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

Robert is joined again by Jason Pargin to continue to discuss Project MKUltra.

 

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Robert Evans here to tell you about the live show
for it could happen here that we're doing this October.
It'll be me and the whole team Chris's and James
and Garrison and Sophie and other fantastic people. Uh though,
or it will be a Q and A so you
can submit questions and you can purchase tickets now at
moment house dot com slash I h H. Remember it's

(00:23):
on October at six pm, but the link will be
good to watch the show for up to a week
after it airs, and you can purchase tickets now at
moment house dot com slash i h H, where you
will also be able to submit questions. Ah, welcome back

(00:45):
to Behind the Bastards. Um. I am Robert Evans. We're
talking about m KLT. This is part two of our
series with Jason Pargeon. Jason, how who what are you?
What are you? Jason? How much time do we have? Uh? No,

(01:05):
I am a full time author now who used to
be Evans boss speck of crack. Although if you're coming
on our part two of this episode, you know that
you should circle back and what you listen to part one?
If you're if you skipped it, Jason. We have a
whole a whole series of fans. We call him backwards

(01:26):
these and they wait until the whole series is out,
and then they listen to everything backwards like Momento. It
makes it less depressing because then it's the story of
a terrible person who ends up as a baby. Um. Yeah, Anyway,
I'm here promoting a book called If this book exists,
You're in the wrong universe. It is not a book

(01:48):
about mk ulture or anything we're talking about today. It
is a work of fiction that is a sequel to
the film and movie John dies at the end, which
fans of mine know that. Well, people who have never
heard of me, Uh, look at that. If you like it,
I mean, can you can go buy this book and
it'll it's in the same universe, in the same characters.
You say, it's not part of m k Ultra, But

(02:09):
if you were working for the CIA, that's what you'd say.
So you know, people can make their own People can
make their own decisions about whether or not they think
you're part of the CIA. But we should probably talk
about who the guy who is your boss if you
are working in the CIA's mk ultrip program, Sydney Gottlieb.
Actually he's been dead for decades. But now at this

(02:31):
point it is not yet called MK Ultra, right, Nope,
it is still it is a Project Artichoke is what
it's moved on to now, right. So it starts out
as m K Naomi and then Project Bluebird and now
Project Artichoke UM and these are all they just kind
of keep getting more funding and getting a bigger sort
of purview to go try and do weird mind control shit.

(02:52):
And by the time Gottlieb takes over the Chemical division
because he's like running like the CIA's the chunk of
the CIA that's like fucking with chemical right, pretty obvious.
So it's everything from like we need a drug for
if guys get captured that they can like bite down
on a fucking fake tooth and kill themselves like in
dune Um, which is like they do stuff like that.

(03:13):
They actually do stuff like that um Like Sydney for
for an idea of where his career goes. He's the
guy who makes the poison cigars they try to kill
Castro with, like he's that guy for the CIA. But
also obviously it includes stuff like lsd um and Alan
Dules by this point has been promoted to the number
two man at the CIA, so he has steadily risen up.

(03:33):
And because he's a big believer in mind control, that
means that Gottlieb is just getting more and more money
in the early fifties to start pumping into this project
Artichoke shit Um. New research at the CIA is heavily
driven by what this blue blooded paranoid egomaniac decided he
what he wanted researched. And in nineteen fifty two Alan

(03:54):
adds to his interest in psychedelics an interest in hypnosis,
so he's he's already like thinks that there's some sort
of mind control drug that the Soviets have that he's
putting money into. And in fifty two he also starts
to become like a fan of hypnosis. And this is
because he actually like goes to a show in New
York City and he watches a famous stage hypnotist um

(04:15):
And the thing that convinces him that hypnotism has military
or has like applications for the CIA is that he
goes it winds up hanging out with this stage hypnotist
after the show, and the guy's like, oh yeah, I
regularly rape women after putting them into a hypnotic trance.
It's really easy. You can make hypnotize women and just
have sex with them. And this is like a thing

(04:35):
that I do. And you know everything you need to
know about Alan Dulis by the fact that this guy
says this and he immediately signs up to take a
four day course from him. That is that is the
man Allen d sis Uh. People who have never listened
to the show before, I realized that it seems like
Robert and I are laughing at extremely inappropriate moments. The

(04:57):
please understand, this is a coping mechanism. We do not
actually think that it is funny. What else do you
do when you hear about that like that? When you
hear about a like the the second in command at
the CIA, that's his fucking thought process? Is this man's like,
I commit felonies all the time on using hypnosis and
he's like, oh yeah, let me take I want to
take a fucking course from you. And your audience knows

(05:19):
that hypnotism, like that form of hypnotism, like the pop
culture form where you can make somebody squawk like a chicken,
like plaining, like that's not a thing, right, Like they
know that's not a thing. No, this man is just
assaulting people. Um and fucking sure enough, Alan Dulas takes
a course from him. We'll talk about actual hypnosis in
a little bit, but Allendlis takes this course and he

(05:40):
goes back to work at the CIA and d C,
and he tries to hypnotize his female co workers. Um.
He uses CIA secretaries as his guinea pigs. He induces
trances in them. Stephen Kinser says that he got them
to quote do things they might not otherwise consider, like
flirting with strangers or revealing office secrets. And my the

(06:00):
feeling I get is that they're kind of playing along
to an extent because this guy is their boss and
they don't want to make him angry. Hopefully he doesn't
from kindser doesn't say he actually assaults any of these women.
So hopefully this doesn't go any further than just you know,
grossly inappropriate sexual harassment. Um. But we really don't know,

(06:22):
because it is the c i A. I mean without
the aid of some sort of a medication or chemical
or something that probably cannot be done. Like stage hypnosis
works because you get people up on a stage and
they like to participate in the show, so you're like
lowering their inhibitions, basically giving them permission to be part

(06:43):
of the show. And so like some of it, it
works in like a subconscious level. But the type again
that the type that exists has existed in pulp culture
pop culture for decades where you can like turn somebody
into a zombie and make them do whatever purely through hypnosis. Again,
hypnosis paired with whatever drugs they were working with at

(07:04):
the time may do that put somebody where they're in
like a half awake state of you know, they're not
fully making decisions or whatever. The just hypnosis. Uh, that's no,
that's just a sleazy weirdo. It's a sleazy where And
probably what is actually to the extent that that hypnotist
is like hypno quote unquote hypnotizing and then having sex

(07:24):
with him and like well he gets them alone because
he's famous, and then they like you know, pretend to
be hypnotized because it's the safest thing to do, right
or or none of it ever happened, and he just
lies he's a liar. That's entirely possible too, that he's
such a sleezball that he lies about using hypnosis to
rape women because he thinks that makes him look cool,

(07:47):
and guess what, back at the time, it did. So
all of these things are possible. We will not know
what exactly happens, but we know the result of this
is that after being a real creep at work and
Dulus writes a memo to the Project art at Choke
team quote. If hypnotic control can be established over any
participant in clandestine operations, the operator will have an extraordinary

(08:10):
degree of influence, a control in order of magnitude beyond
anything that we have considered feasible. Now, as you said, Jason,
hypnosis is like a thing. There's a there's like studies
that scientists do on people's brains, and hypnotic trance is
a thing that people experience. There are documented effects of
being hypnotized, and hypnosis can be effective in conjunction with

(08:33):
certain therapies. But as you said, hypnotizing does not mean
that you're putting someone into a state where they will
take commands and do whatever you can kind of induce
or affect feelings of anxiety and pain and trauma. Actual
professionals who use hypnosis will use it to like you,
can there's some evidence that can be used to reduce
chronic pain in certain ways. It can be reduced, it
can be used to reduce the pain of childbirth. Hypnosis

(08:56):
has been shown to have some efficacy at treating addiction
and PTSD. I'm not gonna get into it. I don't
understand hypnosis. Well, I don't think anyone really does. It
seems like the kind of thing that there's still a
lot of like debate about, but like it is a thing.
It's on the same level something like meditation has absolutely
measurable effects. No one would question that. But that's somewhere

(09:17):
out there, there's somebody claiming that, you know, you're meditating,
you're tapping into the energies of the universe or whatever,
you're leaving your body, and you're not. It's just we
don't understand a lot about how the brain works. But
it's just that what he's talking about was like, well,
if you could do the thing where you wave a
watch in front of somebody and then now using a
keyword later, you can make them your slave. The thing

(09:40):
as it exists in the Manchurion, Canada or whatever. You know,
all these movies, these throwers that were made in the
wake of people believing hypnosis was real. That's the thing
that doesn't exist in terms of using this way to
like recover memories, that kind of thing, you know, putting
the brain into a relaxed, susceptible state. There's all sorts
of ways to do that. Um. But yeah, yeah, um,

(10:03):
so Alan Dullis, you know again, as hypnosis is a thing,
but Alan Dullis is mostly interested in using it to
take over people's brains and get information out of them.
And potentially the thing that he's most excited about, and
the thing that everyone of the CIA is kind of
most excited about, is the potential to turn people into
sleeper agents who can be sent back home to carry

(10:24):
out attacks, right, Like that's the the Manchurian candidate thing.
That's what the CIA actually wants to do, and they
do believe that this is possible. Um. Gottlieb is certain
of it. Um. And Gottlieb tells uh Dullus that like, yeah,
you know, hypnosis can work, and particularly if we mix
hypnosis with these different hallucinogenic drugs people have started testing.

(10:45):
Have you heard of LSD? You know, That's kind of
how the conversation goes although they actually do. They start
with marijuana. Um. And this is because marijuana was something
the OSS had tested pretty heavily on themselves back during
World War Two. Uh. They mixed it into very US
foods and they've smoked it to try to prove that
it had potential is a truth drug. Um. This did
not work, as anyone who's ever had the light of

(11:06):
the cops while stoned as hell could tell you. Um.
Next the OS or next the CIA used so that
under Gottlieb, they do try some marijuana experiments, it does
not prove effective. They move on to cocaine. Next, Gottlieb
used CIA cutouts to sponsor medical experiments in which mental
patients are injected with cocaine. So they are going into

(11:27):
people who are institutionalized with like schizophrenia, and they are
injecting them with cocaine to see if it will make
people want to talk. Now, Jason, you've never done cocaine, right, No,
But I have been around somebody who was on it
and they actually did talk quieter they do it does
it does work? For that? I will say that for cocaine,

(11:48):
it does make you want to talk now. And also
if you need to write a Hollywood screenplay and like
one one hundred hour long writing session. Nothing really beats
cocaine for that. Apparently, as my my namesake, the other
Robert Evans could have told you if his heart hadn't
exploded from seventy years of shooting cocaine straight into his lungs. Um.

(12:12):
But you know, I think you may also note that
while cocaine does want to make people want to talk,
it doesn't make them reliably tell the truth. You can
actually lie really well while on a shipload of cocaine. UM. Otherwise,
nightclubs probably wouldn't exist in the same form. UM. So
cocaine not a great truth drug. After this comes heroin, UM,

(12:32):
which if you were going to me and saying which
drug is least likely to be an effective truth serum,
I would probably say heroin. Stephen Kinzer writes that quote.
Surviving CIA memos note that heroin was frequently used by
police and intelligence officers, and that it and other addictive
substances can be useful in reverse because of the stress
as they produce when they're withdrawn from those who are

(12:54):
addicted to their use. So, in other words, cops, when
the CIA is like, hey, you know, let's let's reach
out to some cops. We know some narcotics guys. Let's
reach out to like the FBI. Uh. See what they
say about using heroin as a truth drug. All these
field agents are like, well, heroin is like great, uh,
and a bunch of like a bunch of the people
talk to them are CI agents who are like, well, yeah,

(13:17):
you can use it as a truth drug for people.
But like, the way it works is you get them
addicted to heroin and then they'll do whatever you tell them,
right like, and then you take it away of yeah,
withdrawal the promise of getting heroin, they will do whatever
you ask. But again, as with all interrogation techniques, nothing
stopping them from just lying to you exactly, and that

(13:39):
continues to be the problem. Um. One thing I did
find interesting is that like a lot of their early
info on heroin comes from narcotics agents and CIA field
agents who are like, the only reason I haven't killed
myself from doing this job is that I use heroin. Like,
those are a lot of their early sources, which tells
you a lot about these agencies. Um. There's like a

(14:01):
couple of very funny moments here. My favorite is that
at one point using like working. As part of this program,
the Navy sponsors a study where they pay college students
to take heroin to see if it works as a
truth drug. Um it does not. Uh So the next
thing they try is mescal, And the Nazi doctors the
CIA had hired to help them with their torturing people

(14:24):
at black sites had all given mescal into prisoners at Dokao.
And so when they bring these guys in, they tell
the CIA, Hey, mescalin seems like it might work as
a truth s here. Maybe you should try that next.
But of course mescalin does not work that way. No
drug works that way. I have lied to cops on
a number of hallucinogens. None of them seem to function

(14:44):
as a truth serum and my experience. But the assumptions
they're making here about how the mind works, that's the
thing is it's almost to imply that when somebody is
intoxicated that they're becoming more honest. I don't I think
that's true in almost any way. Like you lawre somebody's inhibitions,

(15:05):
they may be just as likely to say the most
outrageous thing they can think of. Like I I don't
think that being incredibly drunk revealed like Nel Gibson's perfect
true feelings. I think it made him more racist than
what he probably is in everyday life, because it just
unleashed his ability to just say the worst possible thing

(15:29):
that popped into his into his head. Yeah, And it's
also like I think the thing that and I think
they are starting to recognize that at this point because
the early they keep having these experiments and like they
never find their truth drug, but they do find. Like
one thing that is true is that people who are
really fucked up are easier to manipulate, you know, like

(15:50):
a drunk person. If you're sober, maybe you'll be it'll
be easy for you to get them to do something
that you want them to do, right. And the same
thing is true within limits to people who are on
other substances. People are a little bit easier to like
convince to do things sometimes in certain ways. If those
things aren't you can't, like somebody's tripping on acid, You're
probably not going to convince them to commit murder. But

(16:12):
if they are the kind of person who is inclined
to like strip naked and one through a party, it
will be easier to convince than the strip naked and
run through a party, right they are. It does make
people suggestible in that way. So one thing that's happening
in this period is the CIA is moving away from like,
well maybe this maybe we'll we'll we'll back burner, the
mind can or the truth serum, but we think this

(16:34):
stuff will let us program people because it does seem
to make them more susceptible, right, So that's kind of
as they're sort of experimenting with this stuff. It's not
just truth serum. They're also like, is this the drug
that's gonna let us reprogram Soviet spies and like send
them back as saboteurs because that is increasingly the thing
that Dolus thinks is going to be possible. And they're

(16:54):
they're thinking about like, well, let's try giving them cocaine
and then we'll hypnotize them. Let's try giving them mescaline
and then we'll hypno ties them. And obviously none of
this works great, but they're getting at least enough that
they're convinced they're just sort of like one drug away
from making it work. Um. And by the way, that
the funniest part to me, And it's funny again in
the context that I mentioned earlier. It's darkly humorous is

(17:17):
as far as I can tell. They now in two
by far the most successful examples they have of like
flipping people or turning people into double agents and all that.
It's just by giving them a big old suitcase full
of cash that works really well, and they finally, finally,
after spending billions or however much money they spent on
this stuff over the years, it's like, hey, we have

(17:39):
found a way that can manipulate to make somebody turn
against their own country, which is if you give them
like a Lamborghini and a giant suitcase full of cold,
hard cash, they're actually willing to flip on their own country,
their friends, their their comrades. Yeah, yeah, people will do
like I mean, you know, there's also still Heroin is

(18:02):
actually still a big one. Like when the FBI was
breaking up the green during the Green Scare, when the
FBI was like breaking up environmental extremists like organizations, they
would often target like individuals who they knew were like
addicted to smack. Because you find somebody who's got that addiction,
you take it away from them, it's a little easier
to get them to roll on their friends, or you

(18:23):
arrest them and you tell them like, hey, we've you've
got this amount of stuff on you. We have you
did the rights. It's a twenty five year sentence unless
you help us out by rolling on your friend. Right, Like,
all of these things can be used to control people's behavior,
but none of it works. The two things that work
best our prison time and money. Yeah, yeah, just threats
and threats and money, the same thing that worked years ago.

(18:46):
And the Soviets, by the way, never don't know this. Well,
they're fucking around with the psychic research. They're just being like, well,
we either bribe people or we hit them. This works great. Um,
it's the CIA. It is convinced there's some much more
esoteric way to do this. Ship. Uh So Gottlieb, as
they kind of go through this rolodex of drugs and

(19:08):
none of them work, starts to become convinced that the
answer to his boss's prayers, to Dulus's prayers might be
L S D. Because again he's read about this scientists,
smart people. Especially again, Gottlieb's kind of a proto hippie.
You know, the hippie movement hasn't exist yet, but he's
one of the kinds of people who's going to feed
into it um all of that, those kinds of those seekers,

(19:31):
that people who are interested in mysticism and stuff. They're
all starting to talk about hallucinogens, and they're all starting
to talk about acid. So Gottlieb reaches out to Harold Abramson.
Abramson is a doctor who had worked with the CIA
on past mind control and poison experiments. He was also
a seeker himself, and he'd taken LSD several times and
given it out to colleagues on multiple occasions. Acting as

(19:53):
one of the first modern trip sitters. Abramson gave Gottlieb
l s D and the two hung out. Sidney wrote
this about his first trip. I happen to experience an
out of bodiness, a feeling as though I am in
a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole
body and it is shimmering, and I have a sense
of well being and euphoria for most of the next

(20:13):
hour or two hours, and then it gradually subsides. And
I think he takes a pretty small dose, because LSD
a normal dose to LSD if you're like taking a
solid dose if you're actually tripping, it lasts like eight
to sometimes twelve hours. You know, like some you can
you can make it last longer if you take a
very heavy dose. Longest I've ever tripped is maybe eighteen hours.

(20:33):
Jesus Christ. One reason why I've never experimented with the
stuff is I absolutely would be the guy who just
sits there, like my body is a sausage. I'm assigned
a skin sausage. It's not an unpleasant thing necessarily to
be a skin sausage. Um LS like LSD is whenever

(20:56):
I recommend, like if people are curious about hallucinogen, silo
cybin is by far like the easiest to start with
because kind of no matter how much you take your
top out at three or four hours, So it is
the kind if you have a bad time, it's going
to be over soon. LSD. If you take too much
or have a bad time, it can be really unpleasant
because it lasts a long time. So it's it's the

(21:18):
kind of thing people shouldn't mess around with unless they've
like built up to it. That that would be my opinion.
I'm not telling you to commit illegal acts by taking drugs,
but maybe I wouldn't start with LSD if if you're
asking for my advice on this stuff. Um, But the
other advice is to go to a very reliable source
where you know how much you're getting. Yeah, because I

(21:38):
think half the people I've ever talked to have taken
acid have an experience for one time they took it,
absolutely nothing happened. Yeah, It's like, well, yeah, because you
just got it sold to you by a guy and
he just gave you a piece of paper, like and
and nowadays a lot another problem is that, like you
don't usually know you're getting acid, there's a bunch of
other research chemicals that work similarly that you can also

(21:59):
that you could just dissolve in water and put on stuff,
and they're easier to get that acid. Um, which is
normally fine. A lot of people probably take something that's
not acid, think it's acid and have a good time.
But some of that stuff has more healthcare. LSD is
fairly safe actually, unless you're taking nightmare doses of it,
like it doesn't. I don't think it even has a
recorded LD fifty. I'm sure. I'm sure they found enough

(22:22):
to kill people, but like it's very difficult to have
like an overdose in the way that is like like
heroin or something. Um. But there are other research chemicals
that you can die on that people sometimes just sell
as acid because it's an illegal, unregulated market, right, which
is as Jason said, you should always know your dealer
if you want to start playing around with this stuff.

(22:43):
There's organizations like Project Dance Safe that sell test kits
for a number of different substances. If it's possible to
test and know what you're taking, you always should. Um,
they're not we're advising illegal acts. Yeah, there's sebredits that
do nothing but discuss, like share information about this kind
of thing, which, as much as we criticize Reddit and
actually having a community like that um to warn you

(23:06):
about what to lookout for things like that actually matters
a lot. This has always been an argument for the
legalization because then you can actually know precisely what you're getting. Yeah,
you know, Um, but that that is the argument I
would make. But that's we're we're off the off the
map below here. So LSD. Gottlieb has his first trip
and he has a pretty good time with it. Um,
he starts to get kind of obsessed with it. And

(23:29):
this is a thing I can't prove this subjectively. I
haven't even found this written any of the writing about Gottlieb.
But like a thing that I have noticed in my
own life as a guy who hangs out and does
drugs is some people just kind of get obsessed with LSD.
It is a particular thing to LSD. It had you noticed,
like Albert Hoffman, right, for whatever reason, before he even
takes it, he they synthesize this thing and for five

(23:51):
years he can't get it out of his head until
he actually tries it. Right. There's just kind of something
that certain people find really fascinating about this substance. And
I think as much is everything else. The fact that
Gottlieb just kind of gets obsessed with acid is a
big part of why it becomes the drug of m
K ultra right, because it doesn't work any better than
these other drugs. It does not, again spoilers, none of

(24:14):
this creates a perfect mind control drug. Um. Probably we'll
get to that a bit later. Um, but it is
It's a thing I've seen happen to more people. And
this is not usually a bad thing. People just like
take a lot of acid that can be fine. Um,
and chemists and neuroscientists are especially likely to find themselves
fascinated by LSD. You will, this is about to happen
to a whole generation of very smart people, Folks like

(24:36):
Kinksey Um, Folks like uh oh, Jesus, Timothy Leary. Goddamn um,
I can't believe I forgot Timothy Leary's name. Uh. So, yeah,
you have this like generation of like all And and
Leary and uh And and Kinks and whatnot. They're all
kind of in a lot of ways similar people to Gottlieb.

(24:57):
They have these similar opinions. Unlike these this grarian back
to you know, nature sort of stuff. They they're they're
these they're fascinated by Eastern mysticism and spiritualism. Like the
degree to which the CIA's head poison guy is kind
of a hippie is very important to this story. Um. Now,
at no point did Gottlieb have any hard evidence that

(25:19):
LSD would make a better truth serum or mind control
drug than any other narcotic he tested. But he starts
to become convinced that it holds the secret to all
of the things he's trying to accomplish for Alan Dullis,
and so he's going to spend the next ten years
dosing possibly tens of thousands of people to try and
improve that. First, he starts by dosing other CIA agents
and some scientists working in adjacent government spook projects because

(25:43):
they're testing initially, they're trying to use this as a weapon, right,
They're still trying to see, like, can this be used
to like take over somebody's mind. Can this be used
to at least, like, you know, disable a spy. A
lot of these guys agree to be dosed by surprise,
so this is consensual, right, There's nothing wrong with saying, yes,
you can sneak LSD into my food at a random
point in time, because we want to see what happens

(26:05):
when you're surprised by LSD in the middle of like
a workday. Because nobody has done that, right, they have
not started like horribly doing things with this yet, but
you can see kind of where stuff's about to go.
Because the very next group of people they start to
drug is army trainees, and these people are have agreed
to be in studies for the army. They don't know
that they're going to be dosed with LSD, so they're

(26:27):
just kind of like drugging eighteen year old boys with
this mystery substance that nobody's really tested. Um, and a
lot of people have very terrible experiences, which probably shouldn't
surprise you. Um, it does seem like a lot of
these Army guys have great times too, and a lot
of the CIA guys have a lot of this. Like
is they're partying right, Like they're not just dosing each
other and taking diligent notes. They're like having a good time. Um,

(26:51):
and you know the government's paying for it. In these
early days, Gottlieben, his fellow Bluebird Artichoke researchers, dosed themselves
more often than they do to anyone else. They'd carry
out fake interrogations and try to convince each other to
give up secrets that they promised before taking drugs not
to tell um. And they were able to get each
other and army officers to reveal like secrets. But this

(27:12):
is like this is not a real test, right, Like
they're agreeing ahead of time, what's the secret? You're not
going to give up? Okay, Now we're gonna drug you
and we'll see if we can get you to give
up the secret. Jason, can you think of any reason
why that might not be replicable to actually trying to
get information out of somebody. Really hard to overstate the
role of consent in this whole thing. Yes, and they're

(27:34):
playing a game which even at that, at that early stage,
they should have. It feels like basic logic should have
played a role in this. But yeah, I mean, you know, yeah,
so this is all very flawed and everything they're going
to do is deeply flawed research at like the conceptual
level in ways that I don't part of it's probably

(27:56):
just that the concept of hallucinogens um, particular, particularly like
artificially created hallucinogens, you know, because LSD does not just
randomly occur in the way that like mushrooms do, is
much newer than so I think some of it's just
that people don't understand this stuff as well. But it
does really seem like they're making basic failures of logic

(28:16):
here um. But there are some reasons I have to say,
there are some reasons why you can see people at
this time would have thought LSD could be a really
good weapon for like spy ship um acid is colorless
and odorless. You can put it in basically any liquid
or other kind of substance, and people can't there's no
way to tell that you have asset on you. Um,

(28:37):
so you can transport significant quantities of it without being
detected in a pretty much infinite number of ways. It's
once you are able to make it, it's pretty much
free on a per dose basis, and very small amounts
of asset have gigantic effects. So there's good reasons why
the substance is like, well, yeah, if you could make
this work for us, this would be a great thing.

(28:58):
We can very easily sneak this on spies and get
them into anywhere. Okay, But I think I want to
ask the question that I think a lot of the
listeners are asking, which is like today, when we hear
about the experiments done with the stuff, it's experiments on
like trying to cure people with PTSD, trying to cure depression,
trying to like if it affects the brain that much,
if people claim to have had almost a holy experience

(29:21):
on it, that's like, well could it? You know, it
feels like it shouldn't have just been the CIA dealing
with this. It feels like you should have had whatever
the giant pharmaceutical companies were at the time experimenting with
it as a therapy, saying, what could this be the
drug that will make housewives okay with they with staying

(29:43):
at home and doing nothing but laundry all day. Do
you see what I'm saying? Was that going on or
was it just the CIA that was doing that was
working with this stuff. We're actually going to talk about
that in a little bit. Yes, this is going on
to an extent, but it's very limited at this point
in time. The only people in the world who can
make LSD are Sandals laboratories, right, they have figured it

(30:04):
out and they're not sharing the recipe, so they are
the only source of LSD. They're only making a limited amount,
and the CIA buys basically all of it. They do
send a bunch out for research. There are other organizations
researching this. There's actually in the Soviet Union and all
over the world there's actual studies therapeutic studies on LSD

(30:25):
in this period. But the majority of the drug by weight,
goes to the c I. A okay, yeah, they that's
that tells you a lot about the state of the
world at the time that they priorities or whatever, because
you have everything they think they know about this. It's
not just oh, this would make a good weapon, Like

(30:45):
on the list of things you could do with it
to change the world, that's not even in the top
one hundred, Like when you're talking about, oh, this totally alters,
you know, the way people behave, the way they can
be influenced, the way they think that, you know, like
we're everybody who takes it becomes obsessed with it. And
it's like you would think just the pure capitalism of

(31:06):
the country would come into places like, oh, this is
we could make a bunch of money. It's cheap to make,
people will pay a lot of money for it. The
fact that it's there, I guess it's just a limit
of the imagination. When you're in like a war footing,
it's like, no, this could you could get your theory
like they have these convoluted, almost cartoonish ideas of like, well,

(31:26):
in theory, if you could inject a spy with it,
you could make him do this if we also, yeah,
there's just this. It's it's because like number one, the
sand DAWs is I think kind of they're looking for

(31:49):
any kind of use that will make this profitable, right,
and so the first group that has that puts a
lot of money down for acid is the c I A.
So that has an impact from the beginning, like who
else gets it and how much of it is available?
And I just don't think. I don't think guys like
Gottlieb when they hear stuff like because there is early

(32:11):
research on LSD and alcoholism, and when they hear stuff
like we can treat alcoholism with LSD, all these guys
because they are, as you said, they're so focused on
this war. All they hear is that just that means
that you can change people with this. You can change there.
You can alter a person's mindset, you can like control
their mind. If you can get them to stop being
an alcoholic, maybe you can stop them from being a communist,

(32:32):
you know, Like that's that's straight where they go. And
they have the ability to effectively buy up the world's
supply of acid, which they do in this period. In fact,
all of the LSD that gets out in the early
eras of the hippie movement, and like is the is
the acid that like fucking dudes like Hunter Thompson and
the Beatles are taking right that ship all comes from

(32:52):
the CIA. Oh, I had no idea but it makes sense.
I mean that's you know, and not all just as
part as MK ultra. Because guys like Abramson, who gives
Gottlieba's first dose, he's working with the CIA as a contractor.
He's also just a guy who's interested in this and
does it with his friends. And his friends include a
lot of these like influential intellectuals who are going to

(33:14):
be big leaders in the sixties. Um. And so they
all start taking LSD that he gets from the CIA. Together.
That's like how acid gets out. It's through the agency, um,
not always in controlled ways, not always as parts of studies.
But we're building to that. But you know what else
we're building towards Jason an ad break an ad break, Jason,

(33:37):
have you ever heard of Blue Apron No. I it's
weird because I listened to like four hours of podcast today,
but I've never it's never come up. Well, that's a
it's a company that makes food boxes, and we used
to have a running joke here behind the Bastards about
how they also had an island where people could hunt
children for sport. And I thought, Jason, I thought that

(34:00):
was a joke that everyone would recognize as a joke.
But it turns out a lot of people messaged us
distraught thinking that there was a real child hunting island. Um,
so now we're warning people and a couple of different
episodes of the show there's no child hunting island. It's fine.
That was a joke. We're not going to make the
joke anymore. Please please stop being worried that Blue Apron

(34:21):
has an island where people hunt children for sport. They don't. Anyway,
here's ads possibly including Blue Apron. Ah, we're back, um,
and we're talking about Sydney, Gottlieb and the CIA. So

(34:43):
the other reason that Gottlieb is able to kind of
get the agency to focus on LST there's you know,
it makes sense, there's reasons why it might be a
good weapon. Um. But he's able to bring up a
bunch of Russian scientific journals, which in the early fifties
start to file the first Soviet Union report on the
discovery of LSD. Obviously LSD has existed for a while.

(35:04):
Information does not travel as fast in these days, so
the Soviets kind of start, you start and this is
not there's actually nothing sinister here. It's just academics in
the Soviet Union, who are like, and now there's this
this thing called acid, and we're getting small amounts of
it from Sandas and we're testing it in these ways. Um.
This causes dolus Is analysts to claim that the l
the U S s R is stockpiling argot as a

(35:25):
raw material. Um. Now their own assessments admit there's no
evidence that this is happening. And in fact, here's exactly
what dollus Is analysts right. Quote. Although no Soviet data
are available in LSDI, it must be assumed that the
scientists of the U. S. S are are thoroughly cognizant
of the strategic importance of this powerful new drug and

(35:45):
are capable of producing it at any time. That's must
be assumed that we have to be a key phrase
that I think is going to get used, that's gonna
get used a lot. Yeah, that like, yeah, we just
have to assume that not only do they think the
same thing about this is us, which is that it
should be used to destroy people's minds, but they're already

(36:06):
mass producing it. Obviously they are not. Uh, it is
hard to make acid. No one knows how to other
than sand DAWs. Yet and the Soviet Union as far
as all evidence suggests, the Soviet Union has no capacity
for manufacturing LSD at this point. Um, it's going to
take years before a US company with c I A
help will crack the recipe. Um. But yeah, it is

(36:29):
worth noting that kind of about it. This is actually
there's not even l s D as far as we
can tell in the Soviet Union in this period in
the early fifties. I think the first evidence that we
have of acid in the Soviet Union starts in the
early nineteen sixties when Communist Bulgaria starts carrying out a
series of LSD experiments, this from sixty two to sixty eight,

(36:49):
and it's again to kind of as evidence that there's
not really capacity to make this in the Iron Curtain.
When Bulgaria starts experimenting with acid, they buy it all
from sand DAWs Sandas Library sends it to them. Um,
sand DAWs is selling LSD under the generic name to
Delhi sid Um and they spend about three million dollars

(37:10):
giving their new hallucinogen to universities and mental hospitals in
the early nineteen sixties. So again that's well after the
period we're up to in the actual and k Ultra story.
You know, this is all being fucked with by the
CIA before pretty much anyone is able to study it.
And I'm gonna quote from a write up in Atlas
Obscurity here. Among the human guinea pigs were doctors, artists, miners,
truck drivers, and even prisoners and mentally ill patients. These

(37:33):
research subjects were involved in some hundred and forty trials.
Their aim for these experiments with LSD was to allow
scientists to understand psychotic disorders like schizophrenia better by using
the drug to mimic the effects of a naturally occurring psychosis.
There were some similarities between drug induced psychosis and natural ones,
but it was easier to do a controlled study when
causing psychosis through drugs. So in Czechoslovakia, which is also

(37:57):
a communist state at this period, LSD is per fickly
illegal and available over the counter. This is like most
of the nineteen sixties. If you're living in the Czech
repoor in Czechoslovakia, you can walk down to like the
pharmacy and you can just buy some acid. I have
to ask when did it become illegal in the United States?
Because it was a brand new substance banned immediately. No, no, no,

(38:20):
it's not. It's it's legal for most of the period,
like the hippie period. Um, that's why I thought, Yeah,
it is not banned in the United States until nineteen
sixty eight. Um. Yeah, largely as the result of like
some of the stuff that you know, a bunch of
you know, that's a story for another day. Um, But
for most of the nineteen sixties and Czechoslovakia, you know,

(38:42):
the Bulgarians are doing acid studies with LSD they've bought
from Sandaz. Czechoslovakia is getting acid from Sandas too, And
rather than it being like a thing that like is
being secretly used on people behind like the scenes, people
are just buying acid from pharmacies in like communist Czechoslovakia.
Doctors at psychiatric hospitals are taking acid so that they

(39:05):
can understand what it's like to be schizophrenic. I mean,
I don't know how well that actually prepares you to
treat somebody, but that's how they're using it, right, Like
it's like we've got all these people who are hearing voices,
Let's take this drug so that maybe we can understand
them better. Um. Eventually, a Check pharmaceutical company cracks the
recipe and millions of doses are produced and given out

(39:26):
for free across the country. Um Numerous scientists, including Stanislav Groff,
took LSD and had experiences in this time that impacted
their future work. Artists dosed themselves to great effect, as
this piece from an article in PRIs Kros, which is
a Check news site, makes clear. Among them were well
known painters such as Evo Medic and Jerry Enderley, as

(39:49):
well as young intellectual singers and students. According to an
unverified account, one of them was the current CHECK president
Milo Simon. A number of years later, Carol Got reluctantly
admitted that he just once took LSD in the presence
of doctors. I returned to my earliest childhood memories buried
deep within my subconsciousness. Many participants of the psychedelic sessions,

(40:09):
especially artists, recalled their explorations of LSD is unique even
formative experience. However, others experienced so called bad trips. Suicide
soon followed, and several main centers, especially the psychiatric hospital
in Satska near Prague, research was carried out on a
mass scale. According to unconfirmed reports, one of the provincial
hospitals carried out tests on children as young as three

(40:31):
years old who were experiencing mental health issues. In another hospital,
experiments were supposedly carried out on prisoners. So everybody does
fucked up ship with this. Every state does when they
get access to it. Um although they're not trying to
write like the checks, aren't trying to create a mind
control drug. They're just like, maybe this will cure kids

(40:52):
with illnesses we don't understand. Let's give it to that
three year old, which isn't good behavior, but it's not
like malicious, right, it's there's a little here responsible. Yeah. Yeah,
and there's a level of ignorance around the substance. But
the way you the way you become knowledgeable is not well,
let's see what happens to mentally all three year olds. Yeah,

(41:15):
that's certainly not ideal. Yeah, and then we'll know and
then be ignorant anymore. After all, how else are we
going to find out? Yeah? We we who knows what else?
Like I don't know, and they are like, I'd be
really interested. This is an area where I don't know
as much. I'd be really interested in, Like what they
actually found in terms of how this impacted doctors treating patients. Um,

(41:39):
but yeah, I don't have great context on that, but
this is a thing that's going on in this period.
It does eventually, the check security services they're kind of
KGB or c I a equivalent, start to do some
early research on whether or not they could weaponize LSD.
And again this is like a decade after they do

(42:00):
US in the United States, so they're like, well behind
the curve here. Um, they do some early kind of experiments,
there's no record of anything serious. Um, the primary interest,
like the State Security Service, gets into this and they
kind of say, oh, maybe we can weaponize this. But
the thing they actually start doing is using it to
make a shipload of money because they kind of always

(42:20):
have a cash flow problem. This is true of all
of the communist security services, and they recognize that like,
oh shit, Americans will Europeans will pay a funkload for
LSD just to party. And so for nearly a decade,
a huge amount of the LSD and like the early
like right before it gets banned and right after it
gets banned, a lot of the LSD that gets into

(42:42):
Western Europe and the United States and kind of the
late nineteen sixties, including the famous Summers of sixty eight
and sixty nine. Comes from the Check Intelligence Services, and
they're smuggling acid to the West, not to destroy capitalism,
but because they they want they need money. It's very
profitable to sell drugs, it turns out. So that's kind
of a fun story. Um, that's all more than a

(43:05):
decade in the future from the CIA stuff. But the
point is there's never as far as I found, there's
not ever any real Soviet LSD mind control experiments, And
in the early nineteen fifties, there's no evidence that any
communist country even saw the drug as having that kind
of potential. They didn't have a lot of access to it,
so it would have been hard for them too. After
a few months of benign experimentation on his friends and colleagues,

(43:28):
Gottlieb leaves the United States to test LSD on human
prisoners for the first time. One study later reported quote
in nineteen fifty one, a team of CIA scientists led
by Dr Gottlieb flew to Tokyo, Japanese suspected of working
with the Russians were secretly brought to a location where
the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants
and stimulants. Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for

(43:50):
the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot
and dumped overboard. The CIA team flew to Soul in
South Korea and repeated the experiment on twenty five North
Korean prisoners of war or They were asked to announce communism.
They refused and were executed. In nineteen fifty two, Don'tus
brought Dr Gottlieb in his team to post war Munich
in southern Germany. They set up a base in a

(44:10):
safe house. Throughout the winter of nineteen fifty two to
fifty three, scores of expendables were brought to the safe house.
They were given massive amounts of drugs, some of which
Frank Olsen had prepared back at Detric which is where
they're the camp where they're doing this, to see if
their minds could be altered. They were given electro convulsive shocks.
Each experiment failed, the expendables were killed and their bodies burned.

(44:32):
And even what you're describing there, whenever they what are
effects they got, it seems like it's just plain old
subjecting them to extreme discomfort, using the stimulants and the
presents or whatever to like get their body racing and
then slowing it down. Like that's just that's just putting
them through pain. Yes, you can just hit them with
a stick and do the same thing, like like all

(44:54):
of their sophisticated talk of a wow, the magic of
the human mind and mind control he or it still
seems like it just comes back down to regular brutality
and then the people still not cooperating, then you just
shoot them. That's what's so interesting to be Jason, because
they all all they're doing is using LSD to torture
people in the way that like the Soviets just hit

(45:15):
them with sticks until they do what they want. Right.
But I think what's happening is Gottlieb he keeps he's
taking acid. He's tripping constantly throughout this period. I think
he's having really powerful, like spiritual and emotional experiences on it,
and so he's convinced that like there's something more going
on with this particular substance, and thus there must be

(45:36):
a way to like turn it into a tool for
this purpose. And one of the things I find most
interesting about him is he's having. He's this educated man,
he's this thoughtful guy who studies religion and spirituality, and
he that he's having like experimenting on expanding his consciousness
with hallucinogens, and then when he actually uses them on people,

(45:57):
it's the same way you'd use like a fucking razor
blade on a person you have tied up or whatever.
Like there's not he's not being subtled. There's no like
artifice to it. It's just cruelty. And it seems like
they were so eager to get some kind of a
result that they're just the way you describe. It's like
there was no art to what they were doing. It's

(46:18):
just the same old I don't know, it's like this
is a part of what I found interesting about this,
I said in the first episode is separating the reality
from like the conspiracy stuff, because the conspiracy stuff always
the differences between what they thought this could do and
what it actually did. That's the difference between the conspiracy theories.

(46:40):
And because in the world of conspiracy Manchurian candidates absolutely exist,
whereas the reality as they wanted that, there's no doubt
they wanted that outcome. It just they couldn't do it,
and the actual reality on the ground is so much
more disorganized and stupid and just thuggish than what than

(47:02):
the the supervillains you imagine. It's almost like you imagine
a more sophisticated type of when in reality, like a
lot of it is just bureaucrats trying to get more
funding to their thing. Um, I don't die. I do
not doubt that some of the people at this point
knew it didn't work or had lost faith in it.
But it's like, well, this is where all the funding
is going, and you've got to put food on the table,

(47:22):
and I don't care about the people were killing, so like, yeah,
let's keep doing it. And yeah, so these experiments got
leave travels around Europe and Asia to just we don't
know how many black sites. We don't know how many
people he doses with LSD and then killed certainly hundreds,
um potentially over the lifetime of the c I A
LSD experiments significantly more than that. But we really have

(47:44):
no idea. We do know that so many people were
being killed at these sites that it created a body
disposal problem, even at the black sites that had been
built as death camps. Stephen Kinzer quotes from an American
translator at one of these places, camp King, which I
believe is in Germany. Um. And she writes this home
in a letter in nineteen fifty two, arrived back in

(48:06):
Frankfurt from Paris son morning and time to spend all
day at the Oberseel swimming pool, acquiring a nice tan.
They dragged a dead man out of the pool at
tin Am, like this is the pool that they have
at like the facility, and there's like, yeah, the corpses
are just kind of like showing up places, um, because
they're they're just creating so many of them. Gottlieb seems

(48:28):
to have I don't know, I don't I don't really,
he's a fascinating character. I don't really have a great
concept of what's going on in his head because he's
like every day after doing this, he goes home and
he milks his goats and he hangs out with his
wife and kids, and he's this kind of like kindly
proto hippie nerd who's just very interested in psychedelics. Um. Well,

(48:50):
this is the thing, because when you told his story
in the last episode, like his early his upbringing, there's
a key part of the story that is missing because
we describe why, Well, he was young, he went off
to school, he married a preacher's daughter, you know, he
was kind of a hippie, you know. And then and
then he was asked to be a part of this
program because it's like, well, he's interested in these drugs
and in these chemicals. And then immediately it's like, okay,

(49:13):
well we we invited you him to go torture this
guy that we were torturing with with and trying to
use this It's like, well, and not, hold on, did
did he have any kind of qualms about that? The
transition from normal guy who's curious about these chemicals too,
being at a black site and it's clear what's going on,

(49:35):
Like the reality of it was certainly not hidden from him,
and you are torturing another human being who it may
not be guilty of anything really and it's like, okay,
you did he object? Was he afraid? Did he? The way?
So Stephen Kinzer, who writes Poisoner in Chief, which is
about Gottlieb, is the guy who I think has done
the most detailed work up on Sydney as a man.

(49:59):
His angle on it, the way he kind of explains
it is that Gottlieb is is a patriot. He is
very sore about the fact that he missed out on
participating in World War Two, and he has been convinced
by Dullus and other people in the agency that this
is a life or death struggle with the Soviet Union
and that only the most like they have to try this.

(50:20):
They have to find this out. This is the most
critical weapon that could possibly exist, and if the Soviets
have developed it, then it could be the end of
the world. Right, they could destroy the entire country if
they get people in the right positions. So we have
to know how to That's that's what Kinser says. Now
Kinser is working from information after the fact. He doesn't
know Gotlieb. I don't to an extent. The man is unknowable, right,

(50:43):
just like everybody. I don't actually know if I think
that's what's going on. If I think maybe for all
of his kindly exterior Gottlieb is like a fucking serial killer,
because that there's I could see that when you look
at some of the stuff this guy does, I could
see there being an element of just sort of like
joy and hurting people, and maybe we're just missing it.

(51:04):
Because he didn't talk about it to people, right, And
maybe Kinzer is trying to fill in a less frightening
thing than just a man who likes to hurt people
and gets a job at the CIA where he gets
to do it. Kind of whatever is going on in
his head what he's doing is often like serial killer ship.
For an example, in late nineteen fifty two, Project Artichoke
researchers decided to conduct a test into whether or not

(51:26):
people with hepatitis are more vulnerable to lsd UM they are. Apparently,
it's like a thing if you have hepatitis or have
had it recently, acid will can have like potentially dangerously
high effect on you. Um Gottlieb has his people. He
sets up the CIA, has a deal with the American
Hospital in Paris, and so he has agents waiting there
as patients come in for like the right person to dose.

(51:50):
This turns out to be Stanley Glickman. Now, Glickman is
an American artist. He'd won prizes for his work and
had gotten to go to a fancy art academy in Paris.
So he's like a young man who was just getting
started in the world. He's gifted, he's gotten this like
incredible opportunity to study in Paris. Life is going good,
and then this happens. I'm gonna quote next from Kinser's

(52:10):
book quote. His studio was nearly select, but after a
while he came to prefer another, cafe Le Dome, just
across the Boulevard du Montparnesse. One evening in October nineteen
fifty two, he was drinking coffee there when an acquaintance
appeared and invited him over to lay Select. Reluctantly, he agreed.
At lay Select, the two joined a group of Americans

(52:31):
whose conservative dress set them apart from the rest of
the crowd. Talk turned to politics and grew heated. Glickmant
rose to leave, but one of the men insisted on
buying him a last drink to show there were no
hard feelings. Glickman said he'd have a glass of chartrouss
an herbal liqueur. Rather than call the waiter. The man
walked to the bar, ordered the chartrous himself, and carried
it back to their table. He walked with a limp,

(52:52):
Glickman later recalled the next few minutes were the last
of Glickman's productive life. After taking a few SIPs from
his drink. He began to feel what he later called
a lengthening of distance and a distortion of perception. Soon
he was hallucinating. Others at the table leaned in fascinated.
One told Glickman he could perform miracles. Finally, overwhelmed by
panic and fearing that he had been poisoned, he jumped

(53:14):
up and fled. And for Glickman, the hallucinations don't stop right,
he loses his mind. He goes running into the street.
He's there for hours. He gets taken by an ambulance,
eventually back to the American hospital who has this secret
working relationship with the CIA. And at the American hospitals,
he gets taken in hallucinating and freaking out. They dose

(53:35):
him with sedatives. They electrocute him repeatedly, like they give
him electroshock therapy dozens and dozens of times, and they
dose him with more LSD. They discharge him eventually, but
he never recovers like because he like at no point
in his life does he recover. He eventually gets like
taken back home and he spends the rest of his
days like hiding alone in an apartment owned by his parents.

(53:58):
He can only be social like with dogs. He can't
really be around people ever. Again, he's in a seat,
He's got a girlfriend, they're about to get married. He
leaves her, and he never paints or read books or
has reads books or has a romantic relationship. Again, like
his mind is destroyed by this, Like he is ended
as a human being, is effectively because of what gets

(54:19):
done to him. And kind of based on the reports,
it's probably Gottlieb who puts the fucking acid in his chartreuse.
And the thing is, we're probably going to get into it,
Like do they regard this as a result in their experiment,
Like see, this is proof that you can Yeah, because
all it proves is that if you do enough damage

(54:40):
to somebody's brain, you can ruin their wife. Like again,
if you if you people, yeah you bashed them in
the head with a baseball bat, you can also prove
this like oh yeah, this guy never worked another day
in his life. But it works. It's like you haven't
discovered anything. You've just discovered that if you treat someone horrible,
you can you can permanently mess them up. Yeah. I

(55:03):
think the thing they take out of this is that like, oh, yes,
people who have hepatitis are more vulnerable to LSD, but
also like, well, but you also like in terms of
like it being a bad study, well, you also like
forced him into like a hospital room and electrocuted him
and sedated him and gave him more acid, So you
don't actually know how much of his reaction was due

(55:24):
to the LSD and the hepatitis, how much of it
was due to the electro shock, how much of it
was due to the sedative. Like you've ruined your own
experimental study by conducting it so shodily, Like just as
if you're if you were a soulless monster who thinks
it's okay to test this on people, and you care
about the science deeply, you still wouldn't do it this way.
Like maybe you'd kidnaped this guy and give him acid

(55:46):
and see what would happen, but you wouldn't just start
adding random shit. It's kind of similar to people that
kind of have this really high idea of what the
Nazi scientists accomplished because like, well they didn't have to
worry about ethics to had all these these human subjects.
How much of their science was just pure trash. It's yeah,
their methods, everything about how their record results like you

(56:08):
look at how sloppy this is in terms of getting
any kind of a result. There's no control group, Like
everything about it is these people just they're bad scientists,
Like this is not the way you find out what
they're trying to find out. And that's that's the degree
in terms of like what's going on with Gottlieb. That's
the part of me that's like maybe he is just
kind of like a serial killer, Like I don't know,

(56:31):
maybe that's maybe he just this is what he does
to I don't get off in whatever way, and then
he's able to go home and be this like normal
hippie dad. But he's just got this like deep cruelty
in him that he needs to in the same way
that like you have all these people who were like
murdering folks their entire lives and they're married and they
have kids and stuff like we have. There are examples

(56:52):
like this. There's like John Wayne Gacy, right, Gaycy I
think is one of the ones who had like a family. Um,
maybe I'm wrong, but there's there's like examples of serial
killers everybody, like they're fairly prominent where there it's like, well,
he was just a normal man. We all thought he
was just this you know, he had a wife and
he had kids, and everyone just assumed he was a
member of the community. Um, maybe that's what got leave

(57:14):
is you know, that's the actually the less cynical interpretation,
because the more cynical interpretation, is it, any is a
lot of people if you gave them a job and
it's like your boss just tells you to do it,
you just do it because your boss told you to
do it, and it's otherwise I'll get fired, and this
is my career on the line, and so that if that,

(57:36):
you know that that's part of the lesson the Holocaust,
is it. It didn't take it didn't take millions of
serial killers. It just took a lot of bureaucrats who
kind of like, what else am I gonna do? It's
you know, they is my job. This is what I
was told to guard this building and not let anybody out,
Like that's that that was my job? What you want
me to do? Definitely, I mean obviously, like that's most

(57:57):
of the CIA, right, that's most of the m k
Ultra people. Gottlieb there is that like that particular story
where he's just like he's looking at a bar for
a young kid. He can drug and he does it himself.
That's the thing that like makes me, I don't know,
I know we're getting into more satisfying personal curiosity, but no.
But I think that's what makes a story interesting because again,

(58:21):
the the conspiracy stuff makes certain assumptions about the type
of people that work at the CIA, and I think
it almost imagines him as a different kind of human
being versus so much of this is people just screwing
around like this here, like just dosing this the stranger
to see what happens like this is just this is

(58:41):
reaching stage where you're just screwing around, like there's it's
just your there's not enough oversight. There's nobody checking your method,
there's nobody making your report every single thing you do
because it's all secrets. So you know, um yeah, and
I hate that it as mundane as that it's like, well,
he wasn't reporting to anybody, so it's like, well why
not see what happens? You know, I think you you
get so immersed in this stuff where anything can become

(59:03):
normal if that's just like your day to day job. Yeah,
I mean that is it's to an extent and unknowable question.
But yeah, I but I don't know. Well, well, we'll
come back around to this as we get through, um
like more of this story and you get to know
a little bit more about Sydney Gottlieb. But kind of

(59:23):
right around this time, as Gottlieb is dosing Glickman and
destroying his life, he convinces his boss, Alan Dullis to
merge all the different government teams working on truth serum
and mind control research together. Now, most of what this
means is they're bringing the Army Chemical Corps, who is
still doing separate research into stuff like this, and the
CIA teams under one roof. In November of nineteen fifty two,

(59:46):
a month after Gottlieb drugs Stanley Glickman, Dwight D. Eisenhower
wins the presidency. In a nineteen fifty three he makes
Alan Dullis the new head of the CIA. So, now
this is the kind of ship Sydney has been able
to get up too, with his patron being the number
two man at the CIA. Now is buddies running things,
and stuff's gonna go off the rails. But you know

(01:00:07):
what else goes off the rails? Jason capitalism, I don't.
I mean, yes at some point, um, but but but
probably not while we're all alive. Um. So sit back
and enjoy capitalism and don't think about how it ties
into what these guys were defending by dosing random people

(01:00:29):
in Paris. Ah, we're back, okay. So Jason Alan Dullis
is now running the CIA. Dwight D. Eisenhower is the president.
John Foster Dulas is the Secretary of State, and the

(01:00:49):
agency gets given the go ahead to open more black
sites around the world. At this point, Gottlieb is also
able to expand the scope of his mind control research,
and for the first time, he brings an outside science
to conduct torture experiments. One of these scientists is Paul
Hook of the New York Psychiatric Institute. Gottlieb wanted him
to inject a patient with mescalin to see what would happen.

(01:01:11):
Hawk chose Harold Blower. Now. Blower was depressed after a
divorce and he had gone to Hawk for help. Hawk
is a psychiatrist. Blower is a sad man who in
the fifties is like, you know what, I'm gonna get
over the macho bullshit that like my culture teaches me
about seeking help, and I'm going to go to a
psychiatrist to deal with my divorce. Um. And as a
reward for being that self aware and responsible and taking

(01:01:36):
control of his mental health, Hawk's assistant and secretly injects
Blower with concentrated mescalin, telling him it's depression medicine. He
does this five more times over the course of several weeks,
and and Blower complains, right, he's he's hallucinating. He's having
nightmarish hallucinations every time they give this depression treatment to him.
And he's like, I want to stop. This is not

(01:01:58):
helping me being sad about my wife leaving. Um, my
depression has not been cured by these random, horrible hallucinations. Um,
can we please stop? And Hawk basically tells him, you
can't quit the treatment midstream. You have to finish the
course of medications otherwise it will be really bad for you.
So let's just let's just keep taking this ship. In
January of nineteen fifty three, just days after Dwight Eisenhower

(01:02:21):
is sworn in, Hawk was injected with a dose fourteen
times higher than what he'd been given previously. He began
to have seizures. He had a heart attack, and he
was pronounced dead about three hours after the injection. Hawk
is one of two Americans who are known to have
died from the n kal dr experiments. Right, Um, as
we'll get too later. Most of the there's a lot

(01:02:42):
of data about this that's lost. But howk is one
of the two guys that we know for certain was
killed as a result of these experiments. Um one of
doctor or not Hook Blower, one of doctor Hawk's medical
assistants who had been giving Blower them. Escalin later said, quote,
we didn't know if it was dog piss or what
it was that we were giving him. So maybe these

(01:03:05):
people were not Maybe there's some medical ethics problems here too,
Jesus Christ. Yeah, And so okay, if you had to
put money on all right, there's two people we know died.
If you just had to put down a bet as

(01:03:25):
to whether or not there were at least one or
two more people that we maybe don't know about, would
you take that bet or would you? Yeah? I mean,
I don't want to be irresponsible here and the information
out there, but it just seems it feels implausible. Yeah,
seeing how fast and loose they were playing. I don't know.

(01:03:46):
We will never know because they destroy much of the evidence.
Well we'll we'll explain that later. But like, I don't
I don't see how the the death toll. And we're
talking obviously they've been killing people for a long time.
But those people are yeah, Americans who die kind of
accidentally as a result of experiments. I would be shocked
if it weren't dozens, and it might be more like

(01:04:09):
but we'll but we'll never know, right, And so it's
sometimes it's hard to tell because like a lot of
people have lifelong problems as a result of this and
then eventually die as the result of like and maybe like,
how does the LSD impact the fact that they die
very young of a heart disease or does it make
them take other substances that contribute to their right? This
is all messier. It's usually not as clear as it

(01:04:30):
is with blour, where he just gets injected with a
massive dose of something and has a heart attack. Um,
but yeah, it's it's heart. It's impossible to say exactly,
but my my, if I'm taking that, bet, I feel
pretty good about my adds. Um, now are they calling?
Is this still operating under Artichoke? Or have they started

(01:04:52):
calling it m kale. It's it's just about to be
m kale. So in April of nineteen fifty three, again,
everything we've talked about has happened over about a four
year period, right, this is not a long span of
time that's past. In April of nineteen fifty three, Alan
Dulas gives that big speech at Princeton where he says
that communist spies are about to play the American mind
like a phonograph. A few days later, on April nineteen

(01:05:15):
fifty three, he like officially bundles up all of the
research the US government is going doing into mind control,
and he called launches mk Ultra at Gottlieb's insistence as
the final iteration of the secret mind control research project. Now,
under the terms of the agreement that Gottlieb had made
with Dullus, mk Ultra is granted six percent of the

(01:05:36):
entire CIA operating budget. There are no no requirements for
accounting and no oversight. Alan Dulls is not told what
they're doing. The President of the United States does not
know about this program in anything but the broadest terms.
Like every now and then someone will be like, you know,
we're we're continuing our work on like mind control research

(01:05:57):
because the Soviets have something right, but like um, no
one is being looped in. Gottlieb has six percent of
the CIA budget and zero oversight. And again we can
criticize it in you know, in hindsight, but hindsight at
the time, they had no way of knowing that I
could turn into a carnival of horror. Yeah, so many

(01:06:19):
things go well when you give a man effectively a
license to kill in drug whoever he wants, millions of
dollars and say, no one's watching him? Who himself is
tripping balls much of the day? Who is? Who is? Yeah,
it must be said, is hallucinating an unknown but significant
percentage of the time. Now, maybe this is not something
that made into the records. Did they know that mk

(01:06:41):
Ultra was an awesome name for a project. Yes, it
was randomly generated. They actually kind of break their own
rules to call it him k Ultra. So with cryptonym,
the MK part is normal, right, that just means it's
part of the technical division. The second part of the name,
like we had M k Naomi earlier, it's supposed to

(01:07:02):
be completely random because if somebody, if if some spy
like leaks a document to the Soviets that mentions MK ultra.
You don't want anyone to be able to tell what
it is, Gottly make sure it's called ultra because it's
the most secret thing in the US government, right, Like
that's why he calls it that because he and I
think it's just because he thinks it's cool that that's
his project. Like the most secret thing anyone's doing is

(01:07:24):
his project, and so it's it's ultra. Yeah. If you
sneak into an office at the Pentagon or somewhere and
you see a folder called Project Artichoke, you're probably not
even going to open it, right If you stumble across
a big fat red folder marked MK ultra, Oh yeah, absolutely,
you're stealing that thing. It's like, this is either aliens
or to doomsday weapon, Like you would almost be disappointed

(01:07:47):
at what it actually is. Yeah, it's but it's certainly
like it is actually a pretty bad cryptonym because it
immediately you're like, well, this has to be something pretty
fucking serious, right Yeah. Um, So Adney Gottlieb gets his
blank check and his license to do whatever, and over
the next decade he makes full use of the resources
that have been made available to him under mk ULTRA,

(01:08:08):
and increasing share of the workload gets farmed out to
independent scientists. One of these is Dr Ewen Cameron, a
former head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations as
well as the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron had been born
in Scotland, but he worked mostly in Canada. He was
one of the top couple of psychiatrists on the planet

(01:08:29):
in the mid nineteen fifties. Again, he is the former
head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. He is like,
you don't get much more prestigious than that in this period.
And I want to quote now to talk about what
this motherfucker did. I want to quote from a write
up from the CBCS long form series Brainwashed. Quote. Three

(01:08:50):
years after the CIA launched mk ultra IF, they approached
Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology,
a research foundation and one of their front organizations through
which they funneled money. They encouraged him to apply for
a grant, which he did and quickly received. From January
nineteen fifty seven to September of nineteen sixty, the CIA
gave Cameron sixty dollars US equivalent to slightly more than

(01:09:11):
half a million today. Now, in nineteen fifty five, a
Canadian woman named Esther Schreier marries the love of her
life after a blind date. The two of them have
a child three years later, but the baby dies of
a staff infection a three weeks old. Esther is obviously
very sad about this, and she blames herself for the death.
Her life up to this point has been pretty difficult.

(01:09:32):
Her father had died when she was young, then her
mother had died like right after him. She and her
brother has been a lot of time in foster home.
So this is a woman with a lot of trauma.
And when she gets pregnant two years later, she finds
herself kind of so consumed with anxiety that she's worried
that it's going to harm the baby's health. So Esther
and her husband do the responsible thing. They go to
the best psychiatrists that they can afford to try to

(01:09:53):
get help. And the psychiatrists they go to is Dr
Ewan Cameron. Uh. They had been told that he is
quote godlike when it came to treating issues of anxiety
and depression. And I'm going to continue from quoting from
that CBC right up now. Esther Schreier entered the hospital
in February nineteen sixty to receive what her family thought
was the best care money could buy, but her medical

(01:10:14):
notes showed disregard for her well being and that of
her unborn child right from the start. She spent thirty
days in what was called the sleep room, a place
where patients were put in a drug induced coma and
roused only for three feedings in bathroom breaks per day.
She lost thirteen pounds that month. Her records showed that
she couldn't stand up because she was too weak. She
also underwent a treatment called deep patterning. Cameron believed that

(01:10:37):
breaking down patients minds to a childlike state through drugs
and electroshock therapy would allow him to work from a
clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part
of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed psychic driving,
which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up
to twenty hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake.
These voices were played through headphones, helmets, or speakers, sometimes

(01:10:59):
installed right inside a patient's pillow. Records show that some
patients would hear these messages up to half a million times. Um, okay,
very very briefly, just yeah, got a question there, Jason.
People who follow me on social media and follow me
on my many many podcast appearances know that I have

(01:11:19):
this drum beat that I come back to, which is
how much the past sucked. And I get that there
are lots of things about the modern world that are terrible,
and that it feels like things going in the wrong direction.
The world's becoming just everything is anxiety and stress. Um,
you know, in inequality, all of the problems. You did

(01:11:42):
not want to live in the nineteen fifties, a fucking
lutly not and whatever you've seen where it's like, well,
you know, back my my dad or my grandpa when
he got married, they on just one income, you know,
at a coal mind they were able to afford a
house in a car and his wife could stay home
and take care of the kids. What happened to that?

(01:12:03):
That's that's perfectly valid. Like everything you're saying there, you
didn't want to live in the nineteen anyone out there
listening to this, who is getting any kind of mental
health care? Like in many many ways. We are still
in the dark ages of mental health care. Like anybody
who's taken any depressants or anti anxiety medication knows how
the effectiveness is all over the map. The dosage is

(01:12:26):
getting it right, the withdrawals are terrible, side effects are terrible.
Like our treatments are not great now. The treatments, God,
the treatments back then, they were just experimenting with different
ways to torture people. And like everything he described, if
you were trying to inflict the worst like mental suffering

(01:12:49):
on somebody, these are all the things you would come
up with. It's sadistic, it's it's it's bug fuck, and
it's made worse by like there's stuff going on that's
like in this realm that them like potentially attempting to
test treatments. Cameron isn't just trying to help her, He's
also he's also trying to experiment with the destruction of

(01:13:12):
human thoughts and memories. Right, He's trying to change like
people's personalities through medical torture, right, Like that's part of
the goal here. She doesn't know that that's what she's
agreed to do, but that's what happens. And by March
twelfth of nineteen sixty Esther Esther Schreier is quote considered
completely depatterned. According to Cameron's medical records. The bad news

(01:13:35):
is that being deep pattern means that she had forgotten
the face, name, and existence of her husband. She could
not control her bladder or bowels, She could not speak,
She had trouble even swallowing. Her son later told journalists that,
according to Esther, she could not remember how to boil water.
Despite being deep patterned. The torture continued. Dr Cameron would
give her four or five days of rest at a time,

(01:13:56):
and then he would take her in and subject her
to hundreds of electro shock treatments. These continued until the
eighth month of her pregnancy. In two thousand four, Esther
told BBC Scotland what it was like when she actually
had her baby, completely stripped of her understanding of how
to be a person. I had a new baby and
I didn't know what to do with the baby. I
had help a baby nurse, but she had to have

(01:14:16):
a day off and she left me a book. And
I'll just give you a little example from you book.
From the book, when you hear the baby cry, go
to the room, pick up baby, and step by step
how to feed the baby. And that was very frightening,
Like she she had to have it explained to her,
like how to feed, like that a baby needed feeding,
all of this stuff like it had just And I
think what's happening here is not that because she recovers

(01:14:38):
eventually she it's not that he's obliterated these memories. It's
that he's done so much damage to her ability to
like focus and function and think by blasting her with
noise basically ceaselessly. Um that she's discovered depending at all,
that's all garbage nonsense. It's if you if you just

(01:15:00):
relentlessly attacks someone in many different ways for a long
enough period, Yeah, their whole sense of their whole function
will break down. There's nothing magical and mysterious about it.
If you torture somebody enough long enough, their ability to
function in all sorts of ways. Like you said, she
also lost a bladder control. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you

(01:15:20):
ruin this person's brain temporarily through sheer harm you were
doing to them. Again, you could get the same effect
by bashing them in the head with a pipe. It's
there's nothing like these these people think they're playing god.
It's like, no, you're just brutalizing people. Yeah, and that's
that's all that's happening. Um. So again, esther does recover,

(01:15:41):
she does get to live a full life, unlike some
of these people. She comes back to herself. Obviously, she
and her son suffered trauma because he's in the womb
while a lot of this is happening, Like, none of
this is good for anybody. Um, and his early childhood
is not ideal as a result of his mom going
through a lot of this stuff. Still, he and his mom,
you have to say, are kind of the better case

(01:16:01):
scenarios for Dr Cameron's patients. McGill University, where he taught
and conducted his research, later published a Mia copple where
they noted that quote. In addition to LSD, Cameron also
experimented with various paralytic drugs, as well as electro convulsive
therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His
driving experiments consisted of putting subjects in a drug induced

(01:16:22):
coma for weeks at a time up to three months
in one case, while playing tape loops of noise or
simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on
patients who had entered the institute from minor problems such
as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered
permanently from this action. Now I wanted to provide a
little more context as to just how medieval these fucking

(01:16:45):
experiments were, and so I'd like to quote from one
more passage of Kinser's book here before we close out
for the day. There, he or she was fed LSD
and given only minimal amounts of food, water in oxygen.
Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with ear phones into
which he piped phrases or messages like my mother hates me,
repeated hundreds of thousands of times. In professional papers and

(01:17:06):
lab reports, Cameron reported that he had succeeded in destroying minds,
but he had not found a way to replace them
with new ones. After completing the treatment of one patient,
he he wrote with evident pride that the shock treatment
turned the then nineteen year old Honors student into a
woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded
to be fed from a bottle, and urinated on the floor. Now, again,

(01:17:27):
that's important. His goal is to destroy their minds. This
is part one of what God lead wants, right. They
want to destroy people's personalities so that they can put
new ones in their place. Right. And they never figure
out that second part as far as we know, but
they do figure out how to destroy people for a while. Um.
The Canadian government has provided no list of the experiments

(01:17:49):
that Dr Cameron carried out with their approval. This is
not something the CIA is doing, and the Canadian government
is unaware. The Canadian government is enthusiastically a proving of this,
and when the CIA stops funding Cameron, the Canadian government
gives him money to continue his research. Um. So again,
not just the US involved here. Nine of Cameron's patients

(01:18:12):
sued the CIA in the nineteen eighties for their treatment
under m k Ultra. It was settled out of court
in nineteen under the condition that the agency was not
accepting liability. Esther was too embarrassed to sign onto the
case at that point in time, but she eventually signed
on when the Canadian government in nineteen ninety four offered
compensation for people who had experienced full or substantial deep patterning.

(01:18:33):
Seventy four patients received hundred thousand dollar payments under the
condition that the Canadian government was not admitting culpability. So
even when adjusting for inflation, that is nothing, not not
enough money for this. Um, you could not pay me
to have this, As someone who has done quite a
bit of messing with my own head on chemicals, there's nothing.

(01:18:54):
There's not an amount of money you could pay to
go through this. This is the worst thing I can
literally imagine. Um, Like, yeah, I'd rather go to prison
than absolutely. There's like there's like fucking labor camps that
would be a less traumatic experience than this. At least
you're like a person in that right m hm. Anyway, Jason,

(01:19:18):
you got to think you want to plug. How are
we only halfway through this story? How bad does it get? Um?
It gets a lot worse. I mean it's I'd say
it's kind of just stays at this level. Um, so
false exectations with the listeners. Anyways, the novel is called

(01:19:41):
if this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. I
am Jason Parson. I used to be one of the
head guys that cracked when Evans first started posting there
as a literal child, I'm on this is a sequel
to the book slash film John Dyes at the end
it exists as both of those things. If you're fan
of that, Seriousest is the latest book. Otherwise, if you

(01:20:03):
just want to see me posting things on TikTok or
on Twitter or on any of the other ones, my
name is Jason Pargein p A R. G. I In.
I used to write on the Internet as David Wong
back in the day. Um, and we will. We'll be
back for parts three and four. We share well. Um,
you can find my book after the Revolution if you

(01:20:25):
just type it into anything that will let you buy
a book. You know how to use Google. We're done,
Go Home. 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.