PROJECT MIND CONTROL-John Lisle

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
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(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Evening the inside story of the CIA's secret mind control
project MK Ultra, using never before seen testimony from the
perpetrators themselves. Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's most cunning chemist.
As head of the infamous mk Ultra project, he oversaw

(01:02):
an assortment of dangerous, even deadly experiments, among them dosing
unwitting strangers with mind bending drugs, torturing mental patients through
sensory deprivation, and steering the movements of animals via electrodes
implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods

(01:22):
of mind control that could turn someone into a real
life Manchurian candidate. In conjunction with MK Ultra, Gottlieb also
plotted the assassination of foreign leaders and created spy gear
for undercover agents. The details of his career, however, have
long been shrouded in mystery. Upon retiring from the CIA

(01:46):
in nineteen seventy three, he tossed his files into an incinerator.
As a result, much of what happened under mk Ultra
was thought to be lost. Until now. Historian John Lyle
has uncovered dozens of depositions containing new information about MK Ultra,

(02:07):
straight from the mouths of its perpetrators. For the first time,
Gottlieb and his underlings divulge what they did, why they
did it, how they got away with it, and much more. Additionally,
Lyle highlights the dramatic story of mk Ultra's victims, from
their terrible treatment to their dogged pursuit of justice. The

(02:32):
consequences of mk Ultra still reverberate throughout American society. Project
Mind Control is the definitive account of this most disturbing
of chapters in CIA history. The book that we're featuring
this evening is Project mind Control Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA

(02:53):
and the Tragedy of mk Ultra, with my special guest,
historian and law author John Lyle. Welcome to the program,
and thank you very much for this interview.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
John Lyle, thank you, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
And congratulations on this extraordinary book project mind Control.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yes, thanks, I'm I'm glad it's finally out. I've been
working on this for a long time, and I think
it's an exciting story. I think people are really going
to enjoy, well enjoy in some parts, but really learn
a lot about what was going on in the CIA
during these MK Ultra years in the nineteen fifties and sixties.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Tell us, so you say this project is a few
years in the making, tell us what brought you to
this project, why you felt this and compelled to write
this story.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah, thank you. I've long been interested in scientists who
have connections to the intelligence community. When I was doing
my PhD, I wrote my dissertation on that kind of
subject a group called the Science Attaches, but they had
connections to the CIA, and so I've kind of known
about scientists who have worked with the CIA, various of
them throughout the years, and this is one of the

(04:03):
more interesting stories. I would say, this Mkultra program, this
attempt to create some kind of mind control, either drug
or psychological technique, and so that was naturally kind of
interesting to me. My first book was on the precursor
to the CIA, which is the OSS, the Office of
Strategic Services, that was during World War Two. And I

(04:25):
wrote that first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, about a
group of scientists who created the secret weapons documents disguises
for agents who are going abroad undercover. And so that
kind of naturally led me into this topic about the
CIA because several of the people who were involved in
that program during World War Two they also have connections

(04:46):
to this mk Ultra project. So, for example, one of
the people who is hired by the OSS to do
some truth drug experiments during World War two is a
man named George White, who is a Bureau of a
narcotics agent, and he was hired during World War two
mainly to dose people with THHC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana,
and see how they reacted, see if it could get

(05:08):
them to tell the truth, if they were holding a secret,
something like that. And so when mk ultra, this mind
control program for the CIA, when he got started in
nineteen fifty three, the head of it was a man
named Sidney Gottlieb, and Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist and
he didn't really know how to start with mind control.
He didn't know what kind of experiments to run, who

(05:30):
to fund in order to determine whether truth drugs are possible.
And so he went into the files of the OSS
and as he was rummaging around those files, he happened
to find some files that listed this name on it,
George White, and he was doing these truth drug experiments
and that was exactly the kind of thing that Sidney
Gottlieb was interested in. And so Sidney Gottlieb hired him
that same guy, And so there was a natural kind

(05:51):
of link between my first book and this next subject.
And so that's what led me to it.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
You take us to in or prologue to Boston September
twenty fifth and nineteen eighty eight, a nineteen eighty pardon me,
and a depositions, and there was a sonographer, And so
from the perspective of the stenographer, she writes her account
of what happened September twenty fifth, nineteen eighty regarding Sidney

(06:18):
Gottlieb and an attorney named Joseph Raw and another attorney,
his partner, James Turner. Just tell us about this prologue
and this deposition that was underway.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, I'm really glad you asked about that, because that's
one of the main draws of this book is in
the nineteen eighties, this is twenty years after m k
Ultra began. You know, m k Altri's over by this point,
but several victims of this m k Ultra program who
were subjects of experiments that involved either electric shocks to
their brains or chemical comas, dosing them with LSD, all

(06:55):
kinds of stuff. Several of these victims sued the CIA
in the nineteen eighties and they're attorneys was were Joseph
Raw and James Turner. And as part of this lawsuit,
these attorneys took the depositions of several people who were
involved in mk Ultra, including Sidney Gottlieb, the head of Mkultra.
And so eventually this lawsuit was settled out of court,

(07:16):
but these depositions had still been taken, and they were
in the papers of Joseph Row, this lawyer, and when
he died, those were donated to the Library of Congress,
and that's where I found them. So I have these
verbatim transcripts of these attorneys asking not only the perpetrators
in k Ultra questions, but the victims of mk ultra questions,
and so I have this great dialogue that I can

(07:36):
use in the book to get both perspectives of the
people who were doing it and the people who had
this stuff done to them. And the reason why I
wanted to start the book with this prologue taking the
perspective of this court reporter who was there transcribing the
deposition as it was happening, is because kind of subconsciously
I wanted the reader to think throughout the book that
I want them to be the fly on the wall.

(07:57):
I want them to be like the court reporter who
is in the room listening to these depositions happening. And
so that was what I was trying to get across
with that prologue, is to let the reader know that
we have this great dialogue, this verbatim transcript of what
these people are saying, and you're going to be the
fly on the wall listening to how they talk about
what they did, the experiments that they performed or hired
people to do, and how they rationalize that to themselves,

(08:21):
how they feel about it twenty years later, whether they
have regrets. Many of them did, especially Sidney Gottlieb, and
also from the victim's perspective, what did they go through?
So that those are the depositions that I found for
this book that make it a little bit more unique.
There are a couple of books about mk Ultra, but
this one has that great verbatim transcript that allows us
to get inside the heads of the characters who are
actually in the story, which I'm really glad you picked

(08:43):
up on, because that's part of what makes the book,
I think, exciting to read.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Absolutely, you take us to what you call the outsider
and the origins of Sidney Gottlieb, and so you take
us to his Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents. He was born
in nineteen eighteen. Tell us a little bit about the outsider.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
Yeah, that title of the chapter giving Gotleib's background is
the outsider, because that's how I see him, and I
think that's how he saw himself. He was born with
club feet. He walked with a limp because he had
surgery took correct it, but it didn't quite work exactly
as it needed to, so he constantly walked with a limp.
He talked with a stutter from a young age. He
was always picked on as a child. He was seen

(09:27):
as by others the outsider, and he kind of internalized
that he was brilliant.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Though.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
He was a brilliant scientist, and he eventually got his
PhD in bio organic chemistry from cal Tech, one of
the nation's premier institutions. So he was a brilliant scientist.
And during World War One or during World War Two,
right as he got his PhD, he decided he wanted
to give back to the country that had provided a
home for his immigrant parents, and so he wanted to

(09:53):
enlist in the army and fight in the war. But
he was denied an enlistment because of his physical ailments,
especially his club feet, and so afterwards he again this
emphasized to him that he was an outsider. He wasn't
someone who could enlist an army and serve his country.
So we always felt this debt that he owed to
his country. And so in the beginning of the Cold War,

(10:16):
he decided that he was going to join some government organization.
He didn't know quite which at that moment, but some
organization that would allow him to pay back this debt
that he felt that he owed. And it just so
happened that at the moment the CIA was looking for
brilliant scientists, chemists like himself that might help win the
Cold War. To give a little bit more context, this

(10:39):
is right after World War two and World War two
had been it's sometimes called like the physicists War. If
World War one might have been the chemist's war with
the chemical weapons, world War two might have been the
physicist's war with nuclear weapons. And so science was now
seen as integral to national security. The fact that some
of the most important weapons of the war were built

(10:59):
by scientists, the atomic bombs, or you had proximity fusions
to detect things, or you had radar to detect ships
and planes. So the fact that science was now integral
to national security indicated the CIA that they needed to
hire scientists to determine what our adversaries were doing, what
were the Soviets doing that we can defend against and

(11:20):
maybe replicate ourselves. And so Sidney Gottlieb was hired by
the CIA to be this kind of chemist. One of
the first things that he did there was to work
with what was what's called the Clandestine Service, the Office
at the time it was called the Office of Policy Coordination.
This is the branch of the CIA that deals with
covert operations. And his job at least in the beginning,

(11:42):
was to develop methods of secret writing. So how could
you write something that someone couldn't detect. Maybe it would disappear,
maybe you would have to add some reagent to it
to make it appear on a piece of paper or
something like that. And he quickly kind of moved up
the ladder within the CIA and eventually was given head
of this Mkaltra program. The reason being that the CIA
wanted to determine whether it's possible to manipulate people because

(12:05):
they're especially afraid that this is what's happening in the
Soviet Union and they want to be able to defend
against it. But also if it is possible, maybe we
can use it to our advantage. So that's how Sidney
Gottlieb ends up at the CIA and how he comes
to head this mk Ultra program.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
What did they the CIA believe and many Americans and
Sidney Gottlieb, what did he believe about the Soviet Union,
specifically in terms of getting information from unwitting prisoners.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
Yes, there are a few incidents that lead Gottlieb in,
like the head of the CIA, Alan Dulles, and another
higher up in the CIA who is a champion of
mk Ultra, a guy named Richard Helms, to believe that
the communist powers, either the Soviet Union, China North Korea
at the moment, this is during the Korean War. There
are several incidents that lead them to believe that maybe

(12:57):
these communist powers possess methods of mind control. One of
the rationales for that is just by thinking Ivan Pavlov,
you know, the famous physiologist who did the behavioral conditioning
experiments on dogs where you would ring a bell and
the dog would salivate. That kind of behavioral conditioning that
was done in the eighteen nineties. And so Sidney Gottlieb
and others are thinking, well, if the Soviets or if

(13:19):
the Russians were doing that in the eighteen nineties, then
surely they've since expanded that program. Surely they've since expanded
behavioral conditioning to apply to humans as well. And if
they could make a dog salivate, maybe they can now
make a human do who knows what. So that's one
of the reasons that the CIA thinks that maybe these
communist powers have some kinds of methods of manipulation or

(13:40):
mind control in some way. Another incident is the Moscow
show trials where Stalin's political enemies are kind of being
purged from power and they're accused of doing crimes that
they didn't commit. These political enemies, Stalin accuses them of
trying to assassinate him in all kinds of things that
they didn't do. And so the curious thing is that

(14:01):
these prisoners start confessing to these false crimes. They start
saying that, yes, we did that, we're guilty. You need
to shoot us where you know, you need to lock
us up in prison. Why would they confess to false
crimes that they didn't do. One explanation, of course, is
that within the CIA, this explanation develops that maybe they've
been manipulated in some way. Maybe they've been dosed with
some kind of drugs to make them behave in this

(14:23):
confusing way. Maybe they've been hypnotized in a certain way.
There are several incidents like that. Another one, the most
famous one that leads to mk Ultra is the downing
of several American pilots in the Korean War who get
shot down over Korea and are captured as prisoners of war.
And while they are held captive, they start confessing to

(14:45):
crimes like dropping biological agents over Korea in order to
spread diseases among the Korean people like anthrax or typhus,
or cholera or bubonic plague. So they start confessing to
these false crimes that yeah, we drop this stuff, you know,
over these Korean people to dose them with these with
these germs so that it would spread and kill all
these people. This didn't happen, and many people within the

(15:08):
CIA are wondering, why would they confess to these crimes?
Is it because perhaps, like the like the prisoners in
the Moscow show trials, they have been manipulated with some
kind of communist mind control techniques, perhaps you know, through
drugs or hypnosis or something else. It turns out that
truth is not quite as sensational as that. The truth
is that the communist powers have been using the methods

(15:29):
of coercion that they had been using for a long time,
like sleep deprivation and torture and food deprivation, you know,
just these typical methods of coercion to get these people
to talk. But there was still a lingering suspicion within
the CIA that there might be something else, which is
why they decided to develop their own mind control program.
Mk Ultra. Now, in fact, before mk Ultra, there had

(15:52):
been a couple similar programs within the CIA. Initially it
was called Project Bluebird, and the idea was to develop
some kind of truth drug. And the attempt to develop
a truth drug has you know, gone on forever, I
mean ever since. You know, plenty of the elder thousands
of years ago said in wine lies the truth, the
idea being that alcohol will make someone kind of spill
their secrets. So there's been a long quest to develop

(16:16):
truth drugs. And during World War Two, you know, I
mentioned that there was a quest to develop by the
OSS these truth drugs, whether it be THHC or something else.
And in the CIA, that original Project Bluebird was to
develop a truth drug. The saying was that they wanted
to get prisoners to sing like a bird, which is
why it was called Bluebird. That eventually morphed into another
project called Artichoke, and Artichoke was interested in truth drugs

(16:41):
as well, but also hypnotism and a few other things
related to drugs. But eventually the main CIA mind control
project that was set up in nineteen fifty three, expanding
on those previous projects, was MK Ultra.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
Now you talk about that originally they were trying to
use nerve agents to try to elicit some kind of response,
but then they chose LSD. Tell us how they came
to decide to use LSD and Sydney Gottlieb's earliest forays
into LSD, what was their plan to do real world testing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
So, LSD was first discovered in nineteen forty three by
this Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company,
and he didn't have much interest in the beginning. He
didn't know what its potential powers were, so he shelved
it for five years. Then in nineteen forty eight he
had this nagging suspicion that maybe it had something else
to offer, so he resynthesized LSD and when he did so,

(17:43):
a tiny bit of LSD, just a small, small, little
dose of it, contacted his skin and he started experiencing
this strange phenomena. The room started spinning, he starts hallucinating,
he can't see straight. So he thinks this is, you know,
a very powerful drug. And what was especially interesting to
him is that such a minute dose could have such

(18:06):
profound psychological effects. LSD is extremely powerful, which is one
of the main reasons why when the CIA learns about
this drug, they're interested because such a minute dose, it
can have such a powerful effect. It's so potent, so
you could easily slip this to someone without them knowing it,
and it could have really powerful hallucinogenic psychological effects. So

(18:27):
that's one of the main reasons why the CIA is interested.
The other main reason why is just because the effects
that LSD actually produces, these hallucinogenic effects, it seems potentially
to lower inhibitions, so maybe it can work as a
truth drug. But also if you can make someone seem
like they go crazy if they take LSD and don't
know it, then they're going to be acting very oddly,

(18:49):
then that might be useful in some kind of covert operation.
For instance, say, if there is some foreign leader that
we want to lose an upcoming election, what if we
dose their water with LSD beforehand and they drink it
before they give a important political speech, and then the
hallucinogenic effects start happening while they're giving this speech and

(19:09):
they seem to go crazy. Surely that's going to lead
people to lose faith in them and they might lose
the election. So there are some covert operation applications to
LSD besides just potentially being some kind of truth drug.
So that was one of the main reasons why the
CIA is interested in it.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
That Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now,
let's you take us to an incident, a deeply important
incident at Deep Creek Lodge. Tell us the premise for
this meeting and what happens in terms of involving LSD.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
This is the famous Frank Olsen incident, one of the
most known, well known incidents of this kind of mk
ultra story. Deep Creek was a lodge in Maryland where
occasionally several scientists from the CIA and several scientists from
Camp Diedrich would meet. Diedrich was it eventually became Fort
Diedrich but it was the America's like biological warfare installation.

(20:06):
This is where germs were mass produced for the potential
of using them in biological weapons. And within Camp Didrich
there was a division called the Special Operations Division composed
of several scientists, and it was these scientists who would
meet with CIA scientists at Camp Didrich to share the
results of their experiments and let each other know what

(20:28):
was going on to keep each other informed on the
kinds of things that they were doing to help each
other in their work. So these scientists from the CIA,
Sidney Gottlieb among them. Another was Robert Lashbrook. They're mostly
connected with mk ultra, and the scientist from Fort Diedrich
among them is Frank Olsen. They would meet at Deep
Creek to exchange their results. And during one of these meetings,

(20:51):
Sidney Gottlieb and his underling Robert Lashbrook, another chemist who's
working on mk ultra, they decide to secretly dose the
scientists at Deep Creek with LSD to see how they
react to it in their minds. In the mind of
Sidney Gottlieb, I think that he was thinking of this
almost as kind of a funny prank that he was
going to do. I don't think he actually thought that

(21:11):
it was going to have profound ramifications. He had done
this before with people within the CIA, secretly dose them
with LSD to see how they reacted. There were stories
around the CIA saying that people would dose the coffee
pot with LSD around the office. There was even a
memo coming from the Office of Security within the CIA
warning everyone not to dose the holiday punch bowl with

(21:32):
LSD because then there's going to be some repercussion. So
obviously this was the kind of rank that was carried
out within the CIA among the chemists who were working
on MK ultra, and they decided to bring that kind
of mentality to this Deep Creek retreat, and so they
poured some LSD into the liquor and started passing around
shots of this cointro liquor in One of the people

(21:53):
who took a shot was Frank Olsen, and for the
most part, everyone who had this started hallucinating again. The
walls started to spin. They eventually went to bed, though
except for Frank Olsen, this really seemed to have a
profound effect on his psychology. After the retreat, he returns
home and his wife immediately notices that he's acting very strangely.

(22:13):
He doesn't seem to be himself. Something seems to happen.
He keeps rambling on about how he thinks he messed
up the experiment and he wished that he would be
fired because it would be better for everyone, and he's
upset about things that have happened in this past. It's
very strange what's going on. He's never acted like this before,
and so Alice Olsen, his wife, becomes very concerned. Frank

(22:35):
Olsen goes to work the next few days and his
colleagues notice that he's acting very strangely as well. He
says the same things to them, I wish you would
fire me. I've been such a bad employee. I've ruined
the experiments and all kinds of stuff. He seems to
have some kind of psychotic break after this experiment, and
so Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook and a few other
people who were involved in this they recommend that Frank

(22:56):
Olsen go to New York to see a doctor there
to get some kind of psychiatric evaluation. So they send
him to New York to see a man named Harold Abramson,
who had ties with the CIA. Already he had been
he had been the attending physician at several of the
experiments where Sydney Gottlieb had dosed himself with LSD, So

(23:17):
Harold Abramson certainly knew that this kind of thing had
already been happening within the CIA. So Frank Olsen goes
to Abramson, who analyzes him and agrees that he's had
some kind of reactive psychosis to this experiment where he's
taken this LSD unwittingly, and he recommends eventually that Frank
Olsen go to a psychiatric hospital to stay there for

(23:39):
a while to get some help. It just it turns
out that the psychiatric hospital that he wanted to send
Frank Olsen to didn't have a spare bed for the
next day, so Frank Olsen had to wait in New
York for an extra day. So he and Robert in Lashbrook.
They get a hotel room at the Stateler Hotel, Room
ten eighteen A, and overnight. Robert Lashbrook wakes up at

(24:03):
two thirty am in the morning when he hears a
crash through the bedroom window and he runs over to
the window and he sees Frank Olsen splayed out on
the seventh on the sidewalk. So Frank Olson appears from
Lashbrook's perspective to a jumped out of this window and dies.
There are several people on the ground who see Frank
Olson come out of this window and fall onto the ground.

(24:25):
One of them is the hotel night watchman who runs
over to Frank Olsen and Frank Olsen is still alive.
At that moment, and he seems to try to say something,
but his mouth is filled with blood and he's kind
of gurgling, and he eventually dies right there. So that's
the death of Frank Olson that seems to have been
precipitated by this unwitting dose of LSD at Deep Creek,
which seems to have caused some kind of reactive psychosis

(24:47):
in him that led him eventually to commit suicide in
this way. So that's the story of Frank Olsen, and
it's the you know, a really popular story within this
MK ultra circle because it led to the death of
this individual.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
You write that this lash Brook was questioned by police. Interestingly,
he stays up in the room and waits till police arrived,
and they thought that was odd. He said, well what
could I really do? But he did not tell them
about the dosing at Deep Creek, did he correct?

Speaker 3 (25:19):
Yes, correct, he kept He kept basically everything about himself
secret when the police arrived and tried to ask him questions.
In fact, some of the police officers that I quote
say that he was very uncooperative. It was obvious that
he didn't want to talk. So afterwards that he went
to the police station and he talked to them about
what had happened because they were questioning him, and he

(25:40):
eventually says he was an employee of the army. He
lies about where he was even employed. He didn't want
anyone to know that he was connected to the CIA.
He especially didn't want anyone to know that he had
done he had been involved in these LSD experiments, so
he was keeping that as much of a secret as possible.
In fact, the CIA itself wanted to keep all of
this a secret, especially its interest in LSD, because it

(26:02):
was afraid that if anyone learned that it was performing
experiments with LSD, then potentially other countries like the Soviets
or the Chinese or someone might become interested in LSD
themselves and start experimenting with it. The CIA thought LSD
almost had like magical powers, that it would be able
to open their eyes to manipulating people into doing certain things,
and they didn't want anyone else to have that ability.

(26:24):
So it was a closely guarded secret about their interest
in it. So the CIA itself, after this incident, they
actually what's called backstopped Robert Lashbrook, and that means they
they made it out to seem as if he was
an employee of the Army and not the CIA, to
try to cover its tracks, just in case anyone started
looking into him that they would see that he is

(26:46):
not affiliated with the CIA. Instead he's affiliated with the army,
which of course wasn't the case. He was affiliated with
the CIA, but they didn't want anyone to know that.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
You say that there were certain people that blamed Sydney
gottlie for the death of Olsen, but the program went on.
He had no disciplinary action towards him as a result.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
That's correct. He he had no, I guess, formal disciplinary
action taken against him. However, Alan Dollas, the head of
the CIA, he did reprimand Sidney Gottlieb informally. There are
several notes that survive that Doulas wrote to Sidney Gottlieb
basically saying, I think what you did was, you know,
not a wise action, and you know, I wish you

(27:31):
wouldn't have done it. Something like that. Just a very
informal disciplinary action that didn't affect Sidney Gottlieb's career in
any way. But that's as much as you could say
a discipline he ever got for performing experiment that led
to the death of this man. This was one of
the reasons why the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the
CIA in the nineteen eighties, the people who had been

(27:51):
victims of mk ULTRA, This was one of their arguments
of why they needed restitution was the fact that after
this experiment had led to the death of Frank Olsen,
the CIA didn't do anything about Sidney Gottley. They left
him in charge of this project, which eventually he would
go on to fund the experiments that led to their
own victimization. So that's one of the arguments they used
to try to show that the CIA acted negligently in

(28:14):
this case. The fact that Sidney Gottley was allowed to
retain control of mk ULTR even after a death of
this individual, Frank Olsen.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Not only was he allowed to retain directorship, but also
that they continued with their experiments with LSD. And you
take us to talking about the safe houses that were
used three cities in the US. Tell us about these
safe houses and the experiments therein.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
Yeah, exactly. So, right after the death of Frank Olsen,
Sidney Gottley is not as if he kind of steps
back and tries to analyze what went on and tries
to determine whether it's still safe to use LSD or not. Instead,
he escalates the project. He hires George White, this former
OSS Truth drug tester who I talked to about earlier,

(29:01):
who is a Bureau of Narcotics agent. He hires this
George White to start doing covert unwinning LSD experiments on
unwitting subjects. He first starts doing it in New York.
He rents a hotel room where he starts dosing some
of his criminal contacts with LSD and other drugs. But
eventually Sidney Gottlieb and others were afraid that the police

(29:24):
would catch on to what George White was doing, so
they sent him to somewhere where they thought he would
be less likely to be caught, which was San Francisco
at the time. So George White goes to San Francisco
and he instead of dosing people himself, he starts hiring
prostitutes to dose their unwitting clients with LSD. Meanwhile, George
White is sitting behind a one way mirror watching what

(29:44):
happens to determine how these people react to this drug.
And for the most part he's sitting on a portable
toilet that he bought. We have the receipts of all
this stuff that he has. He's sitting on a portable toilet,
he's drinking martiniz that he's bought with CIA funds, watching
these prostitutes dose their clients with drugs. For the most part,
the way they did it was injecting LSD through the

(30:06):
through the cork in a wine bottle and then pouring
wine and letting people drink it. So this was known
as Operation Midnight Climax. George White termed it that. It
kind of gives you an indication maybe of his character,
the fact that he would call it something like that.
Out of everyone involved in the MK Ultra project, I
think he was the most callous. I think he was
the most uncaring about what happened to the victims that

(30:27):
he was doing this stuff too. Sidney Gottlieb, it seems like,
especially in these later depositions, he regrets a lot of
what he did. But for George White, I think he
was doing it for his own enjoyment. I don't think
he had really a higher calling, At least he didn't
feel a higher calling. I think that he was doing
it because he enjoyed it. He was an alcoholic. He
was drinking these martinis. He was watching this happen. He

(30:48):
was he was especially interested in sex in general. Oftentimes,
I quote several people who were interviewed, he would dose
even his friends with LSD at parties and try to
get them to engage in orgies. So he, out of everyone,
I think, was probably the most depraved individual who was
involved in this, mostly because, at least even for the

(31:09):
other subprojects, a lot of them are unethical and especially illegal,
but I think that the people who are performing them
at least had some kind of justification for what they're doing.
They might think that they were trying to cure mental
illness in some way, or that they were doing this
to protect national security. But I think George White was
the most sadistic in that he was just doing it

(31:29):
for his own pleasure.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now, you take us to a couple other characters.
John Gidtinger. He had read academic journals to come across
nineteen fifty six Journal of Psychiatric Medicine and an article
regarding psychic driving, and the author You and Cameron tell

(31:54):
us about Gottlib's interest in psychic driving and you and Cameron.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
Yes, so this was another subproject of mk ULTRA. It
might be helpful real quick to just explain the construction
of MKULTRA. What this program overall is. It's not that
MKULTRA scientists like Sydney Gottlieb are performing every single experiment
that are part of mk ULTRA. Instead, what mostly happened
MKULTRA was an umbrella term, and under the umbrella of

(32:22):
mk ULTRA there were one hundred and forty nine subprojects.
These could be something like Operation Midnight Climax with George White,
but mostly what these subprojects were was the CIA Sydney
Gottlieb funding independent researchers who were at prisons or hospitals
or university somewhere to conduct some kind of research. So
it's not the CIA itself that's conducting the research. Instead,

(32:45):
it's the CIA funding people to do this research, many
of them who were already doing this these kinds of experiments,
but then they're funded by the CIA to continue what
they're already doing. This was the case with you and Cameron.
He's a Canadian psychiatrist and he was already doing experiments
before the CIA even knew who he was on what
he termed psychic driving. This was his attempt to cure

(33:09):
mental illness. To give some background just on Cameron and
how he thought and how this is going to tie
into his experiments, Cameron was a behaviorist, so he thought
that all behavior was the result of environment. Everything was nurture,
not nature. So he thought that mental illness was the
result of a bad environment. Someone had been brought up
in a bad environment that reinforced bad behaviors and that

(33:30):
leads them to act out in certain ways that is
the manifestation of their mental illness. He thought that the
way to cure this would be to reduce someone back
to a blank slate so that they would forget all
of their bad behaviors their mental illness, and then through
a better environment, you could build them back up in
your own image so that they wouldn't have their mental illness.

(33:51):
This was his kind of grand theory of how he
would cure all mental illness. He thought that he was
destined for the Nobel Prize. He thought that he would
cure schizophrenia and everything else, but he needed a way
to bring someone back down to the blank slate from
where they actually were. So this was his big goal.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
How do you.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
Reduce someone to a blank slate and make them forget
their behaviors so that you can build them back up again.
And his idea was that you could do this through stress.
Through increased stress, you could make someone forget all of
their bad past behaviors and you could build them back
up afterwards. But the question now is how do you
induce enough stress in someone to make them forget their behaviors.

(34:29):
One of his solutions to that is called psychic driving.
This is where you play a negative message for them
over and over and over again thousands of time. They
listened to the same repeating message over and over and
over again, tens of thousands of times, day after day,
week after week. So they basically have either a headphone

(34:51):
strapped to their head or a radio next to them
or something that emits this these messages and they have
to listen to it over and over and over again.
So this was psychic driving, and he wrote an article
about this in this psychiatric journal. And John Gettinger, who
is a psychologist in the CIA working with Sydney Gottlieb
on mk Ultra, happened to see this article and he

(35:11):
gave it to Sidney Gottlieb saying, hey, this looks like
a promising avenue for something to do with mind control
or how we might be able to manipulate people in
certain ways. This is the kind of thing exactly what
Ewan Cameron is doing. He's basically manipulating people to give
them a different psychology. That's exactly what the CIA is
interested in. So after they read that article, Sydney Gottlieb

(35:32):
decides to start funding you and Cameron to continue the
experiments that he's already doing, psychic driving experiments like replaying
this message, these messages thousands of times. But also Cameron
would combine that with other methods in order to increase
the amount of stress. So, for example, sometimes Cameron will
put his patients into sensory deprivation chambers where he would

(35:52):
put tubes over their hands, goggles over their eyes, plugs
in their ears so that they couldn't see anything, hear anything,
feel anything, and this was to increase their stress. Occasionally
they would be played these psychic driving messages as well,
so that's one of the things Cameron did for his
most unruly patients. He would put them in what was
called the sleep room, where he would induce comas into

(36:13):
them through chemicals, and they would sleep there for months
on end, sometimes waking up maybe once or twice per
day to go to the bathroom and to eat, but
otherwise they would be in these chemical comas. Other times
he would put electric signals on their temples and give
them electric shocks in order to again try to induce
enough stress to reduce them back to the blank slate.

(36:33):
These are the kinds of experiments that Ew and Cameron
was doing. He thought that he was curing mental illness,
but of course many of his patients didn't know that
this wasn't kind of tried and tested cure. He was
just experimenting on them without their permission, without their consent,
without their knowledge. Many of the people who are who
give depositions in these lawsuits that I quote throughout the book,

(36:55):
they're the victims of you and Cameron, and they've experienced
all of these things, and they're talking about him in
the depositions. One of the most heart wrenching of them
is the story of Mary Morrow, and she has a
very ironic story because she was a resident in training
at the Allen Memorial institute where you and Cameron was

(37:15):
a psychiatrist, so she was training under him to become
a doctor. However, she had anorexia and she failed some
neurological exams and so she went into a deep depression.
She tried to kill herself. It's a very sad story.
And then ew and Cameron recruited her to come back
to the Allen but not as a resident in training,
that as a patient. So she had been on one
side of it in the beginning. She had been administering

(37:37):
some of these treatments, supposed treatments to these patients, and
then she started receiving them herself when she became a patient.
Her story is very heart wrenching. The way she eventually
escaped is that her sister, who hadn't heard from her
for a while, barges into the institute and basically demands
to see her and threatens to call the police if
she doesn't. So she eventually walks into the room where

(37:58):
she sees her sister Mary sitting there on a chair,
a blank look in her eyes. She had just undergone
this electric shock therapy as they called it, and she
couldn't put on her clothes, she couldn't put on makeup.
She couldn't basically do anything herself, and her sister basically
busted it her out of there. In the depositions that
I have of Mary Morrow, she because she laments the

(38:18):
fact that there are people who were in there for years.
She happened to be there for several weeks, but people
who are experiencing these treatments for years who never got
to escape. She actually considered herself one of the lucky ones.
But these are the kinds of things that you and
Cameron was doing at the Allen Memorial Institute funded by M.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
K Ultra.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
Talking about other funding and other doctors. You title this
the Wild West, and that is doctor Jolly West July fourth,
nineteen fifty four, near San Antonio, Texas and the missing
Cheryl Joe Horton, three year old tell us about the
airman Jimmy Schaeffer and and what happens in this regard

(39:02):
with doctor West.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Yes, this is a very sad story. Cheryl Joe Horton
was this three year old girl in San Antonio. Her
parents had driven her and her younger brother and her
little brother to a bar. They went in for a
drink real quick, and they were going to come out
to get their children drive off, but as they were inside,
something happened to Cheryl Joe Horton. The parents came out

(39:25):
afterwards and they couldn't find her. They looked around. Eventually
there was a search party that was launched and they
ended up finding her body in a gravel pit. She
had been abused, sexually abused, and she had been murdered,
and so there started this man hunt for whoever had
done this, and pretty quickly there was spotted a man
who is running away from the gravel pit, who had

(39:47):
blood stain on his blood stains on his clothes. He
was arrested. He was taken to prison in San Antonio.
He eventually had to be transferred to Austin because there
was a lynch mob that was forming that was threatening
to kill him. And this was Jimmy Shaver. He was
an airman at Lackland Air Force Base and he was
immediately suspect of killing cher Joe Horton, of sexually abusing her.

(40:11):
And one of the psychiatrists who was put in charge
of interviewing Jimmy Shaver afterwards to determine whether he was
guilty or what he would say, was Jolly West. Jolly
West was a famous psychiatrist. One of the reasons why
he was already famous was because after the Korean War
he was one of the psychiatrists who interviewed the Korean

(40:31):
War prisoners who said, you know that they had dropped
biological agents on Korea during the war. He was famous
for having interviewed them and for determining that the reason
why they were admitting to this stuff wasn't because they
had actually done it, it was because they were submitted
to torture, psychological abuse, sleep deprivation, all kinds of things.
And so Jolly West was already well known, and he

(40:53):
starts interviewing Jimmy Shaver to determine what was happening, what
had gone on, what had happened, what did he do
to the little girl? And as part of this interrogation,
really West used some fairly unconventional techniques in order to
get Jimmy Shaver to talk about what he was doing.
And in fact, it turns out that some of these

(41:14):
techniques were inspired by what Sidney gottlie was doing with
MK Ultra. In fact, there's a correspondence between Sidney Gottlieb
and Jolly West beforehand. So we know that they were
talking to each other in which Jolly West tells Sidney
Gottlieb about the CIA the kinds of experiments that he
wants to do with hypnotism in drugs, and so those

(41:36):
kinds of things are what Jolly West eventually does to
Jimmy Shaver when he's interrogating him. He gives him drugs,
He hypnotizes him to try to get him to tell
the truth about what's happening with what happened with Cha
Joe Horton. And in this interrogation, which I quote at
length in the book, it's a really harrowing interrogation. Jimmy
Shaver opens up about, yeah, I took her to the
gravel pit, and you know, he claims not really to

(42:00):
remember what happened at first. And then in the middle
of the interrogation there's a break of about thirty minutes,
a thirty minute break in the tape where we don't
have the transcript of what happens. Then the tape come
back comes back on and at the beginning of it,
Jolly West says, you know, we've just had a break.
And during that those thirty minutes, it wasn't captured on tape,

(42:20):
but you know, I got Jimmy Shaver to admit to
some things that he wouldn't admit on the tape. And
so there's a big question that remains, what did what
did Jolly West do during those thirty minutes to get
Jimmy Shaver to admit what he had done to this
little girl. Of course, their speculation maybe he was imposing
some of these m k Ultra methods of mind control
on him or something. But nevertheless, in the third part

(42:41):
of the interrogation, when they come back from the break,
Jimmy Shaver starts to say that he had sexually abused
this girl, that he had eventually killed her. He admits
to the murder. And so that's the story of how
mk Ultra is kind of tied up in this the
murder of this young girl through Jolly West, who apparently
was drugging this airman in order to get him to
con to what he had done. It turns out later

(43:02):
that Jimmy Shafer is found guilty of this murder. There
are a lot of kind of high jinks that ensued
during the court during the trial of Jimmy shaf to
find him guilty of murder. Yeah, there are a lot
of hijinks. His lawyer basically makes up a fake story
about how the body was found and how she wasn't
actually dead at the time, and he just completely making

(43:23):
this up to try to get him found not guilty
or something. But that doesn't work, and he's eventually found
guilty and he's eventually sentenced to death. But that's how
Jolly West is kind of tied up in this story
about the murder of this girl. He was doing these
kind of hypnotism drug experiments on this person as he
was interrogating him to German whether he was guilty.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages now tell us about the CIA and the
government's interest in assassination.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Yeah, Sidney Gottlieb is pretty closely tied up with several
assassination attempts during the Cold War. After the mk Ultra
program ends, it really ends in the early nineteen sixties.
There are a few subprojects that go on throughout the
nineteen sixties, but for the most part in the early
nineteen sixties nineteen sixties, MK Ultra ends and Sidney Gottlieb
is assigned to be to work for the Clandestine Service

(44:18):
again to work for the kind of covert operations branch
of the CIA, and as part of that, he's a
knowledgeable chemist, and so whenever the CIA is interested in
potentially conducting an assassination, he is one of the first
people they turn to because he knows how potentially you
could kill someone without anyone realizing it. One of the
main targets of the CIA during this time period is

(44:40):
a prime Minister of the Congo named Patrice La Mumba.
In fact, President Eisenhower basically orders the assassination of Patrice Lamumba.
He tells at a meeting several of his aids and
several people who are working at the CIA that he
wants La Mumba eliminated in whatever way you can do it. So,
you know, word go from Eisenhower to Alan Dulls, down

(45:02):
through the chain of command and the CIA, down to
Sidney Gottlieb, and he eventually gets the order basically to
find out a way to kill Patrice Lamumba, and Gottlieb
talks about this in his depositions, how he was thinking
about what to do and he eventually settled on a
method that he didn't think anyone would trace back to him,
which was he wanted to put anthrax in the toothpaste

(45:22):
of Patrice Lamumba and send that to the Congo and
have that snuck into La Mumba's bathroom. Lamumba would brush
his teeth and then that would kill him in some way.
Now it's ironic. Godlieb didn't know this, but among Lamumba's friends,
they often said that he didn't brush his teeth for
this very reason. He was afraid of an assassination attempt
on him. So the joke was that he preferred bad

(45:42):
breath to no breath at all. But anyway, Sidney Gottlieb
procured some anthrax from Fort Diedrich personally took it to
the Congo and gave it to a CIA agent there
who was supposed to try to find a way to
slip it into Lamuma's bathroom. That plan eventually didn't end
up going forward because before it could happened, Lemumba was
captured by several of his political enemies and murdered anyway,

(46:04):
so the CIA didn't have to get its own hands
dirty in this case, even though he was trying to.
So that's one of the assassination attempts that Gottlieb was
involved in. He was also involved in several on Fidel Castro.
Castro is probably the most you know, famous CIA assassination target.
There's a famous picture of Fidel Castro holding up a
newspaper that talks about, you know, CIA assassination attempt on Castro.

(46:27):
So he's alive. He had survived. In fact, at the
end of his life he said, if surviving assassinations was
an Olympic sport, I would win the gold medal. So
several of these assassinations on him involved his hobby. Fidel Castro,
you know, being the leader of Cuba, he was highly
interested in scuba diving. He would often go to specific

(46:50):
spots to scuba dive over and over, and so one
attempt to kill him was to get someone to give
him a scuba suit that was laced with some kind
of fungus that would give him a disease. And so
the idea was that we were going to lace this
suit with a disease, give it to Fidel Castro, he
would put it on, go swimming and die. It turns
out that that didn't actually happen because the person that

(47:12):
they wanted to give the suit to Fidel Castro. This
guy named James Donovan. He was working in Cuba. He
was a lawyer working in Cuba. But ironically he had
already given Fidel Castro Castro a scuba suit as a
gift before, so it would look weird if he did
it again, so that didn't actually go through. Another attempt
to kill Fidel Castro that was capitalizing on his scuba

(47:36):
diving hobby was to get a seashell and put explosives
in it and put the seashell in a spot where
Fidel Castro often dived. And the idea was that we
were going to make the seashell really beautiful, and it
would be so beautiful it would catch Fidel Castro's eye
and he would see it and he would just have
to have it, and so he would pick it up,

(47:56):
and in doing so, in picking it up, this would
trigger the explosives and it would blow up and he
would die right there. That was the idea at least,
but it again eventually didn't go through. You know, none
of these assassination attempts on Fidel Castro actually worked, because
he survived for many decades later. Another attempt to if
not kill Fidel Castro at least to harm him in

(48:17):
some way was to gift him cigars, you know, famous
Cuban cigars that were laced with LSD or some other
kind of poison. Another kind of poison that was considered
for lacing these cigars was bochulin toxin. So lace them
with bochulin toxin. He would smoke it and he would die.
These some cigars were selected, picked out and actually laced

(48:37):
with a poison and given to a Cuban asset, but
he failed to sneak it into Cuba, so that didn't
go forward. Another one was to lace these cigars with LSD.
The idea was to get it to Fidel Castro right
before he gave an important speech, and he would appear
to be crazy and maybe his supporters would lose faith
in him because he couldn't be trusted anymore because he
was saying all these wacky things. Again, that ended up

(48:58):
not going forward. But those are several of the assassination
at least attempts that Sidney Gottlieb was involved in on
Patrice La Mumba and on Fidel Castro.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Now tell us about what prompted the congressional investigations about
MK Ultro. What brought the US to those congressional investigations.

Speaker 3 (49:19):
Yeah, yeah, So in nineteen seventy five is often called
the year of Intelligence because in nineteen seventy five there
were several investigations that led to the exposure of these
past abuses within the intelligence community. So MK ultra started
in nineteen fifty three, but the public didn't know about
it until nineteen seventy five. So you raise a good question,
what is it about the seventies that leads the public

(49:42):
to learn about this. I should mention briefly that in
nineteen seventy three, Sidney Gottlieb retire from the CIA, and
in doing so, right before he did, he destroyed many
of the mk ULTRA files. Right, So this is necessarily
a suspicious act. But in nineteen seventy four, in late
nineteen seventy four, there is an article that appears on
the front page of the New York Times that kind

(50:03):
of sparks many revelations about the intelligence community that's going
to lead to the exposure of m k ULTRA. That
article is written by a famous journalist, Seymour Hirsch, who
had gotten access to a group of documents called the
Family Jewels. The Family Jewels was an internal CIA group
of documents that was compiled in order for the director
of the CIA to understand what were the sensitive aspects

(50:27):
of the agency's past. What were operations that we had
been involved in in the past that could be considered
illegal or unethical that we can know so that if
it ever is exposed to the public, we can know
how to respond to that. That was the idea at
least of compiling the Family Jewels what it became known
as this group of documents the Family Jewels. But someone
within the CIA who is disgruntled with the leadership, leaked

(50:50):
that compilation of documents to this journalist, Seymour Hirsch, and
he started publishing some of these revelations from them, such
as the CIA was involved in illegally spying on anti
war protesters during the Vietnam War. That's what the original
article was about. Once this article comes out in the
New York Times, there are several people within the government
who are demanding that we launch investigations of past abuses.

(51:13):
If it's the fact that the CIA was illegally spying
on these anti war protesters, what else might it have done.
So in the wake of that several investigations are launched.
Within the executive branch there's the Rockefeller Commission. Within the
Senate there is the Church Committee, and within the House
there is the Pike Committee. And these are all happening

(51:34):
really in the beginning and throughout nineteen seventy five, which
is why it's called the Year of Intelligence. And as
part of these investigations, these executive and congressional investigations, they
start realizing that the CIA was involved in much more
than just spying on anti war protesters, and in fact,
they reveal, especially that mk ultra had been a thing
that happened throughout the nineteen fifties. So that's what precipitated

(51:54):
these investigations, and that's how it was first exposed to
the public. After those investstigations conclude, there are several congressional
hearings specifically on mk ultra, where the main perpetrators like
Sidney Gottlieb, are subpoenaed and they're required to come testify
in front of these hearings, and so Sidney gottl Gottlieb
has to actually has to testify before Congress. This in

(52:17):
a sense works to his advantage in a way because
as part of his testimony before Congress, his lawyer works
out a deal whereby Sidney Gottlieb is granted immunity for
anything that he testifies about. So he's never held liable,
he's never held accountable for anything he does, in part
because he gets immunity for testifying in front of Congress.

(52:37):
So that's how eventually a little bit more of the
details are exposed to the public about mk ULTRA. And
then in the seventies there is a journalist and former
State Department employee named John Marx who files a Freedom
of Information Act request for any files relating to mk ULTRA.
Now that these congressional committees have exposed that this took place,

(52:58):
he files a FOYER request any surviving documents about this program. Now,
as I mentioned earlier, it turns out that Sidney Gottlieb
had destroyed many of the mk ultra files, but he
didn't destroy all of them. He didn't realize that were
there were thousands more files that were really budgetary files
that he had overlooked. Those survived, and when John Marx

(53:18):
filed that Freedom of Information Act request, a lot of
those files were released. Some of them are redacted in
certain ways. But many of those files, thousands of them,
are released, which gives us even more information about MK Ultra,
And in response to that, several of the victims of
these subprojects start suing the CIA, leading to the lawsuits
that eventually get the depositions that I found. So that's

(53:40):
kind of how we gradually learned more and more about
this program.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
You're right that Sidney Gottlieb is retired, and so an
attorney may caution him to just have yes or no
responses to any questions. What does Sidney Gottlieb do regardless
of that advice.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up, because that's part
of what makes the deposition so exciting, is because Gottlieb
did not listen to the advice of his lawyers. By
this point in the nineteen eighties, you know, twenty thirty
years had passed since the beginning of MK Ultra, and
it seems as if Gottlieb regrets a lot of what
he did. He and his depositions says basically that the

(54:24):
reason why he destroyed these files was because he was embarrassed.
And so I feel like part of why Sidney Gottlieb
talks so much in these depositions is because he wants
to air a lot of the pent up regret that
he has. He interviewed one of the defense attorneys who
was working with Sidney Gottlieb on these lawsuits, and the
defense attorney told me that he was really surprised at

(54:47):
just how much Sidney Gottlieb talked Before the deposition. He
had advised Sidney Gottlieb to, you know, say yes about
the question that's asked, say yes or no about the
question that's asked, and nothing more. You know, just answer
the question and don't elaborate. But Sidney gottli elaborate it
a lot. And this attorney told me that he is
not the ideal client because he would talk so much,
and that's not great for his defense, but it's great

(55:09):
for someone like me who's a historian and wants to
learn about what was going on. Sidney Gottlieb, at least
in these depositions, was talking about it quite a bit.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
You also talk about Joseph Raw their adversarial but they've
taken it to another level in terms of Joseph raz
taking quite a bit of this behavior by Lee Strickland
as beyond what would be typical. You do write quite
a bit about this battle between these two attorneys.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
I do, yeah, and I wanted that to be at
the forefront of the minds of anyone who's reading this,
because I do want people to situate themselves kind of
as the fly on the wall for these depositions, and
so I want to bring out some of the drama
of these depositions. It's not just that Sidney Gottlieb and
others involved in MK Ultra or who are victims of
MK Ultra are revealing what happened to them or what

(55:58):
they did. In many cases, a lot of the drama
comes from these attorneys who were on opposite sides of
this trial, of this lawsuit, who are battling against each other.
Joseph Row represents the plaintiffs, the victims of these MK
Ultra subprojects, and he's trying to get justice for these victims.
And in many cases, the CIA is resorting to kind
of nasty or illegal tactics to try to delay a

(56:22):
trial from taking place because many of the plaintiffs are
old and they think that they're probably going to die
soon anyway, so if we can delay the trial long enough,
then they might die off one by one. Joseph Row
calls this out. He starts calling these other CIA attorneys' names.
He threatens to punch them in the face on multiple occasions.
He's an extremely fiery attorney. He's he's around eighty years

(56:43):
old by this point, and so he had been involved
in a lot of famous civil rights cases in the
history of the United States, and this was going to
be he thought, his kind of final capstone case that
would be this grand ending to his career. But it
kept dragging on and on, and so he's he's kind
of a curmudgeon, but he's really trying to get justice
for these victims. He starts writing letters to the Prime

(57:05):
Minister of Canada trying to get him to take some
accountability for what you and Cameron was doing and try
to admit that the CIA was funding this guy and
that these people deserve justice. So, uh, there's a lot
of drama between these lawyers. You mentioned Lee Strickland. He
is the lawyer for the CIA in most of these cases,
who is representing not only the CIA, but also the

(57:26):
individuals who are being deposed from the CIA, like Sidney Gottlieb,
and throughout these deposition depositions, Row, Joseph Raw and Lee
Strickland constantly bicker back and forth. They have quips back
and forth about how the other person doesn't know what
they're doing, it is incompetent, and you know, at one
point in the depositions, this is one of the most
dramatic points. Joseph Raw is questioning Sidney Gottlieb about his

(57:49):
involvement in assassination attempts, and he says he asked him,
were you Joseph Scheider referred to in this Run Run
one report? And Joseph Scheider was the pseudonym for a
scientist who worked in the CIA who the Church Committee
was talking about in the report, and nobody really knew
who Joseph Scheider was, although there were speculation that it

(58:10):
might be Gottlieb. So Joseph Rowe asked Sidney Gottlieb, were
you Joseph Scheider the pseudonym that was used for you
in this report? And Sidney Gottlieb says, yes, yes, I was,
And as soon as the word escapes from his mouth,
Lee Strickland, who's representing him, says, objection, objection. He tries
to stop in and this chaos ensues and he asked
Sidney Gottlib to go outside, and as soon as Sidney

(58:31):
Gottlieb comes back, you Gottlieb basically says, oh, no, no,
I wasn't Joseph Scheider. I'm not at liberty to say that,
and it's on the record in the deposition I have.
He just said yes to it. So there's a lot
of drama in these depositions that's not just about the
content of what Sidney Gottlieb or whoever is saying about
what they did or what they experience, but also the
deposition environment itself between these lawyers is such kind of

(58:52):
a rich, dramatic play between these characters that it makes
for an exciting book and an insight into the way
that these people are upperating behind the scenes as they're
trying to get the truth out. I should mention really
quickly while we're on Lee Strickland. You know, Lee Strickland
is the CIA lawyer who's representing the agency but also
many of these perpetrators of mk Ultra during these lawsuits.

(59:13):
He would go on to lead the Freedom of Information
Office within the CIA, So in the depositions, he's trying
to withhold as much information as possible and then who
does the CIA trust to release its information with Foyer
Lee Strickland, who of course is going to restrict as
much as possible. So it just kind of ironic that
he eventually ends up in that position as well.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
It's very interesting overall when Raw pushes Gottlieb to defend
his work with mk Ultra, What is the overall attitude
regarding Gottlieb, with his accountability and even his guilt regarding
some of these projects, How does he rationalize his work?

Speaker 3 (59:55):
I do think Sidney Gottlieb had a lot of guilt
at the end of his life. There were several people
who live close to him who he either volunteered with
or worked with. He eventually became a speech pathologist after
he retired from the CIA, who said that they said
that they always thought that he was trying to atone
for some past sins, like he had some burden on
him that he was trying to unload from himself by

(01:00:15):
volunteering or helping others. So he did seem guilt written
toward the end of his life. In the depositions, he
seems especially guilt ridden about the Frank Olsen incident. The
fact that this innocent Manton died because of something that
he did, the fact that he conducted this LSD experiment
on him. Throughout the depositions, Sidney Gottlieb tries to justify
mk ultra in various ways, although not too successfully. He

(01:00:36):
admits that the program wasn't that successful. They didn't uncover
methods of mind control. It's not that, you know. They
didn't find a drug that can make someone talk in
an interrogation and always say the truth. They didn't find
a hypnotism method or a psychological method that can make
someone behave or believe a certain thing, or behave in
a certain way. So it was unsuccessful from that point
of view. It was successful from a point of view

(01:00:59):
that you could use whose LSD say to make someone
appear insane, Yeah, you can do that. But as far
as controlling someone like a marionette, that wasn't successful. And
so Gottlieb tried to spin that into a positive fact
by saying, well, we learned a lot, We learned a
lot about what you shouldn't do, you know, so we
tried to, you know, kind of spin that as if
to say that that was really good that we learned

(01:01:19):
that you couldn't do all this stuff. But there wasn't
really a positive thing that he did learn that you
could actively do to manipulate a person in a certain way.
So he was guilt written about what he did, but
he did try to justify what he did by saying
that and by also saying, you know, we thought this
was integral to national security. The enns basically justified the

(01:01:40):
means we thought that the Soviets, or the Chinese or
someone else might have even stronger methods of mind control,
and we needed to know how to counter against that. Therefore,
what I did was justified. That was his main defense.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
Really, what was the overall results of those hearings, But
also tell us about, as you do, some of the
laws suits and their results.

Speaker 3 (01:02:02):
Yeah, the hearings, the results were just that we learned
a little bit more about mk ultra. There weren't many
results in the sense that there was accountability for these people.
Like I mentioned, Sidney Gottlieb was granted immunity for testifying
in front of one of these committees, and so he
didn't really have any accountability for what he did. In fact,
I've tried to think to myself, was there anyone involved
in this who was held accountable for what they did?

(01:02:25):
And I don't know if I can think of anyone.
You know, Sidney Gottlieb got that informal reprimand from Alan Doles,
But that's about it. As far as mk Ultra goes.
The people who committed it basically got away with it. Now,
they lived with the guilt of what they had done
for a long time, like Sidney Gottlieb, but that's basically it.
They weren't held accountable for what they did. One of

(01:02:47):
the reasons why I kind of mentioned this in the book.
One of the reasons why, I think is because congressional
oversight of the intelligence community community was so bad during
the Cold War. There was very little oversight of what
was going on, and so the people within the intelligence community,
like Sidney Gottlieb, had a lot of plausible deniability. You know,
if you know, we're entrusted with secrets, meaning we have

(01:03:09):
plausible deniability, we can kind of do what we want
and we're not going to be held accountable. So I
think that led to a lot of abuses and not
much accountability for those abuses. But you know, as far
as mk Ultra goes, there was very little accountability.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
What was the public reaction, Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
The public reaction was very negative against Gottlieb and the
others involved in this. Immediately there were several lawsuits launched
against the CIA. Specifically, one of the sub projects that
was part of mk Ultro was a drug experiment at
a prison, the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. This was run by
Carl Pfeiffer and several of the prisoners who were victims

(01:03:47):
of those experiments. They eventually sued the CIA in the
nineteen eighties when this became known, but their lawsuit was
dismissed because it the statute of limitations had run out
and so they never got anything for The main lawsuit
was what's called the or Lacau lawsuit that was by
Velma or Lacou and several plaintiffs who are victims of
you and Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute who were

(01:04:10):
victims of psychic driving, electric shocks, chemical coma's sensory deprivation,
that kind of thing. Their lawsuit, which generated these depositions
that I use, was eventually settled out of court for
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be split among them,
so they didn't really end up with much money. Of course,
there's attorney fees that is taken out of that, and
then it split about nine ways between the plaintiffs, so

(01:04:31):
they didn't wind up with much, but it was at
least something that they could get. Frank Olsen's family, the
man who jumped out of the hotel window and died,
they were brought to the White House when this became
known and Gerald Ford. President Ford personally met with them
and the CIA agreed to give them seven hundred and
fifty thousand dollars, so they kind of settled that in

(01:04:52):
exchange for agreeing not to sue the CIA. So that's
what happened with his family. So again there wasn't much accountability,
and for some people who tried to sue the CIA,
like the prisoners I mentioned in Atlanta, their lawsuits were dismissed.
Another incident of that happening was a man named Wayne Richie.

(01:05:12):
Wayne Ritchie was a security guard. He worked at Alcatraz
for a while. He was a US marshall in San
Francisco and one day he went to a holiday party,
a Christmas party at the Post Office building in San Francisco.
This is in the nineteen fifties, and he started having
a couple of drinks, and after he did so, he
felt very strangely. He started hallucinating. The walls started spinning,

(01:05:36):
the typical things associated with a hallucinogenic drug. He didn't
know what was happening, though, because he hadn't taken any
drugs to his knowledge, And he decides to go home.
His girlfriend is there and she's mad at him, and
she says she wants to move to New York, and
he's upset. He eventually goes out and gets two pistols.
Then he goes downtown to a bar and threatens to

(01:05:56):
shoot up the bar if they don't hand them all
the money. A quick thinking patron hits him over the
head with a mug, and the police arrest him and
he goes to prison. And he never knew for a
long time what happened to him. Why did he behave
so erratically that was completely out of character for him?
Why would he do such a thing. Until in the
nineteen eighties, he is reading a newspaper article and the

(01:06:17):
article starts talking about Operation Midnight Climax in George White
and Wayne Richie realizes that he knew George White when
he was in San Francisco, and he starts putting two
and two together and thinks that George White must have
dosed me with LSD at that party that caused me
to behave so erratically. And so Wayne Richie eventually sues

(01:06:38):
the CIA, but the lawsuit is eventually dismissed because he
can't prove that he was actually a victim of one
of these drug experiments. So that's another instance of a
lawsuit that was dismissed that didn't actually get recompense for
the victim. But it turns out that George White kept
diaries while he was working for the CIA, and after
he died predictably from cirrhosis of the liver because he

(01:06:59):
was an alcoholic. Once he died, his diaries were donated
to an electronics museum at Foothill Community College in California,
which eventually got moved to San Francis to Stanford. So
Stanford now has these diaries, and looking through these diaries,
I include a single page in the images for the
book you can turn to the exact date that Wayne

(01:07:20):
Ritchie says that he went insane and committed this or
tried to commit this robbery. And on that date, George
White writes in his diary that he was attending a
holiday party, a Christmas party at the Federal Building in
San Francisco, which is the exact same Christmas party that
Wayne Ritchie was at when he went insane and probably
drank something that George White had surreptitiously put in his drink.
So there is a link there, even though Wayne Ritchie

(01:07:42):
wasn't able to actually settle a lawsuit and get anything
from it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
One other thing that's very very interesting is that the
death of Frank Olson in nineteen ninety four, his body's exhumed,
so the family wants to know the truth about what
happened to Frank Olson exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:08:02):
Yeah, So this is a there's a lot of contention
among people, especially Frank Olsen's son, Eric Olson, about what
happened to his father. I am of the opinion that
Frank Olsen was dosed with LSD and that led to
his kind of a psychotic break, a reactive psychosis, which
led to Frank Olsen jumping out of this building at
the Stateler Hotel and dying. However, someone like Eric Olsen,

(01:08:25):
who's Frank Olson's son, he thinks that his father was murdered.
He thinks that his father was going to He thinks
that Frank Olsen had some moral qualms with what the
government was doing. Perhaps they actually were dropping biological weapons
on Korea, and therefore Frank Olsen was going to expose this,
and you know, the CIA didn't want this to happen,

(01:08:46):
therefore they arrange for the murder of Frank Olsen. I
don't think that's the case. I don't think the US
was using biological weapons in Korea either. One of the
reasons why is because from Russian archives, actually we have
the archival document and saying that there are North Korean
officials who go to China to collect samples of bubonic
plague then return to North Korea to dose their own

(01:09:09):
prisoners with this to make it look as if the
US had done this, had dropped these biological agents. So
we know that they were setting up these fink infections.
But anyways, so the idea is that for Frank Olsen,
the idea that he was murdered is that he wanted
to expose these misdeeds of the CIA, potentially of the
army doing some kind of biological weapons experiments or dropping

(01:09:30):
it on people, and so the CIA arranged for him
to be murdered. You're right. In the nineteen nineties, Eric
Olsen has his father exhumed and he hires a forensic
pathologist named David Stars to conduct an investigation as to
the death of Frank Olsen. Stars does this investigation and
he concludes that it's possible Frank Olsen was murdered. There
was a wound on Frank Olson's head that he thought

(01:09:52):
seemed inconsistent with him going out of a window and
landing on the sidewalk. He says that maybe someone bludgeoned
Frank Olson in the head beforehand. I'd don't think this
story is very credible. There are a few reasons why,
you know. We can go through some of those reasons.
One of the reasons not to believe Stars necessarily is
that his own assistance didn't believe them himself. That his

(01:10:14):
own assistant said that he was prone to sensationalizing all
of his cases, and so they thought that he was
kind of sensationalizing this for the publicity of it as well.
So if his own assistants don't really trust what he
was doing, and they were working on this investigation as well,
then that leads me to not trust it as well.
Another reason is that the reasoning seems to be a
little bit backward here, the reasoning to conclude that Frank

(01:10:36):
Olsen was murdered, it starts with the conclusion, and it
starts with Frank Olsen was murdered, and how do we
then fit all the evidence around that. So you know,
if we start with the conclusion that he was murdered,
then we have to kind of rationalize all the other evidence.
There's no really reason to believe that Frank Olsen had
moral compunctions or that he was about to be a
whistleblower about some kind of biological warfare experiments. The reason

(01:10:59):
why that is said is because that's the only explanation
we can use to explain why he was possibly murdered.
So it's a backwards form of reasoning. Another reason I
should mention why some people think that Frank Olson could
have been murdered is because in nineteen fifty three, the
year that he died, the CIA created what's known as
an assassination primer, kind of a guidebook for how to

(01:11:21):
conduct an assassination that wouldn't lead back to the CIA,
and one of the main recommendations in that primer is
that one way to get away with murder is to
drop someone from a high building so that it looks
as if they fell, and then you can make it
seem as if they killed themselves. Obviously, that is very
reminiscent of the Frank Olsen story, but again there's several

(01:11:42):
reasons to think that that's not actually what happened in
the Frank Olsen case. One reason is because the primer
specifically says that you need to open the blinds and
everything before you do so, and Frank Olsen went directly
through the blinds. I don't know why someone would throw
someone through the blinds of the hotel window. Another reason
is because if Frank Golson was bludgeoned in the head
before he went out the window, it's odd that when

(01:12:04):
he was on the sidewalk he was trying to talk.
He wasn't dead. He was alive when he was, you know,
after he went out the window, so they didn't kill
him beforehand and throw him out, you know. Another reason
would be Alan DoLS gives this reprimand to Sidney Gottlieb,
like I mentioned before, for performing this experiment. Why would
the CIA intentionally leave a paper trail of their connection

(01:12:24):
to this, you know, And the same thing happens when
Alan Doles gets the the Inspector General of the CIA,
a guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick, to conduct an investigation into
the death of Frank Olsen. This is just creating more
and more of a paper trail. If the CIA murdered
this guy, why would they want Why would they want
there to be more and more of a paper trail.
You can invent explanations like, oh, they wanted this to

(01:12:47):
throw off suspicion about whatever, but if you know, to me,
it seems like a lot of post hawk rationalizations. After
the fact, we're inventing explanations to make it cohere with
a conclusion that we've already drawn that he was murdered. Instead,
I think it makes more sense to say that he
jumped out of the hotel window after having this reactive
psychosis to being dosed with LSD.

Speaker 2 (01:13:09):
In the end, after mk Ultra investigations and after the CIA,
you write about what happens with Sidney Gottlieb, how his
life changes, but also that journalist Seymour Hirsch had interviewed
him in the late nineties. So what did he have
to say at that time regarding everything in retrospect, tell

(01:13:31):
us a little bit about what Seymour Hirsch got from
Sidney Gottlieb.

Speaker 3 (01:13:36):
Yeah, and remember, Seymour Hirsch is that journalist who exposed
a lot of the CIA's past misdeeds in nineteen seventies
that led to the investigations and the executive branch in Congress.
Seymour Hirsh eventually visits Sidney Gottliebin interviews him, and like
I mentioned previously, he says that he seemed like a
man riddled with guilt. I think that was Hirsch's quote,
one of the ones that I use, a man riddled

(01:13:57):
with guilt who wanted to absolve of his past sins.
And so it did seem to him at least like
Sidney Gottlieb really regretted what he had done as part
of mk Ultra, the fact that he had harmed so
many people for so little in return. This had been
tens of millions of dollars spent on MK Ultra, thousands
of victims of these various subprojects, of these different experiments,

(01:14:18):
whose lives in many cases were inextricably ruined because of
the experiments that were done on them and for what
in return, not much, you know, as Sidney Gottlieb himself
admitted that m. K Ultra didn't discover much about how
to manipulate someone, and so he lived with that for
the rest of his life, and I think he was
riddled with guilt. I think he tried to rationalize it
to himself. Like I mentioned before, the fact that oh well,

(01:14:40):
we just didn't know at the time that this wouldn't
come of anything. It was necessary for national security. But
I think it did affect him in later life. Even
though he wasn't held legally responsible, there was no legal
accountability for what he did. At least there was maybe
some kind of psychological accountability and some kind of ironic
fate for him.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
That he died from pneumonia in nineteen ninety nine. Many
of those files, as we discussed, were destroyed, but fortunately
we have these depositions, these vary, astounding depositions that will
last us. An incredible part of your book.

Speaker 3 (01:15:19):
Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I was very fortunate to
find these depositions, and I'm excited for people to see
them themselves. The story of mk Ultra has been known
for a while. One of the early books on it
was The Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marx,
that former State Department employee who filed the Foyer request
to get many of the surviving documents. But since then
we've learned a lot more about MK Ultra, and especially

(01:15:41):
through the depositions, it provides a human touch to it.
You get to see inside the minds of the people
who were conducting it and who were victims of it.
So it supplies another dimension that I think is necessary
for a good narrative story, to understand the human aspect
of what was actually going on instead of just kind
of the clinical here's how much money was paid to

(01:16:02):
this person whatever. This is the human aspect for our
emotions coming out fully enforced during these depositions.

Speaker 2 (01:16:08):
Absolutely, I want to thank you so much for coming
on and talking about your new book, Project Mind Control,
Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and the Tragedy of MK Ultra.
For those that might want to find out more about
your other books and this book. Do you do any
social media and do you have a website they might
refer to thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:16:30):
Yeah, I do have an X or Twitter. It's just
my name, John Lyle j O H N L I
S L E. I don't post that often, but if
I have, you know, anything coming out or important in
an interview like this or something, I'll post it so
that people can keep up with what I'm doing. I
do have a website, it has my book on there.
It's John Lyleistorian dot com. But following my ex or

(01:16:50):
Twitter that's probably the best way to keep up with
what I'm doing. That's where I'll let everyone know what
I have coming along.

Speaker 2 (01:16:57):
Well. Thank you so much for this interview, John Lyle,
the Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the
tragedy of MK Ultra. Thank you so much for this interview,
and you have a great evening and good night. Thanks
you too, good night,

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