Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle

0:01 Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. >> The Joe Rogan Experience. >> TRAIN BY DAY. JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY NIGHT. All day. >> John, [music] what's happening, man? >> Not much. It's >> very nice to meet you. >> You, too. Thanks for having me. >> 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 MK Ultra and >> Yes. He has gotten the rights to this to this book, you know, this book Project Mind Control, and he's Yeah. interested in adapting it into a series. >> 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 now. I'm like, let's go. So, here we go. Project Mind Control, Sydney, Sydney Gotautleb, the CIA, and the tragedy of MK Ultra, which really is

0:48 a tragedy. 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'Neal's book. Have you read that? >> Oh, yeah. >> And uh when you realize what the MK Ultra program involved and how long it ran and how insane it is and it essentially had no oversight and these people were just running these wild mine experiments on American citizens and >> nobody went to jail for it. >> Yeah, that 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 [snorts] of MK Ultra in society, but also just what happened to these people afterwards. The victims of MK Ultra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA and basically really

1:34 nothing much came out of it. They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MK Ultra, >> 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 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'd delve into that pretty deeply. >> How did you get interested in the subject? Like what was your in introdu in introduction to it? I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people because I didn't know that much about MK Ultra. 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

2:23 had connections to the intelligence community. They were called the science attaches out of the state department. The state department would send these science attaches 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. >> And from that I learned about, you know, Sydney Gotautle, but also mostly my initial interest was this man named Stanley Levelvel who >> was essentially the Sydney Gotautle of the OSS. So prior to the CIA, 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 Levelvel was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the

3:10 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 >> fun stuff. >> Oh yeah. my my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Levelvel and that group and one of the things they do are drug experiments in truth drug experiments trying to find out whether it's possible to give someone, 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 Sydney Gotautly is one of the deponents who would later lead MK Ultra. And in these depositions, he was talking about how when he was assigned to be in charge of MK Ultra, he

3:55 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 Levelvel was doing. And so, I thought that's the connection between Stanley Levelvel, my first book, and now this one. So, that naturally led me into becoming interested in MK Ultra. So, a a lot of the things that Sydney got was up to with MK Ultra, his blueprint was basically Stanley level. 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." And that's where you start from, right? It's not like Sydney Gotautle was some expert hypnotist or really was a psychologist or really understood human minds. >> No, they they started a program going, "What can we do? How can we [ __ ] with people's minds? How can we figure out how to control people's minds?" And they

4:45 did it for decades. Yeah. Yeah. So, >> and they're probably still doing it now. >> Well, even before MK Ultra, so there are a couple programs that precede it. I mean, you know, so during World War II, the OSS was already doing truth 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 get high. >> They would get high and the truth. >> Well, >> supposedly >> supposedly the idea [laughter] was that it lowers their inhibitions and so maybe they'll be more immunable to talking. >> Oh, that's hilarious. Just gave them spliffs. Yeah, exactly. >> They basically gave him split. That's a European smoke. >> 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 against marijuana and at the same time he's overseeing these experiments about dozing people

5:32 with THC. So it's very ironic that that was the case. >> It's it's really stunning the kind of damage those people did to just our trust in government. what we, you know, just 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 of all these there's there's so much negative impact to what they did on top of what they did. They essentially created Ted Kazinski. >> Well, I I'm I'm a little >> Are you on the fence on that? >> I'm a little skeptical of whether MK Ultra is connected to that. Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments that did at Harvard. And I don't imagine they would do that without the involvement of the government. >> Yeah. Well, >> without them wanting to have access to

6:20 research. If you have people at Harvard that doing like really critical LSD studies on people, humiliation studies. >> Yeah. Well, with with him in particular, he he the the study that he was involved in was Henry Murray was the guy who was running that is like a psychological experiment about I think it was interpersonal relationships where he would basically interrogate them and berate them and see how they reacted to it. Now Henry Murray who ran that experiment with Ted Kazinski, he did have connections to the intelligence community. I just am not convinced that he had was funded by MK Ultra or something. His connection, >> he has a couple of connections. One connection that I mentioned in my first book, the dirty tricks department, he was tasked with creating psychological profiles of German leaders like Hitler. And so the idea was that he would kind of figure out what their psychology was and maybe we could find ways to exploit

7:07 that psychology. So Stanley Levelvel, who is the head of this R&D branch of the OSS, he read Henry Murray's psychological profile of Hitler and he decided maybe I can figure out a way to kind of drive Hitler crazy by using this. So Henry Murray, Henry Murray said that Hitler had a very feminine kind of personality. He was on the border between masculine and feminine. And you know, at least that's what Henry Murray is saying in this psychological profile. Stanley level reads that and he thinks maybe I can exploit this by getting one of the gardeners near the Eagle Nest where Hitler often had some meetings. There were some gardeners down there. We can get an agent to slip a gardener some female sex hormone and that gardener [laughter] that gardener can inject it into the beets that are destined for Hitler's plate. Hitler's going to eat it and it's going to like exacerbate this feminine tendency and it's going to make him go

7:54 crazy or something like that. That was the plan that never went actually happened but that so Henry Murray is kind of connected to the OSS in that sense. And then later he develops some personality tests for the OSS and CIA. I believe it was for recruits to give these to recruits to determine whether they kind of have the psychological profile file that would be amanable to being in an intelligence organization. >> Did you re see that they recently uh did a scan of some blood that was found in Hitler's bunker and they determined that he has a very unusual gene expression. Can you find out what that is? It's it's something that would lead to him potentially having a micro penis. >> Yeah. Which is [laughter] the, you know, like the most obvious psychological profile ever. A guy wants

8:40 to destroy everything in the world. He's got a tiny dick. Like >> maybe Henry Murray was on to something. [laughter] >> Look at Yeah, I'm sure he was. Hitler's DN I'm sure there was something some research behind it. Like somebody must have said something about him. >> Yeah. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that. I didn't know that. >> Hitler's DNA reveals Nazi leader likely had syndrome that can affect genitals. Researchers say um according to the Cleveland Clinic, the syndrome can disrupt the process that drives puberty and manifest in symptoms that include uh undescended testicles and a micropenis. Isn't that wild? >> Yeah, [laughter] it is. >> Which totally makes sense. Like we should kill everyone with a micro penis. They're too dangerous. >> It is, you know, maybe uh useful to be careful about correlation and causation. A lot of people probably have this and that doesn't cause them people out there. [laughter] I'm just kidding. Obviously, it was like the nicest people out there that just happen to have a

9:27 micro penis and it actually, you know, maybe his temperament. I don't know. >> Well, he was also on a bunch of drugs, you know, he had like a special doctor that just worked for him. >> Those videos of him at sporting events or whatever. He's like back and forth. It's incredible. >> 1936 Olympic just completely out of his mind on something. Have you read Norman O's book? Uh, >> Blitz. >> Blitz? Um, yes. I I don't know if I've read the whole thing. I know I dipped into it. I can't remember if I >> It's insane. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. >> Yeah, it [laughter] is. >> That the entire Nazi army was methed out of their minds. >> Yeah. And you know what these there are a lot of LSD experiments after World War II within the CIA and MK Ultra, of course, but also Army LSD experiments that aren't really connected to MK Ultra, so I don't go into them that much in this book, but there are, you know, the British are doing LSD experiments on

10:15 their personnel. The US military does, too. And you know it it's just some of the stories that come out of it are very silly and really just insane. But there were there is one document I found that talks about how they were giving these two army personnel, these two soldiers LSD to see how they reacted to it. And so each each of them took the LSD. They were in like a padded room isolated with each other so nobody else was there. And they started hallucinating. And one of them pretended to like start smoking a cigarette. And he didn't actually have a cigarette. He had nothing, you know, but he just pretended to smoke a cigarette. And the other guy was off in his own world. And then the first guy, he reached into his pocket and took out an imaginary pack of cigarettes. He didn't actually have one. It was just an empty hand, but he was just hallucinating that there was one. And he reached it out to the other guy basically to offer, "Hey,

11:02 do you want a cigarette?" And the other guy looked at it and he said, "No, I couldn't take your last one." It was [laughter] just an empty hand. There was nothing. >> No, I couldn't take this shared hallucination or something. >> Wow. Wow. I mean, also back then, we didn't really know too much about that stuff. So, they were kind of gathering information about what would happen if you gave someone LSD. >> Yep. That that was that's kind of the motivation for MK Ultra in the first place. There are several motivating factors. One of them is how do we get prisoners to speak during an interrogation? Maybe there's some maybe there is some kind of truth drug that can get them to tell us the secrets that we want to know. Another is maybe we can use this to discredit individuals like Fidel Castro. Let's say we dose him with LSD before a big speech. He appears to

11:48 be crazy and his people are going to lose trust in him because he's he's making nonsense. You know, he's just talking gibberish. >> Was that proposed? >> Oh yeah. Yeah. That there were proposed a plan to put LSD into cigars that would sneak into Castro's kind of place that he would smoke before he gave a speech. >> What I don't understand about that is they were trying to kill him. So if they couldn't get poison into his cigars, why do they think they could get acid? The original plan was to discredit him and then the later plan was to kill him. >> Yeah. So there were a couple original plans to discredit him. One is to sneak him LSD to make him appear insane so that his people would lose faith in him. Another one was to slip what's called thallium salts into his shoes. And these are depilatories. They make your hair fall out. And so the idea was that, you know, he's got this mascul masculine allure with his big beard, but if we can slip these dilatorries into his shoes and he puts them on, his beard's going

12:37 to fall out and like Samson, he's going to lose his power or something like [laughter] that was the idea. So Sydney Gotley was kind of involved in some of these that I talk about in the book. Uh, another one, so you have the LSD, you have the depilatory. Another one was to photoshop images basically of Castro with a bunch of beautiful women around him and like a buffet of food in front of him and to have a captain underneath it that said, "My ration is different." to indicate like I'm getting all the benefits of, you know, this uh you know, the spoils of society while my people are going hungry. And so, you know, the idea was to spread this around Cuba and have people resent Castro for indulging in all these. >> Well, that one's actually reasonable, >> right? >> A little bit more than the other two. >> That one's probably the closest to accurate. >> Yeah. [snorts] So th those were attempts to discredit Castro and then there were several attempts to assassinate him that Sydney got and others involved kind of in this story do. So some of the main

13:28 assassination attempts on Castro involved his hobby of ocean diving. So he liked to dive in the ocean. And one idea was that what if we get this really beautiful shell that he would just be unable to pass up. It would be so beautiful that if anyone swam by it, they would obviously want to pick it up. We pack the shell full of explosives and put it on have some kind of trigger mechanism for when you pick it up that detonates the explosives. So when he's underwater, he's going to swim by this. He's gonna see this beautiful shell. He's going to pick it up and it's going to explode. But it turns out they they couldn't really figure out a shell big enough that would catch his interest, you know? So that never happened. Another another concept with his scuba diving hobby is that what if we gift him a scuba diving suit? There are people kind of negotiating for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. So, what if we get one of those lawyers to gift Castro a suit? And in that suit, we

14:16 would lace it with some kind of poison or some kind of fungus that would cause him to break out and what develop some kind of disease. But it turns out the guy that they wanted to give him the suit had already given him a diving suit and so it was like, "Oh, we can't use him anymore." [laughter] >> Wow. And they were the people running it. >> Yeah. >> That was the best they could do. >> Yeah. But it's just the concept of not having any experience whatsoever in any studies about mind control and just given this assignment. What do you know about mind control? What can we do? How much does it work? What did the Nazis learn during World War II? Because they did a lot of experiments, right? >> They're doing a lot of experiments. And it it is, you know, I mentioned the OSS is doing truth drug experiments. The Nazis are doing truth drug experiments

15:03 in their concentration camps as well. And the British are doing some truth drug experiments during World War II as well. >> You can get the British ones online. The the Well, at least the pro postWorld War II ones. Was it [clears throat] 1950s? You can Have you seen the the British LSD studies? Oh, you haven't seen it? >> Uh, no, I don't think >> Oh, it's wonderful. You should watch it. We'll watch it real quick cuz it's kind of hilarious. They start breaking out. They can't You have seen it? >> I think so. The soldiers all in a row and some of them they start laughing. They're in the middle of doing their task and they just start laughing uncontrollably and they sit down. >> Yeah. Well, do you know during I I mentioned those like THC acetate experiments during World War II? [laughter] >> These guys are >> giant smiles on their face. >> Yeah, >> this guy's having a guard go of it. >> Yeah, he he might have been having a a downer or something. >> He had to be removed from the experiment after 35 minutes. Look at the radio

15:50 operator trying to figure out how to work it. [laughter] They just they're just so confused and eventually they just start laying down and just laugh like these guys. These guys just [laughter] Yeah. in these these THC experiments during World War I that guys um you for some of the people they would give them this THC they would smoke it through a cigarette and you know some of the reactions it talked about was it made them just uncontrollably start laughing and it put them in a good mood and like some of the reactions were oh yeah I mean they were just getting these people high and they were reacting to >> it didn't make them tell the truth. Oh, no. >> Of course not. >> It it did actually make them talk more, though, because they they actually recorded these interviews and they would count the number of words per minute

16:38 that these people spoke. And it turns out after they smoked this, they would they would talk about like 40% more words per minute. But it's not that this guaranteed the truth. They were just they were just talking. [laughter] >> They just ramble. >> They're talking about cartoons. >> Yeah. [gasps] It's it just What other drugs did they experiment with? Did they experiment with amphetamines as >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. So um one well I should mention that MK Ultra was broken into 149 sub projects. So >> MK Ultra was the umbrella term and within MK Ultra there were 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 or something like that. One of the main people who is running these studies is a guy at named Harris Isbel at the Lexington narcotic farm. This is where drug drug addicts

17:25 could go um to get treatment for their addiction. Prisoners could go there as well. And whenever Sydney got found a drug that he was interested in, he would basically just give it to Harris Isbel who could try it out on these prisoners to see how they reacted. And then Isbel would write reports back to Gotautle. 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 interrogation, the the withdrawal symptoms. So you get them addicted to heroin and then use the withdrawal symptoms saying, well, if you tell us about this, maybe I'll, you know, give you a little. 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

18:12 them could be used as a potential truth drug. >> The heroin one actually makes sense. I never thought of that. >> Yeah. Well, one of the one of the ironies as well about this experiment that I mentioned, you know, Harris's bell 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 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 a hundred bucks 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. They were supposed to be getting off drugs and yet you're incentivizing them to participate in these drug trials by giving them drugs.

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19:43 Terms apply. Limited time offers subject to change. See visible.com for planned features and network management details. >> Wow. >> Yeah. So that's one of 149 sub projects. >> [laughter] >> Do are you aware that heroin was created as uh it was a substitute for people that were addicted to morphine? >> No. No. >> Yeah. I think Google that that's correct, right? Search that. I'm pretty sure that's correct. Yeah. They they came up with heroin to treat people that were addicted to morphine. >> Which [laughter] you know, well, that's like oxy giving them oxycottton if they're addicted to heroin. It's like the same thing. >> Yeah. >> But getting someone addicted to that and

20:30 then pulling it away from them seems like it would be very effective in terms of like getting getting them to give up information. >> Yeah, that was the idea. And >> so here it is. We put it into our sponsor, Perplexity. Heroin created as a morphine treatment originally developed in the late 19th century as a medical drug that was indeed marketed as an improved non-addictive alternative to morphine and as a cough suppressant. >> Hey, what do you know? >> Yeah. How nuts. Who uh what company came up with it? German bear. There you go. [ __ ] Bear. [laughter] >> I think at the same time they were doing this, they just um find out if it's true that acetime is what's toxic in Tylenol. Correct. I find out if it's true that at the same time they decide that acetamophene was too dangerous.

21:20 >> I think that is Tylenol. What do you mean? Yeah, I mean that the substance, you know, that's Tylenol is the name brand. >> What's the question then? >> Um, did they Poor Jamie, if you hear his voice, ladies and gentlemen, inform the people at home. Poor Jamie got a tooth pulled last night. >> It was It's rough. And he not even Yeah. Excuse me. Last night you were in pain. Today you got a tooth pulled and he's got what looks like a softball stuffed in his cheek. >> Oh man. Um did they did bear decide not to release acetaminophene during the same time period? >> I during um the pandemic I got fascinated with acetamophene because I read this horrible story about this poor lady who got COVID and she was in real

22:05 pain. So she took a bunch of acetto she took a bunch of Tylenol and kept taking it and apparently didn't realize how dangerous it is to overdose on Tylenol and she died of liver poisoning. That's true. >> Yeah. And I was like, "Oh my god, how many people die of liver poisoning?" What's like 500 a year in this country? It's like acidamephin. It's scary stuff. [snorts] Was not being actively held back by bear at the same period that it promoted heroin and aspen. It was simply not yet recognized or marketed the way those drugs were. And it development adoption followed a different path. Existing historical accounts focus more on scientific uncertainty and competing drugs than on deliberate suppression campaign by bear. I don't think I was I don't think they were saying in this uh article that I read that it was a uh that they were suppressing it that they decided not to uh focus on it because it was dangerous. [snorts] Why? Why acetaphin less? Early

22:57 clinicians favored fenicetine and aceta n how does that work? Is that a nylide? >> Acetanylide. Despite their later recognized toxicity and instead acetamophene's advantages, better safety profile at therapeutic doses was not clearly distinguished at first. >> Okay. Anyway, >> well, >> we're getting off track. >> One one Oh, I was just going to say one of the uh ironic things too with some of these MK Ultra 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 going to give it to you and you know it's going

23:43 to make you tell the truth, >> that can lower their defenses in a bit in a in the sense that the person who takes this that that might give them kind of the permission to be able to talk because it makes them think, well, I couldn't have stopped myself. Well, you know, I mean, they gave me this truth drug. of course I'm going to have to say this so I can't be blamed. No one's going to 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. 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. >> That totally makes sense. >> They did the same thing with hypnotism too. Um the hypnotism turned out to be not that effective in at least in 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 Orin. He was one of the psychologists who was one in charge of one of these sub projects. Um but he

24:32 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 going to 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. 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. I couldn't help myself but talk. >> At least that's the idea.

25:20 >> It's just so fascinating to me how much time and effort was spent just studying how to control people's minds and and trying to come up with ways to do it. >> Yeah, >> it must have been really exciting to be them. >> I mean, I think what they did is horrible. I I don't you know, I'm not in any way forgiving MK Ultra for what they did. However, boy, it must have been fun >> just to have no oversight. No one even knows you exist. >> You You kind of get this impression by looking at some of these MK Ultra documents, especially at the beginning before the Frank Olson in incident. 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

26:07 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 just to to I mean their rationale is that well if the Soviets possess some kind of hallucinogenic drug and they were going going to release it into the water supply of a city we need to know how people would react to that because 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. >> Didn't they dose up a town in France? Um, I don't think the CIA was connected to that. I mean, I think it actually was like an urgot poisoning that came from the bread from the I think so. But yeah, there >> but there was some speculation that it was purposeful. >> Yeah, there the the town's called Point Staspree, I believe. But yeah, there were multiple dozens of people who came

26:54 down with hallucinogenic symptoms. They were one guy stripped naked and started running around the street. Multiple people died after this. Um, 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? And so that that kind of lead. That's the justification. So they starting the coffee pots and >> and they're running brothel. >> Oh yeah. Yeah. >> That's the crazy one. Operation Midnight Climax. Look it up, folks, because it's really crazy. They they had their own brothel and they would use two-way mirrors with cameras behind them and they would dose the John's up. They'd give him a drink. Would you like a drink? Have a seat. And they go, "Sure, I'll have a drink." And this poor guy

27:40 getting off of work, has a drink, thinks he's going to be with a prostitute and have some nice sex. Next thing you know, he's just tripping out of his mind while he's being recorded by Jolly West. >> Yeah. 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 mentioned Stanley Levelville and the THC acetate. George White was the guy who was hired to do that in the OSS. Then Sydney God when he's thinking, I need to do these drug experiments for myself. Who am I going to get it to to do it for me? I need someone who has connections to the underworld who has criminal connections. George White was a Bureau of Narcotics officer. And so Gotautle was going through the OSS files. And it turns out, oh, this guy's already done these experiments. I'm going to hire him. So that's how George White eventually gets involved in the CIA stuff. >> Wow. I can't wait for this show. >> [laughter]

28:26 >> cuz David Chase gets a hold of a subject like this. This is good. There's so much room like it's so endlessly fascinating. >> Yeah, I'm I'm really excited. Obviously for me, I mean it's just so lucky that he happened to be interested in this kind of topic. I mean there are a lot of books out there on any number of topics that anyone could be interested in. But the fact that you know I mean I do consider myself extremely lucky. I happen to write this book at the right time and someone happened to be interested at the right time. So yeah, I I can't wait for that to come out. >> Yeah, I'm I'm very happy that you did write this book and I'm very happy that this happening cuz I talk to people about this subject, you know, like normies per se and they they look at you sideways like what did they do? They do what they're responsible for Manson. What? Huh? And it's like oh my god the rabbit hole is so deep. I don't have

29:15 enough battery in my flashlight to take you down this rabbit hole. >> That's one of the things with MK Ultra just in general. I mean, initially reading about this, my first impression is that obviously that that's like a, you know, conspiracy theory or it can't be right, but some conspiracies are true. And the MK Ultra stuff, they actually did this. They were dosing people, using prostitutes behind a one-way mirror. George White sitting on a toilet watching this happen there. You know, I mean, even besides drugs, MK Ultra is involved in a lot of psychological experiments. So, not just LSD. Most people associate MK Ultra 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 Euan Cameron. Have you heard that name before Cameron? Okay, you and Cameron. >> He is a psychiatrist up in Montreal in Canada working at what's called the

30:02 Allen Memorial Institute. And Gotle wanted to expand MK Ultra besides drugs because he already had a lot of people doing drug experiments. So he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques 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 you and Cameron had come up with before the CIA is involved. Um I I should mention you and Cameron is a behaviorist. So he thinks that all behavior is a result of nurture, not nature. 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

30:50 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 slate and then the CIA is really interested in if you could do that then you could form them into whatever. So you and Cameron, his main goal is to try to figure out what can induce enough stress in 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 a therapy session, 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 you and Cameron 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 you you say your mother

31:35 used to say to you." When he rewinded the tape and played it forward, as soon as the woman was kind of 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 break them down to the blank slate and then you can record a positive psychic driving message to build them up into

32:23 whatever image you want them to be. So that was his initial um idea. >> Was it based on anything? It 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 going to start playing these negative tapes to them. >> So it was just his idea. >> It's just his idea. He he was known for doing this kind of thing like kind of spur the moment. In fact, there was one there was one kid basically who had been at this Allen Memorial Institute where you Cameron was. He had eventually had gotten out, but he had tried to commit suicide. And so he was sent back to the Allen Memorial Institute. But the way that he had tried to commit suicide was to close the garage and have the CO2 build up with a running car and then he would, you know, breathe it in and pass out and die. Um, that ended up not

33:08 working. However, when he went back to the Allen Memorial Institute, Euan Cameron thought, you know, his personality seems like a little bit better than it was that when he was here before. Maybe CO2 can like influence someone. And so so he sent out some of his uh some of his assistants to go buy like CO2 canisters and we're going to start like giving this to people. 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 patients as guinea pigs. >> Complete guinea pigs. >> Complete guinea pigs. What was the result with the woman the the woman where they played the negative recordings? >> 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

33:54 cuz I don't know if she's actually named in the documents. So, I don't I don't know. >> Did any of these experiments have a positive effect? Did it work? >> Hardly. Hardly. Hardly. So, that that was >> I shouldn't even say positive. I should say were they effective? >> No. No. For the most part, the people who he did his practice on came out way worse than when they went in. So psychic driving, that's initially what got the CIA interested in Cameron. So it's important to keep in mind it's not that the CIA told Cameron to do this. He's doing this on his own because he thinks he's going to cure mental illness by having this radical breakthrough where we break them down and build them back up and we can build them back up and make them forget their schizophrenia or depression or whatever they have. The CIA reads his article about psychic driving and they think this is the kind of thing we're interested in. So from that point on, they start funding him not only to do psychic driving

34:42 experiments, but also he does um like puts people in chemical comas for months on end. And while they're in these chemical comas, he would put a an audio device next to their pillow playing these psychic driving messages. >> And he would put them in sensory deprivation chambers for weeks. You know, they would have goggles over their eyes, ear muffs 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 is one of the patients of U and Cameron in Montreal. The the sad thing about her especially is she had been a resident in training

35:28 at the Allen Memorial Institute under you and 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 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 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

36:13 admitted to the hospital to another hospital. You and 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 as a patient. And she thought to herself that it's going to be okay. they're not going to do the electric shock to me because you had to sign a consent form in, 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 going to 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

37:02 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 going to 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 >> Was it reversible in any way? Was it >> 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. than her and several of the victims of Yu and Cameron's experiments in the 1980s they

37:51 ended up suing the CIA for supporting you and Cameron. And during those lawsuits, the attorneys who are representing them, they took the depositions of several of the people who were involved in MK Ultra to try to use this during their trial. So they took the depositions of Sydney Gotley, 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. >> Wow. Well, so what was the result of the trial? >> 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

38:37 to be split among them, but you know, after attorneys fees and everything, it doesn't really amount to much anyway. And so, >> you know, they settle out of court, they got a little bit of money, but it never went to trial. And so the these depositions, though, you know, since it never went to trial, these were just in the papers of Joseph Ralph, who's the main lawyer who is 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 Sydney got testifying about what he did in MK Ultra. 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. >> 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 that he thought

39:26 you and Cameron thought it was going to do. In fact, it was destroying people's minds. >> Yeah, maybe some I mean it's just speculation cuz I'm not sure, but that had to have weighed on the consciences. You know, there's in what was called the sleep room. You and Cameron's sleep room. This is where they would do the chemical comas. the one of the nurses I have kind of uh 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 you and 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. >> You and Cameron seems like like a complete madman. Like he was an it almost like too good to be true. Not too too good, but too too like mad scientist

40:12 to be true. Was he on any sort of drugs? >> 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. He thought, I'm going to be the one to win the Nobel Prize in medicine because I'm going to cure all mental illness through this psychic driving or whatever it was. He was going to be the next Sigman Freud. He really had delusions of grandeur just like I think Jolly West did as well. 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 actually work and therefore everyone's going to praise me because I've cured, you know, schizophrenia or whatever it is. I have just I'm just always suspicious of something that has that someone has that kind of access to all sorts of compounds >> like and then you're experimenting on

40:58 people and you know especially with things like amphetamines which do tend to make people a little less empathetic and a little more driven >> you know I I would be very curious to see if he was interested in anything like that. Yeah, I don't remember specifically for him in that case. Um there I mean many of the people who are either running the sub projects or um approving them like Sydney Godly Godly took a lot of LSD. He you know he was when the CIA got LSD before it gave it to other people the first thing they did was try it for themselves to see what actually happened. So Sydney Godly took it multiple times before he ever even gave it to people to understand what it was like. >> Wow. And you know, one of the the physician who was the attending physician the first time he took LSD because they did it in kind of a controlled setting with several other people there, a guy named Harold

41:46 Abramson. And for anyone listening who knows much about the Frank Olsen incident, Frank Olsen is a guy that would later be dosed with LSD. He would go out the hotel window in New York. And Harold Abramson is the guy who Sydney Gotautle and Robert Lashbrook, they took to New York to get treatment from Harold Abramson afterwards. So he had this CIA connection. >> Wow. The the reason why I brought up amphetamines is because uh I I feel like >> it might be the one of the unheralded or undisussed drivers in a lot of like psychopathic behavior that we see in our culture today. >> I think there's there's [clears throat] a lot of people on prescribed amphetamines that operate in a way that is is is very very much like a functional

42:32 >> methhead. You know what I mean? And I would wonder like if you were in charge of doing something this evil, just running experiments where you're destroying people's minds and you're getting no positive results. None of it's working. Yet you continue to do it. And you even do it to people that used to be involved in the program with that poor woman. Like what what's the psychological profile of that guy? Because he's obviously mentally ill, which is fascinating, right? It's fascinating that a mentally ill person is working on a mind experiment program >> because there's no way he's not mentally ill. like to have no empathy to these people that you've tried all this stuff on. And not only has it not been effective and not rid them of mental illness, it's made them far worse. >> Yeah. For Yeah. For you and Cameron, he uh I feel like he definitely lacked empathy, whether that's some kind of

43:17 medically medical thing or whatever. There there are a couple people in the book, I think, who are like that. One of them is you and Cameron. Another is George White, who is in charge of Operation Midnight Climax. He 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 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 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 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

44:03 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. 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 someone was out to get her. 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 Richie.

44:48 And George White did the same thing to him. But um Wayne Richie 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

45:34 grab a couple of my service revolver revolvers. I'm going to 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 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 soers 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 MK

46:21 Ultra 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 Richie starts putting all this together and thinking, I think George White gave me LSD that night at the holiday, you know, party and spike 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 Richie went insane. And it says federal building Christmas party. So he was there at the Christmas party. >> Wow. Imagine being that guy reading that article 30 years later and realizing this guy ruined my life >> for fun. >> Yeah. So he he ended up suing the CIA, but the judge said that he couldn't

47:10 prove that he had been dosed with drugs, so they couldn't rule in his favor. And so that was it. >> Oh Jesus. >> Yeah. But there are I mean there are dozens of stories like that. >> What a [ __ ] psycho. >> What a [ __ ] psycho. Just dosing up the punch bowl, ruining lives. and and he knows how messed up it is because 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 >> God, that this is just what happens with people when they have that kind of unchecked power and no oversight. >> Yeah. >> And they're the kind of psychopaths that would be involved in this sort of experimentation in the first place. >> Yeah. Yeah. No. So, so I think he's probably the most um heinous of the

47:57 individuals in this book. All of them are to a degree. Sydney Gotautle um I think he I I don't think he's 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 MK Ultra 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, Sydney Gotautle doesn't really take any responsibility for what happens to these people. Basically, the way that MK Ultra was structured with these sub projects, Sydney Gotautle 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. Euan Cameron was the head of the

48:45 American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. He was like the most famous psych psychiatrist in the world and he was being funded by this. So Sydney got 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 MK Ultra typically worked. >> Such a diffusion of responsibility. >> Exactly. Got is funding people and he's not even funding them directly in most cases. What's happening is he's using cutout organizations. So he's giving the money to of course >> the one of them's called the geter fund, one of them is called the the National Institutes of Mental Health and then the CIA sets sets up its own cutout

49:33 organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which is [laughter] just a it's just a madeup organization. But um so the the CIA would transfer the funds to the society who would then transfer it to the researcher. In many cases, the researchers didn't even know they were being funded by the CIA. They just thought, "Oh, I got a grant from this organization. That's great." So, they don't even know that their true patron is Sydney Gotly and MK Ultra. They just know, "Oh, they want me to do these experiments." And in many cases, they're allowed to still publish their work, you know. So, you know, they're publishing this. Nothing's changed that much from what they were doing before. Um, but it turns out their patron is actually the CIA who wants to make sure they continue doing these experiments just in case they find something that could be of use. >> Oh my god. What was your journey personally like

50:18 both researching these subjects and and then writing books about it? Because what what how how what what was your opinion on all these things before this and how much of it how how much of it has shaped your worldview? >> Um so with the probably the first book is more formative to the shaping of my worldview just because you know I that was the first one I did. So what what was your perspective before getting involved in any of this material? >> Well, I I'm pretty much uh I would consider myself a skeptic generally, you know, so when stuff gets a little too outlandish, I I am pretty skeptical. Um but of course that the existence of MK Ultra and even in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, there are some there are some projects that are even more outlandish than some of the stuff

51:06 I've been talking about with MK Ultra. And so that kind of lowered my barriers to thinking that, oh, people are crazy here. Like, oh, the the government does actually perform these crazy, you know, projects. One one of the one of the ones that really lowered my barriers to that for the first book was called Operation Fantasia. And again, it's just a testament to the absurdity of some of the ideas that were happening in World War II and with just within the intelligence community. Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of this guy named Ed Salinger and he had been a businessman who had done imports and exports with Tokyo in Tokyo. So he knew Japanese culture, he knew the language, he knew the religious beliefs. The OSS wanted to exploit that by trying to find a way we can we can demoralize the Japanese. You know a lot about the Japanese psyche. The idea was Ed

51:53 Salinger. So figure out a way we can demoralize the Japanese and make them basically give up this war because you know they're dug in. and they're not giving up. We need to find a way that we can basically use psychological warfare on them. So his idea is that in the Shinto religion, there are these kind of mystical figures called kitsuni. And in many cases, they take the form of like a fox, a glowing fox. And oftentimes they represent portants of doom. So you know, if you see one of these kits, it's an indication that something bad is about

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