Chilluminati Podcast - The Dirty Tricks Department: An Interview with Author John Lisle

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

We all wish we could be John Lisle let's be honest. Also the government is so stupid. His book - https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250280244/thedirtytricksdepartment Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/johnlisle Site - http://www.johnlislehistorian.com Patreon - http://www.patreon.com/chilluminatipod BUY OUR MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Special thanks to our sponsors this episode - EVERYONE AT HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Stamps - http://www.stamps.com Promo Code - Chill Daily Harvest - http://www.dailyharvest.com/chill Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Art Commissioned by - http://www.mollyheadycarroll.com Theme - Matt Proft End song - POWER FAILURE - https://soundcloud.com/powerfailure Video - http://www.twitter.com/digitalmuppet

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Maintenance repair or install. Any job. Any size. Any Hour Services. Mention this ad and take 50 bucks off your next visit. Call Any Hour Services or schedule online at anyourservices.com. No one helps more homeowners than Any Hour Services. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Chilluminati podcast episode 194.

As always I am one of your hosts Mike Martin joined by the Dick Hills and Sid Green of LA. He switched it up. Alex and Jesse. Oh my god. Who is, who are they? Bing bang boom. Bing bang boom.

Who are these people? Dean, do you know them? Dick, alright. I'm the Dick Hills though. No, Dean doesn't know them, alright. That's fine. I don't know who are these people, but I'm Dick Hills. Dick Hills?

You know? Yeah, I'm Dick Hills. Dick Hills? Dick is Dick Hills. Yeah. That's me. This is, you know, his full, his full name. Who's the other guy?

The other guy? The other guy is not as important. No, his name is Sid Green. Like Seth Green's prototype. Seth Green's prototype? This is, this is absolutely, this is boss baby vibes. Alright. What is, what is special about today?

The special thing today is that Jesse is extremely excited and he's had like a history hard on all week waiting for this episode. Mmm. Mmm. I don't like that. I'm not a fan of that. Just Jesse, just take it. Well, Listener, as you know, we have talked on the show about all sorts of government

organizations and their weird, sometimes wacky projects, uh, even the darker things, right? We've done MKUltra. We've done a unit 731. We've done all that kind of stuff and it's almost as if we had planned this out in some way, like a proper podcast would, because today we are joined by John Lyle, who is a historian, uh, just a big science and American intelligence agency nerd, has a PhD in history from the University of Texas and has taught courses on US history and cyberspace and information

warfare and has a new book coming out on the seventh, the dirty tricks department, which is right in line with everything we're doing, because it kind of covers the origins of OSS into CIA and more importantly, the R&D branch and all of the wacky fun things that went along with that. Can I say a lot less depressing than our, than the stuff that we've been doing the past couple of weeks. Yeah. I had a fun.

I came out of this going, Oh, this was a fun time rainbows and sunshine all in the name of science to better humanity and not at all genocide. This book is, is this book is that this book. I love everything about this. John, welcome. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be on. Yeah.

I'm really enjoyed the shows. I really enjoyed the series on MKUltra, so I'm excited to talk about some of the stuff that I've been working on for a few years. It's, it's great for it to finally come out. So I'm happy for other people to finally read it. You mentioned a few years. Is that just a lot of research, a lot of deep diving digging into your 19 years old. So one, it makes me sad because it means you're much smarter and much younger.

Your potential is, I believe that is beyond podcasting. I don't know about that. Yeah. It's taken a few years. I started, I started working on this when I was doing my PhD at UT. This wasn't kind of the subject of my research. But on the side, I started hearing about these stories and anytime I would go to the archives to actually do my research for my dissertation, I would take some time to get some documents

related to this and, you know, study that stuff while I could on the side. So yeah, I've been researching this for a while and it's been really fun, so I'm excited to talk about it. Yeah. Here's the thing that was really, I think that was really fun about this for me was, you know, we've been subjected to the like human tragedy of it for like quite a long time. I take offense.

You shouldn't. Like we just did like a multi-part episode on Unit 731. It was like not, it was not like a tight subject matter. But what we talk about here to me, like as somebody who comes at this, I mean, you can see behind me the wall of comic books that are here behind me. Like seeing the actual history portrayed in a way that makes it make sense in line with a lot of the more kooky, sort of fun, silly, sort of spy stuff that you would imagine is going on.

You know, and maybe this is an effect of rolling the clock back to a time, you know, when a pen that explodes is like genuinely ingenious, right? But I don't know. The thing that I really enjoyed about it was that it made it seem like an adventure. And you know, it touched on some of the parts of this that went into, you know, you know, people died and, you know, but I'm kind of macabre in that way where, you know, I don't know, enough time has passed where I'm looking at it from this broader stroke, from this from this book.

We've dragged into the depths of five years of this podcast. There's not much that can surprise anymore. Yeah. But I just had a good time. I just had a good time reading about how, how, you know, colorful all these characters were and, you know, coming away from it, I just wonder like, like, did you go into it with like some sort of thesis that you wanted to say about, like, what happened with spycraft? Because I was really interested.

And I know I'm just going to paraphrase because I don't want to, like, scoop the book or something. But, like, there was a quote near the end of the book where you were talking about how it, it was like, I think it was Donovan's farewell to everybody at the end in, like, wherever it was, like a roller rink or whatever it was. And he said something along the lines of, like, this represents, like, the first time that, like, people tried to just, like, fight other nations, like, humans, like, through non-military means, just by, like, sort of like a summation of all of our knowledge. You know, this was, like, a very American sort of enterprise I felt like.

And so I'm interested, like, did you go into it with some sort of overarching thesis like that? Oh, we're coming together. I mainly just started making connections between all these kind of weird stories. And I realized that they were all connected in this figure of Stanley Lovell, who's kind of the main character in the book. So I had heard stories about bat bombs during World War II, where there was this napalm strapped to bats, and the idea was to release them over Japan.

I had heard that independently. Independent of that, I had heard stories of this Aunt Jemima flower that was laced with explosives that you could sneak into enemy territory and it would explode. I kept on eating that stuff. Yeah. I had heard stories of all this different stuff, and it took a while for me to realize it's all connected to this kind of singular figure of Stanley Lovell, and he was in charge of this R&D branch that did all of this stuff.

And so when I figured that out, I thought, well, this has, there has to be a good story here. I mean, all of this is connected. So I didn't come up in with it thinking that it would be this kind of arc of his, really his moral arc of starting this, when he's recruited to join this branch, to lead this R&D branch. He has a lot of moral reservations about whether he wants to get involved with this, whether he wants to create weapons of destruction that are going to kill people.

By the end of the war, he's advocating for the United States to use biological and chemical warfare on other nations. So that became kind of the arc of the story, but it's not something I had in mind as I was going into that. That kind of developed as I did more research. It really was like when we were, when we were talking about just recently, Shishiro Ichi, we were talking about like he, he has like a villain origin, like you can see the pieces come together into like a super villain.

And I wouldn't say level, at least through this book is necessarily characterized as like a direct super villain. And honestly, I feel like another thing that kind of happens as you read this is that you kind of realize that in the face of like what actually won the war, in the face of like the, the atom being split and just everything just kind of like shutting off overnight as it seemed like. Yeah. The World James forever.

The sort of narrative of the timeline the book presents like, you know, it's interesting that he went from like, maybe we shouldn't do this to like, you know what, anything in service of shortening war and then, you know, before anybody got to do anything about that, we blew up 10,000 Japanese citizens with a bomb. Yeah. With Stanley level especially, one of the main things I wanted to do with this book is, you know, not to paint him as a villain or anything like that or not necessarily even as a hero.

I want to lay out the context so that people have empathy with these people. There are a lot of differing viewpoints in the story. And so I want people to at least understand why someone could do this. How could someone change this drastically? That's what I want to do. You don't have to necessarily agree with them. You don't have to sympathize with level, but I do want people to empathize with them and understand where he's coming from.

And the scary part about it seems to be that some of the answer is that it's like kind of fun. I mean, I agree. I think Alex, the way you put it, like reading the book is like very like an adventure. It makes it super easy to read and I agree with you like a hundred percent. And that's what I appreciate about it as well is like your method of looking at level as objectively or as wide as you can, like try like all these other different perspectives on who he is because I think that's just something that's important for people.

It's easy to point at somebody and go bad guy or, you know, a man who did terrible things, but it's also equally fascinating to know what brought him to that point, how he got there and your book does such a good job of doing. Thank you. Again, one of the things I want to do is humanize him to a degree. How could someone do this? And so I point out kind of at the end of the book when he's advocating not only for the atomic bomb, but like I said, biological warfare, chemical warfare, it's not a coincidence

that his only son is on a boat midway across the Pacific getting ready for an invasion of Japan. He wants this war to end as soon as possible. His son is on the line here. It's amazing how once things become personal to somebody, the lengths people will go to make it, you know, OK for their personal like family. And when you have that kind of power and that kind of a resources at your hand, you could do anything.

And to you, you have it rationalized and it just seems like the longer you spend in the higher up you get, you kind of just start detaching from humanity. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's jaded, but it's interesting to see like somebody like Donovan or somebody like, oh, I can't remember his name. The mastodon incarnate. Carl Eifler. I'll never forget that.

Yeah. Carl Eifler. Some old Brock Samson looking guys, some some some some dudes that eat bullets for food, for sustenance. It's crazy to see, you know, they're sort of baptized in, you know, genuine danger to themselves and they see war from this place where they're almost like addicted to it and they keep going back. And it's interesting to see how these lab guys, it's kind of the same thing, you know,

but where Donovan or Eifler is like flying into enemy lines to say like, what's up to his homies or whatever he's doing? You know, it's kind of interesting to see how at the same time you have all these experts in like chemistry and stuff kind of just, you know, dosing their friends with LSD for the laugh and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, again, and again, guys, in March 7, 30 tricks department until it's out in just of like a few days when you're listening to this, but that we talked about the LSD stuff

a tiny bit during MK Ultra because they did that kind of thing just for fucks. Like you said, just like, I see what happens. There's like this footage of I think it's in the 40s or 50s or 50s or 60s of them dosing their own military as they march with LSD as they march just to see what happens. You can see them before and then after where this is just this dude like walking in circles and another guy's like giggling and it's like chaos. It's because like, what's the point? Let's just see what happens.

Yeah. The way that this was rationalized in a lot of cases, especially for these military experiments was that let's say the Soviets have the capability to dose a city's water supply with LSD and we can't detect it. And all of a sudden a city, the inhabitants start drinking this water and go crazy. They start going insane. What's going to happen? How are they going to react?

That was the justification. We need to understand how unwitting people, once they take this, start reacting just in case somebody doses all the water supply. Now in a lot of cases, these kind of explanations of why these experiments are happening, they're kind of post-hoc rationalizations. This is just the way to kind of say, oh, of course we're doing it for this reason, but half the time they're just doing it because yeah, they're kind of crazy. They were dosing their friends' cigarettes as like random employees in the offices, not

telling them. It's just funny because that's literally the same thing. Like a cigarette dosed with LSD is like what the inciting incident is in that Quentin Tarantino movie where Brad Pitt like murders like literally everyone in the house. So it's just funny to imagine that these scientists were just like, no, the government quality weed. He's so strong. It like knocks.

It's insane. The thing that I think is very interesting beyond all the weird experiments and things is like you were saying, the humanizing of these characters and trying to make them more not relatable but understandable. And one of the things that I absolutely love about the book is that there are numerous and I've written down a lot of them anecdotes and things that let you kind of know who these people are. I don't want to get like too far into the book, but there are just two right out the

gate that are like so good. One is when we learn about Donovan, who apparently is a badass. There's a story where he's at like a party with a general and the dude is just like making fun of him and he, you know, making fun of the OSS and the pre OSS and kind of like giving him crap as being like, oh, you guys don't really fight wars. And this dude during the party straight up just like gets all of it like has dudes break into his home, gets all this information and then the other party just presents him with a like a binder of facts and stuff from his home and I'm like, this dude is literally

a spy master. Yeah, this man did the cool like solid snake business. It is very able to do that too. Like I can just see that like it's the origins of the villain that shows up in the third movie who is behind it all like he's like, but it's like a badass. Don't mess with him. I love you can you can say all you want, but you can't stop the OSS, you know, this organization I write about it stands for Office of Strategic Services.

This is the precursor to the CIA. And there were when it was when it was first created, there was a lot of kind of joking about it. One of the nicknames of the OSS was oh so social because it was, you know, the joke around town was that it was pale male and Yale, you know, so it was all these Ivy League kids who were trying to avoid getting in the draft and not going overseas. And so he was trying to defend against some of these, you know, slanders. John, are you trying to tell me that even back then the different branches of the government

hated each other because that doesn't sound like reality. Come on now. They wouldn't tease them. Space Force is very serious, everybody. What's up, everybody? I'm Mike Wilson with Any Hour Services and if you've been thinking about replacing your old water heater, Any Hour Services is here to help and save you some money. Whether you're looking for a new tanked water heater or you want to see what upgrading to

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In Canab, Utah, your family can experience it all. Delve into uncharted exploration, try exquisite cuisine, enjoy exciting events and more as you let imagination go. Go to visitsouthernutah.com to start your adventure. A lot of military people did not like the OSS at all because they said the OSS handed out so-called cellophane commissions because they were kind of see-through and kept the draft off, you know, kept you from going and getting drafted into the army. So yeah, the military had a big kind of problem with the OSS.

Yeah, what's kind of fun about that is how that attitude is pervasive in everything they do. So when it gets to the point where, you know, by the way, thank you for this. It's not the main book, it's an appendix, but that first appendix is like gold. Oh, the one with the words? Yeah. It's just like a list of the project or kind of the idea of a project and then what it was.

It's so nice. And some of those things are amazing. And yeah, in the book you talk about some of the ideas and how at one point the whole process was come up with things that could be used in the field and they were like, oh, so where do we start? And so they just asked people in America, what should we do? And the things they got were insane, but also hilarious in great ways. Again, like you mentioned, bat bombs, which are wild.

And then I love that eventually it starts rhyming like we've got bat bombs and cat bombs and all it's amazing, but every variation of bomb possible. Yeah. And then the best part of all of it is finally when they're talking about bat bombs, they're I'm trying to remember who the two characters are. Thankfully you wrote the books. You'll remember for me. The idea of just do going to meet with a general in DC and him being like bats, atoms, all

these weird, stupid things like your people are crazy. What are you going to do? Mash atoms together? Oh, yeah. That's the guy who came up with this idea of the bat bomb is a dentist named little Adams and he he had some kind of connection with Eleanor Roosevelt. So he was able to get this idea to her. She was able to get it to her husband, the president, Franklin Roosevelt.

He was able to send it to Donovan of the OSS, the head of the OSS, William Donovan. And Donovan gave it to Stanley Lovell, the head of the R&D branch, which was in charge of carrying out all these crazy ideas. And so with these, you know, the idea with these bat bombs, like you said, this general kind of throwing it away or dismissing it, you know, this general had told little Adams, the guy who came up with this bat bomb idea, you know, out in New Mexico, they're experimenting with all these atoms and bombs and all this stuff. And little Adams is upset about that.

He says, you know, they're they're comparing me to these scientists who are jerking off with atoms out there. I've got something real good with a bat bomb. I'm not anything like them. What's crazy about that is that I think that dude literally gave away a government seat. Oh, yeah. It just had a pure anger. Like he just tells a random dude about atoms and he's like, oh, it sucks out there.

I hate those guys. It's like, bro, I think you just gave up a major. Nobody cared. Apparently. Oh, nobody gave a damn. But it also goes to prove the eight old adage is not what you know, it's who you know. That's what matters at the end. The idea that it's not what you know, who you know, this gets Donovan out of trouble

several times. He's, you know, he knows personally Franklin Roosevelt, the president. So when he does, you know, there's one time he takes a pistol into Roosevelt's office and starts unloading the clip into a bag of sand. Yeah. He wants to impress Roosevelt with this like, look at this silent pistol that I've got. So he unloads the clip, Roosevelt turns around because he smells burnt gunpowder and he realizes Donovan has just unloaded this clip into the bag of sand.

And he's impressed. He think this is great. What a great pistol. Donovan gives it to him. But of course, for anyone else, this would have been like, you're locked up in jail. This is crazy. But Donovan knew people in high places like Obama or Biden or Trump era White House would have been like the biggest scandal that's ever occurred.

Yeah. It's like totally insane. But that's actually kind of a good lead lead lead leading the way point into like the thing that I was going to ask you again, which is reading this. You know, the thing that I like, again, the thing I walked away from was how like fun and kooky and James Bond, like a lot of this, like you said to yourself was like Q branch IRL. Right.

Mm hmm. How much of this story that you have put together and strung together in this way and drawn all these lines through, like what is what of that is like on on trod territory? Like how much of the stuff that you that is in this book is stuff that you are contextualizing in this way for the first time. There's a lot of it. A lot of time in the National Archives where they have all the primary sources, the records for the OSS, all the letters and memos and documents.

So I spent a lot of time in there, especially the chapters on the documents division. This is the division under the R and D branch that forges all the passports and ration tickets and train tickets and, you know, occupation currency. Most of that stuff I had to find in the archives, you know, the camouflage division, the people who are supplying undercover agents with disguises and giving them, you know, ways to make them self, you know, basically so that nobody can see them, so that they blend in with the civilians. All that stuff I was finding in the archives. So I was really excited in the archives coming across this thinking, oh, this is going to

be incredible. So yeah, a lot of that stuff is new Stanley Lovell, the main character. He did write a memoir, but, you know, I really had to elaborate and find a lot of new stuff for this book. And you kind of touched on to that like he even like kind of sugared up his story a little bit with some some sweetness to make it a little bit more exciting for the teens, right? Yeah, that's one of the things that was a little bit hard with writing, too, because I really had to take his stuff with a grain of salt because I knew I couldn't necessarily

trust everything that he said, because sometimes in the archives, I might find a document that contradicts something that he wrote in his memoir. So I had to be extremely thorough with the research I was doing. The operation that you're mentioning, it's called Operation Capricious. He writes about this idea he had to lace a goat dung with biological, you know, kind of weapons, tularemia. And the idea was that you would drop the goat dung from planes and it would land on German troops and flies would spread the tularemia to the troops and make them get sick.

So he writes about this in his memoir, but I never found really any confirmation of it in the archives. So, you know, I couldn't really say if I knew that this actually happened or not. That's so wild. This is I wouldn't doubt, but I wouldn't necessarily doubt that that was at least an idea somewhere out there. I mean, coming off of the Unit 731 series we just did, we learned about like the fleas that they let sit in barrels for weeks to breed in a disease that they planned on letting

go in American soil like before the nuke dropped. And I would not be surprised for America. Like again, I would not be surprised if dung laced with disease and hoping flies spread it was actually on a list somewhere of things to try. It might have been and I hope I can find that one really crazy story from the archives, though, related to this biological warfare stuff that Stanley levels involved in was that he mentions in his memoir something about there was a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences where he was talking with all these guys about the different kinds of biological

weapons they were thinking about creating. And I, you know, I thought, OK, that's interesting to know, but I wanted confirmation of it. And so I realized that years before I had gone to the National Academy of Sciences and taken pictures of a lot of documents. I looked in the documents that I had taken pictures of, and there was the minutes of the very meeting that he was talking about. So I could confirm that in his book. So wild.

That's awesome. This is another thing, too, is like, you know, this book seems to be one of the only or first like bits of deeper information about level out there. There's really not a lot about that man out there for especially for how influential he actually was behind the scenes. But I mean, the fact that you're able to dig all this stuff up is. Thank you. Yeah, there really was not much about him out there. You know, in the archives, I found a lot and he has his memoir.

And other than that, he has some grandchildren that I interviewed for the book that are still well, one of them was still alive when I interviewed them. But unfortunately, not anymore. But that that was what made me so interested in writing this story, too, is that I knew someone is going to write this story. It's just too good. And I couldn't believe nobody had already done it when you went to go research and go to the archives and look up stuff.

How much of that was freely available or just sitting there waiting to be looked at? And did you have to put in any records, requests or dive a little deeper and like bug the government for information? Or is it just all there and no one bothered to deep dive ever? I've put in record requests, but for this, everything that appears in this book, I just went to the archives and it was available. It was already declassified. It's just it's just sitting there.

That's crazy that no one said, let's take time and look at this guy. Because again, the order of operations literally is like level in the Gottlieb into MKUltra. Like that's this, like it funnels that way. And it's crazy that no one's taking the time to go back and be like, yeah, these are the guys that were getting weird during World War Two. Not to mention the vibe is like Nick Fury and the Howlin' Commandos. Levels of like irresponsible comic book style soldiering. You know what I mean?

Man, it's like I'm glad we didn't really have a real episode between the 731 and this because it's like a perfect Lego connection of just truly truly was the same time period. You know, the same time period and just the ship. Who would have planned that? Yeah, crazy. You know, that's the you know, it just it works out that way sometimes. Yeah. But it's just that the ship that they were just willing to try and do is wild. And it's scary to think about because if any of it had gone,

if they had made attempts on some of this stuff and had gone wrong, disaster, just fucking unmitigated disease or disaster, if they just fucked up once. I mean, I mean, look what's happened in Ohio right now, like a single fuck up. The huge, huge like problems and they're messing with things just as dangerous back then. Well, that was one of the things that kind of rocked me about it, too, is how willing so many of these guys were to not just like, you know, kind of over like war conventions and stuff like that. Like, you know, you know, poisoning civilians in Japan.

Like that's one thing, right? Like I can kind of see how maybe logically you can schmooze that through in wartime, maybe. But also, they're pretty willing to just perpetrate these sort of falsehoods and stuff on other people in our government, you know, people in the news, you know, and I thought that was kind of an interesting sort of takeaway from this, that maybe not just in terms of spy crap, but in terms of a lot of the other stuff that we cover on this show, maybe some of those seeds were being sown by the OSS and the CIA kind of nebula time.

Well, that ties into one of the main things that the OSS is responsible for doing during World War Two is spreading disinformation. You know, that's that's kind of the one of the main jobs of the OSS, not just to gather intelligence from abroad and analyze that intelligence, not just to create the weapons and documents and disguises for the secret agents that sins, but also to spread propaganda and disinformation. So I tell a couple stories about this disinformation in my book. You know, there one of my, you know, kind of favorite stories is there are attempts to

make the Japanese kind of think that the gods are angry at them. And so let's drop bombs and volcanoes, and maybe we can make these volcanoes blow up and they'll think that something's going on. You're really just crazy. The thing that really messed me up, not messed me up, but just like got my mind working a little bit was the King Tsunne like irradiating like radium paint going on foxes to be like ghost foxes in the woods. Oh, yeah. And the death set Fox with the skull floating above everybody,

like in some kind of weird. Yeah, like it almost feels like they looked at it like Star Trek. Like they saw these like, you know, totally alien people. But my question is, first of all, I want to ask you a question that we ask every guest that we have on our show, which is where do you land in the ghosts, probably should have started with those aliens, conspiracies. Where do you land in that? Are you are you a no, which one of the three of us are you?

Is the is the real question for those who might be listening or don't know the way so we have a like a spectrum. I am on the believer side of the spectrum, basically. Alex is in the middle and Jesse is considered a skeptic. However, lately, Jesse's been a little more curious lately. You've been curious. I still don't believe in none of it, but I'm curious that you've been a little curious. It's OK. We all have our we have to have our years of curiosity, Jesse.

Yeah, I'm paranormal curious on a paranormal spectrum, the ghosts and all that. I've got to say, I'm toward the unbeliever end of that. My man, logical science about aliens. OK, what about aliens? I think it's possible aliens might be out there, but I'm not convinced that they have come here. My man, use the logic. Thank you. Next time you're at the National Archives, I need you to go look up some documents. So two part question is, number one,

do you think that this type of like sort of a lot more? I don't want to say like campy, but like, do you think this type of deception is going on? This type of research is going on today, you know, like the is there like a level of today still going on? And and secondly, do you think that the sort of recent flap in sightings and paranoia around the sort of balloons that have been appearing and being shot down?

And the the the fever of aliens kind of coming back into the conversation. Does that have the hallmarks of, you know, a kind of disinformation kitsune style campaign to you? Or do you think that the government is being straightforward? Well, I I I can't say that I know as much about more recent events like these balloon, alien, any of that. So I'm a little hesitant to to say because you all probably know more about that than I do.

I have no doubt that there are disinformation campaigns that are still going on. In fact, you know, one thing that I'm interested in, I'm going to be writing a second book that's kind of a follow up to this that goes into M.K. Ultra and kind of the aftermath of everything. Yeah, we've got to have you back for that. Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the things I've been looking into recently is the Soviet disinformation campaign around AIDS, the idea that it was created in Fort Deedrick,

this biological warfare laboratory. There was an article in an Indian newspaper called The Patriot that was written, basically, by the KGB, but it was anonymous. This was a KGB mouthpiece. And it was saying, you know, all this stuff about AIDS, that was true. And all this stuff about Fort Deedrick, that was true. They create biological weapons, all this. And then to end the article, they kind of mashed the two together and said,

therefore, Fort Deedrick must have created AIDS. Yeah. So, you know, the best truths are based or the best lies are based on the truth. And so I have no doubt that that kind of thing probably still goes on. I just don't know. That's a major problem in general, in just life now, taking two things that are true, mashing them together and making a falsehood that seems true. Because everything else that happens frequently on a disturbing level these days,

especially with the Internet, I think social media makes that so much easier, exactly, because of the Internet. It's it's also like kind of merging the the alien topic. Just briefly, it is like we had an episode where it looked at some stuff, but it led to a lot of it was just examining how slippery a slope it is to slide into conspiracy and the things you look into, like you're talking about in this book and maybe in future with MK Ultra stuff is like the people point to these things as reasons to believe the really dangerous, racist,

problematic conspiracies of today and how easy it is to just take that next step for some people to be like, well, they did this. So they it seems like they do this. And then at that point, anything is possible, anything, any conspiracy is possible. Yeah, that's such a good point, though, because, you know, especially looking into this MK Ultra stuff that I'm doing right now, I see so many times when there are people who say, if the government did that, imagine what it must be doing today.

You know, so they have they have no, you know, nothing that they say is proven and nothing can be disproven. But, you know, the evidence is the fact that something else happened. That must mean this other thing is happening, which I feel like that's a jump you shouldn't be making. Yeah, but people are, you know, and this is, I think, a deeper conversation for another time, but people are always looking for something they can hold on to, to explain why things are the way they are.

And conspiracies are extremely comfortable and very easy to be like, that is now the world makes sense. Well, as a I'm sure the historian can agree, as a former history teacher, there is something out there that explains why things are the way they are. It's because nobody studies history. Yeah, there you go. That's the answer to stop studying history. But yeah, it's there.

The reasons are there. It's all cause and effect. But people don't want to look into that stuff. Like, like you said, you can walk into the National Archives and get all this information that's just sitting there for waiting for people to just learn about it. It's the same thing with MKLTRA Unit 731. Even today, there are tons of people who still don't know what those are.

There's more people know what MKLTRA is, but not nearly. Enough, like my whole family, when I was doing that series, had no frigging idea what it was. It's just it's it's there, but nobody looks. That also gets to another important point that, you know, the the documents that I'm looking at, they were just sitting there for 70 years. And, you know, apparently no one either saw them or decided to write about them. But that being the case, it's it's often really hard to decide what question to ask.

How do I know to go look for those documents and where to look for those documents? So I'm sure there are a ton of people who would love to have found these documents like I found, but they might not have even even known the story to have even gone looking for the documents in the first place. So that's the hard part is deciding what questions to even ask. That's true. It's it's just how hard was it not to like spiral off into other rabbit holes? Because for me, it just is like a casual. I would consider myself a hobbyist, almost researcher for the show.

There it's very, very hard for me not to like pick something up. Very interesting, like doing MK Ultra, doing it from 31 and then just realizing there's a whole other 20 to 30 hours of another story over there. And I just have to cut that off. Like, I imagine that happened all the time. Well, that was the origins of this book, like I mentioned. Yeah, well, yeah, I was writing my dissertation on something not completely different, but it was about a group of scientists in the intelligence community during the Cold War.

I started coming across these stories and going down the rabbit hole and thinking, I've got to look more into this. So the very origins of this is that it just caught my attention and I had to know more. If I had tried to write the book that you wrote, I absolutely would have ended up writing a biography about Bill Donovan. There is like no way in my world that I had no idea that people like that actually existed that far into American history. So it's very that was very interesting to me.

I know he's even like referenced all the time in like movies and stuff. Yeah, he's he's a big figure. You know, when he died, Dwight Eisenhower, who is the president at the time, said that we've lost the last hero, you know, the last hero, Bill Donovan. He he has an incredible story. I start the book with his war story during World War One, where he gets shot in the leg by a machine gun and he's still giving orders and his troops have to carry him to this hospital.

He gets awarded the Medal of Honor. Yeah, there are several good biographies of Donovan, but he's he's an important part of the book and I I wanted to say more about Donovan. But at a certain point, like you said, I kind of just have to cut off and say, what is this book really about? Yeah, it's it's just such it's such a wild thing, too. Like, I mean, I don't know, it feels so central to everything that we talk about. Like, in this little side of the Internet, like, you know,

we did not even really set out to go super close to no government conspiracies and spy craft and, you know, medical morality, questioning, you know, research and stuff like that. But it's just sort of become, like, you know, as we do things, like, look into JFK's assassination or the Roswell incident or any of these other, like, big, major things, it's it's, you know, the same 25 people just kind of have to do with all of it. And that's, to me, very interesting how little there is out there about it.

I see that same trend happening in my own work again, like I with the origins of this book, I had all these different stories that happened to come together with this figure of Stanley level. It seemed like, you know, there's there's a lot of connections here that I never would have thought have beforehand had I done this research in the archives, but there are a few people that do seem to be connected to a little bit of everything. And yeah, I can see how that might lead into some conspiratorial thinking that,

well, they've got their hand in everything, therefore, they control everything. There's a moment in the book where I was reminded we've done a bunch of different things in the past where every so often during that, like, 1930s and early 1940s, names start coming up. And it's always people that are always tied with conspiracy. So it's like Rockefellers and bushes and like all these different people. And you're like, I get now why conspiracy theory is easy, because it you kind of feel like, oh, well, they all have to be connected

because their names keep coming up, but they were just the most powerful people at the time. So like their names can be attached to all sorts of things. But it's just crazy to think that even in the book, you start listing off like these people were doing this, they were involved with like, oh, I know that name. I know that name. And that exactly. Yes. It's even in unit 731. We had guest stars from the M.K. Ultra series popping up because they wanted the documents.

Well, and that's that goes back to the same thing that ended up with, you know, M.K. Ultra and what that was about, because as you say in the book, they just heard that, you know, Russia and China and other countries were experimenting with with mind control. And how could it possibly be that a P.O.W. would show up on camera and lie about America? He must be mind controlled.

So we have to have our own mind control. And I feel like that was kind of the vibe during World War Two, which was if Japan is going to have unit 731, we have to have our own thing and come up with our own crazy ideas. Like we need a Q branch. So they like went to the UK and they learn how to cube. It's crazy to me that that all happened, but like it makes sense why they would. But in quintessential American fashion, instead of building our own,

we just took theirs and employed them under new American names and wiped away their Nazi and Japanese history as war criminals. I would wager that a lot of people who fall into the conspiracy hole started in a genuine curiosity of something they've bumped into or something they were just curious about and found deeper. And then they follow and follow and follow until they get to that MK Ultra. And at that point, they're like, OK, yeah, like if they can do this, they can do anything.

But a lot of the things they also kind of forget is like these people who are running it very often while powerful, very stupid. Like they do a lot of very silly things that are very childish. And a lot of the times end up getting themselves caught multiple times, like as they it's like to their own and other employees and stuff. I remember a time in the MK Ultra where the guys went in with like hazmat suits and started just spraying things around to see how easy it would be to walk in as a cleaners and spread biochemicals around the CIA office.

Just silly, silly like things. And that's that's the other thing is like they yes, they're doing weird shit. But I don't think most of the time their competency is questionable. So they're not like in the background with a new world order controlling everybody for in some Illuminati's fashion. That's just not that's not happening. I think it goes back to what you were saying earlier about just like. Oh, we did this because we got scared or we figured out some sort

of like post hoc like justification for something. And it just gets you wondering. Like, I mean, this book, especially like with sort of demystifying a lot of the like government, government, government, like, of course, they know what they're all doing, government, government, government, like you can just see how the OSS especially was like a seat of its pants sort of thing. They're taking over country clubs. They're doing all these sort of wild kind of silly, like cranky type things.

And you you just start to wonder, like, is there any sort of leadership beyond getting everyone really scared about stuff until you're allowed to do what you want to do. You know, that's one of the things that people credit the success of the OSS, especially during wartime, is that they kind of had free reign to do whatever they wanted there. You know, Stanley Lovell's idea when he gets the head of this R&D branch, he doesn't know what he's supposed to do. And Donovan doesn't really tell him what weapons to create.

So he just starts throwing stuff against the wall. Well, you know, he's told basically it's better to to ask for forgiveness than permission. So just do a bunch of stuff and see what works. So that led to the creation of a bunch of gadgets and weapons that probably wouldn't have been created otherwise. That might have been good. That might have been good during wartime. But yeah, without that structure, it gives you freedom.

But with that with that freedom also comes a lot of potential missteps, embarrassment, operations that go awry. And the people they were hiring at the time also were like some of the sketchiest people in the world, period. And nobody trusted each other in there anyway. And it was just like a disaster on the inside. But like like you said, you know, especially during wartime, that was like the OSS biggest thing.

And then once that war came to an end, they needed to kind of like justify their existence continually. And that's kind of where the CIA kind of emerged and how they kind of transformed and made the Cold War, you know, way worse than it probably needed to be because they needed an enemy to like have reason to exist or they prevented things from getting worse. I mean, I mean, I mean, yeah, or there's that. I think to remember, I think the thing to remember, I think is just that just

based on like, you know, the kind of things that we're seeing in this book, right, is that I don't think it goes like, I don't think that there's like a level of polish and knowing what you're doing in, you know, subterfuge warfare. I think by design is kind of an arms race of ideologies and who's willing to be more of a freak on a leash. And I don't know. I don't know. Like, what do you think about that?

John? Yeah, especially in more, you know, this is one of the things I kind of conclude the book with. Sydney Gottlieb was in charge of MK Ultra. Stanley Lovell was in charge of this R&D branch. They do many of the same things at different periods of time. Lovell is in charge of developing weapons and documents and disguises. And he's in charge of assassination attempts on foreign leaders and truth drug experiments.

Sydney Gottlieb does all that same stuff during the Cold War. People tend to celebrate Stanley Lovell during World War Two and tend to villainize Sydney Gottlieb during the Cold War. But they're doing a lot of the same stuff. The context in which they're operating really informs our view of what they were doing. If you've ever had to deal with a plumbing problem, you may have felt the pain of realizing you don't know any plumbers. Whether you're trying to stop a leaky faucet, fix a running toilet, replace

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of what they were doing. Do you think a lot of it too is just because just nobody really knows who Lovell is? Like if there was more of an awareness publicly as to who he is and what he did like your book does, would he be seen more like Gottlieb? Or do you still think people might praise him more because of the context of World War Two? I think probably the latter.

I think probably the latter. I think if he were to switch places with Gottlieb and, you know, they're. Gottlieb wasn't. Yeah. Exactly. I think they would probably have similar conceptions of the specific context. But it's like you say, you know, Gottlieb didn't have a kid sitting on a boat about to go invade Japan. You know, there was no invading of Japan.

They basically had to. I mean, I'm sure that we'll read more about it in your upcoming book. But, you know, I'm sure that they had to do their own kind of back, bending backwards around why do we need to do my, you know, my own version of the bat bomb or whatever for Sidney Gottlieb. It's really not too complicated. Stanley Lovell, you know, Stanley Lovell was operating during wartime. And so he felt like he had the justification to do anything necessary.

Sidney Gottlieb is operating during the Cold War, but to Sidney Gottlieb, that is wartime. The Soviets might strike at any moment. They might poison our water supplies. They might drop bombs on us. We never know when they're going to strike. We have to be prepared. And if that means we have to dose a few unwitting citizens to understand

what the consequences are going to be, better that we're prepared than not. You know, so I feel like the the motivations leading him to do this aren't too complicated. It's just, you know, deciding whether you think those motivations are justified given the time and how much philosophy you've absorbed for you to become Oppenheimer or not. Yeah, I mean, you made the point earlier. Like it's just they just rationalized what they needed to do.

And they had heard rumor that Russia and China were doing mind experiments. And so that just does it. We got to get in. We got to do it first. We got to do it better. We got to figure it out before them, even if what they heard wasn't necessarily fully true. Well, there's also an irony to this that kind of goes back to what you were mentioning earlier, that these government organizations in a certain sense are in competition with one another.

So at the beginning of the Cold War, the army would or navy, let's say, the navy would inflate kind of its estimate of the number of ships that the Soviets had. Why? Because if you want appropriations from Congress, well, you better say that they're a big threat. We we need more ships. The Air Force, check your work, the Air Force would do the same thing. It says the Soviets have way more bombers than us.

We need more money because we need those bombers. The job of the CIA was to try to, you know, penetrate that and try to make more accurate intelligence estimates. But the CIA itself was kind of doing the same thing. It actually paid for the kind of distribution. It bought up a bunch of copies of kind of a Soviet mouthpiece, some some magazine in order to inflate its distribution numbers so that it looked more of a bigger minister than it actually was.

So that potentially the CIA might get more appropriations because, hey, you know, if the Soviets are a big threat, we need to defense against that threat. One of the most impressive things about the book is that thing you're talking about, that it's just a bunch of guys trying to do their job, trying to get the money to do their job. And in their mind, the things they're doing, no matter what they're doing, are for the good of the country and to save America and the future. And I keep thinking back to the three episodes we did on Japan

in Unit 731, it was the exact same attitude there. The things they did are terrible and horrible, but it's also kind of like in their mind, just like here in the States, the only difference is that we won. And we're like, well, it was justifiable because we had to do what we had to do. And it's super interesting that when you look at the Cold War and that attitude and the fact that over time, America as a general populace was kind of over it after a while, you can see why that. OK, well, Gottlieb, they were like, no, that guy sucks.

We don't like this guy. Comparatively, it was war time. We had to do what we had to do. And when you put all that together, it's just a fascinating look at just. A normal person and what they're willing to do or just shut off in parts of them to achieve a goal. And I love stuff like that. That's why I love the book.

It's great, man. Like because. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to ask a question that might be a little. No, please, no, no. If you had something more relevant. Oh, well, I was going to ask, do you think people come to their beliefs? You know, not necessarily just about this, but about anything by looking at evidence and kind of forming the belief, or do they have their belief?

And then afterwards, they look for the evidence that confirms their belief. That's a very interesting question, because I think it varies. But I think a not insignificant number have a belief and then look for evidence to support said belief. It exists in the UFO in the UFO world. I would big time as somebody who grew up Catholic. It is all our religion did was do. Do I work for the OSS in this?

Not necessarily. No, you can be you. No, this is just you, Alex. Alex, there are people out there who like jumped into the queue conspiracy immediately because it felt right. And as more and more things came out to prove it wrong, they just looked for more and more reasons why it was right. And they didn't want to let it go because it means their worldview comes crumbling down.

But that's I think that the for me, at least I would have to say this is like there's a dual answer here where when you're young, you're actively learning. And that's why teaching and education is so important for young people, especially when you're learning about the world in general and forming your worldview. I don't know when the cutoff is, but there's clearly a cutoff where you decide you know everything. It's definitely in your teens, for sure. At some point in your teens, you decide you know everything.

And at that point, you form a worldview and then information trickles into that. And then you base everything based on what you think you already know. And so, yeah, I think you can see people who had who like traveled more when they were kids or who had different types of education when they were kids, had very like comparative studies when they looked at multiple things at once, then compared and contrasted. Kids who have that have a much different worldview

than people who were raised in like a more of a fundamentalist things like that, where it's like, this is what it is and this is how it is. Now go live your life. And then from that point on, I think it becomes what you're talking about with people kind of, oh, well, that informs my view. And I will either poo poo it or agree with it, depending on how it makes me feel that day. What you're saying kind of goes along.

This is my kind of history of science background percolating in my brain. Max Plank, the physicist, he had a quote relevant to what you said, which is science progresses one funeral at a time. The old people are inculcated. The old people are inculcated in their beliefs. They die off. New people are more, you know, open to change or at least more open to accepting different ideas that might not be the established beliefs.

And they get older and they're get inculcated in those beliefs and they die off. Yeah, I agree. I think scientists, John Mayer said that as well, I believe. It was like, scientists, be kind to your scientist. Pretty sure he had a song. Well, I was going to what I was going to say. And I think this goes, holds true of like scientists and, you know, government bigwigs, people who really do make

these sort of macro decisions. Like, I think there's this sort of, you know, there's an environment that you're in that's supportive or not supportive of what you think. And I think, like, you know, in the case of people who work in the government, it's hard to, I think people are confronted with new information they're willing to learn in an environment where most people around them accept that same information are willing to learn. I think people are willing to learn as a group when confronted with more information.

But I think when you're in, you sing out one person from a group and you ask them, you tell them, hey, this is going to make you different from your group, this information that I'm going to tell you. I think that's when, you know, you start to get the lady crouching down behind the thing, calling the cops on her black dog walking neighbor or whatever. You know, I think there's just a little bit of everything in there. And I think it all kind of causes the problem that we always have in America, especially, which is just like getting, finding people who agree with you.

You make a great point just because the brain does when you single somebody out and you do present them with with information that challenges their view on whatever, the brain goes into it takes it like a personal. It almost goes fight or flight with the way it reacts. So when you single somebody out, yeah, you're almost like you're triggering their their primal reaction of like defense. And so, yeah, they're going to bury in dig in. But if you like, like you said, with a group, it's easier when you can just kind

of like group talk, you're not singling anybody. But take that take that to Russia, though, you know what I mean? Like let's take it to Russia invading the Ukraine, right? Like in the environment that we're in, there are certain countries and certain governments that like are friends with each other and they all hype that each other up with their like humanitarian beliefs, you know, countries like France and England who are like for all intents and purposes, they want to be like the good guys with us, you know, or whatever.

And then you have countries like China that are like they're there. They're among other, you know, contemporaries. And they maybe still have a foot in Russia that they want to kind of keep in Russia, maybe, you know, I don't know, you can get into the beginnings of World War Two a little bit, a little scary in that way. Don't put that on us. Don't don't say you can break it down to like a friend group or you can break it out into NATO, you know what I mean?

I think that that sort of push and pull you can isolate it to weird scientists, Moriarty types that work within the government and are subject to no rules and have to come up with reasons why they're looking into, you know, gas versus working on accents or something, you know? And I think I think in general, I think like, you know, going back to the difference between Gottlieb and and level, I think it's a similar I think it's a similar situation. I do think people can change, of course, you know, I've changed

my opinions on certain things. There is this book, though, by Leon Festinger. It's this book on psychology and he follows a group of people who think that a flying saucer is going to come and beam them up before the destruction of the earth and they have a specific date on which they say this is going to happen December 21st and December 21st comes and they're excited. And then it goes and it nothing happens. What do they do?

Do they change their mind in this disconfirming evidence? They double down and say, we were right all along and because we were so ardent, you know, in supporting these aliens that they decided not to destroy the earth because we were ready, you know? So it's like nothing can ever be wrong if that's the case. So when people are confronted with stuff that contradicts their beliefs, sometimes they double down on those beliefs. That's evidence of their beliefs.

Yeah, I just want to point out for the record. This is actually something we've talked about to the point where I have the audio book you just talked about when prophecy fails. It's it's absolutely fascinating that doubling down when it's a clear lie, but because it goes against everything you stood for, you have to buy an even more or else reality crumbles for it. And that's a fascinating look at humanity and who we are as people can hold up huge parts of the government right now to that concept.

And you can kind of let your wheels turn a little bit and go, oh, you can think about, you know, literally this is like ripped from the headlines like Tucker Carlson, they had his texts, right? In this like Dominion voting thing where they found out all the stuff about Murdoch knows that the voting claims are false. All the, you know, all the hosts know it's false and they're like texting each other. And there was one message from from Tucker, my favorite Tucker. And he he he had this sort of attitude in private of like

we need to talk about this more, even though it's bullshit ratings, right? Because given an alternative, given an alternative that's even crazier than us, like Newsmax or something like that, they're going to go to Newsmax and watch that crazy bullshit instead of our crazy bullshit if we give up on the bullshit. So it's interesting to see how working behind the scenes of the masses or whatever, the general masses, you can see how, you know, in a position of power, suddenly, not only are you like a genius compared to everyone, but, you know, you you kind of start to realize,

oh, like we can only convince people of stuff that's like within a certain we can't just jump from the election was stolen to the election was not stolen. We have to jump. We have to sort of slowly just forget about it or else it won't seem right. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon in the people don't. I mean, there I mean, people do a lot of people probably do. But it goes to that to the individual of kind of the thing that we're talking about a little earlier is like once they acknowledge it,

their reality crashes and like that's something that's very necessary to just kind of grow as an adult to like realize you're wrong about things and realize, you know, there's so much you still don't know. But for some people, that's akin to dying because you're no longer that person you were anymore and you can't go back. Like once you learn a thing and admit to learning it, you don't get to go back to ignorance of bliss. You don't you do not get to return there no matter how bad you wish you did.

And that's super scary for a lot of people. And it it could feel like death, you know, for a lot of people. And if you're somebody like Lovell, it's hard to not see. Yeah, you can. The situation of like we need to do atrocities. Yeah. Now we need to do them. It's hard to like not see the other side of humans evolve to be social creatures. So I feel like in a lot of cases, whenever there is some kind of big some big idea that lies at the base of your social group,

whether it be a conspiracy theory or something else, to give that up means that you lose part of your identity because your identity is being part of this group because we are social creatures. So are you more willing to try to rationalize that false idea and try to come up with a way? Well, maybe it can be true because this. Or are you willing to give up your entire identity? It's a lot easier just to keep the same friend group and keep the same group and not, you know, ruffle any feathers and just rationalize it in some way.

So I think that's probably why a lot of people do. That's a fantastic point. I mean, again, it's that idea of like you lose your family in a lot. You know, you're your chosen family, your friends and all that. You can no longer talk to them because now you no longer can relate to them. It feels like a lot of those spooks, you know, became kind of a friend group. Oh, yeah, I imagine they did as much as they became like, you know, crazy spies that can kill you and stuff like a lot of the

even the biggest secrets, like there's a scene I forget exactly. I think it's Donovan who's talking in a car or something. And he's like he's with somebody who's like, are you sure that we should be just like talking about when we're going to invade France or something? He's like, oh, he's all right. You're all right. Aren't you doing? He's like, I guess so, sir. Like, you know, like, like, yeah, whatever you say. Yeah, like, I think the perception from the outside about government stuff.

And maybe it is now, maybe it's changed. Maybe I don't maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Maybe it really is like Jason Bourne now 24 seven all the time. But it is interesting to me that every time I read a book like this and we get a look at these people that made these crazy decisions or perpetrated these insane things on people who didn't know what they were doing. Like, it always seems to be more like this, like this sort of like group of people who all sort of like smoke the same

gange a little bit together and like got on one idea and like got kind of fanatical about it. I'd like that to me describes the OSS. It describes the CIA. It describes all these. Well, not the entire organization, but like the birth, the the Hoover group, the Donovan group, like there's all these little clicks that sort of like you start to see.

And I don't know. I think that honor code is kind of an interesting double edged sword. When thinking and writing and researching, you know, these three letter agencies, CIA, FBI, NSA, all this stuff, it's easy to think about the agency itself as an entity like the CIA did this. The CIA is responsible for and what that kind of loses when discussing, when talking like that, what that loses is the idea that the agency, it doesn't really exist.

It's just like this fictional concept that we call the CIA. And it's only composed of people. It's just people in there and people are fallible. It's just it's just people. We have this group of people, the CIA, but it's just people in there. Yeah, it's that whole like people. Yeah, if you just paint something with like easy, ingestible words, and it's easy to paint something as a big old monster or big old non entity

that you can target and everybody in the inside can kind of get away with shit. That's why I kind of am like, I forget what story it is. But there was like some maybe it's maybe it's cyberpunk or something. I can't remember what it is. But there's some story where the United States government replaced the Supreme Court with AIs that are like they make the right choice. They make like infallible choices based off the text every time.

They're like incorruptible. It's kind of a chat GPT Supreme Court. It's just scary. Like it's just it's just like I think about that all the time. Like do I would I feel more comfortable? Like when I was a kid, for example, and I'm 13 years old or 12 years old and I'm looking at 9 11 happening and I'm thinking about like what's being done in my country to like stop something so scary from happening again.

Or however, I was thinking about it when I was a kid. You're right. I'm not thinking about some dude in an office. I'm thinking about every piece of propaganda they've ever seen that makes me feel like the CIA is like this infallible organization or that the FBI is like a bunch of geniuses that are going to like do everything. And, you know, I don't know. It's kind of interesting to see how it feels like maybe I would prefer

in my heart of hearts as a 13 year old and maybe it just as somebody who doesn't want to think about it too much that I would rather not be people that don't know what they're doing. But every time that I work in the entertainment industry in general, like we we we come from YouTube, all three of us. And I can't tell you how many times I heard about some agency or some huge company that's out there that I, you know, oh, someday I'm going to walk the halls and then I get there and it's like a bunch of people younger than me

that don't know what they're doing and, you know, they're sleeping on the floors and shit. And I just I just get the sense that we're all just kind of lying about how cool we are all the time. It's almost like nobody knows what they're doing. And we all just kind of hope what we do works. But I think when it comes to national security and I think when it comes to being number one in the world, which is like a thing that few countries get to like pretend that they are like America does all the time.

Like, I think it's interesting to see like that notion, that idea that is obvious to me, you know, like when you think about it, of course, it's just people versus while we're the most invincible, best nation in the world and what it takes to like connect those two things, like the people that don't know what they're doing and are just figuring out as they go along and what they figure out to do to make me feel like I'm being, you know, protected by the like the the CIA. I would say you're not being protected by the CIA. That's not their goal.

I'm just saying, I'm just saying, like, what what do they do to give me this feeling that I feel that I'm safe and lets me be smug when I go to other countries and like, you know, don't go to other countries and be smug. That's my advice. Look, I don't do that. I'm just saying, I know what Americans have as a reputation around the world. You know what I'm saying? And and, you know, sure, you know, I don't know.

It's kind of an interesting thing. And I as as fun as this book was, that's another thing that it really got me thinking about is just like, I think about the FBI right now. And it's like, what is going on over there? Look at what they did with the things we shot down. Yeah, we can't find it. Bad weather. You're obsessed. You're obsessed with that makes me mad, bro.

I don't think they're aliens, but I'm mad about the way they're handling it. OK, to change the the way that these agencies, the people within them behave. I it's not enough just to change the people within them. I think it's the incentive structure. If you're part of a secret agency, you have plausible deniability. So that means that you kind of are able to do more things without the fear, you know, of either getting caught or you're you're more you're more willing to take risks. And if you're more willing to take risks, then,

you know, more things are likely to go wrong than not. Or you're more likely to do something that goes wrong. And if that's the case, you're more likely to get embarrassed because that's going to come out. And if that's the case, that's going to lead you to become more secret because you don't want that embarrassment. So it's like this vicious cycle of secrecy leads to bad behavior, leads to embarrassment, leads to secrecy, leads to bad behavior.

In order to end that vicious cycle, you need some like outside oversight. That's the idea of what Congress is doing with with intelligence committees. We need these intelligence oversight committees to see what's going on within the CIA. The problem with that is that even if, you know, during the nineteen nineteen seventy five was the church committee when these, you know, afterwards, these oversight committees were established. Well, even when they were established, the CIA oftentimes just wouldn't brief these committees. It just wouldn't tell them what they're doing.

And so, OK, now you need to pass legislation that says you're obligated by law to tell these committees what's going on. But then they get around it another way. So it's like, you know, you need external oversight to do it. But actually getting that extra external oversight is really hard, especially when the incentive structure of the overseers in Congress is kind of messed up. They're incentivized to care more about election campaigns than actually doing government work, you know, just just and it's not their fault.

That's just how the system is set up, you know, so it's a great point. I mean, like when I love that tangent because it just by the by the point they were trying to put oversight over it, the CIA was already very much in control of itself. And I mean, even after the even into the OSS, everything they were they were trying to do was just like more power for them, less oversight, as little oversight as possible. And then trying to put oversight on that, they're not going to be happy about it. Do you when you think about that?

Because I was as you were talking about like sort of the the relationship between the federal government and Congress and, you know, the organizations within it, CIA, FBI stuff. I always think about moments like the run up to the Iraq war, when suddenly there was all this intelligence that was it real? Was it made up? Did they have did they have chemical or biological weapons? And it's one of those things where seeing that we can get to that point

from like, you know, we got to do we got to do where the we America was attacked and taking the idea of the things we do to defend ourselves to well, now we're being an aggressor in this case. And we're going to go to Iraq because there's some problems there, too, that we're just going to happen to handle as well. Do you think that all lines up and not being an aggressor? You're being preventative, Jesse. I bet you is the way they would have marketed it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there definitely is something to that in the sense that if the, you know, if there's not this kind of oversight over whether it's the executive branch or whatever, then there's not going to be accountability for some bad decisions. You know, if you if you don't hold people accountable for those decisions, then that just incentivizes other people to do either the same thing or something different.

So it's the it's the accountability thing. That's really important. I think this is, you know, getting back to MK ultra. This is one thing that should have been done after MK ultra is exposed. It was realized that Sydney Godley had destroyed the files when he retired from the CIA. What what happened to him? Nothing happened to him. Nothing happened to him when, you know, speaking of the Iraq war, whenever it came out that there was these so-called

enhanced interrogations and, you know, Congress was informed that the CIA had filmed some of these interrogations. Well, these intelligence oversight committees requested that those be preserved, those films, those videos, so they could see them. What happened? They were destroyed. And DeSantis was one of those people at Guantanamo. Who fucking did that shit? Like they're everywhere.

What happened to what happened to the people who destroyed those those videos that were required by Congress to be preserved? Nothing. Nothing happened to him. Same thing with the Secret Service texts around January 6th. Same thing just happened recently, where unprecedented deletion of cell phone records just changed their phones that like days afterwards, they were told, don't get rid of these. And then days later, they just think about the kind of person

that would be attracted to just going back to the CIA. That job knowing that they have protection and secrecy immediately. Like you said, yeah, very ambitious. But I mean, there's a certain type of person I feel like that is very attracted to that kind of thing that you just like. I have to believe that there were better than that. I know it's not true. But man, there are great people that work within that government system as well.

Not everybody in there is bad. I'm just saying like that kind of like pull of like power and secrecy and freedom. That's a honey pot for some kind of worried about your senator and or state representative to like all of that. I'll say this, the headspace after reading this book, I, you know, I read it like over a couple of days with my coffee in the morning. It's a pretty like chill little read, to be honest. Like it's a good read.

It's not like a very dent. It's like a nice it's like a nice book to read. It's like enjoyable to actually read. But walking away from it, I felt like sort of like this kind of I was frustrated that people can't see these agencies and organizations in the way that this book looks at them a lot. And I mean, this is kind of I would say mostly what comes out of this book is kind of like a humorous thing.

There's some atrocities in there. There's some horrible stories in there. But I think like I say, there's a little bit of like a spirit of adventure to this book, which I really enjoy. But I think that if the public as a whole can see these organizations in this sort of human light, you know, people like the Supreme Court, the FBI, the CIA, I think that people would have different opinions about how things are, you know, like and you said to yourself, like,

I forget who it was, Hoover, maybe, or somebody was saying to sexy it up every time when you write about working as a secret agent or whatever. They say to sexy it up to make people want to do it or whatever. But I think a side effect of that and maybe even the main effect of that, which which isn't to drive recruitment is to sort of just instill a sort of confidence. It's propaganda, my friend. That's just propaganda. I know. But what I mean is I know.

But what I'm just saying is like in reality, you know, as somebody who's terminally online as myself, you know, I see sort of outrage and sort of people scoffing and being like, well, why doesn't the CIA just do this? Or why doesn't the FBI just do this? Or how come the Supreme Court can't just X, Y, Z? Or why doesn't Joe Biden just da, da, da, da, da? And the action that the actual answer is, as far as I can see from, you know, you know, from reading this book.

And I'm certainly going to assume that this next book that you're going to do that moves the story forward even further is probably going to confirm my feelings that I feel right now, which is just that it's just about people trying to figure shit out like all these people. Like, yeah, there's there's degrees of of corruption. There's degrees of true crimes. There's like actual sex pests in the mix. There's all kinds of like sociopathic people who love to kill,

maybe that sometimes get in there. It's it is what it is. That's just the truth of what humans are. But I think it's funny that the resting state right now for people when they think about these organizations is that they are these sort of non-volatile sort of like institutions and that it's only the sort of J.F.K. Junior, Dealey Plaza types that are like commonly talking to each other about how, you know, wild and crazy things were without this sort of overcurrent of like

sort of I'm tired of all this. Like, why can't they just make it go away? I think it's kind of interesting that the only people that are thinking about this from a human perspective are people who are pretty wrong in general about what's going on, but are at least willing to cross that one line of fallibility, which I think a lot of other countries don't really struggle with as much as Americans do, because we're America, you know what I mean? And I think I think there's something to that.

Like, I don't think French people are like, please, the French CIA is going to fucking kill you. You know what I mean? Like the French people are in the streets, rightfully so, when they were even attempting to roll back, they were roll forward the retirement age. They were caught. It's a cultural thing. It's a cultural thing more than it's than it's, you know,

Viva la révolution based in some thing about France, where revolutions will work better. It's just like, you know, they think one thing about their government institutions and we think another thing. So I don't know. I think that's kind of interesting. And I would I would argue that that's because and I mean, every country does it to an extent, but America is history.

Courses in school are very propagandized. And fairy tales to make us look like the hero in every opportunity possible. And that's not just that's just not the reality of it all. I mean, yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't know. I can only have I only have the education that I had, which granted, I was in LA OSD wasn't the greatest, but I just mean, you know, I just think in general, it's just a shift in mindset. Yeah, something I should mention, but is I don't necessarily dislike

the CIA or government or whatever. I think they do some good things, you know, I mean, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think they do do good things. You know, it's it's easy to focus on on negatives. That's kind of what's interesting. And, you know, it's dramatic and exciting. I do think the government does good things. I don't dislike the American government.

I like the system. The fact that I can criticize the system is great. You know, this is awesome. So, you know, I think that should, you know, I should probably make that clear just because I criticize necessarily people within the government. I do like the system. Yeah, and that's kind of the point. It's that's kind of the point is like I think that I think people need

to be more comfortable with like less perfect institutions. That's that's the thing that I think I'm trying to I kind of went long winded there for a minute. But I think what I'm trying to say and what I think this book kind of correctly highlights is the fact that most of these people are just people that were trying to go to work and like do what they were told and kind of like do a good job and try and save people and like do do do

do what they do. But the result is not like 100 percent success rate and no problems. The result is like it gets kind of ugly. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices and it's not the government not working when someone messes up. That's just the state. But that's where the oversight that John was talking about should come in. Where when it gets too ugly, there's someone to be like crossed the line.

And a lot of the time there's no one there to do. I just want everyone to wonder where that guy is. That's what that's my yeah, exactly. I want people to just be thinking about where that guy is. I think the government, the United States government does do a lot of great stuff. And I do think that, you know, the CIA and the FBI and stuff like that in the military arms are also all very like sternly examples of how those things can be sometimes.

I don't know if they're still around. Could we get the BTS army to ask that question? They will. If we can, I bet you we're going to see some change like this. That's what I'm saying. Fast. It's been awesome to talk with you, John. Again, guys, this is John Lyle, author of Dirty Tricks, the Dirty Tricks Department, Stanley Lovell, the OSS in the masterminds of World War Two, Secret Warfare.

It will be out on March 7th before we wrap this episode up. John, I do want to ask you one question. What is what was your favorite weird secret project that you came across? Whether in the book listed or not, that just you find hilarious. I think probably it's got to be Operation Fantasia. I think we might have mentioned that earlier, but it's the idea that paint foxes with radioactive glowing paint will release them in Japan. And apparently in the Japanese Shinto religion, there's, you know, some

these foxes represent a portent of doom. And so if we release these glowing foxes, it'll make the Japanese want to give up and drop their arms and surrender to the Americans. And so there are actually a lot of experiments that were conducted as part of this. They captured foxes, they painted them, they released them in some American parks to see how people would react. Are they dying of radioactive? Yeah, so that's probably just the most Atlantic one.

Yeah, so I was just mind blown by that. I couldn't believe it. I got to wonder if there was some program somewhere they were like, all right, our operation to really freak out the Americans. We need a bunch of statues with the eyes bleep. It's really going to trip them out. If we could just like start putting those everywhere. I will say before we wrap up, you mentioned the idea of making the report

sexier like doll in a mom. The book, it does that with history. One of the things that is always very hard to get across to people is like the story aspect of history, because it's always facts and figures and dates. And what the book does really, really well is it gives you the right anecdote at the right time. It tells you what was going on through a story. And it all fits together really well.

But you do a thing that I think a lot of authors and historians don't do, which is like, dude, that is so sick for appendix to just straight up like, here's another story and it doesn't fit in with the overall narrative, but it's so good. And you're right, phenomenal story. And so including things like that into the book. Thank you for that. As a big old history nerd, big fan, anyone who gets this vocal realized

that the note section is really fat. I have a thick note section because I came across so many awesome anecdotes that I just could not not include somewhere. And so I have, you know, in my notes, I feel like you could make your own like another book, just like the funniest, weirdest shit that you found while researching these things. John, obviously, again, thank you so much. The book is coming out on March 7th.

The link will be in the description below wherever you're listening to this. But where can people go? Where do you want people to go to get this book, preorder this book? What's the best place you find you on socials? Thank you. Yeah. The best place to keep up with me is probably Twitter. It's just at John Lyle, my name, L-I-S-L-E. And, you know, I post updates about my book and everything on there.

But also I post interesting stuff from the archives. I post pictures that I find in the archives that are really cool of different weapons and disguises. So if you're just curious what it's like being a historian adventuring through the archives, I post those occasionally. So I would encourage you to follow me there. Barty, I just I just followed you on Twitter

because the moment you said I also post little nuggets of info. I'm like, bang. Oh, thank you so much. If you ever if you ever decide to dive into the Roswell files, you know, I will help out. I'll fly. I'll be an assistant, whatever you need. Hey, that'd be great. Yeah. And where can people get the book? Where do you want them to get the book when it comes out?

You can go to, you know, my publisher is Saint Martin's Press. That's a division of McMillan. If you go to McMillan's website, it's on there. It's on Amazon, you know, so if you search for it online, you should be able to find it. You know, it's also an audio book, and I've gotten kind of some advanced audio from it, and it sounds really good.

So the guy who did the audio book, Pete Cross, did a really, really good job. So props to him. So if you if you listen to books instead, definitely check that out. I will make sure all the links to all that is below. Audio book, you know, publisher in your socials. John, it was awesome to have you on. You were like it was a perfect time to have you on.

And I hope if you do get that MK Ultra book done, you will come back and talk with us. Thank you so much. Yeah, I've got a I've got a grant from the government, actually, to write this MK Ultra book. So that that should be coming, hopefully, within a couple of years. Well, well, well, what kind of cover-ups are you involved in now? From the it's yeah, it's it's, you know,

I found some really, really crazy documents in the archives. So the National Endowment for the Humanities is kind of sponsoring this project. So I'm really excited to show some people some new stuff about this. I just want to read what you read. That's well, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming on.

You were a phenomenal guest. Again, last time you can get it. The Dirty Tricks Department, the Stanley level, the OSS and the masterminds of World War Two, Secret Warfare by John Lyle. Thanks again, everybody. We'll be back next week with a brand new topic. We love you. Goodbye.

Bye. Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night, enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside. And after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dash back outside. She's looking up at the sky.

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