Speaker 1: Welcome back to week two of the Behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: m k Ultra episodes. I'm Robert Evans. I am the
Speaker 1: normal host of this show unless you're part of a
Speaker 1: CI A mind controlled experiment that has deep patterned you
Speaker 1: and cause you to forget the real host of this show. Um,
Speaker 1: but that probably hasn't happened. Uh. And to explain why
Speaker 1: that probably hasn't happened, here's our guest, Jason Pargeon. Hello.
Speaker 1: For those of you did not listen to parts one two,
Speaker 1: I am frequent podcast hosts and author Jason Pargean needs
Speaker 1: to be Evans boss. Back in the crack dot com days,
Speaker 1: where I was executive editor for thirteen years from two
Speaker 1: thousand seven till to till two thousand and twenty, during
Speaker 1: what I like to think of as the glory years.
Speaker 1: Maybe other people think those were the bad years and
Speaker 1: that it was fine before and after that. Jason, I
Speaker 1: would think anyone who disagrees with you on that point
Speaker 1: has probably had their minds destroyed by the sea had
Speaker 1: ad a like BuzzFeed. Uh. Yeah, but I have a
Speaker 1: novel and it's called If this book exists, You're in
Speaker 1: the wrong universe. That is coming out right around the
Speaker 1: time you're listening to this. Uh anywhere books are sold
Speaker 1: in any format e book, audiobook. It is one of
Speaker 1: the John Dies at the End books. If you know
Speaker 1: what that means, you are very excited. If not, then
Speaker 1: that was just a nonsense string of words that I
Speaker 1: just said. There there there's a somewhat famous book and
Speaker 1: movie called John Dies at the End of the movie.
Speaker 1: You can find on streaming. But it is a New
Speaker 1: York Times best selling book series, and this is this
Speaker 1: book is one of them. If you've not read any
Speaker 1: of them, you can start in this one if you
Speaker 1: want it is That would be a very expensive way
Speaker 1: to start a series, considering the other ones are probably
Speaker 1: like on Kendall at this point. Um, but by all means,
Speaker 1: please by by the thirty dollar hardcover. I that that
Speaker 1: will be good for me if you do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um by his book. Yeah, it's worth it. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like taking a little bit of LSD and then
Speaker 1: not having the CIA electro shock you until your brain
Speaker 1: gets depatterned. It's like the good parts of that experience.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like what Sydney got Leaves doing, as
Speaker 1: opposed to what got leaves doing to everyone else. Um, yeah, exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: it's fun. You know, there's a there's one of the
Speaker 1: things that you can do if you want to have
Speaker 1: a good time is you can find old uh CIA
Speaker 1: reports about their drug trips. Um. I'm looking at one
Speaker 1: from nineteen three right now where they're talking about like
Speaker 1: the Gateway experience and like the kind of basically they're
Speaker 1: talking about like, hey, is it possible that we're communicating
Speaker 1: with aliens while we're all doing drugs? Um, And kind
Speaker 1: of the conclusion is that it's scary and they don't know,
Speaker 1: because again, these are, to be fair, these are the
Speaker 1: kind of thing things that happened to you when you're
Speaker 1: on drugs. It's like did I just talk to some
Speaker 1: sort of like being from outside of you know, time
Speaker 1: and space? Um, And it's it is I don't know,
Speaker 1: comforting is the wrong word, but it's funny to note
Speaker 1: that the CIA has had the same experiences. Okay, and
Speaker 1: I have to maybe this is a spoiler for the
Speaker 1: remaining episode or episodes in this in this series, but
Speaker 1: between now, from the beginning to the end of this,
Speaker 1: like obviously they did record a ton of data. They
Speaker 1: did do a ton of what they're calling experiments. Did
Speaker 1: they learn anything useful that wasn't learned elsewhere or that
Speaker 1: other people didn't already know? Was there any good that
Speaker 1: came from this? No? Uh. In short, Jason, I mean
Speaker 1: the the good that comes from it. To the extent
Speaker 1: that good comes from it, is that l s D
Speaker 1: gets out and becomes incredibly popular among the generation of
Speaker 1: musicians and artists and philosophers and thinkers. And it gets
Speaker 1: out largely because of guys who are working with Most
Speaker 1: of the people who read LSD into the actual like
Speaker 1: the civilian populace in a way that's not horribly abusive,
Speaker 1: are also these guys who are like contracting their their doctors,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're psychiatrists who have practices. They're
Speaker 1: working with the CIA for extra money. And part of
Speaker 1: that is that they're drugging people in nightmare experiments. But
Speaker 1: also they have free acid, and so they take it
Speaker 1: and they give it to their friends, some of whom
Speaker 1: wind up writing very influential books and becoming like these
Speaker 1: members of the of the sixties, like that that generation
Speaker 1: of you know, people who tune in and drop out,
Speaker 1: so we get a lot of cool music from that
Speaker 1: period of time. Um, there's a lot of of interesting
Speaker 1: thinkers who are influenced by the experiences they have on
Speaker 1: ASCID and a lot of that is positive. And I
Speaker 1: guess you could say that came inadvertently through as a
Speaker 1: result of MK Ultra. That's not what they were trying
Speaker 1: to do, and it was not because they were drugging
Speaker 1: people and then those people wrote great albums. It's more that, like, well,
Speaker 1: we were giving out acid for free to the same
Speaker 1: guys who were torturing people, and some of them gave
Speaker 1: that acid to people who then gave it to people
Speaker 1: who wound up writing pretty pretty rad albums who became
Speaker 1: Jerry Garcia. You know, it certainly was not anything to
Speaker 1: do with what they intended. In fact, I assumed that
Speaker 1: the Cia very much did not like the cultural pivot
Speaker 1: that occurred in the nine six. I think Gottlieb was
Speaker 1: probably cool with it because he is kind of a hippie.
Speaker 1: But yeah, most of these guys would we're we're we're
Speaker 1: horrified by what was happening. Um, we'll be talking about
Speaker 1: that when we get to the Charles Manson portions of
Speaker 1: these episodes. Jason um so as we kind of left
Speaker 1: off here, you know, we talked about dr you and
Speaker 1: Cameron over in Canada de patterning people all of this
Speaker 1: nightmare work. While Cameron is doing this horrible ship, Sidney
Speaker 1: Gottlieb and his friends are continuing to go buck fucking
Speaker 1: wild with their own personal LSD experiments. Conscientious guided trips
Speaker 1: and consensual random dosings had given away to a culture
Speaker 1: of surprise acid trips for anybody who happened to be
Speaker 1: near scientists from the mk Ultra program. At the end
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty four, the problem had gotten so bad
Speaker 1: that the CIA's Office of Security sent out a memo
Speaker 1: to all of the agents at the CIA, warning that
Speaker 1: certain officers were testing LSD on their colleagues and that
Speaker 1: it could quote produce serious insanity for periods of eight
Speaker 1: to eighteen hours and possibly longer. Due to the risk
Speaker 1: of being drugged. They recommended employees not drink from the
Speaker 1: punch bowl at the upcoming Christmas party, Like that's a
Speaker 1: that's a memo you get at the CIA. Don't drink
Speaker 1: from the punch this year. Somebody's probably gonna put acid
Speaker 1: at it, Like can you deliver ascid that way? And
Speaker 1: oh absolutely, I had no idea. You can put it
Speaker 1: in any liquid. Yeah, yeah, you don't notice that it
Speaker 1: doesn't really have a flavor. So a lot of people
Speaker 1: like sticking orange use apparently like potentiates some of the effects,
Speaker 1: So people take it into o J a lot. If
Speaker 1: you're just getting it liquid, most people get it as
Speaker 1: like it's like a little piece of paper that has
Speaker 1: has had a drop on it or something, and they
Speaker 1: take it that way. But you know, all of the
Speaker 1: information you would need if you were really doing this
Speaker 1: as an experiment about in terms of like what are
Speaker 1: what other medications are these people on? What else do
Speaker 1: they have that could be counteracting it or could be
Speaker 1: you know, let me interact with it, you know, or
Speaker 1: any of these people, you know, how many of them
Speaker 1: been drinking alcohol, What's what's the what's the you know,
Speaker 1: the average weight? Or do they have pre existing conditions,
Speaker 1: do they have pre existing mental health problems? And all
Speaker 1: the things you would be like if you're going to
Speaker 1: do a study today to see like what theyre if
Speaker 1: they somehow allowed you to test, Like we're going to
Speaker 1: do somebody's food around them. They don't know what it's coming.
Speaker 1: We're going to study the response there's a battery of
Speaker 1: data you would need on that person to know what
Speaker 1: you were looking at in their response and why it
Speaker 1: was different from individual to individual. Right, And it sounds
Speaker 1: like they were doing any of this. It was so
Speaker 1: sloppy and unscientific. Yeah, what is the scientific value of
Speaker 1: putting LSD in a punch bowl and seeing what happens
Speaker 1: at a work party? Like, how do you actually turn
Speaker 1: that into into usable data? Because you're you're not if
Speaker 1: you're just having fun. If it turned into an orgy,
Speaker 1: or if it turned into a riot, or if it
Speaker 1: turned into nothing, that doesn't mean anything unless you know
Speaker 1: all of the other complicating factors, like the mood. Was
Speaker 1: it something that was gonna happen anyway? Is that unique
Speaker 1: the people of this particular age or the particular mindset
Speaker 1: that work in this agency, Like you don't have any
Speaker 1: of the information that you would need to know. Okay,
Speaker 1: this same thing will happen if we try this in Moscow,
Speaker 1: you know, at a party there. You know we're trying
Speaker 1: to destabilize their government. Like that tells you nothing. No,
Speaker 1: it's completely it's completely useless from a scientific standpoint. And
Speaker 1: I think, honestly, I'm sure Sidney would have had an excuse.
Speaker 1: But he's not doing this for science. You're you're not
Speaker 1: some of this he's probably doing for he believes he's
Speaker 1: doing for science. But you're not dosing the punch bowl
Speaker 1: at the CIA Christmas party for science. You're doing it
Speaker 1: because it's fun, Like because you think it's funny, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's why this is happening. Um, And yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty pretty cool that this, this is just this.
Speaker 1: We've just this man has been set loose. He's been
Speaker 1: given a massive portion of the CIA's budget during the
Speaker 1: period of time in which the CIA is the most
Speaker 1: powerful it will ever be, and no one can tell
Speaker 1: him no. So he's just doing whatever the funk he wants. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: Sydney seems to handle this pretty well, the stress of
Speaker 1: managing this like international drugging and torturing ring. Some of
Speaker 1: his colleagues, though, are more haunted by what the CIA
Speaker 1: was doing than their boss. One of these men was
Speaker 1: Frank Olsen, who he mentioned a little earlier. He's a U. S.
Speaker 1: Army biochemist and a biological weapons researcher. Um. One of
Speaker 1: the first things that like Olsen will do in this
Speaker 1: project is he sits in at these black sites when
Speaker 1: they're torturing prisoners to death with LSD and mescalin and
Speaker 1: he takes notes, right, like, that's one of his early
Speaker 1: jobs and what becomes m k Ultra. Now, according to
Speaker 1: reports from other men in the program, Olsen gets On
Speaker 1: is not happy with this. He doesn't feel good about
Speaker 1: doing this job, like sitting in the chair and watching
Speaker 1: people go mad and then be executed, kind of like
Speaker 1: fux him up a little bit. Um, he's like the
Speaker 1: most human person at the CIA. We're going to hear
Speaker 1: from right now? I guess so. And and again all
Speaker 1: of this is debated. There are some people say, no,
Speaker 1: that's not what it was. He didn't have an issue
Speaker 1: with what we were doing. Was something else. But according
Speaker 1: to the people who say that he had an ethical
Speaker 1: issue with like what they were doing, they say that
Speaker 1: he spoke up about it and he started to talk
Speaker 1: about quitting the agency. Um. And this starts to cause
Speaker 1: like a lot of talk the higher levels of the
Speaker 1: CIA of like what are we gonna do about Frank Olson? Right,
Speaker 1: His doubts are supercharged when in May of nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three he goes to Britain they're doing another series of
Speaker 1: like tests on chemical weapons. And he's not just the
Speaker 1: acid guy. He's got like you know, he's he's a
Speaker 1: he's a biological weapon specialist. And he watches a servant,
Speaker 1: a Sarah nerve gas test go wrong um and a
Speaker 1: twenty year old volunteer soldier dies an agonizing death as
Speaker 1: a result of it. And this is at least what
Speaker 1: Kinser kind of right, Stephen Kinzer kind of says, this
Speaker 1: is the inciting incident that gets Olsen to decide he's
Speaker 1: actually going to leave the agency Kinser rights quote. A
Speaker 1: month later, Olson was back in Germany. While he was there,
Speaker 1: according to records that were later declassified, a suspected Soviet
Speaker 1: agent code named Patient number two was subjected to an
Speaker 1: intense interrogation somewhere near Frankfurt. On that same trip, according
Speaker 1: to a later reconstruction of his travels, Olsen visited a
Speaker 1: CIA safe house near Stuttgart where he saw men dying,
Speaker 1: often in agony, from the weapons that he had made.
Speaker 1: After stops in Scandinavia and Paris, he went to Britain
Speaker 1: and visited Williams sergeant for a second time. Immediately after
Speaker 1: their meeting, Sergeant wrote a report saying that Olsen was
Speaker 1: deeply disturbed over what he had seen in c i
Speaker 1: A safe houses in Germany and displayed symptoms of not
Speaker 1: wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed. He sent
Speaker 1: his report to superiors with the understanding that they would
Speaker 1: award it to the CIA, and Sergeant is like a
Speaker 1: British kind of liaison. So you see what's kind of
Speaker 1: happening here. This is at least the way that kind
Speaker 1: of Kinzer depicts it. You've got this scientist who is
Speaker 1: traveling around the world, watching these weapons he's helping to develop,
Speaker 1: kill people, watching people be tortured, watching that people have
Speaker 1: weapons tested on them, and it just starts to break him. Um.
Speaker 1: There is evidence that Frank had already started to talk
Speaker 1: about some of his top secred research with one of
Speaker 1: his friends, who later claimed in an interview quote he said,
Speaker 1: norm you would be stunned by the techniques that they used.
Speaker 1: They made people talk, they brainwashed people, They used all
Speaker 1: kinds of drugs, they used all kinds of torture. They
Speaker 1: were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians,
Speaker 1: and they didn't care whether whether they got out of
Speaker 1: that or not. Um So, he talks about this to
Speaker 1: an extent and out about that Lettani right there is
Speaker 1: that the only part that's not true is that it worked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he lists like, well, they're usually Nazis, they're killing people,
Speaker 1: are doing this, they're doing that, and they're they're they've
Speaker 1: got ways to get truth out of people. It's like,
Speaker 1: we'll see, that's the thing. That's the one thing they did.
Speaker 1: That's the one that ye know, the part where you
Speaker 1: thought it was actually effective at accomplishing something for the
Speaker 1: cause is where you were wrong. All the rest of
Speaker 1: it was true, the Nazis, all of that, Yeah, it's um.
Speaker 1: So this guy has friend Norm claims that like he
Speaker 1: basically bears his guts to him, says, like, you know,
Speaker 1: I watched them torture people to death. They're doing all
Speaker 1: these horrible things, carrying out this nightmare research, and I
Speaker 1: can't take it anymore. I'm going to leave um And
Speaker 1: Norm says that Frank Olsen tells him I'm getting out
Speaker 1: of the c I a period. So near the end
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty three, not long after this conversation, Frank
Speaker 1: is invited to a work retreat with several other CIA men,
Speaker 1: including Gottlieb's deputy and Sydney Gottlieb. After the dinner, all
Speaker 1: of the men are dosed without their consent with L S. D.
Speaker 1: We don't know how much they're given, UM because as
Speaker 1: far as we can tell, nobody's taking notes about that
Speaker 1: sort of thing on a regular basis. But Sydney reacts
Speaker 1: badly to the huge dose of surprise acid he's given
Speaker 1: after like watching a bunch of men die horribly UM.
Speaker 1: And days later he still has not recovered. So he
Speaker 1: gets taken away by several colleagues to New York City
Speaker 1: to speak with a psychiatrist who was friendly with the agency.
Speaker 1: It's Abramson, I believe, the guy who gave Um Gottlieb
Speaker 1: his first dose. And during that trip, while he's in
Speaker 1: the hotel room with like a colleague, Frank jumps from
Speaker 1: an eleven story or ten story window, out of the
Speaker 1: window and dies on impact. Um. That is the official
Speaker 1: report that while he's in this hotel room with another
Speaker 1: CIA agent, he jumps of his own accord out of
Speaker 1: the window and he dies on impact. Now, are you
Speaker 1: do you think anybody's gonna doubt the official narrative on
Speaker 1: this one? Jason. Yeah, the people who know even a
Speaker 1: little bit about him caultre the moment this guy came
Speaker 1: into the story, they knew this is the famous This
Speaker 1: is one of the figures along with God, Like, this
Speaker 1: is one of the figures that the people that are
Speaker 1: kind of a cursory knowledge of NK culture like me, Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are this is one of the guys that they
Speaker 1: already knew because this is like what movies have been
Speaker 1: made about this. Yeah. And for the record, when it
Speaker 1: comes to like conspiracy theories, this is almost certainly like
Speaker 1: a true one because like, so they exhume Frank Olsen's
Speaker 1: body in nineteen and they find specific cranial injuries in
Speaker 1: his remains that suggests that he was unconscious when he
Speaker 1: started to fall. Now, it's not impossible that something else happened,
Speaker 1: especially like if he was dosed with a drug or something.
Speaker 1: But it's pretty likely he was murdered by the c
Speaker 1: i A right, Like, that's that's not an unreasonable conclusion
Speaker 1: to draw based on the extant evidence. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly what happened. It's also they have
Speaker 1: earned the doubt, yeah, that people express here like I
Speaker 1: I again, I'm very big on. I'm not in favor
Speaker 1: of people who take the true things we know about
Speaker 1: in culture and then try to expand them into very
Speaker 1: weird fiction, because I think that discredits everything in this case.
Speaker 1: You know, in the case of this man dying in
Speaker 1: the way they said he did, it is not weird,
Speaker 1: like them throwing him out of a window would be
Speaker 1: the least weird part of the story. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: not at all out of line with the things these
Speaker 1: people have shown themselves as willing to do morally. It
Speaker 1: makes sense from a logical standpoint. Now, it's also possible
Speaker 1: that like the CIA killed Frank Olsen, and they didn't
Speaker 1: do it by having him thrown but instead like drugging
Speaker 1: him at different points and kind of like breaking him
Speaker 1: until he wound up killing himself. Um. Not out of
Speaker 1: the question, but yeah, it seems like there's i mean,
Speaker 1: based on sort of the exhumation and what gets found
Speaker 1: when they when they do this, uh, the second autopsy,
Speaker 1: it definitely seems like there's a pretty strong odds he
Speaker 1: was just straight up murdered. Um. But we'll never know
Speaker 1: precisely what happened um Frank Olsen's death. Whatever the exact
Speaker 1: details of it was not quieted up. Obviously, this is
Speaker 1: like the thing people tend to know about in k Ultra.
Speaker 1: It's probably the single most famous moment of the entire program. Um,
Speaker 1: even though it's not the most fucked Obviously, the fact
Speaker 1: that they murdered a guy who had been helping them
Speaker 1: torture people is not nearly the worst thing that happens
Speaker 1: as a result of this um. But it's just such
Speaker 1: a like Cold War story, right, This like mysterious suicide
Speaker 1: of a CIA doctor, and I don't know, for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: it's the thing that people latch onto. Um, this is controversial.
Speaker 1: Whatever happens is like causes problems within the CIA. Frank
Speaker 1: Olsen had been a prominent and a well liked member
Speaker 1: of the team. The c i a's general counsel, Lawrence Houston,
Speaker 1: starts to like dozen investigation. He spends two weeks investigating
Speaker 1: the suicide. And Houston is the guy who wrote helped
Speaker 1: write the law that created the CIA. It is again like, obviously, yeah,
Speaker 1: the CIA is investigating itself. I wonder what they found,
Speaker 1: but it is worth noting basically, no one knows exactly
Speaker 1: what God leaves doing. He doesn't have to report to anyone, right. Um,
Speaker 1: so it's not entirely unlikely that Houston learns a lot
Speaker 1: of things that he had not known about him k
Speaker 1: Ultra in the process of investigating this, whatever the reality there.
Speaker 1: He summarizes his findings after this investigation. Thus, Lee, it
Speaker 1: is my conclusion that the death of Dr Olsen is
Speaker 1: the result of circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken
Speaker 1: in the course of his official duties for the U. S. Government,
Speaker 1: and that there is therefore a direct causal connection between
Speaker 1: that accident and his death. I am not happy with
Speaker 1: what seems to me to be a very casual attitude
Speaker 1: on the part of t SS representatives. That's the part
Speaker 1: of the CIA that godly runs to the way experiment
Speaker 1: was conducted, and to the remarks that this is just
Speaker 1: one of the risks running with scientific experimentation. A death
Speaker 1: occurred which might have been prevented, and the agency as
Speaker 1: a whole, particularly the director, were caught completely by surprise
Speaker 1: in a most embarrassing manner. So that's kind of the
Speaker 1: the official sort of chastisement that Gottlieb gets over this.
Speaker 1: It's um something else. I mean, I don't even have
Speaker 1: there's I don't have a joke for that, because yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what do you say, like he's he's writing about it
Speaker 1: the way that it's like like you crash a company
Speaker 1: car because like you're not paying enough attention or something
Speaker 1: like there's such a bureaucratic problem. Um. I mean, and obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not surprised that the CIA's findings aren't
Speaker 1: we murdered a guy, but like, yeah, it's just I
Speaker 1: don't know, seeing it that way is is for whatever
Speaker 1: reason like that, the kind of the contrast between the
Speaker 1: way they write about all this in a very like
Speaker 1: almost corporate manner and what's actually going on is always
Speaker 1: one of the more unsettling pieces of delving and n
Speaker 1: MK ultra well and also truve basically every government sponsored
Speaker 1: horror and history when you see the actual bureaucracy behind
Speaker 1: it in the records they kept in it's all it's
Speaker 1: all just memos And yeah, yep, well, Jason, you know
Speaker 1: what who loves memos and corporate speak is our sponsors
Speaker 1: who write stuff just like this, but not about murdering
Speaker 1: their own team. So yeah, that's probably probably could have
Speaker 1: been framed better. Let's just let's just rolled ads right
Speaker 1: now before I say anything else, We're back. Ah, Jason,
Speaker 1: act your head, Dode. This is like a just kind
Speaker 1: of like a fucking um. I don't know getting all
Speaker 1: of this at once. We're reading all of this in
Speaker 1: a marathon session, so it's just sort of like hitting
Speaker 1: like a like a series of bricks, um. And then
Speaker 1: I'm pausing intermittently and being like, all right, Jason, time
Speaker 1: to time to make a joke. Now was your joke, Jason?
Speaker 1: The well, the to to kind of pull back here.
Speaker 1: As a listener, I think most people came into this
Speaker 1: with about the same amount of information about M k
Speaker 1: Ultra as I had, and I think most people have
Speaker 1: heard of it. They knew that it was a CIA
Speaker 1: program that had something to do with mind control. They
Speaker 1: knew that it's been in a million thrillers and spy movies.
Speaker 1: That in any kind of movie that involved like Manchurion
Speaker 1: candidates or mind control, anything like that, they will always mention, well,
Speaker 1: this is all goes back to M k Ultra. So
Speaker 1: the thing that I wanted to know coming into this
Speaker 1: listening to you as a listener, and I think the
Speaker 1: same thing they want to probably is at one point
Speaker 1: is any of the most outlandish conspiracy stuff true, as in,
Speaker 1: did they have even partial success creating a mansuring in Canada?
Speaker 1: Did they have even partial success in trying to make
Speaker 1: someone do something other than what they wanted to do,
Speaker 1: not make someone piss their pants and vomit and control
Speaker 1: will be? It was like, Wow, they didn't want to
Speaker 1: do that. We need the thing that they once they
Speaker 1: abandoned this as a truth serum, which again we also
Speaker 1: know really doesn't exist. You can kind of get somebody
Speaker 1: drunk and get them talking, but something that makes somebody
Speaker 1: tell the truth is that's all not a real thing. Um.
Speaker 1: So I think what people are kind of listening for
Speaker 1: is like, was this all just people fooling themselves and
Speaker 1: you know, creating horror stories and leaving a trail of
Speaker 1: dead bodies behind them? Like, what's the weirdest thing they
Speaker 1: actually accomplished? And I'm not trying to spoil the rest
Speaker 1: of the EPISO so that we have coming up, but
Speaker 1: I think we're trying to separate fact from fiction. What
Speaker 1: I said earlier was that the fiction is assuming that
Speaker 1: everything they wanted to do they actually did, the fact
Speaker 1: is that everything they wanted to do was fantasy, and
Speaker 1: what they actually did was they just ruined a bunch
Speaker 1: of people's lives and accidentally started the psychedelic sixties movement.
Speaker 1: What I will say is, if you're asking did they
Speaker 1: succeed in implanting false memories and people into some extent,
Speaker 1: the actual answer is we don't know, and we're will
Speaker 1: be getting to them. Maybe they're kind of later on,
Speaker 1: but certainly there is no evidence of success. Right. There
Speaker 1: is no hard evidence during this period at all of
Speaker 1: anything actually working. Um. And there's never been any evidence
Speaker 1: that they actually Manachurian candidated someone and got them to
Speaker 1: do spy ship like that. That has never happened as
Speaker 1: far as we know. There is some evidence that they
Speaker 1: get further on this than is entirely set link to
Speaker 1: think about, and we will be chatting about that in
Speaker 1: a bit. But UM, as regards Frank Olsen, this guy
Speaker 1: who has been probably murdered, there's more investigations. UM. In
Speaker 1: the end, Alan Dullis is forced to write a letter
Speaker 1: to Gottlieb and tell him that he'd exercised poor judgment.
Speaker 1: That is the extent of the actual discipline that Gotlieb
Speaker 1: faces so by the mid nineteen fifties. After this has happened,
Speaker 1: there are no longer any barriers at all as to
Speaker 1: what Sydney can do. For a time after he's, you know,
Speaker 1: given this massive budget and put in charge of this thing,
Speaker 1: he is constrained by the fact that only Sandas Chemical
Speaker 1: makes l s d um. The Agency had bought out
Speaker 1: the entire world supply, but that was just tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of doses. Jason Um Sydney wanted a hell of
Speaker 1: a lot more, and as nineteen fifty four ended, Eli
Speaker 1: Lily figures out the recipe and the CIA becomes their
Speaker 1: primary customer, paying four thousand dollars for probably millions of
Speaker 1: doses of lsd um. This is effectively an off of
Speaker 1: the drug that they could now dose anyone and everyone,
Speaker 1: which is what they proceed to do. The man Gottlieb
Speaker 1: picked to run this program is a cool dude named
Speaker 1: George White. George White is the platonic ideal basically of
Speaker 1: a hard boiled, corrupt g man. He had worked as
Speaker 1: a captain for the OSS during World War Two, and
Speaker 1: then he was an Narcotics Bureau agent that's the precursor
Speaker 1: to the d e A. So he's a fed he's
Speaker 1: supposed to be fighting drug trafficking. He is famous among
Speaker 1: his fellow FEDS for being heavily addicted to basically every
Speaker 1: drug imaginable. And he is he is stealing everything from
Speaker 1: the dealers he arrest, and he's doing them right. Um,
Speaker 1: he like and he this is a thing that he's like,
Speaker 1: he has more experience with this than Gottlieb. In nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three, he's giving concentrated marijuana to New York mobsters
Speaker 1: as part of a truth serum test um. Like, so,
Speaker 1: George White is the guy that like, hey, we need
Speaker 1: someone to secretly dose mobsters with pot to see if
Speaker 1: it makes them tell the truth? Do you know any
Speaker 1: mobsters who you can you can rug? George White doesn't
Speaker 1: even think before he's like, oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, I
Speaker 1: can do that in a minute. Like let's go, let's
Speaker 1: just give me some fucking weed. I got that, I
Speaker 1: got this. Yeah. Um. He is actually a really fun character. Um.
Speaker 1: He's a terrible person, but just entertaining. So, starting in
Speaker 1: the early fifties, the CIA has White run two safe
Speaker 1: houses for LSD testing in Greenwich Village in New York City.
Speaker 1: The men that he tested CIA drugs on were considered
Speaker 1: quote expendable because they were drug addicts and otherwise marginalized people,
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't be missed if they died or went insane.
Speaker 1: And if they go to like if they find out
Speaker 1: what's happening to them and they go to the cops
Speaker 1: and are like, the CIA has dosed me with LSD, Well,
Speaker 1: the cops are not going to to follow up that investigation, right. Um,
Speaker 1: that's part of the genius. Afically confused here this man
Speaker 1: they put in charge of these experiments, what what was
Speaker 1: his background? His scientific background. He's a FED. He's a
Speaker 1: he's a he's he's a federal agent. Um. He's he's
Speaker 1: a federal agent whose specialty is that he looks and
Speaker 1: sounds exactly like a mobster. So he's really good at
Speaker 1: hanging out with drug dealers and doing drugs with them. Okay,
Speaker 1: but does not have a background in like biochemistry or
Speaker 1: science or the guy whose day job is stealing heroin
Speaker 1: from drug dealers and then doing that heroin does not
Speaker 1: have a medical degree. Yeah he is. He has no
Speaker 1: kind of scientists. Um. So one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: he gets this job is that, like because Gottlieb when
Speaker 1: he's looking for a guy. He goes to the Bureau
Speaker 1: of Narcotics and he's like, Hey, I'm looking for someone
Speaker 1: to like help run this program where we're going to
Speaker 1: be giving LSD to unsuspecting people, um, and they advise
Speaker 1: George White, And when he meets White, Gottlieb kind of
Speaker 1: falls in love with him. All of the c I
Speaker 1: So again, the people running this for the Technical Division
Speaker 1: are all big nerds, right, Gottlieb and his fellow scientists
Speaker 1: that these academics they mostly grown up middle class. White
Speaker 1: is like the kind of character you read about in
Speaker 1: a pulp fiction novel. You know, he's always gotten multiple
Speaker 1: weapons on him. He's got like several guns at any
Speaker 1: given time, brass knuckles, knives. He talks luridly about all
Speaker 1: these shootouts and fights he's been in, and he's like,
Speaker 1: he's this hard character who's been like fucking in the streets,
Speaker 1: fight like doing horrible cop ships since the twenties. So
Speaker 1: they they treat him like he's like they've run into
Speaker 1: Dick Tracy, right, Like they they kind of are are
Speaker 1: spell bound by him, and that's part of why he
Speaker 1: gets this job, right. He takes them on right, along,
Speaker 1: so show them as guns and talk about this stuff,
Speaker 1: and they're just like, I think he's really good at
Speaker 1: manipulating the CIA doctors actually, and that's part of why
Speaker 1: this works for him. Um So, initially when they first
Speaker 1: start setting up these safe houses to drug men, George
Speaker 1: White is going to be the actual guy who draws
Speaker 1: them in like for testing. Who's the lure? And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote now from Poisoner in Chief. He posed alternatingly
Speaker 1: as a merchant, seaman or a bohemian artist and consorted
Speaker 1: with a vast array of underworld characters, all of whom
Speaker 1: were involve of in vice, including drugs, prostitution, gambling, in pornography.
Speaker 1: It was under this assumed bohemian artist persona that White
Speaker 1: wooden trap most of his MK Ultra victims. White regularly
Speaker 1: dosed women at parties or who he just encountered in
Speaker 1: the world, leaving vague notes in his diary like Gloria
Speaker 1: gets Horror, janets sky high um. At one point, one
Speaker 1: of his victims escapes and she makes it to Lennox
Speaker 1: Hill Hospital, where she reports George White for drugging her
Speaker 1: against her will. But the CIA had an arrangement with
Speaker 1: the Medical Department of the NYPD. So the NYPD tells
Speaker 1: this woman she's mistaken, nothing has happened to her, and
Speaker 1: she's sent home. And again, easy for us to look
Speaker 1: back and criticize now, but at the time, there was
Speaker 1: no way to know that this that this could have happened. Well,
Speaker 1: the I mean the the NYPD guys know, we have
Speaker 1: been told by our contacts, the FEDS not to pursue this, right, like,
Speaker 1: to calm this woman down and send her away. Right,
Speaker 1: So there is some degree that the PD that doesn't
Speaker 1: know the CIA is running like an acid warehouse, right
Speaker 1: and like drugging people. They just know the CIA said, hey,
Speaker 1: don't do anything with this case. Um, and this is
Speaker 1: a thing that's going to happen a lot, right like
Speaker 1: and this is also I have to say, this is
Speaker 1: not like. This is the way things work sometimes with
Speaker 1: like the FBI and cops. Right, Sometimes the cops will
Speaker 1: arrest a guy like with contraband or something with drugs,
Speaker 1: and it'll turn out he's an FBI informant, and so
Speaker 1: the cops will release him because the FBI is like, hey,
Speaker 1: we don't want to don't blow this up for us, right,
Speaker 1: we need this guy. That is. You can think what
Speaker 1: you want about law enforcement, but that's like a thing
Speaker 1: that happens. The CIA is not a domestic agency. They
Speaker 1: are not supposed to be working on American soil. At
Speaker 1: no point is what they're doing in the United States legal. Um,
Speaker 1: this is not a thing where it's normal and like
Speaker 1: within legal limits for the CIA to like have a
Speaker 1: secret program set up where they work with the NYPD
Speaker 1: to like get their assets let go, that's not supposed
Speaker 1: to be happening. So I do want to note here
Speaker 1: it's kind of minor, like to be like when the
Speaker 1: CIA was breaking the law by working on American soil,
Speaker 1: when they're what they're doing is so much crazier. But
Speaker 1: like they're not supposed to be working in the United
Speaker 1: States at all. Yeah, if we didn't, if we hadn't
Speaker 1: previously made that clear. Yeah, this is on top of
Speaker 1: being insane, what they're doing is at this point extremely illegal.
Speaker 1: In fact, they run into conflict with the FBI a
Speaker 1: bunch because the FBI is like, you guys are running
Speaker 1: a drug house and like you're the c I and this.
Speaker 1: You know, the FBI and the c I are always
Speaker 1: competing for money, so they're not super friendly with each other,
Speaker 1: and they're like, what the funk is going on here? Like,
Speaker 1: why are you guys allowed to do this? This isn't
Speaker 1: we're supposed to be fucking with people here, you know.
Speaker 1: Um So, George White is very good at his job,
Speaker 1: to the extent that his job is to drug random people.
Speaker 1: He does it a lot, but the CIA is hunger
Speaker 1: for test subjects could not be sated by one man
Speaker 1: dosing strangers and bars and at house parties. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, the program expanded. White and Leave hit upon
Speaker 1: the idea to hire sex workers and use them to
Speaker 1: draw in men who could be drugged and then observed
Speaker 1: secretly in a brothel. And I'm gonna quote from a
Speaker 1: write up in the San Francisco Chronicle now. In ninety five,
Speaker 1: White was transferred to San Francisco, where he had worked
Speaker 1: as a journalist, and rented out an apartment on Telegraph
Speaker 1: Hill to give his pad the desired French horehouse look.
Speaker 1: White furnished it with Toulose fra trek posters, a picture
Speaker 1: of a French can can dancer in kinky photos of
Speaker 1: women in bondage, and domination photos. It was supposed to
Speaker 1: look rich. An arcotics agent who regularly visited said, but
Speaker 1: it was furnished like crap. White installed bugging equipment and
Speaker 1: a two way mirror behind which he would sit on
Speaker 1: a portable toilet, quaffing on martini from the picture he
Speaker 1: kept in the refrigerator, and observed the proceedings. The prostitutes
Speaker 1: who staffed the operation were paid in part with chits,
Speaker 1: which they could use for favors such as getting out
Speaker 1: of jail. So to put this picture in your head, Chasen,
Speaker 1: there is a secret brothel where people cia paid institutes
Speaker 1: who have get out of jail free cards take John's
Speaker 1: dose them against their will with LSD for quote unquote
Speaker 1: scientific purposes. And the only person evaluating what's going on
Speaker 1: in these studies is George White, who is watching them
Speaker 1: while actively shifting and drinking martinis. Now, I would love
Speaker 1: to go back in time and after however many months
Speaker 1: or years of operation went on, just sit Mr White
Speaker 1: down and say, okay, can you explain to me let's
Speaker 1: it will? I would have several several hundred questions, but
Speaker 1: the one question I'd be interested if you can answer,
Speaker 1: like do you even remember what this was for? Long
Speaker 1: term Cold War gold like in terms of national security,
Speaker 1: do you know what you're trying to accomplish here? Because
Speaker 1: I strongly suspect he himself had probably lost track by
Speaker 1: that point. I don't think he ever is thinking about it, right,
Speaker 1: Like is he He's not sitting down and being like,
Speaker 1: this is bringing us one step close and time my
Speaker 1: mind control, Sarah, and that'll let us beat the Soviets.
Speaker 1: He is he is pooping and drinking or teeny's while
Speaker 1: he watches strangers have sex, which he does for years,
Speaker 1: for hours every week. So as this has kind of
Speaker 1: gone unspoken for three episodes listeners, but you may have
Speaker 1: noticed we're doing a series on the CIA's misguided attempt
Speaker 1: to find a mind control serum, and about once every
Speaker 1: five minutes we stumble across a much better, more reliable
Speaker 1: method of mind control, Like just luring men back with
Speaker 1: sexy women works. Again, a number of things have been
Speaker 1: shown to work in terms of mind control. Money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like this guy who has gotten the government to pay
Speaker 1: for his little sex dungeon, and like just let him
Speaker 1: teach a class on how to manipulate people like he
Speaker 1: got like like like look at what he did to
Speaker 1: draw Yeah, Like like this guy is living a different
Speaker 1: life than any of us. Like he's just his ability
Speaker 1: to get the authorities and everyone else to just cater
Speaker 1: to his whims and his weird kinks and all all
Speaker 1: on the taxpayer dime. Like just just ask him, just
Speaker 1: ask him how to do it. He already knows of
Speaker 1: all of the things that we've talked about. The detail
Speaker 1: about this that sticks out to me most is that
Speaker 1: he's his office seat is also a toilets. That's who's
Speaker 1: that's who's running this program. Like when we talk about
Speaker 1: the most secret in like terrifying thing the CIA ever did,
Speaker 1: like this is what a lot of it boiled down to. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just what a what a thing do have happened?
Speaker 1: So over time George White learned that drugging men because
Speaker 1: again he's experimenting with a bunch of stuff, he learns
Speaker 1: that the best way is to drug them after they've orgasmed.
Speaker 1: Um that that gets you better data at like getting
Speaker 1: to listen to them talk and stuff while they're tripping.
Speaker 1: I guess he said quote the men expected the hookers
Speaker 1: to hurry off and became emotionally vulnerable when the women
Speaker 1: said they wanted to stay a few more hours. And
Speaker 1: again this is as close to you get as like
Speaker 1: actual usable data. There's like, oh, you can manipulate men
Speaker 1: by making them think women like them. That is the
Speaker 1: most useful piece of information. This is the entire m
Speaker 1: k Ultra program has uncovered so far. Something about their
Speaker 1: mindset seems to shift after the seaman has left their body. Hm,
Speaker 1: there's there's a sort of clarity that seems to come
Speaker 1: over their their brains. George White kept done it again.
Speaker 1: Give this man another bucket of LSD. It's it's something else.
Speaker 1: So do you know what they call this, Jason? Have
Speaker 1: you read the name they give this this program. I
Speaker 1: can't wait to find out. It's Operation Midnight Climax. Okay,
Speaker 1: so again their whole thing of we we carefully disguised
Speaker 1: these operations given that randomized because this is just a
Speaker 1: straight up porno name like Kim k Ultra. That's that's
Speaker 1: the name of like an anime series. If you make
Speaker 1: a porno about the CIA drugging people in a brothel,
Speaker 1: that's what you call it. It's um Yeah, be so
Speaker 1: redundant to make a porno out of this, Like that's
Speaker 1: all it was a guy watching this throw to one
Speaker 1: way mirror like it was already that it is. One
Speaker 1: of the things that's interesting about this to me is that,
Speaker 1: like we started this series talking about that time the
Speaker 1: Army poisoned the entire city of San Francisco just to
Speaker 1: see what would happen. It's weird to me they that
Speaker 1: like that keeps being their base of operations, Like all
Speaker 1: of these experiments, they everything keeps winding up back in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. Maybe it's just that the weather is nice
Speaker 1: and that's where people would prefer to be then the
Speaker 1: East Coast a lot of the time, but it's it
Speaker 1: is weird that, yeah, San Francisco is where this all
Speaker 1: of these programs keep ending. The funk up um so
Speaker 1: using you know, the operation Midnight Climax starts as they've
Speaker 1: got this brothel and they're doing the experiments in the brothel,
Speaker 1: but eventually they decided to expand out and just use
Speaker 1: the entire city as a base. So George White does
Speaker 1: a lot of this himself, but he also has agents,
Speaker 1: some of whom are stationed. There's some of whom just
Speaker 1: fly into like try experiments and they'll just dose random
Speaker 1: people at restaurants and bars in San Francisco. Um, they
Speaker 1: fan out across the city and just like give L
Speaker 1: s D to people, um and not just l s D.
Speaker 1: One source with the agency later told a journalist quote,
Speaker 1: if we were scared enough of a drug not to
Speaker 1: try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and the CIA would just give it to people and
Speaker 1: see what happens. Um. One thing I will say for
Speaker 1: George White that that that maybe a mark in his
Speaker 1: favorite morally. Any time he gets some new weird drug
Speaker 1: from the CIA, he always tries it on himself first.
Speaker 1: So that is the most honorable thing we've heard of
Speaker 1: yet in these episodes. No, I will, I will bravely
Speaker 1: throw myself on this grenade because because what if it
Speaker 1: turns out this gets you more high than anything else
Speaker 1: that's ever been made. Yeah, it's better that I It
Speaker 1: is better that I check. I will bravely, bravely sacrifice myself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are what the heroes of the CIA are doing
Speaker 1: for us, jumping on that grenade. You know who will
Speaker 1: jump on a grenade for you? Jason uh as some
Speaker 1: sort of a monthly mattress service that we'll send you
Speaker 1: a mattress in the mail every month. If you had
Speaker 1: to have a product jump on a grenade for you,
Speaker 1: you could do a lot worse than a mattress. And
Speaker 1: they can ship those to you in a box. You know,
Speaker 1: they'll get it to you in just a couple of days.
Speaker 1: I am mattress. Uh, we're back speaking of mattresses. UM,
Speaker 1: George White is buying a lot of them because he
Speaker 1: opens the second safe House in Marin County, which is
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever been to the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: it's it's like a very very wealthy, very beautiful like area,
Speaker 1: kind of outside of San Francisco. UM. And because it's
Speaker 1: like number one, it's it's kind of high income. UM,
Speaker 1: they're able to get like this bigger place that has
Speaker 1: more space to allow for more elaborate experiments. The CIA
Speaker 1: tests things like stink bombs and itching powder there, in
Speaker 1: addition to stuff like specially designed hypodermic needles that could
Speaker 1: inject poison into a wine cork. Gottlieb even tried out
Speaker 1: an aerosolized L S D bomb on a party they
Speaker 1: hosted there, but it didn't work due to the humidity
Speaker 1: uh that particular day. Now, I think it's worth emphasizing
Speaker 1: that while White is doing all of this, he's also
Speaker 1: a highly placed officer with the Bureau of Narcotics. Like
Speaker 1: he's one of the top men at what becomes the
Speaker 1: d E a UM, and he's the guy who's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll do any drug. I don't give a ship like,
Speaker 1: I'll take it, you know, I'll give it to people,
Speaker 1: I'll poop and I'll watch him. Um. He is reported
Speaker 1: to have regularly used the CIA's brothels to host parties
Speaker 1: for his fellow narcotics officers. One survey of his career
Speaker 1: claims quote, sometimes after a tough day on the beat,
Speaker 1: he invited his narco, but he's up to one of
Speaker 1: the safe houses for a little R and R. Occasionally
Speaker 1: they end zipped their inhibitions and partied on the premises,
Speaker 1: much to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to
Speaker 1: complain about men with guns and shoulder straps chasing after
Speaker 1: women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there
Speaker 1: was always plenty of dope around, and the FEDS sampled
Speaker 1: everything from hashish to L s D. White had quite
Speaker 1: a scene going on for a while. By day he
Speaker 1: fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night
Speaker 1: he dispensed them to strangers. But who who better knew
Speaker 1: the danger of these substances than a man that had
Speaker 1: been at the front line. Yeah, Like it's like we
Speaker 1: got to remind ourselves what we're trying to stop. Like,
Speaker 1: imagine if everybody lived like this? Yeah, what what problems
Speaker 1: we would have if everyone lived the way that Narcotics
Speaker 1: Bureau officers do. We're just doing these drugs to keep
Speaker 1: them out of circulation. Um. So yeah, again, we keep
Speaker 1: harping on this, but it is kind of impossible to
Speaker 1: see how George White, who is the guy running their
Speaker 1: experiments on LSD, how he could possibly have conducted experiments
Speaker 1: that provided useful data. He is nothing but a career
Speaker 1: drug addict and thug, and he's just like, yeah, pooping
Speaker 1: and watching them have hallucinations. Um, that's the science. There
Speaker 1: are no doctors or other health professionals on hand at
Speaker 1: any of these brothels in case an experiment goes wrong,
Speaker 1: and things did go wrong often. In one particularly disastrous example,
Speaker 1: a federal marshal named Wayne Ritchie was dosed with LSD
Speaker 1: at the Federal building in San Francisco. He flipped out,
Speaker 1: grabbed two guns and immediately robbed a bar in the
Speaker 1: Filmore district. Now Richie did not know what was happening
Speaker 1: to him, right, he drinks like some water or some ship,
Speaker 1: and then he is hallucinating and he robs a fucking store. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know what else is going on with Richie
Speaker 1: because I don't think a normal response to LSD is
Speaker 1: to rob fucking bar. But also he's a federal marshal
Speaker 1: who knows what kind of ships he's had happened in
Speaker 1: his life. But um, he gets off basically like because
Speaker 1: he's a fed and he has a clean record, he
Speaker 1: doesn't do any prison time, but he never knows that
Speaker 1: he doesn't know that he's been drugged. And so for
Speaker 1: the next twenty two years he kind of assumes that
Speaker 1: he's lost his mind. His career collapses, his life falls
Speaker 1: apart um, and he just has no idea what has
Speaker 1: happened to him until twenty two years later, Sydney got
Speaker 1: Leeb dies and Richie reads his obituary, which Minson mentions
Speaker 1: mk ultra because a lot of this has come out
Speaker 1: since then, and Richie's like, oh fuck, is that what
Speaker 1: happened to me, like, is this what occurred? And and
Speaker 1: we obviously we can't confirm whether or not Richie is
Speaker 1: someone who got dosed as part of m k Ultra,
Speaker 1: But White, second in command for Operation Midnight Climax, did
Speaker 1: admit to drugging strangers amount around town and said in
Speaker 1: an interview quote, I didn't do any follow up. It
Speaker 1: just wasn't a very good thing to go and say
Speaker 1: how do you feel today? You don't give them a tip.
Speaker 1: You just back away and let them worry like this
Speaker 1: nitwit ritchie. So I'm gonna say his his his theory
Speaker 1: that he may have been doseds credible. Yeah, And again,
Speaker 1: no effort to actually collect data, observe a month down
Speaker 1: the line, six months down the line. No, Like the
Speaker 1: question of what were they even trying to accomplish again,
Speaker 1: I don't there's a point where I think the people
Speaker 1: on the scene themselves could not have told you, you know,
Speaker 1: just a thing they were doing that. It's just it's
Speaker 1: it's got its momentum now. And obviously, like these are
Speaker 1: all the questions you want to answer, is like do
Speaker 1: they care about learning anything? Is there something more here
Speaker 1: we're missing? Because spoiler, a lot of the information that
Speaker 1: they gather is destroyed later. Um, like, what is happening
Speaker 1: in the heads of these people? And obviously we can't
Speaker 1: answer that, and maybe they couldn't either, But to provide
Speaker 1: some context for what that answer might be, I do
Speaker 1: want to read another response that white second in command,
Speaker 1: a guy named Feldman, gave to an interviewer about like
Speaker 1: what was happening at the time. Quote several times Sydney
Speaker 1: Gottlieb came out and met Gottlieb at the pad and
Speaker 1: at White's office. Sydney was a nice guy. He was
Speaker 1: a fucking nut. They were all nuts. I says, you're
Speaker 1: a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, like me, what are
Speaker 1: you doing with these crazy cocksuckers. He had this black
Speaker 1: bag with him. He says, this is my bag of
Speaker 1: dirty tricks. He had all kinds of crap in that bag.
Speaker 1: We took a drive over to m your woods out
Speaker 1: by Stintson Ranch. Sydney says, stop the car. He pulls
Speaker 1: out a dart gun and he shoots this big eucalyptus
Speaker 1: tree with a dart. Then he tells me come back
Speaker 1: in two days and check on this tree. So we
Speaker 1: go back in two days. The tree was completely dead,
Speaker 1: not at least left on it. I went back and
Speaker 1: I saw White and he says to me, what do
Speaker 1: you think of Sydney. I said, I think he's a
Speaker 1: fucking nut. White says, well, they may be a nut,
Speaker 1: but this is the program. This is what we do.
Speaker 1: So I would like you to contrast that with Hollywood's
Speaker 1: favorite trope of the group of secret agents who are
Speaker 1: not governed by any kind of oversight, like like Tom
Speaker 1: Cruise's Mission Impossible for us, Like Hollywood loves this thing
Speaker 1: of like, well here's this guy, like like if we
Speaker 1: had to go through all the bureaucracy and permission, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't get the bad guys. To really get the bad guys,
Speaker 1: we'd uh Jack Ryan, we need whatever. Like it's a
Speaker 1: whole genre of the super badass who operates off the books.
Speaker 1: If you get caught, we will deny. We know you,
Speaker 1: there'll be no oversight. You're not acording to the government,
Speaker 1: and you know that you're the Mission Impossible team and
Speaker 1: you're gonna be working completely. We're gonna fund you, give
Speaker 1: you all the gear, all the gadgets, all the maskmaking stuff,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna trust you without oversight that you're gonna
Speaker 1: get the job done. You're gonna go get the nuke,
Speaker 1: You're gonna be gonna stop it. In reality, when you
Speaker 1: give a bunch of dudes a blank check to just
Speaker 1: do whatever under the guys of hey, your work is
Speaker 1: so important, we're not gonna ask you what you're doing.
Speaker 1: This is what you get more often than not. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine a situation in which it would be useful
Speaker 1: to have this tree killing dart like Sydney, we can
Speaker 1: already kill trees, man, Like, I don't think you really
Speaker 1: accomplished much here by murdering a random tree with this
Speaker 1: dart gun um like it's it's baffling, and one of
Speaker 1: the things that's interesting he is working on, like terrible poisons,
Speaker 1: like one of the things he does figure out by
Speaker 1: like laboriously collecting more of a specific kind of shelf
Speaker 1: issh vindom than had ever been collected, as he makes
Speaker 1: like a perfect suicide drug, like just this idea the
Speaker 1: ideal way to kill yourself if you're captured with like
Speaker 1: a minimum of pain as quickly as possible, can't be reversed.
Speaker 1: Like he figures it out and they put it in.
Speaker 1: They have a couple of different devices for dispensing it
Speaker 1: to people. They give it to like pilots on these
Speaker 1: you know, these spy planes that we have flying over
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union. They'll give them these like suicide drugs
Speaker 1: to take so that if they're captured they could kill themselves.
Speaker 1: A bunch of these guys crash with Sydney's poison on it.
Speaker 1: None of them ever use it, because it turns out
Speaker 1: it's not really like it's it's kind of hard to
Speaker 1: go from like doing my day job to committing suicide
Speaker 1: on a die. Yeah. Yeah, that's the part of the
Speaker 1: equation that a guy like him would not consider. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe they don't. I mean, it's it's it's all,
Speaker 1: it's so weird. I do love the degree to which
Speaker 1: this guy Feldman like is just yeah, man, I'm like
Speaker 1: a criminal, funked up guy, So of course I'm willing
Speaker 1: to do this. Like all these people are crazy, they're
Speaker 1: not like they're they're all just lunatics. Um, but this
Speaker 1: is money, you know, And that's what White says, right,
Speaker 1: this is what we do. Um, So that's all good. Now.
Speaker 1: In his book, Stephen Kinzer continues quote Gottlieb's visit to
Speaker 1: San Francisco were not for purely business purposes. Operation Midnight
Speaker 1: Climax gave him ready access to prostitutes. According to Ira Feldman,
Speaker 1: he took full advantage of this prerequisite. He was caught crazy,
Speaker 1: Feldman said, well free associating about Gottlieb. During a legal
Speaker 1: deposition near the end of his life, he recalled complaining
Speaker 1: to George Hunter White, all he wants me to do
Speaker 1: is get him laid. Anytime that funk came to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: get me a girl, Feldman said, he always needed a girl.
Speaker 1: I know that some listeners are asking, are these real people? Like?
Speaker 1: How how was that everyone involved in this as a
Speaker 1: cartoonish parody of the human being. I think it just
Speaker 1: worked out that way. Yeah, it was the fifties, you know, now,
Speaker 1: are we still in the fifties. It's yeah, okay, we're
Speaker 1: in the mid to late nineteen fifties when this is
Speaker 1: all going on, right, Um, this is like the mid
Speaker 1: fifties is kind of when they moved to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and so this is kind of all throughout the end
Speaker 1: of that decade, and this whole thing is descended into
Speaker 1: a nasty, just orgy operation with incredibly quickly, Like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of time, Yeah, from the genesis of the
Speaker 1: project where it's just it's just a sex dungeon they're
Speaker 1: running when this guy jerks off on a toilet. Uh,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about you know, there's conspiracy theories about like
Speaker 1: did they make the UNI bomber? Right? Did they make
Speaker 1: Charles Manson? Um. My favorite conspiracy theory is like, hey,
Speaker 1: did Sydney Gottlieb realizing like nineteen fifty four that none
Speaker 1: of this was ever going to do anything? But he
Speaker 1: had an excuse to like have the CIA pay for
Speaker 1: a brothel and all of the drugs he wanted to
Speaker 1: do and free trips to San Francisco to party and
Speaker 1: get laid. And that's more less most of what was
Speaker 1: happening here. That's not impossible. Yeah, and in fact that's yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure that conspiracy theory. That may just
Speaker 1: be what Yeah, it's not much of a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: But you know what is a conspiracy theory, Jason, is
Speaker 1: your fiction Careercy have we arrived at the end of that?
Speaker 1: I think we have. I think it's time for blogs.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry what I was sitting here thinking about when
Speaker 1: the guy did the whole event with the tree, which
Speaker 1: I can't get out of my head. When we made
Speaker 1: incredible he shot the tree with a tree, a tree
Speaker 1: shooting dark gun. He had it in his jacket. I says,
Speaker 1: come back in a couple of days. And if if
Speaker 1: I witnessed that happening and the guy told me to
Speaker 1: come back in a couple of days, if all I
Speaker 1: found was that the tree had died, I would be
Speaker 1: so crushingly disappointed, because what else could like a big
Speaker 1: deal I I can kill. I can go to the
Speaker 1: hardware store and get stuff that will kill this tree
Speaker 1: in a couple of days, Like I thought I was
Speaker 1: gonna come back and find out that it had gotten
Speaker 1: up and walked across the street or something. Speaking now
Speaker 1: like the weird word trees and Game of Thrones and
Speaker 1: you could commune with the gods, singly gun, It's just dead.
Speaker 1: Is that all your Is this what you were trying
Speaker 1: to do? Or this one of the failed attempts to
Speaker 1: use your your tree your magic tree game? Was it
Speaker 1: supposed to do something else? Godly was hoping it would
Speaker 1: be talking God damn it another failure anyway? Uh Yeah,
Speaker 1: The book is called if this book exists, You're in
Speaker 1: the wrong universe. Has a lime green cover. You cannot
Speaker 1: miss it on the shelf if you go buy it
Speaker 1: in a physical bookstore, which virtually none of you will do.
Speaker 1: So if you do what most people do and just
Speaker 1: google that title on Amazon, it will come up. Also,
Speaker 1: they have the audio book and e book whatever, all
Speaker 1: all of the books that. Please. If you can support
Speaker 1: a local physical bookstore, if you still have one, please,
Speaker 1: they've been hurting over the course of the pandemic like
Speaker 1: everybody else. Buy it off the shelf. If it's all
Speaker 1: the same to you. Yeah, find a good bookstore. Go
Speaker 1: to bookshop dot com. Also, I think that's the I'm
Speaker 1: gonna double check as a network of all the the
Speaker 1: indie bookstores and you can. You can order from the
Speaker 1: store close to you. That will make so happy. I
Speaker 1: think it's bookshop dot org because that took me to
Speaker 1: a sketchy website. A lot of them will. Um. They
Speaker 1: will ship just no different fromarting from Amazon. It may
Speaker 1: may be slightly more expensive, but gosh, they will appreciate it. Yes,
Speaker 1: bookshop dot org. Find Jason's book there. Um, you can
Speaker 1: also find my book there. After the revolution If you're
Speaker 1: looking to get two books? Why not? You know, treat yourself,
Speaker 1: you deserve it. You listen to all this horrible shit
Speaker 1: about the sea? A why not buy two books? Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com U, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: i heeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.