The Rest Is Classified - 36. CIA Mind Control: Fighting Communism with LSD (Ep 2)

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Who was the eccentric chemist at the heart of the CIA's most controversial experiments? What happened when Langley was turned into a testing ground for mind-altering drugs? And how did the quest for a truth serum lead to a psychedelic free-for-all? Inside the CIA, the search for a mind control breakthrough took a bizarre turn. Driven by the relentless pursuit of Sidney Gottlieb, LSD was introduced into the daily lives of unsuspecting officers. From laced coffee to drug-fuelled office parties, the agency's experiments pushed the boundaries of both science and sanity. Listen as Gordon and David expose the shocking truth about the CIA's top-secret experiments with LSD, the devastating consequences, and the enduring legacy of MK Ultra. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Your groceries delivered. Just like that. Within the agency, Dr Gottlieb found time to lead the chemists of the technical services staff on a series of increasingly daring experiments with LSD. They spiked each other's coffee and liquor they spreaded on their food. They tripped out in their offices and in safe houses in Washington and beyond in the Maryland countryside. They were stoned for days at a time. There were moments of black comedy. A hallucinating scientist suddenly decided that he was

Fred Astaire and grabbed the nearest secretary, convinced she was Ginger Rogers. Dr Gottlieb regarded such incidents as the usual hiccups in searching for the magic technique he was convinced the Communists were using. His sixth sense convinced Dr Gottlieb that there might be no quick answers. The only certain way to arrive at the one which mattered, success, was to continue experimenting. He encouraged his staff to go in search of how to take possession of a man's mind. Watching his colleagues expanding their conception of reality under the influence of LSD, he would sometimes dance a jig. Those

were among some of his happiest hours at the agency, equaled only by rising at dawn to milk his goats. Well welcome to the rest is classified, I'm Gordon Carrera and I'm David McClaskey and that was Stephen Kinser writing about Sidney Gottlieb, the master of the MK Ultra programme in Stephen Kinser's book Poisoner in Chief. And last time we were looking at the character of Sidney Gottlieb and also the origins of this quest for controlling the human mind, which had come first out of some of the Nazi and Japanese experiments in the Second World War and then particularly that era in the

early Cold War when the US and the CIA in particular became obsessed that the Soviets might have found some secret to controlling the mind and to dealing with issues of interrogation and brainwashing. And so the CIA were trying to master it themselves. And the man they turned to was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Well, it made me think as you were reading that Gordon, Ed, just how restrictive the agency's drug policy had become by the time I joined, because they had cut all this out.

I joined at the wrong time, Gordon. What can I say? And we are now picking up this story focused on Sidney Gottlieb at a point where the CIA, as we mentioned in the last episode, had spent some time, some of it under Gottlieb's direction, running programs called Bluebird and Artichoke to try to understand if there were ways, oftentimes using really brutal methods of coercion, torture, to elicit the truth from prisoners.

And Gottlieb is really looking for, as he's in this sort of quest for mind control, he's looking for a path into the human psyche, right? I mean, he is looking for a way into the mind, a way to wipe the mind, I guess you could say, or to condition it, and a way then to fill it, I guess, with intention or desire, the ability to act that is in line with the purposes of the CIA, right? So he is looking for a way to control people. And drugs become a very fascinating

pathway for Gottlieb into the human mind. So he's really after something that will aid in the process of almost a mental reprogramming. And a lot of the drug-oriented experiments in this era really do resemble kind of the pathway of, you know, a wayward teenager going deeper and deeper into harder and harder drugs. So the CIA has experimented with marijuana, refining it into a potent liquid without color, taste, or odor. They call it TD for truth drug. They test it, of course, as you read in that insanely bizarre quote to start the episode. LSD was being used around the office. CIA officers were testing marijuana on themselves, consuming varying doses. They'd mix it into candy, salad dressing, mashed potatoes, smoked it, of course. The research led them to what now, I guess, seem to be blindingly obvious conclusions.

Things like, quote, the active ingredient in marijuana brings on a state of irresponsibility, appears to relax all inhibitions, and the sense of humor is accentuated to the point where any statement or situation can become extremely funny. So there we go. A top secret review of marijuana published by the Central Intelligence Agency determines that it's not going to be a very useful drug for mind control. Sounds like that could have been written by a teenager, but anyway. It could have been written by a teenager. That's right.

Next up on this sort of downward spiral, cocaine. The CIA sponsored experiments in which mental patients were given cocaine in various forms, including injection. Early reports said that cocaine could produce elation and talkativeness, but they kind of come to the conclusion that it could induce free and spontaneous speech. It's too unreliable. The agency's kind of excited about this at the beginning, but then sours on it and believes that it's just too unreliable for use in any kind of interrogation.

So then we go to heroin, of course. I will say as the drugs get a little harder here, there seems to be less evidence that the CIA officers were using it on themselves. Memo's noted that heroin could be useful in reverse because essentially you could get someone addicted to it and then dangle it over them and, you know, basically say, you're going to tell us these things, otherwise you won't get another hit. The U.S. Navy had actually sponsored secret research to study heroin's effects and students were paid $1 per hour to ingest measured doses. While their reactions were observed, heroin, of course, proves to be no more of a wonder drug for getting into the human mind and controlling it than cocaine did. So, of course, we go on to mescaline. The Germans, you know, we talked about this kind of pretty seedy nexus of a lot of the research that had come out of the Nazi concentration camps and the US bio warfare program to begin and some of the German scientists at Dietrich were actually questioned because Mescaline had been given to prisoners at Dachau,

but the work had been inconclusive and Mescaline, like all the others, have deemed to be almost too unpredictable to be useful as a mind control agent. So then of course we go to go to Shrooms, Gordon. A CIA officer is sent to Mexico to collect seeds, plants, herbs, or fungus with high narcotic or toxic value. What a top secret mission to be dispatched on. Go collect some herbs in Mexico. Wander Mexico for fungus with psilocybin in it. This officer spent several weeks in Mexico, which I'm sure were quite

productive, returns with bags full of samples and with something else. He had met with people who told him tales of a magic mushroom. Native shamans and priestesses that, you know, the sort of source said had used it as a pathway to the divine and they called it God's flesh and Gottlieb has the samples analyzed and was told that several did indeed contain psychoactive substances. And so he finds a chemist that he can send to Mexico to find organic toxins and, if possible, this magic mushroom. So he gets a chemist through an outside firm.

The chemist links up with a married couple who'd participated in mushroom rituals in Mexico and who, as Kinsner writes, was known as a guardian of ancient wisdom who used mushrooms to commune with the infinite. The chemist goes down there, apparently doesn't get along well with the married couple, apparently also has a very bad trip on the mushrooms, but returns with samples. And so Gottlieb actually ends up sending people to Pennsylvania to visit with mushroom growers to see if they could help reproduce this and create I guess a fungus to defeat communism. I once had some tequila with a worm in it which I think may have had similar effects but I'm not sure if that was supposed to be

true if it was just the tequila but anyway. And we said in the other episode I mean Gordon and I we've tried all of this right so we've done the first-hand research to get to this point and as we we tick through this list, we can attest- Just to be clear, that's not true before I get denied a visa to travel to anywhere in the future. We can attest to none of this stuff works. And so again, drugs kind of seem to be hitting a bit of a wall. All of this is very interesting.

And again, I think we should mention that Sid Sydney Gottlieb is an infinitely curious guy. He likes to collect a lot of different kinds of knowledge. All of this stuff also, this kind of search for toxins and drugs, is right up his alley, right, as a biochemist. So he is like nerding out on this stuff, right? And I think even if there is a sort of loose connection to the world of covert operations or any actual practical intelligence value, he's got the cover from Alan Dulles. He's running this chemical division inside the technical services staff. He is after this stuff. And Gottlieb

is they go through this progression. Thanks. What about is that go through this progression. Thanks. What about LSD? Now LSD is going to be the official drug of this series on the rest is classified podcast, because this is the one I think more than any that absolutely fascinates and bewitches Sydney Gottlieb. And we should say it's a synthetic drug and it's just been developed a few years earlier, hasn't it, in Switzerland by a chemist as a new stimulant.

So it's not created by the CIA, but I guess it's not very well known at this point. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA forerunner, their R&D branch had been aware of LSD during the Second World War. It's actually created in Switzerland, in Basel, Switzerland in 1943, by a research chemist named Dr. Albert Hoffman. It's the 25th in a series of lysergic acid diethylamides. So that's where the LSD comes from. It's known as LSD 25. Dr. Hoffman is the first person to ever take a quote,

inner voyage, which is what they called an acid trip at the time. And he does so in the spring of 1943. Now, LSD, for you chemistry nerds listening to the rest is classified, it's an enzyme that's sort of synthesized off of an enzyme that is found in the ergot fungus, which is a fungus that grows on rye and on grains. It has been recognized for centuries as kind of having therapeutic possibilities to it, but it can also cause hallucinations.

And a case that actually come to the CIA's attention in 1951 when basically an entire town in France ate bread or the vast majority of the town had eaten bread contaminated with the ergot fungus and went bananas. The village essentially went on a trip like one man jumped into the river because he thought snakes were eating him alive. A number of people actually died in the madness. The CIA has found this out and of course in the very conspiratorial borderline psychotic you know sort of geopolitics of the early 1950s, the CIA wonders well what if the Soviets

had that power and could weaponize it, you could make entire populations go insane. So the CIA, Gottlieb, they get a batch of LSD from Sandoz, which is the pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, that has developed LSD. And the setup here from Gottlieb's standpoint and from the standpoint of other CIA men in the early 50s is that LSD is a very attractive substance because you don't need hardly any to create a massive reaction in a human being. A heavy dose of LSD would rest on the head of a pin, and even small doses can produce kind of mental derangement.

So it's got these intriguing kind of clandestine possibilities, right? Could you use it to control somebody? Could you use it to elicit information, to discredit someone, to incapacitate them? And one CIA officer who was involved in this effort at the time remembers, you know, we had thought at first that this was the secret that was going to unlock the universe. That is how much potential they thought it had. Yeah. You know, we had thought at first that this was the secret that was going to unlock the universe. That is how much potential they thought it had.

Yeah. And of course, Sidney Gottlieb being a kind of practical man, a hands on scientist, not just a bureaucratic manager. He dives straight in, doesn't he? Yeah, he tries it. He tries it himself. Lately, he says he used it more than 200 times. So it's not just a one off. I mean, he really is experimenting on himself in terms of how it works.

In an early book on this time, they note that basically, the way you think about this is they were running kind of ballistics on themselves. I mean, they were testing these drugs like they were weapons. And Gottlieb has described his inner voyage and he said, I happen to experience an out-of-bodiness, a feeling as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body and it is shimmering and I have a sense of wellbeing and euphoria for most of the next hour or two. And then it gradually subsides. I mean, sorry, just the idea of being in a transparent sausage skin is not, that's not a sensation that I actually would want to try. That's not selling it to me, I'm afraid. Have you never done it? I'm not enticed to try it after hearing that description from Dear Sid.

Well, here's why I think it creates such possibilities in the minds of a guy like Gottlieb is that when you read accounts of people who have taken LSD, I think it is unpredictable exactly how that trip goes, but you see basic concepts like time, space, color, light, feelings like happiness, paranoia, good, evil, all these things can get reshaped in the middle of one of these inner voyages or or acid trips and that power to deal with fundamental concepts that order our lives I think is what is so attractive about the drug to Sydney Gottlieb.

And of course, because of this power, the first thing you do is you start testing it on your friends and colleagues, right? So they begin testing it. The first volunteer is to actually take it because again, the CIA has this badge. They're scientists at Dietrich. They are Gottlieb's CIA colleagues. Later agency trainees will be given LSD without forewarning and things, as you read Gordon, the quote to open this, kind of get out of hand relatively quickly.

I mean, it wasn't unusual for the TSS staff to spike the coffee with LSD. On one occasion, an unwitting victim, a CIA officer officer drank the coffee and couldn't pull himself together, is the sort of write-up, left the office and walked across a bridge over the Potomac. And at this time, the TSS staff, they're not out at Langley, they're actually at an office inside Washington, DC. And the guy is just bewildered on this bridge. Every time a car passes, he gets extremely frightened, just kind of huddles down. He's absolutely terrified out on this bridge.

Gottlieb himself, I guess, is so notorious for these LSD experiments that he liked to tell a story about a time that he was on a plane flying back to DC. And he gets up to get a martini from the stewardess, which I mean, also we should note, I mean, this, this era of air travel sounds kind of nice here, cause you just like would get up and go to the galley and someone fixes you a martini. So he walks back to his seat and someone, someone asks him, is that LSD you're drinking? And he looks over at the guy and it's Alan Dulles sitting there on the plane, just assuming that he's on LSD. So things had gotten so out of hand that by the holidays of 1954, the CIA's Office of Security circulates a memo warning that LSD could produce serious insanity for long periods

and that it would not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at Christmas office parties. That is quite a Christmas office party. I don't think I've not been to one where they're putting LSD in the punch bowl, but I don't think we have punch bowls anymore. I would say the CIA holiday or Christmas parties had gotten more boring by the time I arrived. I don't remember anything like this. They were all very sort of buttoned up bureaucratic affairs where, you know, having anything more

than a half glass of wine was generally frowned upon. So I guess the key question, we've got this image now of CIA officers tripping in the office and out of the office sometimes. I guess the question is, is it actually working? Are they able to find out whether it actually helps with this crucial question of interrogating people and trying to break them down. That seems like an irrelevant question at this point in the story, Gordon. Everyone's enjoying themselves too much.

You're ruining a perfectly good experience with that question. I mean, again, I think the power of the drug is interesting to Gottlieb and initially promising, and they do conduct kind of mock interrogations in which CIA employees are given LSD and then induced to violate oaths and promises. In one experiment, a military officer apparently swore he wouldn't reveal any secrets. He then is dosed with LSD. He reveals the secret and then afterward had forgotten the entire episode. So there's like a few anecdotal incidents where I think Gottlieb

looks at this and says, well, this could be fascinating for interrogations. This could be fascinating for use, you know, in sort of other intelligence applications. And Gottlieb is going to be fascinated by LSD and its applications in kind of the covert world. I mean, there is a broader conversation inside the small community of people at Dietrich and the CIA who are even aware of it over what purpose could LSD serve. I mean, I think some see it as a weapon of war for incapacitating enemy populations, kind of like what happened in that village in France. Albert Hoffman, the chemist who initially synthesized it, saw it as a way to treat mental illness.

And you know, you can see a kind of thread running from that impulse to psychedelics today, right? Gottlieb, though, saw it as a way to control people. It's really the kind of ultimate covert action weapon, right? I mean, that was his vision for LSD was that it would allow him not only a pathway into the human mind but a mechanism to establish control over it because at first what they seem to be looking for was a truth serum effectively a way of breaking people down to see if they would be forced to answer questions truthfully but it now seems like got leave it's actually got a kind of wider, more expansive idea of what you might be able to do with the human brain using some of the drugs like LSD. So we start to see it expanding, don't we, in terms of what his vision is of

what you could do potentially. That's right. I mean, some real bureaucratic creep here, Gordon, inside this program. I mean, also one thing we should note is that Gottlieb is not a fan of committing much of this to writing for obvious reasons. He really doesn't like to file reports. What he does insist on filing are expense reports and accounting. So much of what we have now come to learn about these programs have come from those types of reports, right? reports and accounting. So much of what we have now come to learn about these programs

have come from those types of reports, right? But the actual write-ups of a lot of these incidents have been lost to us. So again, I mean, these early experiments, very mixed results, you know, some people take LSD and become docile, uninhibited, other people become extremely paranoid. It seems pretty clear even early on that it's not a particularly reliable truth serum, but it does have, again, it's got that power and then it's colorless, odorless, tasteless. You don't need much of it. So it's got the possibility for applications and kind of clandestine

intelligence operations. Now Gottlieb realizes that he's going to need some help in understanding the true possibilities of this drug. So he starts to bring doctors into his orbit. And this is a period in what is going to become MKUltra, where it's early startup days, right? So we're going to get to a point where there's much more kind of sprawling projects and bureaucracy. But at this point, he's kind of starting to to get to a point where there's much more kind of sprawling projects in bureaucracy. But at this point, he's kind of starting to feel out

allies in the research community and the medical community who can help him understand the impact of LSD. He reaches out to a doctor at the New York Psychiatric Institute, who agrees to inject mescaline into one of his patients, so its effects could be observed. He finds a 42-year-old professional tennis player named Harold Blower, who had come to this doctor seeking treatment for depression following a divorce, and he's given a round of injections over a month's period. The mescaline derivative they were using had only been tested on mice, and then in January of 1953, he's given a dose that's 14 times greater than the previous ones and dies two hours later. And one of the medical assistants at the Psychiatric Institute says, we didn't know if it was dog

piss or what it was we were giving him. You'd think at this point, questions start to ask if a professional tennis player dies suddenly after being injected with something strange, but I guess people don't know what he's been injected with and people just accept it some kind of potentially new drug, but it does seem bizarre that they can get away with doing this on ordinary people and not have questions asked. Yeah, I think it's safe to say, and we'll see this in some of the later episodes, that the state of the profession of psychiatry in the 1950s was really brutal, and the CIA is infinitely interested in sort of the frontiers of this profession, right?

Now, you might think that CIA leadership would start to look askance at all of this, right? I mean, you've got this tragic incident in New York, which is already starting to kind of hint at both the use of these drugs in the states as sort of what's going to happen once you start pushing this stuff out into the community. I mean, this guy ends up being killed by his psychiatrist. And so you'd think the CIA, Alan Dulles and others would sort of look at this and say, whoa, let's stop. But they're totally aligned. No, no, no, no. And it'll be an interesting question throughout these episodes is who knows what about the extent of this research and what's really going on, but it is clear that Alan Dulles, who by this point is running the CIA, and later a guy named Richard Helms, who at this point is running the Directorate of Operations, they are fully

aligned with Sid Gottlieb and his mission to understand if there is a way to establish control over the human mind. So this is a project the CIA, and again, it's not to sort of excuse it, but to explain it that at this period, there is so much fear about what the Soviet Union might be doing on mind control that they do not feel that they could possibly stop this research. They're fully behind it. They want it to be done.

Although clearly they, they want it done quietly, but they're giving it the backing, they're giving it the financial backing and the kind of resources, more money, more budget and crucially here, I guess, a new code name or cryptonym for, for the project. That's right. So in 1953, Dallas is running the CIA. Gottlieb gets a big bureaucratic boost. So he gets a budget of three hundred thousand dollars, not subject to financial controls, permission to launch kind of R&D work and conduct experiments without the signing of the usual contracts or other written

agreements. Maybe only a dozen people inside the CIA know what he's doing. And this program gets a new cryptonym, surely not by accident, it's called MKUltra. We love a digraph, Gordon, on the rest is classified. The MK digraph at the beginning of that means that it lives inside the TSS, the technical services staff, and under MKUltra, Sid Gottlieb is going to pursue his quest to understand and control the human mind. So let's take a break there and afterwards we'll come and see what dark places MKUltra takes us into. This Friday, the amateur arrives in IMAX.

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The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Nice. Now the offer? Lease a 2025 Escape Active all-wheel drive from 198 bi-weekly at 1.99% APR for 36 months with $27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Welcome back everybody to this trip into the world of CIA mind control, where the program has just got its new cryptonym, MKUltra, and Sidney Gottlieb is hard at work trying to master the human mind. That's right.

And it turns out it takes a lot of work to master the human mind, Gordon, and it's impossible to do it without a number of problems along the way. So Gottlieb, as MKUltra gets rolling in 1953, is facing a bunch of big problems. One of them is that he has to run this research program in total secrecy. The second one, and this is where this story, I mean, you could argue that big pieces of this have already been pretty dark and it's going to get darker, is that he needs human subjects to test these methods and drugs on. Another, I guess you could argue, even bigger problem is that he's really got no idea how to research mind control, as we'll see. I mean, he's a biochemist. So he's a bit

out of his depth here, or at least needs collaborators to bring more kind of experience and skills into MKUltra. And of course, one of the first things you do, Gordon, when you set up a mind control program is you set up a safe house in a major US city where people will unwittingly be given drinks laced with LSD and other drugs. That's step one. Mind control 101. And of course, where else do you pick but New York City?

Where else but Greenwich Village, New York City? That's right. 81 Bedford Street is the CIA funded safe house in New York that is going to be stood up as part of the early days of MKUltra. Now, the gentleman, and I use that word loosely, who Gottlieb hires to run this part of the operation is a guy named George Hunter White. He is a former narcotics detective who's also a user. He's a sadomasochist and frequenter of prostitutes, he's apparently got a big high heel fetish, he consumes a full bottle of gin at dinner, he's always armed carrying a weapon, and he owns a pet canary to whom he was deeply attached.

And if after I've said all that you are not interested in George Hunter White, you have something wrong with you, because this man is a villainous and colorful character who is going to reappear, I will say, in later episodes on this series. I mean, you couldn't almost pick a more darker caricature of someone like from a kind of film noir of the late 40s or early 50s of the kind of the bad guy or the thug, not the boss, but the kind of thug employed to kind of beat people up. I mean, that's what George Hunter White is. And also a former employee of the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA during the war.

You seem to have neglected that that link when describing his general villainy. I was going to get there. I was going to get there, Gordon. I just didn't include it in his initial bio. So that's right. He was an OSS man during the war and he had trained many of the OSS cadres at this school for mayhem and murder in Ontario. And what that means is that a lot of these senior people at the CIA in the

1950s who'd come out of the OSS had been trained at this school by George Hunter White. So he's in this kind of orbit, right, which is how Gottlieb ends up finding him. Now, George Hunter White had had this bizarre resume since the end of the Second World War, so he had led anti-narcotics campaigns in New York. He'd actually been on Joe McCarthy's committee investigating communist influence in the State Department. He had this kind of rich pool of potential subjects for drug experiments in New York because he had been a narcotics detective there. He's actually still working at the Federal Narcotics Bureau in New York

when he gets hired to be an MKUltra consultant by Sidney Gottlieb. And George Hunter Wyatt is a very violent and rough guy who lives on the edges of society. He is a total extremist in his appetites and consumptions. And he knows the drug scene really well. So he's perfectly qualified. So he's perfect for this work.

It did take almost a year to get White's security clearance approved. How do you get a security clearance? I mean, given what you said about him, the drink, the prostitutes, the weird predilections, I mean, and yet he still gets a security clearance? It's all about who you know. So White and his second wife, Albertine, they throw wild sex and drug parties in New York, they drug their friends and unwitting subjects. So basically the CIA is kind of subcontracted out the management

of a drug house and brothel. So the Bedford street apartment is a CIA safe house in New York where George Hunter White is luring people, oftentimes he's actually using kind of like a cover as a bohemian artist in Greenwich Village to lure people there for parties, give them drinks laced with drugs and basically watch them as they react to them. Because he's got two adjoining apartments, I think, and he's got surveillance equipment in one which allows him to kind of observe through mirrors what's happening in the other, which frankly sounds more perverted than scientific and sounds like he's, you know, following

his general slightly deranged desires and Gottlieb has given him an excuse and probably lots of money to be able to do that. The perverse desires are the driving factor here for George Hunter White. I mean, he's not interested in the scientific applications of any of this and is just a sicko who's been handed some cash from Sidney Gottlieb and what seems like kind of a blank check to commit a whole bunch of crimes in New York. So this is kind of one early prototype for what will become a more sprawling effort on the West Coast as part of MKUltra, which we're going to cover in a later episode in the series.

But it starts in New York in this kind of early days of MKUltra where Gottlieb is trying to solve a fundamental problem he has, which is he thinks he's got a super drug in LSD, but he needs people to test it on. He can't just test it inside the CIA. He's kind of got to do it out in the wild. Now one of the problems that he will have with LSD is he's got a supply problem, Gordon, because Sandoz, the Swiss company that holds the patent, they haven't actually made that much of it, and they are the only company in the world

in the early 1950s that knows how to make this stuff, how to synthesize LSD from that fungus. And in the early 50s, the CIA starts to worry that Sandoz is selling LSD to the Soviet Union. Now, those intelligence reports later turn out to be false. But what happens is that in 53, just as MK Ultra is starting up, a CIA officer is dispatched to Switzerland and reports back that Sandow's had 10 kilograms of LSD on hand, which is a crazy amount given that enough to put on a pinhead is enough to get one person on a trip.

This is crazy amounts. 10 kilograms is a fantastically gigantic amount of LSD. I mean, when you're talking about doses of LSD, you're speaking in terms of micrograms in most cases. Micrograms. Not milligrams, micrograms. Now, Dulles, Alan Dulles, CIA director, approves the expenditure of $240,000 to buy what he thinks at the time is the world's entire supply of LSD, because he wants to make sure the Soviet Union doesn't get it. But the guys sent to pick it up quickly discovered that their colleague had confused kilograms with grams. But your metric system is sort of,

you know, it's opaque Gordon to us Americans and we couldn't possibly understand its finer points. Sandoz had actually manufactured a total of less than 40 grams of which 10 were still in stock. So the CI buys all of that. So the CI has a supply problem because Gottlieb, he's only got 10 grams of this stuff, right? So Gottlieb creates a sub-project under MKUltra where he pays scientists at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly to break the chemical code in LSD and basically manufacture a knockoff of LSD in the states to solve his supply problem. We've gone breaking bad pretty quickly.

We've gone from Manchurian candidate to breaking bad here. Listeners to our pod will know that we enjoy a breaking bad reference on the show. And I think what we'll see here as we get into this is that the CIA basically becomes the Heisenberg of LSD as we get going into the 1950s. So under Gottlieb, I mentioned the word sub-project a second ago, with respect to Eli Lilly, and under Gottlieb, MKUltra becomes a sprawling network of these sub-projects. Each is kind of aimed at a different set of questions or a different avenue into

the human psyche. Now, one of those we talked about it earlier was hypnosis, right? Gottlieb continues to be fascinated with it because he's sort of endlessly curious, what are the intelligence applications of hypnosis? There's actually an MKUltra sub-project run through the University of Minnesota, conducting a series of hypnosis experiments on about a hundred subjects that look at anxiety, recalling complex information, and polygraph response under hypnosis. Could you hypnotize someone so that they would be able to pass a polygraph? Now, another angle on this is magic.

So, Sidney Gottlieb goes out and finds a very famous stage magician named John Mulholland, who was a protege of Harry Houdini and convinces Mulholland, Mulholland actually, I think is quite excited to participate in this, to write a manual distilling insights from the world of magic to covert operations. I have a copy at home. And it's been published, right? The title is the, this is it the CIA manual of trickery and deception. Yeah.

I've got a copy at home. I use it all the time. Do my magic tricks. I'm so interested in, in the CIA magic and British intelligence magic. I've insisted we leave it there and we do some episodes on it at a later date. Cause I just think it's a great topic topic how they start employing these magicians. So sorry, I've stopped you covering it now. Listeners will be, of course, dismayed to learn that I initially had like a page of stuff in here on magic and different magic tricks that John Mulholland taught CIA officers how to perform and Gordon Carrera struck all of it.

So send your complaints to Gordon. And of course, you know, inside this network of sub projects, it all goes back to LSD, doesn't it, Gordon? And we should note here for our listeners that this part of it does start to get, I think even maybe, is it possible Gordon to get darker than where we've already been? Weirder and darker. And I think, yeah, people should be prepared for that if they're listening, I think.

Because what Gottlieb wants to know, he wants to answer questions like, how much LSD can a human take? Can you blast away someone's consciousness and leave a void into which new impulses or ideas or a new personality could be implanted. And Gottlieb begins to build a more structured web of contractors and subcontractors to conduct this research, because it's not being conducted inside the CIA itself. He's writing the checks and giving the LSD supply and writing the questions and getting others to do the research. And that's what I find really interesting about this is it's not being done in house in some black site of the CIA, but it's actually academics, doctors, people associated with

hospitals and universities are actually going to do the darker experiments, but just secretly funded by the CIA and feeding the results back to them, which almost to me feels darker than if it had been done in-house somehow. I mean, it's almost more manipulative. Well, yeah, because I guess the funding for this and the drugs and kind of the impulse for it comes from the CIA, but it's filtered through what seemed to be, you know, very sort of upstanding rehabilitation centers and psychiatric institutes and research institutions. One of them is the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky.

There's a guy named Dr. Harris Isbell. It's officially a hospital, but it functions like a prison. The Bureau of Prisons actually co-administers it, and it's nicknamed the Narcotic Farm. Now, people there are essentially inmates at this facility, right? And many are black, most are on the margins of society, and Isbell had conducted truth serum research for the Office of Naval Research during the war. He knew the CIA was looking into it, So he had actually volunteered. He wrote the CIA saying he wanted to participate or to help in sort of experiments on truth serum research.

And so Gottlieb visits him. They strike a deal. Gottlieb will give him money, give him LSD because LSD at this point in time is not easy to get in usable quantities or at all. And so Isbell is going to design and conduct the experiments, provide subjects, and then file reports to Gottlieb and his staff. And Gottlieb basically sends a variety of compounds down there, opiates, marijuana, barbiturates, tranquilizers.

A lot of junkies in the Lexington area, of course, become regular volunteers because they can basically show up at this place and participate in the research. Some were even compensated, so they'd be given preferential treatment inside the system or a little bit of money to participate in these experiments. It does seem though that some inmates or patients were almost certainly dosed unwittingly in these experiments and sort of all of this paper, much of which has been destroyed, is going back to Gottlieb and the CIA. Now, Isbell's MKUltra contracts included subproject 73, which was to test whether LSD, mescaline or other drugs could make people more susceptible to hypnosis. The drug experiments that Isbell did were extremely intense. So in one case, gave a test subject 532 micrograms of LSD, which is maybe seven times a typical dose.

And in one case, he dosed someone with LSD for 77 days straight. So just, I mean, really stuff where you'd say, this is abuse. You're abusing somebody with a drug you do not understand. How could anyone, even if they're raising their hand and saying, I want to participate in this, how can someone really even know what they're consenting to? I mean, there's so many dark stories. I mean, this one of a former state senator from Georgia who got addicted to Demerol and is then tested on with LSD and becomes really mentally damaged. And it

seems like this just awful story after awful story about the long-term effects some of these people who experimented on feel, which go on for, you know, for decades actually in many cases. And this isn't the only one of the kind of projects either. No, I mean, another notable victim in this period is the notorious gangster, Whitey Bulger, who was one of these subjects. So Gottlieb had arranged a similar setup to the one in Kentucky at Emery University or through Emery University in Atlanta. And Whitey Bulger ends up kind of filtering in as one of the subjects for this LSD research.

So he was given LSD every day for 15 months. And in a notebook, he wrote that after he was released, he had nightmares, horrible LSD experiences, followed by thoughts of suicide and deep depression. And he didn't want to tell any of the medical attendants about hearing voices or what he would describe as the movement of the calendar in his cell, because he thought if he did that, you know, he'd be committed for life and never see the outside world again. And, you know, he, of course, is a gangster, but he went on to serve two consecutive life sentences for 11 murders. So you kind of get the sense of there are people for whom they come into contact with

these programs and they're forever changed. Now, some of these sub-projects were extremely bizarre. So one of them is MKUltra Subproject 43. The idea here was to conduct experiments on suggestibility and ways to induce disassociative states. And so what kind of experiment do you design to answer those questions, Gordon? Well, you go down to Oklahoma City, where in the early 60s, a CIA psychiatrist,

a guy who actually resembles Santa Claus, got approvals from the director of the Linkin Park Zoo, and he shot a dart containing 300,000 micrograms of LSD into a 7,000-pound bull elephant named Tusco. And so the psychiatrist was apparently trying to induce a state of heightened aggression and strong sexual desire. In The Elephant, the story does not end well for Tusco. Five minutes later, after the injection, according to the report, the elephant, quote, trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated and went into status epilepticus.

He died an hour and 40 minutes later. The conclusion of the CIA report says it appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to LSD and the CIA unbeknownst to the zoo, the zoo doesn't know where the money is coming from, but through the psychiatrist, the CIA compensates the zoo for the loss of Tusco. I hope they didn't do this like in the zoo with like kids watching, because I just have this image of poor old Tusko. When I read this the first time, that is the image I had was like Tusko was just there in his enclosure, and a guy in a pit helmet shoots him with a dart.

This is where I think you can see sort of the imprint of Sydney Gottlieb's curiosity, and frankly just the curiosity of so many other psychiatrists and researchers and scientists who were involved in this work expressed, right? Because we have gotten to a point in the story where the CIA is funding and encouraging the injection of LSD into elephants, right? I mean, and even these stories, they get even weirder. I mean, subproject 70 involved catching ticks and milking their salivary glands for a neurotropic toxic substance.

Gottlieb seems to have dispatched someone to collect a crocodile from Central Africa, so its gallbladder could be harvested and studied for its medicinal qualities. Gottlieb is going to hire psychiatrists as well, right? So, he hires a superintendent of Boston Psychopathic Hospital to run LSD experiments. He gives $85,000 to a New York allergist who's one of the first pioneers of LSD in the States. He gives it to guests at his Long Island home. There's just this, like, litany of crazy stories, dark stories, as Gottlieb starts to really push his research agenda out into kind of the mainstream of

US academia, psychiatric health, you know, and kind of research in the middle of the 50s. And do we sense that Gottlieb has any any doubts, any kind of questions in his mind about these crazy things he's encouraging? Or is he just the kind of archetypal mad scientist who's suddenly been given license to do whatever he wants on whoever he wants and that's great and who cares about people? It's going to be an interesting question throughout many of these kind of episodes in this series. Like how much did Gottlieb know? Were there pieces of

it that he kind of maybe knew what was going on in concept but not in detail? He's probably aware that you know poor Tusco got shot but how aware is he of what's going on at the, you know, addiction research center in Kentucky? Here's what I think. I think he's aware, but I think he's distant. He's so distant from it because he's not participating in these experiments. I think he's distant enough from it that he can kind of deal with it in a cold

way, like a researcher and not have to encounter the human face of it in this period. I'd probably justify it as back to where we started, the Soviets are doing this and it's the Cold War and if we don't do it, they will and use it against us. So that justifies this pretty dark, sometimes quite depraved stuff that's going on in his name. I mean, later on in his life, Gottlieb will come to express some, I think, guilt about MKUltra and about what was done under the program. But we really in this period don't have a record of his thoughts about this

type of work in the moment. You know, we know that at home, he had a relatively happy home life. He and his wife would go out folk dancing. He was a big folk dancing enthusiast. They'd buy the right costumes and he'd come home and teach his wife after going out on trips. So you kind of get the sense of a guy who I think was able to compartmentalize pretty easily.

And we should also say that Gottlieb is starting to take on more and more responsibility inside the technical services staff. And so Mind Control or MKUltra is probably only one thing on his calendar every week. So, you know, to paint a picture of this guy is kind of this mad scientist who's out killing elephants and, you know, force-feeding LSD to inmates. All of that stuff, of course, happens underneath his program, but I think he's interacting with a lot of this stuff at arm's length He's dealing with a lot more on his plate and and I think he's able to compartmentalize, you know everything Really easily and so there with this sprawling MK ultra program with all these sub projects all over the place doing crazy things with elephants and psychiatric hospitals Let's stop and next time when we come back we'll look at perhaps the most dark episode of MKUltra 1 in which a CIA officer themselves pays a

terrible price for being experimented on as Gottlieb searches for what LSD can do and whether it could really deliver mind control. See you next time.