NEW EPISODE! - MKUltra: The CIA’s Mind Control Quest (with Stephen Kinzer)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world.

Speaker 3 (00:11):
And part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. So today's guest
is Stephen Kinzer. Stephen as a former New York Times
coign 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

(00:46):
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, Thanks good to be with you.
A great topic, it's like the perfect conspiracy story because
it is a conspiracy and it is about CIA.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
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 hiten. It's like that happened. Try to find some
kind of a balance. There you go.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
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 1 (01:43):
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 fifties.
CIA senior officers were well aware that if any of
this ever leaked out into the public, there would be

(02:06):
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 his true job, or certainly didn't cover all

(02:30):
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.
It meant that somehow you'd find a way to make

(02:51):
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,
and you have to put yourself back in that era.
They didn't need anything else to set them off into panic.

(03:14):
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
with nuclear weapons at any moment, with no warning. We

(03:34):
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 US
would be taken over and Soviets would win, It would
mean the end of all possibility for meaningful human life

(03:58):
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 terrified
by this fear that the other side was doing this,

(04:20):
the CIA decided to launch a mind control project, and
they hired this chemist, Sydney Guttlieb. I think the people
who hired him, that is, the senior officials at the CIA. Ticually,
Alan Dullis who was the director, and Frank Wisner, the
head of Covit Operations, probably would have thought to themselves,
this is going to be what we call a wet project.

(04:41):
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 who was the head of the program and
say that he was operating without supervision. And in fact
they did let him operate without supervision. So later on,
when William Colby received the family of one of the

(05:03):
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 a chemist, but he had other qualifications.

(05:24):
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 of the same country clubs and the

(05:45):
same yacht clubs, and they worked for the same Wall
Street law firms and banks, so it was a very
inbred 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 because they thought,
I think we might have to throw this guy under
the bus. Sometimes they'd say it was all his fault,

(06:07):
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 CIA 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 went to City College. He had a limp, which

(06:29):
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 of all, there had been a variety of smaller

(06:50):
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 launched it as a scientist would.
The first question that he asked, like a good scientist,
was how do you implant a new mind into someone's brain?

(07:12):
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. So

(07:33):
that was the first thing that Gottlieb decided, You've got
to find a way to destroy the existing mind. And
then the second thing he asked himself was what kinative
research already exists out there? Any scientists would ask this,
We want to build on existing knowledge. Now, how much
saren gas does it take to kill an infant compared
to how much it takes to kill an adult. We

(07:55):
don't know that. In order to know that you have
to have conducted some very gruesome extras.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Japanese and Germans did, and so.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
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 doctors as advisors.

(08:25):
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 prison. It's
a lovely chateau outside of Frankfurt that's now owned by
young guy entrepreneur who broke it up into condominiums. He

(08:47):
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 Deshpiegel 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 these were the fells

(09:11):
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 happened in this house, and

(09:32):
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 reality of MK ultra.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
For the audience, maybe we threw terms around that MK ultra.
I think maybe it's just a quicker side. In the agency,
we loved digraphs. We put two letters in front of
the code word, so MK John on metrixure MK was
I think it was a science and technology digraph.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
It also means that it's global, it's not limited to
a certain continent or country.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
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've still

(10:35):
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

(10:57):
were confessing to crazy things like Jewish doctors were all
admitting they were trying to poison Style and 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

(11:20):
and other authoritarian governments in 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 as
the movie The Manchurian Candidate.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
So what was there?

Speaker 3 (11:32):
What do you get was their sense that they thought
that they were, 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

(11:53):
things up, and covert action was like people were expendable,
you know, in World War Two often So what's your
sense 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 1 (12:08):
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.

(12:28):
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

(12:49):
on trial and confessed 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

(13:12):
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 and the way that he oh. It was
in this kind of monotone, and they analyzed this. They thought,
this is showing that he's not speaking, somebody is speaking

(13:36):
through his mouths. 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 and the Communists had actually seized the mind

(13:58):
of another person man. 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

(14:20):
racism in America. 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 ceased. And actually a
number of these prisoners were repatriated by train across Europe,

(14:42):
and in their train from North Korea, they passed across China,
and they passed across Manchuria, and the CIA began to
think that maybe it was during 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 from the Manchurian candidate. I was

(15:03):
also mistaken, 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 (15:12):
And Stalin did talk about, like the new Soviet Man,
there was enough.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
Out there, so if you wanted to believe it, you
could pick up pieces to make yourself believe.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
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 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 1 (15:41):
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
that I just discussed of these episodes played a big role.
But I I think there was another factor, and it

(16:01):
has 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 and 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

(16:23):
walks into the embassy, 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.

(16:47):
And so I 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 Gottlieve in and set him
off MK Ultra.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
You know, even though I 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,
and I'm just buring me for a second. One was
this was much bigger than I thought. It included US military,
civilian experts, companies, doctors, universities, clinics. It wasn't just a

(17:40):
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 words is probably the most troubling of all is
that it was by no means a rogue CIA program.

(18:01):
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 1 (18:14):
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

(18:35):
heard of him. Of course, he wasn't in office at
the time that Bdney Gottlieb 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,

(18:56):
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 Godly 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

(19:16):
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 (19:39):
But LSD, we all know what it is or him,
But in those days they didn't know, right. It was
like made in forty it was synthesized in forty three
or something like that in Switzerland, and no one really
understood what it was back then or how dangerous it was.
And so maybe maybe if you could just take us
down a quick back alleyway, which I think is fair

(20:00):
desinating of how two things, how CIA became like the
largest purveyor and owner of LSD in the world, and
what happened to Tusco.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
Well, you're right. Godlieb 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,

(20:35):
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 (20:40):
How big was the entire world supply when the CIA.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Found You could have held it in a small glass,
but of course as very potent in very small amounts.
So godlyb was fascinated by LSD, particularly because it was
so potent, no smell, no taste, and you just needed
the tiniest amount to put spectacular effects. He used the

(21:03):
LSD in two ways. One was on experiments on 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

(21:25):
locked into kind of a coffin like space, then he
would overdose them with amphetamines 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

(21:48):
that he did this also in the United 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. D 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 news came out,

(22:11):
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, you know, so called accident. But
we have, for example, the protocol of an experiment that

(22:31):
a prison doctor working for Gottlieb carried 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 seventy seven days. The idea was

(22:53):
to find out if that could destroy 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

(23:15):
clinical setting, knowing that they were being 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.

(23:36):
He said, we have this new psychoactive drug called LSD.
We would like you to administer 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

(23:57):
almost overnight, a big market grew up all over then
because it was a good money maker for hospitals, and
Gottley would send them these 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

(24:21):
in California. Another one was Robert Hunter, 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 whole Grateful Dead phenomenon. Another one was
Ken Keasey, the author of that counterculture bible called One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I saw an interview

(24:42):
with him in which he said, I did gather material
for that book while working in a 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
God that all of this leaked out into the public.

(25:03):
While I was researching Poisoner in Chief, I found an
interview with John Lennon and they asked him about LSD.
His first line was, we must always remember to thank
the CIA. He had never heard of Sidney Godleb. Nobody had,
but if he had, he would have said he must
always remember to thank Sydney Godlieb. So the irony is

(25:23):
that the drum Sidney Gottlieb hoped would give the CIA
the power to rule the world actually wound up fueling
a generational rebellion which was aimed at destroying everything with
the ice, and Godlieb took LSD right. By his own account,
he took LSD more than two hundred times. I began
to wonder as I was doing this research. His experiments

(25:46):
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 ASCID? And then while I was doing my
book tour, somebody came up with something that I found
even more chilling. Could he have been on LFD while
he was actually overseeing the torture sessions. Nobody knows. You know.

(26:07):
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. 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,

(26:28):
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 doorstopping. I just got to go
to Madison and I'm gonna 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

(26:50):
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 speak about their father. So he
took a lot of secrets his grave. They took at
least some. Uh, they're still walking around with them.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
I'm sure not again, not 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 CIA, inside of

(27:30):
the program. They were 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.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
How serious it could get. Well, it's a tradition in
medical search that people, sometimes these discoverers dosed themselves or
the people in their office, and Godly did that and
some of them. You're absolutely right. There was the CIA
employees who he dosed without their knowledge, maybe because he
just wanted to watch them and see how they would be.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
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 1 (28:17):
But I did want to 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 a whitey bulger
was being dosed with LSD, there was a doctor who

(28:39):
was an integral part of mk Ultra and he was
actually he filmed himself on television taking LSD himself, and
they cut this idea that they would try to see
if a dart fullows a number of doses of LSD
would affect an elephant. And they actually went to the

(28:59):
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, odorless, clearer, actually be so
potent as to affect an elephant? And sure enough, after

(29:21):
a little while, the elephant gave a tremendous dump and
then fell over and died. But back to John's question,
which is much more serious.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, because Frank, the Frank Olson episode is sort of
when this begins to turn.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
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.

(29:54):
It was a small, tight knit group. One of those
scientists was Frank Olson. Specialty was aerosoult 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 working on.

(30:15):
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 Olsen 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 cage of monkeys

(30:35):
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 mk
ultra experiments in conjunction with their British counterparts, and he

(30:55):
was present at one of those experiments in which an
air all 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

(31:18):
the CIA. I want to leave 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 got immediately back to his superiors at mk Ultra.
At one point, just before Thanksgiving in nineteen fifty three,

(31:39):
Frank Olsen and the other chemists who were involved in
mk Ultra, including gottlie 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 scientists and Gottleeb to
loosen his tongue and see if he was really thinking
about leaving. But in any case, nothing came out of it,

(32:02):
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

(32:23):
reported as the suicide 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

(32:47):
the mid seventies, when a lot of CIA misdeeds became public,
also material about mk Ultra became public, and one of
the reports prepared by a committee investiating committee headed by
Nelson Rockefeller, came up with the news that at this
cabin meeting twenty years earlier, Frank Olsen had been secretly

(33:09):
given LSD. 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

(33:31):
documents came out, including something that was called the CIA
Assassination Manual, which I think was written by Gottlieb and
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

(33:53):
always hit him in the back of the head first.
So Frank Olsen's son had the body exous 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

(34:14):
detective who went back to 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

(34:34):
is not very big, so he couldn't get up any speed,
and as the detective said, 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 murdered to keep him quiet. Now there is no
smoking gun that there is no absolute evidence. There is

(34:57):
probably some file somewhere. However, evidence, although it's quite damning,
is all circumstantial. However, if you put yourself in the
minds of Gottli 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

(35:17):
is too serious. If this guy does what he seems
to be ready to do, call 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

(35:38):
not like to hear it described as the great mystery
of mka Ault because they don't think it is a mystery,
I think for the rest of us it looks that way.
It's certainly one of the unresolved questions. You know. As
you guys know, the CIA, despite a lot of conspiracy theories,
doesn't shoot its own agents. That just that's a fantasy.
They don't kill their own people. I've ever been a

(36:01):
time when they felt the situation was so urgent they
had to make an exception. I don't know, but if
there ever was one, this would seem me to be
a good moment to do it.

Speaker 3 (36:11):
Well, Steven, you probably know this. There is a lot
of character assassination.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
See. You know, when I used to live in Nicaragua
and we were afraid that people we get arrested in
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 (36:31):
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 1 (36:48):
He was like he was like I think of him
like Jerry Garcia. He was like a hippie. He was
a hippie. He would get up in milk his goats
on his farm. He had an organic you know, he
lived organically. So there's the heeds he's doing.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
But then there's this like guy who like that is
nothing like the deep seems to be nothing like the
deeds that he's doing.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
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 very small. I was
quite intense. But I do think that a character of Gottleeb,
who he was as a person, makes this story all

(37:30):
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.
It was like a proto eco house in the times

(37:54):
when nobody ever thought of that, 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 was very active in
his community. He was quite beloved. Even when he retired.
He was in community theater, and he was always involved

(38:14):
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 like
to ask his living kids how did he do that?

(38:35):
But I 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, loving,
proto hippie identity, and then in the morning, maybe he

(38:59):
would put the 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 tell you
the answer that I came up with the best I

(39:19):
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 this, and
anybody can do it. Anybody can live the way they want.

(39:41):
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 right of
Americans and people in free countries to make their own decisions.

(40:04):
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 commitment to a
great cause is one of the most powerful reasons to

(40:27):
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 trying to awaigh
the means against the end.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
When I read your book, you want God Leave to
be the villain, to be 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 Gottleib's credit, this went on from one
what fifty three to sixty three He closed on the program.

(41:25):
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 and stuff where 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 closed,

(41:49):
insisted that everything be destroyed. And I don't know if
he would have done that, but certainly his leaders thought that.

Speaker 1 (41:55):
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 wame it all on him, that

(42:18):
was pretty good evidence of it.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
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 really

(42:41):
should have known better.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
But also American institution.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
So there was I don't remember the gentleman's name, but
there was a tennis player who died because Sidney Gottlie
gave the guys side characters who was willing to do
medical experiments on his own patient. And then they had
I don't know, I'll throw from university names what I think,
like Harvard and MIT. You know, hospitals were all willing
to do these experiments, and one because they didn't probably

(43:05):
understood 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 1 (43:14):
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, got Leave at
the end finally conceded that there is no such thing
as mind controlled. Now. Some psychologists had been telling him
this all along, but he didn't want to believe it. Finally,

(43:36):
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 destroy all
the records of mk Ultra. Now that's a federal crime,
destruction of federal property. However, it's a federal crime much

(43:59):
less 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 Godlieb 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

(44:21):
choice since he was being ordered by higher authority, and
the archives 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

(44:41):
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 Gottlieb did.

(45:04):
Could you?

Speaker 3 (45:04):
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 god. 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 boy or a drug addict,
a dea agent, a purviewer of LSD. If you could

(45:29):
just for funzies, let's.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Talk about it. That sounds fun.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
Just who has parakeets? Who Sidley got, whose wife Sidley
Gottley may have been not have been hiving? 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 c but frough mk Ultra
they were running a whorehouse. Just the thought is, if
you know the truth of it, all the subsequent conspiracy

(45:54):
theories that come out of MK Ultra, which are not true.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Godly decide I did 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,

(46:20):
fat bald head of the US Drug Agency in San Francisco.
So this guy was not only a drug agent, but
he was a heavy drug user. He tried every drug
that 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. Godlieb hired him to

(46:42):
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 them go
and taking advantage of their services. Sure enough, there was
this apartment and it was decorated with old kind of
French decoration to lose the trek paintings and black lace curtains,

(47:04):
and 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,

(47:26):
nothing 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 that men didn't want to complain because
they'd have to explain where they were. I really began

(47:48):
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 LSD to
learn that, but why do this? Only while I was
writing this book I came across something that maybe explains it.

(48:12):
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

(48:34):
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,
and he said, every time Sidney came out to look
at the project, they called it Operation Midnight Climax. I

(48:57):
always broke. He always wore the girl is 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 at death. But baby. He also felt that he

(49:19):
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

(49:44):
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

(50:06):
for why would you do a project that didn't really
seem to have any scientific basis, who knows.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
I have to say it's a very different CIA that
Jerry and I.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
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 (50:35):
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, and so all
of a sudden, the public is taken with this idea,

(50:58):
almost at the exact same time I said the same work.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
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 already oead 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

(51:22):
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,

(51:46):
even among people who don't know really what it was.
It's kind of the 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, because

(52:07):
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.

(52:27):
And if you want to guess what's going on now,
think of all the books, all the movies you can
make out of that.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
But mk Ultra, aside 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 got terrorists and you know that they're looking to
kill Americans, how do you get them to tell the truth?

(52:51):
How do we find out their plans and attentions? And
initially my understanding was, I think it was f the
art of choke that the early version of m k
ault was really, how do you get if we capture
an enemy agent, how do we get them to tell
us the truth?

Speaker 1 (53:07):
And how do we know?

Speaker 3 (53:08):
And also how do we keep and conversely, how do
we keep our people from blathering 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

(53:30):
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 wonder if

(53:51):
you could go into some of the elements that they
were at least said they were attempting to achieve.

Speaker 1 (53:55):
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.

(54:17):
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 serum was the beginning was the root of mk ultra.

(54:38):
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

(55:02):
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

(55:23):
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.

(55:46):
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 with another kind of a
real bluebird.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Well, if you think it's bad, these tests Americans and
see how you 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
new weapons over villages in their own country to see
how it would go and how it would get in
the water, and then how people downstream could survive or

(56:15):
not survive, how many would die. Like it was a
crazy time.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
Victory or death on both sides, And once you get
into that mindset, victory seems worthwhile achieving, regardless of the tactics.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
One quick thing is is, so Gottliber was in charge
of all this m fault and the things we're doing,
but he also was in charge of poisons for the CIA,
because that's something obviously that probably stow goes on. That's
you'd use poison for specific so things.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Gottley, in addition to running mk Ultra, 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 Patricia 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

(57:02):
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 the realization
that that was nothing. That was just the job of
a pharmacist. If there hadn't been godly somebody else could

(57:26):
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 anyone

(57:46):
else telling him what to do, and was allowed to
do this, which I think takes them far beyond anything
that a normal chemist or pharmacist would do. So is
John and.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
I having spent thirty years for 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, and I wonder if you could run
with this just a bit, is that while a lot
of the files were maybe destroyed, the financial records is

(58:18):
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 1 (58:36):
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.

Speaker 4 (58:55):
We're a tell you, but it's ordible if you have
to buy a little bags to put into it, and
it's expensed how many you buy a box of portable
toilet bags.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
Everything is in there, so actually says by portable and elephants,
I don't think they bought the elephant. I wonder if
the zoo ever asked for a compensation.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Hey, listen, this is fantastic. If you've done a great job,
your other books are fantastic. Two 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 (59:30):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts.