Speaker 1: Fixture the scene for a second. It's a Senate hearing
room right nineteen seventy five. The Church Committee is just
it's in full swing set it for Church is sitting
up there on the desk. The lights are hot, the
tension is palpable in the room, and standing right in
front of him is William Colby, the director of the CIA.
But Colby isn't holding you know, a stack of redacted
documents or a black marker. He's holding a pistol.
Speaker 2: Right, and not just any pistol. It's a modified cult
nineteen eleven. But it looks like a prop from a
bad nineteen.
Speaker 3: Sixties sci fi movie.
Speaker 2: I mean it has this massive, bulky, battery powered scope
mounted right on top of the slide.
Speaker 3: It looks completely ridiculous.
Speaker 1: It really is absurd, but the engineering inside that thing
was terrifying. This is the weapon that has come to
be known as the heart Attack gun. And the reason
we're starting here is that this gun represents the perfect
intersection of technological genius and complete more bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really does. The mechanism alone is fascinating. It
didn't fire a lead bullet, It fired a projectile. It
a frozen water literally ice mixed with a very specific
shellfish toxin called saxy toxin.
Speaker 1: Now, hold on, because the physics of firing an ice
bullet are a total nightmare. You have the heat of
the explosion, the friction of the barrel. How do you
shoot ice without it melting before it even leaves the gun?
Speaker 2: Well, that's where the battery powered part comes in, along
with some really clever ballistics. They used a sabbot, which
is a protective casing that encases the ice projectile.
Speaker 3: The sabbot takes the heat.
Speaker 2: And the friction as it travels down the barrel, and
then it just peels away in flight, allowing the ice
start to continue straight to the target.
Speaker 1: So the dart hits the target, penetrates the skin, and
then physics just takes over. The ice melts exactly.
Speaker 2: The ice melts, leaving literally nobilistic evidence. There's no bullet
to match to a gun. The toxin enters the bloodstream
and causes immediate cardiovascular collapse. To a coroner or anyone
doing an autopsy, it looks exactly like a massive myocardial infection,
a totally natural heart attack. The only clue a tiny
red dot on the skin about the size of a
mosquito bite. I mean, you could assassinate a world leader
in broad daylight, surrounded by bodyguards, and history would just
record it as natural causes.
Speaker 1: It creates this chilling reality where you realize that what
we see as history might just be a carefully crafted
cover story. Welcome to thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: It is so good to be here. And today we
are going to pull on some threads that I think
a lot of people in power would strongly prefer stayed
buried deep in the archives.
Speaker 1: We certainly are. You know, there's this stereotype of the
conspiracy theorist, the guy in the basement wearing the tinfoil
hat red yarn, connecting blurry photos on a corkboard, ranting
about how they're watching us right.
Speaker 2: And to be fair, a lot of the time, those
theories are just noise. They're pattern recognition gone completely wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But what happens when the files are actually declassified?
What happens when the government actually releases the documents, say
thirty or forty years later, and it turns out the
crazy rumors were just factual history.
Speaker 2: That is the uncomfortable space we are exploring today. The
realization that the difference between paranoia and historical fact is
often just a Freedom of Information Act request and a
few decades of patients.
Speaker 1: Today we are walking through a huge collection of these moments.
We are looking at a compilation of thirty government conspiracy
theories that turned out to be true, drawing from an
extensive list put together by watch Mojo. But we aren't
just listing them. We're going to break down the mechanics,
the costs, and the absolute absurdity of these operations.
Speaker 2: We've categorized them to help us process the madness. Really,
from weird science to biological experiments on citizens, all the
way up to shadow governments. And I have to warn
you some of this is funny in a very dark
I can't believe they spend money on this kind of way,
But some of it is genuinely, deeply disturbing.
Speaker 1: Let's start with lighter side, or at least the side
that highlights pure incompetence in Hubris. Section one is weird science.
We are talking about the government spending massive amounts of
cash on ideas that sound like literal hallucinations.
Speaker 2: The Cold War was a desperate time, and desperation breeds.
Let's call it creative problem solving. The intelligence community was
grounding in money but starving for actionable data on the Soviets.
Speaker 1: Creative is a very generous word for our first case
study here, Acoustic Kitty.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, the CIA's attempt to turn the common house
cat into a living purring mobile recording device.
Speaker 1: Now most people hear this and think, oh, they taped
a mic to a cat's collar. No, no, this was
full on Franken cat territory. They launched a massive veterinary
surgery program.
Speaker 2: It was a bioengineering nightmare. The Directorate of Science and
Technology decided they needed a way to listen to Soviet
agents sitting on park benches. They couldn't get close enough
with human agents without being spotted. So they thought, well,
who suspects a stray cat?
Speaker 1: So they took a cat and they surgically implanted a
microphone into its ear canal, using the cat's own ear
geometry to funnel sound. But then they had to get
that signal out right.
Speaker 2: They implanted a radio transmitter at the base of the skull.
But here is the major engineering hurdle. Physics dictates that
for the radio frequencies they were using, you need a
certain length of antenna to transmit the signal. Clearly, you
can't just stick a six inch metal rod out of
a cat's head.
Speaker 3: It ruins the whole disguise, right.
Speaker 1: The Soviets might notice an antenna sticking out of a
tabby cat, So what do they do.
Speaker 2: They wove the wire antenna all the way down through
the cat's tail.
Speaker 3: The tail literally became the antenna.
Speaker 1: Just imagine the complexity here. You have rejection risks, severe
infection risks, and the fact that batteries in the nineteen
sixties weren't exactly microchips. They are bulky and heavy.
Speaker 2: And the cost for all this, adjusted for inflation, we
are talking about roughly one hundred and fifty million dollars
spent on this project over five years. That is the
GDP of a small island nation spent entirely on trying
to turn a feline into a spy.
Speaker 1: And then came the big field test DGE and goes
that they drove the surveillance fan to a park in Washington, DC,
opened the sliding door to release their multimillion dollar cyborg, and.
Speaker 3: Nature just took over.
Speaker 2: The popular story is that it was immediately hit by
a taxi splat game over, but even the less dramatic
version in the official file suggests total failure. The cat
didn't care about the mission at all. With hungry, it
wandered off to find food.
Speaker 3: It got distracted by birds because.
Speaker 1: Cats do not take orders from the federal government.
Speaker 3: They just don't, They absolutely do not.
Speaker 2: The project was eventually scrubbed because they realized that even
if the technology worked perfectly, which was a huge stretch
the platform, the animal itself was fundamentally unmanageable. It really
highlights the hubris of the era, this unwavering belief that
with enough money and enough science, you could bend biology
to your will.
Speaker 1: But they didn't stop looking for magic solutions. This brings
us to the Stargate project. This one always gives me
serious stranger things vibes. We're talking about actual psychic spies,
we are.
Speaker 2: And again to look at the why the US government
didn't just decide to get into the paranormal for fun
on a Tuesday. They were terrified because they had intel,
flawed intel, but intel nonetheless that the Soviets were investing
heavily in psychotronic.
Speaker 1: Weapons, the psychic gap.
Speaker 2: Precisely, they feared the Soviets could use telepathy to locate
our hidden submarines or influence our leader's minds from across
the globe. So the DA and CIA spent about twenty
million dollars over two decades employing people like Uri Geller
and others to perform what they called remote viewing.
Speaker 1: Explain remote viewing for those who haven't spent time diving
into the fringe forums.
Speaker 2: The protocol was basically this. You put a psychic in
a sealed room in Maryland, give them coordinates literally just
numbers latitude and longitude, and ask them to draw what
is at that exact location. The hope was they could
mentally see inside a secret bunker in Siberia or a
research facility in China.
Speaker 1: Did they get anything useful out of it?
Speaker 2: Statistically they had some hits. They drew cranes or buildings
that vaguely resembled the tarts, but in intelligence, vaguely resembles
isn't good enough to launch a cruise missile.
Speaker 3: The official conclusion when.
Speaker 2: They finally shut it down in nineteen ninety five was
that magic wasn't reliable for military intel.
Speaker 1: It's amazing it lasted twenty years. Yeah, you'd think after
the first five years of drawing blurry blobs. They'd cut
the funding.
Speaker 2: Well, bureaucracy protext's own budgets. Once a program exists and
people are employed, it's remarkably hard to kill it.
Speaker 1: Very true. Now, Sometimes the weird science wasn't about technology
or magic. Sometimes it was about culture. This next thread
blew my mind when I first read about it. The
CIA in modern art.
Speaker 2: This is one of my absolute favorites because it's so
incredibly counterintuitive. You have it, the CIA guys in gray
flannel suits, very conservative crew cuts, secretly funding the wildest,
most avant garde abstract expressionism. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem
de Kooning.
Speaker 1: Why though, I mean critics at the time and probably
a lot of politicians called this art a complete scam.
They said it looked like a child did it with fingerpaints.
Why would the government prop that up?
Speaker 2: It was a weapon against Soviet realism. The Soviets had
very rigid state sanctioned art, heroic workers, realistic tractors, very
clear propaganda. It was technically proficient, but totally soulless and controlled.
The CI wanted to.
Speaker 3: Prove that America was the true land of the free So.
Speaker 1: The message was our artists are so free they can
just splash paint on a canvas, as we call it,
absolute genie exactly.
Speaker 2: They wanted to show that in America creativity had no
boundaries whatsoever. They used a front organization called the Congress
for Cultural Freedom to organize massive, expensive exhibitions in.
Speaker 3: Paris and London.
Speaker 2: They essentially bragged critics to write favorable reviews.
Speaker 1: So the rich irony here is that the American public
mostly hated modern art at the time. They thought it
was garbage, but their own tax dollars were secretly ensuring
it became the global standard of high culture just to
own the Russians.
Speaker 2: It was purely cultural warfare. And the crazy thing is
it worked. New York replaced Paris as the center of
the art world during this period. They literally weaponized Jackson Pollock.
Speaker 1: Okay, so those are the fun ones, cats and weird paintings.
But now we really have to turn the page to
something much darker. Section two is playing god. This is
where the government decided to treat its own citizens as
unwitting labrats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the part of the file that makes
you question the fundamental morality of.
Speaker 3: The people in charge. We aren't talking about spying anymore.
Speaker 2: We're talking about biological experimentation on civilian populations.
Speaker 1: Let's unpack Operation Sea Spray September nineteen fifty, San Francisco.
Speaker 2: The Navy had a legitimate defense question. If a Soviet
ship released a bioweapon off the coast, how would it
spread through a dense city. How vulnerable are we to
an airsolized attack?
Speaker 1: A valid question for national defense, I suppose sure.
Speaker 2: But the ethical way to test that is with computer
models or wind tunnel simulations. The Navy decided to do
a live fire test. They spent six days spraying Seratium
marceessens into the fog off the coast of San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Why use that specific bacteria?
Speaker 2: At the time, they genuinely believed it was harmless, But crucially,
seration marcessens produces a bright red pigment when it grows,
it's very distinct visually. This allowed them to set up
sampling stations all over the city and track exactly where
the bacteria went on the wind.
Speaker 1: So they essentially turned the entire city of San Francisco
into a giant peatrie dish.
Speaker 2: They proved a city could be completely infected. They found
the red bacteria in schools, in hospitals, and private homes.
But then people started getting.
Speaker 1: Sick because it wasn't harmless.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't. It's an opportunistic pathogen. There was a
massive outbreak of urinary tract infections and very rare heart
infections across the city. One man, Edward Nevin, a seventy
five year old recovering from prostate surgery, developed endocarditis from
the bacteria and died, and.
Speaker 1: His family had absolutely no idea why.
Speaker 2: Not until decades later when the truth finally came out.
They tried to sue the government, but the courts ruled
that the government had sovereign immunity. They basically infected an
entire major American city, killed at least one citizen, and
just walked away without consequence.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying because it shows a total disregard for individual
life in favor of getting the data. And we see
that pattern again with Project Sunshine. The name sounds so
happy and bright, the reality is just ghastly.
Speaker 2: This was in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
government needed to know how radiation, specifically strontium ninety affects
the human body on a global scale. Strontium ninety is
what's known as a bone seeker. The body mistakes it
for calcium and absorbs it directly into the bone structure,
where it eventually causes cancer.
Speaker 1: They needed to know how much of this stuff was
in the global population from all the atmospheric nuclear testing.
But obviously you can't just ask a living person to
give you a piece of their femur.
Speaker 2: No, you can't, So they launched a global body snashing operation.
They had a massive network of agents, often working quietly
through scientific attaches in foreign countries, who would collect human
samples limbs, ribs, vertebrae, all taken from the dead. But
they specifically targeted babies and young children.
Speaker 1: Because their bones are growing faster.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Children absorb calcium and therefore strontium ninety much faster
than adults. They were the literal canaries in the coal
mine for global radiation levels.
Speaker 1: The true horror here is the consent aspect, or rather
the complete lack of it.
Speaker 2: In over fifteen hundred documented cases, the parents were never asked.
A grieving mother would lose a child's still birth or illness,
and the hospital staff would just say don't worry, we'll
handle the burial arrangements. In reality, they were harvesting tissue
and bone samples to ship off to US labs for
incineration and chemical analysis.
Speaker 1: It's a violation of the most sacred trust imaginable. The
government literally stealing parts of dead children just to build
a statistical chart.
Speaker 2: And yet the scientists involved convinced themselves it was entirely necessary.
They argued that the data saved millions of lives by
proving just how dangerous radioactive fallout was, which eventually led
to test ban treaties. It's the ultimate utilitarian argument, the
ends justify the means.
Speaker 1: We see this exact utilitarian pattern again with Prohibition. I
always thought the poisoned alcohol story was a myth, you know,
the old warning, don't drink the moonshine, it'll make you
go blind. I thought that was just bad brewing technique
by amateurs in the woods.
Speaker 2: Bad brewing was a small part of it, but the
government actively made it lethal. You have to understand the
chemistry at the time. Industrial alcohol used for paint fuel,
medical supplies is ethanol. It's the exact same stuff and whiskey,
but during Prohibition bootleggers were stealing millions of gallons of
industrial alcohol and simply redistilling it to make it drinkable.
Speaker 1: So the government decided to stop them at the source.
Speaker 3: By poisoning the supply.
Speaker 2: The Treasury Department ordered manufacturers to denature the alcohol with
far more lethal chemicals. They forced them to add kerosene, gasoline,
heavy metals like mercury, and crucially, copious amounts of methyl alcohol.
Speaker 1: Or method methanol is this stuff that blinds.
Speaker 3: You and kills you.
Speaker 2: The logic was termed chemical enforcement. They figured if people
started dying horribly, they would simply stop breaking the law.
They knew full well people would drink it anyway. How
many people died from this, The estimates are absolutely staggering.
Around ten thousand people died from drinking poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.
The government effectively poisoned its own population to enforce a
moral statute.
Speaker 1: That is a war casualty list. Ten thousand dead civilians.
Speaker 2: And then there's the gross negligence aspect. Look at the
polio vaccine and SV forty.
Speaker 1: Right, we all know the triumph of the polio vaccine.
Jonah Salk is an American hero eradicating a terrible disease
that paralyzed children, and.
Speaker 3: He was a hero.
Speaker 2: But the early vaccines, specifically the batches manufactured from nineteen
fifty five to nineteen sixty one, had a.
Speaker 3: Very dirty secret.
Speaker 2: To grow the vaccine in the lab, they used kidney
cells harvested from reesis monkeys. It turned out those specific
monkeys carried a virus called Simian virus four or SV.
Speaker 1: Forty, which is potentially linked to cancer in humans.
Speaker 2: Yes, the government scientists actually discovered this contamination, but they
were right in the middle of a massive national public
health push to eradicate polio. They made a cold calculation,
if we stop the vaccine roll out now, polio returns
and paralyzes thousands. If we continue, we risk SV forty exposure.
Speaker 1: So they didn't pull the contaminated batches from the shelf.
Speaker 2: They quietly switched to a new manufacturing process for future batches,
but they allowed the existing contaminated stock to be used up.
Millions of American children were injected with a live monkey
virus because the government didn't want to cause a public.
Speaker 1: Panic, which brings us to arguably the most infamous breach
of medical ethics in US history. The Tuskegee Syphilis study.
Speaker 2: This is the one that destroys trust in public health
for generations to come. For forty years, ending only in
nineteen seventy two, the Public Health Service observed hundreds of
black men in rural Alabama who had syphilis, and.
Speaker 1: The men thought they were getting free health care from
the government.
Speaker 2: They were told they were being treated for bad blood,
which was a colloquialism for various ailments. In reality, the
doctors were strictly observing the natural progression of the disease.
But here is the profound crime. Penicillin became the standard,
widely available and highly effective cure for syphilis in the
mid nineteen forties.
Speaker 1: So they could have cured all these men at any
point after nineteen forty.
Speaker 2: Five easily a few routine shots of penicillin, But the
doctors deliberately withheld the cure. They actively prevented these men
from getting treatment elsewhere. They even contacted local draft boards
to ensure these specific men weren't drafted into the military
because the army would have routinely tested and cured them.
They wanted the autopsy data. They wanted to see exactly
how syphilis destroys a human body.
Speaker 1: Over decades, forty years of this, men died, their wives
were unknowingly infected, their children were born with congenital syphilis.
And it was all totally government sanctioned.
Speaker 2: It took a brave whistleblower going to the press to
finally stop it. And when you ask why certain communities
don't trust government medical advice today, you just have to
point to Tuskegee.
Speaker 3: It's not a theory.
Speaker 2: It's a deep bleeding scar on the national psyche.
Speaker 1: It is so heavy and it transitions us right into
how that exact same mindset. The manipulation in the view
that people are expendable applies to war. Section three is
manipulation of war and geopolitics.
Speaker 2: This is where we see the perfection of the false flag,
the creation of a totally fabricated narrative to justify a
war that the public might not otherwise support.
Speaker 1: The wildest example has to be Operation Northwoods. I remember
reading this declassified file and thinking there is just no
way the Joint chiefs of Staff signed their names.
Speaker 2: To this, But they absolutely did. In the early sixties,
the military establishment was completely obsessed with Austingfidel Castro, but
they needed the American public to be angry enough to
support a full scale, bloody invasion of Cuba, so they
drafted Operation in Northwoods.
Speaker 1: The list of ideas in that document is insane. They
proposed blowing up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and
blaming Cure, developing a fake communist Cuban terror campaign in Miami.
Speaker 2: My favorite, in a deeply dark way, was the plan
regarding the civilian airliner. They proposed creating an exact duplicate
of a civilian charter flight. They would load the real
plane with CIA agents posing as innocent college students on vacation,
and then went The plane would take off somewhere off
the coast of Florida. The real plane would drop below
radar to a secure base, and a drone aircraft painted
to look identical would.
Speaker 3: Pick up the flight path.
Speaker 2: The drone would start transmitting frantic May Day calls saying
they were under attack by Cuban MiGs, and then the
drone would be remotely detonated.
Speaker 1: Midair, blaming Castro for shooting down a plane full of
American college kids.
Speaker 2: It's straight up cinematic villainy, and this proposal went all
the way to the top of the chain of command
who finally stopped it.
Speaker 1: JFK Right.
Speaker 2: President Kennedy flat out rejected the plan. He reportedly looked
at the Joint Chiefs and basically said, we are absolutely
not doing this.
Speaker 3: It's one of the very.
Speaker 2: Few moments in these files where the system actually worked,
or at least one man with a conscience stopped the machine.
Speaker 1: But the machine didn't stop. A few years later, in Vietnam,
the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 2: Right, the incident that launched the major escalation of the
Vietnam War. We were told the USS Mattox was unprovokedly
attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August second and
August fourth, nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: Now, the August second attack was real, right, it was.
Speaker 3: Real, though heavily provoked.
Speaker 2: The US was in their territorial waters supporting covert South
Vietnamese commando raids. But the August fourth attack, the specific
one that LBJ used to go to Congress and get
the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, effectively a blank check for war.
Speaker 3: It never happened.
Speaker 1: It was literally ghosts.
Speaker 3: On the radar exactly.
Speaker 2: The commander on the scene and Captain Herrick realized it
was just freak weather and over eager sonar operators reading glitches.
Speaker 3: He actually cabled back.
Speaker 2: To Washington saying review of action makes many reported contacts
and torpedoes appear highly doubtful, suggests complete evaluation before any
further action. But Washington deliberately ignored the correction. They had
their excuse and they ran with it.
Speaker 1: And that lie costs. I mean, how many.
Speaker 2: Lives millions if you count the Vietnamese civilians and soldiers
and fifty eight thousand Americans all escalated on a complete
non event.
Speaker 1: We see this exact pr manipulation happen again in the
Gulf War. The Nayia testimony.
Speaker 2: This is a masterclass in calculated emotional manipulation. Nineteen ninety,
a fifteen year old girl named Nayera testifies before Congress.
Speaker 3: She's crying.
Speaker 2: She says she volunteered at a hospital in Kuwait and
saw invading Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and
leaving them on the cold floor to die.
Speaker 1: I've seen the footage of her testimony. It's incredibly heartbreaking.
Its swayed the congressional vote. Senators quoted her on the floor.
Speaker 3: It was a total fabrication.
Speaker 2: Naiia was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to
the United States.
Speaker 3: She hadn't been to that hospital.
Speaker 2: Her testimony was heavily coached by a massive PR firm,
Hill and Knowlton, who were paid millions by a front
group for the Kuwaiti government to drag America into the war.
Speaker 1: So we went to war partly based on a theatrical.
Speaker 2: Performance, a very expensive, very effective performance. It reminds us
that in geopolitics, the truth is often just a product
you buy if you have the budget.
Speaker 1: Speaking of buying things off the books, the Iran Contra affair.
This one always confuses people because it's so messy, but
it's essentially the government breaking its own laws to fight
a war Congress explicitly said no to.
Speaker 2: It is very messy, but here is the simple version.
The Reagan administration desperately wanted to fight communism in Nicaragua
by funding a rebel group called the Contras, but Congress
passed the ball And Amendment explicitly saying by law no,
you cannot fund the Contras. They are known drug traffickers
and death squads.
Speaker 1: So the money was completely cut off legally.
Speaker 2: Legally yes, So the administration decided to get extremely creative.
They secretly sold high tech missiles to Iran, our sworn enemy,
who was actively holding American hostages at the time, and
they took the off the book's profit from those illegal
sales to funnel it down.
Speaker 3: To the contrast, it's.
Speaker 1: An absolute pretzel of logic fighting communism by arming in
Islamic theocracy to fund right wing rebels.
Speaker 2: And let's not forget the drug angle here, the Contras
were heavily involved in global cocaine trafficking. There is significant
evidence that the CIA turned a blind eye to Contra
smuggle drugs entering the US, fueling the devastating crack epidemic
of the eighties because that illicit drug money was funding
the shadow war effort.
Speaker 1: It's amazing anyone survived that scandal.
Speaker 2: Politically, well, it helps when a lot of the most
damning documents were frantically shredded by Oliver North before investigators arrived.
Speaker 1: One more of the war category before we move on,
Operation Popeye, Make Mud not war weather warfare.
Speaker 2: We mentioned conspiracy theorists thinking the government controls the weather. Well,
during the Vietnam War, they literally did. They seated clouds
over the jungle with silver iodide to artificially extend the
monsoon season.
Speaker 1: The goal was to wash out the Hochi Man trail, yes.
Speaker 2: Make the unpaved supply roads completely impassable with deep mud.
It actually worked well enough that it eventually led to
a UN ban on environmental warfare, because if you can
weaponize the rain, you can easily starve an entire nation
by ruining their crops.
Speaker 1: Let's pivot now. We've talked extensively about what they did abroad,
but what about what they did to us, to the
people they were supposed to protect. Section four is enemies
of the State.
Speaker 2: This is where the massive surveillance apparatus turns completely inward.
Speaker 1: The FBI versus John Lennon. It sounds like a bad
joke setup.
Speaker 2: Lenin was genuinely terrifying to the Nixon administration. He wasn't
just a beatle anymore. He was a massive counterculture icon
who was planning a huge concert tour in nineteen seventy two,
which was a critical election year. They feared he would
register millions of young people to vote and sway the
entire election against Nixon.
Speaker 1: So Lenin was actually right. He used to tell people
he's being followed.
Speaker 2: He was absolutely right. People called him paranoid, but he
had every reason to be. The FBI heavily tapped his bones,
followed his car constantly, and spent years trying to deport
him on a bogus marijuana charge just to silence his
anti war voice.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just rock stars co intil pro This
is the big.
Speaker 2: One, the counterintelligence program run by the FBI under the
absolute rule of j Edgar Hoover.
Speaker 3: The scope of this was massive.
Speaker 2: They targeted the Black Panthers, the anti war movement, major
civil rights leaders. Their stated goal wasn't just surveillance, it
was neutralization, and the tactics were vicious, deeply psychological warfare.
They famously sent a package to Martin Luther King Junior,
posing as a disappointed black follower. It contained audio recordings
of his affairs and a letter basically telling him he
was a complete fraud and suggesting that he should commit
suicide before receiving the Nobel Prize. They explicitly called it
the suicide Letter.
Speaker 1: That is just evil, pure and simple.
Speaker 2: They also completely destroyed the life of Jean Seberg, the
famous actress. She financially supported civil rights groups, The FBI
decided to plant a completely fake story in the Hollywood
gossip columns that her unborn baby wasn't her husband's but
fathered by a member of the Black Panthers.
Speaker 1: And the stress caused her to lose the baby.
Speaker 2: She went into premature labor from the intense public stress.
The baby died shortly after birth. She was so traumatized
she brought the dead infant to the funeral in an
open casket to prove the baby was white, just to.
Speaker 3: Prove the FBI had lied.
Speaker 2: She eventually committed suicide years later. The FBI literally destroyed
a woman's life just because she donated money to the NAACP, and.
Speaker 1: They controlled the press while doing all this too, Project Mockingberg.
Speaker 3: Why are tapping journalists?
Speaker 2: The CIA and FBI were desperate to know who was
leaking classified information, so they routinely tapped the home and
office phones of reporters at the New York Times and
The Washington Post.
Speaker 3: They even had.
Speaker 2: Numerous high level reporters secretly on the payroll to spin
stories in the government's favor.
Speaker 1: It makes you look at the news of that era
completely differently.
Speaker 2: It really should, But if we jumped to the modern era,
can you get Edward Snowden.
Speaker 1: Twenty thirteen, the exact moment the conspiracy became accepted.
Speaker 2: Life before Snowden, if you said, hey, the NSA records
every phone call and reads every email, people called you crazy.
But Snowden showed us the actual PRISM presentation slides. They
were collecting massive amounts of metadata on everyone, not just
suspected targets, literally everyone.
Speaker 1: It shifted the whole paradigm. We went from innocent until
proven guilty to monitored until found guilty, and we.
Speaker 2: Just accepted it. That's the wildest part to me. We
learned the surveillance state is absolute and undeniable, and we
just shrugged and kept using our iPhones.
Speaker 1: It's overwhelming when you stack it all up, but let's
look at the people actually pulling the strings. Section five
is shadow, power, coups, and secrets. This is the section
where we ask who is really in charge?
Speaker 2: And we have to start with the business plot of
nineteen thirty three. This is a story that isn't taught
in American history schools, and I honestly don't know why,
because it's the closest America ever came to a full
blown fascist dictatorship.
Speaker 1: Set the state US nineteen thirty three. The Great Depression
is raging.
Speaker 2: The country is in absolute economic ruins. FDR has just
been elected in a landslide. He decides to take the
US off the gold standard. He wants to print money
to fund massive social programs and help the starving working class.
To Wall Street, this was the apocalypse. They viewed FDR
as a class trader, a dangerous socialist, a man who
was systematically destroying their accumulated wealth.
Speaker 1: So a group of wealthy bankers and industrialists, the one
percent of the one percent, decided they couldn't just wait
for the next election to vote him out.
Speaker 3: They looked over at Europe.
Speaker 2: They saw what Missolini had done in Italy with the
black Shirts. They really liked the idea of a corporatocracy,
a government run by a business for business. But they
needed a charismatic frontman. A bunch of Wall Street bankers
couldn't lead a populais coup themselves.
Speaker 1: They needed a respected soldier.
Speaker 2: They needed Smedley Butler, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a
two time Medal of Honor recipient, the most decorated Marine
of his time.
Speaker 3: He was an absolute god to the World War One veterans.
Speaker 1: So they approached him with his treason his plan.
Speaker 2: Well bond salesman named Gerald maguire approached Butler. They offered
him a massive private army, five hundred thousand veterans, fully
armed and financed by Wall Street. The plan was to
march on the White House, intimidate FDR into declaring health issues,
and force him to install a newly created Secretary of
General Affairs, basically a fascist dictator, to run the country
on behalf of the banks.
Speaker 1: But they miscalculated who they were dealing with massively.
Speaker 2: They thought Butler was just a dumb, malleable grunt. They
didn't realize he was a fierce patriot who deeply hated
war profiteering. Butler played along for a bit, gave the names,
got the financial details, and then marched straight into Congress
and blew the whistle on the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And what happened? Did these elite bankers go to federal prison?
Speaker 2: No? And this is the real shadow power part. The
McCormack Dickstein Committee investigated. They confirmed the plot was totally real.
They confirmed them massive funding was there, but not a
single person was prosecuted. The names, huge names, like Prescott Bush,
grandfather to two future presidents, were implicated, but it was
all quietly brushed aside. A deal was clearly made in
the shadows. The plot stopped, but the ultrawealthy plotters walked
completely free.
Speaker 1: It proves there is a level of wealth that is
simply above treason.
Speaker 3: It really does.
Speaker 2: It sends shivers down my spine to think what would
have happened if they had just asked a general with
slightly fewer morals than Smedley Butler.
Speaker 1: Speaking of people running the country who legally shouldn't be,
Edith Wilson.
Speaker 2: Secret President President Woodrow Wilson had a massive, debilitating stroke
in nineteen nineteen. He was severely incapacitated. He couldn't speak clearly,
he couldn't focus on policy. For months, his wife Edith
dictated exactly who thought him, what state papers he signed,
and what policies moved forward.
Speaker 1: She was essentially running the executive branch. She was.
Speaker 2: She called it her stewardship, but she was the de
facto president of the United States. They propped him up
in bed for staged photos, hid his paralyzed left side,
and actively lied to the public and even the Vice president.
It was a massive, successful cover up at the highest level.
Speaker 1: Let's move to Operation paper Clip, the ultimate moral dilemma
of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: The central question was is scientific progress worth for giving
a monster? The US government decided definitively yes. Immediately after
World War II, we actively recruited over sixteen hundred top
German scientists, engineers, and.
Speaker 1: Technicians, including Werner von Braun, the man.
Speaker 2: Who designed and built the V two rockets that mercilessly
bombed London. He used brutal slave labor from the door
Middle Bow concentration camp. Thousands of prisoners died building his
rockets in horrific underground conditions. He was a registered committed Nazi,
but the US desperately needed him for the looming space
race against the Soviets, so we scrubbed his entire record.
Speaker 1: Queen, we whitewashed a war criminal.
Speaker 3: We absolutely did.
Speaker 2: He became an American hero, the father of the mighty
Saturn V rocket that eventually took us to the Moon.
Disney even put him on Primetime TV to explain space
travel to American kids.
Speaker 1: It's a dark stain on the moon landing. In a way,
we literally stood on the shoulders of Nazi war criminals
to reach the stars.
Speaker 2: And then there's the CIA doing what it does best,
spending billions of dollars on crazy elaborate covers.
Speaker 3: Project Azorian Howard Hughes.
Speaker 1: This one sounds exactly like a Hollywood heist movie. A
Soviet nuclear sub, the K one twenty nine, sank deep
in the Pacific with nuclear missiles and ultra secret codebooks
on board. The CIA desperately wanted it, but you can't
just park a massive navy salvage ship over it. The
Russians would notice immediately.
Speaker 3: So they called Howard Hughes.
Speaker 1: The famous eccentric billionaire. They had to build a massive,
weird looking ship, the Glomar Explorer, claiming to the press
he was going to mine precious manganese nodules from the
deep ocean floor.
Speaker 2: And everyone believed it because Howard Hughes constantly does crazy
eccentric stuff.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The ship secretly had a giant mechanical claw underneath,
designed to reach down and lift the sub off the
ocean floor.
Speaker 3: Did they actually get it?
Speaker 1: Partially? The sub broke apart as they were hauling it up.
They got about a third of it, but the lasting
legacy of this massive project is the Glomar response. When
investigative journalists finally started sniffing around the real story, the
CIA came up with the now famous phrase, we can
either confirm or deny the existence of such a project.
Speaker 3: The ultimate bureaucratic non answer.
Speaker 1: One more shadow power thread before we move on. Operation Gladio.
Speaker 3: This sounds like a cheap spy novel title.
Speaker 1: It was NATO's highly classified stay behind network. The idea was,
if the Soviets eventually invade Western Europe, we need secret,
well armed gorilla armies already in place, ready to fight
behind enemy lines. So they hid massive weapons caches and
trained civilian operatives across Italy, France and Belgium.
Speaker 3: But the Soviets didn't invade.
Speaker 1: No, so these secret armies, particularly the factions in Italy,
had nothing to do. They eventually allied with violent right
wing extremists. They started committing horrific terrorist attacks bombings of
civilian train stations and banks, specifically to blame the communists.
It was called the strategy of tension. Scare the public
so badly they vote for authoritarian law and order right
wing political.
Speaker 2: Parties, so the protectors literally became the terrorists.
Speaker 1: Precisely.
Speaker 2: Okay, we've covered malice, we've covered evil genius, but sometimes
sometimes it's just staggering, unbelievable stupidity. Section six is incompetence
and oops moments.
Speaker 1: Malice is scary, sure, but incompetence on this scale is
incredibly dangerous. Let's look at Operation Fast and Furious. This
wasn't the distant sixties. This was two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2: The ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,
had what they thought was a brilliant practical idea. Let's
allow licensed gun dealers in Arizona to sell highly illegal
weapons to known straw buyers, fully knowing those buyers are
going to smuggle them straight to the brutal Mexican cartels.
Speaker 1: Why on earth would any lawn for Horseman agency willingly
do that.
Speaker 2: The working theory was, we will let the guns walk
across the border, track them all the way to the
cartel bosses, and then arrest the big kingpins.
Speaker 3: But they didn't track them, No, they didn't.
Speaker 2: They completely lost track of over fourteen hundred high powered weapons,
fifty caliber sniper rifles, AK forty seven variants. They just
vanish into the hands of the notorious Sinaloa cartel.
Speaker 1: And then the inevitable tragedy.
Speaker 2: Struck Brian Terry, a US Border Patrol agent, was murdered
in a firefight in twenty ten. Two of the specific
guns found at the murder scene were traced back as
fast and furious weapons. The US government effectively armed the
very people who killed their own federal agent.
Speaker 1: It's an absolute unmitigated disaster. And speaking of disastrous callous
personnel management, let's talk about Project one hundred thousand, or
as it was cruelly known McNamara's morons.
Speaker 2: That is the incredibly cruel nickname given to these men.
In nineteen sixty six, the Vietnam war meat grinder needed
more bodies. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara decided to lower the
required IQ standards for the military draft. They started actively
recruiting men who scored in the absolute lowest percentile, men
who were previously legally disqualified for mental aptitude.
Speaker 1: These are men who literally couldn't understand basic instructions right.
Speaker 3: Many could not read or write.
Speaker 2: They couldn't understand complex modern warfare tactics or operate high
tech weaponry safely. Yet they were sent directly to the
most dangerous front lines.
Speaker 1: And the result of that policy.
Speaker 2: They died at three times the rate of other gis. Yeah,
they were quite literally used as disposable cannon fodder. It
was a deeply cynical political way to keep the war
machine fed without drafting middle class college kids from the
suburbs who would protest and cause political headaches. It intentionally
exploited the most vulnerable population in America.
Speaker 1: It just breaks your heart to think about it. Finally
we reached section seven, the extremes of control. We have
to talk about mk ultra.
Speaker 3: The dark search for the Manchurian candidate.
Speaker 1: We mentioned the heart attack gun way earlier in the intro,
but mk ultra was essentially the software for the weapon
pure mind control.
Speaker 2: CIA desperately wanted to know can we use LSD to
control a human mind? Can we program a person to
assassinate someone and forget they did it. They experimented heavily
on prisoners, sex workers, mental patients, people who could not
fight back. As one CIA official bluntly put.
Speaker 1: It, doctor ew And Cameron up in Montreal, his work
is the stuff of actual nightmares.
Speaker 2: He was trying to depattern minds, break them down to
a blank slate. He would put vulnerable patients into drug
induced comas for weeks at a time, continuously playing repetitive
loops of noise or degrading messages under their pillows. He
used immense electroshock therapy at voltage levels that absolutely shouldn't
be legal. He wiped people's entire memories. They woke up
not knowing their own children, not knowing how to use
a toilet or feed themselves.
Speaker 1: And the CIA enthusiastically funded this torture they did.
Speaker 2: Most of the files were hastily destroyed in nineteen seventy
three by CIA director Richard Helms when the heat was
turning up, but the Family Jewels documents that miraculously survived
confirmed the absolute horror of what they were.
Speaker 1: Doing, and finally, the targeted assassinations. The Church Committee eventually
revealed that we weren't just spying on foreign leaders, we
are actively trying to murder them.
Speaker 2: Fidel Castro definitely holds the record there, exploding cigars, poisoned
diving wetsuits, literally hiring the American mafia to do a hit.
The CIA tried everything you can imagine to kill him.
Speaker 1: Patres Lumumba in the Congo.
Speaker 2: Yes, they actually sent a frantic government scientist to Africa
with a tube of deadly poisoned toothpaste to kill Lumumba.
It sounds ridiculous like a cartoon, but the intent was
deadly serious. It established the fact that the CIA was
acting as an unchecked global hit squad.
Speaker 1: So we've pulled all these wild threads. Today, We've got
robotic cat spies, government poisoned alcohol, completely fake wars, horrific brainwashing,
and secret ice bullet heart attack guns.
Speaker 3: It is a massive amount of dark history to digest.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us? When we
step back and look at this mosaic of threads from
the watch Mojo list, what is the larger picture of forms?
Speaker 2: The glaring common thread is that national security is treated
as an absolute blank check. When you convince yourself that
you are fighting an existential apocalyptic threat, whether it's communism, terrorism, whatever,
morality just goes out the window. The law becomes a minor.
Speaker 1: Suggestion, and sheer incompetence is just as dangerous as active malice.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, But the truly chilling part for me is the
timeline of it all. Most of these things were only
revealed thirty forty or fifty years after the fact that.
Speaker 1: The really so here. If we know for a fact
they were doing this stuff in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: Exactly what are they doing right now today that we
won't find out about until the year twenty sixty. What
is the acoustic Kitty or the mk ultra of today?
Is it unregulated AI? Is it clandestine genetic editing? Is
it algorithmic social manipulation on a mass scale?
Speaker 1: That is the exact provocative thought I want to leave
you with today. The difference betwe between a crazy conspiracy
theory and accepted history is often just a declassification date.
Speaker 2: Critical thinking is truly your only defense. You have to
question the official narrative, not because everything is a lie,
but because history clearly shows us that some things definitely are.
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you. Which of these threads
did you find the most disturbing Or is there a
theory you believe in right now that you think will
be on this exact list in twenty years. Let us
know in the comments below.
Speaker 3: Keep your eyes open out there.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to thrilling Threads. We'll see you next time.