A new biography by Stephen Kinzer ... Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control" ... traces the life and career of Gottlieb. [He was] the brains behind ... MK-ULTRA, the notorious research endeavor that employed mind-altering drugs, including LSD. In 1952, Gottlieb led a team of scientists to a safehouse in Munich ... where prisoners of war were pumped full of drugs, interrogated and then allowed to die. [Back in the U.S.,] Gottlieb worked with a sadistic narcotics officer in opening a "national security whorehouse" to dose unwitting victims being serviced by prostitutes on the C.I.A. payroll. Drugging johns was easy, but when Gottlieb started dosing unwitting government colleagues the research hit turbulence. Frank Olson, an Army scientist working with MK-ULTRA who had been given LSD without his knowledge, jumped, or was possibly pushed, out of a hotel room window in New York in 1953. [Olson's story is] covered most recently in [the] docudrama "Wormwood." His death has overshadowed the "expendables." We just don't know most of their names since Gottlieb destroyed the records. Some of the details in the book, like the coercion of African-American prisoners to participate in C.I.A. experiments, are astounding. [MK-ULTRA] should be remembered for what it was: a vehicle for abominable experiments that often targeted the most vulnerable " drug users, prisoners and psychiatric patients, who were deprived of meaningful informed consent. Kinzer's book is also a good reminder that there is rarely legal accountability for the C.I.A.'s misdeeds.