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

want to welcome Jason Pargeon to the show. Jason, how's it going now that you are far far more famous than you were in your cracked days. I honestly don't have a sense of how many people in your audience know who I am and they're like, oh my gosh, that's the correct guy who used to write as David Wong, who writes the John dyes Via novels versus how many people just have no idea, just no idea, just could not possibly care and less. Yeah, it's hard for me

to say. I mean whenever we do live events, and we've done like nine or ten this year, between like book events and stuff, I would say like it my my back of my like very rough estimate would be like a third of the crowd um has been following my stuff since Cracked days, So I would guess like somewhere in the thirty range, which is considering the size of the audience, pretty good. Jason, you are the author of a whole bunch of books. We were just talking

about this before the show. But I'm startled as I try to work on my second novel, I'm startled at the number of novels that you've written while doing all of the other stuff that you do. Yeah, the one that is coming out, the one that I am here promoting, is the sixth uh called If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. It is part of the John Dies at the Enfranchise. There are are now four books in that series. For those of you who have read some of them or have just seen the movie that's

out there on streaming. Came out a decade ago. But you can just start with this one if you want. It's it's not it's not a Game of Throne situation where you have to have read all of the books there. They're episodic. You can just now why you would want to start with the new and most expensive one. I don't know, considering all the other ones are you can probably get into used bookstore for like fifty cents. But from my point of view, yes, it's the freshest one

and therefore the best. I read it earlier this year, and it's wonderful. I've been reading the John Dyes at the End books for like, at this point, roughly two thirds of my life. Um, I started reading. I mean, obviously, Jason, you are my boss back at Cracked for years and years and years and years. I think I worked there for close to a decade and you worked there for longer. Um. And then but but you started publishing what became the first book in that series. Um, it was like an

every Halloween on your old website. This isn't the pre Cracked as when you had your own website. Um, you would publish I don't know what was it, probably words something like that every year around Halloween. Yeah, it was just part of my blog. It was like my annual Halloween update was just continuing story I was writing. Started in two thousand and one, I think, yeah, yeah, which I would have been like twelve or thirteen. I think when I started reading that series and I loved it.

Then I found it like very very engaging, and kind of stayed obsessed with it ever since. UM. And one of the things it's always been interesting to me about it, you're that series in particular. I think one of the things you could call it is like psychedelic horror, because it's it's not just like a horror series, but kind of one of the inciting incidents is the characters take

a supernatural hallucinogen. Essentially, that is kind of the inciting incident of the series, and it's one of the only One of the things that I've always found interesting about your books is that I started reading them before I ever started messing around with psychedelics, and I've continued to enjoy them since UM, which is pretty rare in terms of like encountering people writing about that stuff before you know about it personally, and then after you know about it.

And I've always been interested in that in part because you don't do psychedelics. You haven't like actually like taken acid or anything like that. No, And in fact, I've never drank alcohol. I have a very addictive personality. I get addicted to things very easily, and I have been afraid of any kind of drugs or cigarettes anything for ever since I was a youth. Uh but no, yeah, but it's it is very much like I've done a lot of research into them. But it's not to be clear,

it's not scaremongering about. It's not people no no, no, no, no no no, found themselves turning into monsters, because there was a lot of fiction written like that in the day that people they took LST and then they became possessed by a devil or whatever. It's more of a metaphorical thing, but they take a yeah, a some kind of a mysterious substance that lets them kind of see beyond reality and the way that if you were playing a video game and you suddenly glitched through the world.

It's kind of like that, only with through time and space and um. But for those of you who don't read the film is because there's kind of an interesting story. I won't let drag on. But they I sold the

film rights to it back when it was nothing. It was I wrote it on the Internet and then had like a print on demand publisher selling physical copies of it, and we sold just a couple of thousand of them when Don Cosca Elliott, cold horror writer director, a legendary direct Yeah, I made the Phantasm series um of Hotep got hold of the rights and not only bought the rights but made the movie, which is the rare part.

Lots of people saw film rights to actually have it get made to and then it debuted a Sundance in and you know, I flew out there and got to be part of a You and a with the cast and all that. So it's it's kind of a crazy success story because at the time this happened, in the early two thousands, there were there were not a lot of people writing stuff on the Internet and then selling it as books or selling it. Still doesn't happen terribly often.

People you're famous examples of like oh this guy's Twitter account got turned into a TV series or whatever, like you hear you do. But I mean, I often describe you to people as the first fifty shades of gray. Um. But I bring up the fact that the so much of like the inciting incidence of your series is kind of like based around hallucinogens and like shadow people and all this kind of um sort of dark occult stuff, because that ties in directly to what we're talking about today.

The subject of our episodes for the next two weeks is the mk Ultra program that the CIA carried out through most of the fifties in early nineteen sixties. Now, most people I think are probably like Jason, Actually, how would you, based on kind of your level of knowledge, casual knowledge, how would you describe what the mk Ultra

program was. Here's the thing. It is impossible for me to separate what I actually know as fact and what I've merely heard in conspiracy theory circles, because the one conspiracy theory that I do believe in is that government agencies and the true bad actors in society love conspiracy theories, absolutely love that this stuff gets picked up by cranks and the same people who talk about Bigfoot, we'll talk about mk Ultra and the same breath and it's like, well,

you know, Bigfoot was actually an mk Ultra program and turned a man into a giant monkey. They love that, They love that it smears all of these things as this the stuff of cranks and crackpots, when the reality needs no embellishment. No, it does, because what the reality of the mk Ultra program is that the federal government devoted countless resources and essentially like a license to kill to a bunch of scientists so that they could attempt to eradicate the concept of human free will using LSD

like that's that's what they tried to do. UM. And it included uh an outrageous number of crimes. And it is it is a conspiracy. It's just not a conspiracy theory because it's pretty well documented. A lot of the guys who are involved with this have talked at this point, so we know what's happened. UM, So we're gonna be

talking about that for quite a while here. I do want to start by talking a little bit about kind of the human history of use of psychedelics and even kind of the history of the use of psychedelics in a military context by states, um, because all of this stuff actually goes back further than you'd guess. When we're

talking about like actual hallucinogenic drugs. The oldest, like the first thing human beings were taking to consciously make themselves hallucinate was probably We're never gonna get an exact answer on this, but probably either peyote UM and the active ingredient in peyote is a psychedelic proto alkaloid called mescalin um, which has been in use at least like fifty seven hundred years. Uh. And then you know, we have around the same amount of time people have been using hallucinogenic

mushrooms uh sila cyben right. That also goes back by some accounts maybe older something like seven thousand years. Obviously, this is based on like people will draw cave paintings of like mushrooms and stuff that they that they took, and you can find bits of it and like honey and whatnot, things that people like buried with their loved ones.

It's possible people were taking It's possible that like before we were human beings are hammedied predecessors were taking you know, payote and psilocybin, right, because we know that there are certain hallucinogens that non human animals and that other apes take. So this is probably something we've been doing like longer

than we've been human beings. And also this is one of those things where when you look at the entire culture and our mythology and our religion, whenever you have writings of someone who sat down in a field and then had a vision of the heavens opening up. How many of those were actually influenced by hallucinogens or whatever, we won't know, but there's almost no question that they regarded these substances as uh like a sacred means of opening up reality to get a direct line to the

gods or whatever. It's just that in the writings they left behind they may not mention the part where they choot on a certain mushroom to get that effect. Yeah, and it's I mean there's other stuff too, like air

got that people. We know the ancient Greeks were very likely um mixing in a couple of different ways, which is kind of one of the precursors to L s D. There are theories that the human capacity for religious belief aim because are and this is you know, would be twenty thirty thousand years ago ancestors took a shipload of

sila cybin um. There have been studies like the Good Friday study that at least provide pretty good evidence that the kind of religious experiences people have on these drugs aren't any different from other kinds of religious experiences, right Like, they're not They're not any less real because they're induced by a chemical um they continue to influence people, you know, in in for decades. UM. So yeah, it's there. There's

a lot of interesting history there. The first documented military use of what you call an in the agen and when we're talking about sila cybin, we're talking about all of these chemicals. They're all what you'd call in theogen's right, that's kind of the name of the type of thing that we call hallucinogens um. The first documented military use of one of these substances was by Hannibal Barca, you know the guy, the elephant guy right with the alps

uh in around one eight four BC. There are some possibly apocryphal reports that he had had his men drug enemy stores with belladonna before a battle, so that his enemies would basically be hallucinating when he went in to fight them, which would provide a benefit. Right. It's it's not hard to see how that could potentially work out

for you, um. And this is probably copied by the Bishop of Munster in sixteen seventy two, who actually filled grenades with belladonna in order to attempt to disperse its poison on the battlefield, which is a pretty modern for sixteen seventy two. Pretty modern way of like using a chemical weapon. Yeah, that's I had never heard that before. Yeah,

that is pretty cool. Fantastic image. Yeah, the Bishop of Munster filling grenades with because the active chemical in Belladonna is scopolamine, which is what US police tried to use for decades as a truth serum. Um. But it it just kind of is a moderately powerful hallucinogen that he was trying to disperse via grenade. Now I don't actually know how well that worked out. It doesn't seem like there's good documentation whether or not at it actually had

much of a military effect. Um. But the dream that the Bishop of Munster had and that Hannibal Barket had has lingered on in the hearts of military planners for a long time, right, Because obviously fighting people is hard, um, And if you can make them chemically, if you can disperse some sort of substance on the battlefield that makes them not want to or not able to fight, that

would be pretty cool. So World War One is obviously when chemical weapons get used for the first time on a mass scale, and and we all are aware of more or less what happens here. Adolf Hitler himself a victim of mustard gas refused in World War Two to give approval to the German military to use chemical weapons again as an offensive military tool. Right, Obviously, Hitler loves using poison gas, but they're not they're not shooting it off at the battlefield because he knows that it's going

to lead to reprisals and he's seen chemical weapons, you know. Uh, he doesn't have a moral principle obviously, and he's in you know, um, he's not entirely against the idea though, of researching more weapons like this. And so during World War Two, while the Germans don't use their mustard gas stockpiles, they do invent a new poison something called saren nerve gas um. And right around the same time the Nazis are inventing saren, the Empire of Japan is weaponizing and

tracks during the war. Now, they actually did use an tracks on China. During World War Two. They killed thousands of civilians by like dropping anthrax bombs. They would infect water supplies with cholera, and their top scientists working at Unit seven thirty one, which we'll be talking about at some point in the future, were in direct contact with the Nazi chemical weapons head a guy named Kurt Blom, who himself tested an TRACKS on thousands of death camp inmates,

mainly to see what would happen. Right, This is kind of when we're trying to figure out how to actually weaponize and tracks. A lot of the early studies there come from different concentration camps. Blom had also experimented with the use of mescal in on concentration camp inmates as a truth drug. He'd forcibly dosed inmates a lot of them in huge enough quantities that some of them died, which is is not easy to do. Mescalen is not a super toxic substance, so if you're killing people on it,

you're effectively giving them sometimes thousands of doses. Um. Because the Nazis don't really care what happens to these people, they're able to kind of do that. UM. So the Allies are not super aware that most of this is going on at the time. There's a pretty big fog of war. These are very top secret. Obviously, they know that Japan is using chemical weapons against China, but they're not super aware of like what the Germans are researching

at this point. But what was known was enough that it's scared Winston Churchill, and he made a public announcement of his fears that the Nazis were planning a biological weapon attack on the United Kingdom. So he asks the United States for help and building up a defensive stockpile of weaponized viruses and toxins. Right, Churchill doesn't want to use all these either, because he's thinking the same thing Hitler is, if if we use these on the Nazis,

then they'll start using stuff on our soldiers. But he wants to have a bunch of scary ship that he can unleash on continent of Europe if the Nazis start dropping stuff on the UK. You can see, like the logic that's going to be a big part of the nuclear arms race already kind of at play here. Um In general, all of history is a series of people saying, well, we need to pursue this truly grotesque mission because if we don't, the enemy will, or we suspect they already are.

But the only reason the enemy is doing it is because they think you're doing it. And I'm sure there's a name for that paradox. But for example, in the last time I was on this show, we briefly talked about World War One, which is a war based almost entirely around a series of nations saying, look, we better go ahead and just arm up because we know France

is doing it. It's like, if you know when we wis, go ahead and go to war now, because it's gonna happen, like like in every country thought this about everyone else. So here it's you can see this weird gain theory thing where unchecked paranoia about your enemy is a blank check to your people to just pursue madness because after all, what what thing could be too horrifying to use against insert enemy here? Nazis, the communist, the terrorists on the

Muslim terrorists. It's it's like, well, of course we need these advanced interrogation techniques otherwise, you know, how are we going to stop our kinda in fifty years from now? You can insert whatever enemy. But that's always been the logic, probably going back thousands of years. It's like, hey, normally we would do this, but and what's one of the things that's most kind of morally complex about this is

that it doesn't always go badly right. World War one horrible nightmare because that logic leads to tens of millions of deaths. It also doesn't lead to tens of millions of deaths in in the nucle your arms race, like because everybody's got all these weapons and has the ability to end all life, we don't have this big war between the Soviet Union of the Unite. We have a bunch of little horrible wars, but we don't have this

big war. And you kind of it's the same thing with biological weapons on the battlefield in World War two because they don't get used in Europe. The Nazis in Vince Sarin and they weaponize and tractions we're about to talk about, the US develops themuch a horrible ship, but none of it it gets used because everybody's like just kind of too scared to start that. Um, so I don't know, I know what the moral is here? Well know, very very quick note, um, we do record these in advance.

If there has been a nuclear war between now and when this goes up, understand that that's what he just said was based. This was pre the bombs being launched. We were not aware of it when we recorded this. So if you're if you're saying, well, how how how stupid are these guys? They don't know that the situation Ukraine resulted in nuclear apocalypse. It's because we It wasn't

It hadn't happened when we recorded it. If you're listening to this huddled around the ruins of the Chrysler building defending off wolves with like crudely made spears that you you you you created out of like scrap metal from light poles, Um, there was a time where the world wasn't like that. Uh, then please just give us we we're doing our best here. Yeah. If you if you live in a society that has lost all aspects of modernity except for the ability to like yell at podcast hosts. Um,

please please hold up for a second. Sophie deals with enough as it's um. So, yeah, you've got these, uh, you've got these you know. Um this kind of biological arms race that's sort of in the background of World

War Two. Obviously it doesn't get a whole lot of attention because most of this stuff doesn't wind up getting used, and it's it's like fucked up when you're talking about saren nerve gas and like the cholera and trying to weaponize virus that's like horrifying for some reason, but it's actually not when you think about what's going on, it's not any different from any other kind of arms race. Right. You can say that the weaponry is a little more

dangerous maybe, but like it's it's it's stockpiling killing agents. Right, there's not a massive difference fundamentally, And like stockpiling a bomb or stockpiling a bomb that is killed by way of viruses. You know, people are more disgusted by this stuff,

but it is kind of the same basic concept. But on February third, nineteen forty nine, and kind of the early stages of the Cold War, something that was completely new entered the minds of the men plotting their way through this, like opening stages of the Cold War, Right, this is kind of the first new development, totally new development and like conceptions of warfare in in quite a long while. Um. And it it starts because a guy named Cardinal Joseph men zinz Jeez, I'm he's he's he's Hungarian.

Cardinal Joseph men Zinn He was the leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary starting in nineteen forty five, and in World War Two he'd been imprisoned by the fascist Arrow Cross Party for his opposition to fascism. But he was also really opposed to communism. Right, So when the Nazis lose and the Iron Curtain goes down or whatever you want to say, when the USSR winds up kind of influence in Hungary, um, Mencenti is not happy with

that either. He's actually a monarchist. He never really got over the collapse of the Austro Hungarian Empire, so when the Communists come to power, he resists them too. In ninety eight, religious orders get banned by the government of Hungary. The Catholic Church is called a reactionary force, which it had often been a lot of Catholics had supported the fascist dictatorship that had existed in World War Two. Um,

but Mencenti hadn't. Um. But since he was such a prime, like prominent opponent of the communist regime, he gets arrested by the communists and they do the thing that like you do when you capture a political enemy. They like beat him with truncheons until he agrees to go on camera and confess to a bunch of crimes. Um. And this is not weird, right, like having government thugs beat a man until he confesses to like trying to overthrow

the government and reinstitute a monarchy. Pretty normal stuff for like a totalitarian regime can do to do. It shouldn't have been that weird to anybody, But the CI a like kind of freaks out over this. So this is a new organization at the time. They've just been formed from the OSS about a year before this um and they panic when they hear Manzenti come on and be like, I was trying to overthrow the government and the YadA

YadA yadah. And in his excellent book Poisoner in Chief, Stephen Kinzer writes quote, they focused on the way man Zenti had behaved during his trial. He appeared disoriented, spoken a flat monotone, and confessed to crimes that he had evidently not committed. Clearly he had been coerced. But how at the CIA the answer seemed terrifyingly obvious. The Soviets had developed drugs or mind control techniques that can make people say things they did not believe. No evidence of this, ever,

m urged. Manzinti was coerced with traditional techniques like ill treatment,

extended isolation, beatings and repetitive interrogation. The fear that communists had discovered some potent psychoactive tool, however, sent a shockwave through the c I A. So this is what I love about conspiracies about mind control, because the reality is, there are so many ways to manipulate the behavior of a person who is weaker than you, through pain, through threats to their family, through financials with bribes, you know,

and there's some of the most successful interrogators were not violent. They just offered people the cookies or a car or something, uh that to say, well, my gosh, they developed a magical chemical that you injected a person, They'll just do whatever you want. They were so enamored with this idea when that's like the oldest means of humans interacting with one another, like that predates humanity, humans making other humans

do what they want. It says something about these guys that like, instead of being like, yeah, they probably just hit him until he did what they wanted him do, like the thing we do when we want someone to do something, they're like, they must have invented some new drug that's taken over his mind and changed his personality. Um it is it is really like this is the fact that this is the inciting incident of the CIA's mind control program. Um is in a way very funny.

And it's also just like this is the whole Cold War in a nutshell, right, This this is what gets us into so many different conflicts and gets like a few million people killed. Is all of those these things that start with like some guys in a room in d C, like misinterpreting something and then freaking each other out right doing that very human thing where everybody's just kind of like yes, ending each other into the apocalypse, especially when you have funding that will come to your budget.

If you can make the case up the ladder yep, that the enemy has blank that there's a there's a motivation beyond just simple misunderstanding, Like a lot of money was spent here, a lot of jobs were created. Like you don't think in terms of somebody trying to create a bureaucrat try and create work for themselves, but they they this was motivated reasoning if the if the Russians have this, then we now have a blank check to

try to pursue this. And some of it was just people career climbing, yes, indeed, and you know who else is climbing the ranks of the corporate hierarchy, the people who sponsor our podcasts. How do you? How do you? How do you? How do you feel about buying gold online from shady websites that advertise through random podcast ads? Is that how you invest your your money? Well, you know, one society collapses, gold will be the only valuable currency. It just it just makes sense. Not cans of beans

and toilet paper. That's not what people will be trading. They'll be trading gold. Yeah, No, not freeze dried food, or ammunition or or water purification to bublits. Gold the thing that's useful when you're starving, perfect store of value. Anyway, here's probably adds for buying gold off the internet. We're back and we're talking about what a good store of

value gold is. And Jason, if you're looking to diversify your your cash stockpile for the apocalypse, I happen to have a lot of Iraqi dinars and from what I hear, they're about to blow up. They're gonna get revalued by by President Trump and um a lot of a lot of money in the denar these days. Yeah, one society collapses, basically, you're gonna want gold and you're gonna want bitcoin. Oh yeah, yeah,

I I agree with you, Jason. If people really want to survive the end of days, throw out your water, light year, dried food on fire stockpiled denars, and gold. That's that's gonna key you alive when the floodwaters wipe out two thirds of Florida. That's what you want to be carrying with you away as as as the coastline disappears. Is as much gold as you can fit in your pockets. Speaking of things that you can fit in your pockets, let's talk about knowledge. Cia, Um, I don't know. I

did my I did my best there. So this moment, this cardinal getting like just beaten up until he lies about having tried to overthrow the government brings absolute certain teeth to the CIA top bress that the Russians have

developed a mind control drug. Now we're gonna get into a lot of hourly ship here, but it's important that it under that the people who are like freaking out over this, and the people who are the people whose freakouts lead to everything that follows are a bunch of Yale and Harvard kids, right, most of them grew up extremely rich. The Dulles brothers who are going to be big parts of this, like are literally hanging out with heads of state when when their kids. And that's like

most of the early o s s CIA guys. Now, some of these dudes had done real gnarly ship in World War Two had been like like international man of Mystery, badass stuff. You know, you do have some of those like cowboys here, but that's not who's actually calling the shots. For the most part, most of the people calling the shots had been like sitting in Switzerland and kind of like making the decisions that determined whether or not spies

on the ground lived and died. And now they're sitting in d c Um and they've convinced themselves that an old priest commence confessing to crimes he didn't convince under torture meant that the Soviets had developed some sort of mind control drug um. And there's this all of this discourse around the c I A, a lot of which is formed by the things they're doing in this period of time, portrays them as I think these guys probably would have wanted to be portrayed as these insidious, dangerous

competent manipulators of public opinion, and orchestrators of conspiracies. Now, these are all things that the agency and individuals within it have been over the years. But a life in the shadows plotting crimes against your fellow man doesn't mean that you're like healthy or rational, And it doesn't mean that like the things that you're kind of conniving your way into doing make a whole lot of sense. Uh, And that's kind of important to keep in mind as

this story builds. Now, there's another inciting incident for what we're gonna be talking about this week. This one's a little bit happier. It starts in nineteen thirty six when chemists from Sandas Laboratory synthesize lesurgic acid diethylamide for the very first time UM. And one of the guys who's on this project is a dude named Albert Hoffman. He's a research scientist for Sandaz, which is, by the way, the company who gave us like sacharin um or saccharin

like that's that's Sandas. They're a very very large chemical company. And Hoffman had been tasked with finding substances in medicinal plants that could be purified into different pharmaceutical drugs. They didn't care what the pharmaceutical drugs did. They were just saying, like, find us new chemicals, see what stuff does what, and then we'll try to find a way to sell it. So in the night late nineteen thirties, Hoffman is studying air got which is this rye fungus that had been

associated with hallucinatory spells. Sometimes people that make like bread that had this fungus in it, and then like towns would wind up hallucinating for days. There's a lot of fun stuff that happens in the Middle Ages, probably because of of air got um. There's a lot of theories that, like the a lot of witch hunts of stuff, yeah, even trace back to It's it's it's hard to tell

what's true and what's just uh yeah, theorizing. But it's the kind of thing that makes sense because you could have it, people get it in there whatever and their food supply and not know that they were under the influence of something. So that again reporting that they had seen supernatural things happening from there, that's enough of a witness for them to set a witch on fire. Because it did not take much back then, Yeah it does not.

And one of the things the kind of I haven't taken air got fungus, but I have taken LSD somewhere around a hundred times, and different doses do different things. And one thing that can happen if you just take a little bit, it's not even that you like hear voices, but it's it's that, like you, your your impulses feel as if maybe they're coming from somewhere else, and you can kind of convince yourself that someone is talking to

you right. Um, And some people, especially if you're like a medieval peasant, maybe you get convinced it's God right, and maybe you don't like this lady in town and you've never trusted her, and you convince yourself in this state that God is telling you that she's a witch or something like that. There's all sorts of ship that

could potentially have been happening here. The one thing you're not going to get on the show is a lot of scaremongering about who sin agens, because you're going to get a lot of terrifying experiments as we get into this. But you have to understand it is very, very different. One if you're not paying attention to the dose, but

to dosing people who don't know they've been dozed. So when things like set and setting matters so much and how you experience these things, if you're already paranoid, or you're already a place where you're feeling under siege, or you think you've got enemies around every corner, and you've been dosed with this in your food or whatever, and you don't know what's happening to you, you know, and then so you rewind to an another era when people

didn't know the wh whosin degens were even a thing. Yeah, what would you assume. You would, of course assumed you were possessed or that you had been assaulted by the devil or whatever, and so the same thing here, Like, there's a big difference between what these people are doing and the people who use this recreation recreationally. We're not trying to scare you off of it. It's just that you're going to see the worst possible. There's actually there's

a degree we'll talk about this more. There's a degree to which this also kind of makes the case of how safe these are, because a lot of the worst reactions to this are there giving people the equivalent of thousands of doses at a time, like an amount no one would choose to take. And like, yeah, people die when you give them seven thousand times like a normal

dose of a of a drug. Almost any drug will work that way, right, Like if you give someone seven thousand times as much aspirin as they should take, they probably will not make it, right, that will kill them. Or if you give them five thousand servings of mashed potatoes all at once, now will also die. That's that depends on the mashed potatoes. I I I put about a stick of butter pur potato, so it will take much less of my potatoes to kill you. Um. Really,

just a bowl can do it in some cases. Uh. So he's trying to Hoffman is trying to synthesize a compound out of rye fungus that's gonna work as a speaking of heart disease, a circulatory in respiratory stimulant, right because this drug one of the things that can do is it has an impact on your your heart rate and your respirations. And he thinks that maybe this will maybe he can get something out of ergot that will

do that. Um, and the LSD that we have today is his twenty attempt at like pulling a chemical out of ergot that has a medicinal use, which is why we call it LSD. UM. Now, initially the substance that Offman has found seems to be a very little value. Research on it gets canceled, and Hoffman moves on for five years. But there's something about the drug that kind of calls out to him. He just can't kind of get it out of his head, even though he has

not taken it for himself at this point. And so on April nineteenth, nineteen three, he decides to try something, and he takes two and fifty micrograms of acid um. And this is like probably a moderate dose. Like you know, if you actually have ever taken acid, you you buy like a hit or something. And what a hit is

is is not um like standardized. Like you probably have no idea how much LSD you've taken if you've taken LSD, because you you bought like a drop of liquid that was put on a piece of paper by a dude who like gave it to you at a club, Right, you have no idea what what what you're getting? Um, But this is probably something like four to five hits of acid um in like modern terms. So this is like a substantial dose, right, This is not like a

light hit of the drug. UM. So he doses himself at four pm, and at five pm he writes quote beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortion, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh. Um. And that's the last thing he writes in his journal because after that point he is tripping too hard to write anything. Um. Did you say he dosed himself at Yeah, he sure did. That is kind of interesting, isn't it, Jason. Um. So sometimes sometimes

we get these little beautiful synchronicities. So Hoffman has a pretty good trip, it has to be said. Um, it's nineteen forty three, so like you can't take your car on the road because there's these wartime restrictions. So he's bicycling home. Um, and his his he has an assistant

who kind of like escorts him. Who's his sober sitter. Um. And yeah, he recants later in great detail in his book, quote, kaleidoscopic fantastic images surged in me, alternating variegated opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals exploding, and colored fountains rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed

into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vivid, changing image with a jone consistent form and color. So he's tripping balls here. This is a pretty like this. This is a pretty substantial dose of the drug um and it, as he said, he has a great time. Like Hoffman will spend the rest of his life as an advocate for this stuff because he finds it like a wonderfully pleasant and powerful experience. And he he becomes convinced that LSD has an incredible potential as a therapeutic drug. And

he's absolutely correct. In this um asset has been shown to have fantastic potential in a number of clinical trials for treating alcoholism. It can be extreme and again when we say it can treat alcoholism, it can be an antidepressant, It can treat post traumatic stress disorder. We're not saying you can just take some and it makes it better.

Although some people have had that experience in the past, these are all when we're talking about the clinical trials, these are all giving someone LSD alongside therapy for like alcoholism, or therapy for depression, or therapy for post traumatic stress disorder UM. And in terms of like why it's useful for this, I'm gonna quote from a researcher talking to the Guardian. In depression, people get locked into a way of thinking that is repetitive and ruminative. It's like tramline thinking.

Psychedelics disrupt those kind of processes so people can escape from it. And that's why this stuff is useful. And there's there are now studies that show similar promise with substances like m d m A, which seems to be

particularly effective at treating PTSD, or silas cybin. And and to get back to the subjuct of like mushrooms and religion, one of the things that sila cybin has been shown clinically to be most effective at is in hospice patients and people who are like dying of terminal diseases, helping people deal with their fear of death. It's very effective

when used properly UM for that. And and so it is fair to say that Hoffman was right, this kind of immediate thing he thinks when he takes acid, like, oh my god, this stuff could be really useful for people. He's absolutely correct, But in the nineteen forties there's a lot less known about this, and so the kind of initial group of people who start taking acid, like Hoffman is always going to be an advocate for this stuff, and gradually he's going to get other people interested in it.

But the first group of people who really gets hard into acid are not scientists, and they're not hippies. There CIA agents and scientists affiliated with the cia UM, and yeah, that's that's what's going to happen. In late nineteen forty nine, an officer of the Army Chemical Corps reported to L. Wilson Green, a director at the Edgewood Arsenal, which is where the the US keeps all of its like horrible chemical weapons that had been building up during World War Two.

He reports to Green that Sandoz chemists had created a new hallucinogen. Next, Kinser writes, Green was riveted. He collected all the information he could find on the subject, then produced a long report entitled Psychochemical Warfare, a New Concept of War. It concluded with a strong recommendation that the government begins systematically testing LSD, mescalen and sixty other mind altering compounds that might be weaponized for use against enemy populations.

Their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely, destroyed,

by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue. Green wrote the symptoms which are considered to be a value in strategic and tactical operations include the following fitz Er seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium, extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do even simple things, suicidal mania, and one of them just why I wanted to jump in a few minutes ago.

That we're not scaremongering about these substances. Because, to be clear, when they saw the results, they did not come out and say, hey, if you introduce this to the enemy army, they may put down their weapons because they have seen that war is wrong and the life has value, because you know they've had a pleasant trip. No, they were thinking purely in terms, oh this will this will drive

them insane. There they'll tell you tear each other to pieces and then run off into the wilderness screaming before they fold dead of heart attacks and seizures, like they were imagining something. They would just savage the enemy worse than bullets. Not Hey, we can actually prevent conflict by dosing the enemy and having them just be too too

chill to want to fight a war. And a lot of this is a reaction to there had been this assumption prior to World War Two that when cities started getting saturation bombed Byans, which are pretty new at the time, the entire population of the city is going to lose their mind and right like, they'll be murdering each other in the streets and just like people's people's brains will shatter if they're forced to endure bombing, and none of

that happens. In fact, it turns out that like when you bomb cities, people get really tough and they get angry at you, and they don't collapse morally. It doesn't happen. The British don't collapse under bombing, the Germans don't collapse under bombing. For the Japanese to collapse under bombing, it takes the detonation of two atomic bombs. Um. So this is kind of part of what they're looking at is like, well, strategic bombing actually doesn't work for ship. What if we

did it with acid, Like, maybe that'll work better. That is about trying to make their society breakdown. Yeah, yeah, that is exactly the goal. Um. And again you could also, I mean, you could argue that, like this is more humane than carpet bombing people. It's it's not gonna last forever, right, like it is. You can see how people can make the case that actually, this is this wouldn't be as bad as what we would just did to the Germans.

This is a kinder way to wage war without killing. Um. The the argument has made well enough that President Truman agrees, like, yeah, this is a pretty good idea, and over the following months he allows a joint program between the CIA and the U. S Military to get developed and it's called m k Naomi. Now, the reason why it's named this is and the reason why mk Ulter is named k Ulter is this is the way the CIA does their cryptonyms. Right.

A cryptonym is like a name for a project or a department or an organization that's supposed to be impossible for you to like tell what the organization does based on the name, right, So m K identifies a project as being run by the Technical services staff. These are the guys who developed the CIA is like wacky James Bond devices. Naomi is a nonsense word, and they're all supposed to be nonsense words, right. The second word MK,

ultra mk whatever. The second word is just like a random word they pick so people can have some sort of names. So that's why the initial version of this program is called m K Naomi. So for the most part, m K Naomi focused on not just like LSD, but making suicide drugs and assassination poisons. But they were also researching defensive bio weapons and trying to figure out, like what it would look like if the Russians carried out

a biological attack on the United States. In nineteen forty nine, they carry out a fake biological weapons attack on the Pentagon using mock bacteria. They concluded as a result of the attack that half of the people in the building could have been infected if it had been a real attack. This is kind of seen as stirring enough that the military brass are like, well, we need to see what

would happen if the Soviets attack an American city. So the CIA and the U. S Military decide to carry out an actual biological weapons attack on a US city. Now they know that in order to like disperse biological weapons through an insire tire cities population, they're going to need like fog because there's kind of a color to this gas they're going to be distributing throughout the city. So they decide San Francisco is the right place to carry out a biological weapons attack because they can use

the fog to hide what they're actually doing. It's called Operation Sea Spray, is they're shooting clouds of aerosolized bacteria. Now,

the bacteria is supposed to be harmless. The the idea is that you spray this harmless bacteria throughout the city and it's just enough, like it's just enough of a thing that you can test people randomly throughout the city and you can see how far it's penetrated, how many people have been exposed to it, But it's not something that's actually going to hurt them, right, That's that's the idea um And the bacteria performs extremely well, and in fact,

the Pentagon concludes that all eight hundred thousand people in San Francisco have been infected, as well as a significant number of people in five surrounding cities. Basically the entire Bay Area gets infected with this. The problem is that bacteria is kind of like not a predictable thing to dose roughly a million human beings with. You get some like unanticipated consequences when you do that. And it turns out several people in the Bay Area were particularly vulnerable

to whatever bacteria they used. Eleven of them catch urinary tract infections from the poison, and one of these people dies. Um. This would be the first time, but not the last time, that the United States used biological weapons on its own people to see what would happen, which is pretty cool. Yeah, frankly an outcome no one could have foreseen. Yeah, it's just we're gonna give million people a bacteria. It'll be fine,

it'll be fine. Like those million people that a certain number of them are medically fragile or compromised or whatever, and that it wouldn't be harmful to them. How could they have How could they have known? But you possibly have known. You can see that logic you were talking about earlier, though, if like, well we know the enemy is working on biological weapons, and the enemy, the Soviets, are these like godless monsters. They could do anything. It

would be irresponsible of us not to try. Some people are going to get hurt, but we have to know how vulnerable our cities are to these weapons. It's the only responsible thing to do. That way we can figure out how to defend them. Right, you can see how these guys make the argument to themselves. Yeah, that's my argument.

That is a rationalization that every bad person in the history of the species has made, because every every serial killer thought they were like cleaning up the streets of because you know, they target sex workers and it's like, well, I'm cleaning up the streets of what these women are befouling our men or whatever. Like they've all got this rationalization, I guess not Jeffrey Dahmer, he was trying to create

a sex zombie. But a lot of them, in their minds they have this thing it's like, well, I'm just I'm doing to them what they would do to me if they had the chance. Yeah, you do get with the CIA and with serial killers, some of these guys are just at like monsters, Right, you do get sometimes people who just like to cause harm or have this

whatever going on in their head. But like most people, and most of the people who were involved in a horrible acts of evil like infecting an entire city with bacteria to see what happens, in order to do that have to convince themselves there's a good reason, right like that nobody nobody wants to feel like a monster. There's a monster around the corner that's bigger than the monster I'm being So the only thing that can fight that

monster is a monster. Uh. And again, the monster you're fighting, there's a real good chance that that monster acts like that because it is terrified of you. Because the amount of paranoia and the Soviet Union about what the United States was doing was justice. We will we will be chatting about the Soviet Union in a little bit and what they are actually doing because that's a fun story too. But so operations see spray. Obviously, you and I can say, oh,

it's pretty fucked up that they did that. The CIA and the U. S. Army consider this a massive win, right, this works out perfectly as far as they're concerned. They have determined how vulnerable cities are. Um, they understand a lot more about how they could potentially, you know, defend against a bio logical attack. From their perspective, this works great. Now, the CIA is kind of doing a back seat role

in c spray. They help with the implementation, but most of this is the U. S. Army UM, because the CIA is a it's a clandestined agency, right, so it's interested in this stuff, but it's never going to be deploying full scale military tax using chemical weapons. That's the kind of thing the army will do. UM. The CIA is much more interested and kind of more precise stuff

than that. And in nineteen fifty, the director of the CIA, who at that point is a guy named Roscoe hillen Kettter, decides that the agency needs its own dedicated team working on mind control technology. The agency launches Project Bluebird, which the intercept describes as a quote mind control program that tested drugs on American citizens, most in federal penitentiaries or

on military basis. And it is interesting that in the in the eyes of all of the people like doing all of this, ship, US soldiers and UH convicted felons in federal prison are the same, right, Yeah, Like you don't have to care about any of them. You can do whatever to those people. Um, So that's cool. That's

that's there's nothing deeper and dark there. Now, near the end of nineteen fifty, the CIA gets a new director kind of right after this program starts, a guy named General Walter Smith, and Walter Smith is the guy who brings our old buddy Alan Dullis onto the team. Now we've done a couple of episodes about Alan and his brother John Foster, but in brief Allen is a big fan of Carl Young, um, and so he's a big fan of like this kind of esoteric psychology and psychiatry

theory that's sort of floating around at the time. And a lot of this is getting mixed in with early research and psychedelics because this is the period in which scientists are first kind of starting to study psychedelics. And Alan kind of becomes convinced that there are untapped scientific

potential for manipulating minds in different hallucinogenic drugs. And the early and eighteen fifties, the United States espionage effort in this uss are suffered a number of well publicized setbacks, and the CIA the reveal of several prominent double agents revives these fears that had started when that cardinal kind

of UH came out of Soviet mind control. UH. Those fears turned into panic in nineteen fifty two, and an incident described by the intercept quote in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that they'd sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed communists. The POWs must have been brainwashed. The word a literal translation of the Chinese zin now, didn't appear in English before nineteen fifty.

It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced in postwar America that a new class of chemicals could rewire and automate the human mind. So a couple of things here. Number one, we don't know if the US used chemical or used biological weapons in the Korean War. The United States, it says that we did not. Um, these guys. The specific confessions these pilots are making sound kind of silly. They're talking about like bombs that have like compartments with

with like snakes and stuff in them. Um that it just kind of sounds like the stuff that you might say if you've been tortured. But the United States uses a shipload of illegal chemical weapons in Vietnam, so it's not impossible that we were in fact using something. Um, we'll never really know because it's you know, war crimes and such as much a spectacular leap and logic that's

being made here is the thing. Yeah, that that that that whatever they're saying, they're saying because they've been brainwashed and not just hit a bunch brainwashed in some way that is um unheard of, Like it's it's new around land. They were coerced or they were tricked, or they thought they did drop. You know, that's the same thing when recently what they were dropping last year and it came out, it's like, well, you know, they've got actual Air Force pilots,

fighter pilots saying they saw UFOs. It's like yeah, and they're also they're full of crap. They they probably did think they saw that, but they were wrong, or like they're not they're not experts at the highest levels. It's like, well, this thing moved in a way that no craft can move. It's like, well, like, I know, you have some expertise

as a pilot, but you're also just a guy. Uh So these guys may have thought they were dropping chemicals, So they may have been dropping some sort of defoliant or something that they thought was I don't know, or could they could have been a rumor that they heard somebody else was dropping it. It's always this stuff about like people's minds just aren't This is the thing nobody actually likes to think about, Like our brains aren't very good at knowing what's happening in the world. Um, Like,

it is very easy to trick us. It is very easy for people to like convince themselves of things. It's very easy all sorts of things, like if you're a fucking pilot, right, you're taking in more oxygen than normal because of like the way in which you have to like have oh to flooded into you so that you can survive at that kind of altitude. Um all sorts of stuff about flying is mind altering, including g forces like yeah, who knows what's going on in their fucking heads.

And these guys, yes, soldiers also full of shit. They they embellish their war stories. And this is not like I would probably do it too. It's a thing that's a part of the culture yeah, but yeah. So much of this mania is stoked by an American journalist named Edward Hunter. And Hunter is not just a guy writing.

He's the guy who, like he writes an article for the Miami News that is the first time the word brainwashing is used in English, Like, Edward Hunter brings that term when he's talking about these pilots to the United States. So he's like a working journalist. He's also a contractor for the CIA Office of Policy Coordination and a rabbit anti communist. So when he introduces this stuff to the United States, he's not doing it just because he believe

it to be true. He is a guy working for the CIA who sees this in like the best interest of the agency. Um and Kinser writes like a longer article for a newspaper called The New Leader, which is also funded by the CIA. The CIA is funding a shipload of newspapers at this time, including a lot of left wing ones. Um and then he winds up writing a book because the panic he ignites such a big

deal called brainwashing in Red China. And in this book he tells Americans they need to prepare for quote, psychological warfare on a scale incalculably more immense than any militarist

of the past has ever imagined. He becomes like, because you know, once you once you're the first guy to write about a thing that like freaks Americans out, then you get to be the expert on it, and all of like the big time entertainment media people will start having you on their shows over and over again, which helps you sell your books and brings in more money. And that's what Hunter winds up being for brainwashing right. Um, eveny thing you cannot do at this point is go

back on it. That is your brand. Like, the only thing you can do is double down forever. Yeah, that's your fucking meal ticket. Um. So this works well enough that the House Committee on American Activities brings him up. Um. He tells them that the Reds have specialists available on

their brainwashing panels. He tells them they are preparing psychic attacks to subjugate quote, the people and the soil and the resources of the United States, and will use the psychic power to quote turn Americans into subjects of a new world order for the benefit of a mad little knot of despots in the Kremlin. Now pull pull that all, right, completely, well, most of that completely out of his ass asked, we're

gonna talk about the Soviets are trying some weird psychic shit. Um, obviously it doesn't work, but yeah, we'll get to that in a little bit. So Project Bluebird and Edwin Hunters or Mr Hunters like bullshit leads to the creation basically the kind of panic over this brings more money into the CIA and more money behind Project Bluebird. And one of the major things that the CIA uses with this new funding is they start creating the very first of

what are what come to be called black sites. Right, These are secret illegal prisons where prisoners can be tortured. And these prisoners are generally people either spies, Russian spies who are arrested, or just people the CIA says are probably Russian spies. There's no due process here, right, So a lot of times they're just like taking people and they've got these people, they can't ever let them out. They're going to kill all of them. And so what they see is what we have X thousand number of

people all around the world. We can do whatever we want to them. You guys need to test drugs on people, Here's where you do it. Now, Jason, that's a pretty fucked up thing to do, UM, and you're not going to find a whole lot of people who are capable of running a black site prison that tortures people to death with hallucinogens. But thankfully the CIA had an old bench of guys who were ready to help them, and those guys were Nazis. So they hire General Walter Schreiber.

And Schreiber is not a again, he's a general. He had been the surgeon general of the Third Reich, where he had masterminded experiments and multiple concentration in death camps, including one where death camp inmates were infected with gang green and cut open so the progress of the disease

on their bones could be watched. Now, Schreiber had been arrested by the Soviets for obvious reasons, and he had been briefly imprisoned, but they had eventually agreed, probably in their own kind of project paper clip thing, to let him become a professor in East Berlin UM. But he escapes, he gets away to the other the American side of Berlin UH and winds up in the Army's hands. And when the U. S. Army confirms, oh, we've got the

third Reich's former surgeon general. Rather than be like, this guy should probably go to prison, right, you know, maybe we should, maybe we should deal with this man, they sent him to one of the CIA's Project Bluebird black Side's because they're like, well, this guy is great at the job that we're already starting to do. Um. I think that's a great example of where the Americans said, Look, the Soviets tried to cancel this guy because of his views,

and we don't believe in that. It's like, can you should have a chance to redeem yourself by doing the exact same thing for us. It's like Louis c k getting to tour again. Right. That's where Walter Schreiber is. You know, he has his little he gets canceled by the woke mob for running some death camps. But now he's back at Madison Square garden Um, which is a

CIA black site on the outskirts of West Berlin. So he helps them set up a bunch of secret black sites all across western Europe where CIA agents can torture without being observed. And I'm gonna quote from Poisoner in Chief here. This set a precedent that marked a breakthrough for the CIA. By opening prisons, the agency established its right not only to detain an imprisoned people in other countries, but to interrogate them harshly while they were in custody

without regard for US law. So successful was this network of prisons in West Germany that the CIA duplicated it in Japan. Their Bluebird interrogation teams injected captured North Korean soldiers with drugs including sodium amiltal, a depressant that can have hypnotic effects, and with three potent stimulants bids adrine, which affects the central nervous system, coramine, which acts on the lungs, and picro toxin, a convulsant that can cause

seizures and respiratory paralysis. While they were in the weakened state of transition between the effects of depressants and stimulants, CIA experimenters subjected them to hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat. Their goal, according to one report, was to quote induce violent cathartic reactions, alternatively putting subjects to sleep then waking them up until they were sufficiently confused to be coerced into a living an experience from their past now I

don't think that's very ethical behavior. Um, but you know what is ethical, Jason? Is this a transition to an add this this is a transition to an ad break, Jason, because the sponsors of this podcast, will they give you Ben's a Drene? Yes, but you're gonna know that you're getting pure speed if you buy Ben's a Dren from them. You know they're not gonna dose you like you're some North Korean war captive. UM, so enjoy bens Adrine. We're back. Ah,

what a good time. We're talking about Project Bluebird. Now. Very briefly the interject, we both realized that Robert is skipping across incidents that each one could be its own book. Each one's likes a prison they ran for a long period of time and the things that went there, and he has to briefly summarize it because that's all just the part of it's just one block in the tower of of of mk Ultra. They're just getting started here. Yeah, this is this was a lot. We are doing our

best to do it justice. But this is a sprawling thing that went on for how long? Um, this is like close to twenty years. Yeah, we're talking about um, it's we're simultaneously going very long and also hopping from horror to horror almost too quickly to fully absorb it. Yeah, to really let this stuff hit um. And it's it's like they don't find anything like Project Bluebird. They don't find a truth serum. They have what they think are like intriguing results, but they don't find ways to like

actually force people to give up useful information. None of this works well, but they all remain convinced that like it's building to something, and the Project Bluebird experiments eventually split off into Project Artichoke, which is like an even more well funded and elaborate like program to attempt to find a perfect truth serum. One of the guys in charge of Project Artichoke is Morse Alan. He's a CIA agent who is obsessed with mind control, and he's pretty

good friends with Alan Dulles. In the Night. In nineteen fifty, he had advocated for the creation of a quote electro sleep machine that could force people into a trance um. It was basically like shocking people into like a half sleep trance so that you could wipe out their memories. No one knew if this would be possible, but this was like the only thing Morse Allen wanted to see

in the world. In nineteen fifty two, he was part of a three man team that traveled to Villas Schuster and West Germany to test quote dangerous combinations of drugs such as benzadrine and penthetol natrium on Russian captives under a research protocol that specified disposal of the body is not a problem. Um because again that we don't know how many people they're testing this on, we don't know

how many people they're killing. But one thing the CIA, one of the things that they're saying about these black sites is don't worry. All of these people were testing on are going to die, and it's it's not a problem. We'll figure out how to get rid of them for you. Now. Incidentally, if you watch movies, thrillers, even cartoons from the fifties, sixties, seventies, a lot of this stuff like hypnosis, hypnosis machines. These are tropes in those movies from that era that I

don't think people realized that was based on this. It was based on what came out in the government's actual attempts to make these things. Yeah, there was and these again one of the things you have to keep in your head while you're reading about all this. There were a shipload of highly trained people with like doctorates and millions of dollars in funding behind them, who truly believed mind control poisons were a real thing. Um that that that this was a thing that they were going to

figure out how to do. They would not have put all of this work into it if they didn't think they could really do it. Um. Now, obviously, all of the experiments they're doing this is a direct violation of what's called the Nuremberg Code, which acquired that voluntary, well informed consent in a legal capacity is a necessary prerequisite

for experimental patients. Right, you cannot as a result of how bad, like all of the horrible experiments the Nazis do in concentration camps, we make we like the international community writes out a thing being like this is something you cannot do, and we after we write the Nuremberg Code, we use it to convict and execute seven Nazi scientists. But we never incorporated into US law. Right, it's never actually illegal for the United States to violate the Nuremberg Code.

We prosecute and kill people under it, but We're also like, well, why would we We're not going to handicap ourselves by signing onto that ship. That's not a good idea, um, because the Russians are probably breaking up, So sure of course. Yeah, so we've got it too, um, Which Yeah, anyway, it's it's cool how all of that works, and may have part of their willingness to break the Nuremberg Law and may have been all of the Nazis that they hired. You do have to keep that in mind too, which

is also a thing that's being done on both sides. Um. But yeah, Internally, the need to replicate Nazi war crimes using Nazi scientists was always justified by the incredible danger of Russian mind control and brainwashing technology, which the CIA

believed was advancing at a rapid rate. In a speech at Princeton University in early nineteen fifty three, Alan Dules warned that Communist spies were everywhere and so well trained and equipped that they could turn an American mind into quote a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius. Um. That's that's that's that's Alan.

There's a bit of projection there, because they themselves would love, of course, or a chemical or a practice or a protocol that would allow them to do that with other uman beings, to just wind them up and make them say the words come out of this guy's mouth, this politician, this Central American politician. Whatever we dose the with the this injection, and he says whatever we tell him to say, and we just control him like a puppet. So the fear of the bad guys having that technology is a

little bit of them revealing their own wishes there. Yeah, and it's um, it's it's kind of an open question as to how much of Alan Dullis believes everything that he's saying, that the Soviets are actually at advance, and how much of it is that, well, this is just something I want and the way to get it is to claim that the Soviets are making it. And for those of you are new to the show, relatively new. But I was on the episode on The Dullest Brothers.

We did two parts, part two parter three parts. I think it's a three partner. There was a lot to say about those cool dudes, but there's two Those two men. The point of that episode and why I wanted to be on are two of the most influential people in the history of the modern world, and most people don't. If you know their names, you only know it in passing, like you briefly heard it in history class or whatever. The Dullest Brothers were a couple of the Gitexts of

the world as it exists today. Like and it's just one piece of it. Yeah, and and everything Alan is doing here because Alan is not on on the ground guy for m k Ultra. He's not like signing off on specific programs. He's not really even signing off on specific torture prisons. He's just kind of generally saying, keep working on this. I'll make sure you keep getting money,

keep working on this. And then every now and then he'll read like a paper um, because again he's like, he's like the he's he's the he's not the he's not the execution man, right, he's the idea guy. You know, he's the he's the big picture sort of fellow. UM. And so when we talk about the question of like does he believe the Soviets are on the verge of

all this? Um, I think one thing that's useful to ask is, like, what were the Soviets doing at the same time, like, what actual mind control research does the Soviet Union involve and is there any way in which it could justify all of the horror of the CIA does Now, it's true that the Soviet Union had experimented with mind control. Um, it's possible they put more than a billion dollars into the research, although that is hard

to say accurately. Um. But you know, the CIA, as we've started talking about and we'll be talking about, is obsessively focused on chemicals. Right. The CIA believes there is a specific physical drug that if we figure out how to dose it right, or we figure out how to administer it right, it will allow us to brainwash and reprogram human beings. The Soviets don't really spend much time on this kind of thing. Instead, they focus on what

we might be comparatively called cheerful nonsense. Um. A common belief early in the Soviet Union is that and this is stuff that starts out in like nineteen nineteen Soviet scientists. A number of them think that there's there's this idea that thoughts are like a physical thing, right, Like thoughts are a kind of like there's a there's like electrical waves and stuff, and this is true in your brain.

And so kind of from that, there's this idea that since thoughts are something physical that can be detect did and monitored, they can probably be altered to right, and maybe you can change the way people think by changing the waves in their brain. Um. And they kind of take from this that like, well, there's there's probably like people who can tap into those waves and alter thoughts. And this kind of leads the Soviet Union to put

a shipload of money into psychic research. Now, the earliest like examples of this are animal research, which we're like, so there's an animal research program conducted in the earliest years of the U s SR by a guy named Vladimir Durov, and Durov claims that he's figured out how to carry out He's carry out successful tests of telepathy on animals. Right, Durov claims, I figured out how to

manipulate the minds of animals. Now, Jason, you want to guess what Durov's job prior to being a Soviet psychic scientist was. Circus? Yeah, he's a circus clown. Um. Yeah, so circus clown Vladimir Durov becomes the kind of the center of the early Soviet mind control experiments. Did he really work in a circustance, yes, he says he No, he's a circus clown. Jason, Oh, I thought you actually knew. Were you just guessing? I was guessing because yeah, he's a Soviet circus and a guy. I thought he was

like an animal, like an elephant trainer guy. And he thought, Hey, I've mastered I'm I'm the tiger whisperer. Look he has a circuit. Now. I think he's the kind of circus clown who is working with animals, right, because like that, like rodeo clowns, a big part of their job is distracting animals. Um, but he's he's a clown, like that's his literal, his actual cvous circus clown. And the reason I came to mind is because, like the Tiger King guy,

like anybody who thinks they can talk to animals. A few people seeing the Tiger King documentary, tiger people are are all nuts. Yeah, they're crazy, They're lunatics, dangerous people. There's a specific type of crazy that comes with working

with big, dangerous animals. And anybody who goes out and like they start to market themselves as I can control animals like I can talk to them, or that guy that got eaten by the bears because he thought he could community bears like a specific personality type that I don't fully understand it, but there's something that drives people a little bit nuts. And so I can just imagine

this guy marching into an office, and I've mastered. I've mastered the ability to with my mind, with the power of my mind, to control the scrolls all manner of animals,

and that is that is pretty much what happens. I'm going to quote from the l A Review of Books here in During a conference hosted by the Institute on Brain Research of Brain Research on mental influence on the behavior of animals, the neurologists and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekterev presented Durov's dubious research to his colleagues and subsequently conducted

similar experiments on human beings. Their results, which were never replicated, led beck Toev to think that the mental effect of one individ rule on another is possible at a distance through some kind of living matter, most likely through hurts waves. Bektorev's wave theory was further corroborated by a third man

of science, an electrical engineer named Bernard Kazynski. Kazynski claimed that the transmission of mental information at a distance is the same electromagnetic as an ordinary radio communication, just thus giving telepathy is supposedly dependable scientific foundation. And you can get why people could fall for elements of this. Radio is pretty new at the time. Um. It's if you're able to like send waves that include people's voices around the world. And that's the thing that when you were

born people couldn't do. Um. Why it's not that crazy to think, like, well, there's probably some way to do that with thoughts, right, Like, that's not an inherently unreasonable thing to try, you know. Um, So it is important. Like, as silly as this is and as funny as it is that the starts with a circus clown, it's not unreasonable that you would want to, like, see, well, do thoughts work like radio waves? Is there's some way to like intercept and change thoughts as they fly through the areas?

That a thing that people can do. Um. And of course it's not um. If you if you are interested in the history of Soviet pseudo scientific mind control, I can recommend the book Homo Sovieticus by Vladimir will Well Minski. But the short of it is nothing they do works like.

It does not work at all. What we know though makes it all sound decidedly it's not the same as what the CIA is doing, because, as far as I can tell, for all of the different messed up things the Soviet unions do, does they don't have a program where they are like injecting poison into random people, uh in order to see if it will let them control

their minds. And I think part of what makes this evident, like the relative banality of their of their mind control research is the primary real world application of Soviet telepathy research. On October eight, nine, nine, after the Soviet pull out from Afghanistan and just a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soviet Channel one played video of a licensed physician who would previously been a hypnotist for the

Olympic weightlifting team. He led viewers of Soviet TV through what was effectively a series of meditations, telling them to drink water and trying to get them to feel better about the government. His stated goal was to quote Calma Land, beset by turbulence and heal the body politic. Um. You may recognize from your Soviet history that this does not work out. Um. So however, and we don't, you know, we have less access on some of the details of this program than we do about the CIA's MK Ultra,

although not a tremendous amount less. But it is probably worth saying that the c that the the KGBS mind control program is not as extensive, um or as nightmarish as the CIA's in part because it's just kind of based on a fundamentally sillier thing, right, Like they're trying to do psychic stuff, and that's just a little bit

less scary than trying to drug people. But I think there's a thing where whatever the spies or were who whatever they were bringing back to them, we have this thing in the USA, and maybe just just the way it has to be in like intelligent circles where you almost portray the enemy is like bond villains, like you assume that they're so far ahead of the curve in terms of what they can do or what they're capable of, you know, or you'll get headlines about China's latest direct

energy weapon or whatever, and the truth is none of these countries can spend even a fraction of what we can on stuff like this. And we saw so much of this during the War on Terror, Like the fear of a dirty bomb like that was all you heard about for a while and until finally somebody came out and said, look, if they're a dirty bomb, the damage would be done by the initial explosion, and that's pretty

much it. Like like packing a bunch of low grade radioactive material into a box and put in some sea formside, Like that's just not much of anything that it doesn't matter because it's like we just assume that terrorists can easily get hold of nuclear material, We just assume they can easily get hold of nervy gas. And it's like, actually no, it's what we always attribute way more abilities

to them than what they actually have. And during the Cold War and at the height of the Cold War, this was at truly crazy levels with the Soviet Union, like the way we talked up the capability of everything from their tanks to whatever secret stuff they were they were working on, um, you know, space based weapons whatever, Like it was always any rumor like, well we've you know that that you would if it came from your

own government. You would laugh it off, like, well, we've got a team of psychics who can mind control you from the other side of the planet. We're like okay, but no, when it's a Russians doing it, it's like, oh my gosh. And in our team of psychics. Example of like how deeply some of that belief managed to last. In two thousand seven, the Department of Home and Science Security signs a contract and pays for Soviet psycho alcology

research to create a psychic criminal detection system to fight terrorism. Um, so we actually get tricked by this stuff, like thirty years after twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Um, it's pretty funny. And we've dismissed the idea of these energy weapons. But of course the weapon that caused to Vannah syndrome very real, the absolutely real weapon that because that's why, like the Russians are winning so easily in Ukraine, because they have this this mind beam that can debilitate

you from with this invisible energy. Yes, that that's that. I mean, we're I think everyone listening is aware of sweeping Russian successes in Ukraine due to their their laser energy technology. Um. But yeah, so you know, that's what the Soviet Union is actually working on. They do not have a mind control serum. They're not really working on a mind control serum. They are paying people to sit in rooms and like try to talk to dogs with

their brains. Um. Meanwhile, the CIA is being kind of steadily driven into mania by a steady drip of disinformation about Communist brainwashing um. And they decide they've got to bring in a scientist to help really take like clean up some of these programs they're working on and allow them to actually close the mind control gap with the Soviet Union. And they settle on a young man named Sydney Gottlieb. He is he is all over this motherfucker so.

Sydney was born on August third, nineteen eighteen, in New York, New York, to Hungary and Jewish immigrants. He came into the world with a club foot so severe that he couldn't walk for the first years of his life. His mom had to carry him everywhere for most of his childhood until he was able to finish a series of three brutal operations. Sidney took his first steps without leg braces at age twelve. He would go on to be a gifted folk dancer and to live in extremely active life.

And his story would be more satisfying if not for how his parents afforded the operation that gave him his legs. The Gottlieb family owned sweatshops in the garment industry, which are some of the worst of the sweatshop family. Um, we don't have a lot of to tail of about his family sweatshop, but it is not a nice place. And as a young man, Gottlieb joins a campus chapter of the Young People Socialist League because he's so disgusted

by his dad's sweatshop. Um. So like, this part is not really his fault, but that's always fun when when sweatshop moneies what pays for your child surgery. Now, for his own part, Gottlieb struggled with a stutter, which he only corrected later in life. He rose above these challenges though, and he was a really good student. He graduates, he

enrolls in New York City College. He does well there, but Sidney decides that he wants to pursue a career in agricultural biology, which eventually leads him out of the city for the first time. At Arkansas Tech, despite his strictly urban roots. He fits in well there, and he's described by his classmates as quote a Yankee who pleases the Southerners in general. Across the decades of his life and career, Basically everyone who meets this guy agrees that

he's a very pleasant man. Sydney is kind of a hippie rightly. He is a back to the land dude. He likes farming, he likes taking air of his goats, he likes folk dancing. Like he's a in everything but his job for the CIA. Like a sweet kind of hippie dude. So he eventually gets his doctorate in biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. He marries the daughter

of a preacher named Margaret Moore. She'd been raised in India as a missionary, but had discarded dogmatic faith in her religion for kind of a more agnostic, pan spiritual sort of thing, and Sydney is in a similar position. He's proud of his Jewish heritage, but he's not really a practicing Jew. And both of them are seekers, right like, they're kind of interested in Eastern religion. They're interested, they don't like give up entirely the religions they're raised with.

But there they have and this is you know, pretty common at the time, and now like they have this kind of syncretic attitude towards towards all of this stuff, and Sydney is going to always be a very curious, open minded guy when it comes to this sort of thing. At first, Sydney seeking leads him to work for the f d A, where he tests drugs in a boring,

safe and legal way. Next, he does some plant research for the National Research Council, and along the way he and Margaret like by an unpowered cabin near Vienna, Virginia, and they start a goat farm, which is where they raise their children and are going to live most of their lives in this kind of like off grid goat farming community. In addition to his interests in religion and dance, and Gottlieb starts to become fascinated with early reports of

psychedelic research. In the summer of nineteen fifty one, Alan Dullis makes the decision to hire Gottlieb to help with Project Art to Choke. Now. During World War Two, Sydney had been unable to serve because his foot's all you know, hurt uh, and this he kind of had this at least his biographer makes the argument that, like this is part of why he decides to join the CIA, is that he had this desire to serve his country that

he hadn't been able to actually do during the war. Um, and Alan kind of Alan is a pretty good at manipulating. Alan sees this in Sydney, and part of the pitch he makes to Gotlieb is like, hey, you know, you you missed out on fighting for your country back during that war. We're in another crisis point here right, this secret war we're fighting with the Soviets is just as important as anything that happened in World War Two. And now we do have a place for you. So this

is your chance to serve your country, Dullis. And part of why he may have been so good at kind of manipulating Sydney is Dullis had been born with the club foot too. Um. They both kind of had that thing in common, weirdly enough, which is not a super common thing. And maybe that's a little bit of how Dullas kind of is able to get inside Sydney's head. But he seems to be pretty good at at understanding Gottlieb um. It also may have helped the two men

understand each other. Uh Sydney is almost immediately made chief of the new CIA Chemical Division, and he's given a free hand and budget to explore the concept of a truth serum. One of the first tests conducted under Gotlieb's command is a series of chemical tortures at a black site in the Panama Canal Zone on a Bulgarian politician

named Dmitri Dimitrov. He'd given info to the CIA in the past, but then his handlers had become convinced that he was about to start working with the French, so they had kidnapped him, let the Greeks torture him for sent six months, and then sent him to his secret prison in Panama. So this was their guy. They don't

even think that he's going over to the Soviets. They think he's working with their allies, but they still send him over to get tortured in Greece, and then he winds up in Panama where Sidney Gottlieb is asked like, hey, help us figure out how to like chemically torture this guy so he'll give up information on who had hired him um. In early nineteen fifty two, a CI agent in Panama wrote that because of his confinement, uh Dimitrov quote has become very hostile to the United States and

our intelligence operations. In particular. This was seen as a perfect chance to try the new artichoke techniques. The CIA under Gottlieb works on Kelly for three years and whatever

they did to him, we've destroyed the record. Um. But this guy Dimitrov Kelly is kind of the nickname they have for him in the in the files, he survives, and he does try to go to the media and talk about the fact that he's been in a CIA secret prison being tortured, and so like, the news media sees this bulgarian politician saying that he's been in a CIA black site for years, and they're like, they called the CIA and are like, as this guy legit, and

the CIA says, oh, no, of course not. And so nobody covers this guy's life story and as evidence, all of the records are gone. Wouldn't we have records if we had done that? Instead, all we have is this barrel full of ashes. Um. It's also worth noting that it is later proven he had never been planning to go to the French. Um, they were entirely they just like they just destroyed this man's life who had been

working for them for absolutely no reason. And that's going to become a really common story for the CIA under Gottlieb. But Jason, that's all we got time for today. Yes, yes, we barely got started. We have arrived at the beginning of MK Ultra. Yeah. Yeah, we're almost at the beginning of MK and this and this could have been much much more just getting to this point. There's it's a lot.

It was a whole thing because it starts when everybody thinks of them Koltra, they're not thinking of three, they're thinking of the stuff that happened going forward. Um, we probably could have done a two part or just on like the Army's chemical weapons experiments and style biological weapons experiments in World War two and ship like it is. There's so much going on here. But I think this

gives people good context as to what's happening. Jason, you want even context as to how they can buy your book anywhere anywhere the sells books aside from like grocery stores and stuff. Again, the title is if this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. Um, if you want to keep up with me, my name is Jason Pargent P A R G I N. Type that into almost any social media platform and you will find I'm on there, including TikTok. I have become TikTok famous in the last

six weeks. So I I have been watching your TikTok's. Um very erotic, I have to say so. Yeah. And by the way, as we sit here and talk about how foolish it is that you can mind control someone, the fact that I set for four straight hours scrolling through TikTok's, that's how I use my total freedom of mind. The idea that you could be brainwashed by some sort

of advanced technology is ludicrous. It is. It is funny that so much of what these the CIA was trying to do, a number of people have figured out and states have figured out how to basically do by just like fucking with people on social media. Um, that's that's good. That's a good side. Yeah, And all they talk about the well, someday they'll have advanced techniques to make like deep fakes and they can have like a fake Barack

Obama confess to somebody. It's like you realize, just putting that on an extremely blorried jpeg with like comic sands like that will that will spread around Facebook and twenty minutes with no no source or deep fakery or anything. Just yeah that. I I have long been of the opinion that like, no deep fakes aren't going to be what destroys us, Like we're we're already well passed. That being the thing I'm worried about is not required. It does not have to be that sophisticated anyway. But your

book is very sophisticated. People should check it out. Um, and uh, I have a book too, It's called After the Revolution. You can also find it wherever books are sold. This has been Behind the Bastards, part one of the mk Ultra series. We've got three more coming for you. So strap in and take a shipload acid. Take enough acid that you just high for the next fourteen days. Um, that's probably a good idea. Behind the Bastards is a

production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.