Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you've definitely heard those stories, right,
the ones that sound just completely wild, you know, whispers
about secret groups, hidden agendas, government agencies may be doing
things way outside the law, poisoning citizens, maybe even assassinating rivals,
the kind.
Speaker 2: Of stuff you want to dismiss immediately.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Our first reaction, and it's usually the right one,
is skepticism. We think, no, the systems we have in place,
they just wouldn't allow that kind of organized, long term
darkness to happen.
Speaker 2: And that tension, that space between healthy skepticism and well
documented historical fact, that's really what we're diving into today. Yeah,
we tend to rely on our institutions, government, just the
system medicine, to be this firewall, you know, to stop
the really bad organized abuses. But history, well, this few
tells a different story sometimes, especially the material we've dug
into for.
Speaker 1: This, and we have gathered an incredible amount of source
material here, accounts that details all these pivotal moments in
history where organized secrecy, real subversion. It wasn't some myth,
It was documented actions by recognized powerful organizations, including governments themselves, right,
including governments. The scale of some of these operations when
you really look at it, it's just it's kind of staggering.
Speaker 2: It really forces you to look at a pattern, doesn't it.
You see these institutional players, and when they operate under
the excuse of say national security or political necessity, they
consistently sign ways to justify things that are deeply unethical.
Speaker 1: And they set up structures, whole systems to carry out deception,
often on a massive scale.
Speaker 2: Exactly, so when we start dissecting these operations, the question
isn't really could this even happen? It becomes wow, how
did they actually manage to keep this secret for as
long as they did?
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's untack all of this. Our mission for
this duck dive today is to really get into these
specific moments, the times the official story just crumpled and
you found these organized hidden operations literally reshaping his.
Speaker 2: And often causing damage to public trust that lasts well
forever in some cases.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going straight into the details, asking how how
could this level of secrecy be pulled off? And maybe
more importantly, what does it reveal about power when it
operates completely in the shadows, unchecked?
Speaker 2: And we should probably start with the ultimate conspiracy myth, right,
the historical reality behind it.
Speaker 1: It's funny you say Illuminati today and people immediately picture
like pyram Is all seeing eyes.
Speaker 2: Maybe Beyonce at a secret meeting.
Speaker 1: Deciding the fate of the world, or at least gas prices.
It's this huge, kind of cartoonish fantasy.
Speaker 2: Which is such a stark contrast to the actual historical group.
The Order of the Illuminati founded way back in seventeen
seventy six in Bavaria, which is modern day Germany.
Speaker 1: And it didn't start as some grand conspiracy. It was
basically an academic club founded by a guy named Adam Weishaupt.
He was a law professor University of Ingolstadt.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and to really get why Weishaupt did this, you
have to picture Bavaria back then eighteenth century. It was
incredibly dominated by the Catholic Church, by the Vatican, very conservative,
very anti Enlightenment. Intellectual freedom basically non existent.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about just like disagreeing over interpretations here.
If you were an academic like Weishaupten, you even dared
to talk about new scientific ideas or rational.
Speaker 2: Thought or god forbid atheism.
Speaker 1: Right, you risked everything The Church saw that as heresy,
and heresy meant serious organized trouble. You could be excommunicated,
lose your job, get exiled, even thrown in prison.
Speaker 2: It was such a restrictive climate that Wishoff simply couldn't
teach or openly discuss the things he actually believed in.
So he did what dissenters have done throughout history. He
went underground. He formed a set of society.
Speaker 1: Initially just a handful of people, right, his students, just.
Speaker 2: Five students at first. Yeah, And the sources say they'd
meet secretly, sometimes out in the woods near the university,
just to discuss these radical enlightenment ideas that were totally
forbidden in public.
Speaker 1: And the name it's sell the Illuminati, It's Latin right,
means enlightened exactly.
Speaker 2: It wasn't some spooky name picked for effect. It was
a direct political statement against the Church's dogma. They were saying, look, knowledge,
reason that should shape society, not just tradition or religious authority.
In that time and place, that was a seriously subversive
thing to do.
Speaker 1: So this wasn't about world domination from the get go.
It was about survival, protecting ideas.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the sources talk about complex initiation rights, oaths of secrecy.
It sounds very cloak and dagger, but the structure, likely
modeled on things like freemasonry, wasn't about controlling the world.
It was about protecting the members, many of whom were
actually influential people themselves, academics, officials who couldn't afford to
be exposed.
Speaker 1: And it obviously struck a chord because it grew fast.
A lot of people were clearly looking for that kind
of safe space to talk.
Speaker 2: It did grow rapidly, but the leap from being a
local university club to something spreading across Europe that really
hinged on one key individual, the MVP, absolutely Baron Adolph
Franz Friedrich Friar von nigg Quite.
Speaker 1: A name sounds important.
Speaker 2: He was a well connected nobleman, a diplomat, and crucially
he was already a high ranking freemason. He knew how
secret societies worked, how they scaled, so.
Speaker 1: He brought the organizational know how totally.
Speaker 2: Nigga's influence and connections basically took this small group of
thinkers and turned it into a real underground movement. It
spread across Europe, attracting writers, philosophers, reformers. People drawn to
this idea of discussing rational government away from the prying
eyes of the church. This was the period when the
Illuminati became a genuinely organized, albeit small and secret force.
Speaker 1: But keeping something like that secret, especially as it grows,
that seems incredibly difficult.
Speaker 2: It's inherently unstable. More members mean more risk of leaks betrayal,
and the end when it came was actually pretty quick
and decisive. Seventeen eighty four, what happened the ruler of Bavaria,
Duke Carl Theodore. He got increasingly paranoid about these Enlightenment
ideas bubbling up. He saw them as anti establishment, a threat,
so he just outlawed all secret societies and specifically named
the Illuminati full crackdown head quarters. Rated Weiss helped himself
as banished, other key members arrested or forced to flee.
By about seventeen eighty seven, for all intents and purposes,
the historical order of the Illuminati was dead. It lasted
less than eleven years.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the actual historical club is finished. But this
is where the myth really takes off, right, Yeah, how
does a defunct debating society become this all powerful global conspiracy.
Speaker 2: It needed a crisis, it needed a scapegoat, and it
got one almost immediately. Yeah, the French Revolution. Ah, the
sear of violence and upheaval of the French Revolution terrify
the old powers of Europe, the monarchies, the Catholic establishment.
They were desperate to find a single organized enemy to
blame for it all, rather than systemic social problems.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, find an external enemy exactly.
Speaker 2: And this is where certain conservative writers, particularly Jesuit writers,
according to our sources, really stepped up. They pointed to
the recently dissolved I Luminadi and basically said, Aha, they
didn't really disappear, they just went deeper underground. They're the
ones pulling the strings behind the entire revolution.
Speaker 1: Wow. So they resurrected a dead group to blame for
current events.
Speaker 2: It was incredibly effective propaganda. It shifted the blame away
from societal issues and onto this invisible, sinister cabal. Perfect
political tool.
Speaker 1: And that story travels.
Speaker 2: It crossed the Atlantic, landed in early America, which had
just had its own revolution, so paranoia levels were already
pretty high, and you had these fire and brimstone preachers,
especially up in New England, who just latched onto these
sensational stories coming out of Europe.
Speaker 1: And they added their own spin.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they started preaching that the Illuminati weren't just
political masterminds, they were literally agents of Satan, controlling everything
from the shadows, worshiping the Devil, the whole nine yards.
Speaker 1: So the myth gets bigger, darker.
Speaker 2: It metastasized. Yeah, it was the perfect bogey man because
it was based on a real group, which he gave
the fearsome grounding. But since they were supposedly secret and unseen,
you could blame them for absolutely anything that went wrong.
Speaker 1: And then there's a really weird twist. Much later in
the sixties, this is just bizarre.
Speaker 2: You have this group of counterculture pranksters basically called the Discordians,
kind of philosophical gestures. Okay, they thought the whole Illuminati
conspiracy thing was hilarious, so they decided to essentially troll
society by deliberately feeding the myth. They started sending out
fake letters, spreading disinformation, claiming they were the Illuminati and
taking credit for all sorts of random, ridiculous events happening
in the world. Laugh pretty much. But the incredible irony
is that they're prank, they're satire. Actually helped cement the
modern pop culture image of the Illuminati, as this all
powerful shadow government became this weird feedback.
Speaker 1: Loop that's wild. A group founded on enlightenment reason ends
up becoming a for total irrational paranoia, partly thanks to branksters.
Speaker 2: It's a remarkable trajectory. So the core of the myth,
you know, it starts with a real historical attempt to
organize intellectual resistance against oppression. But the thing that lasts,
the image we have now is this political phantom conjured
out of fear and frankly absurdity.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that journey from organized intellectual secrecy to a
global myth, it sets the stage for a much darker
kind of organization, doesn't it, The kind that emerges from
war desperation and leads to some really severe ethical compromises.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. We're shifting now to the aftermath of World War
Two and the Allies face this huge, morally complex question,
what do you do with literally millions of former Nazis.
Speaker 1: The answers were all over the map, weren't they.
Speaker 2: Completely You have the top leadership, the architects the Holocaust
facing trial at Nuremberg executions for figures like Gurring and Striker.
Then you had the notorious ones, the manglely types whom
managed to escape, often with help, slipping away to South America.
Speaker 1: And then just regular party members.
Speaker 2: Millions of lower level members who, after some denostification processes,
were basically reintegrated back into West German society quietly faded
back in.
Speaker 1: But there's a fourth category, the one our sources really zero.
Speaker 2: In on, right, The useful Nazis, the ones with specialized
knowledge scientists, engineers, doctors, intelligence officers. These weren't the ones
destined for trial or quiet reintegration. They were seen as assets.
Speaker 1: Assets that sounds cold, It was cold.
Speaker 2: They possessed skills deemed too valuable to the emerging Cold
War struggle. So instead of facing justice, many of them
got what amounted to a government sponsored get out of
jail free card and a ticket to America.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to Operation Paper Club. This wasn't some
subtle thing, was it. The US government was actively recruiting
former Nazis.
Speaker 2: Not just recruiting. They brought over sixteen hundred German and
Austrian former Nazi collaborators, scientists, engineers, and their families gave
them new jobs, new homes, often wiping their slates clean.
Speaker 1: Why what was the justification for bringing literal Nazis to
the US after fighting a war against.
Speaker 2: Them the Cold War? Simple as that the moment WWII ended,
the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union just evaporated instantly.
It became this new existential conflict, this decades long nuclear
staring contest. As one source puts it, so, it was a.
Speaker 1: Race tech race, space race, arms.
Speaker 2: Race, exactly, and Washington decided that getting a leg up
on the Soviets, especially in missile technology and aerospace, was
the absolute top priority, more important than prosecuting war criminals.
Speaker 1: Apparently, what was the official line. They couldn't just say
we're hiring Nazis, could they.
Speaker 2: The official spin was intellectual reparations. The idea was, we're
just securing German technological know how before the Soviets scrabbit.
President Truman even signed off on it in nineteen forty six,
but he put in a condition.
Speaker 1: What was the condition?
Speaker 2: He specifically said they should screen candidates and exclude anyone
who was a hardcore, committed member of the Nazi Party
or an actual war criminal.
Speaker 1: Seems reasonable, did they follow.
Speaker 2: That Not really. The sources make it pretty clear that
the military and intelligence agencies running paper Clip basically ignored
that condition when it was inconvenient. They knew the most
brilliant scientists, the ones they really wanted, were Austin, deeply
involved with the Nazi regime, sometimes high ranking members.
Speaker 1: So they faked the paperwork systematically.
Speaker 2: They altered files, expunged incriminating details from intelligence reports, created
completely sanitized backgrounds for these individuals. It wasn't a failure
to screen, It was an organized effort not to screen
too closely.
Speaker 1: So people who had done, as the outline says, pretty
horrific stuff. They got green cards, government contracts.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, people with direct links to war crimes, slave labor,
horrific acts. They were welcomed in, given security clearances, put
to work on sensitive US military and space projects.
Speaker 1: Was their pushback at the time, Surely people knew this
was happening.
Speaker 2: Oh, there was significant outrage, especially from people who understood
exactly who these individuals were. The sources specifically mentioned Albert Einstein,
you know, a Jewish scientist who had fled Nazi Germany himself.
He was pulled by paper Clip. It was a huge
ethical contradiction using Nazi expertise to fight the next war.
It definitely cast a shadow over programs like NASA right
from the start.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the most famous example of Werner von Braun.
Speaker 2: Von Braun, the rocket genius, architect of the V two
rocket for the nazis later a key figure in the
US space program helping put Americans on the Moon. Undeniably brilliant.
Speaker 1: But the V two program that wasn't built in a
normal factory.
Speaker 2: Wasn't it. No, It relied heavily on slave labor from
the door Middelbow concentration camp, horrific conditions. Thousands died.
Speaker 1: And what was von Braun's role in that? Was he
just a scientist who looked the other way or was
he involved?
Speaker 2: This is where the organized whitewashing really comes in. The
US government worked hard to present him as just a scientist,
maybe naive, maybe forced into it. But the evidence gathered
by Allied investigators after the war, much of which was
conveniently classified or ignored by the paper clip handlers, strongly
suggests he was directly complicit, complicit hack Well, the sources
allege he wasn't just aware of the slave labor. He
was actively involved in procuring it. There are accounts testimonies
suggesting he attended meetings where labor quotas were discussed, that
he even personally visited the camps and allegedly hand picked
prisoners from places like Buchenwald specifically to work in the
underground V two factories, knowing they would likely work to death.
Speaker 1: He hand picked slave laborers.
Speaker 2: That's the allegation, supported by significant evidence, though heavily contested
during the push to make him an American hero. Estimates
are that around twenty thousand prisoners died building his rockets.
Think about that, more people died building the V two
than were killed by it in attacks.
Speaker 1: And the US government knew this, or parts of it.
Speaker 2: The intelligence suggested they knew that depth of his involvement.
They just decided his rocket expertise was more valuable than
accountability for potentially overseeing mass death. It's a truly stunning
moral calculation.
Speaker 1: So they took this man, built his heroic American image,
and he becomes a face of NASA.
Speaker 2: Incredible, And he wasn't the only one, not by long shot.
Take Auto Ambrose, who was he? Ambrose was a top
chemist for ig Farbin, the company infamous for producing cyclon
b gas used in the death camps. He specialized in
nerve agents chemical weapons. He was personally involved in setting
up a synthetic rubber and fuel plant at Monovitz, part
of the Auschwitz complex, using slave labor. He actually stood
trial at Nuremberg for using slave labor and was convicted
as a war criminal.
Speaker 1: Convicted, and he still got into paper Clip.
Speaker 2: Despite his conviction, He was brought to the US under
paper Clip not once, but twice, according to the records.
Speaker 1: Why what expertise could possibly justify bringing over a convicted
Nazi war criminal involved in chemical weapons and slave labor.
Speaker 2: His knowledge of chemical weapons production, particularly nerve agents like Saren,
which he helped develop. In the Cold War context, that
knowledge was seen as a vital strategic asset against the Soviets.
The US military and intelligence agencies decided that his expertise
outweighed his war crimes conviction and the fact that recruiting
him basically undermined the entire Nuremberg process they just participated in.
Speaker 1: So Operation paper Clip wasn't just about grouting scientists. It
was an organized system for prioritizing perceived national security needs.
Over justice, even for convicted war criminals.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it created a secret pipeline, a state sponsored mechanism
to bypass legal and ethical barriers, all in the name
of technological advantage.
Speaker 1: Okay, if recruiting Nazi war criminals wasn't enough of a
breach of ethics, the next section shifts the focus. It
looks at organized secrecy and abuse within the US, specifically
how government and public health bodies treated American citizens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this really hits home. We moved from importing foreign expertise, however,
taint it to the direct systematic abuse of trust involving
American citizens, often the most vulnerable and.
Speaker 1: The prime exams to be. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
Speaker 2: An absolute horror story and one that was incredibly organized
and lasted for an astonishing forty years from nineteen thirty
two all the way to nineteen seventy two down in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Speaker 1: How did they even get people to participate in something
like that for so long?
Speaker 2: Through deliberate cruel deception, they recruited nearly four hundred black men,
mostly poor sharecroppers, from the area who had syphilis. They
lured them in with promises of social free treatment, free meals,
free medical exams, burial insurance.
Speaker 1: But they weren't actually treating the syphilis. No.
Speaker 2: They told the men they had bad blood, which is
this vague local term for a whole range of ailments.
It wasn't a real diagnosis. The entire purpose of the study,
run by the US Public Health Service in cooperation with
the Tuskegee Institute, was not to treat these men. It
was to observe the natural long term progression of untreated syphilis.
Speaker 1: They just watched them get sicker over decades.
Speaker 2: They watched them fall apart, essentially on purpose, documenting every
stage of the diseases ravages, blindness, insanity, organ failure, death.
They treated these men like labrats, not human beings. There
were about six hundred participants total, three hundred ninety nine
who had syphilis, and a control group of two hundred
one who didn't.
Speaker 1: And the most damning part comes later. Doesn't It would penicillin.
Speaker 2: That's what makes it utterly unforgivable. By nineteen forty three,
maybe a bit later to become widespread, but certainly by
the mid forties, penicillin was discovered and proven to be
a fast effective cure for syphilis a miracle drug really.
Speaker 1: So they could have cured these men easily.
Speaker 2: Easily, but the doctors running the Tuskegee study intentionally withheld it.
They actively took steps to prevent the participants from getting
penicillin treatment elsewhere, like through the military during WWII or
from local doctors. They wanted their pure data set of
untreated syphilis, even if it meant condemning these men to
decades of suffering and death.
Speaker 1: That requires an organized conspiracy, doesn't it. Doctors, nurses, administrators
all having to be in on it the secret.
Speaker 2: Absolutely think about the logistics. They had to maintain records,
track participants for decades, conduct painful procedures like spinal taps,
which they told the men were treatment, but were actually
just for data collection and ensure. Generation after generation of
staff of the Public Health Service kept the secret and
continued the unethical study. It was a massive, organized betrayal
of medical ethics.
Speaker 1: How did it finally end?
Speaker 2: It only ended because a whistleblower, Peter Buxton, finally leaked
the story to the press in nineteen seventy two. The
public outrage was immediate and immense, and the consequences well
over one hundred of the original participants had died directly
from syphilis or related complications. By then, many more suffered blindness,
severe neurological damage, physical disfigurement, and unknowingly passed the disease
to wives partners, heaving children born with congenital.
Speaker 1: Syphilis just devastating.
Speaker 2: The aftermath involved a ten million dollar lawsuit settlement in
nineteen seventy four. More significantly, it led to major reforms
and regulations governing human subject research. The National Center for
Bioethics was established at Tuskegee University, and finally, in nineteen
ninety seven, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology on
behalf of the nation.
Speaker 1: But the damage to trust, especially in the Black community,
towards medical institutions that lasts, doesn't it profoundly?
Speaker 2: Tuskegee became the symbol of medical racism and exploitation. It
created a deep seated mistrust that affects everything from participation
in Clinton trials to vaccine hesitancy even today. It showed
how an organized system could betray the very people that
was supposed to serve.
Speaker 1: And the really disturbing thing the sources highlight is that
Tuskegee wasn't some bizarre, isolated incident. It was part of
a wider pattern right.
Speaker 2: Sadly, Yes, the pattern seems to be that if you
were part of a vulnerable or marginalized population in the
early to mid twentieth century, prisoners, mental patients, the poor,
you were considered fair game for risky or unethical experimentation.
Speaker 1: Blake. What other examples are there?
Speaker 2: Oh, there are quite a few. Mentioned. Back in the
nineteen twenties, there's a prison physician named el Stanley who
was doing these bizarre surgeries grafting animal testicles onto prisoners
thinking it would boost their vitality or something.
Speaker 1: Animal testicles seriously.
Speaker 2: Then, in nineteen forty two, flu vaccines were tested on
patients in a Michigan mental institution without informed consent. There
were studies where patients in Connecticut were deliberately infected with
hepatitis to study the disease.
Speaker 1: Deliberately infected.
Speaker 2: Yes, And in the nineteen fifties, inmates at an Atlanta
prison apparently volunteered the yet to question the nature of
consent in prison, to have gunnerhea injected directly into their
urethras for study. The goal wasn't treatment, it was observing infection.
Speaker 1: So This wasn't just one rogue agency. It was a
kind of institutional mindset that certain people were expendable for research.
Speaker 2: It seems that way. These were organized medical projects, often
funded by government or reputable institutions, but operating under a
veil of secrecy or indifference when it came to the
rights and well being of the subjects. It shows a
systemic willingness to cross ethical lines when the subjects lacked
power or public sympathy.
Speaker 1: Okay, that willingness to use citizens as guinea pigs. It
seems like it reached a whole new level of strangeness
and maybe even danger with the CIA's Cold War obsession
mind control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're shifting now from unethical medical studies which were horrific,
to outright psychological warfare research conducted by the US intelligence
community on its own people and others.
Speaker 1: This is mk Ultra. We're talking about.
Speaker 2: Project mk Ultra, launched by the CIA in nineteen fifty three,
and you really can't understand it without understanding the Cold
War paranoia. It was this intense, almost existential fear. The
US was convinced the Soviets, the Chinese, maybe the North
Koreans were using sophisticated brainwashing.
Speaker 1: Technique, brainwashing like in the movies.
Speaker 2: Well, they believed it was real techniques possibly learned from
captured Nazi and Japanese research on interrogation and manipulation. They
feared these techniques could turn captured soldiers or even ordinary
citizens in despise, assassins or defectors against their will.
Speaker 1: So the logic was, if they might be doing it,
we have to do it.
Speaker 2: First and better. That was the driving force. If mind
control is possible, American needs to master it before the
enemy does. That fear fueled what our sources call the
Crown Jewel of Insane experimentation MK.
Speaker 1: Ultra, who is running this show.
Speaker 2: The key figure was a CIA chemist named doctor Sidney Gottlieb.
He became infamous, nicknamed the Poisoner in Chief, which sounds dramatic,
but given what he oversaw, it's disturbingly accurate. He was
obsessed with finding drugs or techniques that could unlock control,
or even erase the human mind.
Speaker 1: And a goal was literally mind control, like creating sleeper agents.
Speaker 2: That was the ultimate fantasy. Yes, could they wipe someone's personality?
Could they implant a new one? Could they create these
Manchurian candidate type agents, people you could program, put out
into the world and then activate with a trigger phrase
to carry out a mission like an assassination without them
even knowing why.
Speaker 1: That sounds completely sci fi. How do they even try
to achieve that?
Speaker 2: Through systematic, illegal, and incredibly brutal methods. The sources detail
a whole catalog of horrors. They conducted experiments, often on
unwitting subjects, both in the US and abroad. They used
intense psychological torture, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, extreme electroshock therapy, sleep deprivation.
Speaker 1: And drugs. Wasn't LSD A big part of it.
Speaker 2: LSD was central. Gottlieb was fascinated by its potential to
break down personality. They administered high doses of LSD and
other potent psychoactive drugs to people without their knowledge or consent, prisoners,
mental patients, addicts, sex workers, even unsuspecting members of the public,
and incredibly, their own CIA colleagues.
Speaker 1: They dosed their own agents without telling them.
Speaker 2: Yes, there are documented cases. The idea was to study
the effects in unpredictable environments, and chillingly, the techniques they
explored were often directly based on research learned from captured
Nazi and Imperial Japanese war criminals experts in interrogation, torture,
and breaking people down. They were adapting enemy torture techniques
for use in CIA experiments.
Speaker 1: So the CIA, which is supposed to operate overseas, was
doing this inside the US. How is that legal?
Speaker 2: It wasn't. That's a key point. The CIA is generally
barred from domestic operations. So they set up this elaborate
network of front organizations, shell companies, fake research foundations, using
hospitals and universities as cover, often without the institutions even
knowing that CIA was behind the funding. They created an
organized system specifically to bypass US law and conduct these
experiments on American soil using taxpayer money.
Speaker 1: Can we talk about specific examples who are the victims?
Speaker 2: One well known, though perhaps unusual case is James Whitey Bulger,
the Boston.
Speaker 1: Mob boss that Whitey Bulcher YEP.
Speaker 2: Back in nineteen fifty seven, when he was in federal
prison in Atlanta, he volunteered for what he thought was
medical research into a cure for schizophrenia, but it was
not even close. It was an emic ultra study. Instead
of getting medicinely dosed with LSD not just once, but repeatedly,
nearly every day for over a year.
Speaker 1: A year of LSD doses, what did he report?
Speaker 2: He later described it as nightmarish, constant, terrifying hallucinations, walls
turning to blood, skeletons clawing at him, seeing people's heads
turn into dogheads. He suffered severe paranoia and insomnia for
years afterward. The CIA was basically seeing how much psychological
stress they could induce, how close they could push someone
to the breaking point.
Speaker 1: That's horrific. And then there was Operation Midnight Climax.
Speaker 2: That name alone, it's deliberately unsettling, isn't it. Yeah, this
was maybe one of the most infamous subprojects. The CIA
set up fake brothels, primarily in San Francisco and New York.
Speaker 1: Fake brothels run by the CIA, run by the CIA.
Speaker 2: They hired sex workers and when clients came in, the
men were secretly dosed with LSD in their drinks without
any consent.
Speaker 1: And the CIA just watched.
Speaker 2: They watched from behind two way mirrors with microphone set up.
They wanted to see how the men would react under
the influence of LSD in a real world setting with
a spill secrets. Could the drug be used for blackmail
or interrogation. It was systematic drugging and voyeurism, funded by
the government.
Speaker 1: This wasn't just some failed experiment with no consequences, was it.
People were harmed.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The sources stressed this MK ultra wasn't just weird science.
It destroyed lives. Some victims suffer permanent psychological damage. Some
died under very mysterious circumstances, like Frank Olson. Frank Olsen's
the most famous case. He was an Army biochemist working
with CIA, possibly on biological weapons research linked to Gottlieb.
In nineteen fifty three, he attended a CIA retreat where
Gotlieb secretly spiked his drink with LSD. Nine days later,
Olson fell or was pushed to his death from a
hotel window in New York.
Speaker 1: Suicide or something else.
Speaker 2: Officially ruled a suicide for decades, but his family never
believed it. They fought for years, suspecting the LSD experiment
led to his death, or that he was potentially silenced
because he knew too much or wanted out after witnessing
brutal interrogations, possibly using MK Ultra techniques. The government eventually
settled with the family, admitting the dozing, but not murder.
It remains a deeply suspicious case.
Speaker 1: And did the CIA just stop this when they realized
how dangerous it was?
Speaker 2: Well, the program officially ran until the early nineteen seventies.
But the most shocking part might be the cover up.
When details started to leak out during investigations into CIA
activities in the mid seventies, the CIA director at the time,
Richard Helms, ordered the destruction of almost all MK Ultra
records in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: They destroyed the evidence.
Speaker 2: Deliberately purged the files, thousands and thousands of documents detailing
the experiments, the victims, the methods. It was a systematic,
organized effort to erase this chapter from history, making full
accountability almost impossible. We only know what we know because
some documents were misfiled or survived by chance. It shows
just how far an organization will go to bury its
darkest secrets.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so we've seen organized secrecy enabling horrific experiments
by institution. Now let's shift focus slightly again. Let's look
at organized plots aimed directly at subverting or even dismantling
political power structures. Starting with one of the most pivotal
moments in American history.
Speaker 2: The assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 1: Right, and the story we usually get is the loan gunman,
John Wilkes, booth, angry actor, Confederate sympathizer ax alone.
Speaker 2: That narrative is incredibly persistent, but it's just fundamentally wrong.
The sources we looked at are crystal clear. The Lincoln
assassination was not the act of one man. It was
a complex, highly organized conspiracy.
Speaker 1: A conspiracy involving multiple people with multiple targets exactly.
Speaker 2: It was a full blown, multi target, multi assassin plot.
The goal wasn't just to kill Lincoln, it was to
decapitate the leadership of the Union government in a single night.
President Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William
Seard all targeted simultaneously.
Speaker 1: What was the hoped for outcome just chaos.
Speaker 2: Chaos certainly, but potentially also to throw the Union government
into disarray, even spark a revival of the Confederate cause,
even though Lee had already surrendered. It was a desperate,
last ditch effort organized by Confederate sympathizers and likely elements
of the Confederate secret soonvists.
Speaker 1: So Booth was just one piece of a larger machine.
Speaker 2: A crucial piece, obviously, but just one. The plot involved coordination, planning,
safe houses, escape routes. It was an organized operation. It
had apparently evolved too. The original plan, hatched months earlier
by Booth and his core group, was actually to kidnap
Lincoln and trade him for Confederate prisoners.
Speaker 1: But after the surrender it escalated to assassination.
Speaker 2: Correct. The surrender at Appomatics made kidnapping pointless, so the objective
shifted to outright elimination of the top leadership.
Speaker 1: Let's break down the organization. Who were the key players?
Besides Booth, you mentioned support networks, you.
Speaker 2: Had people providing the infrastructure. A key figure here was
John Surrat. He was a known Confederate courier and spy.
He was instrumental in acting Booth with other conspirators, especially
back when it was still a kidnapping plot. His mother,
Mary Surrat, owned the boarding house in Washington, d C.
Where they frequently met, so.
Speaker 1: The meetings were organized there.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was a central hub. After the assassination, John
Surrat managed to escape. He fled to Canada, then Europe,
even joined the papals waves fighting for the Pope in Rome.
He was eventually caught in Egypt in eighteen sixty six
and tried. He was tried in a civilian court later,
but incredibly he managed to get acquitted on the conspiracy charges.
Maybe because key witnesses were unavailable or the military tribunal
fervor had died down. He was the one major conspirator
who really got away.
Speaker 1: What about the people who helped Booth directly at the theater?
Speaker 2: You had Edmund Spangler, he was a stage hand at
Ford's Theater, knew Booth well. He helped Booth with his horse,
may have helped clear the escape path. He was arrested
and sentenced to six years in prison.
Speaker 1: Six years seems light compared to others.
Speaker 2: It does, and interestingly he was pardoned in eighteen sixty
nine by President Andrew Johnson, the man who was also
a target.
Speaker 1: That night, Wow and doctor Mudd, the doctor who treated
Booth's broken leg, Doctor Samuel Mudd.
Speaker 2: His role is still debated by some. Did he know
who Booth was and what he'd done? But he definitely
set Booth's leg after booth broke it jumping from the
presidential box. Mud was arrested, tried by the Military Commission,
and actually came within one vote of being hanged. He
had life imprisonment instead, but like Spangler, he was pardoned
by President Johnson in eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: So Johnson pardoned two people connected to the plot against
his own life.
Speaker 2: Strange politics make strange bedfellows, especially during reconstruction. And then
there was Mary Sarat John's mother, the owner of the
boarding house.
Speaker 1: What happened to her?
Speaker 2: Her fate was much harsher. The military tribunal convicted her,
largely based on testimony about the meetings at her house.
She was sentenced to death and became the first woman
ever executed by the United States federal government, hanged alongside
several other conspirators.
Speaker 1: So who are the other assassins? The ones assigned to
Johnson and Seward.
Speaker 2: Lewis Powell sometimes called Lewis Payne. He was a young,
physically imposing former Confederate soldier. His assignment was to kill
Secretary of State William Seward, who was at home recovering
from a carriage accident.
Speaker 1: Did he succeed?
Speaker 2: He came terrifyingly close. He forced his way into Seward's house,
fought past Seward's son and bodyguard, reached Seward's bedroom and
stabbed him repeatedly in the face and neck. Seward only survived,
likely because he was wearing a metal jaw splint from
his accident, which deflected some of the knife blows. Powell
wounded several people badly, but didn't kill Seward. He escaped initially,
but was caught a few days later and his fate
hanged along with Mary Surratt and two others.
Speaker 1: And the guy assigned to Vice President Johnson.
Speaker 2: That was George Atsrod, a German immigrant involved in the
earlier kidnapping plot. His job was to kill Vice President
Andrew Johnson, who was staying at the kirkwood House hotel.
Did he even try, No, He completely lost his nerve.
He went to the hotel bar and got drunk and
just wandered off. He never made made an attempt on
Johnson's life, so.
Speaker 1: He chickened out. Did he get away with it?
Speaker 2: Not at all? Even though he didn't act. The fact
that he was part of the organized conspiracy was enough.
He was caught, tried by the military Commission and hanged
along with Powell, Mary Surrat, and.
Speaker 1: David Harold, who is David Harold.
Speaker 2: Carold is another young conspirator. His main role was guiding
Powell to Seward's house since Powell didn't know DC well.
Then after the assassination, Harold met up with Booth and
helped him escape through Maryland, eventually reaching doctor Met's house.
He was captured with.
Speaker 1: Booth and Booth himself.
Speaker 2: Booth managed to have aide captured for twelve days, hiding
out in Maryland and Virginia with Harold's help. They were
finally cornered in a barn in Virginia by Union shoops.
Harold surrendered, but Booth refused. The barn was set on fire.
Booth was shot in the neck, either accidentally by a
soldier or possibly by himself it's debated, and died a
few hours later.
Speaker 1: So when you lay out all the pieces, all the
people involved, it's clearly not just Booth. It's an organized
plot with multiple layers, targets, and participants, likely with roots
in the Confederate intelligence apparatus exactly.
Speaker 2: It fundamentally reframes the event from an act of loan
madness to a calculated, coordinated political attack aimed at the
highest levels of government, a chilling example of organized subversion.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if the Lincoln assassination was an organized plot
against the government from the outside, our next example is
almost the inverse, the government itself organizing plots against its
own citizens and political movements.
Speaker 2: Right, we're talking about the FBI and specifically its program
known as co in Tilpro.
Speaker 1: Now, the FBI under j Edgar Hoover. He ran that
place for decades, didn't he, And they did more than
just chase gangsters, oh much more.
Speaker 2: Hoover's FBI was obsessed with surveillance and infiltration across American society.
Our sources mentioned them having informants everywhere, Hollywood figures like
Walt Disney, even Ronald Reagan before he was president. They
allegedly monitored Supreme Court justices, kept files on countless politicians
and activists. They even apparently spent resources investigating claims of
psychic phenomena. Hoover had a very broad definition of.
Speaker 1: Threats, but co intail Pro was something specific, wasn't it more? Focused?
Speaker 2: Cointail Pro short for counterintelligence program was Hoover's secret, undeclared
war primarily waged from the nineteen fifties through the early
nineteen seventies, and its main targets were domestic political groups
that Hoover personally despised or feared, especially the civil rights movement,
the Black Panther Party, anti Vietnam War groups, feminist organizations,
Puerto Rican independence activists, basically anyone challenging the status quo.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just about watching them right. The goal
was more aggressive.
Speaker 2: Absolutely critical distinction. This wasn't passive surveillance co intel pro
was about active sabotage. The FBI used informants not just
to gather information, but to actively disrupt, discredit, and ultimately
destroy these groups from within.
Speaker 1: How what kind of tactics did they use?
Speaker 2: The arsenal was extensive and often illegal wiretaps, burglaries, black
bag jobs to steal documents, false evidence, spreading rumors and
disinformation to sow conflict between groups or within them, bad jacketing,
making members suspect each other of being informants. They used
psychological warfare forged letters, instigated police raids, and in some
cases were implicated in violence, even arguably.
Speaker 1: Murder, and Hoover had particular targets.
Speaker 2: His number one target arguably was doctor Martin Luther King Junior.
Hoover seemed to have this intense personal animosity and paranoia
about King, the.
Speaker 1: Leader of the nonviolent civil rights movement. Why him.
Speaker 2: Hoover was convinced King was either a communist himself or
being manipulated by communists, and that the civil rights movement
was a threat to national security. It's shocking, but the
FBI officially designated King a major security threat the same
week he gave his famous I Have a Dream speech
in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1: Wow, So what did they do to him?
Speaker 2: They went all out extensive wire taps on his home,
his office's, hotel rooms, wherever he traveled. They were desperately
searching for proof of communist ties or financial impropriety, anything
to do credit him. They never found any evidence.
Speaker 1: Of communism, but they found something else.
Speaker 2: They did find evidence through the illegal bugs, of King
having extra marital affairs, and they decided to weaponize it.
How In nineteen sixty four, a high ranking FBI official,
William Sullivan, anonymously drafted a letter to King. It was
sent along with a compilation tape containing excerpts from the
bug hotel room recordings.
Speaker 1: What did the letter say it was vicious.
Speaker 2: It called King a fraud and an evil, abnormal beast.
It threatened to expose the affairs publicly unless King effectively
removed himself from public life. The infamous closing lines strongly
implied King should commit suicide to avoid the scandal, telling
him there was only one way out for him.
Speaker 1: The FBI sent a letter suggesting a Nobel Peace Prize
winner kill himself.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what happened, an organized attempt at psychological destruction
and blackmail by a federal agency against a major American leader.
It's one of the most chilling examples of co intel
Pro's depths.
Speaker 1: Did King respond? Did it work?
Speaker 2: King and his advisors correctly suspected it was from the FBI,
though they couldn't prove it at the time. He was
deeply disturbed by it, naturally, but he didn't buckle. He
continued his work. But it shows the lengths the Bureau
was willing to go to.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just about King. Co intel Pro tactics
got even more aggressive with other groups right, particularly of
the Black Panthers.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Black Panther Party, with its more militant rhetoric
and focus on self defense became a major focus for
co Intel pro in the late sixties. Hoover famously called
them the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.
Speaker 1: And this led to violence actual physical harm it did.
Speaker 2: The most notorious example is the case of Fred Hampton.
He was the young, incredibly charismatic chairman of the Illinois
Black Panther Party in Chicago, only twenty one years old,
but already seen as a powerful leader capable of unifying different.
Speaker 1: Groups, which made him a target a.
Speaker 2: Prime target for the FBI. They saw his effectiveness as
a major threat, so they orchestrated an operation against him.
Speaker 1: Used a key informant, an informant inside Hampton's circle, yes.
Speaker 2: A man named William O'Neill, who was Hampton's bodyguard and
chief of security for the Chicago Panthers. He was secretly
working for the FBI, getting paid well for information. O'Neill
provided the FBI with a detailed floor plan of the
apartment where Hampton and other Panthers lived.
Speaker 1: And allegedly more than just a floor.
Speaker 2: Plan, there are strong allegations, supported by later investigations and testimony,
that O'Neill drugged Fred Hampton's drink the night before a
planned police raid. He allegedly put barbiturates in his kool
aid to ensure Hampton wouldn't wake.
Speaker 1: Up easily, so they planned a raid and knowing he
might be drugged.
Speaker 2: The raid happened at four point four to five in
the morning on December fourth, nineteen sixty nine. It was
carried out by Chicago police officers working under the Cook
County State's Attorney's office, but the intelligence, the floor plan,
the timing, it all came from the FBI via O'Neill.
Speaker 1: And what happened during the raid, it was essentially a massacre.
Speaker 2: The police stormed in guns blazing. Forensics later showed they
fired nearly one hundred shots into the apartment the panthers inside.
They fired maybe one shot, possibly accidentally, after.
Speaker 1: Being wounded and Hampton.
Speaker 2: Hampton was asleep in his bed, likely due to the drugs.
Initial reports suggest he was wounded in the first barrage. Then,
according to eyewitness accounts from survivors and later forensic evidence,
officers went into his bedroom and shot him again point blank.
In they had another panther leader, Mark Clark, was also killed.
Speaker 1: It sounds like an execution.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what many called it an assassination disguised as
a shootout. The official story initially was that the police
were met with heavy gunfire, but the evidence overwhelmingly contradicted
that ballistics showed almost all the bullets came from the police.
Speaker 1: Was there any accountability for this?
Speaker 2: Initially no, The state's attorney cleared the officers, but investigations continued.
Lawsuits were filed. Eventually, years later, in nineteen eighty two,
the city, county, and federal governments agreed to a massive
one point eight five million dollars settlement with the survivors
and the families of Hampton and Clark. It wasn't a
mission of murder, but it was a tacit acknowledgment of
government culpability in the raid and the deaths.
Speaker 1: So co intel pro wasn't just dirty tricks. It was
implicated in actual deaths, orchestrated, at least in part with
the FBI.
Speaker 2: That's the unavoidable conclusion in the Hampton case. And remember
these tactics infiltration, disruption, bad jacketing, encouraging violence were used
broadly against anti war groups, student activists, feminist leaders. It
was a huge, organized campaign to crush domestic descent.
Speaker 1: How did we even find out about co intel pro
if it was so secret?
Speaker 2: We found out because of another organized act, this time
against the FBI secrecy. In nineteen seventy one, a group
of anonymous activists calling themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate
the FBI broke into an FBI field office.
Speaker 1: They robbed the FBI.
Speaker 2: Basically, yes, it happened in Media, Pennsylvania. They chose the
night of the big Muhammad al le versus Joe Fraser fight,
figuring security might be distracted, which is ironic because Ali
himself was under FBI surveillance.
Speaker 1: What did they take?
Speaker 2: They stole hundreds and hundreds of classified documents and then
they meticulously copied them and leaked them to journalists and
members of Congress.
Speaker 1: And those documents exposed co intel pro they did.
Speaker 2: The leaks revealed the wire taps, the burglaries, the psychological
warfare campaigns, the specific plans to neutralize political groups. It
was undeniable proof, straight from the FBI's own files, of
this secret war against American citizens. The public outcry forced
the FBI to officially terminate co intel Pro, though many
believed the tactics just became more covert.
Speaker 1: So it took an organized act of counter secrecy to
expose the government's organized secrecy.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it showed that the most paranoid fears about government
overreach weren't paranoid at all. They were in many cases
documented reality hashtagra autro cynthesis and final thought, So quite
a journey we've taken, huh, from an eighteenth century Bavarian
debate club, all the way through importing war criminals, unethical
medical testing on citizens, CIA mind control experiments, and finally
these organized plots both against the government like Lincoln and
by the government like co intil pro and the Hampton execution.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a lot to take in. So boiling it
all down, what does this deep dive really tell us?
What's the big takeaway for you the listener?
Speaker 2: I think it really stands out as the disturbing consistency
across different centuries, different contexts. You see powerful institutions, especially
governmental ones, resorting to organized secrecy and deception when they
feel threatened, threatened by.
Speaker 1: What ideas, rivals, polital change, all.
Speaker 2: Of the above, whether it's the Church threatened by Enlightenment ideas,
the US threatened by Soviet technology, or the FBI threatened
by the civil rights movement, The response often involves creating
these secret structures to bend or break the rules, to
operate outside the bounds of law and ethics.
Speaker 1: And the justification is always necessity, national security.
Speaker 2: That's always the cover story, isn't it national security, political necessity,
scientific progress. But underneath you see this consistent pattern of
abusing trust, whether it's the public's trust to payations trust
or the trust citizens place in their own government not
to actively sabotage them. And the scale of the organization
required to run paper Clip to keep Tuskegee going for
forty years, to coordinate cointel pro it's immense.
Speaker 1: These weren't just like minor slip ups or rogue agents.
These were systemic organize failures and.
Speaker 2: Plots, exactly long term operations that caused profound damage, destroyed lives,
and fundamentally eroded public faith in the very institutions designed
to protect us. And it often took decades or whistleblowers
or even break ins just to bring them to light.
Speaker 1: So the key thing for you listening is maybe understanding
that organization and secrecy they're just tools, right, They can
be used defensively like weishapt trying to protect.
Speaker 2: Ideas, but as history shows us again and again, they
are far more often used aggressively by established power structures.
The real documented threat isn't always coming from some shadowy,
mythical ball out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, often the most sophisticated, well funded, and frankly dangerous
secret operations are happening much closer to home, sometimes within
the official bodies themselves.
Speaker 2: Which really leaves us with a final, maybe unsettling question
for you to think about. Given everything we discussed today,
the documented reality of organized government plots, recruiting criminals, experimenting
on citizens, subverting democratic movements, should our main concern really
be about those fantastical, anonymous manipulators we hear about in
conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: Or does the evidence suggest the more significant, provable threat
often lies within the shadow operations, the classified programs, and
the potential for abuse hidden inside the very official institutions
we are fundamentally supposed to trust