Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. Um, I've I've introduced the podcast yet again. Um,
Speaker 1: not one of my best introductions, not one of my worst.
Speaker 1: Two weeks ago we had another just shouting Hitler. So
Speaker 1: you know, if you're if you're a regular listener, this
Speaker 1: is about as good as it gets. Um. This is,
Speaker 1: of course Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very
Speaker 1: worst people in all of history. Uh. And to help
Speaker 1: me out this week and next week we have we
Speaker 1: have a four party for you folks. First off, I
Speaker 1: want to welcome Jason Pargeon to the show. Jason, how's
Speaker 1: it going now that you are far far more famous
Speaker 1: than you were in your cracked days. I honestly don't
Speaker 1: have a sense of how many people in your audience
Speaker 1: know who I am and they're like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: that's the correct guy who used to write as David Wong,
Speaker 1: who writes the John dyes Via novels versus how many
Speaker 1: people just have no idea, just no idea, just could
Speaker 1: not possibly care and less. Yeah, it's hard for me
Speaker 1: to say. I mean whenever we do live events, and
Speaker 1: we've done like nine or ten this year, between like
Speaker 1: book events and stuff, I would say like it my
Speaker 1: my back of my like very rough estimate would be
Speaker 1: like a third of the crowd um has been following
Speaker 1: my stuff since Cracked days, So I would guess like
Speaker 1: somewhere in the thirty range, which is considering the size
Speaker 1: of the audience, pretty good. Jason, you are the author
Speaker 1: of a whole bunch of books. We were just talking
Speaker 1: about this before the show. But I'm startled as I
Speaker 1: try to work on my second novel, I'm startled at
Speaker 1: the number of novels that you've written while doing all
Speaker 1: of the other stuff that you do. Yeah, the one
Speaker 1: that is coming out, the one that I am here promoting,
Speaker 1: is the sixth uh called If this book exists, you're
Speaker 1: in the wrong universe. It is part of the John
Speaker 1: Dies at the Enfranchise. There are are now four books
Speaker 1: in that series. For those of you who have read
Speaker 1: some of them or have just seen the movie that's
Speaker 1: out there on streaming. Came out a decade ago. But
Speaker 1: you can just start with this one if you want.
Speaker 1: It's it's not it's not a Game of Throne situation
Speaker 1: where you have to have read all of the books there.
Speaker 1: They're episodic. You can just now why you would want
Speaker 1: to start with the new and most expensive one. I
Speaker 1: don't know, considering all the other ones are you can
Speaker 1: probably get into used bookstore for like fifty cents. But
Speaker 1: from my point of view, yes, it's the freshest one
Speaker 1: and therefore the best. I read it earlier this year,
Speaker 1: and it's wonderful. I've been reading the John Dyes at
Speaker 1: the End books for like, at this point, roughly two
Speaker 1: thirds of my life. Um, I started reading. I mean, obviously, Jason,
Speaker 1: you are my boss back at Cracked for years and
Speaker 1: years and years and years. I think I worked there
Speaker 1: for close to a decade and you worked there for longer. Um.
Speaker 1: And then but but you started publishing what became the
Speaker 1: first book in that series. Um, it was like an
Speaker 1: every Halloween on your old website. This isn't the pre
Speaker 1: Cracked as when you had your own website. Um, you
Speaker 1: would publish I don't know what was it, probably words
Speaker 1: something like that every year around Halloween. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: just part of my blog. It was like my annual
Speaker 1: Halloween update was just continuing story I was writing. Started
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one, I think, yeah, yeah, which
Speaker 1: I would have been like twelve or thirteen. I think
Speaker 1: when I started reading that series and I loved it.
Speaker 1: Then I found it like very very engaging, and kind
Speaker 1: of stayed obsessed with it ever since. UM. And one
Speaker 1: of the things it's always been interesting to me about it,
Speaker 1: you're that series in particular. I think one of the
Speaker 1: things you could call it is like psychedelic horror, because
Speaker 1: it's it's not just like a horror series, but kind
Speaker 1: of one of the inciting incidents is the characters take
Speaker 1: a supernatural hallucinogen. Essentially, that is kind of the inciting
Speaker 1: incident of the series, and it's one of the only
Speaker 1: One of the things that I've always found interesting about
Speaker 1: your books is that I started reading them before I
Speaker 1: ever started messing around with psychedelics, and I've continued to
Speaker 1: enjoy them since UM, which is pretty rare in terms
Speaker 1: of like encountering people writing about that stuff before you
Speaker 1: know about it personally, and then after you know about it.
Speaker 1: And I've always been interested in that in part because
Speaker 1: you don't do psychedelics. You haven't like actually like taken
Speaker 1: acid or anything like that. No, And in fact, I've
Speaker 1: never drank alcohol. I have a very addictive personality. I
Speaker 1: get addicted to things very easily, and I have been
Speaker 1: afraid of any kind of drugs or cigarettes anything for
Speaker 1: ever since I was a youth. Uh but no, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's it is very much like I've done a
Speaker 1: lot of research into them. But it's not to be clear,
Speaker 1: it's not scaremongering about. It's not people no no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no, found themselves turning into monsters, because there
Speaker 1: was a lot of fiction written like that in the
Speaker 1: day that people they took LST and then they became
Speaker 1: possessed by a devil or whatever. It's more of a
Speaker 1: metaphorical thing, but they take a yeah, a some kind
Speaker 1: of a mysterious substance that lets them kind of see
Speaker 1: beyond reality and the way that if you were playing
Speaker 1: a video game and you suddenly glitched through the world.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like that, only with through time and
Speaker 1: space and um. But for those of you who don't
Speaker 1: read the film is because there's kind of an interesting story.
Speaker 1: I won't let drag on. But they I sold the
Speaker 1: film rights to it back when it was nothing. It
Speaker 1: was I wrote it on the Internet and then had
Speaker 1: like a print on demand publisher selling physical copies of it,
Speaker 1: and we sold just a couple of thousand of them
Speaker 1: when Don Cosca Elliott, cold horror writer director, a legendary
Speaker 1: direct Yeah, I made the Phantasm series um of Hotep
Speaker 1: got hold of the rights and not only bought the
Speaker 1: rights but made the movie, which is the rare part.
Speaker 1: Lots of people saw film rights to actually have it
Speaker 1: get made to and then it debuted a Sundance in
Speaker 1: and you know, I flew out there and got to
Speaker 1: be part of a You and a with the cast
Speaker 1: and all that. So it's it's kind of a crazy
Speaker 1: success story because at the time this happened, in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, there were there were not a lot
Speaker 1: of people writing stuff on the Internet and then selling
Speaker 1: it as books or selling it. Still doesn't happen terribly often.
Speaker 1: People you're famous examples of like oh this guy's Twitter
Speaker 1: account got turned into a TV series or whatever, like
Speaker 1: you hear you do. But I mean, I often describe
Speaker 1: you to people as the first fifty shades of gray. Um.
Speaker 1: But I bring up the fact that the so much
Speaker 1: of like the inciting incidence of your series is kind
Speaker 1: of like based around hallucinogens and like shadow people and
Speaker 1: all this kind of um sort of dark occult stuff,
Speaker 1: because that ties in directly to what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: The subject of our episodes for the next two weeks
Speaker 1: is the mk Ultra program that the CIA carried out
Speaker 1: through most of the fifties in early nineteen sixties. Now,
Speaker 1: most people I think are probably like Jason, Actually, how
Speaker 1: would you, based on kind of your level of knowledge,
Speaker 1: casual knowledge, how would you describe what the mk Ultra
Speaker 1: program was. Here's the thing. It is impossible for me
Speaker 1: to separate what I actually know as fact and what
Speaker 1: I've merely heard in conspiracy theory circles, because the one
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory that I do believe in is that government
Speaker 1: agencies and the true bad actors in society love conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: absolutely love that this stuff gets picked up by cranks
Speaker 1: and the same people who talk about Bigfoot, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about mk Ultra and the same breath and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, Bigfoot was actually an mk Ultra program and
Speaker 1: turned a man into a giant monkey. They love that,
Speaker 1: They love that it smears all of these things as
Speaker 1: this the stuff of cranks and crackpots, when the reality
Speaker 1: needs no embellishment. No, it does, because what the reality
Speaker 1: of the mk Ultra program is that the federal government
Speaker 1: devoted countless resources and essentially like a license to kill
Speaker 1: to a bunch of scientists so that they could attempt
Speaker 1: to eradicate the concept of human free will using LSD
Speaker 1: like that's that's what they tried to do. UM. And
Speaker 1: it included uh an outrageous number of crimes. And it
Speaker 1: is it is a conspiracy. It's just not a conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory because it's pretty well documented. A lot of the
Speaker 1: guys who are involved with this have talked at this point,
Speaker 1: so we know what's happened. UM, So we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about that for quite a while here. I do
Speaker 1: want to start by talking a little bit about kind
Speaker 1: of the human history of use of psychedelics and even
Speaker 1: kind of the history of the use of psychedelics in
Speaker 1: a military context by states, um, because all of this
Speaker 1: stuff actually goes back further than you'd guess. When we're
Speaker 1: talking about like actual hallucinogenic drugs. The oldest, like the
Speaker 1: first thing human beings were taking to consciously make themselves
Speaker 1: hallucinate was probably We're never gonna get an exact answer
Speaker 1: on this, but probably either peyote UM and the active
Speaker 1: ingredient in peyote is a psychedelic proto alkaloid called mescalin um,
Speaker 1: which has been in use at least like fifty seven
Speaker 1: hundred years. Uh. And then you know, we have around
Speaker 1: the same amount of time people have been using hallucinogenic
Speaker 1: mushrooms uh sila cyben right. That also goes back by
Speaker 1: some accounts maybe older something like seven thousand years. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this is based on like people will draw cave paintings
Speaker 1: of like mushrooms and stuff that they that they took,
Speaker 1: and you can find bits of it and like honey
Speaker 1: and whatnot, things that people like buried with their loved ones.
Speaker 1: It's possible people were taking It's possible that like before
Speaker 1: we were human beings are hammedied predecessors were taking you know,
Speaker 1: payote and psilocybin, right, because we know that there are
Speaker 1: certain hallucinogens that non human animals and that other apes take.
Speaker 1: So this is probably something we've been doing like longer
Speaker 1: than we've been human beings. And also this is one
Speaker 1: of those things where when you look at the entire
Speaker 1: culture and our mythology and our religion, whenever you have
Speaker 1: writings of someone who sat down in a field and
Speaker 1: then had a vision of the heavens opening up. How
Speaker 1: many of those were actually influenced by hallucinogens or whatever,
Speaker 1: we won't know, but there's almost no question that they
Speaker 1: regarded these substances as uh like a sacred means of
Speaker 1: opening up reality to get a direct line to the
Speaker 1: gods or whatever. It's just that in the writings they
Speaker 1: left behind they may not mention the part where they
Speaker 1: choot on a certain mushroom to get that effect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's I mean there's other stuff too, like air
Speaker 1: got that people. We know the ancient Greeks were very
Speaker 1: likely um mixing in a couple of different ways, which
Speaker 1: is kind of one of the precursors to L s D.
Speaker 1: There are theories that the human capacity for religious belief
Speaker 1: aim because are and this is you know, would be
Speaker 1: twenty thirty thousand years ago ancestors took a shipload of
Speaker 1: sila cybin um. There have been studies like the Good
Speaker 1: Friday study that at least provide pretty good evidence that
Speaker 1: the kind of religious experiences people have on these drugs
Speaker 1: aren't any different from other kinds of religious experiences, right Like,
Speaker 1: they're not They're not any less real because they're induced
Speaker 1: by a chemical um they continue to influence people, you know,
Speaker 1: in in for decades. UM. So yeah, it's there. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of interesting history there. The first documented military
Speaker 1: use of what you call an in the agen and
Speaker 1: when we're talking about sila cybin, we're talking about all
Speaker 1: of these chemicals. They're all what you'd call in theogen's right,
Speaker 1: that's kind of the name of the type of thing
Speaker 1: that we call hallucinogens um. The first documented military use
Speaker 1: of one of these substances was by Hannibal Barca, you
Speaker 1: know the guy, the elephant guy right with the alps
Speaker 1: uh in around one eight four BC. There are some
Speaker 1: possibly apocryphal reports that he had had his men drug
Speaker 1: enemy stores with belladonna before a battle, so that his
Speaker 1: enemies would basically be hallucinating when he went in to
Speaker 1: fight them, which would provide a benefit. Right. It's it's
Speaker 1: not hard to see how that could potentially work out
Speaker 1: for you, um. And this is probably copied by the
Speaker 1: Bishop of Munster in sixteen seventy two, who actually filled
Speaker 1: grenades with belladonna in order to attempt to disperse its
Speaker 1: poison on the battlefield, which is a pretty modern for
Speaker 1: sixteen seventy two. Pretty modern way of like using a
Speaker 1: chemical weapon. Yeah, that's I had never heard that before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is pretty cool. Fantastic image. Yeah, the Bishop of
Speaker 1: Munster filling grenades with because the active chemical in Belladonna
Speaker 1: is scopolamine, which is what US police tried to use
Speaker 1: for decades as a truth serum. Um. But it it
Speaker 1: just kind of is a moderately powerful hallucinogen that he
Speaker 1: was trying to disperse via grenade. Now I don't actually
Speaker 1: know how well that worked out. It doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: there's good documentation whether or not at it actually had
Speaker 1: much of a military effect. Um. But the dream that
Speaker 1: the Bishop of Munster had and that Hannibal Barket had
Speaker 1: has lingered on in the hearts of military planners for
Speaker 1: a long time, right, Because obviously fighting people is hard, um,
Speaker 1: And if you can make them chemically, if you can
Speaker 1: disperse some sort of substance on the battlefield that makes
Speaker 1: them not want to or not able to fight, that
Speaker 1: would be pretty cool. So World War One is obviously
Speaker 1: when chemical weapons get used for the first time on
Speaker 1: a mass scale, and and we all are aware of
Speaker 1: more or less what happens here. Adolf Hitler himself a
Speaker 1: victim of mustard gas refused in World War Two to
Speaker 1: give approval to the German military to use chemical weapons
Speaker 1: again as an offensive military tool. Right, Obviously, Hitler loves
Speaker 1: using poison gas, but they're not they're not shooting it
Speaker 1: off at the battlefield because he knows that it's going
Speaker 1: to lead to reprisals and he's seen chemical weapons, you know. Uh,
Speaker 1: he doesn't have a moral principle obviously, and he's in
Speaker 1: you know, um, he's not entirely against the idea though,
Speaker 1: of researching more weapons like this. And so during World
Speaker 1: War Two, while the Germans don't use their mustard gas stockpiles,
Speaker 1: they do invent a new poison something called saren nerve
Speaker 1: gas um. And right around the same time the Nazis
Speaker 1: are inventing saren, the Empire of Japan is weaponizing and
Speaker 1: tracks during the war. Now, they actually did use an
Speaker 1: tracks on China. During World War Two. They killed thousands
Speaker 1: of civilians by like dropping anthrax bombs. They would infect
Speaker 1: water supplies with cholera, and their top scientists working at
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one, which we'll be talking about at
Speaker 1: some point in the future, were in direct contact with
Speaker 1: the Nazi chemical weapons head a guy named Kurt Blom,
Speaker 1: who himself tested an TRACKS on thousands of death camp inmates,
Speaker 1: mainly to see what would happen. Right, This is kind
Speaker 1: of when we're trying to figure out how to actually
Speaker 1: weaponize and tracks. A lot of the early studies there
Speaker 1: come from different concentration camps. Blom had also experimented with
Speaker 1: the use of mescal in on concentration camp inmates as
Speaker 1: a truth drug. He'd forcibly dosed inmates a lot of
Speaker 1: them in huge enough quantities that some of them died,
Speaker 1: which is is not easy to do. Mescalen is not
Speaker 1: a super toxic substance, so if you're killing people on it,
Speaker 1: you're effectively giving them sometimes thousands of doses. Um. Because
Speaker 1: the Nazis don't really care what happens to these people,
Speaker 1: they're able to kind of do that. UM. So the
Speaker 1: Allies are not super aware that most of this is
Speaker 1: going on at the time. There's a pretty big fog
Speaker 1: of war. These are very top secret. Obviously, they know
Speaker 1: that Japan is using chemical weapons against China, but they're
Speaker 1: not super aware of like what the Germans are researching
Speaker 1: at this point. But what was known was enough that
Speaker 1: it's scared Winston Churchill, and he made a public announcement
Speaker 1: of his fears that the Nazis were planning a biological
Speaker 1: weapon attack on the United Kingdom. So he asks the
Speaker 1: United States for help and building up a defensive stockpile
Speaker 1: of weaponized viruses and toxins. Right, Churchill doesn't want to
Speaker 1: use all these either, because he's thinking the same thing
Speaker 1: Hitler is, if if we use these on the Nazis,
Speaker 1: then they'll start using stuff on our soldiers. But he
Speaker 1: wants to have a bunch of scary ship that he
Speaker 1: can unleash on continent of Europe if the Nazis start
Speaker 1: dropping stuff on the UK. You can see, like the
Speaker 1: logic that's going to be a big part of the
Speaker 1: nuclear arms race already kind of at play here. Um
Speaker 1: In general, all of history is a series of people saying, well,
Speaker 1: we need to pursue this truly grotesque mission because if
Speaker 1: we don't, the enemy will, or we suspect they already are.
Speaker 1: But the only reason the enemy is doing it is
Speaker 1: because they think you're doing it. And I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: a name for that paradox. But for example, in the
Speaker 1: last time I was on this show, we briefly talked
Speaker 1: about World War One, which is a war based almost
Speaker 1: entirely around a series of nations saying, look, we better
Speaker 1: go ahead and just arm up because we know France
Speaker 1: is doing it. It's like, if you know when we wis,
Speaker 1: go ahead and go to war now, because it's gonna happen,
Speaker 1: like like in every country thought this about everyone else.
Speaker 1: So here it's you can see this weird gain theory
Speaker 1: thing where unchecked paranoia about your enemy is a blank
Speaker 1: check to your people to just pursue madness because after all,
Speaker 1: what what thing could be too horrifying to use against
Speaker 1: insert enemy here? Nazis, the communist, the terrorists on the
Speaker 1: Muslim terrorists. It's it's like, well, of course we need
Speaker 1: these advanced interrogation techniques otherwise, you know, how are we
Speaker 1: going to stop our kinda in fifty years from now?
Speaker 1: You can insert whatever enemy. But that's always been the logic,
Speaker 1: probably going back thousands of years. It's like, hey, normally
Speaker 1: we would do this, but and what's one of the
Speaker 1: things that's most kind of morally complex about this is
Speaker 1: that it doesn't always go badly right. World War one
Speaker 1: horrible nightmare because that logic leads to tens of millions
Speaker 1: of deaths. It also doesn't lead to tens of millions
Speaker 1: of deaths in in the nucle your arms race, like
Speaker 1: because everybody's got all these weapons and has the ability
Speaker 1: to end all life, we don't have this big war
Speaker 1: between the Soviet Union of the Unite. We have a
Speaker 1: bunch of little horrible wars, but we don't have this
Speaker 1: big war. And you kind of it's the same thing
Speaker 1: with biological weapons on the battlefield in World War two
Speaker 1: because they don't get used in Europe. The Nazis in
Speaker 1: Vince Sarin and they weaponize and tractions we're about to
Speaker 1: talk about, the US develops themuch a horrible ship, but
Speaker 1: none of it it gets used because everybody's like just
Speaker 1: kind of too scared to start that. Um, so I
Speaker 1: don't know, I know what the moral is here? Well know,
Speaker 1: very very quick note, um, we do record these in advance.
Speaker 1: If there has been a nuclear war between now and
Speaker 1: when this goes up, understand that that's what he just
Speaker 1: said was based. This was pre the bombs being launched.
Speaker 1: We were not aware of it when we recorded this.
Speaker 1: So if you're if you're saying, well, how how how
Speaker 1: stupid are these guys? They don't know that the situation
Speaker 1: Ukraine resulted in nuclear apocalypse. It's because we It wasn't
Speaker 1: It hadn't happened when we recorded it. If you're listening
Speaker 1: to this huddled around the ruins of the Chrysler building
Speaker 1: defending off wolves with like crudely made spears that you
Speaker 1: you you you created out of like scrap metal from
Speaker 1: light poles, Um, there was a time where the world
Speaker 1: wasn't like that. Uh, then please just give us we
Speaker 1: we're doing our best here. Yeah. If you if you
Speaker 1: live in a society that has lost all aspects of
Speaker 1: modernity except for the ability to like yell at podcast hosts. Um,
Speaker 1: please please hold up for a second. Sophie deals with
Speaker 1: enough as it's um. So, yeah, you've got these, uh,
Speaker 1: you've got these you know. Um this kind of biological
Speaker 1: arms race that's sort of in the background of World
Speaker 1: War Two. Obviously it doesn't get a whole lot of
Speaker 1: attention because most of this stuff doesn't wind up getting used,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like fucked up when you're talking about
Speaker 1: saren nerve gas and like the cholera and trying to
Speaker 1: weaponize virus that's like horrifying for some reason, but it's
Speaker 1: actually not when you think about what's going on, it's
Speaker 1: not any different from any other kind of arms race. Right.
Speaker 1: You can say that the weaponry is a little more
Speaker 1: dangerous maybe, but like it's it's it's stockpiling killing agents. Right,
Speaker 1: there's not a massive difference fundamentally, And like stockpiling a
Speaker 1: bomb or stockpiling a bomb that is killed by way
Speaker 1: of viruses. You know, people are more disgusted by this stuff,
Speaker 1: but it is kind of the same basic concept. But
Speaker 1: on February third, nineteen forty nine, and kind of the
Speaker 1: early stages of the Cold War, something that was completely
Speaker 1: new entered the minds of the men plotting their way
Speaker 1: through this, like opening stages of the Cold War, Right,
Speaker 1: this is kind of the first new development, totally new
Speaker 1: development and like conceptions of warfare in in quite a
Speaker 1: long while. Um. And it it starts because a guy
Speaker 1: named Cardinal Joseph men zinz Jeez, I'm he's he's he's Hungarian.
Speaker 1: Cardinal Joseph men Zinn He was the leader of the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church in Hungary starting in nineteen forty five, and
Speaker 1: in World War Two he'd been imprisoned by the fascist
Speaker 1: Arrow Cross Party for his opposition to fascism. But he
Speaker 1: was also really opposed to communism. Right, So when the
Speaker 1: Nazis lose and the Iron Curtain goes down or whatever
Speaker 1: you want to say, when the USSR winds up kind
Speaker 1: of influence in Hungary, um, Mencenti is not happy with
Speaker 1: that either. He's actually a monarchist. He never really got
Speaker 1: over the collapse of the Austro Hungarian Empire, so when
Speaker 1: the Communists come to power, he resists them too. In
Speaker 1: ninety eight, religious orders get banned by the government of Hungary.
Speaker 1: The Catholic Church is called a reactionary force, which it
Speaker 1: had often been a lot of Catholics had supported the
Speaker 1: fascist dictatorship that had existed in World War Two. Um,
Speaker 1: but Mencenti hadn't. Um. But since he was such a prime,
Speaker 1: like prominent opponent of the communist regime, he gets arrested
Speaker 1: by the communists and they do the thing that like
Speaker 1: you do when you capture a political enemy. They like
Speaker 1: beat him with truncheons until he agrees to go on
Speaker 1: camera and confess to a bunch of crimes. Um. And
Speaker 1: this is not weird, right, like having government thugs beat
Speaker 1: a man until he confesses to like trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: the government and reinstitute a monarchy. Pretty normal stuff for
Speaker 1: like a totalitarian regime can do to do. It shouldn't
Speaker 1: have been that weird to anybody, But the CI a
Speaker 1: like kind of freaks out over this. So this is
Speaker 1: a new organization at the time. They've just been formed
Speaker 1: from the OSS about a year before this um and
Speaker 1: they panic when they hear Manzenti come on and be like,
Speaker 1: I was trying to overthrow the government and the YadA
Speaker 1: YadA yadah. And in his excellent book Poisoner in Chief,
Speaker 1: Stephen Kinzer writes quote, they focused on the way man
Speaker 1: Zenti had behaved during his trial. He appeared disoriented, spoken
Speaker 1: a flat monotone, and confessed to crimes that he had
Speaker 1: evidently not committed. Clearly he had been coerced. But how
Speaker 1: at the CIA the answer seemed terrifyingly obvious. The Soviets
Speaker 1: had developed drugs or mind control techniques that can make
Speaker 1: people say things they did not believe. No evidence of this, ever,
Speaker 1: m urged. Manzinti was coerced with traditional techniques like ill treatment,
Speaker 1: extended isolation, beatings and repetitive interrogation. The fear that communists
Speaker 1: had discovered some potent psychoactive tool, however, sent a shockwave
Speaker 1: through the c I A. So this is what I
Speaker 1: love about conspiracies about mind control, because the reality is,
Speaker 1: there are so many ways to manipulate the behavior of
Speaker 1: a person who is weaker than you, through pain, through
Speaker 1: threats to their family, through financials with bribes, you know,
Speaker 1: and there's some of the most successful interrogators were not violent.
Speaker 1: They just offered people the cookies or a car or something,
Speaker 1: uh that to say, well, my gosh, they developed a
Speaker 1: magical chemical that you injected a person, They'll just do
Speaker 1: whatever you want. They were so enamored with this idea
Speaker 1: when that's like the oldest means of humans interacting with
Speaker 1: one another, like that predates humanity, humans making other humans
Speaker 1: do what they want. It says something about these guys
Speaker 1: that like, instead of being like, yeah, they probably just
Speaker 1: hit him until he did what they wanted him do,
Speaker 1: like the thing we do when we want someone to
Speaker 1: do something, they're like, they must have invented some new
Speaker 1: drug that's taken over his mind and changed his personality.
Speaker 1: Um it is it is really like this is the
Speaker 1: fact that this is the inciting incident of the CIA's
Speaker 1: mind control program. Um is in a way very funny.
Speaker 1: And it's also just like this is the whole Cold
Speaker 1: War in a nutshell, right, This this is what gets
Speaker 1: us into so many different conflicts and gets like a
Speaker 1: few million people killed. Is all of those these things
Speaker 1: that start with like some guys in a room in
Speaker 1: d C, like misinterpreting something and then freaking each other
Speaker 1: out right doing that very human thing where everybody's just
Speaker 1: kind of like yes, ending each other into the apocalypse,
Speaker 1: especially when you have funding that will come to your budget.
Speaker 1: If you can make the case up the ladder yep,
Speaker 1: that the enemy has blank that there's a there's a
Speaker 1: motivation beyond just simple misunderstanding, Like a lot of money
Speaker 1: was spent here, a lot of jobs were created. Like
Speaker 1: you don't think in terms of somebody trying to create
Speaker 1: a bureaucrat try and create work for themselves, but they
Speaker 1: they this was motivated reasoning if the if the Russians
Speaker 1: have this, then we now have a blank check to
Speaker 1: try to pursue this. And some of it was just
Speaker 1: people career climbing, yes, indeed, and you know who else
Speaker 1: is climbing the ranks of the corporate hierarchy, the people
Speaker 1: who sponsor our podcasts. How do you? How do you?
Speaker 1: How do you? How do you feel about buying gold
Speaker 1: online from shady websites that advertise through random podcast ads?
Speaker 1: Is that how you invest your your money? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: one society collapses, gold will be the only valuable currency.
Speaker 1: It just it just makes sense. Not cans of beans
Speaker 1: and toilet paper. That's not what people will be trading.
Speaker 1: They'll be trading gold. Yeah, No, not freeze dried food,
Speaker 1: or ammunition or or water purification to bublits. Gold the
Speaker 1: thing that's useful when you're starving, perfect store of value. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's probably adds for buying gold off the internet. We're
Speaker 1: back and we're talking about what a good store of
Speaker 1: value gold is. And Jason, if you're looking to diversify
Speaker 1: your your cash stockpile for the apocalypse, I happen to
Speaker 1: have a lot of Iraqi dinars and from what I hear,
Speaker 1: they're about to blow up. They're gonna get revalued by
Speaker 1: by President Trump and um a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of money in the denar these days. Yeah, one society collapses, basically,
Speaker 1: you're gonna want gold and you're gonna want bitcoin. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I agree with you, Jason. If people really want
Speaker 1: to survive the end of days, throw out your water,
Speaker 1: light year, dried food on fire stockpiled denars, and gold.
Speaker 1: That's that's gonna key you alive when the floodwaters wipe
Speaker 1: out two thirds of Florida. That's what you want to
Speaker 1: be carrying with you away as as as the coastline disappears.
Speaker 1: Is as much gold as you can fit in your pockets.
Speaker 1: Speaking of things that you can fit in your pockets,
Speaker 1: let's talk about knowledge. Cia, Um, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: did my I did my best there. So this moment,
Speaker 1: this cardinal getting like just beaten up until he lies
Speaker 1: about having tried to overthrow the government brings absolute certain
Speaker 1: teeth to the CIA top bress that the Russians have
Speaker 1: developed a mind control drug. Now we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: a lot of hourly ship here, but it's important that
Speaker 1: it under that the people who are like freaking out
Speaker 1: over this, and the people who are the people whose
Speaker 1: freakouts lead to everything that follows are a bunch of
Speaker 1: Yale and Harvard kids, right, most of them grew up
Speaker 1: extremely rich. The Dulles brothers who are going to be
Speaker 1: big parts of this, like are literally hanging out with
Speaker 1: heads of state when when their kids. And that's like
Speaker 1: most of the early o s s CIA guys. Now,
Speaker 1: some of these dudes had done real gnarly ship in
Speaker 1: World War Two had been like like international man of Mystery,
Speaker 1: badass stuff. You know, you do have some of those
Speaker 1: like cowboys here, but that's not who's actually calling the shots.
Speaker 1: For the most part, most of the people calling the
Speaker 1: shots had been like sitting in Switzerland and kind of
Speaker 1: like making the decisions that determined whether or not spies
Speaker 1: on the ground lived and died. And now they're sitting
Speaker 1: in d c Um and they've convinced themselves that an
Speaker 1: old priest commence confessing to crimes he didn't convince under
Speaker 1: torture meant that the Soviets had developed some sort of
Speaker 1: mind control drug um. And there's this all of this
Speaker 1: discourse around the c I A, a lot of which
Speaker 1: is formed by the things they're doing in this period
Speaker 1: of time, portrays them as I think these guys probably
Speaker 1: would have wanted to be portrayed as these insidious, dangerous
Speaker 1: competent manipulators of public opinion, and orchestrators of conspiracies. Now,
Speaker 1: these are all things that the agency and individuals within
Speaker 1: it have been over the years. But a life in
Speaker 1: the shadows plotting crimes against your fellow man doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that you're like healthy or rational, And it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that like the things that you're kind of conniving your
Speaker 1: way into doing make a whole lot of sense. Uh,
Speaker 1: And that's kind of important to keep in mind as
Speaker 1: this story builds. Now, there's another inciting incident for what
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about this week. This one's a
Speaker 1: little bit happier. It starts in nineteen thirty six when
Speaker 1: chemists from Sandas Laboratory synthesize lesurgic acid diethylamide for the
Speaker 1: very first time UM. And one of the guys who's
Speaker 1: on this project is a dude named Albert Hoffman. He's
Speaker 1: a research scientist for Sandaz, which is, by the way,
Speaker 1: the company who gave us like sacharin um or saccharin
Speaker 1: like that's that's Sandas. They're a very very large chemical company.
Speaker 1: And Hoffman had been tasked with finding substances in medicinal
Speaker 1: plants that could be purified into different pharmaceutical drugs. They
Speaker 1: didn't care what the pharmaceutical drugs did. They were just saying, like,
Speaker 1: find us new chemicals, see what stuff does what, and
Speaker 1: then we'll try to find a way to sell it.
Speaker 1: So in the night late nineteen thirties, Hoffman is studying
Speaker 1: air got which is this rye fungus that had been
Speaker 1: associated with hallucinatory spells. Sometimes people that make like bread
Speaker 1: that had this fungus in it, and then like towns
Speaker 1: would wind up hallucinating for days. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: fun stuff that happens in the Middle Ages, probably because
Speaker 1: of of air got um. There's a lot of theories that,
Speaker 1: like the a lot of witch hunts of stuff, yeah,
Speaker 1: even trace back to It's it's it's hard to tell
Speaker 1: what's true and what's just uh yeah, theorizing. But it's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that makes sense because you could
Speaker 1: have it, people get it in there whatever and their
Speaker 1: food supply and not know that they were under the
Speaker 1: influence of something. So that again reporting that they had
Speaker 1: seen supernatural things happening from there, that's enough of a
Speaker 1: witness for them to set a witch on fire. Because
Speaker 1: it did not take much back then, Yeah it does not.
Speaker 1: And one of the things the kind of I haven't
Speaker 1: taken air got fungus, but I have taken LSD somewhere
Speaker 1: around a hundred times, and different doses do different things.
Speaker 1: And one thing that can happen if you just take
Speaker 1: a little bit, it's not even that you like hear voices,
Speaker 1: but it's it's that, like you, your your impulses feel
Speaker 1: as if maybe they're coming from somewhere else, and you
Speaker 1: can kind of convince yourself that someone is talking to
Speaker 1: you right. Um, And some people, especially if you're like
Speaker 1: a medieval peasant, maybe you get convinced it's God right,
Speaker 1: and maybe you don't like this lady in town and
Speaker 1: you've never trusted her, and you convince yourself in this
Speaker 1: state that God is telling you that she's a witch
Speaker 1: or something like that. There's all sorts of ship that
Speaker 1: could potentially have been happening here. The one thing you're
Speaker 1: not going to get on the show is a lot
Speaker 1: of scaremongering about who sin agens, because you're going to
Speaker 1: get a lot of terrifying experiments as we get into this.
Speaker 1: But you have to understand it is very, very different.
Speaker 1: One if you're not paying attention to the dose, but
Speaker 1: to dosing people who don't know they've been dozed. So
Speaker 1: when things like set and setting matters so much and
Speaker 1: how you experience these things, if you're already paranoid, or
Speaker 1: you're already a place where you're feeling under siege, or
Speaker 1: you think you've got enemies around every corner, and you've
Speaker 1: been dosed with this in your food or whatever, and
Speaker 1: you don't know what's happening to you, you know, and
Speaker 1: then so you rewind to an another era when people
Speaker 1: didn't know the wh whosin degens were even a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what would you assume. You would, of course assumed you
Speaker 1: were possessed or that you had been assaulted by the
Speaker 1: devil or whatever, and so the same thing here, Like,
Speaker 1: there's a big difference between what these people are doing
Speaker 1: and the people who use this recreation recreationally. We're not
Speaker 1: trying to scare you off of it. It's just that
Speaker 1: you're going to see the worst possible. There's actually there's
Speaker 1: a degree we'll talk about this more. There's a degree
Speaker 1: to which this also kind of makes the case of
Speaker 1: how safe these are, because a lot of the worst
Speaker 1: reactions to this are there giving people the equivalent of
Speaker 1: thousands of doses at a time, like an amount no
Speaker 1: one would choose to take. And like, yeah, people die
Speaker 1: when you give them seven thousand times like a normal
Speaker 1: dose of a of a drug. Almost any drug will
Speaker 1: work that way, right, Like if you give someone seven
Speaker 1: thousand times as much aspirin as they should take, they
Speaker 1: probably will not make it, right, that will kill them.
Speaker 1: Or if you give them five thousand servings of mashed
Speaker 1: potatoes all at once, now will also die. That's that
Speaker 1: depends on the mashed potatoes. I I I put about
Speaker 1: a stick of butter pur potato, so it will take
Speaker 1: much less of my potatoes to kill you. Um. Really,
Speaker 1: just a bowl can do it in some cases. Uh.
Speaker 1: So he's trying to Hoffman is trying to synthesize a
Speaker 1: compound out of rye fungus that's gonna work as a
Speaker 1: speaking of heart disease, a circulatory in respiratory stimulant, right
Speaker 1: because this drug one of the things that can do
Speaker 1: is it has an impact on your your heart rate
Speaker 1: and your respirations. And he thinks that maybe this will
Speaker 1: maybe he can get something out of ergot that will
Speaker 1: do that. Um, and the LSD that we have today
Speaker 1: is his twenty attempt at like pulling a chemical out
Speaker 1: of ergot that has a medicinal use, which is why
Speaker 1: we call it LSD. UM. Now, initially the substance that
Speaker 1: Offman has found seems to be a very little value.
Speaker 1: Research on it gets canceled, and Hoffman moves on for
Speaker 1: five years. But there's something about the drug that kind
Speaker 1: of calls out to him. He just can't kind of
Speaker 1: get it out of his head, even though he has
Speaker 1: not taken it for himself at this point. And so
Speaker 1: on April nineteenth, nineteen three, he decides to try something,
Speaker 1: and he takes two and fifty micrograms of acid um.
Speaker 1: And this is like probably a moderate dose. Like you know,
Speaker 1: if you actually have ever taken acid, you you buy
Speaker 1: like a hit or something. And what a hit is
Speaker 1: is is not um like standardized. Like you probably have
Speaker 1: no idea how much LSD you've taken if you've taken LSD,
Speaker 1: because you you bought like a drop of liquid that
Speaker 1: was put on a piece of paper by a dude
Speaker 1: who like gave it to you at a club, Right,
Speaker 1: you have no idea what what what you're getting? Um,
Speaker 1: But this is probably something like four to five hits
Speaker 1: of acid um in like modern terms. So this is
Speaker 1: like a substantial dose, right, This is not like a
Speaker 1: light hit of the drug. UM. So he doses himself
Speaker 1: at four pm, and at five pm he writes quote
Speaker 1: beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortion, symptoms of paralysis,
Speaker 1: desire to laugh. Um. And that's the last thing he
Speaker 1: writes in his journal because after that point he is
Speaker 1: tripping too hard to write anything. Um. Did you say
Speaker 1: he dosed himself at Yeah, he sure did. That is
Speaker 1: kind of interesting, isn't it, Jason. Um. So sometimes sometimes
Speaker 1: we get these little beautiful synchronicities. So Hoffman has a
Speaker 1: pretty good trip, it has to be said. Um, it's
Speaker 1: nineteen forty three, so like you can't take your car
Speaker 1: on the road because there's these wartime restrictions. So he's
Speaker 1: bicycling home. Um, and his his he has an assistant
Speaker 1: who kind of like escorts him. Who's his sober sitter. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, he recants later in great detail in his book, quote,
Speaker 1: kaleidoscopic fantastic images surged in me, alternating variegated opening and
Speaker 1: then closing themselves in circles and spirals exploding, and colored
Speaker 1: fountains rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was
Speaker 1: particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound
Speaker 1: of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed
Speaker 1: into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vivid, changing image
Speaker 1: with a jone consistent form and color. So he's tripping
Speaker 1: balls here. This is a pretty like this. This is
Speaker 1: a pretty substantial dose of the drug um and it,
Speaker 1: as he said, he has a great time. Like Hoffman
Speaker 1: will spend the rest of his life as an advocate
Speaker 1: for this stuff because he finds it like a wonderfully
Speaker 1: pleasant and powerful experience. And he he becomes convinced that
Speaker 1: LSD has an incredible potential as a therapeutic drug. And
Speaker 1: he's absolutely correct. In this um asset has been shown
Speaker 1: to have fantastic potential in a number of clinical trials
Speaker 1: for treating alcoholism. It can be extreme and again when
Speaker 1: we say it can treat alcoholism, it can be an antidepressant,
Speaker 1: It can treat post traumatic stress disorder. We're not saying
Speaker 1: you can just take some and it makes it better.
Speaker 1: Although some people have had that experience in the past,
Speaker 1: these are all when we're talking about the clinical trials,
Speaker 1: these are all giving someone LSD alongside therapy for like alcoholism,
Speaker 1: or therapy for depression, or therapy for post traumatic stress
Speaker 1: disorder UM. And in terms of like why it's useful
Speaker 1: for this, I'm gonna quote from a researcher talking to
Speaker 1: the Guardian. In depression, people get locked into a way
Speaker 1: of thinking that is repetitive and ruminative. It's like tramline thinking.
Speaker 1: Psychedelics disrupt those kind of processes so people can escape
Speaker 1: from it. And that's why this stuff is useful. And
Speaker 1: there's there are now studies that show similar promise with
Speaker 1: substances like m d m A, which seems to be
Speaker 1: particularly effective at treating PTSD, or silas cybin. And and
Speaker 1: to get back to the subjuct of like mushrooms and religion,
Speaker 1: one of the things that sila cybin has been shown
Speaker 1: clinically to be most effective at is in hospice patients
Speaker 1: and people who are like dying of terminal diseases, helping
Speaker 1: people deal with their fear of death. It's very effective
Speaker 1: when used properly UM for that. And and so it
Speaker 1: is fair to say that Hoffman was right, this kind
Speaker 1: of immediate thing he thinks when he takes acid, like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this stuff could be really useful for people.
Speaker 1: He's absolutely correct, But in the nineteen forties there's a
Speaker 1: lot less known about this, and so the kind of
Speaker 1: initial group of people who start taking acid, like Hoffman
Speaker 1: is always going to be an advocate for this stuff,
Speaker 1: and gradually he's going to get other people interested in it.
Speaker 1: But the first group of people who really gets hard
Speaker 1: into acid are not scientists, and they're not hippies. There
Speaker 1: CIA agents and scientists affiliated with the cia UM, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's what's going to happen. In late nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: an officer of the Army Chemical Corps reported to L.
Speaker 1: Wilson Green, a director at the Edgewood Arsenal, which is
Speaker 1: where the the US keeps all of its like horrible
Speaker 1: chemical weapons that had been building up during World War Two.
Speaker 1: He reports to Green that Sandoz chemists had created a
Speaker 1: new hallucinogen. Next, Kinser writes, Green was riveted. He collected
Speaker 1: all the information he could find on the subject, then
Speaker 1: produced a long report entitled Psychochemical Warfare, a New Concept
Speaker 1: of War. It concluded with a strong recommendation that the
Speaker 1: government begins systematically testing LSD, mescalen and sixty other mind
Speaker 1: altering compounds that might be weaponized for use against enemy populations.
Speaker 1: Their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely, destroyed,
Speaker 1: by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue. Green
Speaker 1: wrote the symptoms which are considered to be a value
Speaker 1: in strategic and tactical operations include the following fitz Er seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium,
Speaker 1: extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do
Speaker 1: even simple things, suicidal mania, and one of them just
Speaker 1: why I wanted to jump in a few minutes ago.
Speaker 1: That we're not scaremongering about these substances. Because, to be clear,
Speaker 1: when they saw the results, they did not come out
Speaker 1: and say, hey, if you introduce this to the enemy army,
Speaker 1: they may put down their weapons because they have seen
Speaker 1: that war is wrong and the life has value, because
Speaker 1: you know they've had a pleasant trip. No, they were
Speaker 1: thinking purely in terms, oh this will this will drive
Speaker 1: them insane. There they'll tell you tear each other to
Speaker 1: pieces and then run off into the wilderness screaming before
Speaker 1: they fold dead of heart attacks and seizures, like they
Speaker 1: were imagining something. They would just savage the enemy worse
Speaker 1: than bullets. Not Hey, we can actually prevent conflict by
Speaker 1: dosing the enemy and having them just be too too
Speaker 1: chill to want to fight a war. And a lot
Speaker 1: of this is a reaction to there had been this
Speaker 1: assumption prior to World War Two that when cities started
Speaker 1: getting saturation bombed Byans, which are pretty new at the time,
Speaker 1: the entire population of the city is going to lose
Speaker 1: their mind and right like, they'll be murdering each other
Speaker 1: in the streets and just like people's people's brains will
Speaker 1: shatter if they're forced to endure bombing, and none of
Speaker 1: that happens. In fact, it turns out that like when
Speaker 1: you bomb cities, people get really tough and they get
Speaker 1: angry at you, and they don't collapse morally. It doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: The British don't collapse under bombing, the Germans don't collapse
Speaker 1: under bombing. For the Japanese to collapse under bombing, it
Speaker 1: takes the detonation of two atomic bombs. Um. So this
Speaker 1: is kind of part of what they're looking at is like, well,
Speaker 1: strategic bombing actually doesn't work for ship. What if we
Speaker 1: did it with acid, Like, maybe that'll work better. That
Speaker 1: is about trying to make their society breakdown. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is exactly the goal. Um. And again you could also,
Speaker 1: I mean, you could argue that, like this is more
Speaker 1: humane than carpet bombing people. It's it's not gonna last forever, right,
Speaker 1: like it is. You can see how people can make
Speaker 1: the case that actually, this is this wouldn't be as
Speaker 1: bad as what we would just did to the Germans.
Speaker 1: This is a kinder way to wage war without killing. Um.
Speaker 1: The the argument has made well enough that President Truman agrees, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a pretty good idea, and over the following
Speaker 1: months he allows a joint program between the CIA and
Speaker 1: the U. S Military to get developed and it's called
Speaker 1: m k Naomi. Now, the reason why it's named this
Speaker 1: is and the reason why mk Ulter is named k
Speaker 1: Ulter is this is the way the CIA does their cryptonyms. Right.
Speaker 1: A cryptonym is like a name for a project or
Speaker 1: a department or an organization that's supposed to be impossible
Speaker 1: for you to like tell what the organization does based
Speaker 1: on the name, right, So m K identifies a project
Speaker 1: as being run by the Technical services staff. These are
Speaker 1: the guys who developed the CIA is like wacky James
Speaker 1: Bond devices. Naomi is a nonsense word, and they're all
Speaker 1: supposed to be nonsense words, right. The second word MK,
Speaker 1: ultra mk whatever. The second word is just like a
Speaker 1: random word they pick so people can have some sort
Speaker 1: of names. So that's why the initial version of this
Speaker 1: program is called m K Naomi. So for the most part,
Speaker 1: m K Naomi focused on not just like LSD, but
Speaker 1: making suicide drugs and assassination poisons. But they were also
Speaker 1: researching defensive bio weapons and trying to figure out, like
Speaker 1: what it would look like if the Russians carried out
Speaker 1: a biological attack on the United States. In nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: they carry out a fake biological weapons attack on the
Speaker 1: Pentagon using mock bacteria. They concluded as a result of
Speaker 1: the attack that half of the people in the building
Speaker 1: could have been infected if it had been a real attack.
Speaker 1: This is kind of seen as stirring enough that the
Speaker 1: military brass are like, well, we need to see what
Speaker 1: would happen if the Soviets attack an American city. So
Speaker 1: the CIA and the U. S Military decide to carry
Speaker 1: out an actual biological weapons attack on a US city.
Speaker 1: Now they know that in order to like disperse biological
Speaker 1: weapons through an insire tire cities population, they're going to
Speaker 1: need like fog because there's kind of a color to
Speaker 1: this gas they're going to be distributing throughout the city.
Speaker 1: So they decide San Francisco is the right place to
Speaker 1: carry out a biological weapons attack because they can use
Speaker 1: the fog to hide what they're actually doing. It's called
Speaker 1: Operation Sea Spray, is they're shooting clouds of aerosolized bacteria. Now,
Speaker 1: the bacteria is supposed to be harmless. The the idea
Speaker 1: is that you spray this harmless bacteria throughout the city
Speaker 1: and it's just enough, like it's just enough of a
Speaker 1: thing that you can test people randomly throughout the city
Speaker 1: and you can see how far it's penetrated, how many
Speaker 1: people have been exposed to it, But it's not something
Speaker 1: that's actually going to hurt them, right, That's that's the
Speaker 1: idea um And the bacteria performs extremely well, and in fact,
Speaker 1: the Pentagon concludes that all eight hundred thousand people in
Speaker 1: San Francisco have been infected, as well as a significant
Speaker 1: number of people in five surrounding cities. Basically the entire
Speaker 1: Bay Area gets infected with this. The problem is that
Speaker 1: bacteria is kind of like not a predictable thing to
Speaker 1: dose roughly a million human beings with. You get some
Speaker 1: like unanticipated consequences when you do that. And it turns
Speaker 1: out several people in the Bay Area were particularly vulnerable
Speaker 1: to whatever bacteria they used. Eleven of them catch urinary
Speaker 1: tract infections from the poison, and one of these people dies. Um.
Speaker 1: This would be the first time, but not the last time,
Speaker 1: that the United States used biological weapons on its own
Speaker 1: people to see what would happen, which is pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: frankly an outcome no one could have foreseen. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just we're gonna give million people a bacteria. It'll be fine,
Speaker 1: it'll be fine. Like those million people that a certain
Speaker 1: number of them are medically fragile or compromised or whatever,
Speaker 1: and that it wouldn't be harmful to them. How could
Speaker 1: they have How could they have known? But you possibly
Speaker 1: have known. You can see that logic you were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, though, if like, well we know the enemy
Speaker 1: is working on biological weapons, and the enemy, the Soviets,
Speaker 1: are these like godless monsters. They could do anything. It
Speaker 1: would be irresponsible of us not to try. Some people
Speaker 1: are going to get hurt, but we have to know
Speaker 1: how vulnerable our cities are to these weapons. It's the
Speaker 1: only responsible thing to do. That way we can figure
Speaker 1: out how to defend them. Right, you can see how
Speaker 1: these guys make the argument to themselves. Yeah, that's my argument.
Speaker 1: That is a rationalization that every bad person in the
Speaker 1: history of the species has made, because every every serial
Speaker 1: killer thought they were like cleaning up the streets of
Speaker 1: because you know, they target sex workers and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm cleaning up the streets of what these women are
Speaker 1: befouling our men or whatever. Like they've all got this rationalization,
Speaker 1: I guess not Jeffrey Dahmer, he was trying to create
Speaker 1: a sex zombie. But a lot of them, in their
Speaker 1: minds they have this thing it's like, well, I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm doing to them what they would do to me
Speaker 1: if they had the chance. Yeah, you do get with
Speaker 1: the CIA and with serial killers, some of these guys
Speaker 1: are just at like monsters, Right, you do get sometimes
Speaker 1: people who just like to cause harm or have this
Speaker 1: whatever going on in their head. But like most people,
Speaker 1: and most of the people who were involved in a
Speaker 1: horrible acts of evil like infecting an entire city with
Speaker 1: bacteria to see what happens, in order to do that
Speaker 1: have to convince themselves there's a good reason, right like
Speaker 1: that nobody nobody wants to feel like a monster. There's
Speaker 1: a monster around the corner that's bigger than the monster
Speaker 1: I'm being So the only thing that can fight that
Speaker 1: monster is a monster. Uh. And again, the monster you're fighting,
Speaker 1: there's a real good chance that that monster acts like
Speaker 1: that because it is terrified of you. Because the amount
Speaker 1: of paranoia and the Soviet Union about what the United
Speaker 1: States was doing was justice. We will we will be
Speaker 1: chatting about the Soviet Union in a little bit and
Speaker 1: what they are actually doing because that's a fun story too.
Speaker 1: But so operations see spray. Obviously, you and I can say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's pretty fucked up that they did that. The CIA
Speaker 1: and the U. S. Army consider this a massive win, right,
Speaker 1: this works out perfectly as far as they're concerned. They
Speaker 1: have determined how vulnerable cities are. Um, they understand a
Speaker 1: lot more about how they could potentially, you know, defend
Speaker 1: against a bio logical attack. From their perspective, this works great. Now,
Speaker 1: the CIA is kind of doing a back seat role
Speaker 1: in c spray. They help with the implementation, but most
Speaker 1: of this is the U. S. Army UM, because the
Speaker 1: CIA is a it's a clandestined agency, right, so it's
Speaker 1: interested in this stuff, but it's never going to be
Speaker 1: deploying full scale military tax using chemical weapons. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing the army will do. UM. The CIA
Speaker 1: is much more interested and kind of more precise stuff
Speaker 1: than that. And in nineteen fifty, the director of the CIA,
Speaker 1: who at that point is a guy named Roscoe hillen Kettter,
Speaker 1: decides that the agency needs its own dedicated team working
Speaker 1: on mind control technology. The agency launches Project Bluebird, which
Speaker 1: the intercept describes as a quote mind control program that
Speaker 1: tested drugs on American citizens, most in federal penitentiaries or
Speaker 1: on military basis. And it is interesting that in the
Speaker 1: in the eyes of all of the people like doing
Speaker 1: all of this, ship, US soldiers and UH convicted felons
Speaker 1: in federal prison are the same, right, Yeah, Like you
Speaker 1: don't have to care about any of them. You can
Speaker 1: do whatever to those people. Um, So that's cool. That's
Speaker 1: that's there's nothing deeper and dark there. Now, near the
Speaker 1: end of nineteen fifty, the CIA gets a new director
Speaker 1: kind of right after this program starts, a guy named
Speaker 1: General Walter Smith, and Walter Smith is the guy who
Speaker 1: brings our old buddy Alan Dullis onto the team. Now
Speaker 1: we've done a couple of episodes about Alan and his
Speaker 1: brother John Foster, but in brief Allen is a big
Speaker 1: fan of Carl Young, um, and so he's a big
Speaker 1: fan of like this kind of esoteric psychology and psychiatry
Speaker 1: theory that's sort of floating around at the time. And
Speaker 1: a lot of this is getting mixed in with early
Speaker 1: research and psychedelics because this is the period in which
Speaker 1: scientists are first kind of starting to study psychedelics. And
Speaker 1: Alan kind of becomes convinced that there are untapped scientific
Speaker 1: potential for manipulating minds in different hallucinogenic drugs. And the
Speaker 1: early and eighteen fifties, the United States espionage effort in
Speaker 1: this uss are suffered a number of well publicized setbacks,
Speaker 1: and the CIA the reveal of several prominent double agents
Speaker 1: revives these fears that had started when that cardinal kind
Speaker 1: of UH came out of Soviet mind control. UH. Those
Speaker 1: fears turned into panic in nineteen fifty two, and an
Speaker 1: incident described by the intercept quote in Korea, captured American
Speaker 1: pilots admitted on national radio that they'd sprayed the Korean
Speaker 1: countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so
Speaker 1: beyond the pale that the CIA blamed communists. The POWs
Speaker 1: must have been brainwashed. The word a literal translation of
Speaker 1: the Chinese zin now, didn't appear in English before nineteen fifty.
Speaker 1: It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced in
Speaker 1: postwar America that a new class of chemicals could rewire
Speaker 1: and automate the human mind. So a couple of things here.
Speaker 1: Number one, we don't know if the US used chemical
Speaker 1: or used biological weapons in the Korean War. The United States,
Speaker 1: it says that we did not. Um, these guys. The
Speaker 1: specific confessions these pilots are making sound kind of silly.
Speaker 1: They're talking about like bombs that have like compartments with
Speaker 1: with like snakes and stuff in them. Um that it
Speaker 1: just kind of sounds like the stuff that you might
Speaker 1: say if you've been tortured. But the United States uses
Speaker 1: a shipload of illegal chemical weapons in Vietnam, so it's
Speaker 1: not impossible that we were in fact using something. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll never really know because it's you know, war crimes
Speaker 1: and such as much a spectacular leap and logic that's
Speaker 1: being made here is the thing. Yeah, that that that
Speaker 1: that whatever they're saying, they're saying because they've been brainwashed
Speaker 1: and not just hit a bunch brainwashed in some way
Speaker 1: that is um unheard of, Like it's it's new around land.
Speaker 1: They were coerced or they were tricked, or they thought
Speaker 1: they did drop. You know, that's the same thing when
Speaker 1: recently what they were dropping last year and it came out,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, you know, they've got actual Air Force pilots,
Speaker 1: fighter pilots saying they saw UFOs. It's like yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're also they're full of crap. They they probably did
Speaker 1: think they saw that, but they were wrong, or like
Speaker 1: they're not they're not experts at the highest levels. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: this thing moved in a way that no craft can move.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, like, I know, you have some expertise
Speaker 1: as a pilot, but you're also just a guy. Uh
Speaker 1: So these guys may have thought they were dropping chemicals,
Speaker 1: So they may have been dropping some sort of defoliant
Speaker 1: or something that they thought was I don't know, or
Speaker 1: could they could have been a rumor that they heard
Speaker 1: somebody else was dropping it. It's always this stuff about
Speaker 1: like people's minds just aren't This is the thing nobody
Speaker 1: actually likes to think about, Like our brains aren't very
Speaker 1: good at knowing what's happening in the world. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: it is very easy to trick us. It is very
Speaker 1: easy for people to like convince themselves of things. It's
Speaker 1: very easy all sorts of things, like if you're a
Speaker 1: fucking pilot, right, you're taking in more oxygen than normal
Speaker 1: because of like the way in which you have to
Speaker 1: like have oh to flooded into you so that you
Speaker 1: can survive at that kind of altitude. Um all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff about flying is mind altering, including g forces
Speaker 1: like yeah, who knows what's going on in their fucking heads.
Speaker 1: And these guys, yes, soldiers also full of shit. They
Speaker 1: they embellish their war stories. And this is not like
Speaker 1: I would probably do it too. It's a thing that's
Speaker 1: a part of the culture yeah, but yeah. So much
Speaker 1: of this mania is stoked by an American journalist named
Speaker 1: Edward Hunter. And Hunter is not just a guy writing.
Speaker 1: He's the guy who, like he writes an article for
Speaker 1: the Miami News that is the first time the word
Speaker 1: brainwashing is used in English, Like, Edward Hunter brings that
Speaker 1: term when he's talking about these pilots to the United States.
Speaker 1: So he's like a working journalist. He's also a contractor
Speaker 1: for the CIA Office of Policy Coordination and a rabbit
Speaker 1: anti communist. So when he introduces this stuff to the
Speaker 1: United States, he's not doing it just because he believe
Speaker 1: it to be true. He is a guy working for
Speaker 1: the CIA who sees this in like the best interest
Speaker 1: of the agency. Um and Kinser writes like a longer
Speaker 1: article for a newspaper called The New Leader, which is
Speaker 1: also funded by the CIA. The CIA is funding a
Speaker 1: shipload of newspapers at this time, including a lot of
Speaker 1: left wing ones. Um and then he winds up writing
Speaker 1: a book because the panic he ignites such a big
Speaker 1: deal called brainwashing in Red China. And in this book
Speaker 1: he tells Americans they need to prepare for quote, psychological
Speaker 1: warfare on a scale incalculably more immense than any militarist
Speaker 1: of the past has ever imagined. He becomes like, because
Speaker 1: you know, once you once you're the first guy to
Speaker 1: write about a thing that like freaks Americans out, then
Speaker 1: you get to be the expert on it, and all
Speaker 1: of like the big time entertainment media people will start
Speaker 1: having you on their shows over and over again, which
Speaker 1: helps you sell your books and brings in more money.
Speaker 1: And that's what Hunter winds up being for brainwashing right. Um,
Speaker 1: eveny thing you cannot do at this point is go
Speaker 1: back on it. That is your brand. Like, the only
Speaker 1: thing you can do is double down forever. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: your fucking meal ticket. Um. So this works well enough
Speaker 1: that the House Committee on American Activities brings him up. Um.
Speaker 1: He tells them that the Reds have specialists available on
Speaker 1: their brainwashing panels. He tells them they are preparing psychic
Speaker 1: attacks to subjugate quote, the people and the soil and
Speaker 1: the resources of the United States, and will use the
Speaker 1: psychic power to quote turn Americans into subjects of a
Speaker 1: new world order for the benefit of a mad little
Speaker 1: knot of despots in the Kremlin. Now pull pull that all, right, completely, well,
Speaker 1: most of that completely out of his ass asked, we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about the Soviets are trying some weird psychic shit. Um,
Speaker 1: obviously it doesn't work, but yeah, we'll get to that
Speaker 1: in a little bit. So Project Bluebird and Edwin Hunters
Speaker 1: or Mr Hunters like bullshit leads to the creation basically
Speaker 1: the kind of panic over this brings more money into
Speaker 1: the CIA and more money behind Project Bluebird. And one
Speaker 1: of the major things that the CIA uses with this
Speaker 1: new funding is they start creating the very first of
Speaker 1: what are what come to be called black sites. Right,
Speaker 1: These are secret illegal prisons where prisoners can be tortured.
Speaker 1: And these prisoners are generally people either spies, Russian spies
Speaker 1: who are arrested, or just people the CIA says are
Speaker 1: probably Russian spies. There's no due process here, right, So
Speaker 1: a lot of times they're just like taking people and
Speaker 1: they've got these people, they can't ever let them out.
Speaker 1: They're going to kill all of them. And so what
Speaker 1: they see is what we have X thousand number of
Speaker 1: people all around the world. We can do whatever we
Speaker 1: want to them. You guys need to test drugs on people,
Speaker 1: Here's where you do it. Now, Jason, that's a pretty
Speaker 1: fucked up thing to do, UM, and you're not going
Speaker 1: to find a whole lot of people who are capable
Speaker 1: of running a black site prison that tortures people to
Speaker 1: death with hallucinogens. But thankfully the CIA had an old
Speaker 1: bench of guys who were ready to help them, and
Speaker 1: those guys were Nazis. So they hire General Walter Schreiber.
Speaker 1: And Schreiber is not a again, he's a general. He
Speaker 1: had been the surgeon general of the Third Reich, where
Speaker 1: he had masterminded experiments and multiple concentration in death camps,
Speaker 1: including one where death camp inmates were infected with gang
Speaker 1: green and cut open so the progress of the disease
Speaker 1: on their bones could be watched. Now, Schreiber had been
Speaker 1: arrested by the Soviets for obvious reasons, and he had
Speaker 1: been briefly imprisoned, but they had eventually agreed, probably in
Speaker 1: their own kind of project paper clip thing, to let
Speaker 1: him become a professor in East Berlin UM. But he escapes,
Speaker 1: he gets away to the other the American side of
Speaker 1: Berlin UH and winds up in the Army's hands. And
Speaker 1: when the U. S. Army confirms, oh, we've got the
Speaker 1: third Reich's former surgeon general. Rather than be like, this
Speaker 1: guy should probably go to prison, right, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: we should, maybe we should deal with this man, they
Speaker 1: sent him to one of the CIA's Project Bluebird black
Speaker 1: Side's because they're like, well, this guy is great at
Speaker 1: the job that we're already starting to do. Um. I
Speaker 1: think that's a great example of where the Americans said, Look,
Speaker 1: the Soviets tried to cancel this guy because of his views,
Speaker 1: and we don't believe in that. It's like, can you
Speaker 1: should have a chance to redeem yourself by doing the
Speaker 1: exact same thing for us. It's like Louis c k
Speaker 1: getting to tour again. Right. That's where Walter Schreiber is.
Speaker 1: You know, he has his little he gets canceled by
Speaker 1: the woke mob for running some death camps. But now
Speaker 1: he's back at Madison Square garden Um, which is a
Speaker 1: CIA black site on the outskirts of West Berlin. So
Speaker 1: he helps them set up a bunch of secret black
Speaker 1: sites all across western Europe where CIA agents can torture
Speaker 1: without being observed. And I'm gonna quote from Poisoner in
Speaker 1: Chief here. This set a precedent that marked a breakthrough
Speaker 1: for the CIA. By opening prisons, the agency established its
Speaker 1: right not only to detain an imprisoned people in other countries,
Speaker 1: but to interrogate them harshly while they were in custody
Speaker 1: without regard for US law. So successful was this network
Speaker 1: of prisons in West Germany that the CIA duplicated it
Speaker 1: in Japan. Their Bluebird interrogation teams injected captured North Korean
Speaker 1: soldiers with drugs including sodium amiltal, a depressant that can
Speaker 1: have hypnotic effects, and with three potent stimulants bids adrine,
Speaker 1: which affects the central nervous system, coramine, which acts on
Speaker 1: the lungs, and picro toxin, a convulsant that can cause
Speaker 1: seizures and respiratory paralysis. While they were in the weakened
Speaker 1: state of transition between the effects of depressants and stimulants,
Speaker 1: CIA experimenters subjected them to hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat.
Speaker 1: Their goal, according to one report, was to quote induce
Speaker 1: violent cathartic reactions, alternatively putting subjects to sleep then waking
Speaker 1: them up until they were sufficiently confused to be coerced
Speaker 1: into a living an experience from their past now I
Speaker 1: don't think that's very ethical behavior. Um, but you know
Speaker 1: what is ethical, Jason? Is this a transition to an
Speaker 1: add this this is a transition to an ad break, Jason,
Speaker 1: because the sponsors of this podcast, will they give you
Speaker 1: Ben's a Drene? Yes, but you're gonna know that you're
Speaker 1: getting pure speed if you buy Ben's a Dren from them.
Speaker 1: You know they're not gonna dose you like you're some
Speaker 1: North Korean war captive. UM, so enjoy bens Adrine. We're back. Ah,
Speaker 1: what a good time. We're talking about Project Bluebird. Now.
Speaker 1: Very briefly the interject, we both realized that Robert is
Speaker 1: skipping across incidents that each one could be its own book.
Speaker 1: Each one's likes a prison they ran for a long
Speaker 1: period of time and the things that went there, and
Speaker 1: he has to briefly summarize it because that's all just
Speaker 1: the part of it's just one block in the tower
Speaker 1: of of of mk Ultra. They're just getting started here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this was a lot. We are doing our
Speaker 1: best to do it justice. But this is a sprawling
Speaker 1: thing that went on for how long? Um, this is
Speaker 1: like close to twenty years. Yeah, we're talking about um,
Speaker 1: it's we're simultaneously going very long and also hopping from
Speaker 1: horror to horror almost too quickly to fully absorb it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to really let this stuff hit um. And it's it's
Speaker 1: like they don't find anything like Project Bluebird. They don't
Speaker 1: find a truth serum. They have what they think are
Speaker 1: like intriguing results, but they don't find ways to like
Speaker 1: actually force people to give up useful information. None of
Speaker 1: this works well, but they all remain convinced that like
Speaker 1: it's building to something, and the Project Bluebird experiments eventually
Speaker 1: split off into Project Artichoke, which is like an even
Speaker 1: more well funded and elaborate like program to attempt to
Speaker 1: find a perfect truth serum. One of the guys in
Speaker 1: charge of Project Artichoke is Morse Alan. He's a CIA
Speaker 1: agent who is obsessed with mind control, and he's pretty
Speaker 1: good friends with Alan Dulles. In the Night. In nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: he had advocated for the creation of a quote electro
Speaker 1: sleep machine that could force people into a trance um.
Speaker 1: It was basically like shocking people into like a half
Speaker 1: sleep trance so that you could wipe out their memories.
Speaker 1: No one knew if this would be possible, but this
Speaker 1: was like the only thing Morse Allen wanted to see
Speaker 1: in the world. In nineteen fifty two, he was part
Speaker 1: of a three man team that traveled to Villas Schuster
Speaker 1: and West Germany to test quote dangerous combinations of drugs
Speaker 1: such as benzadrine and penthetol natrium on Russian captives under
Speaker 1: a research protocol that specified disposal of the body is
Speaker 1: not a problem. Um because again that we don't know
Speaker 1: how many people they're testing this on, we don't know
Speaker 1: how many people they're killing. But one thing the CIA,
Speaker 1: one of the things that they're saying about these black
Speaker 1: sites is don't worry. All of these people were testing
Speaker 1: on are going to die, and it's it's not a problem.
Speaker 1: We'll figure out how to get rid of them for you. Now. Incidentally,
Speaker 1: if you watch movies, thrillers, even cartoons from the fifties, sixties, seventies,
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff like hypnosis, hypnosis machines. These
Speaker 1: are tropes in those movies from that era that I
Speaker 1: don't think people realized that was based on this. It
Speaker 1: was based on what came out in the government's actual
Speaker 1: attempts to make these things. Yeah, there was and these
Speaker 1: again one of the things you have to keep in
Speaker 1: your head while you're reading about all this. There were
Speaker 1: a shipload of highly trained people with like doctorates and
Speaker 1: millions of dollars in funding behind them, who truly believed
Speaker 1: mind control poisons were a real thing. Um that that
Speaker 1: that this was a thing that they were going to
Speaker 1: figure out how to do. They would not have put
Speaker 1: all of this work into it if they didn't think
Speaker 1: they could really do it. Um. Now, obviously, all of
Speaker 1: the experiments they're doing this is a direct violation of
Speaker 1: what's called the Nuremberg Code, which acquired that voluntary, well
Speaker 1: informed consent in a legal capacity is a necessary prerequisite
Speaker 1: for experimental patients. Right, you cannot as a result of
Speaker 1: how bad, like all of the horrible experiments the Nazis
Speaker 1: do in concentration camps, we make we like the international
Speaker 1: community writes out a thing being like this is something
Speaker 1: you cannot do, and we after we write the Nuremberg Code,
Speaker 1: we use it to convict and execute seven Nazi scientists.
Speaker 1: But we never incorporated into US law. Right, it's never
Speaker 1: actually illegal for the United States to violate the Nuremberg Code.
Speaker 1: We prosecute and kill people under it, but We're also like, well,
Speaker 1: why would we We're not going to handicap ourselves by
Speaker 1: signing onto that ship. That's not a good idea, um,
Speaker 1: because the Russians are probably breaking up, So sure of course. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we've got it too, um, Which Yeah, anyway, it's
Speaker 1: it's cool how all of that works, and may have
Speaker 1: part of their willingness to break the Nuremberg Law and
Speaker 1: may have been all of the Nazis that they hired.
Speaker 1: You do have to keep that in mind too, which
Speaker 1: is also a thing that's being done on both sides. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Internally, the need to replicate Nazi war crimes
Speaker 1: using Nazi scientists was always justified by the incredible danger
Speaker 1: of Russian mind control and brainwashing technology, which the CIA
Speaker 1: believed was advancing at a rapid rate. In a speech
Speaker 1: at Princeton University in early nineteen fifty three, Alan Dules
Speaker 1: warned that Communist spies were everywhere and so well trained
Speaker 1: and equipped that they could turn an American mind into
Speaker 1: quote a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle
Speaker 1: by an outside genius. Um. That's that's that's that's Alan.
Speaker 1: There's a bit of projection there, because they themselves would love,
Speaker 1: of course, or a chemical or a practice or a
Speaker 1: protocol that would allow them to do that with other
Speaker 1: uman beings, to just wind them up and make them
Speaker 1: say the words come out of this guy's mouth, this politician,
Speaker 1: this Central American politician. Whatever we dose the with the
Speaker 1: this injection, and he says whatever we tell him to say,
Speaker 1: and we just control him like a puppet. So the
Speaker 1: fear of the bad guys having that technology is a
Speaker 1: little bit of them revealing their own wishes there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's um, it's it's kind of an open question
Speaker 1: as to how much of Alan Dullis believes everything that
Speaker 1: he's saying, that the Soviets are actually at advance, and
Speaker 1: how much of it is that, well, this is just
Speaker 1: something I want and the way to get it is
Speaker 1: to claim that the Soviets are making it. And for
Speaker 1: those of you are new to the show, relatively new.
Speaker 1: But I was on the episode on The Dullest Brothers.
Speaker 1: We did two parts, part two parter three parts. I
Speaker 1: think it's a three partner. There was a lot to
Speaker 1: say about those cool dudes, but there's two Those two men.
Speaker 1: The point of that episode and why I wanted to
Speaker 1: be on are two of the most influential people in
Speaker 1: the history of the modern world, and most people don't.
Speaker 1: If you know their names, you only know it in passing,
Speaker 1: like you briefly heard it in history class or whatever.
Speaker 1: The Dullest Brothers were a couple of the Gitexts of
Speaker 1: the world as it exists today. Like and it's just
Speaker 1: one piece of it. Yeah, and and everything Alan is
Speaker 1: doing here because Alan is not on on the ground
Speaker 1: guy for m k Ultra. He's not like signing off
Speaker 1: on specific programs. He's not really even signing off on
Speaker 1: specific torture prisons. He's just kind of generally saying, keep
Speaker 1: working on this. I'll make sure you keep getting money,
Speaker 1: keep working on this. And then every now and then
Speaker 1: he'll read like a paper um, because again he's like,
Speaker 1: he's like the he's he's the he's not the he's
Speaker 1: not the execution man, right, he's the idea guy. You know,
Speaker 1: he's the he's the big picture sort of fellow. UM.
Speaker 1: And so when we talk about the question of like
Speaker 1: does he believe the Soviets are on the verge of
Speaker 1: all this? Um, I think one thing that's useful to
Speaker 1: ask is, like, what were the Soviets doing at the
Speaker 1: same time, like, what actual mind control research does the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union involve and is there any way in which
Speaker 1: it could justify all of the horror of the CIA
Speaker 1: does Now, it's true that the Soviet Union had experimented
Speaker 1: with mind control. Um, it's possible they put more than
Speaker 1: a billion dollars into the research, although that is hard
Speaker 1: to say accurately. Um. But you know, the CIA, as
Speaker 1: we've started talking about and we'll be talking about, is
Speaker 1: obsessively focused on chemicals. Right. The CIA believes there is
Speaker 1: a specific physical drug that if we figure out how
Speaker 1: to dose it right, or we figure out how to
Speaker 1: administer it right, it will allow us to brainwash and
Speaker 1: reprogram human beings. The Soviets don't really spend much time
Speaker 1: on this kind of thing. Instead, they focus on what
Speaker 1: we might be comparatively called cheerful nonsense. Um. A common
Speaker 1: belief early in the Soviet Union is that and this
Speaker 1: is stuff that starts out in like nineteen nineteen Soviet scientists.
Speaker 1: A number of them think that there's there's this idea
Speaker 1: that thoughts are like a physical thing, right, Like thoughts
Speaker 1: are a kind of like there's a there's like electrical
Speaker 1: waves and stuff, and this is true in your brain.
Speaker 1: And so kind of from that, there's this idea that
Speaker 1: since thoughts are something physical that can be detect did
Speaker 1: and monitored, they can probably be altered to right, and
Speaker 1: maybe you can change the way people think by changing
Speaker 1: the waves in their brain. Um. And they kind of
Speaker 1: take from this that like, well, there's there's probably like
Speaker 1: people who can tap into those waves and alter thoughts.
Speaker 1: And this kind of leads the Soviet Union to put
Speaker 1: a shipload of money into psychic research. Now, the earliest
Speaker 1: like examples of this are animal research, which we're like,
Speaker 1: so there's an animal research program conducted in the earliest
Speaker 1: years of the U s SR by a guy named
Speaker 1: Vladimir Durov, and Durov claims that he's figured out how
Speaker 1: to carry out He's carry out successful tests of telepathy
Speaker 1: on animals. Right, Durov claims, I figured out how to
Speaker 1: manipulate the minds of animals. Now, Jason, you want to
Speaker 1: guess what Durov's job prior to being a Soviet psychic
Speaker 1: scientist was. Circus? Yeah, he's a circus clown. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so circus clown Vladimir Durov becomes the kind of the
Speaker 1: center of the early Soviet mind control experiments. Did he
Speaker 1: really work in a circustance, yes, he says he No,
Speaker 1: he's a circus clown. Jason, Oh, I thought you actually knew.
Speaker 1: Were you just guessing? I was guessing because yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a Soviet circus and a guy. I thought he was
Speaker 1: like an animal, like an elephant trainer guy. And he thought, Hey,
Speaker 1: I've mastered I'm I'm the tiger whisperer. Look he has
Speaker 1: a circuit. Now. I think he's the kind of circus
Speaker 1: clown who is working with animals, right, because like that,
Speaker 1: like rodeo clowns, a big part of their job is
Speaker 1: distracting animals. Um, but he's he's a clown, like that's
Speaker 1: his literal, his actual cvous circus clown. And the reason
Speaker 1: I came to mind is because, like the Tiger King guy,
Speaker 1: like anybody who thinks they can talk to animals. A
Speaker 1: few people seeing the Tiger King documentary, tiger people are
Speaker 1: are all nuts. Yeah, they're crazy, They're lunatics, dangerous people.
Speaker 1: There's a specific type of crazy that comes with working
Speaker 1: with big, dangerous animals. And anybody who goes out and
Speaker 1: like they start to market themselves as I can control
Speaker 1: animals like I can talk to them, or that guy
Speaker 1: that got eaten by the bears because he thought he
Speaker 1: could community bears like a specific personality type that I
Speaker 1: don't fully understand it, but there's something that drives people
Speaker 1: a little bit nuts. And so I can just imagine
Speaker 1: this guy marching into an office, and I've mastered. I've
Speaker 1: mastered the ability to with my mind, with the power
Speaker 1: of my mind, to control the scrolls all manner of animals,
Speaker 1: and that is that is pretty much what happens. I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from the l A Review of Books
Speaker 1: here in During a conference hosted by the Institute on
Speaker 1: Brain Research of Brain Research on mental influence on the
Speaker 1: behavior of animals, the neurologists and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekterev
Speaker 1: presented Durov's dubious research to his colleagues and subsequently conducted
Speaker 1: similar experiments on human beings. Their results, which were never replicated,
Speaker 1: led beck Toev to think that the mental effect of
Speaker 1: one individ rule on another is possible at a distance
Speaker 1: through some kind of living matter, most likely through hurts waves.
Speaker 1: Bektorev's wave theory was further corroborated by a third man
Speaker 1: of science, an electrical engineer named Bernard Kazynski. Kazynski claimed
Speaker 1: that the transmission of mental information at a distance is
Speaker 1: the same electromagnetic as an ordinary radio communication, just thus
Speaker 1: giving telepathy is supposedly dependable scientific foundation. And you can
Speaker 1: get why people could fall for elements of this. Radio
Speaker 1: is pretty new at the time. Um. It's if you're
Speaker 1: able to like send waves that include people's voices around
Speaker 1: the world. And that's the thing that when you were
Speaker 1: born people couldn't do. Um. Why it's not that crazy
Speaker 1: to think, like, well, there's probably some way to do
Speaker 1: that with thoughts, right, Like, that's not an inherently unreasonable
Speaker 1: thing to try, you know. Um, So it is important. Like,
Speaker 1: as silly as this is and as funny as it
Speaker 1: is that the starts with a circus clown, it's not
Speaker 1: unreasonable that you would want to, like, see, well, do
Speaker 1: thoughts work like radio waves? Is there's some way to
Speaker 1: like intercept and change thoughts as they fly through the areas?
Speaker 1: That a thing that people can do. Um. And of
Speaker 1: course it's not um. If you if you are interested
Speaker 1: in the history of Soviet pseudo scientific mind control, I
Speaker 1: can recommend the book Homo Sovieticus by Vladimir will Well Minski.
Speaker 1: But the short of it is nothing they do works like.
Speaker 1: It does not work at all. What we know though
Speaker 1: makes it all sound decidedly it's not the same as
Speaker 1: what the CIA is doing, because, as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, for all of the different messed up things
Speaker 1: the Soviet unions do, does they don't have a program
Speaker 1: where they are like injecting poison into random people, uh
Speaker 1: in order to see if it will let them control
Speaker 1: their minds. And I think part of what makes this evident,
Speaker 1: like the relative banality of their of their mind control
Speaker 1: research is the primary real world application of Soviet telepathy research.
Speaker 1: On October eight, nine, nine, after the Soviet pull out
Speaker 1: from Afghanistan and just a month before the fall of
Speaker 1: the Berlin Wall, Soviet Channel one played video of a
Speaker 1: licensed physician who would previously been a hypnotist for the
Speaker 1: Olympic weightlifting team. He led viewers of Soviet TV through
Speaker 1: what was effectively a series of meditations, telling them to
Speaker 1: drink water and trying to get them to feel better
Speaker 1: about the government. His stated goal was to quote Calma Land,
Speaker 1: beset by turbulence and heal the body politic. Um. You
Speaker 1: may recognize from your Soviet history that this does not
Speaker 1: work out. Um. So however, and we don't, you know,
Speaker 1: we have less access on some of the details of
Speaker 1: this program than we do about the CIA's MK Ultra,
Speaker 1: although not a tremendous amount less. But it is probably
Speaker 1: worth saying that the c that the the KGBS mind
Speaker 1: control program is not as extensive, um or as nightmarish
Speaker 1: as the CIA's in part because it's just kind of
Speaker 1: based on a fundamentally sillier thing, right, Like they're trying
Speaker 1: to do psychic stuff, and that's just a little bit
Speaker 1: less scary than trying to drug people. But I think
Speaker 1: there's a thing where whatever the spies or were who
Speaker 1: whatever they were bringing back to them, we have this
Speaker 1: thing in the USA, and maybe just just the way
Speaker 1: it has to be in like intelligent circles where you
Speaker 1: almost portray the enemy is like bond villains, like you
Speaker 1: assume that they're so far ahead of the curve in
Speaker 1: terms of what they can do or what they're capable of,
Speaker 1: you know, or you'll get headlines about China's latest direct
Speaker 1: energy weapon or whatever, and the truth is none of
Speaker 1: these countries can spend even a fraction of what we
Speaker 1: can on stuff like this. And we saw so much
Speaker 1: of this during the War on Terror, Like the fear
Speaker 1: of a dirty bomb like that was all you heard
Speaker 1: about for a while and until finally somebody came out
Speaker 1: and said, look, if they're a dirty bomb, the damage
Speaker 1: would be done by the initial explosion, and that's pretty
Speaker 1: much it. Like like packing a bunch of low grade
Speaker 1: radioactive material into a box and put in some sea formside,
Speaker 1: Like that's just not much of anything that it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter because it's like we just assume that terrorists can
Speaker 1: easily get hold of nuclear material, We just assume they
Speaker 1: can easily get hold of nervy gas. And it's like,
Speaker 1: actually no, it's what we always attribute way more abilities
Speaker 1: to them than what they actually have. And during the
Speaker 1: Cold War and at the height of the Cold War,
Speaker 1: this was at truly crazy levels with the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: like the way we talked up the capability of everything
Speaker 1: from their tanks to whatever secret stuff they were they
Speaker 1: were working on, um, you know, space based weapons whatever,
Speaker 1: Like it was always any rumor like, well we've you
Speaker 1: know that that you would if it came from your
Speaker 1: own government. You would laugh it off, like, well, we've
Speaker 1: got a team of psychics who can mind control you
Speaker 1: from the other side of the planet. We're like okay,
Speaker 1: but no, when it's a Russians doing it, it's like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh. And in our team of psychics. Example
Speaker 1: of like how deeply some of that belief managed to last.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seven, the Department of Home and Science
Speaker 1: Security signs a contract and pays for Soviet psycho alcology
Speaker 1: research to create a psychic criminal detection system to fight terrorism. Um,
Speaker 1: so we actually get tricked by this stuff, like thirty
Speaker 1: years after twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Um,
Speaker 1: it's pretty funny. And we've dismissed the idea of these
Speaker 1: energy weapons. But of course the weapon that caused to
Speaker 1: Vannah syndrome very real, the absolutely real weapon that because
Speaker 1: that's why, like the Russians are winning so easily in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: because they have this this mind beam that can debilitate
Speaker 1: you from with this invisible energy. Yes, that that's that.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're I think everyone listening is aware of
Speaker 1: sweeping Russian successes in Ukraine due to their their laser
Speaker 1: energy technology. Um. But yeah, so you know, that's what
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union is actually working on. They do not
Speaker 1: have a mind control serum. They're not really working on
Speaker 1: a mind control serum. They are paying people to sit
Speaker 1: in rooms and like try to talk to dogs with
Speaker 1: their brains. Um. Meanwhile, the CIA is being kind of
Speaker 1: steadily driven into mania by a steady drip of disinformation
Speaker 1: about Communist brainwashing um. And they decide they've got to
Speaker 1: bring in a scientist to help really take like clean
Speaker 1: up some of these programs they're working on and allow
Speaker 1: them to actually close the mind control gap with the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. And they settle on a young man named
Speaker 1: Sydney Gottlieb. He is he is all over this motherfucker so.
Speaker 1: Sydney was born on August third, nineteen eighteen, in New York,
Speaker 1: New York, to Hungary and Jewish immigrants. He came into
Speaker 1: the world with a club foot so severe that he
Speaker 1: couldn't walk for the first years of his life. His
Speaker 1: mom had to carry him everywhere for most of his
Speaker 1: childhood until he was able to finish a series of
Speaker 1: three brutal operations. Sidney took his first steps without leg
Speaker 1: braces at age twelve. He would go on to be
Speaker 1: a gifted folk dancer and to live in extremely active life.
Speaker 1: And his story would be more satisfying if not for
Speaker 1: how his parents afforded the operation that gave him his legs.
Speaker 1: The Gottlieb family owned sweatshops in the garment industry, which
Speaker 1: are some of the worst of the sweatshop family. Um,
Speaker 1: we don't have a lot of to tail of about
Speaker 1: his family sweatshop, but it is not a nice place.
Speaker 1: And as a young man, Gottlieb joins a campus chapter
Speaker 1: of the Young People Socialist League because he's so disgusted
Speaker 1: by his dad's sweatshop. Um. So like, this part is
Speaker 1: not really his fault, but that's always fun when when
Speaker 1: sweatshop moneies what pays for your child surgery. Now, for
Speaker 1: his own part, Gottlieb struggled with a stutter, which he
Speaker 1: only corrected later in life. He rose above these challenges though,
Speaker 1: and he was a really good student. He graduates, he
Speaker 1: enrolls in New York City College. He does well there,
Speaker 1: but Sidney decides that he wants to pursue a career
Speaker 1: in agricultural biology, which eventually leads him out of the
Speaker 1: city for the first time. At Arkansas Tech, despite his
Speaker 1: strictly urban roots. He fits in well there, and he's
Speaker 1: described by his classmates as quote a Yankee who pleases
Speaker 1: the Southerners in general. Across the decades of his life
Speaker 1: and career, Basically everyone who meets this guy agrees that
Speaker 1: he's a very pleasant man. Sydney is kind of a
Speaker 1: hippie rightly. He is a back to the land dude.
Speaker 1: He likes farming, he likes taking air of his goats,
Speaker 1: he likes folk dancing. Like he's a in everything but
Speaker 1: his job for the CIA. Like a sweet kind of
Speaker 1: hippie dude. So he eventually gets his doctorate in biochemistry
Speaker 1: at the California Institute of Technology. He marries the daughter
Speaker 1: of a preacher named Margaret Moore. She'd been raised in
Speaker 1: India as a missionary, but had discarded dogmatic faith in
Speaker 1: her religion for kind of a more agnostic, pan spiritual
Speaker 1: sort of thing, and Sydney is in a similar position.
Speaker 1: He's proud of his Jewish heritage, but he's not really
Speaker 1: a practicing Jew. And both of them are seekers, right like,
Speaker 1: they're kind of interested in Eastern religion. They're interested, they
Speaker 1: don't like give up entirely the religions they're raised with.
Speaker 1: But there they have and this is you know, pretty
Speaker 1: common at the time, and now like they have this
Speaker 1: kind of syncretic attitude towards towards all of this stuff,
Speaker 1: and Sydney is going to always be a very curious,
Speaker 1: open minded guy when it comes to this sort of thing.
Speaker 1: At first, Sydney seeking leads him to work for the
Speaker 1: f d A, where he tests drugs in a boring,
Speaker 1: safe and legal way. Next, he does some plant research
Speaker 1: for the National Research Council, and along the way he
Speaker 1: and Margaret like by an unpowered cabin near Vienna, Virginia,
Speaker 1: and they start a goat farm, which is where they
Speaker 1: raise their children and are going to live most of
Speaker 1: their lives in this kind of like off grid goat
Speaker 1: farming community. In addition to his interests in religion and dance,
Speaker 1: and Gottlieb starts to become fascinated with early reports of
Speaker 1: psychedelic research. In the summer of nineteen fifty one, Alan
Speaker 1: Dullis makes the decision to hire Gottlieb to help with
Speaker 1: Project Art to Choke. Now. During World War Two, Sydney
Speaker 1: had been unable to serve because his foot's all you know,
Speaker 1: hurt uh, and this he kind of had this at
Speaker 1: least his biographer makes the argument that, like this is
Speaker 1: part of why he decides to join the CIA, is
Speaker 1: that he had this desire to serve his country that
Speaker 1: he hadn't been able to actually do during the war. Um,
Speaker 1: and Alan kind of Alan is a pretty good at manipulating.
Speaker 1: Alan sees this in Sydney, and part of the pitch
Speaker 1: he makes to Gotlieb is like, hey, you know, you
Speaker 1: you missed out on fighting for your country back during
Speaker 1: that war. We're in another crisis point here right, this
Speaker 1: secret war we're fighting with the Soviets is just as
Speaker 1: important as anything that happened in World War Two. And
Speaker 1: now we do have a place for you. So this
Speaker 1: is your chance to serve your country, Dullis. And part
Speaker 1: of why he may have been so good at kind
Speaker 1: of manipulating Sydney is Dullis had been born with the
Speaker 1: club foot too. Um. They both kind of had that
Speaker 1: thing in common, weirdly enough, which is not a super
Speaker 1: common thing. And maybe that's a little bit of how
Speaker 1: Dullas kind of is able to get inside Sydney's head.
Speaker 1: But he seems to be pretty good at at understanding
Speaker 1: Gottlieb um. It also may have helped the two men
Speaker 1: understand each other. Uh Sydney is almost immediately made chief
Speaker 1: of the new CIA Chemical Division, and he's given a
Speaker 1: free hand and budget to explore the concept of a
Speaker 1: truth serum. One of the first tests conducted under Gotlieb's
Speaker 1: command is a series of chemical tortures at a black
Speaker 1: site in the Panama Canal Zone on a Bulgarian politician
Speaker 1: named Dmitri Dimitrov. He'd given info to the CIA in
Speaker 1: the past, but then his handlers had become convinced that
Speaker 1: he was about to start working with the French, so
Speaker 1: they had kidnapped him, let the Greeks torture him for
Speaker 1: sent six months, and then sent him to his secret
Speaker 1: prison in Panama. So this was their guy. They don't
Speaker 1: even think that he's going over to the Soviets. They
Speaker 1: think he's working with their allies, but they still send
Speaker 1: him over to get tortured in Greece, and then he
Speaker 1: winds up in Panama where Sidney Gottlieb is asked like, hey,
Speaker 1: help us figure out how to like chemically torture this
Speaker 1: guy so he'll give up information on who had hired
Speaker 1: him um. In early nineteen fifty two, a CI agent
Speaker 1: in Panama wrote that because of his confinement, uh Dimitrov
Speaker 1: quote has become very hostile to the United States and
Speaker 1: our intelligence operations. In particular. This was seen as a
Speaker 1: perfect chance to try the new artichoke techniques. The CIA
Speaker 1: under Gottlieb works on Kelly for three years and whatever
Speaker 1: they did to him, we've destroyed the record. Um. But
Speaker 1: this guy Dimitrov Kelly is kind of the nickname they
Speaker 1: have for him in the in the files, he survives,
Speaker 1: and he does try to go to the media and
Speaker 1: talk about the fact that he's been in a CIA
Speaker 1: secret prison being tortured, and so like, the news media
Speaker 1: sees this bulgarian politician saying that he's been in a
Speaker 1: CIA black site for years, and they're like, they called
Speaker 1: the CIA and are like, as this guy legit, and
Speaker 1: the CIA says, oh, no, of course not. And so
Speaker 1: nobody covers this guy's life story and as evidence, all
Speaker 1: of the records are gone. Wouldn't we have records if
Speaker 1: we had done that? Instead, all we have is this
Speaker 1: barrel full of ashes. Um. It's also worth noting that
Speaker 1: it is later proven he had never been planning to
Speaker 1: go to the French. Um, they were entirely they just
Speaker 1: like they just destroyed this man's life who had been
Speaker 1: working for them for absolutely no reason. And that's going
Speaker 1: to become a really common story for the CIA under Gottlieb.
Speaker 1: But Jason, that's all we got time for today. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: we barely got started. We have arrived at the beginning
Speaker 1: of MK Ultra. Yeah. Yeah, we're almost at the beginning
Speaker 1: of MK and this and this could have been much
Speaker 1: much more just getting to this point. There's it's a lot.
Speaker 1: It was a whole thing because it starts when everybody
Speaker 1: thinks of them Koltra, they're not thinking of three, they're
Speaker 1: thinking of the stuff that happened going forward. Um, we
Speaker 1: probably could have done a two part or just on
Speaker 1: like the Army's chemical weapons experiments and style biological weapons
Speaker 1: experiments in World War two and ship like it is.
Speaker 1: There's so much going on here. But I think this
Speaker 1: gives people good context as to what's happening. Jason, you
Speaker 1: want even context as to how they can buy your
Speaker 1: book anywhere anywhere the sells books aside from like grocery
Speaker 1: stores and stuff. Again, the title is if this book exists,
Speaker 1: you're in the wrong universe. Um, if you want to
Speaker 1: keep up with me, my name is Jason Pargent P
Speaker 1: A R G I N. Type that into almost any
Speaker 1: social media platform and you will find I'm on there,
Speaker 1: including TikTok. I have become TikTok famous in the last
Speaker 1: six weeks. So I I have been watching your TikTok's.
Speaker 1: Um very erotic, I have to say so. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: by the way, as we sit here and talk about
Speaker 1: how foolish it is that you can mind control someone,
Speaker 1: the fact that I set for four straight hours scrolling
Speaker 1: through TikTok's, that's how I use my total freedom of mind.
Speaker 1: The idea that you could be brainwashed by some sort
Speaker 1: of advanced technology is ludicrous. It is. It is funny
Speaker 1: that so much of what these the CIA was trying
Speaker 1: to do, a number of people have figured out and
Speaker 1: states have figured out how to basically do by just
Speaker 1: like fucking with people on social media. Um, that's that's good.
Speaker 1: That's a good side. Yeah, And all they talk about
Speaker 1: the well, someday they'll have advanced techniques to make like
Speaker 1: deep fakes and they can have like a fake Barack
Speaker 1: Obama confess to somebody. It's like you realize, just putting
Speaker 1: that on an extremely blorried jpeg with like comic sands
Speaker 1: like that will that will spread around Facebook and twenty
Speaker 1: minutes with no no source or deep fakery or anything.
Speaker 1: Just yeah that. I I have long been of the
Speaker 1: opinion that like, no deep fakes aren't going to be
Speaker 1: what destroys us, Like we're we're already well passed. That
Speaker 1: being the thing I'm worried about is not required. It
Speaker 1: does not have to be that sophisticated anyway. But your
Speaker 1: book is very sophisticated. People should check it out. Um,
Speaker 1: and uh, I have a book too, It's called After
Speaker 1: the Revolution. You can also find it wherever books are sold.
Speaker 1: This has been Behind the Bastards, part one of the
Speaker 1: mk Ultra series. We've got three more coming for you.
Speaker 1: So strap in and take a shipload acid. Take enough
Speaker 1: acid that you just high for the next fourteen days. Um,
Speaker 1: that's probably a good idea. Behind the Bastards is a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts.