From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Andrew the try Force Howard. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Here's where it gets crazy. Already Previously on stuff they don't want you to know, we asked, does the CIA actually hire magicians? Short answer yes, as bizarre as it sounds, yes, absolutely, Yes, dudes, the CIA high are professional magicians.
Yes, and of course we are not talking about practitioners of the dark arts, though that's its own thing and a question perhaps for another day. As we know, operations involving you know, astral projection and things approaching that genre of clandestine activity certainly did exist. We're talking about like stage magicians, vegas magicians, sleight of hand experts, yes, exactly, mind freaks. You gotta wiggle your fingers when you say that, mind freak.
Oh, you don't know where I wiggling my fingers right now.
Don't don't wiggle that's not that's not the kind of slight of hand we signed out for today. Fellas the FCC won't.
Let me be anyway. Believe it or not, this was a brilliant idea. The CIA has a lot of hair bring schemes historically, not not necessarily evil stuff, just well far out of the box. But this was a pretty smart thing for them to do. The public may have never learned about it without the hard work of the intrepid authors and researchers h Keith Melton and Robert Wallace. Our story begins with a guy named John Mulholland. He's born John wick Aser on June ninth, eighteen ninety eight in Chicago.
And you know why did he change his name wick Aser the Wizard. That would be a perfect stage magic name. I'm very confused. Mulholland's not nearly as cool.
Maybe because of the circles he would run in later are the ones he aspired to run in. Maybe he felt it sounded too foreign.
Maybe he felt that it was sort of like Alice Island, you know, folks coming in and changing their name from something that was more Tom, I'm only more American, and I guess Mulholland is pretty American if you think about old Hollywood. M M.
Yeah, he was one of those kids who always loved magic.
Uh.
If you look at the this is a spoiler, but the primary biography written about this guy is the Magician with ci A, A magician capitalized, the Magician amazing. Yeah, it's in this biography. It is you know, we're no pun left behind crew. In this biography, what we see is that Mulholland's life changes when he's as young as five years old. He sees a performance by a guy named Heinrich Keller, who is known as the Dean of
American magicians, not musicians, and he sticks with it. You know, everybody who's spent time around young kids or has raised a kid themselves, you know that that at that age a lot of kids intro can be ephemeral somewhat right, Dinosaurs one month, space exploration the next, or princesses or pirates, et cetera. This kid latched on to magic like a more a eel, and he did not let go. He reached his teens and he set about learning the art of stage magic under a guide named John William Sargent,
who was president of the Society of American Magicians. And just spoiler, there are a ton of magicians societies. I had no idea there's so many.
Yeah, and these societies take illusion and magic very, very seriously. Just quickly, let's throw the oath in here, because it really is the kind of thing that, especially as a kid, I imagine it being such a secretive thing. It would the intrigue would be like way up here magic has been. There's been a lot of disillusionment in the world of magic over the years, as the following oath has been broken over and over and over again. But then this oath was very very serious and it's still series to
a lot of people today. As a magician, I promise never to reveal the secret of any allusion to a non magician unless that one swears to uphold the magician's oath. In turn, I promise never to perform any illusion for any non magician without first practicing the effect until I can perform it well enough to maintain the illusion of magic.
Can I just say that I, too, much like our buddy Maul Hollins, here have been fascinated by stage magic ever since I was a little kid. I saw David Copperfield perform and I was probably ten or eleven, and I never looked back. And there's a Clive Barker movie from the nineties called Lord of Illusions that you guys may have seen. It's not great, doesn't super hold on you read I have, Yeah, it's I think a part of one of his collections. It is like a short story with then cabal. If I'm not.
Mistaken, it's good.
It's very good stories. The story is more intense than no the film. I watched it the other day actually, and I remember as a kid being obsessed with it and a big and it didn't it didn't quite hold up to my childhood memory, which is pretty common for movies from the nineties. But it a part of it takes place in a place in Los Angeles called the Magic Castle, which is the headquarters for the Academy of Magical Arts, and it is, you know, one of these
very secretive, kind of members only magicians organizations. And I was lucky enough to get to go to a couple of shows at the Magic Castle, and it is like being transported back in time. There is nothing quite like it that I've ever experienced. They're not allowed to take pictures, you have to dress a certain way, and it just feels like the outside world kind of disappears. But it's it's such a neat world, and it's a very niche world today. You know, you don't really think of that
many blockbuster magicians anymore. You got your Chris Angels and maybe still David Copperfield and David Blaine's. But it really the ones that are really pounding the pavement and doing the work are the ones that are performing at places like the Magic Castle, like for like super super fans and other magicians, other members of the community.
We're in Vegas or on cruise ships.
Pen and Teller huge right stills, And I appreciate that we're bringing up the magician oath and the idea of how this feels somewhat Illuminati esque, the initiation into a secret society, something of the level of a cabal.
Right.
Well, because Mulholland's being trained by the president of one of these societies, right, so this he's an apprentice to a master.
Yes, he's taken on a trade, just like in that wonderful fairy tale the Satanic Mill. Check it out. It's also about magic, and it's appropriate for all audiences. I would say it's a great young adult book. So Mulholland is built from this adolescent opportunity to learn from the best. He creates a stellar professional career and he works as
a magician for more than two decades. He's performing in small retinues as you know, part of like a vaudeville variety act, and then he's in larger stage shows as well. He starts headlining these. He's doing other stuff. He's not just practicing his famous rising hook trick or cup and ball stuff. He is also a prolific author. He is
a prolific collector and of magic books. And in nineteen thirty, when he himself is in his early thirties, think like thirty one thirty two, he becomes the editor of a trade magazine all about magic. It's bm FM. It's by magicians for magicians. The name of it is The Sphinx, and he's a go to scholar. People consult him on the history of certain magic tricks, everything from like is this your card? To how do I appear to solve this lady in half without actually killing her.
Well, I think one of the things that's always fascinating to me, or maybe later in life really truly maintained that fascination with magic is that it's not technology based. Like the real stuff. The stuff that you have to be an absolute master of, is movement based, is subtrifuge based,
it's misdirection based. Like sure, there's big stage magician shows like in Vegas and the like, they use crazy set pieces and all of that, but at the heart of magic, it's all this kind of stuff that has been going on for generations and passed down and is just a matter of putting in the work and being an absolute master of your craft.
Yes, but I would say like a major part of this guy's specialty is understanding the technology parts, the mechanism, the oh fre salment, you know, devices, the all of those things that are such well kept secrets. Right about how you actually saw that lady in half unless you're reading the sphinx, And even then it's probably not outright saying hey, here's how you do this with and this is the cutaway, right.
I guess what I'm getting at though, is like that kind of technology that you're talking about, and that we're talking about here is it's old technology. Like it's not like there's some innovation that made the game changer in magic. Like a lot of this tough stuff and these methods and these techniques are like super low tech.
The points I think we're making all stand together here because if there was a piece of technology or a technique in Western stage magic, then John Mulholland would know it. He became the premiere biblifile of the magic world. He had this cue huge collection and as far as we know it is currently in the possession of none other than David Copperfield from earlier, which makes sense. He also Muholan, not Copperfield. He became friends with VIP magicians and related
experts and everything from pugilism to diplomacy. He was good at cultivating contacts, remember that part. By nineteen thirty nine he was the only member of the British Magical Society only officer who was not British. He was like there fore and hire and he had performed or studied magic in forty two different countries. Do you know how hard it was to not be in the military and travel
of forty two different countries in nineteen thirty nine. You had to be like royalty, or you had to be able to do something that rich people liked to watch, you know.
Oh Man callback to the first part of this episode, which I guess ultimately is just kind of a brief history of the CIA. That was such an important ability, you know, that would qualify someone to be a spied an intelligence gatherer is the ability to tran to move unseen in these other these places and not seem out of place. Right.
We're not saying he was a spy at the time, but he definitely had right.
But but that quality is exactly what the CIA would be looking for, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, right, not the kind of person to freak out, you know what I mean, it's not their first time in Morocco, that kind of thing, And that's that's what you're that's what you're looking for. You're not necessarily at this point obviously, he's not speaking the lingua franca fluently everywhere. Right, He is there to do his job researching magic and performing stage magic. So he's legit. He's five by fives on the up and up, but he's a big, big
deal in these magical circles. And to be clear, he's acknowledged to be very talented at what we call stage magic today, but he never not once made any claims toward what we will call the esoteric arts, hermetic or thelemic magic, all the proudly stuff. He was like many stage magicians or escapologist, including Houdini, he was actually quite skeptical of supernatural claims, and he did not cotton to them, as they would say, Yeah, what's.
What's the guy's name, the stage magician that's always out there debunking stuff, James Rand Simpson, James Randy. Yes, that kind of skepticism seems to be a through line in a lot of these stage magic communities.
One hundred percent right. And we also know that Mulholland, this is another you'll see how these pieces are all falling together, fellow conspiracy realists. Mulholland is also a US patriot. He is the kind of guy to wave the flag, so much so that during World War Two he turned his prolific pen toward the troops and he wrote a spell book as a diversion for soldiers. And we can only imagine it was the thing where you open the cover, see a little note from him, and then you.
See the Magician's Oath and it says, you know, do docturn to page three to understand these hidden secrets until you have recited and sworn accordance with the Magician's Oath.
This is a fun book, okay, Okay, So it was more like like some a diversionary entertainment. Yes, entertainment, I guess, because I mean the idea of calling it a spell book seems to me to be a little more along the lines of the hermetic or thelemic flavors of magic.
Yeah, I mean this one too, right, was his own idea. We could, if we're being very fair, we could ascribe it to a desire to corner a niche audience market, a literal captive market, because these guys, you know, they can't leave the area of operation. Or maybe it was an aspiration to entertain the boys on the front, like like the USO would later do.
Oh yeah, that was seeing some parallels there as well, Like it's his way of kind of pitching in and entertaining the truth.
Yeah, and maybe it's a combination of both of those factors. Either way, he pulls it off with a plom and if we were to speculate a little bit and play with the puzzle pieces, do a little Charlie Day kind of conspiratorial Bob Ross stuff, then we could say that this self directed act of patriotism may have played a part in the events that were to follow. But what are you talking about, guys? Right now, we're talking about a break for a word from our sponsors. All right,
we've returned. We know that he is a big deal magician. Mulholland has done a lot of performances, he's widely traveled, he's urbane, he has gotten through World War Two. He's been a patriot all the way. But there's a new war that is already starting. And this is something we talked a little bit about in chapter one. The frenemies.
Yeah, that's the US and the USSR, And a lot of the stuff that's happening is happening in the dark. Both sides are engaged in deception and trickery tactics. But I imagine it like everybody's starting out learning how to trick each other fully, like really fully what they feel is tricking someone fully, And both sides are trying to level up as much as they can on their abilities to deceive the other.
Hmm, yeah, yeah, they're definitely leveling up. I would say that the the playing field is a little bit uneven because they have you know how, like this is so dumb, but I was playing Mario Kart earlier, you know how. Like in Mario Kart there are different attributes, right, Like you know you'll have one.
Character, yeah, and wait even for the character you pick, they matter as well. Sorry not to get I didn't know this about you, Ben. We've got we must play sometimes.
Yeah, well, every every time I'm in Rome, I'll do as the Romans do, you know. And that's part of it. So the idea here than this terrible analogy of making based off sleep deprivation, is that the USSR and the US and Europe and Britain they all had different stats,
different specialties in espionage. They were better at certain things like the British tended to be better at adding stuff through the curtain, right, and the Russians often excelled in other Well, the stereotype is they excelled in more nefarious exercises, right, more dirty pool. As the Cambridge Boys would put it, they were the Russians and the US were immediately fighting uh,
like like you're like, you're talking about Matt. They're they're fighting to level up and they want control of former Nazi territory. This is where the Iron Curtain becomes apparent, right, this is the construction of the literal Berlin Wall. They're fighting for the future of Europe, communist or democratic, and most importantly, we would argue, they're fighting for access to the terrifying scientific minds and innovations of the former Third Reich.
And Uncle Sam got the right Nazis. That's why we have NASA, That's how we made it.
To the moon front of von Braun.
Yeah, nukes, Yeah, and everything was evolving. In nineteen fifty one, the CIA forms this thing called the Technical Services Staff, which sounds very British to me and a lot of the terminology of their things. But these are these are the crew speaking of scientists that were pilfered, right, these are the crew. Yeah, these are the folks who are creating the technical things that you imagine when you think
about spycraft. Right, the hidden compartment that is like for film or a secret message that looks just like a quarter, but it's not. It's actually a little hollowed out thing or a pen that's actually an injector or whatever.
Just think about single used gun, yeah, single used firearm. Yeah.
The technical services staff or just technical services if you're nasty, they are the guys who are creating this, this thing that is like magic.
Right.
These are little magic tricks that they're already creating, but they're just doing it based on something and operative may need or could be they think may be helpful out in the field.
If you're interested. I think we've talked about this before. There's a fabulous spycraft museum in New York City that has a lot of these kinds of clandestine devices on display.
And you can see them now. Please do check it out. It's worth the trip. The reason technical services, if your Nasty becomes so important in this particular turn of history is because the war that everybody has been predicting is a different kind of war. It's a new animal. It's clear to everybody in the know. It's a war fought not primarily on physical theater, right, No more Napoleonic people marching at each other. Instead, it's in the hearts and
minds of human civilization. To people on both sides of the conflict, they actually share some goals, and one of their big goals is to avoid an outright hot war or what we would call a kinetic conflict today, because remember they.
All radually assured destruction.
Right, They're thinking of the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They're thinking about how easily this could be repeated. They're in what Western pulp novelists would call a Mexican standoff. If one person, if one side pushes the line too far, the nukes are gonna fly and everybody is fubar. That's why.
That's why stories like Hunt for Red October and the Cuban Missile Crisis and so on, that's why they hold such psychic weight in the zeitgeist at this time because everybody knows, just like the doomsday clock, everybody knows the world is teetering close to the end of civilization.
So you can't oh your moves anymore. Your moves have to happen quiet.
Right, Yeah, yeah, real g's move in silence like Lasagna. As Wayne would say, uh. As a result, tactics and weaponry to your point, they evolve, you know, Infiltration replaces assault, cameras, radio monitoring, nascent, satellite observation, those replace artillery shells. And now more than ever, thankes Fox News. Geopolitical conflict. It's not a matter of bloody, bloody fights with armies. It's a matter of chess, and that means America needs new
pieces for the board. This is where we go back to John mulholland.
We need you, We need you to serve your country. John mulholland, at this point he's known, but not like you know, ubiquitously known as a stage magician. And in him, the CIA found a bit of an ace in the hole. Is that is that a gambling turn up their sleeve? Anyway, this he would have the ability to aid them in these more asymmetric goals by employing some of the tools and tricks of the trade as a stage magician.
Yeah, let's go to an excellent forward by the former Deputy Director of the CIA, John McLachlan. In his in his writing, he is he is talking about mulholland. McLachlan himself, by the way, is a lifelong intelligence officer and a lifelong amateur magicians. Just so you know, he's a little bit biased and he's the perfect guy to write the forward for the official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception
by Melton and Wallace. And here he says, he kind of sums up you know what you're referring to there, Nolan, He says. John mulholland was never a household word like the world famous eskepologist Houdini or more recently the illusionist David Copperfield. But still to McLachlan, Mulholland is the absolute epitome of what a magician is supposed to be.
Yeah, he's got that secrecy thing on Locke. He also seems to be extremely good at what he does, and he is well, I think the word that's used in that quote is inventive, right, Like, yes, he is thinking outside the box that you put the person in and saw them in half.
The magic box. He's thinking outside the magic box. Yeah, he's highly skilled. He can move with the ruffians and the groundlings, but he can well, you know, like Bridgriard Kipling would say he could walk with kings but not lose his common touch. He could go places and he was used to it. He also was.
Well known in.
Posh New York social circles. He's a real Goldilocks zone for the CIA. He has the social, familial, nepotistic connections that play a great role in the ad hoc trade craft of old. Just like we were talking about this earlier. Just like how LDS Latter Day Saint or Mormon missionaries of the right sort their god to your candidates for CIA recruitment. I'm telling you so cool. And Mulholland's kind of like on this level of a top pick. He
checks all the boxes. And at first the idea of trying to turn a stage magician to do basically the greatest trick of his life, it sounds bonkers. You know, some of the more hard nosed out there in the field guys are probably thinking, well, what can this entertain or teach us? We're the world's most dangerous men. You know, we don't pull rabbits out of hats. We take people's heads.
Because they're looking to Mulholland for advice basically, for know how, for like you said, a teaching opportunity. They're not looking for him to be the person who's out there practicing tradecraft. They're basically thinking, what can this guy teach us about tradecraft?
Yeah, that's right, I mean they just they have a lot in common. There's so many there's so much crossover Venn diagram, you know, between the skills of a stage magician and spycraft, and you know the kind of skills that go into that. Both depend heavily on evasion of prying eyes, you know, of avoiding scrutiny literally sleight of hand, right, Yeah, that's.
The rub of it when we see the CIA at this point, we're talking about doctor Gottlieb in particular, he realized that stage magic, which we would call the art, and his own trade which we'll call the craft, not the movie trade craft. They had so much in common, as you were saying. The Also, just like in Penn and Teller's famous TV show Bulls, both a magician and an intelligence analyst have to be very sensitive to counterintelligence. You got to know the tricks to pull them, you
got to know the tricks to detect them. And this is where we run into It's a common phrase. I don't know who originated it, but in the West, counterintelligence is often described as a wilderness of mirrors because there are so many levels of possible information, disinfo, fog of war, you know, making the right lie or perfecting the correct illusion magic is very similar. You know, you have to understand the principles misdirection, red herrings, information is symmetry, and
this strategy. Going back to our earlier thing, here's what I mean about specializations. This strategy was well established by Russians and the British in their earlier squabbles over control of Eurasia. Since we mentioned Bridgard Kipling before, yes he's kind of an asshole. He's definitely racist, dude, But he mentions a lot of this in his novel Kim, which is entirely about a boy child spy. I don't know if it holds up. It's been a while since I
read it. All this stuff is based in fact, you know, and several legacies of tradecraft and misdirection, magic level misdirection continue today. For instance, this is a great one. I'm sure we all know this one. But growing up, did you, guys ever hear that carrots are good for your eyes?
I sure did not.
True, they're good.
For you, but I mean the idea that they're like somehow magically good for your eyes over other things is a little bit of a misdirection.
In itself, isn't it. No, they help you see in the dark.
I mean, you can't see it all if you don't eat and you starve to death. So I guess technically carrots do help you. See. This is also to that excellent point, This is also propaganda. This is a grift from the British that was entirely meant to downplay in disguise the existence of radar technology. How do these planes keep figuring out where we are? How are they able to bomb stuff no one can see in the dark like that?
Sir?
Have you heard about the carrots? That's terrible?
What about the sticks? That's the question? Nice? So why don't we in this case, as you like to say, been, exercise a bit of empathy. You don't just like say it's a good thing to do. And let's assume the perspective of the Central Intelligence Agency at this time. What
they're thinking here makes a lot of sense. They're facing an enemy that plays dirty, that doesn't operate by some sort of rigid moral code, or at least maybe they have a code, but it's not necessarily one that is predictable or one that plays by.
The rules, right exactly. So let's jump to a report that President Eisenhower received in nineteen fifty four that was talking about more potential surprise attacks that are on the way. And in this it's not authored by but it's headed by a retired general named James H. Doolittle. And this is the this is the quote. This is a takeaway
here quote. If the US is to survive this is in nineteen fifty four, long standing American concepts of fair play must be reconcs We must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by cleverer and more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people become acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.
Yeah. Yeah, repugnant is one of the words that was used, not infrequently, if anybody remembers this time, because one of the concerns was, weirdly enough, it was similar to how European forces felt fighting Americans in the Revolutionary War. These guys aren't playing by our rule book. You know what I mean, You're not doing it fair. And if you've ever been in a real fight, you know that fairness goes out the window in about two seconds.
Right.
That's why ninety percent of real fights out on the street end up on the ground, so quickly they're going for your hair, They're going for your eyes, your throat, and your balls, you know what I mean. They're gonna a lot. They're gonna break those bones if they can.
And that's what the US is dealing with a version of that, and they're saying, look, also, our counterparts on the other side of the curtain, they don't have a problem with sending people on one way operations, you know, just like the Japanese Army would send divine wind or kamikaze pilots, you know, on these suicide missions and funny story, well, the opposite of a funny story. A lot of people don't know this. I think the Japanese Empire also did
that with naval vessels. They took teenage boys age like fourteen to seventeen, and they put them on these plywood boats with a single massive depth charge and they gave them just enough fuel to hit an enemy vessel. So this is stuff that is an ass them unclean to
American forces. They've got to figure out, like you were saying in the Eisenhower pull there, Matt, They've got to figure out how they how they respond in the face of something that seems so cold, right and unceasing, and is more than willing to lose a few fingers right to advance its hand.
Yes, and let's also remember that the US is still relatively new to this type of operation. They have a lot of catching up to do. You know, they really do have to kind of assess the enemy and begin to shift their focus into this new kind of world of clandestine asymmetric warfare. So let's fast forward now to the presence. I believe Ben you've requested a special secretive sound cue from Triforce.
Oh yes, if we're all cool with it, TryForce give us some music as we switch the present tense. Let's go in situ in media arrests. It's nineteen fifty three. What does that mean?
Full on cold wars? What that means?
Yeah, maybe only four years after the Soviet Union did a little nuclear bomb testing in surprise the pants off, Uncle Sam full bit? Yeah, Uncle Sam?
Wait?
Wait what what? And now now the all of the things we've been talking about are culminating, right, we got to get better information as fast as we can.
And this is where the CIA approaches Johnny boy, this is this is so funny. It's a twisted rom com. Through a series of plausibly innocuous conversations, they pitched the idea of writing a manual for field officers work that weaponizes magic, essentially, as we're saying earlier, teach our folks to perform your tricks.
Yeah, it's incredible stuff. Just the idea of how do we make our guys better at giving a secret message to somebody?
Right?
The old what is that move called the bumping the like bumping past or the thing where no, no, the thing where you like you just brush past each other off.
Yeah, that kind of thing, right pocketing, Yeah, well yeah.
Yeah, pickpocketing or two agents that you know, nobody knows their agents, but they were able to pass each other and get a message, or to hide something, you know, or to kill somebody.
In secret, right right, And the CIA wants Mulholland to break that magician's oath that he's loved since he was a child, and in doing so, educate dem boys, which is not how they refer to themselves. On the art of secretly administering pills and poison. In addition to transmitting messages, they wanted him, specifically to develop the skill to surreptitiously place a pill or other substance in drink or food
to be consumed by a target. We're giving you that verbatim quote because it's important to know that John was cognizant of what was happening. He knew that if he revealed these techniques to people that to your earlier point, NOL didn't need a ton of technology. They were going to try to kill folks with them, like they were going to try to take his sleight of hand, and you know, slim down some life expectancies.
No, for sure. I mean it's a very definition of weaponizing a craft. Mulholland accepts a meager salary stipend, really more of three thousand dollars to write this manual that we are talking about. The CIA proves this expense as part of MK Ultry Subprojects number four on May fourth of nineteen fifty three. Ben, what do you say we ridiculous history inflation? Calculate this bad boy.
Ah, Yes, let's do it. So three thousand US dollars in nineteen fifty three is equivalent to drum roll, Matt, will you do the honors?
Thirty five thousand, two hundred and forty five point nine to six US dollars sterling.
No, it'spell never mind.
I mean, look, that's a hefty payday, but it's not a ton of money. It's not what you would think of as it. I think also, we get as weekly. There's no publishing.
This is just here.
Here's why they're drawing on Mulholland's previously proven patriotism. They're giving him a stipend, right, but it's just kind of for his time. Uh, he's in his fifties at this point. He doesn't need the money. And we need to bust a myth that often happens with this kind of stuff. Just like when you read about corrupt politicians in Congress on either side of the aisle, and you see how little it takes to buy their vote, right, like a small amount of money. We could put that together, the
five of us tonight, we could do that. We could sway a member of Congress. Potentially. It turns out that the assets right and turning people and all that jazz also is way more affordable than you think. And that should scare you. That should scare the crap out of everybody. Really, Uh, we're gonna move on though, we're not gonna talk to us about that. Yeah, yeah, I'm smiling from fright. So anyway, Mulholden doesn't need money. He also doesn't need to play
this game. And interestingly enough, as we see time and time again, the CIA is coming to him hat in hand. They are politely, diplomatically, if cryptically, asking him to help.
They are not doing things that they've done in the past, or that the Russian counterparts would do, which is to use the stick method we referred to earlier, the stick method Karen and stick we've talked about in the past, the stick method that in this case would be blackmail, would be extortion, would be threatening a family member, things like that, which are totally possible and happen all the time in this era of history. Instead, they say, look, man,
you're a patriot, we're on the same team. Also, you like magic, help us out.
And he is fully on board for this. As previously mentioned, his patriotism is on full display. He's more or less in it not for the money, but to help his country, and he does so with one of his greatest tricks of all time.
Well, yeah, this guy is well known. He's not Houdini, he's not Copperfield, but he's known. So how do you cover the tracks and get this to spend the amount of time that it would take to create this work? Right, he's he's he is the I guess he's the editor of The Sphinx, which again comes out all the time. If he's just gone from there, you're not covering your tracks very well.
Yeah, he is.
You know, he's not coke, he's not pepsi, but he's kind of like cheer wine. You know, people are aware of him. He needs he needs that cover story you're talking about. So in nineteen fifty three, it comes to pass that he finally takes a sabbatical from the Sphinx. The official reason.
Spend time with his family.
I love it. I'm sorry, sorry, wait, no, no, no, no, let's stay there. How often do you guys think that.
Is sincere, what to spend time with their family?
No politicians say it, like what a politician?
Very rarely, maybe never, because.
They could have spent time with their family all of the years before they were caught, you know, taking illegal bribes or I hate to have to say illegal bribes, or you know, awarding with sex workers. But then it shows up in the news and they're like, I'm in a I remember I had a kid earlier. I'm going to hang out with little Tyson. I don't know why. Tyson's a funny name, but anyway, Yeah, the official reason he gives their health concerns, and the public buys it
because he's got an extreme work ethic. He's prodigious in his output. He's always working and traveling and maintains, you know, reams of correspondence. So not just the public, but his colleagues in the world of magic, they all buy this and they say, you know, sometimes, hey, the guy's taking a vacation. Good for him, and that's how he maintains his secrecy. And we're going to take a break for
a word from our sponsors. Then we're going to learn what John Mulholland RUMs and how, and we'll also see some of that rom com we were talking about.
And we've returned and let's jump right into MK Ultra. We've already set up some of the other operations involved in this program, and Mulholland's manual is no different. This is not meant to be known about by the public. And doctor Godlieb and his cronies deploy their own kind of brand of tradecraft in an effort to conceal all of the correspondence that goes into this project writing this manual.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like a courtship dance, you know, where they don't want to give away too much, but they have to convey enough information somehow that this guy can agree. There is a formal secrecy agreement. Think of it like an NDA on steroids. Obviously, someone who loves the magician's oath is also going to be kind of interested and intrigued in that. And there's shell companies, aliases, there's shadow po boxes. Quick note for all of us playing along at home. This was way easier back in the day
to do physically. I think you can still do stuff like this digitally, but it's I don't know, what do you think is it easier to get Well, let's talk about what he's doing, so all right, Gottlieb contacts Mulholland under a fake name. He's should and C. Griffith representing Chemo Freil Associates via a PO box in DC.
That's an amazing a globokeem name for a fake company.
Kimro Field and later the peobox number changes. Kemro Field becomes the Granger Research Company. What do we say about innocuous names and news? Yeah? Yeah, and Grifford becomes Granger. Mull Holden clocks this. This is super He's guys, he's so down. He's so super down with this. That is where I have to pause and ask, do you think it's easier to do this kind of shenaniganism in the digital age or is it more difficult?
I guess that there are conveniences, but there are also much more robust interception methods and monitoring methods, So I think it might be a bit of a wash.
When you think Matt oh sliding a message into you know, a mailbox somewhere that get sent off that doesn't have anything on it, but what's written on it, I feel like it's pretty easy. Uh yeah, I don't know. I don't know, because you trace everything, even the most like, oh, this is untraceable. Electronic activity is if you work backwards, traceable.
Agreed, Yeah, well said and Mullholland Also, he's doing his part of the dance. It's very important to be aware of this. He never refers to the CIA nor any operations by name. As a matter of fact, as the authors we mentioned, the investigators we mentioned earlier, as they argue, it's pretty likely that he did not have visibility on any specific operation, which is sort of par for the course. You can't have a morning meeting where you catch everybody
affiliated with the CIA up on everything. It's just too many people, too many things. So instead he doesn't write about field operatives. He writes about performance and tricksness, and he and his it's like an improv game where they're inventing a code. As they go. They start talking about he is a trick that every prof should know, and they're in fact, step by step instructions on covert actions like you were talking about Matt with the hollowed out coin, that kind of thing.
Oh, yeah, exactly. And then you jump forward just a little while later to the late days of nineteen fifty four. Well, we'll just say approximately a year in change after including that quarter, and he submits the first manual and guys, I've got an edit on the title, but this is the title that was submitted. Quote some operational applications of the Art of deception.
Okay, not super sexy, but I get what it's about.
What's the edit.
Well, I think you start with the you say, the Art of Deception colon operational applications. That's not some much better. These are the operational Applications of the Art of Deception.
You should I have Matt to name their documents.
And weirdly, well, actually it's not even weird. Old Gotti loves it, as his friends called Sidney and God leaves a weird dude. Okay, it's just this. He's a super weird dude, and he's very difficult to impress. He is so on board with magic. There's something about stage magic that just brightens the date of these spooky guys. And so soon after this first manual, which I agree, Noel, that you have a better title, Matt, we wish you
were in the room with him. Doctor g asked moholland to create a new book, a sequel to the Banger, some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception, and this one is instructions entirely on how to communicate information through unconventional meaning non electrical means. So mholland comes back with a different manual called Recognition Signals. It's much kind of like how Part two of this series is it's probably a little shorter than part one.
Yes, so, I mean the question then becomes like, what is the difference between a stage magician and a covert operator. Early on Mulholland made note that the alpha and omega difference between stage performance and field work is the presence or the nature of an audience. I guess an audience seeing a magician consents to be tricked. However, an operative in the field is as much higher stakes as we talked about having your cover blown. It is all a
non consensual act of deception. A bad magician might lose their reputation or be ostracized by the magic community or God forbid, boot off the stage, or given the old hook. An operative might be arrested, detained, interrogated, or of course killed after horrific interrogation methods and torture, you know, for just a tiny little slip up. And Mulholland describes all this these stakes beautifully.
Yeah, he says, the more of the performer that can be seen, the less his chance of doing anything without detection. As an example of performer on the stage would be seen where he to put his hand into his pocket, but that action can be made without being seen while standing close to a person, so the hand is outside of his range of vision. This is pretty specific, but he's it gives you a sense of the clarity with which he writes. Right, He's not trying to wax philosophical.
He's giving you what may as well be the equivalent of an ikea assembly manual. At different parts in his industry, this is called sideline or stage management. But his audience doubtlessly already recognizes this as the importance of proximity.
Oh, for sure, there's all kinds of fun little tidbits in there about lighting a cigarette and the use of light in your hand, right live sleight of hand, just to do something else on the scene with your other hand, because of how much attention that action draws, Right sure, all kinds of just incredible little things like that that people do. Anyway, it's just you're, you're. He's telling you how to use that thing that everybody does is completely inocuous, and then hide something within that.
Action, and how to especially in uh the second book, recognition signals. He's also talking a little, a little closer, I would say, even to the pre existing language of trade craft. You know what I mean, Like, tie in the shoe is a good old way we could talk about.
Well, yeah, and how to hide somebody if you're trying to get them in or out of a place. Inside a loaded like a crate that you are taking in or out of a place. Make it look like a series of bottles, right the giant, you know, have four palettes of something, but then there's actually a compartment in there for a human being.
Magic box exactly. So this is brilliant stuff. And he breaks them, just like the Cia or the oss breaking laws for a greater good. He breaks the magician's oath in service of a greater good. And he also is there. You can tell sometimes, I think his frustration or his concern that comes across because there are some things that can only really be taught in person. And one of the things that he has he takes pains to emphasize
is the importance of acting natural. You know, you have to you have to look like you belong here, even if you don't speak the language. What is acting natural? It's a combination of indifference, maybe a little bit of stupidity, and then confidence, you know what I mean.
Yeah, like and stuff that's kind of hard to teach, you know. Yeah, it certainly requires a certain kind of aptitude. You know, it makes you a good candidate for this kind of stuff.
Swim through the water like you don't know, people can drown there.
You go and look a little disheveled while you're doing it, because only a spy would be completely buttoned up in all this stuff, and you're outfit would look great and your hair would be perfect, and you know, it's really interesting.
So yeah, yeah, you want to be invisible, right, You want to be non interesting. You don't want to be the Dosakis guy, because the Dosakis guy dies, so does every James Pond pretty much. But this, like that, that's the art of this stuff, and his insights are incredibly helpful.
If we fast forward to nineteen fifty six, we know Gottlieb is digging the holy heck out of his favorite Patriot magician and he essentially promotes mul Holland from what we would call a contributing author to an active consultant. And there are two reasons he does this. Neither of them are based in friendship. The first reason we have to assume is that the instructions in these manuals yield result. Field operatives, whether or not they actually like magic, are
able to do this stuff. They're able to really read this book and really pull off operations right.
The step by step guide, you know, in the hands of qualified agents that already have that kind of aptitude, gives them this ability to execute an objective and most importantly, to make an escape, to get out there, returning to management and proceeding onto the next assignments.
Yeah. And secondly, weirdly enough, most importantly, well, Holland stays quiet. He never talks to anybody about his work, or we have no record of him doing so. In the age of social media where everybody is so incentivized to brag about anything, this is pretty wild. So how do we know about this today? We teased it in chapter one. We know about this due to happy accident and intrepid investigation.
This case, we owe a big, big thanks to Robert Wallace, who is the former director of the CIA's Office of Technical Services in two thousand and seven. Right, this guy is pouring through all these old documents, all these old papers, you know which ones need the famous black highlighters and so on, and he discovers these vague references to something called magician manuals, you know, like, what are these? What
is responding signals? What's all this clap trap? So he tenaciously hunts them down, and eventually, after way too much time, he uncovers copies that have somehow escaped the great culling of MK Ultra. Problem is, according to what I understand, these were really low quality copies, like physically difficult to read.
Yeah, you couldn't read them at all. But also there's a book opportunity sitting here right Like what if you just couldn't read them at all? Every copy of this was supposed to be destroyed in nineteen seventy three, and we've got them. That's write a book. Just get your intelligence historian friend Keith Keith Melton to help you out, and let's just put it out as a book. Baby.
Well, and you know, given the way time works, these manuals at this point weren't considered classified anymore. So Wallace and h. Keith Melton were able to dig through some of these remnants and bring you know, more information about this stuff to the world.
It's so brilliant because they officially don't exist, right, but you've got them.
Somehow exactly. Yeah, what is it? We always used to say we don't lie. The truth changes. We've mentioned that before.
There you go.
It's a scary thing that people say with a street.
Face, and we wonder why we don't trust the CIA.
Yeah, this is a fascinating look at what are the most successful of conspiracies. These are reproducible strategies. They don't need much in the way of equipment, environment or capital investment. Right, you can hide these secrets in your head and you can apply them to the world around you. History proves that these things can happen on a small, large scale. At the end of the day, the CIA and the magicians agree all the world is a stage. Mulholland dies
in nineteen seventy. He never tells people about his job or about that time he went away for his health. It makes you wonder, right, how much hidden knowledge is already out there.
It's interesting. On the one hand, he broke that magician's oath, but then he kind of took it back up again.
I guess, oh, yeah, there's all I guarantee you there's all kinds of stuff like this out there, a lot. But you know, well, I mean and isn't it a little weird that the former director of that office of Technical Services we talked about the magicians, right, the technical magicians, he's the guy that discovers it. Kind of cool, the weird lineage that's snaked its way through the story of this stuff.
I would call it interesting in the Interesting America.
Yeah, hmm. It does make me think just more and more about that that underlying mind state of somebody who finds themselves immersed in these worlds, these worlds of tradecraft and all that stuff. As we said, the perceived misdirection that's always coming your way, right, everything is a misdirection. So therefore I must mix misdirect everybody outwardly because I you know, nobody can know the true me kind of thing or what I'm actually doing, because they're all doing it to me too.
Yeah. Hey, if you want to totally non fictional example of this, please check out The Passage, which is a podcast series ep by you Matt with our pal Nick Tikowski as a head writer. There's an episode on Hoover that may interest you and give you a window into that kind of paranoid reasoning. Again totally factual. The other episodes are fiction. That one is one hundred percent true. It's basically a transcript.
While we were recording this episode, Dan Bush, the creator of that show, was texting me, that's so funny.
Yes, and check out Dan's other work. Also check out all the other episodes we have mentioned in this two part series. Folks, write to us, let us know what else is out there. What other hidden stories and strange bedfellows have the CIA created or made in the course of their existence. We'd love to hear from you. We try to be easy to find online. You can email us, you can call us on the phone. You can hop
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Oh, yes, we have a phone number. It's one eight three three st D WYTK. It's a voicemail system. And you know what we didn't mention in here is the concept of concealment and dead drops, which was it wasn't invented by our magician friend here who created the memos that became the topic of this series, but he did revolutionize it, I think, because I just want to talk about this. What is the weirdest thing that you could hide in plane sight and put like a letter inside
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