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

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.

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.

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."

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.