#963 - John Lisle - Investigating The True History Of MKUltra & CIA Mind Control

24:34So they want to understand how someone reacts to unwittingly ingesting LSD. That's the purpose of operation in nightclimax. George White, like I mentioned, he's this narcotics officer. So by day he's locking up junkies for a legal possession and by night he's doling out drugs to these people to see how they react to them. So it's a sad irony. He himself is a is a character to say the least. He was an addict and basically every sense of the word. He's alcoholic. He takes every drug that Gottlieb gives to him before he gives to anyone else. He just takes for himself just to see what happens. He's addicted to sex too.

25:10There are stories that I recount in the book about how he doses his own friends with LSD unwittingly to try to get them to engage in orgies with him. He does this to... He does this to one woman while she's there. She has her one -year -old daughter with her. He does this to her with LSD. Yeah. It's terrible. And she ends up having a kind of psychotic break. A reactive psychosis, very similar to what it seems to have happened to Frank Olson. And her husband is a way on a business trip. But when he comes back, she's cowering in the corner of her parents' room. and she says that somebody's out to get her.

25:43She's very paranoid. She doesn't want to take phone calls because she thinks the police are gonna come to arrest her. She eventually is committed to a mental asylum for years, for decades, and dies in this mental asylum. So some awful repercussions of... Off your leave, Carlos, about laughing at the fucking sex party. I didn't realize when this deep was this. Yeah. Well, it's hard to know how to react to some of this stuff. I've experienced that too, where on the surface, it is humorous in a way because of how absurd it actually is. Like, it's hard not to take it in a little bit of just because it's hard to believe that someone would actually do this.

26:20But yeah, when you drill down into the details, it is absolutely tragic. That's why the subtitle of this book is the tragedy of MK Ultra. Where is Gottlieb getting the LSD from? Are they synthesizing it in the CIA somewhere? No. The CIA has a deal with sandows to supply them with a certain amount of LSD. And in addition to that, they get the Eli Lilly Company, which is an American company, to also synthesize LSD to provide for them, just because it's an American company so that if something happens to this foreign company, we'll have a domestic supplier. So they're getting it from companies who are independently synthesizing it for them.

26:53Well, wasn't the Nazi scientists, I know that they were brought over for other stuff, right? But were any of the Nazis involved in the MK -Ultra mind control stuff? not really. Some people like to make this connection because it seems like the sort of thing that should be connected. I mean, right, during the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, weren't they experimenting with drugs and trying to find out some similar stuff as MK Ultra? That is the case, but that it's kind of missing the fact that correlation isn't causation. You know, there were a lot of countries that were experimenting with truth drugs.

27:27The US was during World War II independently of the Nazis, you know, in the OSS, they were doing truth drug experiments, And that's been going on for a long time, these kinds of experiments. So just because these two different entities were doing similar experiments, one didn't cause the other as far as I can see. I've never seen a direct connection between the Operation Paperclip bringing these Nazi scientists over after World War II and MK Ultra. People make that connection, but I don't see a connection there. I think it's more of confusing correlation and causation. So George White, pretty intense guy, probably quite fun at the party, but very unscrupulous and seems to be kind of living privately and publicly the same thing, apart from this veneer of being drug officer thing.

28:12But he has this sort of, this paradox of professional life with personal and then second professional life kind of being the same sort of thing. What about Sydney Gottlieb? Because it feels like he has a degree of double life going on as well, the way that he behaves personally, the way that he shows up in his personal life and his philosophies there, and then the things that he's doing by day. Yeah, it does. It is hard to reconcile in a way, especially with Gottlieb. Not so much George White, because I do feel like that was his true character. Like, out of everyone in the book, I feel like he's the most unethical.

28:49It doesn't seem like he has any remorse. In later life, when Gottlieb is doing these depositions that I found, he seems very remorseful. Now he might just be doing that, you know, for the quarter or whatever. But I mean, there are people who were volunteering with him in later life and they said that he they always felt like he was trying to atone for some past sins and You know after MK Ultra is over during these depositions He does say he regretted a lot of what he did and he does seem to have some kind of remorse It didn't really come to much MK Ultra It's not like we found a drug or a psychiatric technique that allowed us to control a person like a Marionette but so I think Sydney Gottlieb was doing this because he actually believed in like the ins justify the means like like this is for national security and we have to do this.

29:30I think George White was doing this because he was having fun. In fact, there's one story in the book, speaking of George White and parties. Again, this is one of the more sad stories. There was a man named Wayne Richie and he lived in San Francisco. He was a US Marshal. He had worked as a guard at Alcatraz for a while. And one night, he goes to a Christmas party at a federal building, the post office. And he takes some drinks there. He's hanging out with his colleagues and all of a sudden his the wall starts spinning He starts kind of hallucinating scene colors. He doesn't know what's going on He kind of has this break as well He runs home not knowing what to do his girlfriend is there and she's kind of upset because she wants to move to New York So they kind of get into this fat.

30:14He eventually goes back to the post office building where his locker is And he decides you know what to set everything straight to make my life better. I'm gonna to get my service revolvers, go down to a bar downtown and steal all the money, and then I'm gonna give it to my girlfriend, she can move to New York, and then she'll love me because I did this for her. So that's exactly what he does. He takes these guns, he goes to a bar, he barges in and says, give me all the money and the till, and then someone who's just drinking a beer hits him over the head with one of the beers, and he's knocked out, the police come, they arrest him, obviously, he goes to jail, and at night, he kinda sober's up from whatever, the fog that he was undergoing, and he realizes that that wasn't me like I felt so weird what was going on He in fact he asked the police officer.

30:57Please give me a gun and one bullet so I can save the state some money And he lived with this he lived with this for the you know for the rest of his life for decades after this He didn't know kind of what happened to him that night. He lost his job. He lost his friends He obviously lost that girlfriend as well and so it was about 30 years later when MK Ultra is made public like he's reading a newspaper and he sees a story that mentions George White and LSD and it kinds of dawns on him. Oh my gosh, I knew George White in San Francisco and it turns out George White's diary has been donated now at Stanford University in George White's diary, which I show in this book, you can flip to the exact day that Wayne Richie went insane at that party and what does George White's diary say?

31:41Christmas party federal building. That's where he was. And so Wayne Richie sued the CIA, but it was dismissed for the judge basically said you couldn't prove that this actually happened to you. But yeah, another victim of George White. Dude. Okay, so getting into the meat and potatoes of the experiments, what does that look like? They've now got the chemist. They've been fucking about with it internally and partly externally. they're doing this thing in the brothels, but when we think about, when I think about MK Ultra, I think about the idly thing being kept open, looking at this, and LSD and hypnosis and repeating stuff and watching the same TV thing over and over in a room and sleep deprivation.

32:30What do this sort of hardcore experiments look like and where are they, who does it? That's a good point because not everything that's part of MK Ultra, these 149 sub -projects, is done by the CIA. There are very few sub -projects that the CIA itself does. It's funding George White to do some of these experiments, but that's most of what the CIA itself is actively doing. Really how MK Ultra is set up, it's based through a funding mechanism. So Sydney Gottlieb would identify researchers at universities, prisons, hospitals who were We're already doing experiments that he was interested. Many of them were already doing LSD experiments without knowing what the CIA is up to.

33:09Many of them were doing experiments in Amnesia to see if Amnesia is possible. So Sidney Gottlieb decides we're going to start funding these people to continue doing what they're doing. Again, it's not as if the CIA is itself committing all of these acts. Instead, it's aiding and abetting the people who are already doing these experiments. One of these people, well, there are a lot of them to talk about, I guess, but some of these are at prisons, so Harris, Isbel, Carl Fyfer, they're in Lexington and Atlanta, and at these prisons, they're dosing the prisoners with different drugs that Sydney got leave as sending them.

33:42I should mention also, these people who are being funded by MK -Ultra, many of them don't know they're being funded by MK -Ultra. They're given grants through, like, cut out organizations to say, Hey, where the society for the investigation of human ecology, the CIA just made this up. And they say, yeah, we're going to fund you whatever. And so they're great. I'll take free money. Why not? Be skeptical of free money is not the lesson. Yeah. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Yeah. So they're getting this money through these grants. That's great. So a lot of them didn't even know the CIA is behind these grants.

34:12So they would use these cut out organizations. Some of them did though. And so a few of these people at these prisons, Harris, Isbel, Carl Fyfer, they're taking drugs that Gottlieb is giving to them, not just LSD, but all kinds of stuff, peyote eventually and just whatever. And they're giving it to these prisoners to see how they react. And in one experiment, Isbel talks about dosing a prisoner with quadruple doses of LSD for days on end to try to build up their tolerance to see how they would react. And he says, well, we really built up their tolerance. And here's one of the crazy things too.

34:45at the Harris -Isbells experiments in Lexington, Kentucky. It's at a prison, but the prison is also like a rehabilitation facility. And so the idea is that we're trying to get these people off of drugs and as payment for volunteering to join these experiments, what would Isbell give them? He would give them an option. They could either take like a good parole letter for their parole board, or they could go to the drug bank window, stick out their arm and get a needle full of heroin injected right into it. So that's their payment for being involved in the rehab place in the rehab place for normal phenomenal.

35:19Yeah. Yeah. So those are those are some of the drug experiments, but you mentioned like sensory deprivation. Well, hang on. What about? Oh, yeah. You mentioned Jail's there. Doctors, universities, these were also being co -opted as well. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I should mention also that it's not as if every LSD experiment at a university or somewhere or psychiatric experiment that sounds like an MK Ultra thing is part of MK Ultra. Again, the scientists in the CIA are funding the things that are already going on for the most part. So just because something sounds like an MK Ultra experiment, oh yeah, I know this guy at this university, he was dosing his students with LSD.

35:56That could have been an MK Ultra experiment, a sub -project, but most likely it wasn't, because there are more people who are doing this on their own than who are doing it as part of MK Ultra. But yes, at universities, this was happening. In fact, one of the people who is doing this at a university he was Harris Isbel. He would do this with his students. Isbel, or I'm sorry, I mentioned him earlier, was Harold Abramsen. He was a doctor who was dosing his students. They would join these experiments. But Abramsen is the person who Sydney Gottlieben -Robert -Lashbrook sent Frank Olsen to after Frank Olsen had that kind of psychotic break.

36:31So he already kind of knew that the CIA was interested in LSD and he eventually got paid basically to dose some of these students and to see how they reacted. So it was going on at a lot of places. A quick aside, using the internet without VPN today is like leaving your front door wide open and hoping that no one walks in. Websites, apps, and data brokers are constantly collecting your personal information, what you search, what you watch, what you buy, where you are. It all gets tracked. And Surfshark protects you from that. It encrypts your internet connection so your activity stays private, even on sketchy public Wi -Fi at airports, cafes, or hotels, and it lets you change your virtual location with a single click.

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37:47So how much truth is in that? Yeah. And people, for some reason, are kind of disappointed when I say, I don't think there's much truth to it. Oh, John, come on. Like the, the Unibomor, this is a big one. It's not as if he wasn't in an experiment, you know, at a university. He was in the experiment of this guy named Henry Murray, who had been involved in the OSS, who was doing some psychological stuff for the OSS. He was creating psychological portraits of different like German leaders. So Henry Murray didn't have ties to the intelligence community, but there's no reason to think that he was actually funded by the CIA through MK Ultra.

38:21At least I haven't found anything that indicates that. Again, that's not to say that Ted Kaczynti wasn't involved in these experiments and that that didn't affect him in some way, but just to haven't seen any tie to MK Ultra. And a point to make too is there are a lot of people who were involved in these experiments, and none of them became the unomomer, but him. And so I think there's probably a lot other stuff going on than the fact that he happened to be one of the people who was involved in that experiment. But another popular one to link to MK Ultra, especially recently, is Charles Manson.

38:50If anyone's read Chaos by Tom O 'Neill, it's a really good book. And he tries to make this link between in John Lee West, who was another researcher, a psychiatrist, who was doing MK Ultra experiments on some people. And he was in LA at the time that Manson was there. So Tom O 'Neill tried to make this connection, but he himself admits in the book and in the Netflix documentary based on it, Chaos, and in several interviews that he's never really found the connection. He can kind of put them in the same place, but sure, a lot of people could be put in the same place. because the ironic thing to me is, it's not that Jolly West was doing some kind of experiments on Manson or that Manson was in these experiments and learned how to control people through that.

39:34It's the opposite. It's that Jolly West could have learned a lot from Charles Manson because Manson actually knew how to manipulate people. It's through the classic cult techniques. It's not through some esoteric hypnosis that the CIA is interested in. There are cult techniques that have been used for hundreds of years before MK Ultra that I've been successfully manipulated people. Incaiol also could've kind of learned from him. I was going to say they should've done it. They should've got Mark Manson. They should've got Charles Manson into of Mark Manson who just taught them how to not give a fuck.

40:05I had, you know, Danny Treyo, do you know him? The actor? Yes, he's the actor. Yes, yeah, he was on the show a couple of years ago. He was in jail with Charles Manson. Really? Wow. Charlie, little Charlie, they called him and he had a rope for a belt. He was a small guy and he was getting bullied apparently around the prison yard. So Danny and his guys, you know, big scary fucking dudes, they took him under their wing and they heard that this guy could put you into this weird trance, which I'm going to guess would have been some form of hypnotism, and he could get you loaded on heroin without the drug.

40:45that he was able to induce heroin without the drug. And Danny, you know, not a scientist. Shock horror, Danny Trey, I was not a scientist. But he did this wonderful control within an experiment, the three guys that were in Danny's cell. Mark, fuck off Mark Manson. Charles Manson. She's a trace. Charles Manson. Did the hypnotism thing and they felt it. Come on, all the rest of it. Apparently, I've never taken heroin. Apparently, when you take heroin, sometimes you throw up, or a lot of the time, maybe you throw up. And Danny and his cellmate both threw up, but the third guy didn't. And the third guy had never taken heroin before.

41:32So the expectation effect of Danny and Danny's cellmate who had meant that when they were under, and the other guy was, I'm feeling it. I'm feeling something. I'm feeling the whatever. But there's this question here, which is you didn't know what to expect. So you didn't behave in the manner that you expected to. I thought that was such a cool little vignette. That is. And you know, that actually ties in with an MK Ultra sub -project, because actually one of the more successful ones, it wasn't giving people drugs and using hypnotism. It was making them think that they had done that. And so this was done by a psychologist, Martin Orn.

42:09And he said, if you really want to interrogate someone, and you want them to tell the truth, you can, instead of giving them a truth drug, which doesn't actually work, maybe it'll lower their inhibitions, but you can't guarantee what they say will be the truth. What you should do is make them think that they've taken a truth drug, especially if they don't know if truth drugs are real or not, make them think they've taken it, and once they think they've taken it in that it's effective, you just give them a placebo, like a sugar pill, and say, oh, this is gonna make you talk now, and if they actually think that truth drugs could be possible, then internally, they're gonna kind of think to themselves, Well, I've taken this truth, Rogue, then I'm kind of a helpless victim, you know, I don't have any choice but to talk because it's gonna make me anyway, I guess I should.

42:47It's the same thing with hypnotism. He said, you know, you can try to hypnotize someone and maybe it's not gonna work on them, but you can still make them think that they've been hypnotized even if they aren't feeling it. So for example, you pretend to hypnotize them and even if they don't go under, you can start suggesting things to them like your hands are gonna be getting really warm or something and it turns out under the desk, you secretly put a heater down there and you turn the heater on. And their hands actually are getting warmer. And so they think, well, I didn't think I was hypnotized, but now maybe there's something to this.

43:16And so if they think they've been hypnotized, they might be more likely to talk because who could control it? I mean, it's not my fault. He hypnotized me. So I guess I better say whatever I'm going to say. So it's a psychological technique inducing the hypnotic situation instead of hypnosis itself. Well, the hypnosis placebo effect. Okay, we mentioned about the psychic driving thing. There's the reputation over and over. What was that? Yes, psychic driving. This was by a psychiatrist named you and Cameron in Montreal. He was working at the Allen Memorial Institute. He had dreams of becoming the next Sigmund Freud.

43:51He was going to win a Nobel Prize in medicine. At least he thought he was. He was going to cure all mental illness. He just didn't know how. He knew he was destined for greatness, but he didn't know how. He was a behaviorist. And so he thought all behavior stems from patterns that you've learned from your environment. So everything is nurture, nothing is nature. And so in his conception, what mental illness is, is a person who has learned bad behaviors from their environment. And if you want to correct mental illness, what you should do is reduce them back to a blank slate where they forget all their behaviors and then put them in a better environment where they learn better behaviors.

44:27That's his conception at least. The question is then, how do you reduce someone to a blank slate and make them forget these bad patterns of behavior that he thinks leads to mental illness and his conception, you have to induce enough stress in them. If you induce enough stress, then that will reduce them to the blank slate and like God, we can build them back up in our image. So how do we induce enough stress? Well, he tried multiple ways, you know, electric shocks, sensory deprivation, and then psychic driving, as you mentioned. This was playing auditory messages in their ears, thousands and thousands of times a day, just on endless repeat.

45:00The reason why he came to this is because he was recording a session that he was having with a young woman, just like a therapy session. And she said something that he wanted her to listen to again. She said something about how my mom used to tell me, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something negative. And so he said, here, I want you to listen to that again and kind of react to it. So he plays it back for her. And she has a very negative reaction to hearing her saying her mom's negative words. And so he starts doing it again and again. And again, she has an increasingly heightened negative reaction each time.

45:30And he thinks to himself, this is how I induce stress. So he started having people record these negative messages. And in some instances, he would have their families come to the Allen Memorial Institute and record negative messages that he could then play to the patients. And then he would make them listen to them, these messages over and over. Sometimes he would put them in chemical comas and then beneath their pillow, he would put a speaker where it would just play these messages. So maybe in their dreams, like it's manipulating them into going down to become a blank slate again. But that's psychic driving.

45:58That's what he was trying to do. Who would the patients? These were patients who were legitimate psychiatric patients. Many of them had schizophrenia or depression who had committed themselves under his care because he was one of the most renowned psychiatrists in the world, really. He, at one point, he was the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. So if you're going to commit yourself to anyone, well, this guy certainly shouldn't he know, you know, what to do. So they thought they were getting tried and true treatments that would help them.

46:28Instead, he was using them as guinea pigs in his experiments that eventually would be funded by MK Ultra. And it's especially ironic because you and Cameron was one of the psychiatrists who evaluated the Nazi German prisoners at the end of World War II to determine whether they're fit to stand trial. These are the same Nuremberg trials that produce the Nuremberg codes about ethical experiments, you know, about like the first point of which is you need consent of the subject, you know. So he's he's involved in those Nuremberg trials and yet he's completely going against the Nuremberg code here So a lot of ironies sadly in this book Was it effective at all the psychic driving thing did they was there anything useful that came out of that?

47:08It was I mean it was effective at breaking people down I don't know about building them back up in fact in his notes He has several notes of for instance. There's one nursing student He says this 18 -year -old nursing student was reduced to basically a vegetable who would pee her own bed and couldn't go to the bathroom on her own It's like he really could break these people down. There was one woman. She was an identical twin. So this is kind of a good case study. The identical twin was committed to the Alan Memorial. The other wasn't. She has the psychic driving done to her electro shock treatment as well.

47:38And afterwards, she can't go to the bathroom on her own. She can't dress herself, put on her makeup, do anything. She moves in with her identical twin, but the, you know, she's so psychologically damaged from this that it causes her severe depression because she looks at her twin and what could have been and she's not that. So she ends up scavenging food out of like dumpsters and living on her own for a while. So it's a really sad story. But yeah, so I mean, you definitely could affect the psychology of someone. You really could kind of break them down and even induce amnesia if you can give them enough electric voltage during these therapies.

48:08But it's not like you could build them back up on your image and make them all of a sudden cure of mental illness like he was hoping for. Did they try and do any twin stuff? remote messaging between twins and you that. Not as part of MK Ultra. There were some remote viewing stuff that the CIA was interested in, but that wasn't part of MK Ultra. Annie Jacobson has a book on this called Phenomena, that's good. But as far as I can tell, there wasn't any MK Ultra things involved with that. And I don't remember any specific twin studies that MK Ultra was involved in either. All right, what about deep patterning?

48:42Was that similar to the psychic driving thing? A kind of deep patterning was the electric shocks. So you would get stimulated with these electric shocks multiple times. And yeah, a lot of people had severe damage after this. One of the patients was named Janine Huard. And she was pregnant at the time that she was getting all this stuff done to her. Eventually, she was allowed out. She had her baby, but her baby was kind of unhealthy. There was some kind of digestion problem the baby had. So Janine Huard went into the severe depression. she was worried and anxious, she gets recommitted to the Allen Memorial Institute because of this.

49:18And then, you know, she talks about in her depositions, which I quote, all everything she's experienced, there's a lot of really sad stories with these patients, but yeah, they went through a lot. And that was just one sub -project at the Allen Memorial under Cameron. All that stuff. That was one sub -project. What, in your opinion, was the, uh, or were the wildest experiments? What were the ones that sort of really put, I mean, those seem to push the limit, turning somebody functional into a vegetable, and then making them live with that twin. That's pretty rough. But yeah, what were the worst ones?

49:50The most unethical, I mean, I already mentioned it, but it's probably George White and dosing these people unwittingly. I will say for some of the prison experiments, these prisoners would sign consent forms in a way, so they would say we're gonna be testing hallucinogenic rugs, although it's a question about informed consent. But, you know, I mentioned you and Cameron, I think his are probably the most destructive of the MK Ultra experiments. One example of that is a woman named Mary Moro, who it's ironic because she had been a neurologist at the Allen Memorial Institute under UN Cameron. So she had been a resident in training, but she had severe anorexia and depression and she failed her neurological exams to become a doctor.

50:32So she went into this deep depression and she eventually got committed to a hospital. While she's there, UN Cameron goes to consult with her and he asks her, Do you want to come back to the Alan not as a resident, but as a patient? She reluctantly does and then she's on the other side of it now. So she was doing this kinds of stuff to people and now she's on the other side of experiencing it. The same thing happens to her where she basically gets to a point where she can't put on her clothes by herself and she has phone calls with her mother after each one of these deep patterning sessions, this electric shock and her mother is very concerned because she's not making any sense.

51:06So her mother tells her sister, you need to go over there and see what's happening. So her sister barges in and says, if you don't let me see my sister right now, I'm calling the police. So they eventually let her into the room, and in the corner is sitting Mary Moro with these hollow eyes. She says later that she felt like she was sunk in a deep hole and couldn't get out, but she basically couldn't do anything for herself. So her family busted her out of there, and she's one of the success, not a success story, but one of the, at least she got out. You know, she talks about in her depositions after going through all this.

51:35There were people who had been there for years. I was there for a few months and I experienced this stuff, but years people were doing this. So I think, yeah, UN Cameron's experiments are among the most unethical. I should also mention somewhat in connection with that, is a guy named Baldwin, Madeleine Baldwin. He was also funded by the CIA to do some experiments, and he was around that area too in Montreal. He had been a student of Donald Hub who had been an associate of UN Cameron. But Madeleine Baldwin, when the experiments, he at least proposed, not that he actually carried out, was to confine someone to a wooden box like in sensory deprivation, so they couldn't move, they'd be confined.

52:14And he called this a terminal type experiment to see how long they could stay in there and before they died. There were several people who actually spoke out against this and said, there's no way we're doing that. So he didn't, but he did end up doing experiments on monkeys where he would decapitate them and try to put different heads on different monkeys. He would beam microwaves into their brains. So he was doing a lot of stuff like that too. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management.

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53:30Wasn't there something to do with the toilets being wired with microphones so that people's post -trip confessions were captured? Didn't that happen somewhere? I don't recall that. I don't remember that. Okay, I thought - Maybe it did. I didn't come across that. I don't know. Yeah, it's an interesting one thinking about, I guess you can do, you can have this effect on people, but unless they're under your care for the entire time, they're going to go away and then it's difficult. You've got to follow this person to see how they behave. With George White, he's got this group of, I guess, for the period of time that they're with their prostitutes, he can sit on his toilet and drink his lecher and look through the one -way mirror so you can actually do some observation.

54:11But the problem is, unless you're able to hold somebody in a location, which is why being in a psychiatric facility is probably so useful, you can just have them under observation to see what happens to them all times. If you do this to someone, they're just out in the world causing mischief. You have no idea what they're actually doing. Yeah. And that's one of the concerns that Gottlieb eventually has about this. In his depositions, he talks about, he's asked, what did you learn from MK Ultra? Like, what came out of this? And for the most part, he says, he tries to put a positive spin on the negative results.

54:42And he says, well, we learned a lot of things you couldn't do. Like, you couldn't control someone like a Mary Annette. But he does say, you could make someone appear crazy. And this did have some operational value in the sense that, like I mentioned, you might I'm one one ideal was to put LSD into a cigar and give it to Fidel Castro. And before he made some kind of speech, he would smoke the cigar and he would appear crazy. And his people would start to lose faith in him. But Sidney Gottlieb was even reluctant to take it to that kind of an operation because he said, just as you were mentioning, it's not like you couldn't control what Castro is going to say or whoever's going to say.

55:15Once they're out of your purview, once they've taken this, you don't know what they're going to do. He might start saying we need to start nuking the United States or something. So, you know, he was kind of against that. Hmm. Okay. So, were there actually any operations used outside of experiments? Did MK Ultra produce anything operationally useful? Yeah, it did. In a couple instances, there were interrogations done with some of these methods. And in some instances, it seems like the interrogations were successful and some may be not. But there are reports, you know, that I talk about in the book about some of these interrogations and what was done.

55:50But also the one operation that really comes out of this is ironically exactly what I was just talking about that actually went forward, except it wasn't Fidel Castro. It was the president of the Philippines. He was running for reelection. He seemed to be maybe sympathetic to the communists. So how can we get him to lose his election? It turns out that the CIA sent some LSD to Manila. They had someone at least tried to slip some of it into his water before or a political rally to make him appear insane. There were several other operations that went into the field, although most of them were unsuccessful.

56:25Sydney Gottlieb was involved in multiple assassination attempts. One of those was on Patrice Lemumba, who was the prime minister of the Congo. Eisenhower wanted Lemumba eliminated. So word went from Eisenhower to Alan Dolez, the head of the CIA, down to Richard Bissell, who was the head of the department Gottlieb was in, down to Sydney Gottlieb. and they basically said, how can we covertly assassinate Patrice Lemumba without anyone realizing that it was us? Because it's easy to kill someone. You know, you just drop a bomb on them and they're dead. But it's hard to kill someone without implicating yourself and that's what the CIA was trying to do.

56:58So what Gottlieb did was procure some anthrax from Fort D -Drick, that biological warfare installation. He personally took it to the Congo and he gave it to a CIA agent, a station chief, who was there and said basically, you know, we want you to slip this to Lemumba some way. The idea was that we would put it in some toothpaste and then he would brush his teeth with it. You know, the toothpaste would make its way to it. It's his bathroom. Lemumba with brushes teeth. He would be infected with anthrax, which occurs naturally. And so he would die from it. That ended up not happening, not least because Lemumba's own friends said that he often didn't brush his teeth because he feared no breath and he did bad breath.

57:36So, he he he. Wow. Okay. So, were they, no point did they get close to creating a programmed killer of some kind? No, no. The closest I think is that the animal experimentation that I mentioned before where they actually got animals to walk on predetermined pests. They could steer them and they were talking about, you know, putting biological or chemical materials on them. And in these documents, they do say this might have application in human terms, but no actual, you know, psychotic killer that could be controlled like a puppet was actually created. In fact, the irony I mentioned earlier about how Charles Manson could have taught the CIA something instead of the opposite is that you actually, I mean, in a way, mind control is possible, not through the MK Ultra methods of drugs and, you know, esoteric hypnotism or whatever they're doing, but really through the classic methods of cult manipulation.

58:27And one model that I think is useful for thinking about this is called the bite model by Stephen Hassen. At B -I -T -E, it stands for behavior information, thought, and emotion. So these are four kind of methods of manipulation that typical cult leaders use in order to get their followers to do and believe certain things. So behavior control, you know, the B and bite, would be something like controlling what close someone wears, where they can go, who they can talk to, what they can eat, when Then they can sleep. Information control, the eye and bite is like feeding them cult propaganda and teaching them to distrust non -cult sources of information.

59:04So it's not just that you completely prevent them from observing things from the outside world. That's not really realistic, but you can teach them to not trust it when they do encounter it. So that's the information control. The T and bite is thought control. So saying prayers, singing hymns, repeating mantras. I mean, that kind of thing. And then the E in bite is emotion control. So making them feel certain emotions, like making them beholden to the cold through guilt, shame, anger, fear, that kind of thing. Those are methods of coercion that have been on. Way more effective than that. But way more effective.

59:42Now, it is the case that it might not necessarily work on any individual person. So the goal of a Manchurian candidate is we can hypnotize or drug this person, anyone, and make them do anything we want. That's not necessarily possible with a biot model, but with a large enough cohort, there are people within that who might be very susceptible and suggestible, and then it might work on them in particular, even though it might not work on everyone. Did any of the research that they went through influence torture techniques or enhanced interrogation me suffer the future. This is another kind of ironic thing, because people have known for a long time that torture doesn't really work to get the truth.

1:00:24It'll make someone talk. I mean, if a quote that I use in the book is, if you have a blowtorch up someone's butt, this is from an intelligence officer, they're gonna talk. I mean, you can guarantee, they'll say something. You just can't guarantee it's the truth. Yeah, I talk about the witch, kind of the European witch craze in the 17th century briefly, talking about how, you know, you could put these witches on the rack and they would talk. They would say that anyone's a witch. There were these two Jesuit scholars Who said that you know torture is really effective and so someone took them down to see these witches on the rack And he said another turn of the rack Do you think these are warlocks and she said yes?

1:00:56I've seen them birth devil babies and all the kinds of stuff and so they were kind of convinced okay Maybe torture just gets people to talk but not say the truth So it's long been known that torture can be used to get people to say something But you don't know what they're gonna say or they'll basically say anything for MK Ultra, the idea was that we wanted to move beyond that. We wanted to find methods of manipulation that could be used to guarantee the truth without having to resort to a method that would make someone say anything. The irony is that when MK Ultra failed, it's not that the CIA learned its lesson and then moved on to something else.

1:01:28It reverted back to torture. It reverted back to torture. This is the thing that we were trying to move away from. And now you go back to it. This fucking medieval solution. Where we tried the LSD, it didn't work. Where's the rack? Have we still got the rack around? Can we grab the, bring, roll the rack out? Yeah, and I mentioned kind of the euphemisms of the CIA within this book. Torture isn't torture, of course. It's enhanced interrogation and assassination isn't assassination. It's executive action or it's targeted killing or within the CIA, the group that was responsible for plotting these assassinations was known as the health alteration committee.

1:02:05So, you know, a lot of you.

1:02:11Yeah, a lot of these euphemisms throughout. In fact, I end up looking by saying the irony, I mean, the last chapter of this book is history loves irony. Listeners may be noting that I'm using the word irony a lot because this book is so full of it and history really does love irony. But one of the great ironies of MK Yoltschra is that it was basically unsuccessful developing methods of mind control. And yet within conspiracy circles, it has become the very definition of mind control. Anytime someone talks about brainwashing or whatever, it's always this must be an MK Ultra plant or Britney Spears of being controlled by the CIA through MK Ultra methods.

1:02:46It's like you haven't you haven't read much about MK Ultra. If you think it was that successful, it really wasn't. Right. Well, oh, maybe that's a double fake. It could be. Yeah. Of course. Well, see, this is, in the last chapter of the book, I talk about conspiracy theories that come off of MK Ultra. And one of the techniques these conspiracy theorists use, there are two things that lead MK Ultra become a very to become a very popular conspiracy theory. One is that in the 1970s, when Sydney got lead was retiring from the CIA and also Richard Helms ahead of the CIA, they retired at the same time.

1:03:21They destroyed many of the MK Ultra files. They incinerated them because they didn't want anyone to know what they were had been up to because they did this. It's not as if we don't have files on it. We still have a lot. But because they did this, it opens the door for anyone to paint MK Ultra as anything they want to. Well, we don't know what was in those files. They're for MK Ultra. I mean, these are actually conspiracies. MK Ultra hosted human hunting expeditions for government officials, where they were hunt people or, you know, pop stars or MK Ultra mind controlled and there's child sex slaves and all kinds of stuff.

1:03:50But because the files many of them were destroyed. Who knows maybe that's in there. So this is the technique of the conspiracy theorists Can they prove any of that? No, they don't offer any documentary evidence nothing so they can't prove it But also they say well you can't disprove me because Tell me that I'm showing me that I'm wrong like it's not proven, but it can't be disproven. It's non falsifiable It's kind of like what the point what's the point? Yeah Okay, so when do things stop falling apart internally? Yeah, in the, so MK Ultra ends in 1963 about in several of the sub projects continue into the late 60s through a program called MK Search, which was kind of like a continuation of MK Ultra into the late 60s.

1:04:30But by that point, Sydney Gottlieb had moved on. He had become the head of the technical services division, kind of the, what came after the TSS, the TSD. And he was in charge of creating those gadgets and disguises and documents and stuff for the CIA for a while. So, he, MK Ultra kind of floundered after that. And in fact, in 1963, there was an internal CIA Inspector General report on MK Ultra. And the Inspector General, John Earman, he says in the report that his words, this is illegal and unethical. Okay, so, so it didn't last too much longer after that. And then in the 1970s, Gottlieb and Richard Helms retired.

1:05:07And they were kind of the main champions of it within the CIA. right. How does this all become litigious? When did the courts get involved? Yeah, the courts get involved really in the late 70s, but the reason why that happens is because in the late 1974 and into 1975, there are several executive and congressional committees that are set up to investigate past abuses of the intelligence community. So the Rockefeller Commission, the church committee, the Pike Committee, there are some leaks out of the CIA. And on the front page of the New York Times, they start publishing in late 1974 reports about how the CIA has been, has spied on anti -war protesters during the Vietnam war.

1:05:48And so these congressional committees were set up to investigate past abuses of the CIA. And one of those is MK Ultra. So during these investigations, it comes out that the CIA had been involved in these unwitting drug experiments that prompts several congressional hearings to launch investigations. So Sydney got lead to subpoenaed. He's in India at that point after he's retired, his wife had been grown up in India, had grown up there. And they were volunteering at a leprechaulony and he gets subpoenaed, he comes back to the United States and in exchange for testifying his lawyer works out a deal whereby he has granted immunity for anything that he says in exchange for his testimony.

1:06:25So he's never held accountable for what he does, he has immunity for it, but that's when this starts coming out. And once that starts coming out, many of the victims of these MK Ultra sub projects realize that wait a second, I didn't know, you know, I was involved in that project. I didn't know that it was funded by the CIA, and so they start suing the CIA. There are multiple lawsuits. One is from a group of prisoners from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where Carl Fifer was dosing them with LSD, especially. And so they sue the CIA, but eventually it's dismissed because the statute of limitations the judge says has run out, so they don't get anything.

1:06:59And then the other more successful lawsuit is that Orlecow lawsuit the victims of you and camera and his experiments and Montreal about eight or nine of them eventually sue the CIA the represented by The famous civil rights attorney Joseph Rao and his law partner James Turner and as part of this lawsuit Rao and Turner Take the depositions of many of these people not only the victims, but the perpetrators as well And that's how I got them except this lawsuit was settled out of court for were $750 ,000 to be split among the plaintiffs, and the depositions were never submitted at trial, and so they were in rouse papers where I found them.

1:07:35Oh, wow. So is that, is 750 ,000, is that the largest payout that comes off the back of all of this, is that the lion's share of the... It's tied for it, because Frank Olson's family, remember, he was dosed with LSD at that deep creek retreat, And he died his family after in the 1970s they realized during these congressional investigations that wait a second They're talking about an army employee who jumped out of this window and he died that that sounds a lot like our you know Husband or our father and so they eventually Threaten a lawsuit against the government but in order to prevent that from happening the Gerald Ford Administration invites them to the White House Gerald Ford the president personally meets with them and basically They apologize on behalf of the government and they work out a deal whereby the family got $750 ,000 in exchange for an agreement not to sue the government.

1:08:28So they got $750 ,000 as well. Yeah. Wow. What made the secrecy of all this self -sustaining when it came to the way that this was all operated? Yeah. There are several factors within the CIA that allowed this to continue. I think there was very little internal oversight. So one of those is that the CIA was very highly compartmentalized. So very few people actually knew what was going on with MK -Ultra. We think of the CIA as this entity, and there's all these people, and surely they're working behind the scenes, and that is the case for the most part, but it's not as if they all know what each other is doing.

1:09:03So for MK -Ultra, there might have been a dozen people who even knew about this project within the CIA. So when you have that much compartmentalization, it means that there's less accountability because there's less people to put you in check. So that's one problem that allowed this to happen is just the highly compartmentalized nature, which in a sense is a necessary kind of evil to a degree, because the CIA does have to keep secrets. I mean, it has to have some secrets. It's just the amount of how much should be kept secret and how many people should know about any particular thing. Of course, that's on a spectrum, but it's got to keep some, but that secrecy allows it to avoid accountability in many instances.

1:09:41So that's one factor. Another factor would be the lack of a record, the lack of a paper trail, mostly because Gottlieb and Helms destroyed many of these files, even though a lot still exist, and they were never punished for it. They were never punished for it. So there was no accountability for that. So Gottlieb got immunity, but what about the other guy? Richard Helms, he, I mean, nothing happened to him because of this. He eventually got, he eventually got in trouble for perjury in front of Congress for something unrelated. He said that we weren't... No, fuck's sake. Yeah. He said that we weren't doing something meddling in this foreign country.

1:10:16I forget exactly what it was, but it turns out he just lied to Congress and he got convicted of perjury for that. But yeah. So, those are a few factors within the CIA that enabled this to continue going without anyone putting a stop to it. And the reason why I think it continued for so long, especially, and there wasn't much accountability, is what I call kind of the vicious cycle of secrecy? There was very little congressional oversight of the CIA during the Cold War. In fact, many Congress people specifically said they didn't want to know what was going on in the CIA. I think this was a holdover from a World War II mentality where Congress didn't really know much about the Manhattan Project.

1:10:55They kind of just approved the funds for the Army to do kind of whatever. And so after the war, it seemed like that was a good idea. It was good that we didn't know this was going on. So we just finished the war with it. Yeah, it's great. We didn't know because we might have shut it down. It's great that we let these scientists do this thing because it can in the war for us that mentality carried over and The idea was that well within the CIA or the army Maybe it's in our best interest not really to peek into those nooks and crannies and the dark corners and see what they're doing Because maybe they're working on something that we don't know whether we should put a stop to something or not We're just gonna let them do what they do and so there was very little congressional oversight during the Cold War or I think that allowed this lack of accountability, this secrecy to encompass the CIA and allow them to do these unethical things.

1:11:41And kind of the vicious cycle of secrecy I mentioned is the idea that when you have an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that inevitably leads to plausible deniability. Because no one can really know what you're up to. Therefore, I mean, you can always say you didn't do something you did who's gonna find out it's secret. Plausible deniability in turn, it leads to reckless behavior. again, because you're not going to be held accountable for what you do. Reckless behavior in many instances, like with MK Ultra, it leads to embarrassment. Because eventually something leaks out, someone finds out they put it in the New York Times and were embarrassed for what happened, because they found out we were actually doing these unethical things.

1:12:18Then embarrassment leads to secrecy, because we may not have to make sure no one does this again. We can't have this leak out. We need more secrecy. So that's kind of the vicious cycle that plays out, I think. What does this sort of grow into? Are you aware of any more similar programs that occur after MK, obviously MK Ultra sort of tries to limp forward in a variety of other forms? After that is it all just secrecy and nothing's got out? I don't think anything like MK Ultra itself was happening really after the late 1960s. The conspiracy theorists listening to this will say no, it's still going on in K.

1:13:01Ultra. One conspiracy theory is called project monarch. They say this is kind of a sub -project of M. K. Ultra that you know, it's still going on and they're recruiting these children from certain families to have, they call them multi -generational incest abused children. They want to give them multiple personalities to make them disassociate from what's happening to them, so they're easier victims of these sex pedophiles or whatever it is. But the first mention that I can find of this project monarch, which didn't exist, is in a journal called Phoenix, it's this conspiracy journal, and the journal itself claims to have been written by a nine -foot tall alien from the Pleiades star system.

1:13:43So I don't really put much stock in that, but that seems to be kind of where this idea originated, one of the most prominent in K. Ultra conspiracy theorists who champions this kind of project monarch thing. She, after that came out a couple months later, she published an article in that journal saying, oh, I've been one of these, I've been one of the victims of project monarch, but I don't think that's true at all. Now, I think, ironically, I think she is a victim though. I don't think she's a victim of M. K. Ultra. She wrote a book about her supposed experience, and in that book, it's co -authored by her husband.

1:14:15And her husband was a member of what's called the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. It was like the pseudo -scientific conspiracy theory society that was championing satanic panic theories during the 1980s. And during that satanic panic, there were this kind of false memory syndrome that was going around the idea that if we hypnotize someone, it might induce their... they might recall these repressed memories. in fact, it was like inducing false memories in people. And he says in this book that he did this hypnotism on her and he was able to recover these memories. But I don't think he recovered the memories.

1:14:50I think those memories were basically implanted by her trying to think of something that happened to her that didn't actually happen. Well, the crazy thing is if you want to give someone multiple personality disorder, you don't need to deliver them drugs or CIA program. You just need to let them download TikTok. I give my TikTok and watch a ton of influences, is whatever it's called, the others or the multiples or whatever, you know, I don't know. There's been a ton of TikTok -injuiced ticks. Ticks, isn't it? And one of the, just a berserk fucking psychological malady that appears to have been hallucinated.

1:15:24Although, I mean, if you feel like you've got it, is it hallucination? It's there for you, right? Even if it's not in the classical sense. But yeah, multiple personality disorder. the newest trend, the newest psychological malady trend that appears to be swimming around on TikTok. And you know, you raised an interesting point because I don't think she's, I mean, I think she's sincere in the sense that I think this thing actually happened to her. So I don't think she's insincere like she's trying to do people. I think she falsely thinks this thing actually happened to her. And she will say something like, well, I know these memories must be true because they're so vivid to me.

1:15:58Like, you know, I can recall them so vividly. They're so traumatic. How could you forget something as traumatic is what I went through with these MK -Ultra experiments done on me, and I was prostituted to all these presidents and government officials and first ladies and whoever. But I mean, there was an experiment even before this that showed that even vivid and traumatic memories are just as likely to be false, as any other memories are likely to be false. This was when the challenger spatial exploded. I don't know if, you know, that was a while ago. But when that exploded at Emory University, there were a couple of psychologists who decided that day after that happened, they had their students write down everything they remembered about how they heard about the explosion.

1:16:35So where they were, who they were with, etc. And then a couple years later, they got 40 something of these students to take the same exact questionnaire when the challenger exploded. Where were you, who were you with, etc. A majority of the students got a majority of the significant details completely wrong. And when they were confronted with their original responses, many of them said, you know what, I think my present memory is actually the correct one. You know, that's a kind of like a version of the Mandela effect, right? Yeah, is that, can you remind me what is that exactly? It's a series of memories that people seem to have that upon closer inspection aren't true if you do the investigation.

1:17:17Like the Bernstein bears and the Bernstein bears, that kind of thing? The fruit of the loom logo. Yes, the co -ocopia had the best. If you want to fuck yourself up, search Mandela Effect Examples. Just do it with a couple of people and it will incite a Thanksgiving -sized argument. It will incite an Elon versus Trump -sized argument around the dinner table. Dr. John Lyle, ladies and gentlemen, John, you're so fucking good, man. This is awesome. Original research, deep in the archives, dusty old shit to come and mansplain like this interesting stuff to me. It's so cool. Why should people go? They're going to want to read the book, get all of your stuff.

1:17:59Yeah, the book is project mind control. If you want to keep up with me, I do have an X or Twitter, you know, it's just my name, John Lyle, J -O -H -N, L -I -S -L -E. I don't post often, but if I have an update about an upcoming project or something, that's where it would be. So that's the place. What are you working on, Nick? I asked you this last time, I got excited for this book. Can you, what do we know? I think the next one is going to be fairly different. I'm a historian of science at heart. This involves science and scientists, but I think I'm done with the intelligence community maybe for now.

1:18:31I'm ready to move on to something closer to my original, I mean, what I'm trained in, the history of science, more so. And so I'm really interested in a few expeditions. I like adventure stories. I've been reading like Hampton Sides into the Kingdom of Ice is such a good book about this polar expedition. So I thought I want to do the equivalent before for like a scientific expedition that is involved dangers and shootouts with bandits and snake attacks and man -eating dog attacks and falling over a cliff. So I think I found the story that has all that kind of stuff, but allows me to tie in some history of science, the history of evolution in an interesting expedition.

1:19:06So all that stuff, I think, will be packaged in a fun way. So I think that's the next project. Hurry up and write it so I can talk to you about it again. I appreciate you, man. Until next time. You too. Okay.