RedHanded - Episode 368 - MKUltra - Part 2: The Myth of Mind Control

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

We now know that the CIA quietly tested mind-bending psychedelics on unwitting American citizens. But how do we know?In Part 2 of our series on MK-Ultra, we're going to tell you the story of how one of the CIA's many dirty secrets was revealed to the world, and how they were forced not only to hand over damaging information about their mind-bending escapades but also to inadvertently help promote the book that followed.More importantly, what does any of this have to do with Fidel Castro's beard?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.

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And welcome to Red Handed. Have you been drinking Cointreau? Courtesy of the Dirty Tricks department. If you haven't listened to last week's episode and you continue to listen to this one, that's your fault. So don't say anything to anyone. Or I'll send Sidney Gottlieb, doink of the world, to come and get you. No! Last week we left you with a boring-seeming administrative request from former intelligence employee turned author John D. Marks.

And just to recap quickly for you, Marks wanted to know why Dr Frank Olsen, seemingly out of nowhere, fell or jumped out of a tenth-storey window of an NYC Hilton in November 1953. And this request was nothing short of genius. Marx knew that this was an offer that the CIA couldn't really refuse. Because of the legal structure of the country they were vowed to protect. Marx was a staunch believer that information belongs to the people, not to the government. And John Marx had a feeling

that there was a big, fat chance that the general public would be able to see what the CIA didn't want them to know. John was also familiar with the National Security Act passed in 1947, in conjunction, funnily enough, with the Assembly of the CIA, which created a new command structure

enabling the Secret Service to fight communism wherever they found it or even suspected it. The first line of defence against communism were given carte blanche to do whatever they thought it would take to stop the spread of the Soviet Union's but, crucially, doesn't mean we can't know about it. It's not a state secrets act.

And John D. Marx knew that. He also knew that the CIA were hiding something. And he was right. Amazingly, the CIA replied to John's request. They told him that they had around 130 boxes of files related to the death of Dr Frank Olsen. Eight or so of these boxes were sent to John. They were essentially thousands of pages

of quite heavily redacted accounts related to MKUltra. It will always be the accountants that get you. I'm convinced because it's accounts, that's why we know about the portable toilet and those boxes ended up being a book which marks called the search for the manchurian candidate colon the cia and mind control colon the secret history of the behavioral sciences it's a very long title it's a very long title and it's a very long book which i have read it's like you couldn't decide what to call it yes but i think he's a very all-in kind of guy.

He's like, no, I want it to be everything. It is a good book. It's not a fun book. But if you want to know, that's where you're going to find it. It would be the only book so far in history to force the CIA to go to court. And it is only because of the contents of those boxes that we were able to make this series at all for you. It is astonishing. I know it's thousands and thousands and thousands of pages,

tens of thousands even, but it is amazing how much John Marks was able to piece together from accounts that are redacted. Also, he doesn't have the whole shebang. So let's pick up where we left off after the end of the san francisco safe houses gottlieb had all of his documents in relation to mk ultra destroyed and he never as long as he lived admitted to testing substances on unwitting victims he He blamed George Hunter White for the whole Midnight Climax catastrophe. But even though the safe house slash brothel slash, I don't even know what to fucking call it, MKUltra didn't move entirely from San Francisco. They just opened an office nearby where

the safe house used to be. It was much more isolated there. So MKUltra got busy with testing other stuff. Stink bombs, itching powders, laxatives and loads of generally unpleasant things that could be used to harass an enemy. But that's probably because Gottlieb had his personal supply of LSD cut off. Sounds like they're starting a joke shop. Yes. So the new MKUltra office was nothing like it had been before. It seemed like MKUltra had accepted defeat when it came to mind control and the production of A Zombie Assassin.

They maintained that they had come frustratingly close, but they just couldn't manage a reliable control mechanism. Because I think it can do all of the things they want it to do, it's just not every time. Humans, luckily for us, are just too complex to predict entirely. You can't rebuild a person's foundations all the way. And I thought you'd like this one. As the Tamils say, we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. Ancient Tamil problem. There you go. And what I'm not saying is that drugs like LSD have no long-term effect on the brain. MKUltra did get pretty good at inducing amnesia,

but it never really seemed to be permanent apart from in a couple of cases, and they certainly never managed to program anyone permanently, and that's just all too hit and miss for the field. It also feels like, okay, say you induce amnesia, it's just so unscient It also feels like, okay, say you induce amnesia, it's like, it's just so unscientific because like you say, you can't keep replicating the results in the exact same way every time. Say you induce amnesia, it's like, is it short term? Is it long term? Have they forgotten their name? Have they just forgotten the things you want them to forget? Like,

is this person now just a potato? Like, what have you made them forget? Exactly. So the agency briefly turned their attention, not to potatoes, but mushrooms, which have been ingrained in loads of cultures for millennia. But they found the same problem. Mushrooms are incredibly powerful. They can send you to the moon, but they can also kill you in an instant.

Ask Agrippina or Aaron Patterson. Check out our bonus Patreon episode for the month of August. It is quite the story. I'm a taxi. I forgot about that. Now, I'm afraid to tell you that we are not quite done with Sidney Gottlieb, the man who took LSD at the very least 200 times. We left out some of his exploits last week, because quite frankly, decades of dirty tricks is quite difficult to put into one episode. When Sidney wasn't bank rolling sex safe houses and trying to figure out how to wipe a brain and how to reprogram it, he had a lot of other things on his plate. And we're not just talking about milking

his goats. No, we're talking about assassinations of world leaders that the US didn't like very much. He actually carried out attempts himself. Naturally, he pushed LSD as the solution to absolutely everything, which I imagine in a how are we going to take out Castro meeting more a bit thin. Still, though, this was his acid dream pitch for getting rid of Fidel. Gottlieb wanted to fill an aerosol can full of LSD and spray it into a radio studio before Castro was due to give one of his rabble-rousing speeches to the Cuban populace.

The intent being to send him so mad that he would embarrass himself over the airwaves in front of his subjects and they would all lose faith in him the plan was not approved oh my god i hate to say it's kind of a good idea i know but uh after this knockback gottlieb came up with another plan to invent a powder that would make castro's iconic beard fall out my God. They're really on the humiliation tip. Like, they've been doing it for like 50 years. So apparently, all an agent needed to do to make this happen was sprinkle a toxic powder

invented by Sidney Gottlieb himself on Fidel Castro's shoes and then just watch the dictator-destructing disgrace unfold. Maybe it's like that thing where, oh, the thing you're really scared of, you just need to laugh at it and then all your fear will go away. Let's just make his beard fall out. Let's make him out nuts on the radio. Naturally, Gottlieb was desperate to do this one himself and he did go to

Cuba. But the famous facial hair did remain intact, so presumably Sidney couldn't get anywhere close enough to Fidel's footwear. Gottlieb and his minions also concocted poisons to kill Chinese statesmen Zhao Enle and Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister ever of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gottlieb was actually dispatched for this assassination, but separatist state president Moisey Tshumbe got there first. Although I wouldn't totally write off the Belgians having had something to do with it. Yeah, like you look into it and go, oh, like he was stopped from getting on a plane

and then the police of this separatist state took him off and beat him to death and I'm like, mm-hmm, and who paid them to do that? Now we could spend all day here, but we won't. Gottlieb was nuts and he did tons of nuts stuff. But we have bigger fish to fry. Through the sham financial bodies that Gottlieb had set up via MKUltra, the CIA funded a lot more experiments on the mind. The organization was called the Human Ecology Society. Yeah, the Human Ecology Society is the biggest one

and the only one we're going to talk about, but there are fucking loads. And ecology is basically, they just coined it as a term meaning like all of the social sciences and also psychiatry. Right. And ironically enough, that is kind of the reason that the behavioral sciences were, at least for a time, taken a bit more seriously. Because they had funding now and they never had it before. By the end of the Korean War, 70% of American prisoners of war held in China had confessed to war crimes, or at the very least, called to end American military involvement in Asia. 15% of them had collaborated fully with the Chinese. And shockingly, at least to Washington, only 5% of their imprisoned men had resisted. More than that, almost none of

these military men recanted once they were back in the home of the brave. British, Australian and Turkish prisoners had nowhere near these numbers, even though their conditions were reportedly pretty similar to that of the Americans whilst they were being held in China. America was stunned and scared, adding to the atmosphere of terror. Why were only American prisoners of war confessing? What could the Chinese possibly be doing to those GIs? Surely, they had to be brainwashing the American soldiers and the American soldiers only because they posed a greater threat than the other nationalities did. Which I think, you know, brainwashing aside, I can kind of see that as a theory. But I think it is probably more likely that the horrors of war, especially in Vietnam, were unacceptable to even the most virulent patriot.

When these statistics were published, it just so happened that the head of the CIA's son was being treated for a brain injury that he had sustained in Korea by a man called Dr. Harold Wolfe. Wolfe, an expert on migraine and pain management, was commissioned by the CIA top brass to conduct an official study of communist brainwashing techniques. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich,

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Funded by MKUltra, Wolf formed a partnership with Cornell Medical School. As a part of his study, Wolf conducted experiments with former communist interrogators and former prisoners too. In fact, this study remains one of the best accounts we have on communist re-education. But yet again, it was revealed to the CIA that the communists didn't have a magic plant or drug. Chinese interrogations, although brutal, only relied on intense psychological pressure and exploiting the vulnerability that that creates. That's how we've all been doing it, since the dawn of time. Wolff noted that the process was no more spectacular than the way that Pavlov conditioned his infamous dogs. The Chinese had a two-step process. Get a confession via conventional means

like good cop, bad cop, threats, anger, the usual. Then move the victim to a group cell where they were forced to study Marx and Mao. The road to freedom for all detainees in that group cell was passing the programme. So if someone resisted the re-education, they were at the hands of their cellmates. It's the classic divide and conquer. There was not a psychiatrist or a chemist in sight. This method, though, is distinctly Chinese.

They have a very collective culture, so their torture methods are informed by that. Things like a group mentality and a sense of mission are specifically Chinese things. The Soviets, specifically the Russians, just very heavy-handed. They don't bother with the re-education part of it, which is, you know, arguably quite Russian. It's not rocket science. It's social science. And that means my degree matters. After the conclusion of Wolfe's study, the head of the CIA released a public statement regarding the findings.

He claimed that there were no human guinea pigs that they could use to devise their own system, which, if we learned one thing last week, was a total pile of shit. But suddenly, the behavioural sciences had the ear of the world. Somewhere else in the United States, Oklahoma to be precise, But suddenly the behavioural sciences had the ear of the world. Somewhere else in the United States, Oklahoma to be precise, John Gittinger was working away on his system for assessing personalities and using those parameters to predict behaviour. A psychologist by training with a brief stint in the Navy behind him,

Gittinger started studying what he called seasonal schizophrenics. This is what he called the homeless men who got stuck in Oklahoma for the winter on their way to a Californian life in the sun. While they waited out the winter, these transient men would get temporary jobs like short order cooks, hot dog sellers and dishwashers. In exchange for a bed and a bath, Gittinger interviewed these men and devised his personality assessment system. Okay, I'm going to try so hard to keep this short because it's so boring. I thought you were going to say because it's so interesting. No, my God.

Okay, essentially, Gittinger realised that the cooks were better at remembering things for a short amount of time and the dishwashers were better at internalising stuff because they just had to be on their own in the corner of the kitchen or whatever. So based on these findings, he came up with different personality types based on Weschler IQ test scores of his subjects. The Weschler test like, well, my IQ is fucking 98 or like, it's the standard one that usually is administered to children, but there is an adult one. Anyway, Gittinger, on the basis of his categorizations, was able to accurately predict how that particular personality type would react to certain external stimuli. He's got like four and they've all got letters.

When the Cuban Missile Crisis hung pendulously in the skies, the White House got Gittinger in straight away to assess how the Soviets would react to pressure. Which sounds ridiculous, but he was really, really good at predicting. And the intelligence wing thought that they could use his research to correctly diagnose the personality type of someone like Che Guevara, for example, so they could figure out the best way to bring him down. Still, though, even though they'd learned about personality types, the CIA were no closer to their sleeper agent,

apart from one instance, where, via hypnosis, an agent called Morse Allen convinced one of his secretaries to shoot the other one. Basically, he hypnotizes both of them, and he hypnotizes one to be like, whatever you do, don't wake up. And then he hypnotizes the other one, he was like, if she doesn't wake up, that isn't going to make you so angry, you're going to want to kill her. And then he hypnotizes the other one. He was like, if she doesn't wake up, that is going to make you so angry you're going to want to kill her. And it happens. And the angry one picks up the gun.

It's unloaded. She doesn't know that. And she shoots it. And then she doesn't remember anything. And she swears blind that she would never fire a firearm. But it wasn't like this. Ah, Eureka, we've got it. Because even Morse Allen himself was like, this is not a reasonable environment.

These women work for me. They trust me. They're in their work environment where they go every day. There's no way I can replicate this because I see these women every day. If I meet a stranger who's an enemy, I'd have to work on them for years. And it's just not reasonable or economic or sound. So on to the next experiment. Sensory deprivation. No Man is an Island and MKUltra confirmed that. Leaving men locked in a dark

box for 35 days did make them more likely to talk but it also caused irreparable damage. After this torture the men were totally useless to the CIA. You won't be surprised to hear that the Human Ecology Society would fund literally anything. And on their quest for the bazaar, they discovered a scientist called John C. Lilly, who was sewing monkey heads onto other monkeys and hooking them up to electrodes, causing them to ejaculate. Is this the same John C. Lilly? The very same. Of the NASA donkey wanking. Donkey dolphin wanking.

It is the very same. Oh my God. Okay. Well, if you are not a shorthand listener, what the hell are you doing with your life? Hannah and I obviously release weekly, every single tuesday shorthand episodes over on amazon music and the very first i believe or maybe the second episode we ever ever did was on john c lily's nasa dolphin wanking off experiment it is absolutely bonkers and i actually think we should release it into the main feed just so everyone can hear it perhaps as an accompaniment to this episode that's a good idea so go check it out we'll put it into the main feed just so everyone can hear it, perhaps as an accompaniment to this episode. That's a good idea.

So go check it out. We'll put it in the main feed. But if you want all the other hundreds of episodes we've done on shorthand, go check that out as well. Because they're really fucking good. So anyway, back to this. So when MKUltra heard about what John C. Lilly was up to, they thought it was interesting.

They thought, could we wank someone into submission perhaps? And they were very keen to pay Dr. Lily to find out. But Lily had no interest in working with the CIA. He refused to work under the cover of darkness. Ethically, he just couldn't do it. Yeah, you really want to make sure everyone knows you're wanking off. I know that's not what he like initially wanted to happen but that is where it goes pretty quickly anyway maybe that was just because of the countless vials of LSD he had injected into his own leg that changed the way he saw the world yeah he does a lot of acid John Lilly but it all came to an end in 1964 after After Gottlieb retired from MKUltra, he and his wife moved to India and worked in a leprosy hospital.

Guilty conscience? Anyway, over the years of operation, MKUltra explored countless avenues in the hunt for mind control, and they all revealed the same thing. The mind just cannot be controlled. At least, not consistently enough for the field. MKUltra had not only failed, it had violated the rights, minds and bodies of countless people, and it was John D. Marx that forced the CIA to tell the world about it.

Once Marx had finished his damning account of MKUltra's hunt for the Manchurian candidate, he sent the manuscript to the CIA for approval. Which sounds mad, but it's actually inspired. Everything John D. Marks had written had been collated from information the CIA had sent him freely. After review, the CIA wanted 339 passages redacted from the book prior to publication, and they took Marx as publisher to court over it. First time in history that ever happened. Wow.

In the end, only 168 of the requested passages were deleted from the manuscript. The other 171 sections that the CIA wanted blasted into oblivion were kept in. And in a punk as fuck move, they were published in bulk. Punk, I love it so fucking much. I mean, could you get better PR for a fucking book than the CIA took us to court and we got at least, we got more than half of the ones they want to take and out kept it by this book. So yeah, they did this and that meant that the common reader could see what the CIA didn't want them to know. Specifically because they're printed in bold.

A masterstroke that directly led to a Senate inquiry into the intelligence activities of the agency that were exposed by the book. Specifically, MKUltra. activities of the agency that were exposed by the book specifically mk ultra the senate hearing named the church committee again give it a boring fucking name why don't you took place in 1975 but you can put your separation of church and state pitchforks down it's called that because it was chaired by a bloke called senator frank church yeah snore i just when i first read that i was like it was called the fucking what no no i thought it was named that because it was like one of those you don't want to come to this it's fucking boring we're talking about god no the inquiry's opening address on capitol hill was delivered by ted kennedy who

after having got away with murder was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. Yeah, can't swing a cat without hitting a Kennedy. The Church Committee had two days to assess the legal abuse of American citizens that had occurred during MKUltra. Sidney Gottlieb dragged himself back from India for the hearing after being informed that his cover had been well and truly blown. Although he did manage to get away with testifying in a private antechamber, because he had a heart condition, he said. Suspect, but in the end it didn't really matter. All Gottlieb said was that he'd been assigned the task of finding out whether and how it was possible to modify human behaviour by covert means.

Conveniently, he had no memory of the San Francisco sex scandal safe houses. And as for defending his legacy of LSD and subversive testing, he wheeled out the old Cold War refrain. The original impetus of the drug and mind control programme was the concern that the enemies of the state had got there first. And that is kind of it. The senators on the committee just didn't ask Gottlieb the right questions. They had other Watergate-shaped things on their mind.

It was uncovered during the church committee that at least one member of US Congress had been placed under surveillance by the very agency that was supposed to protect him. Other members of Congress were on the CIA let's keep an eye on them, they might be a communist list, but hadn't yet been assigned a detail. And the consequence of that was, all of the senators on the committee were much more concerned with saving their own arse

than finding out about LSD and MKUltra. So they just saw Gottlieb as a state-funded pharmacist, and not really that much to worry about. After the church committee concluded, William Colby, who had inherited the CIA from Richard Helms himself, told the Times, quote, I think the family skeletons are best left where they are, in the closet.

Well, you would say that, wouldn't you? Those around him have reported that he was horrified by the cesspool that he had been handed, saying he was having a grenade blowing up in his face every time he turned around. Like, you've been in the CIA for fucking years. Like, you know. I don't believe for a second you're just going, oh, I'm the king of intelligence now. Oh my God, all of these horrible things have been happening. I had no idea.

Colby was firm that his CIA would be nothing like the one of Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb. His agents would be international and international only. Richard Helms didn't testify at the committee because after he sacked off the CIA onto Colby, he became the United States ambassador to Iran and fucked off to Tehran as fast as he could. Un-fucking-believable, isn't it?

And as for all the electrodes, the sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic hype parties, programmed assassins, hypnotically-induced anxiety, lobotomy consideration tested on unconsenting American citizens, well, they were all just kind of forgotten. But there was one family who was never going to forget. That of Dr Frank Olsen. Alice and her two sons went public, pointing the finger straight at the CIA for causing the death of their husband and father.

But again, nothing really happened. I think there was some sort of meeting with some sort of presidential figure, but nothing really happened. And Eric Olsen made it his life's work to find out what really happened to his father. Whilst writing The Men Who Stare at Goats, John Ronson paid Eric a visit and found a man convinced that his father, who worked on Artichoke, was actually a good man who intended to bring it all down from the inside. Eric has been told, he says, by some people who worked with his father, that after a trip to Europe, Frank Olsen had seen and been made to do unspeakable things in the name of national security, and it had tipped him over the edge. Dr. Frank Olsen was going to reveal the dirty

tricks department to the world, and Gottlieb knew it. And that was the real reason that Gottlieb drug Frank Olsen that night in Maryland, to get him to admit that he was going to rat. Eric Olsen is convinced that is what his father meant when he's told his wife Alice, I've made a terrible mistake. So for Eric Olsen, it's not a question of whether his father fell or jumped that night. Eric Olsen thinks it was murder. The murder of a man who knew too much. Dr Frank's son has had little luck trying to get his theory covered in the press. One journalist even told him,

Everyone knows the CIA kills people. That's old news. Eric has even met with Stanley Gottlieb himself, who denied homicide, obviously, and added that he destroyed all of the MKUltra papers because he'd become more eco-conscious in his old age. Or what, like he recycled them? Yeah, literally. Oh my god. And he added

to a person he had half-orphaned that it didn't matter that the papers had disappeared because it was all for nothing anyway. Oh, well, thank fuck for that. My dad died for absolutely nothing. John Ronson asked Eric if he regretted starting his campaign for the truth about his father's death,

and Eric answered, I regret it all the time. Oh. It's awful. Oh. Unfortunately for Eric and the rest of the Olsen family, that journalist was right. No one's interested anymore.

I don't know how convinced I am that Frank Olsen was who Eric thinks he was, but I can completely understand why he thinks that. Yeah. The Senate, the Kennedys and the CIA have tried to close this chapter of espionage history and convince us all that there's nothing to see here. But there is something they weren't counting on. The enormous, irreversible and anti-government effect

that LSD had on society at large. And remember from last week, MKUltra owned the entire world supply of LSD for years. They were handing it out to citizens freely. So in the most beautifully ironic way, the CIA bear great responsibility in the social upheaval and youth movement that swept across America in the 60s. Have we perhaps, but probably not, finally found our non-morbid irony? No? I thought I cracked it!

Maybe. They did a lot of bad shit. Yeah! I see what you're saying. It's the closest I've ever come, I think. And why is it ironic? Well, obviously because they wanted to turn communists into capitalists.

And actually, one could argue they did the opposite. They had an enormous hand in a generational rebellion. University in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine 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.

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We also mentioned last week that big deal cultural icons from that very movement and beyond were guinea pigs in CIA-sponsored LSD experiments. Ken Kessie, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hunter, who's the lyricist for The Grateful Dead, to name just a few. And there's also Margaret fucking Mead, who was, she's an anthropologist. I fucking hate her. She was very involved with the CIA. And like, she wrote a book

called Coming of Age in Samoa. And it's one of the like, original texts that you have to read. And it's so creepy. Like, she just talks about these like glistening black bodies. And like, it's fucking gross. And she's very talks about these, like, glistening black bodies and, like, it's fucking gross.

And she's very old-school anthropology of, like, well, let's just go and see what other, like, what the tribal people do and then write about it and put our own shit on it anyway. So I haven't included her because I hate her. The point is,

what these cultural figureheads experienced during those trials that MKUltra paid for was so transcendent that they became apostles of the ergot derivative for the rest of their lives. Even head honcho Timothy Leary, counterculture icon and LSD great guru, was first introduced to the substance by Sidney Gottlieb himself. Leary's hallucinogenic head was first turned by an article in Life magazine

that told the tale of a couple who had gone down to Mexico to take a bunch of mushrooms. And that little hallucinogen holiday and subsequent article was funded directly by Gottlieb and NK Ultra. Leary wouldn't figure that out for years. I bet he was pissed when he found out he's actually he's kind of fine with it alan gimsburg fucking hates it but timothy leary's like how far well

i'm here now you know timothy leary led people through trips his whole life and he managed to figure out what mk ultra never quite managed to sink their syringe into. That the likelihood of a good trip versus a bad one is all about two things. Set, meaning mindset, and setting, meaning environment. So what the CIA couldn't figure out with all their endless supply of drugs and all the money in the world was that it all just boils down to vibes and the vibe of your childhood trauma probably true all vibes brackets plus childhood trauma got it so yes this realization that tim leary makes about it being vibes and childhood trauma or set and setting, can be said of all drugs, even alcohol. But hallucinogenics are much more sensitive to these two parameters.

Leary, of course, cannot be reduced to just a trip tour guide. He was a Harvard-employed interpersonal psychologist studying the capacity to reduce recidivism in inmates using psilocybin. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? LSD was hard to get hold of during Leary's academic career, if you weren't on the MKUltra payroll, that is. That's why a great body of Tim Leary's work used psilocybin instead. It's really interesting. I read an interview with his son,

and his son is quite bitter about how Timothy Leary is seen as he's the reason that the like flower child generation happened and his argument is like firstly the 60s fucking happened and secondly most of his work was psilocybin anyway he did also though do quite a lot of orgying and was hounded by the FBI for years. And we'll leave you to connect those dots all on your own. Yeah, like I'm not going to pretend that there aren't problems and that I'm a huge Tim Leary fan because I'm not. But I think people are very in two camps about him, which I don't think is ever fair.

But, you know, there's a whole archive open now that you can go and read and it's really interesting. And Leary was far from the only person to attempt to use hallucinogens for good, who was nowhere near Gottlieb's balanced book. But here is one you might not have heard of before. The so-called Johnny Appleseed of LSD. Captain Alfred Hubbard. A former OSS man, he fell in love with LSD

and was the first person to evangelise about its world-warping potential for healing. Captain Hubbard was a well-connected, independently wealthy society guy. He actually, this is fucking fascinating, he supplied USA arms and airplanes to Britain in World War II, well before America entered the war. He just got them over the border to Canada. So yeah, very powerful guy. And interestingly, he aligned the religious experience that he had whilst tripping to the let-go-and-let-God philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous and wondered if there could be some kind of link between the two.

The captain set up three LSD centres in Canada where he administered willing patients, who were alcoholics, with large doses of LSD, and made some miraculous discoveries. A third of those in his studies never drank again, and another third were drastically improved, which when it comes to rehabilitation statistics is staggering. Currently, we think that only about 36% of those

in alcohol recovery manage to stay sober for the rest of their lives. And that's when you take into account AA, people who are in rehab centres, not in it. Because the thing about AA is it's very Christian. And if that's not something you can get on board with, it's not going to work. Because it's very like, give me the strength to like i'm not going

to quote the fucking serenity prayer you all know what it is but like i can see how for people who are not religious that would be quite grating so the 36 we're talking about there is sort of inclusive of every type of rehabilitation not just aa aa claims something outrageous like 80 bullshit and what's more, Hubbard funded these programs, with which he had such good success, himself. He even got permission from the Vatican to administer hallucinogenics in association with the Catholic faith, which is unbelievable. Nuts. Naturally, he was approached by the CIA, but he told them to fuck off. Hubbard hated MKUltra and always maintained that Frank Olsen was certainly not the only one to die at their hands.

It would seem staggeringly, statistically impossible that Dr. Frank Olsen was the only one to die. So, I think this is interesting. If Captain Hubbard was right and LSD can positively improve the lives of the sick and the needy, then I think we should be looking at it. Like, I think it's obviously in light of Matthew Perry, this is probably not the best time to say this. But yeah, there's a lot of, no, not a lot of, there are studies into the use of MDMA and ketamine to treat depression. But because there's such a stigma around them being controlled substances, it's really hard to fund them. But it's kind of like, if LSD is having such an effect on lifelong alcoholics, that third of them never drink again. Something's not right. And there are thousands of people who agree with me. In October 1977,

some of those thousands gathered at a university in Santa Cruz, California for the opening of a conference. To kick it all off, a 71-year-old Swiss man took to the stage. Dr. Albert Hoffman, the man who started it all, was welcomed with a standing ovation. Having not lost his sense of humour in his twilight years, he warned the Santa Cruz crowd that they might be disappointed, for he was no guru, he was merely a chemist. Alan Ginsberg described this event as a class reunion for the Summer of Love. In fact, Ginsberg had come to the conference prepared. So prepared, he dropped acid on the plane over to the Perception Summit.

And having learned some of what we have learned over the past two weeks, I say some, not all, Allen Ginsberg couldn't shake a feeling of concern that he had played right into the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency. Sat in his seat, high in his head and high in an aeronautical sense, Ginsberg wrote the following. Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of the CIA's lamentable, ill-advised or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control. Have the CIA, by conscious plan or inadvertent Pandora's box, let loose the LSD fad on the US and the world? A true disciple of the chemical messiah,

Allen Ginsberg sang LSD's praises for years and years and he was terrified that he had, without his knowledge, done exactly what the CIA wanted him to do. After Dr Hoffman concluded his 25-year review of LSD, Ginsburg raised his concern with other attendees. But he was met with laughter. Everyone, including Timothy Leary, conceded that the CIA were the start of everything.

Espionage absolutely promoted the widespread use of the World Warper. But the drug was so powerful, even the Central Intelligence Agency couldn't control it. It was only ever a matter of time before it slipped through their fingers. Just like it had slipped onto Hoffman's back in Switzerland all those years before. Knowing what we know now, we think Ginsburg had too much faith in the aptitude of the CIA. Yeah. The same year as the flower child reunion, it was written into US law that behavioural

research, including bioelectrics, radio stimulation of the braid, decimation of memory, microwaves, ultrasonics, and a whole host of other MKUltra interests could only be researched inside hospital walls on willing participants. Maybe a coincidence, probably not. So what do we do now? There are undoubtedly elements of MKUltra that are used in interrogation and internment situations today. The most obvious example being sensory deprivation. We don't think twice about a hood being over a prisoner's head. It's used in prisons and internment camps all over the world, but it is relatively new.

Whilst its footprints may remain in international intelligence tactics, MKUltra's attempt to use science to solve the problems of espionage at large didn't work. LSD, although the frontrunner for a while, wasn't the answer. Any drug you can name was used in this program, but we specifically connect LSD with MKUltra for three main reasons. Number one, the tragic death of Dr. Frank Olson. Number two, the CIA controlled the global supply of LSD and spread it through their own populace, violating the rights of their own citizens. And number three, LSD's significant contribution to the counterculture movement of the 60s. Does the failure of MKUltra and the Church Committee mean that the CIA or any secret service have stopped trying to devise ways of controlling the human mind? We doubt it. I also doubt that world leaders have got rid of

the belief that if the enemy might be doing something that's enough reason to try and get to it first, ethics or no ethics. Given the wet blanket outcome of the church committee, I don't even think use of a country's own citizens without their consent to reach movable targets will ever stop. And I also think that we have to accept that we are all controlled to an extent, which brings us in a wonderful circle from Saruti's comment last week. Suggestion is a powerful thing. The original king of spin, Edward Bernays, built a career on the masses being driven by factors outside their conscious understanding, and thus he famously said that their, meaning us, their minds can and should be manipulated by the capable few. Have you ever eaten bacon and eggs for breakfast? It's because of him.

But Hannah, bar cholesterol, that's basically harmless. What's the big deal? Well, look up the role that Bernays played in the CIA orchestrated installation of a puppet government in Guatemala and then get back to me. But there is a glaring difference. Bernays always concerned himself with the masses, and that's not what MKUltra were looking for. They were after a select, reprogrammable few.

MKUltra also wanted those people, those programmable few, to do a lot more than spend a three-month salary on an engagement ring. Not a dig, that was also one of his. You can sleep easy tonight even if you did have bacon and eggs this morning. If there is a way to wiping a person's brain and turning them into an unconscious operative, intelligence services haven't found it yet, probably. And also, if they do, you won't fucking know about it, so don't worry. In 1984, George Orwell wrote, if both the past and the external world exist only in the mind,

and if the mind is controllable, what then? But I just don't think he's got that much to worry about even now. And something my ADHD lady said, she was like, never listen to anyone when they say it's all in your head. Everything is in your head. We are just hormones. That's all we are. There you go.

That is a perfectly appropriate place to wrap this up with a little bow. Yeah, there you go. I'm Kay Ultra. Pow pow. I wouldn't worry about it. There's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do. So just enjoy yourself and, you know, just go with the vibes.

And if you are going to do acid, do it in your pajamas in a padded room. It's not a cell that's got nice cushions that are nice colors. Exactly. All good advice. And don't do heroin yes also goodbye i'm jake warren and in our first season 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 Plus. 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. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. 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

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