PROJECT MIND CONTROL-John Lisle

implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods of mind control that could turn someone into a real life Manchurian candidate. In conjunction with MK Ultra, Gottlieb also plotted the assassination of foreign leaders and created spy gear for undercover agents. The details of his career, however, have long been shrouded in mystery. Upon retiring from the CIA in nineteen seventy three, he tossed his files into an incinerator. As a result, much of what happened under mk Ultra

was thought to be lost. Until now. Historian John Lyle has uncovered dozens of depositions containing new information about MK Ultra, straight from the mouths of its perpetrators. For the first time, Gottlieb and his underlings divulge what they did, why they did it, how they got away with it, and much more. Additionally, Lyle highlights the dramatic story of mk Ultra's victims, from their terrible treatment to their dogged pursuit of justice. The

consequences of mk Ultra still reverberate throughout American society. Project Mind Control is the definitive account of this most disturbing of chapters in CIA history. The book that we're featuring this evening is Project mind Control Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and the Tragedy of mk Ultra, with my special guest, historian and law author John Lyle. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.

more interesting stories. I would say, this Mkultra program, this attempt to create some kind of mind control, either drug or psychological technique, and so that was naturally kind of interesting to me. My first book was on the precursor to the CIA, which is the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, that was during World War Two. And I wrote that first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, about a group of scientists who created the secret weapons documents disguises

for agents who are going abroad undercover. And so that kind of naturally led me into this topic about the CIA because several of the people who were involved in that program during World War Two they also have connections

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

something like that. And so when mk ultra, this mind control program for the CIA, when he got started in nineteen fifty three, the head of it was a man named Sidney Gottlieb, and Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist and he didn't really know how to start with mind control. He didn't know what kind of experiments to run, who to fund in order to determine whether truth drugs are possible.

And so he went into the files of the OSS and as he was rummaging around those files, he happened to find some files that listed this name on it, George White, and he was doing these truth drug experiments and that was exactly the kind of thing that Sidney Gottlieb was interested in. And so Sidney Gottlieb hired him that same guy, And so there was a natural kind of link between my first book and this next subject. And so that's what led me to it.

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

And so eventually this lawsuit was settled out of court, but these depositions had still been taken, and they were in the papers of Joseph Row, this lawyer, and when he died, those were donated to the Library of Congress,

and that's where I found them. So I have these verbatim transcripts of these attorneys asking not only the perpetrators in k Ultra questions, but the victims of mk ultra questions, and so I have this great dialogue that I can use in the book to get both perspectives of the people who were doing it and the people who had

this stuff done to them. And the reason why I wanted to start the book with this prologue taking the perspective of this court reporter who was there transcribing the deposition as it was happening, is because kind of subconsciously I wanted the reader to think throughout the book that I want them to be the fly on the wall. I want them to be like the court reporter who

is in the room listening to these depositions happening. And so that was what I was trying to get across with that prologue, is to let the reader know that we have this great dialogue, this verbatim transcript of what these people are saying, and you're going to be the fly on the wall listening to how they talk about what they did, the experiments that they performed or hired people to do, and how they rationalize that to themselves, how they feel about it twenty years later, whether they

have regrets. Many of them did, especially Sidney Gottlieb, and also from the victim's perspective, what did they go through? So that those are the depositions that I found for this book that make it a little bit more unique.

There are a couple of books about mk Ultra, but this one has that great verbatim transcript that allows us to get inside the heads of the characters who are actually in the story, which I'm really glad you picked up on, because that's part of what makes the book, I think, exciting to read.

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

He didn't know quite which at that moment, but some organization that would allow him to pay back this debt that he felt that he owed. And it just so happened that at the moment the CIA was looking for brilliant scientists, chemists like himself that might help win the Cold War. To give a little bit more context, this is right after World War two and World War two

had been it's sometimes called like the physicists War. If World War one might have been the chemist's war with the chemical weapons, world War two might have been the physicist's war with nuclear weapons. And so science was now seen as integral to national security. The fact that some of the most important weapons of the war were built by scientists, the atomic bombs, or you had proximity fusions to detect things, or you had radar to detect ships

and planes. So the fact that science was now integral to national security indicated the CIA that they needed to hire scientists to determine what our adversaries were doing, what were the Soviets doing that we can defend against and maybe replicate ourselves. And so Sidney Gottlieb was hired by

the CIA to be this kind of chemist. One of the first things that he did there was to work with what was what's called the Clandestine Service, the Office at the time it was called the Office of Policy Coordination. This is the branch of the CIA that deals with covert operations. And his job at least in the beginning, was to develop methods of secret writing. So how could

you write something that someone couldn't detect. Maybe it would disappear, maybe you would have to add some reagent to it to make it appear on a piece of paper or something like that. And he quickly kind of moved up the ladder within the CIA and eventually was given head

of this Mkaltra program. The reason being that the CIA wanted to determine whether it's possible to manipulate people because they're especially afraid that this is what's happening in the Soviet Union and they want to be able to defend against it. But also if it is possible, maybe we can use it to our advantage. So that's how Sidney Gottlieb ends up at the CIA and how he comes to head this mk Ultra program.

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

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

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

saying that, yes, we did that, we're guilty. You need to shoot us where you know, you need to lock us up in prison. Why would they confess to false crimes that they didn't do. One explanation, of course, is that within the CIA, this explanation develops that maybe they've been manipulated in some way. Maybe they've been dosed with some kind of drugs to make them behave in this confusing way. Maybe they've been hypnotized in a certain way.

There are several incidents like that. Another one, the most famous one that leads to mk Ultra is the downing of several American pilots in the Korean War who get shot down over Korea and are captured as prisoners of war. And while they are held captive, they start confessing to crimes like dropping biological agents over Korea in order to spread diseases among the Korean people like anthrax or typhus,

or cholera or bubonic plague. So they start confessing to these false crimes that yeah, we drop this stuff, you know, over these Korean people to dose them with these with these germs so that it would spread and kill all these people. This didn't happen, and many people within the CIA are wondering, why would they confess to these crimes?

Is it because perhaps, like the like the prisoners in the Moscow show trials, they have been manipulated with some kind of communist mind control techniques, perhaps you know, through drugs or hypnosis or something else. It turns out that

truth is not quite as sensational as that. The truth is that the communist powers have been using the methods of coercion that they had been using for a long time, like sleep deprivation and torture and food deprivation, you know, just these typical methods of coercion to get these people to talk. But there was still a lingering suspicion within the CIA that there might be something else, which is why they decided to develop their own mind control program.

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

truth drugs. And during World War Two, you know, I mentioned that there was a quest to develop by the OSS these truth drugs, whether it be THHC or something else. And in the CIA, that original Project Bluebird was to develop a truth drug. The saying was that they wanted to get prisoners to sing like a bird, which is

why it was called Bluebird. That eventually morphed into another project called Artichoke, and Artichoke was interested in truth drugs as well, but also hypnotism and a few other things related to drugs. But eventually the main CIA mind control project that was set up in nineteen fifty three, expanding on those previous projects, was MK Ultra.

it for five years. Then in nineteen forty eight he had this nagging suspicion that maybe it had something else to offer, so he resynthesized LSD and when he did so, a tiny bit of LSD, just a small, small, little dose of it, contacted his skin and he started experiencing this strange phenomena. The room started spinning, he starts hallucinating, he can't see straight. So he thinks this is, you know,

a very powerful drug. And what was especially interesting to him is that such a minute dose could have such profound psychological effects. LSD is extremely powerful, which is one of the main reasons why when the CIA learns about this drug, they're interested because such a minute dose, it can have such a powerful effect. It's so potent, so you could easily slip this to someone without them knowing it,

and it could have really powerful hallucinogenic psychological effects. So that's one of the main reasons why the CIA is interested. The other main reason why is just because the effects that LSD actually produces, these hallucinogenic effects, it seems potentially to lower inhibitions, so maybe it can work as a

truth drug. But also if you can make someone seem like they go crazy if they take LSD and don't know it, then they're going to be acting very oddly, then that might be useful in some kind of covert operation.

For instance, say, if there is some foreign leader that we want to lose an upcoming election, what if we dose their water with LSD beforehand and they drink it before they give a important political speech, and then the hallucinogenic effects start happening while they're giving this speech and they seem to go crazy. Surely that's going to lead people to lose faith in them and they might lose

the election. So there are some covert operation applications to LSD besides just potentially being some kind of truth drug. So that was one of the main reasons why the CIA is interested in it.

of using them in biological weapons. And within Camp Didrich there was a division called the Special Operations Division composed of several scientists, and it was these scientists who would meet with CIA scientists at Camp Didrich to share the results of their experiments and let each other know what was going on to keep each other informed on the kinds of things that they were doing to help each other in their work. So these scientists from the CIA,

Sidney Gottlieb among them. Another was Robert Lashbrook. They're mostly connected with mk ultra, and the scientist from Fort Diedrich among them is Frank Olsen. They would meet at Deep Creek to exchange their results. And during one of these meetings, Sidney Gottlieb and his underling Robert Lashbrook, another chemist who's working on mk ultra, they decide to secretly dose the scientists at Deep Creek with LSD to see how they

react to it in their minds. In the mind of Sidney Gottlieb, I think that he was thinking of this almost as kind of a funny prank that he was going to do. I don't think he actually thought that it was going to have profound ramifications. He had done this before with people within the CIA, secretly dose them with LSD to see how they reacted. There were stories around the CIA saying that people would dose the coffee

pot with LSD around the office. There was even a memo coming from the Office of Security within the CIA warning everyone not to dose the holiday punch bowl with

LSD because then there's going to be some repercussion. So obviously this was the kind of rank that was carried out within the CIA among the chemists who were working on MK ultra, and they decided to bring that kind of mentality to this Deep Creek retreat, and so they poured some LSD into the liquor and started passing around shots of this cointro liquor in One of the people who took a shot was Frank Olsen, and for the most part, everyone who had this started hallucinating again. The

walls started to spin. They eventually went to bed, though except for Frank Olsen, this really seemed to have a profound effect on his psychology. After the retreat, he returns home and his wife immediately notices that he's acting very strangely. He doesn't seem to be himself. Something seems to happen. He keeps rambling on about how he thinks he messed up the experiment and he wished that he would be fired because it would be better for everyone, and he's

upset about things that have happened in this past. It's very strange what's going on. He's never acted like this before, and so Alice Olsen, his wife, becomes very concerned. Frank Olsen goes to work the next few days and his colleagues notice that he's acting very strangely as well. He says the same things to them, I wish you would fire me. I've been such a bad employee. I've ruined

the experiments and all kinds of stuff. He seems to have some kind of psychotic break after this experiment, and so Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook and a few other people who were involved in this they recommend that Frank Olsen go to New York to see a doctor there to get some kind of psychiatric evaluation. So they send him to New York to see a man named Harold Abramson,

who had ties with the CIA. Already he had been he had been the attending physician at several of the experiments where Sydney Gottlieb had dosed himself with LSD, So Harold Abramson certainly knew that this kind of thing had

already been happening within the CIA. So Frank Olsen goes to Abramson, who analyzes him and agrees that he's had some kind of reactive psychosis to this experiment where he's taken this LSD unwittingly, and he recommends eventually that Frank Olsen go to a psychiatric hospital to stay there for a while to get some help. It just it turns out that the psychiatric hospital that he wanted to send Frank Olsen to didn't have a spare bed for the next day, so Frank Olsen had to wait in New

York for an extra day. So he and Robert in Lashbrook. They get a hotel room at the Stateler Hotel, Room ten eighteen A, and overnight. Robert Lashbrook wakes up at two thirty am in the morning when he hears a crash through the bedroom window and he runs over to the window and he sees Frank Olsen splayed out on the seventh on the sidewalk. So Frank Olson appears from Lashbrook's perspective to a jumped out of this window and dies.

There are several people on the ground who see Frank Olson come out of this window and fall onto the ground. One of them is the hotel night watchman who runs over to Frank Olsen and Frank Olsen is still alive. At that moment, and he seems to try to say something, but his mouth is filled with blood and he's kind

of gurgling, and he eventually dies right there. So that's the death of Frank Olson that seems to have been precipitated by this unwitting dose of LSD at Deep Creek, which seems to have caused some kind of reactive psychosis in him that led him eventually to commit suicide in this way. So that's the story of Frank Olsen, and it's the you know, a really popular story within this MK ultra circle because it led to the death of this individual.

lies about where he was even employed. He didn't want anyone to know that he was connected to the CIA. He especially didn't want anyone to know that he had done he had been involved in these LSD experiments, so he was keeping that as much of a secret as possible.

In fact, the CIA itself wanted to keep all of this a secret, especially its interest in LSD, because it was afraid that if anyone learned that it was performing experiments with LSD, then potentially other countries like the Soviets or the Chinese or someone might become interested in LSD

themselves and start experimenting with it. The CIA thought LSD almost had like magical powers, that it would be able to open their eyes to manipulating people into doing certain things, and they didn't want anyone else to have that ability. So it was a closely guarded secret about their interest

in it. So the CIA itself, after this incident, they actually what's called backstopped Robert Lashbrook, and that means they they made it out to seem as if he was an employee of the Army and not the CIA, to try to cover its tracks, just in case anyone started looking into him that they would see that he is not affiliated with the CIA. Instead he's affiliated with the army, which of course wasn't the case. He was affiliated with the CIA, but they didn't want anyone to know that.

any way. But that's as much as you could say a discipline he ever got for performing experiment that led to the death of this man. This was one of the reasons why the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the CIA in the nineteen eighties, the people who had been victims of mk ULTRA, This was one of their arguments of why they needed restitution was the fact that after this experiment had led to the death of Frank Olsen,

the CIA didn't do anything about Sidney Gottley. They left him in charge of this project, which eventually he would go on to fund the experiments that led to their own victimization. So that's one of the arguments they used to try to show that the CIA acted negligently in this case. The fact that Sidney Gottley was allowed to retain control of mk ULTR even after a death of this individual, Frank Olsen.

unwitting subjects. He first starts doing it in New York. He rents a hotel room where he starts dosing some of his criminal contacts with LSD and other drugs. But eventually Sidney Gottlieb and others were afraid that the police would catch on to what George White was doing, so they sent him to somewhere where they thought he would be less likely to be caught, which was San Francisco at the time. So George White goes to San Francisco and he instead of dosing people himself, he starts hiring

prostitutes to dose their unwitting clients with LSD. Meanwhile, George White is sitting behind a one way mirror watching what happens to determine how these people react to this drug. And for the most part he's sitting on a portable toilet that he bought. We have the receipts of all this stuff that he has. He's sitting on a portable toilet, he's drinking martiniz that he's bought with CIA funds, watching

these prostitutes dose their clients with drugs. For the most part, the way they did it was injecting LSD through the through the cork in a wine bottle and then pouring wine and letting people drink it. So this was known as Operation Midnight Climax. George White termed it that. It kind of gives you an indication maybe of his character, the fact that he would call it something like that. Out of everyone involved in the MK Ultra project, I

think he was the most callous. I think he was the most uncaring about what happened to the victims that he was doing this stuff too. Sidney Gottlieb, it seems like, especially in these later depositions, he regrets a lot of what he did. But for George White, I think he was doing it for his own enjoyment. I don't think he had really a higher calling, At least he didn't feel a higher calling. I think that he was doing it because he enjoyed it. He was an alcoholic. He

was drinking these martinis. He was watching this happen. He was he was especially interested in sex in general. Oftentimes, I quote several people who were interviewed, he would dose even his friends with LSD at parties and try to

get them to engage in orgies. So he, out of everyone, I think, was probably the most depraved individual who was involved in this, mostly because, at least even for the other subprojects, a lot of them are unethical and especially illegal, but I think that the people who are performing them at least had some kind of justification for what they're doing. They might think that they were trying to cure mental illness in some way, or that they were doing this

to protect national security. But I think George White was the most sadistic in that he was just doing it for his own pleasure.

These could be something like Operation Midnight Climax with George White, but mostly what these subprojects were was the CIA Sydney Gottlieb funding independent researchers who were at prisons or hospitals or university somewhere to conduct some kind of research. So

it's not the CIA itself that's conducting the research. Instead, it's the CIA funding people to do this research, many of them who were already doing this these kinds of experiments, but then they're funded by the CIA to continue what they're already doing. This was the case with you and Cameron. He's a Canadian psychiatrist and he was already doing experiments before the CIA even knew who he was on what he termed psychic driving. This was his attempt to cure

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

the manifestation of their mental illness. He thought that the way to cure this would be to reduce someone back to a blank slate so that they would forget all of their bad behaviors their mental illness, and then through a better environment, you could build them back up in your own image so that they wouldn't have their mental illness. This was his kind of grand theory of how he would cure all mental illness. He thought that he was

destined for the Nobel Prize. He thought that he would cure schizophrenia and everything else, but he needed a way to bring someone back down to the blank slate from where they actually were. So this was his big goal.

This is where you play a negative message for them over and over and over again thousands of time. They listened to the same repeating message over and over and over again, tens of thousands of times, day after day, week after week. So they basically have either a headphone strapped to their head or a radio next to them or something that emits this these messages and they have to listen to it over and over and over again. So this was psychic driving, and he wrote an article

about this in this psychiatric journal. And John Gettinger, who is a psychologist in the CIA working with Sydney Gottlieb on mk Ultra, happened to see this article and he gave it to Sidney Gottlieb saying, hey, this looks like a promising avenue for something to do with mind control or how we might be able to manipulate people in certain ways. This is the kind of thing exactly what Ewan Cameron is doing. He's basically manipulating people to give

them a different psychology. That's exactly what the CIA is interested in. So after they read that article, Sydney Gottlieb decides to start funding you and Cameron to continue the experiments that he's already doing, psychic driving experiments like replaying this message, these messages thousands of times. But also Cameron would combine that with other methods in order to increase

the amount of stress. So, for example, sometimes Cameron will put his patients into sensory deprivation chambers where he would put tubes over their hands, goggles over their eyes, plugs in their ears so that they couldn't see anything, hear anything, feel anything, and this was to increase their stress. Occasionally they would be played these psychic driving messages as well, so that's one of the things Cameron did for his

most unruly patients. He would put them in what was called the sleep room, where he would induce comas into them through chemicals, and they would sleep there for months on end, sometimes waking up maybe once or twice per day to go to the bathroom and to eat, but otherwise they would be in these chemical comas. Other times he would put electric signals on their temples and give them electric shocks in order to again try to induce enough stress to reduce them back to the blank slate.

These are the kinds of experiments that Ew and Cameron was doing. He thought that he was curing mental illness, but of course many of his patients didn't know that this wasn't kind of tried and tested cure. He was just experimenting on them without their permission, without their consent,

without their knowledge. Many of the people who are who give depositions in these lawsuits that I quote throughout the book, they're the victims of you and Cameron, and they've experienced all of these things, and they're talking about him in

the depositions. One of the most heart wrenching of them is the story of Mary Morrow, and she has a very ironic story because she was a resident in training at the Allen Memorial institute where you and Cameron was a psychiatrist, so she was training under him to become a doctor. However, she had anorexia and she failed some neurological exams and so she went into a deep depression. She tried to kill herself. It's a very sad story.

And then ew and Cameron recruited her to come back to the Allen but not as a resident in training, that as a patient. So she had been on one side of it in the beginning. She had been administering some of these treatments, supposed treatments to these patients, and then she started receiving them herself when she became a patient.

Her story is very heart wrenching. The way she eventually escaped is that her sister, who hadn't heard from her for a while, barges into the institute and basically demands to see her and threatens to call the police if she doesn't. So she eventually walks into the room where she sees her sister Mary sitting there on a chair, a blank look in her eyes. She had just undergone this electric shock therapy as they called it, and she couldn't put on her clothes, she couldn't put on makeup.

She couldn't basically do anything herself, and her sister basically busted it her out of there. In the depositions that I have of Mary Morrow, she because she laments the fact that there are people who were in there for years. She happened to be there for several weeks, but people who are experiencing these treatments for years who never got to escape. She actually considered herself one of the lucky ones.

But these are the kinds of things that you and Cameron was doing at the Allen Memorial Institute funded by M.

ended up finding her body in a gravel pit. She had been abused, sexually abused, and she had been murdered, and so there started this man hunt for whoever had done this, and pretty quickly there was spotted a man who is running away from the gravel pit, who had blood stain on his blood stains on his clothes. He was arrested. He was taken to prison in San Antonio. He eventually had to be transferred to Austin because there was a lynch mob that was forming that was threatening

to kill him. And this was Jimmy Shaver. He was an airman at Lackland Air Force Base and he was immediately suspect of killing cher Joe Horton, of sexually abusing her. And one of the psychiatrists who was put in charge of interviewing Jimmy Shaver afterwards to determine whether he was guilty or what he would say, was Jolly West. Jolly

West was a famous psychiatrist. One of the reasons why he was already famous was because after the Korean War he was one of the psychiatrists who interviewed the Korean War prisoners who said, you know that they had dropped

biological agents on Korea during the war. He was famous for having interviewed them and for determining that the reason why they were admitting to this stuff wasn't because they had actually done it, it was because they were submitted to torture, psychological abuse, sleep deprivation, all kinds of things. And so Jolly West was already well known, and he starts interviewing Jimmy Shaver to determine what was happening, what had gone on, what had happened, what did he do

to the little girl? And as part of this interrogation, really West used some fairly unconventional techniques in order to get Jimmy Shaver to talk about what he was doing. And in fact, it turns out that some of these techniques were inspired by what Sidney gottlie was doing with MK Ultra. In fact, there's a correspondence between Sidney Gottlieb

and Jolly West beforehand. So we know that they were talking to each other in which Jolly West tells Sidney Gottlieb about the CIA the kinds of experiments that he wants to do with hypnotism in drugs, and so those kinds of things are what Jolly West eventually does to Jimmy Shaver when he's interrogating him. He gives him drugs, He hypnotizes him to try to get him to tell the truth about what's happening with what happened with Cha Joe Horton. And in this interrogation, which I quote at

length in the book, it's a really harrowing interrogation. Jimmy Shaver opens up about, yeah, I took her to the gravel pit, and you know, he claims not really to remember what happened at first. And then in the middle of the interrogation there's a break of about thirty minutes, a thirty minute break in the tape where we don't have the transcript of what happens. Then the tape come back comes back on and at the beginning of it, Jolly West says, you know, we've just had a break.

And during that those thirty minutes, it wasn't captured on tape, but you know, I got Jimmy Shaver to admit to some things that he wouldn't admit on the tape. And so there's a big question that remains, what did what did Jolly West do during those thirty minutes to get Jimmy Shaver to admit what he had done to this little girl. Of course, their speculation maybe he was imposing some of these m k Ultra methods of mind control

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

that Jimmy Shafer is found guilty of this murder. There are a lot of kind of high jinks that ensued during the court during the trial of Jimmy shaf to find him guilty of murder. Yeah, there are a lot of hijinks. His lawyer basically makes up a fake story about how the body was found and how she wasn't actually dead at the time, and he just completely making this up to try to get him found not guilty or something. But that doesn't work, and he's eventually found

guilty and he's eventually sentenced to death. But that's how Jolly West is kind of tied up in this story about the murder of this girl. He was doing these kind of hypnotism drug experiments on this person as he was interrogating him to German whether he was guilty.

There are a few subprojects that go on throughout the nineteen sixties, but for the most part in the early nineteen sixties nineteen sixties, MK Ultra ends and Sidney Gottlieb is assigned to be to work for the Clandestine Service again to work for the kind of covert operations branch of the CIA, and as part of that, he's a knowledgeable chemist, and so whenever the CIA is interested in potentially conducting an assassination, he is one of the first

people they turn to because he knows how potentially you could kill someone without anyone realizing it. One of the main targets of the CIA during this time period is a prime Minister of the Congo named Patrice La Mumba. In fact, President Eisenhower basically orders the assassination of Patrice Lamumba. He tells at a meeting several of his aids and several people who are working at the CIA that he

wants La Mumba eliminated in whatever way you can do it. So, you know, word go from Eisenhower to Alan Dulls, down through the chain of command and the CIA, down to Sidney Gottlieb, and he eventually gets the order basically to find out a way to kill Patrice Lamumba, and Gottlieb talks about this in his depositions, how he was thinking about what to do and he eventually settled on a method that he didn't think anyone would trace back to him, which was he wanted to put anthrax in the toothpaste

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

breath to no breath at all. But anyway, Sidney Gottlieb procured some anthrax from Fort Diedrich personally took it to the Congo and gave it to a CIA agent there who was supposed to try to find a way to slip it into Lamuma's bathroom. That plan eventually didn't end up going forward because before it could happened, Lemumba was captured by several of his political enemies and murdered anyway, so the CIA didn't have to get its own hands dirty in this case, even though he was trying to.

So that's one of the assassination attempts that Gottlieb was involved in. He was also involved in several on Fidel Castro. Castro is probably the most you know, famous CIA assassination target. There's a famous picture of Fidel Castro holding up a newspaper that talks about, you know, CIA assassination attempt on Castro. So he's alive. He had survived. In fact, at the end of his life he said, if surviving assassinations was an Olympic sport, I would win the gold medal. So

several of these assassinations on him involved his hobby. Fidel Castro, you know, being the leader of Cuba, he was highly interested in scuba diving. He would often go to specific spots to scuba dive over and over, and so one attempt to kill him was to get someone to give him a scuba suit that was laced with some kind of fungus that would give him a disease. And so the idea was that we were going to lace this suit with a disease, give it to Fidel Castro, he

would put it on, go swimming and die. It turns out that that didn't actually happen because the person that they wanted to give the suit to Fidel Castro. This guy named James Donovan. He was working in Cuba. He was a lawyer working in Cuba. But ironically he had already given Fidel Castro Castro a scuba suit as a gift before, so it would look weird if he did

it again, so that didn't actually go through. Another attempt to kill Fidel Castro that was capitalizing on his scuba diving hobby was to get a seashell and put explosives in it and put the seashell in a spot where

Fidel Castro often dived. And the idea was that we were going to make the seashell really beautiful, and it would be so beautiful it would catch Fidel Castro's eye and he would see it and he would just have to have it, and so he would pick it up, and in doing so, in picking it up, this would trigger the explosives and it would blow up and he would die right there. That was the idea at least,

but it again eventually didn't go through. You know, none of these assassination attempts on Fidel Castro actually worked, because he survived for many decades later. Another attempt to if not kill Fidel Castro at least to harm him in some way was to gift him cigars, you know, famous Cuban cigars that were laced with LSD or some other kind of poison. Another kind of poison that was considered for lacing these cigars was bochulin toxin. So lace them

with bochulin toxin. He would smoke it and he would die. These some cigars were selected, picked out and actually laced with a poison and given to a Cuban asset, but he failed to sneak it into Cuba, so that didn't go forward. Another one was to lace these cigars with LSD. The idea was to get it to Fidel Castro right before he gave an important speech, and he would appear to be crazy and maybe his supporters would lose faith in him because he couldn't be trusted anymore because he

was saying all these wacky things. Again, that ended up not going forward. But those are several of the assassination at least attempts that Sidney Gottlieb was involved in on Patrice La Mumba and on Fidel Castro.

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

to lead to the exposure of m k ULTRA. That article is written by a famous journalist, Seymour Hirsch, who had gotten access to a group of documents called the Family Jewels. The Family Jewels was an internal CIA group of documents that was compiled in order for the director of the CIA to understand what were the sensitive aspects

of the agency's past. What were operations that we had been involved in in the past that could be considered illegal or unethical that we can know so that if it ever is exposed to the public, we can know how to respond to that. That was the idea at least of compiling the Family Jewels what it became known

as this group of documents the Family Jewels. But someone within the CIA who is disgruntled with the leadership, leaked that compilation of documents to this journalist, Seymour Hirsch, and he started publishing some of these revelations from them, such as the CIA was involved in illegally spying on anti war protesters during the Vietnam War. That's what the original

article was about. Once this article comes out in the New York Times, there are several people within the government who are demanding that we launch investigations of past abuses. If it's the fact that the CIA was illegally spying on these anti war protesters, what else might it have done. So in the wake of that several investigations are launched. Within the executive branch there's the Rockefeller Commission. Within the Senate there is the Church Committee, and within the House

there is the Pike Committee. And these are all happening really in the beginning and throughout nineteen seventy five, which is why it's called the Year of Intelligence. And as part of these investigations, these executive and congressional investigations, they start realizing that the CIA was involved in much more than just spying on anti war protesters, and in fact, they reveal, especially that mk ultra had been a thing

that happened throughout the nineteen fifties. So that's what precipitated these investigations, and that's how it was first exposed to the public. After those investstigations conclude, there are several congressional hearings specifically on mk ultra, where the main perpetrators like Sidney Gottlieb, are subpoenaed and they're required to come testify in front of these hearings, and so Sidney gottl Gottlieb

has to actually has to testify before Congress. This in a sense works to his advantage in a way because as part of his testimony before Congress, his lawyer works out a deal whereby Sidney Gottlieb is granted immunity for anything that he testifies about. So he's never held liable, he's never held accountable for anything he does, in part because he gets immunity for testifying in front of Congress. So that's how eventually a little bit more of the

details are exposed to the public about mk ULTRA. And then in the seventies there is a journalist and former State Department employee named John Marx who files a Freedom of Information Act request for any files relating to mk ULTRA. Now that these congressional committees have exposed that this took place, he files a FOYER request any surviving documents about this program. Now, as I mentioned earlier, it turns out that Sidney Gottlieb had destroyed many of the mk ultra files, but he

didn't destroy all of them. He didn't realize that were there were thousands more files that were really budgetary files that he had overlooked. Those survived, and when John Marx filed that Freedom of Information Act request, a lot of those files were released. Some of them are redacted in

certain ways. But many of those files, thousands of them, are released, which gives us even more information about MK Ultra, And in response to that, several of the victims of these subprojects start suing the CIA, leading to the lawsuits that eventually get the depositions that I found. So that's kind of how we gradually learned more and more about this program.

And so I feel like part of why Sidney Gottlieb talks so much in these depositions is because he wants to air a lot of the pent up regret that he has. He interviewed one of the defense attorneys who was working with Sidney Gottlieb on these lawsuits, and the defense attorney told me that he was really surprised at just how much Sidney Gottlieb talked Before the deposition. He had advised Sidney Gottlieb to, you know, say yes about the question that's asked, say yes or no about the

question that's asked, and nothing more. You know, just answer the question and don't elaborate. But Sidney gottli elaborate it a lot. And this attorney told me that he is not the ideal client because he would talk so much, and that's not great for his defense, but it's great for someone like me who's a historian and wants to learn about what was going on. Sidney Gottlieb, at least in these depositions, was talking about it quite a bit.

they did. In many cases, a lot of the drama comes from these attorneys who were on opposite sides of this trial, of this lawsuit, who are battling against each other. Joseph Row represents the plaintiffs, the victims of these MK Ultra subprojects, and he's trying to get justice for these victims.

And in many cases, the CIA is resorting to kind of nasty or illegal tactics to try to delay a trial from taking place because many of the plaintiffs are old and they think that they're probably going to die soon anyway, so if we can delay the trial long enough, then they might die off one by one. Joseph Row calls this out. He starts calling these other CIA attorneys' names. He threatens to punch them in the face on multiple occasions.

He's an extremely fiery attorney. He's he's around eighty years old by this point, and so he had been involved in a lot of famous civil rights cases in the history of the United States, and this was going to be he thought, his kind of final capstone case that would be this grand ending to his career. But it kept dragging on and on, and so he's he's kind of a curmudgeon, but he's really trying to get justice

for these victims. He starts writing letters to the Prime Minister of Canada trying to get him to take some accountability for what you and Cameron was doing and try to admit that the CIA was funding this guy and that these people deserve justice. So, uh, there's a lot

of drama between these lawyers. You mentioned Lee Strickland. He is the lawyer for the CIA in most of these cases, who is representing not only the CIA, but also the individuals who are being deposed from the CIA, like Sidney Gottlieb, and throughout these deposition depositions, Row, Joseph Raw and Lee

Strickland constantly bicker back and forth. They have quips back and forth about how the other person doesn't know what they're doing, it is incompetent, and you know, at one point in the depositions, this is one of the most dramatic points. Joseph Raw is questioning Sidney Gottlieb about his involvement in assassination attempts, and he says he asked him, were you Joseph Scheider referred to in this Run Run

one report? And Joseph Scheider was the pseudonym for a scientist who worked in the CIA who the Church Committee was talking about in the report, and nobody really knew who Joseph Scheider was, although there were speculation that it might be Gottlieb. So Joseph Rowe asked Sidney Gottlieb, were you Joseph Scheider the pseudonym that was used for you in this report? And Sidney Gottlieb says, yes, yes, I was, And as soon as the word escapes from his mouth,

Lee Strickland, who's representing him, says, objection, objection. He tries to stop in and this chaos ensues and he asked Sidney Gottlib to go outside, and as soon as Sidney Gottlieb comes back, you Gottlieb basically says, oh, no, no, I wasn't Joseph Scheider. I'm not at liberty to say that, and it's on the record in the deposition I have.

He just said yes to it. So there's a lot of drama in these depositions that's not just about the content of what Sidney Gottlieb or whoever is saying about what they did or what they experience, but also the deposition environment itself between these lawyers is such kind of a rich, dramatic play between these characters that it makes for an exciting book and an insight into the way that these people are upperating behind the scenes as they're trying to get the truth out. I should mention really

quickly while we're on Lee Strickland. You know, Lee Strickland is the CIA lawyer who's representing the agency but also many of these perpetrators of mk Ultra during these lawsuits. He would go on to lead the Freedom of Information Office within the CIA, So in the depositions, he's trying to withhold as much information as possible and then who does the CIA trust to release its information with Foyer Lee Strickland, who of course is going to restrict as

much as possible. So it just kind of ironic that he eventually ends up in that position as well.

toward the end of his life. In the depositions, he seems especially guilt ridden about the Frank Olsen incident. The fact that this innocent Manton died because of something that he did, the fact that he conducted this LSD experiment on him. Throughout the depositions, Sidney Gottlieb tries to justify mk ultra in various ways, although not too successfully. He admits that the program wasn't that successful. They didn't uncover

methods of mind control. It's not that, you know. They didn't find a drug that can make someone talk in an interrogation and always say the truth. They didn't find a hypnotism method or a psychological method that can make someone behave or believe a certain thing, or behave in a certain way. So it was unsuccessful from that point of view. It was successful from a point of view that you could use whose LSD say to make someone appear insane, Yeah, you can do that. But as far

as controlling someone like a marionette, that wasn't successful. And so Gottlieb tried to spin that into a positive fact by saying, well, we learned a lot, We learned a lot about what you shouldn't do, you know, so we tried to, you know, kind of spin that as if to say that that was really good that we learned that you couldn't do all this stuff. But there wasn't really a positive thing that he did learn that you could actively do to manipulate a person in a certain way.

So he was guilt written about what he did, but he did try to justify what he did by saying that and by also saying, you know, we thought this was integral to national security. The enns basically justified the means we thought that the Soviets, or the Chinese or someone else might have even stronger methods of mind control, and we needed to know how to counter against that. Therefore, what I did was justified. That was his main defense.

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

One of the reasons why, I think is because congressional oversight of the intelligence community community was so bad during the Cold War. There was very little oversight of what was going on, and so the people within the intelligence community, like Sidney Gottlieb, had a lot of plausible deniability. You know, if you know, we're entrusted with secrets, meaning we have plausible deniability, we can kind of do what we want

and we're not going to be held accountable. So I think that led to a lot of abuses and not much accountability for those abuses. But you know, as far as mk Ultra goes, there was very little accountability.

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

that kind of thing. Their lawsuit, which generated these depositions that I use, was eventually settled out of court for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be split among them, so they didn't really end up with much money. Of course, there's attorney fees that is taken out of that, and then it split about nine ways between the plaintiffs, so they didn't wind up with much, but it was at

least something that they could get. Frank Olsen's family, the man who jumped out of the hotel window and died, they were brought to the White House when this became known and Gerald Ford. President Ford personally met with them and the CIA agreed to give them seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, so they kind of settled that in exchange for agreeing not to sue the CIA. So that's

what happened with his family. So again there wasn't much accountability, and for some people who tried to sue the CIA, like the prisoners I mentioned in Atlanta, their lawsuits were dismissed. Another incident of that happening was a man named Wayne Richie. Wayne Ritchie was a security guard. He worked at Alcatraz for a while. He was a US marshall in San Francisco and one day he went to a holiday party, a Christmas party at the Post Office building in San Francisco.

This is in the nineteen fifties, and he started having a couple of drinks, and after he did so, he felt very strangely. He started hallucinating. The walls started spinning, the typical things associated with a hallucinogenic drug. He didn't know what was happening, though, because he hadn't taken any drugs to his knowledge, And he decides to go home. His girlfriend is there and she's mad at him, and she says she wants to move to New York, and

he's upset. He eventually goes out and gets two pistols. Then he goes downtown to a bar and threatens to shoot up the bar if they don't hand them all the money. A quick thinking patron hits him over the head with a mug, and the police arrest him and he goes to prison. And he never knew for a long time what happened to him. Why did he behave so erratically that was completely out of character for him?

Why would he do such a thing. Until in the nineteen eighties, he is reading a newspaper article and the article starts talking about Operation Midnight Climax in George White and Wayne Richie realizes that he knew George White when he was in San Francisco, and he starts putting two and two together and thinks that George White must have dosed me with LSD at that party that caused me

to behave so erratically. And so Wayne Richie eventually sues the CIA, but the lawsuit is eventually dismissed because he can't prove that he was actually a victim of one of these drug experiments. So that's another instance of a lawsuit that was dismissed that didn't actually get recompense for the victim. But it turns out that George White kept diaries while he was working for the CIA, and after he died predictably from cirrhosis of the liver because he

was an alcoholic. Once he died, his diaries were donated to an electronics museum at Foothill Community College in California, which eventually got moved to San Francis to Stanford. So Stanford now has these diaries, and looking through these diaries, I include a single page in the images for the book you can turn to the exact date that Wayne Ritchie says that he went insane and committed this or

tried to commit this robbery. And on that date, George White writes in his diary that he was attending a holiday party, a Christmas party at the Federal Building in San Francisco, which is the exact same Christmas party that Wayne Ritchie was at when he went insane and probably drank something that George White had surreptitiously put in his drink. So there is a link there, even though Wayne Ritchie wasn't able to actually settle a lawsuit and get anything from it.

He thinks that his father was going to He thinks that Frank Olsen had some moral qualms with what the government was doing. Perhaps they actually were dropping biological weapons on Korea, and therefore Frank Olsen was going to expose this, and you know, the CIA didn't want this to happen, therefore they arrange for the murder of Frank Olsen. I don't think that's the case. I don't think the US

was using biological weapons in Korea either. One of the reasons why is because from Russian archives, actually we have the archival document and saying that there are North Korean officials who go to China to collect samples of bubonic plague then return to North Korea to dose their own prisoners with this to make it look as if the US had done this, had dropped these biological agents. So we know that they were setting up these fink infections.

But anyways, so the idea is that for Frank Olsen, the idea that he was murdered is that he wanted to expose these misdeeds of the CIA, potentially of the army doing some kind of biological weapons experiments or dropping it on people, and so the CIA arranged for him to be murdered. You're right. In the nineteen nineties, Eric Olsen has his father exhumed and he hires a forensic pathologist named David Stars to conduct an investigation as to

the death of Frank Olsen. Stars does this investigation and he concludes that it's possible Frank Olsen was murdered. There was a wound on Frank Olson's head that he thought seemed inconsistent with him going out of a window and landing on the sidewalk. He says that maybe someone bludgeoned Frank Olson in the head beforehand. I'd don't think this story is very credible. There are a few reasons why, you know. We can go through some of those reasons.

One of the reasons not to believe Stars necessarily is that his own assistance didn't believe them himself. That his own assistant said that he was prone to sensationalizing all of his cases, and so they thought that he was kind of sensationalizing this for the publicity of it as well. So if his own assistants don't really trust what he was doing, and they were working on this investigation as well, then that leads me to not trust it as well.

Another reason is that the reasoning seems to be a little bit backward here, the reasoning to conclude that Frank Olsen was murdered, it starts with the conclusion, and it starts with Frank Olsen was murdered, and how do we then fit all the evidence around that. So you know, if we start with the conclusion that he was murdered, then we have to kind of rationalize all the other evidence. There's no really reason to believe that Frank Olsen had moral compunctions or that he was about to be a

whistleblower about some kind of biological warfare experiments. The reason why that is said is because that's the only explanation we can use to explain why he was possibly murdered.

So it's a backwards form of reasoning. Another reason I should mention why some people think that Frank Olson could have been murdered is because in nineteen fifty three, the year that he died, the CIA created what's known as an assassination primer, kind of a guidebook for how to conduct an assassination that wouldn't lead back to the CIA, and one of the main recommendations in that primer is that one way to get away with murder is to drop someone from a high building so that it looks

as if they fell, and then you can make it seem as if they killed themselves. Obviously, that is very reminiscent of the Frank Olsen story, but again there's several reasons to think that that's not actually what happened in the Frank Olsen case. One reason is because the primer specifically says that you need to open the blinds and everything before you do so, and Frank Olsen went directly through the blinds. I don't know why someone would throw

someone through the blinds of the hotel window. Another reason is because if Frank Golson was bludgeoned in the head before he went out the window, it's odd that when he was on the sidewalk he was trying to talk. He wasn't dead. He was alive when he was, you know, after he went out the window, so they didn't kill him beforehand and throw him out, you know. Another reason would be Alan DoLS gives this reprimand to Sidney Gottlieb,

like I mentioned before, for performing this experiment. Why would the CIA intentionally leave a paper trail of their connection to this, you know, And the same thing happens when Alan Doles gets the the Inspector General of the CIA, a guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick, to conduct an investigation into the death of Frank Olsen. This is just creating more and more of a paper trail. If the CIA murdered this guy, why would they want Why would they want there to be more and more of a paper trail.

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

And so it did seem to him at least like Sidney Gottlieb really regretted what he had done as part of mk Ultra, the fact that he had harmed so

many people for so little in return. This had been tens of millions of dollars spent on MK Ultra, thousands of victims of these various subprojects, of these different experiments, whose lives in many cases were inextricably ruined because of the experiments that were done on them and for what in return, not much, you know, as Sidney Gottlieb himself admitted that m. K Ultra didn't discover much about how to manipulate someone, and so he lived with that for

the rest of his life, and I think he was riddled with guilt. I think he tried to rationalize it to himself. Like I mentioned before, the fact that oh well, we just didn't know at the time that this wouldn't come of anything. It was necessary for national security. But I think it did affect him in later life. Even though he wasn't held legally responsible, there was no legal

accountability for what he did. At least there was maybe some kind of psychological accountability and some kind of ironic fate for him.

You get to see inside the minds of the people who were conducting it and who were victims of it. So it supplies another dimension that I think is necessary for a good narrative story, to understand the human aspect of what was actually going on instead of just kind of the clinical here's how much money was paid to this person whatever. This is the human aspect for our emotions coming out fully enforced during these depositions.