Willis Gibbons

Willis A. Gibbons was a rubber chemist and industrial research executive who became chief of the CIA's Technical Services Staff in the early 1950s, the division that ran MKULTRA and the Agency's chemical and biological work under Sidney Gottlieb. He came to the CIA from a forty-year career at the U.S. Rubber Company and supervised TSS through the period that included the death of Army scientist Frank Olson.¹

U.S. Rubber Career

Gibbons worked as a researcher and executive at the U.S. Rubber Company in New York from 1912 until 1952, becoming a pioneer in rubber technology who held more than sixty patents, including one for a rubber vulcanization test and several for manufacturing rubber products directly from latex. He served as the company's director of research and development from 1928 until 1946, when he relinquished his administrative duties to return to research full time.¹

CIA Service

Gibbons left U.S. Rubber to join the federal government in 1951, first at the Office of Defense Mobilization, and became a senior official of the CIA in 1952, serving until his retirement in 1959. He received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his work. As chief of the Technical Services Staff he sat above Gottlieb, who from 1951 to 1956 headed the division's Chemical Division during the years of the CIA's most intense interest in LSD. The organization Gibbons led furnished the gadgets, poisons, forgeries, and disguises of covert operations, and through Gottlieb's office oversaw the network of academic researchers and front foundations that conducted MKULTRA. He was later succeeded as TSS chief by Seymour Russell.² After leaving the Agency Gibbons worked as an investor.¹

The Olson Aftermath

On November 18, 1953, Gottlieb spiked the after-dinner Cointreau of a group of Army Special Operations Division scientists at Deep Creek Lodge with LSD; one of them, Frank Olson, fell to his death from a New York hotel window nine days later. The CIA Inspector General, Lyman Kirkpatrick, investigated and recommended that reprimands be issued to Gottlieb, to Gibbons as TSS chief, and to TSS deputy chief James "Trapper" Drum. Kirkpatrick drafted letters for Director Allen Dulles's signature stating that the three had done something wrong, but, in Stephen Kinzer's account, "nothing too wrong"; the letters were never placed in the men's personnel files. In the wake of Olson's death Gibbons also pressed TSS to account for the LSD it had handled and distributed.²