MK-Ultra: Inside the CIA's Secret Mind Control Experiments

Let me tell you about a conspiracy. A real conspiracy. Everything I'm going to say here is true. [music] The US

government admitted to it. What's more, it's one of the craziest conspiracies out there. Beginning in the 1950s and

continuing on into [music] at least the 1970s, the CIA ran a top secret project that involved some extremely [music]

bizarre experiments. These included strange new torture techniques, chemical and biological weapons, [music] ESP,

hypnosis, brain implants, prostitution, child abuse, new age spirituality, and a few dolphins.

Why' this happen? Well, the goal [music] was appropriately, as lofty as it was, impossible. the complete and total

[music] conquest of the human mind. Over its 20-year lifespan, this program went by several names. Bluebird, Artichoke,

MK Naomi, MK [music] Search, but most famously MK

Ultra. For those of you unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, you probably at least

know the sci-fi trope where a shady government agency subjects people to strange experiments involving

mindaltering drugs, behavior modifications, psychic powers, or the creation of an alternate super spy

personality. And you might have thought, what's up with that? Well, that's all more or less based off of a real thing.

Starting in 1950 and supposedly ending in [music] 1974, the CIA was putting a pretty sizable

amount of their budget [music] into this series of programs with the goal of discovering how to control people's

minds. And this wasn't some harmless fantasy. To achieve this, they carried out experiments on [music] thousands of

people, the vast majority of whom were civilians and didn't know what they were participating in or even that they were

being [music] experimented on at all. Many had their lives irrevocably shattered as a result. Well, I realize

some of this might sound crazy. this is a confirmed fact like Epstein or that time the CIA overthrew the government of

Guatemala in order to keep the price of bananas low or how the entire music industry turned against Drake because of

his stance on Palestine. Oh, you didn't like that last one, did you? Hm. I just think it's interesting how Drake was one

of the most high-profile celebrities to sign the artist for ceasefire petition and then a couple months later this

Obama lib starts calling him a pedophile and my Torononian ass is supposed to think that that's all just a

coincidence. >> I love him. I met him in Australia and um a great friend and a great uh great

role model. You know, we text we just text each other the other day and he was like I miss you so much. really was a

fan of one of or not a fan supported one of my teammates um at the time and because

>> and this is when you're in high school. >> Yeah, in high school. So, he was a fan of women's basketball, high school

basketball. >> What advice does he give you? Like what does he say

>> uh about boys? He helps me. >> What? >> How old are you?

>> 17. Why do you look like that? Big. Look at Look at all this. Well, I don't know if I should feel

guilty or not, but I had fun. I like the way the breast feel against my chest. >> Okay, I just saw those clips for the

first time and um yeah, I have to admit that um clearly the plot against Drake is far more sophisticated than I had

thought. No, in all seriousness though, given that we're currently seeing that a lot of conspiracy theories were not only

real, but sent from an iPad, I think that now might be a good time to return to a classic. With very few exceptions,

everything I talk about in this video will be based off of completely verified sources, usually declassified documents

from the CIA themselves. With that said, a big part of this story is that in an effort to cover this up,

the CIA destroyed the vast majority of the documents related to MK Ultra. While we have more than enough to prove that

this did in fact happen, when it comes to the question of what they actually achieved, the jury is still very much

out. Because of that, I'm going to be upfront with you and say that this video won't give you a definitive answer to

that question. Instead, I'm going to give you three. Basically, for the past like four or so months, I've been

reading everything I can about MK Ultra. And the two things I found are that my friends and family are all very worried

about me. And more importantly, that everyone who writes about this more or less argues for one of these three

theories about what happened. And I don't mean this as a dig. All three genuinely have a lot of truth to them,

but also shortcomings where they miss things that the others don't. And so I decide to cover all of them. Call it the

MK Ultra iceberg. [snorts] And the thing is that, you know, now more than ever, it's become so hard to stay informed

with stuff like this. You know, with all the biased news coverage and digital echo chambers, which is why I'm so happy

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to the video. Actually, though, as one final bit of housekeeping, I realize that this video is massive, so I'd

encourage you to think of it as three videos, each of which is going to tell the story of MK Ultra in a different

way. Also, while I do definitely have opinions about which of the theories I believe more than others, and I'm sure

that I'll come out in some ways, I hope that you come to your own conclusions here. And I'm going to do my best not to

put my thumb on the scale too much and present the strongest case I can for each theory. So, let's get into it.

starting with. Now, regardless of any problems I may have with this theory, the reason I'm

calling this the dumbass theory isn't to insult anyone who believes it, but because according to the theory, [music]

MK Ultra was a complete and total failure, i.e., the CIA are dumb asses. With that said, this is the most

commonly repeated theory and the official stance of the CIA. So maybe I am insulting some people who believe it.

The this theory claims that the CIA didn't accomplish any of their goals despite spending an amount of money

comparable to the Manhattan Project and ruining hundreds, if not thousands of lives over the course of around 20

years. Come on, guys. For the same cost and in way less time, the Manhattan Project ruined so many more lives. And

well, I am making it sound a bit ridiculous here, but to be fair, that truly isn't that crazy. [ __ ] up,

wasting money, and harming innocent people are probably the three things the agency is best at. If you take a close

look at most of their projects, it becomes clear that very often these people are completely incompetent. The

reason they succeed isn't because they're great at what they do, but because they have unlimited money and

zero legal or ethical constraints. MK Ultra was no exception to this. In fact, part of the reason why we know

anything about it at all is because when they tried to destroy all the documents, they missed all the financial ones. When

you do even a little digging, what you find is that everyone involved in this mess was either a [ __ ] a scumbag,

insane, or most often all of the above. This was all laid out extremely well in Steven Kinszer's book, The Poisoner

Chief, which is the main source I'll be using in this section. Now, let's get into it. From the very beginning of the

CIA and even further back when it was still the Office of [music] Strategic Services, the people working there were

kept awake at night by a very specific fear. They'd been receiving a steady stream of reports and footage of people

acting strangely [music] compliant after spending time in communist prisons. The Soviet Union would hold highly

publicized [music] show trials where priests renounce their faith and confess to bizarre crimes. The most extreme case

of this was that of the Roman Catholic prelate of Hungary, Cardinal Joseph Menzanti, who in 1949 confessed to

running the Hungarian black market and trying to overthrow the government in order to steal the crown. This kept

happening and not just in the USSR. In 1952, the Korean military released a series of videos of captured American

PWs confessing to dropping biological weapons. >> The germ bombs were loaded uh 15 minutes

before our mission, while ordinarily our aircraft were loaded 2 hours or more before a mission. [clears throat]

My germation took place on the 27th of March 1952 and uh it was a BT germation. The 7th

>> 27th March. Yes. 1952. When I think of my future, when I think of someday, though I'm not

married yet, I intend to be. When my son asks me what I did in Korea, how can I tell him? So, I came over here

and dropped germ bombs on people, destroying and bringing death and destruction.

>> Now, upon seeing this, your average she person might assume that these people had probably just been threatened and

tortured and also that it wouldn't be particularly out of character if those soldiers had in fact dropped chemical

and germ weapons. But the CIA was certain that something far more sinister was going on. For them, the only

possible explanation was, of course, communist hypnosis. This became a major talking point and

then a commonly held belief in the West. A big part of what Americans feared about the communist menace was the

possibility that in their maniacal quest to eradicate all individuality, the Kremlin had developed a technique to

take away free will, [music] turning their subjects into mindless automatons. A new word entered common parliament,

brainwashing. The term was a literal translation of the Chinese phrase ji now meaning washing the brain. Its first

English appearance was the 1951 book Brainwashing in Red China by Edward Hunter, who was naturally a CIA asset.

But while they were spreading this claim, the CIA got to thinking, "Hang on now. This [music] mind control stuff we

made up actually sounds like a pretty good idea." And so they began to look for a way to do it themselves. But

before that, a couple other things had to happen. First up, in 1941, we saw another example of the CIA copying their

enemies when during World War II, word got out that the Japanese were developing biological weapons in China.

Now, in case this isn't obvious, germ warfare was and still is a major war crime explicitly banned by the 1925

Geneva Protocol. Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, put it lightly by saying in a memo that, quote,

"Biological warfare is, of course, a dirty business." However, as you can probably tell from the but hanging over

the end of that sentence, Stimson wasn't one to let some pesky international laws get in the way of a good atrocity and

spent the rest of the memo arguing that said dirty business need to be pursued so the US could do it first. Roosevelt

agreed and so a team of scientists were recruited to build America a boweapons laboratory of its very own. This turned

out to be a pretty difficult project for, you know, all the reasons you might think. A meeting of the country's top

biologists was held in Washington where all the scientists in attendance explained that if they were going to

produce the deadliest germs known to man, it'd be impossible to safely do it on the industrial scale required. All

that is except for one, a bacteriologist named Ira Baldwin, who thought that the problem could be solved relatively

simply, claiming that anything that could be done in a test tube could be done just as, if not more, safely in a

10,000galon tank. For his hubris, Baldwin was placed in charge of the project and soon began surveying

locations. He eventually struck gold when he happened upon Camp Dedricch, an old National Guard air base outside of

Frederick, Maryland that was now sitting empty since all the planes had been moved to Europe for the war. With that

settled, Baldwin set to work recruiting scientists to man the camp, mostly former students of his from the

University of Wisconsin. This was a pretty hard cell, though. Not only were these scientists going to have to bend

their professional ethics beyond recognition, they were also being brought into one of the US military's

most secret projects and therefore would have to deal with all the restrictions that came with that. Upon joining, they

were forced to sign vows of secrecy that were significantly more than lifelong. In the event of my death, I authorized

the commanding officer of Camp Dedricch, Maryland, to make arrangements for and conduct the proceeding of my remains and

to place them in a sealed casket which shall not thereafter be opened. I authorize post-mortem examination of my

remains to be made exclusively by proper army representatives in their discretion. Look, I've had some good

professors who've changed my life. Shout out Nick Mound. But I don't know if even he could get me to agree to spend

eternity in a hermetically sealed sarcophagus. I hope Baldwin at least wrote these guys

one hell of a recommendation letter. Actually, you know what? Let's put a pin in that. While it took some doing,

Baldwin eventually got the base staffed. And just like that, the chemical core was born. Once everything was up and

running, the scientists there were off to the races, cultivating anthrax, botulism, and a newly developed airborne

variant of the bubonic plague with a nearly 100% mortality rate. It was like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory with

slightly more safety protocols. It wasn't all work, though. They also managed to have fun along the way with a

couple kooky little experiments in biological warfare. These included sneaking into the Pentagon to spray the

place with fake bacteria, as well as spraying the entire city of San Francisco with real bacteria, which

caused 11 people to develop UTI, one of whom died. That's right, you just got bald. Needless to say that they

considered both of these to be massive successes. However, as exciting as this was, the higherups in US intelligence

weren't really in the business of selling cranberry juice. Yet, seeing as the military was more interested in

wiping a city off the map rather than making its inhabitants burn when they pee, it's not too surprising then that

the chemical corps soon had their thunder stolen by a different set of scientists working on an even more

secretive project over at Los Alamos. The day they successfully cracked an atom marked the point when the

biological arms race was overtaken by the nuclear one. The Chemical Corps had two options. Admit defeat and return to

civilian life, never to manufacture weapons of mass destruction again, or find a new niche they could fill. I

think you can guess which way they went. Camp Dedric's prayers were answered in part thanks to another scientist who was

developing something pretty interesting in Ocean Away. In 1938, a Swiss scientist named Albert Hoffman was

working at Sando's Pharmaceuticals where he developed a strange chemical called lysurgic acid dthylamine or LSD25,

referring to the number of iterations it took to get to the recipe that we know and love today. Even though it didn't

have any obvious applications, Hoffman was fascinated and spent the next 5 years trying to find a use for it. After

all of that time, he had his breakthrough when it finally occurred to him to test it in the dumbest way

possible, drinking the stuff. On April 19th, 1943, at 4:20 p.m., he dissolved 250 micrograms into 10 cc's of water and

proceeded to have the world's first acid trip. Hoffman described his experience as follows. I had great difficulty in

speaking coherently. My field of vision swayed before me and objects appeared distorted like images and curved

mirrors. As far as I remember, the following were the most outstanding symptoms. Vertigo, visual disturbances.

The faces of those around me appeared as grotesque colored masks marked mtoric unrest alternating with paralysis, an

intermittent heavy feeling in the body, limbs, and the entire body as if they were filled with lead. dry constricted

sensation in the throat, [music] feeling of choking, queer recognition of my condition in which [music] state I

sometimes observed in the manner of an independent neutral observer [music] that I shouted half insanely or babbled

incoherent words. Occasionally I felt as if I were out of my body. An unending [music]

series of colorful, very realistic, and fantastic images surged in upon me. At about 1:00, [music] I fell asleep and

awoke next morning feeling perfectly well. The following year, the CIA caught word of Hoffman's experiment just in

time for when fears of Soviet mind control had really started to percolate. And just like that, Camp Dedrich had

found their new niche. Members of the chemical corps relayed Hoffman's findings to the technical director of

chemical and radiological laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal, L. Wilson Green, who was instantly interested in the

battlefield potential of psychedelics. He penned a report claiming that psychochemical weapons like LSD and

measculine could be used to revolutionize warfare, allowing the US to conquer an enemy without the need for

any death or destruction. The head of the CIA, Rosco Hilloder, agreed and in 1950 launched Operation Bluebird,

rumored to be named in reference to its objective of making people sing like a bird. Bluebird was a covert mission to

research mind control techniques run in partnership between the CIA and the Special Operations Division or SOD, an

ultra secret subunit within the already incredibly secret chemical corps. That same year, the agency was also joined by

a man who'd go on to shape it in his own image, Allan Dulles. Coming from about as elite of an upbringing as possible

without having an airport named after him, although his brother John Foster Dulles now does, Delos's grandfather and

uncle both served as Secretary of State. The two elder bellises made sure to pass on the family business to Allen and his

brother who were given prominent roles fresh out of Princeton. At the age of 26, Allen was representing the US at the

1919 Paris Peace Conference where he played an active role in redrawing the borders of Europe. But after around 10

years of that, Allan got tired of all the red tape and left the State Department to join his brother at the

law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which at the time was essentially a private state department, acting as the legal arm of

America's robber baron class. But then during the big WW deuce, Allan found his true calling when he joined the CIA's

predecessor, the OSS, which stationed him in a luxury apartment in the Swiss city of Burn, where he threw elaborate

parties for diplomats and defectors, earning the most Ivy League nickname imaginable, the gentleman spy master.

Also, interestingly, all of this was at the same time that Hoffman was developing LSD over in Bile, just an

hour-ong train ride away from Dulles's apartment. What makes all that even crazier, though, is that as wild as that

may sound, something to understand is that when Dulles joined the CIA, nothing about his resume was particularly

unusual. Pretty much all of the AY's early members came from well-bred, influential families and Ivy League

schools where they'd all pledged skull and bones. But unfortunately for about half of the people I'm going to name in

this video, in addition to redrawing countries and killing presidents, Dulles was also keenly interested in

psychology, particularly the work of Carl Young. As was the case for the other half of the people I'll name. The

way that this interest manifested was in a deep obsession with controlling people's minds. He was particularly

interested in the possibility of creating mindc controlled assassins. And so on January 2nd, 1951, when Alan

Dulles joined the CIA as deputy director of plans, meaning that he was in charge of all covert ops, which you know is

most of what the CIA does. Naturally, the plan that immediately caught his interest was Operation Bluebird. He

immediately got very busy, as you can see from an early Bluebird memo from 1951 that listed the key questions Delos

wanted answered. Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals? Can agency

personnel or persons of interest to this agency be conditioned to prevent any outside power from obtaining information

from them by any known means? Can we obtain control of the future activities, physical and mental, of any given

individual, willing or unwilling, by application of special interrogation and hypnosis techniques? Can we prevent any

outside power from gaining control of future activities, physical and mental, of agency personnel by any known means?

Can we condition by post-hypnotic suggestion agency employees or persons of interest to this agency to prevent

them from giving information to an unauthorized source or from committing any acts on behalf of a foreign or

domestic enemy? Can we in a matter of an hour, 2 hours, 1 day, etc. induce a hypnotic condition in an unwilling

subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit long range. Can we create by post-hypnotic

control an action contrary to an individual's basic moral principles? Can we seize a subject and in the space of

an hour or two by post-hypnotic control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc. short immediate activity.

Can we by special interrogation and hypnotic techniques force a subject unwilling or otherwise to travel long

distances, commit specific acts, and return to us or bring documents or materials? Can a person acting under

post- hypnotic control successfully travel long distances? Can we alter a person's personality? How long will it

hold? Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to

untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs or credentials?

Can we devise a standard simple relatively fast technique for inducing special interrogation and hypnotic

conditions that can be used by untrained agents with or without drugs? Is it possible to find a gas that can be

used to gain special interrogation control from a gas pencil, odorless, colorless, one shot, etc.? What are full

details on sleep inducing machine? I like that his very first question was if accurate information can be obtained

from willing individuals. Like I feel like you should answer that before you start abducting people and trying to

control their minds. To get these answers, they decided that they needed fresh eyes. Someone with

scientific knowledge from outside the agency who could handle all the CIA's mind control research. Dulles turned to

the Chemical Corps, who then turned to Ira Baldwin, who despite being retired by then, still held tremendous sway.

Baldwin knew just the man for the job. a U ofW alum who he'd been something of a mentor to. Enter Sydney Gotautle. As a

Jew from the Bronx and the son of a humble sweat shop owner, it's fair to say that Gotautle's background set him

pretty far apart from the blueblooded ghouls he'd wind up working with. He had a fairly rough childhood owing largely

to being born with a club foot. While he could walk with braces, his primary way of getting around was to be carried

everywhere by his mom, which, as you can imagine, wasn't great for his self-confidence.

He eventually began walking on his own after 12 years and three surgeries, though he had a limp for the rest of his

life. Got graduated high school in 36 and then enrolled in City College to study advanced German, but transferred

to the University of Wisconsin in order to pursue his passion for agricultural engineering. In order to get in, Gotley

completed a couple of credits at the University of Arkansas and more importantly for his future, he endeared

himself to the dean of the University of Wisconsin's College of Agriculture, who was none other than Ira Baldwin.

Gotautle got in and in 1940 he graduated Magna Kumlad and then was admitted to Caltech's grad program thanks in part to

one of Baldwin's famous letters of recommendation in which he says that quote Mr. Gotautle is a very high type

of Jewish boy. This is what people were willing to risk dying of smallpox for. While in California, Gotautly met his

future wife, Margaret Moore. The two immediately bonded over both of their fundamentalist religious upbringings and

shared desire to explore alternative spirituality. They got married in 42 and had two kids. When Scott finished his

PhD, he found work at the FDA, but quit after a few years, saying that the work was too monotonous. Always looking for

their next adventure, Sydney, [music] Margaret, and their kids bounced around until in 48, the young family moved to

an old cabin about 20 miles from Washington DC, which [music] they'd make their home, living a pretty idyllic

life, raising their now four children, as well as chickens, goats, [music] and a small crop of vegetables on their

personal hippie homestead. For the next 3 years, Gotautle took various university research positions until in

51, his old mentor called him up with a job offer. Unbeknownst to Gotautle, at the time, Dulles was looking for someone

to take over all of the CIA's mind control research, a field which the spy master believed would be the ultimate

battleground for the Cold War and beyond. While Gotautle's brilliant mind and years of working for the government

made him a solid choice on paper, just about everything else about him made him a bit of a weird pick. Not only was he

not a member of the American aristocracy, the dude lived in the woods growing his own food, practiced new age

spirituality, and told the CIA psychologist who screened him that he'd join the Young People's Socialist

[music] League in college. Nevertheless, on Friday the 13th of July in 1951, [music] Gotley reported for his first

day at work at the CIA and within a few months, he was put in charge of the chemical division of the tactical

service staff, i.e. the people who make spy tools. Gotibb's first priority in this role was of course working on the

mind control program which on August 20th, 1951 had been given the new name Project [music] Artichoke and with it a

much wider scope. TSS had been tasked with creating [music] drugs that could be used for interrogations, particularly

a truth serum. Gotib dove right in testing all sorts of experimental and >> [music]

>> illegal chemicals. Their first candidate was marijuana, which was literally codeen named TD for truth drug. This of

course didn't work though, and so Got moved on to something a bit harder, cocaine. I mean, who ever heard of a

cokehead lying to someone, right? I just imagine them trying to interrogate someone like, "Tell me the worst

business idea imaginable." But then towards the end of 51, Gotle had his first taste of LSD. And unfortunately,

he really liked it. See, acid had already been tested and dismissed as a potential truth drug. But as anyone

familiar with the stuff will know, there's something uniquely fascinating about it that tends to cause certain

people to become obsessed. And as you can probably guess from the whole growing his own food, woo woo religious

stuff, Gotautle was exactly that kind of guy. He became convinced that LSD held some kind of mysterious power that if it

could only be understood would unlock the secret of mind control. >> [snorts]

>> From then on, Gotautle and the agents working for him began regularly taking LSD as well as dosing each other with

it. This was at first done consensually. Later, not so much. But things didn't really get off to the races until

November of 52 when Eisenhower took office. He and the Dulles family were extremely close. And so it wasn't too

much of a surprise when Allan Dulles was made the new DCI and his brother John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State.

Now that Allan Dulles was in charge of the CIA, he and by extension Gotautle were free to pursue their obsession with

the human mind. While Artichoke had a significantly wider scope than Bluebird, it was still primarily focused on

interrogation techniques. For Dulles, this simply wouldn't do. He wasn't just looking to get prisoners to talk. He

wanted total control. And so on April 13th of 1953, Delos fixed this by giving Gotautle a new research project with a

$300,000 starting budget and total autonomy. MK Ultra was officially on. One of the

first orders of business was to test out the experimental drugs and techniques they'd been cooking up. And so Gotautle

got to work recruiting doctors and behavioral researchers with the ethical flexibility needed to secretly dose

their patients with powerful mindaltering drugs. For the 10 years that he ran MK Ultra, Gotley would pay

out $25 million for human experiments conducted by 185 non-government researchers at around 80 different

institutions. All of this was paid for through CIA shell companies as well as the Office of Naval Research, who'd done

some work of their own trying to develop a truth serum in 1947, making them an ideal cover for funding MK Ultra

experiments. To give you an idea of how loose and sketchy all of this was, let me take you back to 1952 in Korea, about

5 miles northeast of Punjam near the present-day DMZ. there. Allan Dulles's 22-year-old son, Alan Macy Dulles II,

had his own mindopening experience when shrapnel from a mortar entered his brain through the back of his skull, causing a

number of severe disabilities. Not only that, Allan Jr.'s injury also significantly loosened his inhibitions.

He became prone to angry rants, denouncing his father as a quote Hitler lover. While these were dismissed as

paranoid delusions, he wasn't too far from the truth, which really struck a nerve for Dulles Senior. Allan started

hunting for doctors who could do something to put an end to his son's rants. The more hopeless it got, the

more esoteric the specialist he went to. This eventually led him to an appointment with a neurologist named

Harold Wolf. Rather than a cure for his son's newly Swiss cheesed hippocampus in Wolf, Dulles found something else, a

kindred spirit. As one would hope for with any neurologist, Wolf, like Dulles, was

deeply interested in finding a way to control the human mind, a subject which the two immediately bonded over. Wol had

developed a number of theories for how to wipe a human mind clean and then rebuild it, which he referred to as

human ecology. This was all Dulles needed to hear for him to send Wolf to Gotautle, who similarly hit it off with

him. And just like that, Wolf became a part of MK Ultra's network of doctors. He began offering to test all sorts of

techniques on his patients, including quote threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation,

torture, brainwashing, black psychology, hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents. Naturally,

Gotautle rubber stamped all of this. But while that may seem pretty [ __ ] Wolf was far from the worst of the colorful

characters the good doctor befriended. First up, there's Paul Hodgej, a therapist who, thanks to Gotautle, began

secretly experimenting on one of his patients named Harold Blau, a tennis player who was seeking treatment for the

depression he was suffering from following his recent divorce. HCH convinced him to start a course of

treatment in which Blau received regular injections of what was unbeknownst to him a concentrated derivative of

meascowin called MDA. He complained but was pressured into continuing the treatment which he did right up until H.

Hotch administered a dose 14 times larger than normal. Blower began sweating, flailing, foaming at the

mouth, and then entered a coma before dying of an overdose. One of Hatch's medical assistants later confessed that,

quote, "We didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him." Or how about Harris Isel, who ran the

Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, which despite its name, operated essentially as a prison for

drug addicts, most of whom were poor and black. Isbel had already done some work for the Office of Naval Research in

which he'd tested out various truth serums on his inmates. And so when he heard rumblings that the CIA was looking

to test an exciting new drug called LSD, he immediately threw his hat into the ring. Naturally, Gotly jumped at the

opportunity. Once the ink was dry, Isbel began recruiting test subjects in his usual way, which was to offer them

heroin in exchange for their participation. As a side note, Isbel would go on to write or co-author over

100 scientific articles in which he described these tests, always referring to the participants as volunteers rather

than prisoners or, you know, victims. Anyways, once they'd signed up, he would dose his volunteers with ridiculous

amounts of LSD daily. In the most extreme of these experiments, Isbel selected seven inmates who he gave what

he described to Gotautle as quote double, triple, and quadruple doses every day for 77 days. For an idea of

what that would be like, here's the testimony from a victim of yet another similar experiment. In 1957, while a

prisoner at the Atlanta Penitentiary, I was recruited by Dr. Carl Feifer of Emory University to join a medical

project that was researching a cure for schizophrenia. For our participation, we would receive

3 days of good time for each month on the project. We were injected with massive doses of LSD25.

In minutes, the drug would take over, and about eight or nine men, Dr. Feifer and several men in suits who were not

doctors would give us tests to see how we reacted. Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of

appetite, hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible

periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turned to skeletons in front of me. I

saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane. The men in suits would be in a room and hook

me up to machines asking questions like, "Did you ever kill anyone? Would you kill someone?" Two men went psychotic.

They had all the symptoms of schizophrenia. They had to be pried loose from under their beds, growling,

barking, and frothing at the mouth. They put them in a strip cell down the hall. I never saw or heard of them again. They

told us we were helping [music] find a cure for schizophrenia. When it was all over, everyone would feel suicidal and

depressed, rung out emotionally. Time would [music] stand still. I tried to quit, but Dr. Viper would appeal to me.

Please, you're my best subject, and we are close to finding the cure. And then there was Harold Abramson, an allergist

based in New York City and a very early acid enthusiast. Abramson had guided Gotautle through his first ever trip and

therefore received a special place in the network. Originally, Gotautle had him delivering LSD to the other doctors,

though naturally Abramson also saved some, which he gave out to guests at his infamous sex parties on Long Island. But

after a few years of this, Gotautle decided that clearly Abramson was ready for more responsibility and so tasked

him to run some experiments of his own for which Abramson was given an incredibly generous $85,000

grant to fund this research. Naturally, he took this very seriously. His early experiments involved giving acid to his

Siamese fighting fish. But soon enough, Abramson found a subject that really captured his interest. Giving

psychedelic drugs to, and he was very specific about this, prepubescent boys. One particularly disturbing experiment

involved a group of 14 schizophrenic children as young as 6 years old who he gave LSD to every day for 6 weeks.

Gotley began buying as much LSD as he could from Sandos Pharmaceuticals, at the time the only company on Earth that

knew how to make the stuff. He wasn't just stocking up to make sure he had a supply for his network of doctors as

well as his personal trips, but also because the CIA feared that the Soviets were studying it too and might even be

trying to buy up the world's supply. I've seen some conflicting claims about this. Some say that the Soviets were

experimenting with LSD to develop a mind control program of their own, which is definitely very possible. Others have

said that this was just CIA paranoia mixed with some bad intel, which is also very on brand. Whatever the truth is, we

can say from declassified CIA memos that at the very least they definitely believe that this was true. Naturally,

the only reasonable response then was for the CIA to buy the world's supply of acid first. In 1953, Gotip attempted to

do exactly that. He thought that he'd be getting 10 kg of LST, but this was a miscommunication and he wound up only

receiving 10 g. This was barely enough to get Gotautle and his colleagues through a music festival, let alone

supply for an entire clandestine network. And so [music] Gotautle instructed the American pharma company

Eli Liy to start researching the stuff so they could start manufacturing it themselves. But while you might think

that this limit on Gotautle's acid supply might have slowed him down, that couldn't be further from the truth. One

mishap that really shows how fast and loose they were playing things happened in 1953 [music] when Gotautle, ever the

fun boss, decided to hold a Thanksgiving retreat for the scientists running MK Ultra. He rented a cabin in Deer Creek,

Maryland, and sent out letters inviting the team to [music] come for a little sleepover scheduled from Wednesday,

November 18th until that Friday. Since the guest list consisted of everyone who knew the daily ins and outs of the US

military's most secret initiative, security had to be tight. The invitation contained detailed instructions for the

ciruitous routes they needed to take and ended with a note that read quote camouflage winter meeting of script

writers, editors, authors, lecturers, sports magazines, remove CD, that's Camp Dedric, decals from cars. You know, just

a fun little office Thanksgiving party. Dinner and drinks will be provided, but please bring something for our canned

food drive. Also, anyone who speaks to you while you're traveling must be shot and disposed of. No plus ones. Despite

all the cloak and dagger, the first 24 hours were by all accounts a pretty chill time. But things took a turn on

the second night. After dinner, the men began drinking and Gotweib decided to pull a real evil Michael Scott move. He

broke out a bottle of liquor, which the men helped themselves to. After about 20 minutes, he asked if anyone was feeling

weird and then revealed that he laced the booze with LSD. [snorts] God, how does he always find a way to put his

foot in his mouth? Now, for anyone who's not familiar with taking psychedelics, an important concept to be aware of when

coming into a trip is awareness of what's called set and setting. Originally coined by Alfred Matthew

Hubard, a man often referred to as the Johnny Apples Seed of psychedelics for his role in popularizing LSD. Hubard

argued that whether a psychedelic trip will be a positive or negative experience generally comes down to the

set, meaning the headspace of the person taking the drug and the setting referring to the environment in which

this happens, both physical and social. And in the case of Gotautle's retreat, while the setting of being unknowingly

drugged by your boss in the middle of nowhere isn't ideal for anyone, someone there who came in with a particularly

bad set was Dr. Frank Olsen. Another one of Ira Baldwin's recruits. While high-level decisions about chemical

research were handled by Gotautle, Olsen was the one directing the day-to-day operations of Camp Dedric as the acting

chief of the SOD and MK Naomi, which was the CIA's chemical warfare program. But at the time of the retreat, Olsen was in

particularly low spirits. For the past year, he'd been charged with traveling across Europe and Asia in order to

observe how the chemical cor's handiwork was being put into practice, which turned out to be a deeply upsetting

experience. In particular, Olsen recalled to a friend that he attended an experiment in England in which a

20-year-old engineer in the Royal Air Force named Ronald Madison was exposed to a small dose of a chemical originally

created but never used by the Nazi war machine known as sarin nerve gas. And while we can't know if Olsen was aware

that the CIA would use Sarin on communists in Lao less than 20 years later, what we do know is that in the 5

minutes he spent watching Madison writhe in agony before he died, Olsen began to question the morality of his work. This

is all to say that Frank wasn't in a great headsp space to be tripping balls with his boss that night. In fact, it

seems like for Olsen, this was the trip that broke the camel's back. As in the days that followed, he didn't go back to

normal. When he returned to his family, he was suffering from skull flattening guilt and paranoid delusions that he'd

said something wrong and now the CIA was out to get him. Honestly, it seems like the acid might have cured him of being

an evil psychopath, which he correctly realized made him a liability. After 5 days of this with no signs of

improvement, Olsen's boss Vincent Ruit and Gotautle himself sat down with Olsen and were very disturbed by what they'd

seen. Ironically, while the CIA probably wasn't out to get Frank before, thanks to his paranoid breakdown, that was now

a different story. Olsen's intimate knowledge of MK Ultra and SOD meant that this had to be taken very seriously

since in effect his mental health was now a matter of national security. But even though they needed to get Olsen

straightened out ASAP, he couldn't exactly go yapping to a regular therapist. The only solution would be

for him to talk to a doctor who also knew about MK Ultra. Luckily, Gotautleb knew a bunch of those. Of the people in

his network, Gotautleb decided to send Olsen to the sketchiest and least qualified one, Harold Abramson, who

might I remind you that even setting aside his disturbing interest in young boys, Abramson wasn't a psychologist.

But once that was decided, Ruit and Gotautle's chief aid, Robert Lashbrook, brought Olsen to New York to see

Abramson. The meeting actually seemed to have gone pretty well. Even though Abramson wasn't a therapist, he did have

high enough security clearance that Olsen could feel free to open up to him. And after the appointment, Frank seemed

to be returning to his old self. This didn't last though, and the following day, he was worse than ever. Olsen,

Ruit, and Lashbrook went back to Abramson for two more appointments, which again seemed to calm Olsen down

significantly. After his third visit, Olsen seemed to be lucid and in good spirits. The three men checked into room

1018A at the Statatler Hotel, had dinner, and then went to bed. However, Frank didn't stay there for long. And at

2:25 a.m., he was lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel,

which he got to via the window of his 10thstory room. Strangely, when the police arrived to investigate said room,

they found Lashbrook calmly sitting on the toilet. He claimed to have been asleep when Olsen's LSD adult brain made

contact with the sidewalk and said that he didn't call 911 or even leave the room cuz he thought that there was no

point. Lashbook was brought in for questioning, but quickly released once the police confirmed who he worked for.

The [snorts] police investigation was subsequently squashed and the CIA sent their fixers to the hotel room to get

rid of all evidence. Meanwhile, Ruitt was sent to break the news to Alice Olsen that she was now a widow. When she

asked to know what happened, Ruitt simply said that her late husband quote fell or jumped to his death. When

Alice's crying woke her nine-year-old son, Eric, Ruitt responded extremely strangely by simply turning to the child

and flatly telling him that, "Your father had an accident. He fell or jumped out a window." This strange

phrase wound up being used in every description of Olsen's death, from official police reports to the obituary

in his hometown newspaper. Weird. Eric Olsen would go on to spend decades investigating his father's death

and came to the conclusion that he didn't fall or jump, but instead was pushed or thrown, likely by the man who

first told him that phrase in his childhood living room. Personally, I'm not totally sure, but I also don't think

it really matters. As far as I'm concerned, Frank Olsen was killed by the CIA regardless of what happened in that

hotel room. As you can imagine, this was a pretty sobering event. In the immediate aftermath, the higherups at

the CIA decide that Gotautly need to be reigned in by walking away the LSD and requiring him to receive approval to

access it. Something that it's wild that they took so long to do. However, this didn't last long. The decision was

quickly reversed when it was decided that Gotautle's work was too important to place literally any restrictions on.

Gotautle naturally responded to this by becoming even more insane. Like leading up to the CIA's 1954 Christmas party, a

memo had to be released warning people not to drink the punch since the MK Ultra guys were sure to spike it with

LSD. In fairness though, the boys in TSS had a lot to celebrate at that time. They just received an early Christmas

present when near the end of 54, Eli Lily finally cracked the code for LSD and began producing it at an industrial

scale. >> Santa brought here. >> As a sort of New Year's resolution,

Gotautle started out 1955 by writing a list of all the things that he was working on or hoping to study. The list

is as follows. One, substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the

recipient would be discredited in public. Two, substances which increase the efficacy of mentation and

perception. Three, materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effects of alcohol. Four, materials

which will promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol. Five, materials which will produce the signs and

symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering etc. Six, materials

which will render the indication of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness. Seven substances which will

enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and

so-called brainwashing. Eight, materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during

their use. Nine, physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of

surreptitious use. 10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia,

etc. 11. Substances which will produce pure euphoria with no subsequent letdown. 12. Substances which alter

personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is

enhanced. 13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under the influence

will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning. 14. Substances which will lower the ambition

and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts. 15. substances which will

promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.

16. A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes as an aerosol,

etc. which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc

basis. 17. a material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above roots and which in very small

amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatever. But there was something else

he got up to that wasn't on the list. Now that Gotautle had access to swimming pools of LSD, he wanted to begin doing

real clinical trials, something that the lab at Camp Dedrich and his sketchy doctor friends weren't equipped for. And

so he did what any scientist looking to test a new drug would do and began outsourcing to reputable schools and

hospitals. Unlike most other scientists though, the funding for this came from a series of CIA cutouts through which

Gotautib funded his studies and expanded his network to include many of the top behavioral scientists in America. But

the thing is, doesn't that all sound like too much of a hassle? Having to queer things with other departments in

the agency, keeping track of all these different shell companies, not to mention the very slight amount of

oversight that this involved. Wouldn't it be easier if Gotautle had a front of his very own so he didn't have to keep

borrowing the agencies? He thought so, too. So in 55, Gotautle called up his old friend Harold Wolf and

using his term, the two of them started the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology with Wolf as the founding

president. The first study they funded involved trying to brainwash Chinese people in America in the hopes that they

could be made to go home and commit acts of sabotage. Things quickly ballooned from there as they began funding

research on just about any hairbrain shower thought that popped into Gotle's head. And since he'd been doing acid

constantly for 4 years at this point, there was no shortage of weird ideas. They did a study on how owning a nuclear

fallout shelter affects people's views on foreign policy. Then one about the emotional effects of circumcision. And

of course, there was plenty of good old phronology. Now, moving on, let me tell you a little bit about a real piece of

[ __ ] named George Hunter White. White was a dirt bag tough guy narcotics agent who had been brought on to show the

nerds at TSS how things go down in the streets. He'd originally been put in charge of running fake safe houses in

New York, where he'd dose hippies and drug [music] addicts, then study their behavior. That may sound kind of nuts,

but don't worry. White made it a point to personally test all the drugs that he was using. He generally preferred to do

this orally. In 55, he got promoted to head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and relocated to San Francisco. Gotibb

saw this as a fantastic opportunity to take things up a notch with White setting up a new and even more insane

safe house. And so began Operation Midnight Climax. The cheap vampire porno sounding name was absolutely intentional

here since what Midnight Climax entailed was White along with his friend, a former military intelligence officer

named Ira Ike Feldman setting up a brothel in which the sex workers he hired were trained to dose their JS with

acid and then talk to them after they'd had sex to see if LSD or whatever other drugs Gotautle had cooked up could be

effectively combined with decks to loosen someone's tongue. The place was wired up with bugs from floor to ceiling

and a secret room was built so that White could watch the show while, this is completely true, sitting on a

portable toilet and drinking martinis from a picture. Now, Ike Feldman is a particularly interesting source thanks

to the extremely honest look he gives us into what kind of a guy Gotautle really was. While he was known at home as a

wholesome old hippie dad to his bosses as a nerdy Jewish outsider with his head in the clouds and his subordinates as a

kind and understanding boss, although you should definitely watch or drink around him. Ike, on the other hand, saw

a very different side of Sydney. He described their first meeting as follows. Several times Sydney got came

out. I met Gotautle at the pad and at White's office. Sydney was a nice guy. He was a [ __ ] nut. They were all

nuts. I says, "You're a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn like me. What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers?"

He had this black bag with him. He says, "This is my bag of doy tricks." He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a

drive out to Meyer Woods out by Stinson Beach. Sydney says, "Stop the car." He pulls [music] out a dart gun and shoots

this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me, "Come back in 2 days and check this tree." So we go back in 2

days. The tree was completely dead. Not a leaf left on it. And while I know that sounds pretty bad, and I don't just mean

my Brooklyn accent, don't worry. Golly wasn't just some total psycho. He was also a dirt bag. Feldman added some more

juicy details during a deposition in which he said that quote, "Anytime that [ __ ] came to San Francisco, get me a

[ __ ] He always needed a goy." And hey, definitely not good. But it was the 50s. I'm re-watching Madmen right now. I'm

sure everyone involved in this looked really cool. Where this gets a bit weirder, though, is with Gotautle's

relationship with Mr. and Mrs. White. Felman claims that when he and Gotautle would visit White, the scientists would

slip something into George's drink and then proceed to [ __ ] his wife while her husband was unconscious [music] and

Feldman watched. They were very good friends. I'd always pick him up. We'd go there. We'd sit. I don't drink. Before

you know it, White passed out in the bedroom and Sydney was on the couch with the old lady humping her brains out.

George knew, [music] but he I think he loved her very much. A what the [ __ ] Anyways, in 57, Gotib was approaching 40

and having evidently fallen into the grips of a midwife crisis, decided he needed a change and applied to be

transferred to a field office in Munich, where he'd be able to try out his techniques under more realworld

circumstances. The application was accepted and so he and his family moved to Germany for 2

years. While in Munich, Gotautle's presence was definitely felt. Soon after he arrived, there was a sharp uptick in

people being illegally kidnapped by the CIA and then subjected to strange and extremely illegal interrogation

techniques, all without the knowledge of the German authorities. According to some agents stationed there, Gotautle

was regularly being brought in to interrogate prisoners and seemed to have an uncanny ability to get the truth out

of them. After his two years abroad, Gotautle returned to America in time for the CIA to be handed over to John

McCome, a complete outsider who didn't share Dulles's super villainesque obsession with controlling people's

minds, preferring instead to stay in his lane overthrowing democratically elected socialists. And so when he learned about

MK Ultra, he was a little surprised and called for the CIA's inspector general to conduct a full audit of the project.

Unsurprisingly, the report called for MK Ultra to receive a lot more oversight and a much more narrow scope. You might

expect Gotleb to have thought this, but instead he responded with a letter that argued that the report actually didn't

go far enough, claiming that MK Ultra's findings lacked practical applications and suggested that the whole thing be

shut down. And so they did just that. Over the next few years, MK Ultra's sub projects were shut down. And in 64, it

officially ended and was replaced with MK Search, which had a much more limited mission. Quote, to develop a capability

to manipulate human behavior in a predictable manner through the use of drugs. It's crazy that I have to call

that reasonable now, but here we are. Got spent the rest of his career at the agency devising increasingly insane ways

to assassinate socialist politicians. Like you know that meme about the CIA trying to kill Castro with a poison pen.

That was a real thing that got made. Some other highlights from this time include botulism lace toothpaste which

was made to assassinate Patrice Leumba, a coin with a poison tip needle hidden inside so that captured US soldiers

could commit suicide with it. And funniest of all, he was involved in another plan to take down Castro where

the CIA figured that the source of the Cuban leader appeal was his beard. And so Gotautle developed a powder that

would make him go bald if it was put in his shoes. Unfortunately, the plan fell apart because they spent so long working

on the anti-beard powder that they actually never figured out a way to get their hands on Castro shoes. Isn't that

[ __ ] nuts? Like that's entirely real. They were actually just like, "Oh, stupid, stupid. How do we get our hands

on the shoes? The plan was perfect, too. We realized that his beard is where his power is. We made the powder that goes

in his feet to make it fall out. [clears throat] Back to the drawing board, guys.

Actually though, with everything I just named, one of the weirdest things is that for one reason or another, none of

those inventions were ever actually used. you really get the sense that Gotautle's creations weren't remotely

practical at any point ever. It was just all about like doing cool weird [ __ ] But Gotautle's idealic mad scientist

life was interrupted one day in 1973 when Nixon fired then director of the CIA Richard Helms as retribution for him

not suppressing the FBI's investigation into Watergate. While he was on his way out, Helms called his old buddy Sydney

into his office to reminisce about old times. The meeting took on a more serious tone, though, when Helms changed

the subject to Gotautleb's baby MK Ultra. The two men came to an agreement that all the files needed to be

destroyed. And that night, that's exactly what they did. as a declassified memo by an unnamed CIA psychologist

describes. Early in 1973, Dr. Gotautle, the then chief of the technical services division, called and me into his office

and requested that we review our branch holdings and assure him that there were no extent records of the drug research

program, which had been terminated many years before. Dr. Gotautle explained that Mr. Helms in the process of

vacating his chair as DCI had called him and said in effect, "Let's take this with us or let's let this die with us."

Essentially, Helms was taking notice that he and Dr. Gotautle largely personified the always controversial

drug research program. And since it was long over, he wanted them to take the onus and responsibility away with them

in their retirements, not leaving it as a burden or an albatross for those who came after them. There was no related

investigations taking [music] place at the time and no relevant caveats on reduction of files. Mr. Helms seemed to

be saying, "It was our bath. Let us clean the tub." Honestly, say what you will about these guys. pretty rare to

see a boss who's down to support the next generation by destroying evidence of a massive illegal conspiracy rather

than just pulling the ladder up with them. However, while these two bosses of the year did manage to destroy about 90

to 95% of the documents, things didn't remain buried for long. >> [snorts]

>> Nixon replaced Helms with James Slesinger, who rattled by the Watergate scandal, called for complete accounting

of any illegal activities the agency had conducted, which were collected into a 693page

document that came to be known as the family jewels. The existence of this wound up being leaked to the journalist

Seymour Hirs by a disillusioned CIA agent resulting in the front page New York Times story huge CIA operation

reported in US against anti-war forces and other dissident in Nixon years. This story sparked a new round of government

investigations into CIA misconduct in the forms of the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the 1977 joint

Senate hearing. [snorts] Even though the files were gone, through these hearings, the American public learned about the

many, many, many illegal activities of the CIA through testimony directly from the agents mouths. Finally, while all of

this was going on, a former State Department employee named John Marx decided to do some digging of his own

and began filing foyer requests for anything related to Bluebird, Artichoke, or MK Ultra. In 1976, he hit paid dirt

when the person processing his request searched the CIA's retired record center and found seven boxes containing about

20,000 pages that Helms and Gotautle missed. Turns out that while they were able to destroy all of their lab reports

and just about everything that directly describes what they got up to, all the financial documents were filed in a

separate way, which saved them from being destroyed. While there are obviously still massive holes in our

knowledge, Gotaut was obsessive about recording every expense, which gives us a surprisingly full view of what

happened. Markx used the contents of these boxes to write this book, The Search for the Manurion Candidate, which

was the first major history of MK Ultra and is still one of the best ones that you can read. But while all this was

happening, Gotautle was blissfully ignorant. He'd [music] retired in 73 when he was 54 years young. and deciding

that they were ready for [music] their next big adventure, he and his wife sold their home and set off to travel the

world, providing humanitarian aid and searching for spiritual enlightenment. Without any plan other than to serve the

needy, the two aging [music] hippies got on a freighter in San Francisco and headed off. They traveled [music] the

world, eventually winding up at a hospital in India, helping people with leprosy until [music] one day a message

arrived for Sydney. The US government had finally tracked him down and wanted to ask him some questions.

Got returned to America to testify before the church committee and the Senate. Not only was he able to receive

full immunity in exchange for his testimony, but Gotautle also claimed to be suffering health issues, which made

him medically incapable of appearing before a crowd, and so was able to provide his testimony over an intercom

in a private room. When asked about why he had destroyed all of his documents, Gotautle claimed that it had nothing to

do with covering illegal activity and that there were actually three very good reasons. One, as with the other files

which were destroyed in a continuing and important CIA program of files destruction to handle a burgeoning paper

problem, there was constant pressure to retire files and to destroy those files which had no further use.

Two, with my retirement and that of others connected with this work and with the drug work over and inactive for

several years, these files were of no constructive use to the agency. They were the kind of sensitive files that

were capable of being misunderstood by anyone not thoroughly familiar with their background. Three, the files

contained the names of prominent scientists, researchers, and physicians who had collaborated with us and who had

been assured that their relationship with the CIA would be kept forever confidential. I felt that the careers

and reputations of these people would be severely damaged or ruined, for instance, in today's climate of

investigations if their names and CIA connections were made public. I felt a special deep

personal obligation to respect this assurance of confidentiality and to make as certain as I could that these

particular CIA sources would never be revealed. Literally just A we're destroying files all the time. B you'd

probably misunderstand them and think that drugging people is bad. And C cancel culture. As far as further

justice though, following his testimony, Gotautle faced a number of lawsuits from people who believed that they had been

victims of the program. All wound up being dismissed. And Gotautle went on to spend his golden years in comfort,

surrounded by his loved ones until he died in 1999 at the age of 80. But now the question is, of course, what

exactly was in those destroyed documents? Well, one CIA psychologist named John Ginger claimed that by the

60s they'd realized that all the brainwashing stuff was a complete dead end. Quote, "By 1961, 1962, it was at

least proven to my satisfaction that brainwashing, so-called as some kind of esoteric device where drugs or

mindaltering kinds of conditions and so forth were used, did not exist. The Manurion Candid as a movie really set us

back a long time because it made something impossible look possible. But by 1962 and 1963, the general idea that

we were able to come up with is that brainwashing was largely a process of isolating a human being, keeping him out

of contact, putting him under long stress in relationship to the interviewing and interrogation and that

they could produce any change that way without having to resort to any kind of esoteric means. ironic that a movie

doing red scare anti-China propaganda somehow ended up screwing the CIA. There's also a quote from David Rhodess

who was the president of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology for a couple of years and he said that quote

the possibility of creating a Manurion candidate is a total psychological impossibility but it is intriguing. It

is a lot of fun. Hey, doesn't it make you feel better to know that they were having fun? This, however, is backed up

by Gotautle's testimony in which he said that at the time I left the CIA, my conclusion would have been that the

probability of them using psychoggenic materials in a finely tuned way to alter behavior was very low on the basis that

we found it was very hard to do. what really happened to people when they were under the influence of these

mindaltering or psychoggenic drugs was very variable, very unpredictable. The thing is though that while those claims

may be true, we also have to consider who they're coming from, which are members of the CIA. And if you only

learn one thing from this video, you should absolutely never ever take the CIA at their word. We do have some

harder evidence though in the form of CIA memos. There's this artichoke memo from January 22nd, 1954 that

specifically describes trying to hypnotize someone into committing a political assassination and comes to the

conclusion that it can't be done. There's also another from July 15th of the same year saying that when it comes

to using hypnosis for military purposes, they weren't able to achieve anything meaningful outside of lab conditions.

And then there's a memo Gotautle himself wrote titled scientific and technical problems in covert action operations in

which he admitted that quote as of 1960 no effective knockout pill, truth serum, aphrodesiac or recruitment pill was

known to exist. Typical Gotautle to be most concerned about creating an aphrodesiac. Was that going to help with

interrogations or did you just want that for George White's wife? And finally, probably one of the most convincing

pieces of evidence for the dumbass theory is that back then, just like today, the CIA was sharing their intel

with the Israeli intelligence agency MSAD. And when they heard about MK Ultra, the Israelis got very interested.

In ' 68, they tried to put the CIA's work into practice by kidnapping a Palestinian child who they then spent

three months trying to brainwash into becoming their programmed assassin in order to kill Yasser Arafat. However,

within about 5 hours of them setting him loose, he turned himself into the police and told them everything that happened.

Now, I definitely find this stuff pretty convincing, but to be fair here, it's still absolutely possible that they had

some big successes, too. It's also worth noting that as Naomi Klein argues in the shock doctrine, in order to distract

from the more nefarious stuff that they were up to, the CIA was likely happy to be made a laughingstock as the press

zeroed in on the strange projects like the use of LSD as well as some of the like really bizarre research such as sub

project number 136 which focused on cultivating ESP. Overall though, in my opinion, where this theory gets it right

is in highlighting the fact that MK Ultra was a massive [ __ ] show. That's completely true. The problem though is

that if you're claiming that they didn't get anything out of it, then all we have to do is prove that they did. And I

think that that's pretty doable. So, let me introduce you to >> [music]

>> So, this theory states that MK [music] Ultra was far from a failure, but that its goals were substantially [music]

more mundane. Not mundane as in boring, but mundane in the way that almost everything is compared to creating

mind-controlled secret agents. The idea is that all the weirdass mind control stuff, you know, the drugs, hypnosis,

brain implants, and what have you, were either quickly abandoned, never really taken seriously in the first place, or a

cover to make the agency look silly in order to hide the real objective of MK Ultra, developing more effective torture

[music] techniques, something that undeniably they were massively successful in doing. Two big proponents

of [music] this theory and the main sources I'll be using for this section are the historian Alfred McCoyy's book,

A Question of Torture, as well as the shock doctrine by [music] Naomi Klein. Now, before we get into things, let's do

a brief refresher on torture. It is obviously one of humanity's most ancient forms of artistic expression. But

interestingly, opposition to torture is far from some form of modern woke squeamishness and in fact goes almost as

far back as torture itself. The practice [music] was forbidden in ancient Greece except on slaves. And while the Romans

were cool with it, even they urged caution. The imperial jurist Alpion in the 3rd century AD described torture as

a quote delicate, dangerous, and deceptive [music] thing. For many persons have such strength of body and

soul that they heed [music] pain very little so that there is no means of obtaining the truth from them. While

others are so susceptible [music] to pain that they will tell any lie rather than suffer it. It's crazy that people

today have significantly less progressive views than this guy. Some of them are probably writing angry comments

about what a liberal cuck he was right now. But if we've always known about these drawbacks, why is torture stuck

around for so long? Well, it's not hard to imagine a situation ripped out of some early 2000s action movie to justify

its use. Picture this. You're the leader of a country and there's trouble a foot. You have solid intel that one of your

evil enemies is planning to kill a ton of your citizens or worse, threaten your power. You know just enough to be sure

that something's coming, but not enough to stop it. [music] Luckily, you've captured one of the conspirators, but he

isn't talking and every second counts. What are you going to do? Sure, a trial would be nice, but that's not really a

luxury you can afford. If only just this once there was some way to skip all of that and quickly [music] extract the

information that you need. The problem though is that even in the most black and white hypothetical you can imagine,

it never really stops there. Sure, the results aren't very reliable, but the ease and efficiency with which they're

extracted makes that easy to ignore. There's also something deeply intoxicating about wielding that kind of

power, both for you and the people actually getting their hands dirty. Pretty soon, what used to be a dubious

but potentially justifiable last resort is being used more and more with less and less discrimination. This tends to

have some serious political costs in the long term. Citizens and rival states don't look too kindly on torture or all

the nasty business that comes with it. However, far from dissuading you, this opposition only provides more

justification for you to really take the gloves off. Back in ancient times, the thing that put a damper on the use of

torture in Europe was actually the spread of Christianity. In 866, Pope Nicholas banned the practice on the

grounds that it was antithetical to Christ's teachings. But of course, this didn't last for long. Torture started to

make a comeback around 1215 when the church abolished trial by ordeal and was made official in 1252 when the

ironically named Pope Innocent IV declared that torture was kosher both for interrogation and punishment as it

was used to great effect during the Inquisitions. But all trends are cyclical. And so by the 18th century,

torture once again fell out of fashion in European courts, which were starting to prefer evidence over forced

confessions. This time, the pendulum took about 200 years to swing back. But sure enough, as World War I ended,

strong men leaders rose to power across Europe. each bringing with them a secret police force who were all too happy to

get their hands dirty, enforcing their respective authoritarian regime by applying new methods to this very old

profession. It took a bit longer for this to be felt stateside. In 48, the US helped pass the

UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But in a move that might feel pretty familiar, the Conservatives

jumped on this issue, arguing that it represented a Luciferian globalist one world government nWo takeover. I'm sure

it was also just a coincidence that Jim Crow was a queer violation [music] of it. In response, conservatives tried to

pass the Bricker Amendment, which would limit the president's control over [music] foreign policy. Eisenhower

stopped this, but to do so, he had to prove that he wasn't a little [ __ ] by refusing to [music] sign the UN Covenant

on human rights, the UN Covenant on the political rights of women, or support the genocide convention. Now, we already

covered how the CIA's fear of communist brainwashing was the catalyst for Operation Bluebird, but I left a couple

details out. While Bluebird was absolutely trying to develop all sorts of weird mind control techniques through

drugs and hypnosis, the image that calls to mind is probably some guys in white lab coats waving a pocket watch back and

forth. In reality, what Bluebird actually entailed was a lot closer to, you know, Bluebird's first ever memo

called for experiments, quote, investigating the possibility of control of an individual by application of

special interrogation techniques using defectors, refugees, PSWs, and others. While this was started by Hill and Coder

in 1950, it really took off after Alan Dulles joined the CIA. Now, in order to try out these special interrogation

techniques, they needed somewhere nice and remote. One of the first of such places was a captured Nazi base in

Germany on the outskirts of Ubersol called Camp King, where a notoriously brutal group of American soldiers called

the Rough Boys conducted interrogations. The CIA began performing Bluebird experiments just outside the base's

perimeter in a safe house, i.e. a secret prison they built where captured enemy agents could be subjected to

experimental torture methods. The modern term for this is of course a black site. The agents who conducted these bluebird

interrogations were working under the skilled eye of a doctor who they referred to as Doc Fiser. His real name

though was Walter Shriber, the former surgeon general of the Nazi army who had approved all manner of horrific

experiments on the inmates of Achvitz, Ravensbrook, and Daau. After the war, Shriber was captured by the Russians and

imprisoned in the infamous Lyanka prison, but managed to escape and sneak over to West Germany, where he turned

himself over to the Counter Intelligence Corps, who quickly scooped him up in Operation Paperclip. then sent him to

Camp King. There the tables were turned as Shriber was set to work pllying his trade on captured Soviets.

This wound up being such a hit that soon similar black sites started opening up shop all over West Germany and then East

Asia, often coming complete with their own war criminal doctors provided by Operation Paperclip. One example was

Shiro Ishi, who ran Japan's infamous Unit 731, a germ warfare research division stationed in Manuria, who

served as the inspiration for the Chemical Corps. Unit 731's research involved dissecting the bodies of

between 3 and 12,000 prisoners while they were still alive. But directly following the war, the bourgeois Tokyo

war crimes trial was trying to take punitive measures, but the US stepped in to mediate a transformative justice

process based on anarchist principles of abolition in which was allowed to avoid all charges in exchange for turning over

his research and taking a job at an East Asian black site, shooting up captured North Koreans with benzadrine and sodium

amatl. Remember kids, AAB includes war crime tribunals. [laughter] It's my best bread tube impression.

Anyways, as we know, Sydney Gotautle was brought into the agency in 1951. And shortly thereafter, Bluebird was renamed

to Artichoke and handed over to him. [snorts] As one of Dulles's early memos makes clear, while Artichoke had a much

wider scope than Bluebird, at its core, it would be a continuation of it. Our principal goal remains the same as it

was in the beginning. The investigation of drug effects [music] on ego control and volitional activities i.e. can

willfully suppressed information be elicited through drugs affecting higher nervous systems? If so, which agents

[music] are better for this purpose? Team Artichoke began conducting their experiments at a black site in the

Panama [music] Canal called Fort Clayton. Their first guest was a prisoner they called Kelk, real name

[music] Dmitri Ditrov, a Bulgarian politician who'd been sharing intel with the CIA. The issue, though, was that

they'd heard Dimmitrov might [music] have been thinking of switching over to work with the French. Never ones to take

rejection, well, the CIA did the only rational thing, kidnapping Dimmitrov [music] and bringing him to a Greek

prison where they tortured him for 6 months. After that, he really didn't want to work with America, so they

brought him to Fort Clayton, where he was subjected to experimental [music] torture methods for three years. In that

time, while Dimmitro never really came around on Uncle Sam, a lot of other things did change. Under Gotautle,

Artichoke carried on conducting experiments primarily on Americans and had seen some preliminary success with a

combination of LSD, sodium penol, and hypnosis. The CIA guys were very excited about all of this. And so in 53,

Artichoke was expanded [music] again, turning into MK Ultra. Delos announced the creation of what would be the CIA's

most closely guarded secret in an oddly public way. On April 10th, [music] exactly 3 days before the official

launch of MK Ultra, Dulles gave a speech at a conference for his fellow Princeton alumni. The subject was the dangers of

communist brainwashing [music] which he claimed were a dire threat to America, saying that the Soviets had mysterious

techniques, the victims [music] of which, quote, are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts,

[music] parrot-like, the individuals so conditioned can merely repeat thoughts which have been implanted in their minds

by suggestion from outside. [music] In effect, the brain under these circumstances becomes a phonograph

playing a disc [music] put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control. Interestingly though,

as the speech went on, the methods Dulles described seemed to have a suspicious similarity to the types of

things [music] the CIA had been developing at black sites for the past 2 years. claiming to have spoken to a

Christian missionary who was tortured [music] in China. Dois said this man described how he had been subjected for

75 [music] days to the monotony of interrogation, mostly during the night hours by relays of brutal [music]

questions, deprived of sleep and subjected to the effects of bright lighting during the period [music] of

his questioning. As far as he knew, no drugs were used, but of course they might have been used without his knowing

it. What makes this all the stranger is that while with hindsight it's pretty clear that these rumors of communist

brainwashing experiments were almost entirely [ __ ] Dulles actually knew that back then too. Jumping back a bit,

on May 30th, 1951, Sir Henry T. Tizzer, the senior scientist for the British Ministry of Defense, checked into the

Ritz Carlton Hotel at 1228 Rue Sherbrook West in Montreal. He was there to address the Canadian Association of

Physicists at a conference that would be taking place in 2 days. On June 1st, the day of the conference, [music] Tizzard

gave two speeches, one over lunch and a second at dinner. In between these [music] two addresses, he slipped away

to the real reason for his trip, a meeting which he described in his diary [music] simply as quote discussion with

Soland, etc. Sand referred to Dr. Orman [music] Sanden, the first chairman of the Canadian Defense Research Board,

etc. referred to Sirill Hastings, a senior researcher at the CIA, as well as [music] a group of Canadian scientists

and psychologists. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss what else? The possible threat

of communist [music] mind control. During the meeting, Tizzard made it clear that quote, "There has been

nothing new in the interrogation business since the days of the Inquisition." Shout out Pope Innocent.

He went on to say that there was no evidence of [music] the Soviets making any changes to the state of torture.

Rather, their techniques [music] were quote remarkably similar to the age-old methods. But the meeting didn't end

there. With that worry out of the way, they began toying with the possibility of the US, [music] England, and Canada

going on the offensive. The communists might not have been [music] able to revolutionize the interrogation

business, but maybe they could. The first major development in this process would [music] ultimately come from

another attendee of this meeting, a Canadian psychologist named Donald O'. Heb, both the chair of [music] the human

relations and research committee of the Canadian Defense Research Board, as well as the head of the psychology department

[music] of McGill University. Shortly after the meeting, Heb took a defense grant for $10,000 and began conducting a

[music] series of experiments over the next three years that would completely change the practice of torture. In

[music] classic psychology fashion, Heb's experiments were conducted on firstear students, all of which involve

[music] disrupting their senses. This started with what Heb called experimental [music] deafness in which

five test subjects had their ears plugged with cotton and petroleum [music] jelly during a 3-day weekend.

But things escalated quickly. Eventually, Heb's students were [music] being made to spend days in his black

room. A small soundproof room with a white noise machine to block out all sound, opaque goggles over their eyes to

block their vision, and foam tubes placed over their hands and around their heads to minimize tactile stimulus. The

results were devastating. test subjects showed dramatically reduced cognitive abilities after only a few hours. While

most of them quit on the first day, those that stuck around past day two began hallucinating. They conducted

another experiment to see how this treatment would affect the subject's susceptibility to propaganda by

selecting subjects who were atheists and then rather than white noise played a loop recording of a man saying that

science can't be trusted or that ghosts are real. Sure enough, the subjects reported a newfound interest in religion

and the supernatural which lasted for weeks after the experiment ended. Checkmate atheists. Heb's work, which on

all official documents he claimed was meant to prevent railroad and highway accidents, had shown that the human

brain needs sensory stimulus to function properly and that the simple act of depriving someone of that constituted

one of the most powerful forms of torture imaginable. In 1954, he presented his work at a

conference for the American Psychological Association, which interestingly was held at the exact same

hotel that Frank Olsen had fell or jumped out of one year earlier. And just like the last time that hotel came up,

there were a number of CIA agents in the building. This time on the lookout for promising research that could help MK

Ultra. By this point, the agency was well aware of what Heb had been cooking up. Not only had they played a role in

funding it, but they'd even sent an undercover agent to secretly act as one of his research assistants. That said,

at the convention, Heb did not disappoint. His work earned him a lot of love from the CIA and even resulted in a

Nobel Prize nomination. But in classic Canadian fashion, the same couldn't be said in Ottawa. The same year as the

conference, the Canadian government decided that Heb's research was a waste of money and cut the funding, cancelling

his work. What's more, he claimed that all of his raw research data were suddenly snatched up by some

organization in the States. Bummer. Interestingly, the mysterious disappearance of those documents didn't

seem to be too big of an issue for the CIA, who immediately began working to continue Heb's work. They saw

particularly promising results from an experiment in which a soldier suffered a complete breakdown after being kept in

isolation for 40 hours. This caught the attention of the former head of Artichoke, Moors Allen, as well as the

guy who'd gone undercover as one of Heb's research assistants, a brain surgeon from the National Institute of

Mental Health named Maitellyn Baldwin. Allen and Baldwin got really excited and began advocating for the experiment to

be repeated under terminal conditions, i.e. in a life ordeath circumstance. Now, this problem of a lack of terminal

test cases actually came up four years earlier in Dulles's speech. Towards the end, after so much time spent describing

the brainwashing methods that the communists were using, Dulles included a line that assured the audience that the

US wasn't doing anything like this. except he decided to do this in a pretty strange way by lamenting the fact that

unfortunately America is just too dang moral. We in the West are somewhat handicapped in getting all the details.