Cold War – The CIA’s mind control project, MKULTRA – John Lisle

Hi everyone, this is AJ Williams, host of the Warbook Books Podcast where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today I am extremely excited to have on the show John Lyall for his newest book project, Mind Control, Sydney Gotautle, the CIA and the Tragedy of MK Ultra. John Lyall has a PhD in history from the University of Texas where he is now a professor of the history of science. He has received research and writing awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His work has been published in Skeptic, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere. Uh, he has been on the show before for his first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, which uh, you should go check out um after you uh check out this book. John, how you doing today?

>> I'm good. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about these topics. It never, never really gets old. There's always something exciting to talk about.

>> Yeah. No. Well, I'm I'm I'm glad you wrote this book. Loved it just like I loved the last one. Um, if people are watching this on YouTube as opposed to listening, um, we did not coordinate our outfits today. We are both in red t-shirts and um, black-framed glasses and are looking pretty similar. Uh, great minds think alike though.

>> I think so. I think so.

>> Well, um, let's uh, let's let's dive right into it. The uh, the first question that I like people to answer when they come on the show is, if in your own words, can you just tell us what is your book about?

>> Yes, this book is about the CIA's MK Ultra mind control project that happened during the Cold War. This was in in response to a few events that were happening around the world, especially some American pilots who were shot down during the Korean War and started saying things like they were dropping germ bombs on the Koreans. People within the CIA started to wonder, why would they say something like this? Is it perhaps possible that the communists, the Koreans or the Chinese or someone is using methods of mind control to manipulate these people? And if so, what are those methods? And even whether they are or aren't using those methods, now that we're kind of thinking about it, maybe we should develop those methods ourselves. So, this book is about this MK Ultra project led by a man named Sydney Gotleb. And the idea was to try to use drugs or hypnosis or psychological techniques like electric shocks or sleep deprivation or something in order to manipulate people either to get them to believe certain things or behave certain ways. Um, so that's broadly what the book is about, but it also goes into a lot about the personal life of Sydney Gotautle. He's not only working on MK Ultra within the CIA, he's also involved in assassination attempts on foreign leaders. He's also involved in creating the um, kind of gadgets and disguises and cover stories of within the CIA for agents who are going undercover. So he's involved in a lot of stuff within the CIA that this book goes into. Um, and largely also the second half of this book, what it talks about is the repercussions of MK Ultra, the fallout from it. So the first half is really about what it was. The last half is really about what happened when it was revealed to the public that this was going on during the Cold War. Um, so I talk about how it was revealed to the public, the kinds of investigations that uncovered it and how the public reacted to it and kind of some conspiracy theories that that led to. Um, so it's really about the broad scope of MK Ultra, not only what it was, but also what it influenced.

>> Yeah. And I think if um, if if people are even a little bit familiar with maybe the the excesses of the CIA or maybe the darker periods of the CIA, um, MK Ultra is the project that um, that most people think of when they think of just the messed up things that the CIA has done. Uh, in fact, I was out with some friends. Um, we were we were having lunch. This is I think so your book has been out for about a month now, I think. And um, that week I was out with some friends and it just so happens like one of my friends is like, uh, who works at the state department. He's like, have you ever heard of something called MK Ultra at the the CIA? I'm like, oh, actually, yeah, I have and you should check out this uh, this new book that has come out. But just unprompted um, like when when I think we were probably talking about just like the excesses of of >> um, governments historically. This is the thing that people kind of think about.

>> It is. And it's it's funny that you say that too because I don't know if it's because I was writing this book, but I I lately within the past few years especially, I have noticed a lot more references to MK Ultra than I ever had. And again, it's fresh in my mind, so that is probably part of it. I'm actually noticing the references when they crop up instead of just forgetting them because, you know, before I was writing this book, maybe it wasn't on my radar. But I really do feel like there's there's something to this moment right now where it's really infused into the kind of public discourse. So, yeah, there's definitely an uptick in interest probably about MK Ultra right now, I think.

>> Yeah. Well, and I I think too, and maybe we'll get to this at the the end of the show, um, a lot of conspiracies. You know, we're in an age right now where we're thinking a lot about information and um, how we're getting information and what is a conspiracy and what is not and and you know, this is like one of those things where I don't want to say all conspiracies stem from like MK Ultra, but like this has spawned so many different conspiracies um, which you know, we'll we'll get into maybe at the end. Um, but let's let's start with um, let's start at the beginning. Let's lay some groundwork and uh, and some context. Um, first let's just talk about Syd Sydney Gotautle. Um, who who was Sydney Gotautle? Um, what was his background? U, his family and how did he come to work for the CIA?

>> Yes, Sydney Gotautle. He is this the main character of this book, the man who would eventually head MK Ultra. He was a chemist. He had gotten his PhD in bioorganic chemistry from Caltech. And really when he got his PhD right at the end of it, it was 1943 and he was wanting to volunteer to go into the army. He wanted to join the army during World War II and serve his country. He was born of immigrant parents and so he felt like he owed a debt to his country for allowing his parents to come over here and give him the life that he had. But when he tried to volunteer, he was uh denied service because he had he was born with club feet. So he had this physical ailment that prevented him from serving in the military. And he always afterward kind of carried this burden that he felt that he wasn't able to pay the debt that he owed to his country. So after that he had several jobs working at universities and a few different uh government organizations but eventually he was able to get a job within the CIA and here he felt like he would be able to repay that debt because it wasn't a military job in the sense that he wouldn't be going overseas fighting or something but he could use his brain in order to help the government win the Cold War is what he thought at least. And so he joined the CIA. And originally he served as kind of an assistant, a chemist within a branch that was doing things like secret writing, how to, you know, how can we formulate different chemicals that will allow us to write something that nobody can see and we can send secret messages back and forth. And then he kind of rose through the ranks eventually to become head of this MK Ultra project. One of the reasons why the CIA especially was interested in hiring chemists like Sydney Godly is because just within the historical context, this is right after World War II and right after the atomic bombs had come at the end of World War II. And who created the atomic bombs there? The these physicists that the government recruited, the military recruited these physicists. So, it seemed like science was now necessary and integral to national security right at the end of World War II. And if that's the case, then we better hire a lot of scientists who might know what the next arms race is going to be. You know, the arms race right now could be atomic bombs, but maybe there's something in the future. Maybe that arms race is going to be mind control. And if so, we better get a leg up on the communists. So, we need to start hiring these chemists and other scientists who will be able to help us in that potential arms race that's coming. That was at least the CIA uh thought process. And that's one of the reasons why Sydney got lands at the CIA.

>> Yeah. And um in your book the the reader will uh get kind of a nice um un nice the reader will get an understanding that in the 1950s um mind control was just on on the minds so to speak um of of all these different government like it was uh the the the CIA was fixating on it, the Soviets were fixating on it, scientists were were fixating on it um researchers who were outside of government. It was it would it almost kind of seemed like it was the new frontier um of not not really weaponry but um that was like the it seemed like a cool new thing. What is

>> Yeah, talk about that.

>> It it was and there are several there are several events that kind of lead to that development. You know, going back even to the 1890s, you have Ivan Pavlov, this Russian physiologist who was doing his behavioral conditioning experiments with dogs, you know, ringing a bell and getting them to salivate. These are famous experiments. But within the CIA, people were thinking, well, if the Russians were able to do that back in the 1890s, you know, and if they were able to behaviorally condition these dogs, surely they've since applied that to humans. And so there's kind of the worry that they've been working on this for a long time and maybe we're going to have to catch up on how to condition people in order to behave certain ways. That's one event that leads to this interest in the 1950s especially. Another one is the Moscow show trials where Stalin is purging his political enemies from power and he levies these false charges against them that they didn't do but he's just trying to find them guilty of something that so that he can get them out of the way. But the interesting thing is that they admit to these false charges. They they say that they're guilty of the things that they didn't do. Why would they behave this way? One explanation that develops within the CIA, a CIA who's already thinking about mind control, is that maybe mind control is involved. Maybe there are certain drugs or hypnotic techniques that these prisoners have been subjected to that's making them act this way. Similarly, in Hungary, there's a a very prominent critic of the Communist Party, uh, Cardinal Menzanti, and he's arrested, and the same thing happens to him. He's there are false charges that are levied against him. Um, and he confesses to them eventually. Why would he do this? Again, perhaps it's mind control. At least that's the thinking within the CIA at the time. And then finally, the most important event is the downing of those American pilots during the Korean War who confessed to doing things like dropping biological weapons on the Koreans, anthrax, typhus, bubonic plague, all kinds of stuff. Why would they confess to these false charges? Or why why would they confess confess to these things? And again, the thinking in the CIA is that maybe the communists are in possession of some method of mind control that has been used on these people. Now, it turns out that's not the case. What got these pilots to talk is that they were tortured. They're sleep deprivation and torture and all kinds of other stuff. They're inter they're interviewed basically after they come back to the United States when the war is over. And many of the psychologists who interview them, you know, are able to figure out that what's actually going on here is that if you torture someone, they're going to say anything. You know, it's not that torture necessarily guarantees the truth, but torture can get someone to talk and so people are gonna say anything to make the torture stop. Um, spoiler alert still within this

>> spoiler alert for the audience. Mind control does not work. Uh, and Sydney got comes to understand that and that's what he says. It's like, you know, a lot of these things were were this information was gathered from other methods like torture like he just said.

>> Yeah. And you know, and this is one of the reasons why the CIA wants to turn to these more esoteric techniques of mind control, aside from torture, because people quickly, I mean, people have known for hundreds of years before this, torture can get someone to talk, but it can't guarantee the truth. But what if we want to guarantee the truth? If we need a truth drug or a truth serum, torture is not going to be it. So maybe something else. Maybe something like what Sydney got is doing in the CIA. Maybe, you know, some uh hallucinogenic drug like LSD or maybe some hypnotic technique or something. So the CIA turns away from torture because that is not a proven effective method for getting someone to spill the truth. But then the ironic thing is when MK Ultra for the most part isn't that effective afterwards the CIA turns back to torture.

>> But that's kind of the trajectory of uh

>> going all the way up till like the in the 2000s. Um

>> Exactly. Yeah. But but so that's why the CIA is interested in this in the first place. Can we have an effective truth drug? And is it possible that these other countries might possess some methods that we don't know about that we need to develop ourselves to to defend against it? But once we start developing those things, it, you know, the CIA soon becomes interested in well whether they're developing this or not, we want it for our own sake. So that that that's kind of how it develops.

>> Well, let's going back to Sydney Gotautle. Um, I what something that really struck me about him and you know, this this assignment that he has at the CIA if you want to call it that, it's is weird. It's I mean, I think just like objectively even in the 1950s, anybody working there would be like, this is this is weird. Um, and some people do say that. Um, thinking about Sydney Gotautle himself is um, you also find out that he is an outsider. Like he's always felt like an outsider. Um, he the um, the thing about the CIA is um, pale, male, and Yale. He did not go to Yale. He's u from a he's not from like a a white Anglo-Saxon family. He's from a Jewish family. Uh, so he he really is kind of in this, I don't want to say it's like an outsider, you know, the very very senior people are involved in um, in this project. Um, but like it's kind of like an outsider project and he's an outsider himself and he he he weirdly fills that role. How did how did um, how did Sydney got um put on MK Ultra in the first place?

>> Mhm. And well, I should say that's I think that is a perceptive observation because I think one of the things that motivates Sydney Gotautle is the fact that he's always for his entire life been seen as an outsider. He had a stutter, you know. I mean, he had a stutter throughout his life and he had he was born with club feet. So, he walked with a limp. He talked with this stutter. When he was young, children would make fun of him at school. And so, he always felt like he was kind of this outsider who didn't fit in. At the CIA, he still feels like an outsider because he's not the stereotypical recruit of what someone in the CIA would be. And so, part of I think his the way he rationalized what he was doing to himself was that he was trying to fit in. I'm I'm trying to make these people proud who gave me this important position within the CIA to put in charge of this project and I want I want to prove to them that like, you know, that they have my loyalty and that I can do something special and that I belong. So I think that's part of his internal motivation to want to try to prove to people that hey, I'm not some this other, I'm not this outsider. I belong with you and I can prove that, you know, I'm I'm worthwhile and I have something important to offer. So I think uh that's part of his motivation. As for how he got put in charge of this project. He had been a chemist in in a few earlier projects within the CIA. But one of the things that really ingratiates Sydney Gotly to this position and to Alan Dulles in particular, who's the head of the CIA, ironically, is the thing that makes Sydney Gotautle an outsider. One of the things that he had a club foot. Alan Dulles al also had a club foot. And so I think Allan Doulles took a liking to Sydney Gotautle. And there there's no doubt that Sydney got a brilliant chemist. He had gotten his PhD from Caltech. uh, and so naturally, if you're going to give it to someone within the organization this position, it's going to be someone who has to be competent and understand kind of the basics of chemistry or science or drugs and that certain uh Sydney got certainly fit that bill. So there are a few reasons why I think he got it, his scientific credentials, but also the fact that Allan Doulles kind of sympathized with him.

>> Yeah. Well, did did he have any as far as his uh personality goes, did he have any uh moral uh compunctions with um what he was going to be doing as far as experimenting on human subjects or we we'll get into the LSD stuff, but what was moral compass like?

>> He he definitely had moral compunctions, but he did rationalize them a way in several effective ways that that made him think that this is for the greater good. It is. I mean, the main argument is it's a ends justifies the mean means kind of thing. Well, we have to do this because, you know, if we don't dose these people with LSD, we're never going to know how an unsuspecting person reacts to it. Therefore, if the Soviets are to, you know, dose our water supply with LSD and, you know, all uh chaos breaks loose, then how are we going to deal with this problem? So, you know, it's an ins justifies the means kind of thing. However, another way that Gotautle is going to rationalize what he does is the fact that he's not doing these experiments himself for the most part and even it's not people within the CIA who are doing most of these experiments. MK Ultra is composed of 149 sub projects and for the most part, those sub projects are contracted out to independent researchers at hospitals and universities um throughout the country and even in other countries. One of the most famous ones is Euan Cameron in Montreal. But the people who are contracted to do these sub projects in many cases, they don't even know that they're being funded by the CIA. There's a cutout organization who Sydney got will send funds to and then that cutout organization will send funds to the researcher and those researchers are independently experts. These these are people who are very reputable in their fields. For example, Euan Cameron in Montreal, who's a psychiatrist who's doing many of these experiments. He at one point is head of the American Psychiatric Association, Canadian Psychiatric Association, World Psychiatric Association. He had been on the team at Nuremberg who had analyzed the Nuremberg prisoners to determine whether they're fit to stand trial. So it's like there's hardly anyone who's more at least renowned in the world of psychiatry at this time. And so Sydney got idea for himself at least is well, it's not my job to see that these patients are being treated right. It's the job of the PE person who's running the sub project who is an expert and a professional in their own right. It is just their it's their own duty to do that. So he doesn't feel the moral compunction to follow up to make sure they're actually doing it. Um, so that's how especially in several depositions that I found that Sydney Gotautle gives in the 1980s, he's uh subpoenaed and required to give depositions in a couple of lawsuits. During those depositions, when he's confronted with the fact that how could you not have followed up with these, you know, patients or followed up with these victims and see what was going on and what happened to them and how they reacted. This was the main explanation he gave is that it was the job of the researcher to do that, not my job. Now, whether that's true or not, I mean, that's at least how he rationalized it, but that's how kind of how he gets around these moral compunctions that he initially feels.

>> Yeah. And uh, you just noted um, so in in the book, the information is is the the these um um uh depositions that Sydney Gotautle gives and I think 1980 is um the year that he's he's required to give them are interspersed throughout the book which is how um I I I think you as the researcher have come to find out a lot of this information. Um, in fact, what just would you mind just telling us like how did you come across this information that you know it's a secret project um, uh, famously like made not so secret in the 1970s. Um, how did you come across this information and and how did that information make its way into the book?

>> Thank you. Yeah, this is one of the I mean, to me, it's the most exciting part of the book is the fact that I have verbatim dialogue from the people who are involved in the projects themselves in the 1980s, late '70s, early '80s. This is after MK Ultra has been exposed by several congressional committees to the public. There are many victims of these sub projects who start suing the CIA. And as part of these lawsuits, the lawyers who are representing the plaintiffs, the victims, they take the depositions of many of the people involved in order to prepare to go to trial. And so Cydney Gotautle gives a deposition. Richard Helms, who was the head of the CIA later, he he's one of the people who's deposed. Robert Lashbrook, who's Got Leap's right-hand man. In addition to many of the victims themselves give depositions in preparation for a trial. So the the main attorney on this case is Joseph Ralph. He's a famous civil rights attorney and he took the depositions of all these people. Sydney Gotautle's depositions run to over 800 pages. And in it, Ralph was just questioning him about, what did you do with MK Ultra? How did you feel? It's it's incredible verbatim dialogue that I interspersed throughout the books to try to get into the heads of these people, not only the perpetrators but the victims also to try to understand what they did and what they went through. So that's the a lot of the basis for the book is the dialogue that takes place in the depositions

>> now

>> in the way that I found them.

>> Well, I was just going to ask um in these depositions, how how is Sydney got, is he combative? Um, is he willing to answer these questions? Um, there are several instances where he actually answers and his lawyer is like pinching him or being like, hey, actually don't answer that. You know, talk about kind of this environment um that he is giving these depositions in.

>> Yeah. You know, I interviewed the court reporter who was there for the for one of these depositions with Sydney Gotautle, and you know, this was in the 1980s. And so I sent her the deposition after the fact, you know, several years ago to try to get her memories of what happened, you know, reading over this thing. Does it spark any memories about how how, you know, what kind of impression Sydney got left on you? Anything like that. And she told me, reading over this deposition again, that she was um she was dumbfounded by how much Sydney got actually talked in this deposition. I mean, she did hundreds of depositions over the course of her career. And she said hardly would anyone talk this much. Um, mainly because the attorneys beforehand would always tell the deponents not to talk. They would tell them, "Answer the question that's being asked and nothing but that question." You know, if it's a yes or no question, say yes or no and don't elaborate on it. But for some reason, Godly kept elaborating on this. And you're right, several points throughout this, you know, God's attorney has to pinch him to get him to stop talking about something or to maybe veer onto a different track. And Joseph Ralph, the the plaintiff's attorney, he's watching this and he always brings it up saying, "Stop pinching him. Stop doing that." And so there's this, you know, it's the book is about MK Ultra, but it's also about the dynamics of these depositions between the lawyers who are arguing back and forth trying to extract information from the opponent. And so that brings a lot of drama to the depositions. Um, the way that I came across the depositions was that Joseph Ralph, this main attorney, he and his law partner, James Turner, they settled this lawsuit out of court. So it never went to a trial. It they settled out of court for $750,000. The CIA paid these plaintiffs that much uh in order to end the lawsuit basically. And the the depositions just wound up in Joseph Ralph's papers. He had taken all these depositions, but they're not, you know, they're just in his papers now because it never went to a trial. So, after he passes away, his papers are donated to the Library of Congress, and I'm rooting around in them, and lo and behold, I find the deposition. So, that's that's how I come across them.

>> Yeah. And um, that's one that's wild. Um, I love the Library of Congress. Um, I've I've researched in those archives myself before. So, uh, for the the depositions, um, so you had said that, uh, Sydney got like he he would elaborate more than what he should and he does not actually strike me, his personality, he does not strike me as like a loquacious person, somebody who is like a chatterbox, but I, you know, I wonder if it's just like this, he's got, you know, thinking of him as, as an outsider. he has this this opportunity to share his expertise and he's like being useful and people are you know, he is wanted for something right now and um, a part of me actually wonders if he just couldn't help himself um, but to say more than you

>> yeah, I've thought about this too. Part of me thinks that he he regretted a lot of what he did. That seems to be the indication by people who knew him later in life. Um, he he became a speech therapist and many of the people who either volunteered with him or worked with him uh before he died said that they always felt that he was atoning for past sins. So, part of me thinks that maybe during these depositions, he felt like this was his opportunity to, I don't know, clear the air or atone for what he did in the past. Also, part of me thinks that, I mean, this is a little bit ironic, but um, you know, cuz what Sydney Gotautle is doing in the CIA is very much unethical. I mean, this is the the the quote from the CIA inspector general is that it was unethical and illegal. So it but Sydney Gotley's personality at least is the kind of personality of someone I think who's a rule follower. If the CIA sets a rule or gives him a task, he wants to make sure that that gets done. You know, he's very much uh uh someone who wants to not not um upset the people who have given him this task. Um, and so I feel like that kind of plays out in the depositions a bit. He's there to talk about what happened in the past and so hey, this is this is what I'm told to do, so I'm going to do this to his attorney's chagrin because they obviously don't like him doing that, but there are a lot of differences between his personality in the depositions and someone like Robert Lashbrook, who's his right-hand man.

>> another chemist who's involved in many of these sub projects. Got is very open in the depositions talking and whenever whenever I can corroborate what he's saying with documents that we have from the CIA or from the victim or from whoever. Most of what Sydney got is corroborated. You know, you you can check for from different sources and triangulate that, okay, what he's saying is true based on this. Not always, but in many cases, you can actually make sure that what he's saying is true when you fact check what he's saying. The the same is not true of many of the other deponents, especially the perpetrators like Robert Lashbrook. Lashbrook is very combative in his depositions, unlike Gotautle, who's very um very agreeable at least. Um, Lashbrook is very combative. In fact, when the subpoena is delivered to Robert Lashbrook to give his depositions, he just throws it back in the face of the of the officer who delivers it to him. Uh, so he doesn't want to say anything. In fact, this is one of the interesting parts of a deposition. Robert Lashbrook is asked several questions by Joseph Ralph. I I don't remember exactly what they are, but Ralph asks him, you know, did you do this or did you see this or were you here? And Lashbrook basically refuses to answer. And his own attorney says, you need to say something. You need to answer this. So, it's like he he was so combative that his own attorney is saying you actually need to speak up more. So, yeah, there's the different personalities definitely come out.

>> Yeah. Well, um, let's dive into um, MK Ultra itself and the specifics of that. Um, first, you've noted this a few times, but I think it's worth repeating because I didn't I have heard of MK Ultra, but I did not know this was um, it's a huge project. um, and you have noted 149 um, sub projects within it to different universities and hospitals, prisons, which is um, that factors into things because prisoners are experimented on. Um, so let's let's kind of uh, let's try and unpack MK Ultra a little bit, even though it's like a huge thing u which is basically the the goal of your book. Um, let's start with LSD. Um, talk about LSD. um, what's its role in this period of time and um, I guess more broadly, what's its role with MK Ultra, which is a big role.

>> Sydney Sydney Godly when he's put in charge of this project, well, I should start by saying he didn't really know how to conduct a mind control project. Alan Doulles puts him in charge of MK Ultra and he's unsure of kind of what to do and so largely what he does is go back in the OSS files, the precursor to the CIA, and starts looking through those files for inspiration on what he can do, how he can research mind control. He happens to land upon the files of a guy named Stanley Levelville, who my first book is about in in the OSS. Stanley Levelvel was doing many of the similar things during World War II in the OSS. He was doing truth drug trials mainly with THC, the kind of main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, but he was injecting this into cigarettes and giving it to people and having them smoke it and seeing if they'll reveal their secrets. He was creating, you know, weapons, gadgets, disguises. He was formulating assassination plots. And so it's by reading some of Levelvel's work that God gets a lot of the inspiration for what he's going to do throughout his career, including drug experiments. And so Levelvel had been working with THC acetate as the main drug that he was using to try to get people to uh tell the truth in an interrogation. But since then, um, things had developed a little bit and so LSD was the main drug. And this was especially interesting interesting to people like Sydney Gotley because it had such a profound psychoggenic effect. It produced profound hallucinations with such a minute dose. It's you know, this is tiny tiny doses of LSD can have someone's psychology

>> I believe discovered on accident because uh I think the the there was a the scientist who developed it accidentally got some on his finger and like rode his bicycle

>> rode his bicycle home and experienced you right the world's first LSD trip I believe accidentally on his bike home.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So he had been synthesizing compounds like LSD and I mean, he had synthesized this LSD LSD25 in 1943, I believe it was uh, or 1938, I think it was the first time he synthesized it or 43, I'm getting the dates confused. Um, but he set it on the shelf for five more years because he didn't think anything of it and then he reynthesized it and 5 years later and some of it accidentally contacted his skin and he starts having these hallucinogenic effects. He starts seeing colors, the room starts spinning, and he realizes that it was a tiny minute dose that contacted his skin. And so this must have a very profound effect on human psychology. That's why the CIA becomes interested in it. Because if such a minute dose can have such a profound effect, that might mean that it could be very useful in covert operations. What if we could slip a tiny amount into someone's drink before they give a speech at a political rally that could make them appear insane? So, if we want to do this to one of the people we don't want to get reelected, well, it can make them appear like they're crazy before they give this speech, then they're going to lose their political support because who's going to support this insane person who's spouting all this nonsense? So, it it immediately kindled interest in covert operations among the people who know about it.

>> Yeah. And so, one of the what starts happening is um, of course, you you just mentioned Sydney got very fascinated with LSD and its effects. What starts to happen is um, employees of the CIA start um, experimenting on themselves with LSD. Um, at first voluntarily, which you write about and I you even write at one point, I think uh, I don't think it's Sydney Gotley, but somebody runs into Alan Dulles on a plane and Alan Dulles asks if they have LSD in their drink or something like that because it's become such an open

>> I think I think that was Sydney Godly. He's taking a flight and Dulles happens to be on the plane. He walks up the aisle, Sydney Gotly does, to get a martini and as he's walking back to his seat, Alan Dulles kind of nudges him and says, "Is that LSD in your martini there?"

>> Yeah.

>> Such a Yeah. Go ahead. It it was known about the CIA's interest in LSD among among the people within the CIA, especially because someone like Sydney God and his colleagues who were in MK Ultra, they would dose like the office coffee pot with LSD or during a holiday party, they would put it in the punch bowl and there were warnings that had to go out among the CIA office of security warning them not to do this or you're going to get in trouble, you know, after it happened a couple of times. And so within the CIA, it was well known that these the members of what what's called the TSS, the technical services staff, which is the kind of division within the CIA that Sydney Gosle is working for. It's well known that they are kind of playing these pranks. It's not well known within the CIA, at least broadly among the people who work there, exactly what MK Ultra is or what it's doing. The CIA was very highly compartmentalized. So there aren't many people who know about MK Ultra itself in the sense that, you know, many of the what many of the sub projects are, who's being funded, what even the sub projects are doing, but the CIA's interest in LSD itself is at least known among people within the CIA.

>> and this is um, I I don't know if we want to say fun and games at this point um, but it be it becomes not fun and games um, uh, at a I believe it's a holiday party um, which included a man named Frank Olsen. Um, talk about uh, Frank Olsen and um, talk about why that's an important figure in your book.

>> Yes. Yes. So, well, you know, on the fun and games part, I will say to someone like Sydney Gotle, I think originally in his in from his perspective, it was kind of fun game fun and games. Oh, we're dosing each other with this thing and, you know, we're seeing how we react. And he he would dose himself and he would take it not unwittingly, you know, like he's doing to the victims of this. It definitely wasn't fun and games, but I do think that that is his perspective of what he was doing. Oh, it's no harm done. We're just, you know, we're just, you know, messing around. Um, of course, you know, from the victim's perspective, that's obviously not the case. But from his perspective, I think it it was a little more light-hearted in his view. Obviously, that changes with this figure of Frank Olsen. It's at a it's a work retreat where this happens. There are several members of the uh of the CIA with within the TSS especially, several scientists who would occasionally get together with several scientists from Fort Dedrick, which is the biological warfare installation for the country up in Frederick, Maryland. Actually, a specific division within Fort Dedrick called the Special Operations Division. Several of those scientists and several of the CIA scientists would get together um regularly at this retreat called Deep Creek and they would exchange their research results so they wouldn't have to duplicate each other's experiments or anything like that. And so it was at one of these retreats that Gotautle and Robert Lashbrook, this other chemist, decide that they're going to spike the liquor with some LSD and hand it out to everyone and kind of see how they react. Again, I think in Gotautle's perspective, it's kind of like one of these pranks that he's pulling around the office. Obviously, it's uh it's going to lead to some more dramatic consequences than anything before this had. Frank Olsen is one of the scientists at the Special Operations Division within Fort Dedrick, Camp Dedrick at that time actually, who takes this LSD and he really has a mental breakdown afterwards. Um, he goes home after this retreat. He talks to his wife and she's one of the depositions um who I have. She's one of the people who's deposed as well. And she talks about her experience, what he was like when he came home from this retreat. He seems to have kind of had a psychotic break. He keeps talking about how he ruined the experiment. I ruined the experiment and nobody likes me and the police are out to get me and you know, there there's all kind of these psychological troubles that seem to have arisen uh because of this LSD experiment. He seems to have some kind of psychotic break. And so several of his colleagues like Gotautle and Lashbrook and some others, they decide that he needs to get psychiatric help afterwards. And so they send him to New York to a man named Harold Abramson. And Abramson talks to Frank Olsen and eventually Abramson decides that they need to commit him to a mental asylum for a little bit. And so Abramson makes a call to this hospital trying to get Olsen admitted, but they need an extra day to prepare a room. And so Frank Olsen and uh one of his colleagues, they get a hotel for the night and during the night at 2:30 in the morning, Fras Frank Olsson jumps out the window and he dies. He hits the 7th Avenue sidewalk in New York and he dies. Um, so that is a really profound consequence of one of these LSD experiments that immediately suggested to everyone how how dangerous potentially this kind of thing could be. But the scary thing in a way um is that it didn't prevent the CIA from going forward with these LSD experiments. If anything, they increased. If anything, things kind of ramped up with LSD experiments after the death of Frank Olsen. But that's kind of the a brief summary of the Olsen story. Of course, there are a lot of avenues to go down with that. There are a lot of conspiracy theories around Frank Olsen as well, whether he was murdered or whether it's suicide or something. But in in general, that's that's what happens. He goes to this retreat, he takes the LSD, he goes out the window, he dies.

>> Now, thinking f well, first on um Frank Olsson story, I think this is probably the first example um of things just going terribly wrong um as it relates to MK Ultra. And like you just said, like there's you would think it would be like a watershed moment where people are like, "Oh, maybe we shouldn't do this anymore." But actually, the opposite ends up happening. Um, I you know, I I I wonder why with LSD, thinking about mind control. What was it about um LSD that that made Sydney got or these other people at the CIA think that you could control somebody's mind by giving them LSD?

>> Well, that's the hope at least. So they're they're looking for any kind of drug that might be able to uh, yeah, give you control of someone's mind, play them like a marionette almost, control them. Um, it's not just LSDs. So, for example, in several of these sub projects, some of them involve um, you mentioned prisons. Some of them involved some researchers at various prisons. One is in Lexington, Kentucky, another is in Atlanta. Uh, Harris Isbel and Carl Feifer. Sydney Gotautle would send them all kinds of drugs all the time to get them to test them on these prisoners to determine what the effects are. LSD is the most well-known one um and the most used one with NK Ultra because the psychological effects are just so profound that they're interested in experimenting and seeing how far you can push it and what it can do. But it's not just LSD that is being experimented on. There are dozens if not hundreds of different drugs that are also being tested to determine whether it can either break someone down or give you control of their of their uh actions or something. So LSD is just one of the drugs, although it's the one that's most experimented with. Yeah.

>> Well, um, let's I mean, let's move into this is already kind of just now taken a very dark turn. Obviously, somebody is um has died already from uh the the this experimentation. Um, let's move into how it gets even worse, and that is um, uh, Operation Midnight Climax.

>> which, uh, I think is is might be fair to say is the, I would think, the worst part of, um, MK Ultra. Uh, talk about talk about this and talk about some of the experimentation that begins to happen.

>> Yes. So this is one of the one of the early MK Ultra sub projects pretty soon after the Frank Olsson incident is when Gotautle formulates this new sub project. He puts in charge of it a man named George White and it's George White who actually gives it the name Operation Midnight Climax. That doesn't come from Gotautle. Um, but George White is a Bureau of Narcotics officer. He had worked in the OSS during World War II for Stanley Levelvel as part of the OSS. Remember I I mentioned that Levelville was giving people THC acetate to try to determine whether it's a truth drug. The way he would do that is he would have George White go places. And since George White with was working at the narcotics office, he had many criminal contacts and George White would dose his criminal contacts with THC for Stanley Level to determine whether it can get them to talk about illegal things that they've done. And so as Sydney Gotautle is going through the old OSS files, he sees this name, George White, and he determines, I want him to do that same thing for me, except instead

Of THC, I want to use LSD. So Gotautle hires George White to work on an MK Ultra sub project, which White names Operation Midnight Climax. And as part of this sub project, initially it's in New York, and so White would inject some LSD through the cork of a wine bottle and pass it to people he knows and sees how their reaction is. But eventually it's determined that this is this is very risky because White could be found out, especially in New York. And so he's transferred to San Francisco where things are a little bit looser. And instead of dosing people himself with this, he hires prostitutes to dose their clients with LSD. Meanwhile, White is watching this happen through a one-way mirror. And we have the we have the inventory for the the the San Francisco San Francisco safe house that White creates. And so we can see the different items that he's bought for this. And we can tell from the in inventory that as he's watching this unfold through this oneway mirror, he sits on a portable toilet that he bought. He's drinking liquor that he bought with CIA funds. He has recording equipment, audio, and visual that are pointing out there where he's recording all this happening. So that that's kind of the the summary of Operation Midnight Climax and the CD activities that George White was up to there.

And and these are just um kind of rand these are random people who um the the prostitutes are are with these these are random people. Um however sometimes they're targeted in a way. So the CIA was especially interesting interested in Chinese psychology. um you know if Chinese China is this communist country and it's you know the idea is that these Chinese communists have been brainwashed into doing certain things why is it that they're susceptible to this brainwashing you know so the CIA wants to determine Chinese psychology especially so these prostitutes are um told you know to focus on Chinese clients and so that's a lot of the people who are coming into these safe uh safe houses >> and so they they get um uh you know accidentally not accidentally intentionally excuse me they get intentionally dosed um by these prostitutes with with LSD.

And what is what what is the CIA doing with this information? >> Well, the idea is that the CIA, someone like Sydney Gotautle is trying to determine what the effects of LSD are in terms of can it get someone to talk? Is it a truth drug? So, uh George White is recording this stuff. He's writing reports. He's sending those reports back to Sydney Gotautle. And you know, Godly is just trying to figure out, is this the truth that we had hoped for? It turns out not really. So, you know, a lot of these CIA MK Ultra sub projects came to nothing. It was we wasted all this money. We abused all these people. We created all these victims. We caused all of this harm. And what did we get out of it? Not much. Not Not much at all. In fact, there are a few things that the CIA learned of what you couldn't do. So, this is how Sydney got tries to turn it into a positive in the depositions when asked, "What did you find? like what was all this for? He says we found we discovered a lot of things that you couldn't do. So for example, we knew that you couldn't control someone like a marionette with these drugs. So it's like well you know did you really find anything of you know you determined what not to do but not what you could do in order to control someone. So not very helpful. Um but that was the goal at least.

Um there are a few other sub projects that were more successful than the drug experiments especially but none of them were especially implemented in the field. So you know I can go into some detail in a couple >> I was about to I was about to ask actually please do. >> Yeah. One one of them one of the more you know just insane sub projects that I talk about in this book that I found in several of these documents that have been released is the fact that one of the sub sub projects was trying to create remote control animals basically by implanting electrodes into their brains and then using those electrodes to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain. So the idea was that say you do this to a dog, you implant electrode an electrode into the brain of a dog, then you would try to get the dog to walk uh a predetermined way on a predetermined path. And so if the dog started moving in the desired direction, you would you would stimulate the electrode. And so you'd stimulate that pleasure center of the brain and that through positive reinforcement, they would continue that action. Whenever they moved in the opposite direction that you wanted them to, you would stop stimulating that pleasure center of their brain and they would stop and start searching, you know, for the direction to walk in with that would stimulate it again. And so by doing that, you actually could get a dog or different animals, rats to walk in pre-desired directions. You could steer them like a remote control. Um, this was a successful sub project. Several of these experiments happened and it actually worked. Um, and several documents that I found, it gets even crazier than that. It's not just steering animals, you know, via remote control. Some some of the documents indicate what is the purpose of this. Um, one of these documents says the idea is that eventually we want to attach what it says as payloads of interest, which is biological and chemical weapons referred to in another document. We want to attach payloads of interest to these guidance systems. It calls them u in order to conduct executive action type operations, which is a euphemism for assassinations. So the idea was to put some kind of biological or chemical agent onto one of these animals and then control them to walk in a certain way that it would get close to a person and possibly infect them with some kind of disease. At least that was the idea. So you know it was it was very wild. So the sub project itself was successful in the sense that you could get these animals to walk in pre-desired directions, but it wasn't successful in the sense that I have no reason to think this ever actually went into the field and was actually as part of an operation.

>> Yeah. Well, um, well, first for what you were just talking about, um, something that stuck out with me from your first book was the, uh, the bat bombs where Napal was attached to bats, and it's solving that problem of the bats just going in some direction that you can't get, >> right? Um, you brought up something that I thought was very fascinating is the the involvement of so I think you just yeah I think you just mentioned the Eisenhower administration but the involvement of the executive and um also just like kind of the code names for you know assassinations um or it's either elimination or it's um you know some some other kind of code name. Um, I'm actually thinking of a a part in the book where the um uh president I think the president of the Congo um is Eisenhower basically says let's kill this guy. Um and I believe Sydney Gotautle is actually um consulted to figure out how that is going to take place. Um, this actually is a little bit beyond MK Ultra, but talk about um Sydney Gotautle's involvement or just um maybe the CIA's involvement in general with these types of esoteric weapons in trying to assassinate political opponents.

>> Yes. So, that person in particular, Patrice Leamumba, was the prime minister of the Congo. And yeah, Eisenhower gives this order basically to assassinate him. And so the order goes from Eisenhower to kind of Allan Doulles to Richard Bissell who's the head of the division that Gotautle is in and down to Sydney Gotautle. And it's basically try to find a way to kill this guy that won't implicate us because assassinating someone, killing someone isn't that difficult. You can just drop a bomb on their head, but everyone's going to know that you did it. So the hard part of assassination is to have plausible deniability. How can we make it seem as if this person died maybe of natural causes that won't implicate us? So that's the idea with this one attempt in particular. Sydney Gotautle knows that anthrax is a disease that is endemic in the Congo. And so if if Patrice Leumba is dosed with anthrax then it might possibly be seen as having been natural. And so Gotautly procures some anthrax from Fort Dedricch and he takes it to the Congo himself and he gives it to the station chief there. Um, and the idea is that we're going to slip this maybe in his toothpaste and then maybe we'll have someone uh try to figure out a way that we can get this toothpaste into to Patrice Lumumba's bathroom. He'll brush his teeth, he'll get infected with anthrax and he'll die. That never ends up happening. There are several other people within the CIA who are also plotting the assassination of Leumba. You know, one is trying to procure rifles that they can use to just shoot him or, you know, something else. So there are a lot of potential, you know, CIA assassinations that Sydney Gotautle is involved in. That's probably the one of the most well-known ones is of Patrice Lumumba. And I should mention that when Sydney Gotautle is confronted with this plot in particular during these depositions that I found, this is probably the most dramatic part of the entire story. This is I, you know, I can't believe that I found some of the dialogue that happens when he's confronted about trying to kill Patrice Lumumba, you know, because well, I'll just say he is confronted with a question and he says something that he was supposed to keep secret. So, and as soon as he says it, his lawyer stops the deposition and says, "Objection, objection, stop, stop, stop." And he has to take him outside and they talk and come back and it is so dramatic like that what's going on in these depositions. And so if anyone's just interested in drama itself, you know, the story itself is dramatic, but just the interpersonal relationships between these people and how these depositions are infused with so much of this drama. This is a new part of this MK Ultra story that is especially um I don't know if exciting is the right word, but very dramatic and I think makes for good reading, but it involves this assassination attempt. Sydney Gotib is involved in several other attempts, most notably on Fidel Castro. Um, if anyone is familiar with like CIA assassination attempts, you know, the first thing that people always say is all the different wacky ways that the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro. Whether it was lacing his diving suit with some form of a fungus that would kill him eventually or Fidel Castro was a scuba diver or a diver. And so one idea was, what if we put some explosives into a shell and put that shell, make it a really beautiful shell, put it on the ocean floor, and then when he dives in this location that he always dives in, Fidel Castro is going to see the shell, he's going to want to pick it up, and as soon as he picks it up, that's going to trigger the detonation mechanism. It'll explode and kill him under the water. So there's all kinds of potential attempts on uh Fidel Castro. None of them come fruition, but Sydney got involved in several of those in addition to on Patrice Leumba and some other people as well.

>> Yeah. Well, um before I we we kind of move on um to the uh the aftermath um of all this in the 1970s when all this gets exposed um for for MK Ultra. Um talk a little bit about what I I and what kicks all this off. The reason why he's giving the depositions as you noted is um he's being sued by prisoners who feel like they were experimented on without their permission. um to talk about some of these what I would consider more um not more egregious but these really just like kind of awful instances of either people who've got like a mental health condition and they go to see a doctor who just so happens to be funded by the CIA project and they start getting electroshock or these prisoners who didn't give consent to be experimented on and how that impacted their lives. um talk about like you can you can talk about those two specifically, but I'm I'm curious if you can just give us like your worst of the worst like um what like some of the worst excesses of the MK project, MK Ultra project were.

>> Yeah, I I think one of the scarier ones that you allude to there is you and Cameron in Montreal because again you Cameron who I mentioned earlier, he is a towering figure in the world of psychi psychiatry and so people would commit themelves to his care thinking that they were getting tried and getting tried and trueue treatments um because he was such a well-known and wellrespected figure. Um, it turns out he had kind of this not a necessarily a messiah complex, but he thought he was destined for the Nobel Prize. He really had a big head and he just needed I mean his one problem was that he didn't have anything to, you know, earn the Nobel Prize. He needed to find a cure for mental illness. That was his like life's goal is to find a way to cure mental illness. And the way that he thought this could happen is if you break someone down to their blank slate, you know, make them forget all their past behaviors and then you could give them new behaviors that they could uh build up in its place. So he was a behaviorist. He thought that all behavior came from the environment from nurture, not nature. And so he figured that the way to cure mental illness, mental illness must be the result of a bad environment reinforcing bad behaviors. And so if you want to cure it, you have to get rid of those bad behaviors and reinforce better behaviors in their place. So the the concept now was how do you reduce someone back to a blank slate in order to build up better behaviors in place of the bad ones that you've just gotten rid of? His idea was that you have to induce stress. If you induce enough stress in them, maybe they'll forget their bad behaviors and then you can reinforce them with new and better behaviors in their place. So how do we induce some stress in someone to make them them forget these bad behaviors? One idea that he has is um psychic driving. This is what he thought was kind of his greatest breakthrough. Psychic driving was a process whereby he would play auditory messages over and over, repeated messages thousands and thousands of times a day for days and days on end that he would make his patients listen to. These were negative messages and many times he would have the families of the patients come in and record negative messages that would then play in these patients ears. Again, the idea being that we're going to break them down mentally so that we can build them back up later. And so, Euan Cameron was doing this before MK Ultra or the CIA is interested in his work. He's doing this on his own because he thinks it's potentially the cure for mental illness. So, he's already experimenting with his patients. And then Sydney God reads a an article that you and Cameron wrote and submitted to a psychiatric journal. And Sydney Gotley becomes interested in psychic driving especially because it seems like, you know, potentially a way to induce amnesia. If he's making these patients forget their past behaviors, can we make someone forget something? So that's obviously something the CIA might be interested in. From that point, Sydney got starts funding you and Cameron to do the experiments he was largely already doing. But in addition to psychic driving, those include chemical comas. It includes sensory deprivation, so putting goggles on someone and muffs over their ears and cardboard tubes over their hands and making them lay in bed for weeks on end. Um, it also involved electric shocks, so shocking these people over and over in order to try to make them forget, you know, their past bad behaviors. These are the kinds of things that you and Cameron is doing. I think his experiments are especially egregious though again because these patients have committed themselves to his care thinking that these are tried and trueue treatments that he's going to be using to make them better. In fact, in many cases it does the exact opposite. It makes them worse off than they've ever been before. There are a few stories in the book about this. One is of a twin, an identical twin. one of the identical twins gets committed to the Allen Memorial Institute where you and Cameron is at and receives these treatments, supposed treatments. When she's left out, when she's let out, she goes and lives with her identical twin sister for a while, but she's basically um incontinent. She can't control how she goes to the bathroom. She doesn't remember who she is hardly. She ends up scavenging for food outside of dumpsters. And it's such a stark portrait between these two identical twins. One who's got this supposed treatment and the other who didn't. The one who got it is just a complete mess and abused mentally and the other one has a perfectly normal family life with a husband and children and everything. So it's it's such a sad situation. But that's the an example of the kind of sub project that um Sydney Gotautle is funding. And I should mention with you and Cameron real quick. You know, I said he was doing these experiments before the CIA started funding him. And that's how it is for a lot of these sub projects. A lot of people hear MK Ultra and they think that, oh, the CIA instigated all these terrible things. The CIA didn't instigate necessarily all these things, but it aided and emedded the people who did instigate them. So, a lot of these researchers had been conducting these drug experiments or psychiatric experiments before the CIA was funding them, and the CIA starts funding them so that they continue to do the thing that they were already doing. So, that's a maybe an important distinction for people to keep in mind. the the exception to that being Operation Midnight Climax with George White. That was instigated by the CIA to hire these prostitutes and do all that, but a lot of these sub projects were independent researchers already doing this kind of thing who the CIA then aid in the vets in abusing these people.

>> Yeah. And it's not like there's you know these aren't like researchers in in some in the basement of the CIA like um you know getting like you said there are prisons, hospitals, universities everywhere. Yeah. Um well, let's talk about um the end of MK Ultra. Uh so I think 19 1950 to like 1963, would you say is the time?

>> 53 to 63 is is kind of the main time frame. After 60 Well, in 1963, there's an inspector general report. The CIA inspector general does an investigation of MK Ultra and issues a report condemning it as illegal and unethical. After that, MK Ultra kind kind of dwindled down. It continued on for several more years in the form of a sub of a project named MK search, but for the most part, most of the sub projects the funding was cut off except for a few of them that continued into the late60s.

>> And and when when were people like this was when did people decide collectively this was bad that we did this, we should not have done this. Um who who um uh who was the whistleblower? What was the reaction? um what happened uh tell that story.

>> Yeah. Well, I think among certainly Sydney Godley, but also several other people who were involved in this by the end of MK Ultra knowing that it didn't produce many results, they were ashamed of what they had done, especially Godley. Um one, you know, kind of proof of this is that in 1973, whenever he's retiring from the CIA, he destroys many of the MK Ultra files that he has so that no one would be able to see them because he was embarrassed. In fact, in these depositions, he specifically says, "I was embarrassed by what we did." Um, so he destroys those. In late 1974, a someone within the CIA leaks a group of documents to an investigative journalist named Seymour Hirs, who then publishes on the front page of the New York Times several past abuses of the intelligence community. not MK Ultra yet, but you know, so on the front page of the New York Times, it's revealed that the CIA had infiltrated some anti-war protesters and was spying on them. Um, so that leads to several congressional investigations of the intelligence community. And within those investigations, it's revealed that, oh, not only was the CIA doing that, they were also involved in these drug experiments in the past. That's eventually how MK Ultra becomes public. Um, after several of these, there's one executive investigation, the Rockefeller Commission, and then the Church Committee and the H and the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House, and then there are several independent hearings from different congressional subcommittees that specifically focus on MK Ultra. So, in 1975 really is when it's revealed to the public.

>> Yeah. I I believe a lot of this gets kicked off with a disgruntled employee from the what probably was a disgruntled employee from the CIA during the the Nixon administration. They decided they needed to reorganize. I think they fired like over a thousand people. And um somebody I think the the leadership at the CIA at the time decided they were going to compile this one document that had all the terrible things that the CIA had done um into one file. And of course, somebody gets fired, they leak that file, and now we know about all these, you know, terrible >> um things that happened. Uh yeah, I I'm I'm curious if you know it's living now in the world that we live in, we we tend to kind of associate the CIA with these like kind of weird projects or maybe they're assassination or coup attempts or like the darker side of things. Um but I don't, you know, part of me wonders if that was actually the case in like the 50s or the 60s. if maybe they were seen as like, you know, this very kind of patriotic um doing good things organization. In your uh opinion, you know, after all of these revelations come out, do you think this is a moment culturally where Americans decide uh something's not right here?

>> Yeah. The 70s especially, and this is one of the catalysts for that is the revelations about the intelligence community that comes out from these investigations. But that's not the only thing. You have um the Watergate scandal that's happening at the same time. You have this unpopular Vietnam War. So there are several um events that happen within government, those three especially that really make people turn a skeptical eye to government itself and think you're supposed to be the protector of our liberty liberties, but given that these things are now leaking and we're understanding what's been going on in the past, you seem to be the abuser of our liberties. And so there there's I think a collective shift in the way that people think about the CIA, especially in the 1970s when this is released, but about government in general that makes people a lot more skeptical. The fact that well now we have evidence that you have abused us in the past. I thought that was the opposite of what you're supposed to do. Aren't you supposed to protect our liberties? And so the 1977s I think are a really important time uh integral time for that shift in mindset among the public.

Now, has there ever been um an apology or any kind of reckoning um from the CIA for some of these projects?

>> Kind of. So, you know, Frank Olsen was the man who was uh killed after that uh LSD. He was dosed with LSD at Deep Creek in the 1970s. Once it became public that the CIA had been doing this kind of thing, it was quickly revealed that they were involved in his death, that he had received this LSD and gone out the window. And so in order to stave off any potential lawsuits from the family, the Gerald Ford administration invited uh Franklen's family, his wife and his children to come to the White House where he personally met with them and the government basically gave them $750,000 to not sue the government. And the CIA handed over documents that it had from the Frank Olsson incident. Um, and so they they took the money and agreed not to sue the government. So they got that and then there were several lawsuits against the CIA and the government by prisoners who were involved in these prison experiments and uh Euan Cameron's patients who were involved in all kinds of his experiments and so those lawsuits the prison lawsuit was dismissed actually it didn't settle because uh of the statute of limitations but the uh the victims of you and Cameron that lawsuit went forward enough to where the CIA decided to settle out of court for $750,000.

>> Yeah. And I think something actually that's interesting in doing some preparation for this interview, um I I just was googling some of the terms from your book. You can find on the CIA's website, they they publish information about uh these projects. They've got they publish information about um MK Ultra, about Operation Midnight Climax. You can find out a lot of information about these projects from the CIA's website itself. Uh which which I think is very interesting. But obviously, you know, go ahead.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say there are a lot of um streams of sources that are useful, you know. So, for example, um there are documents from the CIA which are of course useful because it's better to have some documents than no documents. However, it's not like you want to strictly just rely on the documents that you get the CIA for understanding what happened with it with this because for one reason because Sydney got destroyed many of the documents. So, it's like, well, I know the CIA doesn't have all the documents because many of them were destroyed. Um, but that's an important point because despite the fact that Sydney got destroyed a lot of these documents, we still can know about MK Ultra. We can know a lot about what it was. Um, so for example, we have the declassified documents that one that the ones that weren't incinerated, but also we have government reports, we have these congressional investigations, we have memoirs of the people people who were involved in this. We have institutional records from the hospitals and prisons that were subcontracted to as part of these sub projects. We have these thousands of pages of depositions that I found. So through all these sources, we can know a lot about MK Ultra despite the fact that many of these documents were destroyed. And the fact that these documents were destroyed leads a lot of people to conjecture form speculations about MK Ultra. Well, we can't know exactly what it was because we'll never have those documents. Therefore, maybe it was this crazy thing. But I actually think we can know a lot about MK Ultra. We can know enough about it to know what it wasn't, you know? So, we know what it was doing in general. It was using these drugs and different psychiatric techniques and all kinds of stuff. We know in fact what 146 of the 149 sub projects were. You know, we have the the explanations of basically all of them. Um so we can know that it wasn't some of the more crazy things that people think or claim that it was. Um so I I think that is an important point to make because a lot of times there are conspiracy theories that come out of MK Ultra, but if you actually understand the documentation that we have, we know a lot about MK Ultra. We can't know everything. That is absolutely true. We can't know everything, but we we can have a good enough and broad enough picture that we can know enough to know what it wasn't.

>> Yeah. Well, um, kind of lastly here, and uh thanks for your your excellent answers to my questions. Um and I could keep going for a long time, but uh we won't do that. Um what do you think today? What's the um why why is this story important today? You what what lessons do we have to learn? you know, what do you think from your research is important for people to know about this book?

>> Yeah, a couple things. I I tried to draw out some some lessons really in the last few chapters. One of the chapters is about um oversight. So, why is it that MK Ultra was allowed to continue within the CIA even after Frank Olsen dies, even after it's agreed by the CIA inspector general that it's illegal and unethical. How does it still continue despite all that? There are a few reasons. And one is the lack of internal oversight. So the CIA inspector general might write this report, but nobody listens to him. He's basically impotent. He can't do anything. And if he tries to, he's going to get fired, at least at that time. Um, so that's not a good internal check. Instead, what's necessary is external checks by like Congress. You need congressional committees or someone who's required to to look into these things and to do something about it if they do find anything illegal or unethical. Um, you know, I I I talk in one of the chapters of the book about different external checks that are necessary in order to kind of keep the intelligence community in check. Um, so that's that's one of the lessons of the book is what kind of external checks can can help with that and just the fact that these external checks are absolutely necessary and needed. And really another lesson is understanding the origin of many conspiracy theories that stem from MK Ultra and why many of them are just completely not true. So what the thing that I tried to do in this last chapter is really to dispel a lot of the conspiracy theories that stem from this. And again, one of the reasons why they're they proliferate so much is because Sydney got destroyed many of the documents that allows anyone to paint MK Ultra as their anything they want to. It can be their wildest imagination because hey, you don't have the documents to check what I'm actually saying. Um but I I try to explain especially in that last chapter how we can actually know that a lot of what these conspiracy theorists say is absolutely not true you know. Um so for example there's this uh project that's supposedly an MK Ultra sub project that we don't have any reference to it before 1993. Um the first reference that we have to it comes in a journal that's known for pedalling conspiracy theories. One of the editors of the journal claims to be a nine- foot tall alien. And the other editor of the journal claims to receive messages from a god named Aten that sits on a council of gods that governs the universe and is subservient to an allcreator god that created the multiverse. So I mean maybe that doesn't discredit this guy in particular, but to me it seems like I'm not going to place much much credit and this is our source. This is like the first reference to this that I can find comes from this journal. I've never seen anything before that. So to me it seems a little suspect. There's no corroborating documents for any of this stuff. In fact, a lot of the people who claim to to be victims of this supposed subro um are part of kind of the recovered memory movement that was big in the 1980s with the satanic panic saying that if we hypnotize these people, we can recover memories that they supposedly lost, which has been, you know, debunked the fact that you can recover these memories. In many cases, what happens is that you induce false memories in people, which is I think a lot of what's happening here. So um I try to you know in the last chapter have some lesson about what we can and can't know about MK Ultra and the fact that it's not a lot of the conspiracy theories that people think it is.

>> Yeah. Well um or maybe it's a a conspiracy where you have written about it to cover that up. John, do you ever think of that?

>> Yeah, it could. Well, here the thing about MK Ultra, one of the reasons why it's such a powerful tool for the conspiracy theorist is because it is a true conspiracy. Sydney Gotley conspired to do these unethical things to people and it was true. It actually happened. So it's like if you ever want proof that conspiracy theories are true, this is it. Because that is an absolutely true conspiracy. But that doesn't mean that everything that people say about MK Ultra itself is also true. Even despite the fact that it is a true conspiracy.

>> Well, uh John, we will leave it at that. Um but thank you so much for uh for coming on the show and talking about the book. What are uh what are you working on right now?

>> I think my next project is going to be something different from my last two. I've been, you know, I've been writing about the intelligence community for a long time now. I did my dissertation on it, then my first book, then this book. I'm ready for a change of pace. My, you know, my my main interest really, I mean, I'm a historian of science and so I I'd like to get back to the history of science and do something more related to that. So, I think my next project is going to be more history of science related.

>> Okay. Well, when you uh if you settle on a project that is in some shape related to a war, I hope you will come back on the Warbooks podcast to talk about it.

>> Thank you. Yeah, and thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

>> Absolutely. Um well, uh John Lyall, Project Mind Control, Sydney Gotautle, The CIA, and the Tragedy of MK Ultra. Um go out and buy a copy, check it out from your library. Um read this really fascinating book. And John, thanks so much for your time today.

>> Thank you. All right, take care.