School of War - Ep 69: John Lisle on the OSS and "Dirty Tricks"

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

John Lisle, a historian of science and the American intelligence community and author of The Dirty Tricks Department, joins the show to talk about the World War Two-era Office of Strategic Services and its Research and Development Branch. ▪️ Times  • 01:44 Introduction  • 02:10 “Wild Bill” Donovan • 05:54 Donovan’s style  • 08:53 Stanley Lovell • 12:35 An unconventional training process • 16:40 Explosive pancake batter • 19:24 Limpet mines and Java Man • 23:33 A meaningful legacy? • 27:34 Target: Werner Heisenberg • 31:51 WMDs  • 35:40 Truth Serum • 39:02 From OSS to CIA Follow along on Instagram

Here on School of War, we cover everything from battle and campaign histories, up to matters of diplomacy, grand strategy, even a little political philosophy now and then. But it has come to our attention that we have a real deficit in an important area for any military history podcast, namely discussions of boys and their toys. We'll try to remedy that today with this fun conversation about the OSS, the World War II era precursor to the CIA, and in particular about its dirty tricks department. It's Q branch, if you will, which produced the pencil bombs and disguises and everything else that the OSS's operatives used to stick it to the Nazis and to Imperial Japan. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalem. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

And the people are not seen. fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by John Lyle, who teaches at the University of Texas, Austin. We're here in his Ph.D. His writing has appeared in numerous places, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Skeptic Journal of Intelligence History and more.

And he is the author most recently of The Dirty Tricks Department. Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the masterminds of World War II secret warfare. John, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. So, you know, we're going to talk about America and World War II, and then within that, the OSS, and then within that, what you call here the Dirty Tricks Department,

or what seemed to me as I was reading the book, sort of the Q branch, to put it in James Bond term, of the 1940s American Intelligence Community. So before we get to that, and it's really neat stuff, tell us a little bit of a little bit about the OSS, and actually maybe the best place to start is with Wild Bill Donovan, this colorful character who sort of defines the organization, defines the period. Who was Wild Bill? Yeah, Wild Bill. William Donovan, he was a World War I war hero.

He was a lawyer, and he was a pretty close confidant of Franklin Roosevelt. And so right around at the beginning of World War II during the 1930s, William Donovan was advocating for Roosevelt. to create some kind of centralized intelligence organization. And this is what would eventually become the OSS. Donovan saw that there were other intelligence agencies, especially associated with the military branches. And he was worried that they were duplicating research,

that they weren't coordinating with each other. So he wanted a centralized intelligence organization to coordinate all the intelligence that was coming in from abroad. And so he kind of hounded Franklin Roosevelt to create this. After Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt relents, and he creates what's originally called the COI, the coordinator of information with William Donovan as the head. And then that kind of gradually changed into the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. And so during World War II, the OSS was really the country's

centralized intelligence organization, kind of the precursor to the CIA. And it had several different branches within it. There were branches to send people abroad to gather intelligence. There were branches that had people in the United States that analyzed that intelligence. And there were, well, there was one branch in particular that I focused on, the R&D branch, research and development branch. And this branch was responsible for developing the weapons, documents, disguises that people might need on their undercover missions abroad, either to spy on or sabotage the enemy or to train resistance forces.

And so that's the focus of this book within the OSS, this R&D branch. Yeah, and tell us a little bit about, a little bit more about Donovan, because I think you pretty clearly document that his sort of madcat spirit sort of pervades the place in ways that, you know, I doubt, I'm going to go out in a limb and say, alas, pervade the spirit of our intelligence community, though, a more sober and serious conversation of the issue probably reveals there be pros and cons to the application of the spirit of the 1940s to today. So, you know, Donovan is not your normal Washington bureaucratic functionary or even highly level functionary, right?

Yes. Just with some color. Yeah, I think some good words to associate with Donovan would be, especially brave, courageous, but also gung-ho, a little bit reckless even. He's not one for strict formalities. He wants something done, and it doesn't matter who does it. You know, he's not as into strict hierarchies as maybe some other military branches. There was kind of a joke about Donovan that, you know, there are people in the military

and they tend to fill up their lapels with all kinds of ribbons and awards and all kinds of stuff. Donovan during World War I had won the Medal of Honor. And so he typically just wore one little lapel pin of the Medal of Honor. And that was commanded as much respect as anyone else. And so he's not super into hierarchy. He's a little scatterbrained. And he's more of the opinion. Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

And that's kind of the guiding light that Stanley leveled ahead of this R&D branch is going to go by. And there's one story you tell of him in particular, which, you know, it kind of beggars belief. And we're to talk about, I'm skipping ahead here a bit, but there's the development of this silenced pistol, I guess a silenced 22. And how does he, you know, I have, I have a taste for fine briefing techniques and like how to most compellingly present your accomplishments and achievements to hire our headquarters. Talk us through how Donovan accomplishes that with this pistol. Yeah, this is a good story that kind of brings out. a lot of aspects of Donovan's personality

and the way he operated. The R&D branch had developed this silenced flashless 22 automatic pistol and Donovan wanted to show it off to Franklin Roosevelt to give him a sense of here's what some of the stuff that we've been up to keep supporting us. And so he shows up to Donovan or to Roosevelt's office. He had showed up there pretty frequently so the guard kind of let him in, you know, just waved him in. Donovan or

Roosevelt is dictating a letter to his secretary he's not facing the door. So Donovan walks in behind him. Donovan has this silence 22. He pulls it out. He drops a bag of sand in the corner and he starts unloading the clip of this pistol. And after a while, Franklin Roosevelt, he smells burnt gunpowder. So he turns around and he sees William Donovan standing there with an empty clip on his pistol.

And he's kind of blown away. And this was the effect that Donovan wanted him to have. So he presented the pistol to Franklin Roosevelt, who apparently said, you're the only Republican I will ever allow into my office for the guns. But that gives you a sense of kind of the brazen personality of William Donovan. So, and well, the bipartisan nature of their relationship that that joke points to is an interesting cultural aspect to the OSS, right? Like fit the OSS and sort of Donovan into American society at this point because Donovan and

Roosevelt go back, right? They do go back. Yeah. So they had actually both been at Columbia Law School. Donovan a little later than Roosevelt, but they were from New York. Roosevelt had been the governor of New York, and Donovan ran to succeed him as governor. Donovan lost, but they were fairly close in that respect. And Roosevelt respected Donovan.

As far as kind of situating the OSS within kind of the United States, an easy, maybe a memorable way to do that is to think of some of the nicknames that people would give the OSS. So the OSS stood for Office of Strategic Services, but a lot of people gave it some, kind of derogatory nicknames for a few reasons. One of these nicknames was, oh, so social, because it was kind of seen as a social club. These are high status people who are joining this organization in order to make sure that they don't get deployed with one of the military branches. So another joke about the OSS was that it handed out so-called cellophane commissions because they were kind of see-through, they were transparent that you were trying to avoid the

draft and you know they kept this draft off like cellophane so that was one of the jokes of the osse another derogatory thing that people tended to say about the osse is that it was pale male and yale got it got it so turning from the s the osss broadly to the r&d section which is this the subject of your book let's let's also stick with personalities for a minute and tell us about stanley the the real subject of your book who is the guy who gets this work going yeah stanley level is really the main character in this book and has a really fascinating story. And the way that I came to kind of focus on him is that I would hear all kinds of interesting stories about World War II, especially regarding the OSS. And they always seem to connect back to this figure Stanley Lovell.

And so I figured, well, I've got to figure out who this guy is. And so he became kind of the main character. Stanley Lovell was a New England chemist from around Boston. He had worked before the war in a few different shoe and leather factories. So he hadn't been involved in creating weapons or disguises or anything like that. But he was a fairly close friend of Venever Bush. And Venever Bush was kind of Roosevelt's unofficial science advisor. Venever Bush was in charge of coordinating scientific research during World War II. So the Manhattan Project, radar, proximity fuses. And through Venever Bush, Stanley Level kind of got recommended to Donovan to join that organization. When Donovan first met Stanley Lovell, he had, you know, heard good things about

him. You're a good chemist and, you know, you have one foot in business and one foot in science, and that's good because we need to develop those connections in order to develop all these weapons. And so Donovan basically told Stanley Lovell, I want you to be my professor Moriarty. I want you to develop all the dirty tricks that our country is going to need to win this war. And so that becomes Stanley Lovell's job. He's originally fairly reluctant to, you know, to be a very important to, to join the OSS because he kind of felt a Hippocratic obligation to do good. He had, well, he was basically an orphan. His parents had died when he was very young.

His older sister had mostly raised him and he felt indebted to his country. He had gotten a great education and he felt like he owed something to his country, but he felt like he owed it in the sense that he wanted to use his scientific expertise to do something good to help people. And so he was worried about using that expertise to now develop these deadly ones. weapons. But at the end of the day, he decided this is what he could offer his country during this time. And one of the main arcs of the book is seeing how Stanley Lovell changes his view of war. Initially, he's very reluctant to join the OSS. By the end of the war, now that he's gotten

kind of a personal sense of what war really is, he begins advocating for basically the United States to use weapons of mass destruction. He's advocating for biological warfare, chemical warfare. He's in favor of using the atomic bomb. And so this is, again, the main arc of the book is seeing this transformation that Stanley Lovell goes through. And, you know, there's a personal aspect to this as well. By the end of the war, Stanley Lovell's own son is kind of standing midway across the Pacific waiting to get involved in an invasion of Japan. So to Stanley Level, the quicker that we can end this war, by whatever means necessary, overall, that's going to serve the greater good because it's going to lead to less deaths overall. You made this reference

to Donovan saying he wants Lovell to be his Professor Moriarty. How does Lovell react to that? What does it mean? So, yeah, Moriarty is kind of the nemesis to Sherlock Holmes. In the Sherlock Holmes novels, Professor Moriarty is kind of the arch nemesis, the bad guy. But he's involved in all kinds of devious stuff. And so when Donovan is saying, I want you to be the Professor Moriarty, he's basically implying, I want you to create the dirty tricks for us. I want you to be that person for the OSS. And that kind of becomes the nickname that sticks with Stanley Level throughout his time there. So talk about, well, I want to talk through some of these dirty tricks in sort of

in their particulars here in a second because it's interesting and fun. But talk about the operational side of the, talk about the people who are going to use these dirty tricks. Like who's coming into the OSS to go out and, you know, plant limpid mines and everything else. What's their training like? Where's this all happening? Yeah. So one of the main training areas for the OSS is called Area F. And this, what This is what's used to be and is now the congressional country club. So it's a country club in Maryland. During the war, the OSS requisitioned this land, and it used it as a training ground, where recruits would come and do, you know, where the driving range was.

That became a shooting range. Where the ponds full of stray golf balls used to be, well, that became like a demolition ground where you could test underwater detonation. And so in order to join the OSS, some of these agents that are sent abroad, well, they kind of come from two regions. One, like I said, is kind of the pale male and Yale recruiting from some of these Ivy League schools is where a lot of people who join the OSS come from. The other place is foreigners who speak these languages and will be able to have these undercover identities

and blend in with society very easily. Now, if you're an American and join the OSS and you're being recruited as one of these agents, there is a, when you're at Area F, this training ground, there's kind of a course basically you have to take. in learning all kinds of stuff, the tricks of the trade, learn how to pick locks and learn how to use secret writing, and learn how to open and close envelopes without anyone noticing. And kind of as a capstone to this education, what these recruits were expected to do,

just to prove that they understood and had learned some of these tricks, was to break into or infiltrate an American defense plant and steal secrets. And if they could actually steal these secrets, well, that proved that they had actually learned something and they might be able to be sent abroad. And so I tell at the beginning of this book, a few examples of this. One is Roger Hall. He wrote a kind of famous OSS book called You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger.

But he talks about how he was trying to pass this final test. So he got to a defense plant and he used a fake cover story. And the woman who was giving him the tour really liked him. And so her father happened to be the vice president of this company. so he had lunch with the vice president and all kinds of, and he was getting this great information. But the vice president liked him so much that he asked, will you have lunch with me?

You know, tomorrow, I want you to come and have lunch with me. And Hall thought this would be a great opportunity to get some more information out of this company and use it to really show that he had learned his stuff in the OSS training school. So he shows up to this lunch. And little did he know that the vice president walks up to the front of the room and says, everybody in the cafeteria,

we have a special guest today, someone who's been abroad and, you know, all kinds of stuff, a war hero who's gotten hurt and all stuff. This was Roger Hall's cover story, which wasn't, none of it was true. But he said, you know, come up here and tell your story. So Roger Hall starts limping to the stage because he had said he had gotten hurt during the war, which he actually hadn't. He starts limping. He goes on this thing telling his, you know, oh, you need to send letters to the men abroad

because I've seen, I've seen them come away from mail call empty-handed and, you know, tears because they didn't have a letter. You need to buy war bonds. He's really playing it up. By the end of it, people are cheering. The vice president is shaking his right hand. His daughter is clinging to his left arm, and he never shows back to the job

because he had gotten all the information he needed. And he passed his test. Incredible. There must have been complaints, I imagine, with these training techniques. There were, especially with the FBI, because this kind of made them look bad, the fact that these people are infiltrating all these organizations

and the FBI's not stopping them. So the FBI really didn't like this. And Donovan basically said, well, it's good training for both of us. So we're going to keep doing it. So this is fascinating appendix at the end of your book where you list all of these secret projects that this R&D department worked on. It's an extensive list.

You go into a few of them in detail in the book. I don't even really know where to start here. I mean, you tell me what some of the most impressive things are we should go into. I remember Aunt Jemima. Let's start by talking about At Samima and then I can go through a few of these. Yeah, Aunt Jemima is one of the more well-known

of the creations of this R&D branch. The idea behind Aunt Jemima is you want to be able to create an explosive that you can sneak into enemy territory. And so Stanley Level is contemplating how to do this and he hit upon the idea, why not disguise it as flour that you could bake into cookies or pancakes

or something like that. So it looks like flour, but mixed into the flour is some high explosive. And so that's what Aunt Jemima was. And there were several kind of tests and stories in the book about how this was used. But that's kind of the overview of what Aunt Jemima is, this pancake mix that can be used as an explosive. But of course, if you're sneaking it into enemy territory, for all intents and purposes, it just looks like pancake mix. Nobody's going to stop you.

And what's the, so talk us through some of the applications. Like how did this actually get used in the field? There are a couple of ways. So one thing you could actually do with Aunt Jemima was you could bake it into kind of tiles. And so, like, if you were going to build a roof on a house, you could bake it into these tiles, and so it could be snuck into, especially in the east, like in Japan, where these tiles more common, you could do that. I talk in the book, a few instances of, like, detonation tests with this Aunt Jemima that go actually pretty bad. So in one of these tests, there's a lump of Aunt Jemima that the OSS is demonstrating to some, you know, kind of high military generals just to show off. here's what we've been doing, you know, funding us as worthwhile, that kind of thing.

And one of these generals asks to put kind of a sheet of metal on top of the Ant Jemima to see what happens, to see how much damage it causes. Stanley Level is warning against this. No, that's not a good idea. But nevertheless, you know, who's he to say no to a general? So they put the sheet of metal and this kind of armor over the Ant Jemima. They detonate it and it explodes. And, you know, this metal breaks up and starts flying everywhere.

it lodges into a tree, it hits a car that's parked in the parking lot. One almost hits General Donovan in the head. Stanley Lovell is freaking out because he's in charge of this test and, you know, it's his head on the line if something goes wrong here. And he was shaking, he said, but Donovan, who had nearly just died because of this thing, he turns to Stanley Level and says, okay, what's next on the agenda? So that was again, kind of his calm personality under fire. Lipit minds. So this is an interesting one. I confess I did not know that the time tested and very valuable Limpit Mine goes back to this period in this organization. We saw them used, unfortunately, by the bad guys, just as recently as what, the summer of 2019,

the Iranians were using these things off the coast of the UAE. But, I mean, talk us through it. How is the idea conceived of how are they developed, how are they used in the war? Yeah, one of the precursors to this Limpot Mine, the Limpit Mine is kind of an explosive that you can attach to a ship and it can blow it up. Kind of the precursor to that is something called like a time pencil. A time pencil is basically a delayed detonation. You can set a time pencil, attach it to something, and an acid will eat through a wire

at a predetermined rate so that you can go and leave and establish an alibi across town, and by the time that it explodes, you're not there anymore. So Stanley Level is contemplating how he can use this time pencil with different kinds of devices, and he starts creating limpid minds. There are other organizations that are creating limpid minds of this time, as well, the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the British kind of equivalent of the OSS, they're also creating, collaborating on the Olympot Mine in particular. But with Olympot Mine, the idea is to have a saboteur, take this explosive kind of box that has

a time pencil attached to it, and they will paddle up next to a big ship, and they'll pin it to the bottom of the ship, like the whole of the ship. And then they'll set the time pencil, they'll paddle away, and at a predetermined time, the time pencil will explode, which will cause the limpet to explode, and then this will create a big hole in the ship, which will sink it. And so these were used throughout the war, but yeah, I talk about a couple stories in which they are. When I was actually doing research for this, I found some incredible photos of some tests with limpet mines,

and you can see these huge blasts, holes right in the middle of these test ships, and it was really incredible. So those are some of the pictures I'm really proud of finding in the archives. Yeah, absolutely. And then at least one more here, there are these experiments with remote control that are just fascinating. We have the, I don't know, I guess the dramatic irony as a reader here in the 21st century, knowing that this really is ahead of its time and is not going to have a ton of application in World War II. I was actually surprised to learn that the technology goes back this far.

Tell us about that. Yeah, this was one of the more technologically advanced things that the R&D branch does. personally, I tend to like the devices and the disguises that are simple because they're so ingenious because they're so simple, but this one's also ingenious and is technological. So this is one of the first application of like drones. It's kind of like a drone. The idea with this project is called Java Man. The idea would be we can camouflage a ship to look like some native ship. Let's say that's on the coast of Japan. And, you know, Japanese harbors are pretty well protected. So how are we going to, we're not going to be able to bomb them. We're not going to

send an American ship just to drive right up into these harbors. So how are we going to attack these harbors? Java Man is one idea for that. It's basically a remote controlled ship. You disguise this ship and you pack it full of explosives and you put kind of a receiver on this ship and through radio communication, you can have someone, there's a camera on the front of the ship and it'll be able to to see where you are and you can kind of watch where the ship is going and control it via remote control. The idea being you're, you know, you'll sail past all the defenses because they'll think it's just some local fishing ship and then you'll ram it right into some warehouse on the coast or something like that and blow it up. So yeah, that project was called Java Man,

probably one of the probably the most technologically sophisticated project that the R&D branch is involved in. And I, I take, correct me if I'm wrong here, but this one does not get to it to an operational stage. This is always on the on the drawing board. Yeah, this one was not. This one didn't get there. It was kind of being worked on in the middle of the war. And toward the end of the war, it was almost ready. And then the atomic bombs are developed and dropped. And, you know, that was it. There was no need for it. Sort of holistically, like, given evaluation here of the ratio of useful applications of this stuff to, you know, interesting but ahead of its time to actually a waste of time. Like, help us, help us understand. the balance between those three things. And then I'm also interested for the first category, the stuff that gets used. Does it get used in a way that makes a meaningful difference?

Like what is the actual legacy of this department? So there are a couple, yeah, like you say, classifications. The useful, the kind of, eh, not so useful. And then they're just extremely outlandish. And so the book has a lot of these outlandish stories, but there are some actually useful things in here. The most useful, I think, thing that the R&D branch was involved in actually wasn't even the weapons and the gadgets.

I think that the most useful thing that the R&D branch did was the disguises and the documents. So if you think of the R&D branch of the OSS, it kind of has three different divisions. There's a weapons division, Division 19, there's a documents division and a camouflage division. Those latter two divisions, I think, were really useful because they supplied undercover agents with forged passports and train tickets and ration tickets. They supplied them with disguises, original clothing from these foreign countries, even down to extremely minute details. When you think about it, there are really small details of even foreign clothing that if you

don't know this, you might be caught and found out. One example that I give in the book is of buttons. German buttons used kind of a parallel stitching, whereas in the U.S. they typically use crisscross. So if you didn't know to stitch a button in crisscross or parallel, this could lead you to be found out. I think these two divisions, the documents that are forging documents and the camouflage, which is providing disguises, were probably the most useful of this R&D branch because they allowed these people to collect intelligence and send it back that could then be analyzed and you can make decisions based off of that. So I think that was probably the most useful.

The most useful weapons and devices were probably simple things like there were some weapons and devices, especially that were to explode and destroy engines or destroy trains. One in particular was called a mole. The mole was this device that could detect differences between light and dark. And the idea was that a saboteur could take this, attach it to a train, and then it would explode when there's a sudden shift from light to dark. The idea being, when the train enters into a tunnel, this mole device will pick that up and it will explode. This is doubly effective because not only do you derail this train, and so you stop the freight from getting anywhere, you also plug up this tunnel.

So the Germans, let's say, aren't going to be able to use that tunnel for any other trains until you clear that first train. So I think those kinds of devices were probably the most useful devices, but I think the documents and the camouflage and the disguises were more useful in general. And there are a lot of stuff that is really just outlandish. So even besides the useful stuff, there's a lot of stuff that Stanley Lovell and his kind of underlings think, well, we don't know what weapons are going to be needed in this war. We don't know what spies and saboteurs need because the OSS is a relatively newer organization. They don't have a long pedigree in this kind of warfare.

And so they're kind of just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Some of these operations and things that they create are really outlandish, like glowing foxes that are intended to scare the Japanese into surrendering. That probably didn't ever have a hope of actually working, but, you know, they're just trying to see what sticks. Gloid foxes sounds pretty freaky, to be honest. I mean, it would be unsettling. So I was fascinated, you know, there's, it's kind of like, you know, spies are always obsessed with the other guy's spies. And there's the sort of like shadow combat between covert forces. but I was fascinated by a kind of dimension of that here,

where you have this fascination with German nuclear scientists, you know, on behalf of our scientists, right? Because they are all covertly racing to the same thing, right? The atom bomb. And there's this fascination with Heisenberg in particular and some colorful OSS personalities who are involved. You've got what Moberg plays a role in this, right? You've got a caller.

Talk a bit about the fascination with Heisenberg. I guess there's an assassination plot, and then that turns into something else. Like, walk us through all of that. Yeah, so Carl Eiffler is one of the main people involved in this. Carl Eiffler is working with the OSS, and he's leading what's called Detachment 101. This is a group of people that are sent to Burma, and their goal is to kind of destroy a Japanese airbase that they're using to destroy American planes and stuff. And so Carl Eiffler does this.

He's eventually called back to the United States, and he's given the task of kidnapping Werner Heisenberg. The reason for this is that the United States is afraid that the Germans might be creating an atomic bomb. The U.S. has an atomic bomb program. Why wouldn't the Germans? The reason they think Werner Heisenberg is involved in this is because he's kind of the most brilliant German physicists at this time. And if any physicist is going to be leading a German atomic bomb project, it's going to be Warner Heisenberg. There are a couple small pieces of evidence indicating that maybe the Germans are working on this. The U.S. is never too sure how far along this project is, but hey, if the Germans are working on an atomic bomb, we need to cut the head off the snake and prevent them from getting one.

The idea with Carl Eiffler is that the OSS will send him to kidnap Warner Heisenberg, and then it'll prevent him from leading this atomic bomb program. That eventually doesn't actually go off. Carl Eiffler is very loud and rambunctious, and that's kind of the opposite of what you need for this kind of delicate situation. So he's called off the task, and instead it's given to this other person, Mo Berg. Mo Berg is a former baseball player. He played for the Red Sox for a time, and he is valuable to the OSS. He kind of got recruited and joined the OSS because he's very good at languages. He studied several languages in college, who was fluent in many languages, and that's always good for any intelligence organization.

And he had actually been on a trip to Japan earlier where he had taken video recording of the Japanese skyline, and he had showed it to Army intelligence, and they were really proud of it. But it was very useful because it's not like there are pictures of Japanese, you know, Tokyo just floating around. So Moberg. People like this are so frustrating, don't you think?

Like, isn't enough to be like world class at one thing? You really have to be like world class of two or three or four things and make all those. Yeah, he does a little bit of everything. Yeah. Well, Moberg, he gets recruited to basically go to Switzerland because Warner Heisenberg is known to be giving a lecture there. and he's tasked with basically killing Warner Heisenberg.

If he listens to this lecture, Moberg, and he thinks that there's an indication that Heisenberg might be lending a German Atom Project, Moberg is equipped with a pistol, and his orders are basically to shoot Werner Heisenberg right there. Moberg goes to this lecture, and he listens, and it doesn't really seem to have anything to do with nuclear effusion or anything like that. And so he doesn't kill Warner Heisenberg. But then he's invited to a dinner party at a physicist's house. house, Paul Scherer, and he goes and who's there, Werner Heisenberg.

So he, you know, they talk for a little bit and Warner Heisenberg excuses himself and leaves the dinner party early. And Mo Berg sees this as a time where he might be able to question Werner Heisenberg to see what he's doing. So he leaves early too. And he starts walking with Werner Heisenberg away from the house and he's peppering him with questions. And you've got to remember, Mo Berg is undercover here.

He's supposed to be a Swiss physics student. So he's talking to Warner Heisenberg in German, but he has to do it with a Swiss accent. So there's all these kind of layers to it. So he's peppering Warner Heisenberg with these questions about what do you know about nuclear fission and whatever, trying to make it subtle. And he gets the implication indication that Heisenberg isn't really working on any kind of bomb project. And so he doesn't end up assassinating him. But there's definitely an interest in Warner Heisenberg and the German atomic bomb project in general. So obviously the American atomic bomb project is the stuff of history and world-shaking geopolitical

significance. You talk a bit about our biological and chemical warfare projects as well. And you made reference a few minutes ago to Lovell's kind of spiritual evolution on these questions. So what is American policy? I mean, obviously chemical warfare had been used extensively in the First World War. So what's American policy there? What's American policy on biological warfare? And, you know, what is levels role in all of this?

for both biological and chemical Roosevelt puts down basically a no first use policy we're not going to be the first country to use this during World War II however Roosevelt wants to develop biological and chemical weapons as a deterrent and also as a retaliatory force so in case some other country uses this first we have it for backup this is kind of the origins of a place called originally called Camp Diedrich but it's now named Fort Diedrich

This is kind of the main biological warfare installation in the United States. And so during World War II, Fort Camp Diedrich developed lots of biological weapons. Stanley Lovell is doing experiments with some of these weapons, and he starts advocating for using them, especially in Japan. He wants to use them on the islands kind of leading to the Japanese mainland, specifically Iwojima. He wants to use chemical weapons on Iwojima, the idea being we can use. these, we can destroy the Japanese on the island, and we don't have to get bogged down in some kind of bloody fight that's going to destroy thousands of lives. Instead, we can use these weapons, and sure, it's kind of got this taboo around them, but wouldn't you rather do that than have

tens of thousands of our people die? This is Level's, you know, kind of justification for what he's saying. If we want to end this war as soon as possible, we've got to resort to these weapons. And in fact, level comes to the idea that these weapons are the ethical alternative to conventional warfare. His reasoning here is that, let's say you stab someone with a bayonet. And that's pretty gruesome. That's pretty conventional, though. The way that they're going to die, they're either going to bleed out or they're probably going to get infected and they're going to die of some infection. Lovell says, why don't we cut out the middleman? Instead of stabbing them, we just infect them with a biological agent. They're going to die from it anyway and we save them the gruesome wound. So in kind of

this twisted way, he's advocating, well, this is actually an ethical thing. This is the ethical alternative. Yeah. And so, you know, what is the, what are the actual elements of his work? Like, what is he developing? So the R&D branches involved, well, Stanley Level specifically is consulting for a biological weapons committee. This is out of the National Academy of Sciences. And they're contemplating how to use different biological agents. So stuff like anthrax. You know, if we were to use this, what would we do? If someone were to use it against us, what would we do? one of the most interesting personal stories that I have from the book is that I was reading Stanley Lovell's memoir, and he has a tendency to exaggerate a little bit.

And so anytime I'm talking about his memoir in the book, I make sure, well, I've got to, you know, double check it in the archives and make sure this actually happened because he does like to exaggerate. So I was reading this part about biological weapons he's talking about in his book, and it just kind of smelled like the kind of thing that he would exaggerate about. He's meeting with all these biologists and discussing biological warfare, and he's doing experiments to develop this stuff, and he's stockpiling some of these weapons. And I just thought, well, that seems a little, I don't know, it's almost, it just seemed like the kind of thing that was exaggerated. But then I remembered, I had actually done some research in the National Academy of Sciences for my dissertation earlier.

And I had taken pictures of some documents related to biological warfare, so I decided to just go back and look at him. and lo and behold, I had already taken pictures of the minutes of the very meeting where Stanley Level is, and it has him talking about all the stuff he mentions in his book. So it was such a serendipitous occasion that, you know, he was talking about this thing. And I actually had the very document in my own stash. It was so crazy. One other thing that you talk about in the book that I want to make sure we get to is that is truth serum, which is another great sort of cinematic, Hollywood kind of feeling development. But this is a real project with real application. So tell us about that. Yeah, the origin of this idea, at least in this context, really goes back to the 1920s

with this guy named Robert House. He was a doctor, and he had given a woman in labor some sedative scopolamine. And after he gave it to her, she kind of went into this twilight sleep where she started saying things that he did not expect her to say. And so House started trying to figure out what was going on. And the explanation he came to is that this drug had somehow inhibited her creative capacity in her brain. It had prevented her from imagining things,

and instead, the only thing that could come out of her mouth was real stuff. It had inhibited any sort of creative capacity. And so, in other words, Robert House thought that he had stumbled across a truth serum, something that inhibits you from creating, inventing any lies, and if you do speak, you have to speak the truth. This is what House thought at least. This obviously is of extreme interest to intelligence organizations, including the OSS.

During World War II, the OSS starts testing several different compounds to see if they have this kind of ability. One of the main compounds that they start testing is THC acetate. THC is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. And so Stanley Level, wants to develop a truth serum. So he starts injecting this THC acetate into cigarettes, and he hires some people to go around and give these to people and see what happens. And in a lot of circumstances, it turns out, it actually seemed to get them to talk more. You know, so you could record the conversations, and you could count the number of words per minute spoken,

and the people who were high, basically, actually did speak more. The problem was, House is wrong in the sense that doesn't necessarily tamper down the creative centers of the brain. Not really. It just lowers your inhibitions. So, you know, the classic phrase is in vino veritas, which means in wine lies the truth. You know, so the idea of a kind of truth serum had been around for thousands of years, you know, get someone drunk and they'll start telling you stuff. But the OSS was trying to find some kind of compound that would stop lies from happening. Now, it found compounds that lowered inhibitions, but they couldn't guarantee that what you said actually was the truth.

Yeah. My favorite application of this, of course, is the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie True Lies. Oh, I haven't seen it. You haven't seen that? No. You got an amazing scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger has been administered truth serum by the terrorists, and he proceeds to tell them his plan to kill them all, how he's going to break free of his restraints and, you know, beat one over the head with this, you know, bucket. And he walks them very carefully through the plan and they're all laughing at him. And, of course, you can imagine what happens next.

It won't surprise you. So the war ends. The OSS ultimately is dissolved and then reinvented, right, as the CIA. What is the lasting impact of the OSS? Well, actually, a double-barrel question for you. What was it understood to be at the time? You know, what was the OSS legacy thought to be in the immediate aftermath of the war? And what do we think about it today?

Well, William Donovan was pretty upset because he wanted the OSS to continue into peacetime. He thought the United States always needed this centralized intelligence organization, so it's not just a wartime organization to him. That didn't end up happening for a few reasons. One of the main supporters of the OSS was FDR, Roosevelt, and when he died, so did kind of the hope of the OSS continuing into peacetime. Harry Truman received a report on the OSS that was, it's called a Park Report, and it was written by someone in Army Intelligence. And, you know, there's kind of these bureaucratic rivalries. and this park report just slandered the OSS saying they didn't do anything. It's just a bunch of Ivy League people and all kinds of stuff.

Some of it is actually true, but some of it's not. And so Truman dissolves the OSS at the end of the war. A couple of years later, the Central Intelligence Group is created, and then in 1947, that becomes the Central Intelligence Agency. The main lasting impact, this is kind of one of the main points I make at the end of the book, for the R&D branch specifically, is that it really inspires a new, generation of scientists within the CIA to do a lot of similar things to what the R&D branch under Stanley level was doing during World War II. Most infamously is the CIA's MK Ultra program.

This program was the CIA's attempt to see if kind of mind control was possible using drugs, especially LSD, but also hypnotism and all kinds of things. And the main person who was in charge of this program under the CIA was a guy named Sidney Gottlieb. He was also a chemist. And if you look, and this is what I tried to do in the last chapter, at the parallels between Stanley Level and Sidney Gottlieb, their careers, they're strikingly similar. Stanley Level is involved in an intelligence organization, involved in creating devices, weapons, documents, disguises for that organization, is involved in coming up with assassination plots on foreign leaders. He's involved in these truth drug experiments to see if he can develop a truth drug. Sidney Gottlieb, in the CIA,

does exactly that same kind of stuff. And when I started writing this book, I knew that I wanted to kind of play off the parallels in some way between these two people, but I couldn't link them in some way. It's not enough just to say, oh, they're kind of similar. They did similar stuff.

I wanted to find, like, there's some link between them. Surely there's a reason why they're so similar. And so I was fortunate to be able to find several of those links. One of those links is a guy named George White. Stanley Lovell hired George White during World War II to conduct some of these truth drug tests on his criminal context because George White was a narcotics officer in the Bureau of Narcotics. And when Sidney Gottlieb in the Cold War, when he's with the CIA, when he's looking to conduct truth drug experiments, who does he hire to conduct these experiments? George White. He looked into the OSS records and saw White's name there, and that was kind of White's resume. Oh, he's done it before for them. He can do it for us.

So there are several links like that linking the careers of Stanley Level and Sydney Gottlieb. So one of the lasting legacies of the R&D branch, it's not necessarily a great legacy. It's kind of a shaded dark legacy, is that it pretty directly inspires this MK Ultra program that develops in the CIA. John Lyle, author of The Dirty Tricks Department. Thanks for the time today, and thanks for the fascinating research. It's a really interesting book. Of course, yeah. Thank you very much.

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