EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,115 words- 0:00 – 2:01
Why MKUltra still matters: no oversight, no accountability
- JLJohn Lisle
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) John, what's happening, man?
- JLJohn Lisle
Not much. It's good to be here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Very nice to meet you.
- JLJohn Lisle
You too. Thanks for having me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, uh, I know you're in the middle of a project. You're doing a project with David Chase, right? That, it's about MKUltra and...
- JLJohn Lisle
Yes. He has gotten the rights to this, to this book.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
You know, this book, Project Mind Control, and he's, yeah, interested in adapting it into a series.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject, so as soon as I heard about it, and they said, "The series is coming, but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book," and I'm like, "Let's go."
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
So, here we go. Project Mind Control, Sidney, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra, which really is a tragedy.
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, you know, I, uh, really got ... I mean, I knew about it, but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until Chaos, Tom O'Neil's book.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yup. Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you read that?
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, uh, when you realize what the MKUltra program involved and how long it ran, and how insane it is, and it essentially had no oversight.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American citizens, and nobody went to jail for it.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. That, th- that's part of the crazy thing. One of the things I, I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second half in the ... of the book, are the consequences of M- MKUltra in society, but also just what happened to these people afterwards.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JLJohn Lisle
The victims of MKUltra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically, really, nothing much came out of it. They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra, they didn't really face any consequences. And so I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things I really try to talk about in the latter part of the book are, what are the failures of oversight that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- JLJohn Lisle
... allowed this to happen? How is that possible? How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on people unwittingly, and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions? So, I, I delve into that pretty deeply.
- 2:01 – 4:50
Lisle’s path in: OSS ‘dirty tricks’ and the blueprint for MKUltra
- JRJoe Rogan
How did you get interested in the subject? Like, what was your in- introduct- introduction to it?
- JLJohn Lisle
I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people because I didn't know that much about MKUltra, um, and I was doing my PhD at UT. And I, I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of scientists within the intelligence ... They had connections to the intelligence community. They were called the science attachés out of the State Department. The State Department would send these science attachés to different embassies, American embassies around the world, and the CIA was very interested in these people because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad. Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing. So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
And from that, I learned about, you know, Sidney Gottlieb, but also, m- mostly, my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovel, who was essentially the Sidney Gottlieb of the OSS. So prior to the CIA, w- the US had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II, and that was the US kind of intelligence agency. And Stanley Lovel was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development Branch, and that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job was to basically invent the deadly weapons, create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent abroad. So my first-
- JRJoe Rogan
Fun stuff.
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh, yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
My, my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovel in that group, and one of the things they do are drug experiments and truth drug experiments, trying to find out whether it's possible to give someone, uh, you know, a captured enemy agent some kind of drug to make them tell the truth during an interrogation. And it turns out, when I was researching that book, I came across a series of depositions of which Sidney Gottlieb is one of the deportments who would later lead MKUltra. And in these depositions, he was talking about how when he was assigned to be in charge of MKUltra, he didn't really know where to begin. He didn't know anything about mind control. So one of the things that he did, he went into the old OSS files and was starting to look at the drug experiments that Stanley Lovel was doing. And so I thought, that's the connection between Stanley Lovel, my first book-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
... and now this one. So that naturally led me into becoming interested in MKUltra. So a, a lot of the things that Sidney Gottlieb was up to with MKUltra, his blueprint was basically Stanley Lovel.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just imagine being a government agency, the CIA, the OSS, whatever it is, and then someone says, "Hey, figure out if we can control people's minds."
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
And that's where you start from.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right? It's not like Sidney Gottlieb was some expert-
- JLJohn Lisle
No. No.
- JRJoe Rogan
... hypnotist or really was a psychologist who really understood human minds.
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
No. They, they started a program going, "What can we do? How can we fuck with people's minds? How can we figure out how to control people's minds?" And they did it for decades.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Yeah. So and, and even-
- JRJoe Rogan
And they're probably still doing it now.
- 4:50 – 14:50
World War II ‘truth drugs’: THC acetate, Anslinger, and irony in drug policy
- JLJohn Lisle
Well, even before MKUltra, so there are a couple programs that precede it. And I mean, you know, so during World War II, the OSS was already doing truth drug, drug experiments. Not with LSD because that wasn't really around then, but with THC acetate, they would inject it into cigarettes and have people smoke it and then-
- JRJoe Rogan
So they just get high?
- JLJohn Lisle
They would get high. And the idea-
- JRJoe Rogan
And tell the truth?
- JLJohn Lisle
The ... Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
Supposedly?
- JLJohn Lisle
Supposedly.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
The idea was that it lowers their inhibitions and so maybe they'll be more amenable-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
... to talking and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that's hilarious.
- JLJohn Lisle
They would do-
- JRJoe Rogan
They just gave them spliffs.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs) Yeah, exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
They basically gave them spliffs.
- JLJohn Lisle
They did.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's what Europeans smoke.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. No, and, and so one of the guys who was actually on the Truth Drug Committee that was kind of overseeing these drug experiments during World War II was Harry Anslinger, who, of course, is launching this crusade-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, God.
- JLJohn Lisle
... against marijuana, and at the same time, he's overseeing these experiments about dosing people with THC.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- JLJohn Lisle
So it's very ironic that that was the case.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, it's really stunning the kind of damage those people did to just-... our trust in government, what we, you know, what, what we know about these psychedelic compounds and drugs and, like, what they did with them that completely changed our idea of what the future of legalization and all these... There's s- there's so much negative impact to what they did.
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
On top of what they did, they essentially created Ted Kaczynski.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs) Well, I- I'm, I'm a little s-
- JRJoe Rogan
Are you on the fence on that?
- JLJohn Lisle
I'm a little skeptical of whether MKUltra is connected to that. But-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments-
- 14:50 – 1:09:01
Nazis, British LSD footage, and the early chaos of psychedelic testing
- JRJoe Rogan
How much does it work? What did the Nazis learn during World War II? 'Cause they did a lot of experiments, right?
- JLJohn Lisle
They, they were doing a lot of s- experiments. And it, it is ... You know, I, I mentioned the OSS is doing truth drug experiments. The Nazis are doing truth drug experiments in their concentration camps, as well. And the British are doing some truth drug experiments during World War II, as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
You can get the British ones online. The, the ... Well, at least the post- post-World War II ones. Was it 1950s? You can wa- ... Have you seen the, the British-
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm. No.
- JRJoe Rogan
... LSD studies? Oh, you haven't seen it?
- JLJohn Lisle
Uh, no, I don't think so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, it's wonderful. You should watch it.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
We'll watch it real quick, 'cause it's kind of hilarious. They start breaking out. They can't-
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh! Uh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They can't ... You have seen it?
- JLJohn Lisle
I think so, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They can't concentrate.
- JLJohn Lisle
The soldiers all in a row, and they ... Yeah. Uh-huh.
- JRJoe Rogan
And some of them just start laughing-
- JLJohn Lisle
I know what you're talking about.
- JRJoe Rogan
... they're in the middle of doing their task and they just start laughing uncontrollable and then they sit down.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
And s- some of them-
- JLJohn Lisle
You know, during ... I- I mentioned those, like, THC acetate experiments during World War II?
- JRJoe Rogan
Here they are.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs) Here these guys are.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just giant smiles on their face.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
This guy's having a guard go of it. (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, he, he might have been having a-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
... downer or something. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
He had to re- be removed from the experiment after 35 minutes. Look at the radio operator try to figure out how to work it. (laughs) Just, they're just so confused. (laughs) And eventually, they just start laying down and just laugh like these guys. These guys just can't ... (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, in these, these THC experiments during World War ... Oh, that guy's so ... (laughs)
- 16:50 – 23:19
Inside MKUltra’s machinery: 149 subprojects and the Lexington Narcotic Farm
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it's ... It just ... What other drugs did they experiment with? Did they experiment with amphetamines as well?
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah?
- JLJohn Lisle
So, um, one of ... Well, I should mention that MKUltra was broken into 149 sub-projects.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- JLJohn Lisle
So MKUltra was the umbrella term, and within MKUltra, there were, uh, 149 sub-projects that were kind of farmed out to, in many cases, independent researchers who might be working at a hospital or a prison or a university, something like that. One of the main people who was running these studies is a guy, uh, named Harris Isbell at the Lexington Narcotic Farm. This is where drug ac- drug addicts could go, um, to get treatment for their addiction. Prisoners could go there as well. And whenever Sidney Gottlieb-... found a drug that he was interested in, he would basically just give it to Harris Isbell, who could try it out on these prisoners to see how they reacted, and then Isbell would write reports back to Gottlieb. So, he tried psilocybin when that came out, LSD, but also stuff like, I mean, heroin. The CIA was particularly interested in heroin because if you can induce an addiction in a captured agent, let's say, then you can use that as leverage in int- interrogation, the- the withdrawal symptoms. So, you get them addicted to heroin-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- JLJohn Lisle
... and then use the withdrawal symptoms saying, "Well, if you tell us about this, maybe I'll, you know, give you a little..."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JLJohn Lisle
So, that- that was at least the concept. But there were, I mean, dozens and dozens of different kinds of drugs they were testing just to see how people reacted to them if- and if any of them could be used as a potential truth drug.
- JRJoe Rogan
The heroin one actually makes sense. I never thought of that.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Well, one of the- one of the ironies as well about this experiment that I mentioned, you know, Harris Isbell and giving these prisoners all these drugs, the prisoners are in this place, it's called the narcotic farm because they're supposed to be getting off drugs, you know? They're- they're- they're supposed to be, you know, curing them of their addiction, at the same time, they're giving them all these drugs to test them out. And then as a reward for participating in these trials, they had two options. Either they could get like, a positive letter in the parole board and like, $100 or something, or they could go to the drug bank window, stick out their arm, and they would get a needle full of heroin as a reward.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh my God.
- JLJohn Lisle
So, they were supposed to be getting off drugs, and yet you're incentivizing them to participate in these drug trials by giving them drugs.
- JRJoe Rogan
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- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. So, that's one of 149 sub-projects. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Do you- are you aware that heroin was created as a- a- a- it was a substitute for people that were addicted to morphine?
- JLJohn Lisle
Uh, no, no.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
I think- W- Google- that- that's correct, right? Search that. I'm pretty sure that's correct. Yeah, they- they c- came up with heroin to treat people that were addicted to morphine.
- JLJohn Lisle
Hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's... What? (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
You know- you know, it's... Well, that's like OxyContin, giving them OxyContin if they're addicted to heroin.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's like the same thing.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
But getting someone addicted to that and then pulling it away from them seems like it would be very effective in terms of like, getting- getting them to give up information.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, that was the idea. And-
- 23:19 – 25:46
The ‘truth drug’ that worked: placebo, threat, and staged hypnosis
- JLJohn Lisle
One- one- uh, I- I was just gonna say, one of the, uh, ironic things too with some of these MKUltra sub-projects, they're interested in finding these supposed truth drugs that could get someone to tell the truth during an interrogation. But it turns out the- even just the threat of giving someone a truth drug turned out to be a lot more effective than any drug that they actually tried out. So for instance, in an interrogation, if you tell someone that this is a truth drug and I'm gonna give it to you and, you know, it's gonna make you tell the truth-... that can lower their defenses in a, a bit, in a, in, in a, in a sense that the person who takes this, th- that might give them kind of the permission to be able to talk.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JLJohn Lisle
Because it makes them think, "Well, I couldn't have stopped myself. Well, if, you know, I mean, they gave me this truth drug, of course I'm gonna have to say this, so I can't be blamed. No one's gonna blame me." So it takes kind of the burden off their shoulders if they think they've been given a truth drug, even if they haven't and just give them a sugar pill. So that actually turned out to be a lot more effective than any of the drugs that they actually tried. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that totally makes sense.
- JLJohn Lisle
They did the same thing with hypnotism, too. Um, the hypnotism turned out to be not that effective in, at least in an interrogation. But if you could convince someone that they had been hypnotized even if they hadn't, then that could be effective. So for instance, this is what a guy called Martin Orne, he was one of the psychologists who was w- in charge of one of these sub-projects. Um, but he, he put forward what's called the hypnotic situation, not hypnotism but the hypnotic situation. So for instance, you pretend to hypnotize someone, the person you're interrogating, and they know they're not hypnotized. They obviously can tell that, you know, "You're not controlling me. This, nothing's happening." However, you start saying things like, you know, "I'm hypnotizing you, and your hands are getting warmer." And they're gonna think to themselves, "No, they're not." But under the table, you secretly implanted a heater and that their hands actually are getting warmer, because where they're sitting there's this heater under there that they don't know exists and it's making their hands warmer. So after a certain period of time, they start thinking to themselves, "Maybe I am being hypnotized. Like, the things that he's saying are actually happening."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
And so if you can make them think that they've been hypnotized, again, that lowers their, um, resistance because, I mean, who could blame me for talking now? I've been hypnotized.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JLJohn Lisle
I couldn't help myself but talk. At least that's the idea. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Bl- it's just so fascinating to me how much time and effort was spent just studying how to control people's minds and t- and trying to come up with ways-
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... to do it.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it must've been really exciting to be them.
- JLJohn Lisle
Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, I think what they did is horrible. I, I don't ... You know, I'm not c-
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... in any way forgiving MKUltra for what they did. However, boy it must've been fun just to have no oversight. No one even knows you exist.
- 25:46 – 29:35
From dosing coffee pots to CIA brothels: Operation Midnight Climax
- JLJohn Lisle
You, you kind of get this impression by looking at some of these MKUltra documents, especially at the beginning before the Frank Olson in- incident, and Frank Olson eventually dies after one of these experiments, and so that kind of, that definitely puts a damper on a lot of things that are going on. Before that, though, I do get the sense that it's almost like they're a bunch of guys just trying to, you know, play around with each other in a way, even though what they're doing is completely unethical. But they would just be dosing, like, the CIA coffee pot and see what happens to people who are taking drinks of it-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
... just to, to ... I mean, their rationale is that, "Well, if the Soviets possess some kind of hallucinogenic drug and they were gonna, going to release it into the water supply of a city, we need to know how people would react to that, 'cause we need to know how to defend against that. Therefore, we should be doing that to people just to see how they react to it so that we know what kind of signs to look for in case the Soviets do that."
- JRJoe Rogan
Didn't they dose up a town in France?
- JLJohn Lisle
Um, I, I don't think the CIA was connected to that. I mean, I think it actually-
- JRJoe Rogan
Somebody did.
- JLJohn Lisle
... was, like, an ergot poisoning that came from the bread.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, it was ergot? Okay.
- JLJohn Lisle
From the ... I, I think so. But yeah, there, this-
- JRJoe Rogan
But there was some speculation-
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that it was purposeful.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Their, their, the town's called Pont-Sa- Saint-Esprit, I believe. But yeah, there were multiple, dozens of people who came down with hallucinogenic symptoms. They were ... One guy stripped naked and started running around the street. M- multiple people died after this. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, God.
- JLJohn Lisle
But that was one of the things that led the CIA to become really interested in hallucinogens, because if a poisoning from a bakery could cause that much havoc within this one French town, how much more damaging would it be if the Soviets did that to a city's water supply?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JLJohn Lisle
And so that, that kind of leads the CIA-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's the justification.
- JLJohn Lisle
That's the justification. So they-
- JRJoe Rogan
And then next thing you know-
- JLJohn Lisle
... start dosing the coffee pots and, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They're running brothels.
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh, yeah. Yeah, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's the crazy one. O- Operation Midnight Climax. Look it up, folks, 'cause it's really crazy. They, they had their own brothels, and they would use two-way mirrors with cameras behind-
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... them, and they would dose the johns up. They'd give them a dr- "Would you like a drink? Have a seat." And they go, "Sure, I'll have a drink." And this poor guy, getting off of work, has a drink, thinks he's gonna be with a prostitute and have some nice sex. Next thing you know, he's just tripping out of his mind-
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... while he's being recorded by Jolly West. (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, and, you know, the guy who actually ran that is a guy named George White, and he was involved in the OSS. So he was, you know, I, I mentioned Stanley Lovel and the THC acetate. George White was the guy who was hired to do that in the OSS. Then Sydney Gottlieb-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- 29:35 – 34:55
Psychological ‘mind control’: Ewen Cameron, psychic driving, and the blank slate
- JLJohn Lisle
George White sitting on a toilet watching this happen. They're ... You know, I mean, even besides drugs, MKUltra is involved in, in a lot of psychological experiments. So not just LSD. Uh, most people associate MKUltra with LSD, but one of the-One of the most, uh, expansive of the sub-projects is Sub-Project 68. It was by this guy named Ewen Cameron. Have you heard- heard that name before?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- JLJohn Lisle
Cameron? Okay, Ewen Cameron, he is a psychiatrist up in Montreal in Canada, working at what's called the Allan Memorial Institute. And Gottlieb wanted to expand MKUltra besides drugs, because he already had a lot of people doing drug experiments, so he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques th- that, that could be used to manipulate a person. So not just in an interrogation, but can we actually, like, control a person's personality? Can we make them behave in certain ways, make them do something? So the idea that Ewen Cameron had come up with, before the CIA is involved, um, I- I should mention, Ewen Cameron is a behaviorist. So he thinks that all behavior is a result of nurture, not nature.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
So it's- it's the environmental input that causes a person to behave a certain way, and he thought that if you could bring a person back down to a blank slate, remove all the environmental inputs that have been put into them, and then you can build them back up in your image into whatever you want them to be. So his idea to bring someone down to the blank slate was to induce enough stress that they forgot who they formerly were. And so you reduce them to the blank str- slate, and then the CIA's really interested in if you could do that, then you could form them into whatever. So Ewen Cameron, his main goal is to try to figure out what can induce enough stress on a person to bring them down to that blank slate. And so he performs a lot of experiments. His most famous one is called psychic driving, where he was doing a, uh, a therapy session, uh, quote-unquote "therapy" with one of his patients, and she had ... He was recording the session, and she said something about how, you know, "My mother, when I was young, used to tell me blah, blah, blah." You know, she said something negative to her. And so Ewen Cameron re- rewinded that on the tape that he was recording and made her listen back to it and said, "Hey, I want you to listen back to what your- you say your mo- mother used to say to you." When he re- rewinded the tape and played it forward, as soon as the woman was kinda quoting her mother and she listened to that herself on the tape, she recoiled. And Cameron thought, "Oh, you have a negative reaction to that." So he rewinded again, and again, and again, and he kept rewinding it, and she just got more and more emotional, had this more and more kind of visceral reaction to what she was saying her mother used to tell her. So this led Cameron to develop the concept of psychic driving, which is you record some kind of negative message, and then you make someone listen to it for thousands and thousands and thousands of times for weeks on end, for hours every day. All their waking day, they basically are strapped into a headphone that is playing this negative message, and it will break them down over time. That's how you induce enough stress to b- break them down to the blank slate. And then you can record a positive psychic driving message to build them up into whatever image you want them to be. So that was his initial, um, idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
But, but was it based on anything?
- JLJohn Lisle
Not really.
- JRJoe Rogan
Or was it just-
- JLJohn Lisle
It wa- it was just based on he had this one encounter with this woman and she had a negative reaction. And he's just trying to induce stress. This obviously seemed to induce stress in her, therefore we're gonna start playing these negative in- tapes to them.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it was just his idea?
- JLJohn Lisle
It's just his idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JLJohn Lisle
He- he was known for doing this kind of thing, like, kind of spur of the moment. In fact, there was one, there was one kid, basically, who had been at this Allan Memorial Institute where Ewen Cameron was. He eventually had gotten out, but he had tried to commit suicide, and so he was sent back to the Allan Memorial Institute. But the way that he had tried to commit suicide was to close the garage and have the CO2 build up with the running car, and then he would, you know, breathe it in and pass out and die. Um, that ended up not working. However, when he went back to the Allan Memorial Institute, Ewen Cameron thought, "You know, his personality seems like a little bit better than it was th- when he was here before. Maybe CO2 can, like-"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) .
- JLJohn Lisle
... "influence someone." (laughs) And so, so he sent out some of his, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) .
- JLJohn Lisle
... some of his assistants to go buy, like, CO2 canisters, and, "We're gonna start, like, giving this to people."
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- JLJohn Lisle
But it turns out the assistants knew that this was, like, completely unethical. There's no medical basis for anything. And so they lied to him and said, "Oh, the canisters were way more expensive than we could actually afford, so we can't do that." But ... So he was, he was just, he was trying to find any way that he could have a breakthrough to cure mental illness, and he was using his g- patients as guinea pigs, basically.
- JRJoe Rogan
Complete guinea pigs?
- JLJohn Lisle
Complete guinea pigs.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was the result with the woman? The- the woman where they played the negative-
- JLJohn Lisle
Um ...
- JRJoe Rogan
... recordings?
- JLJohn Lisle
I don't ... Well, there are, there are dozens and dozens of people who that happened to. I don't know about her in particular, 'cause I don't know if she's actually named in the documents. So I don't, I don't know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Did any of these experiments have a positive effect?
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did it work?
- JLJohn Lisle
Hardly. Hardly. Hardly. So that, that was only-
- JRJoe Rogan
I- I shouldn't even say positive. I should say were they effective?
- 34:55 – 43:11
Victims and fallout: Mary Morrow’s story, lawsuits, and Lisle’s deposition trove
- JLJohn Lisle
And he would put them in sensory deprivation chambers for weeks. You know, they would have goggles over their eyes, earmuffs on their ears. They would have cardboard tubes over their arms so that they couldn't feel anything, and they would just be in a room for weeks on end. The idea, again, being to induce enough stress so that it breaks them down so that you can eventually build them up. Um, but one of the saddest stories in the book, really, is of this woman named Mary Morrow, who was one of the patients of Ewen Cameron in Montreal. The- the sad thing about her especially is she had been a resident in training at the Allan Memorial Institute under Ewen Cameron. So she had been training to be a doctor under him, and she had administered some of these techniques, including electric shock. So that's one of the things, too. We would put these electrodes on the heads of people and just- he would continually shock them until ... Again, the idea was to reduce them to, like ... In- in one case, he says an infantile-like state where they lose control of their bladder. They can't eat, they can't talk, they can't go to the bathroom on their own. They can't put on their own c- clothes or anything like that. So she was in charge of administering some of these, um, I mean, you know, therapy sessions or whatever they would call it, but th- just basically torture to these pe- people.She ended up, um, having almost kind of a psychotic break herself. She, she became anorexic and she failed her neurology exams, and so she went into a really deep depression. She attempted to commit suicide, that didn't work. She was admitted to the hospital and, to another hospital. Ewen Cameron came to visit her and he said, "I think you should come back to the Allen Memorial, not as a doctor, but as a patient, and let me treat you." So she ends up going back to the Allen Memorial-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
... as a patient and she thought to herself that, "It's gonna be okay. They're not gonna do the electric shock to me," because you had to sign a consent form and, you know, for that to happen to you, you know? The people who are signing the consent forms, they don't know how bad it's actually gonna be, they're just signing their name. But she knows, "I haven't signed a consent form, so they can't do that to me." But it turns out, in the time since she went to the hospital and came back, they had stopped doing the consent forms and he would just do this on whoever. And so they ended up doing this electric shock treatment "treatment" on her, and, you know, afterwards, she would be babbling, incontinent, couldn't put on her makeup or clothes or anything. Eventually, her m- she would call her mother after some of these treatments and her mother knew something was going on because she just became more and more incoherent as time went on. So the mother sent Mary's sister, Margaret, in order to go to the Allen Memorial to basically bust her out of there. So the sister walked in the front door and said, "I'm not leaving until I see Mary, you know, I'm gonna call the police if you don't let me through." So eventually she goes to her sister's room, opens the door, and Mary is sitting there just with wide bug eyes, you know, doesn't even recognize her sister. It takes several days for her to figure out where she actually is, and then she gets busted out of there. Um, so it's a very-
- JRJoe Rogan
Was it reversible in any way? Was it-
- JLJohn Lisle
Um, it's, in her case, I'm not exactly sure. She went on to have a little bit of a career, but she eventually attempted to commit suicide later again. That was unsuccessful. Then her and several of the victims of Ewen Cameron's experiments, in the 1980s, they ended up suing the CIA for supporting Ewen Cameron. And during those lawsuits, the attorneys who were representing them, they took the depositions of several of the people who were involved in MKUltra to try to use this during their trial. So they took the depositions of Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, and many of the victims who were victims of all this, and that's basically the basis for my book. I found thousands of pages of these depositions that's just verbatim transcript of these people talking about either what they did or what was done to them. And so I'm using that throughout the book to explain here's what they're doing in their own words, or here's what was done to them in their own words.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Well, so what was the result of the trial?
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh, well, so it was actually settled out of court before it went to trial. So the plaintiffs, the CIA gave the plaintiffs $750,000 to be split among them, but, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy.
- JLJohn Lisle
... after attorneys' fees and everything, it doesn't really amount to much anyway.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy.
- JLJohn Lisle
And so, you know, they settled out of court. They got a little bit of money, but it never went to trial.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ugh. But they-
- JLJohn Lisle
And so the, these depositions, though, you know, since it never went to trial, these were just in the papers of Joseph Rauh, who's the main lawyer who was involved in this case. And when he passed away, his, his papers were donated to the Library of Congress that had all these thousands of pages of depositions in there, 823 pages of which are Sidney Gottlieb testifying about what he did in MKUltra. And so I was rooting around the Library of Congress and happened to find them. So that's how I found, basically, the basis for what this book is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Wow. I wonder how much of that woman's psychological breakdown had to do with the guilt of performing those experiments on people and realizing that it wasn't doing anything-
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that he thought, that Ewen Cameron thought it was gonna do.
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
In fact, it was destroying people's minds.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, maybe some. I mean, it's, it's just speculation 'cause I'm not sure about-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, of course.
- JLJohn Lisle
... you know, that had to have weighed on the consciences. Uh, uh, you know, there's, in what was called the Sleep Room, Ewen Cameron's Sleep Room, this is where they would do the chemical comas. The, one of the nurses, I have kind of, uh, her, her diary entries basically describing what she was seeing, and she does seem to be pretty reluctant to have done what she was actually doing. And Ewen Cameron, she said, would often come over to her and pat her on the back and say, you know, "You're helping these people. You're helping these people," just trying to coax her along to go along with what he was telling her to do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ewen Cameron seems like h- like a complete madman.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like he was in a d- it almost, like, too good to be true. Not to- too good, but too, too, like, mad scientist to be true. Was he on any sort of drugs?
- JLJohn Lisle
I- I- I mean, I've never seen anything to indicate that he was on drugs, but he definitely had a, almost like a messiah complex.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- JLJohn Lisle
He thought, "I'm gonna be the one to win the Nobel Prize in medicine because I'm gonna cure all mental illness through this psychic driving," or whatever it was. He was gonna be the next Sigmund Freud. He really had delusions of grandeur, just like I think Jolly West did as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
And so I think that drove a lot of what he was doing. His patients were just a means to his own end. They, they're, they're the guinea pigs that I can use to prove that these medical techniques s- actually work, and therefore everyone's gonna praise me because I've cured, you know, schizophrenia or whatever it is.
- JRJoe Rogan
I would j- I'm just always suspicious of something that has that, someone has that kind of access to all sorts of compounds.
- 43:11 – 1:02:56
George White’s ‘fun, fun, fun’: ruined lives, deniability, and cutout funding
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm. Yeah. For... Yeah, for Ewen Cameron, he, uh... I feel like he definitely lacked empathy, whether that's some kind of medically... medical thing or whatever. There, there are a couple people in the book, I think, who are like that. One of them is Ewen Cameron. Another is George White, who was in charge of Operation Midnight Climax. He wa- he was in it just for the fun of it. He would, he would dose his own friends with LSD just to see what would happen. You know, there's-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
... there's one story in the book. There was a woman who had gone over to a dinner party, basically. She had actually gone over with her husband a, a few weeks before, but George White didn't dose them because the husband was there. The husband went away on a business trip, so the woman and her friend, she en- they ended up going to see George White to hang out, and White dosed them with LSD. The woman had her one-year-old son there with her, but he still dosed them with LSD. She ends up basically going crazy. I mean, she, you know, she goes home. She ends up calling, you know, George White asking, "What's happened to me? What's going on?" Um, one of these women, she ended up being committed to a mental institution for basically the rest of her life after this happened to her.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh my God.
- JLJohn Lisle
So she had some kind of, like, psychotic break after this unwitting, surreptitious dose of LSD. Of course, she didn't know what was going on, so she thought her whole world was collapsing. Yeah, she, she lost her husband. It was said that she would cower in the corner of her parents', you know, uh, house before she went to this mental institution, convinced that an unidentified they was, like, looking after her or trying to get her, you know, calling on the phone. None of this was happening, but she was just having these delusions that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JLJohn Lisle
... someone was out to get her.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh my God.
- JLJohn Lisle
That's kind of a recurring theme that you see in these people who are unwittingly dosed. One of them... One of the saddest stories in the book is a guy named Wayne Ritchie, and George White did the same thing to him. But, um, Wayne Ritchie was this... He was a guard at Alcatraz for a while. This is in San Francisco. And he had gone to a Christmas party at the post office there in San Francisco just for, you know... He was a US Marshal too, so just the US Marshals, whatever. And that night, he was drinking, you know, some of the punch at this party, and he started feeling very strange. He started seeing colors. The room started spinning around him. He ended up going upstairs to where his locker was and, you know, getting his things, and he wound up going home because he didn't, you know, know what was going on. When he got home, his girlfriend was upset at him. She said that, you know, "I'm not happy here, I want to move to New York." And so when he's in this fog, he decides, "I know how to set my life on track. I'm going to grab a couple of my service revolver, revolvers. I'm gonna go to a bar downtown. I'm gonna rob it, and I'm gonna give the money to my girlfriend so she can go to New York and she'll be happy an- and so she won't break up with me." So when he's in this fog, he ends up doing all this. He gets his revolvers. He goes to a bar downtown. He, you know, basically has a stick-up, "Give me all the money in the till." A quick-thinking patron who's sitting next to him basically gets the mug of beer and smashes it over his head so he falls down. The cops come later. They arrest him. He's in jail. After a day or two, he kind of sobers up and kind of awakens from this fog, and he doesn't know what happened to him at, at that point. He ends up losing his job, losing his friends for the next 30, 40 years, he doesn't know what happened, until in 1999, he was reading The Washington Post and he saw an article describing MKUltra, and two things in particular stuck out to him. One was George White, whom he knew back in the days when he was a US Marshal, Marshal, and the other one was a description of LSD. And so Wayne Ritchie starts putting all this together and thinking, "I think George White gave me LSD that night at the holiday, you know, party, and s- spiked the punch bowl, and that's what happened." And it turns out, you can see in this book, in the, in the photo section, the last photo in the photo section of my book, it's a image of George White's diary from the day that Wayne Ritchie went insane, and it says, "Federal Building Christmas party." (laughs) So he was there at the Christmas party.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Imagine being that guy reading that article 30 years later, realizing, "This guy ruined my life."
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
"For fun."
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. So he, he ended up suing the CIA, but the judge said that he couldn't prove that he had been dosed with drugs, so they couldn't rule in his favor, and so that was it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, Jesus. (sighs)
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, but there are... I mean, there are dozens of stories like that.
- JRJoe Rogan
What a fucking psycho.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, insane.
- JRJoe Rogan
What a fucking psycho.
- JLJohn Lisle
So he's, he's pu-
- JRJoe Rogan
Just dosing up the punch bowl-
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... ruining lives.
- JLJohn Lisle
And, and he knows how messed up it is, 'cause by that point, he had done this to multiple people and called them... and caused them to, to, to lose a lot, you know? So he, he knew what he was doing at that point. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
God.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Thi- this is just what happens with people when they have that kind of unchecked power and no oversight.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they're the kind of psychopaths that would be involved in this sort of experimentation in the first place.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, yeah. No, so, so I think he's probably the most, um, heinous of the individuals in this book. All of them are to a degree. Sidney Gottlieb, um, I think he... I, I don't think he's ha- as heinous in the sense that he's, like, intentionally trying to harm people. He thinks he's doing this for a patriotic reason. He thinks MKUltra is actually going to help us defend ourselves against the Soviet Union. There is some, like, moral justification, at least he has for himself, so it's not all just, you know, whatever George White is doing. Um, but at the same time, I...... Sidney Gottlieb doesn't really take any responsibility for what happens to these people. Basically, the way that MKUltra was structured with these sub-projects, Sidney Gottlieb wasn't running these experiments himself. What he would do is, he would fund other people to do experiments. And most of the time, these people were experts in their own field, so they were, like, reputable people. Ewen Cameron was the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. He was, like, the most famous psychic- psychiatrist in the world, and he was being funded by this. So Sidney Gottlieb thought, "Well, if I can fund reputable psychiatrists or drug researchers to do these experiments, then it's up to them to provide the safety and the procedures, you know, for, to keep these patients safe. It's not my job. They're the ones who are conducting the experiments." That's how he justified it to himself. But that's how the structure of MKUltra typically worked.
- JRJoe Rogan
Such a diffusion of responsibility.
- 1:02:56 – 1:09:01
How secrets perpetuate abuse: the vicious cycle and why oversight failed
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs) Oof. Now, when y- you get deeper and deeper into this stuff, how much has it sh- shaped your worldview?
- JLJohn Lisle
Um, a, a decent amount in the sense that, uh, just as it did for kind of the American public in general in the 1970s when this was coming out, it really led people to cast a skeptical eye toward the government and thinking ... It's just assumed that the government is supposed to be the protector of civil li- civil liberties, but after Watergate, after MKUltra, after the Vietnam War, it starts to seem as if the government is infringing on those civil liberties, you know? Instead of being the protector of it, in many cases, it's infringing on them. Um, not that it doesn't protect civil liberties, but one of the main things that I came away after writing this book is the problem of oversight. You know, I think the, the constitutional system of government that we have is ingenious, the fact that we have checks and balances and these sep- the sep- the separation of powers. However, you have to enable the separate branches of government to be able to check the other branches. For most of the Cold War, that external check on the executive branch, the, the, like Congress checking the executive, the president or the CIA, didn't really exist. Um, so any time that the CIA was doing an operation, I have a chapter about this, but, you know, sometimes the CIA personnel would try to inform members of Congress of what they were doing. I have one specific quote where a CIA guy walks up to a sitting senator and says, "Hey, let me tell you about what we're doing in Chile or whatever it is." And then he says, "No, I don't want to hear it. Don't tell me. Just do what you're going to do." He doesn't even want to know. So it's like, how can you expect Congress to give oversight of the executive if they are completely unwilling to even know what the executive is doing? So fortunately, in the aftermath of these revelations, there have been some, um, some programs or committees that are set up within Congress to provide that external check. However, it's, you know, it's not even clear how effective those are. Um, for, one, one check on the executive after this is that the president now has to, um, sign off basically on covert operations, so that, that eliminates the president's plausible deniability. One of the main themes throughout this book is th- it is what I call this, uh, the vicious cycle of secrecy. So, an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that kind of leads to what I, I see as this vicious cycle. Secrecy leads to plausible deniability because if it's secret, nobody can know that I'm doing this, therefore I'm not going to be blamed for it. So secrecy leads to plausible deniability. Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior, like MKUltra. If nobody's gonna find out what I'm doing, therefore I'm incentivized to do some crazy stuff because I'm not going to be held accountable for it. So secrecy to plausible deniability, plausible deniability to reckless behavior. Reckless behavior, in many instances, leads to embarrassment. It's almost inevitable for many of these projects that they get found out. Someone leaks something to the press. This is how the family jewels that the CIA had that was like a compilation of all the illegal stuff that it had done over the past couple of decades, it eventually got leaked to Seymour Hersh who published it on the front page of The New York Times. So, reckless behavior leads to embarrassment, but embarrassment leads to secrecy because now that we've been found out, we got to make sure that never happens again. We need more secrecy. And the vicious cycle ten- continues. So if you can break that vicious cycle by having some kind of external check, that's what you actually need, like an empowered Congress that is willing to check the executive.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
So ...
- JRJoe Rogan
And then you realize, well, who's running against them? Who wants that job? Not a lot of impressive people. A lot of really driven, successful, intelligent people are involved in-... other activities that consume their time.
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
They have families, they have careers, they have a lot... They don't have the desire to be a congressperson. So you're not getting the cream of the crop. You're not even getting anything-
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... remotely similar to the cream of the crop. You're occasionally getting great people that really wanna serve the country, but that is rare. That is, that is like... I wouldn't say rare, but if 20% of the food you ate at a place was poison, would you go eat at that place?
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs) No.
- JRJoe Rogan
You would not, right? You would say, "I'm assuming there's fucking poison in that place." That's Congress.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. And, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
That, that's elected officials.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. And Andrew Yang has made this point before, I know I've heard him say it, that the, the reelection rate of Congress is super high. It's like 80, 90%, whatever it is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
The approval rating for Congress is like in the teens.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
So how is it we have such a divergence between the reelection rate and the approval rating? It has to do with the in- the, the kind of electoral system, you know? The people who are incentivized to actually run for Congress, in many cases, they're the most ideological on either side, because the only race that matters is actually the primary. Because if you're in a, you know, uh, a district that is 90% Trump voters, the Republican is going to win the general r- election. It doesn't matter who it is. So, you know, the, the primary is the, the main election that happens in those districts. And if that's the case, well, the person who can win the primary is gonna win the general. And who's gonna win the primary? Well, it's gonna win... I- It's gonna be the person who can get 90% of Trump voters to be more interested in them than whoever the other Republican, you know, is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JLJohn Lisle
In many cases, that drives ideological extremism because, you know, you're, you're already selecting a sample size of voters within the primary who are the most ideological extreme. And so, they're going to elect basically whoever it is-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
... because the general election's a foregone conclusion. So if you can realign the electoral system in a way to where, you know, I mean, I don't know the, the answer to this, but it would be some kind of open primaries or ranked voting or proportional representation, ending gerrymandering, something like that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
... then you better incentivize Congresspeople to actually want the job or incentivize people who would be good at the job to engage in the job or to, to, to become Congresspeople because they actually have a clear path to doing it, because they're not gonna be blocked in the primary. So some kind of reform like that, I think, is how you better, um, facilitate this check between the different branches.
Episode duration: 2:39:14
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Transcript of episode ZrUQdGi0HF8
