How much LSD can a human being take?

Gottlieb wanted to know, could there be a breaking point he wondered, a dose so massive

that it would shatter the mind and blast away consciousness, leaving a void into which

new impulses or even a new personality could be implanted?

So writes journalists and historians Stephen Kinzer in his new book, Poisoner in Chief,

Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control.

It's a biography of the secretive man behind the wildest program in CIA history, MK Ultra,

a years-long operation conceived during the height of the Cold War in which agency scientists

injected massive doses of LSD into unsuspecting human guinea pigs in an effort to find new

ways to bend minds and manipulate human behavior.

It was a program that turns out to have been far more extensive in sinister than was publicly

known when it was first revealed during the late 1970s.

And it was recently back in the news when a juror who voted to convict one of those MK Ultra

victims, Boston mob boss, Whitey Bulger, said she wouldn't have done so, had she known

what the government had done to him.

We'll talk to Kinzer as we dig into the story of MK Ultra and the strange chemist who directed

it on this episode of buried treasure.

Because people have got to know whether or not they're present or subcruped, well I'm

not a crook.

I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostage.

My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence

tell me it is not.

...