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

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Robert is joined again by Jason Pargin to continue to discuss Project MKUltra.    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember, it's on October 26th at 6 p.m., but the link will be good to watch the show for up to a week after it airs. And you can purchase tickets now at momenthouse.com. Where you will also be able to submit questions. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I am Robert Evans, we're talking about MKUltra. This is part two of our series with Jason Parjan.

Jason, what are you? What are you, Jason? How much time do we have? No, I am a full-time author now who used to be Evans' boss, Beckett Crack. Although, if you're coming in on part two of this episode, you should circle back and listen to part one if you skipped it. Jason, we have a whole series of fans. We call them backwardsies and they wait until the whole series is out

and then they listen to everything backwards. Like Momento. It makes it less depressing because then it's the story of a terrible person who ends up as a baby. Yeah, anyway, I'm here promoting a book called, If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. It is not a book about MKUltra or anything we're talking about today. It is a work of fiction that is a sequel to the film and movie John Dies at the End, which fans of mine know that well.

People who have never heard of me, look it up. If you like the movie, you can go buy this book and it's in the same universe and the same characters. It's not part of MKUltra, but if you were working for the CIA, that's what you'd say. People can make their own decisions about whether or not they think you're part of the CIA. But we should probably talk about the guy who is your boss if you are working in the CIA's MKUltra program, Sidney Gottlieb. Actually, he's been dead for decades. Now this point, it is not yet called MKUltra, right?

It is Project Artichoke is what it's moved on to now, right? So it starts out as MK Naomi and then Project Bluebird and now Project Artichoke. And these are all, they just kind of keep getting more funding and getting a bigger sort of purview to go try and do weird mind control shit. And by the time Gottlieb takes over the chemical division, because he's like running like the CIA's, the chunk of the CIA that's like fucking with chemicals, right? Pretty obvious. So it's everything from like, we need a drug for if guys get captured that they can like bite down on a fucking fake tooth and kill themselves like in Dune, which is like, they do stuff like that, they actually do stuff like that. Like Sidney, for an idea of where his career goes, he's the guy who makes the poison cigars they try to kill Castro with,

like he's that guy for the CIA, but also obviously includes stuff like LSD. And Alan Dolis by this point has been promoted to the number two man at the CIA. So he has steadily risen up and because he's a big believer in mind control, that means that Gottlieb is just getting more and more money in the early fifties to start pumping into this project Artichoke shit. New research at the CIA is heavily driven by what this blue-blooded paranoid egomaniac decided he what he wanted researched. And in 1952, Alan adds to his interest in psychedelics an interest in hypnosis. So he's already like thinks that there's some sort of mind control drug that the Soviets have that he's putting money into. And in 52, he also starts to become like a fan of hypnosis.

And this is because he actually like goes to a show in New York City and he watches a famous stage hypnotist. And the thing that convinces him that hypnotism has military or has like applications for the CIA is that he goes once up hanging out with this stage hypnotist after the show. And the guy's like, oh yeah, I regularly rape women after putting them into a hypnotic trance. It's really easy. You can make hypnotize women and just have sex with them. And this is like a thing that I do. And you know everything you need to know about Alan Dolis by the fact that this guy says this and he immediately signs up to take a four day course from him. That is the man Alan Dolis is. People who have never listened to the show before, I realized that it seems like Robert and I are laughing at extremely inappropriate moments.

Please understand, this is a coping mechanism. We do not actually think that it is funny. What else do you do when you hear about that? When you hear about the second in command at the CIA, that's his fucking thought process. Is this man's like, I commit felonies all the time on using hypnosis. And he's like, oh yeah, let me take, I want to take a fucking course from you. And your audience knows that hypnotism like that form of hypnotism, like the pop culture form where you can make somebody squawk like a chicken by playing. Like that's not a thing, right? Like they know that's not a thing. No, this man's just assaulting people.

And fucking sure enough, Alan Dolis takes a course from him. We'll talk about actual hypnosis in a little bit, but Alan Dolis takes this course and he goes back to work at the CIA in DC and he tries to hypnotize his female coworkers. He uses CIA secretaries as his guinea pigs. He induces trances in them. Stephen Kinzer says that he got them to quote, do things they might not otherwise consider like flirting with strangers or revealing office secrets. And my, the feeling I get is that they're kind of playing along to an extent because this guy is their boss and they don't want to make him angry. Hopefully he doesn't, from Kinzer doesn't say he actually assaults any of these women. So hopefully this doesn't go any further than just, you know, grossly inappropriate sexual harassment. But we really don't know because it is the CIA.

I mean, without the aid of some sort of a medication or chemical or something that probably cannot be done. Like stage hypnosis works because you get people up on a stage and they like to participate in the show. So you're like lowering their inhibitions, basically giving them permission to be part of the show. And so like some of it, it works on like a subconscious level. But the type, again, the type that exists has existed in pop culture for decades where you can like turn somebody into a zombie and make them do whatever purely through hypnosis. Again, hypnosis paired with whatever drugs they were working with at the time may do that. Put somebody where they're in like a half awake state of, you know, they're not fully making decisions or whatever. But just hypnosis, that's no, that's just a sleazy weirdo.

It's a sleazy weirdo. And probably what is actual to the extent that that hypnotist is like, quote unquote hypnotizing and then having sex with women. Like, well, he gets them alone because he's famous. And then they like, you know, pretend to be hypnotized because it's the safest thing to do, right? Or or none of it ever happened. And he just lied. He's a liar. That's entirely possible, too.

It's such a sleazeball that he lies about using hypnosis to rape women because he thinks it makes him look cool. And guess what? Back at the time, it did. So all of these things are possible. We will not know what exactly happens. But we know the result of this is that after being a real creep at work, Alan Dulles writes a memo to the Project Artichoke team. Quote, if hypnotic control can be established over any participant in clandestine operations, the operator will have an extraordinary degree of influence, a control and order of magnitude beyond anything that we have considered feasible.

Now, as you've said, Jason, hypnosis is like a thing. There's a there's like studies that scientists do on people's brains and hypnotic trance is a thing that people experience. There are documented effects of being hypnotized and hypnosis can be effective in conjunction with certain therapies. But as you said, hypnotizing does not mean that you're putting someone into a state where they will take commands and do whatever. You can kind of induce or affect feelings of anxiety and pain and trauma. Actual professionals who use hypnosis will use it to like, you can. There's some evidence that can be used to reduce chronic pain in certain ways. It can be used to reduce the pain of childbirth.

Hypnosis has been shown to have some efficacy at treating addiction and PTSD. I'm not going to get into I don't understand hypnosis. Well, I don't think anyone really does. It seems like the kind of thing that there's still a lot of like debate about, but like it is a thing. It's on the same level of something like meditation has absolutely measurable effects. No one would question that, but that's somewhere out there. There's somebody claiming that, you know, you're meditating, you're tapping into the energies of the universe or whatever you're leaving your body and you're not. It's just we don't understand a lot about how the brain works.

But it's just that what he's talking about was like, well, if you could do the thing where you wave a watch in front of somebody and then now using a keyword later, you can make them your slave. The thing as it exists in the Manchurian candidate or whatever, you know, all these movies, these thrillers that were made in the wake of people believing hypnosis was real. That's the thing that doesn't exist in terms of using this way to like recover memories, that kind of thing. You know, putting the brain into a relaxed, susceptible state. There's all sorts of ways to do that. But yeah. Yeah. So Alan Dulles, you know, again, is hypnosis is a thing, but Alan Dulles is mostly interested in using it to take over people's brains and get information out of them.

And potentially the thing that he's most excited about and the thing that everyone at the CIA is kind of most excited about is the potential to turn people into sleeper agents. Who can be sent back home to carry out attacks. Right. Like that's the Manchurian candidate thing. That's what the CIA actually wants to do. And they do believe that this is possible. Gottlieb is certain of it. And Gottlieb tells Dulles that like, yeah, you know, hypnosis can work.

And particularly if we mix hypnosis with these different hallucinogenic drugs people have started testing. Have you heard of LSD? You know, that's kind of how the conversation goes. So they actually do, they start with marijuana. And this is because marijuana was something the OSS had tested pretty heavily on themselves back during World War Two. They'd mixed it into various foods and they'd smoked it to try to prove that it had potential as a truth drug. This did not work as anyone who's ever had to lie to the cops while stoned as hell could tell you. Next the OS or next the CIA use.

So under Gottlieb, they do try some marijuana experiments. It does not prove effective. Cocaine next Gottlieb used CIA cutouts to sponsor medical experiments in which mental patients are injected with cocaine. So they are going into people who are institutionalized with like schizophrenia and they are injecting them with cocaine to see if it will make people want to talk. Now, Jason, you've never done cocaine, right? No, but I have been around somebody who was on it and they actually did talk quite a bit. They do. It does. It does work for that. I will say that for cocaine. It does make you want to talk.

And also if you need to write a Hollywood screenplay and like one 100 hour long writing session, nothing really beats cocaine for that apparently. No, as my namesake the other Robert Evans could have told you. If his heart hadn't exploded from 70 years of shooting cocaine straight into his lungs. But, you know, I think you may also note that while cocaine does want to make people want to talk, it doesn't make them reliably tell the truth. You can actually lie really well while on a shitload of cocaine. Otherwise nightclubs probably wouldn't exist in the same form. So cocaine, not a great truth drug. After this comes heroin, which if you were going to me and saying which drug is least likely to be an effective truth serum, I would probably say heroin.

Stephen Kinzer writes that quote, Surviving CIA memos note that heroin was frequently used by police and intelligence officers and that it and other addictive substances can be useful in reverse because of the stress as they produce when they're withdrawn from those who are addicted to their use. So in other words, cops when the CIA is like, hey, you know, let's let's reach out to some cops. We know some narcotics guys. Let's reach out to like the FBI, see what they say about using heroin as a truth drug. All these field agents are like, well, heroin is like great. And a bunch of like a bunch of the people talking to them are CIA agents who are like, well, yeah, you can use it as a truth drug for people. But like the way it works is you get them addicted to heroin and then they'll do whatever you tell them, right? Yeah, then you take it away and then you take it away.

Those of withdrawal, the promise of getting heroin, they will do whatever you ask. But again, as with all interrogation techniques, nothing stopping them from just lying to you. Exactly. And that continues to be the problem. One thing I did find interesting is that like a lot of their early info on heroin comes from narcotics agents and CIA field agents who are like, the only reason I haven't killed myself from doing this job is that I use heroin. Like those are a lot of their early sources, which tells you a lot about these agencies. There's like a couple of very funny moments here. My favorite is that at one point using like working as part of this program, the Navy sponsors a study where they pay college students to take heroin to see if it works as a truth drug. It does not. So the next thing they try is mescaline. The Nazi doctors, the CIA had hired to help them with their torturing people at black sites had all given mescaline to prisoners at Dachau.

And so when they bring these guys in, they tell the CIA, hey, mescaline seems like it might work as a truth serum. Maybe you should try that next. But of course, mescaline does not work that way. No drug works that way. I have lied to cops on a number of hallucinogens. None of them seem to function as a truth serum in my experience. But all of this is very strange. The assumptions they're making here about how the mind works, that's the thing. It's almost to imply that when somebody is intoxicated, that they're becoming more honest. I don't think that's true in almost any way. Like you lower somebody's inhibitions, they may be just as likely to say the most outrageous thing they can think of. Like I don't think that being incredibly drunk revealed like Mel Gibson's perfect true feelings.

I think it made him more racist than what he probably is in everyday life because it just unleashed his ability to just say the worst possible thing that popped into his head. I think they are starting to recognize that at this point because they keep having these experiments and they never find their truth drug. But they do find one thing that is true is that people who are really fucked up are easier to manipulate. Like a drunk person, if you're sober, maybe it'll be easy for you to get them to do something that you want them to do. The same thing is true within limits to people who are on other substances. People are a little bit easier to convince to do things sometimes in certain ways. If somebody is tripping on acid, you're probably not going to convince them to commit murder. But if they are the kind of person who is inclined to strip naked and run through a party, it'll be easier to convince them to strip naked and run through a party.

It does make people suggestible in that way. So one thing that's happening in this period is the CIA is moving away from, well, maybe we'll back burner the truth serum. But we think this stuff will let us program people because it does seem to make them more susceptible. So that's kind of, as they're sort of experimenting with this stuff, it's not just truth serum. They're also like, is this the drug that's going to let us reprogram Soviet spies and send them back as saboteurs? Because that is increasingly the thing that Dolis thinks is going to be possible. And they're thinking about like, well, let's try giving them cocaine and then we'll hypnotize them. Let's try giving them mescaline and then we'll hypnotize them.

And obviously, none of this works great, but they're getting at least enough that they're convinced they're just sort of like one drug away from making it work. And by the way, the funniest part to me, and it's funny, again, in the context that I mentioned earlier, it's darkly humorous. As far as I can tell, now in 2022, by far the most successful examples they have of like flipping people or turning people into double agents and all that, is just by giving them a big old suitcase full of cash. That works really well. And they finally, that finally after spending billions or however much money they spent on this stuff over the years, it's like, hey, we have found a way that can manipulate to make somebody turn against their own country, which is if you give them like a Lamborghini and a giant suitcase full of cold hard cash,

they're actually willing to flip on their own country, their friends, their comrades. Yeah. Yeah, people will do like, I mean, you know, there's also still heroin is actually still a big one. Like when the FBI was breaking up during the green scare, when the FBI was like breaking up environmental extremists like organizations, that often target like individuals who they knew were like addicted to smack, because you find somebody who's got that addiction, you take it away from them. It's a little easier to get them to roll on their friends or you arrest them and you tell them like, hey, we've got this amount of stuff on you.

We have you did the rights. It's a 25 year sentence. Unless you help us out by rolling on your friend, right? Like all of these things can be used to control people's behavior, but none of it works. The two things that work best are prison time and money. Yeah. Just threats and threats and money, the same thing that worked 10,000 years ago.

And the Soviets, by the way, never don't know this. Well, they're fucking around with the psychic research. They're just being like, well, we either bribe people or we hit them. This works great. It's the CIA that is convinced there's some much more esoteric way to do this shit. So Gottlieb, as they kind of go through this rolodex of drugs and none of them work, starts to become convinced that the answer to his boss's prayers, to Dolos' prayers, might be LSD. Because again, he's read about this. Scientists, smart people, especially, again, Gottlieb's kind of a proto hippie.

You know, the hippie movement hasn't exist yet, but he's one of the kinds of people who's going to feed into it. All of that, those kinds of people, those seekers that people are interested in mysticism and stuff, they're all starting to talk about hallucinogens and they're all starting to talk about acid. So Gottlieb reaches out to Harold Abramson. Abramson is a doctor who'd worked with the CIA on past mind control and poison experiments. He was also a seeker himself, and he'd taken LSD several times and given it out to colleagues on multiple occasions, acting as one of the first modern trip-sitters. Abramson gave Gottlieb LSD and the two hung out. Sydney wrote this about his first trip. I happen to experience an out-of-bodiness, a feeling as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body, and it is shimmering.

And I have a sense of well-being and euphoria for most of the next hour or two hours, and then it gradually subsides. And I think he takes a pretty small dose, because LSD, a normal dose of LSD, if you're like taking a solid dose, if you're actually tripping, it lasts like eight to sometimes 12 hours. You can make it last long if you take a very heavy dose. Longest I've ever tripped is maybe 18 hours. Jesus Christ. It was quite a weekend. One reason why I've never experimented with this stuff is I absolutely would be the guy who just sits there like,

my body is a sausage. I'm a skin sausage. It's not an unpleasant thing necessarily to be a skin sausage. LSD is, whenever I recommend, if people are curious about hallucinogens, Sylasybin is by far the easiest to start with, because no matter how much you take, you're top out at three or four hours. So it is the kind of, if you have a bad time, it's going to be over soon. LSD, if you take too much or have a bad time, it can be really unpleasant, because it lasts a long time. So it's the kind of thing people shouldn't mess around with unless they've built up to it.

That would be my opinion. I'm not telling you to commit illegal acts by taking drugs, but maybe I wouldn't start with LSD if you're asking for my advice on this stuff. No, the other advice is to go to a very reliable source where you know how much you're getting, because I think half the people I've ever talked to have taken acid, have an experience where one time they took it and absolutely nothing happened. It's like, well, yeah, because you just got it sold to you by a guy and he just gave you a piece of paper. And nowadays, another problem is that you don't usually know you're getting acid.

There's a bunch of other research chemicals that work similarly that you could just dissolve in water and put on stuff, and they're easier to get than acid, which is normally fine. A lot of people probably take something that's not acid, think it's acid and have a good time, but some of that stuff has more health. LSD is fairly safe, actually, unless you're taking nightmare doses of it. I don't think it even has a recorded LD50. I'm sure they found enough to kill people, but it's very difficult to have an overdose in the way that is heroin or something. But there are other research chemicals that you can die on that people sometimes just sell as acid,

because it's an illegal unregulated market, right? Which is, as Jason said, you should always know your dealer if you want to start playing around with this stuff. There's organizations like Project Dance Safe that sell test kits for a number of different substances. If it's possible to test and know what you're taking, you always should, not that we're advising illegal acts. There are subreddits that do nothing but discuss, like, share information about this kind of thing, which as much as we criticize Reddit, and actually having a community like that to warn you about what to look out for, things like that actually matters a lot. This has always been an argument for legalization, because then you can actually know precisely what you're getting. That is the argument I would make, but we're off the map a little bit here.

So LSD, Gottlieb has his first trip, and he has a pretty good time with it. He starts to get kind of obsessed with it, and this is a thing. I can't prove this objectively. I haven't even found this written in any of the writing about Gottlieb, but a thing that I have noticed in my own life as a guy who hangs out and does drugs is some people just kind of get obsessed with LSD. It is a particular thing to LSD. You notice, like, Albert Hoffman, right? For whatever reason, before he even takes it, they synthesize this thing, and for five years he can't get it out of his head until he actually tries it, right? There's just kind of something that certain people find really fascinating about this substance.

And I think as much as everything else, the fact that Gottlieb just kind of gets obsessed with acid is a big part of why it becomes the drug of MK-Ultra, right? Because it doesn't work any better than these other drugs. Again, spoilers, none of this creates a perfect mind control drug. Probably. We'll get to that a bit later. But it's a thing I've seen happen to more people, and this is not usually a bad thing. You just, like, take a lot of acid that can be fine. And chemists and neuroscientists are especially likely to find themselves fascinated by LSD.

This is about to happen to a whole generation of very smart people, folks like Ken Kesey, folks like, oh, Jesus, Timothy Leary. Goddamn. I can't believe I forgot Timothy Leary's name. Yeah, you have this generation of Leary and Ken Kesey and whatnot. They're all kind of, in a lot of ways, similar people to Gottlieb. They have these similar opinions on this agrarian, back-to-nature sort of stuff. They're fascinated by Eastern mysticism and spiritualism. The degree to which the CIA's head poison guy is kind of a hippie is very important to this story.

Now, at no point did Gottlieb have any hard evidence that LSD would make a better truth serum or mind control drug than any other narcotic he'd tested. But he starts to become convinced that it holds the secret to all of the things he's trying to accomplish for Alan Dulles. And so he's going to spend the next 10 years dosing possibly tens of thousands of people to try and prove that. First, he starts by dosing other CIA agents and some scientists working in adjacent government spook projects. Because they're testing, initially, they're trying to use this as a weapon. They're still trying to see, can this be used to take over somebody's mind? Can this be used to at least disable a spy?

A lot of these guys agree to be dosed by surprise. So this is consensual. There's nothing wrong with saying, yes, you can sneak LSD into my food at a random point in time because we want to see what happens when you're surprised by LSD in the middle of a workday because nobody's done that. They have not started like horribly doing things with this yet. But you can see kind of where stuff's about to go because the very next group of people they start to drug is army trainees. And these people have agreed to be in studies for the army. They don't know that they're going to be dosed with LSD.

So they're just kind of like drugging 18 year old boys with this mystery substance that nobody's really tested. And a lot of people have very terrible experiences, which probably shouldn't surprise you. It does seem like a lot of these army guys have great times too. And a lot of the CIA guys have a lot of this like is they're partying, right? Like they're not just dosing each other and taking diligent notes. They're like having a good time. And you know, the government's paying for it. In these early days, Gottlieb and his fellow bluebird artichoke researchers dosed themselves more often than they dosed anyone else.

They'd carry out fake interrogations and try to convince each other to give up secrets that they'd promised before taking drugs, not to tell. And they were able to get each other and army officers to reveal like secrets. But this is like, this is not a real test, right? Like they're agreeing ahead of time, what's the secret you're not going to give up? Okay, now we're going to drug you and we'll see if we can get you to give up the secret. Jason, can you give any reason why that might not be replicable to actually trying to get information out of somebody? Really hard to overstate the role of consent in this whole thing. Yes, they're playing a game.

But even at that early stage, they should have, it feels like basic logic should have played a role in this. But I mean, you know, yeah. Yeah. So this is all very flawed and everything they're going to do is deeply flawed research at like the conceptual level in ways that I don't, part of it's probably just that the concept of hallucinogens, particularly like artificially created hallucinogens, you know, because LSD does not just randomly occur in the way that like mushrooms do, is much newer than. So I think some of it's just that people don't understand this stuff as well. But it does really seem like they're making basic failures of logic here.

But there are some reasons, I have to say, there are some reasons why you can see people at this time would have thought LSD could be a really good weapon for like spy shit. Acid is colorless and odorless. You can put it in basically any liquid or other kind of substance and people can't, there's no way to tell that you have acid on you. So you can transport significant quantities of it without being detected in a pretty much infinite number of ways. It's once you are able to make it, it's pretty much free on a per dose basis and very small amounts of acid have gigantic effects. So there's good reasons why the substance is like, well, yeah, if you could make this work for us, this would be a great thing. We can very easily sneak this on spies and get them into anywhere. Okay, I think I want to ask the question that I think a lot of listeners are asking, which is like today when we hear about the experiments done with the stuff,

it's experiments on like trying to cure people with PTSD, trying to cure depression, trying to like if it affects the brain that much, if people claim to have had almost a wholly experience on it, that's like, well, could it, you know, it feels like it shouldn't have just been the CIA dealing with this. It feels like you should have had whatever the giant pharmaceutical companies were at the time experimenting with it as a therapy. Yeah. Saying, well, could this be the drug that will make housewives okay with staying at home and doing nothing but laundry all day? Do you see what I'm saying? Was that going on or was it just the CIA that was doing, that was working with this stuff?

We're actually going to talk about that in a little bit. Yes, this is going on to an extent, but it's very limited at this point in time. The only people in the world who can make LSD are Sandoz laboratories, right? They have figured it out and they're not sharing the recipe. So they are the only source of LSD. They're only making a limited amount and the CIA buys basically all of it. They do send a bunch out for research. There are other organizations researching this.

There's actually in the Soviet Union and all over the world, there's actual studies, therapeutic studies on LSD in this period, but the majority of the drug by weight goes to the CIA. Okay. Yeah. That tells you a lot about the state of the world at the time that that priorities or whatever, because you have everything they think they know about this. It's not just, oh, this would make a good weapon. On the list of things you could do with it to change the world, that's not even in the top 100.

Yeah. When you're talking about, oh, this totally alters the way people behave, the way they can be influenced, the way they think. Everybody who takes it becomes obsessed with it. You would think just the pure capitalism of the country would come into play. It's like, oh, this is, we could make a bunch of money. It's cheap to make. People will pay a lot of money for it.

The fact that it's there, I guess it's just the limit of the imagination when you're in a war footing. It's like, no. Yeah. That's good. In theory, they have these convoluted, almost cartoonish ideas of like, well, in theory, if you could inject a spy with it, you could make him do this. If we also...

Yeah. There's just this, it's because number one, the sandaws is, I think, kind of, they're looking for any kind of use that will make this profitable. The first group that puts a lot of money down for acid is the CIA. That has an impact from the beginning on who else gets it and how much of it is available. I just don't think, I don't think guys like Gottlieb, when they hear stuff like, because there is early research on like LSD and alcoholism, and when they hear stuff like, we can treat alcoholism with LSD, all these guys, because they are, as you said, they're so focused on

this war, all they hear is, that just, that means that you can change people with this. You can change their, you can alter a person's mindset. You can like, control their mind. If you can get them to stop being an alcoholic, maybe you can stop them from being a communist, you know? Yes, that's straight where they go, and they have the ability to effectively buy up the world's supply of acid, which they do in this period. In fact, all of the LSD that gets out in the early eras of the hippie movement, and like,

is the acid that like fucking dudes like Hunter Thompson and the Beatles are taking, right? That shit all comes from the CIA. Oh, I had no idea, but it makes sense, I mean, that's, yeah. And not all just as part of MKUltra, because guys like Abramson, who gives Gottlieb his first dose, he's working with the CIA as a contractor, he's also just a guy who's interested in this and does it with his friends, and his friends include a lot of these like, influential intellectuals who are going to be big leaders in the 60s. And so they all start taking LSD that he gets from the CIA together.

That's like how acid gets out, it's through the agency. Not always in controlled ways, not always as parts of studies, but we're building that. But you know what else we're building towards Jason? An ad break? An ad break. Jason, have you ever heard of Blue Apron? No, I say it's weird because I listen to like four hours of podcasts today, but it's never come up.

Well, that's a, it's a company that makes food boxes, and we used to have a running joke here at Behind the Bastards about how they also had an island where people could hunt children for sport. And I thought, Jason, I thought that was a joke that everyone would recognize as a joke, but it turns out a lot of people messaged us distraught thinking that there was a real child hunting island. So now we're warning people on a couple of different episodes of the show, there's no child hunting island.

It's fine. That was a joke. We're not going to make the joke anymore. Please, please stop being worried that Blue Apron has an island where people hunt children for sport. They don't. Anyway, here's ads, possibly including Blue Apron. 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. Because the FBI sometimes, you've 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 this hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks. 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. We're back and we're talking about Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA. So the other reason that Gottlieb is able to kind of get the agency to focus on LSD, there's you know, it makes sense, there's reasons why it might be a good weapon. But he's able to bring up a bunch of Russian scientific journals, which in the early fifties start to file the first Soviet Union reports on the discovery of LSD.

Obviously, LSD has existed for a while. Information does not travel as fast in these days. So the Soviets kind of start, and this is not, there's actually nothing sinister here. It's just academics in the Soviet Union who are like, and now there's this thing called acid and we're getting small amounts of it from sandaws and we're testing it in these ways. This causes Dolis's analysts to claim that the USSR is stockpiling Ergot as a raw material material.

Now, their own assessments admit there's no evidence that this is happening. And in fact, here's exactly what Dolis's analysts write, quote, although no Soviet data are available in LSD 25, it must be assumed that the scientists of the USSR are thoroughly cognizant of the strategic importance of this powerful new drug and are capable of producing it at any time. It must be assumed that's a key phrase that I think is going to get used, that's going to get used to a lot. Yeah.

We just have to assume that not only do they think the same thing about this as us, which is that it should be used to destroy people's minds, but they're already mass producing it. Now, obviously, they are not. It is hard to make acid. No one knows how to other than sandaws yet. And the Soviet Union, as far as all evidence suggests, the Soviet Union has no capacity for manufacturing LSD at this point.

It's going to take years before a U.S. company with CIA help will crack the recipe. But yeah, it is worth noting that kind of about it. This is actually, there's not even LSD, as far as we can tell, in the Soviet Union in this period in the early 50s. I think the first evidence that we have of acid in the Soviet Union starts in the early 1960s, when Communist Bulgaria starts carrying out a series of LSD experiments. This is from 62 to 68. And it's, again, to kind of as evidence that there's not really capacity to make this in

the Iron Curtain. When Bulgaria starts experimenting with acid, they buy it all from sandaws, like sandaws library sends it to them. Sandaws is selling LSD under the generic name to deli-sid. And they spend about $3 million giving their new hallucinogen to universities and mental hospitals in the early 1960s. So again, that's well after the period we're up to in the actual NK Ultra story. This is all being fucked with by the CIA before pretty much anyone is able to study it.

And I'm going to quote from a write-up in Atlas Obscura here. Among the human guinea pigs were doctors, artists, miners, truck drivers, and even prisoners and mentally ill patients. These research subjects were involved in some 140 trials. Their aim for these experiments with LSD was to allow scientists to understand psychotic disorders like schizophrenia better by using the drug to mimic the effects of a naturally occurring psychosis. There were some similarities between drug-induced psychoses and natural ones, but it was easier

to do a controlled study when causing psychosis through drugs. So in Czechoslovakia, which is also a communist state at this period, LSD is perfectly legal and available over the counter. This is like most of the 1960s. If you're living in Czechoslovakia, you can walk down to the pharmacy and you can just buy some acid. Well, hold on. I have to ask, when did it become illegal in the United States?

Because it was a brand new substance. Yeah. Was it banned immediately? No, no, no. It's not. It's legal for most of the period, like the hippie period. That's what I thought. Yeah.

It is not banned in the United States until 1968. Oh. Yeah. Largely as the result of some of the stuff that, you know, a bunch of, yeah. That's a story for another day. But for most of the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, you know, the Bulgarians are doing acid studies with LSD. They've bought from Sandoz.

Czechoslovakia is getting acid from Sandoz too. And rather than it being like a thing that like is being secretly used on people behind like the scenes, people are just buying acid from pharmacies in like communist Czechoslovakia. Doctors at psychiatric hospitals are taking acid so that they can understand what it's like to be schizophrenic. I mean, I don't know how well that actually prepares you to treat somebody, but that's how they're using it, right? Like it's like, we've got all these people who are hearing voices.

Let's take this drug so that maybe we can understand them better. Eventually a Czech pharmaceutical company cracks the recipe and millions of doses are produced and given out for free across the country. Numerous scientists, including Stanislav Groff, took LSD and had experiences in this time that impacted their future work. Artists dose themselves to great effect as this piece from an article in Przkrosz, which is a a Czech news site makes clear. Among them were well-known painters such as Evo Medek and Giri Enderle, as well as young

intellectuals, singers and students. According to an unverified account, one of them was the current Czech president, Milo Simán. A number of years later, Carol Gott reluctantly admitted that he too just once took LSD in the presence of doctors. I returned to my earliest childhood memories buried deep within my subconsciousness. Many participants of the psychedelic sessions, especially artists, recalled their explorations of LSD as unique, even formative, experience.

However, others experienced so-called bad trips, suicides soon followed, and several main centers, especially the psychiatric hospital in Sadzka, near Prague, research was carried out on a mass scale. According to unconfirmed reports, one of the provincial hospitals carried out tests on children as young as three years old who were experiencing mental health issues. In another hospital, experiments were supposedly carried out on prisoners. So everybody does fucked up shit with this. Every state does when they get access to it, although they're not trying to, right?

Like the Czechs aren't trying to create a mind control drug. They're just like, maybe this will cure kids with illnesses we don't understand. Let's give it to that three-year-old, which isn't good behavior, but it's not like malicious. Right. It's more irresponsible. Yeah. And there's a level of ignorance around the substance, but the way you become knowledgeable is not, well, let's see what happens to mentally all three-year-olds.

Yeah. That's certainly not ideal. Yeah. I mean, then we'll know. Yeah. We won't be ignorant anymore. After all, how else are we going to find out? Yeah.

Who knows what else? I don't know. And they are like, I'd be really interested. This is an area where I don't know as much. I'd be really interested in what they actually found in terms of how this impacted doctors treating patients, but yeah, I don't have great context on that. But this is a thing that's going on in this period. It does eventually the Czech security services, their KGB or CIA equivalent, start to do some

early research on whether or not they could weaponize LSD. And again, this is like a decade after they do this in the United States. So they're like well behind the curve here. They do some early kind of experiments. There's no record of anything serious. The primary interest, like the state security service gets into this and they kind of say, oh, maybe we can weaponize this. But the thing they actually start doing is using it to make a shitload of money.

Because they kind of always have a cash flow problem. This is true of all of the communist security services. And they recognize that like, oh shit, Americans and Europeans will pay a fuckload for LSD just to party. And so for nearly a decade, a huge amount of the LSD and like the early, like right before it gets banned and right after it gets banned, a lot of the LSD that gets into Western Europe and the United States and kind of the late 1960s, including the famous summers of 68 and 69, comes from the Czech intelligence services.

And they're smuggling acid to the West, not to destroy capitalism, but because they want, they need money. It's very profitable to sell drugs, it turns out. So that's kind of a fun story. That's all more than a decade in the future from the CIA stuff. But the point is, there's never, as far as I've found, there's not ever any real Soviet LSD mind control experiments. And in the early 1950s, there's no evidence that any communist country even saw the drug

as having that kind of potential. They didn't have a lot of access to it, so it would have been hard for them to. After a few months of benign experimentation on his friends and colleagues, Gottlieb leaves the United States to test LSD on human prisoners for the first time. One study later reported, quote, In 1951, a team of CIA scientists led by Dr. Gottlieb flew to Tokyo. Japanese suspected of working with the Russians were secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants and stimulants.

Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. The CIA team flew to Seoul in South Korea and repeated the experiment on 25 North Korean prisoners of war. They were asked to denounce communism, they refused, and were executed. In 1952, Dulles brought Dr. Gottlieb and his team to post-war Munich in southern Germany. They set up a base in a safe house. Throughout the winter of 1952-53, scores of expendables were brought to the safe house.

They were given massive amounts of drugs, some of which Frank Olsen had prepared back at Detrick, which is where the camp where they're doing this, to see if their minds could be altered. They were given electroconvulsive shocks. Each experiment failed. The expendables were killed and their bodies burned. And even what you're describing there, whatever effects they got, it seemed like it's just plain old subjecting them to extreme discomfort, like using the stimulants and the depressants

or whatever to get their body racing and then slowing it down. That's just putting them through pain, which you could just hit them with a stick and do the same thing. All of their sophisticated talk of, oh, wow, the magic of the human mind and mind control, here it still seems like it just comes back down to regular old brutality and then the people still not cooperating, then you just shoot them. That's what's so interesting to me, Jason, because all they're doing is using LSD to torture people in the way that the Soviets just hit them with sticks until they do what

they want. But I think what's happening is Gottlieb, he's taking acid. He's tripping constantly throughout this period. I think he's having really powerful spiritual and emotional experiences on it. And so he's convinced that there's something more going on with this particular substance, and thus there must be a way to turn it into a tool for this purpose. One of the things I find most interesting about him is he's this educated man, he's this thoughtful guy who studies religion and spirituality, and he's having, like, experimenting

on expanding his consciousness with hallucinogens, and then when he actually uses them on people, it's the same way you'd use, like, a fucking razor blade on a person you have tied up or whatever. Like, there's not, he's not being subtle, there's no, like, artifice to it, it's just cruelty. And it seems like they were so eager to get some kind of a result that they're just, the way you describe it, it's like there was no art to what they were doing, it's just the same old, I don't know, it's like, this is part of what I found interesting about

this, I said in the first episode, is separating the reality from, like, the conspiracy stuff. Because the conspiracy stuff always, the differences between what they thought this could do and what it actually did, that's the difference between the conspiracy theories and because in the world of conspiracy, Manchurian candidates absolutely exist, whereas the reality is they wanted that. There's no doubt, they wanted that outcome, it just, they couldn't do it and the actual reality on the ground is so much more disorganized and stupid and just thuggish than what, then the super villains you imagine, it's almost like you're imagining a more sophisticated

type of, when in reality, like a lot of it is just bureaucrats trying to get more funding to their thing. I do not doubt that some of the people at this point knew it didn't work or had lost faith in it, but it's like, well, this is where all the funding is going and you've got to put food on the table. Yeah. And I don't care about the people we're killing, so like, yeah, let's keep doing it. And yeah, so these experiments, Gottlieb travels around Europe and Asia to just, we don't know

how many black sites, we don't know how many people he doses with LSD and then killed. Certainly hundreds, potentially over the lifetime of the CIA LSD experiments, significantly more than that, but we really have no idea. We do know that so many people were being killed at these sites that it created a body disposal problem, even at the black sites that had been built as death camps. Stephen Kinzer quotes from an American translator at one of these places, Camp King, which I believe is in Germany, and she writes this home in a letter in 1952, arrived back in Frankfurt from Paris, son, morning and time to spend all day at the Obersel swimming pool

acquiring a nice tan, they dragged a dead man out of the pool at 10 AM. This is the pool that they have at like the facility and there's like, yeah, the corpses are just kind of like showing up places because they're just creating so many of them. Gottlieb seems to have, I don't know, I don't really, he's a fascinating character. I don't really have a great concept of what's going on in his head because he's like every day after doing this, he goes home and he milks his goats and he hangs out with his wife and kids and he's this kind of like kindly proto hippie nerd who's just very interested in psychedelics.

Well, this is the thing because when you told his story in the last episode, like his early, his upbringing, there's a key part of the story that is missing because when he described like, well, he was young, he went off to school, he married a preacher's daughter, you know, he was kind of a hippie, you know, and then he was asked to be a part of this program because it's like, well, he's interested in these drugs and in these chemicals. And then immediately it's like, okay, well, we invited him to go torture this guy that we were torturing with and try to use this. It's like, well, now hold on, did he have any kind of qualms about that?

The transition from normal guy who's curious about these chemicals to being at a black site and it's clear what's going on, like the reality of it was certainly not hidden from him. And you are torturing another human being who may not be guilty of anything really. And it's like, okay, did he object? Was he afraid? Did he? The way, so Stephen Kinzer, who writes Poisoner in Chief, which is about Gottlieb, is the

guy who I think has done the most detailed work up on Sidney as a man. His angle on it, the way he kind of explains it is that Gottlieb is a patriot. He is very sore about the fact that he missed out on participating in World War II. And he has been convinced by Dulles and other people in the agency that this is a life or death struggle with the Soviet Union and that only the most like they have to try this, they have to find this out. This is the most critical weapon that could possibly exist. And if the Soviets have developed it, then it could be the end of the world, right?

They could destroy the entire country if they get people in the right position. So we have to know how to, that's what Kinzer says. Now Kinzer's working from information after the fact he doesn't know Gottlieb. I don't, to an extent, the man is unknowable, right? Just like everybody. I don't actually know if I think that's what's going on. If I think maybe for all of his kindly exterior, Gottlieb is like a fucking serial killer. Because there's, I could see that.

When you look at some of the stuff this guy does, I could see there being an element of just sort of like joy in hurting people. And maybe we're just missing it because he didn't talk about it to people, right? And maybe Kinzer is trying to fill in a less frightening thing than just a man who likes to hurt people and gets a job at the CIA where he gets to do it. And of whatever's going on in his head, what he's doing is often like serial killer shit. For an example, in late 1952, Project Artichoke researchers decided to conduct a test into whether or not people with hepatitis are more vulnerable to LSD.

They are, apparently. It's like a thing if you have hepatitis or have had it recently, acid can have like potentially dangerously high effect on you. Gottlieb has his people. He sets up the CIA has a deal with the American hospital in Paris. And so he has agents waiting there as patients come in for like the right person to dose. This turns out to be Stanley Glickman. Now Glickman is an American artist.

He'd won prizes for his work and had gotten to go to a fancy art academy in Paris. So he's like a young man who is just getting started in the world. He's gifted. He's gotten this like incredible opportunity to study in Paris. Life is going good. And then this happens. I quote next from Kinzer's book, quote. His studio was near Les Select.

But after a while, he came to prefer another cafe, Le Dome, just across the Boulevard du Montparnasse. One evening in October 1952, he was drinking coffee there when an acquaintance appeared and invited him over to Les Select. Reluctantly, he agreed. At Les Select, the two joined a group of Americans whose conservative dress set them apart from the rest of the crowd. Talk turned to politics and grew heated.

Glickman rose to leave, but one of the men insisted on buying him a last drink to show there were no hard feelings. Glickman said he'd have a glass of chartreuse, an herbal liqueur. Rather than call the waiter, the man walked to the bar, ordered the chartreuse himself, and carried it back to their table. He walked with a limp, Glickman later recalled. The next few minutes were the last of Glickman's productive life. After taking a few sips from his drink, he began to feel what he later called a lengthening

of distance and a distortion of perception. Soon he was hallucinating. Others at the table leaned in, fascinated. One told Glickman he could perform miracles. Finally, overwhelmed by panic and fearing that he had been poisoned, he jumped up and fled. And for Glickman, the hallucinations don't stop, right? He loses his mind.

He goes running into the street. He's there for hours. He gets taken by an ambulance eventually back to the American hospital, who has this secret working relationship with the CIA. And at the American hospitals, he gets taken in hallucinating and freaking out. They dose him with sedatives. They electrocute him repeatedly, like they give him electroshock therapy dozens and dozens of times, and they dose him with more LSD.

They discharge him eventually, but he never recovers, like at no point in his life does he recover. He eventually gets taken back home, and he spends the rest of his days hiding alone in an apartment owned by his parents. He can only be social with dogs. He can't really be around people ever again. He's got a girlfriend, they're about to get married. He leaves her, and he never paints or reads books or has a romantic relationship again.

His mind is destroyed by this. He is ended as a human being, effectively, because of what gets done to him, and based on the reports, it's probably Gottlieb who puts the fucking acid in his chartreuse. And the thing is, we're probably going to get into it. Do they regard this as a result in their experiment? Like, see, this is proof that you can... Because all it proves is that if you do enough damage to somebody's brain, you can ruin their life.

Again, if you... You can really hurt people. Yeah, you bashed them in the head with a baseball bat. You can also prove that it's like, oh yeah, this guy never worked another day in his life. It works. It's like you haven't discovered anything. You've just discovered that if you treat someone horribly, you can permanently mess them up.

Yeah, I think the thing they take out of this is that, like, oh yes, people who have hepatitis are more vulnerable to LSD. But also, in terms of it being a bad study, we also forced him into a hospital room and electrocuted him and sedated him and gave him more acid. So you don't actually know how much of his reaction was due to the LSD and the hepatitis, how much of it was due to the electroshock, how much of it was due to the sedative. Like, you've ruined your own experimental study by conducting it so shoddily. Like, just as if you were a soulless monster who thinks it's okay to test this on people

and you care about the science deeply, you still wouldn't do it this way. Like, maybe you'd kidnap this guy and give him acid and see what would happen, but you wouldn't just start adding random shit. It's kind of similar to people that kind of have this really high idea of what the Nazi scientists accomplished because, like, well, they didn't have to worry about ethics. They had all these human subjects. So much of their science was just pure trash. Yeah.

It's nearly all garbage. Yeah. Their methods, everything about how they record results. Like, you look at how sloppy this is in terms of getting any kind of a result. There's no control group. Like everything about it is these people just, they're bad scientists. Like this is not the way you find out what they're trying to find out. And that's the degree in terms of, like, what's going on with Gottlieb.

That's the part of me that's like, maybe he is just kind of like a serial killer. Like, I don't know, maybe that's, maybe he just, this is what he does to, I don't know, get off in whatever way. And then he's able to go home and be this like normal hippie dad, but he's just got this like deep cruelty in him that he needs to, in the same way that, like, you have all these people who are like murdering folks their entire lives and they're married and they have kids and stuff. Like, we have, there are examples like this.

There's like John Wayne Gacy. Right. Gacy, I think is one of the ones who had like a family. Maybe I'm wrong, but there's like examples of serial killers. Everybody like, they're fairly prominent where they're, it's like, well, he was just a normal man. We all thought he was just this, you know, he had a wife and he had kids and everyone just assumed he was a member of the community.

Maybe that's what Gottlieb is. You know, that's the, actually the less cynical interpretation. Yeah. Because the more cynical interpretation is that any, is a lot of people, if you gave them a job and it's like your boss just tells you to do it, you just do it because your boss told you to do it and it's otherwise I'll get fired. And this is my career on the line. And so that if that, you know, that that's part of the less, the Holocaust is it.

It didn't take, it didn't take millions of serial killers that just took a lot of bureaucrats who kind of like, what else am I going to do? It's, you know, they, yeah, this is my job. This is what I was told to guard this building and not let anybody out. Like that's it. That was my job. What do you want me to do? Definitely.

I mean, obviously, like that's most of the CIA, right? That's most of the MK ultra people Gottlieb. There is that like that particular story where he's just like, he's looking at a bar for a young kid. He can drug and he does it himself. That's the thing that like makes me, I don't know. We're getting into the unknown. It's also more satisfying personal curiosity, but no, but I think that's what makes the

story interesting because again, the conspiracy stuff makes certain assumptions about the type of people that work at the CIA. And I think it almost imagines them as a different kind of human being versus so much of this is people just screwing around like this here, like just dosing this stranger to see what happens. Like this is just, this is reaching a stage where you're just screwing around. Like there's just, there's not enough oversight. There's nobody checking your methods.

There's nobody making you report every single thing you do because it's all secret. So, you know, yeah, and I hate that it says mundane is that it's like, well, he wasn't reporting to anybody. So it's like, well, why not see what happens? You know, I think you get so immersed in this stuff where anything can become normal. If that's just like your day to day job. Yeah. I mean, that is, it's to an extent an unknowable question.

But yeah, I, but I don't know, we'll come back around to this as we get through like more of this story and you get to know a little bit more about Sidney Gottlieb. But kind of right around this time as Gottlieb is dosing Glickman and destroying his life, he convinces his boss, Alan Dolis, to merge all the different government teams working on truth serum and mind control research together. Now, most of what this means is they're bringing the army chemical core who is still doing separate research into stuff like this and the CIA teams under one roof. In November of 1952, a month after Gottlieb drugs Stanley Glickman, Dwight D. Eisenhower

wins the presidency and in 1953, he makes Alan Dolis the new head of the CIA. So now this is the kind of shit Sidney's been able to get up to with his patron being the number two man at the CIA. Now his buddies running things and stuff's going to go off the rails, but you know what else goes off the rails, Jason? Capitalism. I mean, yes, at some point, but probably not while we're all alive. So sit back and enjoy capitalism and don't think about how it ties into what these guys

were defending by dosing random people in Paris. 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. 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 on the gun badass 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 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. Okay, so, Jason. Alan Dulles is now running the CIA.

Dwight D. Eisenhower is the president. John Foster Dulles is the secretary of state. And the agency gets given the go-ahead to open more black sites around the world at this point. Gottlieb is also able to expand the scope of his mind control research, and for the first time he brings in outside scientists to conduct torture experiments. One of these scientists is Paul Hock of the New York Psychiatric Institute. Gottlieb wanted him to inject a patient with mescaline to see what would happen.

Hock chose Harold Blower. Now, Blower was depressed after a divorce, and he had gone to Hock for help. Hock is a psychiatrist. Blower is a sad man who in the 50s is like, you know what, I'm going to get over the macho bullshit that like my culture teaches me about seeking help, and I'm going to go to a psychiatrist to deal with my divorce. And as a reward for being that self-aware and responsible and taking control of his mental health, Hock's assistant in secretly injects Blower with concentrated mescaline, telling

him it's depression medicine. He does this five more times over the course of several weeks, and Blower complains, right? He's hallucinating. He's having nightmarish hallucinations every time they give this depression treatment to him. And he's like, I want to stop. This is not helping me being sad about my wife leaving. My depression has not been cured by these random horrible hallucinations.

Can we please stop? And Hock basically tells him, you can't quit the treatment midstream. You have to finish the course of medications, otherwise it'll be really bad for you. So let's just keep taking this shit. In January of 1953, just days after Dwight Eisenhower was sworn in, Hock was injected with a dose 14 times higher than what he'd been given previously. He began to have seizures. He had a heart attack, and he was pronounced dead about three hours after the injection.

Hock is one of two Americans who are known to have died from the M.K. Ultra experiments, right, as we'll get to later, most of the, there's a lot of data about this that's lost, but Hock is one of the two guys that we know for certain was killed as a result of these experiments. One of Dr. Hock's medical assistants who'd been giving Blower the mescaline later said, quote, we didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was that we were giving him. So maybe these people were not, maybe there's some medical ethics problems here, too. Jesus Christ, yeah.

So okay, if you had to put money on, all right, there's two people we know died. If you just had to put down a bet as to whether or not there were at least one or two more people that we maybe don't know about, would you take that bet or would you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to be irresponsible here and put the information out there, but it just seems, it feels implausible, seeing how fast and loose they were playing.

We will never know because they destroy much of the evidence, we'll explain that later. But like, I don't, I don't see how the death toll, and we're talking, obviously they've been killing people for a long time, but those people are dying about it. Yeah, Americans who die kind of accidentally as a result of experiments. I would be shocked if it weren't dozens and it might be more, but we'll never know, right? Sometimes it's hard to tell because a lot of people have lifelong problems as a result of this and then eventually die as the result of, and maybe like, how does the LSD impact the fact that they die very young of a heart disease or does it make them take other substances

that contribute to that, right? This is all messier. It's usually not as clear as it is with Blower where he just gets injected with a massive dose of something and has a heart attack. But yeah, it's impossible to say exactly, but my, if I'm taking that bet, I feel pretty good about my odds. Now, are they calling, is it still operating under Artichoke or have they started calling it MKUltra?

It's just about to be MKUltra, so in April of 1953, again, everything we've talked about has happened over about a four-year period, right? This is not a long span of time that's passed. In April of 1953, Alan Dolis gives that big speech at Princeton where he says that communist spies are about to play the American mind like a phonograph. A few days later, on April 13, 1953, he officially bundles up all of the research the U.S. government is doing into mind control and he launches MKUltra at Gottlieb's insistence as the final iteration of the secret mind control research project.

Now, under the terms of the agreement that Gottlieb had made with Dolis, MKUltra is granted 6% of the entire CIA operating budget. There are no requirements for accounting and no oversight. Alan Dolis is not told what they're doing. The president of the United States does not know about this program in anything but the broadest terms, like every now and then someone will be like, you know, we're continuing our work on mind control research because the Soviets have something, right, but no one is being looped in.

Gottlieb has 6% of the CIA budget and zero oversight. Again, we can criticize it in hindsight, but hindsight is 2020. At the time, they had no way of knowing that that could turn into a carnival of horror. Yeah. So many things go well when you give a man effectively a license to kill and drug whoever he wants, millions of dollars and say no one's watching. Who himself is tripping balls much of the day. Yeah, it must be said, is hallucinating an unknown but significant percentage of the

time. Now, maybe this is not something that made it into the records. Did they know that MKUltra was an awesome name for a project? Yes. Or was it randomly generated? They actually kind of break their own rules to call it MKUltra. So with kryptonym, the MK part is normal, right? That just means it's part of the technical division.

The second part of the name, like we had MK and Naomi earlier, is supposed to be completely random. Because if somebody, if some spy like leaks a document to the Soviets that mentions MKUltra, you don't want anyone to be able to tell what it is. Gottlieb makes sure it's called Ultra because it's the most secret thing in the US government, right? Like that's why he calls it that. And I think it's just because he thinks it's cool that that's his project, like the most

secret thing anyone's doing is his project. And so it's, it's Ultra. Yeah. If you sneak into an office at the Pentagon or somewhere and you see a folder called Project Artichoke, you're probably not even going to open it. Right. If you stumble across a big, fat, red folder marked MKUltra. Oh yeah, absolutely.

You're stealing that thing. It's like this is either aliens or it's a doomsday weapon. Yeah. It almost be disappointed in what it actually is. Yeah. It's, but it's certainly like it is actually a pretty bad cryptonym because it immediately you're like, well, this has to be something pretty fucking serious. Right.

Yeah. Um, so Sidney Gottlieb gets his blank check and his license to do whatever and over the next decade, he makes full use of the resources that have been made available to him. Under MKUltra, an increasing share of the workload gets farmed out to independent scientists. One of these is Dr. Ewan Cameron, a former head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations, as well as the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron had been born in Scotland, but he worked mostly in Canada. He was one of the top couple of psychiatrists on the planet in the mid 1950s.

Again, he is the former head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. He is like, you don't get much more prestigious than that in this period. And I want to quote now to talk about what this motherfucker did. I want to quote from a write up from the CBC's long form series brainwashed quote, three years after the CIA launched MKUltra, they approached Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a research foundation and one of their front organizations through which they funneled money. They encouraged him to apply for a grant, which he did and quickly received from January

1957 to September of 1960, the CIA gave Cameron $60,000 U.S. equivalent to slightly more than half a million today. Now in 1955, a Canadian woman named Esther Schreyer marries the love of her life after a blind date. The two of them have a child three years later, but the baby dies of a staff infection at three weeks old. Esther is obviously very sad about this and she blames herself for the death. Her life up to this point has been pretty difficult.

Her father had died when she was young, then her mother had died like right after him. She and her brother spent a lot of time in foster home. So this is a woman with a lot of trauma. And when she gets pregnant two years later, she finds herself kind of so consumed with anxiety that she's worried that it's going to harm the baby's health. So Esther and her husband do the responsible thing. They go to the best psychiatrist that they can afford to try to get help. And the psychiatrist they go to is Dr. Ewan Cameron.

They had been told that he was, quote, God-like when it came to treating issues of anxiety and depression. And I'm going to continue quoting from that CBC right up now. Esther Schreyer entered the hospital in February 1960 to receive what her family thought was the best care money could buy. But her medical notes show disregard for her well-being and that of her unborn child right from the start. She spent 30 days in what was called the sleep room, a place where patients were put in a

drug-induced coma and roused only for three feedings in bathroom breaks per day. She lost 13 pounds that month. Her records show that she couldn't stand up because she was too weak. She also underwent a treatment called depatterning. Cameron believed that breaking down patients' minds to a child-like state through drugs and electroshock therapy would allow him to work from a clean slate whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed psychic driving, which meant

playing recorded messages to the patients for up to 20 hours a day, whether they were a sleeper awake. These voices were played through headphones, helmets, or speakers, sometimes installed right inside a patient's pillow. Records show that some patients would hear these messages up to half a million times. Okay. Very, very briefly. Yeah.

Got a question there, Jason? People who follow me on social media and follow me on my many, many podcast appearances know that I have this drumbeat that I come back to, which is how much the past sucked. And I get that there are lots of things about the modern world that are terrible and that it feels like things going in the wrong direction, the world's becoming just, everything is anxiety and stress and inequality, all of the problems. You did not want to live in the 1950s. No, I'm so fucking lootily not.

And whatever you've seen where it's like, well, you know, my dad or my grandpa, when he got married, they on just one income, you know, at a coal mine, they were able to afford a house and a car and his wife could stay home and take care of the kids. What happened to that? That's perfectly valid. Like everything you're saying there, you didn't want to live in the 1950s. Yeah. Anyone out there listening to this who is getting any kind of mental health care, like in many,

many ways, we are still in the dark ages of mental health care, like anybody who's taken antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication knows how the effectiveness is all over the map. The dosages, getting it right, the withdrawals are terrible, side effects are terrible. Like our treatments are not great now. But my God. The treatments back then, they were just experimenting with different ways to torture people. And like everything he described, if you were trying to inflict the worst, like mental suffering

on somebody, these are all the things you would come up with that's sadistic. It's bug fuck and it's made worse by like, there's stuff going on that's like in this realm that's them like potentially attempting to test treatments. Cameron isn't just trying to help her, he's also trying to experiment with the destruction of human thoughts and memories, right? He's trying to change like people's personalities through medical torture, right? Like that's part of the goal here. She doesn't know that that's what she's agreed to do, but that's what happens.

And by March 12th of 1960, Esther Schreyer is quote, considered completely de-patterned according to Cameron's medical records. The bad news is that being de-patterned means that she had forgotten the face name and existence of her husband. She could not control her bladder or bowels. She could not speak. She had trouble even swallowing. Her son later told journalists that according to Esther, she could not remember how to boil

water. Despite being de-patterned, the torture continued. Dr. Cameron would give her four or five days of rest at a time and then he would take her in and subject her to hundreds of electroshock treatments. These continued until the eighth month of her pregnancy. In 2004, Esther told BBC Scotland what it was like when she actually had her baby, completely stripped of her understanding of how to be a person. I had a new baby and I didn't know what to do with the baby.

I had help, a baby nurse, but she had to have a day off and she left me a book. And I'll just give you a little example from the book. When you hear the baby cry, go to the room, pick up baby and step by step how to feed the baby. And that was very frightening. Like she had to have it explained to her like how to feed, like that a baby needed feeding all of this stuff. Like it had just, and I think what's happening here is not that, because she recovers eventually.

It's not that he's obliterated these memories. It's that he's done so much damage to her ability to like focus and function and think by blasting her with noise, basically ceaselessly that she's discovered nothing. His deep, that's all garbage nonsense. If you, if you just relentlessly attack someone in many different ways for a long enough period. Yeah. Their whole sense of their whole function will break down. There's nothing magical and mysterious about it.

If you torture somebody enough, long enough, their ability to function in all sorts of ways. Like you said, she also lost bladder control. Yeah. It's like, yeah, you ruin this person's brain temporarily through sheer harm you were doing to them. Yeah. Again, you could get the same effect by bashing them in the head with a pipe.

There's nothing like these, these people think they're playing God. It's like, no, you're just brutalizing people. Yeah. That's all that's happening. So again, Esther does recover. She does get to live a full life. Unlike some of these people, she comes back to herself. Obviously, she and her son suffer trauma because he's in the womb while a lot of this is happening.

Like none of this is good for anybody. And his early childhood is, is not ideal as a result of his mom going through a lot of this stuff. Still, he and his mom, you have to say, are kind of the better case scenarios for Dr. Cameron's patients. He went to a school university where he taught and conducted his research, later published a mea culpa where they noted that, quote, in addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power.

His driving experiments consisted of putting subjects in a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time, up to three months in one case, while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems, such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from this action. Now, I wanted to provide a little more context as to just how medieval these fucking experiments were.

And so I'd like to quote from one more passage of Kinzer's book here before we close out for the day. There he or she was filled LSD and given only minimal amounts of food, water and oxygen. Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with earphones into which he piped phrases or messages like, my mother hates me, repeated hundreds of thousands of times. In professional papers and lab reports, Cameron reported that he had succeeded in destroying minds, but he had not found a way to replace them with new ones. After completing the treatment of one patient, he wrote with evident pride that, the shock

treatment turned the then 19-year-old honors student into a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle, and urinated on the floor. Now, again, that's important, his goal is to destroy their minds. This is part one of what Gottlieb wants, right? They want to destroy people's personalities so that they can put new ones in their place, right? And they never figure out that second part as far as we know, but they do figure out how to destroy people for a while.

The Canadian government has provided no list of the experiments that Dr. Cameron carried out with their approval. This is not something the CIA is doing, and the Canadian government is unaware. The Canadian government is enthusiastically approving of this, and when the CIA stops funding Cameron, the Canadian government gives him money to continue his research. So again, not just the US involved here. Nine of Cameron's patients sued the CIA in the 1980s for their treatment under MKUltra. It was settled out of court in 1988 under the condition that the agency was not accepting

liability. Esther was too embarrassed to sign on to the case at that point in time, but she eventually signed on when the Canadian government in 1994 offered compensation for people who had experienced full or substantial de-patterning. 74 patients received $100,000 payments under the condition that the Canadian government was not admitting culpability. So even when adjusting for inflation, that is nothing. Not enough money for this.

You could not pay me to have this as someone who has done quite a bit of messing with my own head on chemicals. There's not an amount of money you could pay to go through this. This is the worst thing I can literally imagine. I'd rather go to prison than go to business. Absolutely. There's like fucking labor camps that would be a less traumatic experience than this. At least you're like a person in that, right?

Anyway, Jason, you got to think you want to plug. How are we only halfway through this story? How bad does it get? It gets a lot worse. I mean, I'd say it kind of just stays at this level. We don't want to set false expectations with the listeners. Anyways, the novel is called, If This Book Exists, You're In The Wrong Universe, I Am Jason Parjan.

I used to be one of the head guys that cracked when Evan first started posting there as a literal child. I'm on, this is a sequel to the book slash film John dies at the end that exists as both of those things. If you're a fan of that series, this is the latest book. Otherwise, if you just want to see me posting things on TikTok or on Twitter or on any of the other ones, my name is Jason Parjan, P-A-R-G-I-N. I used to write on the internet as David Wong back in the day.

And we will be back for parts three and four. We sure will. You can find my book after the revolution. If you just type it into anything that will let you buy a book, you know how to use Google. We're done. Go home. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone 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 his hearse were 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.

Send 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 in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Send to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.