RedHanded - Episode 367 - MKUltra - Part 1: Cold War of the Mind

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

In the wake of an Allied victory, the threat of a communist New World Order loomed over the West. Desperate to beat the Soviets at their own game, the USA gave the secret service all the money and drugs they needed to create a real-life Manchurian Candidate.Left with their minds in tatters and their relationships all but destroyed, the subjects of the CIA program ‘MKUltra’ were unwitting lab rats in the USA’s never-ending search for a truth serum.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.

I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed, where we're taking a dive for the second time quite recently into espionage, but in a very, very, very different way. I know so little about what we're going to talk about. I didn't know either. I knew vaguely, but my impression of it was only The Men Who Stare at Goats. Sure. it was only the men who stare at goats sure and the men who stare at goats is a sequel to this

and i was aware of the manchurian candidate i've now watched it and the frank sinatra one and that was kind of it oh and also zoolander of course but um yes it's utterly terrifying and i've been astonished by the amount of americans i've spoken to about it and they've been like you what well that's definitely me i'm definitely a you what in this situation and i've only seen the 2004 manchurian candidate oh okay with them yes yes yes and the entire time i was watching it i do to admit, I watched it with my dad and he was like, why is it called Manchurian? Because Manchurian chicken is a dish served in India. I can tell you why it's called the Manchurian candidate.

Manchuria? Yes. Yes. I had to look it up. So this is how little I know. So this is well and truly, you are leading the Manchurianly blind into this episode. So let's go. Well, I've read many books and I think I...

No, I'm going to believe in myself. I did a headstand in yoga last night. I can do anything. I believe it. I will be able to answer your questions. Let's go. If you want to find out if Jane Fonda is being brainwashed by international insurgents, is your victim the Viet Cong? Is it the KGB?

Or is it Jane Fonda? A tricky question that will be bounding around your brain over the next two weeks. Can an international espionage agency under the perceived threat of communist powers act with impunity upon its own civilians? Yes, they do. Yes. They do. But should they is the question. No, but yes. In other words, is it good enough to say, well, we thought our enemies were doing this,

so we did whatever the fuck we wanted, including endangering our own citizens. And I think this is the big question. Is that like, what is enough evidence? What is enough? I don't think it's enough for some fucking doink in the CIA who we'll get onto in a bit to be like, well, I'm convinced, mate. I'm absolutely fucking convinced they're doing it I've got no evidence at all but get in the isolation chamber please yeah I think before you are running experiments we could call them this on your own civilians

on your own citizens I think the the bar the standard, should be quite high. Yes. Without their consent is the key thing also. The Olympics have happened recently, and I think the bar should be high enough that your balls should fall out, like happened to that pole vaulter. Big mistake. Huge. So, yeah. What does count as enough intelligence to give a state-run faculty carteanche to administer mind altering pharmaceuticals to their own taxpayers without their consent? Because that is what happened. Gotta see some balls. Balls. I want balls on sticks. Balls on pole vaults. Balls on pole vaults. That's really hard to say. Balls on pole vaults.

You know, my hand tattoo got accidentally lasered by my laser hair removal lady, which I don't care. Carissa, I love you. I got it redone the other day. And instead of where the fingernails are, I got an M for Mabel. But I'm a bit concerned it looks like a pair of balls. Well, secret. Secret MK ultra agent over here. She's the Manchurian candidate.

I was looking at it and I was like, is it the McDonald's M? And I was like, oh no. They're going to sue you. It's balls. Oh no. It's fine. I think it's fine. I know it's not balls.

That sounds like a cover up for the doink at the... I know it's not balls. But I'm going to tell everyone it's balls on pole vaults so that we can get this shit going. Yes, exactly. We don't have the answer to any of these questions, but we are going to try over the next two weeks to explain to you why we are asking these questions in the first place. And there are several places that we could start this week, but we've chosen Dachau. Didn't see that coming, did you? Dachau, if you don't know, go to school,

was the first concentration camp ever built by the Nazis. Hold on, hard-hearted Hannah. You might be thinking, what on earth does MKUltra have to do with the Nazis? I hate to break it to you, my little bratwurst. MKUltra has everything to do with the Nazis. After the Allies won, they had a new problem to deal with. Fascism was out, but communism was now in.

Boo! And the Americans in particular were definitely not down with it. Famously, they adopted an any-anti-communist-motherfucker-is-our-motherfucker attitude, which meant that a lot of Nazis were granted American citizenship. Not just any old Nazis, naturally. Important ones who were probably eyeing up the rat line to Argentina anyway. This happened because the smarty pants of Washington DC heard on the grapevine that the Nazis had been conducting all sorts of experiments on the

prisoners in their internment camps. We all know about Mengele, but he was far from the only one. Dachau specifically was the home of human mind control experiments. And the Americans wanted to know what the Nazis had discovered in the death camps, and classify it before the Russians got a whiff. So began Operation Paperclip, a program that swapped Nazi knowledge for a United States passport. It is very hard to say Operation Paperclip without smiling, if you don't know what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Operation Paperclip.

Well, it's horrible. I mean, yes, it's very horrible, but without it, no fucking moon landing for you. No. And a very whimsical name. Yes. Actually, there are a lot of whimsical names coming up this week. So the Operation Paperclip system was created whilst the Nuremberg trials were going on. Oh, America. We're going to be saying that a lot. As the United States at Nuremberg told the world at large

that scientific research, even in wartime, needed to be conducted according to unshakable, internationally applied moral guidelines, behind closed doors, they were doing exactly the opposite. During the Third Reich, the SS were experimenting with all sorts of dachau and bases just a few miles away, and they did it for years. Everything you can think of was inflicted on the prisoners there, and the SS, being the SS, took meticulous notes as they watched the prisoners die. We're talking

things like the effects of mescaline on a person, and whether ingesting H.S. Sunter's favourite tipple could make a person tell the truth. They also had a look at how to crush a human to death in a pressure chamber, whether a person could fly, and of most interest to the US Secret Service, how to covertly administer pharmaceuticals to an unwitting victim with the aim of controlling them completely. As far as we know, the Nazis never made use of any of these techniques in the field. The SS were never confident

that a person's mind could be totally commanded by another, no matter how much you fucked them up with mushrooms. But Washington was interested nonetheless. So they set up the Office of Strategic Strategies to see if they could crack what the Nazis hadn't. The OSS is like... Sounds so fake.

Yes, I know. It's, I wouldn't even say parent. It's the older, not as well equipped or funded cousin of the CIA. Okay. Okay. I see. But it's also very strategic, naming it the Office of Strategic Strategies. It's like, have you seen the film In the Loop? No. So it's like the film version of The Thick of It. No, you have shown me that. Yeah.

Yes, you know, we watched it together. And in that, it's like, we have to find the war committee. It'll be named something really boring. And it's the Future Planning Committee. I feel like they're not even trying there with the Office of Strategic Strategies. But anyway, this is what was set up. And on the other side of the world, the Dachau doctors were charged with the newly coined

crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. And a lot of them were hanged. Very few of those men showed any remorse for what they had done. Hitler's own doctor stated that a toll of human lives was a necessity when changing the world. These men were sentenced by a panel of exclusively American judges. After the trials, Watched by the World concluded, the Nuremberg Laws were codified, and they included the following. When it comes to scientific experimentation, there must be full consent of the subjects, and the research must only be conducted if the results are deemed to be fruitful to society, and there is no other way of achieving said results other than human experimentation.

I get what they're trying to do, but like who deems what's fruitful? So basically, after Nuremberg, basically everyone, not everyone obviously, and even the ones who agreed didn't fucking do it, but it was agreed that even when a country is experiencing a national security risk, there have to be limits. The USA publicly and loudly applied this policy in 1946, and they've never actually rescinded it. But as the USA signed on the dotted line, their government employees were pouring over the Dachau research papers to see what they could steal. Washington had absolutely no intention of upholding the vow they had just taken. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the

biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest

season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. Producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983. There were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can

binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Very soon, the OSS, as it would become known for short, not only rejected the services of our girl Virginia Hall, see previous episode for full information on that, and my wrist, they got bang into the mescaline business. The OSS would eventually become the CIA. The agency had actually been studying the effects of marijuana on interrogation subjects for some time. They would administer an ultra-strong

indica to unsuspecting victims to see what beans they might spill. It's really interesting that I I've cut all of this down so much because there's so much information. But they decided that the best way to give someone a fucking full whack of really strong indica without them knowing was to inject it into a cigarette with a syringe when they weren't looking. Jesus Christ. You're just going to go to sleep. I just go to sleep. You're not going to get any answers out of me. A little bit sativa. I'll be talking all day.

But anyway, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't work for the OSS. So anyway, these victims, or research subjects, were actually 12 members of the Manhattan Project team. And this weed wrong turn put them all in hospital with the megavombs. That's fucking horrible. I know.

And all of the nuclear beans that they had hoped would come spilling out everywhere stayed firmly in the can. Yeah, it's executed terribly, but it's quite an interesting idea of like, the Manhattan Project people are their people, but they're working on something so top secret that they could compare and contrast what they were saying. And the big, we'll talk about this a lot, but the big thing that is a problem when you are drugging people and trying to get the truth out of them is that you can always get them to talk, but you will never know if it's true.

This is the problem, right? If somebody is fucking doped up to the point that they are throwing up, are you going to trust what they're saying? It's like torture. You can torture people and they'll fucking tell you everything you want to hear. Is it true? The OSS weren't just interested in interrogation tactics, though. They were looking for any way at all to break an adversary's spirit. One quote-unquote success that the OSS had after researching the cultural values of the Japanese

was the invention of a poo bomb that they would get children to set off behind unwitting Japanese soldiers. And so they would be so ashamed they would defect, is the idea. And they called this lavatorial innovation. Who, me? What? I know. So it's a bomb filled with feces? It's full of feces smell. Oh, like a stink bomb?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Fun, fancy, and farts aside, the OSS were most interested in the discovery of a truth serum that could be used to get any person to expose adversarial state secrets. So, yes, it's the same thing of torture doesn't really work. How can we get round that? As the world turned, allies became enemies

and more crucially, enemies became allies and the United States decided they need to change the way they played the war game because they just weren't getting anywhere. The Cold War was uncharted territory for the entire world but espionage was reasonably new stuff for Washington. They only got their underhanded tactics training wheels in the early 1940s. Subvertive government policy was almost seen as unconstitutional.

Guess who grabbed their saddle and gave them a big push? Luckily for the Americans, the cloak and dagger trade was positively old hat for us Brits. And the OSS was actually the first ever American government agency for secrets, unlimited by law. And it was only born in 1942. It's really interesting, this just period in history seems so difficult for us to comprehend now. But Britain were quite far ahead of America in a lot of ways. So yeah, MI6 just swoop in and they're like, oh, do you need some help? We can help you. Well, we're like the granddaddy, aren't we?

We've been around a lot longer. So the OSS in its nursery years raised a lot of babies who turned out to be pretty important men. One of those babies was Richard Helms. Remember that name because he will come up a lot. Helms started his career with the OSS during World War II and becoming the Director of Intelligence was in his stars. His stars, as usual, were made very twinkly by his privilege. He went to prep school in Switzerland. I have tried so hard to confirm or not confirm whether he went to the same school as Osama bin Laden.

Let's just say it's true. Yeah, and Kim Jong-un, all of them. And he actually interviewed Hitler himself for the United Press before Helms turned his hand to covert operations. As Richard Helms soared through the ranks, he became the most important cheerleader of the need to master mind control. His mantra being, once at war, to reason is treason. he became the most important cheerleader of the need to master mind control. His mantra being, Once at war, to reason is treason.

Catchy. It is. He loves a catchphrase, that man. I mean, we are but simple creatures. I feel like a little rhyme goes a long way. And that is kind of the conclusion of the series. If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit. Reason is treason.

It just works so well. So maybe reason is treason isn't the sentiment of what makes a true patriot, but that is truly, deeply what Mr. Richard Helms believed. Helms, who looks just like Richard Nixon by the fucking way, look him up, had seen the world overtaken by charismatic yet neurotic psychopaths, and he was convinced that their brains were the way to undo them. Which might seem obvious these days, but before the rise of the real dictator,

no one really cared about the behavioural sciences at all. But the OSS, Helms and the CIA thought the little-known ologies could lead to a totally new way to fight and win hearts and minds. Or, even better, destroy them with control. Now this idea had been realised that the brain was the answer, the OSS had the task of figuring out how to do it. As a species, we've always been obsessed with controlling the brain.

Frankenstein was published in 1818, long before spies were getting nuclear scientists off their nut and asking them questions about fission. And in a world where mind-blowing scientific breakthroughs were happening at a pace no one could have ever conceived of pre-war, who was to say that the dream of controlling the brain couldn't come true? In pursuit of this all-American vision, the agency hired the torturers from both Nazi and Japanese concentration camps to lecture CIA operatives on how to kill children with sarin gas. They informed them how long it took for the children to die, what dosage was needed, and how to disperse the poison into

the air. And sarin gas is still very much around. Sarin gas, though, was old news by then. The CIA just wanted the fascists to get to the sleeper agent stuff. By 1947, the CIA had spent millions on researching drugs that could possibly turn people into zombie assassins. On a philosophical but also neurological level, for that to work reliably, the ability to totally own a person, body and soul, would need to be uncovered. If it was possible, such a technique would not only be useful in interrogating the enemy, it would also be handy to let loose on your own spies. Spy handling is a difficult task and an ancient art.

The art of war has a whole chapter on it. This is something I hadn't considered, is that to get a spy is hard, to keep them is even harder. So there is also the potential for an army of super spies that will not crack yeah wow you can see why it's so like alluring it's like the holy grail of international espionage and i think also like we have to remember that this was during the cold war right this is during a time where paranoia is heightened beyond belief like the threat of communism versus capitalism that was a real real fear so i think it's very easy to look back on it and being like this is all fucking batshit but it really does make sense and also it's exactly as

you know you've put in the script technological advances were happening at such a pace things like the space race it was was all on, it was all to play for. So the idea that a country like America wouldn't have been ambitious enough to go after this makes no sense. It is completely rooted in the DNA of that country to want to go and be the first to innovate on this. So I get it. I get how this all happened. And the CIA weren't the only ones contemplating the reality of actual mind control. The plebs were too. Public interest really peaked concerning the possibility of brainwashing after the trial of someone called Joseph Medinsky, the highest ranking Catholic official in Hungary,

who in 1949 was convicted of treason of the highest order and given a life sentence. On the stand, the man of God appeared to be glazed and distant, and he gave an almost unbelievable confession, as if he was being controlled by an unseen force. Western buttholes all clenched at once, had the commies cracked it. I will say, Joseph Medinsky, when he was convicted, is old as shit. I think that might have had something to do with it. Anyway, everybody was very worried that creating a Manchurian candidate

might actually be possible, and worse than that, it looked like the Soviets had got there first. Do we need to take a pause to explain the concept of a Manchurian candidate? I think you should, because I'm still thinking about Gopi Manchurian. Delicious. Originally a book which was published in 1959, and the Frank Sinatra film is like 1963 or something, so it's very quick afterwards.

And essentially, Frank Sinatra and all of his mates were at war, and they come back and frank sinatra keeps having this really weird dream and i think it's really well done because it's like you know when you're in a dream and there's a person but they're in the wrong place it's and they capture that so well uh yeah stunning so long story short it's not a spoiler. The film is 100 million years old. It is revealed that one of Frank Sinatra's mates has been brainwashed to be a assassin and he's not in control of himself and he's triggered by the Queen of Diamonds. So like his handlers are like, why don't you just go and play some solitaire? And then he just read mist and I think he ends up killing his wife or something. So that's what a Manchurian candidate is, is a assassin that you are in complete control of, but they don't know and they will have no memory of what they have done.

Interesting. So that is what a Manchurian candidate is. And as fanciful a concept as it may sound, the Central Intelligence Agency sprang into action. They considered sending a team into Europe to rescue the glassy-eyed priest, but they didn't. Instead, they decided that hypnotism, a scientifically scoffed-at medium, was their best bet, and the use of it was approved across the board. Hypnotism is very interesting. I looked into it briefly. It's like 1800s it's first come up with

and it was called mesmerism. And then everyone was like, ha ha, that's so fucking stupid. And then it bounced back in like 1940 something, presumably in line with everyone trying to contact their boys who were at war, et cetera, mediumship, la la la la. So it was making a bit of a comeback but i don't think

that we'd quite got to the point of like hypnotism stopped me smoking so whether it was proven or not the cia go full force with hypnotism and they also threw the polygraph in there too for good measure by 1951 this project had a name, another very whimsical name, Project Bluebird. Bluebird's task was to improve interrogation tactics at all costs. Their holy grail was a truth serum. They were allowed to do anything they wanted to try and find it. I think if there's anything history has taught us, allowing scientists and or doctors and or psychiatrists, psychologists to do anything they want, doesn't end well. An interrogation team was put together using psychiatrists, polygraph experts and, controversially, hypnotists were given unlimited funds.

Danger, Claxton. Yeah, danger, danger, high voltage. A month after the commencement of the Korean War, Bluebird took these dollar bills to Japan. Their mission was to examine how the polygraph and hypnotism affected enemy human suspects during interrogation. These enemy humans were 20 North Korean prisoners of war. The polygraph, invented in 1921, had been used in interrogations since its inception, but hypnotism, as I explained, new kid on the block, espionage wise, although it had been around for longer as a thing. Polygraphs, as we have told you many, many, many times, are completely useless, but they have a practical problem that I had never

considered. They're not very portable, and they require at least two people to operate them. You need the person asking the questions and the technician reading the readings. So wouldn't it be helpful, Bluebird thought, if they could develop some sort of ray gun version? And that's one of the things they were thinking about in Japan. You've got to dream big. And in Japan, those North Korean insurgents

were subjected to bajillions of polygraphs. But perhaps taking the FBI's current view that polygraphs are about as helpful as reading tea leaves, Bluebird went on to try a different idea. Instead of trying to find out what these soldiers of Sung had been subjected to, or done, they tried to make them forget all about it instead. They shocked them with electrodes and drugged them with sodium amytol and benzadrine, putting them into prolonged unconsciousness, in an attempt to create a torture-induced amnesia. To this day, we're not totally sure what they found out there in the prisons of Japan,

but our best guess is they achieved nothing more than traumatising 20 men. The timing of this deployment is significant, because the Korean War marked one of the few flashes in the Cold War pan. America were right to be concerned. The Soviets had control in China, and North Korea is still communist now. One nation under God was afraid. Very afraid. And as Saru said, the atmosphere of Red Terror meant that Washington DC started to throw themselves

behind a new approach to warfare. To justify the unjustifiable. In the name of saving the globe from a terrifying new world order. Paranoia was everywhere. The horrors of nuclear war weighed heavy on the global conscience, and the USA was a superpower for the first time. If anyone could install an ideology in another country, it was them, they told themselves in a trembling voice in the mirror every morning. Officially, the Bluebird Japan operation was declared a success. After its

conclusion, Bluebird decided that hypnosis was a waste of time. But the search for the truth drug was still on. In 1951, Bluebird changed shape. With the CIA now fully operational, and with funding coming out of their butt, it was time for a change of the guard. So Bluebird became Project Artichoke. And Artichoke had

and ye shall know the truth and it will set you free engraved on the wall of their office at their HQ in Langley, Virginia. Through the years Artichoke did some really, really fucked up shit to try and uncover the truth. And their justification for this was always we need to find it because if the Russians are already doing it, we need to know how to beat them. They carried on with the marijuana experiments of yore, but they also expanded their minds too. Maybe because they tested it on each other so much.

It's nuts how like, they're all quite young men. And they're just like, have this unlimited access to every single drug on the planet. Off you go. There's definitely a lot of third eyes opening. And their findings seem absurdly obvious. Basically, they concluded the following. Marijuana would depress a person's cautions. The characteristics they already had were magnified.

They weren't that interested in sex. They would laugh loudly, and they might let go of things they were withholding as they spiraled to the tops of their little stoned minds. Sounds about right. However, Artichoke soon figured out that there was no way of knowing whether these pot-inspired ramblings were the truth, or just total shit. So the artichoke team concluded that, quote, the drug defies all but the most expert and searching analysis. And they hopped quickly off the weed train. The Navy, though, got back on the mescaline boat to see if they could figure out how to get information out of people

without beating them up. Just like before, it didn't work. And Project Chatter was shelved in 1953. They just had one person making up all of the names. Yeah, man. And he's got all of the fucking weed. He's the king. Probably smug that the Navy had failed as well, Artichoke had another idea.

In the spirit of the ages and in the footsteps of the Kennedys, Project Artichoke wondered whether lobotomy might be the answer. Chopping a bit of someone's brain out could certainly make them forget. But it doesn't exactly let you get state secrets out of them and it also didn't seem like a viable option to make someone a competent assassin. See our Patreon bonus on lobotomies upcycled in December 2022. Surgical brain scrambling wouldn't do the propaganda machine any good either. But again, would those pesky Russians be saying that? Or would they be swinging ice picks all

over the place? Luckily for Artichoke, they didn't have to be too concerned with public image. During the 50s all the way through to the mid-60s, totally sane people were chucked into insane asylums all over the place, including Soviet political prisoners for them to run their tests on without anyone caring. And tests they did, with any drug you can think of and probably some you can't they had high hopes for cocaine after all it is apparently a hell of a drug but they found that in large doses it made their subject a bit too paranoid to be of any use like all of this is so like dodoy like i didn't realize cocaine made people paranoid really no oh man Oh dear. I thought it just made everyone like, yeah. I mean, it does, but if you keep going, there's a, what goes up must come down. I see. Now heroin was

a useful truth serum they found, but only if they broke someone through withdrawal. And this went on and on. Project Artichoke's breakthrough truth drug discovery never came. Until it did. In the early 50s, the CIA heard tell of a new synthesized drug being cooked up in Switzerland, derived from moldy rye bread, lysergic acid diethylamide. All the way back in 1938, chemist Albert Hoffman had been looking into a circulation stimulant inside ergot fungus. He made loads of different samples from the malt, but he lost interest in his blood-swishing quest,

and all of his tubes sat somewhere on a shelf. Until the 16th of April 1943, when Albert Hoffman had a funny feeling that test sample LSD25 might be worth having a look at. And maybe the cast of hair descended from on high and told him he was about to change the world. But something possessed Hoffman to whip up a new batch of 25, which he accidentally spilled on his fingers. Now Hoffman had no choice but to wait and see what happened. And happen, something certainly did. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery+.

In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by

chance but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time if all goes to plan we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be lived a life most people only dream about. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment,

charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom. But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy.

Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. Hoffman recorded in his lab notes experiencing a, quote, remarkable but not unpleasant state of intoxication characterized by an intense stimulation of the imagination and an altered state of awareness of the world as he lay on the sofa he saw a succession of fantastic rapidly changing imagery of a striking reality and depth alternating with a vivid kaleidoscopic array of colours. This enlightened light show lasted a couple of hours, and when Hoffman emerged, he was baffled. He had no idea how such a small amount of distilled bread mould

could have done such wild things to him. It's crazy, isn't it? This is why, again, you can totally believe why they're like, this is completely possible. You're exactly right. Anne Hoffman thought the same thing, being a man of science. can totally believe why they're like this is completely possible you're exactly right and hoffman thought the same thing being a man of science three days later he decided to take it again he swallowed a millionth of an ounce of lsd25 thinking that nothing would happen he was

so convinced that nothing would happen he decided to hop on his bike and cycle home. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. That first day you're testing it out. Stay home. I've never had LSD. Have you? No, never. I'd quite like to. I want to do it after researching this more than ever.

Yeah. In the safety of an inside-y space. Environment is very important. Yes. I don't want to be let loose into the world no no no no i did once take mushrooms by accident and then you fell off a bike and then i fell off a bike it was quite a lot and i don't mean a little pedal bike no no no i crashed a motorbike into the side of a mountain because i didn't realize how high i was i did not take it on purpose and

then get on a motorbike just to be incredibly clear. Somebody drugged me and we're laughing about it now because I'm not dead. Yeah, but it was close. It was fucking close. I still think about it sometimes and I'm like... Anyway, Hoffman is on his bike. He's riding home. And this was clearly an error because he became convinced that he couldn't move or talk. But his assistant told him that he actually cycled home very normally.

Isn't that so interesting? Yep. Once he made it home, Hoffman became totally convinced that he was going to die. His ego felt suspended in space, watching his dead body from above. See, this is what freaks me out.

I just want to have a nice time, see some colours, have some thoughts. Don't want to see my ego suspended in space. There's a really interesting thing about the comparison between LSD and DMT. I think Timothy Leary's son says it. And he's like, if LSD is you being sipped through a straw DMT is you

being shot out of a cannon see this is what worries me a little bit I feel like things are pretty all right up there and my friend who has done quite a few things I don't take heroin just to be clear um and she was like is the voice in your head like quite a nice voice and i was like yeah and she was like don't ever do drugs and i'm scared i'll take lsd and break my brain or something but anyway back to hoffman he's having this mega trip and he has no idea at this point what he has started swiss chemist Albert Hoffman changed the world forever with his bread malt. Now we know a lot more about what happened to Albert Hoffman now, so here is a red-handed rundown on how LSD, the problem child of mind control, actually works.

Inside our brain holes, LSD interacts with the chemical messengers on the surface of our brain. LSD's particular receptor friend is called 5-HT2AR, who is a serotonin guy. LSD gives this receptor a big hug and sends serotonin down a different neural pathway than the one it would usually choose. 5-HT2AR likes the big hug so much that it creates a little lid to go over its ergot friend to stop it from detaching quickly. And this interaction makes us, the brain puppets, happy, excited and giggly,

or it can make us anxious and overwhelmed. Colours, sounds and even time itself can seem wrong and sometimes that can be quite disturbing. And also, it would be irresponsible of us not to point this out, these experiences can repeat on the LSD user long after the drug has been ingested. It is quite rare but it does happen. And so, the CIA got a whiff of this drug that seemed to change one's mind in the early 50s, and they were keen to make sure that no one else found out. The CIA bought it all, with taxpayer money. And I mean all of it.

The agency bought the entire world's supply of LSD, and they took it home with them to see if it was as magic as they had heard tell. They whipped the new wonder drug out in a pilot study in October 1951 and the goals were the same as always, see what LSD did to people when they were being interrogated. And they were also paying close attention to whether LSD had the ability to suppress someone's consciousness entirely. And this is how they did it. Twelve, but probably more, CIA men were told that they were being given a new drug and promised that nothing bad would happen to them.

That's what happened to me when somebody gave me a pizza covered in mushrooms. True story. These men weren't told when they would be slipped the odourless, tasteless, invisible substance. But once they had been drugged, these subjects underwent mock questioning. During these trials, the CIA men experienced anxiety, loss of reality, time and space distortion and paranoia, which are interesting to observe, but not really what you need in a thumbscrew context. Regardless, the CIA was sure that they had the key to unlock the universe. Also, they knew that ergot grew freely in the USSR and in China.

So the race was on to figure out how else this mind-bending acid could be used, before the Soviets did. A mind-control vaccine was their next stop. If LSD was so useless in interrogation, it could make their boys behind enemy lines uncrackable. Or maybe a wiped mind could be rewired with LSD to implant a foreign ideology. The CIA weren't the only ones with the blank sheet brain idea. This thought experiment was being mirrored in the non-espionage medical field. Neurologists had identified that LSD appeared to mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia.

If they could figure out why, then maybe they could cure the most terrifying disease of the mind. This connection has been strengthened since then by various studies showing that LSD has little to no effect on the schizophrenic brain unless it is administered in enormous doses. Many a neurologist and psychiatrist were ruminating upon this idea, but one got there first, and I hate this guy. President of the Canadian, American, and eventually World Psychiatric Association, Ewan Cameron, knocked out patients at mental hospitals and penal facilities for months at a time. Then he pumped these people full of LSDs,

sometimes for 77 days on end, and he would electroshock the shit out of them to recondition them into wellness. Without their consent, I may add. Cameron would keep these wards of the state, remember, they're in prisons and they're in hospitals, they're supposed to be being looked after, in isolation rooms for weeks and he would play tape recordings from speakers hidden in their pillows as the walls of reality slipped away from them. Jesus. He's a fucking piece of work.

Almost all of these unwitting subjects were black and some of them were paid in heroin for their participation in these studies. Yeah, to clarify. Some people were already in hospitals for some reason and then there'll be like a psychiatric wing. And then they said, oh, well, if you want to go over to the psychiatric wing where the food is better and you can listen to your own music,

just do this study. Nothing bad is going to happen. And when you're done, we'll pay you in heroin. And when Cameron is confronted with that years later, he was like, that was just how the system works. Nothing to do with me. And may we remind you that the entire world's supply of LSD at that time was owned by the CIA. They were the only people in the world who could have given it to Mr. Ewan Cameron. That makes these experiments on American citizens state-sponsored. What's more is that Ewan Cameron was on the board of judges at Nuremberg, giving it the big I am about the non-negotiable ethical boundaries of human experimentation.

May have been their supply chain that Cameron had tapped into, but the CIA were not interested in curing schizophrenia. They were only concerned with sane people and what could be done to them. And we just cannot go any further without introducing you to the doink, the CIA's poisoner-in-chief, Sidney Gottlieb. He even has a doinky name.

He does. He took over Artichoke in 1953 as it morphed into the less whimsical name MKUltra. It's such a big step up in sinisterness of names. MKUltra. It sounds like some sort of ray gun prog rock that's gonna pour blood all over itself on stage yes yes it does oh god there is a book about sydney gottlieb called the poisoner in chief i haven't well i have used it but i haven't particularly followed it because i don't like him and I didn't want to make him the central character. It's kind of unavoidable

to an extent, but I've done my best. Sidney Gottlieb was obsessed with the weaponisation of human behaviour and so was his bestest buddy, Richard Helm, who we met a few pages back. Richard Helm was such a fan of Gottlieb that Sid was allowed to do basically anything he wanted in pursuit of the mind control goal. And he was allowed to do it for decades. The CIA department that MKUltra ran under was called the Technical Services Staff. Again, another boring, off-scent-throwing name.

But everyone called it the dirty tricks department nice better interestingly enough sydney gottlieb was jewish i believe quite orthodox had his parents not emigrated to the states from central europe before the reich we can't say where he would have ended up how he squared building on the work of the Dachau doctors is a trip in itself. But there are plenty of odd things for us to look at about Sidney Gottlieb. He took great pride in his talent for folk dancing, despite his club foot.

He lived with his family in a converted slave cabin and later in life built one of the first solar-powered homes in his area. And every single day of his life, Sidney Gottlieb got up at the crack of Christ to milk his goats, all the while planning how LSD could dominate the planet. It's nice to have interests. He has them.

And he talks about them. A lot. He's got a lot of hobbies, this man. But goats and maypoles aside, Sidney Gottlieb loved drugs. Anything he tested at work, he took himself. And he also gave his colleagues. Actually, the whole of the dirty tricks department were at it. They even literally spiked the punch at the Christmas party. Sometimes I wonder if that's where the joke comes from.

I am going to start telling people that's where the joke comes from. Some of the MKUltra team cried because their experience was so beautiful. Others, however, were not so lucky. One poor man ended up running through the streets of Washington convinced that every car was a monster coming to get him. He was found by his colleagues hours later, cowering under a fountain. I wonder if they had, like, a designated searcher. A designated spotter.

I don't know why my brain went here, but I thought you were going to say, I wonder if they had a big net. The designated spotter has a big net. And while that all sounds pretty crazy, this wasn't that novel behind CIA cover. Bluebird and then Artichoke and then MKUltra had done loads of experiments on prisoners of war, insurgents and even their own staff. Yeah, it's really not that, um, strange. Yeah. Just another day at the office.

But Gottlieb had a new plan, arguing that the conditions of these studies couldn't translate into the real world. Richard Helms approved this plan, and Gottlieb was given free reign to administer LSD to unwitting American citizens. Abhorrent, obviously, but it's made worse by the fact that the CIA are not allowed to conduct operations at home. Their beat is international operations only. Domestic duty is the FBI's job. One of the many reasons that the CIA and the FBI have never been on each other's Christmas card list. I didn't know that. I didn't know there was such a clear divide.

Yeah, no, it's like MI5 and MI6, and never the two shall meet. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media.

To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years.

I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favourite podcasts. Gottlieb, though, as I'm sure you can all imagine, didn't give one single shit.

In a truly dirty trick, Gottlieb set up pretend medical associations so he could fund LSD trials at universities, hospitals and prisons. One such programme was at Stanford University. Volunteers were asked to come and try a new substance. Obviously, it isn't hard to get students to agree to do drugs. And it's even easier to get poets to do it. Allen Ginsberg had his first LSD experience at Stanford. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kessie was a subject at a similar CIA-funded program at a different hospital.

But we're going to come back to cultural icons next week. The volunteers in these studies didn't know that they were being pumped with LSD. They had no idea what would happen to them. They certainly didn't know that the whole thing was built on money from the dirty tricks department, but crucially, they did volunteer to be test subjects, which wasn't enough for Gottlieb, because he thinks it spoils the whole thing,

because a baddie that you're interrogating isn't going to be like oh well i signed up for this you know gottlieb only wanted sane unwitting subjects he didn't want anyone being tested to know literally anything about what was happening to them which one more time for those of you in the back is against the nuremberg code but sid didn't have to report to anyone and he took his license to kill to new york there he employed a man called george hunter white white posed as an artist drugged ordinary people in bars without their consent and then took them back to safe houses where he would watch them trip and send word back to MKUltra. That is so fucking sinister. I don't even know where to begin.

It gets so much worse. White had served in World War II. He was a federal agent and he did have intelligence experience, but he was not a a scientist not that if a scientist was doing this it would be any better but he hasn't got fucking clue what's going on so the new york operation didn't last long because it's just a guy running around fucking drugging people but in 1955 white and his house of horrors were moved to san francisco and given the code name, Operation Midnight Climax. Pause for effect. Why? Why? They're so fucking extra.

It's, you can't just stop. Just stop. But they won't. White's mission, which he accepted with open arms, was to cruise the streets of the Golden City, tracking down drug dealers, who he would party with, and then dob into the streets of the Golden City tracking down drug dealers who he would party with and then dob into the narcotics bureau. White particularly loved to

target musicians and legend has it that he planted drugs in Billie Holiday's hotel room whilst he was high as a kite himself but that didn't stop him arresting her for possession on the spot. That arrest meant that Billie Holiday couldn't get a cabaret licence, and it was a real turning point in her career, obviously, for the worse. And we all know what happened to the lady who sang the blues. Whilst sampling the narcotics that he confiscated by day, by night, White used himself and drank like a fish, and it got the best of him.

Agents who would turn up at the safe house quite often to line it with two-way mirrors and secret microphones once found White half a gallon of Gibsons in, shooting bullets at his own reflection. And I have no doubt that Sidney Gottlieb was acutely aware of all of this. But nothing changed, and George Hunter White continued his antics in San Francisco all the way up to 1963. His particular favourite was employing sex workers with abuse issues to bring men back to his safe house. He would pay these women either in drugs or in the get-out-of-jail-free card if they were ever arrested.

Once the men were locked in the safe house the women would slip the unsuspecting john some lsd and white would watch the midnight climax unfold sitting on a portable toilet behind a two-way mirror slurping martinis why does he need someone a toilet i don't know i tried to find out so hard but the drugs have just fucked his guts and also like i don't think safe house quite is the right word i mean it's the word that is used no it's not even that it's like a brothel it's like it's like decorated like deep red and there's like bondage pictures on the walls and like it's like uh i'm a tortured artist and like come back to my den of iniquity it's like that that vibe. These MKUltra years were the foundations of the CIA exploiting sex for espionage.

Former officials have claimed in interviews that midnight climax really opened their eyes to the array of sexual proclivities that were out there. And naturally, they got to work on how to use them for their advantage. They say that, right? Like, there's this one interview that I read with a CIA guy. He's like, well, we didn't even know what a John was. I'm like, bull fucking shit.

You knew. And, like, you probably, like, want to wank off a hamster or something. Like, I don't believe that everyone in the CIA was like, oh, well, missionary only, no eye contact. Like, fuck, come on. Grow up. And these years of citizen abuse, because that's what it is at the san fran house were only brought to a close when john j mccone took over the cia citing that no one had any idea if white was just making up all of the quote-unquote reports that he sent to langley

while totally off his tits and of course he was absolutely right. Operation Midnight Climax was a drug-addled human zoo, not an interrogation research trial. But the wheels of change kept turning, and eventually the US figured out how to synthesise LSD themselves, meaning that they were no longer reliant on the Swiss production pipeline. Now LSD could be produced in tonnes, so the CIA could make enough to turn the world upside down. Once they figured that out, they had loads of ideas, like drugging whole cities

to make them temporarily mad and easier to invade. That was their favourite one. And they even did a press tour about it, presenting the concept as a way to take the teeth out of warfare. Like this guy's just like think how much easier it would be no one would die they just go mad for half an hour and then we get in and they come to and you're like oh whoops hi i'm the king now i mean better than sarin gas i guess i yes i have been struggling with this one this is the thing it's like cold war all of that etc etc and if you're hey, we're actually just doing a really ethical way of invading all of these places. We're not trying to, you know, blow your fucking tits off.

We're just going to get you off your tits and then we'll invade. Very nice. But just like all of the other things the Secret Service used to try and control the totality of human existence, LSD was just not what they thought it would be. So they just left a trail of confused, traumatised, violated and very ill people in the wake of MKUltra. And we've talked about the inmates and patients who we know to have experienced horrifying knock-on effects after being slipped LSD against their will and without their knowledge. And some of them, I think about nine of the subjects of these hospital experiments, have actually sued the state since.

Good. Yeah. We're never, ever, ever going to be able to cover all of them. We don't know about all of them also. But before we leave you this week, the end of part one of Operation MKUltra, we have to tell you about a man on the inside, Dr. Frank Olson. A chemist by trade, he worked on artichoke attempting to hone germ warfare. He's particularly affiliated with an MKUltra offshoot called MK Naomi.

It's got to be someone's kid hasn't it it just has to god i've invented a way of killing people and their skin eats them from the outside in and i've named it after you darling oh my god and yes as hannah said their speciality was cooking up airborne botulism and super deadly shellfish toxins that vaccines were useless to protect against. Dr Olson was an expert in the delivery of disease by air, which if you think about it, is much more effective than a spiking. Everyone has to breathe. You have no guarantee you can make someone digest. In November 1953, Olsen was slipped LSD by Gottlieb himself at a work retreat in Maryland. Everyone there was on it.

Some knew, some didn't. But it became very obvious very soon that Dr. Frank Olsen was having a very bad time. I believe Gottlieb gave it to him in a glass of Cointreau. I know. So yeah, he's having a terrible time. While other CIA employees in the cabin chatted philosophy until the sun came up, Dr Frank Olsen was convinced that everyone in that isolated cabin was against him. This is what happens when you drug people and they don't fucking know.

And your delivery system is a glass of fucking Cointreau. What's happening? Outside of work, Frank was a passionate family man who never talked about his work at home, quite understandably. He had a stress-induced ulcer, which had caused him previously to attempt a resignation. He was talked out of it, but you could argue that he had battled with feelings of isolation,

unwantedness, and not being up to the job for some time. And LSG just shows you what is already there. That is complete speculation from me. You don't have to take it with you. The morning after the drugging incident at the Maryland retreat, the mood had soured and everyone made their excuses pretty quickly. When Frank got home, his wife Alice said that he was totally silent and it wasn't until their kids were in bed that he said to her, I have made a terrible mistake. Alice told her humiliated husband that no one was laughing at him,

everyone at the agency was his friend. But it made no difference. The next day, Frank Holson went back into the office and offered his resignation once again. But this time he said he wanted to be fired if they wouldn't accept it. And once again, his boss talked him down. But 24 hours later, Dr. Frank Olsen was back in that same office, more convinced than ever that he couldn't do what was required of him. It was clear that Frank needed psychiatric attention, but he was sent to Gottlieb's right-hand man instead, who, to be clear, had literally no psychiatric training at all whatsoever.

So Frank was taken to New York to speak to an actual doctor, who, of course, had top security clearance. Yeah, I don't think this doctor's going to be particularly objective. No. And Frank was in real trouble. He told the doctor that he thought the CIA were keeping him awake with the old favourite, Benzitrine. This doctor, if we can even call him that, gave Frank a sedative and a bottle of bourbon and sent him off to see John Mulholland. No, not a doctor, but a magician. It's like the great Mez Marino from that Simpsons episode. I also think he's the original spoonbender.

Oh, move over, Uri Geller. I've had to deal with so much fucking Uri Geller shit in the research for this episode, and I haven't included him on purpose because I think he's such a knobhead. So Mulholland was a favourite of Gottlieb. He was also on the CIA payroll because he taught field agents sleight of hand to make their hallucinogenic slippages slicker. Dr Frank Olsen was not impressed by the magic show and it was decided that he should be sent home for Thanksgiving the next day. But to lighten everyone's spirits, he was taken to see Broadway smash hit Me and Juliet before they went.

What the fuck is happening? It's like, it's okay, Frank. Go and look at the singing and the dancing. It's okay. Do you want some more bourbon? It's okay, Frank. Go and look at the singing and the dancing. It's okay. Do you want some more bourbon? So Frank was clearly agitated in the first act. He told his CIA crone chaperones that people were waiting outside the theatre to arrest him.

There's quite a lot of schizophrenia in my family. And quite a lot of the stories I have heard from them about episodes is that feeling of there will be someone waiting. So they can clearly see that Frank is unravelling. So they took him back to his hotel in the interval. But Frank crept out under the cover of darkness and took to the streets of New York. He ripped up all his paper money and threw his wallet away.

The next morning, the MK Ultramen found Frank sitting in the lobby of the hotel in his hat and coat, and they took him back to Washington. On the drive, I don't know if they drove back to Washington or whether this is the drive to the airport, it's not clear, just to clarify. Frank told the driver that they had to pull over. He couldn't go home. He was afraid that he was going to be violent towards his children. So they turned that car around and back to the Big Apple they went. And they also went back to the magic circle-loving doctor and he rightly admitted that Frank Olsen

was too much for him to handle. Dr. Frank Olsen needed to go to a hospital, a real one, and this was agreed by all parties. And cars were booked for the following morning. But it was far too late. That night, Dr. Frank Olsen threw himself, or fell, from the 10th floor of the hotel they were all staying in.

His family were told that his death was a mystery, that he fell or he maybe jumped. And there are people that think that it's Frank Olsen that is the origin of the idea that LSD makes you think you can fly. Oh. So, his boys were that young, and Alice had nothing to tell them. She couldn't explain where their dad had gone.

That's so sad. Mm-hmm. The truth would not be revealed to the Olsens for decades, and for that truth, you'll have to come back next week. And the story we just told you is probably not 100% true. But we'll talk about that next week. As a result of Frank Olsen's untimely death, Alice was given a government pension and MKUltra was suspended. Sidney Gottlieb even had the audacity to go to Frank Olsen's funeral. But the MKUltra hiatus wouldn't last forever. And we leave you with this horrible

story for a reason. Even for the CIA, MKUltra, MKNaomi, and the Dirty Tricks Department combined, explaining why a government bacteriologist had fallen or jumped out of a window in the middle of the night was quite difficult to explain. Enter the hero of our piece, John D. Marks. In his youth, John worked as a staff assistant to the Director of Intelligence and Research in Washington. He heard intelligence coming in from Southeast Asia firsthand. He did 18 months in Vietnam, but the American military operations in Cambodia were the last straw. In the immortal words of Anthony Bourdain, once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never want to stop beating Henry

Kissinger to death with your bare hands. John Marks saw the CIA's misuse of power and it made him sick. It was a direct violation of the American ideals he held dear. So he decided to become a crusader instead. And when Marks heard about the curious case of Dr. Frank Olson, he wanted answers. And he had a much better chance of getting them in the US than anyone Dr Frank Olsen. He wanted answers, and he had a much better chance of getting them in the US than anyone would here in Britain, not only because the American press is freer than ours is, but the Americans don't have anything like a state secrets act, which here in Britain outlines what we can and what we can't know, and it is a law. Long operating under the suspicion that the CIA's fixation with the cloak and dagger game

had led them to abandon their actual duties to their people, John D. Marks submitted a freedom of information request to the CIA and the result of that landmark demand on the dirty tricks department is where we will meet you next week. Goodbye.

Stay safe. Don't drink any glasses of Cointreau anyone gives you I quite like Cointreau I like Cointreau as like a dash a dash in a thing

oh I am not ordering a glass of Cointreau but if it's the only thing someone's got on their I'll take it over like brandy and on that note we'll see you next week.

Goodbye.