Modern Wisdom - #629 - John Lisle - The Insane Tactics The CIA Used To Defeat Hitler In WWII

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

John Lisle is a historian and an author. Imagine a world where international spying and espionage is only just beginning. Exploding pens, cyanide pills, bats with bombs strapped to them and radioactive foxes all were not only ideas, but were real tools used by the CIA in World War 2. John's research has uncovered a reality far stranger and more intriguing than any spy novel. Expect to learn the origins of the Modern Day CIA, why a commander decided to single-handedly storm Normandy the day after D-Day, why the CIA attempted to trans Hitler into a woman, how someone discharged an entire pistol magazine right next to Franklin Roosevelt’s head in the Oval Office, why the agency tried to release a group of glowing radioactive foxes onto the streets of Japan and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% OFF with our code MODERNWISDOM at https://calderalab.com/modernwisdom to unlock your youthful glow and be ready for summer with Caldera + Lab! #ad #calderalabpod Extra Stuff: Buy Dirty Tricks Department - https://amzn.to/3HYWvpx  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is John Lyle, he's a historian and an author. Imagine a world where international spying and espionage is only just beginning. Exploding pens, sign-eyed pills, bats with bombs strapped to them and radioactive foxes were all not only ideas, but were real tools used by the CIA during World War II. John's research has uncovered a reality far stranger and more intriguing than any spy novel, and today we get to go through it. Expect to learn the origins of the modern-day CIA, why a commander decided to single-handedly

storm Normandy the day after, D-Day, why the CIA attempted to trans-hitler into a woman? How someone discharged an entire pistol magazine right next to Franklin Roosevelt's head inside the Oval Office? Why the agency tried to release a group of glowing radioactive foxes onto the streets of Japan? And much more. So cool, so fun. This episode, John has been storming through the archives, absolutely tearing them apart, desperately trying to find all of the information that he can, these fascinating tales from World War II, it's great. I really love it. There is nothing that you need to take away from today.

You do not need to have a pen and paper out. There's nothing that you're going to add to your morning routine. You can just sit back and enjoy hilarious, fascinating stories from a really great historian. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go up. So if you want to support the show, if you want to make sure that you do not miss episodes and if you want to make me very happy indeed, just navigate to your phone and press subscribe. Ah, thank you. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Caldera Lab.

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if you go to manscaped.com slash modern wisdom, and use the code modern wisdom. At checkout, that's manscaped.com slash modern wisdom, and modern wisdom. At checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to learn about these radioactive foxes with John Lyle. What do you do? What's your job? I'm a historian. I'm a professor at the University of Texas, but I also write books. You know, this one that just came out, the Juddy Tricks Department. That's the book that I've been working on for a year, so I'm glad it is finally out there for people to enjoy, hopefully. What is the story of the Juddy Tricks Department?

What is it? How did it come about? Yeah, this is the story of a group of scientists during World War II, who created the secret weapons, documents, and disguises for the OSS. This is the precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. I had come across this topic when I was working on my dissertation in grad school,

which was on Science in the intelligence community and then I came across some of the figures that appear in this book And so my while my dissertation was on a different topic I couldn't help myself but really want to learn more about this topic and so I was kind of doing a dual Investigation in the archives. I had to finish my dissertation But my heart was interested in researching this stuff. So this is the product of that kind of research that I just couldn't help myself from doing on the OSS and its dirty tricks department. What is the genesis of the dirty tricks department then? Does it

grow out of the OSS? Is it built and then tacked on? How does that work? Yeah, it kind of grows out of the OSS for the most part. So the OSS is in charge of coordinating kind of intelligence during World War II for the United States. It did things like SINS spies abroad and gather information and analyze that information and spread disinformation abroad. One of the things that it also does is create these weapons and gadgets and disguises and forged documents that I mentioned. That became the job of the research and development branch of the OSS, the R&D branch, or what

I call the Dirty Tricks department. That pretty quickly grew out of the OSS as the head of the OSS William Donovan realized that he needed scientists to create these things so that the spies and saboteurs who are being sent abroad are equipped and can do their jobs. There is an equivalent that happened in the UK, and I'm pretty sure that Churchill's Ministry of Ungenital Monell Welfare is kind of, does that feel like a parallel? Does that feel like the Anglicized sister book to what you wrote?

There are definitely parallels between those two organizations. So the kind of parallel to the OSS for the British is the SOE, the Special Operations Executive. I talk about that a little bit in my book because the OSS, especially this R&D branch that I talk about, and the SOE are sharing a lot of their ideas. So there's a lot of collaboration back and forth. One of the things they collaborate on are creating specialized pills for these agents. So one of the pills, the most well-known,

is like the L-pill, lethal pill, a cyanide pill. Another thing that the British work on that doesn't really make it to the OSS, but they're doing independently that I talk about a little bit because it's almost too interesting not to include, was the idea of a rat bomb. So the rat bomb was, you would take a dead rat, taxidermy it, you would kind of hollow it out and stuff in explosives, and you would throw this rat into a coal reserve of, say, the Germans.

The idea being that the Germans would shovel the coal into their boilers of their locomotives, and they're not going to stop to pick out rats if they happen to shovel in a rat, and they'll just shovel in a rat. Well, this rat bomb, it's going to have explosives inside of these rats. They'll shovel it into their boilers, and it's going to explode. It's going to destroy their trains. So that was a British invention. The OSS, the R&D branch, did something very similar called Black Joe, which was kind of hollowed out lumps of coal. So it wasn't a rat, but the same idea. You'd hollow out these lumps of coal, you'd stuff explosives and throw it in the coal reserve

for the same effect, hopefully. How did the agents keep the L-pill on them at all times? So for the L-pill, they would, well, there are a few ways most of the time though, they would just keep it in a pocket or something. So I tell one story in the book of William Donovan, the head of this OSS, on the day after D day, you know, so he's wanting to be in the action. This is kind of a common theme with William Donovan. He is dying to be in the action. He was a World War I war hero. He had earned the Medal of Honor during World War I, and he couldn't stand not being in the action

sitting behind the desk. So he decides he wants to get involved in the Normandy invasion. So on D-Day, or the day after, he goes onto the beaches, and he goes up to where the German line is, and he starts getting shot at, and he's with one of his right-hand men. They're getting shot at, they drop beneath some bushes

and they start talking to one another and this David Bruce, his colleague who's with him, asked Donovan, what are we gonna do? How are we gonna get out of this? What's gonna happen? And Donovan reaches in his pocket and he's rummaging around and he's looking for his L-pill

that he's been supplied with by this R&D branch His cyanide pill because he figures it's better to kill ourselves than to have the Germans capture us and interrogate us and Potentially get information out of us. He ends up not being able to find his L pill He kind of makes a joke that I hope the you know the person who's cleaning my hotel doesn't you know see these pills and take them with them But David Bruce this guy he don't even tells Bruce well, you know, see these pills and take them with them. But David Bruce, this guy, he, Donovan tells Bruce, well, you know, I don't have the L pill, so I think I'm just going to have to shoot first. And Bruce doesn't really understand what Donovan means. He assumes that, oh, you're going to shoot first at the Germans, and you're going to supply

cover for us so that I can run away. And Donovan says, no, you've misunderstood me. I'm going to shoot you're first as you're commanding officer. You first as you're commanding officer. It's my duty that way. You don't have to do the dirty work of killing me. I'll kill you then I'll kill myself. But eventually they were able to get away.

That didn't happen. But yeah, so L pills could be stashed anywhere. But one of the ways was just an apocket. Another way is in that Stanley level, the main character of this book, he comes up with, is to get hollowed out razor. So like a Gillette razor, hollow out kind of the inside, and you can just stash pills in there, and it's going to be really hard to look. Who's going to think to look in this hollowed out part of a razor? So there are a few kind of ingenious ways that came up.

William Donovan is essentially the head of the precursor to the CIA and decides that he wants to be in the action storming the beaches of Normandy the day after the day. That's right. That's what that guy decided to do. Okay, that's psychotic. Okay. Tell me about William Donovan. Who is this man?

What sort of a person is he? What's his working protocols like? Yeah, so like I mentioned, he was a World War I war hero. He was pretty much the most decorated American kind of soldier in World War I. So a really highly, highly decorated. He was shot in the leg with a machine gun while he was commanding his troops. And he eventually got the medal of honor. He was a lawyer. He had gone to Columbia Law School around the same time that FDR, Franklin Roosevelt had. When Franklin Roosevelt had left the governorship of New York, Donovan ran to be the governor of New York.

He lost that, but he had a close relationship with FDR. They were of differing political philosophies. Donovan was a Republican, FDR, a Democrat, but they were still relatively close. During the 1930s, before World War II begins, FDR sends Donovan to Europe to kind of gauge the situation, to feel out what the tensions are between countries. Donovan comes back telling FDR that he thinks it's inevitable that another war is going to break out. And he urges Roosevelt to create some kind of centralized intelligence organization that will be able to gather information and keep the president, keep FDR as up to date and informed as possible on events that are happening abroad.

He's just wanting to check that. John, is there no, there's no other equivalent kind of agency or organization to collect this sort of information and give it to the president before this? Well, there, there are these agencies, but they have some problems in Donovan, Donovan's view, especially associated with the military branches. There's like army intelligence, naval intelligence, but Donovan is worried that they're not coordinating their information. So the president, you know, he's getting a bunch of different views. Another problem Donovan sees is that they're duplicating research. So we have all these different organizations doing the same thing, whereas we're just wasting money.

We should have a centralized group that's able to coordinate all of this and analyze it for the president that way we can trust what's being done. So that's the basis at least of his view of what the OSS should do. So he eventually persuades Roosevelt to create this organization what will become the OSS, the office of strategic services, and he's appointed as its head. So that's kind of how Donovan ends up being the head of this organization. Got you. And what is he like once he gets in the OSS because it doesn't seem like his gung ho war fearing war mongering ways have been left behind him.

Not at all. That the gung ho is a good term to describe William Donovan. The organization is kind of a reflection of his own personality too. He is someone who flies by the seat of this pants. He doesn't want to ask permission for anything, he just wants to do it. And that's kind of reflected in the organization itself. Like I said, the main character of this book is the sky Stanley Lovell. He's a chemist who's put in charge of this R&D branch.

Stanley Lovell originally doesn't quite know what his job is supposed to be. He's recruited by Donovan to create all these weapons and disguises, but Donovan never tells him, here's what you need to create. He just tells level, we'll do it, create stuff. That's useful for us. Level doesn't know what to do. So we asked David Bruce,

that guy who would accompany Donovan on Normandy. He asked him, what do I do? You're to his right-hand man, give me some advice. And David Bruce says, don't ask what to do. Just do something and then ask for forgiveness if necessary, but just do it. So that was kind of the guiding principle. Fly by your seat of the pants,

throw things against the wall, see what sticks, and we'll try to get through this. There's something so kind of almost romantic and whimsical and nostalgic about the fact that both the UK are equivalent over here, the Ministry of Ungenital Money Warfare, and you guys with what you were doing with this research group are just trying stuff out, Anisee Balls as timers for limpid minds and making foxes glow and trying to turn Hitler trans, all of which we'll get onto in a little bit.

So William Dolanvin, he gets introduced, he gets told, just do stuff, make chaos and create some useful tools that our soldiers and our special operators can use overseas. What does he start with? What's the first thing that he does? Well, the main kind of mission of the OSS again is to gather intelligence So you first have to recruit agents who are going to do that for you and develop connections abroad of People who know the geography know the terrain are able to see what the German troop movements are doing So that's kind of the main thing for the OSS

But in doing that, it quickly becomes evident that you're going to need this R&D branch that supplies these agents. How are they going to get their disguises? Well, we need someone to create that. So Roosevelt would frequently call Donovan, well, Roosevelt kind of had, he was paralyzed, he couldn't walk. And so he called Donovan my secret legs. This is someone who's going to go out and find stuff out for me and bring it back to me. So that's kind of the purpose of the OSS. Right, okay.

They need to get some different agents, or I guess they would, what were they called agents at the time? Yeah, so the recruits for the OSS, if you wanted to be a recruiter, if you were recruited, you would have to go to a training school. So in Maryland, at the, what's the congressional country club, the OSS basically took this land over during World War II. It became known as Area F.

And Area F was a place where all of these recruits were trained in how to engage in this unconventional warfare. So where the driving range for golf balls had previously existed, it became a rifle range where they would practice their shooting. The bunkers, you know, with sand in them for shots, it became a target practice for their mortars and all kinds of stuff. And on the Congressional Country Club, there's a clubhouse. And the basement floor of that clubhouse became what's known as the Maryland research laboratory. And this is the laboratory where Stanley level and his underlings try to develop all of

these weapons. Right. So Stanley is in charge. I'm going to guess he was basically not there was no oversight or very little oversight from William Donovan, is that right? Correct. Yes. Stanley level is this New England chemist who gets recruited to join the OSS.

When he's recruited, he actually is told to go to OSS headquarters and he shows up kind of after hours, it's all dark, no one's really there, and he gets tapped on the shoulder by a security guard and he's spooked. Oh my gosh, he didn't know anyone was there. And he's led to a room and he's waiting in this room for a long time, not even knowing really what he's doing there because he doesn't know much about the OSS. It's this secret organization. All of a sudden this giant figure walks in the room, he's got a metal of honor, a lapel pin on him, and he says, I want you to be my professor Moriarty. And it was William Donovan saying this to Stanley level. Professor Moriarty

being the kind of antagonist in the Sherlock Holmes novels. This is the, you know, the bad guy. But I want, Donovan tells him, I want you to create all the dirty tricks for this organization. So that's how Stanley level gets wrapped up in all this. He's initially reluctant to join, because he's a chemist. And he wanted to use his scientific expertise for good. He thought he had kind of an obligation to do that. But he realizes that he's also growing up, he was an orphan, basically. Both of his parents died very young. He was raised by his sister. He got a great education and he thought that he owed it to his country to do something to help in this war. So one of the arcs of this story is seeing levels internal tensions. He doesn't want to use his scientific expertise to harm others, but at the same time he feels

a debt that he owes to his country, that he feels he can repay by joining this organization and creating these weapons. Right. When does he make the exploding pens? When does that happen? That's pretty early on. There's kind of just to break down the hierarchy of this, there's the OSS. One of the branches within the OSS is this R&D branch, the research and development branch that Stanley level is in charge of.

And then that's broken into three different divisions. There's division 19, which creates all the weapons. There's the documents division, which forges all the documents. And then there's the camouflage division, which creates all the disguises. So division 19 is in charge of creating, you know, the pen guns and the, you know, the exploding flower, all that kind of stuff, the incendiary devices, bat bombs, so that's that one division.

That happens pretty early after the R&D branch is created. Okay. What, in terms of document forgery, that seems like the least exciting group to be a part of. Is that fair? You just trying to create German passports all day and stuff? Maybe from a work perspective at that time, yeah, maybe that would be the least exciting from my perspective, it's one of the most exciting,

because looking at the details of what they did is incredible, so it's really exciting to be reading. What did they do? So for a document, you had to be so specific that it really is extremely impressive. For instance, if you wanted to forge a German ration ticket or anything, a license or a passport or anything Not only did you have to kind of use the right

signatures and forge the right stamps to stamp on them You also had to use the right kind of like paper. So you had to analyze what kind of pulp is being used in this paper and it just gets so incredibly complex and the idea that they figured this out is really incredible. One of the interesting things about the documents division two is that the characters within it are really exciting themselves. Some of the foragers that worked for this documents division were sprung from prison because they had been forging government bonds and money and all kinds of stuff and they got caught and were sent to prison. So Stanley level recruits them, hey, you've got this skill, we could use you in the war,

you know, and maybe this will look favorably upon your, you know, synancing or something like that. So prisoners were used in this documents division, especially people who were experts at signatures who could forge the signatures of all kinds of people. One of the most well-known in this division was Jim the Penman. His real name is kind of never really revealed. But it was said that Jim the Penman would get his colleagues to sign their signature on a page.

And he would recreate their signatures up and down the page multiple times. And he would bet them five bucks that they wouldn't be able to pick out their original signature. And he got a lot of money out of this. That is so good. Okay, so the camouflage division,

what do they create? What are they working on? Yeah, they're in charge of the disguises. So they're in charge of procuring the different kinds of anything that you might wear as an undercover agent. So one of the things they did was try to get immigrants who were coming to the United States, European immigrants. They would offer to buy their clothes off of them. So they could have authentic clothing for these agents going abroad. Another interesting thing they do is create secret compartments within like clothing so that you could carry messages with you without a German guard say, if he were to frisky or something, wouldn't be able to detect it.

So these secret message chambers were put into all kinds of things. You could hollow out the sole of your shoe. You could, one of my favorite ones is, involves lipsticks for female agents. So the idea would be, you would have a message, you would roll it up really small, you would melt the wax of lipstick, and you would put the message in the tube,

and then you would pour the wax back into the tube and mold it to look like lipstick. So the lipstick would be surrounding the message and you would never know because it just looks like lipstick. Yeah, some of the other things that the camouflage division would do would artificially age people. So putting charcoal in the wrinkles of the face would make you the wrinkles look deeper and make you look older, applying some white to the temples of your hair, makes you look a little bit older. You could stuff newspaper into your shoe to throw off your gate and make you a little bit taller. There were all kinds of these tricks of the trade. Rub your hands on rusty metal and then on your face and it would give you a little bit different complexion. Wow. Okay, so this is like, you know, we look at prosthetics and Hollywood and cosmetic surgery

and stuff. Now, this is the most village backyard equivalent of that done whatever 80 years ago. Yeah, for the most part, I think some of the simplest kind of inventions and disguises tend to be the most ingenious because it's just so simple. I just love the simple ones, but it actually gets, it does get fairly complicated. There are agents who undergo like facial reconstruction surgery. They'll have their, they'll have their job broken to give their face a little bit different look or they'll graft. There's one person that I talk about, George Longolin, he was this agent for the British. Actually, he gets trained by American, so American people.

But he has, from a young age, he had a very protruding ears, very large ears that were very distinctive. And he spoke French, which made him very valuable because he could go to France and train these resistance forces. But he knew a lot of people in this region and they were worried that he's going to be noticed. They're going to know who he is. And so he undergoes surgery to change the shape of his chin,

but also to kind of pin back his ears so they're a little bit less distinctive. Well, he might have been happy about that. I don't know if he's been teased about his ears all of the time. Okay, what about psychedelics? I know that after World War II, we're talking about MK Ultra,

we're talking about the OSS and its involvements there. Did they decide to try and dip their toe in early during World War II with any psychedelics? Well, one of the things that Stanley level wants to do is to develop a truth drug for interrogations. This has been kind of the goal of intelligence agencies for a long time. If you can have a truth drug, you can give it to someone you're interrogating and they have no choice but to tell you the truth That's the idea at least you know This has been around for forever basically with alcohol the idea that you can apply someone with a few drinks

It'll lower their inhibitions. They'll tell you the truth during the 1920s There was actually a doctor and Dallas Robert House who thought that he had come across a truth drug, and this is later going to really get the OSS interested in what he was doing. He had given a drug called Scopolamine to a woman who was in labor, kind of a sedative, and suddenly she started talking and telling him all kinds of stuff that he thought, you shouldn't be telling me this, like this is not stuff that normal people would say. And he starts realizing, or he starts thinking to himself, that perhaps this drug scopolamied had somehow dimmed her creative capacities.

It had prevented her from imagining things. And if that was true, the only thing that she could say was the truth. She couldn't invent any lies. So maybe that's why she's saying this stuff. That turned out not really to be the case, but this is the kind of this truth drug dough. It eliminates your capacities to invent lies. Therefore, the only thing that you can say is the truth.

This gets picked up during World War II. When Stanley level decides he wants to test different substances to see if they have this potential truth drug quality. One of the main ones he catches on is kind of concentrated THC, like marijuana. You know, this is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. This actually seems to work. He does several experiments with this.

He's giving it to OSS personnel and literally recording what they say and measuring how many words they speak. On the THC, they speak a lot more than off of it. Now, the problem is this doesn't guarantee that what you're saying is the truth. It just means your inhibitions are a little bit lowered. But there were all kinds of experiments

with these truth drugs. One of the main people that Stanley level hires to do these experiments is a guy named George White. George White was an officer with a Bureau of Narcotics, a Narcotics officer. Officer, his job is to clean drugs off the street. George White was an officer with a Bureau of Narcotics, an Narcotics Officer. His job is to clean drugs off the street, but now his job becomes giving drugs to people with the truth drug experiments.

So he's injecting THC into cigarettes and handing it to his criminal contacts. The idea being if they start talking about the crimes they've committed, this is probably a good indication that this truth drug is working. And so he does this most famously to a gangster in New York named August Del Grasio. And Del Grasio starts telling him about the people he could have killed and the politicians who are taking bribes and all kinds of stuff. So George White writes a report saying, this stuff is great. This truth drug is really working.

So anyways, one of the lasting legacies of this R&D branch that I talk about is that these experiments are going to really influence a lot of experiments that take place in the CIA, especially this MK Ultra program. Wasn't this something about a fear of them putting LSD in the water, or did that come after World War II? That's mostly afterwards.

During the Cold War, once the CIA is established, the successor to the OSS, the main guy who's put in charge of this MK-Oltra program, which is kind of the US CIA Mind Control program, to figure out whether mind control, truth, drugs, all that kind of stuff is possible, either through drugs or hypnosis or something like that. The guy who's in charge of that is a chemist, like Stanley Lovell. His name is Sidney Gottlieb. And one of the main motivations for trying to see whether mind control is possible is the fear that the Soviets are going to put LSD into say a city's water supply. And if they do that, Sidney Gottlieb wants to know how are people going to react? You know, how are we going to detect

whether this is happening? If someone puts LSD into our water supply, are people going to start killing each other or how are they going to behave? We need to know this so that we can prepare for it. And so one of the motivations for giving unwitting people LSD is to see how they're affected by it without knowing that they're getting it.

Because if the Soviets do that, we need to know how that's going to turn out. At least that's kind of the rationale. Very interesting. Going back to injecting people with stuff, what was this mission to try and trans-Hitler? Yes. So this is Stanley level in the R&D branch. There is an OSS psychologist who's working with the OSS who writes a report on Hitler's personality trying to understand who Hitler is, maybe he has vulnerabilities

that can be exploited. One of the things that this psychologist points out, Henry Murray, he writes this report, saying that Hitler has a large feminine component to his personality is what he says in the report. He says that he has kind of these sexual is a masochist and all kinds of stuff is submissive and Stanley level reads this report and he wants to figure out a way to use this to the advantage of the United States. Is it possible to push Hitler kind of over that threshold from either male to female or something like

really upset his fragile masculinity. So how can we do this? Stanley level comes up with the idea that what if we inject female sex hormones into the vegetables that Hitler eats? If he eats these hormones, then that's really going to push him over the edge and his moustache is going to fall out, his voice is going to turn soprano, and his chest is going to grow breasts. This will decimate his fragile ego, and he's going to lose all of his credibility, and people aren't going to take him seriously, and we'll somehow win the war. This is the idea at least.

So Stanley level in his memoir, he says that he got some of these female sex hormones. He was able to give it to a gardener in Germany who supplied the eagles nest with its vegetables where Hitler kind of frequently went. And so Stanley level said, yeah, we got the sex hormones to this person, but we never knew really what happened to it. Either the gardener got cold feet or Hitler's tasters. There was a large turnover in them. So I don't know what happened to it, but apparently it didn't go through. Well, I mean, when you think about Hitler's psychological, physiological health throughout the war,

Theodore Morrell, that was his personal physician, is just, I mean, first off, completely insane in injecting him with bullsemen and speed and heroin and crack and cocaine and absolutely everything by the end of the war. He's done like 10 injections a day I think. But there is a lot going on. He's got a lot to deal with. It seems like Hitler was pre-alchzymic or something similar or maybe had like a Parkinsonian tremor or something that was going on. The famous video is it when he's meeting Mussolini and he's got one hand behind his back and the hand that's behind his back on the video won't stop trembling, I think, which is pretty interesting. And... Yeah, there was another plot kind of dealing with his ego.

One idea was that this doesn't come from the R&D branch, but from some other kind of psychologist, he's pitching it to the army air force, the idea being we should drop pornography all over Hitler's place where he's staying. And he doesn't like pornography and it's going to upset him. And so he's going to walk out. He's going to see the smut, these naked women.

And it's going to throw him into a rage. And he's going to lose this temperament and somehow that's going to help eat. So this psychologist actually got to kind of an air force general and was explaining this plan and he was promptly thrown out of the office and that didn't go anywhere. That's not a show. I never understood how that would actually help the war, but apparently it was some kind of psychological scheme

that was cooked up. Would there any other psychological warfare tactics that they decided to try and attempt? Yes, several. I have a chapter in the book that talks just about psychological warfare. This is one of the most interesting ones because they really do get pretty outlandish. One, this one's fairly well known, but there's a substance called Hume that the R&D branch of the OS has created, Hume.

It's a substance that smells really bad. The idea was that we can hire a chemical engineer to manufacture this substance that smells like feces or vomit or skunk or something like that. And we're going to sneak the substance in these tubes to little boys in Japan or little boys in China. And the Japanese are occupying China. These little boys are going to squirt this substance on the back side of the Japanese officials and it's going to embarrass them. And they're, you know, because because it's gonna smell really bad. And so they'd be demoralized and maybe they'll, you know, make a bad decision or something. That was at least the idea. So it was called Hume. I don't know if it had too much practical value. Stanley leveled us telephony story where he kept

this locked up in his office in kind of a cabinet with a lock on it. Well, of course, pretty much everyone in the OSS was taught how to pick locks. So some jokester decided to start pick the lock and take some Hume and was squirting around the office. Level decided to set a booby trap. The next time this happened. So he booby trapped the lock so that whenever anyone picked it and opened the cabinet, it would spray the Hume back at them.

And so level, he says, one night someone came in, picked the lock, opened the cabinet, they got sprayed. He never reveals who it was level, he says, one night someone came in, picked the lock, opened the cabinet, they got sprayed. He never reveals who it was, but he says it was someone too highly placed for me to discipline. So, you know, it was someone apparently pretty high up in the OSS. Wasn't there a story of somebody going into the president's office and unloading a full clip of a gun behind him? Yes, William Donovan himself, the head of the OSS. He wanted to show Franklin Roosevelt the kinds of things that his organization was working on

because it never hurt to impress the president. You've got to have this guy on your side. So he wants to impress Roosevelt. And so how better to impress him than with a silence flashless pistol. So Donovan walks to Roosevelt's office and he was friendly with Roosevelt, so he was often just waved in. So he's waved into the office by the security guard. He drops a bag of sand in the corner of the office.

Meanwhile, President Roosevelt is dictating a letter to his secretary, so he's not really even looking at the door. He doesn't know Donovan has entered. Donovan pulls out this silenced flash list 22 pistol that Stanley level in the R&D branch have created and he unloads the clip into this bag of sand in the office. After a little while, Roosevelt smells burnt gunpowder and he turns around and sees Donovan standing there with his empty pistol in his hand. And he's flabbergasted. He thinks this is great. I didn't even realize this thing had gone off.

So Donovan makes kind of a show of it. He hands the pistol to the president and lets him keep it in Roosevelt kind of jokes. You're the only Republican I would ever allow in my office with a gun. Oh man, it's so, this is what I mean. But when I say sort of whimsical and beautifully nostalgic, the fact that the gloves are off and the rules are out of the window, and no one's got any rules or procedures. Everyone can just do what they want. One of my favorite, I don't know whether you class this is psychological warfare,

but Operation Fantasia, I think, is my favorite story from the entire book. Tell people from the beginning what Operation Fantasia was. Yeah, this might be my favorite one too. I was so excited. I had heard generally that this idea existed, the idea that we would somehow use foxes to scare the Japanese.

And the more I looked into this and the more documents I found, the more ridiculous I realized. And just really incredible and insane. This plot really was. So this idea of Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of a businessman named Ed Salinger. He had done a lot of business before the war in Tokyo. So he kind of knew Japanese culture, he knew the Japanese language, that's what made him very valuable to the OSS.

Because he kind of knew the psychological profile, they thought of who the Japanese were, and they wanted to use that to exploit to demoralize the Japanese. So he's hired Ed Salinger by the OSS. He's part of what's called the Moral Operations Branch, which was in charge of spreading disinformation, but he gets the R&D branch to help on this project. The idea with Operation Fantasia kind of goes back to an idea within Shinto religion that there exists these portance of doom called kitsuni. Kitsuni are like spirit beings, animal, glowing animal beings that if you see one, it's supposed to be a bad omen. Something bad is going to happen.

Salanger wants to capitalize on this by creating kind of fake kitsuni, fake spirit beings. And if we can release them in Japan, it'll make the Japanese scared and think that something bad is going to happen. Well, what bad is going to happen? Well, we're in a war. It's probably means we're going to lose this war. We might as well give up now, then wait for that in to come in some even worse way. That's the idea at least. And so Ed Salinger has a few ideas for how to capitalize on this. He wants to create either glowing foxes or the idea that there are glowing foxes

to scare the Japanese. And so one idea is to create a whistle that mimics a fox sound. We'll spread these throughout Japan. People start blowing these whistles. They're gonna think it's the kitsuni because it's foxes and they'll be demoralized. It didn't really go anywhere

because do people really know what foxes sound like? You know, it doesn't go in. It doesn't sound like you have precisely. Yeah, like that YouTube video, what does the fox say? What does the fox sound like is good enough? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that didn't go. There are a few more kind of variations of Fantasia.

One is to recreate fox odors. So get a foxor. We'll spread that in Japan. People will smell it and think, oh, Foxes are around. This is a bad omen. But again, what does a Fox smell like? Do people really know? And so, Salinger scraps all that. And he decides, instead, we're going to capture live foxes. We're going to paint them with glowing radioactive paint. And we're going to release them in Japan. That way, the Japanese are going to see them. And and know this really is a glowing fox. It must be a kitsuni and it must be a bad omen.

We must be about to lose this war. We might as well give up now. So foxes are captured. They're painted with radioactive paint from the US radium corporation. Actually before they are, just to see if paint adheres to fur, animal fur, they go the OSS, some personnel go to the Bronx Zoo and they paint a raccoon and they let it kind of do raccoon stuff for a few days. These raccoons are just kind of glowing. They're kept away from public. Full of you, and glowing.

Yeah, but the pain actually stays on. So, hey, this is one point for operation phantasia. Maybe it works. The next experiment with this is to take a few foxes to rock Creek Park in Maryland, right by DC, and release these glowing foxes. The idea is that if we can see if it scares Americans, well, it's definitely going to scare

the Japanese. So if the Americans are spooked out by this, the Japanese are going to be even more spooked out. So let's release these foxes and see how Americans respond to them. So these foxes are released in Rock Creek Park. They're glowing at night, walking through the trails, and there's a newspaper report later that says the passers-by were terrified and had the screaming jimies when they saw these foxes these ghostly apparitions. So hey point two for Operation Fantasia, the Americans really are scared of this thing. So there's another experiment with Operation Fantasia. Can foxes swim? That's what needs to be answered.

Because in order to get these foxes to Japan, it's not like you can just drop them out of a plane or something. You're going to have to take a boat, drop them in the ocean, and let them swim to shore. But can foxes swim? This is the question. And so as part of this, Operation Fantasia, several foxes are captured. They're taken into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and they're thrown overboard. And it turns out the foxes actually did swim to shore.

So foxes do swim. The problem is that by the time they got to shore all the paint had washed off. So it was kind of a bust. Like what's the point? The paint washes off. That was the whole point of the operation in the first place. So that didn't really go anywhere. But then, Soundger, this is what I discovered in the archives. Something that I've never seen anyone else talk about. I discovered this document that talks about how he wants to carry this even further. He said he had heard when he was in Japan, one of these ideas about Kitsuni that involved a skull. It was said that apparently a fox with a skull on it was the worst omen of all. This is

a really bad omen. So his idea to capitalize on this is to tax a dermy a fox, to paint it in glowing paint, to take a human skull and put it on the fox as if it's its own skull. And then he wanted to have a mechanical mechanism that could raise and lower the jaw of this skull. And then he would blast audio to the Japanese as if this skull was talking, saying, you need to give up the war, it's worth, you know, just put down your arms, and then he would attach this fox with a skull and audio to a balloon and fly it over Japan,

so it would look like there was this flowing, glowing stuff fox talking with a human skull out of it. Apparently, this is going to win the war, so that's the his idea. So, America tried to conduct spiritual warfare on Japan to try and make them think that the Japanese gods were mad at them with a glowing fox that had a human skull on the top of it. Yes, correct.

Right. There are a couple other similar things that are trying to be done against Japan. One idea that the Army Air Force has is to drop bombs into Japanese volcanoes that are dormant and try to get them to become active. And if the volcanoes start kind of looking like they're active, maybe the Japanese will think that the gods are mad. And then this is an indication that we shouldn't be in this war in the first place.

Fuck yeah, that's what I want. I want to do that. Let's anger the Japanese gods. I think, oh man, I mean, there is something about the advent of technology that has taken away all of this beautiful sort of wistful creativity. Everything's far too logical and rational now. One of the other ones that you go through, bat bombs. We've spoken about rat bombs, but bat bombs as well. Strapping a bomb to a bat, I'm gonna guess.

That is pretty close, yeah, it's pretty close. So there, yeah, there are rat bombs, cat bombs, bat bombs. If you want any variation of an at bomb, this book has got it for you. But the bat bomb idea, this is the brain child of a guy named Little Adams. Little Adams is a dentist. He's not even involved in the OSS or anything.

He's a dentist from Pennsylvania. He goes on a vacation to Carl's Bad Caverns in New Mexico and of course this is home to a colony of millions of Mexican free-tailed bats. After he goes on that vacation, he hears about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And he's a patriotic American and he wants to try to think of what can I do to help us win this war that we're now involved in. And he had just been to Karl's bat and he thinks of this bat bomb idea. What if we strap incendiary devices to bats and we fly them to Japan and we release them? These bats will kind of be like heat seeking missiles.

They will naturally roost in warehouses and in buildings and they'll explode after a time delay and these incendiary devices will catch these buildings on fire. So instead of flying over Japan and dropping bombs which might not even hit the target, let's release these bats and the bats are naturally going to go to these houses and roost in them and blow up and start these fires. That's the idea. Little Adams had one thing really going for him. He was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady of the United States. He gave this proposal to Eleanor Roosevelt. She gave it to her husband, the president of the United States. In turn, he gives it to another than William Donovan, the head of the OSS.

An attached to the proposal, Franklin Roosevelt writes, this man is not a nut. So like, you know, this idea has got something going for it. Donovan, he gives it to the one branch of the OSS capable of actually studying this, the R&D branch. So that's how it gets to the R&D branch. Stanley level, the head of this branch,

hires a man named Lewis Pfizer to develop the incendiary devices that they're going to attach to these bats. Lewis Fizer is fairly famous at the time because he was the inventor of napalm. This is kind of a jelly gasoline that if it catches, you know, if it sticks to anything and it'll burn at a really hot temperature, it can start fires really easily. Actually, he had invented this while he was at Harvard as he's a chemist. And so his first napalm bomb tests had occurred on the Harvard soccer fields.

So he had literally detonated napalm bombs just on the soccer fields at Harvard. He actually got in trouble for this, not so much for the bombs, but because he was hogging the soccer field and they needed it for drill instruction. So he was told to find somewhere else. But anyway, Stanley level hires Lewis Pfizer to create the napalm bombs for these bats really small. There are personnel who go to different caves, literally swing around nets and they capture bats for the tests that they're going to do. So for one of the first tests, they're not using live kind of incendiaries.

Instead, they just have a dummy. They attach it to the bats. They cool the bats down because the idea is that we'll put them in an artificial hibernation state so we can get them on the plane. We'll fly them up. We'll drop them. They'll wake up and then they'll fly away

and we'll see how they're able to actually fly with this stuff on. The problem is that when they flew these bats up, they had cooled them down too much. So by the time they dropped them, they didn't wake up and they just kind of crashed into the water. Hahaha.

So that was one experiment with this bat bomb. Another experiment, they tried with actual live incendiaries. Lewis Fireser wanted to test the official package to make sure it actually tried with actual live incendiaries. Lewis Fires wanted to test the official package to make sure it actually worked with a live incendiaries. They cooled down the bats. The problem was that they didn't cool them down enough this time. The bats woke up prematurely and they flew around before they could be stopped, and they actually burned down a control tower and a barracks that was nearby. So in a kind

of ironic sense, the bat bombs actually seemed to work because they did roost in these buildings and blow them up, but it was never deployed against the Japanese. Geez. Honestly, I think that there's an argument to be made that the atomic bomb wasn't needed. We just needed to have whatever, a million bats send them down in Japan. Everything would have been fine. Well, what I think is one of the funniest kind of parts of the book is that little atoms, the guy who conceived first of this bat bomb idea, he was talking to a lot of different generals in the military to try to get funding because he really wanted

to pursue this idea and make sure the OSS was kind of carrying it out. So he was talking to generals, he comes back and starts talking to some members of the OSS, really dejected and upset because the generals didn't want to give him that much money. And little Adam says, yeah, there's apparently this other project in New Mexico and they're kind of messing around with these atoms. Why should we be messing around with atoms when we have a sure thing like the bat bomb here? Oh man. Okay, so in your opinion, given the fact

that you are currently the world living authority on the dirty tricks department, what was the most successful contribution or the most pivotal mission that they were a part of? I think the most useful contribution is probably those other two branches, the documents division in the camouflage division, because this enabled agents to go undercover in Europe,

especially, and to train resistance forces into gather intelligence, which is actually useful for making decisions. I think that's probably the most useful thing. The most useful kind of weapon that was invented, it's either that silence 22, that was actually being used up even through the Vietnam War in some places

Within different military branches. Another one of the useful technologies weapons that's developed by this R&D branch Is involved derailing trains. We already talked about black Joe that you could throw in a boiler There were several other things like that and derailing trains was especially effective because Not only could you destroy the train and all the material on it, you could derail it, but if you did it strategically, you could really mess things up. One invention was called the mole. It was a light-sensitive explosive.

The idea being, it can detect a sudden shift from light to dark. If you have a saboteur that attaches this to a train and it kind of sets it, then the light-sensitive mole, whenever the train enters a tunnel, it'll notice that light to dark and it'll detonate and it'll derail the train, not only derailing the train, but plugging up that valuable tunnel and preventing any other trains from getting through.

So that's a really useful device. One other of the most useful devices you kind of mentioned earlier is probably the Limbit, the OSS and the British SOE are kind of working on this together and sharing ideas, but the Limbit is this explosive device that a saboteur could attach to the bottom of a ship, set a time pencil that would cut a time delay,

and then paddle away, establish an alibi somewhere else, and then after a while this limpet will explode, putting a hole in the ship and causing it to sink, those were used on mini ships during World War II. Do you know what the original trigger was that they used on the very first version of the limpet mine? They needed something that would dissolve consistently

and was always in a reliable size. I'm not sure. It was an anacid ball, a suite, like a little candy. We would have called it a candy. So they're talking about it. This is in Churchill's Ministry of Ingeneral and the Warfare. And they're talking about the fact that they need to protect it from any moisture because if it gets a tiny little bit wet

during transit, that means that the timer once it gets into the ocean is actually going to be, however much shorter. Think it's about, that means that the timer once it gets into the ocean is actually going to be however much shorter. Think it's about, for those that are interested, I think it's around about 45 minutes, 30 to 45 minutes as the amount of time an anisee ball takes to dissolve in the ocean. So they're talking about the fact that they couldn't tell anybody what they were doing and they had to go around the local village buying every pack of condoms that they could, so that they could individually wrap these aniseed balls and condoms so that it was protected from

water. And the guy that wrote the book says, it is unclear whether nine months later there was an increase in the fertility rate of this small village because there was no access to condoms for a couple of weeks. The SOE must have had a thing with condoms because there's another brief thing I mentioned in the book about how they developed this itching powder from like the seed pod of this one plant. And they would sprinkle it in condoms that were destined for German soldiers. No way. And there were apparently reports of a submarine crew who kind of came back and they noticed an uptick and you know, a hospital visits or whatever. Oh, apparently that was one idea, itching powder.

Dude, that is so funny. So, we spoke earlier on about the fact that the atomic bomb is kind of happening. It's being developed, it's not exactly rivalrous with the, with the bat bomb. Was the OSS involved in stopping any of the Germans or, or, or keeping tabs on what the Germans were doing? I know that there was heavy water plants, obviously the dam busters, there was a bunch of other operations that tried to really slow down what the Allies thought was, that's the development of some sort of atomic weapon. Absolutely. The most famous, well, I'll start with a,

I'll kind of build up to that. There was pretty much any physicist in the United States knew that if the Germans were going to have an atomic bomb program, the person who was going to lead it was Werner Heisenberg. This is one of the most famous, distinguished physicists in the world at the time. He had stayed in Germany at the outbreak of the war, unlike many of his colleagues who

either came to the United States and would work on the Manhattan Project or go somewhere else. He stayed in Germany. And pretty much everyone knew. If anyone is leading a German atomic bomb project, it is Werner Heisenberg. So the OSS has a few ways they want to deal with Werner Heisenberg, the idea being if you kind of cut off the head of the snake, the program is going to flounder. So if you can either kidnap or even maybe kill Werner Heisenberg, you could prevent the Germans from potentially acquiring an atomic bomb.

One of the first people who is assigned to work on this and figure out what to do with Werner Heisenberg is a guy named Carl Eiffler. Carl Eiffler was head of what's called the Tatchment 101 in Burma. This is a group of OSS personnel that was sent to the Burma, India, China area. Their mission is to destroy a Japanese airbase where the Japanese are launching planes from. He gets recalled to the United States. He got, he was on a mission. He fell overboard into the ocean and he was dashed upon the rocks and he had like, head damage. So he was little all over the place. But he got recalled to the United States. But after that, he gets assigned to Kiddnap, Warner Heisenberg.

To think of a plan to figure out how to capture Warner Heisenberg and to smuggle him into Switzerland, and they're going to rendezvous with a plane or even a submarine that will carry him somewhere else. He gets assigned to this. He ultimately gets called off of that because he was like William Donovan in the sense that he was so gung ho. He was ram bunches and wild and never followed orders and did things his way. Because of that, he wasn't really

fit for this operation because it was going to be a very delicate affair, but he's the opposite of delicate. He's someone who would just say whatever and do whatever he wanted. So they needed someone who was a little bit more discerning and technical and skilled. So instead of Carl Eiffler, he's pulled off, the OSS assigns a baseball player named Moberg to assassinate Warner Heisenberg. Moberg was a catcher for several different major league baseball teams like the Red Sox, you know, he was a catcher. What made him valuable to the OSS is that he spoke many languages. So he was kind of a polyglot.

He spoke several languages that he had studied in school or grown up with. And so that's very valuable to the OSS because especially as say an agent, he can pass as someone else because he can speak the language with a dialect and the emphasis and accent and whatever. He gets assigned to assassinate Warner Heisenberg. He's told that Warner Heisenberg is scheduled to give a talk in Switzerland on a specific date at the specific university. So Moberg goes over there and he's told to sit in the lecture and if Warner Heisenberg says anything that indicates that he might be working on an atomic bomb, anything about

vision or, you know, chain reactions, he's supposed to pull out a gun and shoot Werner Heisenberg right there in the lecture hall. So Moberg goes to this lecture, he sits down, he's got a sign I get a gun, yeah for sure. Armed with a gun, he's got a sign I'd pill in his pocket the idea of being after the assassination, he's going to kill himself. So he listens to the lecture and his notes from the lecture still exist, you know, he says I'm the third row and Warner Heisenberg is looking at me a lot because he thinks I'm taking notes and he thinks I'm really interested in what he's talking about and all this stuff. His notes are survive.

Moberg doesn't get the sense that the topic has anything to do with an atomic bomb. He decides not to take the risk and assassinate Warner Heisenberg right there. A few days later, Moberg gets invited to a dinner with some physicists in Switzerland. Who is there? Warner Heisenberg. So they're talking about the war and all kinds of stuff. Warner Heisenberg decides that he has to leave early. He's got to go do something. But Moberg takes the opportunity to leave early too, so that he can leave with Warner Heisenberg and they can walk together for a while, giving Moberg an opportunity to interrogate Warner Heisenberg. Of course, his cover story is that he's, you know, this Swiss physics student, so he's talking to Warner Heisenberg in Swiss Accented German, because Heisenberg speaks German.

So he's asking him questions, kind of leading questions. Are you working on anything? Well, you know, what's the state of nuclear physics? And he still doesn't get the impression that he really is doing anything with a German atomic bomb. So he decides not to kill him. But those were kind of the OSS attempts to assassinate Heisenberg and thus deny Germany his brain to build the atomic bomb. And this guy, this catcher for the Red So, was prepared to take his own life as well. That was the level of sacrifice that he was ready to do. Yes, so not only that with him, but with Carl Eifler too, Carl Eifler asks William Donovan

and the other kind of high-ranking OSS personnel when he's launching this kidnapping mission originally that it doesn't even go through, but he asked them, what am I supposed to do if I'm captured? Obviously, all kidnap highs and burger, maybe even kill him, but I'm going to be captured afterwards. People are going to think, I just murdered this guy. What do I do? And they said, we will deny you. In other words, we're not going to acknowledge that you're even part of our organization. You'll just have to deal with it. And so he accepts and goes on, but it never went through. Absolutely ruthless. So what about, we mentioned it early Ron,

and I think you are right. It's interesting levels, ethical trajectory from the beginning of the war until the end of it, about what he felt was appropriate, about the kind of force. Getting into chemical warfare, what was developed used, what sort of tactics and then what kind of personal reflection and challenges did level face with that?

Mm-hmm, you're all right, because this, like I said, is one of the major arcs I'm following in this book, a Stanley level going from someone who was reluctant to even create kind of deadly weapons like a silence pistol to someone by the end of the war, he is advocating for the use of weapons of mass destruction, not only the atomic bomb, but also chemical agents, biological agents. So in the R&D branch, he's involved with experimenting with some of these agents.

The United States had developed an installation in Maryland called Fort D-Drick, or Camp D-Drick at that time. It was kind of the biological warfare installation where mass production of anthrax and all kinds of diseases were created. The United States or Franklin Roosevelt in particular had said that he has a no first use policy. So the United States is not going to use these weapons first, but we're going to create them as a deterrent force. So if somebody uses them, we have them to retaliate. And just by having them, we can deter others from using them.

That's his idea. Stanley level disagrees with this. By the end of the war, he comes to think that any way that you can end the war as soon as possible is the ethical thing to do. So not just something we should do, but this is the ethical thing to do, especially regarding biological warfare. He says, look at the differences here. You can stab someone in the stomach with a bayonet, and it's going to get infected, and they're going to die from an infection, or you can infect them with anthrax or something through a biological bomb, and they'll get an infection

and die. At least with the second option, we spare them the bayonet. And at least we don't have to stab them first before they get this infection. He comes to see chemical warfare, especially as an ethical alternative to conventional warfare. With chemical warfare, he starts developing the idea that perhaps you can, especially in the Pacific theater

in these islands in Japan, like Iwajima, there are these Japanese soldiers stationed on these islands. Instead of sending American forces to storm the island that's gonna lead to tens of thousands of casualties, why don't we just shell the island with chemical weapons? These don't even necessarily have to kill the Japanese, just like paralyze them or something. And then we just shell the island with chemical weapons? These don't even necessarily have to kill the Japanese, just like paralyze them or, you know, something. And then we go on the island

and prevent those casualties from happening. So Stanley level becomes in favor of using those because he sees it as the ethical alternative. Doesn't he have a sun somewhere as well? Isn't there a little bit of perverse incentive here? Yes, this is a really important point because as the end of the war is coming to a close, Stanley level sun is on a ship midway across the Pacific waiting to engage

in an invasion of Japan. And so the sooner the war ends, the sooner that Stanley level sun gets to come back home. So he's, of course, thinking personally about his son too, but in general, he's also thinking if we don't use these weapons to end the war as soon as possible, that's just going to lead to a lot more casualties. We might as well end the war now. Of course, one of the, I mean, there are several ways to debate with what Stanley Lovell is arguing here. What about the precedent that it sets for future wars? What about the potential that this could spread to civilian populations at least if you know storm an island you it's a little bit targeted if you just drop biological or chemical weapons somewhere it's not really target it could spread to anyone so that there a lot of

there a lot of objections that you could raise to what Stanley level of saying and when Stanley levels grandson after the war level of saying. And when Stanley levels grandson after the war years later, kind of raises some of these objections, especially to the atomic bomb, Stanley level was in favor of using it. His grandson wasn't. Stanley level basically said, we're an inventive people, we'll figure it out. So we'll figure out how to deal with this stuff. We just need to end the war. We just needed to end the war when we could have. Were there many chemical weapons used during World War II? I remember hearing about mustard gas and stuff like that during World War I, but I don't remember reading or hearing about many chemical weapons in World War II at all. Yeah, I'm not too familiar. And certainly not as much as World War I. I have heard reports

that the Germans might have used it on this one particular battle and somewhere, so there are reports that that happened, but I don't actually know if they were. Interesting. It just seems to me, especially as Hitler got more and more desperate when he was fighting the war on two different fronts, when it really starting to scrabble, styling grad, et cetera, et cetera. He was prepared to do pretty much anything.

It seems surprising to me that there would be some ethic that he was unprepared to break in service of him. I mean, he killed himself, you know, and encouraged the people around him to do it, too. Stanley level's explanation for this was that if the Germans used especially chemical weapons, then they knew that the allies were going to respond in kind. And the way that Stanley level explains this is that the German military was much more dependent on horses especially. And so, you know, he says kind of after the war, he's kind of thinking about this. Why didn't the Germans just use chemical weapons

at Normandy and kind of stop the invasion? And apparently he hears from someone, but I don't know how true this is, that well, the Germans knew that if they did that, then the Allies were going to use these chemical weapons, which would ruin their basically way of transporting material, which was these horses, they were so dependent on.

So that could be one explanation. I'm not really confident in level's recollection of that particular incident, so I don't know if that's the case, but that's how he rationalized it. How does level's Korea finish? What's his legacy? Level becomes a businessman after World War II. He starts a chemical company. They invent all kinds of stuff,

like different patterns on shoes and filters and all kinds of stuff. His most lasting legacy, though, really involves his truth drug experiments that we talked about. During the Cold War, Sidney Gottlieb, that chemist who ran MK Ultra, was trying to figure out what kinds of experiments he would do to determine whether truth drugs are possible or mind controller possible, and he didn't really know where to start. To get inspiration for that, he started looking at old records.

The records that he pulled from the archives, Stanley levels records from the OSS. And so there's this pretty direct connection between Stanley level, not intentionally, but influencing directly Sidney Gottlieb in the creation of this MK Ultra, in trajectory of this MK Ultra program, to the point where the person that Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA, who he hired to perform these Truth Drug experiments, was none other than George White, that same guy that Stanley level had hired to perform Truth Drug experiments.

Sidney Gottlieb had seen White's kind of reports in the World War II files and figured, I need someone to perform Truth Drug experiments, I'll just use that same guy. This was really exciting to me. There are a lot more connections between Stanley level and Sidney Gottlieb. And when I was writing this, I knew that there was some connection there. Their careers were so similar. During World War II in the OSS, Stanley level was involved in creating deadly weapons and disguises and documents and truth grugs and experiments and all kinds of stuff.

Sydney Godlyb is involved in that exact same stuff, almost to an item for the CIA and the Cold War. So, I had these two chemists, and I wanted to play them off each other somehow. They're different careers at these different times, and how they're so similar. So, I was in the archives, and I found these depositions that Sydney Gottlieb had to give in the 1980s. He was being sued by victims of the CIA and required to give these depositions. And in the archives, you can't read everything because you want to get as much material while you're there as possible.

So I would take a deposition, I would take a picture of each page, but I wouldn't really read the pages because I can read those later. When I'm in the archives, I'm just gathering material. But I was really excited because I had been looking so long for this connection between level and Godly, and as always flipping through these pages, taking picture, I looked at one of the depositions and I saw the name Stanley level.

And so I knew somewhere in there, Sidney Godly is talking about Stanley level and how they're connected somehow. And so if you wanna know what that is in more detail, you gotta read the book. John Lyle, ladies and gentlemen, John, I absolutely love this. This kind of very unique investigation

into history, the inventiveness of everyone that you found, I think, is fascinating. Dirty Dricks department will be linked in the show notes below if people want to go and get that. And if they want to keep up to date with the other stuff that you do, where should they go? Yeah, the best place is probably Twitter, just at John Lyle. L-L-I-S-L-E is my last name. And if you're kind of interested in this story, not only do I post stuff about my book and whatever, but a lot of times, most of what I post is just adventures in the archives. If I find a cool photo or description

or something in the archive, I post it to Twitter. So if you're interested in seeing what a historian does, that's probably a good place to get some experience, you know, to see what it's like. So if you wanna follow me on Twitter, you can expect some of that stuff. John, I didn't think that you could make history, being a historian cool, but you've managed to do it. Congratulations. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate you too. Catch you later on. Okay, bye. So good. I absolutely adore taking a step out of culture war and modern world topics to just reconnect with some history. Even though it's hardly ancient history, it's less

than 100 years ago. I very much appreciate John's work. It's so sort of quirky and cottage industry and cool to hear about things that seem similar to the world that we're in and yet they're so distant and so far away. I'm going to leave you with a story that I learned about Churchill this week. So he was having an altercation with a lady called Nancy Astor and she said to him, Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison. Churchill responded, Mom, if I were your husband, I would take it. and Churchill responded,

Mom, if I were your husband, I would take it. I'll see you next time.