The Rest Is Classified - 38. CIA Mind Control: America’s Secret Cartel (Ep 4)

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

How did Cold War paranoia fuel the CIA's mind control experiments? What did popular films like The Manchurian Candidate have to do with the agency's secret programs? And did the CIA really help shape the counterculture of the 1960s? In the shadowy world of espionage, the line between science fiction and reality blurred, and as the Cold War deepened, fears of communist brainwashing led the CIA down a twisted path of experimentation. But the agency's quest for mind control may have had unintended consequences, inadvertently influencing the very culture it sought to understand. Listen as Gordon and David conclude their series on MKUltra and explore the surprising connections between their mind control programs, Hollywood thrillers, and the rise of the psychedelic 60s. ------------------- 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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It's happening now at BHP, a future resources company. I would like this committee to know that I considered all this work, at the time it was done and in the context of circumstances that were extant in that period, to be extremely unpleasant, extremely difficult, extremely sensitive, but above all to be very urgent and important. I realise that it's difficult to reconstruct those times and that atmosphere today in this room. The feeling that we had was that there was a real possibility that potential enemies, those enemies that were showing specific aggressive intentions at that time possess capabilities in

this field that we knew nothing about and the possession of those capabilities, possible possession, combined with our own ignorance about it seemed to us to pose a threat of the magnitude of national survival. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was Sydney Gottlieb in testimony to the Senate committee in 1977. And we've been looking at the story of Sydney Gottlieb and the MKUltra program, the CIA's quest to control the human mind. Dark, weird, crazy, bizarre. We're going to look, particularly in this last episode, I guess, at the legacy of MKUltra, how it comes out in the public,

but also how it shapes popular culture. And it's shaped in some ways by popular culture as well, isn't it, David? Well, that's right. And we've spent three episodes now sort of going deeper and deeper into the dark world of MK Ultra. And it's now easy to sort of look back in horror, not only at the ethics,

but to see the quest as sort of a fantasy, right? And one thing that we haven't talked much about, and I think it's helpful to kind of set up the end game of MK Ultra and how it eventually comes to light is the idea that you could control someone's mind, which Gottlieb was on a quest for that power. It's also coming to him and sort of infusing him

and the team around him from outside, from popular culture itself, right? And from film, fiction, comic books, all of this content that's being produced in kind of the 40s and 50s is having its own effect inside the CIA itself, which really is every spy author's dream, Gordon. You get that, don't you, with James Bond and Ian Fleming in that people go to CIA people

and say, can you do this? Can you create a gadget like in the James Bond movies? It's the same kind of thing with MK Ultra, isn't it? Where people are seeing things in popular culture and going, well, we must be able to do that. Or can they do that? Therefore, we must be able to do it. There is this bit where a lot of these ideas about science and about the human mind are

out there in popular culture in this period, aren't they? And they're feeding then into the CIA and what it's trying to do. I mean, you take one example, Gordon, the film Gaslight, which comes out in 1944, it's the origin of the word gaslighting, features Ingrid Bergman, I believe won an Academy Award for her role, portraying a woman whose husband more or less takes control of her mind through what Gottlieb would have called sensory deprivation. In the Zeitgeist is this idea that a human can control another human's mind, control their decision making, right? And the big one, 1959, the Manchurian candidate book that comes out in the States, MK Ultra is in full swing

at this point in time. And it's about an infantry platoon fighting in Korea, where they're captured, they're taken to a lab, where communist scientists are conducting mind control experiments. And the soldiers are essentially reprogrammed to believe that their sergeants saved their lives during combat. For my dedicated research to this pod, I watched the film version of this. Oh, that's dedication, Gordon. That's dedication. I'm willing to watch films for the sake of the

book, which has got Frank Sinatra in it, 1962. And it is still a great movie in which he is working out that one of his fellow soldiers has been reprogrammed by this weird collection of communist scientists to be effectively turned into an assassin. He's told to play solitaire and when he sees the Queen of Diamonds, he is then able to be suggested to any kind of course of action, including in this case, killing a presidential candidate. It's all very, very strange, but very watchable. It still stands up as a great film.

Frank Sinatra is pretty good in it, but it's also bizarre because it comes out in 1962, I think the film. The book was out in 59, so it's right in the MKUltra era. Then in 63, Kennedy gets assassinated by a gunman. You can see in this period at the time, it's playing into this world where people are asking, well, could someone be reprogrammed into being an assassin? You can see how this takes off in popular culture and in the popular mythology. It's also this wider understanding of brainwashing, isn't it?

Which is sci-fi is getting big in the 50s. The aliens can come and take over your mind. I always remember that theory, which is that this is all really the fear of communists through this period in the 50s, which is the idea that the communists can reprogram people's brains. You might not even be able to tell that they've been reprogrammed and they're an alien stroke communist. But it's in the zeitgeist at this period, isn't it?

The idea of being able to control the human mind and not know about it and do it for dark purposes. It is exactly the thing that Gottlieb feared, right? The plot of that novel and movie, communist-led, is exactly the thing that Gottlieb is trying to defend against. And it's also exactly the thing that he is trying to possess. Exactly. Is the ability to control someone else's mind, show them the Queen of Diamonds, and then all of a sudden they'll do anything for you. You mentioned sci-fi, Gordon. I mean, pulp kind of sci-fi in this period

has some great examples of the same zeitgeist filtering into a different genre. There's a 1952 novella called The Brain Stealers of Mars, which is a great title. I'm gonna try to steal that title for a book. There's a quote in there, that old bird just opened up my neck and poured a new set of brains in. And that is exactly what Gottlieb was trying to do, is pour a new set of brains into somebody, right? Through psychic driving or D patterning or LSD, whatever the pathway was to kind of get that

control. There is just an absolute public fascination in this period with brainwashing. The great British novel and then film of this is The Ipcrest File, which is 1962, in which people are being kidnapped by Soviet agents and they are subject to that psychic driving process we talked about in the last episode, in which people are broken down by audio messages being repeatedly prayed into their brains to allow them to be turned into malleable agents. And IPCRES stands for the Induction of Psychoneurosis by Conditioned Reflex with Stress. Could have been a Dr Cameron paper. Dr Cameron figure is almost there.

And then the great film with Michael Caine comes out in 1965 with the slightly crazy sound effects and you're getting into the 60s slightly hallucinogenic feel to the film as well. It's very much into the popular culture, isn't it? This idea of mind control, even though as we've established previously, it doesn't really work. Well, that's the crazy thing is that I think as the idea in the popular culture, the fear is beginning to take hold that the communists have some mind control capability and could use

it, you see that reflected in the Manchurian candidate. Ironically, this is exactly the period in the kind of the late 50s and early 60s, where Gottlieb is starting to become convinced that it's actually not possible. And a CIA psychologist who worked with Gottlieb said later, you know, the Manchurian candidate as a movie really set us back a long time because it made something impossible look plausible. You could almost draw a line from Brave New World in the 1930s to MKUltra to the IPCRS file.

There's a weird ping ponging effect between national security work, spy agencies and film and TV that ideas go both directions. So, so popular culture is influencing MKUltra by making people think we want to be able to do that. influencing MK Ultra by making people think we want to be able to do that. But in turn, MK Ultra is going to, in an amazing way, seep out into popular culture and shape the popular culture of the 60s. That's because of this role that LSD is going to play and the CIA is going to play as the progenitor, the dealer of helping spread LSD? I mean, is that going too far to say a CIA was behind the emergence of counterculture and hippie-dom in the 60s? Maybe that's going a little bit far, but. I don't think so. It certainly contributed by being essentially the Heisenberg. The CIA

is the original dealer of LSD in the United States. The CIA incubates it, I guess it's kind of a lab leak, Gordon, you could say, where the CIA has LSD, it supplies LSD for MKUltra experiments through these kind of subcontracting partners, right? And let's take Dr. Harold Abramson. He's the psychiatrist seen by Frank Olson in New York before Frank Olson jumps out the window of his hotel. So he's got access to this LSD supply and is researching it.

And he would throw dinner parties where he would serve a meal and then he would give everyone a drink that contained 40 micrograms of LSD. Time Magazine is reporting on this in 1955. By the late 50s, LSD has become the rage in New York high society, and it's getting out in large part because of these CIA subcontractors and the CIA supported supply that then starts to come into the market from Eli Lilly.

And I say market, not like they were selling it commercially but it's again coming through these kind of CIA tentacles and networks out into kind of popular high society. Cary Grant, the actor gave a series of interviews to a Hollywood gossip columnist and another one to Look magazine that became this kind of glowing profile, headlined curious story behind the new Cary Grant. And Cary Grant took LSD more than 60 times. He said he had found a second youth and come close to happiness for the first time in his life. And so you start to have these kind of, I

guess you'd say today be equivalent of like influencers, elites, celebrities who start to tap the benefits of LSD. And the researchers that the CIA puts LSD in the hands of a really very lax in controlling the drug. And so it starts to get out there, it gets out through research institutions that again are taking MK Ultra money. And then it gets out to elite groups at universities really on both coasts. And from there, it gets into the student population, because you actually you have professors and researchers and teachers who are making it available in some capacity to their students. So the CIA is kind of the original dealer for LSD

in the United States. And I mean, John Lennon, Gordon, this quote from John Lennon is absolutely remarkable. He said, we must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD. That's what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn't it? So get out of the bottle, boy, and relax.

They invented LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom. So people who sort of formed the backbone of elite society and eventually the counterculture in the 60s get access to this through the CIA. I mean, it's deeply ironic, isn't it? That the kind of button down organization, the CIA, there, if you think about it, kind of trying to fight against, if you like, the counterculture. And yet there it is, having fueled it, the CIA having done more than perhaps anyone else to provide the means for people to tune in and drop out. And I know people who aren't watching the video that you've got your tie-dye t-shirt and your tinted shades on in honor of being a... I've been eating strange brownies for most of this episode. Just in honor of the CIA's role and your predecessor's role in spreading

the counterculture and everyone can thank them for it. I'm a company man at heart, Gordon. Okay, I'm just trying to get back to my roots. I mean, some notable people who received LSD from the CIA, although they didn't know at the time they were getting it from the CIA, a student who took LSD for the first time, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that came from the CIA, Grateful Dead Tours, Gordon, were of course just a traveling LSD fest for the most part. And many of the band's lyrics were written by a poet who credited LSD for his inspiration, right? And who, like the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, first tried LSD as a volunteer at a research project that had been covertly financed by Sid Gottlieb

and MKUltra. I mean, even Alan Ginsberg discovered LSD through the MKUltra experiments and he volunteered to become an experimental subject at Stanford University where there were two psychologists who were secretly working with the CIA on an MKUltra sub-project. You have a lot of notable people who got their first hits of this thing because the CIA made it possible. It is wild. Let's go back to Sid Gottlieb and maybe finish his story as well because he also ends up strangely part of this counterculture. He becomes a bit of a hippie, which I also find bizarre. I mean, maybe not so bizarre when you think of the kind of person

he was, but he tunes in and drops out, doesn't he? As MKUltra ends, he goes and lives on the farm. If your mental image, as we've been doing this series of Sid Gottlieb, is some kind of mad scientist, you're not right. Because you should actually think about Sid Gottlieb as wearing Birkenstocks and milking his own goats, eating his own food that he's grown. Sid Gottlieb is shopping at Whole Foods. If he existed today, he would have long hair, he'd be wearing the tie-dye shirt that Gordon

claims that I'm wearing, and he would have Birkenstocks sandals on. He's way outside of the U.S. suburban mainstream in this period. He's cultivating his spirituality, trying to live closer to nature. He's a mystic in a lot of ways, Gordon. And he's trying to discover the secrets of the universe through MKUltra, but he's not a button down kind of guy, right? And we should say MKUltra, which started in 53, as we said, it didn't really work. So by the end of the 50s, it's starting to run down, isn't it? And by the 60s, it's over. Yeah. And Gottlieb, I think in this later period, he gets restless by the late 50s. MK Ultra at that point is in full swing, but he actually applies and is accepted to become a

case officer overseas to do a tour as just a proper sort of collector of foreign intelligence. And he's accepted in Munich, not much is known about his work in Germany. He's there for two years, but he's really not seems day to day running MK Ultra in that period. And from a character standpoint, you kind of look at this and say, Gottlieb is becoming a company man, you know, he's taking a new job, because I think he has a wanderlust. But also because I think he senses that, as a scientist in an organization that's really run by the case officers, he wants to get that experience to see if he likes it, but also to, I think,

position himself for the longer term at CIA. And I think it works because he comes back from Germany in 59. And one of his kind of primary patrons, a guy named Richard Helms, who will go on to run the agency, is running the Directorate of Operations at the time. And Gottlieb is promoted. So he becomes the deputy chief of the technical services division. So he had been running the chemical division before his tour in Germany. Now he's the deputy chief of the whole technical services piece of CIA. And it is expanded massively in the 50s. And this organization

is not just running MK Ultra. I mean, MK Ultra is probably one minor slice of what the technical services division is doing. It has hundreds of people working on essentially the CIA's gadgetry, right? Cameras, graphology, disguise, and he's got a lot more, a lot more on his plate. And so, you know, I think, again, MK Ultra starts in 53. By 63, it's done, but it's starting to wind down even in the early 60s. It had included 149 sub-projects over its 10 years, spent $10 million at 80 institutions, including three prisons, 12 hospitals, 15 research institutes, and 44 colleges and universities. And it's by 63, all wound down, all those safe houses and brothels and all of those

grants are closed. And by 63, Gottlieb is spending his time on other responsibilities inside that technical services division. And he's spending his time with the family gardening. You know, making homemade bread, taking sailing lessons and swimming. You know, we had mentioned, I think in the first episode, he owned this kind of very rustic cabin in Vienna, Virginia. They actually, the family expands the cabin, gets some more space.

They build a swimming pool. So he's got a very happy family life in this period, it seems. So, there with Gottlieb probably thinking, this is all in the past, MK Ultra, and it's a locked box. He's going to discover, though, that it's going to suddenly be cracked open in a few years' time. So, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll look atUltra finally comes to light and what its final legacy is. This episode is brought to you by Incogni. Now Gordon, have you ever googled yourself? Only by accident, never deliberately, and then regretted it immediately. Not quite

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That's right, David. So to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogni.com forward slash rest is classified or click the link in the episode description box. 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 in financial markets.

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security by blocking malicious websites, ads and trackers and reduces the risk of encountering fraudulent platforms. To stay secure online, you should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. All you need to do is go to NordVPN.com slash Rest is Classified. When you sign up, you can receive a bonus 4 months on top of your plan and there's no risk with Nord's 30-day Welcome back. So we left Sydney Gotlieb living on the farm eating raw vegetables, thinking MKUltra was the past, locked away. But David, it's going to all come out into the light, isn't it, in the 1970s? Well, in early 73, again, we're going to have the nexus of MKUltra and Watergate here, because in early 73, Gordon, Richard Helms, who at that point is the CIA director and one of Sydney Gottlieb's biggest fans,

is fired by Nixon when the Watergate scandal breaks. Which, again, that'll be a story that we cover on a later episode on this pod because it's worthy of one on its own. But the central outline is that Helms refused to help Nixon in the cover-up, and so Helms gets booted. Now, with Helms fired, he and Sidney Gottlieb make the very sensible decision to destroy all of the records associated with MK Ultra. And the exact tenor of that conversation is a bit unclear, but a CIA psychologist who had access to both guys around this time has maintained that Gottlieb told Helms, let this die with us. And Helms agreed and responded,

it was our bath, let us clean the tub. And so there's an order actually given from Helms out to the records center that the CIA at the time maintained out in Warranton, Virginia. And it is an order to destroy a bunch of these MK Ultra documents. Now, the records people didn't want to do this. And there actually was some back and forth.

And I think obviously they felt like this did not seem appropriate. It's a cover up. It's a cover up. Like this guy's just been fired. And all of a sudden, you want all these boxes, you know, incinerated. Gottlieb personally drives out to the record center to present the order from Helms. And on January 30th of 1973, the boxes of MKUltra files are incinerated.

And Gottlieb does the same with the files in his office safe as a secretary destroy those files. Now there's a new director of central intelligence who's brought in, comes into clean house and so Gottlieb at this point is kind of a marked man. And I think he's marked in three ways. One is he's a Helms protege, Helms is gone. Two, Gottlieb is absolutely notorious for MKUltra, which is no longer well thought of at this point, because it had been a failure and illegal. And Gottlieb is inside the Technical

Services Division. And the Technical Services Division, for reasons will go into much more detail in that Watergate pod, was connected to the Watergate break-in. So Gottlieb, for those kind of three strikes, he's pushed out. He retires on the 30th of June, 1973. Before departing, he is awarded one of the agency's highest honors, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the citation that accompanies that Gordon has still not been declassified. But he received the award, quote, for performance of outstanding services, or for achievement of a distinctly exceptional nature.

And he's only 55. So he goes back onto the farm, although they go to the farm, but then he travels the world. It's a fascinating period, isn't it? He goes to Australia, Africa, India. Working at a leper colony. Element of atonement, do you think, in his later life for what he's done? He does some interesting work, doesn't he, with children and other things. You do kind of wonder if this is a man who knows he's done some dark things and needs to repent or atone for it. I'll offer my hot take on this. The biographies of Gottlieb, I think, do directly connect his desire to spend his retirement

kind of really in service to his fellow man. I think there's no question that when he looked back on MKUltra, he didn't look back fondly on much of what happened. I think the atonement bit is overplayed here. I think that he prior to MKUltra had shown that he was an absolute wanderlust. I think this kind of hippie counterculture thing is very much in the water. I mean, at this point, it's the seventies, right? So I think the atonement bit is kind of overplayed, to be honest with you. But his quiet retirement is not going to last long, is it? Because by the mid seventies, you've got a very interesting period in which

some of the CIA's dirty laundry is going to be exposed for lots of reasons to do with spying on anti-war activists, the legacy of Watergate, all these things. You get congressional committees which are investigating the CIA. This is the famous Church Pike committees, which are going through the CIA's dirty laundry and just putting it all out into the public. And that is going to include MK Ultra and Gottlieb himself. Well, and so Gottlieb is actually called back to testify. So he's in India when his name in the public domain essentially becomes attached to MK Ultra.

And he and his wife Margaret are just about to begin a bus tour of the Middle East when he is summoned back to testify on the Hill. And of course, he gets connected with a lawyer right away and he demands and receives immunity from prosecution as long as he testifies. And in October of 1975, he begins answering questions. He provides 40 hours of testimony in a SCIF,

secure compartmented information facility. So basically a place that's been scanned for bugs and things like that. Does that on Capitol Hill. Much of it is on MKUltra, although he also has, and I'm sure we'll cover this in later pods too. I mean, he's got a set of side projects, I guess you'd say that deal with poisons, right? So that is also covered.

And this hearing in 1975 is really the first of several public testimonies that he'll provide. And for many of the questions, Golly basically says, I don't remember. The classic response. The answers are so vague as to almost be useless in many cases. I mean, his lawyer secures a deal to keep Gottlieb's name out of the official record. And he's going to be identified by a pseudonym in this Hill hearing, Joseph Scheider. He chose, Gottlieb chose that name and just remember that because we'll come back to it at the very end. So eventually all of this just starts to come out into the public domain.

At that point, when he's testifying, his name has not yet appeared in the papers. Eventually, the New York Times is going to run a story describing Gottlieb as chief of the CIA's testing of LSD. They print his picture. By the way, in that picture, which is one of the few pictures of him that actually exists, kind of looks like a distinguished older man, looks like a professor, someone who runs a bank, the Olsen family is going to end up filing a suit against the CIA. There's a blitz of FOIA requests,

Freedom of Information Act, yeah, that bring thousands of pages of MK Ultra records into the public domain. Eventually, a book is going to come out in the late 70s on the CIA's quest for mind control. So Gottlieb, amid all of this, he and his wife, they retired first in Northern California. Gottlieb actually gets a master's in speech therapy. Now, remember, he has a pretty pronounced, especially when he's under stress, a pretty pronounced stutter. So he actually gets a master's in speech there to be able to actually teach it in schools.

They go back to Virginia, settle there. And again, this is where the hippiness comes in. They build a 5,000 square foot sort of eco home, solar powered home in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And he's also really involved in the community. You know, he's again, he's volunteering in local middle and high schools as a speech pathologist. He does get a visit from the Olson family, they come to see him and ask questions. And Gottlieb talks to

them about about Frank Olson. And Gottlieb says, and I think this is true, I think he says that Frank Olson was given LSD to see what would happen if one of our scientists was captured and then interrogated, right. And this meeting with Gottlieb apparently is where Olson's son, Eric is going to come away convinced that his father was murdered by the CIA. In Gottlieb's last days, he's piled on with legal trouble. There's lawsuits that are being brought pretty

regularly against the CIA by people who had unwittingly participated in MKUltra experiments, by Dr. Cameron's patients in Canada. It all gets settled out of court. But I think there's a lot of legal trouble that he finds himself in in his later years. And then March of 1999, he dies, age 80 from pneumonia and congestive heart failure. And the obituaries, Gordon, on Gottlieb are fascinating because every single one of them, I think,

really tries to grapple with this contradiction between the granola crunching speech pathologist who's volunteering in the local community and living and working at the leper colony with the incredibly brutal and harsh work he did at the CIA and all this information is coming out in this period. I mean, there's even one, just to kind of paint the contrast, there's even one report that comes out Gordon about an MKUltra subcontractor who had run experiments in which he had taken the head off of one monkey and tried to attach it onto the body of another.

You have this insane contrast of the hippie Gottlieb with the guy who's funding the monkey decapitation research. How do you square those two things? I guess the point with Gottlieb is a scientist who was just given license to do whatever he wants. He's given license by the Cold War, by the sense, well, your enemies are doing it, so you've got to do it. And he's given license in terms of the money and resources to pursue the kind of weirdest, darkest avenues that

science could take him down. That's how I think of him. Yeah, that's right. And I thought one of the more interesting commentaries on Gottlieb's legacy was there's a great history that's been written of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, which is, in Gottlieb's day, the Technical Services Division or Technical Services staff. And that is essentially the CIA's gadget shop. And the

history notes that all of the obituaries, and they pull out the WAPO, the Washington Post obituary for this, WAPO devoted 11 of its 12 paragraphs to mind control and poisons, ignoring everything else that Gottlieb did to, quote, break the back of KGB counterintelligence. Gottlieb was the longest serving chief of the technical services staff. So that, I guess, curiosity, that idea of a scientist who's just sort of got a tremendous amount of funding and the full force and kind of faith of the US government

and the CIA at his back, that's Gottlieb. And it extended from mind control to poisons to how do you build concealed devices and compartments to hide documents in for your assets. It's this wide gamut of knowledge that he was after. And I think one of the most, maybe more interesting questions rather than what does everybody else think

about Sidney Gottlieb is what did he think of himself? Like who did he think he was? And I mentioned earlier that the pseudonym he used when he was testifying in front of the Senate was Joseph Scheider. And Gottlieb chose that pseudonym. You wonder, okay, what does that mean? Who is Joseph Scheider? So Joseph Scheider was a 19th century New York tobacco nest. And there's a very interesting lithograph on the tobacco packages. And Stephen Kinsner talks about this brilliantly in Poisoner and Chief.

The picture shows a hooded monk kind of staring out with this very serious gaze. In one hand, he's got a set of playing cards, and in the other, he's got a very long pipe and smokes coming out of the pipe. There's a very mystical, almost kind of Rasputin vibe, or this guy could be like a 1960s hippie cult leader, right? And I think that monk is Gottlieb's sort of self-reflection, right?

Kinzer wrote, he's a mysterious guardian of esoteric knowledge, alluring, but at the same time unsettling, drawing inspiration from a pipe to peer into the human soul. And I think that that is what Gottlieb thought he was doing. A kind of cult leader stroke scientists gone amok. So that's Gottlieb. When we look back at MKLTRIP, it is one of the strangest stories of the CIA's histories, without doubt. One of the darkest. It's hard not to reflect on it as something which was out of control, where there was a lack of oversight of morality, of thinking about what the consequences were of testing on all those people, including the own officers.

I just think I can't see it in any other way than that. I know it was part of the Cold War and that fear of the other side of doing it, so we have to do it, which is something you see justifying things in all kinds of, you know, places and times. But it does seem this was a period where things were out of control. It's interesting, Gordon, because I think a lot of the histories of MK Ultra and the biographies of Gottlieb really focus on this idea of, well, it's a kind of a security versus liberty story where we gave the CIA a blank check to just, you know, run roughshod over ordinary Americans and to entrap them, give them drugs, put them in situations where

they're being subjected to awful sort of psychiatric tortures. I mean, and that is definitely a piece of the legacy because it was really an outgrowth of a CIA that was totally unconstrained and operating in a very Unlawful way. Absolutely. And there's sort of a bureaucratic morality tale around. Well, how do you properly oversee an Intelligence agency, right and there's something to that. But again, I'm not sure intelligence agency, right? And there's something to that. But again, I'm not sure either of those are the most interesting kind of legacies of MK Ultra. I mean, one of them, we talked

about fiction, right? I think a very interesting legacy is MK Ultra, as we discussed, was itself influenced by this wave of fiction, film, TV, comic books coming out in the 30s, 40s, and 50ss that framed the communist threat in terms of mind control. And Ghalib and his companions were after that sort of Holy Grail. But now in 2025, looking back, we see that MK Ultra itself is influencing the fiction. I mean, I think maybe a bit of a stretch, but I think you probably don't get Jason Bourne, you know, guy waking up his memory has been wiped by a secretive government program. You don't get Jason Bourne without MK Ultra maybe.

And so MK Ultra itself is kind of fueling a new wave of conspiracy fiction about mind control, but I think maybe the most interesting legacy for me, Gordon, is that I don't really think about Gottlieb himself or MK Ultra more broadly as an aberration, but as a chapter in a very long kind of history of a struggle for the cognitive battlefield. And whether it's, you know, it's an MK Ultraltra, it's LSD, it's psychic driving, these pathways into the human psyche, the brain is so valuable to us as individuals, to corporations, to governments that the impulses that drove MKUltra are alive and well. They're evergreen. I mean, the concept of brainwashing is something which emerges in that time. And it comes out of the world of totalitarianism and the ability to use propaganda and then perhaps to use

drugs to manipulate people, to reprogram people. But that idea is very much still with us. I mean, you still hear talk about the idea of brainwashing, about the manipulation of people, about the phrase cognitive warfare. And you think, you know, a few months ago, we did something about TikTok and we were talking about, well, could this be used in theory to manipulate the way people think and to control the way they see the world. This aspiration, I think, from states and from intelligence agencies to potentially shape the human mind, to shape the way we think, to, if you like, reprogram us, is something that is very much in the current mind. It's just not done with LSD, but we think about doing it with social media. You talk about algorithmic manipulation.

And again, it's this idea of the human brain being at the center of conflict, of warfare, of intelligence work. And there's worry about it again. When I read stuff in Washington about the concerns that China is developing, intelligentized warfare, that it's looking at ways of trying to manipulate people's perceptions, whether it's in Taiwan or the United States. And therefore, we must be able to defend and do things to combat that. It feels reminiscent of the 50s, just different because you're not doing it through psychic driving or LSD, but through

modern media techniques. Richard Helms, who had been the CIA Director for part of MKUltra, referred to LSD as the A-bomb of the mind, this power that drugs would have. Of course, MKUltra, one of the major discoveries is that you have no idea where the drugs are actually going to lead you so they're not an effective way to control the mind. I mean, but we are seeing a kind of resurgence in interest in psychedelics, in psilocybin, in DMT. I mean, there are people called psychonauts who are actually like sort of mapping their journeys into their own minds and souls by virtue of these drugs. And so you have a renewed interest in that and it's not yet being sort of weaponized by the government

but I think you'd have to say that there's sort of the prospect that if powerful therapies are discovered in that space, that there would be interest in potentially weaponizing them. But I think there's sort of the drug angle, which I think right now has more of a mental health and wellness vibe to it, right? There's the algorithmic manipulation on social media,

TikTok, et cetera. But one of the, I think, fascinating things is the idea of, I guess you'd call them, cognitive biometrics. So essentially, in implement, it could be implanted like in a wearable device, it could be in your AirPods, it could be in a band that kind of goes around your forehead. And essentially, what they are, are electroencephalography sensors that you wear on your skin. It could even be a small tattoo in some cases. And what they do is they track the electrical impulses that are inside your brain.

And what they can help researchers understand is, well, what sort of emotions are you experiencing? And we're not here yet, but I think we're actually getting close to a point where you could marry up that data with a large language model like a chat GPT that could start to turn the neural impulses in your brain into language. I don't think we're looking at a situation

like the Manchurian candidate, where all of a sudden, you know, you've got these, maybe unbeknownst to you, you've got these sensors in your AirPods and someone shows you the queen of diamonds and then you're going after a presidential candidate. But from an intelligence collection standpoint, the application of being able to understand what's going on in someone's mind.

There's real applications there. What if you were able to get those AirPods into the ears of a foreign leader whose thoughts were very much interested in? There does seem to be a lot of work on these brain-computer interfaces, Neuralink, which Elon Musk amongst others is working on, someone who talks about the woke mind virus. It's an interesting phrase, isn't it, when you think about the kind of MK Ultra resonances for that? This idea is that it's also a way of explaining why people don't think the way you think they

should think, is to say they've been taken over by some woke mind virus and maybe you can manipulate them or reprogram them to understand the truth. You can, you know, red pill, blue pill, all this kind of stuff. So I think there is something in that where both technology, drugs, AI and algorithmic information manipulation is very much in the moment right now and is being talked about. So it's a world away from LSD and Sydney Gottlieb, but it's there. And I think it is at the cutting edge of intelligence and defense work. On that note, David, it's been a wild, weird, wacky, dark journey into the world of CIA mind control in Sydney Gottlieb.

But hopefully we've not led people on too much of a trip and their mind hasn't been blown too much by where we've taken them. That's right. So thank you all for listening and we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.