Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. Every week,
Speaker 1: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host
Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good.
Speaker 2: Evening the inside story of the CIA's secret mind control
Speaker 2: project MK Ultra, using never before seen testimony from the
Speaker 2: perpetrators themselves. Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's most cunning chemist.
Speaker 2: As head of the infamous mk Ultra project, he oversaw
Speaker 2: an assortment of dangerous, even deadly experiments, among them dosing
Speaker 2: unwitting strangers with mind bending drugs, torturing mental patients through
Speaker 2: sensory deprivation, and steering the movements of animals via electrodes
Speaker 2: implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods
Speaker 2: of mind control that could turn someone into a real
Speaker 2: life Manchurian candidate. In conjunction with MK Ultra, Gottlieb also
Speaker 2: plotted the assassination of foreign leaders and created spy gear
Speaker 2: for undercover agents. The details of his career, however, have
Speaker 2: long been shrouded in mystery. Upon retiring from the CIA
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy three, he tossed his files into an incinerator.
Speaker 2: As a result, much of what happened under mk Ultra
Speaker 2: was thought to be lost. Until now. Historian John Lyle
Speaker 2: has uncovered dozens of depositions containing new information about MK Ultra,
Speaker 2: straight from the mouths of its perpetrators. For the first time,
Speaker 2: Gottlieb and his underlings divulge what they did, why they
Speaker 2: did it, how they got away with it, and much more. Additionally,
Speaker 2: Lyle highlights the dramatic story of mk Ultra's victims, from
Speaker 2: their terrible treatment to their dogged pursuit of justice. The
Speaker 2: consequences of mk Ultra still reverberate throughout American society. Project
Speaker 2: Mind Control is the definitive account of this most disturbing
Speaker 2: of chapters in CIA history. The book that we're featuring
Speaker 2: this evening is Project mind Control Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA
Speaker 2: and the Tragedy of mk Ultra, with my special guest,
Speaker 2: historian and law author John Lyle. Welcome to the program,
Speaker 2: and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 3: John Lyle, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: And congratulations on this extraordinary book project mind Control.
Speaker 3: Yes, thanks, I'm I'm glad it's finally out. I've been
Speaker 3: working on this for a long time, and I think
Speaker 3: it's an exciting story. I think people are really going
Speaker 3: to enjoy, well enjoy in some parts, but really learn
Speaker 3: a lot about what was going on in the CIA
Speaker 3: during these MK Ultra years in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
Speaker 2: Tell us, so you say this project is a few
Speaker 2: years in the making, tell us what brought you to
Speaker 2: this project, why you felt this and compelled to write
Speaker 2: this story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you. I've long been interested in scientists who
Speaker 3: have connections to the intelligence community. When I was doing
Speaker 3: my PhD, I wrote my dissertation on that kind of
Speaker 3: subject a group called the Science Attaches, but they had
Speaker 3: connections to the CIA, and so I've kind of known
Speaker 3: about scientists who have worked with the CIA, various of
Speaker 3: them throughout the years, and this is one of the
Speaker 3: more interesting stories. I would say, this Mkultra program, this
Speaker 3: attempt to create some kind of mind control, either drug
Speaker 3: or psychological technique, and so that was naturally kind of
Speaker 3: interesting to me. My first book was on the precursor
Speaker 3: to the CIA, which is the OSS, the Office of
Speaker 3: Strategic Services, that was during World War Two. And I
Speaker 3: wrote that first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, about a
Speaker 3: group of scientists who created the secret weapons documents disguises
Speaker 3: for agents who are going abroad undercover. And so that
Speaker 3: kind of naturally led me into this topic about the
Speaker 3: CIA because several of the people who were involved in
Speaker 3: that program during World War Two they also have connections
Speaker 3: to this mk Ultra project. So, for example, one of
Speaker 3: the people who is hired by the OSS to do
Speaker 3: some truth drug experiments during World War two is a
Speaker 3: man named George White, who is a Bureau of a
Speaker 3: narcotics agent, and he was hired during World War two
Speaker 3: mainly to dose people with THHC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana,
Speaker 3: and see how they reacted, see if it could get
Speaker 3: them to tell the truth, if they were holding a secret,
Speaker 3: something like that. And so when mk ultra, this mind
Speaker 3: control program for the CIA, when he got started in
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty three, the head of it was a man
Speaker 3: named Sidney Gottlieb, and Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist and
Speaker 3: he didn't really know how to start with mind control.
Speaker 3: He didn't know what kind of experiments to run, who
Speaker 3: to fund in order to determine whether truth drugs are possible.
Speaker 3: And so he went into the files of the OSS
Speaker 3: and as he was rummaging around those files, he happened
Speaker 3: to find some files that listed this name on it,
Speaker 3: George White, and he was doing these truth drug experiments
Speaker 3: and that was exactly the kind of thing that Sidney
Speaker 3: Gottlieb was interested in. And so Sidney Gottlieb hired him
Speaker 3: that same guy, And so there was a natural kind
Speaker 3: of link between my first book and this next subject.
Speaker 3: And so that's what led me to it.
Speaker 2: You take us to in or prologue to Boston September
Speaker 2: twenty fifth and nineteen eighty eight, a nineteen eighty pardon me,
Speaker 2: and a depositions, and there was a sonographer, And so
Speaker 2: from the perspective of the stenographer, she writes her account
Speaker 2: of what happened September twenty fifth, nineteen eighty regarding Sidney
Speaker 2: Gottlieb and an attorney named Joseph Raw and another attorney,
Speaker 2: his partner, James Turner. Just tell us about this prologue
Speaker 2: and this deposition that was underway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm really glad you asked about that, because that's
Speaker 3: one of the main draws of this book is in
Speaker 3: the nineteen eighties, this is twenty years after m k
Speaker 3: Ultra began. You know, m k Altri's over by this point,
Speaker 3: but several victims of this m k Ultra program who
Speaker 3: were subjects of experiments that involved either electric shocks to
Speaker 3: their brains or chemical comas, dosing them with LSD, all
Speaker 3: kinds of stuff. Several of these victims sued the CIA
Speaker 3: in the nineteen eighties and they're attorneys was were Joseph
Speaker 3: Raw and James Turner. And as part of this lawsuit,
Speaker 3: these attorneys took the depositions of several people who were
Speaker 3: involved in mk Ultra, including Sidney Gottlieb, the head of Mkultra.
Speaker 3: And so eventually this lawsuit was settled out of court,
Speaker 3: but these depositions had still been taken, and they were
Speaker 3: in the papers of Joseph Row, this lawyer, and when
Speaker 3: he died, those were donated to the Library of Congress,
Speaker 3: and that's where I found them. So I have these
Speaker 3: verbatim transcripts of these attorneys asking not only the perpetrators
Speaker 3: in k Ultra questions, but the victims of mk ultra questions,
Speaker 3: and so I have this great dialogue that I can
Speaker 3: use in the book to get both perspectives of the
Speaker 3: people who were doing it and the people who had
Speaker 3: this stuff done to them. And the reason why I
Speaker 3: wanted to start the book with this prologue taking the
Speaker 3: perspective of this court reporter who was there transcribing the
Speaker 3: deposition as it was happening, is because kind of subconsciously
Speaker 3: I wanted the reader to think throughout the book that
Speaker 3: I want them to be the fly on the wall.
Speaker 3: I want them to be like the court reporter who
Speaker 3: is in the room listening to these depositions happening. And
Speaker 3: so that was what I was trying to get across
Speaker 3: with that prologue, is to let the reader know that
Speaker 3: we have this great dialogue, this verbatim transcript of what
Speaker 3: these people are saying, and you're going to be the
Speaker 3: fly on the wall listening to how they talk about
Speaker 3: what they did, the experiments that they performed or hired
Speaker 3: people to do, and how they rationalize that to themselves,
Speaker 3: how they feel about it twenty years later, whether they
Speaker 3: have regrets. Many of them did, especially Sidney Gottlieb, and
Speaker 3: also from the victim's perspective, what did they go through?
Speaker 3: So that those are the depositions that I found for
Speaker 3: this book that make it a little bit more unique.
Speaker 3: There are a couple of books about mk Ultra, but
Speaker 3: this one has that great verbatim transcript that allows us
Speaker 3: to get inside the heads of the characters who are
Speaker 3: actually in the story, which I'm really glad you picked
Speaker 3: up on, because that's part of what makes the book,
Speaker 3: I think, exciting to read.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you take us to what you call the outsider
Speaker 2: and the origins of Sidney Gottlieb, and so you take
Speaker 2: us to his Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents. He was born
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighteen. Tell us a little bit about the outsider.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that title of the chapter giving Gotleib's background is
Speaker 3: the outsider, because that's how I see him, and I
Speaker 3: think that's how he saw himself. He was born with
Speaker 3: club feet. He walked with a limp because he had
Speaker 3: surgery took correct it, but it didn't quite work exactly
Speaker 3: as it needed to, so he constantly walked with a limp.
Speaker 3: He talked with a stutter from a young age. He
Speaker 3: was always picked on as a child. He was seen
Speaker 3: as by others the outsider, and he kind of internalized
Speaker 3: that he was brilliant.
Speaker 1: Though.
Speaker 3: He was a brilliant scientist, and he eventually got his
Speaker 3: PhD in bio organic chemistry from cal Tech, one of
Speaker 3: the nation's premier institutions. So he was a brilliant scientist.
Speaker 3: And during World War One or during World War Two,
Speaker 3: right as he got his PhD, he decided he wanted
Speaker 3: to give back to the country that had provided a
Speaker 3: home for his immigrant parents, and so he wanted to
Speaker 3: enlist in the army and fight in the war. But
Speaker 3: he was denied an enlistment because of his physical ailments,
Speaker 3: especially his club feet, and so afterwards he again this
Speaker 3: emphasized to him that he was an outsider. He wasn't
Speaker 3: someone who could enlist an army and serve his country.
Speaker 3: So we always felt this debt that he owed to
Speaker 3: his country. And so in the beginning of the Cold War,
Speaker 3: he decided that he was going to join some government organization.
Speaker 3: He didn't know quite which at that moment, but some
Speaker 3: organization that would allow him to pay back this debt
Speaker 3: that he felt that he owed. And it just so
Speaker 3: happened that at the moment the CIA was looking for
Speaker 3: brilliant scientists, chemists like himself that might help win the
Speaker 3: Cold War. To give a little bit more context, this
Speaker 3: is right after World War two and World War two
Speaker 3: had been it's sometimes called like the physicists War. If
Speaker 3: World War one might have been the chemist's war with
Speaker 3: the chemical weapons, world War two might have been the
Speaker 3: physicist's war with nuclear weapons. And so science was now
Speaker 3: seen as integral to national security. The fact that some
Speaker 3: of the most important weapons of the war were built
Speaker 3: by scientists, the atomic bombs, or you had proximity fusions
Speaker 3: to detect things, or you had radar to detect ships
Speaker 3: and planes. So the fact that science was now integral
Speaker 3: to national security indicated the CIA that they needed to
Speaker 3: hire scientists to determine what our adversaries were doing, what
Speaker 3: were the Soviets doing that we can defend against and
Speaker 3: maybe replicate ourselves. And so Sidney Gottlieb was hired by
Speaker 3: the CIA to be this kind of chemist. One of
Speaker 3: the first things that he did there was to work
Speaker 3: with what was what's called the Clandestine Service, the Office
Speaker 3: at the time it was called the Office of Policy Coordination.
Speaker 3: This is the branch of the CIA that deals with
Speaker 3: covert operations. And his job at least in the beginning,
Speaker 3: was to develop methods of secret writing. So how could
Speaker 3: you write something that someone couldn't detect. Maybe it would disappear,
Speaker 3: maybe you would have to add some reagent to it
Speaker 3: to make it appear on a piece of paper or
Speaker 3: something like that. And he quickly kind of moved up
Speaker 3: the ladder within the CIA and eventually was given head
Speaker 3: of this Mkaltra program. The reason being that the CIA
Speaker 3: wanted to determine whether it's possible to manipulate people because
Speaker 3: they're especially afraid that this is what's happening in the
Speaker 3: Soviet Union and they want to be able to defend
Speaker 3: against it. But also if it is possible, maybe we
Speaker 3: can use it to our advantage. So that's how Sidney
Speaker 3: Gottlieb ends up at the CIA and how he comes
Speaker 3: to head this mk Ultra program.
Speaker 2: What did they the CIA believe and many Americans and
Speaker 2: Sidney Gottlieb, what did he believe about the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: specifically in terms of getting information from unwitting prisoners.
Speaker 3: Yes, there are a few incidents that lead Gottlieb in,
Speaker 3: like the head of the CIA, Alan Dulles, and another
Speaker 3: higher up in the CIA who is a champion of
Speaker 3: mk Ultra, a guy named Richard Helms, to believe that
Speaker 3: the communist powers, either the Soviet Union, China North Korea
Speaker 3: at the moment, this is during the Korean War. There
Speaker 3: are several incidents that lead them to believe that maybe
Speaker 3: these communist powers possess methods of mind control. One of
Speaker 3: the rationales for that is just by thinking Ivan Pavlov,
Speaker 3: you know, the famous physiologist who did the behavioral conditioning
Speaker 3: experiments on dogs where you would ring a bell and
Speaker 3: the dog would salivate. That kind of behavioral conditioning that
Speaker 3: was done in the eighteen nineties. And so Sidney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: and others are thinking, well, if the Soviets or if
Speaker 3: the Russians were doing that in the eighteen nineties, then
Speaker 3: surely they've since expanded that program. Surely they've since expanded
Speaker 3: behavioral conditioning to apply to humans as well. And if
Speaker 3: they could make a dog salivate, maybe they can now
Speaker 3: make a human do who knows what. So that's one
Speaker 3: of the reasons that the CIA thinks that maybe these
Speaker 3: communist powers have some kinds of methods of manipulation or
Speaker 3: mind control in some way. Another incident is the Moscow
Speaker 3: show trials where Stalin's political enemies are kind of being
Speaker 3: purged from power and they're accused of doing crimes that
Speaker 3: they didn't commit. These political enemies, Stalin accuses them of
Speaker 3: trying to assassinate him in all kinds of things that
Speaker 3: they didn't do. And so the curious thing is that
Speaker 3: these prisoners start confessing to these false crimes. They start
Speaker 3: saying that, yes, we did that, we're guilty. You need
Speaker 3: to shoot us where you know, you need to lock
Speaker 3: us up in prison. Why would they confess to false
Speaker 3: crimes that they didn't do. One explanation, of course, is
Speaker 3: that within the CIA, this explanation develops that maybe they've
Speaker 3: been manipulated in some way. Maybe they've been dosed with
Speaker 3: some kind of drugs to make them behave in this
Speaker 3: confusing way. Maybe they've been hypnotized in a certain way.
Speaker 3: There are several incidents like that. Another one, the most
Speaker 3: famous one that leads to mk Ultra is the downing
Speaker 3: of several American pilots in the Korean War who get
Speaker 3: shot down over Korea and are captured as prisoners of war.
Speaker 3: And while they are held captive, they start confessing to
Speaker 3: crimes like dropping biological agents over Korea in order to
Speaker 3: spread diseases among the Korean people like anthrax or typhus,
Speaker 3: or cholera or bubonic plague. So they start confessing to
Speaker 3: these false crimes that yeah, we drop this stuff, you know,
Speaker 3: over these Korean people to dose them with these with
Speaker 3: these germs so that it would spread and kill all
Speaker 3: these people. This didn't happen, and many people within the
Speaker 3: CIA are wondering, why would they confess to these crimes?
Speaker 3: Is it because perhaps, like the like the prisoners in
Speaker 3: the Moscow show trials, they have been manipulated with some
Speaker 3: kind of communist mind control techniques, perhaps you know, through
Speaker 3: drugs or hypnosis or something else. It turns out that
Speaker 3: truth is not quite as sensational as that. The truth
Speaker 3: is that the communist powers have been using the methods
Speaker 3: of coercion that they had been using for a long time,
Speaker 3: like sleep deprivation and torture and food deprivation, you know,
Speaker 3: just these typical methods of coercion to get these people
Speaker 3: to talk. But there was still a lingering suspicion within
Speaker 3: the CIA that there might be something else, which is
Speaker 3: why they decided to develop their own mind control program.
Speaker 3: Mk Ultra. Now, in fact, before mk Ultra, there had
Speaker 3: been a couple similar programs within the CIA. Initially it
Speaker 3: was called Project Bluebird, and the idea was to develop
Speaker 3: some kind of truth drug. And the attempt to develop
Speaker 3: a truth drug has you know, gone on forever, I
Speaker 3: mean ever since. You know, plenty of the elder thousands
Speaker 3: of years ago said in wine lies the truth, the
Speaker 3: idea being that alcohol will make someone kind of spill
Speaker 3: their secrets. So there's been a long quest to develop
Speaker 3: truth drugs. And during World War Two, you know, I
Speaker 3: mentioned that there was a quest to develop by the
Speaker 3: OSS these truth drugs, whether it be THHC or something else.
Speaker 3: And in the CIA, that original Project Bluebird was to
Speaker 3: develop a truth drug. The saying was that they wanted
Speaker 3: to get prisoners to sing like a bird, which is
Speaker 3: why it was called Bluebird. That eventually morphed into another
Speaker 3: project called Artichoke, and Artichoke was interested in truth drugs
Speaker 3: as well, but also hypnotism and a few other things
Speaker 3: related to drugs. But eventually the main CIA mind control
Speaker 3: project that was set up in nineteen fifty three, expanding
Speaker 3: on those previous projects, was MK Ultra.
Speaker 2: Now you talk about that originally they were trying to
Speaker 2: use nerve agents to try to elicit some kind of response,
Speaker 2: but then they chose LSD. Tell us how they came
Speaker 2: to decide to use LSD and Sydney Gottlieb's earliest forays
Speaker 2: into LSD, what was their plan to do real world testing. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, LSD was first discovered in nineteen forty three by
Speaker 3: this Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company,
Speaker 3: and he didn't have much interest in the beginning. He
Speaker 3: didn't know what its potential powers were, so he shelved
Speaker 3: it for five years. Then in nineteen forty eight he
Speaker 3: had this nagging suspicion that maybe it had something else
Speaker 3: to offer, so he resynthesized LSD and when he did so,
Speaker 3: a tiny bit of LSD, just a small, small, little
Speaker 3: dose of it, contacted his skin and he started experiencing
Speaker 3: this strange phenomena. The room started spinning, he starts hallucinating,
Speaker 3: he can't see straight. So he thinks this is, you know,
Speaker 3: a very powerful drug. And what was especially interesting to
Speaker 3: him is that such a minute dose could have such
Speaker 3: profound psychological effects. LSD is extremely powerful, which is one
Speaker 3: of the main reasons why when the CIA learns about
Speaker 3: this drug, they're interested because such a minute dose, it
Speaker 3: can have such a powerful effect. It's so potent, so
Speaker 3: you could easily slip this to someone without them knowing it,
Speaker 3: and it could have really powerful hallucinogenic psychological effects. So
Speaker 3: that's one of the main reasons why the CIA is interested.
Speaker 3: The other main reason why is just because the effects
Speaker 3: that LSD actually produces, these hallucinogenic effects, it seems potentially
Speaker 3: to lower inhibitions, so maybe it can work as a
Speaker 3: truth drug. But also if you can make someone seem
Speaker 3: like they go crazy if they take LSD and don't
Speaker 3: know it, then they're going to be acting very oddly,
Speaker 3: then that might be useful in some kind of covert operation.
Speaker 3: For instance, say, if there is some foreign leader that
Speaker 3: we want to lose an upcoming election, what if we
Speaker 3: dose their water with LSD beforehand and they drink it
Speaker 3: before they give a important political speech, and then the
Speaker 3: hallucinogenic effects start happening while they're giving this speech and
Speaker 3: they seem to go crazy. Surely that's going to lead
Speaker 3: people to lose faith in them and they might lose
Speaker 3: the election. So there are some covert operation applications to
Speaker 3: LSD besides just potentially being some kind of truth drug.
Speaker 3: So that was one of the main reasons why the
Speaker 3: CIA is interested in it.
Speaker 2: That Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now,
Speaker 2: let's you take us to an incident, a deeply important
Speaker 2: incident at Deep Creek Lodge. Tell us the premise for
Speaker 2: this meeting and what happens in terms of involving LSD.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: This is the famous Frank Olsen incident, one of the
Speaker 3: most known, well known incidents of this kind of mk
Speaker 3: ultra story. Deep Creek was a lodge in Maryland where
Speaker 3: occasionally several scientists from the CIA and several scientists from
Speaker 3: Camp Diedrich would meet. Diedrich was it eventually became Fort
Speaker 3: Diedrich but it was the America's like biological warfare installation.
Speaker 3: This is where germs were mass produced for the potential
Speaker 3: of using them in biological weapons. And within Camp Didrich
Speaker 3: there was a division called the Special Operations Division composed
Speaker 3: of several scientists, and it was these scientists who would
Speaker 3: meet with CIA scientists at Camp Didrich to share the
Speaker 3: results of their experiments and let each other know what
Speaker 3: was going on to keep each other informed on the
Speaker 3: kinds of things that they were doing to help each
Speaker 3: other in their work. So these scientists from the CIA,
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottlieb among them. Another was Robert Lashbrook. They're mostly
Speaker 3: connected with mk ultra, and the scientist from Fort Diedrich
Speaker 3: among them is Frank Olsen. They would meet at Deep
Speaker 3: Creek to exchange their results. And during one of these meetings,
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottlieb and his underling Robert Lashbrook, another chemist who's
Speaker 3: working on mk ultra, they decide to secretly dose the
Speaker 3: scientists at Deep Creek with LSD to see how they
Speaker 3: react to it in their minds. In the mind of
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottlieb, I think that he was thinking of this
Speaker 3: almost as kind of a funny prank that he was
Speaker 3: going to do. I don't think he actually thought that
Speaker 3: it was going to have profound ramifications. He had done
Speaker 3: this before with people within the CIA, secretly dose them
Speaker 3: with LSD to see how they reacted. There were stories
Speaker 3: around the CIA saying that people would dose the coffee
Speaker 3: pot with LSD around the office. There was even a
Speaker 3: memo coming from the Office of Security within the CIA
Speaker 3: warning everyone not to dose the holiday punch bowl with
Speaker 3: LSD because then there's going to be some repercussion. So
Speaker 3: obviously this was the kind of rank that was carried
Speaker 3: out within the CIA among the chemists who were working
Speaker 3: on MK ultra, and they decided to bring that kind
Speaker 3: of mentality to this Deep Creek retreat, and so they
Speaker 3: poured some LSD into the liquor and started passing around
Speaker 3: shots of this cointro liquor in One of the people
Speaker 3: who took a shot was Frank Olsen, and for the
Speaker 3: most part, everyone who had this started hallucinating again. The
Speaker 3: walls started to spin. They eventually went to bed, though
Speaker 3: except for Frank Olsen, this really seemed to have a
Speaker 3: profound effect on his psychology. After the retreat, he returns
Speaker 3: home and his wife immediately notices that he's acting very strangely.
Speaker 3: He doesn't seem to be himself. Something seems to happen.
Speaker 3: He keeps rambling on about how he thinks he messed
Speaker 3: up the experiment and he wished that he would be
Speaker 3: fired because it would be better for everyone, and he's
Speaker 3: upset about things that have happened in this past. It's
Speaker 3: very strange what's going on. He's never acted like this before,
Speaker 3: and so Alice Olsen, his wife, becomes very concerned. Frank
Speaker 3: Olsen goes to work the next few days and his
Speaker 3: colleagues notice that he's acting very strangely as well. He
Speaker 3: says the same things to them, I wish you would
Speaker 3: fire me. I've been such a bad employee. I've ruined
Speaker 3: the experiments and all kinds of stuff. He seems to
Speaker 3: have some kind of psychotic break after this experiment, and
Speaker 3: so Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook and a few other
Speaker 3: people who were involved in this they recommend that Frank
Speaker 3: Olsen go to New York to see a doctor there
Speaker 3: to get some kind of psychiatric evaluation. So they send
Speaker 3: him to New York to see a man named Harold Abramson,
Speaker 3: who had ties with the CIA. Already he had been
Speaker 3: he had been the attending physician at several of the
Speaker 3: experiments where Sydney Gottlieb had dosed himself with LSD, So
Speaker 3: Harold Abramson certainly knew that this kind of thing had
Speaker 3: already been happening within the CIA. So Frank Olsen goes
Speaker 3: to Abramson, who analyzes him and agrees that he's had
Speaker 3: some kind of reactive psychosis to this experiment where he's
Speaker 3: taken this LSD unwittingly, and he recommends eventually that Frank
Speaker 3: Olsen go to a psychiatric hospital to stay there for
Speaker 3: a while to get some help. It just it turns
Speaker 3: out that the psychiatric hospital that he wanted to send
Speaker 3: Frank Olsen to didn't have a spare bed for the
Speaker 3: next day, so Frank Olsen had to wait in New
Speaker 3: York for an extra day. So he and Robert in Lashbrook.
Speaker 3: They get a hotel room at the Stateler Hotel, Room
Speaker 3: ten eighteen A, and overnight. Robert Lashbrook wakes up at
Speaker 3: two thirty am in the morning when he hears a
Speaker 3: crash through the bedroom window and he runs over to
Speaker 3: the window and he sees Frank Olsen splayed out on
Speaker 3: the seventh on the sidewalk. So Frank Olson appears from
Speaker 3: Lashbrook's perspective to a jumped out of this window and dies.
Speaker 3: There are several people on the ground who see Frank
Speaker 3: Olson come out of this window and fall onto the ground.
Speaker 3: One of them is the hotel night watchman who runs
Speaker 3: over to Frank Olsen and Frank Olsen is still alive.
Speaker 3: At that moment, and he seems to try to say something,
Speaker 3: but his mouth is filled with blood and he's kind
Speaker 3: of gurgling, and he eventually dies right there. So that's
Speaker 3: the death of Frank Olson that seems to have been
Speaker 3: precipitated by this unwitting dose of LSD at Deep Creek,
Speaker 3: which seems to have caused some kind of reactive psychosis
Speaker 3: in him that led him eventually to commit suicide in
Speaker 3: this way. So that's the story of Frank Olsen, and
Speaker 3: it's the you know, a really popular story within this
Speaker 3: MK ultra circle because it led to the death of
Speaker 3: this individual.
Speaker 2: You write that this lash Brook was questioned by police. Interestingly,
Speaker 2: he stays up in the room and waits till police arrived,
Speaker 2: and they thought that was odd. He said, well what
Speaker 2: could I really do? But he did not tell them
Speaker 2: about the dosing at Deep Creek, did he correct?
Speaker 3: Yes, correct, he kept He kept basically everything about himself
Speaker 3: secret when the police arrived and tried to ask him questions.
Speaker 3: In fact, some of the police officers that I quote
Speaker 3: say that he was very uncooperative. It was obvious that
Speaker 3: he didn't want to talk. So afterwards that he went
Speaker 3: to the police station and he talked to them about
Speaker 3: what had happened because they were questioning him, and he
Speaker 3: eventually says he was an employee of the army. He
Speaker 3: lies about where he was even employed. He didn't want
Speaker 3: anyone to know that he was connected to the CIA.
Speaker 3: He especially didn't want anyone to know that he had
Speaker 3: done he had been involved in these LSD experiments, so
Speaker 3: he was keeping that as much of a secret as possible.
Speaker 3: In fact, the CIA itself wanted to keep all of
Speaker 3: this a secret, especially its interest in LSD, because it
Speaker 3: was afraid that if anyone learned that it was performing
Speaker 3: experiments with LSD, then potentially other countries like the Soviets
Speaker 3: or the Chinese or someone might become interested in LSD
Speaker 3: themselves and start experimenting with it. The CIA thought LSD
Speaker 3: almost had like magical powers, that it would be able
Speaker 3: to open their eyes to manipulating people into doing certain things,
Speaker 3: and they didn't want anyone else to have that ability.
Speaker 3: So it was a closely guarded secret about their interest
Speaker 3: in it. So the CIA itself, after this incident, they
Speaker 3: actually what's called backstopped Robert Lashbrook, and that means they
Speaker 3: they made it out to seem as if he was
Speaker 3: an employee of the Army and not the CIA, to
Speaker 3: try to cover its tracks, just in case anyone started
Speaker 3: looking into him that they would see that he is
Speaker 3: not affiliated with the CIA. Instead he's affiliated with the army,
Speaker 3: which of course wasn't the case. He was affiliated with
Speaker 3: the CIA, but they didn't want anyone to know that.
Speaker 2: You say that there were certain people that blamed Sydney
Speaker 2: gottlie for the death of Olsen, but the program went on.
Speaker 2: He had no disciplinary action towards him as a result.
Speaker 3: That's correct. He he had no, I guess, formal disciplinary
Speaker 3: action taken against him. However, Alan Dollas, the head of
Speaker 3: the CIA, he did reprimand Sidney Gottlieb informally. There are
Speaker 3: several notes that survive that Doulas wrote to Sidney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: basically saying, I think what you did was, you know,
Speaker 3: not a wise action, and you know, I wish you
Speaker 3: wouldn't have done it. Something like that. Just a very
Speaker 3: informal disciplinary action that didn't affect Sidney Gottlieb's career in
Speaker 3: any way. But that's as much as you could say
Speaker 3: a discipline he ever got for performing experiment that led
Speaker 3: to the death of this man. This was one of
Speaker 3: the reasons why the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the
Speaker 3: CIA in the nineteen eighties, the people who had been
Speaker 3: victims of mk ULTRA, This was one of their arguments
Speaker 3: of why they needed restitution was the fact that after
Speaker 3: this experiment had led to the death of Frank Olsen,
Speaker 3: the CIA didn't do anything about Sidney Gottley. They left
Speaker 3: him in charge of this project, which eventually he would
Speaker 3: go on to fund the experiments that led to their
Speaker 3: own victimization. So that's one of the arguments they used
Speaker 3: to try to show that the CIA acted negligently in
Speaker 3: this case. The fact that Sidney Gottley was allowed to
Speaker 3: retain control of mk ULTR even after a death of
Speaker 3: this individual, Frank Olsen.
Speaker 2: Not only was he allowed to retain directorship, but also
Speaker 2: that they continued with their experiments with LSD. And you
Speaker 2: take us to talking about the safe houses that were
Speaker 2: used three cities in the US. Tell us about these
Speaker 2: safe houses and the experiments therein.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So, right after the death of Frank Olsen,
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottley is not as if he kind of steps
Speaker 3: back and tries to analyze what went on and tries
Speaker 3: to determine whether it's still safe to use LSD or not. Instead,
Speaker 3: he escalates the project. He hires George White, this former
Speaker 3: OSS Truth drug tester who I talked to about earlier,
Speaker 3: who is a Bureau of Narcotics agent. He hires this
Speaker 3: George White to start doing covert unwinning LSD experiments on
Speaker 3: unwitting subjects. He first starts doing it in New York.
Speaker 3: He rents a hotel room where he starts dosing some
Speaker 3: of his criminal contacts with LSD and other drugs. But
Speaker 3: eventually Sidney Gottlieb and others were afraid that the police
Speaker 3: would catch on to what George White was doing, so
Speaker 3: they sent him to somewhere where they thought he would
Speaker 3: be less likely to be caught, which was San Francisco
Speaker 3: at the time. So George White goes to San Francisco
Speaker 3: and he instead of dosing people himself, he starts hiring
Speaker 3: prostitutes to dose their unwitting clients with LSD. Meanwhile, George
Speaker 3: White is sitting behind a one way mirror watching what
Speaker 3: happens to determine how these people react to this drug.
Speaker 3: And for the most part he's sitting on a portable
Speaker 3: toilet that he bought. We have the receipts of all
Speaker 3: this stuff that he has. He's sitting on a portable toilet,
Speaker 3: he's drinking martiniz that he's bought with CIA funds, watching
Speaker 3: these prostitutes dose their clients with drugs. For the most part,
Speaker 3: the way they did it was injecting LSD through the
Speaker 3: through the cork in a wine bottle and then pouring
Speaker 3: wine and letting people drink it. So this was known
Speaker 3: as Operation Midnight Climax. George White termed it that. It
Speaker 3: kind of gives you an indication maybe of his character,
Speaker 3: the fact that he would call it something like that.
Speaker 3: Out of everyone involved in the MK Ultra project, I
Speaker 3: think he was the most callous. I think he was
Speaker 3: the most uncaring about what happened to the victims that
Speaker 3: he was doing this stuff too. Sidney Gottlieb, it seems like,
Speaker 3: especially in these later depositions, he regrets a lot of
Speaker 3: what he did. But for George White, I think he
Speaker 3: was doing it for his own enjoyment. I don't think
Speaker 3: he had really a higher calling, At least he didn't
Speaker 3: feel a higher calling. I think that he was doing
Speaker 3: it because he enjoyed it. He was an alcoholic. He
Speaker 3: was drinking these martinis. He was watching this happen. He
Speaker 3: was he was especially interested in sex in general. Oftentimes,
Speaker 3: I quote several people who were interviewed, he would dose
Speaker 3: even his friends with LSD at parties and try to
Speaker 3: get them to engage in orgies. So he, out of everyone,
Speaker 3: I think, was probably the most depraved individual who was
Speaker 3: involved in this, mostly because, at least even for the
Speaker 3: other subprojects, a lot of them are unethical and especially illegal,
Speaker 3: but I think that the people who are performing them
Speaker 3: at least had some kind of justification for what they're doing.
Speaker 3: They might think that they were trying to cure mental
Speaker 3: illness in some way, or that they were doing this
Speaker 3: to protect national security. But I think George White was
Speaker 3: the most sadistic in that he was just doing it
Speaker 3: for his own pleasure.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now, you take us to a couple other characters.
Speaker 2: John Gidtinger. He had read academic journals to come across
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six Journal of Psychiatric Medicine and an article
Speaker 2: regarding psychic driving, and the author You and Cameron tell
Speaker 2: us about Gottlib's interest in psychic driving and you and Cameron.
Speaker 3: Yes, so this was another subproject of mk ULTRA. It
Speaker 3: might be helpful real quick to just explain the construction
Speaker 3: of MKULTRA. What this program overall is. It's not that
Speaker 3: MKULTRA scientists like Sydney Gottlieb are performing every single experiment
Speaker 3: that are part of mk ULTRA. Instead, what mostly happened
Speaker 3: MKULTRA was an umbrella term, and under the umbrella of
Speaker 3: mk ULTRA there were one hundred and forty nine subprojects.
Speaker 3: These could be something like Operation Midnight Climax with George White,
Speaker 3: but mostly what these subprojects were was the CIA Sydney
Speaker 3: Gottlieb funding independent researchers who were at prisons or hospitals
Speaker 3: or university somewhere to conduct some kind of research. So
Speaker 3: it's not the CIA itself that's conducting the research. Instead,
Speaker 3: it's the CIA funding people to do this research, many
Speaker 3: of them who were already doing this these kinds of experiments,
Speaker 3: but then they're funded by the CIA to continue what
Speaker 3: they're already doing. This was the case with you and Cameron.
Speaker 3: He's a Canadian psychiatrist and he was already doing experiments
Speaker 3: before the CIA even knew who he was on what
Speaker 3: he termed psychic driving. This was his attempt to cure
Speaker 3: mental illness. To give some background just on Cameron and
Speaker 3: how he thought and how this is going to tie
Speaker 3: into his experiments, Cameron was a behaviorist, so he thought
Speaker 3: that all behavior was the result of environment. Everything was nurture,
Speaker 3: not nature. So he thought that mental illness was the
Speaker 3: result of a bad environment. Someone had been brought up
Speaker 3: in a bad environment that reinforced bad behaviors and that
Speaker 3: leads them to act out in certain ways that is
Speaker 3: the manifestation of their mental illness. He thought that the
Speaker 3: way to cure this would be to reduce someone back
Speaker 3: to a blank slate so that they would forget all
Speaker 3: of their bad behaviors their mental illness, and then through
Speaker 3: a better environment, you could build them back up in
Speaker 3: your own image so that they wouldn't have their mental illness.
Speaker 3: This was his kind of grand theory of how he
Speaker 3: would cure all mental illness. He thought that he was
Speaker 3: destined for the Nobel Prize. He thought that he would
Speaker 3: cure schizophrenia and everything else, but he needed a way
Speaker 3: to bring someone back down to the blank slate from
Speaker 3: where they actually were. So this was his big goal.
Speaker 1: How do you.
Speaker 3: Reduce someone to a blank slate and make them forget
Speaker 3: their behaviors so that you can build them back up again.
Speaker 3: And his idea was that you could do this through stress.
Speaker 3: Through increased stress, you could make someone forget all of
Speaker 3: their bad past behaviors and you could build them back
Speaker 3: up afterwards. But the question now is how do you
Speaker 3: induce enough stress in someone to make them forget their behaviors.
Speaker 3: One of his solutions to that is called psychic driving.
Speaker 3: This is where you play a negative message for them
Speaker 3: over and over and over again thousands of time. They
Speaker 3: listened to the same repeating message over and over and
Speaker 3: over again, tens of thousands of times, day after day,
Speaker 3: week after week. So they basically have either a headphone
Speaker 3: strapped to their head or a radio next to them
Speaker 3: or something that emits this these messages and they have
Speaker 3: to listen to it over and over and over again.
Speaker 3: So this was psychic driving, and he wrote an article
Speaker 3: about this in this psychiatric journal. And John Gettinger, who
Speaker 3: is a psychologist in the CIA working with Sydney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: on mk Ultra, happened to see this article and he
Speaker 3: gave it to Sidney Gottlieb saying, hey, this looks like
Speaker 3: a promising avenue for something to do with mind control
Speaker 3: or how we might be able to manipulate people in
Speaker 3: certain ways. This is the kind of thing exactly what
Speaker 3: Ewan Cameron is doing. He's basically manipulating people to give
Speaker 3: them a different psychology. That's exactly what the CIA is
Speaker 3: interested in. So after they read that article, Sydney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: decides to start funding you and Cameron to continue the
Speaker 3: experiments that he's already doing, psychic driving experiments like replaying
Speaker 3: this message, these messages thousands of times. But also Cameron
Speaker 3: would combine that with other methods in order to increase
Speaker 3: the amount of stress. So, for example, sometimes Cameron will
Speaker 3: put his patients into sensory deprivation chambers where he would
Speaker 3: put tubes over their hands, goggles over their eyes, plugs
Speaker 3: in their ears so that they couldn't see anything, hear anything,
Speaker 3: feel anything, and this was to increase their stress. Occasionally
Speaker 3: they would be played these psychic driving messages as well,
Speaker 3: so that's one of the things Cameron did for his
Speaker 3: most unruly patients. He would put them in what was
Speaker 3: called the sleep room, where he would induce comas into
Speaker 3: them through chemicals, and they would sleep there for months
Speaker 3: on end, sometimes waking up maybe once or twice per
Speaker 3: day to go to the bathroom and to eat, but
Speaker 3: otherwise they would be in these chemical comas. Other times
Speaker 3: he would put electric signals on their temples and give
Speaker 3: them electric shocks in order to again try to induce
Speaker 3: enough stress to reduce them back to the blank slate.
Speaker 3: These are the kinds of experiments that Ew and Cameron
Speaker 3: was doing. He thought that he was curing mental illness,
Speaker 3: but of course many of his patients didn't know that
Speaker 3: this wasn't kind of tried and tested cure. He was
Speaker 3: just experimenting on them without their permission, without their consent,
Speaker 3: without their knowledge. Many of the people who are who
Speaker 3: give depositions in these lawsuits that I quote throughout the book,
Speaker 3: they're the victims of you and Cameron, and they've experienced
Speaker 3: all of these things, and they're talking about him in
Speaker 3: the depositions. One of the most heart wrenching of them
Speaker 3: is the story of Mary Morrow, and she has a
Speaker 3: very ironic story because she was a resident in training
Speaker 3: at the Allen Memorial institute where you and Cameron was
Speaker 3: a psychiatrist, so she was training under him to become
Speaker 3: a doctor. However, she had anorexia and she failed some
Speaker 3: neurological exams and so she went into a deep depression.
Speaker 3: She tried to kill herself. It's a very sad story.
Speaker 3: And then ew and Cameron recruited her to come back
Speaker 3: to the Allen but not as a resident in training,
Speaker 3: that as a patient. So she had been on one
Speaker 3: side of it in the beginning. She had been administering
Speaker 3: some of these treatments, supposed treatments to these patients, and
Speaker 3: then she started receiving them herself when she became a patient.
Speaker 3: Her story is very heart wrenching. The way she eventually
Speaker 3: escaped is that her sister, who hadn't heard from her
Speaker 3: for a while, barges into the institute and basically demands
Speaker 3: to see her and threatens to call the police if
Speaker 3: she doesn't. So she eventually walks into the room where
Speaker 3: she sees her sister Mary sitting there on a chair,
Speaker 3: a blank look in her eyes. She had just undergone
Speaker 3: this electric shock therapy as they called it, and she
Speaker 3: couldn't put on her clothes, she couldn't put on makeup.
Speaker 3: She couldn't basically do anything herself, and her sister basically
Speaker 3: busted it her out of there. In the depositions that
Speaker 3: I have of Mary Morrow, she because she laments the
Speaker 3: fact that there are people who were in there for years.
Speaker 3: She happened to be there for several weeks, but people
Speaker 3: who are experiencing these treatments for years who never got
Speaker 3: to escape. She actually considered herself one of the lucky ones.
Speaker 3: But these are the kinds of things that you and
Speaker 3: Cameron was doing at the Allen Memorial Institute funded by M.
Speaker 1: K Ultra.
Speaker 2: Talking about other funding and other doctors. You title this
Speaker 2: the Wild West, and that is doctor Jolly West July fourth,
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty four, near San Antonio, Texas and the missing
Speaker 2: Cheryl Joe Horton, three year old tell us about the
Speaker 2: airman Jimmy Schaeffer and and what happens in this regard
Speaker 2: with doctor West.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is a very sad story. Cheryl Joe Horton
Speaker 3: was this three year old girl in San Antonio. Her
Speaker 3: parents had driven her and her younger brother and her
Speaker 3: little brother to a bar. They went in for a
Speaker 3: drink real quick, and they were going to come out
Speaker 3: to get their children drive off, but as they were inside,
Speaker 3: something happened to Cheryl Joe Horton. The parents came out
Speaker 3: afterwards and they couldn't find her. They looked around. Eventually
Speaker 3: there was a search party that was launched and they
Speaker 3: ended up finding her body in a gravel pit. She
Speaker 3: had been abused, sexually abused, and she had been murdered,
Speaker 3: and so there started this man hunt for whoever had
Speaker 3: done this, and pretty quickly there was spotted a man
Speaker 3: who is running away from the gravel pit, who had
Speaker 3: blood stain on his blood stains on his clothes. He
Speaker 3: was arrested. He was taken to prison in San Antonio.
Speaker 3: He eventually had to be transferred to Austin because there
Speaker 3: was a lynch mob that was forming that was threatening
Speaker 3: to kill him. And this was Jimmy Shaver. He was
Speaker 3: an airman at Lackland Air Force Base and he was
Speaker 3: immediately suspect of killing cher Joe Horton, of sexually abusing her.
Speaker 3: And one of the psychiatrists who was put in charge
Speaker 3: of interviewing Jimmy Shaver afterwards to determine whether he was
Speaker 3: guilty or what he would say, was Jolly West. Jolly
Speaker 3: West was a famous psychiatrist. One of the reasons why
Speaker 3: he was already famous was because after the Korean War
Speaker 3: he was one of the psychiatrists who interviewed the Korean
Speaker 3: War prisoners who said, you know that they had dropped
Speaker 3: biological agents on Korea during the war. He was famous
Speaker 3: for having interviewed them and for determining that the reason
Speaker 3: why they were admitting to this stuff wasn't because they
Speaker 3: had actually done it, it was because they were submitted
Speaker 3: to torture, psychological abuse, sleep deprivation, all kinds of things.
Speaker 3: And so Jolly West was already well known, and he
Speaker 3: starts interviewing Jimmy Shaver to determine what was happening, what
Speaker 3: had gone on, what had happened, what did he do
Speaker 3: to the little girl? And as part of this interrogation,
Speaker 3: really West used some fairly unconventional techniques in order to
Speaker 3: get Jimmy Shaver to talk about what he was doing.
Speaker 3: And in fact, it turns out that some of these
Speaker 3: techniques were inspired by what Sidney gottlie was doing with
Speaker 3: MK Ultra. In fact, there's a correspondence between Sidney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: and Jolly West beforehand. So we know that they were
Speaker 3: talking to each other in which Jolly West tells Sidney
Speaker 3: Gottlieb about the CIA the kinds of experiments that he
Speaker 3: wants to do with hypnotism in drugs, and so those
Speaker 3: kinds of things are what Jolly West eventually does to
Speaker 3: Jimmy Shaver when he's interrogating him. He gives him drugs,
Speaker 3: He hypnotizes him to try to get him to tell
Speaker 3: the truth about what's happening with what happened with Cha
Speaker 3: Joe Horton. And in this interrogation, which I quote at
Speaker 3: length in the book, it's a really harrowing interrogation. Jimmy
Speaker 3: Shaver opens up about, yeah, I took her to the
Speaker 3: gravel pit, and you know, he claims not really to
Speaker 3: remember what happened at first. And then in the middle
Speaker 3: of the interrogation there's a break of about thirty minutes,
Speaker 3: a thirty minute break in the tape where we don't
Speaker 3: have the transcript of what happens. Then the tape come
Speaker 3: back comes back on and at the beginning of it,
Speaker 3: Jolly West says, you know, we've just had a break.
Speaker 3: And during that those thirty minutes, it wasn't captured on tape,
Speaker 3: but you know, I got Jimmy Shaver to admit to
Speaker 3: some things that he wouldn't admit on the tape. And
Speaker 3: so there's a big question that remains, what did what
Speaker 3: did Jolly West do during those thirty minutes to get
Speaker 3: Jimmy Shaver to admit what he had done to this
Speaker 3: little girl. Of course, their speculation maybe he was imposing
Speaker 3: some of these m k Ultra methods of mind control
Speaker 3: on him or something. But nevertheless, in the third part
Speaker 3: of the interrogation, when they come back from the break,
Speaker 3: Jimmy Shaver starts to say that he had sexually abused
Speaker 3: this girl, that he had eventually killed her. He admits
Speaker 3: to the murder. And so that's the story of how
Speaker 3: mk Ultra is kind of tied up in this the
Speaker 3: murder of this young girl through Jolly West, who apparently
Speaker 3: was drugging this airman in order to get him to
Speaker 3: con to what he had done. It turns out later
Speaker 3: that Jimmy Shafer is found guilty of this murder. There
Speaker 3: are a lot of kind of high jinks that ensued
Speaker 3: during the court during the trial of Jimmy shaf to
Speaker 3: find him guilty of murder. Yeah, there are a lot
Speaker 3: of hijinks. His lawyer basically makes up a fake story
Speaker 3: about how the body was found and how she wasn't
Speaker 3: actually dead at the time, and he just completely making
Speaker 3: this up to try to get him found not guilty
Speaker 3: or something. But that doesn't work, and he's eventually found
Speaker 3: guilty and he's eventually sentenced to death. But that's how
Speaker 3: Jolly West is kind of tied up in this story
Speaker 3: about the murder of this girl. He was doing these
Speaker 3: kind of hypnotism drug experiments on this person as he
Speaker 3: was interrogating him to German whether he was guilty.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages now tell us about the CIA and the
Speaker 2: government's interest in assassination.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Sidney Gottlieb is pretty closely tied up with several
Speaker 3: assassination attempts during the Cold War. After the mk Ultra
Speaker 3: program ends, it really ends in the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: There are a few subprojects that go on throughout the
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties, but for the most part in the early
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties nineteen sixties, MK Ultra ends and Sidney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: is assigned to be to work for the Clandestine Service
Speaker 3: again to work for the kind of covert operations branch
Speaker 3: of the CIA, and as part of that, he's a
Speaker 3: knowledgeable chemist, and so whenever the CIA is interested in
Speaker 3: potentially conducting an assassination, he is one of the first
Speaker 3: people they turn to because he knows how potentially you
Speaker 3: could kill someone without anyone realizing it. One of the
Speaker 3: main targets of the CIA during this time period is
Speaker 3: a prime Minister of the Congo named Patrice La Mumba.
Speaker 3: In fact, President Eisenhower basically orders the assassination of Patrice Lamumba.
Speaker 3: He tells at a meeting several of his aids and
Speaker 3: several people who are working at the CIA that he
Speaker 3: wants La Mumba eliminated in whatever way you can do it. So,
Speaker 3: you know, word go from Eisenhower to Alan Dulls, down
Speaker 3: through the chain of command and the CIA, down to
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottlieb, and he eventually gets the order basically to
Speaker 3: find out a way to kill Patrice Lamumba, and Gottlieb
Speaker 3: talks about this in his depositions, how he was thinking
Speaker 3: about what to do and he eventually settled on a
Speaker 3: method that he didn't think anyone would trace back to him,
Speaker 3: which was he wanted to put anthrax in the toothpaste
Speaker 3: of Patrice Lamumba and send that to the Congo and
Speaker 3: have that snuck into La Mumba's bathroom. Lamumba would brush
Speaker 3: his teeth and then that would kill him in some way.
Speaker 3: Now it's ironic. Godlieb didn't know this, but among Lamumba's friends,
Speaker 3: they often said that he didn't brush his teeth for
Speaker 3: this very reason. He was afraid of an assassination attempt
Speaker 3: on him. So the joke was that he preferred bad
Speaker 3: breath to no breath at all. But anyway, Sidney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: procured some anthrax from Fort Diedrich personally took it to
Speaker 3: the Congo and gave it to a CIA agent there
Speaker 3: who was supposed to try to find a way to
Speaker 3: slip it into Lamuma's bathroom. That plan eventually didn't end
Speaker 3: up going forward because before it could happened, Lemumba was
Speaker 3: captured by several of his political enemies and murdered anyway,
Speaker 3: so the CIA didn't have to get its own hands
Speaker 3: dirty in this case, even though he was trying to.
Speaker 3: So that's one of the assassination attempts that Gottlieb was
Speaker 3: involved in. He was also involved in several on Fidel Castro.
Speaker 3: Castro is probably the most you know, famous CIA assassination target.
Speaker 3: There's a famous picture of Fidel Castro holding up a
Speaker 3: newspaper that talks about, you know, CIA assassination attempt on Castro.
Speaker 3: So he's alive. He had survived. In fact, at the
Speaker 3: end of his life he said, if surviving assassinations was
Speaker 3: an Olympic sport, I would win the gold medal. So
Speaker 3: several of these assassinations on him involved his hobby. Fidel Castro,
Speaker 3: you know, being the leader of Cuba, he was highly
Speaker 3: interested in scuba diving. He would often go to specific
Speaker 3: spots to scuba dive over and over, and so one
Speaker 3: attempt to kill him was to get someone to give
Speaker 3: him a scuba suit that was laced with some kind
Speaker 3: of fungus that would give him a disease. And so
Speaker 3: the idea was that we were going to lace this
Speaker 3: suit with a disease, give it to Fidel Castro, he
Speaker 3: would put it on, go swimming and die. It turns
Speaker 3: out that that didn't actually happen because the person that
Speaker 3: they wanted to give the suit to Fidel Castro. This
Speaker 3: guy named James Donovan. He was working in Cuba. He
Speaker 3: was a lawyer working in Cuba. But ironically he had
Speaker 3: already given Fidel Castro Castro a scuba suit as a
Speaker 3: gift before, so it would look weird if he did
Speaker 3: it again, so that didn't actually go through. Another attempt
Speaker 3: to kill Fidel Castro that was capitalizing on his scuba
Speaker 3: diving hobby was to get a seashell and put explosives
Speaker 3: in it and put the seashell in a spot where
Speaker 3: Fidel Castro often dived. And the idea was that we
Speaker 3: were going to make the seashell really beautiful, and it
Speaker 3: would be so beautiful it would catch Fidel Castro's eye
Speaker 3: and he would see it and he would just have
Speaker 3: to have it, and so he would pick it up,
Speaker 3: and in doing so, in picking it up, this would
Speaker 3: trigger the explosives and it would blow up and he
Speaker 3: would die right there. That was the idea at least,
Speaker 3: but it again eventually didn't go through. You know, none
Speaker 3: of these assassination attempts on Fidel Castro actually worked, because
Speaker 3: he survived for many decades later. Another attempt to if
Speaker 3: not kill Fidel Castro at least to harm him in
Speaker 3: some way was to gift him cigars, you know, famous
Speaker 3: Cuban cigars that were laced with LSD or some other
Speaker 3: kind of poison. Another kind of poison that was considered
Speaker 3: for lacing these cigars was bochulin toxin. So lace them
Speaker 3: with bochulin toxin. He would smoke it and he would die.
Speaker 3: These some cigars were selected, picked out and actually laced
Speaker 3: with a poison and given to a Cuban asset, but
Speaker 3: he failed to sneak it into Cuba, so that didn't
Speaker 3: go forward. Another one was to lace these cigars with LSD.
Speaker 3: The idea was to get it to Fidel Castro right
Speaker 3: before he gave an important speech, and he would appear
Speaker 3: to be crazy and maybe his supporters would lose faith
Speaker 3: in him because he couldn't be trusted anymore because he
Speaker 3: was saying all these wacky things. Again, that ended up
Speaker 3: not going forward. But those are several of the assassination
Speaker 3: at least attempts that Sidney Gottlieb was involved in on
Speaker 3: Patrice La Mumba and on Fidel Castro.
Speaker 2: Now tell us about what prompted the congressional investigations about
Speaker 2: MK Ultro. What brought the US to those congressional investigations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So in nineteen seventy five is often called
Speaker 3: the year of Intelligence because in nineteen seventy five there
Speaker 3: were several investigations that led to the exposure of these
Speaker 3: past abuses within the intelligence community. So MK ultra started
Speaker 3: in nineteen fifty three, but the public didn't know about
Speaker 3: it until nineteen seventy five. So you raise a good question,
Speaker 3: what is it about the seventies that leads the public
Speaker 3: to learn about this. I should mention briefly that in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three, Sidney Gottlieb retire from the CIA, and
Speaker 3: in doing so, right before he did, he destroyed many
Speaker 3: of the mk ULTRA files. Right, So this is necessarily
Speaker 3: a suspicious act. But in nineteen seventy four, in late
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy four, there is an article that appears on
Speaker 3: the front page of the New York Times that kind
Speaker 3: of sparks many revelations about the intelligence community that's going
Speaker 3: to lead to the exposure of m k ULTRA. That
Speaker 3: article is written by a famous journalist, Seymour Hirsch, who
Speaker 3: had gotten access to a group of documents called the
Speaker 3: Family Jewels. The Family Jewels was an internal CIA group
Speaker 3: of documents that was compiled in order for the director
Speaker 3: of the CIA to understand what were the sensitive aspects
Speaker 3: of the agency's past. What were operations that we had
Speaker 3: been involved in in the past that could be considered
Speaker 3: illegal or unethical that we can know so that if
Speaker 3: it ever is exposed to the public, we can know
Speaker 3: how to respond to that. That was the idea at
Speaker 3: least of compiling the Family Jewels what it became known
Speaker 3: as this group of documents the Family Jewels. But someone
Speaker 3: within the CIA who is disgruntled with the leadership, leaked
Speaker 3: that compilation of documents to this journalist, Seymour Hirsch, and
Speaker 3: he started publishing some of these revelations from them, such
Speaker 3: as the CIA was involved in illegally spying on anti
Speaker 3: war protesters during the Vietnam War. That's what the original
Speaker 3: article was about. Once this article comes out in the
Speaker 3: New York Times, there are several people within the government
Speaker 3: who are demanding that we launch investigations of past abuses.
Speaker 3: If it's the fact that the CIA was illegally spying
Speaker 3: on these anti war protesters, what else might it have done.
Speaker 3: So in the wake of that several investigations are launched.
Speaker 3: Within the executive branch there's the Rockefeller Commission. Within the
Speaker 3: Senate there is the Church Committee, and within the House
Speaker 3: there is the Pike Committee. And these are all happening
Speaker 3: really in the beginning and throughout nineteen seventy five, which
Speaker 3: is why it's called the Year of Intelligence. And as
Speaker 3: part of these investigations, these executive and congressional investigations, they
Speaker 3: start realizing that the CIA was involved in much more
Speaker 3: than just spying on anti war protesters, and in fact,
Speaker 3: they reveal, especially that mk ultra had been a thing
Speaker 3: that happened throughout the nineteen fifties. So that's what precipitated
Speaker 3: these investigations, and that's how it was first exposed to
Speaker 3: the public. After those investstigations conclude, there are several congressional
Speaker 3: hearings specifically on mk ultra, where the main perpetrators like
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottlieb, are subpoenaed and they're required to come testify
Speaker 3: in front of these hearings, and so Sidney gottl Gottlieb
Speaker 3: has to actually has to testify before Congress. This in
Speaker 3: a sense works to his advantage in a way because
Speaker 3: as part of his testimony before Congress, his lawyer works
Speaker 3: out a deal whereby Sidney Gottlieb is granted immunity for
Speaker 3: anything that he testifies about. So he's never held liable,
Speaker 3: he's never held accountable for anything he does, in part
Speaker 3: because he gets immunity for testifying in front of Congress.
Speaker 3: So that's how eventually a little bit more of the
Speaker 3: details are exposed to the public about mk ULTRA. And
Speaker 3: then in the seventies there is a journalist and former
Speaker 3: State Department employee named John Marx who files a Freedom
Speaker 3: of Information Act request for any files relating to mk ULTRA.
Speaker 3: Now that these congressional committees have exposed that this took place,
Speaker 3: he files a FOYER request any surviving documents about this program. Now,
Speaker 3: as I mentioned earlier, it turns out that Sidney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: had destroyed many of the mk ultra files, but he
Speaker 3: didn't destroy all of them. He didn't realize that were
Speaker 3: there were thousands more files that were really budgetary files
Speaker 3: that he had overlooked. Those survived, and when John Marx
Speaker 3: filed that Freedom of Information Act request, a lot of
Speaker 3: those files were released. Some of them are redacted in
Speaker 3: certain ways. But many of those files, thousands of them,
Speaker 3: are released, which gives us even more information about MK Ultra,
Speaker 3: And in response to that, several of the victims of
Speaker 3: these subprojects start suing the CIA, leading to the lawsuits
Speaker 3: that eventually get the depositions that I found. So that's
Speaker 3: kind of how we gradually learned more and more about
Speaker 3: this program.
Speaker 2: You're right that Sidney Gottlieb is retired, and so an
Speaker 2: attorney may caution him to just have yes or no
Speaker 2: responses to any questions. What does Sidney Gottlieb do regardless
Speaker 2: of that advice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up, because that's part
Speaker 3: of what makes the deposition so exciting, is because Gottlieb
Speaker 3: did not listen to the advice of his lawyers. By
Speaker 3: this point in the nineteen eighties, you know, twenty thirty
Speaker 3: years had passed since the beginning of MK Ultra, and
Speaker 3: it seems as if Gottlieb regrets a lot of what
Speaker 3: he did. He and his depositions says basically that the
Speaker 3: reason why he destroyed these files was because he was embarrassed.
Speaker 3: And so I feel like part of why Sidney Gottlieb
Speaker 3: talks so much in these depositions is because he wants
Speaker 3: to air a lot of the pent up regret that
Speaker 3: he has. He interviewed one of the defense attorneys who
Speaker 3: was working with Sidney Gottlieb on these lawsuits, and the
Speaker 3: defense attorney told me that he was really surprised at
Speaker 3: just how much Sidney Gottlieb talked Before the deposition. He
Speaker 3: had advised Sidney Gottlieb to, you know, say yes about
Speaker 3: the question that's asked, say yes or no about the
Speaker 3: question that's asked, and nothing more. You know, just answer
Speaker 3: the question and don't elaborate. But Sidney gottli elaborate it
Speaker 3: a lot. And this attorney told me that he is
Speaker 3: not the ideal client because he would talk so much,
Speaker 3: and that's not great for his defense, but it's great
Speaker 3: for someone like me who's a historian and wants to
Speaker 3: learn about what was going on. Sidney Gottlieb, at least
Speaker 3: in these depositions, was talking about it quite a bit.
Speaker 2: You also talk about Joseph Raw their adversarial but they've
Speaker 2: taken it to another level in terms of Joseph raz
Speaker 2: taking quite a bit of this behavior by Lee Strickland
Speaker 2: as beyond what would be typical. You do write quite
Speaker 2: a bit about this battle between these two attorneys.
Speaker 3: I do, yeah, and I wanted that to be at
Speaker 3: the forefront of the minds of anyone who's reading this,
Speaker 3: because I do want people to situate themselves kind of
Speaker 3: as the fly on the wall for these depositions, and
Speaker 3: so I want to bring out some of the drama
Speaker 3: of these depositions. It's not just that Sidney Gottlieb and
Speaker 3: others involved in MK Ultra or who are victims of
Speaker 3: MK Ultra are revealing what happened to them or what
Speaker 3: they did. In many cases, a lot of the drama
Speaker 3: comes from these attorneys who were on opposite sides of
Speaker 3: this trial, of this lawsuit, who are battling against each other.
Speaker 3: Joseph Row represents the plaintiffs, the victims of these MK
Speaker 3: Ultra subprojects, and he's trying to get justice for these victims.
Speaker 3: And in many cases, the CIA is resorting to kind
Speaker 3: of nasty or illegal tactics to try to delay a
Speaker 3: trial from taking place because many of the plaintiffs are
Speaker 3: old and they think that they're probably going to die
Speaker 3: soon anyway, so if we can delay the trial long enough,
Speaker 3: then they might die off one by one. Joseph Row
Speaker 3: calls this out. He starts calling these other CIA attorneys' names.
Speaker 3: He threatens to punch them in the face on multiple occasions.
Speaker 3: He's an extremely fiery attorney. He's he's around eighty years
Speaker 3: old by this point, and so he had been involved
Speaker 3: in a lot of famous civil rights cases in the
Speaker 3: history of the United States, and this was going to
Speaker 3: be he thought, his kind of final capstone case that
Speaker 3: would be this grand ending to his career. But it
Speaker 3: kept dragging on and on, and so he's he's kind
Speaker 3: of a curmudgeon, but he's really trying to get justice
Speaker 3: for these victims. He starts writing letters to the Prime
Speaker 3: Minister of Canada trying to get him to take some
Speaker 3: accountability for what you and Cameron was doing and try
Speaker 3: to admit that the CIA was funding this guy and
Speaker 3: that these people deserve justice. So, uh, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of drama between these lawyers. You mentioned Lee Strickland. He
Speaker 3: is the lawyer for the CIA in most of these cases,
Speaker 3: who is representing not only the CIA, but also the
Speaker 3: individuals who are being deposed from the CIA, like Sidney Gottlieb,
Speaker 3: and throughout these deposition depositions, Row, Joseph Raw and Lee
Speaker 3: Strickland constantly bicker back and forth. They have quips back
Speaker 3: and forth about how the other person doesn't know what
Speaker 3: they're doing, it is incompetent, and you know, at one
Speaker 3: point in the depositions, this is one of the most
Speaker 3: dramatic points. Joseph Raw is questioning Sidney Gottlieb about his
Speaker 3: involvement in assassination attempts, and he says he asked him,
Speaker 3: were you Joseph Scheider referred to in this Run Run
Speaker 3: one report? And Joseph Scheider was the pseudonym for a
Speaker 3: scientist who worked in the CIA who the Church Committee
Speaker 3: was talking about in the report, and nobody really knew
Speaker 3: who Joseph Scheider was, although there were speculation that it
Speaker 3: might be Gottlieb. So Joseph Rowe asked Sidney Gottlieb, were
Speaker 3: you Joseph Scheider the pseudonym that was used for you
Speaker 3: in this report? And Sidney Gottlieb says, yes, yes, I was,
Speaker 3: And as soon as the word escapes from his mouth,
Speaker 3: Lee Strickland, who's representing him, says, objection, objection. He tries
Speaker 3: to stop in and this chaos ensues and he asked
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottlib to go outside, and as soon as Sidney
Speaker 3: Gottlieb comes back, you Gottlieb basically says, oh, no, no,
Speaker 3: I wasn't Joseph Scheider. I'm not at liberty to say that,
Speaker 3: and it's on the record in the deposition I have.
Speaker 3: He just said yes to it. So there's a lot
Speaker 3: of drama in these depositions that's not just about the
Speaker 3: content of what Sidney Gottlieb or whoever is saying about
Speaker 3: what they did or what they experience, but also the
Speaker 3: deposition environment itself between these lawyers is such kind of
Speaker 3: a rich, dramatic play between these characters that it makes
Speaker 3: for an exciting book and an insight into the way
Speaker 3: that these people are upperating behind the scenes as they're
Speaker 3: trying to get the truth out. I should mention really
Speaker 3: quickly while we're on Lee Strickland. You know, Lee Strickland
Speaker 3: is the CIA lawyer who's representing the agency but also
Speaker 3: many of these perpetrators of mk Ultra during these lawsuits.
Speaker 3: He would go on to lead the Freedom of Information
Speaker 3: Office within the CIA, So in the depositions, he's trying
Speaker 3: to withhold as much information as possible and then who
Speaker 3: does the CIA trust to release its information with Foyer
Speaker 3: Lee Strickland, who of course is going to restrict as
Speaker 3: much as possible. So it just kind of ironic that
Speaker 3: he eventually ends up in that position as well.
Speaker 2: It's very interesting overall when Raw pushes Gottlieb to defend
Speaker 2: his work with mk Ultra, What is the overall attitude
Speaker 2: regarding Gottlieb, with his accountability and even his guilt regarding
Speaker 2: some of these projects, How does he rationalize his work?
Speaker 3: I do think Sidney Gottlieb had a lot of guilt
Speaker 3: at the end of his life. There were several people
Speaker 3: who live close to him who he either volunteered with
Speaker 3: or worked with. He eventually became a speech pathologist after
Speaker 3: he retired from the CIA, who said that they said
Speaker 3: that they always thought that he was trying to atone
Speaker 3: for some past sins, like he had some burden on
Speaker 3: him that he was trying to unload from himself by
Speaker 3: volunteering or helping others. So he did seem guilt written
Speaker 3: toward the end of his life. In the depositions, he
Speaker 3: seems especially guilt ridden about the Frank Olsen incident. The
Speaker 3: fact that this innocent Manton died because of something that
Speaker 3: he did, the fact that he conducted this LSD experiment
Speaker 3: on him. Throughout the depositions, Sidney Gottlieb tries to justify
Speaker 3: mk ultra in various ways, although not too successfully. He
Speaker 3: admits that the program wasn't that successful. They didn't uncover
Speaker 3: methods of mind control. It's not that, you know. They
Speaker 3: didn't find a drug that can make someone talk in
Speaker 3: an interrogation and always say the truth. They didn't find
Speaker 3: a hypnotism method or a psychological method that can make
Speaker 3: someone behave or believe a certain thing, or behave in
Speaker 3: a certain way. So it was unsuccessful from that point
Speaker 3: of view. It was successful from a point of view
Speaker 3: that you could use whose LSD say to make someone
Speaker 3: appear insane, Yeah, you can do that. But as far
Speaker 3: as controlling someone like a marionette, that wasn't successful. And
Speaker 3: so Gottlieb tried to spin that into a positive fact
Speaker 3: by saying, well, we learned a lot, We learned a
Speaker 3: lot about what you shouldn't do, you know, so we
Speaker 3: tried to, you know, kind of spin that as if
Speaker 3: to say that that was really good that we learned
Speaker 3: that you couldn't do all this stuff. But there wasn't
Speaker 3: really a positive thing that he did learn that you
Speaker 3: could actively do to manipulate a person in a certain way.
Speaker 3: So he was guilt written about what he did, but
Speaker 3: he did try to justify what he did by saying
Speaker 3: that and by also saying, you know, we thought this
Speaker 3: was integral to national security. The enns basically justified the
Speaker 3: means we thought that the Soviets, or the Chinese or
Speaker 3: someone else might have even stronger methods of mind control,
Speaker 3: and we needed to know how to counter against that. Therefore,
Speaker 3: what I did was justified. That was his main defense.
Speaker 2: Really, what was the overall results of those hearings, But
Speaker 2: also tell us about, as you do, some of the
Speaker 2: laws suits and their results.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the hearings, the results were just that we learned
Speaker 3: a little bit more about mk ultra. There weren't many
Speaker 3: results in the sense that there was accountability for these people.
Speaker 3: Like I mentioned, Sidney Gottlieb was granted immunity for testifying
Speaker 3: in front of one of these committees, and so he
Speaker 3: didn't really have any accountability for what he did. In fact,
Speaker 3: I've tried to think to myself, was there anyone involved
Speaker 3: in this who was held accountable for what they did?
Speaker 3: And I don't know if I can think of anyone.
Speaker 3: You know, Sidney Gottlieb got that informal reprimand from Alan Doles,
Speaker 3: But that's about it. As far as mk Ultra goes.
Speaker 3: The people who committed it basically got away with it. Now,
Speaker 3: they lived with the guilt of what they had done
Speaker 3: for a long time, like Sidney Gottlieb, but that's basically it.
Speaker 3: They weren't held accountable for what they did. One of
Speaker 3: the reasons why I kind of mentioned this in the book.
Speaker 3: One of the reasons why, I think is because congressional
Speaker 3: oversight of the intelligence community community was so bad during
Speaker 3: the Cold War. There was very little oversight of what
Speaker 3: was going on, and so the people within the intelligence community,
Speaker 3: like Sidney Gottlieb, had a lot of plausible deniability. You know,
Speaker 3: if you know, we're entrusted with secrets, meaning we have
Speaker 3: plausible deniability, we can kind of do what we want
Speaker 3: and we're not going to be held accountable. So I
Speaker 3: think that led to a lot of abuses and not
Speaker 3: much accountability for those abuses. But you know, as far
Speaker 3: as mk Ultra goes, there was very little accountability.
Speaker 2: What was the public reaction, Yes.
Speaker 3: The public reaction was very negative against Gottlieb and the
Speaker 3: others involved in this. Immediately there were several lawsuits launched
Speaker 3: against the CIA. Specifically, one of the sub projects that
Speaker 3: was part of mk Ultro was a drug experiment at
Speaker 3: a prison, the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. This was run by
Speaker 3: Carl Pfeiffer and several of the prisoners who were victims
Speaker 3: of those experiments. They eventually sued the CIA in the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties when this became known, but their lawsuit was
Speaker 3: dismissed because it the statute of limitations had run out
Speaker 3: and so they never got anything for The main lawsuit
Speaker 3: was what's called the or Lacau lawsuit that was by
Speaker 3: Velma or Lacou and several plaintiffs who are victims of
Speaker 3: you and Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute who were
Speaker 3: victims of psychic driving, electric shocks, chemical coma's sensory deprivation,
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. Their lawsuit, which generated these depositions
Speaker 3: that I use, was eventually settled out of court for
Speaker 3: seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be split among them,
Speaker 3: so they didn't really end up with much money. Of course,
Speaker 3: there's attorney fees that is taken out of that, and
Speaker 3: then it split about nine ways between the plaintiffs, so
Speaker 3: they didn't wind up with much, but it was at
Speaker 3: least something that they could get. Frank Olsen's family, the
Speaker 3: man who jumped out of the hotel window and died,
Speaker 3: they were brought to the White House when this became
Speaker 3: known and Gerald Ford. President Ford personally met with them
Speaker 3: and the CIA agreed to give them seven hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty thousand dollars, so they kind of settled that in
Speaker 3: exchange for agreeing not to sue the CIA. So that's
Speaker 3: what happened with his family. So again there wasn't much accountability,
Speaker 3: and for some people who tried to sue the CIA,
Speaker 3: like the prisoners I mentioned in Atlanta, their lawsuits were dismissed.
Speaker 3: Another incident of that happening was a man named Wayne Richie.
Speaker 3: Wayne Ritchie was a security guard. He worked at Alcatraz
Speaker 3: for a while. He was a US marshall in San
Speaker 3: Francisco and one day he went to a holiday party,
Speaker 3: a Christmas party at the Post Office building in San Francisco.
Speaker 3: This is in the nineteen fifties, and he started having
Speaker 3: a couple of drinks, and after he did so, he
Speaker 3: felt very strangely. He started hallucinating. The walls started spinning,
Speaker 3: the typical things associated with a hallucinogenic drug. He didn't
Speaker 3: know what was happening, though, because he hadn't taken any
Speaker 3: drugs to his knowledge, And he decides to go home.
Speaker 3: His girlfriend is there and she's mad at him, and
Speaker 3: she says she wants to move to New York, and
Speaker 3: he's upset. He eventually goes out and gets two pistols.
Speaker 3: Then he goes downtown to a bar and threatens to
Speaker 3: shoot up the bar if they don't hand them all
Speaker 3: the money. A quick thinking patron hits him over the
Speaker 3: head with a mug, and the police arrest him and
Speaker 3: he goes to prison. And he never knew for a
Speaker 3: long time what happened to him. Why did he behave
Speaker 3: so erratically that was completely out of character for him?
Speaker 3: Why would he do such a thing. Until in the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties, he is reading a newspaper article and the
Speaker 3: article starts talking about Operation Midnight Climax in George White
Speaker 3: and Wayne Richie realizes that he knew George White when
Speaker 3: he was in San Francisco, and he starts putting two
Speaker 3: and two together and thinks that George White must have
Speaker 3: dosed me with LSD at that party that caused me
Speaker 3: to behave so erratically. And so Wayne Richie eventually sues
Speaker 3: the CIA, but the lawsuit is eventually dismissed because he
Speaker 3: can't prove that he was actually a victim of one
Speaker 3: of these drug experiments. So that's another instance of a
Speaker 3: lawsuit that was dismissed that didn't actually get recompense for
Speaker 3: the victim. But it turns out that George White kept
Speaker 3: diaries while he was working for the CIA, and after
Speaker 3: he died predictably from cirrhosis of the liver because he
Speaker 3: was an alcoholic. Once he died, his diaries were donated
Speaker 3: to an electronics museum at Foothill Community College in California,
Speaker 3: which eventually got moved to San Francis to Stanford. So
Speaker 3: Stanford now has these diaries, and looking through these diaries,
Speaker 3: I include a single page in the images for the
Speaker 3: book you can turn to the exact date that Wayne
Speaker 3: Ritchie says that he went insane and committed this or
Speaker 3: tried to commit this robbery. And on that date, George
Speaker 3: White writes in his diary that he was attending a
Speaker 3: holiday party, a Christmas party at the Federal Building in
Speaker 3: San Francisco, which is the exact same Christmas party that
Speaker 3: Wayne Ritchie was at when he went insane and probably
Speaker 3: drank something that George White had surreptitiously put in his drink.
Speaker 3: So there is a link there, even though Wayne Ritchie
Speaker 3: wasn't able to actually settle a lawsuit and get anything
Speaker 3: from it.
Speaker 2: One other thing that's very very interesting is that the
Speaker 2: death of Frank Olson in nineteen ninety four, his body's exhumed,
Speaker 2: so the family wants to know the truth about what
Speaker 2: happened to Frank Olson exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this is a there's a lot of contention
Speaker 3: among people, especially Frank Olsen's son, Eric Olson, about what
Speaker 3: happened to his father. I am of the opinion that
Speaker 3: Frank Olsen was dosed with LSD and that led to
Speaker 3: his kind of a psychotic break, a reactive psychosis, which
Speaker 3: led to Frank Olsen jumping out of this building at
Speaker 3: the Stateler Hotel and dying. However, someone like Eric Olsen,
Speaker 3: who's Frank Olson's son, he thinks that his father was murdered.
Speaker 3: He thinks that his father was going to He thinks
Speaker 3: that Frank Olsen had some moral qualms with what the
Speaker 3: government was doing. Perhaps they actually were dropping biological weapons
Speaker 3: on Korea, and therefore Frank Olsen was going to expose this,
Speaker 3: and you know, the CIA didn't want this to happen,
Speaker 3: therefore they arrange for the murder of Frank Olsen. I
Speaker 3: don't think that's the case. I don't think the US
Speaker 3: was using biological weapons in Korea either. One of the
Speaker 3: reasons why is because from Russian archives, actually we have
Speaker 3: the archival document and saying that there are North Korean
Speaker 3: officials who go to China to collect samples of bubonic
Speaker 3: plague then return to North Korea to dose their own
Speaker 3: prisoners with this to make it look as if the
Speaker 3: US had done this, had dropped these biological agents. So
Speaker 3: we know that they were setting up these fink infections.
Speaker 3: But anyways, so the idea is that for Frank Olsen,
Speaker 3: the idea that he was murdered is that he wanted
Speaker 3: to expose these misdeeds of the CIA, potentially of the
Speaker 3: army doing some kind of biological weapons experiments or dropping
Speaker 3: it on people, and so the CIA arranged for him
Speaker 3: to be murdered. You're right. In the nineteen nineties, Eric
Speaker 3: Olsen has his father exhumed and he hires a forensic
Speaker 3: pathologist named David Stars to conduct an investigation as to
Speaker 3: the death of Frank Olsen. Stars does this investigation and
Speaker 3: he concludes that it's possible Frank Olsen was murdered. There
Speaker 3: was a wound on Frank Olson's head that he thought
Speaker 3: seemed inconsistent with him going out of a window and
Speaker 3: landing on the sidewalk. He says that maybe someone bludgeoned
Speaker 3: Frank Olson in the head beforehand. I'd don't think this
Speaker 3: story is very credible. There are a few reasons why,
Speaker 3: you know. We can go through some of those reasons.
Speaker 3: One of the reasons not to believe Stars necessarily is
Speaker 3: that his own assistance didn't believe them himself. That his
Speaker 3: own assistant said that he was prone to sensationalizing all
Speaker 3: of his cases, and so they thought that he was
Speaker 3: kind of sensationalizing this for the publicity of it as well.
Speaker 3: So if his own assistants don't really trust what he
Speaker 3: was doing, and they were working on this investigation as well,
Speaker 3: then that leads me to not trust it as well.
Speaker 3: Another reason is that the reasoning seems to be a
Speaker 3: little bit backward here, the reasoning to conclude that Frank
Speaker 3: Olsen was murdered, it starts with the conclusion, and it
Speaker 3: starts with Frank Olsen was murdered, and how do we
Speaker 3: then fit all the evidence around that. So you know,
Speaker 3: if we start with the conclusion that he was murdered,
Speaker 3: then we have to kind of rationalize all the other evidence.
Speaker 3: There's no really reason to believe that Frank Olsen had
Speaker 3: moral compunctions or that he was about to be a
Speaker 3: whistleblower about some kind of biological warfare experiments. The reason
Speaker 3: why that is said is because that's the only explanation
Speaker 3: we can use to explain why he was possibly murdered.
Speaker 3: So it's a backwards form of reasoning. Another reason I
Speaker 3: should mention why some people think that Frank Olson could
Speaker 3: have been murdered is because in nineteen fifty three, the
Speaker 3: year that he died, the CIA created what's known as
Speaker 3: an assassination primer, kind of a guidebook for how to
Speaker 3: conduct an assassination that wouldn't lead back to the CIA,
Speaker 3: and one of the main recommendations in that primer is
Speaker 3: that one way to get away with murder is to
Speaker 3: drop someone from a high building so that it looks
Speaker 3: as if they fell, and then you can make it
Speaker 3: seem as if they killed themselves. Obviously, that is very
Speaker 3: reminiscent of the Frank Olsen story, but again there's several
Speaker 3: reasons to think that that's not actually what happened in
Speaker 3: the Frank Olsen case. One reason is because the primer
Speaker 3: specifically says that you need to open the blinds and
Speaker 3: everything before you do so, and Frank Olsen went directly
Speaker 3: through the blinds. I don't know why someone would throw
Speaker 3: someone through the blinds of the hotel window. Another reason
Speaker 3: is because if Frank Golson was bludgeoned in the head
Speaker 3: before he went out the window, it's odd that when
Speaker 3: he was on the sidewalk he was trying to talk.
Speaker 3: He wasn't dead. He was alive when he was, you know,
Speaker 3: after he went out the window, so they didn't kill
Speaker 3: him beforehand and throw him out, you know. Another reason
Speaker 3: would be Alan DoLS gives this reprimand to Sidney Gottlieb,
Speaker 3: like I mentioned before, for performing this experiment. Why would
Speaker 3: the CIA intentionally leave a paper trail of their connection
Speaker 3: to this, you know, And the same thing happens when
Speaker 3: Alan Doles gets the the Inspector General of the CIA,
Speaker 3: a guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick, to conduct an investigation into
Speaker 3: the death of Frank Olsen. This is just creating more
Speaker 3: and more of a paper trail. If the CIA murdered
Speaker 3: this guy, why would they want Why would they want
Speaker 3: there to be more and more of a paper trail.
Speaker 3: You can invent explanations like, oh, they wanted this to
Speaker 3: throw off suspicion about whatever, but if you know, to me,
Speaker 3: it seems like a lot of post hawk rationalizations. After
Speaker 3: the fact, we're inventing explanations to make it cohere with
Speaker 3: a conclusion that we've already drawn that he was murdered. Instead,
Speaker 3: I think it makes more sense to say that he
Speaker 3: jumped out of the hotel window after having this reactive
Speaker 3: psychosis to being dosed with LSD.
Speaker 2: In the end, after mk Ultra investigations and after the CIA,
Speaker 2: you write about what happens with Sidney Gottlieb, how his
Speaker 2: life changes, but also that journalist Seymour Hirsch had interviewed
Speaker 2: him in the late nineties. So what did he have
Speaker 2: to say at that time regarding everything in retrospect, tell
Speaker 2: us a little bit about what Seymour Hirsch got from
Speaker 2: Sidney Gottlieb.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and remember, Seymour Hirsch is that journalist who exposed
Speaker 3: a lot of the CIA's past misdeeds in nineteen seventies
Speaker 3: that led to the investigations and the executive branch in Congress.
Speaker 3: Seymour Hirsh eventually visits Sidney Gottliebin interviews him, and like
Speaker 3: I mentioned previously, he says that he seemed like a
Speaker 3: man riddled with guilt. I think that was Hirsch's quote,
Speaker 3: one of the ones that I use, a man riddled
Speaker 3: with guilt who wanted to absolve of his past sins.
Speaker 3: And so it did seem to him at least like
Speaker 3: Sidney Gottlieb really regretted what he had done as part
Speaker 3: of mk Ultra, the fact that he had harmed so
Speaker 3: many people for so little in return. This had been
Speaker 3: tens of millions of dollars spent on MK Ultra, thousands
Speaker 3: of victims of these various subprojects, of these different experiments,
Speaker 3: whose lives in many cases were inextricably ruined because of
Speaker 3: the experiments that were done on them and for what
Speaker 3: in return, not much, you know, as Sidney Gottlieb himself
Speaker 3: admitted that m. K Ultra didn't discover much about how
Speaker 3: to manipulate someone, and so he lived with that for
Speaker 3: the rest of his life, and I think he was
Speaker 3: riddled with guilt. I think he tried to rationalize it
Speaker 3: to himself. Like I mentioned before, the fact that oh well,
Speaker 3: we just didn't know at the time that this wouldn't
Speaker 3: come of anything. It was necessary for national security. But
Speaker 3: I think it did affect him in later life. Even
Speaker 3: though he wasn't held legally responsible, there was no legal
Speaker 3: accountability for what he did. At least there was maybe
Speaker 3: some kind of psychological accountability and some kind of ironic
Speaker 3: fate for him.
Speaker 2: That he died from pneumonia in nineteen ninety nine. Many
Speaker 2: of those files, as we discussed, were destroyed, but fortunately
Speaker 2: we have these depositions, these vary, astounding depositions that will
Speaker 2: last us. An incredible part of your book.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I was very fortunate to
Speaker 3: find these depositions, and I'm excited for people to see
Speaker 3: them themselves. The story of mk Ultra has been known
Speaker 3: for a while. One of the early books on it
Speaker 3: was The Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marx,
Speaker 3: that former State Department employee who filed the Foyer request
Speaker 3: to get many of the surviving documents. But since then
Speaker 3: we've learned a lot more about MK Ultra, and especially
Speaker 3: through the depositions, it provides a human touch to it.
Speaker 3: You get to see inside the minds of the people
Speaker 3: who were conducting it and who were victims of it.
Speaker 3: So it supplies another dimension that I think is necessary
Speaker 3: for a good narrative story, to understand the human aspect
Speaker 3: of what was actually going on instead of just kind
Speaker 3: of the clinical here's how much money was paid to
Speaker 3: this person whatever. This is the human aspect for our
Speaker 3: emotions coming out fully enforced during these depositions.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I want to thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2: on and talking about your new book, Project Mind Control,
Speaker 2: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and the Tragedy of MK Ultra.
Speaker 2: For those that might want to find out more about
Speaker 2: your other books and this book. Do you do any
Speaker 2: social media and do you have a website they might
Speaker 2: refer to thank you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do have an X or Twitter. It's just
Speaker 3: my name, John Lyle j O H N L I
Speaker 3: S L E. I don't post that often, but if
Speaker 3: I have, you know, anything coming out or important in
Speaker 3: an interview like this or something, I'll post it so
Speaker 3: that people can keep up with what I'm doing. I
Speaker 3: do have a website, it has my book on there.
Speaker 3: It's John Lyleistorian dot com. But following my ex or
Speaker 3: Twitter that's probably the best way to keep up with
Speaker 3: what I'm doing. That's where I'll let everyone know what
Speaker 3: I have coming along.
Speaker 2: Well. Thank you so much for this interview, John Lyle,
Speaker 2: the Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the
Speaker 2: tragedy of MK Ultra. Thank you so much for this interview,
Speaker 2: and you have a great evening and good night. Thanks
Speaker 2: you too, good night,