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

Robert is joined again by Jason Pargin for part three of our series on Project MKUltra.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome back to week two of the Behind the Bastards
m k Ultra episodes. I'm Robert Evans. I am the
normal host of this show unless you're part of a
CI A mind controlled experiment that has deep patterned you
and cause you to forget the real host of this show. Um,
but that probably hasn't happened. Uh. And to explain why

(00:24):
that probably hasn't happened, here's our guest, Jason Pargeon. Hello.
For those of you did not listen to parts one two,
I am frequent podcast hosts and author Jason Pargean needs
to be Evans boss. Back in the crack dot com days,
where I was executive editor for thirteen years from two
thousand seven till to till two thousand and twenty, during

(00:47):
what I like to think of as the glory years.
Maybe other people think those were the bad years and
that it was fine before and after that. Jason, I
would think anyone who disagrees with you on that point
has probably had their minds destroyed by the sea had
ad a like BuzzFeed. Uh. Yeah, but I have a
novel and it's called If this book exists, You're in

(01:08):
the wrong universe. That is coming out right around the
time you're listening to this. Uh anywhere books are sold
in any format e book, audiobook. It is one of
the John Dies at the End books. If you know
what that means, you are very excited. If not, then
that was just a nonsense string of words that I
just said. There there there's a somewhat famous book and
movie called John Dies at the End of the movie.

(01:30):
You can find on streaming. But it is a New
York Times best selling book series, and this is this
book is one of them. If you've not read any
of them, you can start in this one if you
want it is That would be a very expensive way
to start a series, considering the other ones are probably
like on Kendall at this point. Um, but by all means,

(01:52):
please by by the thirty dollar hardcover. I that that
will be good for me if you do that. Yeah,
um by his book. Yeah, it's worth it. It's like
it's like taking a little bit of LSD and then
not having the CIA electro shock you until your brain
gets depatterned. It's like the good parts of that experience.

(02:14):
It's like it's like what Sydney got Leaves doing, as
opposed to what got leaves doing to everyone else. Um, yeah, exactly. Um,
it's fun. You know, there's a there's one of the
things that you can do if you want to have
a good time is you can find old uh CIA

(02:35):
reports about their drug trips. Um. I'm looking at one
from nineteen three right now where they're talking about like
the Gateway experience and like the kind of basically they're
talking about like, hey, is it possible that we're communicating
with aliens while we're all doing drugs? Um, And kind
of the conclusion is that it's scary and they don't know,

(02:56):
because again, these are, to be fair, these are the
kind of thing things that happened to you when you're
on drugs. It's like did I just talk to some
sort of like being from outside of you know, time
and space? Um, And it's it is I don't know,
comforting is the wrong word, but it's funny to note
that the CIA has had the same experiences. Okay, and
I have to maybe this is a spoiler for the

(03:17):
remaining episode or episodes in this in this series, but
between now, from the beginning to the end of this,
like obviously they did record a ton of data. They
did do a ton of what they're calling experiments. Did
they learn anything useful that wasn't learned elsewhere or that
other people didn't already know? Was there any good that

(03:39):
came from this? No? Uh. In short, Jason, I mean
the the good that comes from it. To the extent
that good comes from it, is that l s D
gets out and becomes incredibly popular among the generation of
musicians and artists and philosophers and thinkers. And it gets
out largely because of guys who are working with Most
of the people who read LSD into the actual like

(04:03):
the civilian populace in a way that's not horribly abusive,
are also these guys who are like contracting their their doctors,
you know, they're they're they're psychiatrists who have practices. They're
working with the CIA for extra money. And part of
that is that they're drugging people in nightmare experiments. But
also they have free acid, and so they take it

(04:24):
and they give it to their friends, some of whom
wind up writing very influential books and becoming like these
members of the of the sixties, like that that generation
of you know, people who tune in and drop out,
so we get a lot of cool music from that
period of time. Um, there's a lot of of interesting
thinkers who are influenced by the experiences they have on

(04:45):
ASCID and a lot of that is positive. And I
guess you could say that came inadvertently through as a
result of MK Ultra. That's not what they were trying
to do, and it was not because they were drugging
people and then those people wrote great albums. It's more that, like, well,
we were giving out acid for free to the same
guys who were torturing people, and some of them gave

(05:05):
that acid to people who then gave it to people
who wound up writing pretty pretty rad albums who became
Jerry Garcia. You know, it certainly was not anything to
do with what they intended. In fact, I assumed that
the Cia very much did not like the cultural pivot
that occurred in the nine six. I think Gottlieb was
probably cool with it because he is kind of a hippie.

(05:28):
But yeah, most of these guys would we're we're we're
horrified by what was happening. Um, we'll be talking about
that when we get to the Charles Manson portions of
these episodes. Jason um so as we kind of left
off here, you know, we talked about dr you and
Cameron over in Canada de patterning people all of this
nightmare work. While Cameron is doing this horrible ship, Sidney

(05:51):
Gottlieb and his friends are continuing to go buck fucking
wild with their own personal LSD experiments. Conscientious guided trips
and consensual random dosings had given away to a culture
of surprise acid trips for anybody who happened to be
near scientists from the mk Ultra program. At the end
of nineteen fifty four, the problem had gotten so bad

(06:14):
that the CIA's Office of Security sent out a memo
to all of the agents at the CIA, warning that
certain officers were testing LSD on their colleagues and that
it could quote produce serious insanity for periods of eight
to eighteen hours and possibly longer. Due to the risk
of being drugged. They recommended employees not drink from the

(06:35):
punch bowl at the upcoming Christmas party, Like that's a
that's a memo you get at the CIA. Don't drink
from the punch this year. Somebody's probably gonna put acid
at it, Like can you deliver ascid that way? And
oh absolutely, I had no idea. You can put it
in any liquid. Yeah, yeah, you don't notice that it

(06:56):
doesn't really have a flavor. So a lot of people
like sticking orange use apparently like potentiates some of the effects,
So people take it into o J a lot. If
you're just getting it liquid, most people get it as
like it's like a little piece of paper that has
has had a drop on it or something, and they
take it that way. But you know, all of the
information you would need if you were really doing this

(07:17):
as an experiment about in terms of like what are
what other medications are these people on? What else do
they have that could be counteracting it or could be
you know, let me interact with it, you know, or
any of these people, you know, how many of them
been drinking alcohol, What's what's the what's the you know,
the average weight? Or do they have pre existing conditions,

(07:37):
do they have pre existing mental health problems? And all
the things you would be like if you're going to
do a study today to see like what theyre if
they somehow allowed you to test, Like we're going to
do somebody's food around them. They don't know what it's coming.
We're going to study the response there's a battery of
data you would need on that person to know what

(07:59):
you were looking at in their response and why it
was different from individual to individual. Right, And it sounds
like they were doing any of this. It was so
sloppy and unscientific. Yeah, what is the scientific value of
putting LSD in a punch bowl and seeing what happens
at a work party? Like, how do you actually turn
that into into usable data? Because you're you're not if

(08:22):
you're just having fun. If it turned into an orgy,
or if it turned into a riot, or if it
turned into nothing, that doesn't mean anything unless you know
all of the other complicating factors, like the mood. Was
it something that was gonna happen anyway? Is that unique
the people of this particular age or the particular mindset
that work in this agency, Like you don't have any

(08:44):
of the information that you would need to know. Okay,
this same thing will happen if we try this in Moscow,
you know, at a party there. You know we're trying
to destabilize their government. Like that tells you nothing. No,
it's completely it's completely useless from a scientific standpoint. And
I think, honestly, I'm sure Sidney would have had an excuse.
But he's not doing this for science. You're you're not

(09:06):
some of this he's probably doing for he believes he's
doing for science. But you're not dosing the punch bowl
at the CIA Christmas party for science. You're doing it
because it's fun, Like because you think it's funny, right, Like,
that's why this is happening. Um, And yeah, it's it's
it's pretty pretty cool that this, this is just this.

(09:27):
We've just this man has been set loose. He's been
given a massive portion of the CIA's budget during the
period of time in which the CIA is the most
powerful it will ever be, and no one can tell
him no. So he's just doing whatever the funk he wants. Um. Now,
Sydney seems to handle this pretty well, the stress of
managing this like international drugging and torturing ring. Some of

(09:51):
his colleagues, though, are more haunted by what the CIA
was doing than their boss. One of these men was
Frank Olsen, who he mentioned a little earlier. He's a U. S.
Army biochemist and a biological weapons researcher. Um. One of
the first things that like Olsen will do in this
project is he sits in at these black sites when
they're torturing prisoners to death with LSD and mescalin and

(10:12):
he takes notes, right, like, that's one of his early
jobs and what becomes m k Ultra. Now, according to
reports from other men in the program, Olsen gets On
is not happy with this. He doesn't feel good about
doing this job, like sitting in the chair and watching
people go mad and then be executed, kind of like
fux him up a little bit. Um, he's like the

(10:33):
most human person at the CIA. We're going to hear
from right now? I guess so. And and again all
of this is debated. There are some people say, no,
that's not what it was. He didn't have an issue
with what we were doing. Was something else. But according
to the people who say that he had an ethical
issue with like what they were doing, they say that
he spoke up about it and he started to talk

(10:54):
about quitting the agency. Um. And this starts to cause
like a lot of talk the higher levels of the
CIA of like what are we gonna do about Frank Olson? Right,
His doubts are supercharged when in May of nineteen fifty
three he goes to Britain they're doing another series of
like tests on chemical weapons. And he's not just the
acid guy. He's got like you know, he's he's a

(11:14):
he's a biological weapon specialist. And he watches a servant,
a Sarah nerve gas test go wrong um and a
twenty year old volunteer soldier dies an agonizing death as
a result of it. And this is at least what
Kinser kind of right, Stephen Kinzer kind of says, this
is the inciting incident that gets Olsen to decide he's
actually going to leave the agency Kinser rights quote. A

(11:35):
month later, Olson was back in Germany. While he was there,
according to records that were later declassified, a suspected Soviet
agent code named Patient number two was subjected to an
intense interrogation somewhere near Frankfurt. On that same trip, according
to a later reconstruction of his travels, Olsen visited a
CIA safe house near Stuttgart where he saw men dying,
often in agony, from the weapons that he had made.

(11:57):
After stops in Scandinavia and Paris, he went to Britain
and visited Williams sergeant for a second time. Immediately after
their meeting, Sergeant wrote a report saying that Olsen was
deeply disturbed over what he had seen in c i
A safe houses in Germany and displayed symptoms of not
wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed. He sent
his report to superiors with the understanding that they would
award it to the CIA, and Sergeant is like a

(12:20):
British kind of liaison. So you see what's kind of
happening here. This is at least the way that kind
of Kinzer depicts it. You've got this scientist who is
traveling around the world, watching these weapons he's helping to develop,
kill people, watching people be tortured, watching that people have
weapons tested on them, and it just starts to break him. Um.
There is evidence that Frank had already started to talk

(12:41):
about some of his top secred research with one of
his friends, who later claimed in an interview quote he said,
norm you would be stunned by the techniques that they used.
They made people talk, they brainwashed people, They used all
kinds of drugs, they used all kinds of torture. They
were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians,
and they didn't care whether whether they got out of
that or not. Um So, he talks about this to

(13:04):
an extent and out about that Lettani right there is
that the only part that's not true is that it worked. Yeah,
because he lists like, well, they're usually Nazis, they're killing people,
are doing this, they're doing that, and they're they're they've
got ways to get truth out of people. It's like,
we'll see, that's the thing. That's the one thing they did.
That's the one that ye know, the part where you

(13:26):
thought it was actually effective at accomplishing something for the
cause is where you were wrong. All the rest of
it was true, the Nazis, all of that, Yeah, it's um.
So this guy has friend Norm claims that like he
basically bears his guts to him, says, like, you know,
I watched them torture people to death. They're doing all
these horrible things, carrying out this nightmare research, and I

(13:49):
can't take it anymore. I'm going to leave um And
Norm says that Frank Olsen tells him I'm getting out
of the c I a period. So near the end
of nineteen fifty three, not long after this conversation, Frank
is invited to a work retreat with several other CIA men,
including Gottlieb's deputy and Sydney Gottlieb. After the dinner, all

(14:09):
of the men are dosed without their consent with L S. D.
We don't know how much they're given, UM because as
far as we can tell, nobody's taking notes about that
sort of thing on a regular basis. But Sydney reacts
badly to the huge dose of surprise acid he's given
after like watching a bunch of men die horribly UM.
And days later he still has not recovered. So he
gets taken away by several colleagues to New York City

(14:32):
to speak with a psychiatrist who was friendly with the agency.
It's Abramson, I believe, the guy who gave Um Gottlieb
his first dose. And during that trip, while he's in
the hotel room with like a colleague, Frank jumps from
an eleven story or ten story window, out of the
window and dies on impact. Um. That is the official

(14:52):
report that while he's in this hotel room with another
CIA agent, he jumps of his own accord out of
the window and he dies on impact. Now, are you
do you think anybody's gonna doubt the official narrative on
this one? Jason. Yeah, the people who know even a
little bit about him caultre the moment this guy came
into the story, they knew this is the famous This

(15:13):
is one of the figures along with God, Like, this
is one of the figures that the people that are
kind of a cursory knowledge of NK culture like me, Yeah,
these are this is one of the guys that they
already knew because this is like what movies have been
made about this. Yeah. And for the record, when it
comes to like conspiracy theories, this is almost certainly like
a true one because like, so they exhume Frank Olsen's

(15:37):
body in nineteen and they find specific cranial injuries in
his remains that suggests that he was unconscious when he
started to fall. Now, it's not impossible that something else happened,
especially like if he was dosed with a drug or something.
But it's pretty likely he was murdered by the c
i A right, Like, that's that's not an unreasonable conclusion

(15:58):
to draw based on the extant evidence. Um, you know,
we don't know exactly what happened. It's also they have
earned the doubt, yeah, that people express here like I
I again, I'm very big on. I'm not in favor
of people who take the true things we know about

(16:18):
in culture and then try to expand them into very
weird fiction, because I think that discredits everything in this case.
You know, in the case of this man dying in
the way they said he did, it is not weird,
like them throwing him out of a window would be
the least weird part of the story. Yeah, it is
not at all out of line with the things these

(16:38):
people have shown themselves as willing to do morally. It
makes sense from a logical standpoint. Now, it's also possible
that like the CIA killed Frank Olsen, and they didn't
do it by having him thrown but instead like drugging
him at different points and kind of like breaking him
until he wound up killing himself. Um. Not out of
the question, but yeah, it seems like there's i mean,

(17:01):
based on sort of the exhumation and what gets found
when they when they do this, uh, the second autopsy,
it definitely seems like there's a pretty strong odds he
was just straight up murdered. Um. But we'll never know
precisely what happened um Frank Olsen's death. Whatever the exact
details of it was not quieted up. Obviously, this is

(17:21):
like the thing people tend to know about in k Ultra.
It's probably the single most famous moment of the entire program. Um,
even though it's not the most fucked Obviously, the fact
that they murdered a guy who had been helping them
torture people is not nearly the worst thing that happens
as a result of this um. But it's just such
a like Cold War story, right, This like mysterious suicide

(17:43):
of a CIA doctor, and I don't know, for whatever reason,
it's the thing that people latch onto. Um, this is controversial.
Whatever happens is like causes problems within the CIA. Frank
Olsen had been a prominent and a well liked member
of the team. The c i a's general counsel, Lawrence Houston,
starts to like dozen investigation. He spends two weeks investigating

(18:06):
the suicide. And Houston is the guy who wrote helped
write the law that created the CIA. It is again like, obviously, yeah,
the CIA is investigating itself. I wonder what they found,
but it is worth noting basically, no one knows exactly
what God leaves doing. He doesn't have to report to anyone, right. Um,
so it's not entirely unlikely that Houston learns a lot

(18:27):
of things that he had not known about him k
Ultra in the process of investigating this, whatever the reality there.
He summarizes his findings after this investigation. Thus, Lee, it
is my conclusion that the death of Dr Olsen is
the result of circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken
in the course of his official duties for the U. S. Government,
and that there is therefore a direct causal connection between

(18:50):
that accident and his death. I am not happy with
what seems to me to be a very casual attitude
on the part of t SS representatives. That's the part
of the CIA that godly runs to the way experiment
was conducted, and to the remarks that this is just
one of the risks running with scientific experimentation. A death
occurred which might have been prevented, and the agency as
a whole, particularly the director, were caught completely by surprise

(19:11):
in a most embarrassing manner. So that's kind of the
the official sort of chastisement that Gottlieb gets over this.
It's um something else. I mean, I don't even have
there's I don't have a joke for that, because yeah, yeah,
what do you say, like he's he's writing about it

(19:32):
the way that it's like like you crash a company
car because like you're not paying enough attention or something
like there's such a bureaucratic problem. Um. I mean, and obviously,
you know, I'm not surprised that the CIA's findings aren't
we murdered a guy, but like, yeah, it's just I

(19:53):
don't know, seeing it that way is is for whatever
reason like that, the kind of the contrast between the
way they write about all this in a very like
almost corporate manner and what's actually going on is always
one of the more unsettling pieces of delving and n
MK ultra well and also truve basically every government sponsored

(20:16):
horror and history when you see the actual bureaucracy behind
it in the records they kept in it's all it's
all just memos And yeah, yep, well, Jason, you know
what who loves memos and corporate speak is our sponsors

(20:37):
who write stuff just like this, but not about murdering
their own team. So yeah, that's probably probably could have
been framed better. Let's just let's just rolled ads right
now before I say anything else, We're back. Ah, Jason,

(21:02):
act your head, Dode. This is like a just kind
of like a fucking um. I don't know getting all
of this at once. We're reading all of this in
a marathon session, so it's just sort of like hitting
like a like a series of bricks, um. And then
I'm pausing intermittently and being like, all right, Jason, time
to time to make a joke. Now was your joke, Jason?

(21:25):
The well, the to to kind of pull back here.
As a listener, I think most people came into this
with about the same amount of information about M k
Ultra as I had, and I think most people have
heard of it. They knew that it was a CIA
program that had something to do with mind control. They
knew that it's been in a million thrillers and spy movies.

(21:46):
That in any kind of movie that involved like Manchurion
candidates or mind control, anything like that, they will always mention, well,
this is all goes back to M k Ultra. So
the thing that I wanted to know coming into this
listening to you as a listener, and I think the
same thing they want to probably is at one point
is any of the most outlandish conspiracy stuff true, as in,

(22:10):
did they have even partial success creating a mansuring in Canada?
Did they have even partial success in trying to make
someone do something other than what they wanted to do,
not make someone piss their pants and vomit and control
will be? It was like, Wow, they didn't want to
do that. We need the thing that they once they

(22:30):
abandoned this as a truth serum, which again we also
know really doesn't exist. You can kind of get somebody
drunk and get them talking, but something that makes somebody
tell the truth is that's all not a real thing. Um.
So I think what people are kind of listening for
is like, was this all just people fooling themselves and
you know, creating horror stories and leaving a trail of

(22:53):
dead bodies behind them? Like, what's the weirdest thing they
actually accomplished? And I'm not trying to spoil the rest
of the EPISO so that we have coming up, but
I think we're trying to separate fact from fiction. What
I said earlier was that the fiction is assuming that
everything they wanted to do they actually did, the fact
is that everything they wanted to do was fantasy, and

(23:14):
what they actually did was they just ruined a bunch
of people's lives and accidentally started the psychedelic sixties movement.
What I will say is, if you're asking did they
succeed in implanting false memories and people into some extent,
the actual answer is we don't know, and we're will

(23:35):
be getting to them. Maybe they're kind of later on,
but certainly there is no evidence of success. Right. There
is no hard evidence during this period at all of
anything actually working. Um. And there's never been any evidence
that they actually Manachurian candidated someone and got them to
do spy ship like that. That has never happened as
far as we know. There is some evidence that they

(23:57):
get further on this than is entirely set link to
think about, and we will be chatting about that in
a bit. But UM, as regards Frank Olsen, this guy
who has been probably murdered, there's more investigations. UM. In
the end, Alan Dullis is forced to write a letter
to Gottlieb and tell him that he'd exercised poor judgment.

(24:17):
That is the extent of the actual discipline that Gotlieb
faces so by the mid nineteen fifties. After this has happened,
there are no longer any barriers at all as to
what Sydney can do. For a time after he's, you know,
given this massive budget and put in charge of this thing,
he is constrained by the fact that only Sandas Chemical
makes l s d um. The Agency had bought out

(24:39):
the entire world supply, but that was just tens of
thousands of doses. Jason Um Sydney wanted a hell of
a lot more, and as nineteen fifty four ended, Eli
Lily figures out the recipe and the CIA becomes their
primary customer, paying four thousand dollars for probably millions of
doses of lsd um. This is effectively an off of

(25:00):
the drug that they could now dose anyone and everyone,
which is what they proceed to do. The man Gottlieb
picked to run this program is a cool dude named
George White. George White is the platonic ideal basically of
a hard boiled, corrupt g man. He had worked as
a captain for the OSS during World War Two, and
then he was an Narcotics Bureau agent that's the precursor

(25:20):
to the d e A. So he's a fed he's
supposed to be fighting drug trafficking. He is famous among
his fellow FEDS for being heavily addicted to basically every
drug imaginable. And he is he is stealing everything from
the dealers he arrest, and he's doing them right. Um,
he like and he this is a thing that he's like,
he has more experience with this than Gottlieb. In nineteen

(25:43):
forty three, he's giving concentrated marijuana to New York mobsters
as part of a truth serum test um. Like, so,
George White is the guy that like, hey, we need
someone to secretly dose mobsters with pot to see if
it makes them tell the truth? Do you know any
mobsters who you can you can rug? George White doesn't
even think before he's like, oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, I

(26:03):
can do that in a minute. Like let's go, let's
just give me some fucking weed. I got that, I
got this. Yeah. Um. He is actually a really fun character. Um.
He's a terrible person, but just entertaining. So, starting in
the early fifties, the CIA has White run two safe
houses for LSD testing in Greenwich Village in New York City.

(26:23):
The men that he tested CIA drugs on were considered
quote expendable because they were drug addicts and otherwise marginalized people,
and they wouldn't be missed if they died or went insane.
And if they go to like if they find out
what's happening to them and they go to the cops
and are like, the CIA has dosed me with LSD, Well,
the cops are not going to to follow up that investigation, right. Um,

(26:45):
that's part of the genius. Afically confused here this man
they put in charge of these experiments, what what was
his background? His scientific background. He's a FED. He's a
he's a he's he's a federal agent. Um. He's he's
a federal agent whose specialty is that he looks and
sounds exactly like a mobster. So he's really good at
hanging out with drug dealers and doing drugs with them. Okay,

(27:07):
but does not have a background in like biochemistry or
science or the guy whose day job is stealing heroin
from drug dealers and then doing that heroin does not
have a medical degree. Yeah he is. He has no
kind of scientists. Um. So one of the reasons why

(27:29):
he gets this job is that, like because Gottlieb when
he's looking for a guy. He goes to the Bureau
of Narcotics and he's like, Hey, I'm looking for someone
to like help run this program where we're going to
be giving LSD to unsuspecting people, um, and they advise
George White, And when he meets White, Gottlieb kind of
falls in love with him. All of the c I
So again, the people running this for the Technical Division

(27:50):
are all big nerds, right, Gottlieb and his fellow scientists
that these academics they mostly grown up middle class. White
is like the kind of character you read about in
a pulp fiction novel. You know, he's always gotten multiple
weapons on him. He's got like several guns at any
given time, brass knuckles, knives. He talks luridly about all
these shootouts and fights he's been in, and he's like,

(28:11):
he's this hard character who's been like fucking in the streets,
fight like doing horrible cop ships since the twenties. So
they they treat him like he's like they've run into
Dick Tracy, right, Like they they kind of are are
spell bound by him, and that's part of why he
gets this job, right. He takes them on right, along,
so show them as guns and talk about this stuff,

(28:32):
and they're just like, I think he's really good at
manipulating the CIA doctors actually, and that's part of why
this works for him. Um So, initially when they first
start setting up these safe houses to drug men, George
White is going to be the actual guy who draws
them in like for testing. Who's the lure? And I'm
gonna quote now from Poisoner in Chief. He posed alternatingly

(28:54):
as a merchant, seaman or a bohemian artist and consorted
with a vast array of underworld characters, all of whom
were involve of in vice, including drugs, prostitution, gambling, in pornography.
It was under this assumed bohemian artist persona that White
wooden trap most of his MK Ultra victims. White regularly
dosed women at parties or who he just encountered in
the world, leaving vague notes in his diary like Gloria

(29:16):
gets Horror, janets sky high um. At one point, one
of his victims escapes and she makes it to Lennox
Hill Hospital, where she reports George White for drugging her
against her will. But the CIA had an arrangement with
the Medical Department of the NYPD. So the NYPD tells
this woman she's mistaken, nothing has happened to her, and
she's sent home. And again, easy for us to look

(29:38):
back and criticize now, but at the time, there was
no way to know that this that this could have happened. Well,
the I mean the the NYPD guys know, we have
been told by our contacts, the FEDS not to pursue this, right, like,
to calm this woman down and send her away. Right,
So there is some degree that the PD that doesn't

(30:00):
know the CIA is running like an acid warehouse, right
and like drugging people. They just know the CIA said, hey,
don't do anything with this case. Um, and this is
a thing that's going to happen a lot, right like
and this is also I have to say, this is
not like. This is the way things work sometimes with
like the FBI and cops. Right, Sometimes the cops will

(30:20):
arrest a guy like with contraband or something with drugs,
and it'll turn out he's an FBI informant, and so
the cops will release him because the FBI is like, hey,
we don't want to don't blow this up for us, right,
we need this guy. That is. You can think what
you want about law enforcement, but that's like a thing
that happens. The CIA is not a domestic agency. They
are not supposed to be working on American soil. At

(30:42):
no point is what they're doing in the United States legal. Um,
this is not a thing where it's normal and like
within legal limits for the CIA to like have a
secret program set up where they work with the NYPD
to like get their assets let go, that's not supposed
to be happening. So I do want to note here
it's kind of minor, like to be like when the

(31:02):
CIA was breaking the law by working on American soil,
when they're what they're doing is so much crazier. But
like they're not supposed to be working in the United
States at all. Yeah, if we didn't, if we hadn't
previously made that clear. Yeah, this is on top of
being insane, what they're doing is at this point extremely illegal.
In fact, they run into conflict with the FBI a

(31:24):
bunch because the FBI is like, you guys are running
a drug house and like you're the c I and this.
You know, the FBI and the c I are always
competing for money, so they're not super friendly with each other,
and they're like, what the funk is going on here? Like,
why are you guys allowed to do this? This isn't
we're supposed to be fucking with people here, you know.
Um So, George White is very good at his job,

(31:46):
to the extent that his job is to drug random people.
He does it a lot, but the CIA is hunger
for test subjects could not be sated by one man
dosing strangers and bars and at house parties. In nineteen
fifty five, the program expanded. White and Leave hit upon
the idea to hire sex workers and use them to
draw in men who could be drugged and then observed
secretly in a brothel. And I'm gonna quote from a

(32:08):
write up in the San Francisco Chronicle now. In ninety five,
White was transferred to San Francisco, where he had worked
as a journalist, and rented out an apartment on Telegraph
Hill to give his pad the desired French horehouse look.
White furnished it with Toulose fra trek posters, a picture
of a French can can dancer in kinky photos of
women in bondage, and domination photos. It was supposed to

(32:29):
look rich. An arcotics agent who regularly visited said, but
it was furnished like crap. White installed bugging equipment and
a two way mirror behind which he would sit on
a portable toilet, quaffing on martini from the picture he
kept in the refrigerator, and observed the proceedings. The prostitutes
who staffed the operation were paid in part with chits,
which they could use for favors such as getting out

(32:49):
of jail. So to put this picture in your head, Chasen,
there is a secret brothel where people cia paid institutes
who have get out of jail free cards take John's
dose them against their will with LSD for quote unquote
scientific purposes. And the only person evaluating what's going on

(33:12):
in these studies is George White, who is watching them
while actively shifting and drinking martinis. Now, I would love
to go back in time and after however many months
or years of operation went on, just sit Mr White
down and say, okay, can you explain to me let's

(33:36):
it will? I would have several several hundred questions, but
the one question I'd be interested if you can answer,
like do you even remember what this was for? Long
term Cold War gold like in terms of national security,
do you know what you're trying to accomplish here? Because
I strongly suspect he himself had probably lost track by

(33:57):
that point. I don't think he ever is thinking about it, right,
Like is he He's not sitting down and being like,
this is bringing us one step close and time my
mind control, Sarah, and that'll let us beat the Soviets.
He is he is pooping and drinking or teeny's while
he watches strangers have sex, which he does for years,
for hours every week. So as this has kind of

(34:22):
gone unspoken for three episodes listeners, but you may have
noticed we're doing a series on the CIA's misguided attempt
to find a mind control serum, and about once every
five minutes we stumble across a much better, more reliable
method of mind control, Like just luring men back with

(34:44):
sexy women works. Again, a number of things have been
shown to work in terms of mind control. Money. Yeah,
like this guy who has gotten the government to pay
for his little sex dungeon, and like just let him
teach a class on how to manipulate people like he

(35:04):
got like like like look at what he did to
draw Yeah, Like like this guy is living a different
life than any of us. Like he's just his ability
to get the authorities and everyone else to just cater
to his whims and his weird kinks and all all
on the taxpayer dime. Like just just ask him, just

(35:27):
ask him how to do it. He already knows of
all of the things that we've talked about. The detail
about this that sticks out to me most is that
he's his office seat is also a toilets. That's who's
that's who's running this program. Like when we talk about
the most secret in like terrifying thing the CIA ever did,

(35:50):
like this is what a lot of it boiled down to. Um,
it's just what a what a thing do have happened?
So over time George White learned that drugging men because
again he's experimenting with a bunch of stuff, he learns
that the best way is to drug them after they've orgasmed.

(36:10):
Um that that gets you better data at like getting
to listen to them talk and stuff while they're tripping.
I guess he said quote the men expected the hookers
to hurry off and became emotionally vulnerable when the women
said they wanted to stay a few more hours. And
again this is as close to you get as like
actual usable data. There's like, oh, you can manipulate men
by making them think women like them. That is the

(36:35):
most useful piece of information. This is the entire m
k Ultra program has uncovered so far. Something about their
mindset seems to shift after the seaman has left their body. Hm,
there's there's a sort of clarity that seems to come
over their their brains. George White kept done it again.
Give this man another bucket of LSD. It's it's something else.

(36:59):
So do you know what they call this, Jason? Have
you read the name they give this this program. I
can't wait to find out. It's Operation Midnight Climax. Okay,
so again their whole thing of we we carefully disguised
these operations given that randomized because this is just a
straight up porno name like Kim k Ultra. That's that's

(37:21):
the name of like an anime series. If you make
a porno about the CIA drugging people in a brothel,
that's what you call it. It's um Yeah, be so
redundant to make a porno out of this, Like that's
all it was a guy watching this throw to one
way mirror like it was already that it is. One

(37:42):
of the things that's interesting about this to me is that,
like we started this series talking about that time the
Army poisoned the entire city of San Francisco just to
see what would happen. It's weird to me they that
like that keeps being their base of operations, Like all
of these experiments, they everything keeps winding up back in
San Francisco. Maybe it's just that the weather is nice
and that's where people would prefer to be then the

(38:04):
East Coast a lot of the time, but it's it
is weird that, yeah, San Francisco is where this all
of these programs keep ending. The funk up um so
using you know, the operation Midnight Climax starts as they've
got this brothel and they're doing the experiments in the brothel,
but eventually they decided to expand out and just use
the entire city as a base. So George White does

(38:26):
a lot of this himself, but he also has agents,
some of whom are stationed. There's some of whom just
fly into like try experiments and they'll just dose random
people at restaurants and bars in San Francisco. Um, they
fan out across the city and just like give L
s D to people, um and not just l s D.
One source with the agency later told a journalist quote,
if we were scared enough of a drug not to

(38:48):
try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco,
and the CIA would just give it to people and
see what happens. Um. One thing I will say for
George White that that that maybe a mark in his
favorite morally. Any time he gets some new weird drug
from the CIA, he always tries it on himself first.
So that is the most honorable thing we've heard of

(39:10):
yet in these episodes. No, I will, I will bravely
throw myself on this grenade because because what if it
turns out this gets you more high than anything else
that's ever been made. Yeah, it's better that I It
is better that I check. I will bravely, bravely sacrifice myself. Yeah,

(39:32):
these are what the heroes of the CIA are doing
for us, jumping on that grenade. You know who will
jump on a grenade for you? Jason uh as some
sort of a monthly mattress service that we'll send you
a mattress in the mail every month. If you had
to have a product jump on a grenade for you,
you could do a lot worse than a mattress. And

(39:53):
they can ship those to you in a box. You know,
they'll get it to you in just a couple of days.
I am mattress. Uh, we're back speaking of mattresses. UM,
George White is buying a lot of them because he

(40:14):
opens the second safe House in Marin County, which is
I don't know if you've ever been to the Bay Area,
it's it's like a very very wealthy, very beautiful like area,
kind of outside of San Francisco. UM. And because it's
like number one, it's it's kind of high income. UM,
they're able to get like this bigger place that has

(40:34):
more space to allow for more elaborate experiments. The CIA
tests things like stink bombs and itching powder there, in
addition to stuff like specially designed hypodermic needles that could
inject poison into a wine cork. Gottlieb even tried out
an aerosolized L S D bomb on a party they
hosted there, but it didn't work due to the humidity
uh that particular day. Now, I think it's worth emphasizing

(40:56):
that while White is doing all of this, he's also
a highly placed officer with the Bureau of Narcotics. Like
he's one of the top men at what becomes the
d E a UM, and he's the guy who's like, yeah,
I'll do any drug. I don't give a ship like,
I'll take it, you know, I'll give it to people,
I'll poop and I'll watch him. Um. He is reported
to have regularly used the CIA's brothels to host parties

(41:17):
for his fellow narcotics officers. One survey of his career
claims quote, sometimes after a tough day on the beat,
he invited his narco, but he's up to one of
the safe houses for a little R and R. Occasionally
they end zipped their inhibitions and partied on the premises,
much to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to
complain about men with guns and shoulder straps chasing after
women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there

(41:40):
was always plenty of dope around, and the FEDS sampled
everything from hashish to L s D. White had quite
a scene going on for a while. By day he
fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night
he dispensed them to strangers. But who who better knew
the danger of these substances than a man that had
been at the front line. Yeah, Like it's like we

(42:03):
got to remind ourselves what we're trying to stop. Like,
imagine if everybody lived like this? Yeah, what what problems
we would have if everyone lived the way that Narcotics
Bureau officers do. We're just doing these drugs to keep
them out of circulation. Um. So yeah, again, we keep
harping on this, but it is kind of impossible to

(42:25):
see how George White, who is the guy running their
experiments on LSD, how he could possibly have conducted experiments
that provided useful data. He is nothing but a career
drug addict and thug, and he's just like, yeah, pooping
and watching them have hallucinations. Um, that's the science. There

(42:45):
are no doctors or other health professionals on hand at
any of these brothels in case an experiment goes wrong,
and things did go wrong often. In one particularly disastrous example,
a federal marshal named Wayne Ritchie was dosed with LSD
at the Federal building in San Francisco. He flipped out,
grabbed two guns and immediately robbed a bar in the

(43:07):
Filmore district. Now Richie did not know what was happening
to him, right, he drinks like some water or some ship,
and then he is hallucinating and he robs a fucking store. Um,
I don't know what else is going on with Richie
because I don't think a normal response to LSD is
to rob fucking bar. But also he's a federal marshal
who knows what kind of ships he's had happened in

(43:27):
his life. But um, he gets off basically like because
he's a fed and he has a clean record, he
doesn't do any prison time, but he never knows that
he doesn't know that he's been drugged. And so for
the next twenty two years he kind of assumes that
he's lost his mind. His career collapses, his life falls
apart um, and he just has no idea what has

(43:48):
happened to him until twenty two years later, Sydney got
Leeb dies and Richie reads his obituary, which Minson mentions
mk ultra because a lot of this has come out
since then, and Richie's like, oh fuck, is that what
happened to me, like, is this what occurred? And and
we obviously we can't confirm whether or not Richie is

(44:08):
someone who got dosed as part of m k Ultra,
But White, second in command for Operation Midnight Climax, did
admit to drugging strangers amount around town and said in
an interview quote, I didn't do any follow up. It
just wasn't a very good thing to go and say
how do you feel today? You don't give them a tip.
You just back away and let them worry like this
nitwit ritchie. So I'm gonna say his his his theory

(44:32):
that he may have been doseds credible. Yeah, And again,
no effort to actually collect data, observe a month down
the line, six months down the line. No, Like the
question of what were they even trying to accomplish again,
I don't there's a point where I think the people
on the scene themselves could not have told you, you know,
just a thing they were doing that. It's just it's

(44:55):
it's got its momentum now. And obviously, like these are
all the questions you want to answer, is like do
they care about learning anything? Is there something more here
we're missing? Because spoiler, a lot of the information that
they gather is destroyed later. Um, like, what is happening
in the heads of these people? And obviously we can't
answer that, and maybe they couldn't either, But to provide

(45:17):
some context for what that answer might be, I do
want to read another response that white second in command,
a guy named Feldman, gave to an interviewer about like
what was happening at the time. Quote several times Sydney
Gottlieb came out and met Gottlieb at the pad and
at White's office. Sydney was a nice guy. He was
a fucking nut. They were all nuts. I says, you're

(45:38):
a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, like me, what are
you doing with these crazy cocksuckers. He had this black
bag with him. He says, this is my bag of
dirty tricks. He had all kinds of crap in that bag.
We took a drive over to m your woods out
by Stintson Ranch. Sydney says, stop the car. He pulls
out a dart gun and he shoots this big eucalyptus
tree with a dart. Then he tells me come back
in two days and check on this tree. So we

(46:00):
go back in two days. The tree was completely dead,
not at least left on it. I went back and
I saw White and he says to me, what do
you think of Sydney. I said, I think he's a
fucking nut. White says, well, they may be a nut,
but this is the program. This is what we do.
So I would like you to contrast that with Hollywood's

(46:26):
favorite trope of the group of secret agents who are
not governed by any kind of oversight, like like Tom
Cruise's Mission Impossible for us, Like Hollywood loves this thing
of like, well here's this guy, like like if we
had to go through all the bureaucracy and permission, we
wouldn't get the bad guys. To really get the bad guys,

(46:47):
we'd uh Jack Ryan, we need whatever. Like it's a
whole genre of the super badass who operates off the books.
If you get caught, we will deny. We know you,
there'll be no oversight. You're not acording to the government,
and you know that you're the Mission Impossible team and
you're gonna be working completely. We're gonna fund you, give
you all the gear, all the gadgets, all the maskmaking stuff,

(47:09):
and we're gonna trust you without oversight that you're gonna
get the job done. You're gonna go get the nuke,
You're gonna be gonna stop it. In reality, when you
give a bunch of dudes a blank check to just
do whatever under the guys of hey, your work is
so important, we're not gonna ask you what you're doing.
This is what you get more often than not. Can

(47:31):
you imagine a situation in which it would be useful
to have this tree killing dart like Sydney, we can
already kill trees, man, Like, I don't think you really
accomplished much here by murdering a random tree with this
dart gun um like it's it's baffling, and one of
the things that's interesting he is working on, like terrible poisons,

(47:54):
like one of the things he does figure out by
like laboriously collecting more of a specific kind of shelf
issh vindom than had ever been collected, as he makes
like a perfect suicide drug, like just this idea the
ideal way to kill yourself if you're captured with like
a minimum of pain as quickly as possible, can't be reversed.
Like he figures it out and they put it in.

(48:14):
They have a couple of different devices for dispensing it
to people. They give it to like pilots on these
you know, these spy planes that we have flying over
the Soviet Union. They'll give them these like suicide drugs
to take so that if they're captured they could kill themselves.
A bunch of these guys crash with Sydney's poison on it.
None of them ever use it, because it turns out
it's not really like it's it's kind of hard to

(48:36):
go from like doing my day job to committing suicide
on a die. Yeah. Yeah, that's the part of the
equation that a guy like him would not consider. Yeah,
you know, maybe they don't. I mean, it's it's it's all,
it's so weird. I do love the degree to which
this guy Feldman like is just yeah, man, I'm like

(48:56):
a criminal, funked up guy, So of course I'm willing
to do this. Like all these people are crazy, they're
not like they're they're all just lunatics. Um, but this
is money, you know, And that's what White says, right,
this is what we do. Um, So that's all good. Now.
In his book, Stephen Kinzer continues quote Gottlieb's visit to
San Francisco were not for purely business purposes. Operation Midnight

(49:20):
Climax gave him ready access to prostitutes. According to Ira Feldman,
he took full advantage of this prerequisite. He was caught crazy,
Feldman said, well free associating about Gottlieb. During a legal
deposition near the end of his life, he recalled complaining
to George Hunter White, all he wants me to do
is get him laid. Anytime that funk came to San Francisco,
get me a girl, Feldman said, he always needed a girl.

(49:44):
I know that some listeners are asking, are these real people? Like?
How how was that everyone involved in this as a
cartoonish parody of the human being. I think it just
worked out that way. Yeah, it was the fifties, you know, now,
are we still in the fifties. It's yeah, okay, we're
in the mid to late nineteen fifties when this is

(50:06):
all going on, right, Um, this is like the mid
fifties is kind of when they moved to San Francisco,
and so this is kind of all throughout the end
of that decade, and this whole thing is descended into
a nasty, just orgy operation with incredibly quickly, Like there's
a lot of time, Yeah, from the genesis of the

(50:28):
project where it's just it's just a sex dungeon they're
running when this guy jerks off on a toilet. Uh,
we'll talk about you know, there's conspiracy theories about like
did they make the UNI bomber? Right? Did they make
Charles Manson? Um. My favorite conspiracy theory is like, hey,
did Sydney Gottlieb realizing like nineteen fifty four that none

(50:49):
of this was ever going to do anything? But he
had an excuse to like have the CIA pay for
a brothel and all of the drugs he wanted to
do and free trips to San Francisco to party and
get laid. And that's more less most of what was
happening here. That's not impossible. Yeah, and in fact that's yeah,
I'm not even sure that conspiracy theory. That may just
be what Yeah, it's not much of a conspiracy theory.

(51:13):
But you know what is a conspiracy theory, Jason, is
your fiction Careercy have we arrived at the end of that?
I think we have. I think it's time for blogs.
I'm sorry what I was sitting here thinking about when
the guy did the whole event with the tree, which
I can't get out of my head. When we made

(51:35):
incredible he shot the tree with a tree, a tree
shooting dark gun. He had it in his jacket. I says,
come back in a couple of days. And if if
I witnessed that happening and the guy told me to
come back in a couple of days, if all I
found was that the tree had died, I would be
so crushingly disappointed, because what else could like a big

(52:00):
deal I I can kill. I can go to the
hardware store and get stuff that will kill this tree
in a couple of days, Like I thought I was
gonna come back and find out that it had gotten
up and walked across the street or something. Speaking now
like the weird word trees and Game of Thrones and
you could commune with the gods, singly gun, It's just dead.
Is that all your Is this what you were trying

(52:21):
to do? Or this one of the failed attempts to
use your your tree your magic tree game? Was it
supposed to do something else? Godly was hoping it would
be talking God damn it another failure anyway? Uh Yeah,
The book is called if this book exists, You're in
the wrong universe. Has a lime green cover. You cannot

(52:43):
miss it on the shelf if you go buy it
in a physical bookstore, which virtually none of you will do.
So if you do what most people do and just
google that title on Amazon, it will come up. Also,
they have the audio book and e book whatever, all
all of the books that. Please. If you can support
a local physical bookstore, if you still have one, please,

(53:05):
they've been hurting over the course of the pandemic like
everybody else. Buy it off the shelf. If it's all
the same to you. Yeah, find a good bookstore. Go
to bookshop dot com. Also, I think that's the I'm
gonna double check as a network of all the the
indie bookstores and you can. You can order from the
store close to you. That will make so happy. I
think it's bookshop dot org because that took me to
a sketchy website. A lot of them will. Um. They

(53:28):
will ship just no different fromarting from Amazon. It may
may be slightly more expensive, but gosh, they will appreciate it. Yes,
bookshop dot org. Find Jason's book there. Um, you can
also find my book there. After the revolution If you're
looking to get two books? Why not? You know, treat yourself,
you deserve it. You listen to all this horrible shit

(53:49):
about the sea? A why not buy two books? Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com U, or check us out on the
i heeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.