Speaker 1: Oh, Sophie, come on, this is it. This is a
Speaker 1: time to celebrate. This is the longest recording session we've
Speaker 1: ever had, five hours of c I A drug nonsense.
Speaker 1: Here it behind the bastards. The people deserved to hear
Speaker 1: me sing. You know, I thought, thank you, thank you
Speaker 1: for praising me. I am lives on praise. Jason Pargeon,
Speaker 1: how are you doing today? Well, the the vibe has
Speaker 1: become so positive here and I'm sure it is among
Speaker 1: the listeners too, because we now know that we're nearing
Speaker 1: the end of the mk ulture project when everyone was
Speaker 1: exposed and got what they deserved. Like it's been a
Speaker 1: parade of human misery up till now that all of
Speaker 1: the people who instigated this, like we all know, well yeah,
Speaker 1: but this is where they all go to jail. This
Speaker 1: is where the truth comes to light, where all the
Speaker 1: reef forms come into play. So I know it's been
Speaker 1: a dark few episodes up to this point, but this
Speaker 1: is where it's like, Okay, this is the sunrise, this
Speaker 1: is the happy ending. That's right, And and listeners, if
Speaker 1: that doesn't wind up happening, I want to tell you
Speaker 1: it is Jason Pargeon's fault. Personally that thanks in that way. Jason.
Speaker 1: Before we move on, I want to let the listeners
Speaker 1: know you are the author of a whole bunch of books,
Speaker 1: but you have one that is just now coming out.
Speaker 1: If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. It
Speaker 1: is the fourth novel in the John Dyes at the
Speaker 1: End series, which I started reading when I was like
Speaker 1: twelve or thirteen and has had a big impact on
Speaker 1: my sense of humor. So I cannot recommend your books enough. Um,
Speaker 1: you're ready to ready to close this out? Jason, Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: all right, let's do it so in between Trists and
Speaker 1: San Francisco, UM making use of all of the sex
Speaker 1: workers that the CIA was paying for. UM. Gottlieb massively
Speaker 1: expanded the CIA a subcontractor program during the late nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: using cutouts, these little fake corporations that he would have
Speaker 1: the agency set up create to sponsor research at a
Speaker 1: number of different institutions that you probably know today. These
Speaker 1: include Massachusetts General Hospital, Ionia State Hospital, Mount Sinai, several
Speaker 1: dozen universities including Harvard, Berkeley, m I T, Stanford, and Baylor. UM.
Speaker 1: The CIA is carrying out l D tests. They are
Speaker 1: drugging people, torturing people, deep patterning them at many of
Speaker 1: these different universities. Also, there's sometimes doing weirder stuff, some
Speaker 1: of which is less horrible than some of the stuff
Speaker 1: we've talked about today. But like if there's a big
Speaker 1: hospital or a prominent university, the CIA was probably doing
Speaker 1: some ship there. Um, Okay, obvious questions, did these facilities know?
Speaker 1: Do these institutions know what was going on? The the
Speaker 1: the employees of those institutions who are running the programs
Speaker 1: to right these are not The CIA isn't sending agents
Speaker 1: into Berkeley or like Baylor to to run things they are.
Speaker 1: They are finding doctors and professors who want to carry
Speaker 1: out research that is in line with what the CIA
Speaker 1: wants to do, and they are paying those people. Now,
Speaker 1: some of those professors, those researchers don't know what's the CIA,
Speaker 1: and some of this research is stuff that isn't all
Speaker 1: that fucked up. It's like, hey, we want to know,
Speaker 1: you know how this um this particular pattern of electroshock
Speaker 1: therapy might impact people with this you know condition, and
Speaker 1: then they'll do the test and you never know. You
Speaker 1: go the rest of your life not knowing that You
Speaker 1: just conducted research for the CIA. Right, that is some
Speaker 1: of this, but it's not most of this. A lot
Speaker 1: of these doctors are perfectly aware of what they're doing
Speaker 1: and who they're working for, as we're going to make
Speaker 1: clear in a little bit. Um. So, Gottlei's objectives at
Speaker 1: this point have spread well beyond where things were with
Speaker 1: Project Artichoke. Um. During long sessions on LSD with his friends,
Speaker 1: he gradually put together a list of the different substances
Speaker 1: he wanted to research. He publicly this is a memo
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty five. It included number one substances which
Speaker 1: will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where
Speaker 1: the recipient would be discredited in public. Number two substances
Speaker 1: which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception. Number three
Speaker 1: materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effective alcohol.
Speaker 1: Number four materials which will promote the intoxicating effective alcohol. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's just think of how such an invention would change
Speaker 1: the world. You can get drunk on so much? Will
Speaker 1: it be cheaper? Like? Can you imagine if just one
Speaker 1: beer could get you as drunk as twelve beers? I
Speaker 1: can imagine Jason, like in the movie version of this,
Speaker 1: gott Lee like looking over as they're as they're taking
Speaker 1: the program apart. They're burning all everything. He like operations
Speaker 1: stronger alcohol and like files it away along with these
Speaker 1: like last couple of cans that you see gradually like
Speaker 1: make their way through The CIA is like underground labs
Speaker 1: until they wind up on the shelves of a bodega
Speaker 1: in New York City, packaged as for Logo. Yes, operation
Speaker 1: for Loco, the CIA is greatest success. So we have
Speaker 1: been going through San Francisco and slipping cans of four
Speaker 1: Loco too, unbeknownst to the residents there, and observing their behavior.
Speaker 1: It's almost like they've had three beers. It's incredible, Sydney,
Speaker 1: you've done it again. So got Leave's wish list included
Speaker 1: substances that would enhance the efficacy of hypnosis, drugs that
Speaker 1: could help people avoid brainwashing, substances that could create pure
Speaker 1: euphoria with no crash, which sounds like he just wanted
Speaker 1: something to get high on. And here's where things get sketchy, Jason.
Speaker 1: Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that
Speaker 1: the tendency of the recipient to become a dependent upon
Speaker 1: another person is enhanced. So it's a weird mix of things. Um,
Speaker 1: that one's pretty scary, but I'm not hearing in there
Speaker 1: is the classic Manchurian candidate thing. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I don't does everybody listening still know that term? Like
Speaker 1: there this is an old movie that we're referencing that's
Speaker 1: been remade a couple of times, but it's the classic
Speaker 1: thing of it's the brainwashed assassin, the person who doesn't
Speaker 1: know they're an assassin, where you can literally program someone
Speaker 1: I guess, like Arl Schwarzenegerant told recalled, like go assassinate somebody,
Speaker 1: and then there's like a phrase it will activate them
Speaker 1: and and like a zombie like form, they will pick
Speaker 1: up a gun and go shoot the queen or the
Speaker 1: president or whatever. And it's important to note, Jason, I
Speaker 1: kind of I probably should have made this more of
Speaker 1: a factor in the script. The book The man charryan
Speaker 1: candidate and like the movie have a big impact on
Speaker 1: this program a lot of Like when that comes out,
Speaker 1: it gets them like another wave of interest, and like
Speaker 1: Dullis or I think I'm not sure if Dullis is
Speaker 1: around with them, but like they and this is like
Speaker 1: a regular thing for the CIA, because Leab the thing
Speaker 1: he does after him k Ultra is he's the CIA's
Speaker 1: gadget man for years, He's making anything they need, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times someone will come to him because
Speaker 1: they've seen something in a James Bond movie and will
Speaker 1: just be like, Hey, Sydney, can we actually like make this, Like, Sydney,
Speaker 1: can you put a gun in like a Rolex watch
Speaker 1: for me? Hey, Sydney, can we like bulletproof a car
Speaker 1: like this? You know? Like that's actually how a lot
Speaker 1: of this does this? This does work, um, you know,
Speaker 1: and that actually he is much more successful at the
Speaker 1: gadgets than he is at the mind control drugs, which again,
Speaker 1: as far as we know, he probably doesn't figure out. Um. Obviously,
Speaker 1: a lot of this is the result of Gottlieb having
Speaker 1: a limitless budget for research and kind of an unlimited
Speaker 1: purview for what he can do. His friends and he
Speaker 1: would regularly read science fiction stories and spy thrillers, and
Speaker 1: then they'd fund experiments to try and create things inspired
Speaker 1: by the fiction they were reading. This sometimes led to tragedy,
Speaker 1: like the time the CIA funded a study at a
Speaker 1: school in Massachusetts to feed mentally handicapped children's serial relaced
Speaker 1: with your um. Um, that's pretty bad. That's a that's
Speaker 1: a pretty bad thing to do. Say that sentence again.
Speaker 1: The CIA funded a study at a school in Massachusetts
Speaker 1: to feed mentally handicapped children serial laced with uranium to
Speaker 1: what end. Well, that's a good question, Jason. The official
Speaker 1: purpose of the study, which was also conducted at Harvard
Speaker 1: again on mentally handicapped little kids, was to study whether
Speaker 1: or not cereal interfered with iron and calcium uptake in children.
Speaker 1: Like that is the official story. We don't know why
Speaker 1: the CIA would particularly be interested in doing that. They
Speaker 1: may have had a different reason for doing it than that,
Speaker 1: and then come up with an excuse. We really don't know, um.
Speaker 1: And the only way to find out this thing they
Speaker 1: wanted to know about cereal uranium feed them radioactive serial. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's versions of this that are normal, where like people
Speaker 1: will be given you know, radio active in like a
Speaker 1: way that is not going to be harmful because it
Speaker 1: like allows you to tell how stuff is passing through
Speaker 1: your system. I'm not it's it's higher contrast image. It's
Speaker 1: so yeah, so that it can be okay, but this
Speaker 1: does this was much more harmful than that. And again
Speaker 1: it's possible that, for whatever reason, Gottlieb actually did just
Speaker 1: want to know does serial hurt iron and calcium uptake?
Speaker 1: But it's one of those things. These were studies that
Speaker 1: were conducted openly by the schools. It was later that
Speaker 1: people found out the CIA was like helping to make
Speaker 1: it happen, and we don't. We simply don't know exactly
Speaker 1: why they were involved. Um So that's cool. You can
Speaker 1: come up with your own conspiracy theories about that one.
Speaker 1: Um Alan Dules remained peripherally involved, treating MK Ultra like
Speaker 1: an occasional pet project. Sometimes he took it rather more seriously.
Speaker 1: When his son suffered a severe head injury fighting in Korea,
Speaker 1: he started talking to specialists at psychiatric clinics. This brought
Speaker 1: him to a neurologist named Harold Wolf who worked at
Speaker 1: Cornell and I'm gonna quote from Kinser's Poisoner in Chief here.
Speaker 1: Wolf shared Doulus's fascination with the idea of mind control.
Speaker 1: He had developed a theory woven from various disciplines that
Speaker 1: a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation could wipe the
Speaker 1: mind clean and then open it to reprogramming. He called
Speaker 1: this human ecology. Delis thought that Wolf might be useful
Speaker 1: to the CIA and sent him to Gotleap. Wolf was
Speaker 1: eager for CIA sponsorship. He wrote several research proposals for Gotleap.
Speaker 1: In one, he proposed placing people in isolation chambers until
Speaker 1: they became receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist, showed
Speaker 1: an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure,
Speaker 1: and broke down to the point where doctors could create
Speaker 1: psychological reactions within them. In another, he offered to test
Speaker 1: special methods of interrogation, including threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing,
Speaker 1: black psychiatry, hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without
Speaker 1: chemical agents. Now, if you're a psychia wrist and you
Speaker 1: are offering to do something and you call it black psychiatry,
Speaker 1: maybe you're the bad guy, right that might want that
Speaker 1: might be your hint. Um. Yeah. And the funny thing is,
Speaker 1: of all the things that scientology claims, yeah, the stuff
Speaker 1: about the dark origins of psychiatry is the one thing
Speaker 1: where they do have something that there's not nothing to it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is there. They do not it's not it is.
Speaker 1: It is not unfair to say that an awful lot
Speaker 1: of influential psychiatrists did unspeakable things as part of a
Speaker 1: government conspiracy to create mind control. That is a thing
Speaker 1: that happened, that is documented, that is historical fact. It
Speaker 1: was was maybe a little too easy to find people
Speaker 1: who were like, yeah, of course I'll do this for
Speaker 1: the country, right, sure, of course, yeah for America. UM.
Speaker 1: So Wolfe told Gottlieb that he had a constant supply
Speaker 1: of patients who he'd be happy to experiment on secretly
Speaker 1: for the c I a UM. Gottlieb was very happy
Speaker 1: to make this deal, and the CIA sent a hundred
Speaker 1: and forty thou dollars to Cornell University officially so wolf
Speaker 1: could study quote changes in behavior due to stress brought
Speaker 1: about by actual loss of cerebral tissues. After a year
Speaker 1: or so of drugging people without their consent, wolf made
Speaker 1: a proposition to Gottlieb. If the CIA would fund his
Speaker 1: creation of an institute that would act as a funding
Speaker 1: hub for all of their in k ultra sub projects
Speaker 1: um or he would let it. He would use it
Speaker 1: to act as a funding hub for all their sub projects.
Speaker 1: The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology carried out
Speaker 1: hundreds of sub projects for the agency. One involved a
Speaker 1: hundred Chinese refugees who were promised fellowships to help them
Speaker 1: start life in the United States. In reality, they were
Speaker 1: drugged to see if they could be programmed to go
Speaker 1: back to China and commit acts of terrorism. So the
Speaker 1: book The man Charian Candidate is about a bunch of
Speaker 1: like Americans who get captured by the Chinese and then
Speaker 1: sent back to the United States having been secretly programmed
Speaker 1: to do, you know, damage the United States. In reality,
Speaker 1: the CIA read that book and then we're like, what
Speaker 1: if we did that to China, wouldn't that be cool.
Speaker 1: Let's use refugees and give them acid to see if
Speaker 1: we can do this. Um, So that's neat. Jason, there
Speaker 1: you go. I have no no, I have nothing to
Speaker 1: say to that, because again, if they had just gone
Speaker 1: to if they had just gone to this group or
Speaker 1: any group this is not specific to you know, Chinese refugees,
Speaker 1: but any group of desperate people and said hey, this
Speaker 1: is what we in America call a suitcase full of cash,
Speaker 1: which one of you in exchange for this hates your
Speaker 1: government enough that you will go blow something up and
Speaker 1: you will be You'll have this and this this, you
Speaker 1: see this sports car park behind me, that will also
Speaker 1: be yours. Uh in all of these sex workers and
Speaker 1: we've we've hired Yeah well yeah, I mean, like again,
Speaker 1: you could appeal to like, yeah, do you want do
Speaker 1: you want to be rich and like have access to sex,
Speaker 1: or like, hey, you're probably gonna die doing this, but
Speaker 1: we'll make sure your family has taken care of forever.
Speaker 1: They'll move into a nice house tomorrow, they'll never have
Speaker 1: to work again. Just go do this terrorism for us
Speaker 1: over in China. Yeah, you'd find people. You don't have
Speaker 1: to give them l s D. It's not going to help. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like government again, governments have done versions of this forever
Speaker 1: um without randomly dosing refugees with LSD. But that's what
Speaker 1: the CIA does so well, and that's what Cornell University does.
Speaker 1: One of the things again, one of the through lines
Speaker 1: here is that an awful lot of the most prestigious
Speaker 1: universities have highly placed faculty who are immediately like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do it um now. While mk ultras different subprojects
Speaker 1: were dizzying in their variety, the primary goal was always
Speaker 1: very clear to develop a repeatable, efficient method of mind control.
Speaker 1: This was expressed in various ways, the quest for a
Speaker 1: perfect truth serum, the quest for a drug that could
Speaker 1: eliminate memories or rewrite, the methods by which people could
Speaker 1: be reprogrammed to carry out actions against their old moral
Speaker 1: beliefs in political allegiances. Right, there's different specific projects, but
Speaker 1: the overall goal is always the same, which is too
Speaker 1: endo the concept of free will by turning people into
Speaker 1: program bable machines. That's what they're trying to do, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's a fair description, Like when you're saying, we
Speaker 1: want to be able to like rewrite someone's memories and
Speaker 1: make them carry out a terrorist attack against their old government, Like,
Speaker 1: that's kind of what you're saying. But I think that
Speaker 1: I think the listeners have the same confusion I do,
Speaker 1: because there is nothing that they've seen in terms of
Speaker 1: results up till now that we know about that has
Speaker 1: gotten them even one percent of the way to that.
Speaker 1: Because you're literally talking about having somebody carry out a
Speaker 1: complex series of instructions, including being able to improvise on
Speaker 1: the fly things that are highly motivated, highly trained person
Speaker 1: would do and doing it entirely against their will. When
Speaker 1: the closest they've gotten up to up to now is
Speaker 1: is what it's just people going crazy, people having seizures.
Speaker 1: People like one guy we think maybe you know, went
Speaker 1: and robbed a liquor store. That it wasn't like they
Speaker 1: implanted that idea. Like they've been successful at making people
Speaker 1: go crazy. They've been successful at making people lose their memories,
Speaker 1: lose basic function. But in terms of saying okay, we're
Speaker 1: now at a stage where we're ready to try this,
Speaker 1: We're ready to try to turn a human into a robot.
Speaker 1: It's like you have no data and no protocols or
Speaker 1: no anything that even is like the beginnings of like
Speaker 1: can we trick this person into preferring a different color
Speaker 1: of shoe? Like like like wherever you would start if
Speaker 1: you were actually using a scientific method of like building
Speaker 1: up to this. You see I'm saying, it feels like
Speaker 1: they're taking almost like a child's idea of how this
Speaker 1: would work. It's like, Okay, we've given a bunch of
Speaker 1: drugs to a bunch of strangers. Um, we've given some
Speaker 1: radioactive stereal to some kids. I think now we're ready
Speaker 1: to take actual human beings see if we can program
Speaker 1: them to become super assessments. You know. It's one of
Speaker 1: those were we're building to kind of the the very
Speaker 1: murky story of what might be their greatest success. We
Speaker 1: don't know. But I think one of the things that's
Speaker 1: going on here, and one of the things that's in
Speaker 1: the background of all of this, is the Manhattan Project, right,
Speaker 1: which is a a thing that would have seemed impossible
Speaker 1: ten years earlier. Right, that you can make something like
Speaker 1: an atomic bomb, that you can split an atom, and
Speaker 1: that you can you know, create nuclear power from this
Speaker 1: as well, not just the weapon like it all is
Speaker 1: this absolute sci fi thing that barely when they started
Speaker 1: researching it. They put a shipload of money and time
Speaker 1: into the Manhattan Project before they knew it was going
Speaker 1: to work. Right, The c i A. Sees this project
Speaker 1: the goal of perfect mind control at is a Manhattan Project.
Speaker 1: Historian Alfred McCoy refers to it as a veritable Manhattan
Speaker 1: Project of the mind. Right, that's how they're thinking about it.
Speaker 1: So the fact that it's hard, and that they're not
Speaker 1: having early success, and that they're they're they're burning up
Speaker 1: this much money and all of these human beings to
Speaker 1: do it. To people who are thinking about this as
Speaker 1: a Manhattan Project style thing, it's not weird to them, right, um,
Speaker 1: you know that is that is how they're thinking about this.
Speaker 1: Dr Cameron's work in d patterning people over at McGill
Speaker 1: University is a really good example of like the scope
Speaker 1: of ambition of this project. And a paper that Cameron
Speaker 1: published at the start of his work for the CIA,
Speaker 1: he said this about the goal of his research. Quote,
Speaker 1: if we can succeed in inventing means of changing their
Speaker 1: attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of
Speaker 1: measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing
Speaker 1: ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs. And that's a very
Speaker 1: prosaic way of saying we can eliminate types of human
Speaker 1: being and types of thought from the species. Right, that's
Speaker 1: the ambition here, right. And brainwashing someone in terms of
Speaker 1: like sending them to a camp to make them, you know,
Speaker 1: like if they've expressed anti government attitudes and you've got
Speaker 1: a method. You know, they have this in North Korea,
Speaker 1: they have this all over the world where you can
Speaker 1: send them off and then it's basically you you torture
Speaker 1: them in various ways until they learn not to say
Speaker 1: anything bad about the government. I don't think you've successfully
Speaker 1: changed anybody's attitude. You've changed their willingness to it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to come back here, so yes, I'll
Speaker 1: say whatever you want me to say. It's just that
Speaker 1: I guess they would say sameything about the mainhand project,
Speaker 1: that like they screwed around with so many different things
Speaker 1: and then finally they had a bomb, and if for
Speaker 1: us it's going to be the same thing, like we're
Speaker 1: gonna keep trying stuff with throwing stuff at the wall,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna come them across a compound or
Speaker 1: a treatment or a protocol that is going to give
Speaker 1: us Like it's just gonna happen. It's like it's gonna
Speaker 1: be like our our test in the desert where the
Speaker 1: first time they see the bomb glop, we're going to
Speaker 1: get that perfect. It's just it feels like everything they've
Speaker 1: done after this point hasn't been building toward anything. It
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like they're any more sophisticated in their methods
Speaker 1: this many years into it than they were when they
Speaker 1: first started. I will say one thing about that they
Speaker 1: are they do start using more outside scientists. And these
Speaker 1: scientists they're not doing what White was doing, right, They
Speaker 1: are actually conducting They're not like pooping and and and
Speaker 1: watching this stuff. They're actually conducting experiments, um not ethical experiments.
Speaker 1: But and you can see the CIA once they're perfect
Speaker 1: mind control drug. These doctors see it as like, well,
Speaker 1: if I can create, if if I can find this
Speaker 1: drug they want, I can just tell people to stop
Speaker 1: being schizophrenic or whatever, and then I'll be the man
Speaker 1: who cured schizophrenica. You know, That's how I think they're
Speaker 1: thinking about it. I think that's how a guy like
Speaker 1: Dr Cameron is thinking about it, is I can be
Speaker 1: the man who cured obsessive compulsive disorder, right, or cured whatever.
Speaker 1: You know. To be clear, if you're a legitimate scientist
Speaker 1: or a doctor that deals with the brain or mental
Speaker 1: illness and this is where the funding is on this research,
Speaker 1: you absolutely want in on it, like I would absolutely
Speaker 1: in their position. It's like, yes, I'm also helping them
Speaker 1: develop a weapon, but yes, I also potentially have the
Speaker 1: cure for every bad thing that happens to the human brain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna this is where I need to be and
Speaker 1: this is where the funding is. I get it now,
Speaker 1: granted when they sent me down for the meeting and
Speaker 1: they say, okay, here's what we've done so far. Have
Speaker 1: you heard of George White or that his name, Like,
Speaker 1: here's here's some of his work, and here's some of
Speaker 1: his results. You see his toilet there in his in
Speaker 1: his martini bar he has next to it. Now, this
Speaker 1: did not actually yield the results we wanted, um that
Speaker 1: we just wanted to show you. We wanted to bring
Speaker 1: you up to date. Yeah, this is the research so far.
Speaker 1: Do you have any hints? I mean, And obviously most
Speaker 1: of these guys, there's a couple who get brought into
Speaker 1: confidence that way, most of them don't know what else
Speaker 1: has been done. They don't know even there's an MK
Speaker 1: that even the ones who are doing messed up stuff,
Speaker 1: they don't know that, like my program where I'm trying
Speaker 1: to break people's minds is part of this like massive
Speaker 1: thing they're doing in you know, all of these black
Speaker 1: sites around the world. I'm they a lot of them
Speaker 1: probably think I'm the only one doing this research, right,
Speaker 1: and the CIA is the only one who will fund
Speaker 1: it and it's so important that you know, a number
Speaker 1: of things are happening here. Um, but yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: I mean, the thing that's scariest to me is that
Speaker 1: stuff that Cameron says about like we we can free
Speaker 1: ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs that like because a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys, a lot of this is out
Speaker 1: of anti communism, right. It's not not a thing that
Speaker 1: like we want a drug that we can give people
Speaker 1: to make them not be communists. Um, you know, and
Speaker 1: then maybe we can make them you know, double agents
Speaker 1: and stuff. But like the idea, the idea of wanting
Speaker 1: to like rewrite people's thoughts at that level, which is
Speaker 1: their expressed goal, is the scariest thing about this. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that's like most unsettling is we
Speaker 1: don't a dent know where the research ended. And this
Speaker 1: brings me to the most unsettling story in the series. Jesus. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but before we do that, you know what isn't unsettling
Speaker 1: the products and services who support this podcast, none of
Speaker 1: whom is looking for a way to destroy the concept.
Speaker 1: We know it cannot say that though they're not I said,
Speaker 1: they're not looking for a way to do that, Sophie.
Speaker 1: You can't. They're not as far as you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't pick most of our sponsors and actually has
Speaker 1: advertised on this podcast. Um, so I don't know. Uh yes,
Speaker 1: just like the CIA. Ah, we're back talking about the agency.
Speaker 1: So Jason, I promised you I'm going to tell you
Speaker 1: the most unsettling story in this series. Now, this is
Speaker 1: going to be kind of unclear. I do not have
Speaker 1: perfect answers to you as to what is going on.
Speaker 1: I'm going to try to read you the facts of
Speaker 1: this case as they exist, and then we will talk
Speaker 1: about what might have happened here. So this is the
Speaker 1: story of Dr Lewis Jolly and West. Jolly was his nickname.
Speaker 1: He was the head of psychiatric services at Lackland Air
Speaker 1: Force Base for much of the nineteen fifties, and as
Speaker 1: you probably guessed, he was also a c I A asset.
Speaker 1: Born in nineteen twenty four, Jolly West, as his friends
Speaker 1: knew him, had enlisted in the Air Force for World
Speaker 1: War Two and retired as a colonel. He was a big,
Speaker 1: friendly man and when he left the flag, Jolly West,
Speaker 1: Jolly West, Baby. Yeah, he's a jolly man. He goes
Speaker 1: to Cornell to follow up on his fascination with different
Speaker 1: methods of controlling the behavior of human beings. He wound
Speaker 1: up being one of the shrinks who worked with POW's
Speaker 1: captured in Korea. Right, you know those guys we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier who claimed to have dropped biological weapons, right
Speaker 1: that the CIA thinks they've been brainwashed. Jolly West is
Speaker 1: the guy that the psychiatrists the CIA brings into debrief them, right,
Speaker 1: and he succeeds in kind of quote unquote deep programming
Speaker 1: those men. He gets them to renounce the claims they'd
Speaker 1: made while being captured, which he gets big kudos from
Speaker 1: the CIA for this. You might not You might say, well,
Speaker 1: that's not really that impressed if they were just like
Speaker 1: beaten until they said they dropped chemical weapons, and then
Speaker 1: he was like, hey, guys, you're in America now, you
Speaker 1: should probably tell people you didn't. Is maybe not the
Speaker 1: hardest thing in the world, right, but whatever, He gets
Speaker 1: a lot of credit for d programming these guys. So
Speaker 1: thanks to letters between West and Gottlieb, which we acquired
Speaker 1: after West's death, we know that both men started working
Speaker 1: together in nineteen fifty three and I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from the intercept addressing Gottlieb as SG West outlined the
Speaker 1: experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic
Speaker 1: drugs and hypnosis. He began with a plan to discover
Speaker 1: the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably
Speaker 1: unwilling subjects through hallus hypnosis alone or in combination with
Speaker 1: certain drugs, possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation or
Speaker 1: the alteration of the subset subjects recollection of the information
Speaker 1: he formerly knew. Another item proposed honing techniques for implanting
Speaker 1: false information into particular subjects or for inducing in them
Speaker 1: specific mental disorders. He hoped to create careers who would
Speaker 1: carry a long and complex message imbreaded secretly in their minds,
Speaker 1: and to study the induction of trans like states by drugs.
Speaker 1: So he's not just wanting to make a mind. He
Speaker 1: wants to number one, induce mental illness and people. He
Speaker 1: wants to see if he can do that. He wants
Speaker 1: to create memories and destroy them. Um. He's he's interested
Speaker 1: in experimenting with all of that, and obviously Gottlieb is
Speaker 1: completely on board with this. Um. In nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: West reported to Gotlieb that his experiment had come to fruition.
Speaker 1: In a paper titled the psycho Physiological Studies of Hypnosis
Speaker 1: and Suggestibility, he claimed to have discovered a replicable method
Speaker 1: of replacing true memories with false ones in human beings
Speaker 1: without their knowledge. Quote. It has been found to be
Speaker 1: feasible to take the memory of a definite event in
Speaker 1: the life of an individual, and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring
Speaker 1: about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this
Speaker 1: event never actually took place, but that a different fictional
Speaker 1: event actually did occur. West claimed to have accomplished this
Speaker 1: by giving patients new drugs, which ones was not specified
Speaker 1: in the papers that we have. These drugs were apparently
Speaker 1: effective in quote speeding the induction of the hypnotic state
Speaker 1: and deepening the hypnotic trance. Specific information is again impossible
Speaker 1: to find here. The version of the study found in
Speaker 1: West's papers is longer and more detailed. This was found
Speaker 1: years after his death. He was not supposed to have
Speaker 1: kept this a c the CIA before these. This version
Speaker 1: is found since a copy of this study to a
Speaker 1: Senate committee when they start investigating M. K Ultra, and
Speaker 1: the copy the CIA has is missing a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff that's later found in the copy that's in Jolly
Speaker 1: West's memoires, right, like that's in his collection of stuff.
Speaker 1: Um So, the CIA's version of this that they actually
Speaker 1: send to that Senate committee cuts out any mention of
Speaker 1: West's claims to have found a way to replace real
Speaker 1: memories with fake ones. And it also adds in a
Speaker 1: passage that's not in West's draft, which reads the effects
Speaker 1: of LSD and other drugs upon the production, maintenance and
Speaker 1: manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied. Now we
Speaker 1: know that this is untrue, but that begs the question,
Speaker 1: what did Dr West actually find? Now We're not going
Speaker 1: to get an answer to that today, But I do
Speaker 1: have a story that is going to make you feel bad.
Speaker 1: On July four, ninety four, in San Antonio, a three
Speaker 1: year old girl named share Joe Horton was raped and murdered.
Speaker 1: When her parents noticed her missing, they formed a search party.
Speaker 1: They eventually found her body next to a gravel pit
Speaker 1: alongside a shirtless man covered in blood and scratches. He
Speaker 1: was described as seeming dazed and in a trance like state.
Speaker 1: The man eventually charged with and convicted of chair Joe
Speaker 1: Horton's murder was a guy named Jimmy Shaver. He was
Speaker 1: an airman at Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record.
Speaker 1: Shaver claimed no memory of the murder, and here's the
Speaker 1: intercept again. Around four that morning, an Air Force marshal
Speaker 1: questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn't drunk.
Speaker 1: One leader testified that he probably was not normal. He
Speaker 1: was very composed outside, which I did not expect him
Speaker 1: to be under these circumstances. He was released to the
Speaker 1: county jail and booked for rape and murder. Investigators interrogated
Speaker 1: Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit,
Speaker 1: he didn't recognize her. He gave his first statement at
Speaker 1: ten thirty a m adamant that another man was responsible.
Speaker 1: He could summon an image of a stranger with blonde
Speaker 1: hair and tattoos. After the Air Force marshal returned to
Speaker 1: the jail house, however, Shaver signed a second statement, taking
Speaker 1: full responsibility. Though he still didn't remember any thing, he
Speaker 1: reasoned he must have done it. Two months later, AIRMoN
Speaker 1: Shaver still reported no memories of the murder. The commander
Speaker 1: of the base hospital ordered him evaluated. Said evaluation was
Speaker 1: performed by the head of psychiatric Services for Lackland, Dr
Speaker 1: Lewis Jolly and West. Shaver and West spent two weeks
Speaker 1: together the return to the scene of the crime, and
Speaker 1: West eventually hypnotized Shaver and injected him with sodium pentathal
Speaker 1: to clear his amnesia. Event Eventually, well drugged, Shaver recalled
Speaker 1: remembering the act of murdering Horton. He told doctor West
Speaker 1: that the little girl had brought out repressed memories of
Speaker 1: his own cousin, who he said had molested him when
Speaker 1: he was a child. Later, Shaver took back this confession. Eventually,
Speaker 1: segments of West's drugged interview with Shaver were read into
Speaker 1: the court record. The doctor had used leading questions to
Speaker 1: walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. Tell me about
Speaker 1: when you took your clothes off, Jimmy, He'd said. The
Speaker 1: transcript of the interview, which survived among West's papers, also
Speaker 1: showed West trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories. Jimmy,
Speaker 1: do you remember when something like this happened before or
Speaker 1: after you took her clothes off? What did you do?
Speaker 1: I never did take her close off. Shaver said. The
Speaker 1: interview was divided into thirds and the middle third hadn't
Speaker 1: been recorded. When the transcript picked up, it said, Shaver
Speaker 1: is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.
Speaker 1: West asked, now you remember it all, don't you, Jimmy, yes,
Speaker 1: Sir Shava replied. So we don't know precisely what happened here.
Speaker 1: We know that a young girl was murdered. We know
Speaker 1: that a guy who claimed no memory of the murder
Speaker 1: um confessed and then took back his confession, and then
Speaker 1: sat down with the guy who has claimed that he
Speaker 1: can create false memories and people and remove actual memories,
Speaker 1: and then temporarily comes forward and says that he did it,
Speaker 1: but never really seems to have any memory of it,
Speaker 1: and eventually recants that confession. Um. Now, at the time,
Speaker 1: there's nothing known publicly about the mk Ultra program, but
Speaker 1: shavers lawyers did learn that earlier before the murder, he
Speaker 1: had suffered from migraines that had debilitated him enough that
Speaker 1: the Air Force had recommended him for a two year
Speaker 1: experimental program at Lackland Air Base. This program would have
Speaker 1: been run from the same facilities where doctor West did
Speaker 1: his research for the CIA. There is no record of
Speaker 1: what doctor had attempted to recruit Shaver, and there's no
Speaker 1: record of Shaver in the Lackland Hospital official Master Index
Speaker 1: of patients. Right, so there's no evidence that he went
Speaker 1: into Lackland Hospital and was treated prior to the murder
Speaker 1: for his headaches. However, the index that would include his
Speaker 1: patient record is incomplete. The base archivist told the court
Speaker 1: that all records for patients in nineteen fifty four with
Speaker 1: last names beginning with s A through ST had been destroyed.
Speaker 1: There was no explanation for why this had happened. Shaver
Speaker 1: was sentenced to death and eventually executed by the state.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing. I don't think the spiracy version of
Speaker 1: this requires anything advanced or magical, or doesn't it is
Speaker 1: if they did exactly what we've already seen them do.
Speaker 1: Where do they just break people down to where all
Speaker 1: of their normal executive functions have ceased through just sleep
Speaker 1: deprivation or traumatizing them over and over again or whatever. Again,
Speaker 1: it's not difficult to do this, um and then the
Speaker 1: guy went out and did like It doesn't require them
Speaker 1: to program him to go out and kill. It just
Speaker 1: requires them to whatever failed treatments they gave him to
Speaker 1: have just screwed up his head to the point where
Speaker 1: he no longer was in control of his actions, similar
Speaker 1: to the guy that thought that he, you know, had
Speaker 1: spontaneously robbed a liquor store. Because once you remove the
Speaker 1: frontal lobes ability to govern your actions, you just start
Speaker 1: doing weird stuff. And you know, whatever is in your
Speaker 1: subconscious or whatever primal urge that a person has um
Speaker 1: it just doesn't take sophisticated mind control to make that happen.
Speaker 1: It just you mess up enough people over a long
Speaker 1: enough period that somebody's going to go out and commit
Speaker 1: a murder or beat someone to death, or get into
Speaker 1: a fight at a bar. It's just this particular guy,
Speaker 1: if that's what happened, he just acted on some urge
Speaker 1: and they probably the girl was just a target of opportunity.
Speaker 1: She was just small enough and defenseless enough that and
Speaker 1: we don't even know. I mean, it's entirely possible that
Speaker 1: she was murdered by someone else who doesn't get caught,
Speaker 1: and he's just someone that this doctor is working with
Speaker 1: who is being dosed around the time, and who they're like,
Speaker 1: I wonder if we can convince him he did it.
Speaker 1: You know, that is not beyond the pale for what
Speaker 1: it does. It also does not require them to have
Speaker 1: figured out a mind control drug. It's certainly not beyond
Speaker 1: the pale of the stuff they've done. Yeah, by the way,
Speaker 1: getting confessions out of people is nothing like the the
Speaker 1: whole era of the and going back and checking for crimes,
Speaker 1: like we found something like in a third of the
Speaker 1: cases where they exonerated people, they had confessions. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: confess to a crime they didn't commit. That happened instantly,
Speaker 1: and again doesn't so whatever happened, And again we don't
Speaker 1: know exactly what went down here, like and we never
Speaker 1: will for reasons I'll get to. But like something bad,
Speaker 1: I feel confident saying that. And when we talk about
Speaker 1: there's obviously there's a more conspiratorial version, like we could
Speaker 1: we could turn this into a slightly different podcast and say,
Speaker 1: this is clear evidence that the c I developed a
Speaker 1: mind control poison, right, um, And if you want to
Speaker 1: take that, there's all these little facts that you can
Speaker 1: use to like make put together what seems like a
Speaker 1: more convincing conspiracy theory case for example, Jason in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, immediately after the Kennedy assassination, there's a psychiatrist
Speaker 1: who gets brought in to examine Jack Ruby, the guy
Speaker 1: who had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, and it's Dr Jolly
Speaker 1: and West. Now West speaks to Ruby right before he's
Speaker 1: testifies to the War in Commission, and he tells him
Speaker 1: that Ruby suffered an acute psychotic break and Ruby is
Speaker 1: never able to form to fully explain to the commission
Speaker 1: why he chose to assassinate Oswald. You can make a
Speaker 1: bunch of conspiracies about that. There's also the thing that
Speaker 1: makes total sense, which is, well, back when those fucking
Speaker 1: pilots got brought back having been like brainwashed or whatever,
Speaker 1: Jolly's the guy they sent in to talk to him.
Speaker 1: It's not unreasonable that you would assume that maybe a
Speaker 1: foreign power was responsible for something to do with the
Speaker 1: JFK assassination. So the CIA is going to send in
Speaker 1: the guy they normally send in to talk to people
Speaker 1: in this situation, and Jolly has a history doing that, right.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that Ruby was like a programmed c I,
Speaker 1: A L. S. D assassin um. But all of this
Speaker 1: stuff is just close enough that like you get part
Speaker 1: of like why conspiracy culture becomes the thing that it
Speaker 1: is that is such a problem for all of us,
Speaker 1: is there's a lot of reasons to ben spiratorial, particularly
Speaker 1: about this period in American history, right, Like, it's not
Speaker 1: it's not you're not like doing something unreasonable. If you're like, well, shit,
Speaker 1: maybe they did figure out something, right, Like, there's all
Speaker 1: these little pieces of fucked up stuff here, and we
Speaker 1: know what they were trying to do, and a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of the Q and on terrible stuff
Speaker 1: that's going around today that's causing so much of a
Speaker 1: fucking catastrophic problem for a society. Part of why that
Speaker 1: is so effective and able to spread so much is
Speaker 1: this all of this ship seeds the ground, right, it
Speaker 1: provides they've provided a fertile environment for which, well, nothing
Speaker 1: is impossible, nothing is beyond the kind of ship our
Speaker 1: government might try to do. Right, It's not like I
Speaker 1: think that's that's one of them maybe unrecognized crimes of
Speaker 1: the n k Ultra program is they're going to provide
Speaker 1: justification for a thousand conspiracy movements because how fucked up
Speaker 1: the ship they're trying to do is even if they
Speaker 1: never accomplished any of it, right, And the issue with
Speaker 1: the usually the issue with conspiracies that they is that
Speaker 1: they assume a much higher level of competence and precision
Speaker 1: and everything else than what you actually get. For example,
Speaker 1: if if we only had a gap where that guy's
Speaker 1: um the toilet sex dungeon was, there have been a
Speaker 1: conspiracy coming up suggesting that that had occurred. I would
Speaker 1: have no problem with that because it's like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: can see this getting out of hand. There's no one,
Speaker 1: there's no grown ups in the room, so yeah, I
Speaker 1: can believe the rumors that this guy had a toilet
Speaker 1: Martini sex dungeine going on with CIA money, because that's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing people do. The issue is that
Speaker 1: it almost ascribes, it almost gives them too much credit
Speaker 1: to where if you see something like the JFK s astination,
Speaker 1: you say, oh, I'll bet Oswald was actually a world
Speaker 1: because the reality is that there were failures in terms
Speaker 1: of security, in terms of the protocols they're following, in
Speaker 1: terms of like everything that a man like Kennedy that
Speaker 1: the whole world can pivot on one frankly kind of
Speaker 1: a dumbass with a gun who just happens to be
Speaker 1: a good shot. Yeah, and that like Jack Ruby, that
Speaker 1: appears was an even bigger dumbass who actually made the
Speaker 1: decision to shoot Oswald as like a spontaneous like you
Speaker 1: just ran home and got his gun and decided to
Speaker 1: do it. Like it wasn't even a planned thing as
Speaker 1: far as I could tell, it was just it was
Speaker 1: just a local dumbass who thought, hey, I'll go shoot
Speaker 1: Oswald and that was and then again he changed history
Speaker 1: because that launched a whole universe of its own conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think that people want to believe
Speaker 1: it's weird because they want to believe the CIA is
Speaker 1: almost like godlike invisibilities, that it can work magic, that
Speaker 1: they can do things that is that are totally unknown
Speaker 1: to science. And when you find out the reality, it's
Speaker 1: almost disappointing, even though the things they are actually guilty
Speaker 1: of horrible, Yeah, are worse because it was done. What's so,
Speaker 1: it was done so irresponsibly and with such a lack
Speaker 1: of care, where you would almost prefer a bond villain
Speaker 1: that's trying to do that's, you know, trying to pull
Speaker 1: the string. It's like, no, the actual things that that
Speaker 1: we've done in Central America elsewhere. It doesn't require a
Speaker 1: sophisticated master plan. It just requires you know, the fruit
Speaker 1: company saying, hey, the locals are trying to unionize, as
Speaker 1: we've as we keep saying. The only thing necessary here
Speaker 1: is not deep, like incredibly complicated conspiracies including magical mind
Speaker 1: control drugs. It's money and willingness to hurt people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very powerful people saying hey, this is gonna lower
Speaker 1: our stock price by several points unless unless this guy
Speaker 1: who's threatening to become president and this unless something bad
Speaker 1: happens to him, and it doesn't require you know, a
Speaker 1: mind controlled assassin. The old ways work just fine. Propaganda
Speaker 1: still works, Bribing the right people still works. Killing the
Speaker 1: right people works really well. That's the best way to
Speaker 1: do it, which is actually Jason leads me to our
Speaker 1: sponsor for this episode, because you know, when you need
Speaker 1: the right person killed, um, you know, the president of
Speaker 1: Chile for example, no one can do it better than
Speaker 1: the sponsors for this podcast. Where is fiber is still
Speaker 1: a thing? Yeah, five, that's what's gonna be. The next
Speaker 1: government overthrown is through fucking fiber. Um it is we're
Speaker 1: like when it comes to like incompetent cia ship. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons why I'm willing to like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think maybe that attempt by those weird US contractor guys
Speaker 1: to overthrow the government of Venezuela might have been a
Speaker 1: cia op is that it ended with them all pissing
Speaker 1: on themselves after getting captured by fishermen, like like, they're
Speaker 1: just not They're not. They they succeed because they have
Speaker 1: infinite resources a lot of the time, but it's not
Speaker 1: because they're the most competent people in the world anyway.
Speaker 1: By the early nineteen sixties, mk Ultra was officially seen
Speaker 1: by Sydney Gottlieb as a failure. The program was gradually
Speaker 1: wound down, and Gottlieb went out to spend the rest
Speaker 1: of his career designing James Bond style assassination devices. He
Speaker 1: tries to kill Fidel Castro so many times. He flies
Speaker 1: to the Congo to try to poison Patrice la Mumba.
Speaker 1: It doesn't work out often for him. He's not and
Speaker 1: usually because other things happen, they just never use the poison.
Speaker 1: But he makes a lot of poisons. In nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: the mk ULTRA program, which by that point is known
Speaker 1: to be a failure, is renamed m K Search, which
Speaker 1: again terrible cryptonym. But as far as we know, most
Speaker 1: of the experiments were wound down after this point. However,
Speaker 1: as this passage from Poisoner in chief makes clear, Gottlieb
Speaker 1: remained actively pursuing mind control technology even after MK Ultra
Speaker 1: proved a disappointment quote In their behavior laboratories, the psychiatrists
Speaker 1: and psychologists continued experimenting. Once more. They had turned to
Speaker 1: an earlier line of research, implanting electrodes in the brain.
Speaker 1: An agency team flew to Psygon in July nineteen eight.
Speaker 1: Among them were a neurosurgeon and a neurologist. In a
Speaker 1: closed off compound at ben Hua Hospital, the agency team
Speaker 1: set to work. Three Vietcong prisoners had been selected by
Speaker 1: the local station. How or why they were chosen would
Speaker 1: remain uncertain. In turn, each man was anesthetized, and after
Speaker 1: he had hinged back a flap in their skulls, the
Speaker 1: neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain. When the prisoners
Speaker 1: regained consciousness, the behavior is set to work. The prisoners
Speaker 1: were placed in a room and given nigh pressing the
Speaker 1: control buttons on their handsets. The behaviorists tried to arouse
Speaker 1: their subjects to violence. Nothing happened for a whole week.
Speaker 1: The doctors tried to make them in attack each other.
Speaker 1: Baffled with their lack of success, the team flew back
Speaker 1: to Washington, as previously arranged in case of failure. While
Speaker 1: the physicians were still in the air, that prisoners were
Speaker 1: shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned. And
Speaker 1: this is all stuff that happened before got we went
Speaker 1: went to prison like I'm sure the listeners are waiting
Speaker 1: from the point right right before. And don't worry is
Speaker 1: it is put on trial for all of this. It's
Speaker 1: it's coming up right now, Jason. So in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: it becomes obvious that Congress was going to look into
Speaker 1: MK Ultra. CIA director Richard Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy
Speaker 1: all records of the programs. Everything we know now came
Speaker 1: from caches of papers that were missed and odd bits
Speaker 1: of correspondence from MK Ultra partners like Dr West. No
Speaker 1: full investigation into the program will ever be possible because
Speaker 1: again all of the records are destroyed. They miss like
Speaker 1: eight thousand pages. A bunch of these doctors they used
Speaker 1: as contractors, have stuff that gets found by by journalists
Speaker 1: and stuff later. But we do not know everything that
Speaker 1: was done under this program, and we have no accounting
Speaker 1: of how many people were hurt. Um, none of that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Gottlie burns it all and then a
Speaker 1: year or so later he retires from the CIA. So
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. Um. And yeah. In nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: President Lyndon Johnson looked out at the growing protest movement
Speaker 1: against the Vietnam War and the occupation of several college
Speaker 1: campuses by anti war radicals. He ordered CIA director Richard Helms,
Speaker 1: who is the guy like right after Alan Dulas gets
Speaker 1: shit canned? Um, Helms is, by the way, the guy
Speaker 1: who later orders the MK Ultra records destroyed to launch
Speaker 1: in a legal domestic surveillance program code named Chaos. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from Tomo. Yeah, yeah, right, like
Speaker 1: they're they're just they keep getting worse at the kryptonyms. Um.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna quote now from Tommonio's book Chaos, which
Speaker 1: is a history of the Charles Manson murders, as a
Speaker 1: spoiler for where we're headed here. That August, with the
Speaker 1: president's approval, CIA director Richard Helms authorized in a legal
Speaker 1: domestic surveillance program code named Chaos. Meanwhile, j Edger Hoover
Speaker 1: revived the FBI's dormant counterinsurgency program co Intel pro. Both
Speaker 1: agencies opened the first offices of their respective operations in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, still considered ground zero for the revolution, especially
Speaker 1: since the founding of the Black Panther Party in nearby
Speaker 1: Oakland the previous summer. Thanks to these two secret programs
Speaker 1: and their network of well placed informants, there was an
Speaker 1: all out war raging in California. By the summer of
Speaker 1: sixty nine. The FBI and the CIA had induced the
Speaker 1: Left to feed on itself among competing factions. What had
Speaker 1: been sectarian strife devolved into outright violence. Now there is
Speaker 1: credible evidence to suggest that Charles Manson was for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: of interest to the CIA. UM. This is timbo O'Neill's book, Chaos,
Speaker 1: deals with this in a lot of detail. It's all
Speaker 1: very messy. There's nothing perfectly clear. There's two different guys
Speaker 1: who were close to him, who had ties to the agency.
Speaker 1: One guy who was probably a c I a contractor,
Speaker 1: like an actual like doing ship on the ground man
Speaker 1: who was tied into Manson, who was there after the
Speaker 1: murders probably but before the murders got reported to the
Speaker 1: l A p. D Um who was very likely tied
Speaker 1: to the agency. We don't know what he was doing.
Speaker 1: He claimed that like he was because he talked a
Speaker 1: few times to people and even helped write a book
Speaker 1: with a former FBI agent and made the repeated claim
Speaker 1: that like something had this wasn't supposed to happen, and
Speaker 1: like something had gone wrong. I'm gonna tell you right now,
Speaker 1: because all this is very messy. The most likely reason
Speaker 1: why the murders are committed is essentially a series of
Speaker 1: drug deals and relationships gone bad, and everything kind of escalates,
Speaker 1: and you have these these people who are not particularly
Speaker 1: tied in mentally, um, taking a lot of drugs and
Speaker 1: like getting scared about, like Manson at one point shoots
Speaker 1: a guy that he thinks as a black panther so
Speaker 1: he's convinced the panthers are coming after him. This is
Speaker 1: all really fucking messy. Um. But there are one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why there's a lot of conspiracy theories that
Speaker 1: like the Cia programmed Manson is two fold. Number One,
Speaker 1: Manson is giving these these young mostly women, but there's
Speaker 1: some of them are men who he has do the
Speaker 1: actual murders. He's giving them a shipload of acid and
Speaker 1: using that to kind of reprogram them. Right. That's a thing,
Speaker 1: especially in the book Helter Skelter, that gets brought up
Speaker 1: a bunch. There's debate as to the extent to which
Speaker 1: he was actually trying to program them and the extent
Speaker 1: to which they were all just taking acid. But they
Speaker 1: were taking a lot of acid, which probably had its
Speaker 1: because of where the acid was coming from. There's a
Speaker 1: good chance a lot of the acid they did came
Speaker 1: out of mk Ultra one way or the other. Um.
Speaker 1: That's one reason people get conspiratorial. And then there's a
Speaker 1: couple of guy is one of whom is for a
Speaker 1: while Manson's uh, what parole officer? Um? Who like he
Speaker 1: keeps getting off for stuff he shouldn't get off for. Um,
Speaker 1: he gets like arrested while he's on patrol with guns
Speaker 1: and drugs and with stolen cars. He keeps getting At
Speaker 1: one point after the murders, when people are talking that
Speaker 1: Manson and his family may have been the people who
Speaker 1: did it. The l a p D carries out the
Speaker 1: largest rate in their history at his compound and arrests
Speaker 1: he and his cult members for like stealing cars, and
Speaker 1: then they all get released, even though he's a paroled
Speaker 1: convict and shouldn't have been near any of this stuff.
Speaker 1: So there's all this like we don't really know what's
Speaker 1: going on, and it may not even be that it was.
Speaker 1: It's possible he was like an FBI informant, and so
Speaker 1: that's why he kept until they realized he was tied
Speaker 1: to the murders, kept getting out. Um, it's just all
Speaker 1: like again you see why where all of these fucking
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories can come from. Right, there's all of this.
Speaker 1: There's all of this like territory in which you can
Speaker 1: kind of maneuver to set up a story about what
Speaker 1: had happened. And again, it doesn't require there actually being anything,
Speaker 1: because Charles Manson was a messed up and abusive dude. Um,
Speaker 1: And like, it's not like cult leaders convince people to
Speaker 1: kill people all of the time without the CIA being involved.
Speaker 1: The CIA was involved to some extent. We just don't
Speaker 1: know the precise reasons why. Right. See, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: If your imagination goes off in a direction of well,
Speaker 1: maybe this was the ultimate experiment to see if they
Speaker 1: could create a perfect assassin. That a look if somehow,
Speaker 1: through happenstance, the CIA and the people involved in in
Speaker 1: k Ultra came across Charles Manson and tried to get
Speaker 1: him to do one thing or another. If you knew
Speaker 1: the full story, every detail of if someone wrote the
Speaker 1: book of exactly what happened, I can promise you that
Speaker 1: what occurred was dumb as hell. Yep, Like the killings
Speaker 1: were an accident. He didn't do what they asked. It
Speaker 1: was a clumsy, stupid just whole just a carnival of nonsense.
Speaker 1: I I'm saying that, based on every single other thing
Speaker 1: we know about him k Ultra, that if there was involvement,
Speaker 1: it was not successful. It was it was a very
Speaker 1: dumb person who had I mean, Charles Manson's background was horrible.
Speaker 1: He was abused as a child, He was a weirdo.
Speaker 1: The people he surrounded himself with, like Tex Watson, were
Speaker 1: for the most part very stupid um and the whole
Speaker 1: thing with the killings may have been largely a misunderstanding
Speaker 1: or a spur of the moment thing or whatever, because
Speaker 1: I think, based on what I know of the Manson murders,
Speaker 1: his whole like what he told these people around him
Speaker 1: that they basically formed the cult, where he told them
Speaker 1: that there was a race war coming and they needed
Speaker 1: to go out into a compound and on and on.
Speaker 1: I believe he made up all that stuff because those people,
Speaker 1: those people hung around him because he was about to
Speaker 1: be a successful musician and get a record deal and
Speaker 1: he's really tied in with the fucking the Beach Boys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and when the record deal fell through, he just didn't
Speaker 1: want his groupies to go away, so he made up
Speaker 1: this lie so they would stick around because he didn't
Speaker 1: want to be lonely. Like I fully believe that whole
Speaker 1: thing they began and ended with Charles Manson not wanting
Speaker 1: these hot girls who hung around him all the time
Speaker 1: to leave. So he's like the world's about to end
Speaker 1: because it's gonna be reest war. And I can sort
Speaker 1: of do a Manson voice, Not really, there's I mean,
Speaker 1: because there's also and again O'Neill's book goes into it.
Speaker 1: There's like a Hollywood kind of drug dealing thing here too.
Speaker 1: A lot of it may have involved like money and
Speaker 1: just kind of but but that's that's outside of the
Speaker 1: scope of these episodes. Um. When it comes to the
Speaker 1: CIA's involvement, it's there's there's a lot of ugly connections,
Speaker 1: including the fact our friend Dr Jolly and West is
Speaker 1: during the period that Manson is in hate Ashbury in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, West is there too, running a free clinic
Speaker 1: with a guy named David Smith. Um and West is.
Speaker 1: One of the things he's doing is he's operating he's
Speaker 1: renting out a house on Frederick Street which he's turned
Speaker 1: into a laboratory designed as a hippie crash pad, and
Speaker 1: he is once again using CIA resources giving a shipload
Speaker 1: of drugs to people. Um, while he has now in
Speaker 1: this case, he actually has grad students observing the hippies
Speaker 1: and like taking notes, and most of those grad students
Speaker 1: they people to talk to them. You can talk to
Speaker 1: these people, like results were published. The grad students are like,
Speaker 1: this is a shitty study. I don't understand what he's
Speaker 1: trying to do. Like we're not really getting anything. But
Speaker 1: Manson is kind of around at the time. Um, there's
Speaker 1: there's some connections there and kind of the thing that
Speaker 1: O'Neill brings up that I think is actually plausible in
Speaker 1: terms of there being a degree of CIA involvement here,
Speaker 1: is that we do know multiple police officers who had
Speaker 1: interactions with Manson and like arrested him, and we're looking
Speaker 1: into him at this period before and after the murders,
Speaker 1: say that it was well known in the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Police Department that like, Charles Manson had some FEDS who
Speaker 1: had his back and that you were not supposed to
Speaker 1: like mess with him. Um, you're not supposed to like
Speaker 1: keep him in. And so when he would get arrested,
Speaker 1: he would get let out because somebody was like and
Speaker 1: there's a number of reasons for this. It could have
Speaker 1: been he was informing for the FBI. Um, But one
Speaker 1: possibility is that either the FBI or the CIA, not
Speaker 1: that they were like trying turning Charles Manson and his
Speaker 1: followers into assassins, but that they were like, well, this
Speaker 1: is dangerous. This guy is dangerous. What he's doing with
Speaker 1: these people are dangerous. Eventually, something terrible is going to happen,
Speaker 1: and are are The order that we have from our
Speaker 1: boss is to funk with the hippies, right, is to
Speaker 1: like do some damage to this kind of flower power movement.
Speaker 1: So if we let this guy who was like the
Speaker 1: poster child for the worst things that can happen to
Speaker 1: like when you turn tune in, turn on and drop out,
Speaker 1: if we just let him do stuff for a while,
Speaker 1: eventually he'll do something horrible and then it'll do damage
Speaker 1: to these this movement. That's you know, we've been We've
Speaker 1: been brought in as part of Operation Chaos to hurt um.
Speaker 1: And it was kind of the end of the hippie
Speaker 1: It absolutely was. And I'm gonna I'm gonna read a
Speaker 1: quote from Tip O'Neill one more or Tom O'Neill one
Speaker 1: more time, she's tip O'Neil. It struck me that the
Speaker 1: Tate la Bianca murders had been so often invoked as
Speaker 1: the death knell of the sixties. Arguably they did more
Speaker 1: than any other event to turn the public opinion against
Speaker 1: the hippies. Recasting the peace and love flower power ethos
Speaker 1: is a thing of latent, drug addled criminality. As the
Speaker 1: writer Tom Getland noted for the mass media, the acid
Speaker 1: head Charles Manson was ready made as the monster looking
Speaker 1: in the heart of every long hair. So yeah, um,
Speaker 1: who knows what went on there? Uh, something we just
Speaker 1: will never quite know what. In nineteen seventy four, the
Speaker 1: details of the of mk Ultra finally broke out into
Speaker 1: public knowledge after a report from Seymour Hirsch for The
Speaker 1: New York Times. This reporting helped spawn the Church Committee
Speaker 1: and the Rockefeller Commission. The Church Committee's final report, they
Speaker 1: quoted from a nineteen fifty seven internal evaluation by the
Speaker 1: c I A precautions must be taken. The document warrant
Speaker 1: to conceal these activities from the American public in general.
Speaker 1: The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and
Speaker 1: illicit activities would have serious repercussions. Don't let him know
Speaker 1: about this, Like one the first time someone from the
Speaker 1: agency has not got Lieber Dulls actually looks at what
Speaker 1: they're doing. They're like, oh my god, don't let anyone
Speaker 1: know what we're doing. We have to hide this ship
Speaker 1: at all costs. Um and they do. A more haunting
Speaker 1: reveal is that in nineteen sixty three, a review by
Speaker 1: the Inspector General of the CIA included this line. A
Speaker 1: final phase of the testing of mk Ultra products places
Speaker 1: the rights and interests of US citizens in jeopardy. I
Speaker 1: don't know precisely what that means because we don't know
Speaker 1: what all of the products were, but kind of a
Speaker 1: sketchy little line there. Um, Sydney gott Lieb burns all
Speaker 1: of his records. This comes out in the congressional investigation.
Speaker 1: He is recalled to Washington, so he when he retires,
Speaker 1: he and his wife travel to run a clinic for
Speaker 1: lepers and like India, like they're like traveling around the world,
Speaker 1: just like trying to do good. Um. I don't know
Speaker 1: what's going on in this man's head, but yeah, he
Speaker 1: goes back to d C. He claims that he's in
Speaker 1: bad health and so he can't address the entire synate chamber,
Speaker 1: and so in a private room he's questioned and the
Speaker 1: American people can hear on a loud speaker as he
Speaker 1: tells everyone that he's destroyed the MK Ultra files. Now,
Speaker 1: he says this was not to cover up a legal activity,
Speaker 1: but quote because this material was sensitive and capable of
Speaker 1: being misunderstood. I don't know what what's more misunderstood, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to not let people conspiracy about this
Speaker 1: Sydney burning at all, probably isn't the right thing to do.
Speaker 1: It could be taken the wrong way. Wow, the fact
Speaker 1: that we were doing all this could really be taken
Speaker 1: the wrong way. I better let all this on fire
Speaker 1: so nobody thinks we're bad guys. That way, they can
Speaker 1: just fill in the void with their imaginations. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: that way, and then there won't be any conspiracy theories. Um.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb says under congressional like testimony that he cannot provide
Speaker 1: specific information on any mkal trick experiments because he's never
Speaker 1: witnessed any himself. He was investigated for federal crimes due
Speaker 1: to his destruction of government files, which is absolutely illegal,
Speaker 1: but the case was quietly dropped by the Justice Department.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb was never prosecuted, and the Senate gave him total
Speaker 1: criminal immunity in exchange for testifying against who so other
Speaker 1: people did go to prison because that's why. That's why
Speaker 1: they gave him immunity, so they can nail all those
Speaker 1: other people. Nope, we're done. All's well. Sydney Gottlieb spends
Speaker 1: the rest of his life with his wife on their
Speaker 1: eco friendly goat farm in rural Virginia, Virginia. He dies
Speaker 1: in and for the rest of his life. Friends of
Speaker 1: the family of his children would recall a kindly, intelligent,
Speaker 1: open minded man with a strong spiritual and mystical interest.
Speaker 1: Sydney meditated regularly, he read constantly. He was, in his
Speaker 1: private life the absolute epitome of an aging hippie. The
Speaker 1: people who loved him and spent time close to him
Speaker 1: only got occasional glimpses of something darker. Stephen Kinser at
Speaker 1: one point quotes from a young woman named Elizabeth, who
Speaker 1: wound up dating one of Sydney's sons. So she spends
Speaker 1: this summer around the family compound, and she recalled this
Speaker 1: as a generally positive experience. But there's one peculiar moment
Speaker 1: that she related later to an interviewer. One day that summer,
Speaker 1: we were out at the house swimming. The parents had
Speaker 1: gone to the store to buy food for dinner, and
Speaker 1: Peter goes, kind of conspiratorially, come here, I want to
Speaker 1: show you something. He takes me into his father's din,
Speaker 1: his library, and says, turn around. He did something. He
Speaker 1: didn't want me to see. What he did, and the
Speaker 1: wall of books opened up behind it was all this
Speaker 1: stuff weapons. I couldn't tell which kind, but guns, there
Speaker 1: was other stuff back there. It was like a secret compartment.
Speaker 1: I asked him what is that for. He closed it
Speaker 1: back up quickly and said, you know, my father has
Speaker 1: a price on his head. I said, why is he
Speaker 1: a criminal? He said no, he works for the CIA.
Speaker 1: Then he said, you know, my dad has killed people.
Speaker 1: He made toothpaste to kill someone. Later on he told me,
Speaker 1: don't tell anybody that you were in here, and don't
Speaker 1: ever tell anyone that you know my father kills people.
Speaker 1: And they pulled out a particular gun and he aimed
Speaker 1: it out the window and fired it at a tree.
Speaker 1: He said, you come back in two days. That tree
Speaker 1: is gonna be fucked. She's gonna she's gonna be dead.
Speaker 1: My dad's killed trees. What all such? We just a
Speaker 1: just a I mean, that's true. That says to me
Speaker 1: that like he was kind of like he's kind of
Speaker 1: milking it, you know, like you tell like, hey, kids,
Speaker 1: you want to see like your dad's secret gun wall.
Speaker 1: I made toothpaste to kill somebody, um, which I don't
Speaker 1: believe never killed anybody. It was none of another one
Speaker 1: of the things that nothing happened with. But like I
Speaker 1: don't know, I guess that's not weird that like a
Speaker 1: guy like that would want people, would like want people
Speaker 1: who was close to to know that he was this
Speaker 1: he has this other secret life as a badass spy. Um,
Speaker 1: he's probably not telling him about all the prostitutes, about
Speaker 1: his friend with the portable toilet or any of that
Speaker 1: would be my guess. But yeah, I mean I don't
Speaker 1: doubt that if if, if he told the story, I
Speaker 1: would love to know how he told the story, if
Speaker 1: he made it seem more dark and mysterious than it was,
Speaker 1: if you tried to cover up the fact that it
Speaker 1: was such a clumsy mess and irresponsible, Like the people
Speaker 1: who died weren't because of his gadgets. It was through negligence.
Speaker 1: It was through killing test subjects because there was nothing
Speaker 1: else else to do with them, Like I don't know, I,
Speaker 1: I you you. And that's obviously what makes him such
Speaker 1: fascinating character, because you'll never know what he thought of himself,
Speaker 1: or what he thought of what he did, or if
Speaker 1: he spend his time abroad trying to make up for it,
Speaker 1: trying to save his own soul. Yeah, did he feel
Speaker 1: did he realize this was all a terrible mistake and
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, dedicate the rest of his life to
Speaker 1: helping lepers or something. Um, yep, who knows. I mean
Speaker 1: I like the eco friendly goat farm part, but I
Speaker 1: wish he had just raised goats. I think they can
Speaker 1: all agree that. Yeah, Um, Jason, it's well, now, hold on,
Speaker 1: I thought that the UNI bomber was also part of Ultra?
Speaker 1: Did we leave Are we leaving that out? Or is
Speaker 1: that not true? Is that he's he's involved in some
Speaker 1: experiments that are that are like part of this, like
Speaker 1: the whole thing, because remember it's like a pretty broad
Speaker 1: variety of things and his are like, um, it's not
Speaker 1: entirely the same. Um, It's like he's involved in a
Speaker 1: voluntary psychological study that's like pretty abusive and that probably
Speaker 1: does some damage to him. That it wasn't funded by
Speaker 1: m KAY Ultra. Well it might have been, because I remember,
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly what was an m KAY Ultra
Speaker 1: because Sydney destroyed. But it's the kind of thing they
Speaker 1: would have done, right. It sounds a lot of what
Speaker 1: Kazinski goes through sounds like aspects of the dip patterning
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that is being researched, Like, um, that's
Speaker 1: being done up at McGill University. So I think it's
Speaker 1: pretty likely that he was in an experiment that was
Speaker 1: part of m KAY Ultra. I don't think you're gonna
Speaker 1: get exact confirmation. Kazinski was always pretty adamant that like
Speaker 1: that had nothing to do with what he did. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: that's why I wanted to bring him up, not not
Speaker 1: to suggest that he was a product of it, but
Speaker 1: to suggest that if he if he was, it wasn't
Speaker 1: because they again, they created the perfect assassin and he
Speaker 1: carried out a series of ineffective bombings the rather than yeah,
Speaker 1: it took someone who was already disturbed and made him
Speaker 1: much much worse than they just turned him out into
Speaker 1: the world, Like like that's the thing that they were
Speaker 1: good at, was Yeah, it was really hurting people were
Speaker 1: didn't Yeah, who were already having some problems, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's probably the best way to look at
Speaker 1: what you've got with um. UM with Kazinski is like
Speaker 1: I don't want to we'll we'll talk about Papa Ted
Speaker 1: one of these days, but he's Whatever you want to
Speaker 1: say about the likely impact MK Ultra has on Ted Kazinski,
Speaker 1: it doesn't no way it helped right, like, there's certainly
Speaker 1: no way and made him made him a less likely
Speaker 1: to blow things up. Right, And if his whole issue
Speaker 1: was that he did not have faith in the system
Speaker 1: and wanted to bring it down, like this probably did
Speaker 1: not yes help his faith in the system. Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1: If you really start reading a lot of mk ultra stuff,
Speaker 1: you do find yourself thinking about bringing down the system. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a natural reaction to reading a lot of stories
Speaker 1: of the CIA torturing people. Um. But that's but we've
Speaker 1: reached end of it, ultimately had a happy ending. Justice prevailed.
Speaker 1: The guy at the top of it died in peacefully
Speaker 1: at age ninety or whatever, living living a long and
Speaker 1: peaceful retirement on his goat farm, exactly what he deserved.
Speaker 1: It is done. Yeah, I learned. It taught the lesson
Speaker 1: that actually, by destroying evidence, you can totally get off
Speaker 1: on a crime because they need evidence to convict you,
Speaker 1: Like they can charge you for destroying the evidence as
Speaker 1: a separate crime. But yeah, you'll get off from the
Speaker 1: original the original thing you did if you do successfully
Speaker 1: destroy all of the records of you doing it. They
Speaker 1: can really they're helpless and uh yeah, that's um. Once again,
Speaker 1: their attempt to to cancel this poor man didn't work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank god do it? Just like uh David Chappelle uncancellable
Speaker 1: and and like Dave Chappelle regularly shows up at concerts
Speaker 1: to to sing surprise versus when I forget what band
Speaker 1: that was that had just happened with Radio ahead, Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably Radio. We're we're on this. We're referencing things that
Speaker 1: happened on Twitter hours ago when this this episode will
Speaker 1: come out weeks later. But that's what the audience loves. Jason, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me on so that I could
Speaker 1: I could go on this very dark journey with you.
Speaker 1: I I hope that it has Uh what what have
Speaker 1: we learned? What have we learned from this? I guess? Well,
Speaker 1: if if you're worried that LSD is a mind control agent,
Speaker 1: don't worry. The CIA tested that hypothesis. Um. I guess
Speaker 1: if you've ever thought I would like to sit on
Speaker 1: a portable toilet and watch strangers have sex, Um, you
Speaker 1: might want to look for a job in the Central
Speaker 1: Intelligence Agency apparently, And if you're if you if you're
Speaker 1: worried about the techniques for affecting someone's brain. One the
Speaker 1: knowledge of how to totally destroy someone's brain. We do
Speaker 1: have that technology, but but we've actually had it since
Speaker 1: the Stone Age. It's just called hitting someone in the
Speaker 1: head with a rock. Like it doesn't require subjecting them
Speaker 1: two months of techniques and repeating things in a in
Speaker 1: a sound helmet, and while under the influence of various drugs.
Speaker 1: You can just hit them with a rock. That in
Speaker 1: terms of you know, actually mind controlling somebody, the old
Speaker 1: methods are best. Just good old fashioned lies and bribes
Speaker 1: and threats. Uh. They all work very well. We do
Speaker 1: not need new techniques. They work great. Advertisers have have
Speaker 1: mastered all sorts of ways to put on your insecurities
Speaker 1: and make you spend money that you don't have. Uh.
Speaker 1: They did not need some amazing new technology to do it.
Speaker 1: It's actually super easy to manipulate people into doing things.
Speaker 1: It's not not hard at all. Speaking of which, if
Speaker 1: you're looking to mind control me, Um, the thing I'm
Speaker 1: most vulnerable too is in fact suitcase is full of money.
Speaker 1: So you know, we're always the case of money. We
Speaker 1: are available. We will betray anyone as anyone with for
Speaker 1: a big enough suitcase, not a little suitcase. You know. Anyway,
Speaker 1: my the book that I've been promoting the beginning of
Speaker 1: these each of these episodes one final time. The title
Speaker 1: is if this book exists, You're in the wrong universe
Speaker 1: has a lime green cover. If you buy books based
Speaker 1: purely on the color of the color of the cover,
Speaker 1: this one is neon lime green. You can't miss it
Speaker 1: at your bookstore. You know. I did work at a
Speaker 1: bookstore for a while as a younger man, and people
Speaker 1: did come in occasionally asking for books by color. I
Speaker 1: don't remember the title of the author, but it was blue. Um.
Speaker 1: That is a thing I have been asked working in
Speaker 1: a bookstore. So go into your local bookstore and demand
Speaker 1: a green book. Um. And if they don't give you
Speaker 1: Jason's book, then riot um. Otherwise, you can look me
Speaker 1: up on any of the social media platforms. My name
Speaker 1: is Jason Park and p A R G. I n
Speaker 1: um on TikTok, I'm on Twitter, I'm on all of them.
Speaker 1: Just just searched the box for my name and you'll
Speaker 1: find either my account or some bot pretending to be
Speaker 1: me that will probably both be equally as good excellent. Well, Jason,
Speaker 1: thanks for this five hour stretch of our lives that
Speaker 1: we've spent learning about the CIA. Thanks for having me,
Speaker 1: I guess. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media.