MKUltra: CIA’s Secret Mind Control Experiments (with Stephen Kinzer)

How CIA became the largest purveyor and owner of LSD in the world and, in the process, destroyed lives and introduced psychedelics to The Counterculture.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts or click on
the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm
John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
The world, and part of our job was creating conspiracies
to deceive our adversaries.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of
you may not have heard.

Speaker 4 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. So today's guest
is Stephen Kinzer. Stephen as a former New York Times
foreign correspondent and a prolific author. We overlapped with him
in the early nineties in Berlin and covering the fall
of Communism. He's written a number of excellent books. All
the Shaw's Men is one of my personal favorites, and

(01:05):
today we want to talk about his book on CIA's
mind control program in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
known to many as MK Ultra. The book is the
Poisoner in Chief, Sidney Gottlieb, and the CIA search for
mind control. So welcome Stephen.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
Thanks, good to be with you. A great topic.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
It's like the perfect conspiracy story because it is a
conspiracy and it is about CIA.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
So well. I sometimes tell my students there's a danger
in being a conspiracy theorist and thinking that nothing is
the way it seems. But there's also the other danger.
That's the danger of being a non conspiracy theory and
believing that everything is the way it seems and there's
nothing hit. It's like you happen to try to find
some kind of a balance.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
There you go. So this book is a perfect one
for that. So I think most people know something about
MK Ultra. It's the basis of movies and shows and
multiple conspiracy theories. But just to get us started, can
you give us a bit of background on the program
and on your subject, Sidney Gottlieb. Was he a mad scientist?

Speaker 4 (02:03):
I've certainly one of the one of the monikers that
was attached to him, and I think probably richly deserved.
So MK Ultra what a bizarre project. And I've got
to point out that this was highly secret. It was
maybe the greatest secret of the CIA in the FIFTIESA
senior officers were well aware that if any of this

(02:23):
ever leaked out into the public, there would be an explosion.
It could destroy the CIA or even destroy America's position
in the world. So Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist who
was brought in to be head of the chemical branch
of the CIA when the CIA was just beginning in
the early nineteen fifties, But that title didn't really explain

(02:45):
his true job, or certainly didn't cover all of what
he had to do. The CIA had become convinced, by
misinterpreting some things that had happened in the rest of
the world, that the Soviets or the Chinese or international
Communism was closing in on the secret of mind control.

(03:05):
It meant that somehow you'd find a way to make
people do what you wanted them to do, and of
course this terrified and electrified the CIA, because if you
could actually accomplish this, then the prize would be nothing
less than global mastery. So the idea that the Soviets
were on the trail set off panic at the CIA,

(03:28):
and you have to put yourself back in that era.
They didn't need anything else to set them off into panic.
The CIA was in a panic mode, and so was
the whole US government, the State Department, the White House,
the Defense Department. You have to realize that Americans were
taught to believe and did believe, that the Soviet Union
was likely to launch an attack on the United States

(03:50):
with nuclear weapons at any moment, with no warning. We
were told that there were only two possible outcomes to
the Cold War. One was that the United States would
triumph over and destroy the Soviet Union, or the Soviet
Union would triumph over and destroy the United States. If
that ladder happened, it wouldn't only mean that the the
US would be taken over and Soviets would win. It

(04:12):
would mean the end of all possibility for meaningful human
life on Earth. Everybody would be transformed into a kind
of a robot or automaton controlled by Soviet commissars. So,
with the stakes that high, the loss of a few
lives or even a few hundred lives would seem to
be quite a small price to pay. So, electrified and

(04:34):
terrified by this fear that the other side was doing this,
the CIA decided to launch a mind control project and
they hired this chemist, Sidney Guttlieb. I think the people
who hired him, that is, the senior officials at the CIA,
particularly Alan Dllis who was the director, and Frank Wisner,
the head of COVID operations, probably would have thought to themselves,

(04:56):
this is going to be what we call a wet project.
People are gonna suffer and people are gonna die, and
we don't want this ever to come out, but if
it does, we're going to try to blame it on
the guy was the head of the program and say
that he was operating without supervision, and in fact they
did let him operate without supervision. Later on, when William

(05:19):
Colby received the family of one of the MK Ultra victims,
he did say some of our people were out of
control in those days. There was a lack of supervision.
This was true, but it was planned that way, and
I think they chose Gottlieb particularly with this in mind.
He was a trained scientist. He was certainly qualified as

(05:40):
a chemist, but he had other qualifications. At that time,
all the senior CIA officers had a very similar background.
They were all silver spoon products of the American elite.
They'd gone to Gratton or one of those other schools
up in New England. They went to the same Ivy
League schools, They dated the same girls, they were members

(06:02):
of the same country clubs and the same yacht clubs,
and they worked at the same Wall Street law firms
and banks. So it was a very red group. Now
you're trying to hire somebody who's going to do something
pretty awful. So they decided they wanted to hire somebody
who wasn't from their social group because they thought, I
think we might have to throw this guy under the

(06:23):
bus sometimes say it was all his fault. So we
don't want that to be one of the people in
the Georgetown set that we hang around with every weekend.
So Sidney Gottlieb was so different from all the other
early CI officers. First of all, he was Jewish. He
was son of immigrants. His parents were Orthodox Jewish immigrants
from Central Europe. He grew up in the Bronx. He

(06:45):
went to City College. He had a limp, which had
kept him out of the army in World War Two
and actually made him all the more eager to try
to do something to make up for it. He had
a stutter. It was so different from all the rest
of them, And I think maybe part of the reason
was again that they thought we might have to blame
it all on him. So what did he do? First

(07:07):
of all, there had been a variety of smaller projects
in this area, in the CIA and also even in
the military, So he pulled those all together into one
project called mk Ultra, and he launched it as a
scientist would. The first question that he asked, like a
good scientist, was how do you implant a new mind

(07:29):
into someone's brain? And he concluded that the way to
do that, or before you could do it, you had
to find a way to destroy the mind that was
in there. So when you hear about all the excesses
of mk Ultra and all the blood and all the depths,
that was the purpose of it. They were trying to
see what were the ways you could seize control of
a human mind and a human spirit and a human body.

(07:52):
So that was the first thing that Gottlieb decided, You've
got to find a way to destroy the existing money.
And then the second thing he asked himself was what
creative research already exists out there? Any scientists would ask this,
we want to build on existing knowledge. Now, how much
Sarah Gas. Does it take to kill an infant compared
to how much it takes to kill an adult? We

(08:14):
don't know that. In order to know that, you have
to have conducted some very gruesome.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
That Japanese and Germans did.

Speaker 4 (08:20):
And so yeah, we know who knows all that stuff,
and that was the German doctors who had worked in
the Nazi concentration camps carrying out those horistic experiments, and
their Japanese counterparts. In some cases, we're doing things even
more horrific than anything that went on in a Nazi
concentration camp. So mk Ultra hired the former concentration camp

(08:42):
doctors as advisors. And while I was working on Poisoner
in Chief, I went to Germany, where Gottlieb did some
of his gruesome work, and I found where I think
might be the first CIA black site or the first
CIA secret prism. It's a lovely chateau outside of Frankfurt.
It's now owned by young guy entrepreneur who broke it

(09:05):
up into condominiums. He was very friendly when I went there.
He was fully aware of what had happened in that house.
There had actually been an article in the German magazine
Der Spiegel about it, which had called it the CIA
torture House, and it said there were deaths, but the
number is unknown. So this guy took me down into
the basement to show me his storerooms, and he said

(09:28):
these were the fells where Gottlieb and his Nazi doctor
pals carried out those experiments, which were actually just continuations
of the experiments that those Nazis had been conducting just
down the road only a few years earlier. And he
also said to me, people around you, the older people
that have lived here a long time, they know what

(09:50):
happened in this house, and they've told me that the
bodies of the so called expendables, the people who were
experimented to death, were buried in forest around here, in
places that are now covered over by apartment blocks and
shopping malls. So that was my first introduction to realize
and come face to face with the real Ultra.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
For the audience, maybe we took terms around that MK Ultra.
I think maybe it's a just a quick aside. In
the agency, we love digraphs, so we put two letters
in front of the code word. So MK, John, I'm
the trick, sure, MK was. I think it was a
science and technology digraph.

Speaker 4 (10:27):
It also means that it's global, it's not limited to
a certain continent or country.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Okay, great, Yeah, whenever we run an operation, there'll be
a digraph in front of it and then the code word.
And if you know what the digraph is, if it's
I just make something up. If it's PL, then you know,
oh PL, that's Germany or whatever it is. So MK
ultra is not a word, but it is now. But Steve,
I wanted to go big. First of all, I wanted
to say this is all true. Despite this, I'm still

(10:55):
I spent thirty years in the agency. I was really
proud of it. This is one of the most shameful
episodes that happened seventy five years ago. But I do
want to touch maybe just go a little deeper into
why it is they thought they had to do this.
And so when I looked into this, there were things
like the show trials that Stalin was having, where people

(11:16):
were confessing to crazy things like Jewish doctors were all
admitting they were trying to poison Stalin, or Cardinal Manzetti
in Hungary was admitting that he tried to steal the
crown of Saint Stephen's things that were ludicrous and obviously wrong.
And I think CIA and maybe Hollywood and the US
government was assuming wrongly that the Soviet Union and other

(11:39):
authoritarian governments the North Koreans that they had figured out
away or were figuring out a way to control people's minds.
And of course that later is the movie The Manchurian Candidate.

Speaker 4 (11:50):
So what was there?

Speaker 3 (11:52):
What do you get was their sense that they thought
that they were a yes, genuinely evil what was going on?
But also what put yourself into their minds? Did they
actually think that they were like one step ahead trying
to save liberty? And one last thing too, is these
are guys from the OSS, not Sinley Gottlieb, but these
are guys who were used to killing Germans and blowing

(12:12):
things up, and COVID action was like people were expendable,
you know, in World War Two.

Speaker 4 (12:18):
Often So what's your sense.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
Of again, not to excuse it, but to explain, to
put yourself in the mind of why these people thought
this was so important to do.

Speaker 4 (12:27):
I would say they didn't feel that they were just
one step ahead of the other side. They thought they
were a step behind. That's one of the things that
electrified them, So you're asking a very important question. So
why what made them come up with this view that
we now know was false. I think there are two reasons.
One is and you actually touched on both of them.

(12:47):
So one had to do with particular episodes that the
CIA watched, and I don't think it was so much
the show trials in Moscow, but it was the one
you mentioned, the trial of Cardinal Vincente in Hungary. So
he was the Roman Catholic prelate. He was arrested why
Communist authorities, and after some months in prison, was put

(13:08):
on trial and concessed to crimes that he obviously had
not committed. In the rest of the world, it might
have been thought, what actually turned out to be true,
that he was just abused and essentially tortured in the
same ways that people had been torturing people since forever.
Sleep deprivation, intense loud interrogations that very repetitive, the usual

(13:31):
ways that you'd break a person's spirit. But at the
CIA they saw something different. They weren't concerned about the
fact that he was confessing to things he hadn't done,
because they could imagine a person being terrified enough to
do that, but they were focused on the way that
he looked, in the way that he hoped it was
in this kind of monotone, and they analyzed this. They thought,
this is showing that he's not speaking, somebody is speaking

(13:55):
through his mouth. This was wrong. It turned out you
had just been tortured the way other people were tortured
for many years. But at the CIA they didn't see
it that way, or at least they had a fear
that it was more than what you or I might
have noticed. That this was an example terrifying of how
the Soviets, the Communists had actually seized the mind of

(14:17):
another person. Then a few years later we had another
episode which the CIA, also in its panic, misinterpreted, and
that was the return of prisoners from Korea. A number
of American prisoners had written essays condemning aspects of American life,
including some African American soldiers who wrote about racism in America.

(14:40):
Some of those soldiers confessed to war crimes, including using
germ warfare, which the United States always insisted it never did.
And the idea slowly grew that these people must have
had their minds seized, and actually a number of these
prisoners were repatriated by train across Europe, and in their

(15:01):
train from the North Korea, they passed across China, and
they passed across Manchuria, and the CIA began to think
that maybe it was that train ride while they were
crossing Manchuria that they were administered either a drug or
put under some kind of a spell. And that's how
you get the phrase the Manchurian candidate. I was also mistaken.

(15:23):
But you can see how these episodes would have terrified
people at the CIA and led them to think, we
got to get on this project.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
And Stalin did talk about like the new Soviet Man,
there was enough.

Speaker 4 (15:35):
Out there if you wanted to believe it, you could
pick up pieces to make yourself believe.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
And it was much bigger than the CIA. It was
a Korean War. There was a McCarthy who's a red scare.
Eisenhower had do little write a report in nineteen fifty
four that said, literally it said, if the United States
isn't going to survive, long standing concepts of fair play
must be reconsidered. So it was a mindset that wasn't
just at the CIA.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
Absolutely, it was total in fact, as if the years passed,
the CIA actually turned out to be a little more
calm than some of the civilian agencies. But I want
to finish on the question of motives. What made these
officers believe it was possible. So I think the syndrome
I just discussed of these episodes played a big role.
But I think there was another factor, and it has

(16:21):
to do with something more diffuse. That's the cultural conditioning
that you would have had growing up in late nineteenth
early twentieth centuries. Think of all the bucks, all the movies,
all the stories gaslight, all those movies about somebody dropping
a pill into somebody's drink, or you're swinging the watch
in front of somebody's eyes. Then he walks into the embassy,

(16:44):
opens the saves, takes out the files and gives them
to you. I think these guys were impressed with that,
and they figured that what screenwriters and novelists could imagine,
they could also make real and the fact, and they
over reacted to those stories and thought that they weren't
just made up. Actually there's something there. And so I

(17:06):
think they came into office with that cultural background, which
probably many other Americans also had, and then they saw
these episodes. It all seemed to fit together, and that's
why they brought Gottlieb in and set him off on
an MK ultra. You know, even though I.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Spent like thirty years inside CIA, I never really knew
much of anything about MK Ultra, and I learned almost
everything I know about it from your excellent book. But
from that, there's a few things that jumped out to me.
I'm interested in your comments on I'm just buried me
for a second. One was this was much bigger than
I thought. It included US military, civilian experts, companies, doctors, universities, clinics.

(17:57):
It wasn't just a secret in house effort. Number Two,
it wasn't necessarily supported by most of the CIA except
for the top leadership. I think it was sort of
a bastard stepchild in the agency for a lot of
people in the operation side of things and the security
side of things. And three, which is probably the most
troubling of all, is that it was by no means

(18:18):
a rogue CIA program. I think the program was supported
by US presidents. We now see it as a shameful episode.
But as I read your book and other histories at
a time, even if it wasn't secret, I think a
large part of the population might have supported it.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
I'll tell you that little town where I grew up
also is the place where a former CIA director has retired.
And I ran into him in the line at the
coffee shop once while I was working on Poisoner in Chief,
and I said, Oh, I got a question to ask you.
I'm writing a biography from the major CIA officer. He said,
who's that. I said to Sidney Gottlieb. He said, never

(18:54):
heard of it. Of course he wasn't in office at
the time that Bidney Gottlieg was there. You're right that
this program was a major secret even inside the CIA. However,
little by little people began to pick up on what
Gottlieb was doing. And I found an amazing memo from
Sheffield Edwards, the longtime head of security for the CIA,

(19:15):
a memo to other CIA people in the building, and
he said to watch out about taking punch out of
the punch bowl at the customers party, because Godlyeve is
around and you don't know what he might be putting
in punch bowl. So that already suggests that some people
already knew about it. Actually. Gottlieb later told a story

(19:35):
about being on an airplane and walking back, going up
to the front of getting a drink and then walking
back to his seat. And as he's walking back, he
hears somebody say to him, is that LSD you're drinking?
And he was terrified because this is supposed to be
a huge secret. He turned around. It was alan dullish
to be to be afraid. So I didn't want to
get too far ahead of the story.

Speaker 3 (19:58):
But LSD, we all know what it is or him,
But in those days they didn't know. Right it was
made in forty it was synthesize in forty three or
something like that in Switzerland, and no one understood what
it was back then or how.

Speaker 4 (20:12):
Dangerous it was.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
And so maybe maybe if you could just take us
down a quick back alleyway, which I think is fascinating
of how two things, how Cia became like the largest
purveyor and owner of LSD in the world, and what
happened to Tusco.

Speaker 4 (20:29):
Well, you're right, Gottlieb was the first LSD maven and
in nineteen fifty three Gottlieb developed this idea that LSD
could be, as one of his chemists put it, the
key that could unlock the universe. In other words, this
might be the way into mind control. So he persuaded
the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD,

(20:54):
and the chemical company in Switzerland was actually happy to
get rid of it. They didn't want to be in
that business.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
How big was the entire world supply when the CIA.

Speaker 4 (21:02):
Faced You could have held it in a small glass,
but of course as very potent in very small amounts.
So God he was fascinated by LSD, particularly because it
was so potent, no smell, no taste, and you just
needed the tiniest amount to produce spectacular effects. He used
the LSD in two ways. One was on experiments on

(21:27):
human beings, usually people that had no idea what was
happening to them. Part of these experiments were conducted in Europe,
where he was freer to experiment people to depth if
he wanted to, and there LSD was just a part
of extreme drug cocktails that he would put together. Or
he'd have somebody locked into kind of a coffin like space,

(21:47):
then he would overdose them with amphetamines so they become hyperactive,
then overdose them immediately with an overdose of sedatives so
they'd go into a coma. And then in the space
between hyperactivity and comatose, he would inject them with all
kinds of drugs, including LSD, to see what their tolerance was.
We know that he did this also in the United

(22:09):
States at several prisms. Of course, if you need human
subjects that are unwitting, prisms are a great place to
get them. Whitey Bulger, right, yeah. Whitey Bulger, the famous
Boston gangster, is one of the few people we know
who later wrote about this, and he didn't know what
was happening to him until twenty years later when the

(22:29):
news came out, and he was so furious that he
told the other gangsters in his crew, I'm going on
to Atlanta. I'm going to find that doctor and I'm
going to kill it. I don't think he did, although
that doctor did die at a young age and so
called accident. But we have, for example, the protocol of
an experiment that a prison doctor working for Gottlieb carried

(22:53):
out at the Federal Penitentiary in Lexington, Kentucky. In this experiment,
seven African American men were placed into a cell and
without their knowledge, given what we're described as triple and
quadruple doses of LSD every day for sev seven days.
The idea was to find out if that could destroy

(23:14):
a person's mind. Now we don't have the ultimate result
of that experiment, but I'm guessing the answer is yes,
that could definitely destroy someone's mind. So those were the
more grotesque ways that Gottleib used LSD. But that wasn't all.
Gotlieb wanted to know how ordinary people would respond to
LSD in a clinical setting, knowing that they were being

(23:37):
given LSD. Since the CIA doesn't have hospitals or clinics,
Gottlieb set up a couple of bogus medical foundations they
printed up stationary. With that stationary, he wrote to clinics
and hospitals around the United States and told them quite
openly what he wanted. He said, we have this new
psychoactive drug called LSD. We would like you to administer

(24:01):
it to people. Put an ad in the newspaper, say
it's a psychedelic drug, and ask people for volunteers. If
you want to come in and try it, you can
pay them with money that we will supply, and all
you have to do then is write up reports about
how they respond. So almost overnight, a big market grew
up all over the country because it was a good
money maker for hospitals, and Gottlee would send them these

(24:23):
piles of LSD. So who were among the very first volunteers.
One of them was Alan Ginsberg, the beat poet who
went on to become one of the great gurus of LSD.
He took his LSD while listening to Wagner on headphones
in a clinic in California. Another one was Robert Hunter,

(24:44):
the songwriter for The Grateful Dead. He loved it, and
he took the LSD, brought it back to The Grateful Dead,
and that went on to the Hold Grateful Dead Phenonmen.
Another one was Ken Keasey, the author of that counterculture
bible called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, And I
saw an interview with him in which he said, I
did gather material for that book while working in a

(25:05):
mental hospital. However, that's not the reason I went to
work there. The reason I went to work there is
so that I could get into the pharmacy and steal
the LSD and give it to all my friends. So
it was through Godly that all of this leaked out
into the public. While I was researching Poisoner in Chief,
I found an interview with John Lennon and they asked

(25:27):
him about LSD. His first line was, we must always
remember to thank the CIA. He had never heard of
Sidney Godleeb. Nobody had, but if he had, he would
have said he must always remember to thank Sydney Godleeb.
So the irony is that the drum Sidney Gottlieb hoped
would give the CIA the power to rule the world

(25:49):
actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion which was aimed
at destroying everything with the.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Ice, and Godlieb took LSD right.

Speaker 4 (25:57):
By his own account, he took LSD more than two
hundred times. I began to wonder as I was doing
this research. His experiments were so bizarre. The things that
he came up with to try to do to people
were so strange. Did he come up with some of
these ideas while he was on acid? And then while
I was doing my book tour, somebody came up with
something that I found even more chilling. Could he have

(26:19):
been on LSD while he was actually overseeing the worker sessions?
Nobody knows. You know. While I was researching the book,
I wanted to speak to Gottlieb's adult children who were
still surviving, and one of them was a sort of
prominent figure. He lived in Wisconsin, where he was the
state archivis. He wrote a book about the labor movement.

(26:40):
So I sent him a note and I said, I
want to talk to you about your dad. And I
didn't hear back. So I used all my journalism tricks.
I went on Facebook, I went on Twitter, I sent
a registered mail, I found out other email addresses for him.
I didn't hear anything. So I finally decided I got
to go and do that journalistic thing called door stopping.
I just got to go to Madison and I'm gonna

(27:00):
just sit there until he comes out. However, just before
I was able to do that, it was outset to
do that, I happened to find a person that was
very close to the family, and this person told me,
don't waste your time. Because after gottlie died, his widow
called the children together and made them promise never to

(27:20):
speak about their father. So he took a lot of
secrets his grave. They took at least some they're still
walking around with them.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
I'm sure not again. Nots excused this shameful episode. But
innocent isn't the right word. But at least when reading
about the very start of when they're experimenting with LSD,
before it got really nasty, they were like spiking each
other's drinks coffee around the office. They didn't realize what
they were dealing with. Right inside of CAA, inside of

(27:49):
the program. They again, before the death started, they were
like doing it to each other just to see what
was going on before they started doing this clinically, which
sort of tells me they didn't really understand what they
were at least initially, what they were involved in, how
serious it could get.

Speaker 4 (28:04):
Well, it's a tradition in medical search that people sometimes
the dose themselves or the people in their office, and
Godley did that and some of them. You're absolutely right.
There was or CIA employees who he dosed without their knowledge,
maybe because he just wanted to watch them and see
how they would be.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Hang, Yeah, let's riff off of that one then to
talk about Frank Olsen, right, because that was one of
the things that still comes back that defines the program
and supports a lot of conspiracy theories and some that
are correct.

Speaker 4 (28:36):
But I did want it before we touched on that
real quick on Tusco. Ah. Yes, the CIA was interested
in finding out anything he could about LSD, and Gottlieb
was willing to certify any experiment that came across his desk.
In Atlanta, exactly at the place where Whitey Bulger was
being dosed with LSD, there was a doctor who was

(28:58):
an integral part of MK Ultra and he was actually
he filmed himself on television taking LSD himself. And they
got this idea that they would try to see if
a dart full of a number of doses of LSD
would affect an elephant. And they actually went to the

(29:18):
zoo in Atlanta and shot this elephant named Tusco with
a dart packed with we don't know how much LSD,
just to watch and see what would happen. Could LSD,
that tiny little substance, colorless, orderless, clearer, actually be so
potent as to affect an elephant? And sure enough, after

(29:40):
a little while, the elephant gave a tremendous dump and
then fell over and died.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
But big to John's question, which is much more serious, Yeah,
because Frank, the Frank Olson episode is sort of when
this begins to turn.

Speaker 4 (29:51):
I think Godley didn't work all by himself. Of course,
he had a small crew of chemists. They were all specialists.
It was a tightly knit group that had security even
way beyond the security of the CIA, so much so
that at this time even people in the CIA didn't
know what was happening. And those people were working at
a They had their labs in a military base in Maryland.

(30:13):
It was a small, tight knit group. One of those
scientists was Frank Olson. His specialty was aerosoults, and he
would aerosolize poisons. The idea was now actually later on,
we had this idea that we would spray lsd into
a recording studio where Fidel Castro was giving a speech.
That was the kind of thing that Frank Olsen was

(30:33):
working on. How do you aerosolize poisons? As with the
other kinds of poisons, these were administered to unknowing victims
and probably killed some of them. So Olson became disenchanted
with his work. I talked to his son, who said
he would sometimes come back and he'd say that he
got in in the morning and looked in at the

(30:54):
cage of monkeys that he had dosed the night before.
And they were all dead, and this was considered to
be a successful experiment. After a while, he became uncomfortable
with this. Then he was in Britain where the CIA
was also conducting k Ultra experiments in conjunction with their
British counterparts, and he was present at one of those

(31:17):
experiments in which an aerosol that he designed was used
on a victim and the guy died. He probably watched
him die. He actually came home and asked one of
his friends, have you ever seen a man die? And
this guy said no, well I have, And he told
his friend they have had it not only with with
mk Ultra, but with the CIA. I want to leave

(31:38):
the CIA. I can't do this anymore. And then he
said to the guy, do you know a good journalist.
So Frank Olsen didn't keep his discontent secret. He mentioned
it to a few people. This guy immediately back to
his superiors at mk Ultra. At one point, just before
Thanksgiving in nineteen fifty three, Frank Olsen and the other

(31:59):
chemists who were involved in mk Ultra, including Gottlieb, went
off for a retreat. It later turned out that Frank
Olsen had been given LSD in his drink without his knowledge.
Maybe it was an effort by the other mk ULTRA
scientist and Gottlieb to loosen his tongue and see if
he was really thinking about leaving. But in any case,

(32:20):
nothing came out of it, and a few days later
Olsen was brought to New York by his mk Ultra
comrades to consult with the psychiatrist. While he was staying
in a hotel across the street from Penn Station, he
went out the tenth floor window and died immediately after
hitting the ground. Now, this was reported as the suicide

(32:45):
of an army scientist, but he wasn't an army scientist. Obviously,
he was working for the CIA. But that was the
end of the story that it was a suicide because
he had been very distressed. Now, his wife didn't believe
that he'd been that distressed, that he hadn't been suicidal,
But there was nothing else to say, and nothing happened
for another twenty years, and then in the mid seventies,

(33:08):
when a lot of CIA misdeeds became public, also material
about mk Ultra became public, and one of the reports
prepared by a committee investigating committee headed by Nelson Rockefeller
came up with the news that at this cabin meeting
twenty years earlier, frankels that had been secretly given LSD.

(33:29):
So then we get story number two. He didn't commit
suicide because he was distressed. He committed suicide because we
the CIA unfortunately gave him LSD and that just set
off his psychosis and that pushed him to jump out
the window. So that was story number two. Then you
flash forward another twenty plus years. Some other documents came out,

(33:51):
including something that was called the CIA Assassination Manual, which
I think was written by Gottlieb. It had a lot
to do with how do you not only how do
you kill people, but have you softened them up for interrogation.
One of the things that he wrote in there is
that the one of the best ways to kill someone
and not be noticed is to throw him out of
a high window. But you should always hit him in

(34:12):
the back of the head first. So Frank Olsen's son
had the body exhumed and he had a coroner go
over it. Sure enough is a heavy blow on the forehead,
and the coroner came to the conclusion that he was
hit on the head and was thrown out the window.
And a New York police detective who went back to

(34:34):
investigate this, went into the room and you can actually
see the video of this, and he said, the story
just doesn't make sense. That there was one other guy
in the room who was the deputy director of mk Ultra,
And he said Olson ran across the room and dove
through the window and jumped out. The window doesn't open
very high, the room is not very big, so he
couldn't get up any speed, and as the detective said,

(34:57):
there wouldn't be any reason why he couldn't just open
the window and just slip out. Story number three is
it wasn't that he was psychologically disturbed, and it wasn't
the LSD that set him off. He was m to
keep him quiet. Now, there is no smoking gun that
there's no absolute evidence. There's probably some file somewhere. However, evidence,

(35:21):
although it's quite damning, is all circumstantial. However, if you
put yourself in the minds of godly and whoever he
might have consulted with, you can understand why they might
have thought, we hate to do this to learn of
our own, but this is too serious. If this guy
does what he seems to be ready to do call

(35:42):
a journalist then tell everything about mk Ultra. The stakes
are too high. The family is certainly convinced that it
was a murder. There's a lot of evidence for that,
but as I said, the evidence is not conclusive. So
although the family does not like to hear it described
as the great Mystery of mkult because they don't think
it is a mystery, I think for the rest of

(36:04):
us it looks that way. It's certainly one of the
unresolved questions. You know, as do you guys know, CIA,
despite a lot of conspiracy theories, doesn't shoot its own agents.
That's just that's a fantasy. I don't kill their own people.
Could there have ever been a time when they felt
the situation was so urgent they had to make an exception,

(36:25):
I don't know, but if there ever was one, this
would seem me to be a good moment to do it.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Well, Steven, you probably know this. There is a lot
of character assassination.

Speaker 4 (36:33):
See. You know, when I used to live in Nicaragua
and we were afraid that people we get arrested and
tortured by the contras. One of my colleagues used to say,
and they talk a lot about psychological torture. Give me
that I can handle the psychological torture. Just get the
physical stuff, please.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
There's so many like strange byways, and one reason is
so compelling. Yes, it's the story of like maybe good
intentions gone wrong charitably, but certainly it became dark and
even evil. But we're talking about Sidney Gottlieb, and like,
in people's eyes, they might be thinking like this not
doctor Mengele is.

Speaker 4 (37:07):
He was like he was like I think of him
like Jerry Garcia. He was like a hippie. He was
a hippie.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
He would get up in milk his goats on his farm,
he had an you know, he lived organically.

Speaker 4 (37:18):
So there's the deeds he's doing.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
But then there's this like guy who like is nothing
like the seems to be nothing like the deeds that
he's doing.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
Right, This is actually one of the most fascinating parts
of the book. And when you're writing a biography, you're
really living with the person you're writing about. And to
be living with Gottlieb and all those terrible things that
he did in my Officer just Ary Small I was
quite intense. But I do think that a character of Gottlieb.
Who he was as a person makes this story all

(37:49):
the more interesting because, as you said, he had a
private life which was the opposite of what you would expect.
So he lived, unlike probably any civil servant in Washington
in the early nineteen fifties, in a cabin out at
the end of a long dirt road, which I went
to visit. I could hardly even find it even now. Oh,

(38:10):
it was like a proto eco house in the times
when nobody ever thought of that. He even had primitive
solar panels. He didn't have running water. He didn't think
that was a good idea. Grew his own vegetables, He meditated,
he wrote poetry, studied Zen Buddhism, and he was very
active in his community. He was quite beloved. Even when

(38:30):
he retired, he was in community theater and he was
always involved in local charities. And after he retired, he
and his wife went off to India to work in
a hospital to help for people who were suffering from leprosy.
So how do you put these two lives together? Now?
I don't have the answer to this. I think that
I would have loved to ask his kids. I'd still

(38:52):
like to ask his living kids? How did he do that?
But I can speculate. Sometimes it seems to me that
maybe when he was driving home over the bridge leaving Washington,
on his way out to his cabin, would be like
a snake that leaves the skin behind, and he became
a different person, and then he would morph into his lovely,

(39:13):
loving proto Hitie identity, and then in the morning maybe
he would put that skin back on again. How does
he How could you possibly justify having the compassionate, loving
view of life that he professed and do the things
that he did. Well, of course I had to reflect
on this, and I don't have a real answer. I'll

(39:35):
tell you the answer that I came up with the
best I could do. So Godly might have been thinking this.
I live a very unusual life. I don't live like
normal people want to live. I have my own idea.
I'm off on my own trip, and thanks to being
in America, living in a free country, I can do

(39:56):
this and anybody can do it. Anybody can live the
way they want. Now we're facing a huge faithful international conflict.
If the other side wins, it will become impossible for
anyone to live like I do. Everybody will be subjected
to a totalitarian rule. So I'm fighting to protect the

(40:18):
right of Americans and people in free countries to make
their own decisions about their lives. And again, it's a
shame that some people have to be tortured and killed,
But that goal of assuring that people could go on
living free lives like I do is so big that
the life's lost would be considered minor. So I think

(40:42):
commitment to a great cause is one of the most
powerful reasons to commit immoral acts, and patriotism is one
of the greatest and noblest causes of law. So you
can get caught up in that, and I think it's
an example of how you can begin to feel that
something is so important that you lose your balance in

(41:03):
trying to awagh the means against the end.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
When I read your book, you want god Leeve to
be the villain to beat this horrible person, and you
describe him very well. But when I read it, one
of the things I come up with is that if
there's a villain, it's almost more like Dulles or Helms.
Are these guys who were supporting this and pushing him
on and then to got Lead's credit. This went on
from one went fifty three to sixty three. He closed

(41:44):
on the program. He said, yeah, we can destroy minds,
but we can't rebuild them. We need to close this down.
And it wasn't until the Church Committee stuff came out
and they asked him like, why did he do this,
and he said, he agreed he went too far, but
he felt he had the security of the United States
in his hands. He believed they were fighting a war.
So villain Wise Helms and those guys when the program

(42:07):
closed insisted it thing be destroyed. And I don't know
if he would have done that, but certainly his leaders
thought that.

Speaker 4 (42:14):
It's true that when he was called to testify in secret,
we know that in front of a Senate committee, we
know that he complained about some of the documents that
had been released because there were like four or five
signatures on them and they're all blacked out except for him,
except for him. So if you believed that the whole
project was ultimately to wlame it all on him, that

(42:37):
was pretty good evidence of it.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
It's hard to imagine, and for younger listeners, it's hard
to imagine how we all felt just after nine to eleven,
right what we were willing to do because of the
fear and paranoia. I think in the early fifties there
was a sense of that it was even more contense,
right and riffing on what John said, I was surprised,
not just that like the agency senior leadership, people who

(43:00):
really should have known better, but also American institution. So
there was I don't remember the gentleman's name, but there
was a tennis player who died because Sydney Gottlieb gave
the guys like characters, was willing to do medical experiments
on his own patient. And then they had I don't know,
i'll throws from university names, but I think like Harvard
and MIT hospitals were all willing to do these experiments,

(43:23):
and one because they didn't probably understand what they were
completely what they were dealing with, but also too there
was a sense of, oh my god, the paranoia where
if we don't do this, the commis could take over.

Speaker 4 (43:33):
I think there was a sense in those medical institutions
that this is a brave new world. Hey, maybe we're
experimenting and finding out something that could ultimately be beneficial
for humanity. However, as he pointed out, Gottlieb at the
end finally conceded that there is no such thing as
mind control. Now, some psychologists had been telling him this
all along, but he didn't want to believe it. Finally,

(43:55):
in the end he agreed. And then when he was
on his way out of the CIA in nineteen seventy
four along with Richard Helms, who was being replaced as DCI,
the two of them agreed that we should just destroy
all the records of mk Ultra. Now that's a federal crime,
destruction of federal property. However, it's a federal crime much

(44:18):
lesser than the crimes that probably were described in those files.
So Gottlieb ordered the CIA records Depository to destroy those files,
and the person in charge of the depository refused to
do it, and Gottlieb had to drive out there and
tell them, you got to take the seven cases of
mk ultra documents and destroy them, and he had no

(44:40):
choice since he was being ordered by higher authority. And
the archivist actually writes in his diary that these documents
were destroyed quote over my stated objection. So actually it worked,
though if they hadn't destroyed those who knows, those were
probably the protocols of all the experiments and you'd find

(45:00):
out who were the victims, how did they die, what
kinds of experiments. So even though I think my book
Poisoner in Chief is the most exhaustive account of mk Ultra,
I'm painfully aware that I have only uncovered a small
fraction of what mk ultra was and what Sidney Gottli did.

(45:23):
Could you?

Speaker 3 (45:23):
So there's so many like fascinating people in this But
if you could talk to like what I found to be,
if there is a real bad guy that you could
hate and love to hate, it would be George Hunter White. Right,
this is a guy I don't even know where to start, right,
but this is a guy you start with a high
heel fetish that he was a voy or, a drug addict,
a dea agent, a purviewer of LSD. If you could

(45:48):
just for funzies, let's talk about it.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
That sounds fun.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Just who has parakeets? Who Sidley got? Whose wife Sidley
Gottley may have been not have been hitting. So I
didn't even want to start with this, but maybe like
New York and San Francisco, like yeah, I mean, I'm
proud of been in the CAA, but flugh mk Ultra
they were running a whorehouse. Just a thought is if
you know the truth of it, all the subsequent conspiracy

(46:14):
theories that come out of edka Ault which are not true.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
Godly decided that one of the ways he wanted to
test not just LSD, but various drug combinations would be
to try to administer them to men after they'd had sex.
So in order to do this, he set up a
bordello in San Francisco, and he hired a guy, this
George Hunter White, who was this very short, fat bald

(46:41):
head of the US Drug Agency in San Francisco. So
this guy was not only a drug agent, but he
was a drug heavy drug user. He tried every drug,
but he ever arrested anybody for using. He was one
of these wild, out of control cops. So he was
a perfect fit for mk Ultra. Godib hired him to

(47:01):
set up what amounted to a national security forehouse. And he,
of course he knew all the girls because he was
arresting them all the time and then letting go and
taking advantage of their services. Sure enough, there was this
apartment and it was decorated with old kind of French
decorations to LuSE tret paintings and black lace curtains, and

(47:23):
girls would be hired to bring men back there. Then
they would give the guy a drink, and in that
drink would be either LSD or whatever combination of drugs.
Sydney Gottlieb wanted to try that week, and watching through
a one way mirror would be this obese George Hunter
White who had no slightest training in psychology, sexology, nothing

(47:46):
to do with anything scientific. He was sitting on He's
sitting on a toilet, He's sitting on his portable toilet,
and he's drinking cocktails out of a picture. Watching these scenes,
and as I began to realize that the destroyed a
lot of lives, But of course people couldn't complain. That
was the idea of the men didn't want to complain
because they'd have to explain where they were. I really

(48:07):
began to wonder, since there was no science involved at all,
what did Gottlieb intend to do? Why did he do this?
I could understand it in a certain way. He came
up with this fantastic idea that gee, men do talk
more freely after sex. Yeah, I didn't need LST to
learn that, But why do this only while I was
writing this book, I came across something that maybe explains it.

(48:31):
So George hunter White had a deputy. The two of
them worked together, and although George hunter White died soon afterwards,
the deputy lived on to the point where when M.
K Ultra was revealed and there were court cases, he
actually gave a couple of depositions. And I went out
to Long Island and found the very elderly lawyer who

(48:53):
had been involved in one of these lawsuits, and he said,
you know, I do have some boxes full of depositions
from decades ago, if you want to go look at them.
In there, I found a deposition by this guy who
was the number two guy running the whoreorhouse in San Francisco.
He said, every time Sidney came out to look at
the project, they called an operation Midnight Climax. I always brought.

(49:17):
He always wanted a girl. As soon as he showed up.
He wanted a girl, and I always supplied him with girls.
And none of them ever asked for any money. They
all did it as a favorite to me. So Sidney
Gottlieb is now in his late forties. He's got his
hot wife and kids at home, and he's traveling a
lot while he's out in the Philippines and Germany torturing
people's to death. But baby, he also felt that he

(49:38):
could do this as a perk of his job, that
this would be a way for him to under the
cover of official CIA business. He would get himself a
chance to go out to San Francisco every couple of
weeks and have a good time. So he did a
lot of crazy things out there. I have a wonderful
story in the book about George Hunter White traveling with
him and they stop in front of a giant tree

(50:03):
and Gottlieb takes out a gun, a kind of a
pistol that shoots out a needle, and he shoots a
needle into the tree, and he tells the guy next
to him come back in a couple of days and
take a look. And the guy went back and all
the leaves had fallen off the tree. It was dead.
So he went out to San Francisco to show off
his little toys. But if you're looking for a reason

(50:25):
for why would you do a project that didn't really
seem to have any scientific basis, who knows.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
I have to say it's a very different CIA that
Jerry and I grew.

Speaker 4 (50:35):
I want to say that even then the CIA in
a lot of ways was probably like the CIA you knew,
but this was an exception. This was the whole self
controlled little piece that was apart from all any kind
of ethical or moral or legal guidelines that were applied
to Even at that time most CIA office.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah, they were saving the world. So one of the
things that's said and odd inness is that this program,
which is really hot through the fifties into the early sixties,
and then when it shuts down, when they realize it's
a failure, they can't do it. That's almost the time
in public opinion when people get really interested in this
and they start to think maturia candidate. So all of
a sudden, the public is taken with this idea, almost

(51:17):
at the exact same time the CIA has said the
same work.

Speaker 4 (51:20):
They're exactly right, And there's actually people We have a
few notes from people in the CIA commenting on this
that it took, of course a long time for these
ideas to penetrate into the public, and by the time
they started to penetrate, the CIA was alreadyhead of them
and telling them this was all nonsense. But mk Ultra,
as you know better than I, has become really a
kind of a part of our culture. I even I

(51:41):
was looking for ways that the name has been used,
and I even found out that in Amsterdam every year
they have the Cannabis Cup for the best marijuana strain
in the world, and one year it was the strain
that one was called mk ultra. So it shows you
how that name has now entered a popular popular culture,

(52:05):
even among people who don't know really what it was.
It's kind of the a paradigm for saying, hell, crazy,
out of control, mad scientists. And I'll tell you when
I was researching mk ultra, I always found that you're
only about two clicks away from the wildest conspiracy theories,

(52:26):
because mk ultra is really right on the border between
what really happened and what you can imagine. And if
people want to believe that secret government agencies are doing
terrible things that you wouldn't never believe, this is the
example that they use. And if they can say, well,
if it was going back in the fifties and it
was such a secret, who knows what might be going
on now. And if you want to guess what's going

(52:47):
on now, think of all the books, all the movies,
you can make out of that. But MK ultra.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
Side deep dive into the human psyche at least an
attempt a failed attempt to do that. It was also
attempt to figure out what the truth is, because this
is something after nine to eleven with al Qaeda that
you John and I bumped into. So, if you've got
terrorists and you know that they're looking to kill Americans,
how do you get them to tell the truth? How
do we find out their plans and attentions? And initially

(53:13):
my understanding was, I think it was fd Arto choke
that the early version of mk ulture was really, how
do you get if we capture an enemy agent, how
do we get them to tell us the truth?

Speaker 4 (53:26):
And how do we know?

Speaker 3 (53:27):
And also how do we keep and conversely, how do
we keep our people from blanthering things? Because at least
initially my understanding was is, no, he's a tough guy,
he'll never talk. Right, we now know that basically you'll
talk or whatever. You may not tell the whole truth,
but you're certainly going to talk eventually, And so this
is also a search for truth. So where did they
ever get to on a truth serum or was this

(53:49):
exactly the same thing where their different streams of the
mk ulture mind control but also true serum, and then
one more was a bio weapon. My understanding is they
were looking as if they could like get the invading
Soviet troops all high. I mean, there were different elements
of it that sort of make it a little more understandable,
But it wasn't always mind control. So if one, if

(54:10):
you go into some of the elements that they were
at least said they were attempting to achieve.

Speaker 4 (54:14):
You're right that the origins of mk Ultra before Gottlieb
came on board had to do with finding a truth serum,
how do you get people to talk? And actually Gottlieb
had the feeling that it could be LSD, and only
after much experimenting did he write a memo saying LSD's
too unpredictable. It might make some people talk, it might
make some other people lie, make some people shut up.

(54:36):
You don't know what it's gonna do. But one of
the early versions of mk Ultra before it became mk Ultra,
was called Operation Bluebird. And the reason they came up
with that name is it was a project to find
a way to get prisoners to sing like a bird.
Truth theoreum was the beginning, was the root of mk Ultra.

(54:57):
As for bioweapons, it's true that there were experiments carried out.
You can actually see videos of soldiers on American basis
who's been given LSD and you see them kind of
dancing around and throwing their weapons down. It's quite a
thing to see. However, those experiments were carried out outside
of mk Ultra, including in the military, and I tried

(55:21):
in my book not to focus on everything that was
done with drugs in the American government, but to limit
myself to mk ULTRA. So I'm not into the bio weapons,
but I definitely did get into the evolution of the
projects from Artichoke and the Bluebird at the beginning through
mk ULTRA. And I'll tell you a little funny footnote

(55:42):
to that. I found out that a couple of the
people who were involved in that project, years later, after
they retired and went back to live in Northern Virginia,
joined a society for the protection of bluebirds, and I
thought to myself, that cannot be a coincidence. They're not
there for the protection of cardinals or sparrows or robins.

(56:05):
Couldn't it be that maybe it was a little bit
of a wink to history to say I started with bluebird,
now I'm finishing my life, but another kind of a
real bluebird.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
Well, if you think it's bad these tests Americans and
CIA did on sometimes unwitting and other Americans. At the
same time, the Russians are testing their nuclear weapons and
how fallout was and they were actually dropping weapons over
villages in their own country to see how it would
go and how would get in the water, and then
how people downstream could survive or not survive, how many

(56:35):
would die. Like it was a crazy time.

Speaker 4 (56:38):
Victory or death on both sides, And once you get
into that mindset, victory seems worthwhile achieving, regardless of the tactics.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
One quick thing is is, so Gottlieb was in charge
of all this m faulture and the things we're doing,
but he also was in charge of poisons for the CIA,
because that's something obviously that probably still goes on. That's
you'd use poison for specific so things.

Speaker 4 (57:00):
Gottley, in addition to running mk ulture, was the head
of the chemical bridge of the CIA, So he was
the guy that prepared all of the poisons that were
supposed to use to be killed, to kill Fidel Castro,
to kill the Patrisa Mumba, all of those agents who
were sent out with what were called l pills, suicide pills.
Where do you get those pills? Gottlieb made them. He

(57:21):
probably knew more about poisons than any living human. But
when Gottlieb was called ultimately to testify in the mid
seventies in secret, all they wanted to ask him about
was these assassination plots and his involvement in them. And
what got me going in this book was it the
realization that that was nothing, That was just the job
of a pharmacist. If there hadn't been godly, somebody else

(57:44):
could have made those pills. Mk Alter was different because
it came completely out of his mind. That's why I
think to understand him, it's not just the fact that
he made those poisons, although that's why I call my
book Poisoner in Chief, but it's also that he went
way beyond that and created something without any supervision, without

(58:05):
anyone else telling him what to do, and was allowed
to do this, which I think take them far beyond
anything that a normal chemist or pharmacist would do.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
So is John and I having spent thirty years each
four or less in the agency. You know, it's also
a bureaucracy, which means that we have budgets and we
have to fill out monthly reports and we you know,
all the rest of this. So my understanding was that
I wonder if you could run with this just a bit.
Is that while a lot of the files were maybe destroyed,

(58:36):
the financial records is like like every you know, if
he's going to buy George Hunter White a toilet he
can sit on while watching men have sex with LSD,
somebody's got to expense that, right, you know, and the
booze and all the rest of it. And so with
your research, what records did you have? And my understanding
was there were a lot of them. Were the financial records?

Speaker 4 (58:55):
You're right? All the records of experiments were destroyed. However,
later on it was discovered that there was a pile
of financial records related to MK Ultra And that's exactly
how we learn about some of these projects. Because you
just mentioned George Hunter White's toilet, I literally have the document.
We're a tell you, but it's ordable if you have

(59:18):
to buy little bags to put into it, and it's expensed.
How many you buy a box of portable toilet bags?
Everything is in there, so actually says by elephants. I
don't think they bought the elephant. I wonder if the
zoo ever asked for a compensation.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Hey, listen, this is fantastic. If you've done a great job,
your other books are fantastic too. Will be eager to
read what you come up with. But thank us for
spending so much time with us today. We really appreciate it.

Speaker 5 (59:49):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Stern.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.

Speaker 5 (59:59):
Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable
pictures for iHeart Podcasts.