Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer
“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!”
--letter to Gottlieb from CIA contractor George Hunter White upon his retirement
Sidney Gottlieb ran MK-ULTRA, aka the thing conspiracy theorists always shout about when you tell them you don't think school shootings happen because young anti-social white men are being mind-controlled via fluoride in the water supply by the Lizard People who secretly run the planet. Just because one crazy conspiracy theory turned out to be true don't mean they all are.
I knew some of this story from watching Errol Morris' documentary Wormwood, which was about the death of Frank Olson after he was unwittingly dosed with LSD by the CIA. That's a chilling tale in its own right, and I recommend the series (I believe it was a Netflix production, so it's probably still on that platform), but just one chapter in the tale of MK-ULTRA.
Researchers have done a pretty good job of reconstructing what happened, but there will always be things we don't know for sure (like what exactly happened to Olson), because Gottlieb destroyed most of his files when he retired. He forgot about the expense reports though, so we at least we know how much this total fucking nightmare of civil and human rights violations cost the American public.
This was a pretty good book, but at the end of it I felt like I still didn't really understand Gottlieb as a person, or why the CIA did what they did. That's not Kinzer's fault, I'm not sure those questions have answers. I know in the 1950s they would have said Communism was an existential threat and they thought the Soviets were working on mind control. But I feel like that rationale only gets you so far.
It's funny to think that the hippies may have been "created" by the CIA. (Like the Reavers being created by the Alliance in Serenity!) A lot of CIA operatives took LSD home for fun, some of them had parties where all their guests took it. It made its way into high society, where it got introduced to Ivy League professors, and eventually leaked out to their students.