Forbidden History - Beyond MK-Ultra

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

In this episode of Forbidden History, we delve into the CIA’s controversial and secretive experiments that were conducted in the name of national security. From Project MK-Ultra’s mind control trials to the mysterious Operation Sea Spray, the strange outbreak in Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951, and the conspiracy-laced Montauk Project, experts explore the threads that may connect these suspicious events… Cast List: Peggy Brunache: Historian, archaeologist and lecturer at University of Glasgow Lindsay Moran: Author and former CIA operative  Dominic Selwood: Historian, barrister and author Luke Daly Groves: Historian, author and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire Lynn Picknett: Historian, researcher and author Colin Ross: Psychiatrist and former president of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian Danielle Lindsay & Brian Minnick: Montauk, Long Island  Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA's notorious mind control program knew no bounds. In some cases, people died, but in all cases, their lives were irreparably damaged. Classified documents and modern investigation tell of terror. horrible atrocities carried out in the name of national security, both at home and abroad.

Using the brand new drug LSD, they sought to completely destroy subjects' minds, only to rebuild them for their own purpose. This is a real part of history. It goes against the grain of everything that we think is acceptable in America. Could the agency have been involved in one of the most notorious assassinations in history? What is the truth behind the CIA's mind control program? The foothills of the Alps are the birthplace of the CIA's mind control program. Just outside Munich, Germany, lie the remnants of Dachau concentration camp.

It was here that a campaign of human experimentation using mind-altering drugs began. The Nazis conducted all sorts of horrible experiments on concentration camp prisoners. They put people in large tubs of ice water to see how long it could take them to die, and they put people in high altitude chambers. They even put a drug called mesculin, which has got hallucinogenic properties in people's drinks. One eyewitness from Dachau said that the mesculin experiments were conducted to try and eliminate the will of the person examined. At the end of the Second World War, there was something called Operation Paperclip,

where a great many German scientists were invited over to the United States. They shared their knowledge, their scientific discoveries, their research, and basically took root in the States. There's a man named Albertus Strukeld who did real atrocity-level experimentation that resulted in people dying during the Second World War. He was brought over to Texas, a library is named after him, and he's regarded as the medical founder of aviation medicine. The intelligence gain from Nazi scientists via Operation Paperclip

led to huge advances in the fields of rocketry and aeronautics. But the CIA also pursued clandestine research into mind control. In 1950, just five years after the end of World War II, the Cold War II, the Cold War suddenly heated up. The West found itself at war with communism in Korea. During the Korean War, many American soldiers who were shot down by communist forces over Korea subsequently made public confessions saying that they'd been engaging in germ warfare, that they dropped anthrax and plague onto the civilian populations.

Now that was something hotly denied by the Americans, and they accused the Koreans of of using Soviet and Chinese brainwashing methods. And you can see the anxiety in the United States about this whole issue in Hollywood movies like the Manchurian candidate and invasion of the body snatchers. So the official story of why the CIA got into mind control was that it was defensive and reactive

to brainwashing by the communist Chinese. This brainwashing, the psychological indoctrination that had taken place was so successful, that we had 21 people decide not to be repatriated. Some CIA agents reasoned that even if the Soviets hadn't yet got a mind-controlling drug, they could get one in future, which meant that America had to have one first to better protect Americans and to help win the Cold War. A number of projects were started by the CIA to explore the use of drugs in mind control.

The most ambitious of these became known as MK Ultra. Of all the drugs tested by the CIA, one new synthetic chemical compound stood out from all the others. Lysergic acid diethelamide, or LSD. So LSD was discovered by accident late 30s, early 40s, by a chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland. His name was Albert Hoffman. So he was doing research on ergo-alkylides, which are rye fungus, He got one on his fingers and licked his finger and went on the first LSD trip. LSD is the great psychedelic drug.

It's psychoactive substance that basically gives you hallucinations, which can be heavenly and can be hellish. The CIA decided to use LSD because they essentially saw it as a way to destroy someone's mind. There are you. And the thinking was, if we can destroy a person's mind, we can perhaps build it back to our liking. And the man chosen by the CIA to lead the research into this seemingly incredible new drug

was Sidney Gottlieb. Sidney Gottlieb was essentially the CIA's top chemist. He was in charge of the mind control program. And he's been referred to since as the CIA's Poisoner in Chief. So here we have an American Jew who's using the same methodology that Nazi scientists used to experiment on prisoners in DACO, with seemingly no qualms about it. In the early 1950s, the CIA bought the world's entire supply of LSD

from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals for $240,000. The scope of the mind control program soon grew exponentially. MK Ultra was a super secret program. Very few individuals knew about it. And it very quickly got completely out of hand. We'll never know the full scope of how many people were involved in the MK Ultra program. We certainly know that there were volunteers that knew what they were getting into,

but there were also people who were coerced into it, and unfortunately, so many more that had no clue that they were being dosed. But at one stage, the MK Ultra team, they decide that in order to test the true effects of LST, they have to do it unwittingly. And so you have this remarkable situation where at the height of the Cold War, CIA agents are actually putting LSD in their morning coffee cups and tripping out. There's many ways that we know that all of this science fiction-sounding stuff is true. The Freedom of Information Act liberated all these documents back in the 70s.

It's fully, fully, fully documented by the CIA. And it describes in great detail implanting electrodes in people's brains, using hypnosis, using all kinds of different chemicals. Inevitably, the cavalier experiments undertaken by Sidney Gottlieb and his underlings would have dire consequences, shown most clearly by the fate of a scientist named Frank Olson. Former CIA operative Lindsay Moran knows all too well what the agency is capable of doing in the interests of national security. Frank Olson was a bio-weapons scientist, and he was actually doing top-secret work for the CIA

On 19th of November 1953, Frank Olson is at a work retreat with his CIA colleagues in the woods of Maryland. And just after dinner in the evening, the men share a bottle of Quantro, which Sidney Gottlieb had actually spiked with LSD. Now, Frank Olson has a really bad trip, and one of the men who's with him says that he actually starts to act psychotic. Olson returned home and appeared despondent to his family, telling them that he's made a terrible mistake. Reluctantly, he agreed to go to New York City with his colleagues to see a psychiatrist. So Frank Olson was given this LSD, and it kind of understandably blew his mind.

Both prior to the retreat and even during and after the retreat, Frank Olson was expressing misgivings about the programs he was involved with with the CIA. And these were super top-secret programs. So it had become evident that Frank Olson was a problem. He was essentially a dissident. And he expressed openly to this small core group of people that he didn't want to do this anymore. He actually asked to quit. Frank Olson's grave misgivings about his initial.

involvement in this secretive CIA program would seal his fate. Frank Olson at 2.30 in the morning plunged to his death right here. The night manager of the hotel came out, and Frank Olson was still alive at this point, and was trying to mumble a few words that the night manager couldn't understand, and then Frank Olson died. But the night manager knew that something was amiss. If you look at the Look at the rooms in this hotel, they're actually very small. There would be no way that someone could get enough of a running start to dive and crash through the glass window and fall to his death.

Even if he opened the door and got a running start down the hallway, it's just virtually impossible. It doesn't make any sense. But who was responsible for Frank Olson's death? And why? I'm strongly convinced that Frank Olson was pushed out of the hotel room and it was not a suicide. And the reason that was done is he was threatening to become a whistleblower. He was directly involved in all kinds of chemical experimentation, chemical warfare.

I think the evidence is such that one could say, yeah, Frank Olson was murdered. CIA agents proceeded to cover up the circumstances of Frank Olson's death in public, although privately they admitted that LSD had triggered as death. Frank Olson's loving wife and children had to wait until 1975 to discover that the CIA had actually given him LSD. The CIA has never admitted to having a hand in Frank Olson's death. Yet over 20 years later in 1975, the Olson family received apologies from CIA director William Colby

and President Ford, as well as $750,000 in compensation. I can sympathize greatly with Frank Olson, having worked for the CIA myself. The Central Intelligence Agency is not now and never has been a place appropriate for someone who has a strong moral compass. It's a place where you have to be comfortable operating in the gray. Frank Olson was deeply uncomfortable with a lot of the things that the CIA and the U.S. government was doing. Thousands of people were knowingly and unknowingly dosed with LSD by the CIA in the 1950s. This project was so pervasive. It started to have some unintended consequences.

Some famous volunteers to take LSD were Alan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Ness, a Grateful Dead lyricist, Robert Hunter. One of the ultimate ironies about the MK Ultra program is that it was created by the government for control. And yet when you look at some of the people who participated in the program or were closely impacted by it, they actually founded the counterculture.

MK. Ultra succeeded in creating a revolution. But this LSD dosing also had negative consequences for many of its participants, including psychosis and suicide. As you concentrate, time slows down, you hallucinate that as you dream. This is called tripping. A combination of human experimentation and little oversight would lead to some very unsavory side projects. The CIA really had very few limits on who they chose

to use as the subjects in their trials. People in prisons, people in hospitals and mental asylums, even men visiting brothels. 81 Bedford Street in the West Village in New York City was actually home to one of the CIA's most secretive, most nefarious, and perhaps little-known missions. It was called Operation Midnight Climax.

They gave unwitting American. doses of LSD, and it coupled the drugs with sex. They used this as a safe house, and they had the prostitutes go out, bring their Johns back, and they would watch everything that happened, including the sex. Operation Midnight Climax was essentially the brainchild

of two people. The CIA's main chemist, Sid Gottlieb, and also this guy, this guy named George Hunter White, a completely out-of-control character. Federal Bureau of Narcotics Agent George Hunter White was said to be more interested in sampling the CIA-supplied drugstash than conducting scientific research. Operation Midnight Climax has to be one of the most bizarre episodes

in this whole mind-control saga. I mean, it's a completely ridiculous idea to use. prostitutes to lace their client's drinks with LSD and have scientists behind a mirror gauping all of this. I mean, really, this is voyeurism. This isn't science. Starting in the mid-1950s, Operation Midnight Climax would run for nearly a decade with little to no credible results.

But soon, the MK Ultra project would spread beyond America's borders and become an international scheme of brainwashing. Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA dosed thousands of people with LSD, leading to the death of at least one of its own scientists. But spurred on by Cold War paranoia and claims of communist brainwashing, it would continue to undertake a variety of unethical experiments in its quest for mind control. There was a wide range of institutions who contracted under MKL And this includes leading universities like Tulane, Harvard, Yale, many leading psychiatrists and psychologists,

all cleared at top secret. For many of the MK Ultra experiments, the CIA chose people who would be almost powerless for revenge. These are people like prostitutes, drug addicts, and even mental patients. And in this, there are horrible echoes of the selective nature of Nazi terror. As the 50s wore on, the CIA enlisted more

more and more institutions into the MK Ultra project, both in the US and abroad. One of the most respected scientists that take part in the international experiments was the Scottish-born Ewan Cameron. U.N. Cameron was at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was part of the team that went over and interviewed Nuremberg doctors. His experiments were on psychic driving and depattering.

From 1957 to 1964, Cameron worked in the MK Ultra program, and he was particularly focused on LSD, convulsives, and administering electroshock therapy at many times the normal and the safe dosage. But one thing he's still really known for is inventing the psychic driving technique of torture. And he did that by putting people into comers for days, weeks, or in some cases even months. And while the victim was in a coma, playing white noise or repeated sentences at them over over and over and over again. And in several cases, this resulted in complete

and permanent mental breakdown. So the purpose of you and Cameron's experiments was to wipe out a person's memories. And it's obvious why the CIA would be interested in that, and it's massively unethical, destructive treatment. What's absolutely shocking is that this was really happening. These weren't theories on a blackboard. People like Cameron were taking real people.

Often people who were just checking in to a medical facility because they had anxiety or post-natal depression, and they were being put into comers and having their minds destroyed. And this was being done on the American taxpayers' dollar. It shouldn't be a surprise to any of us that so many conspiracy theories swirl around the topic of mind control and particularly around the CIA, because this is a real part of history. This really did happen. It's pretty horrifying.

And it really goes against the grain of everything that we think is acceptable in America. But the U.S. government's testing on unsuspecting subjects wasn't confined to hospitals or labs. One bold operation experimented on a major U.S. city in plain sight. In the early 50s, there was efforts to test a number of things on unwitting civilians. So there was various kinds of bacteria were sprayed in New York and San Francisco. Radioactive plutonium was injected into people without their consent. All kinds of different things were done. One such operation undertaken in 1950 was known as Operation Sea Spray.

Operation Sea Spray just defies comprehension. In 1950, the U.S. Navy decided to investigate how to do you. the San Francisco Bay Area would cope if there was a biological attack. And they did that by releasing two biological agents. Unsurprisingly, not long afterwards, people began to turn up with unexplained illnesses. Ten people were hospitalized, and one person died from this simulated biological aerosol attack. But could the CIA have carried out similar experiments in other parts of the globe? Some say MK Ultra's scope reached across the Atlantic Ocean with deadly consequences.

In southern France lies the town of Ponce Espri. The sleepy community seems an unlikely place for international espionage. But in 1951, events here put it in the global spotlight. Multiple residents of this town, Ponce & Esprit in France became sick, mysteriously sick. They were being hospitalized, there were rashes, people were becoming unconscious, and nobody had any idea why.

And there was some speculation that maybe there had been a poisonous agent inserted into the bread, into the bakeries of the town, or maybe something had gotten into the water supply. At first, it was thought to be simple food poisoning. But for some unfortunate people, those symptoms evolved into hallucinations and convulsions. One man jumped from a window believing that he was an airplane, an 11-year-old boy tried to strangle his mother. What caused these apocalyptic scenes?

Many have pointed to these symptoms being very similar to those of an LSD trip. Recent new evidence suggests that the CIA might have been responsible. More than 250 people were infected, seven died, and 50 were confined in lunatic asylums. The official explanation why so many people just started having these horrific nightmares and to daymairs was bread. A particular bakery that had sold bread to a number of the townspeople was responsible. The idea is that this was a case of ergot poisoning. Urgut poisoning is caused by the ingestion of a fungus that can grow unspoiled grain. Throughout French history, there have been a number of these deadly outbreaks,

with victims displaying symptoms similar to those seen in 1951. But evidence from one author suggests foul play. In 2009, Hank Albrelli wrote that the CIA, possibly with the help of Frank Olberle, was responsible for what happened at Ponce Espri. Hank Albrelli, who died a few years back, a very thorough, very scholarly researcher, doesn't fly off the handle with conspiracy theories. He was strongly convinced that Frank Olson was murdered

and that the Ponce de Espri was an LSD experiment. What's really suspicious about this incident is that Frank Olson, who we know was somehow involved in the M.K. Ultra program until he fell to his death, he happened to be in the vicinity at the same time that this was taking place. So the very valid speculation is, perhaps this was a CIA conducted experiment.

In the CIA's primary mandate of the 1950s, which was to fight communism, they were going to use any mechanism. that they could. So why not experiment on a small French town instead of a small American town? Because he had spoken out about what really happened at Ponce Espri, Albrelli claims that Frank Olson was murdered by the CIA, with the help of George Hunter White, the mastermind behind Operation Midnight Climax.

However, Albrelli's sources within the CIA remain anonymous, purportedly for their own sense. for their own safety. But without solid proof of the agency's involvement, many remain skeptical. Could LSD have been injected into the bread at a certain bakery? Yes, that's possible. Though I don't think that many people

believe that was the case. It was probably some bad spores or the kind of cleaning products to use to clean the wheat that became used in the wheat used in flour. They suffered from very bad digestive problems as a result of this poisoning, which is not a feature of LSD at all.

So there's things that really don't match the LSD thing and really do match the historical description of Ergot poisoning. The CIA has never admitted to having any involvement in the terrible events that occurred in Pons Saint-Esprit. However, the vast majority of files relating to MK Ultra were destroyed when the project was dissolved. President Ford in the 70s came down hard on what he discovered about the CIA using LSD and other really dodgy techniques for basically playing with people's minds, in some cases destroying

people's minds. So officially, such things are no longer legal. There's a whole series of projects which just were brought to an end administratively, And then it was all just shut down by the director of the CIA, Richard Helms. But that's not believable. There must have been subsequent projects with different names that we don't know about. Even though the MK Ultra project was officially disbanded in the 1970s, rumors of ongoing experiments continued.

One of the epicenters of these rumors lies 100 miles east of Manhattan. Camp Hero Montauk When we think of the beaches of Long Island, we think of the Hamptons, and you would never suspect that there's actually a rather creepy and menacing military base that's been shrouded in mystery and conspiracy for decades. Camp Hero is basically a coastal defense station built during World War II and cunningly disguised as a fishing village. and basically its purpose was to protect New York from seaborne invasion.

There is a theory that there was a project, and this involved the development of psychological warfare techniques, but also some pretty far-out stuff that some people believe included time travel and teleportation. What secrets lie beneath this abandoned military base? Officially, the CIA's mine control program ended in the... 1970s. Yet in the 1980s, rumors of abduction, torture, and experimentation began to swirl around Camp Hero, the site of an abandoned Air Force base in Montauk Long Island.

Although it's never been proven, a lot of people think that there's a connection between Montauk and M.K. Ultra, that Montauk was a place where where unwitting victims, potentially children, were kidnapped and held hostage and experimented on with LSD. Locals Brian Minnick and Danielle Lindsay have been investigating these claims for 25 years. They have assembled all available declassified documents

to build a picture of the suspected underground base. We have maps of bunkers. of bunkers. And we have all kinds of military maps. This space is huge. I'm mapping the underground as best I can, and we keep finding to this day entrances. We climbed in as kids, we just rode off

from the lighthouse parking lot on our bikes, found a hole in the wall, climbed into a bunker, and halfway through the hallway, there was this hole in the floor that went across the whole hallway. We dropped the brick, and it was about 40 feet down with water. Some were big enough for our homer to fit through. They go down kind of like steps, you have to climb down, and it goes deeper and deeper, so we don't know how big they go out.

Although main entrances to the underground base are now impossible to access, pieces of the old facility can be seen from the beach. We're basically on the eastern side of Campiro, where it connected right next to the lighthouse actually is part of the base. So there's rumors that tunnels start running along these bluffs and go all the way to the other side of the base. This is a communications cable. Basically, that's a base end station for the coastal artillery.

There was elaborate cable system throughout the whole base. There was a tunnel that ran across here, and since then the tunnel fell into the sea and broke onto the beach. All the pieces you could find sometimes, you know, big pieces of cement with rebar, and these wires were running through the tunnels for communications. There are many rumors about what happened here, including drug testing on unwitting subjects, due to the presence of a place known as the LSD room.

The LSD room was a former World War II house, base housing, and it was the commander's house. All four bedrooms had strange painted designs with the trim and the electric sockets all taped off, everything perfectly professionally done. The strange designs in this building are highly reminiscent of the color scene during an LSD trip. Brian and Danielle's working theory is

is that the use of LSD is somehow connected to Camp Hero's huge radar transmitter. They picked up on where MK Ultra left off with some of the LSD experiments, and they did what the people at Harvard wish they could do is add hallucinogens with oscillating microwave or radio waves. And they had the perfect place at Montauk to do it, and that's when that room had popped up with all that psychedelic designs. hero's history as an Air Force base has also led to a number of strange sightings. But we actually have two UFOs on video.

One was a while ago and one was just recent like a couple weeks ago and we were filming the radar and one UFO comes up behind it and accelerates as the next one drops down from the sky turns and accelerates that way. There's a whole story and there's books about Montauk, stories about all kinds of mind control, experimentation, advanced physics research being done there, torture of children, none of it proven as far as I know. So is it impossible? No.

Could it have happened? Yes. But really there's not any solid evidence. This place has always been in such an important place to defend the United States. And then all of a sudden they just left it, you know? And another thing is if they in fact had a deeper underground base where there's more important, like something like a laboratory. I couldn't see them abandoning that without trying to use it till this day.

What happened here at Montauk remains to be seen, and investigators like Brian and Danielle will continue to search for evidence. But what is the legacy of the CIA's mind control program? Could it still be going on today? After M.K. Ultra, Sidney Gottlie continued to work for the CIA, and he was kind of their main chemist in devising different ways that we might assassinate foreign leaders. Sydney Gottlieb ended up becoming involved

in some very curious attempts to undermine Fidel Castro in Cuba. One was to spray Castro's TV studio with LSD. Another one was to coat his shoes of thallium so his beard would fall out. There was also very famously the idea of a... poison cigar because Castro loved smoking cigars, so he'd smoke one and hopefully die. Some of them were quite silly. Some of them had the potential to be very deadly. Fidel Castro managed to evade them all. The CIA may have failed to undermine Fidel Castro,

but one area where it might have succeeded was in the creation of a real-life Manchurian candidate assassin. There are certainly many anomalies in the killing of Bobby Kennedy by Sirhan, Sirhan. One of them is his general demeaner. He shoots him, and then the security guards jump on him, and it's like he's just being got, as one of the guards said, for a traffic violation. There's no doubt that, like his brother, JFK,

Bobby Kennedy had plenty of enemies. And of course, it spawned a vast amount of theories about why he was assassinated. And if you watch the footage of the assassinated, There is something rather unnerving and surreal about the whole event and what motivated Sihans Sahan to commit this terrible deed. Well, Sir Han has always had amnesia for the shooting. And so there's circumstantial evidence that he was controlled by somebody and was hypnotically

controlled, but it's not really quite locked down and proven. So I'd say better than 50-50 odds that he was handled and controlled by someone. somebody. Through the years a lot of speculation has swirled around a kind of wild conspiracy theory that Sirhan Sirhan might have been a CIA agent. Knowing what we know now about MK Ultra and how far reaching it was and how there was truly no lack of accountability at the CIA and they were getting into bed with mobsters and drug dealers and assassins and all insundry criminals. it certainly wouldn't surprise me

if there was some tangential connection between Sirean Sourhan and the MK Ultra program. In 2021, Sirhan Sirhan was granted parole. But this was overturned by California Governor Gavin Newsom, giving the reason of Sirhan's refusal to accept responsibility for the murder. With so many questions still unanswered

about the CIA's involvement, some wonder, Could the CIA's mind control program still be active? When somebody asks me, do you think this is ongoing? My basic answer is, I don't know for a fact. But what I do know for a fact is Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Those are organized interrogation programs using a lot of pretty destructive unethical tactics,

like electric shock to the person, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, sexual humiliation. All of these are elements of enhanced interrogations that have traced probably back 2,000 years, but certainly back to MK Ultra. Militories and governments are always researching, always trying to find the next edge in combat and intelligence to give them the advantage.

But these days, the research is much more likely to be into automation. in AI than it is to be pumping soldiers or spies full of drugs. With all of the experimentation of the MK Ultra program, the CIA really didn't succeed in any of its aims. So one could say that the program was almost entirely for naught, although you potentially could credit the CIA with being the harbinger of the age of,

of free love and LSD really found its foothold. There was a massive amount that obviously we don't know. The person in charge of MK. Ultra, Sidney Gottlieb, who I talked to briefly on the phone once, he told me an interesting thing, which was there was another unit within the CIA in parallel to his conducting mind control research, which has not been identified or declassified at all.

We may never know if MK Ultra was responsible for the poisonings at Pons Saint-Esprit, or the deaths of Frank Olson and Robert F. Kennedy. But until more files are declassified, and the CIA is either exonerated or admits responsibility, rumors of agency involvement in some of the darkest moments of the 20th century will continue. Unexplored catacombs buried beneath the city, a crumbling castle perched on a mountain peak, a top-secret government bunker, a cursed mansion, cloaked. in legend. I'm Sasha Auerbach. Join me in Tom Ward every Wednesday and Sunday as we reveal the mysteries and histories behind these abandoned places and ask, where did everyone go?

We'll hear from Sasha, who knows the history the best. In fact, there's a very famous book by a chap named Marcus Rediker called The Many-Headed Hydra, and he talks about pirate ships as an experiment in radical democracy. And me, who knows nothing, erinautical scientists can't quite explain it. And they say, We don't actually know how it gets up there. No, no, no. How it stays up? You're just not good at a science.

No, there are explanations? There are explanations. Oh, okay, fine. It's just plain physics. Brought to you by Like a Shot, makers of forbidden history. Search for Where Did Everyone Go on your favorite podcast platform.