Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 484: MK Ultra Part III - The Cup and Balls

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

Continuing along with the story of MK Ultra and the CIA's desire to harness Mind Control, the LSD experiments reach new heights with the creation of Camp X, and the CIA's newfound infatuation with Magicians.

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'm recording. Oh, recording, very good, that means this is going to go out to everyone, right? Everyone's going to hear this, I mean everyone who's anyone. And some boys. Anyone who's in the know, who wants to be in on the scene, just listening to this episode. Oh, absolutely, this is a pretty cool scene. The pizza is done. That meant nothing, don't worry about it.

I mean, honestly, you're talking to Marcus and it could just be code for the pizza is done. The pizza is done. What is the code for? Nothing. Let's just say there's a new tier on our Patreon that will be coming up. $10,000, you willingly volunteer to be a part of Henry Zabrowski's new behavior modification and training program, how to be a comedy assassin. I will teach you how to drop those scruples.

No more scruples. Get rid of your scruples. No more scruples. Absolutely. If you're Spanish, and then we're going to get you in there, we might do a little bit of, we'll do some dabbling under the hood. Under the hood. That's for the hood on the top of your eyebrows.

Sure. But the pizza is done. All right, welcome to the last podcast on the left, everyone. I am Ben, hanging out with Marcus and the hyper cryptic or hungry, Henry Zabrowski. I'm hungry. I don't quite know. The raspberries are back in season. He's bleeding for his ass.

The raspberries are... Marcus is bleeding for his ass. Once again, that's great to know. That is his coat. That is his coat. Darling, the raspberries are back in season again. I got to go back to the gastroenterologist. Oh, it gives us time for me to be the berry farmer again.

Why does he cry every time he talks about being a berry farmer? I thought it was kind of fun. Some people go out there on the weekends to do it with their children. No, not his wife. Not Carolina. No. No, she is forced into that. She is drafted.

Of course, no one. It's marriage. This series, again, I've been joking about being set back and all this kind of... You haven't been joking about it. You've just said the sentence over and over again. I don't think at any point it's inferred that you were joking. But to be completely fair, I literally put up walls to a lot of conspiracy theory thought over the years because especially the last six years, it's been extra stupid and extra

wasted time. And nowadays, though, because when we went through JFK series, the JFK series, everything had been largely debunked. Everything had already been worked over for years and years and years. And then the thing about this series, back into MK Ultra, is that this is all the stuff that is real. This is also the truly is very real. And there's all this documentation, all these witnesses, all this kind of shit.

And you slowly, in my mind, it's like a poach and an egg, but it's my brain. It's like my brain is being lowered slowly in the vinegar-filled, slightly simmering, boiling water of conspiracy theory thought. It's the government's war on drugs commercial. Yes, but they're doing it to me. And I now I'm hard boiled. All right. I got crusted over because it's the shit, man.

It's like there was a van outside my fucking house that I stared at for 15 minutes. It's like the shit were like someone's been because it happens in waves where someone tries to get into my social media accounts or like my various things where someone you could see like a ping or a bunch of people like tried to like break their way into my accounts. And you like see all this kind of shit happening at the same time. I'm having all these emails come in from people saying that we're like they were experimented on by the government.

I've done this to myself. I'm like back into this like a conspiracy goggle world. Yes. Well, there's always medication. I'm all right. Yeah, man. You're like, you're this close to attracting another guy. Like remember the Chase Bank manager that told you all about the reptilians?

You're this close to finding another one of those. Richard Bunch. Richard Bunch out there in Chase Bank in Manhattan. Make sure you do all your banking. Make sure your banking needs accomplished with Richard Bunch. All right, everyone. We are on to part three of MKUltra. Now, by the time the CIA decided to up the ante on their Mind Control program, psychiatrists

outside of the CIA had surmised years before that you cannot program a person to do something that they are deeply and morally opposed to doing. Furthermore, Sidney Gottlieb, head of the MKUltra program, was aware of this research by the time he escalated his Mind Control programming experiments from project artichoke levels to the debacle that was MKUltra. The octopus of malice. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. I feel like people have changed. You know, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump called his wife like a fat bitch. I feel like people maybe now are easier to flip because they're such, I don't know. My people are our hungry monsters. People have been subjected to years of propaganda that has also been blasted into hyperspeed by the rectangles that are in our pockets. The research that I did for this episode about hypnotism shows that these motherfuckers have

known since the 1940s, like they had this funny little idea, George Esther Brooks, who will cover, he had this great little sentence in his book, Hypnotism, by George Esther Brooks, where he's like, the radio will one day be a fascinating tool for mass hypnotism. And you realize they have been thinking about this. It was mostly anal ring toss. Sure. But this has been in them. And they've been thinking about this for a while now.

People play that stuff all the time. But I think, well, concerning Ted Cruz and that whole sort of like turning all that, Ted Cruz has always been a shivering turd of a human being. He's always been out for power. So the whole point is, is that he was able to be turned, but that's because his only motivation is power. So he's willing to do anything for it. And the thing about these hypnosis programs.

It's in his nature, in other words. And it's CIA also as well, is that they are looking for people. Like they are, this is where Marcus and I had our discussion, which is interesting. It's the, then the goal is, all right, you can't turn someone where all of these actions are completely against their will. Sure. But why don't we find people where it's not necessarily just against their will. And then we create a situation where they have a way to validate what they do and get

out of it later. I think that's called dating. Well, that's interesting. And this brings me up to another great point here, small jackets for cold turds. I've seen a lot of cold turds out there. And I think it's important we give them small turd jackets. If they're cold. If you're cold, they're cold.

That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. But as we said last episode, Gottlieb felt that he had been hired to explore, not to give up. And as it happened so often, it was the exploration that turned out to be the nasty business. Incredibly though, or perhaps predictably considering the amount of Cold War paranoia

at the time, this all occurred with very little internal pushback, with the exception of one fatal objection that we'll discuss near the end of this episode. Okay. Now as opposed to projects Bluebird and Artichoke, which mostly used foreign nationals or government employees as subjects in their experiments, MKUltra expanded the scope to include American citizens. Why leave us out? Yes.

Yes. I'm so happy to be part of this wonderful program. Specifically, they wanted to experiment on urban populations and prisoners. And since they certainly weren't going to conduct these experiments in Levittown, they needed a proxy who could find a new kind of expendable, someone who could move in the more salacious circles of society without giving off a CIA vibe. Now, I just wonder why I can't put my finger on the mistrust of the U.S. government. I don't know.

What could it be? What could it be? Is it Mel Gibson? He knows what women want. And if he knows what women want, he can control a lot of other people as well. He makes on average 100,000 women orgasm a day. Mel Gibson. Women love him.

I don't know of as much anymore. But they don't care. They don't care. They don't care about anything. They just watch them in Braveheart and come and come. Oh, no. I think more women go for Kevin Costner, the man who cannot act yet still gets work. You're just speaking for your mother.

Wow. Yes, exactly. My mother and my wife. Oh, my God. You watch dances with wolves once. Holy shit. Wow. Okay, we'll talk about it later.

And that, my friends, is where a former OSS man named George Hunter White comes into the picture. This guy's a straight-up bastard. Cool. Bastard has entered the picture. George Hunter White was a narcotics detective, described by author Stephen Kinzer as a vastly obese slab of a man who looked like an extremely menacing bowling ball. Nothing wrong with that.

No, no, no. The thing is, you have to say vastly obese. Now, he's an obese. When he really comes down to us, obese really covers it. There's an obese, vastly obese. That's just getting rude. He's a cop. He's a cop.

Okay. Now, White was your classic dirty cop, simultaneously busting drug traffickers while also using the drugs that he confiscated. How would you know what it is if you're not using it? You see all those? I always love that in cop shows when they see the white powder and then they stick two fingers in it and rub it in their mouth. Yeah, that's pure cocaine.

Unfortunately, that was 100% fat. White was also a hard drinker known to put down a full bottle of gin every night at dinner. That's just dinner. Wow. That is a full bottle just that, well, how long is dinner for a bloviating big drug-busting bastard though? It could be an hour and a half affair. It could be.

It's still a lot. It's still a lot, I'm just saying. It's a lot and an hour and a half. I'm just saying he's not having a McDonald's five-minute meal. I know. True. And continuing the theme of moral crusaders with sexual secrets like Jaya Gerhoover, White was also heavily into sadomasochism, although his appetites were harsher than

the fine SNM enthusiasts we have listening right now. Oh. Really, about the only thing that was sweet about George Hunter White was his devotion to his pet canary. When his bird died, Hunter journaled, quote, Poor little bastard, just couldn't make it. I don't know if I'll ever get another bird a pet. It's tough on everyone when they die.

Oh, you're going to have here, you know what? Because you're lost your pet canary or maybe you're thinking about it here as a free steak. All right. That's fine. I'm just going to go kill a hooker. Honestly, the only thing that makes me feel now is eat the steak. Also isn't it ironic the cop has the most snitch of all animals, the canary? Interesting.

Interesting. Now, before White was involved with MKUltra or even the OSS, he had gained national notoriety before World War II for busting a Chinese-American opium ring in Seattle called the Hipsing Tong, whom he'd infiltrated by agreeing to death by fire. If he betrayed any of their secrets. Cool. What does that mean? They said you were fire?

Yeah. They said you're on fire, man. Yeah, roast me up. That's kind of fun. That seems kind of fun. You know what I'm saying? You're not going to like the smell. Absolutely not.

Poor crines. But once World War II began, George White joined the OSS and was sent to a secret paramilitary base in Ontario called No Shit Camp X. Yeah, man. It comes from somewhere, everything in pop culture comes from somewhere. It is the dumbest, we'll call it Camp X. Seriously, but this is when it was scary and not corny. Yeah.

George described Camp X as a school of murder and mayhem. Well, during the OSS days, they were very proud of their spy and assassin training schools. That was a part of the thing that Wild Bill was obsessed with, because they treated everything like fucking kids at summer camp. They were like, yeah, we get to put our murder school together, yes, yes. Which I do. You tell me that doesn't sound fun. I would love to be the dean of our murder school.

I feel like I could really be like, you get it B, you're not good enough at it, you know, like, you can be really fun to do. But they really like this. But again, the project art show story of this, the part of that was much more containable because it was they thought that they could just have everybody do it in one building, but now we're seeing what contractors can bring to the table. So after training, George White became a teacher himself at Camp X and instructed such future CIA leaders as Frank Wiesner, James Jesus Angleton, and the aforementioned future head

of the CIA, Richard Helms. He does know that Professor X didn't find himself in a wheelchair because of diabetes. But this is back in the day. This is before Professor X. Oh, this is before Professor X. I think it's okay. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, this is definitely.

Yeah, Professor X didn't come about till 62, I believe, maybe 63. All right. Additionally, White was also involved in the OSS's first experiments to produce a truth serum using marijuana. We brought him up in the, I believe, the second episode. He's the guy who talked to that gangster dude and gave him the weed tincture that made everybody else throw up and he went and spilled the beans in his entire drug operation to George White.

Dang. Well, after World War II, White became a narcotics detective again, this time in New York City, where he led the Narcotics Bureau's campaign against jazz music. No. They were like, it's boring, it has no, it has no play, they don't even play the song and only play tracks of it. I like a little bit of jazz because you can stay at the bar for three hours and feel like you were there for three minutes because the song never changes.

You've been here, I've only been here for one song. That's it. I mean, this is actually some serious shit. White spied on and entrapped musicians like Billie Holiday, who was framed by George White after she started singing the anti-lynching protest song, Strange Fruit. This is like the beginnings of like Cointel pro type shit. It's really weird to really kind of roll back and just see this shit has just been a part of what they do now.

Like, you know, the CIA just came, they just revealed that whole like echelon thing that they have been spying on us again and it's like, well, they're nothing, it's like, I don't know what's going to change. Spying on us now more than ever before. Now, eventually, White continued his path in participating in the worst campaigns of the 20th century by going to work for Senator Joe McCarthy in 1950 and White took part in the anti-communist witch hunts investigating the State Department. After that, White moved to investigating organized crime where he leaked information that President

Truman and New York Governor Thomas Dewey had mob connections. Now, Truman did kind of have some mob connections from back in his early days in politics, like Kansas City mob shit. But Dewey was the guy who'd convicted the most famous gangster in New York City history, Lucky Luciano. He had no mob connections. No. So, this is the type of shit that then he did all this irresponsible stuff and then the

CIA was like, great, you're our number one guy. Yeah. For these reckless claims, George Hunter White was fired and just when George White had nothing to do, he got a call from Sidney Gottlieb, who was looking for a man on the street to procure subjects for civilian MK ultra experiments. Because the goal is to open wide operations, right? Because in an operational theater, the people you would use these things on would not know that they were going to be receiving these drugs and these various shit.

They would be getting them by surprise. So in order for them to see how it works, I mean, it makes sense. It's just, look at the facts. Look at the facts. And who doesn't want to follow what a fat man says in New York City? I mean, as long as it's talking about pizza, absolutely. Well Gottlieb wanted to see how ordinary people reacted to LSD. So he opened a safe house at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village and directed White to

find new expendables. So this is basically lays the groundwork for the hippies that we came to know and love. Dude, this is what we've been saying, man. He rips open the psychic veil of the entire country accidentally. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he was out there to find drug addicts, petty criminals, and other people that nobody

of consequence would miss. For this purpose, the program bought two apartments. They'd lure the subjects to one apartment and drug them. While on the other, MK ultra scientist would monitor and record the results, listening on surveillance equipment and watching through a one-way mirror. Oh my God, the first ever live podcast. Yeah. To attract their victims, George White developed a persona, sometimes posing as a merchant

seaman and sometimes as a bohemian artist. But always. I love to see how you're fucking scarfing a hat on. Yeah. I'm working. Paint. Yeah. You should come over here.

Yeah. You want drugs? You want to get your dick sucked? Yeah. Come on. I'm an artist. I'm bohemian. You just seem very bohemian.

But he always used the alias Morgan Hall. Hey, because Greenwich Village, it's not quite the folk scene that's starting to call it. The folk scene, there are some rumblings of it. You've got the beat writers that are hanging out. Okay. Greenwich Village is starting to become a counterculture center, but it is definitely where you want to pick up some people that would eventually become known as hippies, drug addicts.

And since White had already built a social circle of drug addicts, sex workers, gamblers and pornographers during his time in VICE, he could provide an almost endless supply of subjects to MK ultrascientists. He just flipped his covert intelligence, all the people that he used as like info sources when he was working for the narcotics girls, he just, yeah, he's flipped them over. And he's like, all right, now we're all in the CIA, I know, new office, new header, that's it. It's the same shit.

He obviously has a skill set. Yep. He does. The next time at Bedford Street was later described by a retire officer as quote, wild and wooly. Oh man. And that wouldn't even compare to what would come later with Operation Midnight Climax, which we'll cover next episode.

I would love to see all the back hair stuck to the lube on all the random tarps. Oh yeah, man. That's where you get the information from. Men with back hair need love and that's the thing, they're out there pining for love and then they get, they get flipped, they get turned. I know. Well, you have hinted that you are CIA for quite a while now. Amen.

I know fucking, who knows? Who knows? I just talked to a guy with a hat in the park. Who knows? From what that same officer said, those experiments at the Bedford safe house were so out of control because they were still operating under an OSS mentality, meaning that it didn't matter if what you were doing was a good or a bad idea. You didn't question it, you just did it because anything can be justified during a war.

The common thread is, we don't even know what this experiment's going to show us. We're going to do a bunch of shit and then see what comes out of the end of the tube and then see if that's collectible and see if anybody, it's worth it. But if not, well, you know, you just leave a bunch of shattered people in its wake. They had a vague goal. Yeah, they had a goal. But it was still a somewhat vague goal and they didn't have anywhere near, but any sort of idea how they were going to reach that goal.

You know, I wonder if they did help someone though, if there was like one moment where it's like, who did you just release from here? What was his name? Lenny Bruce? Dude, no! Lenny Bruce? Actually, yes. No, it's all of them.

It's Kinkisi. It's so many. How many people that we love or that are historic got drugged off of the, who got drugged off of the government dive? The entire beat movement. Not the entire, but a lot of them. I would say at least five. Five major...

That was CIA drugs. Five major counterculture figures had their minds open, at least by CIA experimentation with L.A. You would not have gotten acid in the 1950s if it was not from the CIA. Doesn't that show you that sometimes it's difficult to be a parent because yeah, you gave, you gave and you gave and all of a sudden they turn into someone who hates you. That's what it is. That's what being a parent is.

You just eventually, you just raise an enemy. Close. Get out to some degree. As far as the CIA was concerned, the Cold War was ready to turn hot at any moment. While MK ultrascientists were drugging people in the village, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were being executed for stealing nuclear secrets for the Soviets at around the same time. And this is all how it's kind of laid out by Stephen Kinzer and Poisoner-in-Chief.

And around the same time, leftist governments were taking off in South America. The prime minister of Iran had nationalized all reserves and rebels in Vietnam. Some communists, some not, were well on their way to casting off the shackles of French colonialism. Now, of course, everything but the Rosenbergs had been pure paranoia. There was no good reason for us to meddle in South America or Iran. And while we should have seen the defeat of the French at the hands of the Vietnamese as the end of colonialism in Southeast Asia, we only saw it and everything else in Cold

War terms. No, everything is their own person. Marcus, this is like the Mount Everest for the CIA. They were like, why'd you go down there and meddle in South America? Because it was there. Yeah. Because it was there. Absolutely.

You say there was no good reason, but there was reason. Yeah. So it doesn't that matter. But it's not. Yeah, exactly. Come on. Again, last episode, like how do you think it made us flipping these governments in South America?

How do you think it made us feel? Yeah. Absolutely. And in no way is that began a trend that is now constantly being seen. Yeah. Oh, our misreadings of all these situations still have major consequences that affect our lives in both small and large ways to this day, from the border crisis to the destabilization of the Middle East.

Not to mention, you know, Vietnam. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that one. It's a conflict. That was Cold War, right? It's a conflict. You remember that when we changed our rider and I was like, I would love a meat and cheese tray back, that conflict?

Conflict. That's like the video. That was with Vietnam. That's all it was. But from the viewpoint of CIA director Alan Dulles and many directors after him, all of it was justified. And while we now know that MKUltra was a fool's errand, Dulles believed that it was just as important as anything else the CIA was doing.

Well, as it was, Dulles's insistence that mind control was real and in possession of the communists, that kept getting validated. Or at least it was validated from Dulles's point of view. Sure. In July of 1952, when the armistice the end of the Korean War came about, over 7,000 American soldiers were released from communist prisons in North Korea. But to the American public's astonishment, almost 70% of those prisoners came back criticizing the United States and praising communism.

How fucking dare they meet a woman with baby bangs on tumbler. Some prisoners even refused to leave. They settled in China or Korea and that prompted the Pentagon to announce that any soldier who stayed behind would be labeled as a deserter and executed as if they were ever found. Oh, yes. Oh my God. And of course, that's what they call me after I have dinner. I have dessert.

The deserter and the deserter. They kiss all the deserter. Yeah. Really good. I would have stayed in South Korea, man. I heard South Korea is awesome. Yeah. It is supposed to be nice.

Well, hopefully we'll do a live show there. Well, it'll be awesome. Love to. Well, furthermore, several pilots who came back confirmed that they had been directed to drop biological weapons on the enemy, which they most likely had, although the evidence ... No, no, no. It's not like...

Marcus, I watched several old newsreels on this. We only had biological weapon facilities in order to defend ourselves against their weapons. How dare you? Makes all those sense in the world. Yeah. We were never doing it. And it's not like everybody's doing it in any way, shape, or form, trying to figure out a way to make everybody sick from far away.

No. I mean, of course, when you have government contracts with large pharmaceutical companies, they don't want money. They don't want the money. They don't even give them the money. They give it to their children. No. No.

This doesn't have anything to do with that. This is... I mean, we did most likely drop anthrax bombs on the North Koreans, not to make money, but to just fucking kill them. My uncle was saturated with Agent Orange during Vietnam. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It changed his whole life, and it ruined... I mean, all of the kids... All these kids have developmental disabilities.

Oh, well, they are wonderful. Yes, but they're saying it did not bode well. Yes. Yes. No one got better. The biological weapons use in Korea is still, to this day, circumstantial. People still argue about this shit. Yeah.

Now, the American media waved off these reports of defectors by saying that the men who'd stayed behind in those communist states had poor upbringings, emotional problems, Asian lovers, or homosexual tendencies. Hey, media. Some of us have all of the above, and we love it. And that's all right. And that's fine. Welcome.

What I want to know is that I found a debriefing that was given by the Department of the Army in 1956. So this is... They said in this thing, it was about communist interrogation and indoctrination and exploitation of prisoners of war. And in this, they even debunked the idea of brainwashing. They say in this novel... In this report, there were like... The term brainwashing came out, and they are immediately saying like... They have rudimentary brainwashing. Basically what they do is make you physically tired, restrict your... And then it's classic

good cop, bad cop, where they give you propaganda, and then they set you up. They'll do a thing where you could live a life like this, where you show this peaceful pastoral because it's beautiful. I'm sure you go to these beautiful places in Korea and be like, do you want to go back to Cleveland? Or do you want to be here amongst these hills? They do these things where they convince you to... Cleveland is nice.

Cleveland's great. I love Cleveland. I love that you have a living inch of your life, but eventually you do get the Stockholm syndrome thing that they are slowly building up, but it's not what we think it is that they're doing, but they knew this in 1956. The term brainwash could be replaced with brainfucked. You just kind of get brainfucked. You're like, all right, I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, that's the funny thing about this is that it's so fucking childish where these guys... They have thoughts that are different from the American public, and the best they can come up with is probably because you're fucking gay. You're fucking gay, you fucking piece of shit, you're so fucking gay. You have to meet with my 10-inch cock and this beautiful woman that I married to. Exactly. That's the most delicious street food in the world.

You're so gay. Super fucking gay. Yeah, some members of the media even said, and tell me if this sounds familiar to any generation listening, that the defectors were a sign of, quote, the weakening American masculinity and its replacement by a generation of pampered kids and mama's boys. Oh god. Every morning I wake up and I slap my mother, I call her a bitch. I call my manager, I'll never get in.

I fucked the postman to show him just to dominate him, it's not about the postman in this house. I'm not gay with my love of men. Shut up. Shut up. Yeah, I'm not no pansy boy. So it's a shing is gay in the foxhole. But to the CIA, the fact that even a few men decided to forsake the democratic paradise that was America for the communist hellscape of North Korea and China was a sign that communist

mind control was a definite reality. There was, however, further information that the CIA didn't make public. Some prisoners who returned from North Korea or the Soviet Union apparently had a blank period of disorientation that occurred only when they passed through a zone in Manchuria. Manchuria. This to the CIA was a sign that at least mind meddling had been achieved and the word Manchuria or as it came to be known, Manchurian got introduced into the mind control lexicon. I think it's more like mind muddling.

Yeah. That's what I said. You turn your brain into it. You turn your brain to like a mimosa. Like a mimosa? You're muddling it? Yeah. What's it called?

A mojito. A mojito. Oh, yeah. It's a mojito that then you're not gay anymore. You're an assassin. That's a horrible memory I have with the mojito summer when I faked all those bartending jobs by telling everyone I knew what a bartend. And then I constantly broke glasses when I was trying to muddle them and then they

made fun of me. And then they made me a bouncer. Yeah, that's probably best. See, you break white glasses with your own hands. I broke so many glasses. You break glasses while he's trying to make cocktails. Yeah, he becomes the bouncer. Yeah, I know.

I just wasn't prepared for mojito summer. It's not a Wisconsin beverage. So extrapolating from these observations about Korean War POWs, the CIA claimed that communists were using drugs, physical duress, electric shock, and possibly hypnosis against their enemies. In reality, the CIA was assuming this because that's what they were doing. Right. So the CIA considered themselves the ultimate good.

They assumed that the communists, whom they considered to be the ultimate evil, had to be doing something far worse. Okay. Did no one ever say at one point being like, hey, guys, though, the thing is, is that if we keep doing like worse and worse shit and we think they're doing worse and worse shit, like are we just making them worse by us doing our shit? I think that's why it's the Cold War. Oh, wow.

Oh, great. And then they're like, yes. Yes. Let's just keep on doing this forever. Escalation. This is going to be perfect. Yeah. There's a reason why this war almost ended the entire world.

Geez. Yeah. Multiple times. Now, MKUltra was different from Project Artichoke in that it was not a single undertaking trying to answer all of the questions concerning mind control that Alan Dulles had tasked Gottlieb with answering. He just thought one building of dudes could do it. Yeah.

We'll just have one group of guys putting this all together. While Gottlieb was certainly a sociopath of a kind, he was also a genius. He realized that if he was going to answer Dulles' questions, he needed dozens of teams to answer those questions one at a time. The octopus. Oh. Oh, bro. I'm bracedown right now.

Do that octopus. Smell. Oh, my God. Smell. Smell. Smell. Smell. Smell.

Oh, my God. Now, additionally, this worked well in keeping MKUltra a secret because if you've got a lot of scientists working on pieces of the question here and there, then nobody knows the full picture except the men up top. Therefore, the MKUltra sub-projects were born. This is where we see the fracturing of the whole thing and this is why it's so difficult to put together as a story because there's so many avenues and there's so many places that were connected to MKUltra through various things.

We'll talk about next episode like the Human Ecology Fund and all these types of things that they figured out how to break it all up and so all these different little corporations and companies. See, now you're there. Let's get rid of this ecology stuff, buddy, but it reminds me of the mural. You look at it and, oh, that's a little penis and then it pans out and it's a picture of Donald Trump made out of little penises and then you got him. You got him.

But really, if you just look at the penis, you're like, that's just a little penis. That's just a nice little penis. Yeah. So sometimes you're just long-lens. Yeah. Then you see Donald Trump. Yeah. Yeah.

It truly is. It's wasted hours and hours of their lives focused on that, man. Oh, yeah. I hate it. I hate it. Rewind art for four years. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Truly is a mosaic of pain, Ben. Yes. Very correct. While LSD was certainly a large part of MKUltra, not all sub-projects involved drug experimentation. Others included social psychology, group psychology, psychotherapy, and sleep and sensory deprivation. I also was reading a very interesting article that I want to cover a little bit later on about the CIA's involvement in anthropology places all over the world and what they used and how they format and frame the way people viewed cultures for years as well.

Oh, cultural anthropology. Yes. Interesting. They found out something like 70% of funding during this time period was CIA shell groups giving money to anthropology departments and then framing the way that they look at cultures. It's bad, man. He's really fucking bad, dude. There's so many things that we don't even know the truth of anymore, man.

There's no objective reality, bro. You're turning into ice cream. There's no fucking objective reality, bro. We live in a fucking CIA metaverse here. Oh, my God. We got to get this frozen turd of jacket. Uh-oh. Please.

He's turning into a street turd. So you're telling me all those fucking ethnographies that I studied in college are all worthless? Shill. Not all of them. You're a shill just like Burton J. Montisches. Whoa. Yeah. Oh.

Shilts. Yeah, shilts. Specifically, the sensory deprivation techniques were based on the work of Dr. Donald Hebb and Montreal. In 1951, Hebb received a $10,000 grant under contract X-38 to study sensory deprivation on students. In one study, Hebb paid 22 students a pittance to lay in a lighted cubicle 24 hours a day with all sensory stimuli muted.

You know how many college kids were like, that's all I got to do? Light was diffused by translucent goggles, auditory stimulation was limited by soundproofing and constant low noise, and textual perception was blocked by thick gloves and a U-shaped foam pillow around the head. Dr. Hebb found that after just four hours, subjects were unable to follow a train of thought. After 24 hours of being deprived sensory input, it caused, quote-unquote, serious disturbance. You know when they write that in a book, it's not pretty, it's like a guy goes, ah, ah,

ah, ah. Yes, Nancy, put that down as serious disturbance. Actually, put a bit of a temper tantrum in there because he's being a bit of a baby right now. Yeah, a bit of a baby, sure. After 48 hours, though, subjects experienced hallucinations similar to what one experiences on mescaline. One subject said he saw rows of little yellow men with their mouths open wearing little

black caps. That's good. It's a minion. It's a fucking minion. Oh, it's disgusting. It came from the CIA. It's a fucking disinformation project right in the middle of the whole despicable meme. In downtown LA, there's a massive minion that watches you like the dumpy eye of Sauron,

and I believe it is the CIA's sigh up, and I believe that he is watching, Henry is tinkering on the truth. This is going to get bad. All right, well, let me see if you can find some CIA head meeting in this one. Another hallucination was a guy who saw a procession of squirrels with sacks over their shoulders walking, quote-unquote, purposefully. Yes, because they are going to the funeral of RFK Jr. They are the working class with their nuts in their bag, and all they wanted was freedom,

and he was killed by the CIA. They are going there to make sure he's dead, and then they can call Sirhan Sirhan. We're going to get into probably episode five. We'll talk a little bit about Sirhan Sirhan and how he was a robot of the CIA. Yeah, no, I think I'm losing my mind too, because Top Atta was doing a lot of surveillance going on right now. Things are starting to really get up. It's going to get real in a way that is bad for my mental health.

We need to go to Vegas. In the auditory realm, one subject heard a choir singing in full stereophonic sound, which is fucking awesome. It's sweet. Yeah, but in the tactile realm, another subject actually felt pellets being fired from a miniature rocket ship. And you can't even pay for this shit anymore, Bob. That just wouldn't brain cooks up, dude.

Wow. It's like doom patrol shit, like how they'd created Mr. Nobody. It's fucking amazing. Now, it's worth pointing out that these experiments were not conducted in a CIA torture house. According to Dr. Hebb, every experiment occurred in purposefully cheery and happy surroundings. Let me make sure that everyone was comfortable. Oh, God, that would drive me freaking nuts. Yeah.

Well, so one could only imagine what these techniques might do to someone in, say, the bowels of a CIA black site. But we now know what the CIA is really good at setting a vibe, right? That's kind of what we learn from a lot of their work, is that it's really all about creating environment where we can get the most impact from what is that we're doing. And then these guys were doing these experiments in these various places, because to them, to this guy, this is science. This is just innocent science, and we are doing this for the good of America.

Like it's very nice to him. It's all like, yeah, of course we're doing this. Meanwhile, they have cubicles with men screaming inside of it, and they're just like, fascinating. Turns out people like to sleep. They do. Wow, shocking. Well, the other side of this is that this is something I've really been thinking about, especially when writing this episode, is you really have to question, like, I think these

guys would have been doing it anyway, even if the CIA hadn't paid for it. They still would have done it. That's the center of the secret schools of the secret schools knowledge of this entire subject. It is that, I think. Well, isn't that what we did? We did it for free for seven years. Because we love to do it.

Literally, it's because we love to do it, and we would do it for free, honestly. But I think that's the idea, is that you find people that would be into it in the first place. I mean, think about it. Like, nobody paid. The CIA didn't pay all those fucking surgeons to create lobotomies. They did it because they felt like doing it, and because they wanted to know more about the human brain.

And these people are doing the same shit. They all, all of those Harvard professors knew what Jeffrey Epstein was doing. But they took his money because it allowed them to do all the fucking hypothetical weird fringe science stuff that they always wanted to do, but no one would give them the money to do it. But since the experiments with sensory deprivation were showing results, the CIA saw the value of Dr. Hebb's work, and therefore, they funded hundreds of other projects on sensory deprivation. Eventually, these projects produced 230 articles in scientific journals over just seven years.

And that was just for one relatively small subsection of MK Alter Research. Wait, this whole point was just so they could write articles? That's the thing, because the thing is, those guys get to think it too full. You, sir, don't understand academia at all. No. That's the whole point. I read The Economist. Wow.

Wow. Whoa. Give him a medal. Yeah. You know, why should I give him a pile of points? You're a history economist. That's the whole point. With Epstein and Harvard, they took his name off.

They kept the money. But whenever we're in Ohio, Lex Westerner's name is everywhere. Yeah. I mean, you may have even been one. And he just got his dick sucked by Epstein. I don't know what they did. I don't know what they did. I don't know what they did.

I don't know what they did. I don't know what they did. You know they touched hips. Ugh. Life from your play. The sensory deprivation was nothing outside of LSD, of course, was more important to MK ultra scientists than hypnosis. With hypnosis, the CIA could conceivably create assassins who would carry out a mission, then

forget both the crime itself and who had ordered it. That was at least the dream. Yeah. That was the dream. Yeah. That was the goal. And as far as hypnosis went in the CIA, the main man was psychiatrist George Estabrooks. Oh, LSD.

Mm-hmm. That's what they called him. Is that what they called him? Sounds like he smells. He smells like something. Yes, he does. Estabrooks told the CIA that he could create a hypnotic messenger who would not be able to betray his mission because he or she would have no conscious knowledge of what their

mission actually was. This is great. We can use them for the U.S. Postal Service. They're going to love the mail. In this, Estabrooks claimed that he could establish a condition of split personality, where two consciousnesses unaware of each other could exist within the same person, which is, of course, one of the most common MK Ultra tropes. Now, personally, I think Estabrooks' claims were a case of a man who overpromised and

underdelivered in just about everything that he did. But Henry is of a different opinion when it comes to the possibility of split personalities. When we attack these subjects quite often, the goal is we keep coming back to the human element. What is it about people that make these things work and why people do it? And how the human element, the X factor like Dan Carlin talks about, these types of things that are what make history happen. It's a part of the right people and the right place kind of have to be there.

And George Estabrooks, he wrote this book called Hypnotism, that when you read it, you realize like there's a lot of ideas in that book that are subtle, that then he puts forward that I think that you realize permeated the intelligence community in a way that it started subtle and then it became obvious, where George Estabrooks, yes, he said that it was really easy to train people to do this. Super easy. Like anybody can do it. Really?

Okay. But what he talked about, it's really weird because the introduction of hypnosis is supposed to be the idea of like, you either slip some somebody from a sleeping state into a hypnotic state, into a trance state, or what he called stage magic hypnosis, where you put somebody up in front of a crowd and you berate them to do things. And then people, people who follow along do it, right? And then they do it. And this is used in evangelical, a lot of religions as well.

You can argue similar. Yes. Very much to argue that. Like Benny Hinn, all of his chorus will fall over and stuff and it's like, I don't think you really did. But what he do, right? So he wrote this thing in there that was very interesting, is that he basically surmised that one in five people are incredibly hypnotizable, that they're like canaries.

Well, how did he get to that number? I don't know. He made shit up. He didn't make shit up. He would run tests. And one thing that he'd do to find out, because the goal is, is to find out who's highly suggestible. And you do things like he'd put a hypnotic suggestible thing, like he would, he said he did it under a yodeling record.

Think about this. And he would see people in a yodeling and he put subliminal messages in this recording and he played in a room and basically he'd see who'd fall asleep. And not because of just boring, like he would see people that would fall into a hypnotic trance. And then he's like, oh, that's somebody who's really good for it. Because he talks about in, he has an example of it where he says that he trained a guy to do this thing where he, he basically said, okay, we're going to hypnotize you to have

a secret bit of information that we're going to give to this other colonel in Japan. You're going to, and I'm going to hypnotize you. And then I'm going to lock you in. It's called locking to that you're going to hear the word, the moon is clear. And then when you go there, that guy you meet, it's going to say the moon is clear. You're going to shift back into a hypnotic state. You're going to give him the statement that you're going to, you said that you could. And then the other guy then puts you back into a trance, you go back to America.

Right. And the thing is like, I do believe in a way that like, because the idea of hypnotism working or not is up for debate. No one really talks about what they do. No one really is sure if hypnotism works. But I think that if you do it on somebody who's so fucking like, let's put it this way, stupid or highly suggestible, highly, highly, highly suggestible, spongy, super, super spongy that it works every once in a while, but it's not dependable.

But wouldn't the suggestion itself work? Well, who knows, because also what it does is it gives you a way out too. We were talking about this, is that you find people that are willing to do these things quote unquote under hypnosis, but then afterwards if they get caught, they can be like, I must have been hypnotized. Isn't that what Patty Hurst said? Yes. Well, not really.

Kind of sort of. That's an oversimplification of the Patty. We'll do that story one day, we'll do that story. But no, it's just this idea of like it's about finding the right people that would fall into these things. But yes, he talked about using the radio to hypnotize the entire population in the United States of America. And he just kind of talked about this idea of like, but then the people like you fool

people. What you do is they don't know they're being hypnotized. You set them up like it's in a medical experiment where he uses as an example and you put like a blood pressure cuff on them to do measure their blood pressure. And then you still be like, the thing is, before we get your blood pressure, we're going to have to calm you down. So you're going to really want to listen to my voice and you're going to fall deeper. Yeah, like we're going to do the bit, right?

Yeah. Is that where you all of a sudden you got him and he didn't even know he was being hypnotized. But not to be too corny here, but isn't there a truth to the radio being you look at Rush Limbaugh, for example, he the Limbaugh Congress, those things, he actually changed the minds or he LRH, John Jones, all these people. People mind control? I don't say. Is that all the same thing?

What I would say is it's the same thing that's happened very recently. It's not about changing people's minds. It's about awakening what's already there. Yeah. It's yeah. And that's pretty much the same deal with hypnotism is that hypnotism, you can't make anyone do anything they wouldn't normally do. We'll get into this a little bit more later on.

But that really is. And I think with George Esther Brooks, the people that he's talking about, if he's able to accomplish what he says he'll accomplish, the people that he could accomplish it on are such fucking dullards that they would not be able to accomplish anything of consequence. They're also expendable. They're expendable. They're expendable, but you also can't depend on them because there's no CIA operation that's done by just one guy.

Like, it is an entire team of people that has to put this thing into motion and you're not going to risk the whole operation on Gummied Steve that's just a fucking moron. I thought I was getting a free sandwich when I got back from Vietnam. Gummied Steve, you know you can't have any sandwiches. Oh man, I'm going to get shot in the head, aren't I? Yeah, you're a slosh. I knew it. All right.

Well, I'm glad it's you. Uh-huh. You're a slosh. Enjoy. So they're basically looking for the kind of people that would get into a fight at the old country buffet or the golden corral because they didn't get their steak when they wanted it. People that are ready to go, people that are willing to do it.

But again, it would only, imagine you take 100,000 candidates for this and then 100 people can actually be useful for it and then they're one-shots. Yeah, they're one-shot. They can only do it one time. But that's the other thing too, is that you don't know if they're going to be able to do it that one time. Because everybody's- Which is the reason why they started abducting children and growing children and vats in

order to train them from their birth age. So that's really, you guys have not- That's the matrix. You guys have not read M.K. Ultra candidates, the stephored wives of the M.K. Ultra. So you'll get there. I'll listen to it on tape.

Well the CIA believed in the split personality principle enough to produce a short film called The Black Art to educate their own agents. In this film, an American intelligence officer drugs and hypnotizes an Asian diplomat, then forces him to enter his embassy, steal documents and turn them over to the intelligence officer. The film ends with this voiceover. Could what you have just seen be accomplished without the individual's knowledge? Yes, against an individual's will, yes. How through the powers of suggestion and hypnosis.

I believe it because he said it deeply. I also just love the CIA is like, we do shit without people's consent. Yeah, they love it. We love it. Now as I said at the top of this episode, the OSS had tossed aside hypnosis as a possible espionage weapon back in World War II because they've been told by multiple psychiatrists that you cannot hypnotize a person into doing something that they would never do. For example, we spoke in the last episode about how Morris Allen, director of Project

Bluebird, was able to use hypnotism to turn chaste employees into flirty girls. But that's cute. That's like cute. That's not fascination. I don't know. Well, that's the thing is that that's really that's not all that hard because it's possible that those employees wanted to flirt. But believe that it was not appropriate to do so or not appropriate to do work.

It's a common feeling. It's a good. It's a good guess. I'm introducing gropey Thursdays. We know that every secretary is here to find a husband. We know. We're just going to make it easy. So we're going to put your bare butts through holes in these walls and then these men, your

bosses are going to smell your butts and choose one of you to be like, Gummy Steve, get out of here. You never get to be a part of the buttocks, Gummy Steve, go have your slosh. But to take that same employee and turn them into an assassin against their will is a different matter altogether. Because even if that person is capable of murder, there's no way to know they're capable of murder unless you put them in a situation where killing is a possibility. Right.

But even though Gottlieb knew all this, he decided that those initial studies had missed something. So he continued with MKUltra sub projects. There was sub project five, which included 100 subjects at the University of Minnesota. And according to a surviving memo, Gottlieb wanted the sub project to investigate the following areas, hypnotically induced anxieties, hypnotically increasing the ability to learn and recall complex written matter, polygraph response under hypnotism, the relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis.

You got to have a marshmallow mind. I mean, I just like this is all with the backdrop of the Midwest accent. Oh, yes. And most importantly, the recall of hypnotically acquired information by very specific signals. To that last point, Gottlieb had also assigned the chair of the psychology department at the University of Oklahoma, a guy named Dr. Jolly on West jolly to his friends with sub project 43, researching disassociative states under jolly supervision, sub project 43 tested drugs in a special chamber that attempted to use hypnotic, pharmacological and sensory

environment variables to manipulate the subject into altered personalities. In other words, if sub project 43 could figure out how to alter personalities and sub project five could use hypnosis to acquire information through specific signals, then Sidney Gottlieb was that much closer to delivering an MK ultra agent. And you know how Mormons were so happy. They're like, we're finally going to fix our son, Greg. This is it. We're going to make him love not having coffee.

That's right. But concerning jolly West, he, like many MK ultra subcontractors, had a mad scientist streak. Oh, yes. Oh, good. Distorted. That's what I like. I love that.

Mad scientist streak. In 1962, jolly shot a dart containing 300,000 micrograms of LSD into an elephant named Tusco at the zoo in Oklahoma City. I don't know what he was trying to accomplish. If LSD is in a bigger thing, it will have more of an effect. Is it? I mean, honestly, he just may have wanted to see this elephant fucked up. He might have truly just wanted to see the pink elephants from fucking Penoch.

Or do elephants, do you think if elephants are alcoholics, they see pink humans? He just want to end myself. Here's a blow dart. He gave this elephant a hundred thousand times the regular LSD dose, or at least what you give a human. You should have just started small, waited 45 minutes, then add a little bit, add a little bit. You wait an hour and a half.

You don't wait 45 minutes. You wait an hour and a half. Ask the elephant. I'm just trying to have fun. Also, an elephant never forgets this is a nightmare. It's a fucking lost cause. Oh, dude. I mean, the elephant didn't need to fucking forget.

Five minutes later, it fell over, shat itself, had a seizure, and died. Science. It's horrible. It's what science? It's useful. It is the science. You just made a new, you know what you just did? You just made four end tables.

That's fantastic. Just from the legs. You got to throw the rest of the corpse away cause it's fucking useless. I, well, I don't, I don't know. Now one might think that MKUltra would contain its experiments to medical or scientific professionals. But since the Cold War was all hands on deck, one of the very first people recruited into the program was a magician named John Mulholland. I would like to think, I would like to hope cause magicians show up all the time and you

always want to do like, hello, like that style, but I'm thinking he's a Chris Angel type. You think so? Brooding. Showing up and like, where's your girlfriend? How much does Annie's disappear? Like, he has a very long happy trail, like he's that guy who has like a fucking three foot long happy trail that goes right up to the shaft of his beautiful penis. Oh, okay.

So we have kind of a Chris Angel type magician. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of necklaces. Absolutely. Yes. Well, Mulholland had been a close friend and protege of Harry Houdini and claimed that no man could be considered a magician until he was able to quote skillfully perform the cup and ball.

What's the cup and ball? I know. I've heard that line before. And I'm sick of applying to these magician schools to only get right. I am sick of it. The cup and balls, Mike. The cup and balls, it's when you get three cups and you get the ball. Yes, indeed.

Now Mulholland was somewhat of a celebrity who rubbed elbows with Dorothy Parker, Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor and Orson Wells. I know you recognize at least one of those names. Jimmy Durante. No. Jimmy Durante, he may have transferred over. I don't think Jimmy Durante is alive in the zoomer generation. I feel like Jimmy Durante was his generation's Abe Vagoda, where he was just kind of like

known, but I don't know why. I don't know. I don't know. John Mulholland also edited a professional journal for illusionists called The Sphinx. But every time you put it on the table, it disappears. The only magic trick is the price keeps going up. Slation. And John Mulholland had a personal library of over 6,000 books on magic that was eventually

purchased by David Copperfield. Or George H. W. Bush. His favorite joke, David Copperfield. That's indeed. Mulholland was also an accomplished author of books about stage magic. And once World War II began, Mulholland's book is my favorite magic book title ever, The Art of Illusion, Magic for Men to Do. This is magic for men to do.

It's not like how you can magically make a pussy on yourself, a V, take you dick and you shove the head of it in your asshole. Now you're not so lonely, are you? That was distributed to members of the armed services as entertainment. Okay. Now since Mulholland's book Magic for Men to Do had been so popular with the military, his name was well known to intelligent services. Additionally, Mulholland also had the same failed Patriot Complex as Sidney Gottlieb.

Because Mulholland had been denied the chance to fight in World War I because of rheumatic fever. I was going to go to the war, but I was sick. That's too bad. That's what I would do if you were dragging me into a future war, just go, I don't think I could. I just am so. You're a Navy boy, you're immediately going to be put on the Navy ship.

Yeah, dude. So when Gottlieb approached Mulholland to serve his country with MKUltra, the magician jumped at the chance. Now since Mulholland was a master of illusion, his first job was to train CIA agents to covertly deliver poisons, both hallucinogenic and deadly. Look at the bird, look at the bird, look at the bird, look at the bird, your poison. Oh! It's that easy to do, it's that easy.

That was pretty good. What if I don't have a bird? You're fucked! You're gonna get a bird. God. First of all, honestly, if we are not, if there's not a bird budget here, then this entire operation is a bust. All right.

Well, every member of the CIA now gets a bird. Oh man, that would be amazing if we had a whole fucking branch of our covert services. This bird scientist. Just do it with birds. Stupid birds. You know what they were up to, that's for sure. These instructions about covertly slipping poisons were so successful that Gottlieb commissioned Mulholland to write a training manual for CIA officers, and Gottlieb requested

this using his alias, Sherman Grifford, which sounds like one of those stupid fucking names Holden used to make up on Roundtable. It is. Sherman Grifford. Well, you know, we find out, you know, they gotta make names, like, CIA's gotta make up names all the time, so eventually they get stupider and stupider. They're busy. Yeah.

I mean, look at what parents are doing these days. Yeah. Yeah. This manual. Yeah. God, God. Yeah. Oh, look.

You notice the names are different than when I was a kid. Yeah, wow. The names. Whatever happened, the names like Pete. Yeah, now they're all named like Peter, but it's like P-E-T-E slash her, and it's very interesting. It's hard. Yeah, it's hard to be a teacher.

Now, this manual called Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception Was Long Thought to Be Lost, recently, however, it resurfaced in totality, making it the, and this is serious, the only MK Ultra document to survive completely intact. Whoa. Yeah. It's wild. It's a fun document. Like, I was reading through it.

It's very fun. Like, it's a lot of party tricks. Cool. Yeah. For an example of how weird all this shit was, the manual refers to everything in euphemisms. CIA officers were performers, toxins were materials, targets were spectators, and the act of poisoning was called a trick. In total, Mulholland's manual was divided into five sections, starting with the bases

for successful performance and the background psychological principles by which they operate. From there, it moved on to, quote, tricks with pills, tricks whereby small objects could be obtained, tricks with liquids, and tricks with loose solids. Honestly, with loose solids, it's better to just leave them alone. We don't need to be all tactile. I don't. Loose solid is so gross. I don't even know what that means.

Jello? Jello. It just feels like you're re-weaponizing Jello. Is that where we got to in fucking 1950s? Manays. Whoa. We already saw the weaponized mayonnaise story in side stories. Exactly.

In practice, the manual taught such tricks as how to flick a pill into a victim's drink while distracting him by lighting a cigarette. Over here. Over here. Over here. Look over here. Uh-huh. It also told how capsules could be hidden in than ejected from wallets, notebooks, or

paper pads. It told of how venom could be concealed in a ring, how toxic powders could be dispensed from the eraser cavity of a lead pencil, and how to spray liquid on a solid, like bread, without either the action or the result being noticed. It's bonacca. It's bonacca. What you do is you pump it up your butthole, and then take it to the bathroom, and then you just kind of let it fall out onto the bread, and you're like, here's your bread.

That's like a thousand times more difficult than just spraying it on the bread though. I didn't write the manual. The guy's like, you just brought bread from the bathroom? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, great. I always like dry bread.

Yeah. Now, so far, we've discussed interrogation techniques, hypnotism, and practical spy craft. But MKUltra's main focus was how LSD could be used in the service of mind control. That's the special sauce of MKUltra. That's where they were like, this is what's going to be the real key, and we're just going to apply all of these other various tricks and trades of the spy craft to this, because they'd already been interested in all these magic trick bullshit Sidney Gottlieb's book is all full of that.

But the main focus is all the same thing where that's where they put forward. The CIA always puts all of these like fun like bits of trivia about them. Like they love talking about that. The International Spy Museum is all about that, where it's just like, look at all these fun things we do. And meanwhile, like, I don't know if any of this shit works. I don't think any of these guys are magicians. Mind control was the main goal though.

Oh, yeah. And all the time. So these are just little fun side quests. They just wanted to hang out with magicians. Yes. I mean, they are fun side quests, but, you know, it's also, but with the magician, it's also about delivering these poisons, it's about delivering LSD, because they wanted this both for practical like field use and for, you know, interrogation use and for creating

their own agents. MKUltra had a lot of different tentacles out there, but mind control really was the main thing and they thought that LSD was the secret key to mind control. Something like an octopus or something. Some kind of bad repute. So Gottlieb started with the basics, commissioning tests to see just how much LSD a guy could take. Sign me up, bruh.

Yeah, bruh. There was one summer there. From there, Gottlieb moved on to how much LSD it would take to completely shatter a man's consciousness so it could be replaced with a new personality or new impulses. I'm going to cover this more in later episodes, but if you look at the Cubark like interrogation manual the CIA uses, like talk about this, that's kind of when the idea of hypnosis would come in. The idea is that you just fuck up a guy for a while and then you start doing things.

Why don't they just realize the person that they're dealing with and retroactively try to figure out how to convince them to do these things without breaking their brains? It's because people don't want to do them. They don't want to do the things, they don't want to defend against their government, they don't want to get executed but they're released, they don't want to be in the prison anymore but they also don't want to cooperate with you. I could find someone who wants to get executed. I mean, no, that's easy now, especially these tiktok.

Tiktok. It's like in Craigslist. Well, they had this first bit of research, Gottlieb hired a man named Harris Isbel, director of research at the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky. Where Isbel had his pick of inmates from the prison system, mostly Isbel used black inmates because they were considered the most expendable of all. This is again, we're going to see a common thread where we talk about in our true crime episodes and serial kill episodes about the last dead, what these guys understood too

is that what you do is you look at the least protected members of society, prisoners and people that are in insane asylum and all this kind of shit and you use those guys and that's what we'll find out, we'll get information from these guys and it's going to happen again and again and again and again throughout this whole story. Indigenous people as well, of course, very sad. Under many different sub-projects, Isbel conducted such experiments as testing whether LSD or mescaline could make users more susceptible to hypnosis, the effects of drugs that produce delusion or delirium and pharmacological studies to develop new quote unquote, psychochemicals

just in case LSD didn't work out. Okay. Now, even though this research was funded by the CIA, Isbel, like many others who experimented with mind-altering drugs, made no secret of what he was doing. He wrote hundreds of scientific articles based on his research, but in those articles, he always referred to his subjects as quote unquote, volunteers. Anybody's a volunteer if you ask them to do something and you put a hand on either side of their heads and you make them nod, you would go like, you squished their head up and down

and you're like, see, we got, we see, he's a volunteer. Oh man, you made me think about that, nothing, that Gordon Ramsay, when he put the slice. The sandwich, we call that an idiot sandwich. The person in idiot sandwich, I remember, I remember, I remember, I was like, oh, it's amazing. Yeah, you fucking, you fucking donkey. You're such a dog, you're such a dog, you're such an idiot sandwich, I guess it was. And technically, I suppose you could call these men volunteers in the loosest sense,

but the manner in which their cooperation was gained was by no means ethical and could very well be considered evil. None of the so-called volunteers were told what drug they were taking nor what the effect might be and many were bribed with high-grade heroin, which is not the most ethical reward when you're running a place called the Addiction Research Center. They're like, oh shit, I can get the best stuff, here at the center? Well, this is awesome, yeah, it doesn't seem like they're volunteers. We're really experimenting on just how groovy this smack is and whether or not anyone else

would enjoy the Velvet Underground to its peak of enjoyment. Oh wow. In one experiment, Isbel gave an inmate 170 micrograms of LSD, which caused the inmate to feel that he might die or become permanently insane. The inmate said he'd never do it again, but agreed to repeat the experiment after, quote unquote, considerable persuasion. He's forced to. Yeah.

Well, no, not really. Well, you get everything taken from you. You get things taken from you. No, it's not what you get taken from you, it's what you get given. What they did with these experiments, it was about positive reinforcement, because that considerable persuasion. Oh wow. Oh wow.

I mean, it's just horrible. In a horrible way. I mean, considerable persuasion meant more comfortable cells, better prison jobs or good time credit that could go towards early release. But mostly, Isbel was just exploding the addictions of these prisoners. Mostly he used heroin. That's what they chose most of the time. And the goal of the experiment is to, it's not to see how LSD just works, it's to see

how much LSD a human brain and mind can take. So it's not like, it's not a fun time. I cut tabs in half now. That's where I'm at, like I cut a tab in half and I do half of it like, and that's cool. That's 12 hours. Yeah, because you're not a prisoner who said their constitutional rights completely stripped away from them. Not yet.

You still have autonomy and stuff. But the whole thing, the saddest part is, all of this is for fucking, it's so stupid. They just want to figure out how fucked up you get on a droid that gets you fucked up. Yes. And what it's like. It's just so stupid. It's what they did in Nazi fucking Germany. Exactly.

It's unit 731 again, but light. Right? Yeah. It's a light version. Well, that's what they're doing is that they're trying to create an, they're trying to create a theory. They're trying to create a working theory. A body of knowledge.

Right. Yeah, body of knowledge. Like, you know, the whole idea of, you know, the sum is greater than the equal of its parts, you know, where you have an, like if you have all of the pieces of a car, a car is fucking useless. But if you put it all together, then you have a car. And what they're trying to do is they're basically trying to build a car without knowing what a car looks like.

So they're just trying fucking anything. Yeah. They're trying to gain as much knowledge as they can. That's a new award that I'm presenting analogy of the day. Really? Thank you. Thank God. We need more awards in this society.

They really help. Now, as the experiments continued, Isbel found five inmates who volunteered to take LSD every day. And after months of continual dosing, Isbel almost doubled the dosage to 300 micrograms, which in layman's terms, is a tripping balls amount. Oh yeah. This is when you can taste the acid. You know, like it's like so much acid, you can, it has a flavor.

These men reported massive anxiety as well as feelings of unreality, electric shocks on the skin, tingling sensations, choking, abnormal coloration, spinning circles of color and distortions in the sizes of inanimate objects. Taking things further, Isbel expanded his experiment group to seven inmates and kept them on LSD for 77 days straight, doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the doses from previous experiments. Perhaps not surprisingly, these experiments were only between Isbel and Stanley Gottlieb. These weren't published.

Yeah. I think I turned into a gargoyle, or like at some point, do you think one of them just turned into pure energy, just like disappeared, like just be like, bye, I'm going through the bar now. Like that's what I would, you hope that the idea you're tripping that hard for that long that you've seen through the veil, you know how to time travel. Think you just end up in the fetal position, kind of puking on yourself. I think you just, yeah, you become a shattered ventriloquist dummy every person.

Right. And you start calling your penis a faucet and you start drinking out of it. I was like, look, I'll make my own water. Well think of it this way. Like all of us have, you know, we have decades of cultural experience with LSD. We have so much context. Movies have taught us what to do with it, music, we have there all that kind of shit. Yeah.

We know what it is. We know what a trip is like. We know all of this shit. It's a part of the, it's a part of the fucking collective unconsciousness now. Back then, this is 1952, 53, these guys have no idea what's happening with them. They might have been abducted by aliens. Yeah. But Isabel didn't just experiment on black inmates.

In one case, he chose a white former senator named William Henry Wall, who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for illegally taking the painkiller, Demerall. I'm rooting for this one. Fucking get to it. Let's see what he does. I don't know why. Every senator should be fucking dosed. Why?

But that doesn't see. I don't know. What's, this was the middle of the communist witch hunt. Joseph McCarthy never got to, was sent to prison. This man was sent to prison for Demerall? Demerall, yeah, he had, for illegally taking, yeah, well, I mean it's, no, it's what happens nowadays where you get people who get prescribed oxy and then they get addicted to oxy and then they go to prison for getting more, they get, they go to prison for illegally buying

oxy. This is exactly what happened with this guy, but with Demerall, the secular family should be in prison. Yeah. Oh yeah. No, I mean this guy was, it was just Demerall after a fucking, um, dentist appointment. Like he had been given Demerall after like a root canal and then got, now how many more teeth do you have?

I think, how many more teeth do you think you can pull? I'm pretty certain you give me enough Demerall, them teeth are going to grow back. All right. So he's in there for Demerall. Reportedly the LSD experiments left wall mentally crippled. And for the rest of his life, he suffered from delusions, paranoia, panic attacks and suicidal impulses. However, the addiction center was by no means the only American prison where LSD experiments

happened. Carl Pfeiffer, chairman of the department of pharmacology at Emory University, ran four MK ultra sub projects that studied ways to induce psychotic states in normal and schizophrenic human beings using LSD and other drugs. Like what's the thing that we can give you to make you go into berserk remote? Right. So you'll do a bunch of fucked up shit in an afternoon. And he's doing this on schizophrenic prisoners.

Jesus. But apparently the schizophrenic prisoners of what I was reading, when he went to do this experiment, he found that the people with schizophrenia reacted to LSD different than the people who didn't have schizophrenia were like, honestly, the LSD and the schizophrenic patients, like it had no effect. It may have just been like, welcome to the party. Seriously. I don't think it like me, now like, now do I make sense?

And then the other dude is way nuts. You do make sense. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that makes sense. Well, pursuant to the CIA, this guy evaluated hallucinogenic materials of interest to the CIA's technical services, reporting induced psychosis on inmates that lasted for days characterized by repeated waves of depersonalization, visual hallucinations, and feelings of unreality.

Interestingly, infamous Boston gangster James Whitey Bulger was one of Pfeiffer's subjects. We have to cover him eventually, because he's fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. Because he was an undercover informant the whole time. We'll get into something like that, but yeah, that's a crazy story. Well, Bulger was incarcerated at the Atlanta Federal Prison for armed robbery and truck hijacking, but had not yet committed the 19 murders for which he was later charged. From what Bulger was told in prison, though, he was volunteering for an experiment that

was testing drugs to find a cure for schizophrenia. So he and 19 other inmates were given LSD every day for 15 months. That's a lot. Well, that's how you get the nickname Whitey. Yep. Wow. Holy shit. Later in one of the few credible MK Ultra reports from a victim's perspective, Bulger

wrote that he constantly heard voices and saw movements in his cell, but refused to tell anyone what he was seeing because he was afraid he'd be committed for life. And is that weird? That's like the superpower of an officer that until later when they moved to Florida and they start talking, or it's like the idea of like keeping his mouth shut as he's just like watching all the shit happen around him, that's a true criminal. There's something about Florida. It makes people very talkative.

It does. I don't know why. After being injected with large doses of LSD, Bulger said that eight to 10 men in suits would give the subjects tests to see their reactions, inducing hallucinogenic states of panic and paranoia for hours at a time in what Bulger called a living nightmare. This is like when I was forced to do pull-ups in gym and everyone fucking knew I couldn't do a pull-up. And they're all laughing.

They make you go try to do it and then, oh, what a horrible situation. From what Bulger said, he saw blood coming out of the walls. He saw men turning into skeletons before his very eyes. You would be cool if you forgot this. He saw a camera change into the head of a dog. That's too much acid, man. You take it too much. If you walk up to a camera going, oh, he's gone.

Then while the men were hooked up to machines, the scientists would ask questions. They'd ask, hey, you ever killed anyone? Hey, you ever thought about killing anybody? Yeah, I mean constantly thinking about it. Can we put some fucking, like, police brothers on this? Yeah, try by truckers or something. Now while Bulger came out the other end, others in this experiment lost their mind completely. Some had to be pried loose from under their beds, growling, barking, and frothing at the

mouth. This I understand. Bulger said that after these men were taken to a strip cell down the hall, none of them were ever seen again. Oh, that's fucking horrifying. I mean, they might have taken them to a different part of the prison, but they also might have just took them out back and shot them in the fucking head. Yeah, buried them in one of the nameless, grave-less prison graveyards.

Now outside of the prison system, Gottlieb also contracted a psychiatrist at Stanford University named James Hamilton, who'd worked with George Hunter White on the OSS Truth Serum Project and had advised the Chemical Corps on Biological Warfare. Among the three MK Ultra subcontracts Hamilton headed, he studied, quote, synergistic actions of drugs that may be appropriate in abolishing consciousness. That's not good. I really need my consciousness. What are you, uh, what are you studying?

We're trying to get rid of the operating system that you live in. Oh, okay. And he was researching methods to enable the administration of these drugs without the patient's knowledge. You know, now that I think about it, it seems like most of the names we're talking about are male other than MK Naomi, which is the secretary. Maybe a woman could have helped you. You know, maybe just like, what are you doing?

The woman they trot out that is like the friendly face of the CIA at this time. I forget what her name is. It's like the former director and she's this cute little lady and she's like, oh, you know, we just sit at the desk and we read vitals and just be like, you fucking traitor is bitch. You fucking, you all need to go to the hang. Oh yeah. We all know what happened when that wonderful woman Janet Reno was put in charge.

He did. Play my song. Play my song. Oh yes. We love Waco. Well, also in the, we do, we love you Waco. Also in the Ivy League, a psychiatrist named Robert Hyde experimented on students from Harvard, Emerson and MIT, and all of these people were unwittingly participating in the

CIA's research into mind control. No, I got the conclusion here. They're all spoiled brats. Yeah, but you nerds. Hello, spoiled brats. For the paltry sum of $15, students drank a vial of clear, colorless, odorless liquid that they were told might produce a quote unquote altered state, maybe. I remember licking a powder out of an Altoid can at the creek, so that was for free.

They got paid 15 bucks. Yeah, they used to pay five bucks for a cup of that. However, no one involved in the study had the proper training to guide the participants, nor did they have the proper training to even know what the participants were going through. And the reactions were so severe, one girl hanged herself in the clinic bathroom. What? Yeah. No, don't do that.

You don't go out. It's very difficult, especially if you have other ungnosed mental illnesses with it. And then you just get shot hardcore down a fucking tube of your own mind. You got soft rooms, blow up castles, man. Come on. Well, they had no idea. They had no idea. The CIA has the best fricking drugs.

They just needed to get a play. They needed Chip and Joe. Yeah, they did. They needed someone to come and fix up these places. Which is why they hired him. Absolutely. Because they got the fucking drugs to the right people, we got one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

I mean, it's fucking insane what happens. It helps. Fantastic movie. Yeah. Well, book. They made a book out of that movie. Yes. It never fails.

Life from your grave. But perhaps the most infamous Ivy League study that is suspected to have been funded by MK Ultramoney involved Ted Kaczynski. I will have my revenge. Ted, you actually will. Yeah. Yeah. He's got cancer now.

Does he really? Well, he's had a run. He's like in his 80s. Yeah. Yeah. Ted Kaczynski, of course, is the unabomber. In Ted's second year at Harvard, when he was just 17 years old, he volunteered for a study run by a doctor named Henry Murray.

Now, there was no drugs involved in this study. This was pure psychological mumbo jumbo. And over the course of three years, Kaczynski and other students were subjected to aggressive traumatizing sessions in which Murray had them confessed to their most revered beliefs. Then once Murray had all of their beliefs all typed up in a nice little file, he'd go in and rip those beliefs and the subjects apart during brutal interrogation sessions. That's what you believe in? Let's see what Reddit thinks.

They just went through and just showed all of the various shithead opinions. You just see what the Ted Kaczynski file, just be like, I'm actually going to file this one under, we'll come back to haunt me. That's great. Smells like old milk. Nice. Okay. Good.

Well, the point of this study, Murray said, was to test how subjects would emotionally respond to extreme stress and interrogation. But all it did to Ted Kaczynski, who was never what you'd call well-adjusted, was destroy his entire sense of self. He was never at the same after the experiments at Harvard. And it's not a coincidence that almost half of Kaczynski's mail bombs were sent to universities after he escaped society to a remote shack in Montana. They made a supervillain.

Dude, and then you start to, and then you can see why when you start to read Program to Kill, how it begins to start to make sense in some ways, where like Program to Kill jumps off the reservation, like this is one of those where you're like, well, that's a direct fucking result of MK Ultra, so, well, they got one on the, got one Program to Kill Zero America. But they did not program him to kill. Like they did not. They just programmed him to not be him anymore.

Yeah. Well, they just didn't give a shit. Like that's the whole thing about all of this. They just don't fucking care what happens. It's all chaos. Yeah. All of it. Now, outside of academia, Sidney Gottlieb trusted his fellow MK Ultra scientists with

LSD in social settings. Oh, that's going to work out great. I mean, the idea, you got to see how it works operationally. Start to dance in like a lane from Seinfeld. Now, people did a lot more than that. Actually, they would say that sometimes Sidney Gottlieb would do a bunch of acid and like show off his folk dancing. Folk dancing!

I can't. How do you do the thing where they click and you like kick their feet together and then they slide more arms and say that? Dang. So, specifically, Gottlieb would supply acid for recreational use to Harold Abramson, who, if you'll remember, guided Gottlieb through his first acid trip. Do you think you have to sit and talk about fucking soccer with Gottlieb for an hour like after you get it?

Like, is this where the actual ceremony of hanging out with your dealer began? Oh, yeah, it sucked, dude. Reportedly, Abramson would distribute acid to guests at his Long Island home during parties. These parties were, according to a source, quote, Wild and Crazy, along with all the sex and what have you, so, Fondue, Salsa was everywhere. Everywhere, yeah, Wild and Crazy, and the other one was Wild and Woolly. Yep, Woolly. And these are just LSD fuck parties.

He thinks I don't get horny on hallucinogens. No, not like, no man, it's weird, it's weird. Do reach his own, then. Do reach his own. Do reach his own, he's a little horned up, he's a little horny dog. I'm a horny too, but... Well, yeah, yeah, but, you know, I mean, on hallucinogens, it can be an absolutely beautiful experience.

Interesting. Okay. But from what that same person said, you would be very, very surprised, and those are the words that he used, very, very surprised, at who attended some of these LSD fuck parties. It was all celebrities, which is why they get pulled into this shit, too. It's the same thing, that they all started kind of mixing. I thought you were gonna say hard-working middle-class people with fans. You would be very surprised.

Wow. You would be like five line workers in car-hards, judge-jackets. But outside of the hallucinogenic sex parties, Gottlieb gave Abramson $85,000 in MKUltra funding to perform LSD experiments that were supposed to surmise disturbance of memory, the eliciting of information, suggestibility, creation of dependence, and, of course, alteration of sex patterns. Oh, they're gonna unlock so much magical information. It's all the leading ass.

It's all the mind of those actors. Yeah, it's the leading asshole. Sucking dick. Well, among these experiments with adults, though, Abramson is also the only MKUltra scientist known to experiment on children. Well, we know that he, so we have proof that he did. So it probably happened more than this. Yes, probably, I think so.

Abramson gave prepubescent boys psilocybin and fed 14 children between the ages of six and 11 that were all diagnosed with schizophrenia, 100 micrograms of LSD every day for six weeks. I mean, Dweezel Zappa was on the same diet, and look how successful he is. I guess so, but it's so, man, that's horrible. But also back in the 1950s, diagnosed with schizophrenia doesn't mean schizophrenia because schizophrenia was the catch all back then. No, you were like a little boy who kind of wanted to play with dolls, and they were like, schizophrenic, we need to fucking blast his brain.

Yeah. Definitely, these are probably kids with emotional problems, but still, you're giving 100 micrograms of LSD to a child. But while many of the subjects of MKUltra experiments were drug addicts, prisoners, students, and mental patients, the scientists in charge also experimented quite a bit on themselves. Now, they'd already been dosing each other here and there during artichoke, but during MKUltra, they took it to the next level.

Since there was a considerable difference between testing LSD in a laboratory and using it in the real world, Gottlieb and his colleagues began in-house experiments designed to find out what would happen if you gave LSD to a subject in a normal life setting without warning. Oh my God, I wonder what's going to happen. High paranoia. Yeah, that checks out. To prepare for these experiments, scientists would go into a room two at a time, drop acid together, and observe each other for hours, taking notes and analyzing their separate

experiences. We should do this with the three of us. No, what is it, like, Bette Miller and Lily Tomlin in, oh, that fantastic movie, Street Margin for a Dollar, Chubby Girls were a plaid, Chin, two girls go to the execution chamber. No, not two girls. Prince of Beaches. Beaches.

No, you guys wouldn't even know the movie I'm thinking of, because I think it's Beaches. No, it was a fantastic movie. They played twins. I remember. I don't remember. I don't remember at all. But once everybody was comfortable with tripping on LSD, they agreed to have acid slipped into their drink at any time.

It's like being on set for a Jackass movie, where everything's redone. And they never knew when their turn would come. But once the acid was ingested, they were eventually told that they'd been dosed, and they were told they could also take the rest of the day off. Yeah, man, your day is over. Your working day is now over. I guess it must be kind of nice, too. But when the limits of testing experienced psychonauts was reached, they started dosing

agency personnel who had never tripped before, to the point where surprise acid trips became an occupational hazard for CIA operatives. The tests actually went so far that a few members of the technical services staff actually planned to put acid in the punch served at the CIA Christmas party in 1954. They're still doing this shit. I know they're still doing this shit. Hey, honey, I was drugged at work today, and I loosened my tie just a little bit. I got pretty crazy.

We need to put you in the sanitary room. I know. That's all. I disagree. You're on mode. The Office of Security learned of the plan, they put the kibosh on the whole scheme. Don't put the acid in the punch bowl at the Christmas party. It's a bad idea.

Wait till New Year's Eve, I guess. These surprise acid trips didn't always work out well. When one operative realized he'd been dosed, he fled out into the streets of Washington, D.C., hallucinating that every car had turned into a living monster with horrific eyes, but all of them were out to get him. You're going to want to escape from that. I know exactly that feeling. I have left.

I remember leaving the creek. I remember just walking the streets, just like, but somehow I got home. I don't remember how I got to a bus station. I remember spending some time in a bush. For hours. Yeah, dude, this agent would hide behind parapets every time a car would drive by. You can get me, man. It couldn't be a great day, but I think he was probably not having fun.

He said that it was like living a horrific dream about someone chasing you that never stops. It was real bad. Just be, you know, although I'd love to trip in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. That place gives me high paranoid vibes, man. Oh, man. That's it.

He drives me crazy. Love, D.C. But without a doubt, the most well-known story of a surprise dosing involved Frank Olson, whose death nearly blew the lid off the whole MKUltra project. Frank Olson played incredibly by Peter Skarsgaard in the Wyrmwood series, the Errol Morris documentary series on Netflix. It's fantastic. But like, this guy was not a good fit for the job that he was chosen for.

He was not the type of person who was built for MKUltra work. But he did also participate in biological research that some might consider evil. He was not. But Frank Olson was not a blameless citizen. No. But he didn't feel like he's a sad sack who got pulled into these various things, because before this, he was working in the agricultural sciences. And then he kind of got, he got drafted.

I mean, he definitely got drafted into like the whole World War II like scene, but everybody's got to do everything they can for the country. Don't ask questions about what we're asking you to do. Frank's introduction to the world of covert operations began when Ira Baldwin called on him to assist in research into biological warfare at Edgewood Arsenal. And Olson was actually one of the first scientists assigned to Fort Dietrich. Remember that's a place where they sent the Nazis and such. Yes.

And Frank Olson, what's also interesting just about his story is that his is an encapsulation of the entire movement from part project Artichoke to MKUltra, because he was featured in all of the original biological experiments that they were doing for bio warfare and moved through all of the darkest chapter of intelligence, spook history, he was there for it. Oh, he's an MKUltra centerfold. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he showed up at Fort Dietrich and oh my God, there's a fucking Nazi here.

He's like, I hope you like sausages. Actually, I kind of do like sausages. That's the thing of Bavarian pretzel is actually good. By 1949, Frank Olson was acting chief of the special operations division, the SOD, and he was tasked with collecting data on medical biological aspects by the CIA. So Frank traveled to Antigua for operation harness, which tested toxic clouds on animals. And guess what? It spilled over.

Yeah. Some people got sick as well. What a coincidence. Yeah. How'd the animals do? They didn't do well, huh? He participated in Operation Seaspray in San Francisco, which we talked about last episode, one fatality there.

And on Plum Island, just off the coast of Long Island, he tested toxins deemed too deadly to be brought to the US mainland. So you're going to want to give it a good 10 mile range. Yeah, you don't think that's a Plum Island there, right near Long Island. Yeah. Well, you don't want these guys to have too long of a commute, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They charge for the island.

No, I love it. They got your gas. Yeah. I love the idea of a bunch of drugged up mafioso dudes. That's a great idea. Oh, yeah. It's a great idea. Weapons-wise, Olsen developed handheld anthrax aerosols disguised as cans of shaving cream,

asthma spray that induced pneumonia, and a lipstick that would kill on contact. But by 1953, Olsen had to step down as acting chief of the SOD because the pressures of the job were giving him massive ulcers. But he still stayed with the SOD, and the SOD was by then working closely with the CIA on MKUltra. Working out of Fort Detrick, Olsen mostly conducted experiments involving poisoning animals. According to his son, Olsen would come to work in the morning and see just piles of

dead monkeys. And Frank Olsen was not the right guy for that kind of job. Because everybody's high-fiving each other, right? Great work. Great work. Like, he is, you know, Frank Olsen was a bit of a, he's a sad sack, right? He's a bit of an e-or already. I think that would be, it would make me sad.

No, yes. But he was already not fit for any of this stuff. And he kept kind of being dragged along with these various things, because you know, love of country, feeling of duty, like he's supposed to do these things, he has the skillset to do it. He's already killed people, so he might as well just kill these monkeys as well. Yeah. I don't think e-or would do anything like that.

You get e-or involved in the bio-weapons. You could use some acid, probably. I bet if e-or be like, yeah, let's drop the bomb, like he's ready to go, he's suicidal himself. Yeah. I mean, yeah. You put someone like that in charge of a bunch of shit, and we're all living in a fucking crater.

We're in his world now. We're in e-or's world. But maybe that's exactly what he wanted, and he would handle it all really well. Maybe he just wanted a little bit of fucking respect. Oh, so we now have the e-or defender? I think we give it to Tigger. I love e-or. Where's Tigger in this?

Well, he is having fun. He's already successful. Yeah. He's playing basketball. Now, Frank Olsen just didn't, he didn't have the temperament for this sort of work, but he was also there while all of this work was going on, and he watched all of it happen. He didn't torture humans directly, but since he was a part of this program going all the way back to the OSS days, he observed and monitored quite a bit of torture.

He was at Vila Schuster in Germany. He saw the shit. He watched it. He wrote reports. I will say, he didn't like it. Well, I know. He didn't do anything about it. He didn't.

He didn't like it. Oh, yeah. I know. Maybe his hands were tied, I guess. Now, Frank Olsen wasn't feeling great about his work with the CIA, and it was amidst this uncertainty that Frank was invited to an SOD group retreat at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake near Frederick, Maryland. And I feel like this wasn't done, this was done kind of on purpose.

They were brought out there as they would do these fun little trips, and like, his son found a document that said, like, because it was a hunting trip, right? And that was the idea is that they go out to this hunting lodge and they will fucking hang out and they're going to talk, maybe talk some business, but it was kind of like a mixer. But I think they brought guys out there too to kind of see, like, you know, what's your loyalty like? What's your thing?

How much are you willing to? Like surviving the game? Yes. Very much so. Typically, these retreats held every few months by Sidney Gottlieb were made up of the four CIA scientists who ran MKUltra and five Army scientists from the SOD. And one of those scientists was Frank Olson. But on this occasion, on the first night, Gottlieb announced after dinner that he'd

dosed all of them with LSD. Yay. It's not good because you're with these guys. Yeah. And the rest, they just kind of took it in stride. They laughed it off. But Olson became very upset. Uh-oh.

He was very confused and very agitated. Because he'd never dropped acid, nor had he ever wanted to. And you're dropping acid with the four dudes in charge of MKUltra. Well, have fun with it. These are not the trip-sitters you want. Or I don't know. Because the good thing is that he kept saying they laughed at me. They laughed at me.

Yeah, but of course, they were laughing at him. They're CIA. But you know, sometimes Ol takes his one, like, you know, that Ben Fold story, guy up in the tree. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know that one. The next day, Olson returned home and refused to speak to his wife about what had happened on the retreat, saying only, quote, I've made a terrible mistake. Oh, man.

She probably thinks he did something a lot worse than he actually did. Well, you know what, like, both, you know, because her first question is, did you break security protocol? And he's like, of course not. I'd never do that. But I've made a terrible mistake. Yeah. And there are many theories proposed over the years as to what Frank Olson's terrible

mistake statement actually meant. He could have pooped his pants. Yeah, I mean, it's acid, dude. Yeah, I don't know. But still. But everyone else is on acid. I mean, I think people... You forget that perspective.

I mean, the most popular theory is that in the midst of the trip, Olson lost his cool and threatened to expose MKUltra, along with all the other shady shit that he'd done in the government's name over the years. He's such a... Not to be anything. He's such a company man, and he was not a... He was not a dynamic personality. No.

So I don't know if it went that far, but I like what his son said. His son... His point makes more sense. Yeah. According to Frank Olson's son, his father probably just finally realized the sort of people he'd actually been working for this whole time. Because it's all three of us know hallucinogens have a way of putting shit in a perspective. Oh, yeah.

Because now... Because this is the danger of acid within these groups, right? Because we've said this. Most of them, like, had no reaction. They were like, all right, whatever. I'm seeing things. But every once in a while, they had the enlightened agent that would get... They would get what acid is supposed to do, and it opens your perspective, and then all

of a sudden, they're not as good at their job anymore. I've got to get out of here. I'm going to go join the circus. True. Well, it's all the shit over the years that he has known is wrong, but he's going to push to the back of his head by saying... By using patriotism or using service for his... Fighting the communists.

And now he's taken acid, and he finally sees, oh my God, what have I done? All right. Now, after Olsen returned to work, he was obviously disoriented and kind of pissed. He openly considered resignation, which was really bad news for both the SOD and the CIA. I think you mean it was bad news for Frank Olsen. Yeah. Because if you were a part of the literal war crimes system of the United States armed forces, and then you say, I'm going to quit, it's not like chill for them because you're

supposed to harbor the secrets, the most closely held, darkest secrets within our military like arm. And now, oh, you want to be free agent now? Oh, sure. Yay. Okay. Yeah. We'll let you go.

See, Olsen had spent 10 years at Fort Dietrich and therefore knew almost everything about the SOD and MKUltra. He knew shit that was bad enough to cause international incidents if they ever got out. For one, Frank had been in France with several other SOD scientists in 1951, when an entire French village had been mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium. Dude, look this up. Look this up. It's called the 1951 Pulsal Esprit, P-O-N-T, Saint Esprit mass poisoning.

It's a wild story and there's an hour long documentary on it about these people that had been a part of an MKUltra experiment, but they didn't know. Wow. Seven people died. The official cause was ergot poisoning, but it's very likely that this was an MKUltra or maybe even a project artichoke experiment. This episode's so thick. This is so good, Spiracy Thicc.

Additionally, Frank Olsen knew the truth about the use of biological weapons during the Korean War, which again has circumstantial evidence but no proof. Frank Olsen might have given us real evidence. Furthermore, Olsen had also watched a 20-year-old soldier in London volunteer for seren testing, then very quickly foam at the mouth, collapse and die. In other words, Frank Olsen knew about a lot of dirty deeds, which is very dangerous knowledge to have when you're spinning out of control in a fit of sudden conscience. It seems like the CIA gave Olsen a chance to snap out of it, but five days after his

trip, it was obvious to the CIA that Frank Olsen was permanently and massively fucked up. He's out of pocket. Dude, the thing is, he still seems pretty upset. Yeah. He's like all upset about us dosing him or whatever, but I thought he'd be over it. Five days ago. I gave him like 72 hours to be chill.

Yeah, whatever, Frank. Get over it, dude. Eventually, word got to Sidney Gottlieb, and after a few minutes of chatting with Olsen, Gottlieb decided to deliver Frank to MK Ultra Scientist Harold Abramson in New York City. Remember Abramson's the guy with the Long Island fuckhouse, and once Olsen arrived, he told Abramson that since he'd been dosed, he couldn't sleep, couldn't focus, and he couldn't work. So after a six-hour conversation, Abramson gave Olsen a bourbon and barbituit cocktail.

Take this. It's going to make you sleep for like 19 hours. You're going to love it. It's going to be delicious. Okay. Am I being drugged again? No, absolutely not. No, no, no, no.

It's just barbituits. Wait, what? No, no, no. I'll just drink it. Okay. Then Abramson woke him up the next morning so they could go see John Mulholland, the CIA's magician. Hey, wake up.

We got to go see a magician. No, no, no. I know you're reeling from like whatever, all this kind of shit. You don't know what's real or not. Well, we got to go see a guy who does tricks for a living. Right? I don't know if I'm ready for this, but all right. I'm not really in it.

I don't want to play any, choose your card games or anything. Okay. He's a balloon animal. He's going to do it. He's going to perform for us, buddy. Well, in one account of this meeting, Mulholland tried hypnotizing Olsen in an attempt to probe his mind, see if he could find what was wrong. But in another account, which I think is actually the more likely account, Olsen freaked out

on Mulholland because he thought the magician was going to make him disappear like a rabbit. Also, saying, hey, so this is this guy. This is this super fucking cryptic MK-Ultrapsychiatrist that you're working with. He says, we're going to go see a magician, a crazy magician, which in my mind, that's code for assassin, right? That's code for like, that's the thing in mafia movies. When you're like, we're going to go take a drive, we're going to take a drive out to the beach.

And you're like, oh, fuck. And then it's you and two guys wearing ponchos in the back of it and be like, why are you wearing ponchos? Splashback. Oh, we're going to like a theme park or something. Yeah. And it could be worse, you could actually go to the beach for the bunch of mobs to hang out all day.

Once the magician got to be too much, Olsen jumped from his chair and ran out of the house. While one of his two handlers, Vincent Ruit, followed behind. Once Ruit caught Olsen, he and Olsen's other handler, Robert Lashbrook, took him to see, and this is a fun day, a magician and a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on Broadway called me and Juliet. We need to have a fun day. This is a fun day so far, I mean, I guess I could go and see you play or whatever. I mean, plays are boring and I don't even want to go.

Buddy, you are being a buzzkill and we've drugged you so much. I know, I should like all this. You really should. It's a Broadway musical, it's Rodgers and Hammerstein, come on. Come on. Have fun with it. Now Frank did make it all the way to intermission, but once they were out in the lobby, Olsen's paranoia kicked in and he became convinced that he was going to be arrested by somebody

at any moment. You're next to two members of the CIA, right? You know that something's going on, you're being bodily handled by two men all day long and then forced you to go see a musical and there's no, that's not where I want to go. It's not as bad as it could be. Because you know you're just loitering for something, like you're just waiting for something that's supposed to happen. They got to paper their room for the freaking theater, dude.

You need to go in there and support the arts. Well, it's hard to say exactly what is happening and exactly what they're trying to do or exactly what they're trying to figure out because that night they went back to the hotel and Olsen was sent to a room by himself. They didn't keep an eye on him, they didn't stay in the room with him. In fact, the next morning when they went downstairs, they found Olsen in the lobby. Olsen had wandered New York City all night long. He'd even thrown away his wallet and his identification in the process.

You know what I truly think it is? It's been their, it all tracks, it's been their philosophy all along. It's them being like, let's just see what happens because again, Frank Olsen has been a good company man for a very long time and he's really close and Frank Olsen, even though he's not acting like it, he has his own ships because he has all this fucking information. So they are watching him guardedly and trying to decide maybe he'll pop out of it. That's what I really think that they're kind of doing, waiting to kind of see maybe he'll come around.

Like we'll be in this, we're in this like safe place for the CIA, we got places everywhere we could take him and then maybe we'll just kind of see what he does and then figure out how we'll react depending on what he does. Could be, they might just love the chaos of it all. They do. Now since this all happened close to Thanksgiving, Olsen returned to his family in Maryland. But after Ruit and Lashbrook reported Olsen's state of mind to Sidney Gottlieb, Gottlieb ordered them to bring him back to New York City.

On the way, they stopped off in Long Island and picked up Harold Abramson, then all four drove to Manhattan where Abramson convinced Olsen to voluntarily commit himself to a mental hospital. Oh, great. Olsen agreed and from what Agent Lashbrook said, Frank was actually looking forward to the break, commenting that he was excited to catch up on his reading. I can't wait to be forced into rehab at some point. That'd be great.

Yeah, a lot of reading. Seven rehab. Oh my God. One day when quote unquote exhaustion catches up to me, holy shit, I can't wait. Oh, passages of Malibu seems nice. That's where I want to go. It's expensive though. I barely get great drugs then.

It's really, I'm sure, yeah, it's really expensive though. Frank Olsen, however, would never make it to that hospital. That's what his son said. His son said like, dad died? No, he disappeared. He went to New York and he just never came back. Oh yeah, no way that means he's dead. At 2.25 a.m. that night, Frank Olsen crashed through his hotel window at the Statler 10

stories up. Whoa. And he'd die in a pool of blood on the 7th Avenue sidewalk. Reportedly, he tried saying something to the hotel's doorman right before he expired, but couldn't get out the words. Oh, I know what it was. So my room's on the first floor, right? No, when police went up to Frank's room, they found one of his handlers, Robert Lashbrook,

sitting on the toilet, because the two of them have been sharing the space. That's the funny thing. Robert Lashbrook and Frank Olsen have been staying in the same room. He did a horrible job as a handler. I feel like, or he did exactly what his job as a handler, much like the baggage handlers that I've seen in various airports, and the way they treat. You're going to take this time to bitch about airport security. I am just saying, the way they treat our bags might be the way they treated a certain Frank

Olsen. Do you want to talk about how men and women drive a little differently? I am just saying, they don't necessarily view our luggage as it's their luggage. And that is a shoehorn from Henry's. What's the deal with air traffic, guys? I'm now doing you. I'm you. That's pretty funny.

Well, interestingly, Lashbrook said that he hadn't heard Olsen flinging himself through the window. Definitely not, man. Oh my God. What is this? Ace Ventura? Yep. But when police questioned the switchboard operator at the hotel, they got a different

story. The operator said that she'd connected Lashbrook to MK ultra scientist Harold Abramson after Olsen went out the window. Lashbrook said, well, he's gone. According to that, Abramson said, well, that's too bad. Oh, we didn't really didn't seem genuine, though. We need a sarcasm thought. Well, that's too bad.

Wow. Now, the police figured for some reason that this was a homosexual affair gone wrong. Why is it always? They're just lazy. They're just lazy. I don't know. Was the fifties, was it was every fucking man on man violence, every man on man murder? Was it a homosexual affair gone wrong because that seems like every fifth murder, that's

what the cops say. I don't know. I don't think that's the case. I don't know. But when Lashbrook was taken to the police station and questioned, he said that he and Olsen worked for the defense department and that Olsen had become mentally unstable. According to Lashbrook, Olsen had jumped and that was all. Because you know what?

Suicidal guys, they always take a running jump, a closed window. That was a difficult way to do it. Oh, always, just to show you how fucking, they are like super metal. They want it to be metal always. They don't ever open the window and tumble out. No, no. I like to do it the most painful possible way. But since these men worked in defense, Lashbrook said, the whole matter had to be kept quiet

for national and security reasons. All right, so, but so you're not gay? So you guys ain't kissing, huh? But you got through the same route. Listen, listen. You kiss me, show me you're not gay. Yeah, that's my point. Make sure he's not gay.

Now, let me watch, okay? Now, you guys all tumble around on the ground a little bit. Let me see if you got it hard. Yeah, turns out I'm gay. I'm gay. I'm gay. Arrest me. Put the handcuffs on me.

Congratulations. Oh, yeah. Oh, everyone's gay. That is great. 1953. Wonderful time. And once Lashbrook's status as a government employee was confirmed, he was set free. And a CIA fix-it man made sure everyone at the crime scene kept their mouths shut as

well. Now, no one will ever know what really happened with Frank Olsen that night, but it's thought that Sidney Gottlieb had decided that Frank Olsen was so ill that he threatened the security of MK Ultra. Wow. And it might have been, you know what? Frank Olsen might have just said one thing. That night.

I'mma talk. All he has to say is I'mma talk. I'mma tell everyone. Not even that. He might have just fucking joked. It's like, man, you guys are sending me in the mental institution. You're really trusting me with all these secrets. What if I fucking tell somebody about this?

Man, can I talk to myself? If he's sort of surmising what he could do. Yeah, they may have just inferred in his actions. Maybe he didn't say anything. And they're just like, oh, don't think we can trust him. Or he's going, you know, he's going to a mental hospital and they're thinking, what's he going to tell that psychiatrist? Exactly.

Well, to be honest, they would just put him in an MK-Ultra hospital. He was not going out of, he was going to go out of the network. He wasn't going out of network for this. They would also rely on everyone just not believing him. True. Absolutely. Maybe sometimes, but that's kind of that. That's what they shifted to, which is the idea of like, that's where all the satanic

ritual abuse stuff kind of gets hidden and stuck into this and all that kind of shit where like, you make it so outlandish, no one believe you. This I just think, they were already killing people. They were already killing guys. That's another one. They're just throwing out the window. And since MK-Ultra was seen as one of the most important projects in the CIA, Gottlieb had no qualms ordering Olsen's death, or so the story goes.

But what's interesting here is that even if Frank Olsen did just kill himself, it still happened as a result of Sidney Gottlieb dosing him. It had been the direct result of an MK-Ultra experiment, yet nobody really cared. As far as Alan Dulles was concerned, Gottlieb exercised nothing more than quote-unquote poor judgment. Over here at the CIA, we call that a whoopsy-doopsy. Yeah, that's a whoopsy-doopsy indeed. That's a double whoopsy-doopsy, I think.

Therefore, he was given a light reprimand. But since MK-Ultra was considered so vital, that's a slap on the wrist. Gottlieb? No. Get away from the honey mustard. I'm gonna spray you with the spray bottle. That's right. No honey mustard to launch, Gottlieb.

But since MK-Ultra was considered so vital, Sidney Gottlieb was given permission to take MK-Ultra even wider and even weirder. And that's where we'll pick back up for part four with Operation Midnight Climax and Psychic Driving. It truly does only get worse from here. Getting into season nine when they adopt a duck. Seriously. We are just getting wilder and woolier here next episode because we're really gonna start

getting into what y'all know about MK-Ultra, what comes up all the time in pop culture. This is, we're actually really starting to just hit that part. And then we'll wrap it all up with an episode five talking about where it left America and all the rest of us now, which is a shattered group of people. It's really fucked up. Well, I can't wait. It's a bit of a rough story. It is a fascinating story, a true story, and a story that I'm so happy we are covering.

Thank you all so much for supporting the show. I hope you guys are enjoying this series thus far. We have some big news regarding our serious show. We're gonna start that the 21st. 21st. So that'll be 5pm PST and 8pm EST. So call in. We'll have a number and stuff.

We'll put it on our social media. We can't wait to talk with you guys. And the comic book is out there. Soul Palmer coming out soon. Episode five. Issue five. Issue five. I forgive you for calling it out, so I keep doing that.

We just finished writing and we can't wait to do more, but hopefully we get to do more comic books. We love it so much. It's been so much fucking fun. So cool. Absolutely. We got Z2. Go check it out.

Last comic book on the left. You can pre-order that. Then we got our coffee. Have some sprinkle jackmob. And I'm still drinking. And I absolutely, it's only gotten better. The dude's just fucking. He's a wizard.

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