Part One: MKUltra: When The CIA Tried to Destroy Free Will

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'm Robert Evans. Um, I've I've introduced the podcast yet again. Um,
not one of my best introductions, not one of my worst.
Two weeks ago we had another just shouting Hitler. So
you know, if you're if you're a regular listener, this
is about as good as it gets. Um. This is,
of course Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very

(00:26):
worst people in all of history. Uh. And to help
me out this week and next week we have we
have a four party for you folks. First off, I
want to welcome Jason Pargeon to the show. Jason, how's
it going now that you are far far more famous
than you were in your cracked days. I honestly don't
have a sense of how many people in your audience

(00:48):
know who I am and they're like, oh my gosh,
that's the correct guy who used to write as David Wong,
who writes the John dyes Via novels versus how many
people just have no idea, just no idea, just could
not possibly care and less. Yeah, it's hard for me
to say. I mean whenever we do live events, and
we've done like nine or ten this year, between like
book events and stuff, I would say like it my

(01:10):
my back of my like very rough estimate would be
like a third of the crowd um has been following
my stuff since Cracked days, So I would guess like
somewhere in the thirty range, which is considering the size
of the audience, pretty good. Jason, you are the author
of a whole bunch of books. We were just talking
about this before the show. But I'm startled as I

(01:31):
try to work on my second novel, I'm startled at
the number of novels that you've written while doing all
of the other stuff that you do. Yeah, the one
that is coming out, the one that I am here promoting,
is the sixth uh called If this book exists, you're
in the wrong universe. It is part of the John
Dies at the Enfranchise. There are are now four books

(01:55):
in that series. For those of you who have read
some of them or have just seen the movie that's
out there on streaming. Came out a decade ago. But
you can just start with this one if you want.
It's it's not it's not a Game of Throne situation
where you have to have read all of the books there.
They're episodic. You can just now why you would want
to start with the new and most expensive one. I

(02:16):
don't know, considering all the other ones are you can
probably get into used bookstore for like fifty cents. But
from my point of view, yes, it's the freshest one
and therefore the best. I read it earlier this year,
and it's wonderful. I've been reading the John Dyes at
the End books for like, at this point, roughly two
thirds of my life. Um, I started reading. I mean, obviously, Jason,

(02:39):
you are my boss back at Cracked for years and
years and years and years. I think I worked there
for close to a decade and you worked there for longer. Um.
And then but but you started publishing what became the
first book in that series. Um, it was like an
every Halloween on your old website. This isn't the pre
Cracked as when you had your own website. Um, you

(03:02):
would publish I don't know what was it, probably words
something like that every year around Halloween. Yeah, it was
just part of my blog. It was like my annual
Halloween update was just continuing story I was writing. Started
in two thousand and one, I think, yeah, yeah, which
I would have been like twelve or thirteen. I think

(03:23):
when I started reading that series and I loved it.
Then I found it like very very engaging, and kind
of stayed obsessed with it ever since. UM. And one
of the things it's always been interesting to me about it,
you're that series in particular. I think one of the
things you could call it is like psychedelic horror, because
it's it's not just like a horror series, but kind

(03:44):
of one of the inciting incidents is the characters take
a supernatural hallucinogen. Essentially, that is kind of the inciting
incident of the series, and it's one of the only
One of the things that I've always found interesting about
your books is that I started reading them before I
ever started messing around with psychedelics, and I've continued to

(04:05):
enjoy them since UM, which is pretty rare in terms
of like encountering people writing about that stuff before you
know about it personally, and then after you know about it.
And I've always been interested in that in part because
you don't do psychedelics. You haven't like actually like taken
acid or anything like that. No, And in fact, I've
never drank alcohol. I have a very addictive personality. I

(04:28):
get addicted to things very easily, and I have been
afraid of any kind of drugs or cigarettes anything for
ever since I was a youth. Uh but no, yeah,
but it's it is very much like I've done a
lot of research into them. But it's not to be clear,
it's not scaremongering about. It's not people no no, no, no,

(04:48):
no no no, found themselves turning into monsters, because there
was a lot of fiction written like that in the
day that people they took LST and then they became
possessed by a devil or whatever. It's more of a
metaphorical thing, but they take a yeah, a some kind
of a mysterious substance that lets them kind of see
beyond reality and the way that if you were playing

(05:09):
a video game and you suddenly glitched through the world.
It's kind of like that, only with through time and
space and um. But for those of you who don't
read the film is because there's kind of an interesting story.
I won't let drag on. But they I sold the
film rights to it back when it was nothing. It
was I wrote it on the Internet and then had

(05:30):
like a print on demand publisher selling physical copies of it,
and we sold just a couple of thousand of them
when Don Cosca Elliott, cold horror writer director, a legendary
direct Yeah, I made the Phantasm series um of Hotep
got hold of the rights and not only bought the
rights but made the movie, which is the rare part.
Lots of people saw film rights to actually have it

(05:53):
get made to and then it debuted a Sundance in
and you know, I flew out there and got to
be part of a You and a with the cast
and all that. So it's it's kind of a crazy
success story because at the time this happened, in the
early two thousands, there were there were not a lot
of people writing stuff on the Internet and then selling
it as books or selling it. Still doesn't happen terribly often.

(06:17):
People you're famous examples of like oh this guy's Twitter
account got turned into a TV series or whatever, like
you hear you do. But I mean, I often describe
you to people as the first fifty shades of gray. Um.
But I bring up the fact that the so much
of like the inciting incidence of your series is kind

(06:37):
of like based around hallucinogens and like shadow people and
all this kind of um sort of dark occult stuff,
because that ties in directly to what we're talking about today.
The subject of our episodes for the next two weeks
is the mk Ultra program that the CIA carried out
through most of the fifties in early nineteen sixties. Now,

(07:01):
most people I think are probably like Jason, Actually, how
would you, based on kind of your level of knowledge,
casual knowledge, how would you describe what the mk Ultra
program was. Here's the thing. It is impossible for me
to separate what I actually know as fact and what
I've merely heard in conspiracy theory circles, because the one

(07:23):
conspiracy theory that I do believe in is that government
agencies and the true bad actors in society love conspiracy theories,
absolutely love that this stuff gets picked up by cranks
and the same people who talk about Bigfoot, we'll talk
about mk Ultra and the same breath and it's like, well,
you know, Bigfoot was actually an mk Ultra program and
turned a man into a giant monkey. They love that,

(07:46):
They love that it smears all of these things as
this the stuff of cranks and crackpots, when the reality
needs no embellishment. No, it does, because what the reality
of the mk Ultra program is that the federal government
devoted countless resources and essentially like a license to kill

(08:10):
to a bunch of scientists so that they could attempt
to eradicate the concept of human free will using LSD
like that's that's what they tried to do. UM. And
it included uh an outrageous number of crimes. And it
is it is a conspiracy. It's just not a conspiracy
theory because it's pretty well documented. A lot of the

(08:31):
guys who are involved with this have talked at this point,
so we know what's happened. UM, So we're gonna be
talking about that for quite a while here. I do
want to start by talking a little bit about kind
of the human history of use of psychedelics and even
kind of the history of the use of psychedelics in
a military context by states, um, because all of this
stuff actually goes back further than you'd guess. When we're

(08:55):
talking about like actual hallucinogenic drugs. The oldest, like the
first thing human beings were taking to consciously make themselves
hallucinate was probably We're never gonna get an exact answer
on this, but probably either peyote UM and the active
ingredient in peyote is a psychedelic proto alkaloid called mescalin um,
which has been in use at least like fifty seven

(09:17):
hundred years. Uh. And then you know, we have around
the same amount of time people have been using hallucinogenic
mushrooms uh sila cyben right. That also goes back by
some accounts maybe older something like seven thousand years. Obviously,
this is based on like people will draw cave paintings
of like mushrooms and stuff that they that they took,

(09:37):
and you can find bits of it and like honey
and whatnot, things that people like buried with their loved ones.
It's possible people were taking It's possible that like before
we were human beings are hammedied predecessors were taking you know,
payote and psilocybin, right, because we know that there are
certain hallucinogens that non human animals and that other apes take.

(09:58):
So this is probably something we've been doing like longer
than we've been human beings. And also this is one
of those things where when you look at the entire
culture and our mythology and our religion, whenever you have
writings of someone who sat down in a field and
then had a vision of the heavens opening up. How
many of those were actually influenced by hallucinogens or whatever,

(10:21):
we won't know, but there's almost no question that they
regarded these substances as uh like a sacred means of
opening up reality to get a direct line to the
gods or whatever. It's just that in the writings they
left behind they may not mention the part where they
choot on a certain mushroom to get that effect. Yeah,

(10:43):
and it's I mean there's other stuff too, like air
got that people. We know the ancient Greeks were very
likely um mixing in a couple of different ways, which
is kind of one of the precursors to L s D.
There are theories that the human capacity for religious belief
aim because are and this is you know, would be
twenty thirty thousand years ago ancestors took a shipload of

(11:06):
sila cybin um. There have been studies like the Good
Friday study that at least provide pretty good evidence that
the kind of religious experiences people have on these drugs
aren't any different from other kinds of religious experiences, right Like,
they're not They're not any less real because they're induced
by a chemical um they continue to influence people, you know,

(11:27):
in in for decades. UM. So yeah, it's there. There's
a lot of interesting history there. The first documented military
use of what you call an in the agen and
when we're talking about sila cybin, we're talking about all
of these chemicals. They're all what you'd call in theogen's right,
that's kind of the name of the type of thing
that we call hallucinogens um. The first documented military use

(11:48):
of one of these substances was by Hannibal Barca, you
know the guy, the elephant guy right with the alps
uh in around one eight four BC. There are some
possibly apocryphal reports that he had had his men drug
enemy stores with belladonna before a battle, so that his
enemies would basically be hallucinating when he went in to
fight them, which would provide a benefit. Right. It's it's

(12:10):
not hard to see how that could potentially work out
for you, um. And this is probably copied by the
Bishop of Munster in sixteen seventy two, who actually filled
grenades with belladonna in order to attempt to disperse its
poison on the battlefield, which is a pretty modern for
sixteen seventy two. Pretty modern way of like using a
chemical weapon. Yeah, that's I had never heard that before. Yeah,

(12:35):
that is pretty cool. Fantastic image. Yeah, the Bishop of
Munster filling grenades with because the active chemical in Belladonna
is scopolamine, which is what US police tried to use
for decades as a truth serum. Um. But it it
just kind of is a moderately powerful hallucinogen that he
was trying to disperse via grenade. Now I don't actually

(12:56):
know how well that worked out. It doesn't seem like
there's good documentation whether or not at it actually had
much of a military effect. Um. But the dream that
the Bishop of Munster had and that Hannibal Barket had
has lingered on in the hearts of military planners for
a long time, right, Because obviously fighting people is hard, um,
And if you can make them chemically, if you can

(13:18):
disperse some sort of substance on the battlefield that makes
them not want to or not able to fight, that
would be pretty cool. So World War One is obviously
when chemical weapons get used for the first time on
a mass scale, and and we all are aware of
more or less what happens here. Adolf Hitler himself a
victim of mustard gas refused in World War Two to
give approval to the German military to use chemical weapons

(13:40):
again as an offensive military tool. Right, Obviously, Hitler loves
using poison gas, but they're not they're not shooting it
off at the battlefield because he knows that it's going
to lead to reprisals and he's seen chemical weapons, you know. Uh,
he doesn't have a moral principle obviously, and he's in
you know, um, he's not entirely against the idea though,

(14:00):
of researching more weapons like this. And so during World
War Two, while the Germans don't use their mustard gas stockpiles,
they do invent a new poison something called saren nerve
gas um. And right around the same time the Nazis
are inventing saren, the Empire of Japan is weaponizing and
tracks during the war. Now, they actually did use an
tracks on China. During World War Two. They killed thousands

(14:23):
of civilians by like dropping anthrax bombs. They would infect
water supplies with cholera, and their top scientists working at
Unit seven thirty one, which we'll be talking about at
some point in the future, were in direct contact with
the Nazi chemical weapons head a guy named Kurt Blom,
who himself tested an TRACKS on thousands of death camp inmates,

(14:43):
mainly to see what would happen. Right, This is kind
of when we're trying to figure out how to actually
weaponize and tracks. A lot of the early studies there
come from different concentration camps. Blom had also experimented with
the use of mescal in on concentration camp inmates as
a truth drug. He'd forcibly dosed inmates a lot of
them in huge enough quantities that some of them died,

(15:04):
which is is not easy to do. Mescalen is not
a super toxic substance, so if you're killing people on it,
you're effectively giving them sometimes thousands of doses. Um. Because
the Nazis don't really care what happens to these people,
they're able to kind of do that. UM. So the
Allies are not super aware that most of this is
going on at the time. There's a pretty big fog
of war. These are very top secret. Obviously, they know

(15:25):
that Japan is using chemical weapons against China, but they're
not super aware of like what the Germans are researching
at this point. But what was known was enough that
it's scared Winston Churchill, and he made a public announcement
of his fears that the Nazis were planning a biological
weapon attack on the United Kingdom. So he asks the
United States for help and building up a defensive stockpile

(15:46):
of weaponized viruses and toxins. Right, Churchill doesn't want to
use all these either, because he's thinking the same thing
Hitler is, if if we use these on the Nazis,
then they'll start using stuff on our soldiers. But he
wants to have a bunch of scary ship that he
can unleash on continent of Europe if the Nazis start
dropping stuff on the UK. You can see, like the
logic that's going to be a big part of the

(16:07):
nuclear arms race already kind of at play here. Um
In general, all of history is a series of people saying, well,
we need to pursue this truly grotesque mission because if
we don't, the enemy will, or we suspect they already are.
But the only reason the enemy is doing it is

(16:30):
because they think you're doing it. And I'm sure there's
a name for that paradox. But for example, in the
last time I was on this show, we briefly talked
about World War One, which is a war based almost
entirely around a series of nations saying, look, we better
go ahead and just arm up because we know France
is doing it. It's like, if you know when we wis,

(16:51):
go ahead and go to war now, because it's gonna happen,
like like in every country thought this about everyone else.
So here it's you can see this weird gain theory
thing where unchecked paranoia about your enemy is a blank
check to your people to just pursue madness because after all,

(17:13):
what what thing could be too horrifying to use against
insert enemy here? Nazis, the communist, the terrorists on the
Muslim terrorists. It's it's like, well, of course we need
these advanced interrogation techniques otherwise, you know, how are we
going to stop our kinda in fifty years from now?
You can insert whatever enemy. But that's always been the logic,

(17:36):
probably going back thousands of years. It's like, hey, normally
we would do this, but and what's one of the
things that's most kind of morally complex about this is
that it doesn't always go badly right. World War one
horrible nightmare because that logic leads to tens of millions
of deaths. It also doesn't lead to tens of millions

(17:58):
of deaths in in the nucle your arms race, like
because everybody's got all these weapons and has the ability
to end all life, we don't have this big war
between the Soviet Union of the Unite. We have a
bunch of little horrible wars, but we don't have this
big war. And you kind of it's the same thing
with biological weapons on the battlefield in World War two
because they don't get used in Europe. The Nazis in

(18:21):
Vince Sarin and they weaponize and tractions we're about to
talk about, the US develops themuch a horrible ship, but
none of it it gets used because everybody's like just
kind of too scared to start that. Um, so I
don't know, I know what the moral is here? Well know,
very very quick note, um, we do record these in advance.
If there has been a nuclear war between now and

(18:43):
when this goes up, understand that that's what he just
said was based. This was pre the bombs being launched.
We were not aware of it when we recorded this.
So if you're if you're saying, well, how how how
stupid are these guys? They don't know that the situation
Ukraine resulted in nuclear apocalypse. It's because we It wasn't
It hadn't happened when we recorded it. If you're listening

(19:05):
to this huddled around the ruins of the Chrysler building
defending off wolves with like crudely made spears that you
you you you created out of like scrap metal from
light poles, Um, there was a time where the world
wasn't like that. Uh, then please just give us we
we're doing our best here. Yeah. If you if you

(19:26):
live in a society that has lost all aspects of
modernity except for the ability to like yell at podcast hosts. Um,
please please hold up for a second. Sophie deals with
enough as it's um. So, yeah, you've got these, uh,
you've got these you know. Um this kind of biological
arms race that's sort of in the background of World

(19:48):
War Two. Obviously it doesn't get a whole lot of
attention because most of this stuff doesn't wind up getting used,
and it's it's like fucked up when you're talking about
saren nerve gas and like the cholera and trying to
weaponize virus that's like horrifying for some reason, but it's
actually not when you think about what's going on, it's
not any different from any other kind of arms race. Right.

(20:09):
You can say that the weaponry is a little more
dangerous maybe, but like it's it's it's stockpiling killing agents. Right,
there's not a massive difference fundamentally, And like stockpiling a
bomb or stockpiling a bomb that is killed by way
of viruses. You know, people are more disgusted by this stuff,
but it is kind of the same basic concept. But
on February third, nineteen forty nine, and kind of the

(20:31):
early stages of the Cold War, something that was completely
new entered the minds of the men plotting their way
through this, like opening stages of the Cold War, Right,
this is kind of the first new development, totally new
development and like conceptions of warfare in in quite a
long while. Um. And it it starts because a guy

(20:52):
named Cardinal Joseph men zinz Jeez, I'm he's he's he's Hungarian.
Cardinal Joseph men Zinn He was the leader of the
Catholic Church in Hungary starting in nineteen forty five, and
in World War Two he'd been imprisoned by the fascist
Arrow Cross Party for his opposition to fascism. But he
was also really opposed to communism. Right, So when the

(21:13):
Nazis lose and the Iron Curtain goes down or whatever
you want to say, when the USSR winds up kind
of influence in Hungary, um, Mencenti is not happy with
that either. He's actually a monarchist. He never really got
over the collapse of the Austro Hungarian Empire, so when
the Communists come to power, he resists them too. In
ninety eight, religious orders get banned by the government of Hungary.

(21:34):
The Catholic Church is called a reactionary force, which it
had often been a lot of Catholics had supported the
fascist dictatorship that had existed in World War Two. Um,
but Mencenti hadn't. Um. But since he was such a prime,
like prominent opponent of the communist regime, he gets arrested
by the communists and they do the thing that like
you do when you capture a political enemy. They like

(21:56):
beat him with truncheons until he agrees to go on
camera and confess to a bunch of crimes. Um. And
this is not weird, right, like having government thugs beat
a man until he confesses to like trying to overthrow
the government and reinstitute a monarchy. Pretty normal stuff for
like a totalitarian regime can do to do. It shouldn't
have been that weird to anybody, But the CI a

(22:19):
like kind of freaks out over this. So this is
a new organization at the time. They've just been formed
from the OSS about a year before this um and
they panic when they hear Manzenti come on and be like,
I was trying to overthrow the government and the YadA
YadA yadah. And in his excellent book Poisoner in Chief,
Stephen Kinzer writes quote, they focused on the way man

(22:40):
Zenti had behaved during his trial. He appeared disoriented, spoken
a flat monotone, and confessed to crimes that he had
evidently not committed. Clearly he had been coerced. But how
at the CIA the answer seemed terrifyingly obvious. The Soviets
had developed drugs or mind control techniques that can make
people say things they did not believe. No evidence of this, ever,
m urged. Manzinti was coerced with traditional techniques like ill treatment,

(23:03):
extended isolation, beatings and repetitive interrogation. The fear that communists
had discovered some potent psychoactive tool, however, sent a shockwave
through the c I A. So this is what I
love about conspiracies about mind control, because the reality is,
there are so many ways to manipulate the behavior of
a person who is weaker than you, through pain, through

(23:24):
threats to their family, through financials with bribes, you know,
and there's some of the most successful interrogators were not violent.
They just offered people the cookies or a car or something,
uh that to say, well, my gosh, they developed a
magical chemical that you injected a person, They'll just do
whatever you want. They were so enamored with this idea

(23:45):
when that's like the oldest means of humans interacting with
one another, like that predates humanity, humans making other humans
do what they want. It says something about these guys
that like, instead of being like, yeah, they probably just
hit him until he did what they wanted him do,
like the thing we do when we want someone to
do something, they're like, they must have invented some new

(24:08):
drug that's taken over his mind and changed his personality.
Um it is it is really like this is the
fact that this is the inciting incident of the CIA's
mind control program. Um is in a way very funny.
And it's also just like this is the whole Cold
War in a nutshell, right, This this is what gets
us into so many different conflicts and gets like a

(24:29):
few million people killed. Is all of those these things
that start with like some guys in a room in
d C, like misinterpreting something and then freaking each other
out right doing that very human thing where everybody's just
kind of like yes, ending each other into the apocalypse,
especially when you have funding that will come to your budget.

(24:50):
If you can make the case up the ladder yep,
that the enemy has blank that there's a there's a
motivation beyond just simple misunderstanding, Like a lot of money
was spent here, a lot of jobs were created. Like
you don't think in terms of somebody trying to create
a bureaucrat try and create work for themselves, but they
they this was motivated reasoning if the if the Russians

(25:12):
have this, then we now have a blank check to
try to pursue this. And some of it was just
people career climbing, yes, indeed, and you know who else
is climbing the ranks of the corporate hierarchy, the people
who sponsor our podcasts. How do you? How do you?
How do you? How do you feel about buying gold

(25:34):
online from shady websites that advertise through random podcast ads?
Is that how you invest your your money? Well, you know,
one society collapses, gold will be the only valuable currency.
It just it just makes sense. Not cans of beans
and toilet paper. That's not what people will be trading.
They'll be trading gold. Yeah, No, not freeze dried food,

(25:56):
or ammunition or or water purification to bublits. Gold the
thing that's useful when you're starving, perfect store of value. Anyway,
here's probably adds for buying gold off the internet. We're

(26:18):
back and we're talking about what a good store of
value gold is. And Jason, if you're looking to diversify
your your cash stockpile for the apocalypse, I happen to
have a lot of Iraqi dinars and from what I hear,
they're about to blow up. They're gonna get revalued by
by President Trump and um a lot of a lot

(26:38):
of money in the denar these days. Yeah, one society collapses, basically,
you're gonna want gold and you're gonna want bitcoin. Oh yeah, yeah,
I I agree with you, Jason. If people really want
to survive the end of days, throw out your water,
light year, dried food on fire stockpiled denars, and gold.

(26:58):
That's that's gonna key you alive when the floodwaters wipe
out two thirds of Florida. That's what you want to
be carrying with you away as as as the coastline disappears.
Is as much gold as you can fit in your pockets.
Speaking of things that you can fit in your pockets,
let's talk about knowledge. Cia, Um, I don't know. I

(27:22):
did my I did my best there. So this moment,
this cardinal getting like just beaten up until he lies
about having tried to overthrow the government brings absolute certain
teeth to the CIA top bress that the Russians have
developed a mind control drug. Now we're gonna get into
a lot of hourly ship here, but it's important that
it under that the people who are like freaking out

(27:43):
over this, and the people who are the people whose
freakouts lead to everything that follows are a bunch of
Yale and Harvard kids, right, most of them grew up
extremely rich. The Dulles brothers who are going to be
big parts of this, like are literally hanging out with
heads of state when when their kids. And that's like
most of the early o s s CIA guys. Now,
some of these dudes had done real gnarly ship in

(28:05):
World War Two had been like like international man of Mystery,
badass stuff. You know, you do have some of those
like cowboys here, but that's not who's actually calling the shots.
For the most part, most of the people calling the
shots had been like sitting in Switzerland and kind of
like making the decisions that determined whether or not spies
on the ground lived and died. And now they're sitting

(28:27):
in d c Um and they've convinced themselves that an
old priest commence confessing to crimes he didn't convince under
torture meant that the Soviets had developed some sort of
mind control drug um. And there's this all of this
discourse around the c I A, a lot of which
is formed by the things they're doing in this period
of time, portrays them as I think these guys probably

(28:48):
would have wanted to be portrayed as these insidious, dangerous
competent manipulators of public opinion, and orchestrators of conspiracies. Now,
these are all things that the agency and individuals within
it have been over the years. But a life in
the shadows plotting crimes against your fellow man doesn't mean
that you're like healthy or rational, And it doesn't mean
that like the things that you're kind of conniving your

(29:09):
way into doing make a whole lot of sense. Uh,
And that's kind of important to keep in mind as
this story builds. Now, there's another inciting incident for what
we're gonna be talking about this week. This one's a
little bit happier. It starts in nineteen thirty six when
chemists from Sandas Laboratory synthesize lesurgic acid diethylamide for the
very first time UM. And one of the guys who's

(29:32):
on this project is a dude named Albert Hoffman. He's
a research scientist for Sandaz, which is, by the way,
the company who gave us like sacharin um or saccharin
like that's that's Sandas. They're a very very large chemical company.
And Hoffman had been tasked with finding substances in medicinal
plants that could be purified into different pharmaceutical drugs. They
didn't care what the pharmaceutical drugs did. They were just saying, like,

(29:55):
find us new chemicals, see what stuff does what, and
then we'll try to find a way to sell it.
So in the night late nineteen thirties, Hoffman is studying
air got which is this rye fungus that had been
associated with hallucinatory spells. Sometimes people that make like bread
that had this fungus in it, and then like towns
would wind up hallucinating for days. There's a lot of
fun stuff that happens in the Middle Ages, probably because

(30:16):
of of air got um. There's a lot of theories that,
like the a lot of witch hunts of stuff, yeah,
even trace back to It's it's it's hard to tell
what's true and what's just uh yeah, theorizing. But it's
the kind of thing that makes sense because you could
have it, people get it in there whatever and their
food supply and not know that they were under the

(30:39):
influence of something. So that again reporting that they had
seen supernatural things happening from there, that's enough of a
witness for them to set a witch on fire. Because
it did not take much back then, Yeah it does not.
And one of the things the kind of I haven't
taken air got fungus, but I have taken LSD somewhere
around a hundred times, and different doses do different things.

(31:03):
And one thing that can happen if you just take
a little bit, it's not even that you like hear voices,
but it's it's that, like you, your your impulses feel
as if maybe they're coming from somewhere else, and you
can kind of convince yourself that someone is talking to
you right. Um, And some people, especially if you're like
a medieval peasant, maybe you get convinced it's God right,

(31:24):
and maybe you don't like this lady in town and
you've never trusted her, and you convince yourself in this
state that God is telling you that she's a witch
or something like that. There's all sorts of ship that
could potentially have been happening here. The one thing you're
not going to get on the show is a lot
of scaremongering about who sin agens, because you're going to
get a lot of terrifying experiments as we get into this.
But you have to understand it is very, very different.

(31:45):
One if you're not paying attention to the dose, but
to dosing people who don't know they've been dozed. So
when things like set and setting matters so much and
how you experience these things, if you're already paranoid, or
you're already a place where you're feeling under siege, or
you think you've got enemies around every corner, and you've
been dosed with this in your food or whatever, and

(32:08):
you don't know what's happening to you, you know, and
then so you rewind to an another era when people
didn't know the wh whosin degens were even a thing. Yeah,
what would you assume. You would, of course assumed you
were possessed or that you had been assaulted by the
devil or whatever, and so the same thing here, Like,
there's a big difference between what these people are doing

(32:29):
and the people who use this recreation recreationally. We're not
trying to scare you off of it. It's just that
you're going to see the worst possible. There's actually there's
a degree we'll talk about this more. There's a degree
to which this also kind of makes the case of
how safe these are, because a lot of the worst
reactions to this are there giving people the equivalent of

(32:51):
thousands of doses at a time, like an amount no
one would choose to take. And like, yeah, people die
when you give them seven thousand times like a normal
dose of a of a drug. Almost any drug will
work that way, right, Like if you give someone seven
thousand times as much aspirin as they should take, they
probably will not make it, right, that will kill them.
Or if you give them five thousand servings of mashed

(33:13):
potatoes all at once, now will also die. That's that
depends on the mashed potatoes. I I I put about
a stick of butter pur potato, so it will take
much less of my potatoes to kill you. Um. Really,
just a bowl can do it in some cases. Uh.
So he's trying to Hoffman is trying to synthesize a

(33:34):
compound out of rye fungus that's gonna work as a
speaking of heart disease, a circulatory in respiratory stimulant, right
because this drug one of the things that can do
is it has an impact on your your heart rate
and your respirations. And he thinks that maybe this will
maybe he can get something out of ergot that will
do that. Um, and the LSD that we have today

(33:55):
is his twenty attempt at like pulling a chemical out
of ergot that has a medicinal use, which is why
we call it LSD. UM. Now, initially the substance that
Offman has found seems to be a very little value.
Research on it gets canceled, and Hoffman moves on for
five years. But there's something about the drug that kind
of calls out to him. He just can't kind of
get it out of his head, even though he has

(34:16):
not taken it for himself at this point. And so
on April nineteenth, nineteen three, he decides to try something,
and he takes two and fifty micrograms of acid um.
And this is like probably a moderate dose. Like you know,
if you actually have ever taken acid, you you buy

(34:38):
like a hit or something. And what a hit is
is is not um like standardized. Like you probably have
no idea how much LSD you've taken if you've taken LSD,
because you you bought like a drop of liquid that
was put on a piece of paper by a dude
who like gave it to you at a club, Right,
you have no idea what what what you're getting? Um,

(35:02):
But this is probably something like four to five hits
of acid um in like modern terms. So this is
like a substantial dose, right, This is not like a
light hit of the drug. UM. So he doses himself
at four pm, and at five pm he writes quote
beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortion, symptoms of paralysis,

(35:25):
desire to laugh. Um. And that's the last thing he
writes in his journal because after that point he is
tripping too hard to write anything. Um. Did you say
he dosed himself at Yeah, he sure did. That is
kind of interesting, isn't it, Jason. Um. So sometimes sometimes

(35:46):
we get these little beautiful synchronicities. So Hoffman has a
pretty good trip, it has to be said. Um, it's
nineteen forty three, so like you can't take your car
on the road because there's these wartime restrictions. So he's
bicycling home. Um, and his his he has an assistant
who kind of like escorts him. Who's his sober sitter. Um.

(36:07):
And yeah, he recants later in great detail in his book, quote,
kaleidoscopic fantastic images surged in me, alternating variegated opening and
then closing themselves in circles and spirals exploding, and colored
fountains rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was
particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound

(36:28):
of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed
into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vivid, changing image
with a jone consistent form and color. So he's tripping
balls here. This is a pretty like this. This is
a pretty substantial dose of the drug um and it,
as he said, he has a great time. Like Hoffman
will spend the rest of his life as an advocate

(36:48):
for this stuff because he finds it like a wonderfully
pleasant and powerful experience. And he he becomes convinced that
LSD has an incredible potential as a therapeutic drug. And
he's absolutely correct. In this um asset has been shown
to have fantastic potential in a number of clinical trials
for treating alcoholism. It can be extreme and again when

(37:08):
we say it can treat alcoholism, it can be an antidepressant,
It can treat post traumatic stress disorder. We're not saying
you can just take some and it makes it better.
Although some people have had that experience in the past,
these are all when we're talking about the clinical trials,
these are all giving someone LSD alongside therapy for like alcoholism,
or therapy for depression, or therapy for post traumatic stress

(37:31):
disorder UM. And in terms of like why it's useful
for this, I'm gonna quote from a researcher talking to
the Guardian. In depression, people get locked into a way
of thinking that is repetitive and ruminative. It's like tramline thinking.
Psychedelics disrupt those kind of processes so people can escape
from it. And that's why this stuff is useful. And
there's there are now studies that show similar promise with

(37:52):
substances like m d m A, which seems to be
particularly effective at treating PTSD, or silas cybin. And and
to get back to the subjuct of like mushrooms and religion,
one of the things that sila cybin has been shown
clinically to be most effective at is in hospice patients
and people who are like dying of terminal diseases, helping
people deal with their fear of death. It's very effective

(38:14):
when used properly UM for that. And and so it
is fair to say that Hoffman was right, this kind
of immediate thing he thinks when he takes acid, like,
oh my god, this stuff could be really useful for people.
He's absolutely correct, But in the nineteen forties there's a
lot less known about this, and so the kind of
initial group of people who start taking acid, like Hoffman

(38:37):
is always going to be an advocate for this stuff,
and gradually he's going to get other people interested in it.
But the first group of people who really gets hard
into acid are not scientists, and they're not hippies. There
CIA agents and scientists affiliated with the cia UM, and yeah,
that's that's what's going to happen. In late nineteen forty nine,

(38:59):
an officer of the Army Chemical Corps reported to L.
Wilson Green, a director at the Edgewood Arsenal, which is
where the the US keeps all of its like horrible
chemical weapons that had been building up during World War Two.
He reports to Green that Sandoz chemists had created a
new hallucinogen. Next, Kinser writes, Green was riveted. He collected
all the information he could find on the subject, then

(39:20):
produced a long report entitled Psychochemical Warfare, a New Concept
of War. It concluded with a strong recommendation that the
government begins systematically testing LSD, mescalen and sixty other mind
altering compounds that might be weaponized for use against enemy populations.
Their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely, destroyed,
by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue. Green

(39:42):
wrote the symptoms which are considered to be a value
in strategic and tactical operations include the following fitz Er seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium,
extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do
even simple things, suicidal mania, and one of them just
why I wanted to jump in a few minutes ago.

(40:03):
That we're not scaremongering about these substances. Because, to be clear,
when they saw the results, they did not come out
and say, hey, if you introduce this to the enemy army,
they may put down their weapons because they have seen
that war is wrong and the life has value, because
you know they've had a pleasant trip. No, they were

(40:26):
thinking purely in terms, oh this will this will drive
them insane. There they'll tell you tear each other to
pieces and then run off into the wilderness screaming before
they fold dead of heart attacks and seizures, like they
were imagining something. They would just savage the enemy worse
than bullets. Not Hey, we can actually prevent conflict by
dosing the enemy and having them just be too too

(40:49):
chill to want to fight a war. And a lot
of this is a reaction to there had been this
assumption prior to World War Two that when cities started
getting saturation bombed Byans, which are pretty new at the time,
the entire population of the city is going to lose
their mind and right like, they'll be murdering each other
in the streets and just like people's people's brains will
shatter if they're forced to endure bombing, and none of

(41:11):
that happens. In fact, it turns out that like when
you bomb cities, people get really tough and they get
angry at you, and they don't collapse morally. It doesn't happen.
The British don't collapse under bombing, the Germans don't collapse
under bombing. For the Japanese to collapse under bombing, it
takes the detonation of two atomic bombs. Um. So this
is kind of part of what they're looking at is like, well,

(41:32):
strategic bombing actually doesn't work for ship. What if we
did it with acid, Like, maybe that'll work better. That
is about trying to make their society breakdown. Yeah, yeah,
that is exactly the goal. Um. And again you could also,
I mean, you could argue that, like this is more
humane than carpet bombing people. It's it's not gonna last forever, right,

(41:54):
like it is. You can see how people can make
the case that actually, this is this wouldn't be as
bad as what we would just did to the Germans.
This is a kinder way to wage war without killing. Um.
The the argument has made well enough that President Truman agrees, like, yeah,
this is a pretty good idea, and over the following
months he allows a joint program between the CIA and

(42:15):
the U. S Military to get developed and it's called
m k Naomi. Now, the reason why it's named this
is and the reason why mk Ulter is named k
Ulter is this is the way the CIA does their cryptonyms. Right.
A cryptonym is like a name for a project or
a department or an organization that's supposed to be impossible
for you to like tell what the organization does based

(42:36):
on the name, right, So m K identifies a project
as being run by the Technical services staff. These are
the guys who developed the CIA is like wacky James
Bond devices. Naomi is a nonsense word, and they're all
supposed to be nonsense words, right. The second word MK,
ultra mk whatever. The second word is just like a
random word they pick so people can have some sort

(42:57):
of names. So that's why the initial version of this
program is called m K Naomi. So for the most part,
m K Naomi focused on not just like LSD, but
making suicide drugs and assassination poisons. But they were also
researching defensive bio weapons and trying to figure out, like
what it would look like if the Russians carried out
a biological attack on the United States. In nineteen forty nine,

(43:20):
they carry out a fake biological weapons attack on the
Pentagon using mock bacteria. They concluded as a result of
the attack that half of the people in the building
could have been infected if it had been a real attack.
This is kind of seen as stirring enough that the
military brass are like, well, we need to see what
would happen if the Soviets attack an American city. So

(43:41):
the CIA and the U. S Military decide to carry
out an actual biological weapons attack on a US city.
Now they know that in order to like disperse biological
weapons through an insire tire cities population, they're going to
need like fog because there's kind of a color to
this gas they're going to be distributing throughout the city.

(44:02):
So they decide San Francisco is the right place to
carry out a biological weapons attack because they can use
the fog to hide what they're actually doing. It's called
Operation Sea Spray, is they're shooting clouds of aerosolized bacteria. Now,
the bacteria is supposed to be harmless. The the idea
is that you spray this harmless bacteria throughout the city

(44:23):
and it's just enough, like it's just enough of a
thing that you can test people randomly throughout the city
and you can see how far it's penetrated, how many
people have been exposed to it, But it's not something
that's actually going to hurt them, right, That's that's the
idea um And the bacteria performs extremely well, and in fact,
the Pentagon concludes that all eight hundred thousand people in

(44:44):
San Francisco have been infected, as well as a significant
number of people in five surrounding cities. Basically the entire
Bay Area gets infected with this. The problem is that
bacteria is kind of like not a predictable thing to
dose roughly a million human beings with. You get some
like unanticipated consequences when you do that. And it turns

(45:06):
out several people in the Bay Area were particularly vulnerable
to whatever bacteria they used. Eleven of them catch urinary
tract infections from the poison, and one of these people dies. Um.
This would be the first time, but not the last time,
that the United States used biological weapons on its own
people to see what would happen, which is pretty cool. Yeah,

(45:28):
frankly an outcome no one could have foreseen. Yeah, it's
just we're gonna give million people a bacteria. It'll be fine,
it'll be fine. Like those million people that a certain
number of them are medically fragile or compromised or whatever,
and that it wouldn't be harmful to them. How could
they have How could they have known? But you possibly

(45:48):
have known. You can see that logic you were talking
about earlier, though, if like, well we know the enemy
is working on biological weapons, and the enemy, the Soviets,
are these like godless monsters. They could do anything. It
would be irresponsible of us not to try. Some people
are going to get hurt, but we have to know
how vulnerable our cities are to these weapons. It's the
only responsible thing to do. That way we can figure

(46:10):
out how to defend them. Right, you can see how
these guys make the argument to themselves. Yeah, that's my argument.
That is a rationalization that every bad person in the
history of the species has made, because every every serial
killer thought they were like cleaning up the streets of
because you know, they target sex workers and it's like, well,
I'm cleaning up the streets of what these women are

(46:31):
befouling our men or whatever. Like they've all got this rationalization,
I guess not Jeffrey Dahmer, he was trying to create
a sex zombie. But a lot of them, in their
minds they have this thing it's like, well, I'm just
I'm doing to them what they would do to me
if they had the chance. Yeah, you do get with
the CIA and with serial killers, some of these guys
are just at like monsters, Right, you do get sometimes

(46:52):
people who just like to cause harm or have this
whatever going on in their head. But like most people,
and most of the people who were involved in a
horrible acts of evil like infecting an entire city with
bacteria to see what happens, in order to do that
have to convince themselves there's a good reason, right like
that nobody nobody wants to feel like a monster. There's
a monster around the corner that's bigger than the monster

(47:15):
I'm being So the only thing that can fight that
monster is a monster. Uh. And again, the monster you're fighting,
there's a real good chance that that monster acts like
that because it is terrified of you. Because the amount
of paranoia and the Soviet Union about what the United
States was doing was justice. We will we will be
chatting about the Soviet Union in a little bit and

(47:37):
what they are actually doing because that's a fun story too.
But so operations see spray. Obviously, you and I can say, oh,
it's pretty fucked up that they did that. The CIA
and the U. S. Army consider this a massive win, right,
this works out perfectly as far as they're concerned. They
have determined how vulnerable cities are. Um, they understand a
lot more about how they could potentially, you know, defend

(47:59):
against a bio logical attack. From their perspective, this works great. Now,
the CIA is kind of doing a back seat role
in c spray. They help with the implementation, but most
of this is the U. S. Army UM, because the
CIA is a it's a clandestined agency, right, so it's
interested in this stuff, but it's never going to be
deploying full scale military tax using chemical weapons. That's the

(48:21):
kind of thing the army will do. UM. The CIA
is much more interested and kind of more precise stuff
than that. And in nineteen fifty, the director of the CIA,
who at that point is a guy named Roscoe hillen Kettter,
decides that the agency needs its own dedicated team working
on mind control technology. The agency launches Project Bluebird, which

(48:42):
the intercept describes as a quote mind control program that
tested drugs on American citizens, most in federal penitentiaries or
on military basis. And it is interesting that in the
in the eyes of all of the people like doing
all of this, ship, US soldiers and UH convicted felons
in federal prison are the same, right, Yeah, Like you

(49:04):
don't have to care about any of them. You can
do whatever to those people. Um, So that's cool. That's
that's there's nothing deeper and dark there. Now, near the
end of nineteen fifty, the CIA gets a new director
kind of right after this program starts, a guy named
General Walter Smith, and Walter Smith is the guy who
brings our old buddy Alan Dullis onto the team. Now

(49:26):
we've done a couple of episodes about Alan and his
brother John Foster, but in brief Allen is a big
fan of Carl Young, um, and so he's a big
fan of like this kind of esoteric psychology and psychiatry
theory that's sort of floating around at the time. And
a lot of this is getting mixed in with early
research and psychedelics because this is the period in which

(49:47):
scientists are first kind of starting to study psychedelics. And
Alan kind of becomes convinced that there are untapped scientific
potential for manipulating minds in different hallucinogenic drugs. And the
early and eighteen fifties, the United States espionage effort in
this uss are suffered a number of well publicized setbacks,
and the CIA the reveal of several prominent double agents

(50:09):
revives these fears that had started when that cardinal kind
of UH came out of Soviet mind control. UH. Those
fears turned into panic in nineteen fifty two, and an
incident described by the intercept quote in Korea, captured American
pilots admitted on national radio that they'd sprayed the Korean
countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so

(50:30):
beyond the pale that the CIA blamed communists. The POWs
must have been brainwashed. The word a literal translation of
the Chinese zin now, didn't appear in English before nineteen fifty.
It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced in
postwar America that a new class of chemicals could rewire
and automate the human mind. So a couple of things here.

(50:53):
Number one, we don't know if the US used chemical
or used biological weapons in the Korean War. The United States,
it says that we did not. Um, these guys. The
specific confessions these pilots are making sound kind of silly.
They're talking about like bombs that have like compartments with
with like snakes and stuff in them. Um that it

(51:14):
just kind of sounds like the stuff that you might
say if you've been tortured. But the United States uses
a shipload of illegal chemical weapons in Vietnam, so it's
not impossible that we were in fact using something. Um,
we'll never really know because it's you know, war crimes
and such as much a spectacular leap and logic that's
being made here is the thing. Yeah, that that that

(51:34):
that whatever they're saying, they're saying because they've been brainwashed
and not just hit a bunch brainwashed in some way
that is um unheard of, Like it's it's new around land.
They were coerced or they were tricked, or they thought
they did drop. You know, that's the same thing when
recently what they were dropping last year and it came out,

(51:55):
it's like, well, you know, they've got actual Air Force pilots,
fighter pilots saying they saw UFOs. It's like yeah, and
they're also they're full of crap. They they probably did
think they saw that, but they were wrong, or like
they're not they're not experts at the highest levels. It's like, well,
this thing moved in a way that no craft can move.
It's like, well, like, I know, you have some expertise

(52:18):
as a pilot, but you're also just a guy. Uh
So these guys may have thought they were dropping chemicals,
So they may have been dropping some sort of defoliant
or something that they thought was I don't know, or
could they could have been a rumor that they heard
somebody else was dropping it. It's always this stuff about
like people's minds just aren't This is the thing nobody
actually likes to think about, Like our brains aren't very

(52:40):
good at knowing what's happening in the world. Um, Like,
it is very easy to trick us. It is very
easy for people to like convince themselves of things. It's
very easy all sorts of things, like if you're a
fucking pilot, right, you're taking in more oxygen than normal
because of like the way in which you have to
like have oh to flooded into you so that you

(53:01):
can survive at that kind of altitude. Um all sorts
of stuff about flying is mind altering, including g forces
like yeah, who knows what's going on in their fucking heads.
And these guys, yes, soldiers also full of shit. They
they embellish their war stories. And this is not like
I would probably do it too. It's a thing that's

(53:22):
a part of the culture yeah, but yeah. So much
of this mania is stoked by an American journalist named
Edward Hunter. And Hunter is not just a guy writing.
He's the guy who, like he writes an article for
the Miami News that is the first time the word
brainwashing is used in English, Like, Edward Hunter brings that
term when he's talking about these pilots to the United States.

(53:45):
So he's like a working journalist. He's also a contractor
for the CIA Office of Policy Coordination and a rabbit
anti communist. So when he introduces this stuff to the
United States, he's not doing it just because he believe
it to be true. He is a guy working for
the CIA who sees this in like the best interest
of the agency. Um and Kinser writes like a longer

(54:09):
article for a newspaper called The New Leader, which is
also funded by the CIA. The CIA is funding a
shipload of newspapers at this time, including a lot of
left wing ones. Um and then he winds up writing
a book because the panic he ignites such a big
deal called brainwashing in Red China. And in this book
he tells Americans they need to prepare for quote, psychological

(54:30):
warfare on a scale incalculably more immense than any militarist
of the past has ever imagined. He becomes like, because
you know, once you once you're the first guy to
write about a thing that like freaks Americans out, then
you get to be the expert on it, and all
of like the big time entertainment media people will start
having you on their shows over and over again, which

(54:50):
helps you sell your books and brings in more money.
And that's what Hunter winds up being for brainwashing right. Um,
eveny thing you cannot do at this point is go
back on it. That is your brand. Like, the only
thing you can do is double down forever. Yeah, that's
your fucking meal ticket. Um. So this works well enough

(55:11):
that the House Committee on American Activities brings him up. Um.
He tells them that the Reds have specialists available on
their brainwashing panels. He tells them they are preparing psychic
attacks to subjugate quote, the people and the soil and
the resources of the United States, and will use the
psychic power to quote turn Americans into subjects of a

(55:32):
new world order for the benefit of a mad little
knot of despots in the Kremlin. Now pull pull that all, right, completely, well,
most of that completely out of his ass asked, we're
gonna talk about the Soviets are trying some weird psychic shit. Um,
obviously it doesn't work, but yeah, we'll get to that
in a little bit. So Project Bluebird and Edwin Hunters

(55:54):
or Mr Hunters like bullshit leads to the creation basically
the kind of panic over this brings more money into
the CIA and more money behind Project Bluebird. And one
of the major things that the CIA uses with this
new funding is they start creating the very first of
what are what come to be called black sites. Right,
These are secret illegal prisons where prisoners can be tortured.

(56:16):
And these prisoners are generally people either spies, Russian spies
who are arrested, or just people the CIA says are
probably Russian spies. There's no due process here, right, So
a lot of times they're just like taking people and
they've got these people, they can't ever let them out.
They're going to kill all of them. And so what
they see is what we have X thousand number of

(56:37):
people all around the world. We can do whatever we
want to them. You guys need to test drugs on people,
Here's where you do it. Now, Jason, that's a pretty
fucked up thing to do, UM, and you're not going
to find a whole lot of people who are capable
of running a black site prison that tortures people to
death with hallucinogens. But thankfully the CIA had an old

(56:58):
bench of guys who were ready to help them, and
those guys were Nazis. So they hire General Walter Schreiber.
And Schreiber is not a again, he's a general. He
had been the surgeon general of the Third Reich, where
he had masterminded experiments and multiple concentration in death camps,
including one where death camp inmates were infected with gang

(57:20):
green and cut open so the progress of the disease
on their bones could be watched. Now, Schreiber had been
arrested by the Soviets for obvious reasons, and he had
been briefly imprisoned, but they had eventually agreed, probably in
their own kind of project paper clip thing, to let
him become a professor in East Berlin UM. But he escapes,
he gets away to the other the American side of

(57:41):
Berlin UH and winds up in the Army's hands. And
when the U. S. Army confirms, oh, we've got the
third Reich's former surgeon general. Rather than be like, this
guy should probably go to prison, right, you know, maybe
we should, maybe we should deal with this man, they
sent him to one of the CIA's Project Bluebird black
Side's because they're like, well, this guy is great at

(58:02):
the job that we're already starting to do. Um. I
think that's a great example of where the Americans said, Look,
the Soviets tried to cancel this guy because of his views,
and we don't believe in that. It's like, can you
should have a chance to redeem yourself by doing the

(58:23):
exact same thing for us. It's like Louis c k
getting to tour again. Right. That's where Walter Schreiber is.
You know, he has his little he gets canceled by
the woke mob for running some death camps. But now
he's back at Madison Square garden Um, which is a
CIA black site on the outskirts of West Berlin. So
he helps them set up a bunch of secret black

(58:45):
sites all across western Europe where CIA agents can torture
without being observed. And I'm gonna quote from Poisoner in
Chief here. This set a precedent that marked a breakthrough
for the CIA. By opening prisons, the agency established its
right not only to detain an imprisoned people in other countries,
but to interrogate them harshly while they were in custody
without regard for US law. So successful was this network

(59:07):
of prisons in West Germany that the CIA duplicated it
in Japan. Their Bluebird interrogation teams injected captured North Korean
soldiers with drugs including sodium amiltal, a depressant that can
have hypnotic effects, and with three potent stimulants bids adrine,
which affects the central nervous system, coramine, which acts on
the lungs, and picro toxin, a convulsant that can cause

(59:28):
seizures and respiratory paralysis. While they were in the weakened
state of transition between the effects of depressants and stimulants,
CIA experimenters subjected them to hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat.
Their goal, according to one report, was to quote induce
violent cathartic reactions, alternatively putting subjects to sleep then waking
them up until they were sufficiently confused to be coerced

(59:50):
into a living an experience from their past now I
don't think that's very ethical behavior. Um, but you know
what is ethical, Jason? Is this a transition to an
add this this is a transition to an ad break, Jason,
because the sponsors of this podcast, will they give you

(01:00:11):
Ben's a Drene? Yes, but you're gonna know that you're
getting pure speed if you buy Ben's a Dren from them.
You know they're not gonna dose you like you're some
North Korean war captive. UM, so enjoy bens Adrine. We're back. Ah,

(01:00:36):
what a good time. We're talking about Project Bluebird. Now.
Very briefly the interject, we both realized that Robert is
skipping across incidents that each one could be its own book.
Each one's likes a prison they ran for a long
period of time and the things that went there, and

(01:00:57):
he has to briefly summarize it because that's all just
the part of it's just one block in the tower
of of of mk Ultra. They're just getting started here. Yeah,
this is this was a lot. We are doing our
best to do it justice. But this is a sprawling
thing that went on for how long? Um, this is

(01:01:18):
like close to twenty years. Yeah, we're talking about um,
it's we're simultaneously going very long and also hopping from
horror to horror almost too quickly to fully absorb it. Yeah,
to really let this stuff hit um. And it's it's
like they don't find anything like Project Bluebird. They don't
find a truth serum. They have what they think are

(01:01:39):
like intriguing results, but they don't find ways to like
actually force people to give up useful information. None of
this works well, but they all remain convinced that like
it's building to something, and the Project Bluebird experiments eventually
split off into Project Artichoke, which is like an even
more well funded and elaborate like program to attempt to

(01:02:01):
find a perfect truth serum. One of the guys in
charge of Project Artichoke is Morse Alan. He's a CIA
agent who is obsessed with mind control, and he's pretty
good friends with Alan Dulles. In the Night. In nineteen fifty,
he had advocated for the creation of a quote electro
sleep machine that could force people into a trance um.

(01:02:21):
It was basically like shocking people into like a half
sleep trance so that you could wipe out their memories.
No one knew if this would be possible, but this
was like the only thing Morse Allen wanted to see
in the world. In nineteen fifty two, he was part
of a three man team that traveled to Villas Schuster
and West Germany to test quote dangerous combinations of drugs
such as benzadrine and penthetol natrium on Russian captives under

(01:02:45):
a research protocol that specified disposal of the body is
not a problem. Um because again that we don't know
how many people they're testing this on, we don't know
how many people they're killing. But one thing the CIA,
one of the things that they're saying about these black
sites is don't worry. All of these people were testing
on are going to die, and it's it's not a problem.
We'll figure out how to get rid of them for you. Now. Incidentally,

(01:03:07):
if you watch movies, thrillers, even cartoons from the fifties, sixties, seventies,
a lot of this stuff like hypnosis, hypnosis machines. These
are tropes in those movies from that era that I
don't think people realized that was based on this. It
was based on what came out in the government's actual

(01:03:28):
attempts to make these things. Yeah, there was and these
again one of the things you have to keep in
your head while you're reading about all this. There were
a shipload of highly trained people with like doctorates and
millions of dollars in funding behind them, who truly believed
mind control poisons were a real thing. Um that that
that this was a thing that they were going to
figure out how to do. They would not have put

(01:03:50):
all of this work into it if they didn't think
they could really do it. Um. Now, obviously, all of
the experiments they're doing this is a direct violation of
what's called the Nuremberg Code, which acquired that voluntary, well
informed consent in a legal capacity is a necessary prerequisite
for experimental patients. Right, you cannot as a result of
how bad, like all of the horrible experiments the Nazis

(01:04:12):
do in concentration camps, we make we like the international
community writes out a thing being like this is something
you cannot do, and we after we write the Nuremberg Code,
we use it to convict and execute seven Nazi scientists.
But we never incorporated into US law. Right, it's never
actually illegal for the United States to violate the Nuremberg Code.

(01:04:33):
We prosecute and kill people under it, but We're also like, well,
why would we We're not going to handicap ourselves by
signing onto that ship. That's not a good idea, um,
because the Russians are probably breaking up, So sure of course. Yeah,
so we've got it too, um, Which Yeah, anyway, it's
it's cool how all of that works, and may have

(01:04:55):
part of their willingness to break the Nuremberg Law and
may have been all of the Nazis that they hired.
You do have to keep that in mind too, which
is also a thing that's being done on both sides. Um.
But yeah, Internally, the need to replicate Nazi war crimes
using Nazi scientists was always justified by the incredible danger
of Russian mind control and brainwashing technology, which the CIA

(01:05:16):
believed was advancing at a rapid rate. In a speech
at Princeton University in early nineteen fifty three, Alan Dules
warned that Communist spies were everywhere and so well trained
and equipped that they could turn an American mind into
quote a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle
by an outside genius. Um. That's that's that's that's Alan.

(01:05:40):
There's a bit of projection there, because they themselves would love,
of course, or a chemical or a practice or a
protocol that would allow them to do that with other
uman beings, to just wind them up and make them
say the words come out of this guy's mouth, this politician,
this Central American politician. Whatever we dose the with the
this injection, and he says whatever we tell him to say,

(01:06:03):
and we just control him like a puppet. So the
fear of the bad guys having that technology is a
little bit of them revealing their own wishes there. Yeah,
and it's um, it's it's kind of an open question
as to how much of Alan Dullis believes everything that
he's saying, that the Soviets are actually at advance, and

(01:06:24):
how much of it is that, well, this is just
something I want and the way to get it is
to claim that the Soviets are making it. And for
those of you are new to the show, relatively new.
But I was on the episode on The Dullest Brothers.
We did two parts, part two parter three parts. I
think it's a three partner. There was a lot to
say about those cool dudes, but there's two Those two men.
The point of that episode and why I wanted to

(01:06:45):
be on are two of the most influential people in
the history of the modern world, and most people don't.
If you know their names, you only know it in passing,
like you briefly heard it in history class or whatever.
The Dullest Brothers were a couple of the Gitexts of
the world as it exists today. Like and it's just
one piece of it. Yeah, and and everything Alan is

(01:07:06):
doing here because Alan is not on on the ground
guy for m k Ultra. He's not like signing off
on specific programs. He's not really even signing off on
specific torture prisons. He's just kind of generally saying, keep
working on this. I'll make sure you keep getting money,
keep working on this. And then every now and then
he'll read like a paper um, because again he's like,
he's like the he's he's the he's not the he's

(01:07:30):
not the execution man, right, he's the idea guy. You know,
he's the he's the big picture sort of fellow. UM.
And so when we talk about the question of like
does he believe the Soviets are on the verge of
all this? Um, I think one thing that's useful to
ask is, like, what were the Soviets doing at the
same time, like, what actual mind control research does the
Soviet Union involve and is there any way in which

(01:07:53):
it could justify all of the horror of the CIA
does Now, it's true that the Soviet Union had experimented
with mind control. Um, it's possible they put more than
a billion dollars into the research, although that is hard
to say accurately. Um. But you know, the CIA, as
we've started talking about and we'll be talking about, is
obsessively focused on chemicals. Right. The CIA believes there is

(01:08:14):
a specific physical drug that if we figure out how
to dose it right, or we figure out how to
administer it right, it will allow us to brainwash and
reprogram human beings. The Soviets don't really spend much time
on this kind of thing. Instead, they focus on what
we might be comparatively called cheerful nonsense. Um. A common

(01:08:34):
belief early in the Soviet Union is that and this
is stuff that starts out in like nineteen nineteen Soviet scientists.
A number of them think that there's there's this idea
that thoughts are like a physical thing, right, Like thoughts
are a kind of like there's a there's like electrical
waves and stuff, and this is true in your brain.
And so kind of from that, there's this idea that

(01:08:57):
since thoughts are something physical that can be detect did
and monitored, they can probably be altered to right, and
maybe you can change the way people think by changing
the waves in their brain. Um. And they kind of
take from this that like, well, there's there's probably like
people who can tap into those waves and alter thoughts.

(01:09:18):
And this kind of leads the Soviet Union to put
a shipload of money into psychic research. Now, the earliest
like examples of this are animal research, which we're like,
so there's an animal research program conducted in the earliest
years of the U s SR by a guy named
Vladimir Durov, and Durov claims that he's figured out how

(01:09:39):
to carry out He's carry out successful tests of telepathy
on animals. Right, Durov claims, I figured out how to
manipulate the minds of animals. Now, Jason, you want to
guess what Durov's job prior to being a Soviet psychic
scientist was. Circus? Yeah, he's a circus clown. Um. Yeah,

(01:09:59):
so circus clown Vladimir Durov becomes the kind of the
center of the early Soviet mind control experiments. Did he
really work in a circustance, yes, he says he No,
he's a circus clown. Jason, Oh, I thought you actually knew.
Were you just guessing? I was guessing because yeah, he's
a Soviet circus and a guy. I thought he was

(01:10:21):
like an animal, like an elephant trainer guy. And he thought, Hey,
I've mastered I'm I'm the tiger whisperer. Look he has
a circuit. Now. I think he's the kind of circus
clown who is working with animals, right, because like that,
like rodeo clowns, a big part of their job is
distracting animals. Um, but he's he's a clown, like that's
his literal, his actual cvous circus clown. And the reason

(01:10:43):
I came to mind is because, like the Tiger King guy,
like anybody who thinks they can talk to animals. A
few people seeing the Tiger King documentary, tiger people are
are all nuts. Yeah, they're crazy, They're lunatics, dangerous people.
There's a specific type of crazy that comes with working
with big, dangerous animals. And anybody who goes out and
like they start to market themselves as I can control

(01:11:05):
animals like I can talk to them, or that guy
that got eaten by the bears because he thought he
could community bears like a specific personality type that I
don't fully understand it, but there's something that drives people
a little bit nuts. And so I can just imagine
this guy marching into an office, and I've mastered. I've
mastered the ability to with my mind, with the power

(01:11:27):
of my mind, to control the scrolls all manner of animals,
and that is that is pretty much what happens. I'm
going to quote from the l A Review of Books
here in During a conference hosted by the Institute on
Brain Research of Brain Research on mental influence on the
behavior of animals, the neurologists and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekterev

(01:11:48):
presented Durov's dubious research to his colleagues and subsequently conducted
similar experiments on human beings. Their results, which were never replicated,
led beck Toev to think that the mental effect of
one individ rule on another is possible at a distance
through some kind of living matter, most likely through hurts waves.
Bektorev's wave theory was further corroborated by a third man

(01:12:09):
of science, an electrical engineer named Bernard Kazynski. Kazynski claimed
that the transmission of mental information at a distance is
the same electromagnetic as an ordinary radio communication, just thus
giving telepathy is supposedly dependable scientific foundation. And you can
get why people could fall for elements of this. Radio
is pretty new at the time. Um. It's if you're

(01:12:30):
able to like send waves that include people's voices around
the world. And that's the thing that when you were
born people couldn't do. Um. Why it's not that crazy
to think, like, well, there's probably some way to do
that with thoughts, right, Like, that's not an inherently unreasonable
thing to try, you know. Um, So it is important. Like,

(01:12:50):
as silly as this is and as funny as it
is that the starts with a circus clown, it's not
unreasonable that you would want to, like, see, well, do
thoughts work like radio waves? Is there's some way to
like intercept and change thoughts as they fly through the areas?
That a thing that people can do. Um. And of
course it's not um. If you if you are interested
in the history of Soviet pseudo scientific mind control, I

(01:13:11):
can recommend the book Homo Sovieticus by Vladimir will Well Minski.
But the short of it is nothing they do works like.
It does not work at all. What we know though
makes it all sound decidedly it's not the same as
what the CIA is doing, because, as far as I
can tell, for all of the different messed up things
the Soviet unions do, does they don't have a program
where they are like injecting poison into random people, uh

(01:13:34):
in order to see if it will let them control
their minds. And I think part of what makes this evident,
like the relative banality of their of their mind control
research is the primary real world application of Soviet telepathy research.
On October eight, nine, nine, after the Soviet pull out
from Afghanistan and just a month before the fall of

(01:13:54):
the Berlin Wall, Soviet Channel one played video of a
licensed physician who would previously been a hypnotist for the
Olympic weightlifting team. He led viewers of Soviet TV through
what was effectively a series of meditations, telling them to
drink water and trying to get them to feel better
about the government. His stated goal was to quote Calma Land,
beset by turbulence and heal the body politic. Um. You

(01:14:18):
may recognize from your Soviet history that this does not
work out. Um. So however, and we don't, you know,
we have less access on some of the details of
this program than we do about the CIA's MK Ultra,
although not a tremendous amount less. But it is probably
worth saying that the c that the the KGBS mind
control program is not as extensive, um or as nightmarish

(01:14:42):
as the CIA's in part because it's just kind of
based on a fundamentally sillier thing, right, Like they're trying
to do psychic stuff, and that's just a little bit
less scary than trying to drug people. But I think
there's a thing where whatever the spies or were who
whatever they were bringing back to them, we have this
thing in the USA, and maybe just just the way

(01:15:04):
it has to be in like intelligent circles where you
almost portray the enemy is like bond villains, like you
assume that they're so far ahead of the curve in
terms of what they can do or what they're capable of,
you know, or you'll get headlines about China's latest direct
energy weapon or whatever, and the truth is none of
these countries can spend even a fraction of what we

(01:15:26):
can on stuff like this. And we saw so much
of this during the War on Terror, Like the fear
of a dirty bomb like that was all you heard
about for a while and until finally somebody came out
and said, look, if they're a dirty bomb, the damage
would be done by the initial explosion, and that's pretty
much it. Like like packing a bunch of low grade
radioactive material into a box and put in some sea formside,

(01:15:47):
Like that's just not much of anything that it doesn't
matter because it's like we just assume that terrorists can
easily get hold of nuclear material, We just assume they
can easily get hold of nervy gas. And it's like,
actually no, it's what we always attribute way more abilities
to them than what they actually have. And during the
Cold War and at the height of the Cold War,

(01:16:09):
this was at truly crazy levels with the Soviet Union,
like the way we talked up the capability of everything
from their tanks to whatever secret stuff they were they
were working on, um, you know, space based weapons whatever,
Like it was always any rumor like, well we've you
know that that you would if it came from your

(01:16:29):
own government. You would laugh it off, like, well, we've
got a team of psychics who can mind control you
from the other side of the planet. We're like okay,
but no, when it's a Russians doing it, it's like,
oh my gosh. And in our team of psychics. Example
of like how deeply some of that belief managed to last.
In two thousand seven, the Department of Home and Science
Security signs a contract and pays for Soviet psycho alcology

(01:16:53):
research to create a psychic criminal detection system to fight terrorism. Um,
so we actually get tricked by this stuff, like thirty
years after twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Um,
it's pretty funny. And we've dismissed the idea of these
energy weapons. But of course the weapon that caused to
Vannah syndrome very real, the absolutely real weapon that because

(01:17:18):
that's why, like the Russians are winning so easily in Ukraine,
because they have this this mind beam that can debilitate
you from with this invisible energy. Yes, that that's that.
I mean, we're I think everyone listening is aware of
sweeping Russian successes in Ukraine due to their their laser
energy technology. Um. But yeah, so you know, that's what

(01:17:39):
the Soviet Union is actually working on. They do not
have a mind control serum. They're not really working on
a mind control serum. They are paying people to sit
in rooms and like try to talk to dogs with
their brains. Um. Meanwhile, the CIA is being kind of
steadily driven into mania by a steady drip of disinformation
about Communist brainwashing um. And they decide they've got to

(01:18:01):
bring in a scientist to help really take like clean
up some of these programs they're working on and allow
them to actually close the mind control gap with the
Soviet Union. And they settle on a young man named
Sydney Gottlieb. He is he is all over this motherfucker so.
Sydney was born on August third, nineteen eighteen, in New York,

(01:18:22):
New York, to Hungary and Jewish immigrants. He came into
the world with a club foot so severe that he
couldn't walk for the first years of his life. His
mom had to carry him everywhere for most of his
childhood until he was able to finish a series of
three brutal operations. Sidney took his first steps without leg
braces at age twelve. He would go on to be
a gifted folk dancer and to live in extremely active life.

(01:18:44):
And his story would be more satisfying if not for
how his parents afforded the operation that gave him his legs.
The Gottlieb family owned sweatshops in the garment industry, which
are some of the worst of the sweatshop family. Um,
we don't have a lot of to tail of about
his family sweatshop, but it is not a nice place.
And as a young man, Gottlieb joins a campus chapter

(01:19:06):
of the Young People Socialist League because he's so disgusted
by his dad's sweatshop. Um. So like, this part is
not really his fault, but that's always fun when when
sweatshop moneies what pays for your child surgery. Now, for
his own part, Gottlieb struggled with a stutter, which he
only corrected later in life. He rose above these challenges though,
and he was a really good student. He graduates, he

(01:19:28):
enrolls in New York City College. He does well there,
but Sidney decides that he wants to pursue a career
in agricultural biology, which eventually leads him out of the
city for the first time. At Arkansas Tech, despite his
strictly urban roots. He fits in well there, and he's
described by his classmates as quote a Yankee who pleases
the Southerners in general. Across the decades of his life

(01:19:50):
and career, Basically everyone who meets this guy agrees that
he's a very pleasant man. Sydney is kind of a
hippie rightly. He is a back to the land dude.
He likes farming, he likes taking air of his goats,
he likes folk dancing. Like he's a in everything but
his job for the CIA. Like a sweet kind of
hippie dude. So he eventually gets his doctorate in biochemistry

(01:20:11):
at the California Institute of Technology. He marries the daughter
of a preacher named Margaret Moore. She'd been raised in
India as a missionary, but had discarded dogmatic faith in
her religion for kind of a more agnostic, pan spiritual
sort of thing, and Sydney is in a similar position.
He's proud of his Jewish heritage, but he's not really
a practicing Jew. And both of them are seekers, right like,

(01:20:34):
they're kind of interested in Eastern religion. They're interested, they
don't like give up entirely the religions they're raised with.
But there they have and this is you know, pretty
common at the time, and now like they have this
kind of syncretic attitude towards towards all of this stuff,
and Sydney is going to always be a very curious,
open minded guy when it comes to this sort of thing.
At first, Sydney seeking leads him to work for the

(01:20:56):
f d A, where he tests drugs in a boring,
safe and legal way. Next, he does some plant research
for the National Research Council, and along the way he
and Margaret like by an unpowered cabin near Vienna, Virginia,
and they start a goat farm, which is where they
raise their children and are going to live most of
their lives in this kind of like off grid goat
farming community. In addition to his interests in religion and dance,

(01:21:18):
and Gottlieb starts to become fascinated with early reports of
psychedelic research. In the summer of nineteen fifty one, Alan
Dullis makes the decision to hire Gottlieb to help with
Project Art to Choke. Now. During World War Two, Sydney
had been unable to serve because his foot's all you know,
hurt uh, and this he kind of had this at
least his biographer makes the argument that, like this is

(01:21:39):
part of why he decides to join the CIA, is
that he had this desire to serve his country that
he hadn't been able to actually do during the war. Um,
and Alan kind of Alan is a pretty good at manipulating.
Alan sees this in Sydney, and part of the pitch
he makes to Gotlieb is like, hey, you know, you
you missed out on fighting for your country back during

(01:21:59):
that war. We're in another crisis point here right, this
secret war we're fighting with the Soviets is just as
important as anything that happened in World War Two. And
now we do have a place for you. So this
is your chance to serve your country, Dullis. And part
of why he may have been so good at kind
of manipulating Sydney is Dullis had been born with the
club foot too. Um. They both kind of had that

(01:22:20):
thing in common, weirdly enough, which is not a super
common thing. And maybe that's a little bit of how
Dullas kind of is able to get inside Sydney's head.
But he seems to be pretty good at at understanding
Gottlieb um. It also may have helped the two men
understand each other. Uh Sydney is almost immediately made chief
of the new CIA Chemical Division, and he's given a
free hand and budget to explore the concept of a

(01:22:41):
truth serum. One of the first tests conducted under Gotlieb's
command is a series of chemical tortures at a black
site in the Panama Canal Zone on a Bulgarian politician
named Dmitri Dimitrov. He'd given info to the CIA in
the past, but then his handlers had become convinced that
he was about to start working with the French, so
they had kidnapped him, let the Greeks torture him for

(01:23:02):
sent six months, and then sent him to his secret
prison in Panama. So this was their guy. They don't
even think that he's going over to the Soviets. They
think he's working with their allies, but they still send
him over to get tortured in Greece, and then he
winds up in Panama where Sidney Gottlieb is asked like, hey,
help us figure out how to like chemically torture this
guy so he'll give up information on who had hired

(01:23:23):
him um. In early nineteen fifty two, a CI agent
in Panama wrote that because of his confinement, uh Dimitrov
quote has become very hostile to the United States and
our intelligence operations. In particular. This was seen as a
perfect chance to try the new artichoke techniques. The CIA
under Gottlieb works on Kelly for three years and whatever

(01:23:44):
they did to him, we've destroyed the record. Um. But
this guy Dimitrov Kelly is kind of the nickname they
have for him in the in the files, he survives,
and he does try to go to the media and
talk about the fact that he's been in a CIA
secret prison being tortured, and so like, the news media
sees this bulgarian politician saying that he's been in a
CIA black site for years, and they're like, they called

(01:24:07):
the CIA and are like, as this guy legit, and
the CIA says, oh, no, of course not. And so
nobody covers this guy's life story and as evidence, all
of the records are gone. Wouldn't we have records if
we had done that? Instead, all we have is this
barrel full of ashes. Um. It's also worth noting that

(01:24:28):
it is later proven he had never been planning to
go to the French. Um, they were entirely they just
like they just destroyed this man's life who had been
working for them for absolutely no reason. And that's going
to become a really common story for the CIA under Gottlieb.
But Jason, that's all we got time for today. Yes, yes,

(01:24:48):
we barely got started. We have arrived at the beginning
of MK Ultra. Yeah. Yeah, we're almost at the beginning
of MK and this and this could have been much
much more just getting to this point. There's it's a lot.
It was a whole thing because it starts when everybody
thinks of them Koltra, they're not thinking of three, they're

(01:25:09):
thinking of the stuff that happened going forward. Um, we
probably could have done a two part or just on
like the Army's chemical weapons experiments and style biological weapons
experiments in World War two and ship like it is.
There's so much going on here. But I think this
gives people good context as to what's happening. Jason, you

(01:25:29):
want even context as to how they can buy your
book anywhere anywhere the sells books aside from like grocery
stores and stuff. Again, the title is if this book exists,
you're in the wrong universe. Um, if you want to
keep up with me, my name is Jason Pargent P
A R G I N. Type that into almost any
social media platform and you will find I'm on there,

(01:25:50):
including TikTok. I have become TikTok famous in the last
six weeks. So I I have been watching your TikTok's.
Um very erotic, I have to say so. Yeah. And
by the way, as we sit here and talk about
how foolish it is that you can mind control someone,
the fact that I set for four straight hours scrolling
through TikTok's, that's how I use my total freedom of mind.

(01:26:14):
The idea that you could be brainwashed by some sort
of advanced technology is ludicrous. It is. It is funny
that so much of what these the CIA was trying
to do, a number of people have figured out and
states have figured out how to basically do by just
like fucking with people on social media. Um, that's that's good.

(01:26:34):
That's a good side. Yeah, And all they talk about
the well, someday they'll have advanced techniques to make like
deep fakes and they can have like a fake Barack
Obama confess to somebody. It's like you realize, just putting
that on an extremely blorried jpeg with like comic sands
like that will that will spread around Facebook and twenty
minutes with no no source or deep fakery or anything.

(01:26:57):
Just yeah that. I I have long been of the
opinion that like, no deep fakes aren't going to be
what destroys us, Like we're we're already well passed. That
being the thing I'm worried about is not required. It
does not have to be that sophisticated anyway. But your
book is very sophisticated. People should check it out. Um,

(01:27:17):
and uh, I have a book too, It's called After
the Revolution. You can also find it wherever books are sold.
This has been Behind the Bastards, part one of the
mk Ultra series. We've got three more coming for you.
So strap in and take a shipload acid. Take enough
acid that you just high for the next fourteen days. Um,

(01:27:38):
that's probably a good idea. Behind the Bastards is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: MKUltra: When The CIA Tried to Destroy Free Will