Part Four: MKUltra: When The CIA Tried to Destroy Free Will

Robert is joined again by Jason Pargin for the final part of our series on Project MKUltra.

 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Oh, Sophie, come on, this is it. This is a
time to celebrate. This is the longest recording session we've
ever had, five hours of c I A drug nonsense.
Here it behind the bastards. The people deserved to hear
me sing. You know, I thought, thank you, thank you

(00:25):
for praising me. I am lives on praise. Jason Pargeon,
how are you doing today? Well, the the vibe has
become so positive here and I'm sure it is among
the listeners too, because we now know that we're nearing
the end of the mk ulture project when everyone was
exposed and got what they deserved. Like it's been a

(00:48):
parade of human misery up till now that all of
the people who instigated this, like we all know, well yeah,
but this is where they all go to jail. This
is where the truth comes to light, where all the
reef forms come into play. So I know it's been
a dark few episodes up to this point, but this
is where it's like, Okay, this is the sunrise, this

(01:08):
is the happy ending. That's right, And and listeners, if
that doesn't wind up happening, I want to tell you
it is Jason Pargeon's fault. Personally that thanks in that way. Jason.
Before we move on, I want to let the listeners
know you are the author of a whole bunch of books,
but you have one that is just now coming out.
If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. It

(01:31):
is the fourth novel in the John Dyes at the
End series, which I started reading when I was like
twelve or thirteen and has had a big impact on
my sense of humor. So I cannot recommend your books enough. Um,
you're ready to ready to close this out? Jason, Yes, absolutely,
all right, let's do it so in between Trists and

(01:52):
San Francisco, UM making use of all of the sex
workers that the CIA was paying for. UM. Gottlieb massively
expanded the CIA a subcontractor program during the late nineteen fifties,
using cutouts, these little fake corporations that he would have
the agency set up create to sponsor research at a
number of different institutions that you probably know today. These

(02:13):
include Massachusetts General Hospital, Ionia State Hospital, Mount Sinai, several
dozen universities including Harvard, Berkeley, m I T, Stanford, and Baylor. UM.
The CIA is carrying out l D tests. They are
drugging people, torturing people, deep patterning them at many of
these different universities. Also, there's sometimes doing weirder stuff, some

(02:36):
of which is less horrible than some of the stuff
we've talked about today. But like if there's a big
hospital or a prominent university, the CIA was probably doing
some ship there. Um, Okay, obvious questions, did these facilities know?
Do these institutions know what was going on? The the
the employees of those institutions who are running the programs

(02:56):
to right these are not The CIA isn't sending agents
into Berkeley or like Baylor to to run things they are.
They are finding doctors and professors who want to carry
out research that is in line with what the CIA
wants to do, and they are paying those people. Now,
some of those professors, those researchers don't know what's the CIA,
and some of this research is stuff that isn't all

(03:19):
that fucked up. It's like, hey, we want to know,
you know how this um this particular pattern of electroshock
therapy might impact people with this you know condition, and
then they'll do the test and you never know. You
go the rest of your life not knowing that You
just conducted research for the CIA. Right, that is some
of this, but it's not most of this. A lot

(03:39):
of these doctors are perfectly aware of what they're doing
and who they're working for, as we're going to make
clear in a little bit. Um. So, Gottlei's objectives at
this point have spread well beyond where things were with
Project Artichoke. Um. During long sessions on LSD with his friends,
he gradually put together a list of the different substances
he wanted to research. He publicly this is a memo

(04:00):
in nineteen fifty five. It included number one substances which
will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where
the recipient would be discredited in public. Number two substances
which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception. Number three
materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effective alcohol.
Number four materials which will promote the intoxicating effective alcohol. Um. Yeah,

(04:30):
let's just think of how such an invention would change
the world. You can get drunk on so much? Will
it be cheaper? Like? Can you imagine if just one
beer could get you as drunk as twelve beers? I
can imagine Jason, like in the movie version of this,
gott Lee like looking over as they're as they're taking

(04:52):
the program apart. They're burning all everything. He like operations
stronger alcohol and like files it away along with these
like last couple of cans that you see gradually like
make their way through The CIA is like underground labs
until they wind up on the shelves of a bodega
in New York City, packaged as for Logo. Yes, operation
for Loco, the CIA is greatest success. So we have

(05:17):
been going through San Francisco and slipping cans of four
Loco too, unbeknownst to the residents there, and observing their behavior.
It's almost like they've had three beers. It's incredible, Sydney,
you've done it again. So got Leave's wish list included
substances that would enhance the efficacy of hypnosis, drugs that

(05:39):
could help people avoid brainwashing, substances that could create pure
euphoria with no crash, which sounds like he just wanted
something to get high on. And here's where things get sketchy, Jason.
Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that
the tendency of the recipient to become a dependent upon
another person is enhanced. So it's a weird mix of things. Um,

(06:02):
that one's pretty scary, but I'm not hearing in there
is the classic Manchurian candidate thing. And by the way,
I don't does everybody listening still know that term? Like
there this is an old movie that we're referencing that's
been remade a couple of times, but it's the classic
thing of it's the brainwashed assassin, the person who doesn't

(06:22):
know they're an assassin, where you can literally program someone
I guess, like Arl Schwarzenegerant told recalled, like go assassinate somebody,
and then there's like a phrase it will activate them
and and like a zombie like form, they will pick
up a gun and go shoot the queen or the
president or whatever. And it's important to note, Jason, I
kind of I probably should have made this more of

(06:42):
a factor in the script. The book The man charryan
candidate and like the movie have a big impact on
this program a lot of Like when that comes out,
it gets them like another wave of interest, and like
Dullis or I think I'm not sure if Dullis is
around with them, but like they and this is like
a regular thing for the CIA, because Leab the thing
he does after him k Ultra is he's the CIA's

(07:03):
gadget man for years, He's making anything they need, and
a lot of times someone will come to him because
they've seen something in a James Bond movie and will
just be like, Hey, Sydney, can we actually like make this, Like, Sydney,
can you put a gun in like a Rolex watch
for me? Hey, Sydney, can we like bulletproof a car
like this? You know? Like that's actually how a lot
of this does this? This does work, um, you know,

(07:26):
and that actually he is much more successful at the
gadgets than he is at the mind control drugs, which again,
as far as we know, he probably doesn't figure out. Um. Obviously,
a lot of this is the result of Gottlieb having
a limitless budget for research and kind of an unlimited
purview for what he can do. His friends and he
would regularly read science fiction stories and spy thrillers, and

(07:47):
then they'd fund experiments to try and create things inspired
by the fiction they were reading. This sometimes led to tragedy,
like the time the CIA funded a study at a
school in Massachusetts to feed mentally handicapped children's serial relaced
with your um. Um, that's pretty bad. That's a that's
a pretty bad thing to do. Say that sentence again.
The CIA funded a study at a school in Massachusetts

(08:09):
to feed mentally handicapped children serial laced with uranium to
what end. Well, that's a good question, Jason. The official
purpose of the study, which was also conducted at Harvard
again on mentally handicapped little kids, was to study whether
or not cereal interfered with iron and calcium uptake in children.
Like that is the official story. We don't know why

(08:31):
the CIA would particularly be interested in doing that. They
may have had a different reason for doing it than that,
and then come up with an excuse. We really don't know, um.
And the only way to find out this thing they
wanted to know about cereal uranium feed them radioactive serial. Okay, Yeah,

(08:55):
there's versions of this that are normal, where like people
will be given you know, radio active in like a
way that is not going to be harmful because it
like allows you to tell how stuff is passing through
your system. I'm not it's it's higher contrast image. It's
so yeah, so that it can be okay, but this
does this was much more harmful than that. And again
it's possible that, for whatever reason, Gottlieb actually did just

(09:19):
want to know does serial hurt iron and calcium uptake?
But it's one of those things. These were studies that
were conducted openly by the schools. It was later that
people found out the CIA was like helping to make
it happen, and we don't. We simply don't know exactly
why they were involved. Um So that's cool. You can

(09:40):
come up with your own conspiracy theories about that one.
Um Alan Dules remained peripherally involved, treating MK Ultra like
an occasional pet project. Sometimes he took it rather more seriously.
When his son suffered a severe head injury fighting in Korea,
he started talking to specialists at psychiatric clinics. This brought
him to a neurologist named Harold Wolf who worked at

(10:01):
Cornell and I'm gonna quote from Kinser's Poisoner in Chief here.
Wolf shared Doulus's fascination with the idea of mind control.
He had developed a theory woven from various disciplines that
a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation could wipe the
mind clean and then open it to reprogramming. He called
this human ecology. Delis thought that Wolf might be useful
to the CIA and sent him to Gotleap. Wolf was

(10:24):
eager for CIA sponsorship. He wrote several research proposals for Gotleap.
In one, he proposed placing people in isolation chambers until
they became receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist, showed
an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure,
and broke down to the point where doctors could create
psychological reactions within them. In another, he offered to test
special methods of interrogation, including threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing,

(10:50):
black psychiatry, hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without
chemical agents. Now, if you're a psychia wrist and you
are offering to do something and you call it black psychiatry,
maybe you're the bad guy, right that might want that
might be your hint. Um. Yeah. And the funny thing is,

(11:14):
of all the things that scientology claims, yeah, the stuff
about the dark origins of psychiatry is the one thing
where they do have something that there's not nothing to it, right, Yeah,
it is there. They do not it's not it is.
It is not unfair to say that an awful lot
of influential psychiatrists did unspeakable things as part of a

(11:37):
government conspiracy to create mind control. That is a thing
that happened, that is documented, that is historical fact. It
was was maybe a little too easy to find people
who were like, yeah, of course I'll do this for
the country, right, sure, of course, yeah for America. UM.
So Wolfe told Gottlieb that he had a constant supply

(11:58):
of patients who he'd be happy to experiment on secretly
for the c I a UM. Gottlieb was very happy
to make this deal, and the CIA sent a hundred
and forty thou dollars to Cornell University officially so wolf
could study quote changes in behavior due to stress brought
about by actual loss of cerebral tissues. After a year
or so of drugging people without their consent, wolf made

(12:20):
a proposition to Gottlieb. If the CIA would fund his
creation of an institute that would act as a funding
hub for all of their in k ultra sub projects
um or he would let it. He would use it
to act as a funding hub for all their sub projects.
The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology carried out
hundreds of sub projects for the agency. One involved a
hundred Chinese refugees who were promised fellowships to help them

(12:43):
start life in the United States. In reality, they were
drugged to see if they could be programmed to go
back to China and commit acts of terrorism. So the
book The man Charian Candidate is about a bunch of
like Americans who get captured by the Chinese and then
sent back to the United States having been secretly programmed
to do, you know, damage the United States. In reality,

(13:06):
the CIA read that book and then we're like, what
if we did that to China, wouldn't that be cool.
Let's use refugees and give them acid to see if
we can do this. Um, So that's neat. Jason, there
you go. I have no no, I have nothing to
say to that, because again, if they had just gone
to if they had just gone to this group or

(13:27):
any group this is not specific to you know, Chinese refugees,
but any group of desperate people and said hey, this
is what we in America call a suitcase full of cash,
which one of you in exchange for this hates your
government enough that you will go blow something up and
you will be You'll have this and this this, you

(13:47):
see this sports car park behind me, that will also
be yours. Uh in all of these sex workers and
we've we've hired Yeah well yeah, I mean, like again,
you could appeal to like, yeah, do you want do
you want to be rich and like have access to sex,
or like, hey, you're probably gonna die doing this, but
we'll make sure your family has taken care of forever.
They'll move into a nice house tomorrow, they'll never have

(14:09):
to work again. Just go do this terrorism for us
over in China. Yeah, you'd find people. You don't have
to give them l s D. It's not going to help. Yeah, yeah,
like government again, governments have done versions of this forever
um without randomly dosing refugees with LSD. But that's what
the CIA does so well, and that's what Cornell University does.

(14:31):
One of the things again, one of the through lines
here is that an awful lot of the most prestigious
universities have highly placed faculty who are immediately like, yeah,
let's do it um now. While mk ultras different subprojects
were dizzying in their variety, the primary goal was always
very clear to develop a repeatable, efficient method of mind control.

(14:53):
This was expressed in various ways, the quest for a
perfect truth serum, the quest for a drug that could
eliminate memories or rewrite, the methods by which people could
be reprogrammed to carry out actions against their old moral
beliefs in political allegiances. Right, there's different specific projects, but
the overall goal is always the same, which is too
endo the concept of free will by turning people into

(15:14):
program bable machines. That's what they're trying to do, right,
Like that's a fair description, Like when you're saying, we
want to be able to like rewrite someone's memories and
make them carry out a terrorist attack against their old government, Like,
that's kind of what you're saying. But I think that
I think the listeners have the same confusion I do,
because there is nothing that they've seen in terms of

(15:36):
results up till now that we know about that has
gotten them even one percent of the way to that.
Because you're literally talking about having somebody carry out a
complex series of instructions, including being able to improvise on
the fly things that are highly motivated, highly trained person
would do and doing it entirely against their will. When

(16:00):
the closest they've gotten up to up to now is
is what it's just people going crazy, people having seizures.
People like one guy we think maybe you know, went
and robbed a liquor store. That it wasn't like they
implanted that idea. Like they've been successful at making people
go crazy. They've been successful at making people lose their memories,

(16:20):
lose basic function. But in terms of saying okay, we're
now at a stage where we're ready to try this,
We're ready to try to turn a human into a robot.
It's like you have no data and no protocols or
no anything that even is like the beginnings of like
can we trick this person into preferring a different color

(16:44):
of shoe? Like like like wherever you would start if
you were actually using a scientific method of like building
up to this. You see I'm saying, it feels like
they're taking almost like a child's idea of how this
would work. It's like, Okay, we've given a bunch of
drugs to a bunch of strangers. Um, we've given some
radioactive stereal to some kids. I think now we're ready

(17:04):
to take actual human beings see if we can program
them to become super assessments. You know. It's one of
those were we're building to kind of the the very
murky story of what might be their greatest success. We
don't know. But I think one of the things that's
going on here, and one of the things that's in
the background of all of this, is the Manhattan Project, right,

(17:26):
which is a a thing that would have seemed impossible
ten years earlier. Right, that you can make something like
an atomic bomb, that you can split an atom, and
that you can you know, create nuclear power from this
as well, not just the weapon like it all is
this absolute sci fi thing that barely when they started
researching it. They put a shipload of money and time

(17:49):
into the Manhattan Project before they knew it was going
to work. Right, The c i A. Sees this project
the goal of perfect mind control at is a Manhattan Project.
Historian Alfred McCoy refers to it as a veritable Manhattan
Project of the mind. Right, that's how they're thinking about it.
So the fact that it's hard, and that they're not

(18:10):
having early success, and that they're they're they're burning up
this much money and all of these human beings to
do it. To people who are thinking about this as
a Manhattan Project style thing, it's not weird to them, right, um,
you know that is that is how they're thinking about this.
Dr Cameron's work in d patterning people over at McGill

(18:33):
University is a really good example of like the scope
of ambition of this project. And a paper that Cameron
published at the start of his work for the CIA,
he said this about the goal of his research. Quote,
if we can succeed in inventing means of changing their
attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of
measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing

(18:56):
ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs. And that's a very
prosaic way of saying we can eliminate types of human
being and types of thought from the species. Right, that's
the ambition here, right. And brainwashing someone in terms of
like sending them to a camp to make them, you know,

(19:19):
like if they've expressed anti government attitudes and you've got
a method. You know, they have this in North Korea,
they have this all over the world where you can
send them off and then it's basically you you torture
them in various ways until they learn not to say
anything bad about the government. I don't think you've successfully
changed anybody's attitude. You've changed their willingness to it's like,

(19:40):
I don't want to come back here, so yes, I'll
say whatever you want me to say. It's just that
I guess they would say sameything about the mainhand project,
that like they screwed around with so many different things
and then finally they had a bomb, and if for
us it's going to be the same thing, like we're
gonna keep trying stuff with throwing stuff at the wall,
and then we're gonna come them across a compound or

(20:02):
a treatment or a protocol that is going to give
us Like it's just gonna happen. It's like it's gonna
be like our our test in the desert where the
first time they see the bomb glop, we're going to
get that perfect. It's just it feels like everything they've
done after this point hasn't been building toward anything. It
doesn't feel like they're any more sophisticated in their methods

(20:22):
this many years into it than they were when they
first started. I will say one thing about that they
are they do start using more outside scientists. And these
scientists they're not doing what White was doing, right, They
are actually conducting They're not like pooping and and and
watching this stuff. They're actually conducting experiments, um not ethical experiments.

(20:45):
But and you can see the CIA once they're perfect
mind control drug. These doctors see it as like, well,
if I can create, if if I can find this
drug they want, I can just tell people to stop
being schizophrenic or whatever, and then I'll be the man
who cured schizophrenica. You know, That's how I think they're
thinking about it. I think that's how a guy like
Dr Cameron is thinking about it, is I can be
the man who cured obsessive compulsive disorder, right, or cured whatever.

(21:09):
You know. To be clear, if you're a legitimate scientist
or a doctor that deals with the brain or mental
illness and this is where the funding is on this research,
you absolutely want in on it, like I would absolutely
in their position. It's like, yes, I'm also helping them
develop a weapon, but yes, I also potentially have the
cure for every bad thing that happens to the human brain. Yeah,

(21:32):
I'm gonna this is where I need to be and
this is where the funding is. I get it now,
granted when they sent me down for the meeting and
they say, okay, here's what we've done so far. Have
you heard of George White or that his name, Like,
here's here's some of his work, and here's some of
his results. You see his toilet there in his in

(21:54):
his martini bar he has next to it. Now, this
did not actually yield the results we wanted, um that
we just wanted to show you. We wanted to bring
you up to date. Yeah, this is the research so far.
Do you have any hints? I mean, And obviously most
of these guys, there's a couple who get brought into
confidence that way, most of them don't know what else
has been done. They don't know even there's an MK

(22:16):
that even the ones who are doing messed up stuff,
they don't know that, like my program where I'm trying
to break people's minds is part of this like massive
thing they're doing in you know, all of these black
sites around the world. I'm they a lot of them
probably think I'm the only one doing this research, right,
and the CIA is the only one who will fund
it and it's so important that you know, a number
of things are happening here. Um, but yeah, it's it's

(22:39):
I mean, the thing that's scariest to me is that
stuff that Cameron says about like we we can free
ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs that like because a
lot of these guys, a lot of this is out
of anti communism, right. It's not not a thing that
like we want a drug that we can give people
to make them not be communists. Um, you know, and
then maybe we can make them you know, double agents

(22:59):
and stuff. But like the idea, the idea of wanting
to like rewrite people's thoughts at that level, which is
their expressed goal, is the scariest thing about this. And
one of the things that's like most unsettling is we
don't a dent know where the research ended. And this
brings me to the most unsettling story in the series. Jesus. Um. Yeah,

(23:21):
but before we do that, you know what isn't unsettling
the products and services who support this podcast, none of
whom is looking for a way to destroy the concept.
We know it cannot say that though they're not I said,
they're not looking for a way to do that, Sophie.
You can't. They're not as far as you know. I mean,

(23:42):
we don't pick most of our sponsors and actually has
advertised on this podcast. Um, so I don't know. Uh yes,
just like the CIA. Ah, we're back talking about the agency.

(24:07):
So Jason, I promised you I'm going to tell you
the most unsettling story in this series. Now, this is
going to be kind of unclear. I do not have
perfect answers to you as to what is going on.
I'm going to try to read you the facts of
this case as they exist, and then we will talk
about what might have happened here. So this is the
story of Dr Lewis Jolly and West. Jolly was his nickname.

(24:30):
He was the head of psychiatric services at Lackland Air
Force Base for much of the nineteen fifties, and as
you probably guessed, he was also a c I A asset.
Born in nineteen twenty four, Jolly West, as his friends
knew him, had enlisted in the Air Force for World
War Two and retired as a colonel. He was a big,
friendly man and when he left the flag, Jolly West,
Jolly West, Baby. Yeah, he's a jolly man. He goes

(24:54):
to Cornell to follow up on his fascination with different
methods of controlling the behavior of human beings. He wound
up being one of the shrinks who worked with POW's
captured in Korea. Right, you know those guys we talked
about earlier who claimed to have dropped biological weapons, right
that the CIA thinks they've been brainwashed. Jolly West is
the guy that the psychiatrists the CIA brings into debrief them, right,

(25:16):
and he succeeds in kind of quote unquote deep programming
those men. He gets them to renounce the claims they'd
made while being captured, which he gets big kudos from
the CIA for this. You might not You might say, well,
that's not really that impressed if they were just like
beaten until they said they dropped chemical weapons, and then
he was like, hey, guys, you're in America now, you
should probably tell people you didn't. Is maybe not the

(25:37):
hardest thing in the world, right, but whatever, He gets
a lot of credit for d programming these guys. So
thanks to letters between West and Gottlieb, which we acquired
after West's death, we know that both men started working
together in nineteen fifty three and I'm gonna quote now
from the intercept addressing Gottlieb as SG West outlined the

(25:57):
experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic
drugs and hypnosis. He began with a plan to discover
the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably
unwilling subjects through hallus hypnosis alone or in combination with
certain drugs, possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation or
the alteration of the subset subjects recollection of the information

(26:18):
he formerly knew. Another item proposed honing techniques for implanting
false information into particular subjects or for inducing in them
specific mental disorders. He hoped to create careers who would
carry a long and complex message imbreaded secretly in their minds,
and to study the induction of trans like states by drugs.

(26:39):
So he's not just wanting to make a mind. He
wants to number one, induce mental illness and people. He
wants to see if he can do that. He wants
to create memories and destroy them. Um. He's he's interested
in experimenting with all of that, and obviously Gottlieb is
completely on board with this. Um. In nineteen fifty six,
West reported to Gotlieb that his experiment had come to fruition.

(27:01):
In a paper titled the psycho Physiological Studies of Hypnosis
and Suggestibility, he claimed to have discovered a replicable method
of replacing true memories with false ones in human beings
without their knowledge. Quote. It has been found to be
feasible to take the memory of a definite event in
the life of an individual, and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring

(27:22):
about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this
event never actually took place, but that a different fictional
event actually did occur. West claimed to have accomplished this
by giving patients new drugs, which ones was not specified
in the papers that we have. These drugs were apparently
effective in quote speeding the induction of the hypnotic state

(27:42):
and deepening the hypnotic trance. Specific information is again impossible
to find here. The version of the study found in
West's papers is longer and more detailed. This was found
years after his death. He was not supposed to have
kept this a c the CIA before these. This version
is found since a copy of this study to a
Senate committee when they start investigating M. K Ultra, and

(28:04):
the copy the CIA has is missing a bunch of
stuff that's later found in the copy that's in Jolly
West's memoires, right, like that's in his collection of stuff.
Um So, the CIA's version of this that they actually
send to that Senate committee cuts out any mention of
West's claims to have found a way to replace real
memories with fake ones. And it also adds in a

(28:25):
passage that's not in West's draft, which reads the effects
of LSD and other drugs upon the production, maintenance and
manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied. Now we
know that this is untrue, but that begs the question,
what did Dr West actually find? Now We're not going
to get an answer to that today, But I do
have a story that is going to make you feel bad.

(28:47):
On July four, ninety four, in San Antonio, a three
year old girl named share Joe Horton was raped and murdered.
When her parents noticed her missing, they formed a search party.
They eventually found her body next to a gravel pit
alongside a shirtless man covered in blood and scratches. He
was described as seeming dazed and in a trance like state.

(29:08):
The man eventually charged with and convicted of chair Joe
Horton's murder was a guy named Jimmy Shaver. He was
an airman at Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record.
Shaver claimed no memory of the murder, and here's the
intercept again. Around four that morning, an Air Force marshal
questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn't drunk.
One leader testified that he probably was not normal. He

(29:31):
was very composed outside, which I did not expect him
to be under these circumstances. He was released to the
county jail and booked for rape and murder. Investigators interrogated
Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit,
he didn't recognize her. He gave his first statement at
ten thirty a m adamant that another man was responsible.
He could summon an image of a stranger with blonde
hair and tattoos. After the Air Force marshal returned to

(29:53):
the jail house, however, Shaver signed a second statement, taking
full responsibility. Though he still didn't remember any thing, he
reasoned he must have done it. Two months later, AIRMoN
Shaver still reported no memories of the murder. The commander
of the base hospital ordered him evaluated. Said evaluation was
performed by the head of psychiatric Services for Lackland, Dr

(30:14):
Lewis Jolly and West. Shaver and West spent two weeks
together the return to the scene of the crime, and
West eventually hypnotized Shaver and injected him with sodium pentathal
to clear his amnesia. Event Eventually, well drugged, Shaver recalled
remembering the act of murdering Horton. He told doctor West
that the little girl had brought out repressed memories of

(30:34):
his own cousin, who he said had molested him when
he was a child. Later, Shaver took back this confession. Eventually,
segments of West's drugged interview with Shaver were read into
the court record. The doctor had used leading questions to
walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. Tell me about
when you took your clothes off, Jimmy, He'd said. The
transcript of the interview, which survived among West's papers, also

(30:56):
showed West trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories. Jimmy,
do you remember when something like this happened before or
after you took her clothes off? What did you do?
I never did take her close off. Shaver said. The
interview was divided into thirds and the middle third hadn't
been recorded. When the transcript picked up, it said, Shaver
is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.

(31:17):
West asked, now you remember it all, don't you, Jimmy, yes,
Sir Shava replied. So we don't know precisely what happened here.
We know that a young girl was murdered. We know
that a guy who claimed no memory of the murder
um confessed and then took back his confession, and then

(31:39):
sat down with the guy who has claimed that he
can create false memories and people and remove actual memories,
and then temporarily comes forward and says that he did it,
but never really seems to have any memory of it,
and eventually recants that confession. Um. Now, at the time,
there's nothing known publicly about the mk Ultra program, but

(32:02):
shavers lawyers did learn that earlier before the murder, he
had suffered from migraines that had debilitated him enough that
the Air Force had recommended him for a two year
experimental program at Lackland Air Base. This program would have
been run from the same facilities where doctor West did
his research for the CIA. There is no record of
what doctor had attempted to recruit Shaver, and there's no

(32:24):
record of Shaver in the Lackland Hospital official Master Index
of patients. Right, so there's no evidence that he went
into Lackland Hospital and was treated prior to the murder
for his headaches. However, the index that would include his
patient record is incomplete. The base archivist told the court
that all records for patients in nineteen fifty four with

(32:45):
last names beginning with s A through ST had been destroyed.
There was no explanation for why this had happened. Shaver
was sentenced to death and eventually executed by the state.
Here's the thing. I don't think the spiracy version of
this requires anything advanced or magical, or doesn't it is

(33:08):
if they did exactly what we've already seen them do.
Where do they just break people down to where all
of their normal executive functions have ceased through just sleep
deprivation or traumatizing them over and over again or whatever. Again,
it's not difficult to do this, um and then the
guy went out and did like It doesn't require them

(33:31):
to program him to go out and kill. It just
requires them to whatever failed treatments they gave him to
have just screwed up his head to the point where
he no longer was in control of his actions, similar
to the guy that thought that he, you know, had
spontaneously robbed a liquor store. Because once you remove the

(33:51):
frontal lobes ability to govern your actions, you just start
doing weird stuff. And you know, whatever is in your
subconscious or whatever primal urge that a person has um
it just doesn't take sophisticated mind control to make that happen.
It just you mess up enough people over a long
enough period that somebody's going to go out and commit

(34:12):
a murder or beat someone to death, or get into
a fight at a bar. It's just this particular guy,
if that's what happened, he just acted on some urge
and they probably the girl was just a target of opportunity.
She was just small enough and defenseless enough that and
we don't even know. I mean, it's entirely possible that

(34:33):
she was murdered by someone else who doesn't get caught,
and he's just someone that this doctor is working with
who is being dosed around the time, and who they're like,
I wonder if we can convince him he did it.
You know, that is not beyond the pale for what
it does. It also does not require them to have
figured out a mind control drug. It's certainly not beyond
the pale of the stuff they've done. Yeah, by the way,

(34:55):
getting confessions out of people is nothing like the the
whole era of the and going back and checking for crimes,
like we found something like in a third of the
cases where they exonerated people, they had confessions. Yeah, they
confess to a crime they didn't commit. That happened instantly,
and again doesn't so whatever happened, And again we don't
know exactly what went down here, like and we never

(35:18):
will for reasons I'll get to. But like something bad,
I feel confident saying that. And when we talk about
there's obviously there's a more conspiratorial version, like we could
we could turn this into a slightly different podcast and say,
this is clear evidence that the c I developed a
mind control poison, right, um, And if you want to
take that, there's all these little facts that you can

(35:39):
use to like make put together what seems like a
more convincing conspiracy theory case for example, Jason in nineteen
sixty three, immediately after the Kennedy assassination, there's a psychiatrist
who gets brought in to examine Jack Ruby, the guy
who had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, and it's Dr Jolly
and West. Now West speaks to Ruby right before he's

(36:03):
testifies to the War in Commission, and he tells him
that Ruby suffered an acute psychotic break and Ruby is
never able to form to fully explain to the commission
why he chose to assassinate Oswald. You can make a
bunch of conspiracies about that. There's also the thing that
makes total sense, which is, well, back when those fucking
pilots got brought back having been like brainwashed or whatever,
Jolly's the guy they sent in to talk to him.

(36:25):
It's not unreasonable that you would assume that maybe a
foreign power was responsible for something to do with the
JFK assassination. So the CIA is going to send in
the guy they normally send in to talk to people
in this situation, and Jolly has a history doing that, right.
It doesn't mean that Ruby was like a programmed c I,
A L. S. D assassin um. But all of this

(36:48):
stuff is just close enough that like you get part
of like why conspiracy culture becomes the thing that it
is that is such a problem for all of us,
is there's a lot of reasons to ben spiratorial, particularly
about this period in American history, right, Like, it's not
it's not you're not like doing something unreasonable. If you're like, well, shit,

(37:10):
maybe they did figure out something, right, Like, there's all
these little pieces of fucked up stuff here, and we
know what they were trying to do, and a lot
of a lot of the Q and on terrible stuff
that's going around today that's causing so much of a
fucking catastrophic problem for a society. Part of why that
is so effective and able to spread so much is

(37:33):
this all of this ship seeds the ground, right, it
provides they've provided a fertile environment for which, well, nothing
is impossible, nothing is beyond the kind of ship our
government might try to do. Right, It's not like I
think that's that's one of them maybe unrecognized crimes of
the n k Ultra program is they're going to provide

(37:55):
justification for a thousand conspiracy movements because how fucked up
the ship they're trying to do is even if they
never accomplished any of it, right, And the issue with
the usually the issue with conspiracies that they is that
they assume a much higher level of competence and precision
and everything else than what you actually get. For example,

(38:18):
if if we only had a gap where that guy's
um the toilet sex dungeon was, there have been a
conspiracy coming up suggesting that that had occurred. I would
have no problem with that because it's like, yeah, I
can see this getting out of hand. There's no one,
there's no grown ups in the room, so yeah, I

(38:39):
can believe the rumors that this guy had a toilet
Martini sex dungeine going on with CIA money, because that's
the kind of thing people do. The issue is that
it almost ascribes, it almost gives them too much credit
to where if you see something like the JFK s astination,
you say, oh, I'll bet Oswald was actually a world

(39:07):
because the reality is that there were failures in terms
of security, in terms of the protocols they're following, in
terms of like everything that a man like Kennedy that
the whole world can pivot on one frankly kind of
a dumbass with a gun who just happens to be
a good shot. Yeah, and that like Jack Ruby, that

(39:29):
appears was an even bigger dumbass who actually made the
decision to shoot Oswald as like a spontaneous like you
just ran home and got his gun and decided to
do it. Like it wasn't even a planned thing as
far as I could tell, it was just it was
just a local dumbass who thought, hey, I'll go shoot
Oswald and that was and then again he changed history

(39:49):
because that launched a whole universe of its own conspiracy theories.
I don't know. I think that people want to believe
it's weird because they want to believe the CIA is
almost like godlike invisibilities, that it can work magic, that
they can do things that is that are totally unknown
to science. And when you find out the reality, it's

(40:11):
almost disappointing, even though the things they are actually guilty
of horrible, Yeah, are worse because it was done. What's so,
it was done so irresponsibly and with such a lack
of care, where you would almost prefer a bond villain
that's trying to do that's, you know, trying to pull
the string. It's like, no, the actual things that that

(40:33):
we've done in Central America elsewhere. It doesn't require a
sophisticated master plan. It just requires you know, the fruit
company saying, hey, the locals are trying to unionize, as
we've as we keep saying. The only thing necessary here
is not deep, like incredibly complicated conspiracies including magical mind

(40:56):
control drugs. It's money and willingness to hurt people. Yeah,
it's very powerful people saying hey, this is gonna lower
our stock price by several points unless unless this guy
who's threatening to become president and this unless something bad
happens to him, and it doesn't require you know, a
mind controlled assassin. The old ways work just fine. Propaganda

(41:18):
still works, Bribing the right people still works. Killing the
right people works really well. That's the best way to
do it, which is actually Jason leads me to our
sponsor for this episode, because you know, when you need
the right person killed, um, you know, the president of
Chile for example, no one can do it better than

(41:41):
the sponsors for this podcast. Where is fiber is still
a thing? Yeah, five, that's what's gonna be. The next
government overthrown is through fucking fiber. Um it is we're

(42:01):
like when it comes to like incompetent cia ship. One
of the reasons why I'm willing to like, yeah, I
think maybe that attempt by those weird US contractor guys
to overthrow the government of Venezuela might have been a
cia op is that it ended with them all pissing
on themselves after getting captured by fishermen, like like, they're
just not They're not. They they succeed because they have

(42:23):
infinite resources a lot of the time, but it's not
because they're the most competent people in the world anyway.
By the early nineteen sixties, mk Ultra was officially seen
by Sydney Gottlieb as a failure. The program was gradually
wound down, and Gottlieb went out to spend the rest
of his career designing James Bond style assassination devices. He
tries to kill Fidel Castro so many times. He flies

(42:46):
to the Congo to try to poison Patrice la Mumba.
It doesn't work out often for him. He's not and
usually because other things happen, they just never use the poison.
But he makes a lot of poisons. In nineteen sixty four,
the mk ULTRA program, which by that point is known
to be a failure, is renamed m K Search, which
again terrible cryptonym. But as far as we know, most

(43:07):
of the experiments were wound down after this point. However,
as this passage from Poisoner in chief makes clear, Gottlieb
remained actively pursuing mind control technology even after MK Ultra
proved a disappointment quote In their behavior laboratories, the psychiatrists
and psychologists continued experimenting. Once more. They had turned to
an earlier line of research, implanting electrodes in the brain.

(43:30):
An agency team flew to Psygon in July nineteen eight.
Among them were a neurosurgeon and a neurologist. In a
closed off compound at ben Hua Hospital, the agency team
set to work. Three Vietcong prisoners had been selected by
the local station. How or why they were chosen would
remain uncertain. In turn, each man was anesthetized, and after
he had hinged back a flap in their skulls, the

(43:51):
neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain. When the prisoners
regained consciousness, the behavior is set to work. The prisoners
were placed in a room and given nigh pressing the
control buttons on their handsets. The behaviorists tried to arouse
their subjects to violence. Nothing happened for a whole week.
The doctors tried to make them in attack each other.
Baffled with their lack of success, the team flew back

(44:12):
to Washington, as previously arranged in case of failure. While
the physicians were still in the air, that prisoners were
shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned. And
this is all stuff that happened before got we went
went to prison like I'm sure the listeners are waiting
from the point right right before. And don't worry is
it is put on trial for all of this. It's

(44:34):
it's coming up right now, Jason. So in nineteen seventy two,
it becomes obvious that Congress was going to look into
MK Ultra. CIA director Richard Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy
all records of the programs. Everything we know now came
from caches of papers that were missed and odd bits
of correspondence from MK Ultra partners like Dr West. No

(44:56):
full investigation into the program will ever be possible because
again all of the records are destroyed. They miss like
eight thousand pages. A bunch of these doctors they used
as contractors, have stuff that gets found by by journalists
and stuff later. But we do not know everything that
was done under this program, and we have no accounting
of how many people were hurt. Um, none of that

(45:18):
kind of stuff. Gottlie burns it all and then a
year or so later he retires from the CIA. So
that's pretty cool. Um. And yeah. In nineteen sixty seven,
President Lyndon Johnson looked out at the growing protest movement
against the Vietnam War and the occupation of several college
campuses by anti war radicals. He ordered CIA director Richard Helms,

(45:41):
who is the guy like right after Alan Dulas gets
shit canned? Um, Helms is, by the way, the guy
who later orders the MK Ultra records destroyed to launch
in a legal domestic surveillance program code named Chaos. And
I'm gonna quote now from Tomo. Yeah, yeah, right, like
they're they're just they keep getting worse at the kryptonyms. Um.

(46:04):
So I'm gonna quote now from Tommonio's book Chaos, which
is a history of the Charles Manson murders, as a
spoiler for where we're headed here. That August, with the
president's approval, CIA director Richard Helms authorized in a legal
domestic surveillance program code named Chaos. Meanwhile, j Edger Hoover
revived the FBI's dormant counterinsurgency program co Intel pro. Both

(46:25):
agencies opened the first offices of their respective operations in
San Francisco, still considered ground zero for the revolution, especially
since the founding of the Black Panther Party in nearby
Oakland the previous summer. Thanks to these two secret programs
and their network of well placed informants, there was an
all out war raging in California. By the summer of
sixty nine. The FBI and the CIA had induced the

(46:45):
Left to feed on itself among competing factions. What had
been sectarian strife devolved into outright violence. Now there is
credible evidence to suggest that Charles Manson was for whatever reason,
of interest to the CIA. UM. This is timbo O'Neill's book, Chaos,
deals with this in a lot of detail. It's all

(47:05):
very messy. There's nothing perfectly clear. There's two different guys
who were close to him, who had ties to the agency.
One guy who was probably a c I a contractor,
like an actual like doing ship on the ground man
who was tied into Manson, who was there after the
murders probably but before the murders got reported to the

(47:27):
l A p. D Um who was very likely tied
to the agency. We don't know what he was doing.
He claimed that like he was because he talked a
few times to people and even helped write a book
with a former FBI agent and made the repeated claim
that like something had this wasn't supposed to happen, and
like something had gone wrong. I'm gonna tell you right now,
because all this is very messy. The most likely reason

(47:50):
why the murders are committed is essentially a series of
drug deals and relationships gone bad, and everything kind of escalates,
and you have these these people who are not particularly
tied in mentally, um, taking a lot of drugs and
like getting scared about, like Manson at one point shoots
a guy that he thinks as a black panther so
he's convinced the panthers are coming after him. This is

(48:12):
all really fucking messy. Um. But there are one of
the reasons why there's a lot of conspiracy theories that
like the Cia programmed Manson is two fold. Number One,
Manson is giving these these young mostly women, but there's
some of them are men who he has do the
actual murders. He's giving them a shipload of acid and

(48:33):
using that to kind of reprogram them. Right. That's a thing,
especially in the book Helter Skelter, that gets brought up
a bunch. There's debate as to the extent to which
he was actually trying to program them and the extent
to which they were all just taking acid. But they
were taking a lot of acid, which probably had its
because of where the acid was coming from. There's a
good chance a lot of the acid they did came

(48:53):
out of mk Ultra one way or the other. Um.
That's one reason people get conspiratorial. And then there's a
couple of guy is one of whom is for a
while Manson's uh, what parole officer? Um? Who like he
keeps getting off for stuff he shouldn't get off for. Um,
he gets like arrested while he's on patrol with guns

(49:15):
and drugs and with stolen cars. He keeps getting At
one point after the murders, when people are talking that
Manson and his family may have been the people who
did it. The l a p D carries out the
largest rate in their history at his compound and arrests
he and his cult members for like stealing cars, and
then they all get released, even though he's a paroled
convict and shouldn't have been near any of this stuff.

(49:37):
So there's all this like we don't really know what's
going on, and it may not even be that it was.
It's possible he was like an FBI informant, and so
that's why he kept until they realized he was tied
to the murders, kept getting out. Um, it's just all
like again you see why where all of these fucking
conspiracy theories can come from. Right, there's all of this.

(49:58):
There's all of this like territory in which you can
kind of maneuver to set up a story about what
had happened. And again, it doesn't require there actually being anything,
because Charles Manson was a messed up and abusive dude. Um,
And like, it's not like cult leaders convince people to

(50:19):
kill people all of the time without the CIA being involved.
The CIA was involved to some extent. We just don't
know the precise reasons why. Right. See, here's the thing.
If your imagination goes off in a direction of well,
maybe this was the ultimate experiment to see if they
could create a perfect assassin. That a look if somehow,
through happenstance, the CIA and the people involved in in

(50:42):
k Ultra came across Charles Manson and tried to get
him to do one thing or another. If you knew
the full story, every detail of if someone wrote the
book of exactly what happened, I can promise you that
what occurred was dumb as hell. Yep, Like the killings
were an accident. He didn't do what they asked. It
was a clumsy, stupid just whole just a carnival of nonsense.

(51:06):
I I'm saying that, based on every single other thing
we know about him k Ultra, that if there was involvement,
it was not successful. It was it was a very
dumb person who had I mean, Charles Manson's background was horrible.
He was abused as a child, He was a weirdo.
The people he surrounded himself with, like Tex Watson, were

(51:27):
for the most part very stupid um and the whole
thing with the killings may have been largely a misunderstanding
or a spur of the moment thing or whatever, because
I think, based on what I know of the Manson murders,
his whole like what he told these people around him
that they basically formed the cult, where he told them

(51:48):
that there was a race war coming and they needed
to go out into a compound and on and on.
I believe he made up all that stuff because those people,
those people hung around him because he was about to
be a successful musician and get a record deal and
he's really tied in with the fucking the Beach Boys. Yeah,
and when the record deal fell through, he just didn't

(52:11):
want his groupies to go away, so he made up
this lie so they would stick around because he didn't
want to be lonely. Like I fully believe that whole
thing they began and ended with Charles Manson not wanting
these hot girls who hung around him all the time
to leave. So he's like the world's about to end
because it's gonna be reest war. And I can sort

(52:31):
of do a Manson voice, Not really, there's I mean,
because there's also and again O'Neill's book goes into it.
There's like a Hollywood kind of drug dealing thing here too.
A lot of it may have involved like money and
just kind of but but that's that's outside of the
scope of these episodes. Um. When it comes to the
CIA's involvement, it's there's there's a lot of ugly connections,

(52:52):
including the fact our friend Dr Jolly and West is
during the period that Manson is in hate Ashbury in
San Francisco, West is there too, running a free clinic
with a guy named David Smith. Um and West is.
One of the things he's doing is he's operating he's
renting out a house on Frederick Street which he's turned
into a laboratory designed as a hippie crash pad, and

(53:13):
he is once again using CIA resources giving a shipload
of drugs to people. Um, while he has now in
this case, he actually has grad students observing the hippies
and like taking notes, and most of those grad students
they people to talk to them. You can talk to
these people, like results were published. The grad students are like,
this is a shitty study. I don't understand what he's
trying to do. Like we're not really getting anything. But

(53:36):
Manson is kind of around at the time. Um, there's
there's some connections there and kind of the thing that
O'Neill brings up that I think is actually plausible in
terms of there being a degree of CIA involvement here,
is that we do know multiple police officers who had
interactions with Manson and like arrested him, and we're looking
into him at this period before and after the murders,

(53:59):
say that it was well known in the Los Angeles
Police Department that like, Charles Manson had some FEDS who
had his back and that you were not supposed to
like mess with him. Um, you're not supposed to like
keep him in. And so when he would get arrested,
he would get let out because somebody was like and
there's a number of reasons for this. It could have
been he was informing for the FBI. Um, But one

(54:21):
possibility is that either the FBI or the CIA, not
that they were like trying turning Charles Manson and his
followers into assassins, but that they were like, well, this
is dangerous. This guy is dangerous. What he's doing with
these people are dangerous. Eventually, something terrible is going to happen,
and are are The order that we have from our

(54:42):
boss is to funk with the hippies, right, is to
like do some damage to this kind of flower power movement.
So if we let this guy who was like the
poster child for the worst things that can happen to
like when you turn tune in, turn on and drop out,
if we just let him do stuff for a while,
eventually he'll do something horrible and then it'll do damage
to these this movement. That's you know, we've been We've

(55:03):
been brought in as part of Operation Chaos to hurt um.
And it was kind of the end of the hippie
It absolutely was. And I'm gonna I'm gonna read a
quote from Tip O'Neill one more or Tom O'Neill one
more time, she's tip O'Neil. It struck me that the
Tate la Bianca murders had been so often invoked as
the death knell of the sixties. Arguably they did more

(55:24):
than any other event to turn the public opinion against
the hippies. Recasting the peace and love flower power ethos
is a thing of latent, drug addled criminality. As the
writer Tom Getland noted for the mass media, the acid
head Charles Manson was ready made as the monster looking
in the heart of every long hair. So yeah, um,
who knows what went on there? Uh, something we just

(55:46):
will never quite know what. In nineteen seventy four, the
details of the of mk Ultra finally broke out into
public knowledge after a report from Seymour Hirsch for The
New York Times. This reporting helped spawn the Church Committee
and the Rockefeller Commission. The Church Committee's final report, they
quoted from a nineteen fifty seven internal evaluation by the
c I A precautions must be taken. The document warrant

(56:08):
to conceal these activities from the American public in general.
The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and
illicit activities would have serious repercussions. Don't let him know
about this, Like one the first time someone from the
agency has not got Lieber Dulls actually looks at what
they're doing. They're like, oh my god, don't let anyone

(56:28):
know what we're doing. We have to hide this ship
at all costs. Um and they do. A more haunting
reveal is that in nineteen sixty three, a review by
the Inspector General of the CIA included this line. A
final phase of the testing of mk Ultra products places
the rights and interests of US citizens in jeopardy. I

(56:49):
don't know precisely what that means because we don't know
what all of the products were, but kind of a
sketchy little line there. Um, Sydney gott Lieb burns all
of his records. This comes out in the congressional investigation.
He is recalled to Washington, so he when he retires,
he and his wife travel to run a clinic for
lepers and like India, like they're like traveling around the world,

(57:13):
just like trying to do good. Um. I don't know
what's going on in this man's head, but yeah, he
goes back to d C. He claims that he's in
bad health and so he can't address the entire synate chamber,
and so in a private room he's questioned and the
American people can hear on a loud speaker as he
tells everyone that he's destroyed the MK Ultra files. Now,
he says this was not to cover up a legal activity,

(57:36):
but quote because this material was sensitive and capable of
being misunderstood. I don't know what what's more misunderstood, Like,
if you're trying to not let people conspiracy about this
Sydney burning at all, probably isn't the right thing to do.
It could be taken the wrong way. Wow, the fact

(57:57):
that we were doing all this could really be taken
the wrong way. I better let all this on fire
so nobody thinks we're bad guys. That way, they can
just fill in the void with their imaginations. Yeah, exactly
that way, and then there won't be any conspiracy theories. Um.
Gottlieb says under congressional like testimony that he cannot provide

(58:18):
specific information on any mkal trick experiments because he's never
witnessed any himself. He was investigated for federal crimes due
to his destruction of government files, which is absolutely illegal,
but the case was quietly dropped by the Justice Department.
Gottlieb was never prosecuted, and the Senate gave him total
criminal immunity in exchange for testifying against who so other

(58:41):
people did go to prison because that's why. That's why
they gave him immunity, so they can nail all those
other people. Nope, we're done. All's well. Sydney Gottlieb spends
the rest of his life with his wife on their
eco friendly goat farm in rural Virginia, Virginia. He dies
in and for the rest of his life. Friends of

(59:01):
the family of his children would recall a kindly, intelligent,
open minded man with a strong spiritual and mystical interest.
Sydney meditated regularly, he read constantly. He was, in his
private life the absolute epitome of an aging hippie. The
people who loved him and spent time close to him
only got occasional glimpses of something darker. Stephen Kinser at

(59:21):
one point quotes from a young woman named Elizabeth, who
wound up dating one of Sydney's sons. So she spends
this summer around the family compound, and she recalled this
as a generally positive experience. But there's one peculiar moment
that she related later to an interviewer. One day that summer,
we were out at the house swimming. The parents had
gone to the store to buy food for dinner, and
Peter goes, kind of conspiratorially, come here, I want to

(59:43):
show you something. He takes me into his father's din,
his library, and says, turn around. He did something. He
didn't want me to see. What he did, and the
wall of books opened up behind it was all this
stuff weapons. I couldn't tell which kind, but guns, there
was other stuff back there. It was like a secret compartment.
I asked him what is that for. He closed it
back up quickly and said, you know, my father has

(01:00:05):
a price on his head. I said, why is he
a criminal? He said no, he works for the CIA.
Then he said, you know, my dad has killed people.
He made toothpaste to kill someone. Later on he told me,
don't tell anybody that you were in here, and don't
ever tell anyone that you know my father kills people.
And they pulled out a particular gun and he aimed
it out the window and fired it at a tree.

(01:00:28):
He said, you come back in two days. That tree
is gonna be fucked. She's gonna she's gonna be dead.
My dad's killed trees. What all such? We just a
just a I mean, that's true. That says to me

(01:00:48):
that like he was kind of like he's kind of
milking it, you know, like you tell like, hey, kids,
you want to see like your dad's secret gun wall.
I made toothpaste to kill somebody, um, which I don't
believe never killed anybody. It was none of another one
of the things that nothing happened with. But like I
don't know, I guess that's not weird that like a

(01:01:08):
guy like that would want people, would like want people
who was close to to know that he was this
he has this other secret life as a badass spy. Um,
he's probably not telling him about all the prostitutes, about
his friend with the portable toilet or any of that
would be my guess. But yeah, I mean I don't

(01:01:28):
doubt that if if, if he told the story, I
would love to know how he told the story, if
he made it seem more dark and mysterious than it was,
if you tried to cover up the fact that it
was such a clumsy mess and irresponsible, Like the people
who died weren't because of his gadgets. It was through negligence.

(01:01:49):
It was through killing test subjects because there was nothing
else else to do with them, Like I don't know, I,
I you you. And that's obviously what makes him such
fascinating character, because you'll never know what he thought of himself,
or what he thought of what he did, or if
he spend his time abroad trying to make up for it,
trying to save his own soul. Yeah, did he feel
did he realize this was all a terrible mistake and

(01:02:10):
just like, yeah, dedicate the rest of his life to
helping lepers or something. Um, yep, who knows. I mean
I like the eco friendly goat farm part, but I
wish he had just raised goats. I think they can
all agree that. Yeah, Um, Jason, it's well, now, hold on,

(01:02:37):
I thought that the UNI bomber was also part of Ultra?
Did we leave Are we leaving that out? Or is
that not true? Is that he's he's involved in some
experiments that are that are like part of this, like
the whole thing, because remember it's like a pretty broad
variety of things and his are like, um, it's not

(01:03:03):
entirely the same. Um, It's like he's involved in a
voluntary psychological study that's like pretty abusive and that probably
does some damage to him. That it wasn't funded by
m KAY Ultra. Well it might have been, because I remember,
we don't know exactly what was an m KAY Ultra
because Sydney destroyed. But it's the kind of thing they
would have done, right. It sounds a lot of what

(01:03:24):
Kazinski goes through sounds like aspects of the dip patterning
kind of stuff that is being researched, Like, um, that's
being done up at McGill University. So I think it's
pretty likely that he was in an experiment that was
part of m KAY Ultra. I don't think you're gonna
get exact confirmation. Kazinski was always pretty adamant that like
that had nothing to do with what he did. Um. Well,

(01:03:46):
that's why I wanted to bring him up, not not
to suggest that he was a product of it, but
to suggest that if he if he was, it wasn't
because they again, they created the perfect assassin and he
carried out a series of ineffective bombings the rather than yeah,
it took someone who was already disturbed and made him
much much worse than they just turned him out into
the world, Like like that's the thing that they were

(01:04:06):
good at, was Yeah, it was really hurting people were
didn't Yeah, who were already having some problems, and like, yeah,
I think that's probably the best way to look at
what you've got with um. UM with Kazinski is like
I don't want to we'll we'll talk about Papa Ted
one of these days, but he's Whatever you want to

(01:04:28):
say about the likely impact MK Ultra has on Ted Kazinski,
it doesn't no way it helped right, like, there's certainly
no way and made him made him a less likely
to blow things up. Right, And if his whole issue
was that he did not have faith in the system
and wanted to bring it down, like this probably did
not yes help his faith in the system. Yeah, it does.

(01:04:48):
If you really start reading a lot of mk ultra stuff,
you do find yourself thinking about bringing down the system. Um,
it's a natural reaction to reading a lot of stories
of the CIA torturing people. Um. But that's but we've
reached end of it, ultimately had a happy ending. Justice prevailed.
The guy at the top of it died in peacefully
at age ninety or whatever, living living a long and

(01:05:12):
peaceful retirement on his goat farm, exactly what he deserved.
It is done. Yeah, I learned. It taught the lesson
that actually, by destroying evidence, you can totally get off
on a crime because they need evidence to convict you,
Like they can charge you for destroying the evidence as
a separate crime. But yeah, you'll get off from the

(01:05:33):
original the original thing you did if you do successfully
destroy all of the records of you doing it. They
can really they're helpless and uh yeah, that's um. Once again,
their attempt to to cancel this poor man didn't work. Yeah,
thank god do it? Just like uh David Chappelle uncancellable

(01:05:59):
and and like Dave Chappelle regularly shows up at concerts
to to sing surprise versus when I forget what band
that was that had just happened with Radio ahead, Yeah,
probably Radio. We're we're on this. We're referencing things that
happened on Twitter hours ago when this this episode will
come out weeks later. But that's what the audience loves. Jason, Well,

(01:06:22):
thank you for having me on so that I could
I could go on this very dark journey with you.
I I hope that it has Uh what what have
we learned? What have we learned from this? I guess? Well,
if if you're worried that LSD is a mind control agent,
don't worry. The CIA tested that hypothesis. Um. I guess

(01:06:44):
if you've ever thought I would like to sit on
a portable toilet and watch strangers have sex, Um, you
might want to look for a job in the Central
Intelligence Agency apparently, And if you're if you if you're
worried about the techniques for affecting someone's brain. One the

(01:07:05):
knowledge of how to totally destroy someone's brain. We do
have that technology, but but we've actually had it since
the Stone Age. It's just called hitting someone in the
head with a rock. Like it doesn't require subjecting them
two months of techniques and repeating things in a in
a sound helmet, and while under the influence of various drugs.

(01:07:27):
You can just hit them with a rock. That in
terms of you know, actually mind controlling somebody, the old
methods are best. Just good old fashioned lies and bribes
and threats. Uh. They all work very well. We do
not need new techniques. They work great. Advertisers have have
mastered all sorts of ways to put on your insecurities

(01:07:47):
and make you spend money that you don't have. Uh.
They did not need some amazing new technology to do it.
It's actually super easy to manipulate people into doing things.
It's not not hard at all. Speaking of which, if
you're looking to mind control me, Um, the thing I'm
most vulnerable too is in fact suitcase is full of money.
So you know, we're always the case of money. We

(01:08:10):
are available. We will betray anyone as anyone with for
a big enough suitcase, not a little suitcase. You know. Anyway,
my the book that I've been promoting the beginning of
these each of these episodes one final time. The title
is if this book exists, You're in the wrong universe
has a lime green cover. If you buy books based

(01:08:32):
purely on the color of the color of the cover,
this one is neon lime green. You can't miss it
at your bookstore. You know. I did work at a
bookstore for a while as a younger man, and people
did come in occasionally asking for books by color. I
don't remember the title of the author, but it was blue. Um.
That is a thing I have been asked working in
a bookstore. So go into your local bookstore and demand

(01:08:55):
a green book. Um. And if they don't give you
Jason's book, then riot um. Otherwise, you can look me
up on any of the social media platforms. My name
is Jason Park and p A R G. I n
um on TikTok, I'm on Twitter, I'm on all of them.
Just just searched the box for my name and you'll
find either my account or some bot pretending to be

(01:09:15):
me that will probably both be equally as good excellent. Well, Jason,
thanks for this five hour stretch of our lives that
we've spent learning about the CIA. Thanks for having me,
I guess. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool

(01:09:37):
Zone Media.