Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 483: MK Ultra Part II - No Shirt, No Bodies, No Problem

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

On part two, we continue the origin story of MK Ultra, as the CIA's push to harness Mind Control leads to Project Artichoke - along with numerous questionable experiments with LSD.

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?

I had this voice class that was, it was all dudes except for one girl. You know, it was a nice normal class, but we had this mid-30s woman. Essentially, this woman came in and she was teaching us, quote unquote, tremor work. I love experiments in art and science, and this is, you know, it leads right into this episode. She was doing tremor work, and it was this very tight mid-30s woman who came in and she was like, okay, you guys ready? We're gonna unleash these emotions that are hidden inside of our muscles. And she got down on her back and she went full spread eagle. And it was just all these dudes.

Florida. We were all watching her like an umpire in the World Series, just like, interesting. Yes. Fascinating. Fascinating. Because she kept going like, hi, hi, hi, hi. Like, by her legs, just like shook in the air, it was fantastic. That's great. Do you want to start the episode like that?

I don't know. The last podcast on the left, everyone. And Mark is an impromptu intro. And of course, that is fantastic. Today's topic, we are on to part two of MK Ultra. Marcus. Hi, Marcus. Yeah?

Why don't you want to believe that the medical mob view is going to kill us with the vaccines? Marcus, I figured that's a new way to- Is that what we want to do today? I feel like it's important. We're going to take a hard right and just talk vaccines. I think that if we are going to talk about the fact that, oh, hey, Marcus, if you just change the way you hear conspiracy theories, maybe it allows them to not be as dangerous. So if you interpret them through the mind of Forrest Gump's mother.

Oh, hey. Okay. Marcus, he's a true now caught blum invented the chemtrails. And it's the clouds that are making us sick. And then the back seats, they make us extra sick. I wish chemtrails were real, man. Free drugs. Chemtrails are real.

But it's about whether or not they're taking our jobs and making our wives leave us. Okay. Interesting. We'll get into it. So when we last left our story, the year was 1949. And the CIA had become convinced that Soviet Russia had developed either a drug or a technique to control the minds of men with the purpose of making them say or do out of character things. No, you just have to give them an exclusive contract with an advertising agency. The problem was the Soviets were in possession of no such drug or technique, nor had they even attempted such a thing.

They were nowhere near it. And the main thing that they said that the Soviets had was old school, right? Where they, you'd stand in one position for a long time, stress positions where they would like tie your wrists behind your back and like lift you up, hold you up by your wrist. That's what they did to Puffin. Yes. Yes. Because they want to make them tender. They would read from you transcripts of the sex in the city reboot.

All of the type of stuff like that. Kim Petrel is not coming back, by the way. No. I've been a long lengthy response from Stuart and Jessica Parker. She's too good for it. I guess. Well, as a result of this paranoid notion, the CIA had created the Special Operations Division to conduct research into ways that we could use drugs or special techniques to control minds, all in the service of winning the Cold War. Yeah.

Everyone in the division, you know they work in that division because they all walk backwards. Like that movie that was supposed to be good, that was horrible. All of them? Yeah. So, a search for the perfect drug to use for interrogation and behavior modification began. And after a long search that will be the subject of today's episode, the CIA settled on a new psychedelic that had been synthesized just a few years earlier called LSD. LSD. LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandals Laboratory in Switzerland through experimentation with the Ergot M-Zine.

Ergot, you may already know, is a naturally occurring hallucinogenic fungus that quite possibly created the mass hysteria surrounding the Salem Witch Trials through tainted rye bread. Honestly, stick around for the rest of this year's programming and you might get further information on that subject. Can't wait to hear more about Salem. Indeed. Now, Hoffman's original intention was not to create a hallucinogen, but to synthesize a respiratory and circulatory stimulant to replace a drug called Choramine that was known to have negative side effects on a lady's uterus. Yeah, man. It made it go like, I don't know, dude. He turned it into a puppy.

Sometimes a uterus would sneak out, it would sneak out and would grab things out. He would untie a man's shoes a lot and you're like, what is this, stacked shepherd inside of you? Wow, ma'am, this will turn your uterus into a puppy that plays pranks. Whoa, I don't like this drug. Do you have any LSD? Yeah, you gotta stay inside. Yes, yes. Coincidentally, Choramine was also later used in mind control experiments and it was one of the drugs favored by Adolf Hitler's personal physician who would fill Hitler's veins with the stuff to pop Hitler back to life when he'd been given too many barbiturates.

Like Judy Garland. Yeah, just like Judy. Or Zendaya. Oh. You know she's on that fucking drip, dude. She's on like nine movies. She's so skinny. She's a hybrid, first of all.

Because if you look at the cheekbones, she's a hybrid, she's been given to us by fucking Eisenhower who's still alive. I think she's a reptilian. No, no, she could be. She could be hated. A hybrid gray is what he's saying. A hybrid gray. A part of the alien breeding programs, yes. Look at her.

That was fantastic. Now LSD was created in 1943, but it sat on a shelf for five years before Hoffman returned to the drug thinking that maybe he'd missed something. In the process of handling it though, Hoffman accidentally got some on his fingertips and found that it had a psychoactive effect. God, I just, that moment, that moment of like looking at your hands and be like, something's going on right now. Like seeing it shoot through time, like you see your hand in front of like an old western carriage and like all of a sudden you're in a waterfall and you got there and then you're just back home and you get there. Mozart hits different on this, man. This is crazy. So three days later, Hoffman decided to test a larger dose of 250 micrograms on himself.

So honey, there's just something I gotta go do at work. Is this work? Okay, this is work. It's just bizarre that he decided to test again three days later with a fuck ton more. Why don't we just turn this up a bit? You just know that was one week and all his clothes are on backwards. You know, I mean like, there is just something different today. Honey, did you change your coffee?

This is crazy. 30 minutes later, Hoffman wrote in his journal that he felt no trace of any effect. So he climbed on his bicycle and rode home. But as he was riding his bike, the acid took hold. Turned into the wicked witch of the west. Seriously. This was Tuesday, April 19th. This was bicycle day that I found out accidentally.

We talked about this on side stories during quarantine when I had no clue was going on. It was the very beginning of quarantine. I was walking around my neighborhood. This is when we were all still masked up outside hyper paranoid. I was walking down the street and this dude on a bicycle was doing donuts in this area. And then he came up to me. He's like, hey man, you want some fucking acid? And I was like, we just got COVID.

This is all brand new to me, dude. I'm not ready to open the fucking, my mind right now in the street. Yeah, that could have led to a lot of fetal position sweating. Well, the acid took hold and once Hoffman got home, he wrote another entry. This one was a scrawled note that trailed off after the words quote, Difficulty in concentration. Visual disturbances. Mark desire to laugh.

Oh, isn't that nice? It's always amazing when you wake up and you see what you were writing in your notebook or joke book after you tripped acid or mushrooms. And it's always just like stores are weird. And it's like, never makes any sense. When you write it down, you're like, yeah. Cool, cool. No, I remember the first time I did acid, I had this whole thing where I was talking about

how the penny is the ingenue of the coin system. That the penny is the hot young woman at the quarters, the producer, like this like long thing. And then, you know, it just sort of makes sense. I totally disagree with you actually. I don't know. Now it's worthless. Yeah, it's totally worthless.

It costs more to make a penny than the penny is worth. It's just a different color. Yeah, the last time I did a lot of drugs and like wrote down something that I thought was the funniest thing in the world, I remember giggling the whole time I wrote it. And then I woke up the next morning and looked at the paper and it just said, the smell is the same. God damn it.

That probably was funny though. I don't know what that's about, but that was funny. If you could get back to that moment. Oh my God. It's like in your dream. I have a sketch or a joke in my dream and I'm like, and I'm just seeing it crush and like change the world. And then I wake up like, oh yeah, I got to write it down.

I was like waffles or gay pancakes. This is what I've done. From what Hoffman later reported about the first ever acid trip in history, the most outstanding symptoms were vertigo, marked metoric unrest alternating with paralysis, an intermittent heavy feeling in the head, limbs and body. Got it. The illusion that other people's faces were grotesque masks happened to me.

Whoa. And the shouting of half insane incoherent babble. Jokes and you assholes, I built a career on that. So he was tripping hard. He was tripping real hard. But Hoffman also noticed extreme senses of well-being and a deeper, more comprehensive, almost mystical view of reality. Therefore, Hoffman began thinking of LSD as a drug that could be used to treat mental illness.

It's nice that the first thought wasn't to make it a weapon. It was the second thought. Yeah, predictably, when word of Hoffman's experiments with LSD reached L. Wilson Green, the head of the chemical and radiological laboratories at Edward Arsenal, the only application Green saw was LSD's potential as a weapon. God, you almost see the thunder crash and the dark clouds go over the building. Seriously. Laboratory.

If you remember. Meanwhile at the chemical and radiological laboratories at Edward Arsenal. How do I make the anti-groovy drug? But at Edgewood, if you remember our episodes when we covered them, Edgewood is the groovy version of MK Ultra. It was them really just them throwing the LSD experiments at a wall, see what would stick amongst their people. But the research from Edgewood would come into the back door of Product Artichoke

and all of these various things that would allow them to then use it during MK Ultra. Yeah, Edgewood, they just gave a whole company of Army dudes acid and then just gave them missions and tried to see if they could do it. Oh my God, that would be so funny. Operation Brownie Pockets. That is so fun. God, that would be like, oh God, just go and talk to a Vietnam vet with no legs and you were like, how was your service?

I think it was really bad. I lost my legs and then how was your service? I played with a balloon for six months. Fucking sweet, bro. They did also give them sarin gas and mustard gas. They really fucked them up. Like LSD was the one fun day they had. But I love watching these videos.

I got into a little bit of a hole of soldiers on LSD. Have you ever watched these videos? Or is them trying to do stuff? And you just see a bunch of like, which I also love because it's World War II. So everybody's in those official green uniforms. You see the G.I. Joe versions on all the propaganda posters and stuff. So it's like they all look all buttoned up. But it's them with like their shirts half done and their helmets to the side.

And they're, they're trying to do their wall climb and they're all like laughing and rolling on the ground and shit. Oh, good for them. They need a break. Now, L. Wilson Green at Edgewood almost immediately became obsessed with using psychoactive chemicals in ground warfare. And after collecting all the information available on the subject, he published a report entitled Psychochemical Warfare, a new concept of war.

Oh, yeah, you ruined it. Honestly, if you want to have, you want to go ruin a weekend, just print out a PDF of that and start reading it at your college parties this weekend. Well, in the report, Green talked about the possibility of using psychoactive drugs on general populations, which would hopefully, in his mind, cause mass hysteria and panic so armies could march in and take over a country city by city without bloodshed. Now, admittedly, this is a more compassionate rollout of total war than, say, firebombing or nuking entire populations.

It's weird, though, because to me, this is a middle thing where, yeah, sure, it's not setting them on fire, but it's also creating mass hysteria. And within the mass... People are still going to die. People are going to die almost in a way. I would posit that it's, I mean, nothing's worse than being set on fire, I imagine. But with the napalm and all that. Yeah, that's bad.

Obviously, it's the firebombing address and all that. Yeah, that's kind of bad. Or Tokyo. But have you ever seen the movie Mom and Dad? Oh, fantastic. That style. Nicholas Cage. It's like how everybody fantasizes on Twitter about the end of American civilization

by like, oh, you know, the end of society, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, you don't know what that would look like. That would actually turn into a wave of rape and murder and suicide and people running around like lightnings. Society never ends until you die. Yeah, it just gets worse. It just keeps going. Yeah.

And well, considering how every war since the American Civil War had become increasingly more destructive and deadly with each consecutive war, it's easy to see why they'd want to go another way. They're coming out of World War II here. Like, we really... They just saw the concentration camps. So they're like, after this...

Yeah, I mean, the concentration camps were the worst of it, but just in general, the devastation of Europe and Asia and pretty much every country, every continent except for North and South America, it's hard to fathom really how horrific World War II was. We dropped the bombs. We dropped the two biggest bombs of the entire thing. And we're like, hey, we need to really be reasonable now.

And it's like, we just did this. And we'd also firebomb Dresden and Tokyo, killing about 300,000 people in the process. It's more difficult to be the person that breaks up with the person than to be the person that's broken up with. And so the U.S. was like, yeah, we dropped the bomb. But have you thought about how that made us feel? Us feel.

Think about that. Also, the recipe that they're going with is the recipe that we've been using, which leads to 20 years of guerrilla warfare. That's the compromise. Everyone on acid, and it could just last forever. We're just so excited to go back to a new one. Yeah.

Well, considering all the destruction they just witnessed, Green's report about psychoactive warfare was taken seriously. President Truman authorized the proposed drug research. Unfortunately, though, Truman handed over the application of psychedelics and other drugs to the most paranoid, bad-vibes organization in the government, the CIA. It really was. It feels like one of those, how do you put it,

fate, destiny, that type of thing that comes together. You try to do that thing where it's like work and effort meets something and then you get successful. It's a old Seneca quote. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I live my life by that quote. That's true. Absolutely.

And it's true. When do you marry your own daughter like Woody Allen? I mean, that's when you have been snubbed by the Oscars several times. Oh, OK. I see. I get it. But the CIA, them getting ahold of this program

is very bad for modern times. Yeah. And the fact that it happened like this, I really feel like if LSE went to maybe one of the other branches, where like, yeah, they'd just blow people up. But really, it's like not to be anything. There's a quote unquote softer side to like the US Navy. Because they were with the UFO branch.

And they had all kind of like softer sciences. Like you could have put it in another spot. I agree. I think the Navy and acid, yeah, that would have been fun. It could have been. So who knows? The Navy did pay $300,000 to a guy to give heroin to college students.

It's all bad. OK. It's all bad. I'm just saying that the CIA was especially bad. To give LSE. They were. They were the worst. No, you're definitely giving it to the most paranoid people.

Like the biggest psychic explosion for the collective unconsciousness in hundreds of thousands of years. And you give it to the CIA. You put them in charge of the new version in counterculture that all of this will create. Nice. But since the CIA was mostly an action agency, they needed a partner to conduct the deep research.

And since biological weapons had fallen out of vogue, the Special Operations Division at the aforementioned Fort Dietrich needed a new project. And I apologize for that. Camp Dietrich became Fort Dietrich. So if I referred to Fort Dietrich as Camp Dietrich in the last episode, I apologize to all you army fucking nerds. Good.

Did you see what biological weapons were wearing yesterday? They were all wearing all like, they were all covered in anthrax. It's out of vogue. It's out of vogue. So a covert joint program was created between the SOD and the CIA. Code named MK Naomi after one of their secretaries. She must have been so flattered. I mean, kind of.

It's pretty cool. Now, the main thrust of MK Naomi was to carry out field tests to learn how airborne biological and chemical agents worked in crowded environments, partly to test the theories of L. Wilson Green, the psychoactive chemical test. I thought bio weapons was the six year anniversary. By like 10.

Yeah. Yeah, dog me. Come on. I'll look what you did there. Come on, guys. I get it. Well, as their first experiment, six members of the SOD entered the Pentagon in 1949,

pretending to be air quality monitors. They sprayed mock bacteria into the air ducts and found that had their operation been malicious, they could have killed half the people in the Pentagon. It's the meetings afterwards. You know what I mean? You go, you spread all of this bullshit inside of the buildings and then afterwards be like,

hey, you feel a tingle on Wednesday? Covered you in bacteria from near conditioning units. Not sick though, huh? Right? Right? Well, having tried it on a smaller scale, the MK Naomi team escalated rapidly with Operation Sea Spray in San Francisco,

choosing the city because it had a coastline, tall buildings, and chronic fog that would disguise the germ clouds they were about to spray into the Bay Area. Here's a conspiracy alert. The reason why we have all of these problems with this idea of chemtrails. Like, you know, now chemtrails are even that kind of passe,

but at the time... Gwyneth Peltrow talks about them. It's because they changed the smell of her vagina. Oh. But, I mean, it made it marketable. It did. But sea spray involved planes dumping trails of bacteria on American cities.

So it happens. It's another thing that has happened. So that's the kernel of truth within the conspiracy that they've sprouted. They would literally spray on the coast. It doesn't sound that unbelievable. I don't think they used minesweepers. They didn't use planes and sea spray, did they?

They had crop dusters. I know that they used many different ways. They used many ways of spreading it. So they did stuff that was on the ground. They had... Crop dusting was a thing that they would do oftentimes in their... When they were running experiments outside of...

Kissel would actually go... He seriously got the fucking Medal of Honor. People in the bar last night. But no. But to that point, my mom used to tell me a little bit of a different scenario. But DEET, DDT, they used to just have a truck that would come by in North Dakota.

Spray everything with DDT, and they used to play in the fog. They have that ability to just spread a bunch of shit around. Yes. They have crop dusting operations, which were Antigua, which we're going to talk about probably next episode with Frank Olson.

They were... These were done by ship. So they were sprayed by ship. Okay. Yeah. We're using a minesweeper provided by the Navy. And without notifying locals, the MK Naomi team used large aerosol hoses

to spray a supposedly harmless bacterium called Seratia Markunzis. I think it's Markunzis. Markunzis. It's Markisens. Seratia Markisens. Into the coastal mist. If it was played by a character,

it'd be Bendelbing Hungerbump. What's his name? Benedict Cumberbunch. Cumberbunch. I like Cumberbunch. It's a fancy game. His name is Benedict Cumberbunch. And that's for now on.

All right. This bacterium was chosen because it had a red tent, making it easier to trace. And it wasn't thought to cause ill effects. Assholes. Now the experiment was an unqualified success in the eyes of the MK Naomi team.

Yes. It was a yes. It's everywhere. Wait, why was it an unqualified success? Because they were able to surmise that the spray reached all 800,000 San Francisco residents as well as people in Oakland, Berkeley, Sausalito, and five other cities.

It's even more of a success. You got extra. You got more than you thought. That's so great. I'm so happy you guys did that. But the casualties of Operation Sea Spray were by no means negligible. Over the next few weeks,

11 people were hospitalized for serious urinary infections and red drops were found in their urine. In one case, a man recovering from prostate surgery actually died from the bacteria they sprayed over San Francisco. So is Naomi still flattered

that all of this was named after her? I mean, you know what? Do you get flattered if your cat brings home a dead bird? Yeah. Some people do. So in a way, Naomi would say yes. Yeah, I'm glad you killed him. I'm glad you killed him with your bumpy ass prostate.

Fuck his prostate. Probably named it after you, Naomi. But this is just one example of them doing it. I remember I was watching a documentary about this time period, the Bio-Warfare leading up to Project Artichoke. And the way that you got these guys talked about it is very similar to the way everybody else has talked about everything else in terms of the OSS.

It was like a game. It was a clumsy game that they would play. And the one thing that they would always lament is that they never got to use actual live, unwilling people like the Nazis got to do because they got to have all these people. They got to test all the efficacy of all this shit on. But also it's the way they talked about it,

because everything was in code and everything was super casual. So one guy was talking about how the way that we would go down, they'd be like, so tell me, do you want to come over to the Ding-Dung Hut and play with the hot stuff? And these were all like concepts. Wait a second, yeah? The Ding-Dung Hut was like, that wasn't an actual name,

but we would have names. But the hot stuff is what they would call fucking anthrax. They would call these things where they would work in controlled lab scenarios. But this idea of them all joking around, be like, come over and check out the hot stuff sometimes. It's just like kind of like, sends a shiver up my spine. It is bizarre to think them listening to Frank Sinatra's regrets.

I admit it, I've had a few. When you're like, what are your regrets? We never got to test it on actual people. Seriously. It's like, that's your regret? You didn't kill enough people? No, when these scientists started working with Operation Paperclip Nazis,

they welcomed them as colleagues, because these were the guys that had done the shit that they wanted to do. They would sit down with them and have these conversations. They'd be like, all right, tell me the real shit. Really tell me the real shit, what really goes on. And the Nazis would tell them like, yeah, fuck it up, man. You would not believe a man dies

if you just pump him full of glue. He just fucking dies and you're just sitting there. I thought he'd become sticky on the outside that we were hoping and then I lost that bet to Gunther. Gunther said he'd die, because Gunther's a fucking party pooper. Fascinating, fascinating. Now, since agents have proved that they could infect a city population with a biological agent,

the first director of the CIA, Roscoe Hillencoder, directed his agents to start experimenting with chemicals on a smaller scale. This undertaking, the first step towards MKUltra, was called Operation Bluebird. Now, Bluebird, so named because its goal was to find ways to make prisoners sing like a bird, and MKUltra was mostly concerned with experiments

using chemicals for interrogation purposes on foreign agents. I bet you that they were more likely to actually make bird noises, then give credible information. Absolutely. Therefore, the subjects of these experiments where people the CIA was going to interrogate anyway, prisoners, defectors, refugees, prisoners of war, or basically any non-citizen the United States just didn't like.

Whoa, who's that like? Who's that like? Is that like the Nazis? What? Weird, it's almost like we're learning from them. Now, this was a time of change in the CIA, and it was decidedly a change for the worst. A new director took over in 1950,

and one of this new director's first decisions was to hire the aforementioned OSS psychopath, Alan Dulles. You say psychopath, you feel, to me, that makes him more exciting than anything. Alan Dulles, in my mind, is a ghost of a human being, that he is a, he loved the secret hallways of power. He existed as one person to his family. I mean, he had multiple mistresses.

He had a, his family didn't know anything about what he did until after he died, and it went, you know, and they were all like, we had these lovely summers on the hill, and they would go to these little, like this wonderful little farm town where he'd go and eat fish and stuff. Yeah, and it was until they went through his documents, much like Kissel, when his fun vacation to Uruguay,

when you look at all of this stuff. No, I wasn't Uruguay. You look at all of this stuff, and they're all like, our daddy was bad. He was some kind of bad, and they're like, maybe. He's one of the great, Alan Dulles is one of the great villains of United States history. Yeah, another example of a person who thought

he knew what was best for everyone and that everybody else didn't go fuck themselves. Oh, fuck US history. I would say Alan Dulles is one of the great villains of world history. Yeah, certainly one of the greatest villains in the world of the 20th century. He fucked, like the world, he changed the world.

He really was one of those Dan Carlin's great men. Dulles had become a student of the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung during World War II, and when Dulles began his long career in the CIA, he became obsessed with the prospect that science could discover ways to manipulate the human psyche. Science? Carl Jung was also an OSS agent.

He would flip over his psychological records of Nazis that he was working with at the time and just gave them to the US government for them to find out how to psychoanalyze these guys. So Dulles was put in charge of all mind control projects, along with most other covert operations, making Dulles the spook's spook. Whoa, he's like David Tell.

He's the comedian's comedian. But Dulles saw mind control as an indispensable part of the secret war against communism, and just about every time these programs accelerated, it was Alan Dulles' foot on the gas. He was really obsessed with this because there's something about these types of guys, these true dictators and waiting,

that they want you. You see this, I think, all over the world, where it's not just you're supposed to absorb a political ideology. You have to love it. He really wished to have total control over the world's mind. Like, he wanted it.

He wanted to figure out how to cheat all of us like puppets if he could. Sure. And in the minds of paranoid cold warriors like Alan Dulles, the Cold War appeared to be escalating. Eleven leaders of the Communist Party in the U.S. have been convicted of seeking to overthrow the U.S. government, and two British intelligence officers

have been revealed as Soviet double agents. Oh, double agents. The thing was is that when you start to realize all these espionage worlds, it was so casual. Everybody had somebody everywhere else. Like, yeah, sure, it might have been. I honestly do think that there might have been people on the inside of all these things.

But we had people on the other side, too. We hired a bunch of Nazis. Specifically, Alan Dulles hired a bunch of Nazis to be our espionage group. Henry, you don't understand. In Germany. We also need to have fall guys. I go, of course.

Please, we need these people to take the fall so we can say, see, we're good. See? See, we got one. So with the belief that commies were everywhere, Dulles tasked Operation Bluebird with finding ways to crawl into the brain of just about anyone using any means available,

no matter how cruel or destructive those methods might be. Additionally, early memos also directed researchers to investigate ways that a person could be made to commit acts under post-hypnotic suggestion, along with ways their own agents could be trained to resist such tactics. I was reading the book of spies and stratagems by Stanley Lovell, like the guy that was the,

the guy who first started experimenting with weed back in the day with the, in the OSS times for his fucking, like using all the liquid weed to control people's brains. But he was talking about the first time he saw hypnosis, right? The first time he saw it happen in front of him when they, the very, very first experiments where he had two army privates where it was this guy,

he had a hypness come in. They took these two like guys where he said, they came just so directly from South Carolina that he thought that the army boots that they were issued were the first shoes they have ever worn. Right? Like he was, these two guys are, ready? And he's just like, okay, show me how you do this.

Let me show you how the hypnosis works. And they were like, this hypnosis came in, literally it's like, at 11 a.m. today, when you are in training, your feet are going to become very itchy and you're going to have to take off your boots and scratch them. And so they're like, okay, Lovell met there with the, with these two guys,

they were looking, they're watching at 11 a.m. and the two guys were like, my, my feet itchy. And they took the feet off, took the shoes off, certain itch in their feet and he said this hypnosis is like, see, see, see, see. And then Lovell was like, I think that these men would pay for a chance to show me their god-awful feet

and break the dress code of this army, just because they get to. They're like allowed to do it. Right, so the question is, was it more suggestion than hypnosis? Where am I feeling done in G.S.? Well, as far as where they were going to test these interrogation techniques,

Dulles maintained that these quote unquote, augmentations can only be carried out overseas, because many of these experiments would be frowned upon if they were conducted on U.S. soil. See, that's why I put all of these letter C's on the ground. What? C, so we can do the experiment right here. What?

Oh, overseas, wow. Oh my God, wow. Holy shit, all the C's on the ground so we can do the experiment here. It's weird. It's a fucking play on words. They're like blue's clues to you. Yeah, whatever.

And there's nothing wrong with that, man. They fired him because he went bald. It wasn't because he didn't do anything. He had it. He time happened to him. Yeah, just bring him back. So the CIA began a search for what would become its first black site.

Hey. Now, black sites didn't come to be known to the general public until the mid-2000s when the dirtier parts of the war on terror were exposed. But these secret CIA prisons, mostly but not always located on foreign soil, have been in operation since at least 1950. The first black site that we know of

was established in a former Nazi POW camp called Camp King that was converted by counterintelligence officers into a U.S. installation for quote-unquote special interrogation. Ben, can you guess what special interrogation means? Probably get an interior decorator over there if they're going to change it all around. Honestly.

And don't listen to any of their suggestions. Don't listen to any of them. No, it's probably like ripping off toenails, putting your dick in people's mouths, stuff like that. It's torture. Yeah, it's 100% torture. Yeah, of course. That's something that people do to other people.

Using freezing water immersion and baseball bat beatings amongst other traditional torture techniques, the officers at Camp King also clumsily experimented with mescaline, heroin, and amphetamines without any real goal. They threw a bunch of shit at the wall, quote-unquote, because they... What was the goal?

The goal was to... There had to be some actual goal. Make them talk! Yeah. Make them talk! Oh, my God. They just beat them with it into their life and put them out in the middle of nowhere

and try to scare them. They really just try to scare them. Because that was also the thing, too, is create the temperament. Create an atmosphere of discomfort. Of fear, yeah. You know, like, you're out here. You're in a very scary-looking castle

in the middle of the Bavarian Mountains. You've got nowhere to go. Oh, my God. All of these guys have licenses to kill. None of them are wearing a badge. They're all just... And they're all from everywhere. They're from Russia and UK and America.

You don't know who you're talking to. You don't know what acronym you're talking to. You're tripping on a different drug every day. Oh, my gosh. But since these guys were the sorts of soldiers who do just about anything to a Nazi, they're sort of like Tarantino's bastards. Nice.

Yeah. Camp King became known as the Crout Gauntlet. And the officers who ran the place came to be known as the Rough Boys. Oh, God. And these days, if you've ever seen, if you look up at the movie, Rough Boys at the Crout Gauntlet,

it's a different thing now. Oh, it's not a documentary about it. Now a movie featuring a bunch of quote-unquote Rough Boys in a German castle has a different plot. Oh, weird. I didn't... I've been watching so much of it.

Now, the Rough Boys' willingness to do just about anything certainly appealed to Alan Dulles. But what really caught his attention was the fact that disposal of bodies at Camp King in the parlance of CIA memos written at the time, quote, would be no problem. No problem. Oh, no problem.

Good. It's so weird how flippant they refer to it in these CIA memos. They just say body disposal would be no problem. No shirts, no bodies, no problems. No problems. Keep the shoes. See, Camp King was a site where the CIA

could test any drug or any coercive technique on a steady supply of human subjects. And if any of these subjects died, no one would notice because the subjects were considered quote-unquote expendable. And not in the treasured film franchise sense of expendables because they were actually not expendable because they were actually very good at their jobs.

You are correct. You're talking about elderly people's retirement moving. It's yes. Memos is collecting checks and then doing the Lord of the Rings handshake every five minutes. But these guys, these expendables, a lot of them were sourced by a group called the Galen Organization, which was started by,

which was fronted by Reinhard Galen. It was this guy that I've been talking about, Alan Dulles' Nazi friends that set up their, they were the espionage wing for Hitler. And Hitler loved them. And that was a big thing that Alan Dulles kept, would tout. They were Hitler's favorite spies.

Like, we're all like, That's a good thing? Great. All right. And so he had these. Like, Dulles was such a, he could be such a weird objective person at times. Or he just looks at everything in such terms

of we can use them because they're good. Who gives a shit? This is when centralism turns to fascism. It's this idea that everybody is just fine. People get whitewashed, right? Like, in this scenario, it is a hyper-extreme version of looking at these war criminals and deciding oh, we can use them because it's the same fallacy

that the fucking, the chancellor had about Hitler to begin with. This idea we can control these guys, though. Don't worry. Yeah, they might be hardcore Nazis that are fucking working on their own agenda, but we'll control them in the end, which you won't, because the goal is to have them,

because they were already having their own inner plot, knowing that one day, if so-called democratic experiment doesn't work here, we can flip this whole thing and we'll be the new Nazis in charge, because it was all about being afraid of Russia. Like a little popper. It reminds me of Antonio Brown, Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

They did win a Super Bowl with him, but they could not control him. And at the end, they ended up right off the field taking his shirt off. So Antonio Brown, I'm going to go on the record of saying so, Antonio Brown is the Reinhard Gaylen of the NFL. Yes, that's correct, because he will be productive

and tell he's not. Well, expendable in CIA terms meant that if a prisoner disappeared, no one would come looking for them. Many of these expendables were Soviet agents, but just like it was with the war on terror, there were a fair amount of innocent refugees mixed in who were just at the wrong place

at the wrong time. Just people that the Gaylen organization didn't like, and then, you know, various people. But no matter who they were, all prisoners were treated the same in what came to be known as the CIA's torture house. Now the rough boys were seen as somewhat inelegant. So the CIA sent their own men to Camp King

to carry out experiments in the service of Project Bluebird. Bluebird, however, was considered so secret that even a secure army base like Camp King wasn't secure enough. So the CIA opened their own site just a few miles away under the protection of Camp King at a large estate called Villa Schuster. From the outside, Villa Schuster appeared to be

a regal old house at the end of a country lane. Inside, it also appeared normal with high ceilings, a dozen bedrooms, and an imposing fireplace on the ground floor. But the true terror of Villa Schuster was the basement. It was unfinished. It was going to take months, months of work, and the grouting was going to be nightmare.

Horrible, horrible. There, you had a complex of brick-in storerooms which converted easily to sealed cells that could be used for both prisoner housing and human experimentation. Basically, Villa Schuster was the house from Resident Evil. Oh, my God. It also reminds me of the house from Dieter Laser.

Yes. Some human centipede stuff could be going on. What we're seeing here is, again, what has been now seeded by pop culture again and again. Like, we talked about with Ed Gein's house, all these things that existed in real. They were real. And then now we've become, like, a cliche.

You know, now it's a thing that people talk about all the time. Oh, yeah, that house in the back of the field, you want to go there. They come from somewhere, which is this. They literally invented this whole thing of, like, we're just going to make a real evil. Dude, it's scary, man. Yeah.

And in Villa Schuster, like, they would, they talk about these times where you would have these former concentration camp doctors talking to these project bluebird scientists in front of the fire at Villa Schuster, drinking brandy, having a grand old time, meanwhile, right below their feet, our cells full of political prisoners

being experimented upon. That's what I was thinking. If you're the neighbor who just comes over with some borsch, and you're like, yeah, you want him to sit there at the dinner table? Help me! We have ways of making you talk. Help me!

Here's a nice brandy. And let's have some lava cake because I just want some local gossip. I'm down here! Is somebody downstairs? No, it's my sleep app. That's my sleep app. Good.

Now, the person that the CIA officers at Villa Schuster looked to for guidance was a German physician known by the innocent name of Doc Fisher. In reality, Doc Fisher was General Walter Schreiber, former Surgeon General of the Nazi Army. Wow. Schreiber had approved experiments at Auschwitz, Ravensbrook, and Dachau,

in which inmates were frozen, injected with mescaline, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored. Hey, man, how else are you going to know how far it goes inside the bone? Well, you know... Okay, let's take that for a second. Are there other ways to get these answers?

Ask them. Yeah, you can ask them. No, there aren't. You stick a stick in, you stick a stick in like measuring a quart of oil and see how far the stick goes. Oh, this is... Well, that was the reason why they took a lot of these Nazis

and also why they protected the guy in charge of Unit 731 because these experiments and this information could not be gleaned unless you killed the subject. It just couldn't be. Wow. Specifically, Schreiber seemed to specialize in experiments involving the slow and agonizing deaths of his subjects. So what's your specialty?

Slow and agonizing deaths? Okay. Now, Schreiber had first been captured by the Soviets in the post-World War II Nazi Roundup, but eventually he convinced the USSR to let him take a teaching position in Soviet-occupied East Berlin. Those who can't teach.

Also, the serious radio has Nazi Roundup on... Every Saturday. Nazi Roundup. Schreiber soon escaped to West Berlin and gave himself up to the Americans who offered a choice operation paperclip contract. Now, Operation Bluebird Interrogators, directed by Dr. Schreiber,

worked without supervision from anyone but other CIA agents, setting a precedent for the CIA to detain and imprison people in other countries without regard for domestic or international law. And that precedent lives to present day. How dare you ever defy the art of improv? This is all about, this is yes and markets. This is a follow the fear.

So you're blaming Dell Close for all of this? I always do. Fantastic. Once the CIA got a taste for it, Vila Schuster in Germany, they soon copied the formula and opened black sites in Japan. There, they captured and interrogated

North Korean soldiers using sodium amatol and stimulates, like benzadrine, the aforementioned coramine, and pyrotoxin. Under the effects of these drugs, CIA experimenters subjected prisoners to hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat. The goal was to induce violent cathartic reactions

by alternating between deep sleep and high alertness, confusing a prisoner's nervous system until they could be coerced into spilling the beans. Now they thought it would lower their inhibitions, but it does also seem like it just makes you want everything to stop, which is kind of why, which is the problem with quote-unquote what we call it these days

advanced interrogation, or at least what we call it in the middle of this. But yeah, quote-unquote. And the idea is, but the problem is, is that then they'll say anything. They'll just say like, we have to end this. I'll tell you whatever you want. I'll tell you whatever you need to know.

But I think we can all agree out of all of these, the hypnotism isn't so bad. We're not even near the real hypnotism part. Because do they make two students who don't like each other kiss? They want to. They wish they could. They wish they could.

But we'll have that debate next episode when we talk about whether or not you can truly hypnotize somebody against their will to do something against their will. Are we secretly empowering the hypnotist class? No, I don't want to be anywhere near them. I'm afraid of them. Yes.

Now eventually, Dr. Schreiber got tired of his life at Camp King and tried to go to the United States under the terms of his operation paperclip contract. Seriously, this place is freaking me out. It's the screams. Honestly, I love screams. I kind of like it, but I'm getting burnt out. Okay, he's added up to here with the screams.

But when a reporter discovered the transfer, he published testimony from the Nuremberg Trials, rightly implicating Schreiber in concentration camp experiments. So Schreiber quit the whole program and fled to backup Germany, Argentina, leaving Camp King without a quote-unquote staff doctor. What a fucking bitch.

Just because he couldn't move to fucking California and work for Disney? That's why? That was his dream, Henry. That was his dream. I wanted to be an imaginary. That's why I got into the concentration camp business to begin with.

You know, sadly, there might be a truth to that. Luckily for the CIA, they had a replacement in another sociopathic Nazi doctor called Dr. Kurt Blom, who we covered in episode one. Yes. See, Blom had never actually entered the United States because even though he had been acquitted of war crimes at Nuremberg, he was still a highly public Nazi.

Very famous Nazi. Very big, old, famous, big-time, capital N Nazi. You never want to just be like, hey, weren't you accused of all those war crimes? And then you have to be like, I was acquitted. Like, oh, okay, but there was a trial and everything. Yeah, he was the Casey Anthony of Nuremberg. Yeah, I was acquitted.

I work here. I work here. Thank God they never checked my Firefox account. Well, it was thought that Blom's presence in America might draw attention to the hundreds of other Nazis we'd already brought over. So when Walter Schreiber fled to Argentina, the staff doctor position at Camp King was open.

And since Dr. Blom, like the idea of, quote, a return to biological research. Yay, you got to go back to his dream. Yasqueef. Oh my gosh. He left his new life as a small-town doctor and accepted the CIA's offer to oversee the experiments at Villa Schuster, the resident evil house.

I will tell you, I don't know if I have the love of the game of giving people different viruses and watching what happens to them. I've just sort of fallen out of it, but maybe just this one last time. Did you just have this little boy with cancer just been like, Mr. Dr. Blom, do you think you could give the boys kids one last time?

One last time. Make the play go in a bomb, Dr. Blom, for me. Yasqueef. Well, I have been working on this idea to maybe make a virus like as big as a man. Like a big virus. I want to be a man. A man who shows up with a shovel and he hits you with a hat

and his name is Mr. Virus. Oh, wow. That's a great idea. That's an amazing idea, Dr. Brown. I hate John Cena. Oh, why? Well, Dr. Blom's specialty in the concentration camps had been both biological and hallucinogenic experimentation.

So he was technically the most qualified Nazi to do project bluebird work at Villa Schuster. There, Dr. Blom and Operation Bluebird Operatives were tasked by Alan Dulles with answering a series of questions. If answered, the information gleaned would be considered to be of great value to the CIA, and these questions would form the basis of all CIA Mind Control programs to come.

Among other things, they wanted to know if accurate information could be obtained through drugs, if these techniques could guarantee total amnesia, if they could alter a person's personality, and how long that alteration would hold, if they could make unwilling subjects into willing agents, and how quickly all of it could be done. Everywhere there's executive producers all over LA

just going like, me too, tell me as well. How do I get down? But even though Dr. Blom could oversee these experiments, Alan Dulles realized that he and other project bluebird agents lacked both the scientific background and the imagination to really answer the questions they were asking. I mean, sure, Blom could inject mescaline into someone's spine, but he, like other concentration camp doctors like Joseph Mengele,

were like a gang of psychopathic little boys setting cats on fire, then timing how long they took to burn to death. That's honestly, those are the nerdier versions of those little boys. They had great knowledge in how to kill other human beings, and they had great knowledge of how long it took to do so. But these Noxie doctors were hammers,

and Dulles needed a scalpel. So, Dulles and a bluebird operative named Richard Helms, director of the CIA after Alan Dulles, by the way, decided that they needed a chemist with imagination. I don't think there should be. No, you need a creative chemist. No, we don't. We need a non-creative chemist.

Nothing is going to go wrong. No way. No, this is going to be perfect. Furthermore, they needed someone who was willing to ignore legalities and conscience in the service of national security. That's the truly important part. The man who ticked all these boxes was Sidney Gottlieb. Yeah, it's me.

It's me. I live with chemicals. It's fun to do, eh? Come here. Sidney, don't forget to come in on Tuesday for your horse blinders fitters. Excellent. I look right down the tunnel.

I don't want to look anywhere else. I'm weaponizing Parmesan next week. That'll be great. The Sidney Gottlieb was not your typical military man, nor was he a former OSS officer like a lot of the other guys in the CIA. Instead, Gottlieb was among the first in a long line of weirdos employed by the CIA to run or inform covert operations. A committed gardener who lived in a lodge in the woods with outdoor toilets,

Gottlieb meditated, wrote poetry, raised goats in his spare time, and was a lifelong enthusiast of folk dancing. That's how they humanize him in all these various things. They said, you know, you could never find Gottlieb without the newest folk music sheets in his hands. And he was playing the piano and his little, like, elf and knees would lift as he goes, plays his folk music

while thinking of botulism. Folk is notoriously nonviolent. Folk is a peaceful music. I mean, what is it? Arlo Guthrie? No, not folk music, folk dancing. Oh, he didn't listen to music while doing it? He did, but it's not when you say folk dancing, it's not folk music that he's dancing to.

You can't see this. But look at this. You can see how I'm dancing. How would you describe how I'm dancing? Like a teddy bear that came to life and realized it had no brain. That's folk dancing. No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, it's folk dancing where it's, like, it's more cultural type stuff.

Where it's, like, you know, like Irish dancing, like the type, the, like the t-p-d-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t. What I just did. What I just did. So if I go to a ren fair I will folk dance. Yeah. Kind of. Kind of. Kind of disorder.

Kind of. You go lump dance. You, you, you stomp. You big man stomp. Lump dance? Sounds like cancer. Well, it's like, remember in, From your perspective, Ben, the guys that wear the later hosin' and they do the slap dance,

like slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, clap, clap, that's folk dancing. Now I understand. Yeah, so he got me. He loved it. Thank you for putting it in later hosin' terms. Yeah, of course. In addition to having all these sweet, innocent fucking hobbies, he was also the director of the CIA's Mind Control programs for two decades, and as senior chemist, he worked

as the CIA's chief poison maker. Gottlieb was born in the Bronx, the son of Orthodox Jews, which is ironic considering how much of his work was built on Nazi research. Inspired! Come on! It's inspired by, it's like story-buying, the movies. Nobody looks at that guy, he's gotta give that guy a credit so he doesn't fucking sue everybody.

Right. Yeah, okay. Gottlieb was also born with deformed feet that reportedly made his mother scream when he was born. It's like Eugene Levy's character in Best in Show when he has two left feet. And while his feet were corrected by the age of 12, Gottlieb walked with a lifelong limp. After starting his academic career at City College in New York, Gottlieb transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where he made a strong connection with Ira Baldwin.

Baldwin, if you'll remember, would one day head government research into biological warfare during World War II. Hold on a second, so you mean to tell me that they were planning to poison and kill thousands of people all in a Wisconsin accent? So, yeah, so we're gonna take them, we'll take them down and then we'll be done. You know what? We need, we need the plague. We need a plague and I love my people, but nothing should ever be said seriously.

If you've ever watched any of the most recent trials, a Wisconsin accent is not good. It's not judicial. No, it's not. After graduating magna cum laude in 1940, is it magna cum laude? I don't know. I don't fucking know. I was, I was 664 out of 666 students in high school. Yeah.

I graduated like at 2.3 in college, so I was not magna cum laude. I was, I had a 2.7, you fucking idiot. Whoa. So cool. Whoa, whoa. The math classes don't really drug me down. Yeah, same here. Well, Gottlieb earned a doctorate in biochemistry from Caltech just after America entered World

War II, but since Gottlieb still had club feet, he couldn't enlist even though he badly wanted to. Yeah. This inability to fight for his country during the war might have skewed his perspective a bit because once he did get a chance to serve his country working with the CIA, he would do anything without question. Eventually, Gottlieb got a job at the FDA developing tests to measure drugs in humans, which led to a job at the National Research Council in 1948.

There, Gottlieb was exposed to what he called quote unquote, interesting work concerning ergot alkaloids as Vasco constrictors and hallucinogens. That of course meant Albert Hoffman's LSD research. Yeah, man. He means by interesting work, he means I'm tripping balls. Interesting. Now, by this time, 1951, Operation Bluebird was already studying the effects of drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation on foreign prisoners, and they were convinced

that what they were doing was not only right, but essential to the survival of the United States. See, as author Stephen Kinzer put it in his book Poisoner in Chief, Senator Joe McCarthy, another Wisconsin boy, had convinced a large swath of the American public that communists had infiltrated the State Department. They hadn't. But even people who should have known better, like Alan Dulles, believed they had. They wanted to.

You know who did infiltrate the US government? Alcoholics. Yes. Yes. The secret. They were amored. They were spies against themselves. Alcoholism makes you a double agent against yourself.

But they wanted to believe it. They wanted to think that this was true because then it validated what they did. And they just acted like it was and then just moved on with no problem. Sure. Well, therefore, Dulles believed justified in using any technique to root out the commies. And even though Sidney Gottlieb had openly flirted with socialism in his youth, Dulles took a cue from Wild Bill Donovan from the OSS in his opinion that he would put Stalin himself on the payroll if it meant defeating the enemy.

You know how you decide if someone's Russian or not. You ask them if they can recreate an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond and see what they do with it. Yeah. If they make it a crushing realization about the authority and what it's like to live in a kind of like a poverty state, then yes. They're Russian. But your mother lives across the street.

Oh. I watched a bunch of German dubs of King of Queens the other day. It was highly unsettling. I mean, he's... What's his name? Oh my God. I went Fat Man Blind. I don't know what happened.

You're talking about Kevin James? Yeah. Kevin James. He doesn't hit the same in the hinterland. So after three months of intelligence training, Gottlieb was given the official title of chief of the chemical division of the technical services staff and was charged with developing testing and building tools of espionage without oversight or limit. Now you're going to hear the term the TSS.

It's going to come up a lot in the next couple of episodes as well. But they did, so within the CIA, you remember, we had the idea of guys and we had the guys that like to beat people up. So you had the hard boys and you had the soft boys. This was when the soft boys were no longer really giving the government what they wanted. This is they were frustrating. Project Bluebird was frustrating for them. And then also, they were only complaining about the emotional burnout they all had from

torturing people. So they created the TSS as like a new, new branch within the CIA that would actually then cover the even more nefarious, hard shit to again, further compartmentalize it, make it farther away from everybody else. So eventually no one would know when anybody was doing it at any time. You make a great point. There should be a new hostile movie where the torturer, it begins where he's clocking out. And I want to see what happens when he goes home.

He's home. And he's just like, man, another, I'm getting bored with this shit. Oh yeah. I'm over it. I'm over it. TSS. They also did fun stuff, though. All the stuff you see, the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

That was the TSS. They did like rubber airplanes. They made escape kits that could be concealed as rectal suppositories. Yeah. And the best part about the International Spy Museum is that you don't know what's propaganda and what's not. And they list all these funny little in-vermite things, what was also put out in of spies and stratagems.

That was the first time we see all of those kind of like the fun things that they did and the weapons they made and all the technology that they did. And it seems in my mind that none of it worked in operation and a lot of it was just plans and ideas that they put out to project an ability to do things that they didn't have the ability to do. Yeah. Well, once Sidney Gottlieb's position was established, Alan Dulles decided the Operation Bluebird had not gone far enough.

It needed to be expanded, intensified, and centralized. So in 1951, it was reworked and renamed to Project Artichoke. So named. It's a spiky vegetable. It's a spiky vegetable. It's hard to get to the center of. Yeah. That's true.

It's named Artichoke. They're not quite sure. It was either named because Artichokes were Alan Dulles' favorite vegetable. That's disgusting. Yeah. The idea that it's your favorite vegetable, like I like Artichokes. I love Artichokes. I like them.

They're wonderful. Yeah. My favorite vegetable. Yeah. I guess. I don't think that's the biggest indictment on his character. I know. No, he's got to be fair.

No. Or it was named after a New York gangster known as the Artichoke King. Why him? I don't know. Because I looked up the Artichoke King and his whole thing was that he bought all the Artichokes that were coming into New York City, and then he would charge three times what he bought him for. No, he took the capitalism at work, capitalism at his finest.

Yeah, that's another victim of the Artichoke Killer. You can tell because the Artichoke's in his ass. He's a simple man, and that's why I understand him. Yeah. But at the same time, Alan Dulles was also rising in the ranks of the CIA. He was promoted to deputy director the same year Artichoke was christened, making Dulles the number two man, giving him carte blanche to carry out whatever experiments he deemed necessary.

Now, the goals of Artichoke were similar to Bluebird, but the scope was much larger. The program was extended to more black sites outside of Germany and Japan, specifically to Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone. There a Bulgarian prisoner named Dmitry Dmitrov, codenamed Kelly, became the first subject of Project Artichoke. Wait a second. Hold on. They were like, what was your name?

Dmitry Dmitrov? We'll call you Kelly. I mean, what are you going to do? You just pick random ass names. They're not supposed to have anything. Technically, all the secret names, top secret operation names, they're supposed to have nothing to do with anything because they would appear random. See Dmitrov had been working with the CIA, but his handlers have become suspicious of

his motives, despite his insistence that his only loyalty was to the CIA. This is the problem. They're like, the thing is, man, okay, we're the CIA, and I don't trust me, because I'm the CIA, and then because you just said that you're CIA, I can't trust you, because everybody says that they're CIA, again and again and again, and everybody knows the only people who are CIA are podcast comedians that are out there pumping this information to really fuck with the webbies. Yeah.

Well, God knows. It's about destabilizing the I Heart Radio Awards. Absolutely. Everyone loves their webby. So after the CIA tortured Dmitrov for six months in a Greek prison, he was shipped to Fort Clayton where he was subjected to artichoke interrogation experiments. The A treatment. Yeah.

Now, most of the experiments prisoners were subjected to under project artichoke would qualify as medical torture that was not too far off from what the Nazis have been prosecuted for about five years previous. But no, Marcus, we won the war. Okay. That's right. We won, so it's different now. It's a celebration.

Yeah. Well, and also, America did not take on any of the Nuremberg laws that most other countries did. We just said, nah, we're not going to do it, because a lot of them did have to do with human experimentation and part of the Nuremberg experiment, part of the Nuremberg laws was that you had to have the unqualified permission of a person to experiment upon them. And the United States looked at that and said, nah. Nah.

We're going to get a chance during the Nuremberg trials when the Germans pretend like they were not anti-Semitic. Oh, yeah. When they pretend like they had no idea what was going on with the Jews. It's some of the greatest German acting. Oh, they try to act. They go like, what? Like you could see them practicing their surprise faces when they look at the pictures of the

concentration camps going like, oh, it's something special. Well, unwilling prisoners like Dmitrov would be dosed with potent drugs subjected to extremes of temperature and sound and strapped to electroshock machines, all in the service of finding the best way to ride a man's mind like a broken horse. Now, we'll find that these techniques, and we'll go through them, especially in the next couple of episodes, were like, they would become more refined. But I was trying to look up like, what exactly was the sequence of events that would happen when you go in one of these interrogation rooms during this time period?

And I can't find one. So as far as the order or? Well, just like, how was the process go? So it really did, truly, it does seem. And if you know any different side stories, LPOTL, thejimiel.com, I'd love to know. But from what I've seen, it really does seem like it was a game of like, what are we going to do today? Yeah.

Let's see what it does today. Yeah. Like, let's see how we, let's see how we respond when we take the puppy away. Judging by our most recent example with Abu Ghraib, I think it is improv. Yeah. They just sit and be like, okay, let's see what he does now. Put electrodes on their nuts. See what he does?

Yeah. Doesn't like it. He doesn't like it. Doesn't like it. Like it. Doesn't like it. It's just two big columns. Mostly doesn't like it.

This one guy comes every time. Really weird. Somehow though, Dimitrov survived for three years. Oh my gosh. What a nightmare. Until the CIA decided, ah, he's all right. You're all right. You're all right.

Yeah. I mean, well, dude, that's what we did. How many guys are still in fucking Guantanamo Bay that we put in there in 2002 that we still haven't decided, ah, you're all right. What do you do? You're all right. Get out of here. What do you do?

I heard a thing the other day about a guy who's like still in there. He's like, I don't know why the fuck I'm here and no one will tell me. Well now it's scary because they're like, if we let him go, he's going to be mad. Oh yeah. So I don't know. Maybe we just keep him in here. Apparently he knows what that secret spice is that goes into the KFC chicken. Oh my God.

And after three years, they just released Dmitrov back into the world to rave for decades about the ill treatment he had received from the CIA. Now, the experiments performed on Dmitrov, just like those performed in Germany and Japan produced no worthwhile results, nor did they come any closer to answering the questions Dulles wanted answered. But Dulles had convinced himself that the Soviets had definitely discovered the secrets of mind control, especially after America was introduced to the concept of brainwashing. Now these days, brainwashed is sort of a hokey term used mostly to describe people who fall

in with cults. But back in the early fifties, this was a legitimate term used by anti-communist propagandists to terrify the American public. I mean, it's still out there. It still floats. Now, just so you know, because if you type in Dr. Kurt Blom into my search engine, it is all anti-vax shit. It's all really intense conspiracy theories.

Like people really, you'd be surprised how affected people are about the idea of brainwashed. And we just had fucking Rudin Giuliani on the fucking secret singer bullshit. Mass singer. Whatever. Who gives a fucking shit where it's just another being like, no, we're all the same. It doesn't matter that he tried to flip the government. It doesn't matter. Totally normal.

Yeah. In 1951, a rabid anti-communist and former OSS propaganda specialist named Edward Hunter published an article in the Miami Daily News entitled, Brainwashing Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party. This article claimed that a secret communist Chinese program had been developed that controlled people's minds. This program was called She Now, which Hunter claimed, roughly translated, to wash brain. It's not good.

No. But, you know, who knows? Again, who knows? Because what does it mean? What exactly were they doing over there versus what we were doing? It seems that we really expanded upon the concept in a truly American way. Well, you could say culture is no more than brainwashing, and that is our major export. Interesting.

I know that's how you win. That's how I won a cultural victory in Civ 6. It's the most boring way to do it, but I won. Yeah. Well, I mean, with the Chinese, and from what I know about what they talked about, like at least the Chinese interrogators at this time, is that they would basically take a guy out, they would torture him for a while, and then bring him back, and kind of use positive reinforcement with the other prisoners, where the prisoners would say, like, have you become

a communist yet? Like, we would love it if you would. And so they just had, it was a good cop, bad cop thing, but with the other prisoners. That makes sense. I mean, it was certainly psychological. Yeah, of course. But that's very interesting. Yeah, but it's a psychological thing, but it's very much a long-term thing.

Because they'll show you a lifestyle, too. Like, they will go and be like, you could live like this, like we have these things, where to come here, you can find a nice communist wife, and you can literally like do all of this kind of shit. It's like, it's communist birthright. There you go. Well, eventually, Hunter expanded this article and knew a book called Brainwashing in Red China, which urged Americans to prepare for psychological warfare on an unimaginable scale,

not realizing that the true psychological warfare would not come until the age of social media. Nice. And no matter what the Chinese were actually doing, the American public seized on the brainwashing concept as a way to explain non-conformist behavior, especially anything that they deemed anti-American or unorthodox. In turn, the CIA backed this propaganda and publicly announced that the communists had definitely mastered brainwashing techniques.

Secretly, Dulles became convinced that the mind control gap was widening. Therefore, more extreme measures became, in Dulles's view, a moral duty. It's very interesting to see how the CIA, they still wanted public opinion on their side. There is something also like, inherently, I'm going to put this in a way, people who listen to the CIA, my bosses are going to be so mad, is that they're so needy. They just want to be loved like everybody else. They really feel like this.

They want to be these heroes, right? They have this idea that they are the hero, that they're the center of the story. When actually it turns out that actually means you're very evil because you do all these things on an ideological basis, which ends up because you get tunnel vision, right? You think that you're doing this for the good of the world when you're like, no, you're hurting people. All you do is create more pain, and then that's a cycle of violence that just reverberates psychically throughout all of us because it goes through the human unconscious and it makes

us all more violent. Yeah. Well, it's not good. No. Well, that's not good. It's weird how they did this full publicity campaign for brainwashing and propagandize in America to convince the people that this was so important that they then would have a mandate to go do it, which is very, I don't really know why they even needed one.

I don't think they really did. Well, I will say it probably did help them get back up from the quote-unquote officials up top. So if you have the president believing in it too, where he's looking at his poll numbers and he's saying, well, everybody's believing in it, and then it does help them, I guess, get funds. So I guess it does work. Well, it's funds and permission.

Keep doing what you're doing. Keep the paranoia going. Right from your grave. Well, Project Artichoke also had subset assignments to glean other kinds of practical knowledge in the pursuit of the main goal. It was suggested, and by the way, we're about to get into a lot of suggestions. Hey, say just suggestions. We're just throwing out ideas here, spitballing.

Is this a moment where I could say, or could it be? Seriously, yeah, big if true. This is your time. It was suggested that gas guns, gas jets, and gas sprays should be studied as delivery devices. Additionally, it was suggested they study the problem of permanent brain injury following exposure to these gases, as well as suggesting finding out what depriving a brain of oxygen for long periods of time might do.

It's suggesting, in case, just in case you come across this eventuality, make sure to study it. No, we know what it does. It makes your buddy Timmy pass out at the sleepover. Well, that is true. I mean, that is kind of nice. The CIA was just playing the chokeout game, Drinking Mountain Dew, Pizza Hut, shit in your pants, because you passed out.

Oh, man. Yeah, bring it back, huh? So much Pizza Hut, you shit. Well, echoing Unit 731, it was also suggested that Project Artic Choke examine the effects of high and low pressures on the human body, as well as the effects of vibrations, monotonous sounds, concussion, ultra high frequency, and ultrasonics. In the bid to break the mind of a prisoner, they also suggested testing the efficacy of constantly repeated words, sounds, continuous suggestion, non-rhythmic sounds, and whispering,

all to see what it would do to a prisoner's psyche. I just had a fucking chill around my spine. It's literally hashtags, trending topics, and ASMR. It's just all there. It's the whole internet culture. If I would be like, we're going to put a nail in your fucking brain, we're going to water board you, we're going to grab your dick and do whatever with it, or I'm going to whisper. I would be like, you can whisper all day, you know what, now that I think about it,

I wrap my dick around my leg. I hate this. Unless you're that amaranth woman, because she has big boobies, you must hear them. In practical application, they developed moving or vibrating rooms, distorted rooms, bobia rooms, overly damp or overly dry rooms, and perhaps worst of all, completely soundproof rooms. One day this will be known as Hollywood Horror Nights. Honestly, it just sounds like a New York City apartment building except for the soundproof

rooms. Yeah, that's very true. Soundproof rooms, it's supposed to be a torture that you cannot imagine, being in a completely totally soundproof room. Have you seen those rooms because you can hear your blood, like you can hear your brain going like. Yeah. These new prisons we're making that are supposed to be so wonderful, they're much more inhumane,

and they do that now in solitary. Sound dampening? They do sound dampening. The doors, there's two doors, and yeah, the people, after a couple of years in there, they come out, and then they just sit down and do an interview on camera, and it really is like an alien conversation. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, finally, Project Artichoke was also told that under no circumstances would the agency consider lobotomy or brain surgery as an operative measure. We have rules here, hold on a second, out back, okay, there are rules here. But they did feel that the subject, quote, could be examined if the opportunity presented itself. So hold on a second, so you are going to do lobotomy? No. Under no circumstances should you do lobotomy.

Except for some specific circumstances. This is great. I wonder why no one trusts the government. But if you walk into a room and a guy's doing a lobotomy, pay attention. We're already here, we're already doing it, he's got the ice mix out. Oh man, now you're rationalizing how I buy pork at the store, it's already dead. It's already dead. It's like it would be rude not to eat it.

Well from a result standpoint, the biggest problem faced by Project Artichoke was that the researchers were scientists and doctors with no training in psychology. Which was ostensibly the whole thrust behind this fucking thing. Therefore, everything was trial and error, done without any real knowledge of why they were doing anything. I mean, if you're going to experiment on me, figure something out. Just tell me if you got something. Figure out how to get the whole just right in the bag.

You can break my mind with hypnotism and barbiturates, but also make my dick bigger. Throw me a bone here. Be the person that suggests having a butt light backer with a Bloody Mary. Whatever it might be. Wow, it's not bad. Now on the chemical research side of things, scientists back at Fort Detrick outside of Washington DC were hard at work producing chemical compounds for what they called artichoke work, in addition to delivery systems for said chemicals.

And then also now I got an email basically called, what they called the Fort Detrick cancer bubble, which is idea that like to this day, the cancer rates around Fort Detrick skyrocket. There's a couple of articles I was reading, it's wild and very scary. The Fort Detrick scientist constructed a four story high, 131 ton chamber officially called the one million liter test sphere. This is kind of metal. It's scary.

But to the men who built it, it was known only as the eight ball. Oh my, like putty from Seinfeld? Oh my gosh. This structure consisted of five airtight humidity and temperature controlled ports for which toxins could be sprayed on subjects trapped inside. These chambers allowed scientists to test potency of toxins under different conditions, meaning they can see if certain chemicals, fungi or bacteria would work better in say, Moscow or Cuba?

Could it be cold and dry or hot and wet? Which one's going to be better? They do it like how they test Gore-Tex. For raincoats. Seriously? Yeah. Wow. But among the most active men who would fly back and forth between Fort Detrick and the

German torture house at Villa Schuster was Morse Allen, director of Project Bluebird. Morse Allen was particularly fixated on the application of electricity, and he became obsessed with using electroshock to induce amnesia or put subjects into vegetative states. It's definitely a thing that what it does is it cooks your brain. Yeah. A lot of times after these experiments, you don't go back to normal. Like they can induce amnesia. They can quote unquote erase your memory, but you don't come back as Tommy anymore.

No. Never again. You're Gregor, you're Mr. Electroman that I've picked 66 times, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. I mean electroshock therapy these days, they figured it out. Like it's very small, tiny little- Of course. But back then it's just turning on the fucking juice and seeing what happens. It was to melt your personality.

Right. Morse Allen was also one of the first in the program to become interested in hypnosis, which would become highly important to MKUltra later on. In search of hypnotic knowledge, Allen studied with an unnamed hypnotist who freely and proudly said he used hypnotism to rape women. It's not a good party, like good line. It doesn't make anybody laugh. No one likes it.

No. Right. Morse Allen brought these techniques back to the CIA and found that he could put employees into trances that could turn the most chaste employees into flirts, or the most tight-lipped secretaries into gossips. I don't remember this, I don't remember this Kathy comic strip. I just don't remember when she got hypnotized and fucked the office. Again, why we can't ever fucking trust a single person with a watch, a stopwatch, maybe

like this idea of like, he used it immediately to be like, this is so dead he wants to look at my penis. Like, that's what, this is what we've done. It's a good point, John Brennan's of the world. Anytime you see CIA, secret intelligence, anything in the Chiron, can't trust him. Nope. But for Project Artichoke, the holy grail was the discovery and application of a single wonder drug that would loosen tongues, open the mind to programming, or wipe memories.

All of this depending, of course, on the guidance that agents gave the subject. Now the OSS had already proved that marijuana was effectively useless, but Project Artichoke figured they'd give it another shot. Again dosing each other with candy, salad dressing, and mashed potatoes. This was fun. Now there's a whole industry. Breathe it into my mouth and bro, take a big hit and then breathe it into my mouth. When they finally just smoked it though, they found that it produced nothing more than quote,

a state of irresponsibility, a relaxing of inhibitions, and an accentuation of humor to the point where any statement can become extremely funny. That's so easy to monetize. You didn't understand how good it was. And this is like a new, I actually don't even think that this weed was very good. I think that the tincture was probably good, but I imagine that like, we got good now. No, we don't, we have too strong weed now. We need to have some growth.

There's various. There's level. Well, you're still in New York, you don't get the full gradient yet. Once you get the full gradients and you see all the different, there's now it's all hyper specific. It's not like this shit that they smoked in like Vietnam, where I like out of a fucking the barrel of a shotgun. You know what I mean?

That kind of shit. No, man. Beckett, this is just jazz bones, man. Just fucking hitting it hard. Yeah. It quitted that noise. A man should be like, man, what the fuck, what if I hit the drums with these tiny fucking fans?

I found it. Fucking tiny little drum noises, man. People love it when people drum hard, but like, why do you drum really soft? The whole point is, dude, what I do is I skip like five notes to the song and everybody calls me a fucking cheese. I got a boner. After we, it was a great day to be in the CIA. It is.

Well, after weed was deemed useless, artichoke scientists tried cocaine by experimenting on mental patients. Talk about getting them to talk. Well, they said that cocaine produced elation and talkativeness, which was good, but found that what Subject said was ultimately unreliable. Yeah. It was like I did the experiment with Gregor, and then the next thing I know is like, he didn't show up to the half marathon that he promised that he was going to show up with

me for an 11 a.m. I know. That's why his feet were itchy. Yeah. It was unfortunate. But if you want to find out, like, what are the effects of cocaine? Ask anyone in Congress. I mean, you don't think if Joseph McCarthy was lit off his freaking ass.

Matt Gaetz is what happens with cocaine in the car. God. Human used condom. Next was heroin, which CIA memos noted was used frequently by police and intelligence officers to either disorient or hook prisoners on the drug. Think about how common it was. Think about how common it was that it was listed as an operative measure. I mean, cops use this to fucking fuck with people all the time, and you're like, oh,

what? What was that? Who said that? Yeah, they'd hook them on heroin and then take it away to produce a talkative desperation for, of course, more heroin. Additionally, the U.S. Navy had already sponsored a secret program called Project Chatter to study the effects of heroin amongst other drugs. Now, Project Chatter is fucking terrifying.

That is scary, dude. That's a set of bite. Yeah. They paid a psychologist at the University of Rochester $300,000 to do it. His name, interestingly enough, George Wint. Whoa. Norm. Dude, if George Wint gave me all of my acid, I'd be like, yeah, I don't want to use this,

but you're still George Wint. Who is the norm of acid? Is it Jerry Garcia? Yeah. Jerry. Jerry. Jerry Garcia. I think that's good.

Yeah. Well, students were paid a dollar an hour to take heroin, so George Wint could watch. Boring. But ultimately, George Wint declared that heroin held little value for interrogation. But speaking of Project Chatter, it also involved chemical research done by the Nazis at the concentration camps with mescaline. We already paid for it. It's another thing.

It's like, we've already paid for all this research. We might as well use it. Yeah. They're like, well, it's already done. Mm-hmm. Mescaline, synthesized in laboratories from Peyote, had been a top contender for a mind-controlled drug by the Nazis. And by the way, those Nazis in Operation Paperclip, they were saying, we still haven't reached

the limit of mescaline. We need to look into mescaline more. Artichoke scientists, however, deemed it too unpredictable to be useful. Now, it seemed like the CIA had hit the end of the road as far as the search for the pharmacological Holy Grail went. But as Gottlieb poured through reports of drug experiments, he noticed that very little research had been done concerning LSD. Being a curious man, Gottlieb tried LSD himself first.

For a trip guide, he chose a former officer in the World War II chemical warfare service named Harold Abramson. I don't know if that's a good idea. That's a thing, man. Is he going to bring you orange slices? No. Is he going to change the TV when it's a little too fucking, when it's harshing your shit? Is he going to do what Marcus did when we were tripping balls off of mushrooms and we

couldn't figure out how to turn the music on and then Marcus fixed it? He saved everyone. He saved the night. He saved the entire night? That is true. That is true. And I did that even after you were mean to me. So, yeah.

Well, I said one mean thing to you. You were out of control on acid. Well, this guy, Harold Abramson, he was one of the few scientists who had actually done LSD. So, yeah, he was a pretty good trip guide. Gottlieb's trip was first rate. He reported out-of-body feelings, a sense of well-being in euphoria, and the sensation that his entire body was encased in a shimmering, semi-transparent sausage skin.

Well, Harry, wait, wait, wait, wait, Harry, am I a hot dog? Bro? No, no, bro. Be serious with me, bro. Am I a fucking hot dog right now, bro? No, no, you're still a person, dude. Fuck me? Yeah, I get it, dude.

Yeah, man. Oh, yeah. I know that feeling. I know exactly what it's like. We're all encased in just meat. We're in a meat case. Well, soon Gottlieb began testing LSD on volunteer CIA colleagues and scientists at Fort Dietrich. Some agreed to trip in controlled settings, but others gave permission to be surprised

with a dose. No, no. It's interesting. I don't want to be a dose. I don't want to be a dose ever. It's not fun to not know. You're about to go insane. No.

Oh, my God, what a nightmare. But the breakdown of the experiences of the various officers are really interesting because a lot of the officers that got it, like, well, you know, they were very professional and they would be like disorientation. I feel a dizziness. I feel that, you know, there is an accentuated mix thing to my version of there's something to my vision. But some of these guys every once in a while, you had what's called enlightened.

They became enlightened officers where there was like one dude that started weeping when they gave it to him and he was crying because he did the thing where he was just like, we're all like layers of the same consciousness and, you know, we are of the same matter of birds and trees. We're all in the same global economy and stuff. And he started crying. I'm starting to think this guy's a communist. But they literally, they looked at him and they know being like, see him that this dose

caused sadness. Like they couldn't understand crying from beauty. They would just thought like, yeah, a subject sad must eliminate. Also make fun of Barry on Monday, get a pussy. Don't forget that, guys. Eventually those fair warning tests reached their limits and Gottlieb began dosing CIA trainees without warning. Oh my God.

What is happening? Man, they know rules. Yeah. Then once the trainee was high, he would be interrogated to see if he would violate oaths and promises. I would rather be abducted by aliens. I would rather be Barney Hill. The breakthrough for Gottlieb came when an officer was dosed and revealed a secret he

swore he would never reveal. Then he forgot the entire episode once he was no longer tripping. He's fucked up. He's just fucking hammered. Yeah, man. We don't fucking kiss our roommates in college, man. Don't fucking do it, man. Startin' to think this guy's a communist.

With this Gottlieb felt that they were finally on the right track. However, LSD proved to be almost as unpredictable as mescaline. Those who got surprised doses experienced intense distortions of time, place, and body damage, which more often than not culminated in full-blown paranoid reactions. They didn't know they're on acid, so they think they're losing their fucking minds. Yeah. And acid's a hard way to go. Even mushrooms, if you lightly have mushrooms, you can kind of slide into a trip and understand

what's going on. But acid comes on hard, especially dish shit, old school shit, directly from old- Government acid? Yeah. Fucking, from old owl eyes, fuckin' spout, like, you know, you trip hard, fast. So, like, you don't work at a nightclub, which theoretically, if you get dosed, you're gonna be like, oh, at least I'm here. But like, you're at the CIA headquarters.

Which is not trip-friendly. Around some of the most buttoned-up, stuck-up people in the world. Yeah. Must smell horrible once you, like, the office setting and tripping. Yeah. And then you're getting interrogated by your boss. Oh, my God. That's horrifying.

We should try it here at the network. Oh, we should. Yeah. Pretty great. Yeah. Pretty nice. Yeah. It's a violation against human rights.

Ben, you guys have, you guys don't, you guys never got an office. Step into the hallway then. Fernando, step into the bathroom. We're, we're gonna meet over at Kissel's office, big wings. But on the other side, trippers would also ride the wave and have ecstatic or transcendental experiences in which they would become convinced that they could defy their interrogators indefinitely. Sure. Dude, I love it.

It is kind of fun if you can flip it and be like, so I'm not gonna get fired for this. I'm gonna interrogate you. Therefore, hallucinations either way were more of a hindrance than an aid to interrogation. But since LSD was so unpredictable, it was suggested by security officers that it be used as a kind of psychedelic suicide pill where agents would take it in the event of capture so all they'd say during their interrogations was pure gibberish. Oh, God. I can't even imagine, then tripping in an enemy jail, like in a combat in jail.

Yeah. Contradictory to this method though, security officers also drug CIA agents with LSD as a kind of mind control vaccine in case the Soviets ever captured them and gave them LSD. So you would know what LSD was like if the Soviets ever captured you and gave you LSD. I will tell you what though, each trip is different. It is. And you really don't get used to it. Like I love it.

I love tripping on acid, but it's definitely each time I've done it, it has been a unique time. I don't know why for me acid hurts my bones. Yeah, you say that because I think it's because it's like an upper and you're up, like you run around. I have no idea. Ah, interesting. But while LSD was proving to be more slippery than Gottlieb had hoped, he was still convinced

that chemicals were the future. And in 1951, he flew to Tokyo with CIA scientists to test what they'd learned from chemical interrogation experiments on four Japanese citizens suspected of being covert Russian agents. The key word there is suspected. Suspected. They are not. We don't know if they were.

Yeah. Gottlieb and these CIA scientists injected these prisoners with an alternating variety of depressants and stimulants under questioning. And when all four confessed to being Russian agents, false confessions or not, they were executed and their bodies were dumped in the Tokyo Bay. So you're really going to kill me. I thought this was all a trip. No, no, no, no.

You trip and then you die. Whoa. Well, soon after the CIA team flew to South Korea where the experimentation was repeated on 25 North Korean prisoners of war. Whoa. This time, however, the goal was not confession, but renunciation. These POWs were drugged and told to renounce communism, but when they refused, all 25 were executed.

We're executed. Oh, okay. I thought you were going to say we're giving small franchises with McDonald's to understand the capital. No, no, no. They were executed. And there is some. No.

Maybe a mix of both. But even though the flip hadn't worked, the confessions had. So one out of two. That ain't bad. So. They're just saying whatever. They're just saying shit. Yeah.

But at the time, they're like, okay, well, these guys confessed. So we got to keep going with this. So Dulles again expanded the program in 1952 and set up a safe house in Munich for project artichoke scientists. There, they were given permission to experiment on hundreds of so-called expendables. For months, they gave prisoners massive amounts of drugs and sometimes given electroconvulsive shocks on the insistence of Morse Allen. Why don't we shock them a little bit?

Come on. Let's get them all. I'll get it one more. Bro, if you thought about like just like tanning or like doing, maybe vitamin D would help you. No, man. No. Every single attempt failed.

And every single expendable was killed and had their bodies burned. But Dulles figured that they just hadn't found the right angle. And since he had a good feeling about Gottlieb, Dulles got to work making formal arrangements to give Gottlieb the power to take project artichoke in whatever direction he deemed necessary. What I'm going to do is I'm going to spike the New York Mets' water. Because they're losing the subway series to my fucking Bronx bummers, man. Well, don't forget the dude, what was it, Doc?

Something who pitched a perfect game. On LSE. And balls on acid, so maybe it'll make the Mets better. But this agreement gave Gottlieb the authority to feed drugs in much larger doses under far more torturous conditions to prisoners and other helpless subjects such as mental patients. All to see what he could see. And that is, we're going to see a lot of that in the coming episodes as we go when this thing really fucking expands.

Soon after, Gottlieb's power increased when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. Eisenhower appointed Truman's CIA director as his undersecretary of state, which meant that Alan Dulles was promoted from number two to head of the CIA. And this wasn't good. Number one. Additionally, Alan Dulles' brother, John Foster Dulles, was named secretary of state, which meant that the CIA had the full support of the State Department. This gave Dulles all the diplomatic cover he needed to continue running black sites all

over the world. And this truly was how the black sites got established, where the CIA has black sites and that's just the way it fucking happens. That's what we do now, yeah. So with total freedom from consequence or question, Gottlieb got to work following any avenue that he thought might lead to results, and since he needed more doctors willing to expand the program, he brought in a sociopath from the New York Psychiatric Institute named Albert Hawke.

Now instead of confining experiments to prisoners of war, Gottlieb was now expanding the scope to include unwitting American citizens, and he was putting non-military personnel in charge of said experiments. It always comes home. And these are like the pilot programs for what come next. So this is like them starting the beginning work so that would become the octopus of malice that is MK Ultra. And since Albert Hawke had no conscience or scruples whatsoever, he agreed to inject

mescaline into his unwitting patients without their consent or knowledge just to see what he could see. Hawke's first subject was a professional tennis player named Harold Blower, who'd just gone through a nasty divorce and was seeking treatment for depression. You see, because you know, honestly, love is like a game of tennis. It really is. Love starts at zero, but it can go all the way to 45, and you're never really out until you're out.

You got to play close to the net. That's just what I know about love, not a professional tennis player. Well for some reason, Dr. Hawke figured Blower was the perfect subject, so he began injecting Blower with mescaline without telling him what he was doing. What in the hell? I bet he thought that he was like, he's secure, he's got great ankles, he does his cardio, like he must really be, he's fit. How happy do you think a tennis player in the 50s going through a divorce is?

I don't know, they throw their rackets a lot. I know that. Well, over a period of about a month, Blower was injected with mescaline six times, and each time he complained of highly unpleasant hallucinations. Like, I don't know if this is helping me not be sad anymore, doctor. No, you got to stop going to that doctor. Finally, for some reason, Hawke gave Blower a dose of mescaline 14 times larger than any previous dose.

That's a good idea. They don't know what they're doing. No, they really just make it up as they go. This is the thing we keep saying, they just make it up, and there's nobody in charge. That's the whole point. Six minutes later, Blower was flailing out of fear. Yeah, he spent eight minutes flailing, then his body stiffened. After two hours had passed, Harold Blower was dead.

That is just what a great test. He died from bad vibes. Like, he bad tripped himself to death. Can you imagine how terrifying those last eight minutes of his life was, where he's just like, locked, just gone. Just seen some demonic force staring at you. Yeah, no, not eight minutes, two hours. Like two hours of rigidly tripping until you die.

Yeah, because you know how it's like when you're tripping, and like you're in time feels like. This is never going to end. I'm broken in my mind. I'm always like this. Yeah, and time just slows down. Imagine that for two hours. It's like some Freddy Krueger shit, dude.

As one medical assistant later confessed, this is a direct quote. We didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him. Wait, but the option what like, like, oh dog piss was in the office. Yeah. Honestly, I was taking it for my ADHD and I've never been so focused. And this wasn't even the worst experiment Hawk performed. He would also give LSD to patients before and after lobotomizing them. Oh, it's not good, man, it's evil.

Once he gave a patient LSD and a local anesthetic before a lobotomy, then asked the patient to describe his visual experience as chunks of his brain were removed. I'm getting a lot of, I don't know, it smells like flowers to me. It smells like flowers. I'm getting the flower smell. Am I a shoe? To be honest, I'm blind. I'm blind.

Yeah. I'm taking chunks of my brain out. Wait a second. Wait, is that what this is? Wait, what? But even though Gottlieb had gotten the power to do whatever he wanted, he was still frustrated. After 18 months of experiments, he'd been forced to admit that none of these drugs had answered any of the questions Dulles had wanted him to answer.

I'm still not sure what the questions are. God, that's literally, he's like, I actually know that we've been doing this for a year and a half. What was I supposed to be doing? Because these guys are just screaming and dead, half of them are dead and a lot of them are just screaming. So as author Stephen Kinzer put it, Gottlieb had to choose between two conclusions. Either there was no such thing as a mind control drug or he just hadn't discovered the right

one. Or if he had discovered the right one, he hadn't discovered the right way to use it. All right, well, you better try, try, try again until everyone's dead. Actually, that's what he said, he said, I was hired to explore, not give up. Oh my God. Oh, wow. Oh Lord, my friend, this is a horrible, you're a horrible doctor. Like Jimmy Fallon with his NFTs, is he doing NFTs now?

Yeah, and he also interviewed the robot military dog on his show. He is an arm of the U.S. propaganda machine, he's a part of the government. Folks, don't even get me going folks, they're coming home for you. So Gottlieb concluded that the secrets to mind control were locked away in LSD. Also, Gottlieb was, he was taking a lot of acid himself at this time, so his imagination was what you'd call fertile. This is what they did. They literally said this because he needed, he talked about getting into a creative headspace.

He was so laced with acid that they were just like, they're just zips zaps off it. Does it make it better that he was full of acid? I mean, at least he was, at least he was also, I don't know, I don't have these thoughts on acid, I just partied it. At the same time though, Gottlieb was taking on another role in the CIA besides just chief mind control expert. Since he was the CIA senior chemist and had experience introducing toxins into the human body and since he had all that Nazi concentration camp research to draw upon, Gottlieb became

the so-called Poisoner-in-Chief. His first official action as Poisoner came in March of 1953 when Alan Dulles told Gottlieb that he needed a clean way to get rid of a senior officer named James Cronthal. See, Cronthal and Dulles had worked together in the OSS during World War II, but the CIA had discovered that Cronthal was a pedophile who'd been blackmailed into being a double agent for first the Nazis and then the Soviets. A bit of a liability. So Dulles informed Cronthal at a dinner that his services would no longer be needed.

Yeah, we're gonna have to let you go and I wonder if he knew then what that meant, what he's just been like, yeah, maybe we should part ways, maybe this is best. Is it the pedophilia or the double agent thing? I would say it's actually more the double agent thing. For him, for Dulles, for Dulles, for Dulles, yeah, he would use any, if he, if he, if he was like, well, if we kick every pedophile out of the CIA, I don't have a fucking company anymore. I mean, if he used Nazis so casually, yeah, he'd use a pedophile, but this guy was such

a pedophile that he was caught twice. First the Nazis used him, then the Soviets used him. So Cronthal was escorted home by CIA security officers and Cronthal was found dead the next morning with an empty vial laying on his body because he had been killed by an untraceable poison made by Gottlieb. So they left the thing that could be traced, which is the vial that the poison had and on his chest, like the mafia does when they kill you. Yes, where it's, yeah, it's there and the poison is untraceable, but anybody who knows

knows. Knows that we did it. Is that how they killed Marilyn Monroe? I mean, I'm, again, I've been set back years. Well, having proven his loyalty, Gottlieb's request to further explore the possibilities of LSD in the search for mind control was approved by Alan Dulles and the resulting project was entitled MKUltra and that's where we'll pick back up for part three of our series.

Oh, my God, Naomi is now ultra. We got some stories ahead of us, folks. We got fucking, we're going to get deep into hypnotism. We're going to get, we're going to talk about Frank Olson. We're going to talk about continued CIA experimentation over the next, what, three episodes? We're thinking five. We don't quite know, probably five. I do think, I like that you address the audience as folks because this, this is a folks, folks,

folks, we're talking, this is a folks series, yeah. It's going to just get thicker and meaner and more fucked up. And then we're also going to get into some more, bringing it a little bit more conspiracy territory, especially the, there's a couple of choice named words that these self-published books about MKUltra really use. It's very, very intense and we're going to cover every last squirming inch of it. Stick with us, folks. Well, thank you all so much for listening.

We hope you're doing well out there. Don't forget to check out the comic book, Soul Plumber. Yes. Episode five should be. It's got pushed. It's got pushed because of the supply line. Supply chain line. It's all very real and happening.

And then of course the Z2 comic. Z2, or did you pre-order from that for Z2, last comic book on the left, coffee, Mothman coffee is delicious. I'm still drinking. It's absolutely delicious. It's the best. And I believe he was able to purchase a larger machine. He did.

Oh no, he's ready to go. Awesome. And purchase the other things that are not just the Mothman line on his Spring Hill Jack coffee. It's so delicious. Oh yeah. I love high strangeness is delicious. I love high strangeness.

And it's got, it's got a lot of torque in it. That's what you need more of. You need more torque. I mean, I am sort of maybe in the possibility of the range of having panic attacks while I'm watching hours and hours and hours of footage of MK Ultra. So I love Henry Zabrowski, Tokyo drift. It's really good. Yeah.

We need more. More torque. Yeah. And keep on supporting all the shows here in the last podcast network. And as I'm sure you all know, we are now wide and that is means we are on all platforms. So please listen to us. And we're working on the trends. We're still got one.

Things are updating. We've, we've, we have heard the thing about Google podcasts. We're in communication with them. They are, they are going to say, it's going to take a second for all of the feeds to catch up. And that's what we're doing. Yep. So we're all, all the, just taking a, taking a second as always.

One app at a time. Absolutely. So thank you all so much for your support throughout that entire process. And yeah, I guess that's about it. Yeah. Dogmeet any last words for the folks at home. Do this weekend. Final words.

Just last words for this week. Okay. Not, not, not final words. You're about to be like, enjoy every sandwich. This isn't your warren's eve on moment. No, just any. Let's get back to using psychedelics for mental health. Let's do it.

That's my bad. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking micro dose pills. Like a motherfucker. Two days on, three days off. Fuck yeah. Okay.

If you, if you combine them, that becomes a macro dose. No. That's what you're doing. That's, that was having fun. I am, I am actually, I was macro dosing for a while. I am now micro dosing and it's much, it's, it's not quite as fun, but it works better. I'll say that. We'll take care of your brains out there, otherwise the government's going to try to

take it from you. All right. Everyone hail yourselves. Hail game. Be careful. If you try any sort of the psychedelic mental health stuff, you'll do it under the care of a doctor. Yeah.

I mean, talk to your buddy fucking Daryl. He knows what's up. Ask him how much he took and then see, and then, and then do half with Daryl. Yeah. And then, then take the other half after you're like, just as a couple hours, but then you realize that it did kick in. Of course. Cause it always takes long.

Yeah. And I do mushrooms, not LSD. So, you know, I've only actually only taken acid once. I can't wait. I have a little, I have some. Well, these are, now you are admitting to felonies. What are you talking about? I'm excited.

What do you think? Thank you for listening. Hail yourselves. Good bye. See you burgers. 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 lastpodcastnetwork.com.