Part Four: MKUltra: When The CIA Tried to Destroy Free Will exposes how Gottlieb expanded the program in the late 1950s, funding experiments at Harvard and Stanford to create programmable humans. While Dr. West claimed hypnosis could replace true memories, cases like Jimmy Shaver's reveal clumsy incompetence rather than sophisticated control. The episode argues that destroyed records and bribes, not magic technology, drove these crimes, suggesting old methods of manipulation remain more effective than unproven mind-control fantasies today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:52
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
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Oh, Sophie, come on.
This is a time to celebrate.
This is the longest recording session we've ever had.
Five hours of CIA drug nonsense.
Eric Behind the Bastards.
The people deserved to hear me sing.
You know, I thought your beautiful Robert.
You did really well.
Thank you, Sophie.
Thank you.
Thank you for praising me.
I am a machine.
I love this.
Jason Pargin.
How are you doing today?
Well, the vibe has become so positive here, and I'm sure it is among the listeners too, because we now know that we're nearing the end of the MK Ultra project when everyone was exposed and got what they deserved.
That's right.
Like it's been a parade of human misery up till now that all of the people who instigated this, like we all know, well, yeah, but this is where they all go to jail.
This is where the truth comes to light, where all the reforms come into play.
So I know it's been a dark few episodes up to this point, but this is where it's like, okay, this is the sunrise.
This is the happy ending.
That's right.
And listeners, if that doesn't wind up happening, I want to tell you it is Jason Parjin's fault personally that things don't end that way.
Jason, before we move on, I want to let the listeners know you are the author of a whole bunch of books, but you have one that is just now coming out.
CIA Gadget Man Revealed00:15:16
If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe.
It is the fourth novel in the John Dies at the End series, which I started reading when I was like 12 or 13 and has had a big impact on my sense of humor.
So I cannot recommend your books enough.
You ready to close this out, Jason?
Yes.
Absolutely.
All right, let's do it.
So in between Trists and San Francisco, making use of all of the sex workers that the CIA was paying for, Gottlieb massively expanded the CIA's subcontractor program during the late 1950s using cutouts, these little fake corporations that he would have the agency create to sponsor research at a number of different institutions that you probably know today.
These include Massachusetts General Hospital, Ionia State Hospital, Mount Sinai, several dozen universities, including Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and Baylor.
The CIA is carrying out LSD tests.
They are drugging people, torturing people, depatterning them at many of these different universities.
Also, they're sometimes doing weirder stuff, some of which is less horrible than some of the stuff we've talked about today.
But like, if there's a big hospital or a prominent university, the CIA was probably doing some shit there.
Okay, the obvious question is, did these facilities know, do these institutions know what was going on?
The employees of those institutions who are running the programs do, right?
These are not, the CIA isn't sending agents into Berkeley or like Baylor to run things.
They are finding doctors and professors who want to carry out research that is in line with what the CIA wants to do.
And they are paying those people.
Now, some of those professors, those researchers don't know it's the CIA.
And some of this research is stuff that isn't all that fucked up.
It's like, hey, we want to know how this particular pattern of electroshock therapy might impact people with this condition.
And then they'll do the test.
And you never know.
You go the rest of your life not knowing that you just conducted research for the CIA, right?
That is some of this, but it's not most of this.
A lot of these doctors are perfectly aware of what they're doing and who they're working for, as we're going to make clear in a little bit.
So Gottlie's objectives at this point have spread well beyond where things were with Project Artichoke.
During long sessions on LSD with his friends, he gradually put together a list of the different substances he wanted to research.
He published this as a memo in 1955.
It included, number one, substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
Number two, substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
Number three, materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
Number four, materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
That's great.
Yeah.
Because just think of how such an invention would change the world.
You can get drunk on so much money.
Well, it'd be cheaper.
Can you imagine if just one beer could get you as drunk as 12 beers?
I can imagine, Jason, like in the movie version of this, Gottlieb like looking over as they're as they're taking the program apart, they're burning all everything.
He like Operation Stronger Alcohol and like files it away along with these like last couple of cans that you see gradually like make their way through the CIA's like underground labs until they wind up on the shelves of a bodega in New York City packaged as for loco.
Yes, Operation For Loco.
Yes.
The CIA's greatest success.
So we have been going through San Francisco and slipping cans of Forloco to unbeknownst to the residents there and observing their behavior.
It's almost like they've had three beers.
It's incredible.
Sydney, you've done it again.
So Gottlieb's wish list included substances that would enhance the efficacy of hypnosis, drugs that could help people avoid brainwashing, substances that could create pure euphoria with no crash, which sounds like he just wanted something to get high on.
And here's where things get sketchy, Jason.
Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
So it's a weird mix of things.
That one's pretty scary.
But what I'm not hearing in there is the classic Manchurian candidate thing.
And by the way, I don't, does everybody listening still know that term?
Like this is an old movie that we're referencing that's been remade a couple of times, but it's the classic thing of it's the brainwashed assassin, the person who doesn't know they're an assassin, where you can literally program someone, I guess like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall to like go assassinate somebody.
And then there's like a phrase that will activate them and like a zombie-like form.
They will pick up a gun, go shoot the queen or the president or whatever.
And it's important to note, Jason, I probably should have made this more of a factor in the script.
The book, The Manchurian Candidate, and like the movie have a big impact on this program.
A lot of like when that comes out, it gets them like another wave of interest and like Dulles, or I think I'm not sure if Dulles is around it then, but like they, and this is like a regular thing for the CIA, because Gottlieb, the thing he does after MK Ultra is he's the CIA's gadget man for years.
He's making anything they need.
And a lot of times someone will come to him because they've seen something in a James Bond movie and will just be like, hey, Sydney, can we actually like make this?
Like, hey, Sydney, can you put a gun in like a Rolex watch for me?
Hey, Sydney, can we like bulletproof a car like this?
You know, like that's actually how a lot of this does, this, this does work.
You know, and that actually, he is much more successful at the gadgets than he is at the mind control drugs, which again, as far as we know, he probably doesn't figure out.
Obviously, a lot of this is the result of Gottlieb having a limitless budget for research and kind of an unlimited purview for what he can do.
His friends and he would regularly read science fiction stories and spy thrillers, and then they'd fund experiments to try and create things inspired by the fiction they were reading.
This sometimes led to tragedy, like the time the CIA funded a study at a school in Massachusetts to feed mentally handicapped children cereal laced with uranium.
That's pretty bad.
That's a pretty bad thing to do.
Say that sentence again.
The CIA funded a study at a school in Massachusetts to feed mentally handicapped children cereal laced with uranium.
To what end?
Well, that's a good question, Jason.
The official purpose of the study, which was also conducted at Harvard, again, on mentally handicapped little kids, was to study whether or not cereal interfered with iron and calcium uptake in children.
Like that is the official story.
We don't know why the CIA would particularly be interested in doing that.
They may have had a different reason for doing it than that and then come up with an excuse.
We really don't know.
And the only way to find out this thing they wanted to know about cereal is uranium.
Feed them radioactive cereal.
Okay.
Yeah, there's versions of this that are normal where like people will be given, you know, radioactive in like a way that is not going to be harmful because it like allows you to tell how stuff is passing through your system.
I'm not.
It's higher contrast imaging.
It's so, yeah, so that it can be okay.
But this does, this was much more harmful than that.
And again, it's possible that for whatever reason, Gottlieb actually did just want to know, does cereal hurt iron and calcium uptake?
But it's one of those things.
These were studies that were conducted openly by the schools.
It was later that people found out the CIA was like helping to make it happen.
And we don't, we simply don't know exactly why they were involved.
So that's cool.
You can come up with your own conspiracy theories about that one.
Alan Dulles remained peripherally involved, treating MKUltra like an occasional pet project.
Sometimes he took it rather more seriously.
When his son suffered a severe head injury fighting in Korea, he started talking to specialists at psychiatric clinics.
This brought him to a neurologist named Harold Wolf, who worked at Cornell.
And I'm going to quote from Kinzer's Poisoner-in-Chief here.
Wolf shared Dulles' fascination with the idea of mind control.
He had developed a theory woven from various disciplines that a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation could wipe the mind clean and then open it to reprogramming.
He called this human ecology.
Dulles thought that Wolf might be useful to the CIA and sent him to Gottlieb.
Wolf was eager for CIA sponsorship.
He wrote several research proposals for Gottlieb.
In one, he proposed placing people in isolation chambers until they became receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist, showed an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure, and broke down to the point where doctors could create psychological reactions within them.
In another, he offered to test special methods of interrogation, including threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, black psychiatry, hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents.
Now, if you're a psychiatrist and you are offering to do something and you call it black psychiatry, maybe you're the bad guy, right?
That might be your hint.
And the funny thing is, of all the things that Scientology claims, the stuff about the dark origins of psychiatry is the one thing where they do have something about it.
There's not nothing to it, right?
Yeah.
It is there is, they do not, it's not, it is, it is not unfair to say that an awful lot of influential psychiatrists did unspeakable things as part of a government conspiracy to create mind control.
That is a thing that happened that is documented.
That is historical fact.
It was maybe a little too easy to find people with who were like, yeah, of course I'll do this for the country, right?
Sure, of course.
Yeah, for America.
So Wolf told Gottlieb that he had a constant supply of patients who he'd be happy to experiment on secretly for the CIA.
Gottlieb was very happy to make this deal, and the CIA sent $140,000 to Cornell University, officially so Wolf could study, quote, changes in behavior due to stress brought about by actual loss of cerebral tissues.
After a year or so of drugging people without their consent, Wolf made a proposition to Gottlieb if the CIA would fund his creation of an institute that would act as a funding hub for all of their NK Ultra sub-projects, or he would let it, he would use it to act as a funding hub for all their sub-projects.
The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology carried out hundreds of sub-projects for the agency.
One involved 100 Chinese refugees who were promised fellowships to help them start life in the United States.
In reality, they were drugged to see if they could be programmed to go back to China and commit acts of terrorism.
So the book The Manchurian Candidate is about a bunch of like Americans who get captured by the Chinese and then sent back to the United States having been secretly programmed to do, you know, damage the United States.
In reality, the CIA read that book and then were like, what if we did that to China?
Wouldn't that be cool?
Let's use refugees and give them acid to see if we can do this.
So that's neat, Jason.
There you go.
No, I have nothing to say to that.
Because again, if they had just gone to this.
What do you say?
If they had just gone to this group or any group, this is not specific to Chinese refugees, but any group of desperate people and said, hey, this is what we in America call a suitcase full of cash.
Which one of you in exchange for this hates your government enough that you will go blow something up?
And you will be, you'll have this and this, this, see this sports car parked behind me?
That will also be yours.
And all of these sex workers that we've hired.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, again, you could appeal to like, yeah, do you want, do you want to be rich and like have access to sex?
Or like, hey, you're probably going to die doing this, but we'll make sure your family's taken care of forever.
They'll move into a nice house tomorrow.
They'll never have to work again.
Just go do this terrorism for us over in China.
Yeah, you'd find people.
You don't have to give them LSD.
Yeah, you're not going to help.
You'd find somebody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like government, again, governments have done versions of this forever without randomly dosing refugees with LSD.
But that's what the CIA does.
So, well, and that's what Cornell University does.
One of the things, again, one of the through lines here is that an awful lot of the most prestigious universities have highly placed faculty who are immediately like, yeah, let's do it.
Now, while MKUltra's different sub-projects were dizzying in their variety, the primary goal was always very clear to develop a repeatable, efficient method of mind control.
This was expressed in various ways.
The quest for a perfect truth serum, the quest for a drug that could eliminate memories or rewrite them, methods by which people could be reprogrammed to carry out actions against their old moral beliefs and political allegiances, right?
There's different specific projects, but the overall goal is always the same, which is to end the concept of free will by turning people into programmable machines.
That's what they're trying to do, right?
Like that's a fair description.
Like when you're saying we want to be able to like rewrite someone's memories and make them carry out a terrorist attack against their old government, like that's kind of what you're saying.
But I think the listeners have the same confusion I do, because there is nothing that they've seen in terms of results up till now that we know about that has gotten them even 1% of the way to that.
Because you're literally talking about having somebody carry out a complex series of instructions, including being able to improvise on the fly things that a highly motivated, highly trained person would do and doing it entirely against their will.
When the closest they've gotten up to now is what?
It's just people going crazy, people having seizures, people like one guy we think maybe went and robbed a liquor store.
It wasn't like they implanted that idea.
Like they've been successful at making people go crazy.
They've been successful at making people lose their memories, lose basic function.
But in terms of saying, okay, we're now at a stage where we're ready to try this.
We're ready to try to turn a human into a robot.
It's like you have no data and no protocols or no anything that even is like the beginnings of like, can we trick this person into preferring a different color of shoe?
Unethical Mind Control Experiments00:06:59
Like wherever you would start if you were actually using a scientific method of like building up to this, you see what I'm saying?
Yeah.
It feels like they're taking almost like a child's idea of how this would work.
It's like, okay, we've given a bunch of drugs to a bunch of strangers.
We've given some radioactive cereal to some kids.
I think now we're ready to take actual human beings and see if we can program them to become super assassins.
It's one of those, we're building to kind of the very murky story of what might be their greatest success.
We don't 100% know.
But I think one of the things that's going on here, and one of the things that's in the background of all of this, is the Manhattan Project, right?
Which is a thing that would have seemed impossible 10 years earlier, right?
That you can make something like an atomic bomb, that you can split an atom, and that you can create nuclear power from this as well, not just the weapon.
Like it all is this absolute sci-fi thing that barely, when they started researching it, they put a shitload of money and time into the Manhattan Project before they 100% knew it was going to work, right?
The CIA sees this project, the goal of perfect mind control, as a Manhattan project.
Historian Alfred McCoy refers to it as a veritable Manhattan project of the mind, right?
That's how they're thinking about it.
So the fact that it's hard and that they're not having early success and that they're burning up this much money and all of these human beings to do it, to people who are thinking about this as a Manhattan Project style thing, it's not weird to them, right?
You know, that is how they're thinking about this.
Dr. Cameron's work in depatterning people over at McGill University is a really good example of like the scope of ambition of this project.
In a paper that Cameron published at the start of his work for the CIA, he said this about the goal of his research, quote, if we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs.
And that's a very prosaic way of saying we can eliminate types of human being and types of thought from the species, right?
That's the ambition here.
Right.
And brainwashing someone in terms of like sending them to a camp to make them, you know, like if they've expressed anti-government attitudes and you've got a method, you know, they have this in North Korea, they have this all over the world where you can send them off.
And then it's basically you torture them in various ways until they learn not to say anything bad about the government.
I don't think you've successfully changed anybody's attitude.
You've changed their willingness to, it's like, I don't want to come back here.
So yes, I'll say whatever you want me to say.
It's just that I guess they would say the same thing about the Manhattan Project that like they screwed around with so many different things and then finally they had a bomb.
And for us, it's going to be the same thing.
Like we're going to keep trying stuff and throwing stuff at the wall and then we're going to come across a compound or a treatment or a protocol that is going to give us like it's just going to happen.
It's going to be like our test in the desert where the first time they see the bomb go up, we're going to get that perfect.
It's just it feels like everything they've done up to this point hasn't been building toward anything.
It doesn't feel like they're any more sophisticated in their methods this many years into it than they were when they first started.
I will say one thing about that.
They are, they do start using more outside scientists.
And these scientists, they're not doing what White was doing, right?
They are actually conducting, yeah, they're not like pooping and watching this stuff.
They're actually conducting experiments, not ethical experiments, but you can see the CIA wants their perfect mind control drug.
These doctors see it as like, well, if I can create, if I can find this drug they want, I can just tell people to stop being schizophrenic or whatever.
And then I'll be the man who cured schizophrenia, you know, like that's how I think they're thinking about it.
I think that's how a guy like Dr. Cameron is thinking about it is I can be the man who cured obsessive compulsive disorder, right?
Or cured whatever, you know?
To be clear, if you're a legitimate scientist or a doctor that deals with the brain or mental illness and this is where the funding is on this research, you absolutely want in on it.
Like I would absolutely, in their position, it's like, yes, I'm also helping them develop a weapon, but yes, I also potentially have the cure for every bad thing that happens to the human brain.
Yeah, I'm gonna, this is where I need to be.
This is where the funding is.
I get it.
Now, granted, when they sit me down for the meeting and they say, okay, here's what we've done so far.
Have you heard of George White?
Or is that his name?
Yeah, here's some of his work and here's some of his results.
You see his toilet there and his martini bar he has next to it.
Now, this did not actually yield the results we wanted, but we just wanted to show you, we wanted to bring you up to date.
Yeah, this is the research so far.
Do you have any hints?
I mean, and obviously most of these guys, there's a couple who get brought into confidence that way.
Most of them don't know what else has been done.
They don't know even there's an MK.
Even the ones who are doing messed up stuff, they don't know that like my program where I'm trying to break people's minds is part of this like massive thing they're doing in, you know, all of these black sites around the world.
I'm they, a lot of them probably think I'm the only one doing this research, right?
And the CIA is the only one who will fund it.
And it's so important that, you know, a number of things are happening here.
But yeah, it's, it's, I mean, the thing that's scariest to me is that stuff that Cameron says about like we can free ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs that like, cause a lot of these guys, a lot of this is out of anti-communism, right?
It's not a thing that like we want a drug that we can give people to make them not be communists.
You know, and then maybe we can make them, you know, double agents and stuff.
But like the idea, the idea of wanting to like rewrite people's thoughts at that level, which is their expressed goal, is the scariest thing about this.
And one of the things that's like most unsettling is we don't 100% know where the research ended.
And this brings me to the most unsettling story in the series.
Oh, Jesus.
Yeah, but before we do that, you know what isn't unsettling?
The products and services who support this podcast, none of whom is looking for a way to destroy the concept of you cannot say that, though.
They're not.
I said they're not looking for a way to do that, Sophie.
They're not, as far as you know.
I mean, we don't pick most of our sponsors.
The Unsettling Truth About Sponsors00:03:49
You really do.
And actually, the CIA has advertised on this podcast.
So, I don't know.
You're lying?
Yes, just like the CIA.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
Government Programmed Assassin00:15:45
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back talking about the agency.
So, Jason, I promised you I'm going to tell you the most unsettling story in this series.
Now, this is going to be kind of unclear.
I do not have perfect answers to you as to what is going on.
I'm going to try to read you the facts of this case as they exist, and then we will talk about what might have happened here.
So, this is the story of Dr. Louis Jollian West.
Jolly was his nickname.
He was the head of psychiatric services at Lackland Air Force Base for much of the 1950s.
And as you probably guessed, he was also a CIA asset.
Born in 1924, Jolly West, as his friends knew him, had enlisted in the Air Force for World War II and retired as a colonel.
He was a big, friendly man, and when he left the service.
Jolly West, baby.
Red flag.
Yeah, he's a jolly man.
He goes to Cornell to follow up on his fascination with different methods of controlling the behavior of human beings.
He wound up being one of the shrinks who worked with POWs captured in Korea, right?
You know, those guys we talked about earlier who claim to have dropped biological weapons, right?
That the CIA thinks they've been brainwashed.
Jolly West is the guy that the psychiatrist the CIA brings in to debrief them, right?
And he succeeds in kind of quote-unquote deprogramming those men.
He gets them to renounce the claims they'd made while being captured, which he gets big kudos from the CIA for this.
You might not, you might say, well, that's not really that impressed.
If they were just like beaten until they said they dropped chemical weapons and then he was like, hey guys, you're in America now.
You should probably tell people you didn't.
It's maybe not the hardest thing in the world, right?
But whatever.
He gets a lot of credit for deprogramming these guys.
So thanks to letters between West and Gottlieb, which we acquired after West's death, we know that both men started working together in 1953.
And I'm going to quote now from The Intercept.
Addressing Gottlieb as SG, West outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis.
He began with a plan to discover the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs, possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation or the alteration of the subject's recollection of the information he formerly knew.
Another item proposed honing techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.
He hoped to create couriers who would carry a long and complex message embedded secretly in their minds and to study the induction of trance-like states by drugs.
So he's not just wanting to make a mind, he wants to, number one, induce mental illness in people.
He wants to see if he can do that.
He wants to create memories and destroy them.
He's interested in experimenting with all of that.
And obviously, Gottlieb is completely on board with this.
In 1956, West reported to Gottlieb that his experiments had come to fruition.
In a paper titled, The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility, he claimed to have discovered a replicable method of replacing true memories with false ones in human beings without their knowledge.
Quote, it has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different fictional event actually did occur.
West claimed to have accomplished this by giving patients new drugs, which ones was not specified in the papers that we have.
These drugs were apparently effective in, quote, speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and deepening the hypnotic trance.
Specific information is, again, impossible to find here.
The version of the study found in West's papers is longer and more detailed.
This was found years after his death.
He was not supposed to have kept this.
The CIA, before this version is found, sends a copy of this study to a Senate committee when they start investigating MKUltra.
And the copy the CIA has is missing a bunch of stuff that's later found in the copy that's in Jolly West's memoirs, right?
Like that's in his collection of stuff.
So the CIA's version of this that they actually send to that Senate committee cuts out any mention of West's claims to have found a way to replace real memories with fake ones.
And it also adds in a passage that's not in West's draft, which reads, the effects of LSD and other drugs upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied.
Now, we know that this is untrue, but that begs the question, what did Dr. West actually find?
Now, we're not going to get an answer to that today, but I do have a story that is going to make you feel bad.
On July 4th, 1954, in San Antonio, a three-year-old girl named Cher Joe Horton was raped and murdered.
When her parents noticed her missing, they formed a search party.
They eventually found her body next to a gravel pit, alongside a shirtless man covered in blood and scratches.
He was described as seeming dazed and in a trance-like state.
The man eventually charged with and convicted of Cher Joe Horton's murder was a guy named Jimmy Shaver.
He was an airman at Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record.
Shaver claimed no memory of the murder.
And here's the intercept again.
Around 4 that morning, an Air Force Marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn't drunk.
One later testified that he probably was not normal.
He was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.
He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.
Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning.
When his wife came to visit, he didn't recognize her.
He gave his first statement at 10.30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible.
He could summon an image of a stranger with blonde hair and tattoos.
After the Air Force Marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement, taking full responsibility.
Though he still didn't remember anything, he reasoned, he must have done it.
Two months later, Airman Shaver still reported no memories of the murder.
The commander of the base hospital ordered him evaluated.
Said evaluation was performed by the head of psychiatric services for Lackland, Dr. Lewis Jollian West.
Shaver and West spent two weeks together.
They returned to the scene of the crime, and West eventually hypnotized Shaver and injected him with sodium pentothal to clear his amnesia.
Eventually, while drugged, Shaver recalled remembering the act of murdering Horton.
He told Dr. West that the little girl had brought out repressed memories of his own cousin, who he said had molested him when he was a child.
Later, Shaver took back this confession.
Eventually, segments of West's drugged interview with Shaver were read into the court record.
The doctor had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime.
Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy, he'd said.
The transcript of the interview, which survived among West's papers, also showed West trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories.
Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?
Or after you took her clothes off, what did you do?
I never did take her clothes off, Shaver said.
The interview was divided into thirds, and the middle third hadn't been recorded.
When the transcript picked up, it said, Shaver is crying.
He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.
West asked, now you remember it all, don't you, Jimmy?
Yes, sir, Shaver replied.
So...
We don't know precisely what happened here.
We know that a young girl was murdered.
We know that a guy who claimed no memory of the murder confessed and then took back his confession and then sat down with the guy who has claimed that he can create false memories in people and remove actual memories and then temporarily comes forward and says that he did it, but never really seems to have any memory of it and eventually recants that confession.
Now, at the time, there's nothing known publicly about the MKUltra program.
But Shaver's lawyers did learn that earlier before the murder, he had suffered from migraines that had debilitated him enough that the Air Force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program at Lackland Air Base.
This program would have been run from the same facilities where Dr. West did his research for the CIA.
There is no record of what doctor had attempted to recruit Shaver, and there's no record of Shaver in the Lackland Hospital official master index of patients, right?
So there's no evidence that he went into Lackland Hospital and was treated prior to the murder for his headaches.
However, the index that would include his patient record is incomplete.
The base archivist told the court that all records for patients in 1954 with last names beginning with SA through ST had been destroyed.
There was no explanation for why this had happened.
Shaver was sentenced to death and eventually executed by the state.
Here's the thing.
I don't think the conspiracy version of this requires anything advanced or magical or it doesn't.
No.
It is if they did exactly what we've already seen them do, where they just break people down to where all of their normal executive functions have ceased through just sleep deprivation or traumatizing them over and over again or whatever.
Again, it's not difficult to do this.
And then the guy went out and did, like, it doesn't require them to program him to go out and kill.
It just requires them to whatever failed treatments they gave him to have just screwed up his head to the point where he no longer was in control of his actions, similar to the guy that thought that he, you know, had spontaneously robbed a liquor store.
Because once you remove the frontal lobe's ability to govern your actions, you just start doing weird stuff.
And, you know, whatever is in your subconscious or whatever primal urge that a person has.
It just doesn't take sophisticated mind control to make that happen.
It just, you mess up enough people over a long enough period that somebody's going to go out and commit a murder or beat someone to death or get into a fight at a bar.
It's just this particular guy.
If that's what happened, he just acted on some urge.
And probably the girl was just a target of opportunity.
She was just small enough and defenseless enough that.
And we don't even know.
I mean, it's entirely possible that she was murdered by someone else who doesn't get caught.
And he's just someone that this doctor is working with who is being dosed around the time and who they're like, I wonder if we can convince him he did it.
You know, that is not beyond the pale for what it does.
It also does not require them to have figured out a mind control drug.
It's certainly not beyond the pale of the stuff they've done.
Yeah, by the way, getting confessions out of people is nothing.
Like the whole era of with DNA and going back and checking for crimes, like we found something like in a third of the cases where they exonerated people, they had confessions.
Yeah.
They confessed to a crime they didn't commit.
That happens every day.
And again, doesn't.
So whatever happened, I mean, and again, we don't know exactly what went down here.
Like, and we, we never will for reasons I'll get to, but like something bad.
I feel confident saying that.
And when we talk about, there's obviously there's a more conspiratorial version.
Like we could, Jay, we could turn this into a slightly different podcast and say this is clear evidence that the CIA developed a mind control poison, right?
And if you want to take that, there's all these little facts that you can use to like make, put together what seems like a more convincing conspiracy theory case.
For example, Jason, in 1963, immediately after the Kennedy assassination, there's a psychiatrist who gets brought in to examine Jack Ruby, the guy who'd murdered Lee Harvey Oswald.
And it's Dr. Jolly and West.
Now, West speaks to Ruby right before he testifies to the Warren Commission, and he tells them that Ruby suffered an acute psychotic break, and Ruby is never able to form to fully explain to the commission why he chose to assassinate Oswald.
You can make a bunch of conspiracies about that.
There's also the thing that makes total sense, which is, well, back when those fucking pilots got brought back, having been like brainwashed or whatever, Jolly's the guy they sent in to talk to him.
It's not unreasonable that you would assume that maybe a foreign power was responsible for something to do with the JFK assassination.
So the CIA is going to send in the guy they normally send in to talk to people in this situation.
And Jolly has a history doing that, right?
It doesn't mean that Ruby was like a programmed CIA LSD assassin.
But all of this stuff is just close enough that like you get part of like why conspiracy culture becomes the thing that it is that is such a problem for all of us is there's a lot of reasons to be conspiratorial, particularly about this period in American history, right?
Like it's not, it's not, you're not like doing something unreasonable if you're like, well, shit, maybe they did figure out something, right?
Like there's all these little pieces of fucked up stuff here, and we know what they were trying to do.
And a lot of a lot of the QAnon, terrible stuff that's going around today that's causing so much of a fucking catastrophic problem for our society, part of why that is so effective and able to spread so much is all of this shit seeds the ground, right?
They've provided a fertile environment for which, well, nothing's impossible.
Nothing is beyond the kind of shit our government might try to do, right?
It's not like, I think that's one of the maybe unrecognized crimes of the MK Ultra program is they're going to provide justification for a thousand conspiracy movements because of how fucked up the shit they're trying to do is, even if they never accomplish any of it.
Right.
And the issue with usually the issue with conspiracies is that they assume a much higher level of competence and precision and everything else than what you actually get.
For example, if we only had a gap where that guy's toilet sex dungeon was, there had been a conspiracy coming up suggesting that that had occurred.
I would have no problem with that because it's like, yeah, I can see this getting out of hand.
There's no one, there's no grown-ups in the room.
So yeah, I can believe the rumors that this guy had a toilet martini sex dungeon going on with CIA money because that's the kind of thing people do.
The issue is that it almost ascribes, it almost gives them too much credit to where if you see something like the JFK assassination, you say, well, I'll bet Oswald was actually a robot controlled.
Conspiracies Overstate Competence00:02:34
Programmed.
Yeah, he was programmed by government.
Because the reality is that there were failures in terms of security, in terms of the protocols they're following, in terms of like everything that a man like Kennedy, that the whole world can pivot on one, frankly, kind of a dumbass with a gun who just happens to be a good shot.
Yeah.
And like Jack Ruby, that appears, was an even bigger dumbass who actually made the decision to shoot Oswald as like a spontaneous, like he just ran home and got his gun and decided to do it.
Like it wasn't even a planned thing as far as I could tell.
It was just, he was just a local dumbass who thought, hey, I'll go shoot Oswald.
And again, he changed history because that launched a whole universe of its own conspiracy theories.
I don't know.
I think that people want to believe it's weird because they want to believe the CIA is almost like godlike in its abilities, that it can work magic, that they can do things that are totally unknown to science.
And when you find out the reality, it's almost disappointing, even though the things they are actually guilty of horrible, yeah, are worse because it was done with.
So it was done so irresponsibly and with such lack of care where you would almost prefer a bond villain.
That's trying to.
That's, you know, trying to pull the string.
That's like no, the actual things that that we've done in Central America and elsewhere.
It doesn't require a sophisticated master plan, it just requires, you know, a fruit company saying hey, the locals are trying to unionize as we've, as we keep saying, the only thing necessary here is not deep, like incredibly complicated conspiracies, including magical mind control drugs.
It's money and a willingness to hurt people.
Yeah, very powerful people saying hey, this is gonna lower our stock price by several points unless, unless this guy who's threatening to become president, unless something bad happens to him.
And it doesn't require uh, you know, a mind-controlled assassin.
The old ways work just fine.
Propaganda still works, bribing the right people still works, killing the right people works really well, that's the best way to do it.
Um, which is actually Jason, leads me to our sponsor for this episode, because you know when you need the right person killed.
Um, you know the, the president of Chile, for example.
Old Ways Still Work Fine00:03:03
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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Charles Manson and the CIA00:15:18
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There's a lot of luck.
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Is Fiverr still a thing?
Yeah, Fiverr.
That's what's going to be the next government overthrown is through fucking Fiverr.
It is.
Like, when it comes to incompetent CIA shit, one of the reasons why I'm willing to like, yeah, I think maybe that attempt by those weird U.S. contractor guys to overthrow the government of Venezuela might have been a CIA op is that it ended with them all pissing on themselves after getting captured by fishermen.
Like they did.
Right.
Like they're just not, they're not, they, they succeed because they have infinite resources a lot of the time, but it's not because they're the most competent people in the world.
Anyway, by the early 1960s, MK Ultra was officially seen by Sidney Gottlieb as a failure.
The program was gradually wound down and Gottlieb went out to spend the rest of his career designing James Bond style assassination devices.
He tries to kill Fidel Castro so many times.
He flies to the Congo to try to poison Patrice Lumumba.
It doesn't work out often for him.
He's not, and usually because other things happen, they just never use the poison, but he makes a lot of poisons.
In 1964, the MK Ultra program, which by that point is known to be a failure, is renamed MK Search, which again, terrible kryptonym.
But as far as we know, most of the experiments were wound down after this point.
However, as this passage from Poisoner in Chief makes clear, Gottlieb remained actively pursuing mind control technology, even after MK Ultra proved a disappointment.
Quote, in their behavior laboratories, the psychiatrists and psychologists continued experimenting.
Once more, they had turned to an earlier line of research, implanting electrodes in the brain.
An agency team flew to Saigon in July 1968.
Among them were a neurosurgeon and a neurologist.
In a closed-off compound at Binh Hoa Hospital, the agency team set to work.
Three Viet Cong prisoners had been selected by the local station.
How or why they were chosen would remain uncertain.
In turn, each man was anesthetized, and after he had hinged back a flap in their skulls, the neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain.
When the prisoners regained consciousness, the behaviorists set to work.
The prisoners were placed in a room and given knives.
Pressing the control buttons on their handsets, the behaviorists tried to arouse their subjects to violence.
Nothing happened.
For a whole week, the doctors tried to make the men attack each other.
Baffled at their lack of success, the team flew back to Washington.
As previously arranged in case of failure, while the physicians were still in the air, the prisoners were shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned.
And this is all stuff that happened before Gottlieb went to prison.
Like, I'm sure the listeners are waiting for the point where he's goes to jail.
Don't worry.
It's coming up right now, Jason.
So in 1972, it becomes obvious that Congress was going to look into MKUltra.
CIA Director Richard Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all records of the programs.
Everything we know now came from caches of papers that were missed and odd bits of correspondence from MKUltra partners like Dr. West.
No full investigation into the program will ever be possible because again, all of the records are destroyed.
They miss like 8,000 pages.
A bunch of these doctors they use as contractors have stuff that gets found by journalists and stuff later.
But we do not know everything that was done under this program, and we have no accounting of how many people were hurt.
None of that kind of stuff.
Gottlieb burns it all.
And then a year or so later, he retires from the CIA.
So that's pretty cool.
And yeah, in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson looked out at the growing protest movement against the Vietnam War and the occupation of several college campuses by anti-war radicals.
He ordered CIA Director Richard Helms, who is the guy like right after Alan Dulles gets shit canned.
Helms is, by the way, the guy who later orders the MK Ultra records destroyed, to launch an illegal domestic surveillance program, codenamed Chaos.
And I'm going to quote now from Tom O'Neill.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Like they're just, they keep getting worse at the cryptonyms.
So I'm going to quote now from Tom O'Neill's book, Chaos, which is a history of the Charles Manson murders as a spoiler for where we're headed here.
That August, with the president's approval, CIA Director Richard Helms authorized an illegal domestic surveillance program codenamed Chaos.
Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover revived the FBI's dormant counterinsurgency program, COINTELPRO.
Both agencies opened the first offices of their respective operations in San Francisco, still considered ground zero for the revolution, especially since the founding of the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland the previous summer.
Thanks to these two secret programs and their network of well-placed informants, there was an all-out war raging in California by the summer of 69.
The FBI and the CIA had induced the left to feed on itself.
Among competing factions, what had been sectarian strife devolved into outright violence.
Now, there is credible evidence to suggest that Charles Manson was, for whatever reason, of interest to the CIA.
This is Timba O'Neill's book, Chaos, deals with this in a lot of detail.
It's all very messy.
There's nothing perfectly clear.
There's two different guys who were close to him who had ties to the agency.
One guy who was probably a CIA contractor, like an actual like doing shit on the ground man, who was tied into Manson, who was there after the murders, probably, but before the murders got reported to the LAPD, Who was very likely tied to the agency.
We don't know what he was doing.
He claimed that, like, he was, because he talked a few times to people and even helped write a book with a former FBI agent and made the repeated claim that like something had this wasn't supposed to happen and like something had gone wrong.
I'm going to tell you right now, because all this is very messy, the most likely reason why the murders are committed is essentially a series of drug deals and relationships gone bad and everything kind of escalates and you have these people who are not particularly tied in mentally taking a lot of drugs and like getting scared about like Manson at one point shoots a guy that he thinks is a Black Panther.
So he's convinced the Panthers are coming after him.
This is all really fucking messy.
But there are one of the reasons why there's a lot of conspiracy theories that like the CIA programmed Manson is twofold.
Number one, Manson is giving these young, mostly women, but there's some of them are men who he has do the actual murders.
He's giving them a shitload of acid and using that to kind of reprogram them, right?
That's a thing, especially in the book Helter Skelter that gets brought up a bunch.
There's debate as to the extent to which he was actually trying to program them and the extent to which they were all just taking acid.
But they were taking a lot of acid, which probably had its, because of where the acid was coming from, there's a good chance a lot of the acid they did came out of MKUltra one way or the other.
That's one reason people get conspiratorial.
And then there's a couple of guys, one of whom is for a while Manson's parole officer, who like he keeps getting off for stuff he shouldn't get off for.
He gets like arrested while he's on patrol with guns and drugs and with stolen cars.
He keeps getting at one point after the murders, when people are talking that Manson and his family may have been the people who did it, the LAPD carries out the largest raid in their history at his compound and arrests he and his cult members for like stealing cars.
And then they all get released, even though he's a paroled convict and shouldn't have been near any of this stuff.
So there's all this like, we don't really know what's going on.
And it may not even be that it was, it's possible he was like an FBI informant.
And so that's why he kept until they realized he was tied to the murders, kept getting out.
It's just all like, again, you see why, where all of these fucking conspiracy theories can come from, right?
There's all of this, there's all of this like territory in which you can kind of maneuver to set up a story about what had happened.
And again, it doesn't require there actually being anything because Charles Manson was a messed up and abusive dude.
And like, it's not like cult leaders convince people to kill people all of the time without the CIA being involved.
But the CIA was involved to some extent.
We just don't know the precise reasons why.
Right.
See, here's the thing.
If your imagination goes off in a direction of, well, maybe this was the ultimate experiment to see if they could create a perfect assassin, da-da-da.
Look, if somehow, through happenstance, the CIA and the people involved in NK-Ultra came across Charles Manson and tried to get him to do one thing or another.
If you knew the full story, every detail of it, if someone wrote the book of exactly what happened, I can promise you that what occurred was dumb as hell.
Yep.
Like the killings were an accident.
He didn't do what they asked.
It was a clumsy, stupid, just whole, just a carnival of nonsense.
I'm saying that based on every single other thing we know about MKUltra.
If there was involvement, it was not successful.
It was a very dumb person who had, I mean, Charles Manson's background was horrible.
He was abused as a child.
He was a weirdo.
The people he surrounded himself with, like Tex Watson, were for the most part very stupid.
And the whole thing with the killings may have been largely a misunderstanding or a spur of the moment thing or whatever.
Because I think, based on what I know of the Manson murders, his whole like what he told these people around him that they basically formed the cult where he told them that there was a race war coming and they needed to go out into a compound and on and on.
I believe he made up all that stuff because those people, those people hung around him because he was about to be a successful musician and get a record deal.
And he's really tied in with the fucking Beach Boys.
Yeah.
And when the record deal fell through, he just didn't want his groupies to go away.
So he made up this lie so they would stick around because he didn't want to be lonely.
Like, I fully believe that whole thing began and ended with Charles Manson not wanting these hot girls who hung around him all the time to leave.
So he's like, no, the world's about to end because it's going to be race war.
And I can sort of do a Manson voice, not really.
There's, I mean, because there's also, and I, again, O'Neill's book goes into it.
There's like a Hollywood kind of drug dealing thing here, too.
A lot of it may have involved like money and just kind of, but that's, that's outside of the scope of these episodes.
Um, when it comes to the CIA's involvement, it's there's, there's a lot of ugly connections, including the fact our friend Dr. Jolly and West is during the period that Manson is in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco.
West is there too, running a free clinic with a guy named David Smith.
Um, and West is one of the things he's doing is he's operating, he's renting out a house on Frederick Street, which he's turned into a laboratory designed as a hippie crash pad.
And he is once again, using CIA resources, giving a shitload of drugs to people.
Um, while he has now, in this case, he actually has grad students observing the hippies and like taking notes.
And most of those grad students, they people talk to them.
You can talk to these people.
Like, results were published.
The grad students are like, this is a shitty study.
I don't understand what he's trying to do.
Like, we're not really getting anything.
But Manson is kind of around at the time.
There's, there's some connections there.
And kind of the thing that O'Neill brings up that I think is actually plausible in terms of there being a degree of CIA involvement here is that we do know multiple police officers who had interactions with Manson and like arrested him and were looking into him at this period before and after the murders say that it was well known in the Los Angeles police department that like Charles Manson had some feds who had his back and that you were not supposed to like mess with him.
You were not supposed to like keep him in.
And so when he would get arrested, he would get let out because somebody was like, and there's a number of reasons for this.
It could have been he was informing for the FBI.
But one possibility is that either the FBI or the CIA, not that they were like trying turning Charles Manson and his followers into assassins, but that they were like, well, this is dangerous.
This guy is dangerous.
What he's doing with these people are dangerous.
Eventually something terrible is going to happen.
And our, our, the, the order that we have from our boss is to fuck with the hippies, right?
Is to like do some damage to this kind of flower power movement.
So if we let this guy who is like the poster child for the worst things that can happen to like when you turn tune in, turn on and drop out, if we just let him do stuff for a while, eventually he'll do something horrible.
And then it'll do damage to these, this movement that's, you know, we've been, we've been brought in as part of Operation Chaos to Hurt.
And it was kind of the end of the hippie.
It absolutely was.
And I'm going to, I'm going to read a quote from Tip O'Neill one more, or Tom O'Neill one more time.
Jeez, Tip O'Neill.
It struck me that the Tate Labianca murders had been so often invoked as the death knell of the 60s.
Arguably, they did more than any other event to turn the public opinion against the hippies, recasting the peace and love flower power ethos as a thing of latent, drug-added criminality.
As the writer Tom Gitlin noted, for the mass media, the acid head Charles Manson was ready-made as the monster lurking in the heart of every long hair.
So, yeah, who knows what went on there?
Something.
MKUltra Secrets Finally Break Out00:10:22
We just will never quite know what.
In 1974, the details of the MKUltra finally broke out into public knowledge after a report from Seymour Hirsch for the New York Times.
This reporting helped spawn the church committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
In the church committee's final report, they quoted from a 1957 internal evaluation by the CIA.
Precautions must be taken, the document warned, to conceal these activities from the American public in general.
The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions.
Don't let them know about this.
Like the first time someone from the agency who's not Gottlieb or Dolas actually looks at what they're doing, they're like, oh my God, don't let anyone know what we're doing.
We have to hide this shit at all costs.
And they do.
A more haunting reveal is that in 1963, a review by the Inspector General of the CIA included this line.
A final phase of the testing of MKUltra products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.
I don't know precisely what that means because we don't know what all of the products were, but kind of a sketchy little line there.
Sidney Gottlieb burns all of his records.
This comes out in the congressional investigation.
He is recalled to Washington.
So when he retires, he and his wife travel to run a clinic for lepers in like India.
Like they're like traveling around the world just like trying to do good.
I don't know what's going on in this man's head.
But yeah, he goes back to DC.
He claims that he's in bad health and so he can't address the entire Senate chamber.
And so in a private room, he's questioned and the American people can hear on a loudspeaker as he tells everyone that he's destroyed the MKUltra files.
Now, he says this was not to cover up illegal activity, but quote, because this material was sensitive and capable of being misunderstood.
I don't know what's more misunderstood.
Like, if you're trying to not let people conspiracy about this, Sidney, burning it all probably isn't the right thing to do.
It could be taken the wrong way.
Wow, the fact that we were doing all this could really be taken the wrong way.
I better light all this on fire so nobody thinks we're bad guys.
That way they can just fill in the void with their imaginations.
Yeah, exactly.
That way, and then there won't be any conspiracy theories.
Gottlieb says under congressional like testimony that he cannot provide specific information on any MKUltra experiments because he's never witnessed any himself.
He was investigated for federal crimes due to his destruction of government files, which is absolutely illegal.
But the case was quietly dropped by the Justice Department.
Gottlieb was never prosecuted, and the Senate gave him total criminal immunity in exchange for testifying.
Against who?
So other people did go to prison because that's why they gave him immunity so they could nail all these other people.
Nope.
We're done.
All's well.
Sidney Gottlieb spends the rest of his life with his wife on their eco-friendly goat farm in rural Virginia, Virginia.
He dies in 1999.
And for the rest of his life, friends of the family of his children would recall a kindly, intelligent, open-minded man with a strong spiritual and mystical interest.
Sidney meditated regularly.
He read constantly.
He was in his private life the absolute epitome of an aging hippie.
The people who loved him and spent time close to him only got occasional glimpses of something darker.
Stephen Kinzer at one point quotes from a young woman named Elizabeth who wound up dating one of Sidney's sons.
So she spends a summer around the family compound.
And she recalled this as a generally positive experience.
But there's one peculiar moment that she related later to an interviewer.
One day that summer, we were out at the house swimming.
The parents had gone to the store to buy food for dinner, and Peter goes kind of conspiratorily, come here.
I want to show you something.
He takes me into his father's den, his library, and says, turn around.
He did something.
He didn't want me to see what he did.
And the wall of books opened up.
Behind it was all this stuff, weapons.
I couldn't tell which kind, but guns.
There was other stuff back there.
It was like a secret compartment.
I asked him, what is that for?
He closed it back up quickly and said, you know, my father has a price on his head.
I said, why?
Is he a criminal?
He said, no, he works for the CIA.
Then he said, you know, my dad has killed people.
He made toothpaste to kill someone.
Later on, he told me, don't tell anybody that you were in here and don't ever tell anyone that you know my father kills people.
And they pulled out a particular gun and he aimed it out the window and fired it at a tree.
He said, you can't scare her?
You come back in two days.
That tree's going to be fucked.
That tree's going to be dead.
My dad's killed trees.
But how?
Such a thing is certainly not possible.
Just a, just a, I mean, that's, that says to me that, like, he was kind of like, he's kind of milking it, you know?
Like, you tell, like, hey, kids, you want to see like your dad's secret gun wall?
I made toothpaste to kill somebody, which I don't believe ever killed anybody.
It was another one of the things that nothing happened with.
But like, I don't know.
I guess that's not weird that like a guy like that would want people, would like want people who he's close to to know that he was this, he has this other secret life as a badass spy.
He's probably not telling him about all the prostitutes, about his friend with the portable toilet or any of that would be my guess.
But I mean, I don't doubt that if he told the story, I would love to know how he told the story.
If he made it seem more dark and mysterious than it was, if he tried to cover up the fact that it was such a clumsy mess and irresponsible, like the people who died weren't because of his gadgets, it was through negligence.
It was through killing test subjects because there was nothing else to do with them.
Like, I don't know.
And that's obviously what makes him such a fascinating character because you'll never know what he thought of himself or what he thought of what he did or if he spent his time abroad trying to make up for it, trying to save his own soul.
Yeah, did he feel that he realized this was all a terrible mistake and just like, yeah, dedicate the rest of his life to helping lepers or something?
Yep.
Who knows?
I mean, I like the eco-friendly goat form part, but I wish he had just raised goats.
I think we can all agree that would have been a better idea.
I'm not sure that.
Yeah.
Jason?
It's the plugin.
Anything to plug?
Yeah.
Well, now, hold on.
I thought that the Unabomber was also part of MK Ultra.
Did we leave?
Are we leaving that out or is that not true?
Is that just rumor?
He's involved in some experiments that are like part of this whole thing.
Because remember, it's like a pretty broad variety of things.
And his are like it's not entirely the same.
It's like he's involved in a voluntary psychological study that's like pretty abusive and that probably does some damage to him.
But it wasn't funded by NK Ultra at all.
Well, it might have been.
Because remember, we don't know exactly what was in MKUltra because Sydney destroyed, but it's the kind of thing they would have done, right?
A lot of what Kaczynski goes through sounds like aspects of the de-patterning kind of stuff that is being researched, like that's being done up at McGill University.
So I think it's pretty likely that he was in an experiment that was part of MKUltra.
I don't think you're going to get exact confirmation.
Kaczynski was always pretty adamant that that had nothing to do with what he did.
Well, that's why I wanted to bring him up, not to suggest that he was a product of it, but to suggest that if he was, it wasn't because they, again, they created the perfect assassin and he carried out a series of ineffective bombings.
Rather than it took someone who was already disturbed and made him much, much worse.
And then they just turned him out into the world.
Like that's the thing that they were good at was really making people worse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who were already having some problems.
And like, yeah, I think that's probably the best way to look at what you've got with Kaczynski.
It's like, I don't want to, we'll talk about Papa Ted one of these days, but he's, whatever you want to say about the likely impact MKUltra has on Ted Kaczynski, it doesn't, no way it helped, right?
Like there's certainly no way it made him made him less likely to blow things up.
Right.
And if his whole issue was that he did not have faith in the system and wanted to bring it down, like this probably did not help his faith in the system.
Yeah, it does.
If you really start reading a lot of MKUltra stuff, you do find yourself thinking about bringing down the system.
It's a natural reaction to reading a lot of stories of the CIA torturing people.
But we've reached the end of it.
Ultimately, it had a happy ending.
Justice prevailed.
The guy at the top of it died peacefully at age 90 or whatever.
Yeah.
Living a long and peaceful retirement on his goat farm.
Exactly what he deserved.
Exactly.
Justice is done.
Yeah, I learned, it taught the old lesson that actually by destroying evidence, you can totally get off on a crime because they need evidence to convict you.
Like they can charge you for destroying the evidence as a separate crime, but yeah, you'll get off from the original, the original thing you did.
If you do successfully destroy all of the records of you doing it, they can really, they're helpless.
And yeah, that's once again, their attempt to cancel this poor man didn't work.
Yeah.
Thank God.
Sidney Cogley.
Just like David Chappelle, uncancelable.
And like Dave Chappelle regularly shows up at concerts to sing surprise verses when I forget what band that was that that just happened with.
Manipulating People Is Easy00:05:53
Is it radio head?
Yeah, probably radio.
We're on this.
We're referencing things that happened on Twitter hours ago when this episode will come out weeks later.
But that's what the audience loves, Jason.
Wow.
Thank you for having me on so that I could go on this very dark journey with you.
I hope that it has.
What have we learned?
What have we learned from this?
I guess.
Well, if you're worried that LSD is a mind control agent, don't worry.
The CIA tested that hypothesis.
I guess if you've ever thought, I would like to sit on a portable toilet and watch strangers have sex, you might want to look for a job in the Central Intelligence Agency.
Apparently.
Yeah.
And if you're worried about the techniques for affecting someone's brain, one, the knowledge of how to totally destroy someone's brain, we do have that technology, but we've actually had it since the Stone Age.
Is called hitting someone in the head with a rock.
Like it doesn't require subjecting them to months of techniques and repeating things in a sound helmet and while under the influence of various drugs, you can just hit them with a rock.
That in terms of actually mind-controlling somebody, the old methods are best.
Just good old-fashioned lies and bribes and threats.
They all work very well.
We do not need new techniques.
They work great.
Advertisers have mastered all sorts of ways to put on your insecurities and make you spend money that you don't have.
They did not need some amazing new technology to do it.
It's actually super easy to manipulate people into doing things.
It's not hard at all.
Speaking of which, if you're looking to mind control me, the thing I'm most vulnerable to is, in fact, suitcases full of money.
So, you know, we're always looking for a suitcase of money.
We are available.
We will betray anyone.
Absolutely.
Anyone with for a big enough suitcase.
Not a little suitcase, you know.
Anyway, the book that I have been promoting beginning in each of these episodes, one final time, the title is If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe.
It has a lime green cover.
If you buy books based purely on the color of the color of the cover, this one is neon lime green.
You can't miss it at your bookstore.
You know, I did work at a bookstore for a while as a younger man, and people did come in occasionally asking for books by color.
I don't remember the title of the author, but it was blue.
That is a thing I have been asked working at a bookstore.
So go into your local bookstore and demand a green book.
And if they don't give you Jason's book, then riot.
Otherwise, you can look me up on any of the social media platforms.
My name is Jason Parchin, P-A-R-G-I-N.
I'm on TikTok.
I'm on Twitter.
I'm on all of them.
Just search the box for my name and you'll find either my account or some bot pretending to be me.
They'll probably both be equally as good.
Excellent.
Well, Jason, thanks for this five-hour stretch of our lives that we've spent learning about the CIA.
Thanks for having me, I guess.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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