Welcome back to week two of the Behind the Bastards m k Ultra episodes. I'm Robert Evans. I am the normal host of this show unless you're part of a CI A mind controlled experiment that has deep patterned you and cause you to forget the real host of this show. Um, but that probably hasn't happened. Uh. And to explain why that probably hasn't happened, here's our guest, Jason Pargeon. Hello. For those of you did not listen to parts one two, I am frequent podcast hosts and author Jason Pargean needs to be Evans boss. Back in the crack dot com days, where I was executive editor for thirteen years from two thousand seven till to till two thousand and twenty, during what I like to think of as the glory years. Maybe other people think those were the bad years and that it was fine before and after that. Jason, I would think anyone who disagrees with you on that point has probably had their minds destroyed by the sea had ad a like BuzzFeed. Uh. Yeah, but I have a novel and it's called If this book exists, You're in the wrong universe. That is coming out right around the time you're listening to this. Uh anywhere books are sold in any format e book, audiobook. It is one of the John Dies at the End books. If you know what that means, you are very excited. If not, then that was just a nonsense string of words that I just said. There there there's a somewhat famous book and movie called John Dies at the End of the movie. You can find on streaming. But it is a New York Times best selling book series, and this is this book is one of them. If you've not read any of them, you can start in this one if you want it is That would be a very expensive way to start a series, considering the other ones are probably like on Kendall at this point. Um, but by all means, please by by the thirty dollar hardcover. I that that will be good for me if you do that. Yeah, um by his book. Yeah, it's worth it. It's like it's like taking a little bit of LSD and then not having the CIA electro shock you until your brain gets depatterned. It's like the good parts of that experience. It's like it's like what Sydney got Leaves doing, as opposed to what got leaves doing to everyone else. Um, yeah, exactly. Um, it's fun. You know, there's a there's one of the things that you can do if you want to have a good time is you can find old uh CIA reports about their drug trips. Um. I'm looking at one from nineteen three right now where they're talking about like the Gateway experience and like the kind of basically they're talking about like, hey, is it possible that we're communicating with aliens while we're all doing drugs? Um, And kind of the conclusion is that it's scary and they don't know, because again, these are, to be fair, these are the kind of thing things that happened to you when you're on drugs. It's like did I just talk to some sort of like being from outside of you know, time and space? Um, And it's it is I don't know, comforting is the wrong word, but it's funny to note that the CIA has had the same experiences. Okay, and I have to maybe this is a spoiler for the remaining episode or episodes in this in this series, but between now, from the beginning to the end of this, like obviously they did record a ton of data. They did do a ton of what they're calling experiments. Did they learn anything useful that wasn't learned elsewhere or that other people didn't already know? Was there any good that came from this? No? Uh. In short, Jason, I mean the the good that comes from it. To the extent that good comes from it, is that l s D gets out and becomes incredibly popular among the generation of musicians and artists and philosophers and thinkers. And it gets out largely because of guys who are working with Most of the people who read LSD into the actual like the civilian populace in a way that's not horribly abusive, are also these guys who are like contracting their their doctors, you know, they're they're they're psychiatrists who have practices. They're working with the CIA for extra money. And part of that is that they're drugging people in nightmare experiments. But also they have free acid, and so they take it and they give it to their friends, some of whom wind up writing very influential books and becoming like these members of the of the sixties, like that that generation of you know, people who tune in and drop out, so we get a lot of cool music from that period of time. Um, there's a lot of of interesting thinkers who are influenced by the experiences they have on ASCID and a lot of that is positive. And I guess you could say that came inadvertently through as a result of MK Ultra. That's not what they were trying to do, and it was not because they were drugging people and then those people wrote great albums. It's more that, like, well, we were giving out acid for free to the same guys who were torturing people, and some of them gave that acid to people who then gave it to people who wound up writing pretty pretty rad albums who became Jerry Garcia. You know, it certainly was not anything to do with what they intended. In fact, I assumed that the Cia very much did not like the cultural pivot that occurred in the nine six. I think Gottlieb was probably cool with it because he is kind of a hippie. But yeah, most of these guys would we're we're we're horrified by what was happening. Um, we'll be talking about that when we get to the Charles Manson portions of these episodes. Jason um so as we kind of left off here, you know, we talked about dr you and Cameron over in Canada de patterning people all of this nightmare work. While Cameron is doing this horrible ship, Sidney Gottlieb and his friends are continuing to go buck fucking wild with their own personal LSD experiments. Conscientious guided trips and consensual random dosings had given away to a culture of surprise acid trips for anybody who happened to be near scientists from the mk Ultra program. At the end of nineteen fifty four, the problem had gotten so bad that the CIA's Office of Security sent out a memo to all of the agents at the CIA, warning that certain officers were testing LSD on their colleagues and that it could quote produce serious insanity for periods of eight to eighteen hours and possibly longer. Due to the risk of being drugged. They recommended employees not drink from the punch bowl at the upcoming Christmas party, Like that's a that's a memo you get at the CIA. Don't drink from the punch this year. Somebody's probably gonna put acid at it, Like can you deliver ascid that way? And oh absolutely, I had no idea. You can put it in any liquid. Yeah, yeah, you don't notice that it doesn't really have a flavor. So a lot of people like sticking orange use apparently like potentiates some of the effects, So people take it into o J a lot. If you're just getting it liquid, most people get it as like it's like a little piece of paper that has has had a drop on it or something, and they take it that way. But you know, all of the information you would need if you were really doing this as an experiment about in terms of like what are what other medications are these people on? What else do they have that could be counteracting it or could be you know, let me interact with it, you know, or any of these people, you know, how many of them been drinking alcohol, What's what's the what's the you know, the average weight? Or do they have pre existing conditions, do they have pre existing mental health problems? And all the things you would be like if you're going to do a study today to see like what theyre if they somehow allowed you to test, Like we're going to do somebody's food around them. They don't know what it's coming. We're going to study the response there's a battery of data you would need on that person to know what you were looking at in their response and why it was different from individual to individual. Right, And it sounds like they were doing any of this. It was so sloppy and unscientific. Yeah, what is the scientific value of putting LSD in a punch bowl and seeing what happens at a work party? Like, how do you actually turn that into into usable data? Because you're you're not if you're just having fun. If it turned into an orgy, or if it turned into a riot, or if it turned into nothing, that doesn't mean anything unless you know all of the other complicating factors, like the mood. Was it something that was gonna happen anyway? Is that unique the people of this particular age or the particular mindset that work in this agency, Like you don't have any of the information that you would need to know. Okay, this same thing will happen if we try this in Moscow, you know, at a party there. You know we're trying to destabilize their government. Like that tells you nothing. No, it's completely it's completely useless from a scientific standpoint. And I think, honestly, I'm sure Sidney would have had an excuse. But he's not doing this for science. You're you're not some of this he's probably doing for he believes he's doing for science. But you're not dosing the punch bowl at the CIA Christmas party for science. You're doing it because it's fun, Like because you think it's funny, right, Like, that's why this is happening. Um, And yeah, it's it's it's pretty pretty cool that this, this is just this. We've just this man has been set loose. He's been given a massive portion of the CIA's budget during the period of time in which the CIA is the most powerful it will ever be, and no one can tell him no. So he's just doing whatever the funk he wants. Um. Now, Sydney seems to handle this pretty well, the stress of managing this like international drugging and torturing ring. Some of his colleagues, though, are more haunted by what the CIA was doing than their boss. One of these men was Frank Olsen, who he mentioned a little earlier. He's a U. S. Army biochemist and a biological weapons researcher. Um. One of the first things that like Olsen will do in this project is he sits in at these black sites when they're torturing prisoners to death with LSD and mescalin and he takes notes, right, like, that's one of his early jobs and what becomes m k Ultra. Now, according to reports from other men in the program, Olsen gets On is not happy with this. He doesn't feel good about doing this job, like sitting in the chair and watching people go mad and then be executed, kind of like fux him up a little bit. Um, he's like the most human person at the CIA. We're going to hear from right now? I guess so. And and again all of this is debated. There are some people say, no, that's not what it was. He didn't have an issue with what we were doing. Was something else. But according to the people who say that he had an ethical issue with like what they were doing, they say that he spoke up about it and he started to talk about quitting the agency. Um. And this starts to cause like a lot of talk the higher levels of the CIA of like what are we gonna do about Frank Olson? Right, His doubts are supercharged when in May of nineteen fifty three he goes to Britain they're doing another series of like tests on chemical weapons. And he's not just the acid guy. He's got like you know, he's he's a he's a biological weapon specialist. And he watches a servant, a Sarah nerve gas test go wrong um and a twenty year old volunteer soldier dies an agonizing death as a result of it. And this is at least what Kinser kind of right, Stephen Kinzer kind of says, this is the inciting incident that gets Olsen to decide he's actually going to leave the agency Kinser rights quote. A month later, Olson was back in Germany. While he was there, according to records that were later declassified, a suspected Soviet agent code named Patient number two was subjected to an intense interrogation somewhere near Frankfurt. On that same trip, according to a later reconstruction of his travels, Olsen visited a CIA safe house near Stuttgart where he saw men dying, often in agony, from the weapons that he had made. After stops in Scandinavia and Paris, he went to Britain and visited Williams sergeant for a second time. Immediately after their meeting, Sergeant wrote a report saying that Olsen was deeply disturbed over what he had seen in c i A safe houses in Germany and displayed symptoms of not wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed. He sent his report to superiors with the understanding that they would award it to the CIA, and Sergeant is like a British kind of liaison. So you see what's kind of happening here. This is at least the way that kind of Kinzer depicts it. You've got this scientist who is traveling around the world, watching these weapons he's helping to develop, kill people, watching people be tortured, watching that people have weapons tested on them, and it just starts to break him. Um. There is evidence that Frank had already started to talk about some of his top secred research with one of his friends, who later claimed in an interview quote he said, norm you would be stunned by the techniques that they used. They made people talk, they brainwashed people, They used all kinds of drugs, they used all kinds of torture. They were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians, and they didn't care whether whether they got out of that or not. Um So, he talks about this to an extent and out about that Lettani right there is that the only part that's not true is that it worked. Yeah, because he lists like, well, they're usually Nazis, they're killing people, are doing this, they're doing that, and they're they're they've got ways to get truth out of people. It's like, we'll see, that's the thing. That's the one thing they did. That's the one that ye know, the part where you thought it was actually effective at accomplishing something for the cause is where you were wrong. All the rest of it was true, the Nazis, all of that, Yeah, it's um. So this guy has friend Norm claims that like he basically bears his guts to him, says, like, you know, I watched them torture people to death. They're doing all these horrible things, carrying out this nightmare research, and I can't take it anymore. I'm going to leave um And Norm says that Frank Olsen tells him I'm getting out of the c I a period. So near the end of nineteen fifty three, not long after this conversation, Frank is invited to a work retreat with several other CIA men, including Gottlieb's deputy and Sydney Gottlieb. After the dinner, all of the men are dosed without their consent with L S. D. We don't know how much they're given, UM because as far as we can tell, nobody's taking notes about that sort of thing on a regular basis. But Sydney reacts badly to the huge dose of surprise acid he's given after like watching a bunch of men die horribly UM. And days later he still has not recovered. So he gets taken away by several colleagues to New York City to speak with a psychiatrist who was friendly with the agency. It's Abramson, I believe, the guy who gave Um Gottlieb his first dose. And during that trip, while he's in the hotel room with like a colleague, Frank jumps from an eleven story or ten story window, out of the window and dies on impact. Um. That is the official report that while he's in this hotel room with another CIA agent, he jumps of his own accord out of the window and he dies on impact. Now, are you do you think anybody's gonna doubt the official narrative on this one? Jason. Yeah, the people who know even a little bit about him caultre the moment this guy came into the story, they knew this is the famous This is one of the figures along with God, Like, this is one of the figures that the people that are kind of a cursory knowledge of NK culture like me, Yeah, these are this is one of the guys that they already knew because this is like what movies have been made about this. Yeah. And for the record, when it comes to like conspiracy theories, this is almost certainly like a true one because like, so they exhume Frank Olsen's body in nineteen and they find specific cranial injuries in his remains that suggests that he was unconscious when he started to fall. Now, it's not impossible that something else happened, especially like if he was dosed with a drug or something. But it's pretty likely he was murdered by the c i A right, Like, that's that's not an unreasonable conclusion to draw based on the extant evidence. Um, you know, we don't know exactly what happened. It's also they have earned the doubt, yeah, that people express here like I I again, I'm very big on. I'm not in favor of people who take the true things we know about in culture and then try to expand them into very weird fiction, because I think that discredits everything in this case. You know, in the case of this man dying in the way they said he did, it is not weird, like them throwing him out of a window would be the least weird part of the story. Yeah, it is not at all out of line with the things these people have shown themselves as willing to do morally. It makes sense from a logical standpoint. Now, it's also possible that like the CIA killed Frank Olsen, and they didn't do it by having him thrown but instead like drugging him at different points and kind of like breaking him until he wound up killing himself. Um. Not out of the question, but yeah, it seems like there's i mean, based on sort of the exhumation and what gets found when they when they do this, uh, the second autopsy, it definitely seems like there's a pretty strong odds he was just straight up murdered. Um. But we'll never know precisely what happened um Frank Olsen's death. Whatever the exact details of it was not quieted up. Obviously, this is like the thing people tend to know about in k Ultra. It's probably the single most famous moment of the entire program. Um, even though it's not the most fucked Obviously, the fact that they murdered a guy who had been helping them torture people is not nearly the worst thing that happens as a result of this um. But it's just such a like Cold War story, right, This like mysterious suicide of a CIA doctor, and I don't know, for whatever reason, it's the thing that people latch onto. Um, this is controversial. Whatever happens is like causes problems within the CIA. Frank Olsen had been a prominent and a well liked member of the team. The c i a's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, starts to like dozen investigation. He spends two weeks investigating the suicide. And Houston is the guy who wrote helped write the law that created the CIA. It is again like, obviously, yeah, the CIA is investigating itself. I wonder what they found, but it is worth noting basically, no one knows exactly what God leaves doing. He doesn't have to report to anyone, right. Um, so it's not entirely unlikely that Houston learns a lot of things that he had not known about him k Ultra in the process of investigating this, whatever the reality there. He summarizes his findings after this investigation. Thus, Lee, it is my conclusion that the death of Dr Olsen is the result of circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the U. S. Government, and that there is therefore a direct causal connection between that accident and his death. I am not happy with what seems to me to be a very casual attitude on the part of t SS representatives. That's the part of the CIA that godly runs to the way experiment was conducted, and to the remarks that this is just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation. A death occurred which might have been prevented, and the agency as a whole, particularly the director, were caught completely by surprise in a most embarrassing manner. So that's kind of the the official sort of chastisement that Gottlieb gets over this. It's um something else. I mean, I don't even have there's I don't have a joke for that, because yeah, yeah, what do you say, like he's he's writing about it the way that it's like like you crash a company car because like you're not paying enough attention or something like there's such a bureaucratic problem. Um. I mean, and obviously, you know, I'm not surprised that the CIA's findings aren't we murdered a guy, but like, yeah, it's just I don't know, seeing it that way is is for whatever reason like that, the kind of the contrast between the way they write about all this in a very like almost corporate manner and what's actually going on is always one of the more unsettling pieces of delving and n MK ultra well and also truve basically every government sponsored horror and history when you see the actual bureaucracy behind it in the records they kept in it's all it's all just memos And yeah, yep, well, Jason, you know what who loves memos and corporate speak is our sponsors who write stuff just like this, but not about murdering their own team. So yeah, that's probably probably could have been framed better. Let's just let's just rolled ads right now before I say anything else, We're back. Ah, Jason, act your head, Dode. This is like a just kind of like a fucking um. I don't know getting all of this at once. We're reading all of this in a marathon session, so it's just sort of like hitting like a like a series of bricks, um. And then I'm pausing intermittently and being like, all right, Jason, time to time to make a joke. Now was your joke, Jason? The well, the to to kind of pull back here. As a listener, I think most people came into this with about the same amount of information about M k Ultra as I had, and I think most people have heard of it. They knew that it was a CIA program that had something to do with mind control. They knew that it's been in a million thrillers and spy movies. That in any kind of movie that involved like Manchurion candidates or mind control, anything like that, they will always mention, well, this is all goes back to M k Ultra. So the thing that I wanted to know coming into this listening to you as a listener, and I think the same thing they want to probably is at one point is any of the most outlandish conspiracy stuff true, as in, did they have even partial success creating a mansuring in Canada? Did they have even partial success in trying to make someone do something other than what they wanted to do, not make someone piss their pants and vomit and control will be? It was like, Wow, they didn't want to do that. We need the thing that they once they abandoned this as a truth serum, which again we also know really doesn't exist. You can kind of get somebody drunk and get them talking, but something that makes somebody tell the truth is that's all not a real thing. Um. So I think what people are kind of listening for is like, was this all just people fooling themselves and you know, creating horror stories and leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them? Like, what's the weirdest thing they actually accomplished? And I'm not trying to spoil the rest of the EPISO so that we have coming up, but I think we're trying to separate fact from fiction. What I said earlier was that the fiction is assuming that everything they wanted to do they actually did, the fact is that everything they wanted to do was fantasy, and what they actually did was they just ruined a bunch of people's lives and accidentally started the psychedelic sixties movement. What I will say is, if you're asking did they succeed in implanting false memories and people into some extent, the actual answer is we don't know, and we're will be getting to them. Maybe they're kind of later on, but certainly there is no evidence of success. Right. There is no hard evidence during this period at all of anything actually working. Um. And there's never been any evidence that they actually Manachurian candidated someone and got them to do spy ship like that. That has never happened as far as we know. There is some evidence that they get further on this than is entirely set link to think about, and we will be chatting about that in a bit. But UM, as regards Frank Olsen, this guy who has been probably murdered, there's more investigations. UM. In the end, Alan Dullis is forced to write a letter to Gottlieb and tell him that he'd exercised poor judgment. That is the extent of the actual discipline that Gotlieb faces so by the mid nineteen fifties. After this has happened, there are no longer any barriers at all as to what Sydney can do. For a time after he's, you know, given this massive budget and put in charge of this thing, he is constrained by the fact that only Sandas Chemical makes l s d um. The Agency had bought out the entire world supply, but that was just tens of thousands of doses. Jason Um Sydney wanted a hell of a lot more, and as nineteen fifty four ended, Eli Lily figures out the recipe and the CIA becomes their primary customer, paying four thousand dollars for probably millions of doses of lsd um. This is effectively an off of the drug that they could now dose anyone and everyone, which is what they proceed to do. The man Gottlieb picked to run this program is a cool dude named George White. George White is the platonic ideal basically of a hard boiled, corrupt g man. He had worked as a captain for the OSS during World War Two, and then he was an Narcotics Bureau agent that's the precursor to the d e A. So he's a fed he's supposed to be fighting drug trafficking. He is famous among his fellow FEDS for being heavily addicted to basically every drug imaginable. And he is he is stealing everything from the dealers he arrest, and he's doing them right. Um, he like and he this is a thing that he's like, he has more experience with this than Gottlieb. In nineteen forty three, he's giving concentrated marijuana to New York mobsters as part of a truth serum test um. Like, so, George White is the guy that like, hey, we need someone to secretly dose mobsters with pot to see if it makes them tell the truth? Do you know any mobsters who you can you can rug? George White doesn't even think before he's like, oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, I can do that in a minute. Like let's go, let's just give me some fucking weed. I got that, I got this. Yeah. Um. He is actually a really fun character. Um. He's a terrible person, but just entertaining. So, starting in the early fifties, the CIA has White run two safe houses for LSD testing in Greenwich Village in New York City. The men that he tested CIA drugs on were considered quote expendable because they were drug addicts and otherwise marginalized people, and they wouldn't be missed if they died or went insane. And if they go to like if they find out what's happening to them and they go to the cops and are like, the CIA has dosed me with LSD, Well, the cops are not going to to follow up that investigation, right. Um, that's part of the genius. Afically confused here this man they put in charge of these experiments, what what was his background? His scientific background. He's a FED. He's a he's a he's he's a federal agent. Um. He's he's a federal agent whose specialty is that he looks and sounds exactly like a mobster. So he's really good at hanging out with drug dealers and doing drugs with them. Okay, but does not have a background in like biochemistry or science or the guy whose day job is stealing heroin from drug dealers and then doing that heroin does not have a medical degree. Yeah he is. He has no kind of scientists. Um. So one of the reasons why he gets this job is that, like because Gottlieb when he's looking for a guy. He goes to the Bureau of Narcotics and he's like, Hey, I'm looking for someone to like help run this program where we're going to be giving LSD to unsuspecting people, um, and they advise George White, And when he meets White, Gottlieb kind of falls in love with him. All of the c I So again, the people running this for the Technical Division are all big nerds, right, Gottlieb and his fellow scientists that these academics they mostly grown up middle class. White is like the kind of character you read about in a pulp fiction novel. You know, he's always gotten multiple weapons on him. He's got like several guns at any given time, brass knuckles, knives. He talks luridly about all these shootouts and fights he's been in, and he's like, he's this hard character who's been like fucking in the streets, fight like doing horrible cop ships since the twenties. So they they treat him like he's like they've run into Dick Tracy, right, Like they they kind of are are spell bound by him, and that's part of why he gets this job, right. He takes them on right, along, so show them as guns and talk about this stuff, and they're just like, I think he's really good at manipulating the CIA doctors actually, and that's part of why this works for him. Um So, initially when they first start setting up these safe houses to drug men, George White is going to be the actual guy who draws them in like for testing. Who's the lure? And I'm gonna quote now from Poisoner in Chief. He posed alternatingly as a merchant, seaman or a bohemian artist and consorted with a vast array of underworld characters, all of whom were involve of in vice, including drugs, prostitution, gambling, in pornography. It was under this assumed bohemian artist persona that White wooden trap most of his MK Ultra victims. White regularly dosed women at parties or who he just encountered in the world, leaving vague notes in his diary like Gloria gets Horror, janets sky high um. At one point, one of his victims escapes and she makes it to Lennox Hill Hospital, where she reports George White for drugging her against her will. But the CIA had an arrangement with the Medical Department of the NYPD. So the NYPD tells this woman she's mistaken, nothing has happened to her, and she's sent home. And again, easy for us to look back and criticize now, but at the time, there was no way to know that this that this could have happened. Well, the I mean the the NYPD guys know, we have been told by our contacts, the FEDS not to pursue this, right, like, to calm this woman down and send her away. Right, So there is some degree that the PD that doesn't know the CIA is running like an acid warehouse, right and like drugging people. They just know the CIA said, hey, don't do anything with this case. Um, and this is a thing that's going to happen a lot, right like and this is also I have to say, this is not like. This is the way things work sometimes with like the FBI and cops. Right, Sometimes the cops will arrest a guy like with contraband or something with drugs, and it'll turn out he's an FBI informant, and so the cops will release him because the FBI is like, hey, we don't want to don't blow this up for us, right, we need this guy. That is. You can think what you want about law enforcement, but that's like a thing that happens. The CIA is not a domestic agency. They are not supposed to be working on American soil. At no point is what they're doing in the United States legal. Um, this is not a thing where it's normal and like within legal limits for the CIA to like have a secret program set up where they work with the NYPD to like get their assets let go, that's not supposed to be happening. So I do want to note here it's kind of minor, like to be like when the CIA was breaking the law by working on American soil, when they're what they're doing is so much crazier. But like they're not supposed to be working in the United States at all. Yeah, if we didn't, if we hadn't previously made that clear. Yeah, this is on top of being insane, what they're doing is at this point extremely illegal. In fact, they run into conflict with the FBI a bunch because the FBI is like, you guys are running a drug house and like you're the c I and this. You know, the FBI and the c I are always competing for money, so they're not super friendly with each other, and they're like, what the funk is going on here? Like, why are you guys allowed to do this? This isn't we're supposed to be fucking with people here, you know. Um So, George White is very good at his job, to the extent that his job is to drug random people. He does it a lot, but the CIA is hunger for test subjects could not be sated by one man dosing strangers and bars and at house parties. In nineteen fifty five, the program expanded. White and Leave hit upon the idea to hire sex workers and use them to draw in men who could be drugged and then observed secretly in a brothel. And I'm gonna quote from a write up in the San Francisco Chronicle now. In ninety five, White was transferred to San Francisco, where he had worked as a journalist, and rented out an apartment on Telegraph Hill to give his pad the desired French horehouse look. White furnished it with Toulose fra trek posters, a picture of a French can can dancer in kinky photos of women in bondage, and domination photos. It was supposed to look rich. An arcotics agent who regularly visited said, but it was furnished like crap. White installed bugging equipment and a two way mirror behind which he would sit on a portable toilet, quaffing on martini from the picture he kept in the refrigerator, and observed the proceedings. The prostitutes who staffed the operation were paid in part with chits, which they could use for favors such as getting out of jail. So to put this picture in your head, Chasen, there is a secret brothel where people cia paid institutes who have get out of jail free cards take John's dose them against their will with LSD for quote unquote scientific purposes. And the only person evaluating what's going on in these studies is George White, who is watching them while actively shifting and drinking martinis. Now, I would love to go back in time and after however many months or years of operation went on, just sit Mr White down and say, okay, can you explain to me let's it will? I would have several several hundred questions, but the one question I'd be interested if you can answer, like do you even remember what this was for? Long term Cold War gold like in terms of national security, do you know what you're trying to accomplish here? Because I strongly suspect he himself had probably lost track by that point. I don't think he ever is thinking about it, right, Like is he He's not sitting down and being like, this is bringing us one step close and time my mind control, Sarah, and that'll let us beat the Soviets. He is he is pooping and drinking or teeny's while he watches strangers have sex, which he does for years, for hours every week. So as this has kind of gone unspoken for three episodes listeners, but you may have noticed we're doing a series on the CIA's misguided attempt to find a mind control serum, and about once every five minutes we stumble across a much better, more reliable method of mind control, Like just luring men back with sexy women works. Again, a number of things have been shown to work in terms of mind control. Money. Yeah, like this guy who has gotten the government to pay for his little sex dungeon, and like just let him teach a class on how to manipulate people like he got like like like look at what he did to draw Yeah, Like like this guy is living a different life than any of us. Like he's just his ability to get the authorities and everyone else to just cater to his whims and his weird kinks and all all on the taxpayer dime. Like just just ask him, just ask him how to do it. He already knows of all of the things that we've talked about. The detail about this that sticks out to me most is that he's his office seat is also a toilets. That's who's that's who's running this program. Like when we talk about the most secret in like terrifying thing the CIA ever did, like this is what a lot of it boiled down to. Um, it's just what a what a thing do have happened? So over time George White learned that drugging men because again he's experimenting with a bunch of stuff, he learns that the best way is to drug them after they've orgasmed. Um that that gets you better data at like getting to listen to them talk and stuff while they're tripping. I guess he said quote the men expected the hookers to hurry off and became emotionally vulnerable when the women said they wanted to stay a few more hours. And again this is as close to you get as like actual usable data. There's like, oh, you can manipulate men by making them think women like them. That is the most useful piece of information. This is the entire m k Ultra program has uncovered so far. Something about their mindset seems to shift after the seaman has left their body. Hm, there's there's a sort of clarity that seems to come over their their brains. George White kept done it again. Give this man another bucket of LSD. It's it's something else. So do you know what they call this, Jason? Have you read the name they give this this program. I can't wait to find out. It's Operation Midnight Climax. Okay, so again their whole thing of we we carefully disguised these operations given that randomized because this is just a straight up porno name like Kim k Ultra. That's that's the name of like an anime series. If you make a porno about the CIA drugging people in a brothel, that's what you call it. It's um Yeah, be so redundant to make a porno out of this, Like that's all it was a guy watching this throw to one way mirror like it was already that it is. One of the things that's interesting about this to me is that, like we started this series talking about that time the Army poisoned the entire city of San Francisco just to see what would happen. It's weird to me they that like that keeps being their base of operations, Like all of these experiments, they everything keeps winding up back in San Francisco. Maybe it's just that the weather is nice and that's where people would prefer to be then the East Coast a lot of the time, but it's it is weird that, yeah, San Francisco is where this all of these programs keep ending. The funk up um so using you know, the operation Midnight Climax starts as they've got this brothel and they're doing the experiments in the brothel, but eventually they decided to expand out and just use the entire city as a base. So George White does a lot of this himself, but he also has agents, some of whom are stationed. There's some of whom just fly into like try experiments and they'll just dose random people at restaurants and bars in San Francisco. Um, they fan out across the city and just like give L s D to people, um and not just l s D. One source with the agency later told a journalist quote, if we were scared enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco, and the CIA would just give it to people and see what happens. Um. One thing I will say for George White that that that maybe a mark in his favorite morally. Any time he gets some new weird drug from the CIA, he always tries it on himself first. So that is the most honorable thing we've heard of yet in these episodes. No, I will, I will bravely throw myself on this grenade because because what if it turns out this gets you more high than anything else that's ever been made. Yeah, it's better that I It is better that I check. I will bravely, bravely sacrifice myself. Yeah, these are what the heroes of the CIA are doing for us, jumping on that grenade. You know who will jump on a grenade for you? Jason uh as some sort of a monthly mattress service that we'll send you a mattress in the mail every month. If you had to have a product jump on a grenade for you, you could do a lot worse than a mattress. And they can ship those to you in a box. You know, they'll get it to you in just a couple of days. I am mattress. Uh, we're back speaking of mattresses. UM, George White is buying a lot of them because he opens the second safe House in Marin County, which is I don't know if you've ever been to the Bay Area, it's it's like a very very wealthy, very beautiful like area, kind of outside of San Francisco. UM. And because it's like number one, it's it's kind of high income. UM, they're able to get like this bigger place that has more space to allow for more elaborate experiments. The CIA tests things like stink bombs and itching powder there, in addition to stuff like specially designed hypodermic needles that could inject poison into a wine cork. Gottlieb even tried out an aerosolized L S D bomb on a party they hosted there, but it didn't work due to the humidity uh that particular day. Now, I think it's worth emphasizing that while White is doing all of this, he's also a highly placed officer with the Bureau of Narcotics. Like he's one of the top men at what becomes the d E a UM, and he's the guy who's like, yeah, I'll do any drug. I don't give a ship like, I'll take it, you know, I'll give it to people, I'll poop and I'll watch him. Um. He is reported to have regularly used the CIA's brothels to host parties for his fellow narcotics officers. One survey of his career claims quote, sometimes after a tough day on the beat, he invited his narco, but he's up to one of the safe houses for a little R and R. Occasionally they end zipped their inhibitions and partied on the premises, much to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to complain about men with guns and shoulder straps chasing after women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there was always plenty of dope around, and the FEDS sampled everything from hashish to L s D. White had quite a scene going on for a while. By day he fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night he dispensed them to strangers. But who who better knew the danger of these substances than a man that had been at the front line. Yeah, Like it's like we got to remind ourselves what we're trying to stop. Like, imagine if everybody lived like this? Yeah, what what problems we would have if everyone lived the way that Narcotics Bureau officers do. We're just doing these drugs to keep them out of circulation. Um. So yeah, again, we keep harping on this, but it is kind of impossible to see how George White, who is the guy running their experiments on LSD, how he could possibly have conducted experiments that provided useful data. He is nothing but a career drug addict and thug, and he's just like, yeah, pooping and watching them have hallucinations. Um, that's the science. There are no doctors or other health professionals on hand at any of these brothels in case an experiment goes wrong, and things did go wrong often. In one particularly disastrous example, a federal marshal named Wayne Ritchie was dosed with LSD at the Federal building in San Francisco. He flipped out, grabbed two guns and immediately robbed a bar in the Filmore district. Now Richie did not know what was happening to him, right, he drinks like some water or some ship, and then he is hallucinating and he robs a fucking store. Um, I don't know what else is going on with Richie because I don't think a normal response to LSD is to rob fucking bar. But also he's a federal marshal who knows what kind of ships he's had happened in his life. But um, he gets off basically like because he's a fed and he has a clean record, he doesn't do any prison time, but he never knows that he doesn't know that he's been drugged. And so for the next twenty two years he kind of assumes that he's lost his mind. His career collapses, his life falls apart um, and he just has no idea what has happened to him until twenty two years later, Sydney got Leeb dies and Richie reads his obituary, which Minson mentions mk ultra because a lot of this has come out since then, and Richie's like, oh fuck, is that what happened to me, like, is this what occurred? And and we obviously we can't confirm whether or not Richie is someone who got dosed as part of m k Ultra, But White, second in command for Operation Midnight Climax, did admit to drugging strangers amount around town and said in an interview quote, I didn't do any follow up. It just wasn't a very good thing to go and say how do you feel today? You don't give them a tip. You just back away and let them worry like this nitwit ritchie. So I'm gonna say his his his theory that he may have been doseds credible. Yeah, And again, no effort to actually collect data, observe a month down the line, six months down the line. No, Like the question of what were they even trying to accomplish again, I don't there's a point where I think the people on the scene themselves could not have told you, you know, just a thing they were doing that. It's just it's it's got its momentum now. And obviously, like these are all the questions you want to answer, is like do they care about learning anything? Is there something more here we're missing? Because spoiler, a lot of the information that they gather is destroyed later. Um, like, what is happening in the heads of these people? And obviously we can't answer that, and maybe they couldn't either, But to provide some context for what that answer might be, I do want to read another response that white second in command, a guy named Feldman, gave to an interviewer about like what was happening at the time. Quote several times Sydney Gottlieb came out and met Gottlieb at the pad and at White's office. Sydney was a nice guy. He was a fucking 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 dirty tricks. He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a drive over to m your woods out by Stintson Ranch. Sydney says, stop the car. He pulls out a dart gun and he shoots this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me come back in two days and check on this tree. So we go back in two days. The tree was completely dead, not at least left on it. I went back and I saw White and he says to me, what do you think of Sydney. I said, I think he's a fucking nut. White says, well, they may be a nut, but this is the program. This is what we do. So I would like you to contrast that with Hollywood's favorite trope of the group of secret agents who are not governed by any kind of oversight, like like Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible for us, Like Hollywood loves this thing of like, well here's this guy, like like if we had to go through all the bureaucracy and permission, we wouldn't get the bad guys. To really get the bad guys, we'd uh Jack Ryan, we need whatever. Like it's a whole genre of the super badass who operates off the books. If you get caught, we will deny. We know you, there'll be no oversight. You're not acording to the government, and you know that you're the Mission Impossible team and you're gonna be working completely. We're gonna fund you, give you all the gear, all the gadgets, all the maskmaking stuff, and we're gonna trust you without oversight that you're gonna get the job done. You're gonna go get the nuke, You're gonna be gonna stop it. In reality, when you give a bunch of dudes a blank check to just do whatever under the guys of hey, your work is so important, we're not gonna ask you what you're doing. This is what you get more often than not. Can you imagine a situation in which it would be useful to have this tree killing dart like Sydney, we can already kill trees, man, Like, I don't think you really accomplished much here by murdering a random tree with this dart gun um like it's it's baffling, and one of the things that's interesting he is working on, like terrible poisons, like one of the things he does figure out by like laboriously collecting more of a specific kind of shelf issh vindom than had ever been collected, as he makes like a perfect suicide drug, like just this idea the ideal way to kill yourself if you're captured with like a minimum of pain as quickly as possible, can't be reversed. Like he figures it out and they put it in. They have a couple of different devices for dispensing it to people. They give it to like pilots on these you know, these spy planes that we have flying over the Soviet Union. They'll give them these like suicide drugs to take so that if they're captured they could kill themselves. A bunch of these guys crash with Sydney's poison on it. None of them ever use it, because it turns out it's not really like it's it's kind of hard to go from like doing my day job to committing suicide on a die. Yeah. Yeah, that's the part of the equation that a guy like him would not consider. Yeah, you know, maybe they don't. I mean, it's it's it's all, it's so weird. I do love the degree to which this guy Feldman like is just yeah, man, I'm like a criminal, funked up guy, So of course I'm willing to do this. Like all these people are crazy, they're not like they're they're all just lunatics. Um, but this is money, you know, And that's what White says, right, this is what we do. Um, So that's all good. Now. In his book, Stephen Kinzer continues quote Gottlieb's visit to San Francisco were not for purely business purposes. Operation Midnight Climax gave him ready access to prostitutes. According to Ira Feldman, he took full advantage of this prerequisite. He was caught crazy, Feldman said, well free associating about Gottlieb. During a legal deposition near the end of his life, he recalled complaining to George Hunter White, all he wants me to do is get him laid. Anytime that funk came to San Francisco, get me a girl, Feldman said, he always needed a girl. I know that some listeners are asking, are these real people? Like? How how was that everyone involved in this as a cartoonish parody of the human being. I think it just worked out that way. Yeah, it was the fifties, you know, now, are we still in the fifties. It's yeah, okay, we're in the mid to late nineteen fifties when this is all going on, right, Um, this is like the mid fifties is kind of when they moved to San Francisco, and so this is kind of all throughout the end of that decade, and this whole thing is descended into a nasty, just orgy operation with incredibly quickly, Like there's a lot of time, Yeah, from the genesis of the project where it's just it's just a sex dungeon they're running when this guy jerks off on a toilet. Uh, we'll talk about you know, there's conspiracy theories about like did they make the UNI bomber? Right? Did they make Charles Manson? Um. My favorite conspiracy theory is like, hey, did Sydney Gottlieb realizing like nineteen fifty four that none of this was ever going to do anything? But he had an excuse to like have the CIA pay for a brothel and all of the drugs he wanted to do and free trips to San Francisco to party and get laid. And that's more less most of what was happening here. That's not impossible. Yeah, and in fact that's yeah, I'm not even sure that conspiracy theory. That may just be what Yeah, it's not much of a conspiracy theory. But you know what is a conspiracy theory, Jason, is your fiction Careercy have we arrived at the end of that? I think we have. I think it's time for blogs. I'm sorry what I was sitting here thinking about when the guy did the whole event with the tree, which I can't get out of my head. When we made incredible he shot the tree with a tree, a tree shooting dark gun. He had it in his jacket. I says, come back in a couple of days. And if if I witnessed that happening and the guy told me to come back in a couple of days, if all I found was that the tree had died, I would be so crushingly disappointed, because what else could like a big deal I I can kill. I can go to the hardware store and get stuff that will kill this tree in a couple of days, Like I thought I was gonna come back and find out that it had gotten up and walked across the street or something. Speaking now like the weird word trees and Game of Thrones and you could commune with the gods, singly gun, It's just dead. Is that all your Is this what you were trying to do? Or this one of the failed attempts to use your your tree your magic tree game? Was it supposed to do something else? Godly was hoping it would be talking God damn it another failure anyway? Uh Yeah, The book is called if this book exists, You're in the wrong universe. Has a lime green cover. You cannot miss it on the shelf if you go buy it in a physical bookstore, which virtually none of you will do. So if you do what most people do and just google that title on Amazon, it will come up. Also, they have the audio book and e book whatever, all all of the books that. Please. If you can support a local physical bookstore, if you still have one, please, they've been hurting over the course of the pandemic like everybody else. Buy it off the shelf. If it's all the same to you. Yeah, find a good bookstore. Go to bookshop dot com. Also, I think that's the I'm gonna double check as a network of all the the indie bookstores and you can. You can order from the store close to you. That will make so happy. I think it's bookshop dot org because that took me to a sketchy website. A lot of them will. Um. They will ship just no different fromarting from Amazon. It may may be slightly more expensive, but gosh, they will appreciate it. Yes, bookshop dot org. Find Jason's book there. Um, you can also find my book there. After the revolution If you're looking to get two books? Why not? You know, treat yourself, you deserve it. You listen to all this horrible shit about the sea? A why not buy two books? Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com U, or check us out on the i heeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.