The Rest Is Classified - 37. CIA Mind Control: Sex, Drugs, and Mysterious Deaths (Ep 3)

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

From LSD-fuelled hallucinations to medically-induced comas, the CIA explored every avenue in their search for mind control. But how did they justify these gross violations of human rights? And what does it reveal about the hidden history of the Cold War? In the clandestine world of espionage, the pursuit of knowledge can have a dark side. As the US and the USSR battled to come out on top, the CIA embarked on a series of top-secret experiments, pushing the boundaries of ethics and legality in their quest to unlock the secrets of the human brain. Listen as Gordon and David expose the shocking truth about MK Ultra, the CIA's mind control program, and the legacy of abuse that continues to haunt the agency's past. ------------------- 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

It has become increasingly obvious over the last several years that the general area had less and less relevance to current clandestine operations. The reasons for this are many and complex but two of them are perhaps worth mentioning briefly. On the scientific side it has become very clear that these materials and techniques are too unpredictable in their effect on individual human beings under specific circumstances to be operationally useful. Our operations officers, particularly the emerging group of new senior operations officers, have shown a discerning and perhaps commendable distaste for using these materials

and techniques, they seem to realise that in addition to moral and ethical considerations, the extreme sensitivity and security constraints of such operations effectively rule them out. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified, I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was Sydney Gottlieb, the man in charge of the weird, crazy, dark world of the CIA's mind control programs, also known as MK Ultra. That's my best kind of over the top voice. That was very ominous. It was ominous.

I do like in the quote how Sydney Gottlieb never really says what they're working on, right? He just sort of alludes to what they were doing. Something with ethical and moral issues, I think, which we're going to be looking at. Some people have moral and ethical distaste for trying to control the human mind. In our last episodes, we saw how at the start of the Cold War, there was this fear that the communists had developed ways of manipulating the brain, developing truth serums, brainwashing people like captured soldiers in the Korean War and then reprogramming their minds.

That's the only reason you could explain someone going communist, of course. And as a result, the CIA thought it wanted a piece of the action, creating its own program, MKUltra, and placing Sidney Gottlieb in charge. And we saw how he'd begun experimenting with LSD on himself, and also using fellow CIA officers as, I think, witting and unwitting guinea pigs, it's fair to say. A different era, David. A guinea pig can't truly consent though, can they Gordon? A true guinea pig is an unwitting lab rat, I guess you could say.

They don't do consent forms for guinea pigs. No, I think you're right. Gottlieb, we do have to say to his credit, the guy rolls up his sleeves, doesn't he? Because I mean, we mentioned this in the last episode, he himself went on 200 LSD acid trips for purposes of national security. So the guy is willing to put his money where his mouth is. And the story though that we're going to start this episode with, I think Gordon is fair to say is maybe one of the darker.

We keep saying this. I keep trying to not say it, but we keep saying it just keeps getting darker. And as we go into the world of MKUltra, each of these stories are bizarre and increasingly sort of dark. And in this story, this is a case of Gottlieb's, I guess, preference for testing on story we're going to focus on here now takes place in 1953. So MKUltra has actually just gotten going. And Gottlieb as part of this work is going to sponsor as kind of occasional work retreats at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake in Maryland. And work retreat makes this sound much more normal than it's actually going to be, right?

This is not a corporate retreat with trust falls and that kind of thing. This is 11 people from Gottlieb Shop at CIA, the technical services staff, particularly the chemical division, and the special operations division at Fort Detrick, the center of the United States' bioweapon, biowarfare program. chemical division, and the special operations division at Fort Detrick, the center of the United States' bio-weapon, bio-warfare program. And they go to this cabin in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, to kind of talk shop, talk about their

research. There is some fishing, so there's some, you know, sort of extracurricular activities. And the people from Dietrich who are brought to this, you know, sort of retreat are totally normal people who collaborate with the CIA on poisons, chemical and biological weapons, creation of, you know, suicide pills. We talked in back in the Tolkachev episodes about L pills, you know, some of the initial research for those would have come out of Dietrich. At this point, they're actually starting developing pills to give to U-2 pilots in case they're shot down over the Soviet Union. Aphrodisiacs for operational use.

So this is- Sorry, this is Aphrodisiacs for operational use. Yeah. That sounds mighty suspicious. And the details on this are vague. This is a crew of people who are sort of, I guess, joined at the hip with Gottlieb in his maniacal research. So in mid-November of 1953, one such group goes out to Deep Creek Lake.

Again, there's 11 scientists there. One of them is a man named Frank Olson. Now, Frank Olson is a chemist. He's also from Ira Baldwin's circle of sort of the intersection of chemistry and national security pulled from the University of Wisconsin. Frank Olson had been one of the first scientists assigned to DETRIC.

He is an expert in aerosol delivery systems for biological agents. And he has done research on developing a range of kind of lethal aerosols that you can put in handy containers disguised as like shaving cream or insect repellents. Pete Slauson Useful, yeah. Jared Slauson Now, he apparently is kind of already pretty stressed with his work as he's heading to this retreat. His son will say he's kind of, it's taken a bit of a moral toll on him. On November 18th, 1953 though, they go out to the

cabin and they socialize, they have dinner, they have a round of drinks at around 7 30 p.m. Now, Gottlieb's deputy, a guy named Robert Lashbrook, is also there. He's the one pouring the drinks. They're apparently drinking Cointreau straight. Someone will send us a nasty gram to say that, you know, we're sort of uncultured in this area, but I've never heard of anyone drinking Cointreau straight. They're drinking Cointreau. And after about 20 minutes, about half of them start to feel weird and say they're feeling strange. And it is of course, because their drinks have been spiked with LSD, obviously. Yeah, obviously. I mean, it's like a kind of weird party, but you'd also think they might have

almost expected it given the context. It's kind of early days for MK Ultra at this point, I guess. And I suppose it's possible that you're not maybe fully aware of the coffee pots being spiked at Langley. If you're not maybe fully aware of the coffee pots being spiked at Langley if you're coming in from Dietrich, or maybe you just assume, you know, hey, tonight's not our night. But Lashbrook, the deputy, has spiked the drinks. Now Gottlieb later in depositions will say he doesn't think any of the sort of maybe

seven or eight people who received the spiked drink knew it was coming it's, they seem unwitting. People start laughing uncontrollably, the conversation becomes unintelligible, the walls start spinning, and by 1 a.m., everyone's passed out except for Frank Olson. Now, Olson is having a hard go at it. So the next day, their work retreat is over. And I guess he comes home feeling there's something very off, right? So when he comes back, he tells his family, you know, I made terrible mistake. He's feeling disoriented, all mixed up was one way his wife said that he put it, said that he'd done something wrong. And that he felt that he was incompetent to do the type of

work he was doing. And at first, he might think, and his wife thinks, well, maybe he's got food poisoning or something like that. But it becomes apparent pretty quickly that, and his colleagues will agree, that he needs some kind of psychiatric help. Now, at this point, MKUltra has only been running for about seven months. Barely two dozen people know its true nature. And, you know, a good portion of those are people who were at Deep Creek Lake for this retreat and had been dosed with LSD. And so he's kind of in a very, very uncomfortable position here, because you have a guy who has access to an understanding of one of the deepest secrets at the heart of the US government who now is having a mental collapse and needs psychiatric help because of the bad LSD trip that you put

him on. Olsen is summoned or brought to Gottlieb for a chat and then they send him to see Dr. Harold Abramson in New York, who is an MKUltra subcontractor. So he's in on the secret. He's already in on the secret. It's why they go to New York because they're not just going to take him to see a psychiatrist in DC who's not already cleared for this. Olsen is escorted up there by Lashbrook, the guy who spiked his Quantro, and his own boss, a guy named Vincent Ruitt. And this is in the run-up to Thanksgiving of 1953.

And again, as they travel, Olsen is feeling all mixed up, still acting paranoid, starting to talk about how people are out to get him. And Olsen has two days of sessions with Abramson on the 24th and 25th of November. Olsen tells Abramson, can't work, can't sleep, can't concentrate, can't spell anymore, he's not sleeping. So then the next morning, after those sessions with Abramson, they take him to see a magician. He had been mentored by Harry Houdini and had written a manual for how to embed illusion and and deceit and trickery into CIA operations. Because every intelligence agency needs a magician and he's their man.

And you have to say at this point, maybe this isn't the care that Frank Olson needed because he's being taken to an MK Ultra subcontractor who's also dealing LSD in New York and a magician. So this is... It's not top quality care. This is not the way you would want to run the play. Later it will be reported that Mulholland, the magician, may have tried to hypnotize Olsen. So maybe the idea here was that they would try to hypnotize the guy as part of a psychiatric care and it doesn't seem to work very well.

But I wanna count Olsen becomes agitated when he quote, Thought Mulholland was going to make him disappear like one of the magician's rabbits. And so he is deeply paranoid at this point in the story. Now, for some bizarre reason, they then take Olsen to see a play in New York. So he's up there with Lashbrook and his boss.

They go see a play, me and Juliet, which I've not seen. Olsen stands up and leaves halfway through and says later that he's trying to escape from the people outside who are waiting to arrest him. That night, Olsen sneaks out of the hotel, tears up his money, throws his wallet in the trash bin, and claims, when they discover him later, sort of in the lobby the next morning, looking completely disheveled, like he's been out in the town all night, which he has. You know, he's been wandering around the city and he says, look, people were following me. I was actually eluding a chase team. So this is bad, right? So now it's Thanksgiving week, really bad timing.

bad, right? So now it's Thanksgiving week, really bad timing. They fly back to DC for Thanksgiving. And then on the drive from the airport, Olsen basically says, I can't go face my wife. I'm just too ashamed. And he tries, Frank Olsen tries to tell these guys to just let him go. But they say, there's no way we can do that, right? So Ruit stays behind in DC and Lashbrook takes Olson back to New York. They just turn around and go back onto a plane. They go out to Dr. Abramson's pad on Long Island. Then they go to Manhattan, to his office. Abramson diagnoses Olson as being in a psychotic state and eventually will convince Olson that he should be hospitalized voluntarily.

And Olson actually agrees to commit himself. So they're starting these kind of logistical arrangements to get him actually committed to a sanitarium, but apparently they need a day or so to prep the room. And so they go back to the hotel, they have what is arguably the worst Thanksgiving dinner of 1953, where they literally sit there at the hotel, have dinner. Olsen is during the Thanksgiving meal saying that he's terrified because everyone, and he's eating with Lashbrook, he's pointing at Lashbrook, he's saying, everyone, including you, is out to get me, you know, while he's eating the Lashbrook and he's pointing at Lashbrook. He's saying, everyone, including you is out to get me, you know, while he's eating the Thanksgiving turkey, right? And at this point in the story, you're starting to

wonder maybe this guy's got maybe he's got a point here. So next day, they meet again with Abramson, they watch TV, they have martinis, which doesn't seem like what you'd want to do in a, you know, psychotic state, they check into room 1018A at the Statler Hotel. Olsen calls his wife for the first time in three days and says, look, I'll see you soon. Seems encouraging. Olsen washes his socks in the sink that night. They watch television for a while and he goes to bed.

Now, Lashbrook wakes up around 2.30 in the morning to the sound of a very loud noise and Frank Olsen has gone out the window. wakes up around 2.30 in the morning to the sound of a very loud noise. And Frank Olson has gone out the window. When you say gone out the window, you mean gone out the window. He's fallen or was potentially pushed out of the window. And the Statler Hotel's doorman is screaming downstairs, you know, we got a jumper, we got a jumper.

And he'll later describe Olson's fall as like the guy was just diving with his hands out in front of him, his body twisting, he comes down feet first, his arms kind of grabbing at the air above him. And Olsen isn't dead immediately, apparently he's struck a piece of wood on the way down, but he's dead in moments. And Lashbrook sees all of this upstairs because they're sharing a room and he doesn't go downstairs.

He immediately calls Sid Gottlieb. And the police eventually question Lashbrook and ask him, you know, why didn't you go downstairs? It does kind of seem like maybe the natural human thing to do would have been to immediately go downstairs to check on the situation. But again, that's not what he does. to do would have been to immediately go downstairs to check on the situation. But again, that's not what he does. And Lashbrook will say later, you know, what could I have done? I mean, he was dead. So the night manager asked the hotel's operator if any calls had been made that night.

And one had, during the call, a man had said, it's all over. And the other said, that's too bad. And that was the call. And so, five hours later, at eight in the morning, a CIA officer named James McCord Jr., who will later be an accomplice in the Watergate break-in, he's going to come, he's going to meet with Lashbrook, accompany him to the police. They don't mention, of course, any of the LSD dosing to the police and it is ruled a suicide. Is it though?

I mean, lots of people over the years have suggested he was pushed or thrown out of that window to kind of keep the MK ultra secret going. I mean, there've been some, you know, documentaries in which people have suggested this it's hard to know. Isn't it? I don't think he was killed. So most of that theory has really come from the Olsen family, in particular, Frank Olsen's son.

Who's kind of haunted by it throughout his whole life. It was really, really haunted by it. I mean, for very obvious reasons, right. And actually ended up years later, having the body exhumed and actually hired a team of forensic pathologists to look at the corpse. And of course there's no sort of forensic pathologists to look at the corpse. And of course, there's no sort of toxicity reading they could take, you know, decades later.

But there was one forensic pathologist on the team who said that the skull had fractures consistent with him having been struck before he went out the window. Because again, you know, he goes feet first onto the ground, right. And other forensic pathologists on the team said, well, those could be consistent with him having hit something like, you know, we talked about him hitting a piece of wood going on the way down. I mean, so I don't think there's any particularly strong evidence

to suggest that he was killed. I think that what you do have is a situation where the CIA is absolutely keen to keep this as quiet as possible. So the family's situation is not being taken into consideration here, right? But I don't think there's been good evidence that has come out to suggest that anyone inside the CIA actually tried to kill this guy. I think he had a breakdown after he took LSD and jumped out a window. But in a sense, the CIA and Sidney Gottlieb are still responsible, perhaps, for his death because they created the conditions by feeding that LSD, which tipped him over the edge.

So maybe not direct murder in that sense, but somehow complicity in his death, I guess, is how you'd see it with Gottlieb, who I think feels some guilt about it, even though this is kept pretty quiet within the CIA. That's right. I mean, I think you have to draw a line between his death and the LSD. I mean, he could have been dealing with some kind of emotional trauma or disturbance before he took it, but it seems that there's a pretty straight line from the dosing via Quantro to jumping out the window of the hotel.

Because you can create a scenario if you were very conspiratorially minded in which you've got someone who's been tipped over the edge. The risk is in his treatment or whatever happens next, the secret of MK Ultra is going to come out. But equally, this is one of their own people that we're talking about. That's the bit which makes me a bit cautious about the idea they simply bump him off. He's one of theirs, isn't he? He's one of their kind of colleagues and friends. But I don't know. I think on balance, I'd go with you that it's less likely. But you

can see why people might think it. I don't think there's any really solid evidence to suggest that the CIA killed him. But I think it is maybe a bit of a moot point because, I mean, even the CIA's, the IG wrote years later on this, that there was a direct connection between Frank Olson's death and the LSD experiment, quote unquote. I mean, he was drugged without his consent by CIA officers at Deep Creek Lake. And then from there you go to the hotel. I mean, there's a direct connection between the two things, right? But here's the question.

What does it do to MK Ultra? Does it lead? I think we all know the answer to this. Does it lead to them going something, hey, let's stop this. No more of this crazy mind control and experimenting on people. We'll just quit at that point. I think the answer is an emphatic no, isn't it? Well, for those who've been listening to the last two episodes, Gordon, the bureaucratic on people. We'll just quit at that point. I think the answer is an emphatic no, isn't it?

Well, for those who've been listening to the last two episodes, Gordon, the bureaucratic controls on Sydney Gottlieb are light. Light touch regulation. There's no punishment. There's no real change in the way MKUltra is being managed. There is a, I guess you'd call it almost a formal reprimand from Alan Dulles, the CIA director to Gottlieb. And, you know, he basically says, you exercised poor judgment in this case. And years later, Gottlieb will claim that he felt personal anguish over what happened to Frank Olson. He'd even say that he considered resigning from the CIA to go into other work

because he was so affected, but he doesn't. And MKUltra doesn't change. And you have to say that a formal reprimand from the CIA director, while not great, is certainly not a punishment really, and work more or less goes on. As, as it had, right, the program just keeps moving. So maybe, I mean, Gordon there with this tragedy kind of almost inaugurating MKUltra. Let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to revisit

George Hunter White and see what that pervert has gotten up to on his latest adventures. See you after the break. This episode is brought to you by our friends at NordVPN. Now, Gordon, you've come across the sinister and secretive side of trading bots, haven't you? Unfortunately, David, I have. For those who don't know, trading bots are automated software programs designed to trade

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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. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or ford.ca today. Welcome back to the strange world of MKUltra and the CIA's efforts at mind control. Frank Olson may have passed away, but Sidney Gottlieb is still going and it's getting even weirder, isn't it, David, at this point? As if it were possible, but I would argue, yes, it is getting weirder. So, in about 1954, Gottlieb is dealing with a couple problems, right? And these are actually going to be problems that plague the program throughout.

One of them is the LSD supply. And we talked a little bit in the last episode about how a Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, had actually patented LSD, right? And there was actually very little supply in the world. I mean, the CIA was concerned that Sandoz was selling it to the Soviets. That turned out to be not true. And in response to those fears, though, Gottlieb had actually subcontracted with Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company. And by 1954, they've done that. So the CIA pays $400,000. It's the largest subcontract under the MK Ultra banner for a mass purchase of LSD. So he's kind of by 54 Gottlieb

has worked out his supply. He's got the supply line. What's he going to do with it though? He needs guinea pigs. He really does. He needs people to participate in his experiments. And of course, as we talked about, you know, he's been testing it at CIA with tragic result in the case of Frank Olson, but Gottlieb needs to widen his reach. He can't just be, you know, from, I guess, a scientific perspective, he can't just be spiking the coffee pot at Langley and trying to figure out what sort of the results are. He's got to get this out in the wild.

He needs to test it on more people. And critically, this is where it gets really weird, is you would think, well, CIA, Foreign Intelligence Service, maybe you'd want to go and test this outside the United States. But Gottlieb does not want the Soviets to find out that the CIA is studying this. And he wants to do it in a, I guess, a more controlled environment. Now, as a side note, I mean, much of what we're talking about in the series, I mean, MKUltra is actually the US centric piece of the mind control work, right? It's the experiments, the research, the projects that take place in the United States. John Lyle in his book on Gottlieb and the quest for CIA mind control notes that MK Delta

was actually the overseas component of the mind control work. And there were a handful of operations conducted under that banner, including in one case, some circumstantial evidence that John Lyle points out on his book, that the CIA may have tried to actually slip LSD to the president of the Philippines, who the CIA at the time was trying to replace with someone more pro-American, and the idea is that an asset would slip, you know, put LSD in his drink or something like that. And he'd go crazy and then, yeah, discredit him in the election. He would not be elected. So anyway, but the focus has been domestic.

So this is where George Hunter White is going to reappear in the N.K. Ultra story. Yeah. So just to recap, because we met him previously, I think of him as the kind of baddie, the kind of henchman from a film noir. He looks it as well. He's got the kind of slightly sweaty, you know, kind of big guy. He does look like a man who was always sweating. Yeah, he's just got this kind of, I mean, he did work in counter narcotics, but he seems to have skirted between being on the right side and the wrong side of the light. He's on both sides of the line.

He's on both sides. And he's also got a bit of a background in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA in World War II. He'd been involved in the McCarthy hearings. I was reading stuff about him. He infiltrated a Chinese opium smuggling ring at one point called the Hipsing Tong in Seattle. But he also was trained at a British special operations executive camp in Canada during World War II. So he's kind of got crazy background in sabotage, subversion, and infiltrating drug smuggling gangs and kind of working for them. Also got a high heel fetish. And he's got a high heel fetish. I don't think he's a very nice person. I'm going to just put that out there.

When we do our hero or villain, I think I'm going to put definitely put him in the villain category. Yeah. We agreed on that. I think we're not going to argue about that. Oh, we know. No, he's very villainous. And listeners will recall that George Hunter White had set up a safe house sort of slash brothel in New York City

Under an MK ultra subcontract to begin testing Drugs on unwitting subjects and I think you know to put this in sort of business terms here Like they didn't have the scale right that it was just a smaller operation and by the time we get to 1955 MK ultra has been up and running for a couple of years. George Hunter White has relocated as part of his counter narcotics duties to San Francisco. And he is going to set up a similar operation in San Francisco that is going to become known as Operation Midnight Climax, which is really the name of the operation. Yeah, and when we get to the details of the operation, they're not trying to hide what this is about. I mean, that's just kind of...

It's not subtle. There's a disgusting lack of subtlety in Operation Midnight Climax. So he's got this apartment overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, but it's a brothel, basically, isn't it? It's a brothel where he's employing prostitutes. That's the simple way of putting it. That's right. So basically the CIA is testing through white what happens when people are dosed with LSD and in particular what happens when you mix sex in. And white assembles at Gottlieb's direction a group of prostitutes whose job is going to entail bringing clients to the pad.

By the way, this is not my lingo, George Hunter White refers to the safe house as the pad exclusively in his writings. They dose the Johns with LSD while White watches and records their interactions and reactions. And so again, we have a similar setup where he's like in New York, he wires up this safe house, it's stocked with booze and sex toys. An FBI informant who's spying on White. Okay, so White's working for the CIA, but there's an FBI informant who's spying on White. And this informant says that it contains

the largest library pornographic material he'd ever seen. There's one more detail which I find particularly weird though, which is that White watches all this take place through a kind of two-way mirror while sitting on a portable toilet. And so he expenses a portable toilet so he doesn't have to leave while he's watching everything take place. Is that right? Well, I suppose you could be locked in there for hours. toilet so he doesn't have to leave while he's watching everything take place. Is that right? While he just watches? I suppose you could be locked in there for hours.

Like maybe he can't. I mean, given the layout, maybe he couldn't extract himself. This is just the worst, weirdest, I mean craziest thing. This guy's just spending hours there sat on a portable toilet, not moving, watching people with LSD and prostitutes. I mean, weird. Weird. And CIA funded and directed, which is even weirder.

And Gottlieb, we mentioned this last time, he has a bit of an all or nothing approach to documenting these operations. And so the reason we know about this is not because he's written up extensive reports. It's because Gottlieb is a stickler for the financial accounting bit of this. And so every bit of furniture, every sex toy, every handle of booze that White is purchasing, he is itemizing it and sending it to Gottlieb for reimbursement. The only thing that's not being itemized as part of Operation Midnight Climax are the payments to the prostitutes, but everything

else is. It's how we know that George Hunter White has his portable toilet with him in that little room. Just let me get this right. The idea of it is to see whether under the influence of LSD, the clients will talk openly. I mean, that's the purpose of it. Like what the effect is of the LSD on their willingness to what share secrets to open up. Cause we're back to this idea that they're after a kind of truth serum or a way of, of getting people to spill the beans. That's what this is about. I mean, do we know

if it's effective? Well, what actually they end up learning, and I should use scare quotes, is that the LSD seems to have almost no impact on any of these Johns' willingness to share secrets. What actually helps them to share secrets is if the prostitute encourages them to stay after and talk, and then they're willing to share secrets, which is sort of obvious. I guess, like, I mean, you know, it already probably understood by certainly the prostitutes themselves. So, I mean, that was the effective bit of this is from the standpoint of

trying to elicit a secret. The LSD had really no impact, but the CIA is sending, golly, sending drugs out to San Francisco regularly to test them. In one quote, someone said, look, if we were scared enough of a drug not to try it ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco. And then they would get it to White. And by the way, White, you know, like Gottlieb, was a fervent believer in trying everything himself.

So he would try everything on his own person person and then give it to the prostitutes to slip into the Johns drinks. Now, White also opens up another safe house outside of San Francisco in Marin County, a little more privacy for experiments that went beyond the sex and drugs. So there Gottlieb, he's kind of using it as a bit of a proving grounds for a lot of crazy tech that the

technical services division is working on. So they test stink bombs, itching powder, sneezing powder, diarrhea inducers, a drug laced swizzle stick, an ultra thin hypodermic needle that you could use to poison a wine bottle through the cork, glass capsules that would release noxious gases when they were crushed underfoot. They sent a fountain pen out there that shot out tear gas and White sprayed it into his own eyes to test it, apparently. I mean, it's like kind of weird schoolboyish pranks gone wild, but with a massive budget

and the kind of scientific base of the CIA behind you to try it out. It's kind of almost childish, it feels, this attitude. I mean, maybe that's the wrong word. I don't know. It's just weird. What's crazy is that there are just unwitting, ordinary Americans who are being pulled into this. You go out there and someone slips a diarrhea-inducing pill into your drink because you got invited to a party at a nice house out in Marin County. Now Gottlieb, he apparently was a participant.

He would frequent the prostitutes in San Francisco. He carried on allegedly an affair with White's wife, Albertine, and there's a wild story about one of Gottlieb's visits to San Francisco where he's out with one of White's henchmen, I guess you'd say, and they're driving and Gottlieb sees a eucalyptus tree up ahead on the side of the road. He says, pull over. Gottlieb gets out, he's got a dart gun with him, and he shoots the eucalyptus tree with a dart and gets back in the car and tells White's associate, he says,

come back in two days and check on this tree and tell me what happened. And the guy does, he goes back in two days and the whole tree is dead and wilted. There's not a leaf on it. Zah. No idea what was in the dart, right? Now Gottlieb estimated later that White conducted 30 to 40 unwitting drug tests in San Francisco, but John Lyle in his book notes that the hundreds of checks issued to White

suggest that that number is really garbage, right? It's way more than that, as does the testimony of the safe house neighbors who said that for years this guy had a feeling that something was going on in there, quote, people were screaming out the windows. I mean, because I guess he's essentially next to a, he's living next to a brothel that is being used to test exotic drugs. Right. I love this. White writes a letter to Gottlieb about all this.

I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. White wrote, where else could a red blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest? Pretty good stuff, brother. I mean, what a guy. I mean, this is- I'm sure Gottlieb did not appreciate receiving that letter. That is not the kind of thing you want in writing. But it does give you a sense of how unlawful this entire thing was and how wild it was. And I think for CIA, I mean, even though we're talking about the CIA of another era that was much less constrained, and regulated, Gottlieb is an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, right? And for him to think that this stuff is permissible is really, I think, an insight both into his

personality and character, but also into the times, right? That the stakes were perceived as so high that this sort of operation, midnight climax could be justified. I mean, it's wild. And David, it's not just drugs, is it? Because MK Haltner is also getting involved in psychiatry and psychology and using kind of real doctors and academics to do that. Yeah. And we should say, Gordon, that by the mid to late fifties, I think it is becoming

apparent to Gottlieb and the people around him that they're so unpredictable that they're not a particularly effective way to gain control of someone's mind. It seems like they're pretty effective for destroying it, but not necessarily for reprogramming it. And Gottlieb, though, I will say, he is very curious and I think stubborn. And he has on his desk a carving of a turtle that bears the inscription, Behold the turtle. It never advances unless it sticks its neck out. So in other words, he wants to push the boundaries. You've got to take risks. Keep going, take risks. We can only learn if we take risks.

And that's where you get this dip into psychiatry and psychology. And again, you know, he's out of his depth, right? I mean, he's not a psychiatrist, he's not a psychologist, he's a chemist. And the CIA doesn't have the scale or the personnel to run that sort of research. And so he again, partners with a string of independent research foundations that would appear independent, but actually serve as a conduit for MK Ultra money, right? And that way he can dispense that cash to physicians, psychologists, chemists, other

scientists. The cutouts kind of take a handling fee to make it worth their while, but it allows the CIA to essentially wash the money through legitimate psychiatric institutions. But this is what I find amazing is that you've got really established, you know, universities, hospitals, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Mount Sinai Hospital, all involved in MKUltra. I mean, they're getting the money effectively from the CIA to subsidize research. Do you think they know

about it? Is it quite well masked where this is coming from? I think it is a mix. We should say again that maybe in 2025, the idea of a psychiatrist taking CIA money to conduct crazy research feels, you know, icky. But I think in 1955, there is a patriotic sense of when your government comes calling, you know, you sort of, you know, stand and say, we should also say that when we get to the psychiatry piece of this, the CIA isn't directing the experiments. What they're doing is actually going out and finding researchers who are engaged in work that they find interesting and supporting that research, right? Now, one of Gottlieb's principal cutouts was an

organization the CIA called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which I think I'm going to have to work into a spy novel at some point because that's got a great ring to it. It's run by two research partners at Cornell Medical School, and they use that essentially as a mechanism to fund a massive number of these MKUltra sub-projects throughout the 1950s. Gottlieb is one of the more secretive pieces of this actually tries to gain access to a part of this kind of new edition

at Georgetown University Hospital. He wanted to put a secret, essentially CIA lab inside the hospital to be used for experiments on human subjects. Stephen Kinzer in his book, Poisoner in Chief, writes that it was extraordinary even by MKUltra standards. And in fact, the approvals for that had to go all the way to the White House, which was very rare for the program. Now, little is known about what the CIA did at Georgetown and Stan Turner, friend of the pod and

future CIA director who's going to take over under Carter in the late 70s. When he's pressed for details later, he says, there's actually no factual evidence of what went on. It's just missing. It's not that it didn't happen. It's just that we do not know exactly what happened there. So tons of really crazy research ends up getting funded through these cutouts. But there is one bit of this that we do know more about maybe than some of the other parts and which is absolutely fascinating

and again pretty weird and that's run by a guy called Dr Ewan Cameron originally Scottish I think trained in Scotland then I think in Switzerland a bit but then ends up in Canada doesn't he and he seems to be someone who is very involved in the kind of psychological aspect of breaking people down which is clearly something that the CIA are interested in. Mm-hmm. What Dr. Cameron is studying in the mid-50s, and he's already studying this and working on it prior to the CIA finding him, is something called psychic driving, which sounds awful,

right? Already off the bat. And in January of 56, a CIA psychologist comes across an article in which Dr. Cameron is referencing or discussing the psychic driving becomes, so that's how the CIA starts to get interested in him. Now Cameron is an absolute giant in the field of psychiatry in the mid-50s. He's president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association.

So he's got the three biggies, Gordon. He is a very strong-willed and domineering, maybe borderline psychotic individual who is the director of the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, which is a stone mansion turned psychiatric hospital and sounds like it's basically straight out of horror film central casting. And Cameron is fascinated with extreme stress as a way to get access to the human psyche. And so he's kind of

a, I guess you'd say a behaviorist who thinks that mental illnesses are the result of negative environmental factors and if you essentially stress someone out sufficiently, you can reduce them back to a blank slate and then condition that blank slate into performing better behavior, right? And if that sounds like it could be damaging to a human being, you are absolutely right, because Dr. Cameron is a fan of very unorthodox treatments for mental illness. And one of those is by subjecting mental patients to repeated auditory messages. So it could be something like, if you don't keep quiet, I'm going to leave you behind. And that would be replayed on like a loop while you're sitting in a room by yourself. For 20 hours a day.

For like 20 hours. This is the Ipcrest file, a famous novel and then film. I mean, this is that world, isn't it, of breaking people down, making them malleable. And I guess the medical reason is because you think you can get rid of some kind of something like schizophrenia or something like that and remove it. But the CIA are obviously interested in it for other reasons. The theory of the case here that Cameron is testing, and this is why Gottlieb is so interested, is the idea that could you break someone down the idea that could you break someone down so that you can control what gets built back in its place?

And the breaking down is where this kind of works, right? Because one of the things that Cameron does is something called sleep therapy, which is a chemically induced coma, where those psychic driving messages are played endlessly through speakers beside their pillows. And so Cameron has actually built a version of that. So he'll place people in sensory deprivation chambers. In one case, he did that for up to 35 days, to the point where people hallucinate, they see squirrels running through fields, someone saw an eyeglass walking down the street. I mean, so he's very effectively turning people into mush. But again, he's not able to kind of reprogram someone to be under your control if you're the CIA or just to cure their mental illness.

Yeah. And I mean, I watched documentaries about decades later, people never recovered from their treatment under Cameron. I mean, never recovered. You know, they talk about family members never being the same again, never recovering. It's pretty grim stuff. And I guess the point is he was doing this anyway, but the CIA were funding it and learning from it to see if they could understand it.

By 63, so 10 years into MKUltra, Cameron has come to the conclusion that psychic driving is useless. A study that was done after Cameron left Alan showed that three quarters of his patients felt that they were worse off after the treatment that he provided. Now, and I think you'd also have to say here that a lot of the patients that he was seeing believed they were coming to him for psychiatric treatment and for a cure. And he was essentially just trying new techniques and kind of frontier crazy ideas

on people who they're not psychiatrists themselves. They have no sense of where the field is at this point in time, but he's really kind of taking advantage of and preying on people who come to him as a potential healer. And he's kind of using them as lab rats is really what's going on here. But as with the LSD, I mean, all of this kind of effort, all of this trauma, and basically it doesn't work. By the end of the day, they've not found the ability to control minds, white them, you know, truth serums, none of it.

I mean, it's in the sense all for nothing. It is one of many tragedies in this story is that really every time Gottlieb and his crew go down a particular pathway, different types of drugs, sensory deprivation, isolation, all of these things, what they're finding is that there are plenty of ways to wreck the human mind, but really no good way to sort of reprogram it or control it. And maybe they're Gordon with yet another pathway toward mind control blocked. Let's end and when we pick it up next time we'll see how the CIA becomes really the first drug cartel to popularize LSD in the States and how all of those pipe-smoking squares at Langley fueled the

countercultural rebellion of the 1960s and then how Gottlieb's dark research will at last come to light. See you next time.