have
been apostasy to a younger Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb friend Butch Zindel
says that Gottlieb told him he had never really believed that communism was
the threat it was made out to be. 'We wasted a lot of money and a lot of
people fighting it,' he once said.

In 1993 Gottlieb declined an interview with U.S. News & World Report,
saying only that he was 'on the side of the angels now.'

Gottlieb's two worlds came together for one brief afternoon in the gym of
the old schoolhouse across from Gottlieb's home. There, perhaps 200
gathered for his memorial service, bearing casseroles and covered dishes.
Most who spoke were neighbors and friends from his second life, but there
were also white-haired men from Langley who did not speak publicly but
mingled afterward. The arc of his life had stretched from one Washington to
the other. The first had all but branded him a monster. The second all but
canonized him.

'Ah-poor Sid Gottlieb,' says Richard Helms, a former director of the CIA.
'He has been heavily persecuted, but to bail him out of the troubles he's
in would take a lot more than just a few minutes and I'm not sure I'd be
much of a contributor to it. The nation just saw something they didn't like
and blasted it, and he took the blame for it.'

Now 88 and editing his own memoirs, Helms has chosen to delete all
reference to MK-ULTRA. 'I see no way to handle it in the amount of space I
have available,' he says.

Gottlieb's CIA associate John Gittinger maintained his friendship with
Gottlieb after retirement, but the two rarely spoke of their travails.
Still, Gittinger believes Gottlieb suffered from the investigations and
lawsuits. 'His was twice as bad as mine, and mine was terrible,' says
Gittinger. 'I have a feeling that Sid was left out on a limb as far as
support from the agency was concerned.'Even now, Gottlieb has not fully
escaped his past. Eric Olson, who lost his father 48 years ago, is
preparing to sue the government, claiming that his earlier settlement was
tainted by lies. His father's skeleton, potential evidence, rests under
lock and key in the office of forensic pathologist James Starrs. Tissue
samples are in labs in Florida and Pennsylvania.

But Gottlieb's life raised a question broader than any that will ever be
addressed in court. It was the subtext of every obituary, the unspoken
question on the lips of mourners: how to reconcile the two Sid Gottliebs.
One is humble and compassionate, an altruist eager to ease the miseries of
the weak and sick. The other, a heedless Cold Warrior, is willing to
experiment on innocents or unleash anthrax in the name of national security.

It is hard to argue that Sid Gottlieb was not a product of his time. His
life reflected the same polarities that defined the Cold War, the virtues
and vices of extreme patriotism, the promise and perversion of science. He
inhabited another era-a time of smothering conformity, loyalty oaths, witch
hunts, segregation, lobotomies, sterilizations and radiation experiments.

As recently as August, many might have found it easy to look back at those
excesses as virtually medieval and call them 'unthinkable,' a handy term to
distance ourselves from unsavory elements of our own past. But what was
unthinkable in summer is no longer so in autumn. This season, we don't need
Gottlieb or anyone else to convince us of the hidden threats and potential
horrors we face. We can see it in the endless loop of the news.

The revulsion felt at secret American schemes of assassination has given
way to the fervent hope of some that our assassins will be more successful
this time. A recent national poll revealed that one in three Americans is
ready to sanction torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects. Once
again, the good we do and the evil we are capable of glide within the same
tight orbit.