#629 - John Lisle - The Insane Tactics The CIA Used To Defeat Hitler In WWII

27:32And absolutely everything by the end of the war. He's done like 10 injections a day, I think. But there is a lot going on. Like he's got a lot to deal with. It seems like Hitler was pre -alch -simic or something similar. Maybe he had like a Parkinsonian tremor or something that was going on. The famous video, is it when he's meeting Mussolini and he's got one hand behind his back and the hand that's behind his back on the video won't stop trembling, I think, which is pretty interesting. There was another plot dealing with his ego. One idea was that this doesn't come from the R &D branch, but from some other psychologist, he's pitching it to the army air force, the idea being we should drop pornography all over Hitler's place where he's staying.

28:18And he doesn't like pornography and it's going to upset him. and so he's gonna walk out, he's gonna see the smut, these naked women, and it's gonna throw him into a rage. And he's gonna lose this temperament, and somehow that's gonna help. So this psychologist actually got to kind of an Air Force general and was explaining this plan, and he was promptly thrown out of the office and that didn't go anywhere. That's not a show. I never understood how that would actually help the war, but apparently it was some kind of psychological scheme that was cooked up. Would there any other psychological warfare tactics that they decided to try and attempt?

28:51Yes, several. I have a chapter in the book that talks just about psychological warfare. This is one of the most interesting ones because they really do get pretty outlandish. One, this one's fairly well -known, but there's a substance called Humei that the R &D branch of the OSS has created, Humei. It's a substance that smells really bad. The idea was that we can hire a chemical engineer to manufacture this substance that smells like feces or vomit or skunk or something like that. And we're gonna sneak the substance in these tubes to little boys in Japan or little boys in China. And the Japanese are occupying China.

29:28These little boys are going to squirt the substance on the back side of the Japanese officials and it's gonna embarrass them. And they're, you know, because it's gonna smell really bad. And so they'll be demoralized and maybe they'll make a bad decision or something. That was at least the idea. So it was called Hume. I don't know if it had too much practical value. Stanley level does tell a funny story where he kept this locked up in his office in a kind of a cabinet with a lock on it Well, of course pretty much everyone in the OSS was taught how to pick locks so some jokester Decided to start pick the lock and take some whomine was squirting around the office Level decided to set a booby trap the next time this happened So he booby trapped the lock so that whenever anyone picked it and opened the cabinet It would spray the whomine back at them and so level he says one night Someone came in, picked the lock, opened the cabinet, they got sprayed.

30:16He never reveals who it was, but he says it was someone too highly placed for me to discipline. So, you know, it was someone apparently pretty high up in the OSS. Wasn't there a story of somebody going into the president's office and unloading a full clip of a gun behind him? Yes. William Donovan himself, the head of the OSS. He wanted to show Franklin Roosevelt the kinds of things that his organization was working on because it never hurt to impress the president. You've got to have this guy on your side. So he wants to impress Roosevelt. And so how better to impress him than with a silence flashless pistol.

30:52So Donovan walks to Roosevelt's office and he was friendly with Roosevelt. So he was often just waved in. So he's waved into the office by the security guard. He drops a bag of sand in the corner of the office. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt is dictating a letter to his secretary. So he's not really even looking at the door. He doesn't know Donovan has entered. Donovan pulls out this silenced flashlist 22 pistol that Stanley level in the R &D branch of created and he unloads the clip into this bag of sand in the office. After a little while, Roosevelt smells burnt gunpowder and he turns around and sees Donovan standing there with his empty pistol in his hand.

31:29He's flabbergasted. He thinks this is great. I didn't even realize this thing had gone off. Donovan makes a show of it. He hands the pistol to the president and lets him keep it in Roosevelt kind of jokes. You're the only Republican I would ever allow in my office with a gun.

31:46Oh, man. It's so... This is what I mean. But when I say sort of whimsical and beautifully nostalgic, the fact that the gloves are off and the rules are out of the window and no one's got any rules or procedures, everyone can just do what they want. One of my favorite... I don't know whether you class this is psychological warfare, but Operation Fantasia, I think, is my favorite story from the entire book. Tell people from the beginning what Operation Fantasia was. Yeah, this might be my favorite one too. I was so excited. I had heard generally that this idea existed, the idea that we would somehow use foxes to scare the Japanese and the more I looked into this and the more documents I found, the more ridiculous I realized and just really incredible and insane.

32:29This plot really was. So this idea of Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of of a businessman named Ed Salinger, he had done a lot of business before the war in Tokyo. So he kind of knew Japanese culture, he knew the Japanese language. That's what made him very valuable to the OSS because he kind of knew the psychological profile they thought of who the Japanese were and they wanted to use that to exploit, to demoralize the Japanese. So he's hired Ed Salinger by the OSS. He's part of what's called the Moral Operations Branch, which was in charge of spreading disinformation, but he gets the R &D branch to help on this project.

33:07The idea with Operation Fantasia kind of goes back to an idea within Shinto religion that there exists these portents of doom called Kitsuni. Kitsuni are like spirit beings, animal, glowing animal beings that if you see one, it's supposed to be a bad omen. Something bad is going to happen. Salinger wants to capitalize on this by creating kind of fake kitsuni, fake spirit beings. And if we can release them in Japan, it'll make the Japanese scared and think that something bad is going to happen. Well what bad is going to happen? Well we're in a war, it's probably means we're going to lose this war.

33:43We might as well give up now, then wait for that in to come in some even worse way. That's the idea at least. And so Ed Salinger has a few ideas for how to capitalize on this. He wants to create either glowing foxes or the idea that there are glowing foxes to scare the Japanese. And so one idea is to create a whistle that mimics a fox sound. We'll spread these throughout Japan. People start blowing these whistles. They're going to think it's the kid's SUNY because it's foxes and they'll be demoralized. It didn't really go anywhere because people really know what foxes sound like. You know, it doesn't go in.

34:18It sounds like you're precisely. Yeah. Yeah, like that YouTube video, what does the Fox say? What does the Fox sound like is good enough? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that didn't go. There are a few more variations of Fantasia. One is to recreate Fox Otors. So get a Fox Otor. We'll spread that in Japan. People smell it and think, oh, Foxes are around. This is a bad omen. But again, what does the Fox smell like? Do people really know? And so, Salinger scraps all that. And he decides, instead, we're going to capture live foxes, we're going to paint them with glowing radioactive paint, and we're going to release them in Japan.

34:54That way the Japanese are going to see them and know this really is a glowing fox. It must be a kitsuni, and it must be a bad omen. We must be about to lose this war. We might as well give up now. So foxes are captured. They're painted with radioactive paint from the US radium, a radium corporation. Actually, before they are, just to see if paint adheres to for animal fur, they go the OSS, some personnel go to the Bronx zoo and they paint a raccoon and they let it kind of do raccoon stuff for a few days. These raccoons are just kind of glowing. They're kept away from from public. But the paint actually stays on.

35:37So hey, this is one point for operation Fantasia. Maybe it works. The next experiment with this is to take a few foxes to Rock Creek Park in Maryland right by DC and release these glowing foxes. The idea is that if we can see if it scares Americans, well it's definitely going to scare the Japanese. So if the Americans are spooked out by this, the Japanese are going to be even more spooked out. So let's release these foxes and see how Americans respond to them. So these foxes are released in Rock Creek Park. They're glowing at night, walking through the trails. And there's a newspaper report later that says the passers -by were terrified and had the screaming jimmies when they saw these foxes, these ghostly apparitions.

36:18So hey, point two for Operation Fantasia. The Americans really are scared of this thing. So there's another experiment with Operation Fantasia. Can foxes swim? That's what needs to be answered. Because in order to get these foxes to Japan, it's not like you can just drop them out of a plane or something. You're going to have to take a boat, drop them in the ocean, and let them swim to shore. But can foxes swim? This is the question. And so as part of this, Operation Fantasia, several foxes are captured. They're taken into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and they're thrown overboard. And it turns out the fox actually did swim to shore.

36:53So foxes do swim. The problem is that by the time they got to shore, all the paint had washed off, so it was kind of a bust. Like what's the point? The paint washes off. That was the whole point of the operation in the first place. So that didn't really go anywhere. But then, Soundger, this is what I discovered in the archives, something that I've never seen anyone else talk about. I discovered this document that talks about how he wants to carry this even further. He said he had heard when he was in Japan, one of these ideas about Kitsuni that involved a skull. It was said that apparently a fox with a skull on it was the worst omen of all.

37:28This is a really bad omen. So his idea to capitalize on this is to tax a dermy a fox to paint it in glowing paint, to take a human skull and put it on the fox as if it's, you know, its own skull. And then he wanted to have a mechanical mechanism that could raise and lower the jaw of this skull. And then he would blast audio to the Japanese as if this skull was talking, saying, you need to give up the war, it's worth, you know, just put down your arms. And then he would attach this fox with a skull and audio to a balloon and fly it over Japan. So it would look like there was this flowing, glowing stuff box talking with a human skull out of it.

38:06Apparently this is going to win the war. So that's that's the his idea. So America tried to conduct spiritual warfare on Japan to try and make them think that the Japanese gods were mad at them with a glowing fox that had a human skull on the top of it. Yes, correct. Right. And there are a couple other, I mean, there are a couple other similar things that are trying to be done against Japan. One idea that the Army Air Force has is to drop bombs into Japanese volcanoes that are dormant and try to get them to become active. And if the volcanoes start kind of looking like they're active, maybe the Japanese will think that the gods are mad.

38:44And then this is an indication that we shouldn't be in this war in the first place. Fuck yeah, that's what I want. I want some, let's do that. Let's anger the Japanese gods. I think, oh man, I mean, there is something about the advent of technology that has taken away all of this beautiful sort of wistful creativity. Everything's far too logical and rational now. One of the other ones that you go through, bat bombs. We've spoken about rat bombs, but bat bombs as well. Strapping a bomb to a bat, you're gonna guess? That is pretty close, yeah, it's pretty close. So there, yeah, there are rat bombs, cat bombs, bat bombs.

39:21If you want any variation of an at bomb, this book has got it for you. But the bad bomb idea, this is the brain child of a guy named Little Adams. Little Adams is a dentist. He's not even involved in the OSS or anything. He's a dentist from Pennsylvania. He goes on a vacation to Carl's Bad Caverns in New Mexico, and of course, this is home to a colony of millions of Mexican -free -tailed bats. After he goes on that vacation, he hears about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And he's a patriotic American and he wants to try to think of what can I do to help us win this war that we're now involved in.

39:59And he had just been to Karl's bat and he thinks of this bat bomb idea. What if we strap incendiary devices to bats and we fly them to Japan and we release them? These bats will kind of be like heat seeking missiles. They will naturally roost in warehouses and, you know, in buildings, and they'll explode after a time delay, and these incendiary devices will catch these buildings on fire. So instead of flying over Japan and dropping bombs, which might not even hit the target, let's release these bats, and the bats are naturally going to go to these houses and roost in them and blow up and start these fires.

40:34That's the idea. Little Adams had one thing really going for him. He was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady of the United States. He gave this proposal to Eleanor Roosevelt. She gave it to her husband, the president of the United States. In turn, he gives it to another than William Donovan, the head of the OSS. And attached to the proposal, Franklin Roosevelt writes, this man is not a nut. So like, you know, this idea has got something going for it. Donovan, he gives it to the one branch of the OSS capable of actually studying this, the R &D branch. So that's how it gets to the R &D branch.

41:09Stanley level, the head of this branch. Hires, a man named Lewis Fizer, to develop the incendiary devices that they're going to attach to these bats. Lewis Fizer is fairly famous at the time because he was the inventor of Napalm. This is kind of a jelly gasoline that if it catches, you know, if it sticks to anything and it'll burn at a really hot temperature, it can start fires really easily. Actually, he had invented this while he was at Harvard as he's a chemist. And so his first napalm bomb tests had occurred on the Harvard soccer fields. So he had literally detonated napalm bombs just on the soccer fields at Harvard.

41:47He actually got in trouble for this, not so much for the bombs, but because he was hogging the soccer field and they needed it for drill instruction. So he was told to find somewhere else. But anyway, Stanley level hires Louis Fizer to create the napalm bombs for these bats really small. There are personnel who go to different caves, literally swing around nets, and they capture bats for the tests that they're going to do. So for one of the first tests, they're not using live kind of incendiaries. Instead, they just have a kind of a dummy. They attach it to the bats. They cool the bats down because the idea is that we'll put them in an artificial hibernation state so we can get them on the plane.

42:26We'll fly them up. We'll drop them. They'll wake up and then they'll fly away. and we'll see how they're able to actually fly with this stuff on. The problem is that when they flew these bats up, they had cooled them down too much. So by the time they dropped them, they didn't wake up and they just kind of crashed into the floor.

42:48So that was one experiment with this bat bomb. Another experiment, they tried with actual live incendiaries. Lewis Fireser wanted to test the official package to make sure it actually worked with a live incendiaries. They cooled down the bats. The problem was that they didn't cool them down enough this time. The bats woke up prematurely and they flew around before they could be stopped and they actually burned down a control tower and a barracks that was nearby. So in a kind of ironic sense, the bat bombs actually seemed to work because they did roost in these buildings and blow them up, but you know, it was never deployed against the Japanese.

43:21Jeez. Honestly, I think that, you know, there's an argument to be made that the atomic bomb wasn't needed. We just needed to have whatever a million bats send them down into Japan. Everything would have been fine. Well, what I think is one of the funniest kind of parts of the book is that little Adams, the guy who conceived first of this bat bomb idea, he was talking to a lot of different generals in the military to try to get funding because he really wanted to pursue this idea and make sure the OSS was kind of carrying it out. So he was talking to generals. He comes back and starts talking to some members of the OSS, really dejected and upset because because the generals didn't want to give them that much money.

43:56And little Adam says, yeah, there's apparently this other project in New Mexico and they're kind of messing around with these atoms. Why should we be messing around with atoms when we have a sure thing like the bat bomb here?

44:10Oh, man. Okay. So in your opinion, given the fact that you are currently the world living authority on the dirty tricks department, what was the most successful contribution or the most pivotal mission that they were a part of. I think the most useful contribution is probably those other two branches, the documents division and the Chem Flosha division, because this enabled agents to go undercover in Europe especially and to train resistance forces into gather intelligence, which is actually useful for making decisions. I think that's probably the most useful thing. The most useful kind of weapon that was invented, it's either that silence 22, that was actually being used up even through the Vietnam War in some places within different military branches.

44:58Another one of the useful technologies, weapons that's developed by this R &D branch, is involves derailing trains. We already talked about Black Joe that you could throw in a boiler. There were several other things like that. And derailing trains was especially effective because not only could you destroy the train and all the material on it, you could derail it. But if you did it strategically, you could really mess things up. So one invention was called the mole. And it was a light -sensitive explosive. The idea being it can detect a sudden shift from light to dark. And so if you have a saboteur that attaches this to a train and it kind of sets it, then the light -sensitive mole, whenever the train enters a tunnel, it'll notice that light to dark and it'll detonate and it'll derail the train, not only derailing the train, but plugging up that valuable tunnel and preventing any other trains from getting through.

45:53So that's a really useful device. One other of the most useful, full devices you kind of mentioned earlier is probably the Limbit, the OSS and the British SOE are kind of working on this together and sharing ideas, but the Limbit is this explosive device that a saboteur could attach to the bottom of a ship, set a time pencil that would cut a time delay, and then paddle away, establish an alibi somewhere else, and then after a while this Limbit will explode, putting a hole on the ship and causing it to sink, those were used on many ships during World War II. Do you know what the original trigger was that they used on the very first version of the limpet mine?

46:27They needed something that would dissolve consistently and was always in a reliable size. I'm not sure. It was an anacid ball, a suite, like a little candy. We would have called it a candy. So they're talking about it. This is in Churchill's Ministry of Ungeneral and the warfare, and they're talking about the fact that they need to protect it from any moisture, because if it gets a tiny little bit wet during transit, that means that the timer once it gets into the ocean is actually going to be, however, much shorter. Think it's about, for those that are interested, I think it's around about 45 minutes, 30 to 45 minutes, as the amount of time an anisee ball takes to dissolve in the ocean.

47:06So they're talking about the fact that they couldn't tell anybody what they were doing, and they had to go around the local village buying every pack of condoms that they could, so that they could individually wrap these anacid balls and condoms so that it was protected from water. And the guy that wrote the book says, it is unclear whether nine months later there was an increase in the fertility rate of this small village because there was no access to condoms for a couple of weeks. The SOE must have had a thing with condoms because there's another brief thing I mentioned in the book about how they developed this itching powder from the seed pod of this one plant.

47:40And they would sprinkle it in condoms that were destined for German soldiers. No way. And there were apparently reports. There were apparently reports of a submarine crew who kind of came back and they noticed an uptick and a hospital visits or whatever. So apparently that was one idea. Itching powder. Dude, that is so funny. So we spoke earlier on about the fact that the atomic bomb is kind of happening. It's being developed. It's not exactly rivalrous with the bat bomb. was the OSS involved in stopping any of the Germans or keeping tabs on what the Germans were doing. I know that there was heavy water plants, obviously there was the dam busters, there was a bunch of other operations that tried to really slow down what the Allies thought was Nazi development of some sort of atomic weapon.

48:32Absolutely. The most famous, well, I'll start with a, I'll kind of build up to that. There was pretty much any physicist in the United States knew that if the Germans were going to have an atomic bomb program, the person who was going to lead it was Werner Heisenberg. This is one of the most famous, distinguished physicists in the world at the time. He had stayed in Germany at the outbreak of the war, unlike many of his colleagues who either came to the United States and would work on the Manhattan project or go somewhere else, he stayed in Germany. And pretty much everyone knew if anyone is leading a German Atomic Bomb project, it is Werner Heisenberg.

49:10So the OSS has a few ways they want to deal with Werner Heisenberg, the idea being if you kind of cut off the head of the snake, the program is going to flounder. So if you can just, if you can either kidnap or even maybe kill Werner Heisenberg, you could prevent the Germans from potentially acquiring an Atomic Bomb. One of the first people who was assigned to work on this and figure out what to do with Warner Heisenberg is a guy named Carl Eiffler. Carl Eiffler was head of what's called the Tatchment 101 in Burma. This is a group of OSS personnel that was sent to the Burma, India, China area.

49:45Their mission is to destroy a Japanese airbase where the Japanese are launching planes from. He gets recalled to the United States. He has kind of he got he was on a mission He fell overboard into the ocean and he was dashed upon the rocks and he had like head damage So he he was little all over the place But he got recalled to the United States, but after that he gets assigned to Kidnap Warner Heisenberg to think of a plan to figure out how to Capture Warner Heisenberg and to smuggle him into Switzerland and they're gonna rendezvous with a plane or even a submarine that will carry somewhere else.

50:20So he gets assigned to this. He ultimately gets called off of that because he was, he was like William Donovan in the sense that he was so gung -ho. He was ram bunches and wild and never followed orders and did things his way. And because of that, he wasn't really fit for this operation because it was going to be a very delicate affair, but he's the opposite of delicate. He's someone who would just say whatever and do whatever he wanted. So they needed someone who was a little bit more discerning and technical and skilled. So instead of Carl Eiffler, he's pulled off, the OSS assigns a baseball player named Moberg to assassinate Warner Heisenberg.

50:58Moberg was a catcher for several different major league baseball teams like the Red Sox, you know, he was a catcher. He, what made him valuable to the OSS is that he spoke many languages. So he was kind of a polyglot. He spoke several languages that he had studied in school or grown up with. And so that's very valuable to the OSS because especially as say an agent, he can pass as someone else because he can speak the language with a dialect and the emphasis and accent and whatever. He gets assigned to assassinate Werner Heisenberg. He's told that Werner Heisenberg is scheduled to give a talk in Switzerland on a specific date at the specific university.

51:37So, Moberg goes over there and he's told to sit in the lecture And if Warner Heisenberg says anything that indicates that he might be working on an atomic bomb Anything about vision or you know chain reactions He's supposed to pull out a gun and shoot Warner Heisenberg right there in the lecture hall So Moberg goes to this lecture. He sits down. He's got a sign ID bill. Yeah for sure armed with a gun He's got a sign ID pill in his pocket the idea of being after the assassination. He's gonna kill himself So he listens to the lecture and his notes from the lecture still exist. He says, I'm sitting in the third row and Warner Heisenberg is looking at me a lot because he thinks I'm taking notes.

52:20And he thinks I'm really interested in what he's talking about and all this stuff. So his notes are survived. Moberg doesn't get the sense that the topic has anything to do with an atomic bomb. So he decides not to take the risk and assassinate Warner Heisenberg right there. A few days later, Moberg gets invited to a dinner with some physicists in Switzerland. Who is there? Warner Heisenberg. So, they're talking about the war and all kinds of stuff. Warner Heisenberg decides that he has to leave early. He's got to go do something. But Moberg takes the opportunity to leave early too, so that he can leave with Warner Heisenberg and they can walk together for a while, giving Moberg an opportunity to interrogate Warner Heisenberg.

53:01Of course, his cover story is that he's, you know, this Swiss physics student. So he's talking to Werner Heisenberg in Swiss Accented German, because Heisenberg speaks German. So he's asking him questions, kind of leading questions. Are you working on anything? You know, what's the state of nuclear physics? And he still doesn't get the impression that Heisenberg is really doing anything with a German atomic bomb. So he decides not to kill him. But those were kind of the OSS attempts to assassinate Heisenberg and thus deny Germany his brain to build the atomic bomb. And this guy, this catcher for the Red Sox was prepared to take his own life as well.

53:39That was the level of advice that he was ready to do. Yes, so not only that with him, but with Carl Eiffler too, Carl Eiffler asks William Donovan and the other kind of high ranking OSS personnel when he's launching this kidnapping mission originally, that it doesn't even go through, but he asked them, what am I supposed to do if I'm captured? Obviously, all kidnap, highs and burger, or maybe even kill him, but I'm gonna be captured afterwards. People are gonna think I just murdered this guy. What do I do? And they said, we will deny you. In other words, we're not going to acknowledge that you're even part of our organization.

54:12You'll just have to deal with it. And so he accepts and goes on, but it never went through. Absolutely ruthless. So what about, we mentioned it early Ron, and I think you're right, you are right. It's interesting levels, ethical trajectory from the beginning of the war until the end of it about what he felt was appropriate about the kind of force. Getting into chemical warfare, what was developed used, what sort of tactics and then what kind of personal reflection and challenges did level face with that? You're right because this, like I said, is one of the major arcs I'm following in this book, a Stanley level going from someone who was reluctant to even create kind of deadly weapons like a silence pistol to someone by the end of the war, he is advocating for the use of weapons of mass destruction, not only the atomic bomb, but also chemical agents, biological agents.

55:06So in the R &D branch, he's involved with experimenting with some of these agents. The United States had developed an installation in Maryland called Fort Diedrich, or Camp Diedrich at that time. It was kind of the biological warfare installation where mass production of anthrax and all kinds of diseases were created. The United States or Franklin Roosevelt in particular had said that he has a no first use policy. So the United States is not going to use these weapons first, but we're going to create them as a deterrent force So if somebody uses them, we have them to retaliate and just by having them, we can deter others from using them That's his idea.

55:49Stanley level disagrees with this. By the end of the war, he comes to think that Any way that you can end the war as soon as possible is the ethical thing to do So not just something we should do, but this is the ethical thing to do especially regarding biological warfare He says, look at the differences here. You can stab someone in the stomach with a bayonet, and then it's gonna get infected, and they're gonna die from an infection, or you can infect them with anthrax or something through a biological bomb, and they'll get an infection and die. At least with the second option, we spare them the bayonet.

56:22At least we don't have to stab them first before they get this infection. He comes to see chemical warfare, especially as an ethical alternative to conventional warfare. With chemical warfare, he starts developing the idea that perhaps you can, especially in the Pacific theater, in these islands in Japan like Iwajima, there are these Japanese soldiers stationed on these islands, instead of sending American forces to storm the island that's going to lead to tens of thousands of casualties, why don't we just shell the island with chemical weapons? These don't even necessarily have to kill the Japanese, just like paralyze them or, you know, something.

56:57And then we go on the island and prevent those casualties for happening. So Stanley level becomes in favor of using those because he sees it as the ethical alternative. Doesn't he have a sun somewhere as well? Isn't there a little bit of perverse incentive here? Yes, this is a really important point because as the end of the war is coming to a close, Stanley level sun is on a ship midway across the Pacific waiting to engage in an invasion of Japan. And so the sooner the war ends, the sooner that Stanley level sun gets to come back home. So he's, of course, thinking personally about his son too, but in general, he's also thinking, if we don't use these weapons to end the war as soon as possible, that's just going to lead to a lot more casualties.

57:42We might as well end the war now. Of course, one of the, I mean, there are several ways to debate with what Stanley level is arguing here. What about the precedent that it sets for future wars? What about the potential that this could spread to civilian populations? At least if you, you know, storm in Ireland, it's a little bit targeted. If you just drop biological or chemical weapons somewhere, it's not really targeted. It could spread to anyone. So that there are a lot of objections that you could raise to what Stanley Lovell is saying. And when Stanley Lovell's grandson, after the war, years later, kind of raises some of these objections, especially to the atomic bomb, Stanley Lovell was in favor of using it.

58:20His grandson wasn't. Stanley level basically said we're an inventive people, we'll figure it out. So we'll figure out how to deal with this stuff. We just need to end the war. We just need to end the war when we could have. Were there many chemical weapons used during World War II? I remember hearing about mustard gas and stuff like that during World War I. But I don't remember reading or hearing about many chemical weapons in World War II at all. Yeah. I'm not too familiar. And certainly not as much as World War I. I have heard reports that the Germans might have used it on this one particular battle and somewhere, so there are reports that that happened, but I don't actually know if they were.

59:04Interesting. It just seems to me, especially as Hitler got more and more desperate when he was fighting the war on two different fronts, when it really starting to scrabble, styling grad, etc., etc. He was prepared to do pretty much anything. It seems surprising to me that there would be some ethic that he was unprepared to break in Service of him. I mean he killed himself, you know and encouraged the people around him to do it too Stanley levels explanation for this was that if the Germans used especially chemical weapons Then they knew that the the allies were going to respond in kind and the way that Stanley level explains this is that the German military was much more dependent on horses, especially.

59:49And so, he says after the war, he's thinking about this, why didn't the Germans just use chemical weapons at Normandy and kind of stop the invasion? And apparently he hears from someone, but I don't know how true this is, that the Germans knew that if they did that, then the Allies were going to use these chemical weapons, which would ruin their basically way of transporting material, which was these horses they were so dependent on. So that could be one explanation. I'm not really confident in level's recollection of that particular incident. So I don't know if that's the case, but that's how he rationalized it.

1:00:24How does level's career finish? What's his legacy? Level becomes a businessman after World War II. He starts a chemical company. They invent all kinds of stuff like different patents on shoes and filters and all kinds of stuff. His most lasting legacy, though, really involves his truth -drug experiments that we talked about. During the Cold War, Sidney Gottlieb, that chemist who ran MK Ultra, was trying to figure out what kinds of experiments he would do to determine whether truth -drugs are possible or mind -control are possible, and he didn't really know where to start. To get inspiration for that, he started looking at old records.

1:01:06The records that he pulled from the archives, Stanley levels records from the OSS. And so there's this pretty direct connection between Stanley level, not intentionally, but influencing directly Sydney Gottlieb in the creation of this MK Ultra, and trajectory of this MK Ultra program, to the point where the person that Sydney Gottlieb in the CIA, who he hired to perform these Truth Drug experiments, was none other than George White, that same guy that Stanley level had hired to perform Truth Drug experiments, Sydney Gottlieb had seen white kind of reports in the World War II files and figured I need someone to perform truth -reg experiments.

1:01:42I'll just use that same guy. This was really exciting to me. There are a lot more connections between Stanley level and Sydney Gottlieb and when I was writing this I knew that there was some connection there. You know their careers were so similar. During World War II in the OSS Stanley level was involved in creating deadly weapons and disguises and documents and truth drugs and experiments and all kinds of stuff. Sydney Gottlieb is involved in that exact same stuff, almost to an item for the CIA in the Cold War. So, I had these two chemists and I wanted to play them off each other somehow. They're different careers at these different times and how they're so similar.

1:02:24So I was in the archives and I found these depositions that Sydney Gottlieb had to give in the in the 1980s. He was being sued by victims of the CIA and required to give these depositions. And in the archives, you can't read everything because you want to get as much material while you're there as possible. So I would take a deposition, I would take a picture of each page, but I wouldn't really read the pages because I can read those later when I'm in the archives, I'm just gathering material. But I was really excited because I had been looking so long for this connection between level and got leave.

1:02:55And as always flipping through these pages, taking picture, I looked at one of the depositions and I saw the name Stanley Lovell. And so I knew somewhere in there, Sydney God leave is talking about Stanley Lovell and how they're connected somehow. And so if you wanna know what that is in more detail, you gotta read the book. John Lyle, ladies and gentlemen, John, I absolutely love this. This kind of very unique investigation into history, the inventiveness of everyone that you found, I think is fascinating. Dirty Dricks department will be linked in the show notes below if people want to go and get that.

1:03:25And if they wanna keep up to date with the other stuff that you do, where should they go? Yeah, the best place is probably Twitter, just at John Lyle. L -L -I -S -L -E is my last name. And if you're kind of interested in this story, not only do I post stuff about my book and whatever, but a lot of times most of what I post is just adventures in the archives. If I find a cool photo or description or something in the archive, I post it to Twitter. So if you're interested in seeing what a historian does, that's probably a good place to get some experience, you know, to see what it's like. So if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can expect some of that stuff.

1:03:57John, I didn't think that you could make history, being a historian cool, but you've managed to do it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.