Uncover - S8 "Brainwashed" E3: Exposing MKULTRA

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

Communist brainwashing, mind control experiments, a government cover up... MKULTRA sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories or science fiction. But it was real. John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, and Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief, reveal the shocking details of the bizarre and expansive secret CIA project. This is Uncover: Brainwashed. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/brainwashed-transcripts-listen-1.5734335

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The story is dry. All we've got are pieces. We can't seem to figure out what the puzzle is supposed to look like. This is the famous parking garage scene from All the President's Men, where Robert Redford is meeting his source, Deep Throat. Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House. Follow the money. We meet them. Where?

Oh, I can't tell you that. Redford plays real-life Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Woodward, along with his colleague Carl Bernstein, are on the cusp of bringing down U.S. President Richard Nixon's White House during the Watergate scandal. He just needs to connect the dots. You tell me what you know, and I'll confirm. I'll keep you in the right direction if I can.

But that's all. Just follow the money. Follow the money may have been a Hollywood catchphrase, but what Deep Throat was urging was to dig deeper. Look into campaign finances. There had to be a paper trail, a way to finish the puzzle. Well, when Watergate was breaking, I was still, let's say, pretty angry about the course of American foreign policy and the like. And I was invited by a guy who had been in the CIA for 14 years, to help him write his book, which I did. John Marks was a young diplomat around the time of Watergate. He'd worked for the Foreign Service in Vietnam, and then for an anti-war senator, before writing his first book on the CIA.

The CIA and the cults of intelligence. And that preceded the book I wrote called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, which you mostly want to talk about. It was John Mark's second book on the CIA that set him on the course of sleuthing like Woodward and Bernstein. He even had his own codenamed source. Let me just say, I had a CIA guy, a retired CIA guy, who I called Deep Trance. Deep Trance? Deep Trance, right? You know, there's Deep Throat and everything, and we're coming off Watergate. So I had Deep Trance. And Deep Trance would give me information, and he'd been part of the unit that did this kind of work.

John Marks followed his source and he followed the money. And eventually it led him to Montreal, a psychiatrist named Dr. Ewan Cameron, and a massive CIA covert program known as MKUltra. I'm Michelle Shepard and this is Brainwashed, Episode 3, Exposing MKUltra. Congressional leaders in the United States are calling for a full-scale public inquiry into the disclosures made in the New York Times that the CIA was involved in domestic spying. In Washington, we have the man who broke the story, Seymour Hersh. I quoted somebody in my Sunday story saying it was like he stepped into a cesspool,

one bomb after another, one hand grenade after another. He discovered the Watergate mess, and then he also discovered this domestic operation. Here's a rarely told truth about investigative journalism. It can be pretty tedious. It's not all sources with code names and meetings and dimly lit parking garages. A lot of it is just about pouring through documents,

essentially being a bureaucrat. Or rather, maybe smarter than a bureaucrat and their overlords who might be trying to hide something. Investigative journalism was in its heyday when John Marks began his career. After Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon, the New York Times' Seymour Hersh exposed another scandal, allegations of domestic spying by the CIA. The CIA had been committing crimes inside the United States since the 50s. Wiretapping, illegal mail cover, surveillance of mail, that is, break-ins against Soviet agents and Americans they believed to be involved with Soviet agents. The CIA began collecting dossiers

on American citizens. The CIA began collecting dossiers on American citizens. Hirsch also found that the agency was illegally spying on anti-war protesters and other dissidents, including members of the Black Panthers. President Gerald Ford opposed any kind of investigation, but the political climate in the U.S. had shifted. Americans demanded a more transparent government. So Ford appointed his VP, Nelson Rockefeller, to report back on the CIA's activities inside the United States.

And when the Rockefeller Commission report came out, it was generally thought to be something of a cover-up. But there was a lot of interesting stuff in it at the same time. of a cover-up. But there was a lot of interesting stuff in it at the same time. The most salacious detail, and the one that the media pounced on, was that the CIA had been experimenting with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, and that a CIA biochemist named Frank Olson had LSD slipped in his drink by colleagues and had died a few days later. He fell, or he jumped, or he was pushed to his death from a 13th floor hotel window in New York City.

And then it said, this incident was part of a much larger program to find ways to control human behavior by using the behavioral sciences. This is what intrigued John Marks. What was this larger program to control human behavior? Almost the next day, I filed a freedom of information request, and the CIA came back to me and said, sorry, but we didn't give the Rockefeller Commission any written material about that particular section. And I thought that was pretty interesting. So I gave that particular information to the Washington Post, which had a little blurb saying the CIA didn't give any material backing up its story on the behavioral science program. And within days, I believe, or weeks, I was contacted by the CIA to say,

in fact, they had found 13 boxes of material. And so I was in business. But here comes that boring part of journalism. He wasn't really in business, not right away. It took several years and the help of lawyers associated with the American Civil Liberties Union to get the documents. And that was something, but without the researchers I

couldn't have done it because it was just such a long mass of research. John Marks was on to something. Something big. Something the CIA codenamed MKUltra. But as he sifted through the massive intelligence file, the CIA was working hard to control the narrative. Yes, they had a covert program, they admitted. But it was simply an opportunity to test the power of LSD. Nothing more. Marx knew it was so much more.

And so, you know, when in doubt, Escalate tends to be my motto. He held a press conference and released just a small sample of the documents he had acquired. This is from CBS News. The released CIA documents deal with a project codenamed MK Ultra in operation between 1953 and 1964. It involved drug experiments to control human behavior. These documents turned over to CIA critic John Marks under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents are so heavily deleted at times they look like Swiss cheese. They do not want us to know where it went on, who it was done with, and who did it. This is a program for manipulating people's minds,

which to me is a lot stronger and heavier than a program of drug experimentation. I wound up on the front page the next day of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all three network news. And at that point, I got a call from a publisher from the New York Times, and all three network news. And at that point, I got a call from a publisher from the New York Times Books. And they said, we'd like to give you an advance to write a book. And I am not sure up to that point, I had even decided I was going to write a book. But that seemed kind of interesting to me. And they love the title, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. That's what sold it. Where did you come up with that for the book?

Well, The Manchurian Candidate was a famous movie and book starring Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey, and I think Angela Lansbury. And it was about a controlled assassin who had been brainwashed, controlled assassin who had been brainwashed supposedly by the North Koreans and the Chinese and was going to assassinate the President of the United States. Well, we are at war. It's a cold war, but it will get worse and worse until every man, woman, and child in this country will have to stand up and be counted. The whole idea of having a controlled assassin, having him brainwashed, was what one of the things that the CIA was looking for. So the search for the Manchurian candidate was a logical title to me. I'm just going to stop here for a second before we get into the specific details of what the CIA was doing. Just what exactly happened in the MKUltra program.

A lot of you may want to dismiss this as conspiracy theories. I've had those doubts too. And I've been reporting on the dark and sometimes surreal world of espionage for years. I once even interviewed two former CIA heads aboard a spy cruise. Yep, it's a thing. Or it used to be anyway. They defended the use of waterboarding over cocktails. So let's just say this isn't my first rodeo.

But until I started working on this podcast, I didn't fully know the CIA's history. That they hired Nazi doctors and drugged prisoners, trying out hundreds of types of drugs. The CIA used electroshocks, hypnosis, severe harassment. So when I hear someone say, that was a national security bordello in which we hired prostitutes to give LSD to their clients in order to help the United States fight communism. I'm like, what? Operation Midnight Climax, as it was called. It wasn't. Absolutely. These are the kind of stories that just inherently sound like conspiracy theories.

People hear it and they don't believe it. I've written a lot of books about stories that people don't understand or believe or know about. But this one is really beyond even what I'd ever come up with before. How could this have happened? Wait a minute. Let me find another document. Let me find something else to prove this. Can this really be true? Yeah, it was.

So here we go. I'm Stephen Kinzer. I'm a former New York Times foreign correspondent. I write a world affairs column for the Boston Globe. And I'm the author of Poisoner in Chief, Sid Gottlieb, and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's senior chemist. He was one of the agency's pioneers. The CIA was formed in 1947 after the Second World War and at the start of the Cold War. It was an uncertain, fearful, paranoid time. And during the Korean War, strange things started happening with American prisoners of war. Some began collaborating with their captors.

Several pilots confessed to having used biological weapons, something the U.S. firmly denied. And later, 21 POWs refused to repatriate to America. There had to be an explanation. refuse to repatriate to America. There had to be an explanation. So the fear that gripped the CIA was that Soviet Union or Communist China had found the key to mind control. Then we realized that if you could do this,

if you could find a way to control people's minds, essentially the prize would be nothing less than global mastery. So not only were we terrified that communists had found the secret, but we determined to go out and find it for ourselves. The first question they asked is, what research is already out there? Who's already looked into the problems that we're trying to investigate? Essentially, how to destroy human beings. And they thought, well, let's look at the Nazis.

And sure enough, they found that there were Nazi doctors and scientists who had a lot of information that they gathered from experiments in which they killed people. information that they gathered from experiments in which they killed people. And while we pretended that we were so horrified at what the Nazis were doing, we wound up hiring some of the people that conducted some of the most horrific Nazi experiments in concentration camps, as well as those who had conducted experiments that in some ways were even more gruesome in the Imperial Japanese military. As the Second World War came to an end, many Nazis were rounded up by the American Intelligence Service. And those who had a scientific background

were thought of as especially valuable. Those files were put in a separate pile with paperclips on them. The CIA gave this program the codename Operation Paperclip. That was the operation by which Nazis were brought to the United States to work first as intelligence agents for the United States, second as rocket scientists, and third, finally, as scientists and biochemists working for the CIA Mind Control Project.

So the CIA began several projects aimed at carrying out experiments with various drugs, sensory deprivation, electroshock, and other techniques. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's chemist, was obsessed with the mission to control minds. He wanted all the research rolled into one program, which he would direct, MKUltra. Sidney Gottlieb is an amazing character. He lived in total anonymity. Nobody ever heard him. Nobody knew who he was. In a sense, my book is the biography of a person who didn't exist as far as anybody knew. But boy, what a life he led in secret. There weren't any whistleblowers at the time. No one questioned what Sidney Gottlieb was directing.

Only one man seemed to have some doubts. Only one man seemed to have some doubts. Frank Olson was expressing his regrets, his fears, his desire to quit to various people. He even told it to his superiors at the CIA. I'm finished. I want to quit. They persuaded him to stay on. One thing led to another. They wanted to give him psychological treatment. At one time, he was invited to a retreat by Gottlieb and other members of the inner core of MKUltra.

They went to this retreat, and on the first night, several of the people, including Frank Olson, were fed drinks that had LSD in them. We're not quite sure what the point of all that was. A few days later in New York, Olson went out the window. It was reported as the suicide of an army scientist. So he was not an army scientist. He was actually a CIA scientist. And whether it was suicide was uncertain, but it certainly was reported that way. reported that way. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your

podcasts. MKUltra, the CIA's program to harness the power of brainwashing, became a massive operation. Scientists would work for the CIA at secret sites throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Abroad, these experiments were even more intense. Gottlieb had established a series of operations where he could requisition human subjects, expendables, prisoners, people that the military intelligence agents in those countries would supply to him. He would then use them to see what various combinations of drugs would do to a human mind and body. 149 subprojects, 80 institutions, including 44 universities, 12 hospitals, three penitentiaries, 185 researchers. LSD did play a starring role in many of the experiments.

But it was not just about how the drug affected the brain, as the CIA would later claim, but an attempt to use the drug to brainwash. Scott Gottlieb came to believe that this could be, as one of his associates put it, the secret that could unlock the universe. In other words, this could be the key to mind control. This would be a way you could destroy a human being's mind. In 1953, Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD. It was all being produced by one laboratory in Switzerland, and it all came to the United States. So he would feed huge doses of LSD to prisoners, among others, and try to see what their reaction would be, to see if this is a way you can destroy a human mind.

One of the most bizarre experiments that Sidney Gottlieb came up with had to do with testing LSD and sex. Could we find a combination that would lead people to speak or would somehow open their minds to control. Yes, this is Operation Midnight Climax. So in order to test this, he opened up a bordello in San Francisco. The people working for him hired a group of prostitutes, and their job was to bring their clients back to this apartment on Telegraph Hill with a nice view over the San Francisco Bay.

There, the men would be given drinks that were laced with LSD. And the federal narcotics agent who was supervising this operation for Gottlieb would watch the proceedings from behind a one-way mirror while sitting on his portable toilet and drinking martinis from a pitcher. This guy had no training in psychology, biology, or anything like that, so it was a highly unscientific experiment, to put it mildly. Not all MKUltra experiments involved unwitting subjects. Some people volunteered, although they had no idea the CIA was behind the testing. The CIA, through a bogus medical foundation, sent out notices to a whole array of hospitals and universities and clinics across the United States saying, essentially,

we've discovered this new substance, LSD. It's a psychoactive drug. We want to test it. We're going to send you the LSD. You will then advertise for volunteers who you can pay. So who were some of the early subjects? Who were some of the first volunteers? Well, one of them was the novelist Ken Kesey,

who went on to write that counterculture Bible, When Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ken Kesey, the hero of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The New York Times, upon Kesey's death, called him the Pied Piper of the psychedelic era. Ken Kesey tried LSD in an experiment, and he loved it so much that he got a job in the hospital, the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital in California. That's where he gathered the material for writing that book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But as he later said, that was just something that came later. The real reason he wanted to get the job was so that he could steal the LSD from

the laboratories and bring it home and share it with all his friends. Another one of the early volunteers was the poet Allen Ginsberg. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked. by madness, starving, hysterical, naked. Another one was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

He loved LSD too and took it home and turned on the other Grateful Dead members. Long, strange trip it's been. So, actually, none of these people understood at the time that whom LSD leaked out of the laboratory into the counterculture. The irony, of course, being that the drug the CIA hoped would provide the key to controlling minds and winning the Cold War, wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was aimed at destroying everything the CIA stands for. Even though John Marks said the censored CIA documents looked like Swiss cheese, there were just enough details in the 1,600 pages for him to piece together the truth. They had black names out. And sometimes you would find like there would be a letter left in because they didn't black out.

So there would be an N at the end and a B in the beginning. And because in those days typewriters had even spacing, you could tell how many letters it was. So we'd be looking for a seven-letter word that starts in B and that ends in N about a scientist in Washington. And sometimes you would do this by going into the journals. Sometimes you would do it by looking in the professional directories. So you'd find a scientist with that kind of name, background, or the like. That's incredible. Sort of a forensic crossword. And this is all before, of course, the Internet.

Right. It would have been easier if there had been an Internet. Because you could have done different kinds of cross-checking. But we did pretty well, I felt. The documents Marks received were mainly financial records. He did follow the money. And that's how he discovered the funding that was being sent to Dr. Cameron for Subproject 68. Once I understood that he was getting CIA funding, my main source of what Cameron was doing was the journals and articles he had written

himself. He would write articles about the various techniques he was using, electroshock that would go on for 60 or 70 days, that kind of stuff, massive electroshock. And it was in the journals. Cameron's techniques may not have been completely secret, but no one was suspecting that a psychiatrist at the very top of his field was funded by the CIA to experiment on patients, not to find ways to make them better, but to learn how to brainwash them. One of the most prominent universities had turned its psychiatric hospital to a PhD doctor, head of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, head of the American Psychiatric Association,

head of the World Psychiatric Association. And this man was doing totally unethical things, which probably ranked up there with some of the Nazi atrocities. And I don't say that lightly. He really was messing with people and hurting them very seriously. When the search for the Manchurian candidate was released, John Marks had another bestseller. And Cameron's former patients were particularly interested. One sunny morning, I think it was a Sunday morning, I was sitting and reading the New York Times, and on the left-hand page there was an article

that talked about this CIA project called MK Ultra, which had been a project to develop methods of mind control. And one of the places that was mentioned was the Allen Memorial Institute. Remember Harvey Weinstein? I usually introduce myself by saying Harvey Weinstein, the other one. Lou Weinstein, Harvey's dad, was a patient of Dr. Ewan Cameron's at Montreal's Allen Memorial. This was a book written by John Marks called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. And when I saw that, all of a sudden the light went off and I thought, my God, this is the explanation. This is really what it was all about. is the explanation. This is really what it was all about. And, you know, I think of it, and even now,

I have this sort of memory of time just frozen, of just the whole world stopping. And in the article, it talked about the fact that some Washington lawyers were going to bring a case against the CIA. And I then talked to my parents and said, do you want me to explore this further? And my father would have none of it. He got extremely upset and agitated and my mother ultimately said, no, let it go, let it go. And then my mother died suddenly of a heart attack and I went back to my father

and I told him that his whole life had been taken away from him, that he had been robbed of a fulfilling existence, that his marriage had been affected, that all his friends had disappeared, and that it was time to take control of this and to show that we could fight back. But how do a handful of Canadians sue one of the most secretive and powerful intelligence agencies in the world? Now I know the CIA doesn't mind wasting anybody, but you see, when you're one of the wasted, you sort of would like people to know and I really want to go into court

and have the whole story revealed. That's next time on Brainwashed. Brainwashed is written and produced by Lisa Ellenwood, Chris Oak and me, Michelle Shepard. Sarah Melton is our associate producer. Sound design by Cecil Fernandez. Our digital producer is Emily Canal. The senior producer of CBC Podcasts is Tanya Springer, and our executive producer is Arif Naraini.

Special thanks to Alina Ghosh, Keith Hart with CBC Radio Archives, and the CBC Reference Library. For discussions, posts, videos, and pictures, find us on social media. Just search for CBC Podcasts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our theme song is Desert Novel by Key Witness. Brainwashed is produced by CBC Podcasts and The Fifth Estate. Another podcast you may like is Hunting Warhead. The series follows a global team of police and journalists as they attempt to dismantle a massive network of predators on the dark web. It's raw, compelling, and surprising.

Winner of the Grand Prize for Best Investigative Reporting at the New York Festivals and recommended by The Guardian, Vulture, and The Globe and Mail, you can find Hunting Warhead on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.