Investigating The True History Of MKUltra & CIA Mind Control - John Lisle

1. 0:00 – 15:14

   Researching MKUltra, The CIA, & Mind Control

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      How did you find all of this out? Like, where did you do all of the research for this stuff? This is... I didn't think that you could top the insanity of the last book that you wrote, but you managed to do it. Congratulations.

   2. JLJohn Lisle0:12

      Thank you. Thank you. This book was really exciting, because I found a lot of new documents about MKUltra, specifically some depositions about a, uh, maybe over a dozen depositions that were taken in the 1980s as part of a lawsuit against the perpetrators of MKUltra, against the CIA, and as part of these depositions, um, I have the perpetrators, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, his right-hand man, Robert Lashbrook, the head of the CIA, Richard Helms, they are questioned by these attorneys, and I have the verbatim transcript of them talking about what they were doing in the CIA as part of MKUltra, why, why they wanted to do, to do this, how they got away with it. So, I have some great transcripts. So, that's, that's really the basis of the book, are these verbatim dialogues, which is so exciting for a historian, 'cause usually in history, you never get dialogue, because nobody's there to write it down, you know? I'm not gonna quote something if I don't have the verbatim quote. That's usually a thing you can do in fiction, to get inside the heads of the readers, or into the heads of the characters. But for me, I now have this dialogue, so I get to play with it and work with it, and oh, it's just been so fun getting into their heads and seeing what they say.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:18

      How... I'm interested in why the CIA was keen to look at mind control in any case. What happens during the '40s and the '50s for them to consider, "Yeah, this would be a good idea. This, this, this seems like a, an appropriate direction to go in."

   4. JLJohn Lisle1:37

      There are a few triggering events that lead them to want to perform experiments in mind control, and it's not just from the '40s or '50s. Even further back, if you go back to the 1890s, you have Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who's doing his famous behavioral conditioning experiments. You know, if you ring a bell, can you d- get a dog to salivate? Um, and the thinking within the CIA was, "Well, if this Russian is doing that back in the 1890s, surely they've since extended that work in order to include human subjects now, and if they could get a dog to salivate at a bell, what might they be able to get a human to do with drugs or something else?" So, it's that kind of slippery slope thinking that leads into this. Another event that precipitated MKUltra was, uh, the Moscow Show Trials. This is when Stalin was purging kind of his enemies from political power, and he put them on trial for false charges that they didn't do, and yet they admitted to doing them. So, there are these false charges, and then they, they, on their hands and knees, are begging to be found guilty. Why would they do this? One explanation that develops within the CIA is, "Maybe they've been mind controlled. Maybe there's drugs or hypnotism or something they've been manipulated with, and if that's the case, we need to know what they are doing so we can prevent it, and so maybe we can do it ourselves." But then the most important event that precipitated MKUltra was the downing of several American POWs during the Korean War. These pilots are downed in their planes. They're taken prisoner. And while they're prisoners in Korea, these American pilots admit to doing things like dropping germ bombs on the Koreans, dropping typhus and cholera and bubonic plague, trying to spread these diseases throughout the Korean population. Now, we, we know now from Russian archives especially that there are some Korean officials who flew to China and who got samples of bubonic plague and took it back and infected their own Korean soldiers in order to make it seem as if the Americans had done this. But the question within the CIA, they didn't know that at the time, the question was, "Why would these Americans admit to this? Why would they say this?" Uh, uh, the same with the Moscow Show Trials. "Are they being drugged? Are they being hypnotized?" Um, and so that spurs interest in answering these questions, which is eventually what leads to the development of this program, MKUltra.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:46

      Mm. Okay. Sidney Gottlieb, this mastermind. How does he get selected for this? What, what makes him an attractive candidate? What's his sort of comeuppance?

   6. JLJohn Lisle3:58

      Yeah. He is a, a chemist within the CIA. His background is in bioorganic chemistry. He has a PhD in it from Caltech. And during World War II, so a few years before this, in 1943 he gets his PhD, and he desperately wants to volunteer for the army. He wants to join the army because his parents were immigrants from Hungary and he felt that he, he owed this country a debt for allowing his immigrant parents to come over and for allowing him to live a life here. And so he wanted to join the army, but he was refused service because he had a limp. He was born with club feet. He also talked with a stutter. And that had a really psychological effect on him, the fact that he had always seen himself from a young age as an outsider. Kids would always make fun of him for his limp and stutter, and this seemed to reinforce that fact, that he's an outsider. "I was denied service in the army." And he was looking for a way that he could repay the debt that he felt that he owed his country. And so, it just so happened that the CIA in particular was looking for some brilliant scientists like himself to join, because right after World War II, science is now seen as integral to national security. We just had this war that ended with these atomic bombs. Those, that was physicists doing this. We need scientists within the intelligence community now to determine whether not only are the Soviets doing some kind of project themselves that we might figure out, but also, how can we do those projects ourselves? So, the fact that he was a brilliant scientist, that's what led him into this role. And it didn't hurt also that Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA at the time, he was also born with a club foot, and so he kind of took a liking to Sidney Gottlieb.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:26

      Oh, God.

   8. JLJohn Lisle5:27

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson5:27

      We, we, we ble- bonded over our physical deformity.

   10. JLJohn Lisle5:30

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson5:30

       Dear me. Um, w- how would you describe Gottlieb's personal philosophy, his nature, sort of the way that he presented his personality? That, that kind of stuff.

   12. JLJohn Lisle5:43

       He, he was maybe a new age sense of, like, spirituality. He, his parents were Jewish, and he was culturally Jewish, but he wasn't very religious. Um, but he, he did have kind of this new age spirituality where he would meditate and dance to folk music and go on retreats, and, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about LSD, but he took LSD a lot. Um, so that's a little bit about his psychology. It's...... a little ironic maybe that he becomes the head of MKUltra because he is an outsider. He doesn't really fit in with the typical CIA personnel that you might think of. Kinda the saying at the time was "Pale, male, and Yale." And so, he didn't really come from that exact background. Um, but yeah, so he has this, uh, a little bit different background from other people who were within the CIA, uh, that led him to, uh, really stand out and (laughs) get noticed, if nothing else.

   13. CWChris Williamson6:34

       Okay, so Sidney Gottlieb, chemist, presumably, uh, with a interest in forward-thinking, quasi-spiritual, come early psychedelic bro-type-

   14. JLJohn Lisle6:47

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CWChris Williamson6:47

       ... things. Uh, concern from the United States, "Why is it that some of our prisoners of war have been saying these weird things? What's going on with happening in Russia, what's happening across the rest of the world?" People are say, "Is this some sort of mind control? Can we get in on the action? Can we do a little bit of this?" What's the, uh, beginning of the, the blending of Sidney and then sort of this desire? How does this all start?

   16. JLJohn Lisle7:10

       In 1953, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, he gives a speech at an alumni conference in Princeton University, just to alumni there, which to me is crazy that he would give this speech. It was called Brain Warfare, and at this speech, he talks about the potential that the Soviets might be using these techniques that we don't know about, and we're, we're falling behind in this mind control arms race, and, you know, "We need to be ahead of the Soviets in every single arms race, so we need to start this program." It was three days after that speech that he signed the papers initiating this MKUltra program to research mind control to see if it's possible. Um, so that's what initiated min- or, uh, the MKUltra program in 1953. Sidney Gottlieb is placed as its head, and originally, he doesn't really know what to do because he's placed in this position, but he doesn't have a background in mind control or in, uh, you know, psychedelic drugs or anything like that. So, what he actually does is he goes to the OSS archives, these old archives from World War II, the OSS was a precursor to the CIA, and he starts looking around the papers, and he finds the work of Stanley Lovell, who my first book was about. And Stanley Lovell, during World War II, had done drug experiments. He had done, especially with THC, trying to determine whether it's a truth drug, and so Sidney Gottlieb's career within the CIA very neatly parallels S- Stanley Lovell's career within the OSS. Both were involved in these drug experiments, both were involved in creating weapits, weapons, gadgets desi- uh, in disguises for their intelligence organization, both were involved in assassination attempts, you know, the list goes on. But, uh, they're kinda stories eerily parallel one another, so this is one of the inspirations for Gottlieb is the fact that he has this historical example that he can turn to, um, for especially the drug experiments, but that's kinda the, the origins and start of MKUltra and how he comes to want to experiment in the ways that he actually does.

   17. CWChris Williamson8:59

       Mm. But he, there's predecessors to MKUltra, right? MKUltra isn't sort of the first iteration of stepping in to trying to do this stuff.

   18. JLJohn Lisle9:06

       Yes, that's exactly right. There were, before within the CIA, there was a program called Bluebird, and the main focus of Bluebird was to, to create a truth drug. Um, the saying about why its name was Bluebird was because they wanted to make prisoners sing like a bird. And so, they, they had some drugs, not LSD at that time, that they were using, and there are some, uh, documents from the CIA that have been declassified that indicate that, you know, in some instances, it may seem to work, you know? The lo, inhibitions are lowered when we give them these drugs and these captured spies, they actually do seem to be saying stuff that we otherwise didn't think that they would have, so maybe there's something to this that only spurs interest in wanting to repeat these experiments. Shortly after Bluebird, there's another program called Artichoke, it kinda morphs into Artichoke, uh, and that's when the CIA and a couple of the military departments, they kind of coalesce a few programs that are pretty similar, like Bluebird, into one called Artichoke, um, that way they don't duplicate each other's research and, you know, it saves expenditures. Artichoke was mostly focused on, uh, drugs as a means to develop truth drugs and some kind of mind control. Um, they're also interested in hypnotism. One of the heads of Bluebird was a, a guy, a guy named Morse Allen, and he hired a stage magician to teach him how to, like, manipulate people (laughs) , so this magician teaches Morse Allen how to hypnotize people, and Morse Allen says that the magician would tell him stories of how the magician would, you know, go around town and hypnotize women into having sex with him and doing all kinds of stuff. So, Morse Allen starts se- hypnotizing his secretaries in the office to try to really determine, "I- is what he's saying true? Can you really manipulate someone?" So, early in the book, I talk about some of these experiments on these secretaries. He, uh, claims to have convinced one of them that she had regressed several weeks and was on a surfboard in the Gulf of Mexico on a vacation that she had previously taken, and she's really sitting in a chair and she falls off her surfboard, which is her chair, and she, you know, gulps down this imaginary seawater, and she starts, you know, coughing and everything. But Morse a- Allen had a real problem, and that was could he really trust these secretaries to be legitimately exhibiting these kind of mind control patterns, or is it the case that they're just humoring him? Th- that's what he starts to realize after a while. He thinks that, "Well, they're just humoring me. They're just going along with it because I'm their boss and they don't wanna make me upset," and this seems to have been the case in a lot of kinda hypnotism studies. There's, there's (laughs) one study I talk about, this is in France, and this guy, he hypnotizes a woman in front of a large crowd, and he tells her, "Okay, now you're gonna, you're gonna kill these people," and so she picks up a rubber dagger and starts stabbing them, and she puts poison into their drinks, allegedly not really knowing what she's doing. But as soon as one of his assistants, uh, his assistants kinda shout out, "Now take your clothes off," she snaps out of it, and all of a sudden, she wakes back up and, "Oh, I'm not hypnotized anymore." So, it's a matter of how much were they really going along with it as opposed to under the influence.

   19. CWChris Williamson11:57

       Yeah. Okay, so how does that morph into MKUltra? What, what sort of triggers the launch of that?

   20. JLJohn Lisle12:03

       ... it, it's really those Korean War pilots who get down. So those are before 1953, and then during the Korean War that, that those pilots get shot down, captured and it, and, uh, talk about how they were allegedly dosing Koreans with germs. And so that instigates now we need a broader program that's not just hypnotism, we need something that's a little more encompassing. That's where MKUltra eventually, uh, becomes a thing. And so MKUltra largely is focused on drugs. If anyone, uh, you know, anyone listening to this knows about MKUltra, you're probably associating it with LSD, but that's not all MKUltra was. In fact, there was a lot of psychological experiments with it, such as, uh, electric shocks, sensory deprivation, um, what- what's called psychic driving, like repeating messages in someone's headphones for hours and hours, weeks and weeks on end. Uh, so, you know, we can talk about all that, but there's more than just drugs. Sometimes people get the impression that's it. It's, it's a lot of other crazy stuff too. In fact, (laughs) one of the sub-projects, maybe one of the most crazy ones, is implanting electrodes into the brains of animals to try to get them to move in predetermined directions, so basically to steer them like a remote control. The crazy thing about this sub-project, MKUltra is composed of 149 sub-projects, this was one of them, is it worked. This actually worked. Uh, in the 19- late 1950s, they implanted electrodes into the brains of rats, cats, dogs, and especially with the dogs you could actually get them to move on a predetermined path in a field. And the way that they did this is by stimulating, uh, pleasure centers of the brain through positive reinforcement. So if the dog moved in a correct direction, they would reinforce that stimulus and so they would feel this pleasure and they would continue moving. If they moved in a undesired direction, then they, you know, you would stop stimulating this part of the brain and they would look around and search for it and try to find it again. And through this, you could actually get them to move in pre-desired directions. You could steer them like a remote control. And th- there are a couple of quotes from some of the (laughs) documents that I found about why are they, why they are doing this. Why do you want to be able to steer animals or potentially people? And within thes- these documents it says, "The CIA planned to attach payloads of interest to these guidance systems to use in direct executive action type operations." And the payloads of interest was biological and chemical weapons, the guidance system was the animals, and direct executive action is an euphemism for assassination. So we want to create these animal assassination drones that can be remotely controlled-

   21. CWChris Williamson14:30

       (laughs)

   22. JLJohn Lisle14:30

       ... carrying these biological materials.

   23. CWChris Williamson14:32

       (laughs)

   24. JLJohn Lisle14:32

       (laughs) And within one of these documents, the CIA is speculating, "What's the best animals we could use for this?" And apparently they say it's yaks and bears because they, and I'm quoting, "are capable of carrying heavy payloads over great distances under adverse climactic conditions." So we need to strap them with a lot of biological materials and we can control these yaks to potentially go kill someone.

   25. CWChris Williamson14:55

       Holy shit. They'd, they'd created, like, the B-22 Flying Fortress of the animal world, then-

   26. JLJohn Lisle15:00

       (laughs) Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson15:00

       ... put a remote control on them and got gangrene or bubonic plague and attached that to them as well.

   28. JLJohn Lisle15:06

       Yeah, that's the idea. Now, uh, I, I have no reason to think that this ever went into the field, but at least this is what they were experimenting with.

2. 15:14 – 26:41

   MKUltra’s Origin & LSD Experiments

   1. CWChris Williamson15:14

      Okay. Where does the name MKUltra come from? What's that?

   2. JLJohn Lisle15:18

      Yeah, the CIA for different departments it has what's called a diagraph, like MK, MH, that just indicates the department that it's under. So at that time, N- MK indicated that it fell under the Technical Services Staff which was, you know, it, it was involved in technical services, so doing experiments and creating weapons and gadgets and that kind of thing. Um, and so Ultra, as far as I can tell, is kind of an homage to the cryptographic intelligence units during World War II that were decrypting the German Enigma machine, that was called the Ultra Project. So I think it was a combination of that. MKUltra.

   3. CWChris Williamson15:49

      Okay. Where does the interest in LSD come from? Like, that, that seems to be a specific direction that they're focused on.

   4. JLJohn Lisle15:58

      Definitely. And it might be important to mention that there were, there were drug experiments and truth drug e- experiments long before MKUltra. You know, I mentioned them in my first book in the OSS, I have a whole chapter on truth drug experiments. But even, you go back thousands of years and people talk about how, you know, wine and alcohol can lower your inhibitions and make you spill your secrets. So the search for a truth drug or something like it isn't new. What's new with LSD is that, well, it's a new drug and it's extremely potent. It's only first discovered in 1938 in Switzerland by Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz corporation, and, but he shelves it for five years. He doesn't even realize that it has much potential. And so in 1943, he kind of re-synthesizes LSD and accidentally some contacts his skin and he starts having these weird feelings, hallucinations, the room starts spinning. So he, he leaves work, he rides his bicycle home, he collapses on the couch and he realizes there's, there's something to this, especially because it was such a minute dose. So it's such, so potent that this especially interested people like Gottlieb within the CIA because it means that it would be extremely effective in a, in covert operations. It would be very easy to sneak this into someone's drink or whatever because such a minute dose could have such a profound effect.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:11

      Mm. So how do they first find out about LSD? How does that first get over from Hofmann to the US to the understanding of the CIA?

   6. JLJohn Lisle17:23

      Yeah. It's, it's not as if the CIA is the first American entity to learn about this. Sandoz corporation had brought LSD over in the late '40s, '48, '49, to try to trial it and to try to figure out if they could use it as a, a drug to treat something because they want to make money off of it. So people knew about LSD at the time, not unless you're like a psychopharmacologist or something, but it's not as if it's an entire secret. Um, and then there's another important event that happens right around this time period that gets the CIA interested in hallucinogens in general, and just LSD happens to be one of the most potent of those, and that's in France. There is this-... this drugging through bread. There's this ergot fungus that grows on a bread at a particular bakery and several people, you know, eat this bread and... I talk about this in the book, but, you know, the town kind of go- goes crazy. Multiple people die, you know, because they start ripping off their clothes and then, you know, the mayor's, like, ripping off his clothes and journalists-

   7. CWChris Williamson18:18

      (laughs)

   8. JLJohn Lisle18:19

      ... (laughs) they start... Journalists go to the town to try to figure out what's happening (laughs) and so, um... Yeah, and so, you know, this is an indication to the CIA if an ergot fungus in a bakery can cause this much havoc, what would be the case if, say, the Soviet Union got ahold of a really potent hallucinogen like LSD and put it into the water supply of an American city?

   9. CWChris Williamson18:42

      Mm-hmm.

   10. JLJohn Lisle18:42

       Well that, that's not good news, so we gotta figure out how we can prevent that from happening or we have to figure out what are the effects... What- how is somebody going to react if they take this drug without wittingly know they ha- knowing they have so we can counteract it in case the Soviets do that to us? So that's the, kind of, motivation. I should mention though that the CIA contracted someone to answer this question, like, how, how potent would CIA be if it were released into a city's water supply and he basically came to the conclusion, I think it was, that there was too much chlorine in the water and it would counteract the LSD and it would dissolve it or something and-

   11. CWChris Williamson19:14

       Hmm.

   12. JLJohn Lisle19:14

       ... it would have no effect so it wouldn't... As far as I know, what he said, it wouldn't really have an effect, um, but they decided, "We're gonna test this anyway and see, (laughs) see what happens."

   13. CWChris Williamson19:23

       Did they take it themselves? Wasn't there a thing about the guys running the program thinking, "Hey if we're gonna, if we're gonna be researching this thing, we might as well have a crack at it ourselves."

   14. JLJohn Lisle19:31

       Definitely. They were the first people to take it within the CIA. They're- not only are they dosing themselves, Gottlieb doses himself multiple times, um, and his colleagues too, so they can understand what the reaction to it is, so that they can better understand how we might be able to use this in a covert operation. So we need to know how someone might react so that we can, kind of, plan for that. Um, but also they're doing it as basically pranks around the office. You know, they're putting it in the office coffee pot to see, "How is Jim? How's he gonna react when we dose him with LSD?" Turns out, not good. You know, one guy is dosed with this LSD in the- in the office coffee pot at the CIA and he ends up running outside over to a bridge and almost gets hit by traffic and they have to wrangle him back, um, so that kind of thing is going on. In fact, the CIA Office of Security has to issue a- a warning basically saying, "If anyone spikes the holiday punch bowl, there are gonna be severe repercussions," because this was, like, such a-

   15. CWChris Williamson20:26

       No more LSD in the coffee pot.

   16. JLJohn Lisle20:28

       (laughs) Exactly.

   17. CWChris Williamson20:29

       No more LSD. This is an internal memo going to all staff. Stop putting LSD in the coffee pot.

   18. JLJohn Lisle20:34

       Exactly. And then the most famous incident of this happening, where they're kind of dosing themselves, is at a retreat called Deep Creek where several MKUltra scientists like Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, they meet with several scientists from Fort Detrick which was the biological warfare installation for the US in- in Maryland. These scientists would occasionally meet at this retreat in order to exchange their research results and talk about the experiments that are- they're performing and it was at one of these retreats that Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook dosed the liquor with LSD and they start passing out shots to everyone and it turns out one of the people who was there is this guy named Frank Olson. He was within the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick and he really had, kind of, a psychotic break after this and if anyone has heard really about the MKUltra program you might have heard of Frank Olson. He jumps out the hotel window in New York after Gottlieb and Lashbrook take him there and he dies on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk. And so it had, uh, you know, uh, lethal repercussions just what- what Gottlieb, I think, saw as kind of a prank really had this lethal repercussion.

   19. CWChris Williamson21:36

       This isn't even part of an experiment for MKUltra.

   20. JLJohn Lisle21:40

       Not even- Yeah. Ne- ne-

   21. CWChris Williamson21:41

       This is just a prank.

   22. JLJohn Lisle21:41

       Exactly. Exactly. It's- it's- it's guys... In my sense, it's these guys trying to have some fun, trying to lighten up the mood, they're pulling these pranks, they've been dosing themselves and other people and they don't really grasp how immoral and crazy this is until this Frank Olson incident and it r- really makes them think, "W- Whoa," (laughs) like, "Hang on, wha- wha- what just happened? What do we do?" So there- there are some repercussions for that. Gottlieb gets an informal reprimand from Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, but that's it. And, in fact, after the Frank Olson incident, it's not as if MKUltra shuts down, "You just killed this guy." Instead, it expands even further into what's known as Operation Midnight Climax, this new sub-project where Gottlieb is getting this narcotics officer, George White, to dose people unwittingly with LSD and eventually he hires prostitutes to dose their unwitting clients with LSD while White is sitting behind a one-way mirror, sitting on a port- portable toilet drinking liquor that he bought with CIA funds. That (laughs) ... So and he-

   23. CWChris Williamson22:38

       (laughs) you need to dig into this. Tell me more about this- this plan that they've got going on.

   24. JLJohn Lisle22:43

       Yeah. George White, this narcotics officer, he- he terms this his own sub-project, Operation Midnight Climax. The idea is that we're gonna dose these unwitting people with drugs, LSD being the main one, inject it through the- the cork on a wine bottle and then pour drinks and we're gonna see how people react when they unwittingly take this because we wanna be prepared for if someone does that to us. And is it possible to make them behave in certain ways? Can we make them seem insane? That could be useful, um, if we want to, say, dose a foreign political, uh, leader with some LSD before a big political rally and maybe they'll look like they lose their mind and the population is gonna start thinking, "Maybe we shouldn't trust this guy." So they wanna understand how someone reacts to unwittingly ingesting LSD, that's the purpose of Operation Midnight Climax. George White, like I mentioned, he's this narcotics officer. So by day he's locking up junkies for illegal possession and by night he's doling out drugs to these people to see how they react to them, so it's a sad irony. He- he himself is a- is a character to say the least. He was an addict in basically every sense of the word. He's alcoholic, he takes every drug that Gottlieb gives to him, before he gives to anyone else, he just takes for himself just to see what happens. Um, he's addicted to sex too. There are stories that I recount in the book about how he doses his own friends with LSD unwittingly to try to get them to engage in orgies with him. Um, he does this to-

   25. CWChris Williamson24:04

       (laughs)

   26. JLJohn Lisle24:05

       (laughs) He does this to one womanWhile she's there, she has her one-year-old daughter with her. He doses her with LSD.

   27. CWChris Williamson24:13

       Bloody hell.

   28. JLJohn Lisle24:13

       Yeah. It's terrible. And she ends up having a kinda psychotic break, a reactive psychosis very similar to what seems to have happened to Frank Olson. And her husband is away on a business trip, but when he comes back, she's cowering in the corner of her parents' room and she, she says that somebody's out to get her. She's very paranoid. She doesn't wanna take phone calls because she, she thinks the police are gonna come to arrest her. She eventually is committed to like a, a mental asylum for years, for decades, and dies in this mental asylum. Um, so s- some awful repercussions of Operation Midnight 10.

   29. CWChris Williamson24:44

       Wow. I feel really callous about laughing at the fucking sex party.

   30. JLJohn Lisle24:47

       Oh. (laughs)
3. 26:41 – 30:41

   The Main Scientists Behind MKUltra

   1. JLJohn Lisle26:41

      causation.

   2. CWChris Williamson26:42

      So, George White, pretty intense guy. Probably quite fun at a party, but very unscrupulous, uh, and seems to be kind of living privately and publicly the same thing apart from there's this veneer of being drug officer thing. But he, he has this sort of, um, this paradox of professional life with personal and then second professional life kind of being the same sort of thing.

   3. JLJohn Lisle27:08

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson27:09

      What about, uh, Sidney Gottlieb? Because it feels like he has a degree of double life going on as well, the way that he behaves personally, the way that he shows up in his, in his personal life and his philosophies there and then the things that he's doing by day.

   5. JLJohn Lisle27:25

      Yeah, it does. It's, it is hard to reconcile in a way, especially with Gottlieb. Not so much George White because I do feel like that was his true character. Like, out of everyone in the book, I feel like he's the most unethical. It doesn't seem like he has any remorse. In later life when Gottlieb is doing these depositions that I found, he seems very remorseful. Now, he might just be doing that, you know, for the court or whatever. But, I mean, there are people who were volunteering with him in later life and they said that he, they always felt like he was trying to atone for some past sins.

   6. CWChris Williamson27:53

      Mm.

   7. JLJohn Lisle27:53

      And, you know, after MKUltra's over, during these depositions, he does say he regretted a lot of what he did and he, he, he does seem to have some kind of remorse. It didn't really come to much in MKUltra. It's not like we found a drug or a psychiatric technique that allowed us to control a person like a marionette. But, so I think Sidney Gottlieb was doing this because he actually believed in, like, the ends justify the means. Like, this is for national security and we have to do this. I think George White was doing this because, you know, he was having fun. Uh, in fact, there's one story in the book, speaking of George White and parties, again, this is one of the more sad stories, there was a man named Wayne Ritchie and he lived in San Francisco. He was a US Marshal, he had worked as a guard at Alcatraz for a while, and one night he goes to a Christmas party at a federal building, the post office, and he, you know, takes some drinks there, he's hanging out with his colleagues, and all of a sudden his, the wall starts spinning. He starts kinda hallucinating, seeing colors, he doesn't know what's going on. Uh, he kinda has this break as well. He runs home not knowing what to do. His girlfriend is there and she's kinda upset because she wants to move to New York, so they kinda get into this spat. He eventually goes back to the post office building where his locker is e- and he decides, "You know what? To set everything straight, to make my life better, I'm gonna get my service revolvers, go down to a bar downtown, and steal all the money and then I'm gonna give it to my girlfriend. She can move to New York and then she'll love me because I did this for her." So, that's exactly what he does. He takes these guns, he goes to a bar, he barges in and says, "Give me all the money and the till," and then someone who's just drinking a beer hits him over the head with one of the, with one of the beers and he's knocked out cold.

   8. CWChris Williamson29:29

      (laughs)

   9. JLJohn Lisle29:30

      The police come, they arrest him obviously, he goes to jail, and at night he kind of sobers up from whatever the fog that he was undergoing and he realizes, "Tha- that wasn't me. Like, I, I felt so weird. What was going on?" He, in fact, he asked the police officer, "Please give me a gun and one bullet so I can save the state some money." And he lived with this, he lived with this for the r- you know, for the rest of his life. For decades after this, he didn't know kinda what happened to him that night. He lost his job, he lost his friends, he obviously lost that girlfriend as well. And so, it was about 30 years later when MKUltra is made public, he's reading a newspaper and he sees a story that mentions George White and LSD and it kinds of dawns on him, "Oh my gosh. I knew George White in San Francisco." And it turns out George White's diary has been donated, now it, it's at Stanford University.... in George, George White's diary, which I show in this book, you can flip to the exact day that Wayne Ritchie went insane at that party. And what does George White's diary say? "Christmas party, federal building." That's where he was. And so, Wayne Ritchie sued the CIA but it was dismissed for, um, the judge basically said you couldn't prove that this actually happened to you. But yeah, another victim of George

4. 30:41 – 41:30

   CIA Funding & Celebrity Involvement

   1. JLJohn Lisle30:41

      White.

   2. CWChris Williamson30:41

      Dude. Okay, so getting into the meat and potatoes of the experiments, what does that look like? They've now got their chemist, they've been fucking about with it (laughs) internally and partly externally.

   3. JLJohn Lisle30:56

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson30:56

      They're doing this thing in the brothels, but, you know, when we think about, when I think about MKUltra, I think about the, the eyelid thing being kept open, looking-

   5. JLJohn Lisle31:07

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson31:07

      ... like this. And, and the LSD and hypnosis and repeating stuff and watching the same TV thing over and over in a room and sleep deprivation.

   7. JLJohn Lisle31:16

      Yes.

   8. CWChris Williamson31:17

      What, what do the sort of hardcore experiments look like, and where-

   9. JLJohn Lisle31:19

      Yes, and-

   10. CWChris Williamson31:19

       ... where are they, who does it?

   11. JLJohn Lisle31:21

       That's a, that's a good point, because not everything that's part of MKUltra, these 149 sub-projects, is done by the CIA. There are very few sub-projects that the CIA itself does. It's funding George White to do some of these experiments, but that's most of what the CIA itself is actively doing. Really how MKUltra is set up, it's, it's based through a funding mechanism. So Sidney Gottlieb would identify researchers at universities, prisons, hospitals, who were already doing experiments that he was interested. Many of them were already doing LSD experiments without, you know, knowing what the CIA is up to. Many of th- them were doing, uh, experiments in amnesia to see if amnesia is possible. And so Sidney Gottlieb decides, "We're going to start funding these people to continue doing what they're doing." So again, it's not as if the CIA is itself committing all of these acts. Instead, it's aiding and abetting the people who are already doing these experiments. One of these people, one of, well, there're a lot of them to talk about, I guess. But some of these are at prisons, so Harris Isbell, Carl Pfeiffer, they're in Lexington and Atlanta. And at these prisons, they're dosing the prisoners with different drugs that Sidney Gottlieb is sending them. Um, and I should mention also, these people who are being, being funded by MKUltra, many of them don't know they're being funded by MKUltra. They're given grants through, like, cutout organizations to say, "Hey, we're the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology." The CIA just made this up. And they say, "Yeah, we're gonna fund you, whatever." And so they're like, "Great, yeah, I'll take free money. Why not?"

   12. CWChris Williamson32:48

       Be, be skeptical of free money, is that the lesson?

   13. JLJohn Lisle32:51

       Yeah. There's n- no such thing as a free lunch. Yeah, so they're, they're getting this, uh, money through these grants, that's great. So a lot of them didn't even know the CIA was behind these grants, so they, they would use these cutout organizations. Some of them did, though. Uh, and so a, a few of these people at these prisons, Harris Isbell, Carl Pfeiffer, they're taking drugs that Gottlieb is giving to them, not just LSD but all kinds of stuff, peyote eventually, and just whatever, and they're giving it to these prisoners, um, to see how they react. And in one experiment, Isbell talks about dosing a prisoner with quadruple doses of LSD for days on end to try to build up their tolerance to see how they would react, and he says, "Well, we really built up their tolerance." And here's one of the crazy things too. At the, at Harris Isbell's experiments in Lexington, Kentucky, it, it's at a prison but the prison is also like a rehabilitation facility, and so the idea is that we're trying to get these people off of drugs. And as payment for volunteering to join these experiments, what would Isbell give them? He, well, he would give them an option, they could either take, like, a, a good parole, uh, letter for their parole board, you know, or they could take, they could go to the drug bink window, stick out their arm, and get a needle full of heroin injected right into it. So that's their payment for involv- being involved in this experiment.

   14. CWChris Williamson34:02

       In the rehab place?

   15. JLJohn Lisle34:04

       In the rehab place, yes.

   16. CWChris Williamson34:04

       Phenomenal. Phenomenal.

   17. JLJohn Lisle34:05

       Yeah. Yeah, so those are, those are some of the drug experiments. Um, but you mentioned, like, sensory deprivation.

   18. CWChris Williamson34:11

       Well, hang on. What, what about-

   19. JLJohn Lisle34:12

       Oh, yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson34:12

       ... because you, you mentioned jails there, doctors, universities, these were also being co-opted as well.

   21. JLJohn Lisle34:18

       Yes. Yes. Yeah. Uh, I, I should mention also that it's not as if every LSD experiment at a university or somewhere, or psychiatric experiment that sounds like an MKUltra thing is part of MKUltra. Again, the, these scientists in the CIA are funding the things that are already going on for the most part. So just because something sounds like an MKUltra experiment, "Oh yeah, I know this, you know, this guy at this university, he was dosing his students with LSD," that could have been an MKUltra experiment, a sub-project, but, um, most likely it wasn't, because there were more people who were doing this on their own th- than who were doing it as part of MKUltra. But yes, at universities this was happening. In fact, one of the people who was doing this at a university was Harris Isbell. He would do this with his students. Isbell... Or, I'm sorry, uh, I mentioned him earlier, uh, was Harold Abramson. He was, uh, he was a doctor who was dosing his students, you know, they would join these experiments. But Abramson is the person who Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook sent Frank Olson to after Frank Olson had that kind of psychotic break. So he already kind of knew that the CIA was interested in LSD, and he eventually got, uh, paid basically to dose some of these students and to see how they reacted. So it was going on at a lot of places.

   22. CWChris Williamson35:30

       How much truth is there in the famous people involved in MKUltra, the cult leaders-

   23. JLJohn Lisle35:36

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson35:37

       ... the bombers of many stripes, uh, uh, this, you have to have looked into this. So-

   25. JLJohn Lisle35:44

       Yes.

   26. CWChris Williamson35:44

       ... h- how much truth is in that?

   27. JLJohn Lisle35:45

       Yeah, and people for some reason are kinda disappointed when I say I don't think there's much truth to it. Um-

   28. CWChris Williamson35:50

       God, John, come on.

   29. JLJohn Lisle35:53

       Like the, the Unabomber, this is a big one. He, it's not as if he wasn't, uh, in an experiment, you know, at, at, uh, university. He was in the experiment of this guy named Henry Murray who had been involved in the OSS, who was doing some psychological stuff for the OSS, some, he was creating psychological portraits of different, like, German leaders. Um, so Henry Murray did have an, ent- and ties to the intelligence community, but there's no reason to think that he was actually funded by the CIA through MKUltra, at least I haven't found anything that indicates that. Again, that's not to say that Ted Kaczynski wasn't involved in these experiments and that that didn't affect him in some way, but I just haven't seen any tie to MKUltra. And, you know, and a point to make too is, there are a lot of people who were involved in these experiments and none of them became the Unabomber but him, and so I think there's probably a lot other stuff going on than the fact that he happened to be, you know, one of-

   30. CWChris Williamson36:39

       Hmm.
5. 41:30 – 47:27

   Experiments On Mental Health

   1. CWChris Williamson41:30

      Uh, okay, you- we mentioned about the psychic driving thing. There's the re- repetition over and over. What was that?

   2. JLJohn Lisle41:38

      Yeah, psychic driving. This was by, uh, a psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron in Montreal. He was working at the Allan Memorial Institute. He had dreams of becoming the next Sigmund Freud. He was going to win a Nobel Prize in medicine, at least he thought he was. He was going to cure all mental illness, he just didn't know how. Like, he, he knew he was destined for greatness, but he didn't know how. He was a behaviorist, and so he thought all behavior stems from patterns that you've learned from your environment. So everything is nurture, nothing is nature. And so in his conception, what mental illness is, is a person who has learned bad behaviors from their environment, and if you want to correct mental illness, what you should do is reduce them back to a blank slate where they forget all their behaviors, and then put them in a better environment where they learn better behaviors. That's his conc- conception, at least. The question is then, how do you reduce someone to a blank slate and make them forget these bad patterns of behavior that he thinks leads to mental illness? In his conception, you have to induce enough stress in them. If you induce enough stress, then that will reduce them to the blank slate, and like God, we can build them back up in our image. So how do we induce enough stress? Well, he tried multiple ways. You know, electric shocks, sensory deprivation, and then psychic driving, as you mentioned. Um, this was re-... playing auditory messages in their ears thousands and thousands of times a day, just on endless repeat. The reason why he came to this is because he was, he was recording an, a session that he was having with a young woman, uh, just like a therapy session, and she said something that he wanted her to listen to again. She said something about how, "My mom used to tell me..." I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something negative. And so he said, "Here, I want you to listen to that again and kind of react to it." So he plays it back for her, and she has a very negative reaction to hearing her saying her mom's negative words, and so he starts doing it again and again and again. She has a increasingly heightened negative reaction each time, and he thinks to himself, "This is how I induce stress." So he started having people record these negative messages. And s- in some instances, he would have their families come to the Allen Memorial Institute and record negative messages that he could then play to the patients, and then he would make them listen to them, these messages, over and over. Sometimes, he would put them in chemical comas, and then beneath their pillow, he would put a speaker where it would just play these messages. So maybe in their dreams, like, it's manipulating them into, into going down to become a blank slate again. But that's psychic driving. That's what he was trying to do.

   3. CWChris Williamson43:57

      Who were the patients?

   4. JLJohn Lisle43:58

      These were patients who were legitimate psychiatric patients, many of them had schizophrenia or depression, who had committed themselves under his care, because he was one of the most renowned psychiatrists in the world, really. He, at one point, he was the head of the American Psychiatric S- Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. So if you're gonna commit yourself to anyone, well, this guy certainly, shouldn't he know, you know, what to do? So they thought they were getting tried and true treatments that would help them. Instead, he was using them as guinea pigs in his experiments that eventually would be funded by MKUltra. And it's especially ironic because Ewen Cameron was one of the psychiatrists who evaluated the Nazi German prisoners at the end of World War II to determine whether they're fit to stand trial. These are the same Nuremberg trials that produced the Nuremberg Codes about ethical experiments, you know, uh, about, like, the first point of which is you need consent of the subject, you know? (laughs) And so, he's, he's involved in those Nuremberg trials, and yet he's completely going against the Nuremberg Code here. So a lot of ironies, sadly, in this book.

   5. CWChris Williamson44:59

      Was it effective at all, the psychic driving thing? Did they, was there anything useful that came out of that?

   6. JLJohn Lisle45:04

      It was, I mean, it was effective at breaking people down. (laughs) I don't know about building them back up. In fact, in his notes, he has several notes of, for instance, there's one nursing student, and he says, "This 18-year-old nursing student was reduced to basically a vegetable who would pee her own bed and couldn't go to the bathroom on her own." It's like, he, he really could break these people down. There was one woman, she was an identical twin, so this is kind of a good case study. The identical twin was committed to the Allen Memorial, the other wasn't. She has this psychic driving done to her, electroshock treatment as well, and afterwards, she can't go to the bathroom on her own, she can't dress herself, put on her makeup, do anything. She moves in with her identical twin, but, uh, you know, she's so psychologically damaged from this that it causes her severe depression because she looks at her twin and what could've been, and she's not-

   7. CWChris Williamson45:49

      Hmm.

   8. JLJohn Lisle45:49

      ... that. So she ends up scavenging food out of, like, dumpsters and living on her own for a while. It's a really sad story. But yeah, so, I mean, you definitely could affect the psychology of someone. You really could kind of break them down and even induce amnesia if you can give them enough electric voltage during these therapies.

   9. CWChris Williamson46:04

      Hmm.

   10. JLJohn Lisle46:05

       But n- you, y- it's not like you could build them back up in your image and make them all of a sudden cured of mental illness like he was hoping for.

   11. CWChris Williamson46:11

       Did they try and do any twin stuff, uh, g- w- w- y- g- remote messaging between twins, any of that?

   12. JLJohn Lisle46:18

       Not as part of MKUltra. Um, there were some, like, re- remote viewing stuff that the CIA was interested in, but that wasn't part of MKUltra. Annie Jacobsen has a book on this called Phenomena that's, that's good. But, i- y- as far as I can tell, there wasn't any MKUltra things involved with that, and I don't remember any specific twin studies that MKUltra was involved in either.

   13. CWChris Williamson46:37

       All right, what about depatterning? Was that s- similar to the, the psychic driving thing?

   14. JLJohn Lisle46:42

       Uh, kind of, depatterning was the electric shocks.

   15. CWChris Williamson46:45

       Right.

   16. JLJohn Lisle46:45

       So you would get, y- yeah, stimulated with these electric shocks multiple times and, uh, yeah, a lot of people had severe damage after this. One of the patients, um, was named Janine Huard, and she was pregnant at the time that she was getting all this stuff done to her. Eventually, she was allowed out, she had her baby, but her baby was kind of, uh, unhealthy. I- there was some kind of digestion problem the baby had, so Janine Huard went into this severe depression. She was worried and anxious. She gets recommitted to the Allen Memorial Institute because of this-

   17. CWChris Williamson47:14

       Oh, fuck's sake.

   18. JLJohn Lisle47:15

       ... and then, you know, she talks about in her depositions, which I quote, all, everything she experienced. It's, there's a lot of really sad stories with these patients. But yeah, they went through a lot. And that, that was just one subproject at the Allen Memorial under Cameron, all th- that

6. 47:27 – 52:27

   The Worst & Unethical Brain Experiments

   1. JLJohn Lisle47:27

      stuff. That was one subproject.

   2. CWChris Williamson47:28

      What, in your opinion, was the, uh, or were the wildest experiments? What were the ones that sort of really p- I mean, tho- those seemed to push the limit. Turning somebody functional into a vegetable and then making them live with their twin, that's pretty rough. But yeah, wh- what were the worst ones?

   3. JLJohn Lisle47:45

      Um, the most unethical, I mean, I already mentioned it, but I, uh, it's probably George White and dosing these people unwittingly. Um, I will say for, for some of the prison experiments, these prisoners would sign consent forms in a way, so they would say, "We're gonna be testing hallucinogenic drugs," although it's a question about informed consent. But, you know, I mentioned Ewen Cameron, I think his are probably the most destructive of the MKUltra experiments. Um, and one example of that is a woman named Mary Morrow, who, it's ironic because she had been a neurologist at the Allen Memorial Institute under Ewen Cameron, so she had been a resident in training. But she had severe anorexia and depression, and she failed her neurological exams to become a doctor, so she went into this deep depression, and she eventually got committed to a hospital. While she's there, Ewen Cameron goes to consult with her, and he asks her, "Do you wanna come back to the Allen not as a resident but as a patient?" She reluctantly does, and then she's on the other side of it now. So she, she was doing this kinds of stuff to people, and now she's on the other side of it experiencing it. The same thing happens to her where she bas- basically be- gets to a point where she can't put on her clothes by herself and she has phone calls with her, her mother after each one of these depatterning sessions, this electric shock, and her mother is very concerned 'cause she's not making any sense.So her mother tells her sister, "You need to go over there and see what's happening." So her sister barges in and says, "If you don't let me see my sister right now, I'm calling the police." So they eventually let her into the room, and in the corner is sitting Mary Morrow with these hollow eyes. She says later that she felt like she was sunk in a deep hole and couldn't get out, but she basically couldn't do anything for herself, so her family busted her out of there. And she's one of the success... Not a success story, but one of the... At least, um, she got out. You know, she talks about in her depositions, after going through all this, there were people who had been there for years. I was there for a few months and I experienced this stuff, but years people were doing this. So I think, yeah, Ewen Cameron's experiments are among the most unethical. I, I should also mention, somewhat in connection with that is, uh, is a guy named, uh, Baldwin, Maitland Baldwin. He was also funded by the CIA to do some experiments, and he was around that area too, in Montreal. He had been a student of Donald Hebb, who had been an associate of Ewen Cameron. Uh, but Maitland Baldwin, one of the experiments he at least proposed, not that he actually carried out, was to confine someone to a wooden box, like in se- sensory deprivation so they couldn't move, you know, they'd be confined. And he called this a terminal type experiment to see how long they could stay in there and, you know, before they died. Uh, there were several people who actually spoke out against this and said, "We're- there's no way we're doing that," so he didn't. But he did end up doing experiments on monkeys where he would decapitate them and try to put different heads on different monkeys. He would beam microwaves into their brains. Um, so he, he was doing a lot of stuff like that too.

   4. CWChris Williamson50:33

      W- wasn't there something to do with the toilets being wired with microphones so that people's post-trip confessions were captured? Didn't that happen somewhere?

   5. JLJohn Lisle50:41

      I don't recall that. I don't remember that. Um-

   6. CWChris Williamson50:43

      Oh, okay. I thought there-

   7. JLJohn Lisle50:44

      Maybe it did. I didn't, I didn't come across that. I don't know.

   8. CWChris Williamson50:46

      Yeah, it's an interesting one thinking about, uh... I guess you can do... You can have this effect on people, but unless they're under your care for the entire time, they're gonna go away and then-

   9. JLJohn Lisle50:58

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CWChris Williamson50:58

       It's like i- i- it's difficult. You've got to follow this person to see how they behave. Now, with George White, he's got this group of, I guess, for the period of time that they're with their prostitutes, he can sit on his toilet and drink his liquor and look through the one-way mirror so you can actually do some observation. But the problem is, unless you're able to hold somebody in a location, which is why being in a, uh, psychiatric facility is probably so useful, that you can just have them under observation to see what happens to them at all times-

   11. JLJohn Lisle51:24

       Yep.

   12. CWChris Williamson51:24

       ... if you do this to someone, it's- they're just out in the world causing mischief. You have no idea what they're actually doing.

   13. JLJohn Lisle51:30

       Yeah. Yeah, and that's, that's one of the, the concerns that Gottlieb eventually has about this. In his depositions, he talks about, y- he's asked, "What did you learn from MKUltra? Like, what came out of this?" And for the most part, he says... He tries to s- put a positive spin on the negative results, and he says, "Well, we learned a lot of things you couldn't do. Like, you couldn't control someone like a marionette." But he does say, "You could make someone appear crazy," and this did have some operational value in the sense that, like I mentioned, you might be able to s-... Um, one, one idea was to put LSD into a cigar and give it to Fidel Castro, and before he made some kind of speech, he would smoke this cigar and he would appear crazy, and his people would start to lose faith in him. But Sidney Gottlieb was even reluctant to take it to that kind of an operation because he said, just as you were mentioning, "It's not like you c- can control what Castro's gonna say or whoever's gonna say. Once they're out of your purview, once they've taken this, you don't know what they're gonna do. He might start saying, 'We need to start nuking the United States or something.'" So, you know, he, he was kind of against that.

   14. CWChris Williamson52:26

       Mm.

7. 52:27 – 1:01:14

   Did MKUltra Create Anything Useful?

   1. CWChris Williamson52:27

      Okay. So were there actually any operations used outside of experiments? Did MKUltra produce anything operationally useful?

   2. JLJohn Lisle52:38

      Yeah, i- it did in, in a couple instances. There, there were interrogations done with some of these methods, and in some instances, it seems like the interrogations were successful, in some maybe not. But there are, there are reports, you know, that I talk about in the book about some of these interrogations and what was done, but also the one operation that really comes out of this is, ironically, exactly what I was just talking about that actually went forward, except it wasn't Fidel Castro. It was the President of the Philippines. He was running for re-election. He seemed to be maybe sympathetic to the communists, so how can we get him to lose his election? It turns out that the CIA sent some LSD to Manila. They had someone at least try to slip some, uh, some of it into his water before a political rally to make him appear insane. There were several other, other operations that went into the field, although most of them were unsuccessful. Sidney Gottlieb was involved in multiple assassination attempts. One of those was on Patrice Lumumba, who was the Prime Minister of the Congo. Eisenhower wanted Lumumba eliminated, so word went from Eisenhower to Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, down to Richard Bissell, who was the head of the department Gottlieb was in, down to Sidney Gottlieb, and they basically said, "How can we covertly assassinate Patrice Lumumba without anyone realizing that it was us?" Because it's easy to kill someone, you know, you just drop a bomb on 'em and they're dead, but it's hard to kill someone without implicating yourself, and that's what the CIA was trying to do. So what Gottlieb did was procure some anthrax from Fort Detrick, that biological warfare installation. He personally took it to the Congo and he gave it to, uh, a CIA agent, a station chief who was there, and said basically, you know, "We want you to slip this to Lumumba some way." The idea was that we would put it in some toothpaste and then he would brush his teeth with it. You know, the toothpaste would make its way to his bathroom. Lumumba would brush his teeth, he would be infected with anthrax, which occurs naturally, and so he would die from it. That ended up not happening, not least because Lumumba's own friends said that he often didn't brush his teeth because he feared, uh, d- uh, no breath and he did bad breath. So... (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson54:40

      Wow. Okay, so were they... D- they... At no point did they get close to creating a programmed killer of some kind?

   4. JLJohn Lisle54:47

      No, no. The closest I think is the, the, the animal experimentation that I mentioned before where they actually got animals to walk on predetermined paths. They could steer them, and they were talking about, you know, putting biological or chemical materials on them, and in these documents they do say this might have application in human terms, but, y- y- no actual, you know, psychotic killer that could be controlled like a puppet was actually created. In fact, the irony I mentioned earlier about how Charles Manson could have taught s- the CIA something instead of op-

   5. CWChris Williamson55:16

      (laughs)

   6. JLJohn Lisle55:16

      ... the opposite is that you actually... I mean, in a way, mind control is possible. Not through the MKUltra methods of drugs and, you know, esoteric hypnotism or whatever they're doing, but really through the classic methods of cult manipulation. And one model that I think is useful for thinking about this is called the BITE model by Stephen Hassan. It... B-I-T-E. It stands for behavior, information, thought, and emotion, so these are four kind of methods of manipulation that typical cult leaders use in order to get their followers to do and believe certain things. So behavior control, you know, the B in BITE, would be something like controlling what clothes someone wears, where they can go, who can, who they can talk to, what they can eat, when they can sleep. Uh, information control, the I in BITE, is, like, feeding them cult propaganda and teaching them to distrust non-cult sources of information. So it's not just that you completely prevent them from observing things from the outside world. That's not really realistic, but you can teach them to not trust it when they do encounter it, so that's the information control. The T in BITE is thought control, so saying prayers, singing hymns, repeating mantras, um, um, I mean, that kind of thing. And then the E in, uh, BITE is emotion control, so making them feel certain emotions like, um, uh, making them beholden to the cult- cult through guilt, shame, anger, fear, that kind of thing. Um, those are methods of coercion that have-

   7. CWChris Williamson56:42

      Way more effective than...

   8. JLJohn Lisle56:43

      But way more effective. Now, it is the case that you- it might not necessarily work on any individual person, so the I- you know, the goal of a Manchurian Candidate is, "We can, you know, hypnotize or drug this person, anyone, and make them do anything we want." That's not necessarily possible with a BITE model, but with a large enough kind of cohort, there are people within that who might be very susceptible and suggestible, and then it might work on them in particular even though it might not work on everyone.

   9. CWChris Williamson57:08

      Did any of the research that they went through influence torture techniques or enhanced interrogation-y stuff for the future?

   10. JLJohn Lisle57:19

       This is another kind of ironic thing, because people have known for a long time that torture doesn't really work to get the truth. It'll make someone talk, you know? I mean, it's... (laughs) The- a quote that I use in the book is, "If you have a blowtorch up someone's butt..." this is from an intelligence officer, "... they're gonna talk." I mean, you can guarantee they'll say something. You just can't guarantee it's the truth. Yeah, I talk about the witch tri- uh, kind of the wi- European witch craze in the 17th century briefly, talking about how, you know, you could put these witches on the rack and they would talk. They would say that anyone's a witch. There were these two Jesuit scholars, um, who said that, "You know, torture is really effective," and so someone took them down to see these witches on the rack, and he said, "Another turn of the rack. Do you think these are warlocks?" And she said, "Yes, I've seen them birth devil babies and all st- kinds of stuff." And so they were kinda convinced, okay, maybe torture just gets people to talk but not say the truth. So it's long been known that torture can be used to get people to say something but you don't know what they're gonna say or they- they'll basically say anything. For MKUltra, the idea was that we, we wanted to move beyond that. We wanted to find methods of manipulation that could be used to guarantee the truth without having to resort to a method that would make someone say anything. The irony is that when MKUltra failed, it's not that the CIA learned its lesson and then moved on to some- something else. It reverted back to torture. It reverted back to tor-

   11. CWChris Williamson58:33

       (laughs)

   12. JLJohn Lisle58:33

       This is the thing that we were trying to move away from, and now you go-

   13. CWChris Williamson58:36

       This fucking-

   14. JLJohn Lisle58:36

       ... back to it.

   15. CWChris Williamson58:36

       ... medieval solution. "Well, we tried the LSD. It didn't work. Where's the rack? Have we still got the rack around? Can we grab the, bring r- b- roll the rack out?"

   16. JLJohn Lisle58:44

       Yeah, and, uh, you know, I, I mention kind of the euphemisms of the CIA within this book. Torture isn't torture, of course. It's enhanced interrogation, and assassination isn't assassination. It's, you know, uh, executive action or it's, uh, targeted killing.

   17. CWChris Williamson59:00

       Mm.

   18. JLJohn Lisle59:00

       Or y- within the CIA, the group that was responsible for plan- plotting these assassinations was known as the Health Alteration Committee.

   19. CWChris Williamson59:07

       (laughs)

   20. JLJohn Lisle59:07

       So, you know, a lot of... Yeah, a lot of these euphemisms throughout.

   21. CWChris Williamson59:17

       Oh.

   22. JLJohn Lisle59:17

       In fact, I end the book by saying, "The irony..." I'm e- the last chapter of this book is History Loves Irony. Listeners may be noting that I'm using the word irony a lot because this book is so full of it, and history really does love irony. But one of the great ironies of MKUltra is that it was basically unsuccessful at developing methods of mind control, and yet within conspiracy circles, it has become the very definition of mind control. A- anytime someone talks about brainwashing or whatever, it's always, "This must be an MKUltra plant," or, "Britney Spears is being controlled by the CIA through MKUltra methods." It's like, (laughs) you, you haven't, you haven't read much about MKUltra if you think it was that successful. It really wasn't.

   23. CWChris Williamson59:54

       Right. Well, or maybe that's a double fake-

   24. JLJohn Lisle59:57

       It could be.

   25. CWChris Williamson59:58

       ... for you-

   26. JLJohn Lisle59:58

       Yeah. Of cour-

   27. CWChris Williamson59:59

       ... John.

   28. JLJohn Lisle59:59

       Well, see-

   29. CWChris Williamson59:59

       So the-

   30. JLJohn Lisle59:59

       ... this is, this is... I... In the last chapter of the book, I talk about conspiracy theories that come off of MKUltra, and one of the techniques these conspiracy theorists use... Thir- there are two things that lead MKUltra become a very, to become a very popular conspiracy theory. One is that in the 1970s when Sidney Gottlieb was retiring from the CIA, and also Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, they retired at the same time, they destroyed many of the MKUltra files. They incinerated them because they didn't want anyone to know what they were- had been up to. Because they did this, it's not as if we don't have files on it. We still have a lot. But because they did this, it opens the door for anyone to paint MKUltra as anything they want to. "Well, we don't know what was in those files. Therefore, MKUltra..." I mean, these are actually conspiracies. MKUltra hosted human hunting expeditions for government officials where they would hunt people, or...... you know, pop stars are MKUltra mind controlled and there's child sex slaves and all kinds of stuff. But because the files, many of them were destroyed, who knows? Maybe that's in there. So this is the technique of the conspiracy theorist. Can they prove any of that? No, they don't offer any documentary evidence, nothing, so they can't prove it, but also they say, "Well, you can't disprove me because, uh, tell me that I'm- show me that I'm wrong." Like, it's not proven, but it can't be disproven. It's non-falsifiable. It's kinda like, what the point? What's the point?

8. 1:01:14 – 1:09:30

   The Downfall Of MKUltra

   1. JLJohn Lisle1:01:14

      (laughs)

   2. CWChris Williamson1:01:15

      Yeah. Okay, so when do things start falling apart internally?

   3. JLJohn Lisle1:01:19

      Yeah. In the... So MKUltra ends in 1963 about and several of the sub-projects continue into the late '60s through a pro- program called MKSearch, which was kind of like a continuation of MKUltra into the late '60s. Um, but by that point, Sidney Gottlieb had moved on. He had become the head of the Technical Services Division, kind of the- the- what came after the TSS, the TSD, and he was in charge of creating those gadgets and disguises and documents and stuff for the CIA for a while. So he- M- MKUltra kind of floundered after that, and in fact in 1963 there was an internal CIA Inspector General report on MKUltra and the Inspector General, John Earman, he says in the report that, i- his words, "This is illegal and unethical." Okay? (laughs) So- so it didn't last too much longer after that, and then in the 1970s Gottlieb and Richard Helms retired, and they were kind of the main champions of it within the CIA.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:02:12

      Right. How does this all become litigious? Uh, when-

   5. JLJohn Lisle1:02:17

      Yes. (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson1:02:18

      ... when- when do the courts get involved?

   7. JLJohn Lisle1:02:20

      Yeah, the courts get involved really in the late '70s, but the reason why that happens is because in the late 1974 and into '75, there are several executive and Congressional committees that are set up to investigate past abuses of the intelligence community. So the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee. There are some leaks out of the CIA and on the front page of The New York Times they start publishing, in late 1974, reports about how the CIA was been- has spied on anti-war protestors during the Vietnam War. And so these C- Congressional committees were set up to investigate past abuses of the CIA and one of those is MKUltra. So during these investigations it comes out that the CIA had been involved in these unwitting drug experiments. That prompts several Congressional hearings to launch investigations, so Sidney Gottlieb is subpoenaed. He's in- in India at that point, after he's retired. His wife had been grown up in India, uh, had grown up there, and they were volunteering at a leper colony and he gets subpoenaed. He comes back to the United States and in exchange for testifying, his lawyer works out a deal- a deal whereby he is granted immunity for anything that he says in exchange for his testimony. So he's never held accountable for what he does. He has immunity for it. But that's when this starts coming out, and once that starts coming out, many of the victims of these MKUltra sub-projects realize that, "Wait a second, I didn't know... uh, you know, I was- I was involved in that project. I didn't know that it was funded by the CIA," and so they start suing the CIA. Uh, there are multiple lawsuits. One is from a group of prisoners from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where Carl Pfeiffer was dosing them with LSD especially, and so they sue the CIA but eventually it's dismissed because the statute of limitations the judge, uh, says has run out, so they don't get anything. And then the other more successful lawsuit is that Oerlikow lawsuit. The victims of Ewen Cameron, his experiments in Montreal, about eight or nine of them eventually sue the CIA. They're represented by th- this famous civil rights attorney, Joseph Rauh, and his law partner, James Turner, and as part of this lawsuit, Rauh and Turner take the depositions of many of these people, n- not only the victims but the perpetrators as well, and that's how I got them. Except this lawsuit was settled out of court for $750,000 to be split among the plaintiffs and, uh, the- the depositions were never submitted at trial and so they were in Rauh's papers where I found them.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:04:36

      Oh, wow! So is that, uh, $750,000, is that the largest payout that comes off the back of all of this? Is that the- the lion's share of the r-

   9. JLJohn Lisle1:04:48

      It's- it's tied for it, um, because Frank Olson's family, remember he was dosed bu- uh, with LSD at that Deep Creek Retreat and he died. His family after th- in the 1970s, they realized during these Congressional investigations that, "Wait a second, they're talking about an army employee who jumped out of this window and he died. That- that sounds a lot like our, you know, husband or our father." And so they eventually threaten a lawsuit against the government, but in order to prevent that from happening, the Gerald Ford administration invites them to the White House. Gerald Ford, the President, personally meets with them and basically apologizes on behalf of the government and they work out a deal whereby the family got $750,000 in exchange for an agreement not to sue the government. So they got $750,000 as well, um, yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:05:33

       Wow. What made the secrecy of all this so self-sustaining when it came to the way that this was all operated?

   11. JLJohn Lisle1:05:41

       Yeah. There are several factors within the CIA that allowed this to continue, I think. There was very little internal oversight, so one of those is that the CIA was very highly compartmentalized, so very few people actually knew what was going on with MKUltra. We think of the CIA as this entity and there's all these people and surely they're working behind the scenes, and that is the case for the most part, but it's not as if they all know what each other is doing. So i- for MKUltra there might have been a dozen people who even knew about this project within the CIA. So when you have that much compartmentalization, it means that there's less accountability because there's less people to put you in check. So that's one problem that allowed this to happen, is just the highly compartmentalized nature, which in a sense is a necessary kind of evil to a degree because the CIA does have to keep secrets. I mean, it- it has to have some secrets, it's just the amount of how- how much should be kept secret and how much- how m- many people should know about any particular thing. Of course, that's on a spectrum, but it's got to keep some, but that secrecy allows it to avoid accountability in many instances. So that's one factor. Another factor would be the lack of a record, the lack of a paper trail, mostly because Gottlieb and Helms destroyed many of these files, even though a lot still exist.... and they were never punished for it. They were never punished for it, so it was, there was no accountability for that.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:06:59

       Hang on, so Gottlieb, Gottlieb got immunity, but what about the other guy?

   13. JLJohn Lisle1:07:02

       Richard Helms? He, I mean, nothing happened to him because of this. He eventually got, um, he eventually got in trouble for perjury in front of Congress for something unrelated. He said that we weren't-

   14. CWChris Williamson1:07:13

       Oh, for fuck's sake.

   15. JLJohn Lisle1:07:14

       Yeah. (laughs) He said that we weren't doing something, meddling in this foreign country, I, I forget exactly what it was, but it turns out he just lied to Congress, and he got convicted of perjury for that. But, (laughs) yeah. Yeah. So, those are a f- a few factors within the CIA that en- enabled this to continue going without anyone putting a stop to it. And the reason why I think it continued for so long especially and there wasn't much accountability, is what I call kind of the vicious cycle of secrecy. There was very little Congressional oversight of the CIA during the Cold War. In fact, many Congresspeople specifically said they didn't wanna know what was going on in the CIA. I think this was a holdover from a World War II mentality, where Congress didn't really know much about the Manhattan Project. They kinda just approved the funds for the Army to do kinda whatever. And so, after the war, it seemed like that was a good idea. It was good that we didn't know this was going on.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:08:05

       We had so much success, we just finished the war with it.

   17. JLJohn Lisle1:08:07

       Exact- yeah. It's great we didn't know because we might have shut it down. W- it's great that we let these scientists do this thing because it can end the war for us. That mentality carried over. And the idea was that, well, within the CIA or the Army, maybe it's in our best interest not really to peek into those nooks and crannies, into the dark corners, and see what they're doing, because maybe they're working on something that we don't know whether we should put a stop to something or not. We're just gonna let them do what they do. And so, there was very little Congressional oversight during the Cold War. I think that allowed this lack of accountability, this, um, this secrecy to encompass the CIA and allow them to do these unethical things. And kind of the, the vicious cycle of secrecy I mentioned is the idea that when you have an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that inevitably leads to plausible deniability because no one can really know what you're up to, therefore, I mean, you can always say you didn't do something you did. Who's gonna find out? It's secret. Plausible deniability, in turn, it leads to reckless behavior, again, because you're not gonna be held accountable for what you do. Reckless behavior, in many instances, like with MKUltra, it leads to embarrassment, because eventually something leaks out, someone finds out, they put it in the New York Times, and we're embarrassed for what happened because they found out we were actually doing these unethical things. Then embarrassment leads to secrecy because we've made-

   18. CWChris Williamson1:09:23

       (laughs)

   19. JLJohn Lisle1:09:23

       ... gotta make sure no one does this again. We can't have this leak out. We need more secrecy. So, that's kind of the vicious cycle that plays out, I think.

9. 1:09:30 – 1:14:44

   The “Project Monarch” Conspiracy Theory

   1. JLJohn Lisle1:09:30

   2. CWChris Williamson1:09:30

      What does this sort of grow into? Are there, are you aware of any more similar programs that occur after MK... Obviously, MKUltra sort of tries to limp forward in a variety of other forms. Uh, uh, after that, is it all just secrecy and, and s- uh, nothing's got out?

   3. JLJohn Lisle1:09:52

      I, I, I don't think anything like MKUltra itself was, uh, happening really after the late 1960s. The conspiracy theorists listening to this will say, "No, it's still going on, MKUltra." One, one conspiracy theory is called Project Monarch. They say this is, uh, a kind of a sub-project of MKUltra, that, you know, it's still going on, and they're recruiting these children from certain families to have, um, uh, they call them multi-generational incest-abused children. They wanna give them multiple personalities to make them disassociate from what's happening to them, so they're easier victims of these sex, uh, pedophiles or whatever it is.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:10:29

      Okay.

   5. JLJohn Lisle1:10:29

      Um, but the first mention that I can find of this Project Monarch, which didn't exist, is in a journal called Phoenix. Um, it's this conspiracy journal, and the journal itself claims to have been written by a nine-foot-tall alien from the Pleiades star system. So, I don't really put much stock in that, um, but that, it seems to be kinda where this idea originated. One of the most prominent MKUltra conspiracy theorists who, uh, champions this kinda Project Monarch thing, she wra-... after that came out, a couple months later, she published an article in that journal saying, "Oh, I've been one of these, I've been one of the victims of Project Monarch." But I don't think that's true at all. Now, I think, i- ironically, I think she is a victim, though. I don't think she's a victim of MKUltra. She wrote a book, uh, about her supposed experience, and in that book, it's co-authored by her husband. And her husband was a member of what's called the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. It was like this pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory society that was championing Satanic p- panic theories during the 1980s. Um, in, during that Satanic panic, there were, um, this kind of false memory syndrome that was going around, the idea that if we hypnotize someone, it might induce their, uh, that they might recall these repressed memories. In fact, it was, like, inducing false memories in people. And he s- he says in this book that he did this hypnotism on her, and he was able to recover these memories, but I don't think he recovered the memories. I think those memories were basically implanted by her trying to r- think of something that happened to her that didn't actually happen.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:11:58

      Well, the crazy thing is if you want to give someone multiple personality disorder, you don't need to deliver them drugs or a CIA program. You just need to let them download TikTok-

Episode duration: 1:16:28