Transcription
The Joe Rogan experience.
The Manson family is a fascinating one, right? Because, um, I know that you have, uh, studied Jolly West and the, the whole MK Ultra program and what, what they were experimenting with with psychedelic drugs and and and cults and mind control. Um, do you, what is, what is your perspective on why they were doing that? Why, uh, why Jolly West was involved? Why, why were they involved? What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies, the federal government?
I think the initial motivation was a kind of national internal, uh, emergency, national security emergency that emerged right after World War II, actually at the beginning of the Korean War, uh, when US, uh, pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having shown flown germ warfare missions over China. And then many POWs were coming back and, um, seemed to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing by that. So many of the, the soldiers coming back seemed to have been brainwashed or have been have collaborated to some degree when they were, uh, held as prisoners. And then there were 21, uh, US, uh, POWs who elected to stay in China. And this really was a disturbing, um, you know, they all had a chance to choose when they were in the UN camps after they'd been held prisoner for, for four years or so. And 21 of them decided that they'd like to try their lot in China. And so this caused this kind of collective, this, this, uh, caused a crisis of, you know, did the communists possess a super weapon of some, some kind that no other war? There was even a famous article in the New Yorker that said something new in history, that there was something that some capacity that this ideological system had, the communists had, that would that was somehow rendering, uh, Americans, uh, powerless against it. So this, this was kind of the crisis of mind control and MK Ultra was an attempt to de, to basically, uh, reverse engineer what this was.
So Jolly West was one of the first people. He was, he was in charge of studying the brainwash pilots initially, and that's how he—
What year was this?
That was in '52. But he also, pre, before that, he was involved. I mean, his, he had been trained to some degree with, um, he was trained by, uh, Harold Wolf, who was at Cornell. He had done his residency at Cornell with Dr. Harold Wolf, who is a, a world neurologist, world expert in migraine and, and basically the type of pain that comes from migraine. So you could say he was an expert in the pain, fear, pain cycle. And he had CIA connections from even before MK Ultra was started.
So what did they determine the Chinese were doing?
So they determined, West, uh, wrote a paper in 1957, and the part that was publicly, that was published in a journal called Sociometry, described, uh, he, he described it as DDD or dability, dependency, and dread. And he said, basically, these camps, uh, were systematically inducing a state of dability, which was, which was that, uh, soldiers were starved and basically worn down. They were, uh, deprived of medical care. They were, I mean, this is also in the historical record. Something I studied extensively is that, you know, they had men were marched in, for example, the Tiger Death March north of the Yalu River from, uh, you know, from the war where they'd been captured. And by the time they got there, they had often lost half their body weight. They had been, uh, bombed by their own forces. At night, they sometimes, you know, were, they had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning just to keep going. And not be, anyone who stopped would be shot. So by the time they got to the camps, they were really worn down. And a missionary who saw, who passed them in a train at that time, wrote or described in an oral history that he, he didn't recognize them as Americans. That they were, they were the most haggard, you know, that it was just a very, uh, they were in a terrible state. And so, so, uh, dability was the first thing West described when he was extracting what had happened. Dependency was, uh, you know, later, there was a layer added in, which the soldiers were, the POWs were dependent for all their, if they were going to survive, they required, um, you know, the camp, the camp, uh, leaders would provide it. So it made them very dependent. And there, they also engaged in, um, very formal thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment. And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time, or perhaps your family could be, because they threatened thought reform.
Yeah. The, in the camp, in the POW camps, um, the Chinese, once the Chinese took over from the Koreans running the camps, they, because they decided, I think it was almost a formal experiment, at least that's how it looks to me. I don't think West wrote about this, but, um, in my own, uh, research on the camps, it, it transpires that they, they wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants. He felt that only something like seven or to 8% of the human population was unreformable, and those people would be disposed of. But he wanted to check if these American, uh, soldiers would also be, uh, susceptible to re-education. So, they really did a formal, you know, three-part re-education program on them. And men had many different responses to it. But when West met them, he, he studied, uh, some of many of their returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base, and he extracted those three, those three components of what had happened to them, DDD, and then, and that's the way he became an expert on what he called brainwashing or coercive persuasion.
So, how do they go from that to like sponsoring the Manson family and, you know, Operation Midnight Climax and all the crazy stuff that they were doing?
Yeah, it may seem like a leap, but I think it, I mean, sort of, it's sort of a leap, but it's sort of not. I think that MK Ultra was funded, um, around indirect response to this crisis of the, of the POWs. And in addition to reverse engineering what had happened to them, they also wanted to turn it into a weapon and continue certain programs in, in, uh, interrogation procedures, in making them more effective. So MK Ultra just had a wide reach and it was pretty free rein. Uh, it was a free rein program. And, um, you know, the historian Alfred, Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the, uh, Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan Project for the mind. So just as the atom had been disassembled and, you know, transformed into this new, uh, this new world had emerged from that program, that intensive, uh, exertion of scientific acumen, the same thing could be done with the mind. The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understood. You know, people could be broken down and rebuilt.
Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage? Like, what was the end goal that they were trying to do with this?
One thing, a couple things, I think. One idea was it potentially could be a weapon. One goal. Another, so it could be used on, on an enemy, perhaps even a city. So that's one reason they were researching LSD. It had certain properties that made it easily, it could be easily dispensed to an entire population through the water supply. So they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD. People didn't really know at the time. So there was an offensive part of it. There's also a defensive part. So US military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was. Once they understood it, they developed the SEAR training, and that was West was involved in that as well. And then a third thing was a more, maybe a broader curiosity about, you know, which would lead you to be able to interrogate people better and perhaps also to, um, un, you know, just really understand. I think there was also kind of a, a curiosity about what would happen. I think just because they had so much power to, uh, experiment in a way without any oversight. And it wasn't until 1963 that the Inspector General of the CIA himself said, this is, this is, um, unethical and, you know, we've done it, basically put us, put a stop to it. But it, it really—
'63?
Yeah. But it went on. I mean, the Harvard LSD studies, when were those?
Um, I actually, I don't know which ones exactly. There were some that were earlier than—
What did, what are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski? Okay, that, yeah, that's earlier.
Was that earlier than '63?
Yeah. And, uh, that's Henry Murray. Yeah. But so I don't, I don't actually know the answer to that question of exactly how it continued, but they officially discontinued and destroyed all the records. So they may have continued under other forms, but Manson was '69. Yeah. So Manson is after that. So they didn't discontinue it. They kept doing things.
Well, West kept working. Yeah. It's ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult because the amount of power, the amount of unchecked power and influence that Jolly West had and MK Ultra in general had, and all the people that were working on this, you have this power, the fact that you are working in complete secrecy, you, uh, are the puppeteer. You're, you're controlling all these people. And then this idea that—
Have you read Chaos, the Tom O'Neill book?
Yeah. What did you think about that?
I thought it was great research. Amazing. Yeah, it's a really, it's a really good book and just so stunning. I had never considered that before. I thought Manson was a crazy guy and he got together with a bunch of crazy people and he ran a cult. I have no, no suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating the entire thing. They may, they may not have been. I don't think O'Neill, Tom O'Neill, thinks that he made an absolute link. He just brought—
You do get West in the same room potentially. This, you get West visiting Manson in jail.
I don't, I don't remember that.
Yeah, West visited Manson in jail. Uh, West, he believes, at least Tom O'Neill does, supplied him with LSD, and then every time Manson would get arrested, he would get released.
This is true, but this wasn't West necessarily. This was, uh, Roger Smith, who was West. He was an associate of West, and West was head of the meth, uh, methamphetamine research project or things like boy, which was so, you know, West did. So he got, West got funding to do his hippie labor, you know, his psych, psycho lab or psyche lab in '68, '67, and '68 during his sabbatical in the Bay Area. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't obviously funded by this, this, if it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine. But there are many notes that Tom O'Neill also writes about. So both of us have gone to the West papers over many, many years. And, um, and I think, uh, you can put West at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where he had an office and where Manson would go for medical treatment, and his girls, he would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his, his cult. And this was, they were at the time, as I understand it, seen as a kind of a model cult. And many of the researchers under West, I mean, we can prove that link, that people like Alan Rose, who was a sociologist. They were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults and, you know, what is the natural environment? How do they, how do they create bonds? And what is their relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that? So West would apparently hang out on the couch getting high and wearing, you know, kind of dressed up in hippie garb with his middle-aged friends. And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was. But, you know, some, sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient and it wasn't really ne, there didn't appear to be a plan, which isn't to say, so to me, it's not entirely clear, uh, what the relationship was with Manson. It is very, uh, evident. He was bailed out several times by Roger Smith, who was also a psychologist, as well as a parole officer. So that's highly suspicious. And Roger Smith did know West, and Dave Smith, who was the head of the medical clinic, also knew West. But these things are, it's hard to tell exactly how—
I appreciate you being cautious about it. Yeah, that's good for you. Um, I'm less cautious. I—
But I think it's also that is how the government functions in general. The idea that they would be so inefficient at everything except cults is kind of silly. I mean, it's—
Yeah, it's a, it's a really, it's a deep question. Yeah. You know, is it clownish or because if you look at some of the other MK Ultra operations, they look highly inefficient and, you know, they're dosing each other at the holiday party with the punch and, you know, uh, just many lives ruined while, uh, at the Operation Midnight Climax, it just looks like a free-for-all and out of control. But I, there, there are really concerning aspects of the Haight Ashbury operation, I would definitely say. And Manson was, uh, I mean, he could have been an also an informant.
Well, he certainly was. I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm cert, I'm, I'm certain he was connected. There's no way he just kept getting out of jail the way he got out. And the sheriffs who arrested him were told that it's above their pay grade.
Exactly. Yeah.