Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 482: MK Ultra Part I - The Manchurian Candidate

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

This week the boys begin their long awaited breakdown of how Project Paperclip lead to birth of the CIA - and the MK Ultra Project.

A roast as dark as the night, perfect for fueling the cryptid research and mad ravings required for your podcasting. Don't mind the red eyes, he's just trying to warn you of the bridge! The bridge! Finally, from the caffeine-addled brains of Spring Hill Jack Coffee and Last Podcast on the left, we bring you Mothman's Red Eye Blend. Yes, delicious Panama beans, go to lastpodcastmerch.com to order yours today! Hey, what's up everyone? How you doing? Ben Kissel here with Henry Zabrowski. Yeah, it's me, man!

Yeah, bro, Henry Zabrowski is smoking some of that sweet last podcast on the left, babe. Go out there and purchase yourself some. I hope you enjoy it. We have sativa, we have indica, and we have a hybrid, and I have to tell you, from my personal experience, they are wonderful. Super tasty, live resin, you really get the delicious, weedy taste, which is what I like, and three different experiences. You go to your local vape store and get it! Absolutely, thank you all so much for supporting the show. We absolutely love you. Can't wait to see you on the road and get that vape, put it in your brain, and have a good time. And if you want to set your favorite weed store, give them a call and ask for them by name.

Last podcast on the left, it's weed. Hail yourselves, everyone! Hail Satan! There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that?

What was that? Military intelligence, I think that's called an oxymoron. Wow, shots fired, shots fired, and not from a drone. Back in the day, OSS guys, these old school guys, they got parachuted, and they had to have, like, fucking figure out how to make a Nazi's favorite martini. General, so we're parachuting in, but any idea how to get out? You're gonna want to get yourself a suicide pill. Okay! But they get over there, they start working with all of these, you know, like fucking clad-assigned shit,

chasing Nazis everywhere, all this kind of crazy shit, like, you know, get fucking hardcore action sequences, growing things up, all these crazy new weapons. I think that's just in Glorious Bastards, but yes. But now, the fucking CIA is like, oh yeah, it's Havana syndrome. Well, sound weapons, we're experimenting a lot of different things right now. I got hurt by a microwave, I got it called China, and blame China. Oh, I hate it when they make us human hot pockets. What's up everyone, welcome to the last podcast on the left.

I had too many plantains yesterday, I must have Havana syndrome. We're about to blow you up, Henry. Henry Zabrowski recently coming down with Havana syndrome, but how nice because now you're wearing tropical shorts, you have fun sunglasses on, and you are a beach-loving Polish man. And this is a mild case. It's beautiful. And Marcus Parks.

Hello. Thanks all so much for joining us. We have a fantastic episode today. Freedom. Freedom. Absolutely, thanks to everyone who supported us for our stint on Spotify, and now it is so wonderful to be in the general population. We are back on all the platforms that you love to listen to your podcasts on,

so please go and you know where to find us now. And now that we're good and more open than ever, what an excellent time to handle the secret history of the United States of America. Isn't that nice? This topic, man, this is going to unfurl in a magical way. It's a huge topic. We've been waiting years to do it, and so excited to learn right along with you all the secret history of MKUltra.

My God, I just realized that we're doing MKUltra. That's super cool. Right, we got here. We did this a long time ago. Very, very beginnings of last podcast and left started with one of those weird perfunctory paragraph on Wikipedia-style episodes about MKUltra. And this is one of those topics that people like me, as a young man, kind of like what 9-Eleven did to the next generation,

what JFK did to my generation and the people before that, got people into it. Are you 70 years old? No, but it's just your generation. It was 64. But these are the entry-level conspiracy theories that get you into this world, and it's kind of fun to now, having all this, look at the experience. Look at my burger-crank shirt I have on. I love that burger-crank shirt.

We're ready to tackle it. And this is a fun topic for everyone to begin, take some acid, and go down the road with us. MKUltra was a top-secret CIA project that explored psychological, often drug-induced torture and interrogation techniques in the pursuit of a new kind of weapon to use against the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century. This program existed for about half of the Cold War, from 1953 until 1973. And it definitely didn't continue in any way, shape, or form after that.

How dare you even think or say that, dog meat? I know, I see the twinkle in your eyes. I know what you're about to say, that they're continuing to do human experimentation. Sure. Oh, am I? Am I gonna fuck? Are you putting that word in my fucking mouth? You put the words in my fucking mouth.

That's what you get. That's right. This is what they wanted. This is what they wanted. They wanted us fighting each other. I do think you had a secret phone call with the United States government last night. They're already talking to us. They're already on a stage in Washington, D.C., a person in a mask.

I mean it, like a Guy Fox mask threw a little pouch onto the stage and I opened it up and it was four challenge coins from the other side. That was cool. They're here. Yes, they are. The MKUltra experiments performed sometimes unwilling participants, but mostly on the unwilling or unaware, sometimes showed Nazi levels of clinical evil, either destroying or killing multitudes in the name of pulling a fast one on the Ruskies.

We learned from bad teachers. In a nutshell, MKUltra was the espionage wing of chemical warfare, America's clumsy attempt at cracking the code of mind control for a war whose outcome seemingly rested on which country was more clever. You know what, you know for a fact they had to turn away some people who were like, Barry, you've been here three times this week. Yeah, man. I know.

But the thing is, we actually think you're taking advantage of us. Yeah, I'm just saying, bro, that I got this fucking balloon festival, I gotta go with my fucking girlfriend, man, and I need to be a Manchurian candidate to that, bro. You haven't made it to any of the events you were supposed to assassinate the Queen at. Fuck. Yeah. Whoa.

Can we sync up calendars? Dude, you're fired. Now as far as what the point of MKUltra was, the experiments were supposed to glean techniques that would either elicit confessions from Soviet spies, reprogram said spies to become American agents, or both, all without leaving any physical evidence that anyone had done anything. It turns out they just made a bunch of comedians. I wish.

They invented the electric tambourine during the 1960s. It is an interesting, another side of this whole experimentations program was also to, for them to like, listen, we put such a burden, an intellectual and emotional burden on our operatives. Like, they have to go out there, they have to fucking lie, cheat and steal for the United States government. It's not easy to be Eddie Guerrero for the United States government. You have to go out there, you got to fucking seduce people and poison people, do all this

kind of shit. And we really want to like, we want to help ease the burden of our agents by erasing their memories. And then maybe a way to do it, this is true. So this is for us. This is for you. This is for you. Protect you.

Awesome. It's very interesting to see. Thank you for fucking with my brain. For me. That's what they wanted. That's what they could also do is help stop the problems of information leaks after people were quote-unquote done working for the CIA, because guess what, you're never done working for the CIA.

So you're not. I should know. You are really putting this shill thing. You're taking this to the next level, that's for sure. Or is he? I mean, the problem is that CIA agents were killing themselves, because they had done really, really bad shit. And sometimes they had done things in service of the program that was supposed to wipe their

mind. And I'm going to put one of those little dashy stars there over really bad things, proper things that needed to be done in order to ensure the United States government's reign domestically and globally. Thank you for your service. That's an asterisk, is what he's saying. Asterisk. No, it's a star thing.

But while eliciting confessions and reprogramming spies, while that was the main focus of MK Ultra, the objective that was given the least research is the one that gets the most attention. That objective was the creation of so-called Manchurian candidates. Manchurian candidates, as they were named in pop culture, were assassins who had supposedly been programmed to kill through a combination of mind wipes and hypnosis. I really appreciate that you did speak in capital letters. Yeah, that's how you heard him to kill. You have to do it.

If we say that again, because that's TM, that's conspiracy theory trademark. Perogram to Ka-El. Ka-El. That's how you speak in capital letters? Yes. Good to know. Once suitably programmed with an assassination mission, Manchurian candidates would be totally unaware of said mission, status, or target, until they were activated by a word, phrase,

or image. And I'm here to tell you about Ben Kissel's Manchurian Eats, where it's actually Manchurian candidates that drive to McDonald's for you. You're talking about being on sleep medication, like sleep eating. I'm talking about getting a whole force of drugged out people that have shitty cars that are going to pick up my food for me. Whoa, finally MKUltra can be used with Uber. MKUltra and Uber can get together.

Oh, who? Actually, and the name, the Manchurian candidate actually came from the movie, right? So they said they were... Well, the movie began the term. They started this... Yeah, as I said, as they were named in pop culture, they were named by pop culture, yeah. But there actually is a real connection to possible human experimentation that was done in the Manchurian area of China.

So there is some people, like again, once you go back double, double, double into the world of conspiracy theory, that some people think that that information was fed to Hollywood executives to point the truth of where the nature of the MKUltra Manchurian candidate program came from. One thing that's not a conspiracy is human rights abuses across the country and the globe. Yeah. The whole generation mostly knows it from Zoolander, Ernaked Gump, Must Kill the Queen. That's where we know Manchurian candidates from.

Reggie Jackson, fantastic, fantastic acting job by Reggie Jackson. Oh, Must Kill the Queen. But he did it like a row back, it was very good. Now once activated, the assassin would carry out their mission, then have no knowledge of what they'd done or who would put the idea in their head. Needless to say, this would have created a powerful weapon for the CIA in terms of both efficiency and the kind of paranoia such a weapon would create. And of course, MKUltra was spearheaded by the CIA in the first place because they believed

that the Russians were working on mind control techniques first. It's called vodka. And the US government could not afford a mind control gap. Unfortunately though, all of the intelligence that they had collected, not a single bit pointed towards the Russians having one of these programs in any way, shape, or form, or the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Japanese is this time period, which they all suspected. And it's almost like they came up with the idea on their own and then just ran with

it. All right. That's the American way. Now MKUltra is not a conspiracy theory. It is fact, history, policy, it happened, hard fact alert. We know about the hallucinogen induced psychological torture perpetrated on American prisoners, the irreversible mind wipes of mental patients, and the foreign POWs who were taken past the limits of human endurance into death.

We know about the agents who were murdered to keep this program a secret, the callousness of the agents in charge of it, and the moral price America paid to get the project off the ground. We even know how fucking bonkers the MKUltra program actually was. From Greenwich Village LSD honeypot fuckhouses to mind eraser helmets. And we know that MKUltra is but a small part of the CIA's loony tunes nuttiness in the 50s and 60s. It's a thing that we like to call asymmetrical warfare where we come up with a bunch of things

that are an alt to bullets. So what they said, decided to do it like, what if we do it psychically? What if we get in there and really scramble your brains? So what that does is take us from us, we spent the delta points of American exceptionalism that we earned winning World War II on this, and then we became like everybody else. Like that is like one of those things where we deeply sold out the soul of the American people and its government. Well mind eraser helmets, you know, that's just if you're in the NFL, that's called CTE.

You're going to want to be very careful out there with the head injuries. The worst part of it all though, we sold it out for nothing. I mean, we got a bunch of acid. True. What about music? Didn't it have some positive effect on music? We're going to get there. We're going to get there, right?

Like there was some cool tunes. Yeah, we're going to get there. But then I'm going to ask you, is the price worth it? Because MKUltra did not work. Please. Yeah, it might have been worth it. The people in charge of MKUltra, the Special Operations Division, wasted 20 years, destroyed thousands of mines and killed dozens of people in pursuit of a possible outcome that was

at best a guess. The human mind is difficult terrain to know because in order to look at it, we have to look in our own brains and our eyeballs are attached to the front of it. I don't want to. Succinctly fucking put, Henry. Very succinctly put. Thank you. Eyes in the back of your head.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the human brain is far too complex for something as simple as wipe and rewrite. And while we still to this day don't know as much about the human psyche as we should, we know far more than they knew back in the 50s. Back in the 50s, the best idea they had to treat mental illness is either overly aggressive shock therapy, too much Thorazine, or fucking lobotomies. We did an entire series on the concept of trying to fix things physically and easily. We did the whole lobotomy series where you could see how all of these things slowly but

surely as we do last podcast on the left. All of our topics will begin to touch each other. They really do. And the CIA, back in the day, we were at the point where in the 1950s, if you sneezed wrong, they were like, he's gay. He's gay. And it was, there was very little social science or mental science. But that's also why they invented all of these various truth serums.

Two was to test to see if their people were gay or communist. They couldn't handle anybody having a good time inside of the CIA. Take this pill. I'm going to lay out five long objects in front of you, most of them have balls, yes they're dildos. Yes indeed, you both passed and failed the test. Oh, I forgot to take my pill. God damn it, man, you're a genius.

The problem here, however, is that there are still thousands of conspiracy theorists who believe with all of their heart that MKUltra actually did work and still works to this day. They think that everyone from serial killers to mass shooters to presidential assassins, basically anyone who introduces mass chaos and misery through violence, can't be anything but MKUltra agents. Now personally, I think that believing in MKUltra's effectiveness is born out of too much respect for the United States government and too much faith in their ability to follow

through on any plan beyond bomb them and steal their oil or flood their neighborhood with drugs and make money off the incarceration. It's very simple A to B shit. Hey, we also try to negotiate with the Nazis for a truce and we also have destabilized many different, hey, you know, hey, we've destabilized many governments. We're also going to spend that $700 billion a year on. We've sprayed a bunch of pilots with syphilis, we've done a lot of things, Marcus. That's how Lindsey Graham got his ladybugs.

I don't think, I think he earned those the old fashioned. To that point, I think it is very disturbing for some Americans to believe that our post World War II government, the supposed saviors of the world would waste so many lives and spend so much time on something this fucking stupid. Well, the first in the very, very beginning, it didn't seem stupid, but the problem is is that as soon as they saw that they were getting no results, they continued to go. And I think that's really kind of a crime in amongst itself where they were doing all these human experiments, not getting what they wanted.

And they said, like, why don't we just grind it harder? Yeah. But we must believe it because they did do it. And as the Robert Heinlein quote goes, never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. My main drive of all of the research that I have done for this episode, obviously it's set me back. I've done a lot of good work, a lot of good work with therapists and my family in order

to find a way to like back off some of the paranoia all over the like over the last several years trying to find ways to find some semblance of peace inside of my chaotic mind. This is an improved Henry's eyebrows. Yes. I mean, I'm on like, how many milligrams of caffeine? I don't know. I don't know. I'm souped up.

Sure. But this has really set me back because as you go through and you read all of these documents, it's really hard to not get into the mindset of everything's an op. All the government does is lie and kill us and they want to. The idea of like that it's continuing to go is kind of attractive because again, it seems like some people with conspiracy theorists, it's kind of like believing in God or like having a thing there like there's a safety net. It gives some order to the chaos.

The matter what somebody's thinking of you, right? So there's somebody there in control of the whole thing. But what this thing really points towards is that I think that in conspiracy theory in general, we think that the government is trying actively to kill us when actually I think the real thing is that they don't care if we die, right? It's a negligence. I was talking about this with Eddie last night and he actually said that a really important thing to me is like for the government to be actually killing you, they'd have to care

about you. They'd have to think of you, but they don't. They mostly just roll you over. You don't think Joe's thinking of me? They want you to work. They want you to be in factories. They want you to do that type of shit. They want you to fucking deliver people's food and work at the airport and shit, but

they're not yet at the population control thing. Well, that's the corporation class. Yes. Now, we used many sources for this series, but our main guide was a fantastic new book by Stephen Kinzer called Poisoner in Chief, which follows the life of MK ultra architect Stanley Gottlieb. This fucking guy. Which means life of God, God full of life, life of God.

Oh, good. In addition, in today's episode specifically, we used OSS, the Secret History of America's first central intelligence agency by Richard Harris Smith. And we use the granddaddy of them all, 1975's The Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marx, which blew the lid off the whole operation. It's wild. I was watching this report from 1979 on American television the first time anybody had heard the words MK ultra and it's wild to imagine this coming out for the first time and shattering

people's minds, but they also like showed a kaleidoscope and they're like, this is a scientific reenactment of what you would see on LSD and you're like, and it's not like that. It's a little bit like that though. If you shut your eyes, it can be. I just love that the backdrop is all plaid and tweed and like really fun Argyle 70s were cool. They were great.

And to understand how the CIA had enough arrogance to believe that they had the right to even attempt something as far-fetched and reckless as MK ultra, we've got to understand the organization that birthed the CIA and that organization was the OSS, sending out the OSS. The office of strategic services was America's intelligence agency during World War II. This was an organization of wealthy socialites, big businessmen, mad scientists, artists, writers, and of course, military agents who all developed an unhealthy love of spying for its own sake, all in the pursuit of defeating the Nazis. It's hard to not get pulled into the energy of the OSS as you read about it because it

is like, you're like, well, fuck yeah, oh cool, oh shit, like they're doing all this stuff. Office work though too. There was a lot of office work. But honestly, the OSS has got their fucking hands dirty. This is before it became a full, just like, analysts in a room of computers, like, these are guys killing people. It's like the A-team.

Well, the OSS really was the anti-paperwork organization in the military. They were not into paperwork. Yeah. By design, it was we're going to do whatever the fuck we want to do whenever the fuck we want to do it and you're going to give us medals for it. That's awesome. What's more reliable than a good old game of telephone about international affairs? But the thing that actually happened was is that because it was the elite that were all

chosen to be a part of the OSS, it did create a secret group of government, basically created a secret government within our government because it was a bunch of people as we're going to see time and time again throughout the story. There's many different agencies and human beings within this story that all thought they knew what was best for the United States of America and they all just ran in a hundred different directions, all believing they will eventually be the rightful king of America and people will all give them all of the trust and the power that they feel that they deserve. Sounds like a great way to unravel the American quilt.

It's what happened. Yeah. Now, the OSS was more or less created five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. When it became clear to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that we were going to be a part of World War II whether we liked it or not. You want to happen, you want to happen. So for America's first serious excursion into espionage, sabotage, propaganda and guerrilla warfare, FDR chose a man named William Wild Bill Donovan.

See, like many in the early American espionage game, Donovan was both upper crust and a war hero. He's like Teddy Roosevelt in that way, where it's rich boy who was really excited to go kill people. To this day, William Donovan is still the only person to have earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the National Security Medal, the Medal of Honor and both a silver and purple heart. And he earned all of those during World War I.

You can definitely hear him coming. Oh, hit that. Not very secret, but that's okay. He earned all of that in one mission, where he took a tank turret in his own butthole and he absorbed the bullet like he's Kirby. All in one go. He got every medal. That's incredible.

All the medals. This man, he loved to kill. He really loved being in the shit. You say love, it's a passion. It's just a passion. He developed a love of combat. He liked being in the mix to the point where, as you'll see later on, he kept showing up in all these various war fronts and the United States Army would be like, why are you here?

And he's like, I'm checking up on all of you, and they're like, you have no reason to be here. You're a liability. Like he hadn't been protected. It's like when O.J. Simpson shows up to the Buffalo Bills games, and you have to go, O.J., you were great. Thank you for your, thank you, O.J. Why don't we put you in a private room?

You need your own room. Let's go back here. No, it's a VIP area. Yeah, that's right. This is a bathroom, guys. Hello, bathroom world. And while Bill was a guy that was deeply connected to FDR, he went to school with us, this is the same title, Hoity-Toyty Old School Family Connections that I thought the United States

of America had left it all behind. We had left the, we'd left Europe assuming that we wanted to get rid of this caste system that your, your name would tell you where you belonged in life, like, and that you were born into your station and you can't get out of it in any way, shape, or form. But America, we decided to change it all with money can make you extra special, right? Like, that's how you get your little Archduke versions of life here in America. You just have a fuck ton of money. And while Bill had...

That's all you have to do. I guess. But you have to get it. But while Bill... Now, it used to be a lot different, but... Now, it is different. Yeah. It changed, yeah.

It changed. You gotta get that, you gotta get that cash flow. While Bill was deeply connected to all of these elite families, and he got pushed through all of these various things, he was, you know, he kind of like, he was a, the forest gump of the American espionage world, where he kind of just walked his way through it. FDR hated him, because FDR and him were both, they were staunchly different politically. They weren't either opposite size of the spectrum, where FDR was very liberal, while Bill was super conservative.

But for some reason, he decided he felt that he could control him enough to make him the spy master of America, but this guy was also a Wall Street lawyer, very similar to the Dulles brothers that we'll get into in a little bit, where they had a lot of connections into all of this old world European money, that they basically had to go and protect the interests of when they went back over to Europe. And while Bill was like, again, he's just a dude with cash flow, that because he already had natural connections in all of these weird, different areas of the world, FDR was like, okay, well, you already got the numbers, you got the Rolodex, you're in charge of our espionage

world. And Bill was left to trust a guy named Wild Bill. Well, he got that because nothing will go wrong now. He kept going back into combat. And every single time he would try to push his boys in World War I, being like, we got to do one more thrust, we got to do this, and he'd be like, that's just because you're too wild, Bill. You're too wild, Bill.

Now, like the CIA, the OSS mostly operated outside of the United States government with a budget that was both unlimited and unregulated, all in the name of doing whatever they felt was necessary to win the war. Eventually, they would enlist 13,000 agents to finish the job. But since the OSS was unregulated and flushed with wartime cash, it was rife with corruption, which is the natural state of all large, completely unregulated human institutions. One officer was found with a suitcase containing $200,000 in small bills and no real explanation for where it was supposed to go.

Another agent simply bought a commercial steamship with government funds just to take him on a covert mission to the Canary Islands. The whole point was to not have any way to tie it back to the top of the organization. So everybody was kind of free to do whatever they wanted. They got a blank check. Wow. Yeah, and steamship plan, though, that was scuttled when they figured out that it was probably not a good idea to deliver an undercover agent on a covert mission by steamship.

What's the loudest mode of transportation? That's great. See, OSS agents were recorded in secret, so no one knew who was OSS and who wasn't. And Donovan further muddled what his organization was up to by actively bucking standard operating procedures. Well, he would do the thing where he'd ask for standard operating procedures, and then they'd give it to him, and then he'd do the opposite of whatever it is that they told him to do, which is very interesting.

And he was just constantly, he's like, see, you can't even trust me, bro. Well, that's great to know. Donovan actually preferred insubordinate officers, saying that he'd rather have a lieutenant with guts enough to obey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself. As a result, Donovan himself was often insubordinate, and it regularly fucked up operations carried out by other branches of the military. At one point in the war, OSS officers broke into a Japanese embassy in Portugal and stole a code book.

We got it. Fuck yes, we got it. Oh, a code book. Great. This is great. Oh yeah, the OSS thought they'd scored a big win. Yeah, now we're gonna get double extra secret covert money, we're gonna get an ice cream machine.

I think they have the code for Contra on here for NES. Up down, right down, up down, right, left, eight, something like that. Yeah, pretty good. Up, down, down, left, right, left, right, AB starts. See, it's right there. Wow, it's grained in his brain, MK Ultra works. But since the OSS had gone off on their own, they were unaware that Naval intelligence had just broken the codes that they'd stolen.

And once the code book was reported missing, the Japanese changed the codes, nullifying an entire code breaking operation. So not only had the OSS wasted their own time, they had also wasted the time of Naval code breakers who had worked pretty fucking hard to break those Japanese codes. Japanese government, can you not change the codes? We were so hard to get these codes and then you're just gonna change them like that. We just love the old codes so much. They were their own poetry.

They were beautiful codes. I was watching this talk of a guy that wrote some biography about an OSS, some officer, and he was in front of all of these incredibly aged, old OSS veterans. And they're all like screaming secrets like, MacArthur was gay. Yeah, literally, he came up smoking 25 years before he died. You're like, you know, all of us, we were like, okay. I bet you they mostly just call people gay. Yeah, sure, yeah, we had them.

But then the speaker was like, and you would have, and I would have you know, I was in the National Archives and a researcher came up to me and he dared say to me, the OSS did nothing in World War II. Whoa, what did they say? And they're all like shaking looking and he's like, have you heard of a little thing called a bat bomb? Yes, they did attach TNT to bats and exploded them. Can we think about that for a second?

That is funny, that is interesting, it's a bad day to be a bat. Bombed. Yeah, literally. Yeah, well, Donovan always defended the actions of his officers no matter what and refused to allow any of his men to be punished because Donovan believed that the only way for his men to be effective was if they were allowed to operate in an unsupervised and scattershot manner. Always.

I mean, in some ways he makes a lot of sense because human situations are fluid, they're ever changing. You do have to think on your feet, you have to be very good at improv. So he isn't wrong. It is not a desk job. It's interesting. I mean, that's the thing is that this massive military wildcard would not have continued operating throughout the war if they didn't sometimes strike gold and oftentimes they

did. Well, it's because we also didn't have an espionage arm. We didn't have one until they built the OSS. This is the beginning of it, I guess. Before this, FDR was talking about how it was so difficult to do all these land invasions because number one. The polio. Yeah, he can't jump and then it's very difficult for them to know what we're walking

into. Because before this, we thought that espionage was un-gentlemenly, rightly. We thought that that's not how you would know. The rules of war, guerrilla warfare being rude. I mean, I don't know if we thought it was un-gentlemenly, it's just that America was very isolationist. Sure, yes. But yeah, and so there was no need for a spy wing if we're not going to be fucking with

other countries. Yes. Because that's the thing. When we came into World War II, we were still, we still had horses. Like we had cavalry, all of our shit was from World War I when World War II broke out. We had to learn on our fucking feet and the OSS was actually a big part of that. Oh yes, and we were building our army as we went. We were building our espionage community as we went in one go and it was really, you'll

see how it transgresses, but man, you'll see how it spreads out, but it is really interesting. I do think about a bunch of horses on a plane and then they all have little- I'd allow them to drink because they're just going to die. Yeah. I do think the little horses on a plane and they all have parachutes and then they jump off and then they land. I want to say that they did shit like that. Yeah.

What a day to be a horse. I don't think people ever tried parachuting in horses. Why not? Why not? We got on parachutes. And then you land with the horse and you're like ready to go. You've got a head full of government-grade LSD and you're like listen, listen, musty a horse.

All right. On a pale horse. I mean the OSS, they were essential to America's invasion of North Africa. That's where we started the war in Europe, our European front. That gave us our first foothold towards invading Italy. They set up agent networks in France to support the invasion at Normandy and they provided invaluable information on German strength, air defenses, submarine production and rocket production.

Not saying that the OSS is a fucking wonderful organization, I'm just saying credit where credits do. They did their job. Yeah. However, because OSS officers knew that they could avoid disciplinary action no matter what they did, operational funds often mysteriously disappeared and just as mysteriously reappeared in the bank accounts of OSS veterans after the war. And I'll just take my bonus.

Thank you. That's great. Just see the guys showing up like dumb and dumber, just dressed to the tent. This is good as money. You're going to want to hold on. That's for a tank. According to the OSS psychological chief, Dr. Henry Murray, the way the OSS operated was almost tailor made to attract psychopaths.

Oh, good, good. They were intrigued by the idea that they could do whatever they wanted without consequence and they were also intrigued by the fact that they could more often than not be rewarded and praised for acting like a psychopath. I think you're talking about the overnight shift at Taco Bell. My middle manager at Borders, guys, it's weird to think that like in order to work for an organization like this, you have to be good at keeping a secret. And what what are the qualities of someone who's good at keeping a secret?

You really have to really believe in some way, shape or form that you are superior to other people. I really do think that there's a factor here where you think that you can hold the secrets of America inside of you. And then because you are holding this quote unquote precious information, you then have a license to do whatever it is that you do have leverage over those people, right? Because you have a piece of information they don't say you're playing with another card in the deck.

But the OSS will already create a problem here with how do you hire people whose jobs are to be treacherous and then expect them to not not fuck with the organization that they're working for and not fuck over you and fuck over everybody else. And speaking of psychopaths, the OSS's drive for operational autonomy came most strongly from intelligence operator Alan Dulles, who would eventually become one of the most notorious directors of the CIA. Boo! Oh, he's getting a boo!

I need a sound board. Quack quack. What else do you want to hear? That's a good one. That's what she said. Wow. I needed that's what she said, but that would really help the show. I didn't expect it to get that big.

Yeah, it's perfect. That's great. Well, Dulles believed that it was not possible for people in Washington, D.C. to understand the on-the-ground reality of OSS intelligence gathering. Couldn't possibly understand. I mean, they... Go on. Well, while that may be true in some cases, it definitely is, Dulles believed that it

could only work if Washington, D.C. assumed that it was true in all cases. And can you say Washington, D.C. like Tim Curry from Clue? Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. Now a Princeton graduate like Alan Dulles fit right in with the rest of the operational heads of the OSS. Yeah, he's old money. He's deeply connected to the Ivy League system, and he's already got money invested in German

businesses that were making things for the Nazi war machine, and he had to go in and make sure that they were taken care of during his negotiations, his secret negotiations with the Nazis. J.P. Morgan's sons were OSS leaders, a Vanderbilt was in charge of the Special Operations Branch, a Dupont directed French espionage, a member of the Standard Oil family, rent security in Calcutta, and a member of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, headed intelligence in Italy. The only reason why the Rockefellers weren't in the OSS was because they were already in

charge of an entire agency all by themselves, the coordinator of inter-American affairs. They just had their own intelligence group. They just bought guys, they bought G-men, they bought enforcers, because then these will follow the maps of like, because the CIA has idea guys, and they've got hard-nosed guys. They got the guys to do their dirty work, and they got the guys to come up with the dirty work plans, and it was really easy for a bunch of rich people who have been sitting back and kind of planning what they'd do. If they had all these connections.

I don't think they were planning and just like waiting and all that. Who knows? But the interesting thing about Dupont, it's also responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. So when you go and buy your paint, it might as well just say Lockheed Martin, eggshell. So don't forget that everything that we're surrounded by is copper and gray. Oh, missile silo gray is so beautiful, it goes absolutely perfect with anthrax red. Afghan blood red, whoa!

Now needless to say, these early connections to the wealthy families of America don't do much to dissuade conspiracy theorists from believing that the CIA is an all-powerful octopus of malice. It certainly don't. I don't like that term, but all right. Octopus of malice? That's looking sweet. Because I see the Kaleca.

I know, I'm going to drive it around with big fucking sand on it and a fucking whip. That's the octopus of malice, huh? Well, nice car. But I mean really, all this just comes from the fact that President Roosevelt came from a wealthy old money New York family. So he appointed people who also came from wealthy families, who in turn appointed more people from wealthy families. It's not calculated conspiracy, it's simple social connection.

It sounds like we're building a caste system. We would never do that. Human nature doesn't just do that. We're ants. But that's why you like, in a way, like while it's not a, how do you, ugh, this is fun, fun muddy ground. In a way it is calculated conspiracy because they wanted a certain type of person to be in charge of these things.

They wanted a person who was monied of an elite class obviously probably did not have a lot of Jewish connections or any other sort of ethnic persuasion, they were literally, they were all on this top level and so- Protestant probably, huh? Oh yes, and in my mind, a lot of it is, it's like a conspiracy literally is just a group of people meeting in a room straight up, like that's what a conspiracy is. So in a way, this sort of is a conspiracy, but they didn't view it that way because they've only lived in this little bubble their entire lives.

I mean, it would be a conspiracy as much as like middle class people getting together for a homeowner's association meeting is a conspiracy. That is a conspiracy. You don't think that conspiracies don't happen inside of HOA? Never sign up with an A. Are you in an HOA? No, absolutely. I could never do an HOA. No, I'm not signing up for the fucking, the Illuminati of Culver Avenue.

No, remember, that's what Dennis Rader used to do because he was part of an HOA. Exactly. He would be like, oh, your loan's a little too long and it's like, you're raping everybody in town. This is what I'm saying. Why was a collaboration does not equal conspiracy? Sure. You could say that.

Right from your play. Now, famously, the CIA never got along with the FBI and this competition goes all the way back to the OSS. There's mean girl stuff here. The meanest girl of all, J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover refused to let the OSS get involved in the FBI's secret operations in South America because the OSS actively hired communists. Can you even believe that they all share a toothbrush?

They even fucking believe what they do over there, they all share one brown uniform and they all go to shit together. Well, that is horrible. That doesn't seem very clean. Well the hiring of communists was Wild Bill Donovan's idea because while he hated communists, he hated Nazis even more and this was back in the day when everyone hated Nazis more than anything else. He would hire a bunch of communists and the nice thing is you don't have to pay them.

You just teach them about economics, but this guy, he understood. Do you misunderstand communism, sir? Yes. What? Wow, let's keep it. He's gone. He's gone. But the thing is, this is a time period when the very few things that happen, one of the

few times this happens in all history where there's clear cut good guys and bad guys. The Nazis were like, it's such a nice softball. Be careful. They were the bad guys. But the Nazis were bad guys, so it's easy to hate the Nazis. The communists, this something else was happening during this time period where you'll also see that they were just setting up the next villain. They were super hopeful for a new season two baddie.

We are in a new Cold War, my friend. I don't know if they were super, I think they were super bummed about having another fucking enemy after the whole thing happened. I think the people in the military industrial complex were pretty excited about the Cold War. But people like Ike Eisenhower, who was actually president, said, we really need to pump the brakes on all this shit. Because he's like, I just got done with the Nazis, I just got done with them.

And I think that's how most of them were, like, fucking, oh my God, that was so hard. But we were all in proxy wars the entire time. They loved it. But I will, yes, the Cold War, the way a lot of these guys talk about the Cold War is how a lot of my old buddies talk about college, where they were just like, how was this? Crazy. No pressure.

Free. What free times. I mean, once they got into it, they loved it. But I think they liked having a new enemy, but I don't think they actively yearned for a new enemy. It's just when a new enemy came, they were very excited about it. Yes. Sometimes you don't know what you got until it's gone.

Yes. I would love to see all three of us on a clandestine episode. Just what would they, what mission would we even be on? Like get the croissant. I'm going to give up, I'm going to bring a poisoned burger to Vladimir Putin. I'm going to dress in a catering outfit. You dress as a horse, Marcus is on the horse, this is a special gift for the, for the president of Russia.

And then you show and you're like moo, like look at that, it's a great moo and horse, huh? Burger? I'm going to tell you, I've always, if I were to say, I never thought about riding Ben, I'd be lying. Wow, that's fantastic, that is absolutely wonderful. Just one clap in the back of a large auditorium. No, you can ride me whenever you want, Marcus, don't even worry about it.

Thanks, thanks. Yes, indeed. Just don't do it with no hands, if you know what I mean. I would insure your penis into my rectum and then that's why you would be able to hang on. You get it. Well, Bill Donovan was quoted as saying that he would put Stalin himself on the OSS payroll if it meant killing Hitler and he meant it, but shit like that was the sort of thing that

J. Edgar Hoover thought was the most dangerous way of thinking you could have. Hoover might have been right about that. I don't know. Nazis, we had, the Nazis, if they did not open up the western front, if they did not open the eastern front with Russia, they very well would have had Europe. They would have had it. Oh, absolutely. They were winning.

It was them versus Europe. And they were winning. Yeah. Oh, I know. They were, it got close. I've had a couple conversations about it. I know. You've seen some documents that had to go up in smoke.

Like Snoop Dogg. Is that what the up in smoke tour was all about them burning Nazi documents? Yes, he was sponsored by Enron. Interesting. Now, once Roosevelt heard of the rift between the FBI and the OSS, he intervened and gave the operation to the FBI. And the OSS, however, just didn't give a fuck and interfered in South American operations anyway.

Another time, the OSS secretly raided a Spanish embassy in DC to photograph code books and other pro access documents. But since this was a domestic operation, Hoover felt that the OSS was stepping on his toes. This was Budweiser. You get there all out of here, you go out there with your hands still white. All right. That's what you do. You do the European theater.

Okay. And I've actually heard that the European theater is wonderful. And we should all go. European theater is fantastic. So Hoover spent wartime resources assigning FBI agents to trail OSS agents. Oh my God. What are we doing, guys? Okay.

What are we doing here, guys? This would continue for years. And anytime the FBI saw the OSS doing anything covert on American soil, the FBI tales would turn on their sirens, causing the OSS to scurry away. Stop it. Stop doing that. Oh my God. I know that you're spying in there, okay?

It's just... Listen. God, my fucking pain. You just fucking mess with my balls today. It's just... Listen. You just need to stop with the magnifying glasses. It's all of our tax money at work.

Yep. Now, even though the OSS took many of their cues from British intelligence, they also operated under the general principle that, quote, in intelligence, the British are just as much the enemy as the Germans. Drutger, I was reading... That was policy. Yeah. I was reading this incredible book called Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobson, and

they talk about the SCIOS, the group that went in to try to investigate the German scientific steps that they've taken. They basically found out that Germany was 25 years ahead of us in weapons technology, and it was this group called the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee. Rolls right off the tongue. Absolutely. It was a group of American, British, communist scientists that were over there. And not only are they all there trying to scoop each other about information, they're

all supposed to be like, we're all here working together, and they did trust falls, and they all hung out with each other, and they're like, don't worry, this is all one front. Meanwhile, each one of them is investigating the other while they're also trying to get technology scoops that the others don't get and hiding information from each other. And then in the mainstream, it would be known as trust but verify that kind of stuff, where of course. But everyone knew what everyone else was doing. So in a way, it was kind of fair.

It's weird if everybody's spying, and everybody knows that everybody's spying, it's like Glantz Armstrong, who's innocent, where everybody's fucking juicin', and everybody's juicin', and you're the only person, and you're the backs of the juicers. Let's give it to Barry Bontz. Let's say Barry, because Lawrence, I think that he did juice just a little bit more than most. Yeah. Any of those stupid ass bracelets that didn't actually go to cancer research.

He lost one of his testicles for America. Yeah, but, well, that's because he spent his entire life bouncing on his balls. Yeah. I think it's exercise. Exercise is what hurts. He did hurt his nuts. Oh my God, that's how we're all gonna go, swallowing nuts from bean podcasters. Okay.

Oh my God. Yeah, dude. I'm already getting, I'm getting podcaster prostate. It's already happening. Well the OSS, they assumed that London's Secret Services, they assumed they're not here to defeat the Nazis, they're here for what comes after the war, they're here to expand the British Empire. The OSS is just as paranoid as the CIA was.

Well, didn't we learn everything that we knew about spy craft from them? Yeah, because the Brits have been doing, they've been doing spy craft since like the 1500s or the 1600s, like that MI5 should have been going on forever. So we stole their system, like the OSS is built off the British system. And it's also on Netflix, there is a really fun show called spy craft, I believe. It's propaganda. Well, it's not propaganda, the weapons are very real. That's what I'm saying.

The angle is very pro-US, but we're in America. That's a fun show. Well, but while the OSS distrusted the Brits, they seemed to distrust America's ability to close out the war even more. In 1945, Alan Dulles attempted to broker peace with the Nazis through connections Dulles had made in Italy with Italian industrialists and the Catholic church. The problem was that Alan Dulles hadn't actually run this plan by the president. He thought that, him and Wild Bill thought that, hey, because they made this decision.

I forget what the actual term was. The three of them got together. I think it was Operation Sunrise is what they called it. They made a decision that while FDR basically said we need unconditional surrender from the Nazis. They need to lose, lose. We need to strip them of everything. We need to divide up their lands.

We need to do all of this shit. We need to fucking show the world that we are going to put the behel on Nazis. But Dulles and Wild Bill- The lands they took, it was none of their lands, that's for sure. Absolutely. Liebenstrom. Right? And they, you know, that's where your summer home was.

And then- What's wrong with you? They knew. Dulles and Wild Bill were like, okay, we got all, like, but this is a little bit more complicated than these so-called world leaders like to say it is. We're going to try to broker peace with the Nazis, even though everyone's saying don't, don't do it. And so they started, like, having lunch with Himmler, all these people, all the number twos,

looking out to figure out how do they, because all of those guys are just being like, what if we just give you Hitler? Like we'll give you Hitler, and then you make me new president, and then I'll wear even American flag, and then we'll do all this shit, and it didn't seem to want to work out that way. It didn't want to become hacksaw, Jim Duggan. Seriously. I mean, Dulles wasn't as clever as he thought he was.

The Russians, the Russian intelligence immediately saw what Dulles was doing. They told Stalin, Stalin told Church Helen Roosevelt, and Roosevelt told Dulles to cut it out. And that was that. Cut it out. He did the Dave Collier thing, cut it out. But these are three non-elected public officials that are completely in the shadows, and they have so much power, and the audacity that they were just like, we don't have to run

it by the most powerful person in the world, the president of the United States, shows you their ego. Well, the president would have still had to approve it, but I think they were coming, they were going to come to them with this package and be like, look, here's how we in the war. Like a spec script. Don't you do it? Seriously, like a spec script.

Yeah, yeah, a spec script for a peace process, a peace plan. But it's a war between many people who all thought they knew what was best for everybody else. It's the problem and the fault of people who want power is that they think that they deserve it. Mm-hmm. But while the OSS's behavior on the ground showed all the same flaws that the CIA would later magnify, the OSS were involved in far more than just on the ground operations.

As Henry said earlier, there were the action guys, but there were also the idea, man. Idea guys. And who's worse? I don't know. Yeah. The OSS's research and analysis branch was the first concentrated effort on the part of any world power to apply the talents of its academic community to official analysis of foreign affairs.

And here's where we get closer to MKUltra. Because we know that Nazi Germany, the way that they leapfrogged us with military technology is that Hitler pulled all of the top of the top of every science school and he was like, you're Nazi now, you're making weapons for me. And so he did a full-fledged attack on weaponry. And we weren't there yet. But our, eventually, our manufacturing prowess would catch us up, which is why it's so important to get all those production materials if you're playing Siv, especially if you do a domination

victory. Right. Because you can go science victory, but really only if you're India, science domination victory because you're playing the long game. But the most part of you want to do an early run-up, you want to get some cities, like you want to attack and get some cities that someone else built instead of you building your own, you've got to really have to up the production. All right.

Well, that's a great piece of advice. It's exactly like real war. You can do it in your sandals from the comforts of your home. It's perfect. Now, the OSS's first forays into the psychology of the enemy were quite clumsy. One operation was based on the idea that the Nazi state would disintegrate if Hitler was demoralized. And that's not the worst assumption.

Hitler's the figurehead, he gets demoralized, everything falls down. Yeah, but I also kind of think that was his superpower because I can see him getting his balls stomped and getting like dookie all over his face and then he's just like, I feel stronger than ever. But in practice, the OSS tried to demoralize Hitler by air dropping piles and piles of filthy German pornography. Thank you. Thank you.

It's really weird. This actually still goes on in the psyops of the US Army because they play like Taliban bloopers and shit on radio stations. We hear people go like, oh, like people like Taliban dudes accidentally blowing themselves up in order to make you think that they're not as dangerous as they are to inspire you to attack them. I wonder what some of those porno mags were, Milfers for sure. It's German.

Oh yeah. Dookie boys. Oh, you got Team Shiza? Team Shiza. They're out there. You have a little big butt, small boo, big mouth? Weird one. Big mouth, small tits.

Yeah, that's a strange one. I mean, the logic is unclear on this one. I can't quite figure it out. I mean, I guess they thought that if Hitler saw German frows in compromising positions, he'd lose faith in the whole thing and the third right would just fall apart. I don't think so. I don't know. I don't know what their logic is.

Did you read about the thing where they would drop off leaflets saying that it was like the lonely women's league? Like this thing that they would paper the German people with this concept of, apparently these incendiary articles that would say that German wives, while the boys are out fighting, are cheating on them at home, and they form these organizations, and so it's about demoralizing them from the inside out. Wow. They did some really subtle things too, like where they would have spies put up signs in

cold bathrooms, and they would say, make Hitler cold, and we will make the bathroom warm again. Interesting. Actually, I think it's such, because it's really like creature comforts. That's what people go for, and who likes to shit in a freezing cold room? Nobody. So they use the same tactics as a New York City super? Yeah, basically.

Absolutely. It's also, isn't it just an extension, or aren't we now just in an extension of that with the Mimor? I hate you. It's all just a series of memes they dropped, and then people are like, oh, okay. The CIA used to use dangerous shit. Now they're fucking doing pet-a-frog memes. Yeah.

I mean, that's all of it. A meme is a unit of information. That's the definition of the word meme. So yeah, memes have always been a useful means of propaganda. Tick-tock is a sigh-up. Facebook is a sigh-up, perhaps, as well. What? They're almost there.

Who knows? Or they can be used as a sigh-up. I've been set back. Oh, Facebook was a thousand percent co-opted as a sigh-up. Well, they used to immediately still do that. I would say Facebook is the most successful sigh-up in human history. Yeah, they decentralize Central America more than we want. We've been trying so hard.

So hard. And they did it with a couple of like buttons. Well, from there, while Bill Donovan got into the same game that Germany had been playing before and during World War II, better living through chemistry. Cool. Now, Donovan asked his scientists to develop a speech-inducing drug for use in intelligence operations, insisting that the need for such a weapon was so acute as to warrant any attempt to find it.

What I need for you to do is to invent the Bud Light, something that will make someone go up and do two to three minutes of rape material in an open mic somewhere in Long Island City. Something that dares inspire a man in a stinky hoodie to go up there and talk about how bad his dick smells. Yes, indeed. Unfortunately, we have not been able to crack the Bud Light code, but we do have Operation Takati.

Oh, no! That makes us extra bad at comedy. Now, the committee soon got to work researching alcohol, barbiturates, caffeine, peyote, and the anti-nausea drug, scopolamine. Because scopolamine is also the zombie drug. It's the thing that they can blow in your face and they say it can control you, but it also keeps you from getting motion sickness. Weird.

I mean, just like Dramamine also is like, I took Dramamine once and I was knocked out for like six hours. Do you get highly suggestible on Dramamine? Didn't they also say the same thing about Tylenol? Like, it's just an acetaminophen. It did say so. No, it's not that it makes you more suggestible, it makes you more, it makes you less risk adverse.

Impulsive. Yeah, it makes you more impulsive. But these people found that the most effective drug for inducing speech, or at least the most effective among the first ones they tried, was marijuana. Marijuana! Yeah, dude. Because, yeah, it does tend to make somebody pretty chatty. I guess so.

But it also makes me kind of locked in my own brain sometimes, but I guess it depends on the strain. It really does. Because yeah, in the couch, it really does it to me. So the committee made an odorless, colorless, tasteless, highly potent weed tincture. And that tincture became the OSS's truth drug. That's what I did during dry January. And you honestly, you spoke a lot of truths.

You revealed your secret song for the audition that you did for that school musical. Yeah. Then when you had the ability to speak, you did speak some truths, some big truths. That's it. That's all you can ask for. Now since this tincture was undetectable, agents could eject it into any kind of food without the subject being any the wiser. But since it needed to be tested, and since the OSS still had a couple of scruples, OSS

operatives would test it on each other. That must have been a fun dinner. Yeah, they dosed their coworkers through candy, salad dressing. Mashed potatoes was a big one to put in the mashed taters. Man, we really have come far because this is just something you can get from the most beautiful woman in Santa Barbara right now. Yes, you remember her mother. You can have weed dinner, bring your friends.

This is something that we paid good money to have happen to us. But dude, this is not friendly tincture. Even using the word tincture is fun. So what's the difference between the THC strains that they're using here and the ones we have now? The original dosages of it used to make people vomit, like it's that much THC. You would go into catatonia, like they would like full body sweats, seizures, like they first were like, we think we might be giving these guys too much.

And then they started to realize like, oh, it needs other ways to do it. And finally they got to smoking it. It seems to be the most effective. Wait, they finally got to fucking smoking it. If you want another reminder, how stupid these people are. It came from guys that they knew within the jazz scene. Because the jazz scene, they had operatives, because the thing too about all of these guys is that you need guys from all walks of life.

You need people that have all these different hands in all these different worlds. And they had guys that were at the time, like in the underground of the jazz scene. And they had known that they were like, well, you know what happens is like sometimes that one guy, before he hit the joint, he was just going, but then he hit that one guy. One cigarette. And he started going. Whoa. And so it's like, I think that we've got something here.

And then they finally, he was like, we should smoke it. And they were like, no, no, no, we need something more sciency than that. We're going to turn it to liquid. And then he kept being like, we should be smoking it. Smoking it, yeah. If it works a cafe wall, it can work at the White House. Well part of what you needed to do was to make it, was to give it to a guy clandestinely. So you couldn't just say like, here, smoke this joint so we can get all the secrets out

of you. You can't get it to him in a way that he doesn't know he's getting it. So what they ended up doing was injecting that tincture into cigarettes. Oh, oh yeah. And after smoking one of these laced cigarettes, the subject would of course get high. Then the interrogator would try to get the subject to spill the beans. Ultimately though, the truth drug proved inconsistent because while it sometimes stimulated a rush of talk, it made other people paranoid.

That's awesome. To clam up. And they didn't say shit. One of the most, so the head of the CIA at the time, he actually would, it became the rumor of like, never take a cigarette from the boss. That's not a rumor you want spread about you. Because he would have a pack of cigarettes laced with this shit because their whole thing is they would like, again, what we'll see, this is a common thread.

They wanted to see these things in an operative scene. They wanted to see it in a place where like, we wouldn't use it on willing, yeah. We wouldn't use it on willing, normally in war, we wouldn't use this on willing people. They'd have to, we have to see its effectiveness when we do it on people who don't know that they're getting it. So he, so they had to figure out a way to do it and in 1943, there was this guy named George White that we're going to talk about next series of episodes. George White is up there with like the wackiest fucking JFK conspiracy characters you can

possibly imagine. Like George White is like an American character. He's a real fucking, he's a scooch, this guy. He's a real piece of work. How does he dress? I've seen suspenders. He is old school 1940s goon, like looking like a goon, like big head, big meat head. Yeah, bowling ball body.

They said he looked like a bowling ball with a hat on. Seriously, he looked like Alex Jones. He's got like that. He's got a fat from whiskey body. And he went into a field test where he wanted to see the effectiveness of this shit. So what they decided to do, that he went undercover and talked with this mafioso, this guy named August Little Augie Del Gracio, right? He was a drug dealing guy.

He started getting deep into like the original heroin networks into New York City, like his old school drug dealing. And yeah, he's like getting in with like Lucky Luciano and guys like that. And so he gave him these cigarettes, right? And he started like hanging out and doing stuff. It turned into Del Gracio giving him a two hour monologue about the intricacies of drug dealing and drug networking and telling me like basically, you won't even believe where we hide.

It goes behind the potatoes and he's like, man, this shit's fucking wild. Dude, don't fucking hear this shit, dude. We hide it in the fucking spaghetti. You're spilling the beans, dude. Those are beans. You're spilling the beans. More like I'm sluicing the ranzoni. Oh my God.

So after the marijuana experiment, Stanley Lovell, head of OSS Research and Development, proposed that there might be a way to use hypnosis to program a German prisoner to hate the Gestapo. But they decided there was no reason to stop there. If you could program someone to hate, then you could program them to hate enough to kill. Oh, I thought you were going to say love. No, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, no.

And if you directed that hatred in the right direction, you could use hypnosis to make that German kill Hitler. Kill Hitler. Wow. But I don't think that they understood that it actually was really easy to motivate people to kill Hitler because he wasn't nice. Seems like a lot of people wanted to kill Hitler. And he wasn't a nice boss.

No. He wasn't a nice guy. And he wasn't a funny guy. It wasn't like when you hear stories about other people, you know, like Stalin was actually very charming. Like those bullshit words being like, no, Hitler was weird. Well, they say he was handsome. They say Stalin was handsome.

How about charming? You know, it's that shit. You're like, no, Hitler didn't have a personal magnetism. He was cool on stage. But you're going to isolate that audio. No. That was the part that you liked about him. Well, I wasn't in the audience.

Let's say effective on stage. He was effective on stage. Many people used how effective he was on stage to get what they wanted. But he was like a weird guy. Yes, he was. You know what? He was a weird guy. He was a very weird, uncomfortable man.

He was uncomfortable to be in the room with Adolf Hitler. Nowadays, he would just be on the fucking mask singer. Oh, my God, it's Hitler. It's Hitler. He's the big cupcake. It was Hitler. And would you believe Ken Jong walked off stage for five minutes? That show he produced and booked?

Wow, I can't believe. Wow, brave of him. Now, when the CIA was formed years after World War II ended, they started going through old OSS documents and they found research on the truth drug project that was given marijuana to try to get people to tell the truth, and they saw the studies on hypnosis. And these two studies formed the basis for the CIA mind control programs to come. What's this paperwork that's rolled up like a huge mass of blunt? Right or no?

Just unroll this. Dude, we've been giving drugs out for a long time, huh? Now, let me save these drugs. Now, concerning the creation of the CIA, the idea was born from the realization that the Russians were going to be a problem after World War II. So while Bill Donovan wrote a secret memo to FDR asking to transform the OSS into a central intelligence service. This idea, however, was leaked to J. Edgar Hoover, and J. Edgar Hoover put a kibosh on

the whole idea. I'm going to buy every single pair of handcuffs that I'm going to keep in my basement. No one's ever going to be able to have handcuffs ever again. I'm the only cop that's allowed. It's not me. Are you just mad that you have to be J. Edgar Hoover because of that other person and he has your name and it wasn't you like a... It's John First.

Yeah. I know. I'm sad. I'm sorry, buddy. But when FDR died, and Harry Truman took over the presidency, one of the biggest fucking tragedies in American history, he was Truman. I think he's weak. I don't know.

I don't like this Truman guy. I think he's too much of a pussy. There's no way he's going to do what we need him to do. And another cut from Naked Gun, you should have seen how FDR died. Just going down the steps of those stadiums and then he hit the bottom and flew out into the baseball field. Truman wanted no part of a secret, unaccountable agency. He had the OSS officially dissolved in 1945, but in 1947, Harry Truman had seen the scope

of the Cold War to come and he changed his mind. Well, especially, you know, there's a lot of dirty work that had to get done. There are a lot of things that had to be done secretly. I'm a tool to do your dirty work. No more. No more. I like Steely Dan, dad, that you need somebody else to do it. Yeah.

Right? Somebody else and not me. I can't be me. Like, I'm here to do it. Exactly. I'm here to do it. I don't know. But he's like, he didn't want to be connected to it.

He realized like, oh, we need this spy agency. We need somebody who's going to be able to do all of this shit and do fucked up shit in the name of the country. Well, yeah. And you need that layer of, you know, protection. You need that layer of plausible deniability. Exactly. You need that layer of like, I don't know what they're doing.

These guys are out here doing their own thing. You didn't have to do any of this shit. You need to have a Stefan to your Stefan, Urkel. So did I do that? And then he's like, no, that was Stefan and Steve. Urkel has no idea what Stefan is doing. No. Stefan.

Even though they're the exact same entity. Stefan assaulted and murdered those 12 women. We don't. Not Steven Urkel. We don't know. We just don't know. Well, against J. Edgar Hoover's protest, the White House approved the creation of a new organization born from the ashes of the O.S.S.

They named it the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. And they packed it with former O.S.S. operatives like Alan Dulles. Yeah. This is so crazy. Yes. And this is when America starts transitioning out of Best Intentions into fucking evil. Fucking evil. And they didn't want Wild Bill, but Wild Bill got fucking cut out.

Because Wild Bill was a little bit too much for people. He would still go on to have like and pretend as if he was in charge of a bunch of like intelligence services and people go in and out of his house. Same thing that would happen to Dulles after he was like got kicked out by JFK, where it's like he would still be. It's interesting how that has always happened, where they like that that guys, they were all still all running their op games without anybody knowing and any sort of connections and then basically paying for it on their own dime.

Well, I would assume also it's a competition, right? So the U.S. government wants to make sure that they stay in their pocketbook on their payroll. So they basically pay him to do nothing, but they just, it was like when I worked at Fox and there was a lot of producers and there was a producer war and they're like, we want this guy because he used to produce Frontline, but then Fox was like, we're going to buy him. And they gave him $20 million just sitting in his office all day and do nothing until

he was escorted out because he was fired and they escorted him out via armed guard. But he was just an old man who literally just drank tea all day. It was kind of fun. And I know America had done plenty of evil shit before 1947. I know that. I know that. We've done some good stuff as well. We have.

There was just a unique point in time when America was the distinct good guy and we did good things and then we immediately spent that capital on becoming everybody else and destroying the world. May I do a small separation of the American government and the American people? The American people give us wonderful sides. Somebody's campaigning. I mean, in Fortville, during this time was fantastic. Oh, so yes.

Honestly, it always goes back to Vondville. The arts were fantastic. The American people were fantastic. We invented jazz. The United States government was up to no good. Barbecue. Barbecue. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you, American people for all of the wonderful things. Basketball. Yes. Absolute football. Yes. But by the time the OSS morphed into the CIA, a precedent for action had already been set.

When the CIA was created, it was basically understood that they operated outside of government influence with an almost unlimited budget and very little, if any, accountability. Wow. I mean, they had their official budget, but we all know about Black Ops budget. Exactly. You just put it, you just redact it and then no one knows what you're spending money on. It's awesome. I do it to myself with booths.

You know what I mean? I just redact whole purchases for myself. There's things that my hands do that my mind can't know that I do. I'm about to go to downtown Hollywood and just start screaming about editing the Pentagon. This is going to really... This is going to ruin me. It's really bad. Where's the money?

Where is the money going? The CIA also had the OSS's arrogance, carrying over their belief that if your cause is righteous, there's nothing you shouldn't do to win and the belief that nobody knew how to win better than the CIA. And this egotism basically created MKUltra. Wow. It's not even that they completed the program. It's just the act that they did not...

They had no... They had no scruples about what they did. They had no scruples. Yeah. And there's some corruption in that, no matter how, because I also don't get nationalism because you're just born whatever the fuck it is. You randomly come out of a pussy and you don't choose where you're born. It's not that random.

It's pretty fucking random. For me, for the person coming out of the pussy is random, but I don't get nationalism. And so this idea that you did it all for the love of country, when the love of country is also this weird like... It can't be perverted. Complicated. It's very complicated. And so that you do whatever it takes for the quote-unquote America, whatever, you're

hurting me. So at this point, the creation of the CIA, we wonder why Cartman is a bad child on South Park. He was given everything with absolutely zero rules. So the CIA had a budget that was whatever they wanted and they had no rules. They were the Eric Trump of government agencies. I'm surprised they're not as... I'm surprised they're as good as they are.

Yeah. It's gonna be bad. But before we get into how the CIA built a mind control program, we've got to talk about the outside sources that provided some of their more nefarious ideas. For that, we've got to backtrack just a bit to Operation Paperclip. We got the boogie, we got the boogie right here, we're going to boogie. We're acting right here, it's Bunch of Nazis, we're going to buy right here, it's that paper clip.

As World War II ended in Germany, the U.S. forces marched into Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party. They had two goals, suppress the black market and find as many high ranking Nazis as possible. Once they rounded up enough high rank Nazis, the most famous Nazis were sent to Kranzberg Castle in Germany. Seriously, Reed, we're going to do a full on deep dive into Operation Paperclip. At some point, because it's two episodes on its own, and it's the book Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobson.

This is a fucking, it's an action movie with Tarantino villains, like all of these guys are all like master villains that were a part of the architecture of the Nazi war machine, and so they also knew like they don't say anything, everything's in code, they're a bunch of smarmy fucking greasy Gestapo fucks all hanging out in these like big old castles. The chumming around with everybody like it's funny. The pretzel has no beginning and no end, the pretzel is none, the pretzel is nothing and everything all at once, because technically a pretzel never does, it never can, I mean it's forever.

It's the infinity symbol. Yeah, it's the infinity symbol. Thank you. Well, at this makeshift prison, you had architect Albert Spea, automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche, creator of the VW bug, and the directors of the IG Farben chemical cartel, the so-called devil's chemists who had manufactured the Zyclon B-palates used in the Holocaust. I was reading about the interrogation of the head of IG Farben and like it's just so fucking miserable because he was like, we did all bastards, it's amazing what we can do with

science these days and all of these, this American officer like a scene from a movie is knocking around his wall, right? He's knocking and being like, oh yeah, okay, that's interesting, so what else did you do to IG Farben? And then he hit the hollow point and then the man started crying and he was just like, oh, that must be bad. And he opened up the fucking literally pulled a bookcase aside and there was a safe in there, they cracked open the safe and it was the building of the chemical plant at Auschwitz.

It was all of the pictures, it was a photo album of all of the pictures of them like cutting the grand opening ribbon at Auschwitz. Like throwing like a ticker tape parade while you see all of these like Jewish like workers in the background building that their own cyclone be like factories. One of those things that's hard to believe, well, it's not hard to believe sadly, shit takes time to build, this stuff did not happen on accident. But included in that Motley crew were people of potentially great value to the powers that survived World War II.

Next many others, you had rocket scientist, Wona von Braun, and the Nazis director of research into biological warfare, Dr. Kurt Blom. We'll take those two, please. And about 700 others. You'll just grab those. Thank you so much. I have a doggie bag for Nazis, put this in your purse, it's a rocket. Wona von Braun will be covered much more extensively when we do a full series on operation paper

clip. But Dr. Blom had several Nazi funded laboratories devoted to bacteriology, pharmacology and radiology. He had, it was seriously called the tumor farm. Well, you know what, and this is where I'm gonna say, can I get off this cruise? I don't wanna stop at the tumor farm, I don't wanna be anywhere near the tumor farm. In America, the tumor farmers are the only farmers we pay. We pay them to farm, it's called cigarettes. Oh my goodness, a lot of tumors out there.

And his laboratory complex, like it was supposed to be given like kind of a medical name, but it was still, the name was still fucking terrified. They called it the Central Cancer Institute. It's all horrible, what about like, it just sounds like, it sounds like where cancer goes to school. Exactly, where it's stronger and stronger and it comes out as leukemia, you go in as breast cancer and you come out as prostate cancer and you're just like, I think I can kill now.

Dr. Blom also developed aerosol delivery systems for nerve gas that got tested on inmates at Auschwitz. Yeah. He bred infected mosquitoes and lice to be tested on inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald. And he produced gas that was used to kill 35,000 tuberculosis patients in a concentration camp in Poland. I don't understand, Marcus, it says right here, he was quoted as saying, I know nothing. I know nothing.

Yes, from, I believe that's laughing, which is a 1970s comedy show. It's with Gomer Pyle. Yes, Hogan's Heroes. Hogan's Heroes. Hogan's Heroes. I know nothing. I know nothing. Yes, that is, for our younger viewers out there, they're going to love that one.

I mean, it's from Gomer's. That's what this is all about. That's a Gomer joke. That's good. Fly from your place. So in January of 1945, about five months before the Germans surrendered, Dr. Blom fled the tumor farm in advance of the invading allies. But somewhat like Mengele, what Blom really cared about was the work to the detriment

of all else. He didn't really give a fuck about being a Nazi. He just cared about the science. What did he think he was doing? Helping the war effort, learning more about the virology that no one else was brave enough to do? Okay. Yeah.

It was just about knowledge. It was just about like, I'm going to find out. It was just like Mengele, where it's like, I'm going to find out the shit that no one else has had the balls to find out because no one else is willing to kill for science. As such, Blom continued his research in another town in Germany until the allies captured that one as well. He escaped to Munich, but was caught with the rest of the rap bastard Nazis when there was nowhere else to go.

It still feels good to say. It still feels good to say. It does. No, no, no. It feels good to call Nazis. Nazis. A bunch of rap bastard Nazis. Oh, dude.

I just finished Call of Duty Vanguard, and it was really fun to hunt down some Nazis. It's a great, it's a great time. Always kill them. It's so much fun to do their bad people, you know. Yeah. I just got in glorious bastards on fucking Blu-ray. I can't wait to watch it tonight. Yeah, fuck yeah, Nazis.

And you know when the U.S., you know when it's officially allied territory, there's a golden corral. We always, we drop it in Planet One. That's a part of the propaganda engine, because you can see like, could a country be so bad if we create a buffet of this style quality that 40 people will fight each other in a golden corral because they ran out of steak? Which actually happened. Can you imagine coming from Ukraine, coming to America, this is why they say the sentence,

I love America, because they see a golden corral for the first time, they don't realize 10 years later, they're going to lose their feet. But you know, when you first came here, it's like, whoa, that's the ultimate American deception. Fuck the chocolate fountain. Cut to them. Dying of diabetes. It was worth it. I didn't know I'd lose half my body to chocolate.

Now, by the time the allies caught Dr. Blom, they already had documents proving he was an evil son of a bitch. They were in possession of a letter addressed to Blom from Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler, directing Blom to produce the toxins that killed all those tuberculosis patients. Now, Blom admitted that the letter was real and he did admit to killing 35,000 people. He said, yes, I'm sorry. Yes, I did that. Is he going to do a dot, dot, dot, dot, dot on this one?

Yeah, you're going to do a dot, dot, dot, dot, however, he insisted that the director of the Nazi biological warfare programs was Heinrich Himmler, not Dr. Kurt Blom. Kurt Blom, he's just following orders. Just following orders. He's got to do all that stuff with it. That's great. I love when people just follow orders. Now, one thing that became blindingly obvious to the allies once they began sifting through

Nazi research was that Nazis like Dr. Kurt Blom had accumulated a unique store of knowledge about the human body. Specifically, this knowledge was extremely valuable because it could only come from experiments in which humans were explicitly made to suffer and die. Unlike, say, the American Tuskegee experiments were suffering in death was more of a possible, if likely, consequence. Boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo. For example, the Nazis knew how long it took for human beings to die after exposure to

various germs and chemicals, and they knew which toxins would kill most quickly and efficiently. But in the Dachau concentration camps, Nazis had also fed mescaline and other psychoactive drugs to prisoners, hoping to find ways to either control their minds or simply shatter the human psyche altogether. But this year was an exciting nightmare. See, hadn't occurred to Americans just yet, why don't we try psychoactive substances? They got that idea from the Nazis. They looked at the paperwork, too, because they were very crude.

The experiments that they did at the concentration camps were obviously very crude and very like hitting things with a hammer, but the United States government looked at this, and as they started getting all of this intel about what the Nazi doctors were all up to, the idea of purchasing them was a slow roll. It was eventually they started to realize, like, oh, we might have to have, quote unquote, have to have these guys to do shit with this stuff. Well, hear me out. We'll dress them up as Pokemon, and we'll just collect them all.

It'll be great. I can't imagine the first person to walk into the office that says, let's recruit the Nazis. Must have been, like, Earl? Oh, no. Everyone was there. Why don't you just go? The guy who sent the first, I mean, there was a guy that did send the first telegram being like, we might want to hire some of these guys, and the response back was not

happy. No. No. Slowly, but surely. But without, Dr. Kurt Blum had been involved in many of the biological experiments, making him highly valuable to the U.S. military because the U.S. military had spent years believing that biological warfare was the future. Oh.

Because remember, not everyone knew about the Manhattan Project. Not everyone knew that we had nuclear weapons, and we also didn't know, and those who did know about the nuclear weapons, they didn't know if it was ever actually going to work out. It's sort of a maybe kind of, I don't know, let's see what this fucking Oppenheimer weirdo comes up with. Oh, gosh. It was the ABC Warfare, atomic, biological, chemical, and they were basically just running

on each one, being like, all right, let's see who we get first. All right, so they got, they have the air covered and the land covered, and now they're going to get our lungs covered perhaps. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, we've been doing chemical warfare since World War I, mustard gas and so on and so forth. Yeah. But before World War II, it was discovered that Japanese scientists were producing biological

weapons. And by the way, before you all start screaming for Unit 731, it will be getting its own redo series in the future. Ben, are you excited about reliving Unit 731? I am a little bit not excited about it, but I think it will be fun. We're making sleep. Making sleep. Oh, God.

At that movie, what is it? Beyond the Sun. And Behind the Sun, it still traumatizes me. That will be a grotesque series, but an important series when it comes to human history. Let's not repeat it. Mm-hmm. So after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, FDR created the War Research Service, our first agency dedicated to biological warfare.

To head the agency, FDR tapped George Merck, CEO of what is now one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. God, what's that? Again, not helping with the conspiracy. I'm getting hot. I'm sweating. No, it's not. I'm going to end up at all stops.

Follow the money. I'm just going to end up at all stops. Follow the money. I'm just going to end up at all stops. Follow the money. I'm just going to get back in bike helmet with the top cut off, screaming at people. That might not be right. I'm going to run out of the Hatties pretzels.

Yeah, it's not a conspiracy, but it's true. Now the task that put this agency on the map came when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill received intelligence reports that Hitler was planning a biological attack on England. Tragically, that report was later proven false, which means that this program, which caused A domino effect with a thousand other serious consequences Have been started for no real reason whatsoever. Well, he planted the German government from what I read They planted that rumor themselves, right? Because you know Hitler is chasing after the Wunderwaffens the wonder weapons for a long time

Which was really like at that point the v2 all these various rocketry things that they use to blow us up harder than everybody else But they were technically on the verge of creating a massive chemical poison called 2 ban Which is like t u b a n that they were going to use to fucking because I guess the final idea that what the Nazis were going To do was that at the very end of the war it was floated that the two Hitler Let's just kill everybody let's literally just do a massive suicide bomb with the chemical weapon on All of Europe and kill as many people as we can well that would that also kill us exactly when they wanted to come And then you look they all committed suicide right they wanted it so they did work There was a it was a gleam in Hitler's eye. Did it?

Did any of these experiments did anything accidentally turn out right like is this how Nutella was created by Was all of this just a net negative Yeah, we got we went to the moon No, we did that picture from the moon that was cool Yeah, yeah one of the one of the greatest accomplishments in human history Yeah, there was it came from Nazi technology was the dude that came from Werner von Braun's v2 rocket scientist technology That's how America got to the moon. We went all the way to the moon though, and we came right back I'm not sure if it was worth it for that trip, but let's see

Yeah, okay, now since the UK didn't have the facilities or the budget to build up a store of pathogens as retaliation for a possible German bio attack Churchill asked FDR for a little help in turn FDR asked his top Bacteriologists if it was possible to produce deadly germs on an industrial level using one big bomb I love this conversation the president's having oh, yes, so comforted These are the these are the conversations that that he did they have I know they said and they talk about this We're like what if we made just one big bomb and then grandpa Joe's like What if we make a shape like a word there's let me be clear

It's all about sharing a moment between a grandfather and his grandson corn pop You're like most scientists of this time they didn't have a moral problem Infecting an entire population with a deadly disease. They did however have a practical one Most said that it was impossible to build a hermetically sealed container on that scale But one bacteriologist Dissented saying that this was merely a problem of scale that could be solved That bacteriologist was Ira Baldwin who would later serve as a mentor for the eventual architect of MK ultra Now Baldwin was an interesting figure

Simultaneously existing as both America's first biological warrior and as a committed Quaker who aboard violence Why are they all of these guys at stories that they all are like this like while Bill was like a fucking gardener Sydney Gottlieb The same thing like they lead these like little like provincial like cute like normal lives where they preach They want the silence of the country right while like they do that they both like So I buy a bacterial warfare, which is probably the bio warfare is the most nefarious thing to come out of the human mind Since the beginnings of it since we started the first throwing disease bodies over the wall Black plague started with some biological war

It was a fucking bad idea to begin with and then also the idea of just the psychic rape of a generation of people like it I don't know how they can put the two together Mm-hmm Baldwin later said that it never occurred to him to say that he didn't want to produce biological weapons Because everyone was pitching in on the war effort. However, they could all he needed to do was think his way through the problem Eventually he decided that even though killing people is immoral He had on the other hand spent his time in medical bacteriology killing micro organisms that kill humans to stop those micro organisms from killing humans There you go for therefore using bacteria to kill other humans So those humans stopped killing other humans. It was no different

What makes all the sense in the world if you're completely and utterly deranged and attempting to Rationalize your creation of a biological weapon that theoretically is gonna end the war But we all know we'll just increase it and cause mass human suffering But you talk about how scientists did their parts There was also a t-shirt maker and he invented the term Hitler more like shittler. It went viral It went shirt viral in the 1950s and 60s 40s. Yeah, well actually Ben I mean you you bring up a good point later on like but later on Baldwin Ira Baldwin actually say he's like, yeah I know it's horrifying

Know that yeah, he's like looking back on it like I know it was horrifying for me to make that justification That's the difference between being a scientist and a comedian because I am sorry that I got too drunk on stage five years ago In Minneapolis it still comes up But that's really different though because I'm not that haunted by it, you know, I'm not haunted like oh, I killed a whole generation of people Yeah, unless you mean kill on that mic We have killed We just murdered that show. I actually don't like that terminology for it No

So after Baldwin was given the UK biological weapons gig he became the scientific director of the army biological warfare Laboratories and both a new facility just 50 miles outside of Washington DC at a former National Guard base called Dietrich Field It was soon renamed can't Dietrich cute from the beginning. Yeah From the big actually they could see camp David from can't Oh David people because all the germs are over there. Okay, they should never do Ernest saves camp Dietrich If he was still around to do it

Talk burns perfect for the cladestine like of the clandestine intelligence Well the installation was shrouded in the deepest secrecy because military commanders thought it thought that if news of research into germ warfare leaked out Americans would panic at the possibility of a biological attack. It's not the worst logic. Americans can be quite skittish. Yeah, buddy Yeah, I feel like everyone has a different reaction, don't they? And everyone just handles everything perfectly Mm-hmm Calm calm and so the first rule of camp Dietrich was don't talk about camp Dietrich

And all of them were forced to sign a vow of secrecy They didn't even have autonomy over their own dead bodies if they died while they were working at camp Dietrich They had to immediately be sealed in an airtight coffin And the only people allowed to do autopsies on camp Dietrich scientists were other camp Dietrich scientists At some point, don't you just sit down and say what is let's just say we accomplish everything. What's the best case scenario? That's the ultimate fan patreon I mean that's the ultimate like you're just signing me like my body belongs to my brother my brother and me But these guys they fucking loved the work they were doing they loved being at camp Dietrich

They adored it because I mean really for them the in-game best case scenario They just get to work on science for the rest of their lives, and that's it. They get to accumulate knowledge They get to figure it out. That's why the game is the first place. I loved it man. They got the fucking they had the snack bar They had foosball tables, you know They have those like you know those spinny with like the tables the chairs look like tops It's amazing, but it's like if you were actually sitting in one of those chairs or using the foosball table Like one of your bosses would eventually come by me like what are we doing here Greg? Yeah, what are we doing here? It's there, but it's not there. Why are you why are you using absolutely?

But if it just feels like I mentioned this in I mentioned this on top at this week when it comes to Having more military troops go abroad Romania and things like that and the the old adage of theater Where if you show the gun in the first act you better use it by the third It just seems like they're creating the gun to then show and by definition They're going to have to use it otherwise. What are they doing millions of dollars are wasted? Well, that's the whole thing about yeah the whole joke and dr. Strange love about the doomsday machine like what well What is the point of having it if nobody knows you have it? And as you know the premier love surprises

Kubrick is the bad I'm starting to think Stanley Kubrick is a good director. Yeah, maybe he knew shit that We didn't know that he knew maybe. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah I'm just saying he was he catered it he was there The guys at the guys at camp Dietrich like they fucking loved to be in there But they were also like they knew they had to be secret about it But they also had fun with it or like they'd have parties and a guy would be like well There's a whole lot of fucking bacteriologists here. That's crazy. Where is this world? Is this where all the germs with dicks hang out?

Just one dude has a super tight 10. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they even had their own school tier Henry if you would please brucelliosus Pacificosis pu bar antibodies anti-toxin rah, rah, rah I'm just so fucking pissed off that these people killed everyone These nerds did it Well over the next two and a half years Baldwin and hundreds of scientists under his command engaged in over 200 projects including breeding mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and developing a pigeon bomb a Pigeon bomb was a pigeon whose feathers had been infected with toxic spores

So when the pigeon flies around you just kind of toss the pigeon out it fucking spreads toxic spores across the city people get sick however as Scientists were solving the project that started it all remember it all started with Churchill saying I want a big germ bomb Churchill abruptly changed the order from one big germ bomb to half a million bomblets Filmed with anthrax spores That's like when I get the nuggets a Chick-fil-A Little nuggets yeah, so it literally is the joke would you rather have would you rather fight one big germ bomb or a thousand tiny ones?

Yeah, tiny ones what he thought that well He kind of got that intelligence that Henry had said earlier about you know The Germans might try one last crazy fucking attack because at that point they're like we're gonna beat the Germans We've got him on the run It's gonna happen eventually But everyone was worried is like what are they gonna do on the way out are they gonna try to blow up the whole fucking mess? Well, they were technically they were burning everything down and but burning all the documents and destroying everything that they could and Technically there was a mass order for Berlin to be leveled by their own forces

We know we already got there in moments of waning power moments of waning power are the most dangerous by far Yeah, wait till we're at the very end of our podcast and what happens? Nothing Yeah, I'll probably just I'll just play more bass that's pretty much all that's gonna happen. Yeah, I'll develop my hot sauce line No yet dragon blood delixir, that's my favorite For whom the bell for whom the bell tolls best hot sauce bar none. It's my favorite hot sauce. Thank you dragon blood elixir It's fantastic. You get one. Well check out Zabrowski's bleeding asshole Dogmeats bleeding asshole will be after you. Oh, it'll be nice. Thank you. I appreciate that

Now the scientists were well on their way to filling this order But in May of 1945 the Nazis surrendered and the anthrax order was cancelled Now the scientists at Camp Dietrich had learned quite a bit about how to kill large numbers of people with germs But they were still limited by the fact that they couldn't actually kill a human being in the service of scientific research The Germans however had operated under no such restrictions The Americans had known for a while that their Axis counterparts had been working on similar projects without any sort of Moral boundaries, so when they heard that Allied forces had captured the infamous Nazi Dr. Kurt Blom They damn near pissed themselves with excitement

Oh man, we stand The only question was how they were gonna get Dr. Blom and Dr. Blom's knowledge Now put simply the aforementioned Operation paperclip was a program in which captured Nazi scientists would be brought to the United States to apply their knowledge to American projects Partly this was done to keep these Nazis out of Soviet hands Although the Soviets did end up getting away with quite a few Nazis, but we got the good ones Yeah, I mean the Soviet space program was full of just as many Nazis as we had we did But however, we did get the smarter Nazis for Nirvan Braun was the fucking he was the rock star of the rock stars

Stalin got the dogs though. Yeah Yeah, in the divorce that was the fallout of World War two they got the dog But the story of them looking for the the hidden crates of Werner von Braun's V2 documents His like hidden documents is fantastic. It should be its own movie. Yeah Well, most I mean we did this partly to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets But mostly we did this because the Nazis had put all of their chips into science at any cost And they had knowledge that we could only dream of Most famously we brought over rocket scientist Werner von Braun

Whose knowledge about rocket propulsion built on the backs of enslaved Jewish prisoners Eventually landed America on the moon. The V2 program was built underneath a mountain It was like Mordor and they were not allowed to be these the slaves. They were brought from the the concentration camps They were not allowed to have digging tools because they thought that they would rise up against the SS people So they literally had to dig caverns in the mountains with their hands Oh my god, and they would kill they would just you just threw bodies at it So more and more people would die building these things But the thing is that when you have a group of emaciated

Basically dying people build your entire rocketry system. These rockets sort of falling apart They used to blow up on the landing pads They used to blow up before they were supposed to do because their heart really wasn't in the work. Yeah Sounds horrible. Well to demonstrate just how hard we engraved these Nazis into our society Werner von Braun was even featured on an episode of a Disney television show in 1955 called Disneyland to explain rocket propulsion. Oh, how fun for the kids that must have been Yeah, that presentation by the way still available on Disney fucking you That they still have it on Disney

Plus I would love to have seen Werner von Braun in Disney and be forced like my parents did with Mickey like go tell Werner von Braun You love him. Yep. You love him. Go get his autograph, please This is another reminder when Disney I don't know tells us that people like James Gunn Who's just an artistic man trying to do the best he can suicide squad the new movie is fantastic But when they say James Gunn's a bad person, don't forget Disney not exactly pure. Yeah Well, push gardens didn't buy any Nazis. They didn't buy one Nazi push gardens not one Nazi But once we started bringing over rocket scientists the rest of the commander started getting jealous So they proposed opening the pipeline to the physicians chemists and biologists who had conducted experiments at the concentration camps

And like Ira Baldwin the officers running operation paperclip figured There wasn't much of a difference between the people killed by the v2 rockets built by Werner von Braun and the people killed by the gas Used by dr. Blonde if anything von Braun's projects had probably killed more people. Yes, so as a result Operation paperclip got to work whitewashing the biographies of all these scientists References to membership in the SS collaboration with the Gestapo abuse of slavery at laborers or Experiments on human subjects were expunged like it never even happened like bye bye delete delete And you know what it really helped them that they had some way to give them amnesia

I really would have helped them get over the burden over their their histories because think of the how much Yeah, you don't know what it's like to kill tons and tons of people it's hard for me Then they doctored the applications recategorizing scientists who had been rated by interrogators as quote ardent Nazis to quote Not ardent Nazi T-shirt Like this is dr. Von Braun. He's an ardent Nazi Finally they padded the bios of the scientists to make them sound like loving family men and the paperclip contracts were signed

Did you hear the soul of America died? Overall more than 700 Nazis would enter the United States with clean slates No matter what they'd done and after dr. Blom somehow Skated his way through the Nuremberg trials. We brought him over as well He was one of the few guys to be found not guilty at Nuremberg also this whole time Wild Bill is trying to get Goring off Goring is on then he's in the Nuremberg trials and they were trying to get him They thought like maybe he's like we'll get Goring to flip and have him rat out the other Nazis and you're like what the fuck are you talking about?

Wild Bill was doing the do too much for my research for next week's episode. I will be watching Dana Carvey's clean to light Because isn't that a wonderful example of what MK ultra can do Now almost immediately after the Nazis got wiped up like so much fucking diarrhea The Soviet Union replaced the Germans and the Japanese as America's next big bad Hatred for communists had been building for decades and citizens were soon convinced that communism was a demonic force that morally threatened the existence of the United States and therefore all of humanity and Since the stakes were set so high by both the government and the citizenry that created kind of a feedback loop The government says that it's really bad the citizens go even further and so on and so forth

Sure, so no sacrifice of money morality or human life could be considered excessive Which was the perfect environment for the newly created CIA It's set the scene and the temperament for how they would work without the first for the first 15 the first 15 years of the CIA Arguably their most like Destructive, I mean I mean who knows what they do now like to now We're gonna cover more later on in the series about like modern things that the CIA are up to but it is it this time period was No, I was just choice for it. Yeah, this is when they're there. They're a newborn baby Mm-hmm with a gun with a massive a lot of money and a lot of power and it seems as if

Political will is on their side of this. This is the American people are gonna like do whatever you got to do So the real story boss, baby. Oh, this is boss, baby. Yes The original boss, baby Now by 1949 the CIA had been on the job for a couple of years Hiring Corsican gangsters to break communist led strikes in Italy while they sent saboteurs spies and commando squads Throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They were really into supporting insurgencies That is where it really started the OSS was doing that as well And that's how it started was the idea of you get grassroots campaigns against non-friendly

American governments and trying to flip them you wait We're gonna have a guerrilla war in our hands here in a second. It's crazy, man. Yeah, I can't believe they're gonna let those monkeys fight You made almost a bend you made a bend there. Yep. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's rubbing off It took something super horrific and try to make it cute But in 1949 a prelate of the Roman Catholic Church named Cardinal Yosef Mindzinty Appeared on a televised show trial in the Soviet controlled country of Hungary There the Cardinal confessed to attempting to overthrow the government and Seeking to seal the royal Hungarian crown as a part of a plot to reestablish the long-dead Austro-Hungarian Empire

Now the Cardinal obviously hadn't done anything so outlandish But because he confessed he was sentenced to life in prison. This was basically a Soviet Okay, now while the world leaders were outraged at the Cardinal sentence senior officers at the CIA Had an entirely different reaction Instead of focusing on the outcome of the trial they focused on the behavior of the Cardinal during the trial They observed that the Cardinal appeared disoriented He spoke in a flat monotone and he confessed to crimes that he obviously had not and could not have committed

And he seems to just like to collect little twigs and make a little home out of it And oh you're saying that he's a Cardinal like a bird. Thank you for the honestly, that's really helpful. Thank you Yeah, you see him on the witness stand making this little we all can that's what it was weird because that's why he's there Yeah, now the Cardinal had been coerced into confessing with nothing more special than ill treatment extended isolation beatings and repetitive interrogation and you're also just forced your hand is you're just forced to say these lies and you know It's lies and the audience knows it lies We all have to agree which is why the Soviets at that point You know they were it was a bad environment because they all had to live in this fantasy world of a government's construction

Yeah, I'm not gonna. I'm not buying into that hole like that modern bullshit We're like Soviet Russia is cute and cuddly and fun. They're not Soviet Russia was a fucking awful place Yeah But the CIA could not accept that a man could be made to confess to something so huge Using standard torture techniques even though that's exactly what happened The CIA became convinced that the Soviets had developed drugs or mind-control techniques to say things That they did not believe he's a Catholic priest. He lies for a living What are we talking? There's no way he could flip a Catholic. No

What started is speculation around the CIA offices soon became fact Despite a complete lack of evidence that the Soviets were doing anything like this Most likely I kind of got a feeling that they had read the the fucking OSS files about the truth serum and about using Hypnosis I got a feeling they read that shit about a week before and then when they saw the Cardinal she was like, oh fuck That's what they're doing and then before you know it fucking you know, it just becomes MK ultra That's how humans work. Yeah, and as it's just so happened the former biology boys over at Camp Dietrich They needed a new project. Oh Project

See after World War two military planners had concluded that since we had nuclear weapons There was no need to develop biological weapons So the scientists at Camp Dietrich had temporarily been out of a job But after the trial of the Cardinal in Hungary the scientists at Camp Dietrich had their mission changed from biological to chemical 1949 the CIA formed the special operations division and began conducting research into ways that chemicals could be used as weapons of covert action and that is where we will pick back up next time for part two of our series on MK ultra for the introduction of a chemical called Lycurgic acid

deethylamide aka LSD Oh, man, I don't know even only the US government in the CIA could ruin something as wonderful as LSD Well, the thing is is that it started if it wasn't for them. We would never have Yeah, we'll get into it later But yes, it's the creation of LSD in the counterculture by the CIA is possibly one of the most ironic chapters of human history But we'll get into that a few episodes from now guys can't wait this twisty road Yeah, just started just like Cheryl Crowe said every day is a fucking winding road winding road a little bit closer

And they so we're gonna get to the end of this series by the end of this year. It's we hope to be worse people and and more More unpredictable as a person in the things that like it's just it's gonna shred our brains a little bit because we're really getting Into it because we did immediately up top say there's not there's not a conspiracy blah blah blah and it's like all of these things pop up or like Merk is there and all these other guys are there and you're like Well, I don't really know what to do here But we're seeing here is that the crimes that the CIA would commit against humanity would create the platform for

Modern conspiracy theory and why we aren't here today because it creates a place of reality For more and more ludicrous things to be put on top of it Absolutely hard to say the CIA doesn't do this shit when they've already been doing done doing this Absolutely, and of course they love conspiracy and the propagation of conspiracy because that creates the hell a gray fog that they can navigate in so be very careful Honestly send a certificate send us Yeah, yeah, I mean this whole thing just created like a big feedback loop where it's like we started doing evil shit But since we believe that we're the good guys and they're the bad guys

We start thinking like if we're doing this shit imagine what they're doing Right, yeah, and so we start upping the ante because they think that they're that they're up in the we think that they're upping The ante and they're doing the same exact fucking thing without any real goddamn reason paranoia is the biggest poison in the human brain And in human society absolutely nothing more powerful than an empty briefcase Yeah, what's in the box? Oh, it's a stick Thank you guys for listening to our bullshit. Thank you all so much for listening. We got a z2 We are comic book last comic book on the left is coming out this spring. You want to pre-order it You want to go to over to z2 pre-order that comic book? It is not shipping for another month or two

I don't know when it's coming out, but we are working on that. We got issue 5 of soul plumber. Yeah, very soon a couple of weeks. Yes, very soon, but again pick up issue for we're doing that I'm very very excited not a CIA agent. Am I okay? Well, just kind of a random thing there We want to thank everyone who came out to our shows in DC and Richmond and Philadelphia We had a strange thing occurred the power went out and we can't wait to be back inside you in June June 3rd And you know what it was kind of weird to share that moment with with all of them And I hope I hope everyone can make it back because sorry about that. That was Unun out of our control also

I want to give a big up to the garrison brothers boys over the bourbon people because they fucking gave me another big Old bottle of bourbon. I just want to say fuck. Thank you so much. It's so fucking tasty a fucking one. It's a fucking munch I mean so much to me. That's a mind control. That's a mind control. I'll take it. I'll take it. Yes, indeed All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for listening. Keep on supporting all the shows here in the last podcast network And again, we are now wide. We are on every platform We are so happy to be back on whatever platform you like to listen to podcasts on and yes And thank you all so much for your support and you guys made the transition Just smooth as ever and you guys have just been wonderful. So thank you for that. Thank you

Thanks to my team and big ups LPN team. Absolutely Thank you so much. They did such a wonderful job or so Hashtag blessed to have them. So all right, everyone hail yourselves. Hail Satan again Magusta Lations. Hey, man. Hey, bro. Yeah, it's cool. Like I'm not fucking it's not an up, bro No, it's not your entire existence is not no, it's not and I am beginning Marcus No, because I would I say it so much? Yeah I mean, honestly, the only person that you truly know is not a CIA operative in your life is yourself and even then

Do you you I actually think it's probably Holden McNeely. Oh fuck. I have to kill him tonight. Oh Finally the excuse you've been looking for This show is made possible by listeners like you thanks to our ad sponsors You can support our shows by supporting them for more shows like the one you just listened to go to last podcast network.com