Behind the Bastards - Part Three: MKUltra: When The CIA Tried to Destroy Free Will

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Robert is joined again by Jason Pargin for part three of our series on Project MKUltra. https://www.moment.co/ichhSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to week two of the Behind the Bastards MK Ultra episodes. I'm Robert Evans. I am the normal host of this show unless you're part of a CIA Mind Control experiment that has deep patterned you and caused you to forget the real host of this show. But that probably hasn't happened. And to explain why that probably hasn't happened, here's our guest, Jason Parjan.

Hello, for those of you who did not listen to parts one and two, I am frequent podcast host and author Jason Parjan. It used to be Evans Boss back in the crack.com days where I was executive editor for 13 years from 2007 till 2020 during what I like to think of as the glory years. Maybe other people think those were the bad years and that it was fine before and after that. Jason, I would think anyone who disagrees with you on that point has probably had their minds destroyed by the CIA. Either that or they like Buzzfeed. Yeah, but I have a novel and it's called If This Book Exists You're in the Wrong Universe that is coming out right around the time you're listening to this. Anywhere books are sold in any format, e-book, audio book, it is one of the John Dies at the end books. If you know what that means, you are very excited. If not, then that was just a nonsense string of words that I just said there.

There's a somewhat famous book and movie called John Dies at the end, the movie you can find on streaming. But it is a New York Times bestselling book series and this book is one of them. If you've not read any of them, you can start on this one if you want. That would be a very expensive way to start a series considering the other ones are probably like $0.99 on Kendall at this point. But by all means, please buy the $30 hardcover. That would be good for me if you do that. Yeah, by Jason's book. Yeah, it's worth it. It's like taking a little bit of LSD and then not having the CIA electro shock you until your brain gets de-pattered. It's like the good parts of that experience. It's like what Sidney Gottlieb's doing as opposed to what Gottlieb's doing to everyone else. Yeah, exactly. It's fun. One of the things that you can do if you want to have a good time is you can find old CIA reports about their drug trips.

I'm looking at one from 1983 right now where they're talking about like the Gateway experience and basically they're talking about like, hey, is it possible that we're communicating with aliens while we're all doing drugs? And kind of the conclusion is that it's scary and they don't know because again, these are, to be fair, these are the kind of things that happen to you when you're on drugs. It's like, did I just talk to some sort of like being from outside of, you know, time and space? And it's, I don't know, comforting is the wrong word, but it's funny to note that the CIA has had the same experiences. Okay, and I have to, maybe this is a spoiler for the remaining episodes or episodes in this series, but between now, from the beginning to the end of this, like obviously they did record a ton of data. They did do a ton of what they're calling experiments. Did they learn anything useful that wasn't learned elsewhere or that other people didn't already know? Was there any good that came from this? No. In short, Jason, I mean, the good that comes from it to the extent that good comes from it is that LSD gets out and becomes incredibly popular among a generation of musicians and artists and philosophers and thinkers. And it gets out largely because of guys who are working with most of the people who spread LSD into the actual like the civilian populace in a way that's not horribly abusive are also these guys who are like contracting their doctors, you know, their psychiatrists who have practices. They're working with the CIA for extra money. And part of that is that they're drugging people in nightmare experiments, but also they have free acid. And so they take it and they give it to their friends, some of whom wind up writing very influential books and becoming like

these members of the of the 60s like that that generation of, you know, people who tune in and drop out. So we get a lot of cool music from that period of time. There's a lot of interesting thinkers who are influenced by the experiences they have on acid. And a lot of that is positive. And I guess you could say that came inadvertently through as a result of MK ultra. That's not what they were trying to do. And it was not because they were drugging people and those people wrote great albums. It's more that like, well, we were giving out acid for free to the same guys who were torturing people and some of them gave that acid to people who then gave it to people who wound up writing pretty, pretty rad albums who became Jerry Garcia. It certainly was not anything to do with what they intended. In fact, I assume that the CIA very much did not like the cultural pivot that occurred in the 1960s. I think Gottlieb was probably cool with it because he is kind of a hippie. But yeah, most of these guys would were horrified by what was happening. We'll be talking about that when we get to the Charles Manson portions of these episodes, Jason. So as we kind of left off here, we talked about Dr. Ewan Cameron over in Canada, de-patterning people, all of this nightmare work. While Cameron is doing this horrible shit, Sidney Gottlieb and his friends are continuing to go buck fucking wild with their own personal LSD experiments. Conscientious guided trips and consensual random dosings had given away to a culture of surprise acid trips for anybody who happened to be near scientists from the MK Ultra program.

At the end of 1954, the problem had gotten so bad that the CIA's Office of Security sent out a memo to all of the agents at the CIA, warning that certain officers were testing LSD on their colleagues and that it could quote, produce serious insanity for periods of eight to 18 hours and possibly longer. Due to the risk of being drugged, they recommended employees not drink from the punch bowl at the upcoming Christmas party. That's a memo you get at the CIA. Don't drink from the punch this year. Somebody's probably going to put acid in it. Can you deliver acid that way in a punch bowl? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I had no idea. You can put it in any liquid. Yeah. Yeah. You don't notice that it doesn't really have a flavor. So a lot of people like sticking orange juice apparently like potentiates some of the effects.

So people take it in OJ a lot if you're just getting it liquid. Most people get it as like, it's like a little piece of paper that has had a drop on it or something and they take it that way. All of the information you would need if you were really doing this as an experiment about in terms of like, what are what other medications are these people on? What else do they have that could be counteracting it or could be, you know, the me interact with it? You know, are any of these people, you know, how many of them have been drinking alcohol? What's the average weight or do they have preexisting conditions? Do they have preexisting mental health problems? All of the things you would like, if you're going to do a study today to see like what if they somehow allowed you to test like, we're going to do somebody's food or random.

They don't know what it's coming. We're going to study the response. There's a battery of data you would need on that person to know what you were looking at in their response and why it was different from individual to individual, right? And it sounds like they weren't doing any of this. It was so sloppy and unscientific. Yeah. What is the scientific value of putting LSD in a punch bowl and seeing what happens at a work party? Like, how do you actually turn that into usable data?

Because you're not. You're just having fun. If it turned into an orgy or if it turned into a riot or if it turned into nothing, that doesn't mean anything unless you know all of the other complicating factors. Like, the mood was something that was going to happen anyway, is that unique to people of this particular age or the particular mindset that work in this agency? Like, you don't have any of the information that you would need to know, okay, this same thing will happen if we try this in Moscow at a party there. You know, we're trying to destabilize their government. Like, that tells you nothing. No, it's completely useless from a scientific standpoint.

And I think honestly, I'm sure Sidney would have had an excuse, but he's not doing this for science. You're not, some of this he's probably doing for, he believes he's doing for science, but you're not dosing the punch bowl at the CIA Christmas party for science. You're doing it because it's fun. Like, because you think it's funny, right? Like, that's why this is happening. And yeah, it's pretty cool that this man has been set loose. He's been given a massive portion of the CIA's budget during the period of time in which the CIA is the most powerful it will ever be, and no one can tell him no. So he's just doing whatever the fuck he wants.

Now, Sidney seems to handle this pretty well, the stress of managing this like international drugging and torturing ring. Some of his colleagues, though, are more haunted by what the CIA was doing than their boss. One of these men was Frank Olson, who we mentioned a little earlier. He's a U.S. Army biochemist and a biological weapons researcher. One of the first things that Olson will do in this project is he sits in at these black sites when they're torturing prisoners to death with LSD and mescaline and he takes notes, right? Like, that's one of his early jobs and what becomes MKUltra. Now, according to reports from other men in the program, Olson is not happy with this. He doesn't feel good about doing this job, like sitting in the chair and watching people go mad and then be executed kind of like fucks him up a little bit.

He's like the most human person at the CIA we're going to hear from right now, I guess. So, and again, all of this is debated. There are some people who say, no, that's not what it was. He didn't have an issue with what they were doing. It was something else. But according to the people who say that he had an ethical issue with like what they were doing, they say that he spoke up about it. And he started to talk about quitting the agency. And this starts to cause like a lot of talk in the higher levels of the CIA of like, what are we going to do about Frank Olson, right?

His doubts are supercharged when in May of 1953, he goes to Britain. They're doing another series of like tests on chemical weapons and he's not just the acid guy. He's got like, you know, he's a biological weapons specialist. And he watches a Seren nerve gas test go wrong and a 20 year old volunteer soldier dies and agonizing death as a result of it. And this is at least what Kinzer kind of writes. Stephen Kinzer kind of says this is the inciting incident that gets Olson to decide he's actually going to leave the agency. Kinzer writes, quote, a month later Olson was back in Germany while he was there according to records that were later declassified. A suspected Soviet agent code named patient number two was subjected to an intense interrogation somewhere near Frankfurt.

On that same trip, according to a later reconstruction of his travels, Olson visited a CIA safe house near Stuttgart where he saw men dying often in agony from the weapons that he had made. After stops in Scandinavia and Paris, he went to Britain and visited William Sargent for a second time. Immediately after their meeting, Sargent wrote a report saying that Olson was deeply disturbed over what he had seen in CIA safe houses in Germany and displayed symptoms of not wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed. He sent his report to superiors with the understanding that they would forward it to the CIA and Sargent is like a British kind of liaison. So you see what's kind of happening here. This is at least the way that kind of Kinzer depicts it. You've got this scientist who is traveling around the world watching these weapons.

He's helping to develop kill people, watching people be tortured, watching people have weapons tested on them, and it just starts to break him. There is evidence that Frank had already started to talk about some of his top secret research with one of his friends who later claimed in an interview, quote, he said, Norm, you would be stunned by the techniques that they used. They made people talk. They brainwashed people. They used all kinds of drugs. They used all kinds of torture. They were using Nazis.

They were using prisoners. They were using Russians and they didn't care whether they got out of that or not. So he talks about this to an extent and he seems to think they figured something out. About that litany right there is that the only part that's not true is that it worked. Yeah. Because he lists like, well, they're using Nazis. They're killing people. They're doing this.

They're doing that. They've got ways to get truth out of people. It's like, well, see, that's the thing. That's the one thing they didn't do. The part where you thought it was actually effective at accomplishing something for the cause is where you were wrong. All the rest of it was true. The Nazis all of it. Yeah.

So this guy, his friend Norm claims that like he basically bears his guts to him says like, you know, I watch them torture people to death. They're doing all these horrible things. They're carrying out this nightmare research and I can't take it anymore. I'm going to leave. And Norm says that Frank Olson tells him, I'm getting out of the CIA period. So near the end of 1953, not long after this conversation, Frank is invited to a work retreat with several other CIA men, including Gottlieb's deputy. And Sidney Gottlieb. After the dinner, all of the men are dosed without their consent with LSD.

We don't know how much they're given because as far as we can tell, nobody's taking notes about that sort of thing on a regular basis. But Sidney reacts badly to the huge dose of surprise acid he's given after like watching a bunch of men die horribly. And days later, he still has not recovered. He gets taken away by several colleagues to New York City to speak with a psychiatrist who was friendly with the agency. It's Abramson, I believe, the guy who gave Gottlieb his first dose. And during that trip, while he's in the hotel room with like a colleague, Frank jumps from an 11 store or a 10 story window out of the window and dies on impact. That is the official report that while he's in this hotel room with another CIA agent, he jumps of his own accord out of the window and he dies on impact. Now, are you, you think anybody's going to doubt the official narrative on this one, Jason?

Yeah, the people who know even a little bit about MK Ultra, the moment this guy came into the story, they knew this is the famous. This is one of the figures, along with Gottlieb, this is one of the figures that the people that had kind of a cursory knowledge of MK Ultra like me. These are, this is one of the guys that they already knew because this is like movies have been made about this. Yeah. And for the record, when it comes to like conspiracy theories, this is almost certainly like a true one because like, so they exhumed Frank Olsen's body in 1994, and they find specific cranial injuries in his remains that suggest that he was unconscious when he started to fall. Now, it's not impossible that something else happened, especially like if he was dosed with a drug or something. But it's pretty likely he was murdered by the CIA, right?

Like that's not an unreasonable conclusion to draw based on the extant evidence. You know, we don't know exactly what happened. They have earned the doubt that people express here. Again, I'm very big on, I'm not in favor of people who take the true things we know about MK Ultra and then try to expand them into very weird fiction, because I think that discredits everything. In this case, you know, in the case of this man dying and the way they said he did, it is not weird. Like them throwing him out of a window would be the least weird part of the story. Yeah.

It is not at all out of line with the things these people have shown themselves as willing to do morally. It makes sense from a logical standpoint. Now, it's also possible that like the CIA killed Frank Olson and they didn't do it by having him thrown, but instead like drugging him at different points and kind of like breaking him until he wound up killing himself. Not out of the question. But yeah, it seems like there's I mean, based on sort of the exhumation and what gets found when they when they do this, the second autopsy, it definitely seems like there's a pretty strong odds he was just straight up murdered. But we'll never know precisely what happened.

Frank Olson's death, whatever the exact details of it was not quieted up. Obviously, this is like the thing people tend to know about MK Ultra. It's probably the single most famous moment of the entire program, even though it's not the most fucked up. Obviously, the fact that they murdered a guy who had been helping them torture people is not nearly the worst thing that happens as a result of this. But it's just such a like Cold War story, right? This like mysterious suicide of a CIA doctor.

And I don't know, for whatever reason, it's the thing that people latch on to. This is controversial. Whatever happens is like causes problems within the CIA. Frank Olson had been a prominent and a well liked member of the team. The CIA's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, starts to like does an investigation. He spends two weeks investigating the suicide. And Houston is the guy who wrote, helped write the law that created the CIA. It is, again, like obviously, yeah, the CIA is investigating itself.

I wonder what they found. But it is worth noting basically no one knows exactly what Gottlieb's doing. He doesn't have to report to anyone, right? So it's not entirely unlikely that Houston learns a lot of things that he had not known about MK Ultra in the process of investigating this. Whatever the reality there, he summarizes his findings after this investigation thusly. It is my conclusion that the death of Dr. Olson is the result of circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the US government. And that there is, therefore, a direct causal connection between that accident and his death. I am not happy with what seems to me to be a very casual attitude on the part of TSS representatives.

That's the part of the CIA that Gottlieb runs to the way this experiment was conducted. And to the remarks that this is just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation. A death occurred which might have been prevented. And the agency as a whole, particularly the director, were caught completely by surprise in a most embarrassing manner. So that's kind of the official sort of chastisement that Gottlieb gets over this. It's something else. I don't even have a joke for that because... Yeah, what do you say?

He's writing about it the way that it's like you crash a company car because you're not paying enough attention or something. It's such a bureaucratic problem. I'm not surprised that the CIA's findings aren't, we murdered a guy. But yeah, it's just... I don't know, seeing it that way is... For whatever reason, the contrast between the way they write about all this in a very almost corporate manner and what's actually going on is always one of the more unsettling pieces of Delving and MK Ultra. Well, and also true of basically every government-sponsored horror in history.

When you see the actual bureaucracy behind it in the records, they kept it all. It's all just memos and... Yep. Well, Jason, you know what who loves memos and corporate speak is our sponsors who write stuff just like this but not about murdering their own team. Sophie, yeah, that probably probably could have been framed better. Let's just roll the ads right now before I say anything else. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial.

To discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think most people came into this with about the same amount of information about MK Ultra as I had. And I think most people heard of it. They knew that it was a CIA program that had something to do with mind control. They know that it's been in a million thrillers and spy movies. That any kind of movie that involves like Manchurian candidates or mind control, anything like that, they will always mention, well, this is all goes back to MK Ultra. So the thing that I wanted to know coming into this, listening to you as a listener, and I think the same thing they want to know probably,

is at one point, is any of the most outlandish conspiracy stuff true? As in, did they have even partial success creating a Manchurian candidate? Did they have even partial success in trying to make someone do something other than what they wanted to do? Not make someone piss their pants and vomit and control. It's like, well, they didn't want to do that. The thing that they once they abandoned this as a truth serum, which again, we also know really doesn't exist. You can kind of get somebody drunk and get them talking, but something that makes somebody tell the truth is that's not a real thing at all. Not a real thing.

So I think what people are kind of listening for is like, was this all just people fooling themselves and creating horror stories and leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them? Like, what's the weirdest thing they actually accomplished? I'm not trying to spoil the rest of the episodes we have coming up, but I think when trying to separate fact from fiction, what I said earlier was that the fiction is assuming that everything they wanted to do, they actually did. The fact is that everything they wanted to do was fantasy and what they actually did was they just ruined a bunch of people's lives and accidentally started the psychedelic 60s movement. What I will say is if you're asking, did they succeed in implanting false memories in people to some extent, the actual answer is we don't know and we'll be getting to them maybe there kind of later on. But certainly there is no evidence of success, right? There is no hard evidence during this period at all of anything actually working.

And there's never been any evidence that they actually Manchurian candidate and someone and got them to do spy shit like that. That has never happened as far as we know. There is some evidence that they get further on this than is entirely settling to think about and we will be chatting about that in a bit. But as regards Frank Olson, this guy who has been probably murdered, there's more investigations. In the end, Alan Dulles is forced to write a letter to Gottlieb and tell him that he'd exercised poor judgment. That is the extent of the actual discipline that Gottlieb faces. So by the mid 1950s after this has happened, there are no longer any barriers at all as to what Sidney can do for a time after he's given this massive budget and put in charge of this thing. He is constrained by the fact that only Sandos chemical makes LSD.

The agency had bought out the entire world's supply, but that was just tens of thousands of doses, Jason. Sidney wanted a hell of a lot more. And as 1954 ended, Eli Lilly figures out the recipe and the CIA becomes their primary customer, paying $400,000 for probably millions of doses of LSD. This is effectively enough of the drug that they could now dose anyone and everyone, which is what they proceed to do. The man Gottlieb picked to run this program is a cool dude named George White. George White is the platonic ideal basically of a hardboiled corrupt G-man. He had worked as a captain for the OSS during World War II, and then he was an narcotics bureau agent. That's the precursor to the DEA.

So he's a fed. He's supposed to be fighting drug trafficking. He is famous among his fellow feds for being heavily addicted to basically every drug imaginable. He is stealing everything from the dealers he arrests, and he's doing them, right? This is a thing that he has more experience with this than Gottlieb. In 1943, he's giving concentrated marijuana to New York mobsters as part of a truth serum test. George White is the guy that like, hey, we need someone to secretly dose mobsters with pot to see if it makes them tell the truth. Do you know any mobsters who you can drug?

George White doesn't even think before he's like, oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I can do that in a minute. Like, let's just give me some fucking weed. I got that. I got this. Yeah. He is actually a really fun character. He's a terrible person, but just entertaining.

So starting in the early fifties, the CIA has White run two safehouses for LSD testing in Greenwich Village in New York City. The men that he tested CIA drugs on were considered, quote, expendable because they were drug addicts and otherwise marginalized people, and they wouldn't be missed if they died or went insane. And if they go to like, if they find out what's happening to them and they go to the cops and are like, the CIA has dosed me with LSD, well, the cops are not going to follow up that investigation, right? That's part of the genius of this. I am briefly confused here. This man they put in charge of these experiments, what was his background, his scientific background?

He's a Fed. He's a federal agent. He's a federal agent whose specialty is that he looks and sounds exactly like a mobster, so he's really good at hanging out with drug dealers and doing drugs with them. Okay, but does not have a background in like biochemistry or neurology or brain science or... The guy whose day job is stealing heroin from drug dealers and then doing that heroin does not have a medical degree. Okay. Yes, he is no kind of scientist.

So one of the reasons why he gets this job is that like, because Gottlieb, when he's looking for a guy, he goes to the Bureau of Narcotics and he's like, hey, I'm looking for someone to like help run this program where we're going to be giving LSD to unsuspecting people. And they advise George White. And when he meets White, Gottlieb kind of falls in love with him. So again, the people running this for the technical division are all big nerds, right? Gottlieb and his fellow scientists through these academics, they mostly grown up middle class. White is like the kind of character you read about in a pulp fiction novel, you know? He's always got multiple weapons on him.

He's got like several guns at any given time, brass knuckles, knives. He talks luridly about all these shootouts and fights he's been in. And he's like, he's this hard character who's been like fucking in the streets fight like doing horrible cop ships since the 20s. So they treat him like he's like they've run into Dick Tracy, right? Like they kind of are spellbound by him. And that's part of why he gets this job, right? He takes them on ride along, so show them his guns and talk about this stuff. And they just like, I think he's really good at manipulating these CIA doctors, actually.

And that's part of why this works for him. So initially, when they first start setting up these safehouses to drugmen, George White is going to be the actual guy who draws them in, like for testing, who's the lure. And I'm going to quote now from Poisoner in Chief. He posed alternatingly as a merchant semen or a Bohemian artist and consorted with a vast array of underworld characters, all of whom were involved in vice, including drugs, prostitution, gambling, and pornography. It was under this assumed Bohemian artist persona that White would entrap most of his MK ultra victims. White regularly dosed women at parties or who he just encountered in the world, leaving vague notes in his diary like, Gloria gets horror, Janet sky high.

At one point, one of his victims escapes and she makes it to Linux Hill Hospital, where she reports George White for drugging her against her will. But the CIA had an arrangement with the medical department of the NYPD. So the NYPD tells this woman she's mistaken, nothing's happened to her and she's sent home. And again, easy for us to look back and criticize now. But at the time, there was no way to know that this could have happened. Well, I mean, the NYPD guys know we have been told by our contacts, the feds, not to pursue this, right? Like to calm this woman down and send her away, right?

So there is some degree that the NYPD doesn't know the CIA is running like an acid warehouse, right? Drugging people, they just know the CIA said, hey, don't do anything with this case. And this is a thing that's going to happen a lot, right? And this is also, I have to say, this is not like, this is the way things work sometimes with like the FBI and cops, right? Sometimes the cops will arrest a guy like with contraband or something with drugs. And it'll turn out he's an FBI informant. And so the cops will release him because the FBI is like, hey, we don't want to don't blow this up for us, right? We don't need this guy. That is, you can think what you want about law enforcement, but that's like a thing that happens.

The CIA is not a domestic agency. They are not supposed to be working on American soil at no point is what they're doing in the United States legal. This is not a thing where it's normal and like within legal limits for the CIA to like have a secret program set up where they work with the NYPD to like get their assets let go. That's not supposed to be happening. So I do want to note here, it's kind of minor like to be like when the CIA was breaking the law by working on American soil when what they're doing is so much crazier. But like, they're not supposed to be working in the United States at all. Yeah, if we didn't, if we hadn't previously made that clear. Yeah, this is on top of being insane.

What they're doing is at this point extremely illegal. In fact, they run into conflict with the FBI a bunch because the FBI is like, you guys are running a drug house and like you're the CIA and this, you know, the FBI and the CIA are always competing for money. So they're not super friendly with each other and they're like, what the fuck is going on here? Like, why are you guys allowed to do this? This isn't, we're supposed to be fucking with people here, you know. So George White is very good at his job to the extent that his job is to drug random people. He does it a lot. The CIA's hunger for test subjects could not be sated by one man dosing strangers in bars and at house parties.

In 1955, the program expanded. White and Gottlieb hit upon the idea to hire sex workers and use them to draw in men who could be drugged and then observed secretly in a brothel. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the San Francisco Chronicle now. In 1955, White was transferred to San Francisco where he had worked as a journalist and rented out an apartment on Telegraph Hill. To give his pad the desired French whorehouse look, White furnished it with Toulouse Retrek posters, a picture of a French can-can dancer in kinky photos of women in bondage and domination photos. It was supposed to look rich, an narcotics agent who regularly visited, said, but it was furnished like crap. White installed bugging equipment in a two-way mirror behind which he would sit on a portable toilet,

quaffing a martini from the pitcher he kept in the refrigerator and observe the proceedings. The prostitutes who staffed the operation were paid in part with chits which they could use for favors such as getting out of jail. So to put this picture in your head, Jason, there is a secret brothel where people, CIA-paid prostitutes who have get out of jail free cards, take johns, dose them against their will with LSD for quote-unquote scientific purposes. And the only person evaluating what's going on in these studies is George White, who is watching them while actively shitting and drinking martinis. Now, I would love to go back in time and after however many months or years this operation went on, just sit Mr. White down and say, OK, can you explain to me...

Why on a toilet? I would have several hundred questions, but the one question I'd be interested if he can answer, like, do you even remember what this was for? The long-term Cold War goal, like in terms of national security, do you know what you're trying to accomplish here? Because I strongly suspect he himself had probably lost track by that point. I don't think he ever is thinking about it, right? Like, he's not sitting down and being like, this is bringing us one step closer to a mind control serum that'll let us beat the Soviets. He is pooping and drinking martinis while he watches strangers have sex,

which he does for years, for hours every week. So this has kind of gone unspoken for three episodes, listeners, but you may have noticed we're doing a series on the CIA's misguided attempt to find a mind control serum. And about once every five minutes, we stumble across a much better, more reliable method of mind control, like just luring men back with sexy women works. Again, a number of things have been shown to work in terms of mind control money. And this guy who has gotten the government to pay for his little sex dungeon, just let him teach a class on how to manipulate people.

Like, look at what he did to draw in the lead. He's so good at this. Yeah, this guy is living a different life than any of us. Like, his ability to get the authorities and everyone else to just cater to his whims and his weird kinks and all on the taxpayer dime, just ask him how to do it. He already knows. Of all of the things that we've talked about, the detail about this that sticks out to me most is that his office seat is also a toilet.

That's who's running this program. Like, when we talk about the most secret and terrifying thing the CIA ever did, this is what a lot of it boiled down to. It's just, what a thing do have happened. So, over time, George White learned that drugging men, because again, he's experimenting with a bunch of stuff, he learns that the best way is to drug them after they've orgasmed, that that gets you better data at getting to listen to them talk and stuff while they're tripping, I guess. He said, quote, the men expected the hookers to hurry off

and became emotionally vulnerable when the women said they wanted to stay a few more hours. And again, this is as close to you get as like actual usable data, which is like, oh, you can manipulate men by making them think women like them. Like, that is the most useful piece of information. This is the entire MK Ultra program hasn't covered so far. Something about their mindset seems to shift after the semen has left their body. There's a sort of clarity that seems to come over their brains. George White, you've done it again. Give this man another bucket of LSD.

It's something else. So, do you know what they call this, Jason? Have you read the name they give this program? I can't wait to find out. It's Operation Midnight Climax. Okay, so again, their whole thing of we carefully disguised these operations. No, they've given that up. Because this is just a straight up porno name. Like MK Ultra, that's the name of like an anime series.

If you make a porno about the CIA drugging people at a brothel, that's what you call it. Yeah. It'd be so redundant to make a porno out of this. It was a guy watching this through a two-of-one-way mirror. It was already that. One of the things that's interesting about this to me is that we started this series talking about that time the army poisoned the entire city of San Francisco just to see what would happen.

Maybe that keeps being their base of operations. Like all of these experiments, everything keeps winding up back in San Francisco. Maybe it's just that the weather's nice, and it's where people would prefer to be than the East Coast a lot of the time. But it is weird that San Francisco's where all of these programs keep ending the fuck up. So using the Operation Midnight Climax starts as they've got this brothel and they're doing the experiments in the brothel. But eventually they decide to expand out and just use the entire city as a base.

So George White does a lot of this himself, but he also has agents, some of whom are stationed there, some of whom just fly in to try experiments. And they'll just dose random people at restaurants and bars in San Francisco. They fan out across the city and just give LSD to people. And not just LSD. One source with the agency later told a journalist, quote, if we were scared enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco. And the CIA would just give it to people and see what happens.

One thing I will say for George White, that may be a mark in his favor morally, anytime he gets some new weird drug from the CIA, he always tries it on himself first. So that is the most honorable thing we've heard of yet in these episodes. No, I will, I will bravely throw myself on this grenade. Yeah, I'll take this. What if it turns out this gets you more high than anything else that's ever been made? Yeah. It's better than I, it's better than I check.

I will bravely, bravely sacrifice myself. Yeah. These are what the heroes of the CIA are doing for us. Jumping on that grenade. You know who will jump on a grenade for you, Jason? Some sort of a monthly mattress service. They send you a mattress in the mail every month. If you had to have a product jump on a grenade for you, you could do a lot worse than a mattress.

And they can ship those to you in a box, you know, they'll get it to you in just a couple of days. Buy a mattress. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ah, we're back. Speaking of mattresses, George White is buying a lot of them because he opens a second safe house in Marin County, which is, I don't know if you've ever been to the Bay Area. It's like a very, very wealthy, very beautiful area kind of outside of San Francisco. And because it's like number one, it's kind of high income, they're able to get like this bigger place that has more space to allow for more elaborate experiments. The CIA tests things like stink bombs and itching powder there, in addition to stuff like specially designed hypodermic needles that could inject poison into a wine cork. Gottlieb even tried out an aerosolized LSD bomb on a party they hosted there, but it didn't work due to the humidity that particular day. Now, I think it's worth emphasizing that while White is doing all of this, he's also a highly placed officer with the Bureau of Narcotics. Like, he's one of the top men at what becomes the DEA.

And he's the guy who's like, yeah, I'll do any drug, I don't give a shit, like I'll take it, you know, I'll give it to people, I'll poop and I'll watch him. Um, he is reported to have regularly used the CIA's brothels to host parties for his fellow narcotics officers. One survey of his career claims, quote, Sometimes after a tough day on the beat, he invited his narco buddies up to one of the safe houses for a little R&R. Occasionally they unzipped their inhibitions and partied on the premises, much to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to complain about men with guns and shoulder straps chasing after women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there was always plenty of dope around, and the feds sampled everything from hashish to LSD. White had quite a scene going on for a while.

By day, he fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night, he dispensed them to strangers. But who better knew the danger of these substances than a man that had been at the front line? Yeah. Like, we've got to remind ourselves what we're trying to stop. Like, imagine if everybody lived like this. Yeah. What problems we would have if everyone lived the way that narcotics bureau officers do. We're just doing these drugs to keep them out of circulation. Um, so yeah, again, we keep harping on this, but it is kind of impossible to see how George White, who is the guy running their experiments on LSD, how he could possibly have conducted experiments that provided useful data.

He is nothing but a career drug addict and thug, and he's just like, yeah, pooping and watching them have hallucinations. Um, that's the science. There are no doctors or other health professionals on hand at any of these brothels in case an experiment goes wrong. And things did go wrong often. In one particularly disastrous example, a federal marshal named Wayne Richie was dosed with LSD at the federal building in San Francisco. He flipped out, grabbed two guns and immediately robbed a bar in the Fillmore district. Now, Richie did not know what was happening to him, right? He drinks like some water or some shit and then he is hallucinating and he robs a fucking store.

Um, I don't know what else is going on with Richie because I don't think a normal response to LSD is to rob a fucking bar, but also he's a federal marshal who knows what kind of shits he's had happen in his life. But, um, he gets off basically like because he's a fed and he has a clean record. He doesn't do any prison time, but he never knows that he doesn't know that he's been drugged. And so for the next 22 years, he kind of assumes that he's lost his mind, his career collapses, his life falls apart. Um, and he just has no idea what has happened to him until 22 years later, Sidney Gottlieb dies. And Richie reads his obituary, which Minson mentions MKUltra because a lot of this has come out since then. And Richie's like, oh fuck, is that what happened to me? Like, is this what occurred?

And, and we obviously, we can't confirm 100% whether or not Richie is someone who got dosed as part of MKUltra. But White's second in command for Operation Midnight Climax did admit to drugging strangers around town and said in an interview, quote, I didn't do any follow up. It just wasn't a very good thing to go and say, how do you feel today? You don't give them a tip. You just back away and let them worry like this nitwit Richie. So I'm going to say his, his, his theory that he may have been dosed is credible. Yeah. And again, no effort to actually collect data, observe a month down the line, six months down the line. No. No, like the question of what were they even trying to accomplish?

Again, I don't, there's a point where I think the people on the scene themselves could not have told you. No. It was just a thing they were doing. It's just, it's, it's got its momentum now. And obviously, like these are all the questions you want to answer is like, do they care about learning anything? Is there something more here we're missing because spoiler a lot of the information that they gather is destroyed later? Like what is happening in the heads of these people? And obviously we can't answer that and maybe they couldn't either. But to provide some context for what that answer might be, I do want to read another response that white second in command,

a guy named Feldman gave to an interviewer about like what was happening at the time, quote. Several times Sidney Gottlieb came out. I met Gottlieb at the pad and at white's office. Sidney was an ice guy. He was a fucking nut. They were all nuts. I says, you're a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Like me.

What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers? He had this black bag with him. He says, this is my bag of dirty tricks. He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a drive over to Muir Woods out by Stinson Ranch. Sidney says, stop the car. He pulls out a dart gun and he shoots this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me, come back in two days and check on this tree.

So we go back in two days. The tree was completely dead. Not a leaf left on it. I went back and I saw white and he says to me, what do you think of Sidney? I said, I think he's a fucking nut. White says, well, he may be a nut, but this is the program. This is what we do. So I would like you to contrast that with Hollywood's favorite trope of the group of secret agents

who are not governed by any kind of oversight. Like Tom Cruise's mission impossible force. Like Hollywood loves this thing of like, well, here's this guy. Like if we had to go through all the bureaucracy and permission, we wouldn't get the bad guys to really get the bad guys. We need a Jack Ryan. We need whatever. Like it's a whole genre of the super badass who operates off the books.

If you get caught, we will deny we know you. There'll be no oversight. You're not reporting to the government and you know, you're the mission impossible team and you're going to be working completely. We're going to fund you, give you all the gear, all the gadgets, all the mask making stuff. And we're going to trust you without oversight that you're going to get the job done. You're going to go get the nuke. You're going to stop it.

In reality, when you give a bunch of dudes a blank check to do whatever under the guys of, hey, your work is so important. We're not going to ask you what you're doing. This is what you get. Like more often than not. Can you imagine a situation in which it would be useful to have this tree killing dart? Like Sidney, we can already kill trees, man. Like I don't think you really accomplished much here by murdering a random tree with this dart gun.

Like it's baffling. And one of the things that's interesting, he is working on like terrible poisons. Like one of the things he does figure out by like laboriously collecting more of a specific kind of shellfish venom than it ever been collected as he makes like a perfect suicide drug. Like just this ideal way to kill yourself if you're captured with like a minimum of pain as quickly as possible, can't be reversed. Like he figures it out and they put it in. They have a couple of different devices for dispensing it to people.

They give it to like pilots on these, you know, these spy planes that we have flying over the Soviet Union. They'll give them these like suicide drugs to take so that if they're captured, they could kill themselves. A bunch of these guys crash with Sidney's poison on it. None of them ever use it because it turns out it's not really like it's kind of hard to go from like doing my day job to committing suicide on a dime. Yeah. Yeah. That's the part of the equation that a guy like him would not consider.

Yeah. You know, maybe they don't. I mean, it's all, it's so weird. I do love the degree to which this guy Feldman like is just, yeah, man, I'm like a criminal fucked up guy. So of course I'm willing to do this, but like all these people are crazy. They're not like, they're all just lunatics. But this is money, you know, and that's what white says, right? This is what we do.

So that's all good. Now, in his book, Stephen Kinzer continues, quote, Gottlieb's visit to San Francisco were not for purely business purposes. Operation Midnight Climax gave him ready access to prostitutes. According to Ira Feldman, he took full advantage of this prerequisite. He was cock crazy, Feldman said while free associating about Gottlieb during a legal deposition near the end of his life. He recalled complaining to George Hunter White. All he wants me to do is get him laid. Anytime that fuck came to San Francisco, get me a girl, Feldman said.

He always needed a girl. I know that some listeners are asking, are these real people? Like, how was it that everyone involved in this is a cartoonish parody of a human being? I think it just worked out that way. Yeah, I mean, it was the 50s, you know. Now, are we still in the 50s? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

We're in the mid to late 1950s when this is all going on, right? This is like the mid 50s is kind of when they moved to San Francisco. And so this is kind of all throughout the end of that decade. Yeah. And this whole thing is descended into a nasty just orgy operation. Yeah. Incredibly quickly. It didn't take a lot of time.

Yeah, from the genesis of the project where it's just a sex dungeon, they're running where this guy jerks off on a toilet. We'll talk about, you know, there's conspiracy theories about like, did they make the unabomber, right? Did they make Charles Manson? My favorite conspiracy theory is like, hey, did Sidney Gottlieb realize in like 1954 that none of this was ever going to do anything, but he had an excuse to like have the CIA pay for a brothel and all of the drugs he wanted to do and free trips to San Francisco to party and get laid. And that's more or less most of what was happening here. That's not impossible. Yeah.

And in fact, that's, yeah, I'm not even sure that's a conspiracy theory. That may just be what, yeah. It's not much of a conspiracy theory. But you know what is a conspiracy theory, Jason, is your fiction career, a conspiracy. Have we arrived at the end of the episode? I think we have. I think it's time for blokes. I'm sorry.

I was sitting here thinking about when the guy did the whole event with the tree, which I can't get out of my head. Incredible. Absolutely amazing. He shot the tree with a tree shooting dart gun he had in his jacket. I said, come back in a couple of days. And if, if I witnessed that happening and the guy told me to come back in a couple of days, if all I found was that the tree had died, I would be so crushingly disappointed. Because what else could, like a big deal. Like I can kill, I can go to the hardware store and get stuff that'll kill this tree in a couple of days.

Like I thought I was going to come back and find out that it had gotten up and walked across the street or something. Yes, it is speaking now. It was like the weird trees in Game of Thrones and you could commune with the gods. He's built some sort of fern-gully gun. It's just dead. Is that all you were, is this what you were trying to do? Or is this one of the failed attempts to use your tree, your magic tree gun? Yeah.

Was it supposed to do something else? Gotley was hoping it would be talking. Ah, damn it. Another failure. Anyway, yeah, the book is called, if this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. It has a lime green cover. You cannot miss it on the shelf. If you go buy it in a physical bookstore, which virtually none of you will do.

So if you do what most people do and just Google that title on Amazon, it will come up. Also, they have the audiobook and ebook, whatever, all the books. But please, if you can support a local physical bookstore, if you still have one, please, they've been hurting over the course of the pandemic like everybody else, buy it off the shelf if it's all the same to you. Yeah, find a good bookstore, go to bookshop.com. Also, I think that's the, I'm going to double check this. Yes, as a network of all the indie bookstores. Yes.

You can order from the store close to you. They will make you so happy. I think it's bookshop.org because that took me to a sketchy website. A lot of them will, they will ship just no different from ordering from Amazon. It may be slightly more expensive, but gosh, they will appreciate it. Yes, bookshop.org. Find Jason's book there. You can also find my book there, After the Revolution, if you're looking to get two books.

Why not? You know, treat yourself. You deserve it. You've listened to all this horrible shit about the CIA. Why not buy two books? Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse was like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.