LPOTL (intro theme) This is the Last Podcast on the Left. Rise from your grave! That's when the
cannibalism started. What was that? Oh shit!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Military intelligence, I think that's called an oxymoron.
BEN KISSEL Wow, shots fired, shots fired. And not from a drone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Back in the day OSS guys, these old school guys, they got parachuted in, they had to figure out
how to make a nazi's favorite martini.
BEN KISSEL General, so we're parachuting in but any idea how to get out?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're gonna wanna get yourself a suicide pill.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But they get over there, they start working with fucking clandestine shit, chasing nazis
everywhere, all this kind of crazy shit, hardcore action sequences, blowing things up, all these
crazy new weapons.
BEN KISSEL Sure. I think that's just Inglourious Basterds but yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But now the fucking CIA is like, 'Oh yeah it's Havana syndrome.'
BEN KISSEL Sound weapons, we're experimenting a lot of different things right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I got hurt by a microwave, I gotta call China and blame China.
BEN KISSEL Oh I hate it when they make us human hot pockets. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the
Last Podcast on the Left.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I had too many plantains yesterday, I must have Havana syndrome!
BEN KISSEL I'm about to blow you up, Henry. Henry Zebrowski, recently coming down with Havana
syndrome but how nice because now you're wearing tropical shorts, you have fun sunglasses
on, and you are a beach-loving Polish man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this is a mild case.
BEN KISSEL It's beautiful. And Marcus Parks.
MARCUS PARKS Hello.
BEN KISSEL Thank you all so much for joining us. We have a fantastic episode today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you smell that though? (singing) Freedom, I won't let you down!
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Thanks to everyone who supported us for our stint on Spotify and now it is so
wonderful to be in the general population, we are back on all the platforms you like to listen to
your podcasts on. So please, you know where to find us now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now that we're good and more open than ever, what an excellent time to handle the secret
history of the United States of America.
BEN KISSEL All right. This topic, man this is gonna unfurl in a magical way. It's a huge topic, we've been
waiting years to do it, and so excited to learn right along with you all the secret history of MK
Ultra.
MARCUS PARKS Oh my god, I just realized that we're doing MK Ultra. That's super cool!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We got here! We did this a long time ago, very, very beginnings of Last Podcast on the Left
started with one of those weird, perfunctory paragraph on Wikipedia-style episodes about MK
Ultra. And this is one of those topics that people like me as a young man, kinda like what 9/11
did to the next generation, what JFK did to my generation and people before that-
BEN KISSEL Are you 70 years old?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No but it's the truth.
BEN KISSEL Your generation? It was '64!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But these are the entry level conspiracy theories that get you into this world and it's kinda fun
to now look at the experience. Look at my burger crying shirt I have on.
BEN KISSEL I love that burger crying shirt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're ready to tackle it.
BEN KISSEL And this is a fun topic for everyone to begin. Take some acid!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And go down the road with us.
MARCUS PARKS MK Ultra was a top secret CIA project that explored psychological, often drug-induced torture
and interrogation techniques in the pursuit of a new kind of weapon to use against the Soviet
Union in the latter half of the 20th century. This program existed for about half of the Cold
War from 1953-1973.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it definitely didn't continue in any way, shape, or form after that. And how dare you even
think of say that, Dogmeat. I see the twinkle in your eyes, I know what you're about to say,
that they're continuing to do human experimentation.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Oh am I? Are you putting those words into my fucking mouth?
BEN KISSEL You putting words in Dogmeat's mouth?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what you get, that's right. This is what they wanted.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what they wanted, they wanted us fighting each other.
BEN KISSEL I do think you had a secret phone call with the United States government last night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're already talking to us.
BEN KISSEL Indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI On a stage in Washington, DC a person in a mask, I mean it, like a Guy Fawkes mask threw a
little pouch onto the stage and I opened it up and it was four challenge coins from the NSA.
BEN KISSEL That was cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're here.
BEN KISSEL Yes, they are.
MARCUS PARKS The MK Ultra experiments performed, sometimes on willing participants but mostly on the
unwilling or unaware, sometimes showed nazi levels of clinical evil, either destroying or killing
multitudes in the name of pulling a fast one on the ruskis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We learn from bad teachers.
MARCUS PARKS In a nutshell, MK Ultra was the espionage wing of chemical warfare, America's clumsy attempt
at cracking the code of mind control for a war whose outcome seemingly rested on which
country was more clever.
BEN KISSEL You know for a fact they had to turn away some people. It was like, 'Barry, you've been here
three times this week.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, man! Fuck yeah, man!
BEN KISSEL I know but the thing is we actually think you're taking advantage of us. Isn't that weird?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna say bro that I got this fucking balloon festival I gotta go with my fucking girlfriend,
man. And I need to be a Manchurian candidate to that, bro.
BEN KISSEL You haven't made it to any of the events you were supposed to assassinate the Queen at.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa. Can we sync up calendars?
BEN KISSEL Shh. Dude, you're fired.
MARCUS PARKS Now as far as what the point of MK Ultra was, the experiments were supposed to glean
techniques that would either elicit confessions from soviet spies, reprogram said spies to
become American agents, or both, all without leaving any physical evidence that anyone had
done anything.
BEN KISSEL Turns out they just made a bunch of comedians.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wish. No, they invented the electric tambourine.
BEN KISSEL Oh, no kidding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI During the 1960s. It is interesting. Another side of this whole experimentation program was
also for them to like, listen, we put such an intellectual and emotional burden on our
operatives, right? They have to go out there, they have to fucking lie, cheat, and steal for the
United States.
BEN KISSEL It's not easy. They gotta Eddie Guerrero for the United States government.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have to go out there, you gotta fucking seduce people and poison people, do all this kind
of shit. And we really want to help ease the burden of our agents by erasing their memories.
And there may be a way to do it - this is true.
BEN KISSEL So this is for us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is for you to protect you.
BEN KISSEL Awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's very interesting.
BEN KISSEL Thank you for fucking with my brain for me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what they wanted. They thought that what they could also do is stop the problems of
information leaks after people were quote unquote "done working for CIA" because guess
what? You're never done working for the CIA.
BEN KISSEL You're not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I should know.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL You are really putting this shill thing, you're taking this to the next level that's for sure.
MARCUS PARKS Or is he? I mean the problem is that CIA agents were killing themselves because they had done
really, really bad shit and sometimes they had done things in service of the program that was
supposed to wipe their mind.
BEN KISSEL Okay, I'm gonna put one of those little dashy stars there over really bad things. Proper things
that needed to be done in order to ensure the United States government's reign domestically
and globally, thank you for your service.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's an asterisk is what he's saying.
BEN KISSEL An asterisk. No it's a star thing.
MARCUS PARKS But while eliciting confessions and reprogramming spies, while that was the main focus of MK
Ultra, the objective that was given the least research is the one that gets the most attention.
That objective was the creation of so-called Manchurian candidates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes! Yes!
MARCUS PARKS Manchurian candidates as they were named in pop culture were assassins who had
supposedly been programmed to kill through a combination of mind wipes and hypnosis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I really appreciate that you did speak in capital letters, programmed to kill. You have to. If we
say that again, cause that's TM, that's a conspiracy theory trademark.
MARCUS PARKS Programmed to kill.
BEN KISSEL That's how you speak in capital letters?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Good to know.
MARCUS PARKS Once suitably programmed with an assassination mission, Manchurian candidates would be
totally unaware of said mission, status, or target until they were activated by a word, phrase,
or image.
BEN KISSEL And I'm here to tell you about Ben Kissel's Manchurian Eats where it's actually Manchurian
candidates that drive to McDonald's for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're talking about being on sleep medication, like sleep eating.
BEN KISSEL I'm talking about getting a whole force of drugged out people that have shitty cars that are
gonna pick up my food for me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa! Finally MK Ultra can be used with Uber. MK Ultra and Uber can get together. Actually
the name the Manchurian candidate actually came from the movie, right.
BEN KISSEL Oh the movie began the term.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. As I said, as they were named in pop culture. They were named by pop culture, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. But there actually is a real connection to possible human experimentation that was done
in the Manchurian area of China. So there is some people, again, once you go back double
double into the world of conspiracy theory, some people think that information was fed to
Hollywood executives to point the truth of where the nature of the MK Ultra Manchurian
candidate program came from.
BEN KISSEL Well one thing that's not a conspiracy is human rights abuses across the country and the
globe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well our generation mostly knows it from Zoolander or Naked Gun, "must kill the
queen". That's where we know Manchurian candidates from.
BEN KISSEL Of course. Reggie Jackson, fantastic acting job by Reggie Jackson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I. Must kill. The Queen.
BEN KISSEL But he did it like a robot, it was very good.
MARCUS PARKS Now once activated the assassin would carry out their mission, then have no knowledge of
what they'd done or who had put the idea in their head. Needless to say, this would have
created a powerful weapon for the CIA in terms of both efficiency and the kind of paranoia
such a weapon would create. And of course MK Ultra was spearheaded by the CIA in the first
place because they believed that the Russians were working on mind control techniques first.
BEN KISSEL It's called vodka.
MARCUS PARKS And the US government could not afford a mind control gap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unfortunately though, all of the intelligence that they had collected, not a single bit of it
pointed towards the Russians having one of these programs in any way, shape, or form or the
Chinese or the North Koreans or the Japanese in this time period which they all suspected. And
it's almost like they came up with the idea on their own and then just ran with it.
BEN KISSEL All right. That's the American way.
MARCUS PARKS Now MK Ultra is not a conspiracy theory. It is fact, history, policy, it happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hard fact. Hard fact alert.
MARCUS PARKS We know about the hallucinogen-induced psychological torture perpetrated on American
prisoners, the irreversible mind wipes of mental patients, and the foreign POWs who were
taken past the limits of human endurance into death. We know about the agents who were
murdered to keep this program a secret, the callousness of the agents in charge of it, and the
moral price America paid to get the project off the ground. We even know how fucking
bonkers the MK Ultra program actually was. From Greenwich Village LSD honeypot fuck
houses to mind eraser helmets. And we know that MK Ultra is but a small part of the CIA's
Looney Tunes nuttiness in the 50s and 60s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a thing that we like to call asymmetrical warfare, where we come up with a bunch of
things that are an alt to bullets. So like what if we do it psychically? What if we get in there and
really scramble your brains? But what that does is take us from... We spent the Delta points of
American exceptionalism that we earned winning WWII on this and then became like
everybody else. That is one of those things where we deeply sold out the soul of the American
people and its government.
BEN KISSEL Well mind eraser helmets, if you're in the NFL that's called CTE. You're gonna wanna be very
careful out there with head injuries.
MARCUS PARKS The worst part of it all though, we sold it out or nothing.
BEN KISSEL I mean we got a bunch of acid. What about music? Didn't it have some positive effect on
music?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna get there.
BEN KISSEL We're gonna get there, right? There was some cool tunes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, we're gonna get there. But Ben I'm gonna ask you is the price worth it? Because MK
Ultra did not work.
BEN KISSEL Please! Yeah, it might've been worth it.
MARCUS PARKS The people in charge of MK Ultra, the special operations division, wasted 20 years, destroyed
thousands of minds, and killed dozens of people in pursuit of a possible outcome that was at
best a guess.
BEN KISSEL Dang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The human mind is difficult terrain to know because in order to look at it we have to look in
our own brains and our eyeballs are attached to the front of it.
BEN KISSEL I don't want to.
MARCUS PARKS It's succinctly fucking put, Henry. Very succinctly put.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you.
BEN KISSEL Eyes in the back of your head, CIA.
MARCUS PARKS The human brain is far too complex for something as simple as wipe and rewrite. And while we
still to this day don't know as much about the human psyche as we should, we know far more
than they knew back in the 50s. Back in the 50s the best idea they had to treat mental illness is
either overly aggressive shock therapy, too much Thorazine, or fucking lobotomies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We did an entire series on the concept of trying to fix things physically and easily.
BEN KISSEL The lobotomy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We did the whole lobotomy series where you could see how all of these things slowly but
surely as we do Last Podcast on the Left, all of our topics will begin to touch each other.
BEN KISSEL They really do. And the CIA, back in the day we were at the point where in the 1950s if you
sneezed wrong they were like, 'He's gay.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's gay.
BEN KISSEL And there was very little social science or mental science.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But that's also why they invented all of these various truth serums too was to test to see if
their people were gay or communist. They couldn't handle anybody having a good time inside
of the CIA.
BEN KISSEL Take this pill, we're gonna lay out five long objects in front of you. Most of them have balls.
Yes, they're dildos. Yes indeed, you've both passed and failed the test.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh I forgot to take my pill!
BEN KISSEL Goddamnit man, you're a genius.
MARCUS PARKS The problem here however is that there are still thousands of conspiracy theorists who believe
with all of their heart that MK Ultra actually did work and still works to this day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS They think that everyone from serial killers to mass shooters to presidential assassins, basically
anyone who introduces mass chaos and misery through violence, can't be anything but MK
Ultra agents. Now personally I think that believing in Mk Ultra's effectiveness is born out of too
much respect for the United States government and too much faith in their ability to follow
through on any plan beyond 'bomb them and steal their oil' or 'flood their neighborhood with
drugs and make money off the incarceration'. It's very simple A to B shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey, we also tried to negotiate with the nazis for a truce and we also have destabilized many
different governments.
BEN KISSEL We're busy. What else are we gonna spend that 700 billion dollars a year on?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We sprayed a bunch of pilots with syphilis, we've done a lot of things, Marcus.
BEN KISSEL That's how Lindsey Graham got his ladybugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think he earned those the old fashioned way.
MARCUS PARKS To that point, I think it is very disturbing for some Americans to believe that our post-WWII
government, the supposed saviors of the world, would waste so many lives and spend so much
time on something this fucking stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI At the very, very beginning it didn't seem stupid but the problem is that as soon as they saw
that they were getting no results, they continued to go.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that's really kind of a crime in and amongst itself where they were doing all these human
experiments, not getting what they wanted.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then said why don't we just grind it harder?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But we must believe it because they did do it. And as the Robert Heinlein quote goes,
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
BEN KISSEL Woo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI My main drive of all of the research that I have done for this episode, obviously it set me back.
I've done a lot of good work, a lot of good work with therapists and my family in order to find a
way to back off some of the paranoia over the last several years, trying to find some
semblance of piece inside of my chaotic mind.
BEN KISSEL Sure. This is you improved. This is an improved Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. I'm on how many milligrams of caffeine? I don't know.
BEN KISSEL But that's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm souped up, sure. But this has really set me back because as you go through and you read all
of these documents, it's really hard to not get into the mindset of everything's an op, all the
government does is lie and kill us and they want to. The idea that it's continuing to go is kind of
attractive because again like some people with conspiracy theories, it's kind of like believing in
god or having a thing there like there's a safety net.
BEN KISSEL It gives some order to the chaos.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No matter what, somebody's thinking of you, right. There's somebody there in control of the
whole thing. But what this thing really points towards is that I think that in conspiracy theory
in general, we think that the government is trying actively to kill us when actually I think the
real thing is that they don't care if we die.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a negligence. I was talking about this with Eddie last night and he actually said a really
important thing to me. He's like, 'For the government to be actually killing you, they'd have to
care about you. They'd have to think of you. But they don't. They mostly just roll you over.'
BEN KISSEL Oh you don't think Joe's thinking of me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They want you to work, they want you to be in factories, they want you to do that type of shit,
they want you to fucking deliver people's food and work at the airport and shit. But they're not
yet at the population control thing.
BEN KISSEL Well that's a corporation class.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Now we used many sources for this series but our main guide was a fantastic new book by
Stephen Kinzer called 'Poisoner in Chief' which follows the life of MK Ultra architect Sidney
Gottlieb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This fucking guy.
MARCUS PARKS Which means 'god full of life', 'life of god'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh good.
MARCUS PARKS In addition, in today's episode specifically we used 'OSS: The Secret History of America's First
Central Intelligence Agency' by Richard Harris Smith. And we used the granddaddy of them all,
1975's 'The Search for the Manchurian Candidate' by John Marks which blew the lid off the
whole operation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's wild.
BEN KISSEL Sweet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was watching this report from 1979 on American television, the first time anybody had heard
the words MK Ultra and it's wild. To imagine this coming out for the first time and shattering
people's minds. But they also showed a kaleidoscope and they were like, 'This is a scientific reenactment
of what you would see on LSD.'
BEN KISSEL It's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it's not like that, I wish it was.
BEN KISSEL It's a little bit like that though if you shut your eyes. It can be. I just love that the backdrop is all
plaid and tweed and really fun argyle. The 70s were cool.
MARCUS PARKS They were great. Now to understand how the CIA had enough arrogance to believe that they
had the right to even attempt something as far fetched and reckless as MK Ultra, we've got to
understand the organization that birthed the CIA. And that organization was the OSS.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) Sending out the OSS!
BEN KISSEL What?
MARCUS PARKS The Office of Strategic Services was America's intelligence agency during WWII. This was an
organization of wealthy socialites, big businessmen, mad scientists, artists, writers, and of
course military agents who all developed an unhealthy love of spying for its own sake, all in the
pursuit of defeating the nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's hard to not get pulled into the energy of the OSS as you read about it cause you're like,
'Whoa, fuck yeah! Oh cool! Oh shit!'
BEN KISSEL It's a lot of office work though too. There is a lot of office work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But honestly the OSS got their fucking hands dirty. This is before it became full of just analysts
in a room of computers. These are guys killing people.
BEN KISSEL It's like the A-Team.
MARCUS PARKS Well the OSS really was the anti-paperwork organization.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were not into paperwork.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. By design it was, 'We're gonna do whatever the fuck we wanna do, whenever the fuck
we wanna do it and you're gonna give us medals for it.'
BEN KISSEL Great. That's awesome. What's more reliable than a good old game of telephone on
international affairs?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the thing that actually happened was that because it was the elite that were all chosen to
be a part of the OSS, it did create a secret group of government. It basically created a secret
government within our government because a bunch of people, as we're gonna see time and
time again throughout this story, there's many different agencies and human beings within
this story that all thought they knew what was best for the United States of America and they
all just ran in 100 different directions, all believing they will eventually be the rightful king of
America and people will give them all of the trust and the power that they feel they deserve.
BEN KISSEL Sounds like a great way to unravel the American quilt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what happened.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now the OSS was more or less created 5 months before the attack on Pearl Harbor when
it became clear to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that we were gonna be part of WWII
whether we liked it or not.
BEN KISSEL (coughing) He let it happen. He let it happen.
MARCUS PARKS So for America's first serious excursion into espionage, sabotage, propaganda, and guerrilla
warfare, FDR chose a man named William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. See like many in the early
American espionage game, Donovan was both upper crust and a war hero.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's like Teddy Roosevelt in that way where it's rich boy, he was really excited to go kill
people.
MARCUS PARKS To this day, William Donovan is still the only person to have earned the Distinguished Service
Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the National Security Medal, the Medal of Honor, and
both a Silver and Purple Heart. And he earned all of those during WWI.
BEN KISSEL You can definitely hear him coming.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (jangling sounds)
BEN KISSEL Not very secret but that's okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He earned all of that in one mission where he took a tank turret in his own butthole and he
absorbed the bullet like he's Kirby.
BEN KISSEL Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All in one go, he got every medal.
BEN KISSEL That's incredible. All the medals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This man, he loved to kill. He really loved being in the shit.
BEN KISSEL You say love, it's a passion. It's just a passion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He developed a love of combat. He liked being in the mix to the point where as you'll see later
on, he kept showing up in all these various war fronts and the United States Army would be
like, 'Why are you here?' And he's like, 'I'm checking up on all of you.' And they're like, 'You
have no reason to be here, you're a liability.' Like he had to be protected.
BEN KISSEL It's like when OJ Simpson shows up to the Buffalo Bills games.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
BEN KISSEL And they're like, 'You have to go, OJ. You were great. Thank you, OJ but please go.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why don't we put you in a private room? You need to go in a booth.
BEN KISSEL Let's go back here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, it's a VIP area.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's right. This is a bathroom, guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hello bathroom world. But Wild Bill was a guy that was deeply connected to FDR, he went to
school with him. This is the same title, hoity-toity old school family connections that I thought
the United States of America had left it all behind, we'd left Europe assuming that we'd wanna
get rid of this caste system that your name would tell you where you belonged in life.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that you were born into your station and you can't get out of it in any way, shape, or form.
But America, we decided to change it all with money can make you extra special. That's how
you get the little archduke versions of life here in America, you just have a fuckton of money.
BEN KISSEL That's all you have to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. But you have to get it.
MARCUS PARKS Now. It used to be a lot different but now yeah. It changed, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It changed, you gotta get that cash flow. Wild Bill was deeply connected to all of these elite
families and he got pushed through all of these various things. He was the Forrest Gump of the
American espionage world where he kinda just walked his way through it. FDR hated him
cause FDR and him were staunchly different politically, they were on either opposite sides of
the spectrum where FDR was very liberal, while Bill was super conservative. But for some
reason he decided he felt that he could control him enough to make him the spymaster of
America. But this guy was also a Wall Street lawyer very similar to the Dulles brothers that
we'll get into in a little bit where they had a lot of connections into all of this Old World
European money that they basically had to go and protect the interests of when they went
back over to Europe. And Wild Bill was again, he's just a dude with cash flow that because he
already had natural connections in all of these weird different areas of the world, FDR was like,
'Well okay, you already got the numbers, you got the rolodex. You're in charge of our
espionage world.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah well I always love to trust a guy named Wild Bill. Nothing will go wrong now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he got that because he kept going back into combat and every single time he would try
and push his boys in WWI being like, 'We gotta do one more thrust.' And they'd be like, 'That's
just because you're too wild, Bill.'
BEN KISSEL You're too wild, Bill.
MARCUS PARKS Now like the CIA, the OSS mostly operate outside of the United States government with a
budget that was both unlimited and unregulated, all in the name of doing whatever they felt
was necessary to win the war. Eventually they would enlist 13,000 agents to finish the job.
BEN KISSEL Woo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But since the OSS was unregulated and flush with wartime cash, it was rife with corruption
which is the natural state of all large, completely unregulated human institutions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, buddy, whoa.
BEN KISSEL Audit the Pentagon.
MARCUS PARKS One officer was found with a suitcase containing $200,000 in small bills and no real
explanation for where it was supposed to go.
BEN KISSEL Oh man, oh wow, you found my suitcase full of $200,000 in bills. I was looking for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh this is yours?
BEN KISSEL That's mine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm honest. (shooting sounds)
BEN KISSEL Oh no!
MARCUS PARKS Another agent simply bought a commercial steamship with government funds just to take him
on a covert mission to the Canary Islands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The whole point was to not have any way to tie it back to the top of the organization. So
everybody was kinda free to do whatever they wanted.
BEN KISSEL They got a blank check. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. The steamship plan though, that was scuttled when they figured out it was probably not
a good idea to deliver an undercover agent on a covert mission by sea ship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga choo-choo!
BEN KISSEL That's the loudest mode of transportation. That's great.
MARCUS PARKS See OSS agents were recorded in secret, so no one knew who was OSS and who wasn't. And
Donovan further muddled what his organization was up to by actively bucking standard
operating procedures.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He'd also the thing where he'd ask for standard operating procedures and then they'd give it
to him and then he'd do the opposite of whatever it is that they told him to do which is very
interesting that he was constantly like, 'See? You can't even trust me, bro.'
BEN KISSEL Well that's great to know.
MARCUS PARKS Donovan actually preferred insubordinate officers, saying that he'd rather have a lieutenant
with guts enough to disobey an order than a Colonel too regimented to think and act for
himself. As a result, Donovan himself was often insubordinate and it regularly fucked up
operations carried out by other branches of the military. At one point in the war, OSS officers
broke into a Japanese embassy in Portugal and stole a code book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We got it. Fuck yes! We got it. We're crushing it.
BEN KISSEL Oh a code book, this is great.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, the OSS thought they'd scored a big win.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, now we're gonna get double extra secret covert money. We're gonna get an ice cream
machine!
BEN KISSEL I think they got the code for Contra on here for NES.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Up, down, right, down, up, down, right, left.
BEN KISSEL Something like that, yeah. Pretty good.
MARCUS PARKS Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, start.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See it's right there!
BEN KISSEL It's ingrained in his brain! MK Ultra works!
MARCUS PARKS But since the OSS had gone off on their own, they were unaware that naval intelligence had
just broken the codes that they'd stolen. And once the code book was reported missing, the
Japanese changed the codes, nullifying an entire code breaking operation. So not only had the
OSS wasted their own time, they'd also wasted the time of naval code breakers who had
worked pretty fucking hard to break those Japanese codes.
BEN KISSEL The Japanese government, can you not change the codes? We worked so hard to get these
codes and then you're just gonna change them like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We just love the old codes so much, they were their own poetry.
BEN KISSEL They were beautiful codes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was watching this talk of a guy that wrote some biography about an OSS, some officer, and
he was in front of these incredibly aged OSS veterans and they're all like screaming secrets
like, 'MacArthur was gay! Churchill, he gave up smoking 25 years before he died!'
BEN KISSEL I bet you they mostly just call people gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure. We got 'em! But then the speaker was like, 'And I would have you know, I was in the
National Archives and a researcher came up to me and he dared say to me the OSS did nothing
in WWII.'
BEN KISSEL Whoa, what did they say?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they're all like shaking, looking. And he's like, 'Have you heard of a little thing called a bat
bomb?' Yes, they did attach TNT to bats and exploded them. Can we think about that for a
second?
BEN KISSEL That is funny. That is interesting. Bad day to be a bat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It bombed.
BEN KISSEL Yeah it did, literally.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well Donovan always defended the actions of his officers no matter what and refused to
allow any of his men to be punished because Donovan believed that the only way for his men
to be effective was if they were allowed to operate in an unsupervised and scattershot
manner.
BEN KISSEL Always.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean in some ways he makes a lot of sense because human situations are fluid, they're
everchanging, you do have to think on your feet, you have to be very good at improv. So he
isn't wrong, this is not a desk job.
BEN KISSEL It's interesting.
MARCUS PARKS I mean that's the thing is that this massive military wildcard would not have continued
operation throughout the war if they didn't sometimes strike gold. And oftentimes they did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it's cause we also didn't have an espionage arm, we didn't have one until they built the
OSS.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL This is the beginning of it I guess, huh?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well because before this FDR was talking about how it was so difficult to do all these land
invasions cause number one-
BEN KISSEL The polio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he can't jump. And then it's very difficult for them to know what we're walking into.
Because before this we thought that espionage was ungentlemanly, right. We thought that
that's not how you win a war.
BEN KISSEL The rules of war, guerrilla warfare being rude.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know if we thought it was ungentlemanly, it's just that America was very isolationist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And so there was no need for a spy wing if we're not gonna be fucking with other
countries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Because that's the thing, when we came into WWII we still had horses, like we had cavalry. All
of our shit was from WWI when WWII broke out. We had to learn on our fucking feet. And the
OSS was actually a big part of that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, when we were building our army as we went, we were building our espionage
community as we went in one go. And you'll see how it transgresses but man, you'll see how it
spreads out. But it is really interesting.
BEN KISSEL I do think about a bunch of horses on a plane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'd allow them to drink because they're just going to die.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. I do think of little horses on a plane and they all have parachutes and then they jump off
and then land.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wanna say that they did shit like that.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS I don't think they ever tried parachuting in horses.
BEN KISSEL Why not? Why not? Come on!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Come on! We got the parachutes!
BEN KISSEL And then you land the horse and you're like, 'Ready to go!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You've got a head full of government-grade LSD and you're like, 'Listen, listen, listen.'
BEN KISSEL (singing) On a steel horse I ride! On a pale horse.
MARCUS PARKS I mean the OSS, they were essential to America's invasion of North Africa, that's where we
started the war in Europe, our European front. That gave us our first foothold towards
invading Italy. They set up agent networks in France to support the invasion at Normandy and
they provided invaluable information on German strength, air defenses, submarine
production, and rocket production. Not saying that the OSS is a fucking wonderful
organization, I'm just saying credit where credit's due.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They did their job.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. However because OSS officers knew that they could avoid disciplinary action no matter
what they did, operational funds often mysteriously disappeared and just as mysteriously
reappeared in the bank accounts of OSS veterans after the war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I'll just take my bonus. Thank you!
BEN KISSEL That's great. Just see the guy showing up like Dumb & Dumber, just dressed to the 10s, looking
great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Here's an IOU. This is as good as money, you're gonna wanna hold onto that. That's for a tank.
MARCUS PARKS See according to the OSS psychological chief Dr. Henry Murray, the way the OSS operated was
almost tailor made to attract psychopaths.
BEN KISSEL Oh good, good.
MARCUS PARKS They were intrigued by the idea that they could do whatever they wanted without
consequence and they were also intrigued by the fact that they could more often than not be
rewarded and praised for acting like a psychopath.
BEN KISSEL I think you're talking about the overnight shift at Taco Bell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or my middle manager at Borders. Guys, it's weird to think that in order to work for an
organization like this you have to be good at keeping a secret and what are the qualities of
someone who's good at keeping a secret? You really have to really believe in some way, shape,
or form that you are superior to other people. I really do think that there's a factor here where
you think that you can hold the seeds of America inside of you but then because you are
holding this quote unquote "precious" information, you then have a license to do whatever it
is that you want.
BEN KISSEL You do have leverage over those people, right? Because you have a piece of information they
don't, you're playing with another card in the deck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely. But the OSS will already create a problem here with how do you hire people whose
jobs are to be treacherous and then expect them to not fuck with the organization that they're
working for? And not fuck over you and not fuck over everybody else?
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And speaking of psychopaths, the OSS' drive for operational autonomy came most strongly
from intelligence operator Allen Dulles who would eventually become one of the most
notorious directors of the CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Boo! Boo!
BEN KISSEL Uh oh, he's getting a boo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I need a soundboard.
BEN KISSEL Quack quack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Get this duck outta here.
BEN KISSEL What else do you wanna hear?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (siren sounds)
BEN KISSEL That's what she said. Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I need a 'that's what she said' button, that would really help the show.
BEN KISSEL I didn't expect it to get that big.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, that's perfect.
MARCUS PARKS That's great. Well Dulles believed that it was not possible for people in Washington, DC to
understand the on the ground reality of OSS intelligence gathering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Couldn't possibly understand.
BEN KISSEL Go on.
MARCUS PARKS While that may be true in some cases, it definitely is, Dulles believed that it could only work if
Washington, DC assumed that it was true in all cases.
BEN KISSEL Can you say Washington, DC like Tim Curry from Clue? (British accent) Washington, DC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (British accent) Washington, DC.
MARCUS PARKS Now a Princeton graduate like Allen Dulles fell right in with the rest of the operational heads of
the OSS.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he's old money, he's deeply connected to the Ivy League system and he's already got
money invested in German businesses that were making things for the nazi war machine and
he had to go in and make sure that they were taken care of during his negotiations, his secret
negotiations with the nazis.
MARCUS PARKS JP Morgan's sons were OSS leaders, a Vanderbilt was in charge of the special operations
branch, a DuPont directed French espionage, a member of the Standard Oil family ran security
in Calcutta, and a member of the Equitable Life Insurance Company headed intelligence in
Italy. The only reason why the Rockefellers weren't in the OSS was because they were already
in charge of an entire agency all by themselves, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They just had their own intelligence group. They just bought guys, they bought G-men, they
bought enforcers. Cause the CIA had idea guys and they've got hard-nosed guys, they got the
guys that do their dirty work and they've got the guys who come up with the dirty work plans.
And it was really easy for a bunch of rich people who have been sitting back and kind of
planning what they'd do if they had all of these connections.
MARCUS PARKS I don't think it was that. I don't think they were planning and just waiting and all that>
BEN KISSEL I've been set back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who knows? But the interesting thing about DuPont, it's also responsible for hundreds of
thousands of deaths. So when you go and buy your paint it might as well just say Lockheed
Martin eggshell. So don't forget that, everything that we're surrounded by is covered in blood.
BEN KISSEL Missile silo gray?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh missile silo gray is beautiful, it goes absolutely perfect with anthrax red.
BEN KISSEL Afghan blood red?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS Now needless to say, these early connections to the wealthy families of America don't do
much to dissuade conspiracy theorists from believing that the CIA is an all powerful octopus of
malice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It certainly don't.
BEN KISSEL Oh god, I don't like that term. But all right.
MARCUS PARKS Octopus of malice?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's fucking sweet!
BEN KISSEL Cause I'd see the cloaca.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (guitar riff) I'm gonna drive it around. Yeah! Put a big fucking saddle on it and a fucking whip.
BEN KISSEL Oh that's the octopus of malice, huh? Wow. Nice car.
MARCUS PARKS Well I means really all of this just comes from the fact that President Roosevelt came from a
wealthy, old money, New York family so he appointed people who also came from wealthy
families who in turn appointed more people from wealthy families. It's not calculated
conspiracy, it's simple social connections.
BEN KISSEL It sounds like we're building a caste system.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no, no, no. We would never do that.
BEN KISSEL Human nature doesn't just do that like we're ants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But that's why in a way while it's not... This is fun, fun money grab. In a way it is calculated
conspiracy because they wanted a certain type of person to be in charge of these things, they
wanted a person who was moneyed, of an elite class, obviously probably did not have a lot of
Jewish connections or any other sort of ethnic persuasion. They were all on this top level.
BEN KISSEL Protestant probably, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL Mostly protestant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And in my mind a lot of it is, conspiracy is literally just a group of people meeting in a room
straight up, like that's what a conspiracy is so in a way this sort of is a conspiracy but they
didn't view it that way because they've only lived in this little bubble their entire lives.
MARCUS PARKS I mean it would be a conspiracy as much as middle class people getting together for a
Homeowners Association meeting is a conspiracy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is.
BEN KISSEL That is a conspiracy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You don't think that conspiracies don't happen inside of HOAs?
BEN KISSEL Never sign up with an HOA. Are you in an HOA?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, absolutely not.
BEN KISSEL I could never do an HOA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, I'm not signing up for the fucking Illuminati of Culver Avenue.
BEN KISSEL No remember, that's what Dennis Rader used to do because he was part of an HOA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Exactly.
BEN KISSEL Your lawn's a little too long. And it's like, you're raping everybody in town!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what I'm saying.
MARCUS PARKS Well I would say collaboration does not equal conspiracy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI True. You could say that.
MARCUS PARKS Now famously the CIA never got along with the FBI and this competition goes all the way back
to the OSS.
BEN KISSEL Mean Girls stuff here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The meanest girl of all, J. Edgar Hoover.
BEN KISSEL Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS J. Edgar Hoover refused to let the OSS get involved in the FBI's secret operations in South
America because the OSS actively hired communists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you even believe it? They all share a toothbrush! Can you even fucking believe what they
do over there? They all share one brown uniform and they all go to shit together.
BEN KISSEL That is horrible and doesn't seem very clean.
MARCUS PARKS Well the hiring of communists was Wild Bill Donovan's idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it was.
MARCUS PARKS Because while he hated communists, he hated nazis even more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI As he should.
MARCUS PARKS This was back in the day when everyone hated nazis more than anything else.
BEN KISSEL You hire a bunch of communists and the nice thing is you don't have to pay them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You just teach them about economics.
MARCUS PARKS You misunderstand communism, sir!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes!
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow. He's gone. But the thing is this is a time period when one of the few times this happens
in all of history where there's clear cut good guys and bad guys. And the nazis were-
BEN KISSEL Be careful. They were the bad guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The nazis were bad guys so it's easy to hate the nazis.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The communists, something else was happening during this time period where you'll also see
they were just setting up the next villain, they were super hopeful for a new season 2 baddie.
BEN KISSEL Oh we are in a new Cold War, my friend.
MARCUS PARKS I think they were super bummed about having another fucking enemy after that whole thing
happened.
BEN KISSEL Well they took a break.
MARCUS PARKS The people in the military industrial complex were pretty excited about the Cold War but
people like Ike Eisenhower who was actually president said like, 'We really need to pump the
brakes on all this shit.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause he was like, 'I just got done with the nazis! I just got done with them!'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I think that's how most of them were. Like fuck it, oh my god that was so hard!
BEN KISSEL Yeah but we were all in proxy wars the entire time, they loved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, the way a lot of these guys talk about the Cold War is how a lot of my old buddies talk
about college. No pressure, what free times.
MARCUS PARKS I mean once they got into it they loved it. But I think they liked having a new enemy but I don't
think they actively yearned for a new enemy. It's just when a new enemy came, they were very
excited about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes! Yes!
BEN KISSEL Sometimes you don't know what you got til it's gone. I would love to see all three of us on a
clandestine...what mission would we even be on? Like get the croissant from France?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna bring a poisoned burger to Vladimir Putin, I'm gonna dress in a catering outfit. You
dress as a horse. Marcus is on the horse.
MARCUS PARKS Hell yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is a special gift for the president of Russia and you show up like-
BEN KISSEL I'm like moo! Moo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look at this great mooing horse, huh? Burger?
BEN KISSEL Oh that's good.
MARCUS PARKS If I were to say I never thought about riding Ben, I'd be lying.
BEN KISSEL (slow claps) Wow. That's fantastic. That is absolutely wonderful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just one clap in the back of a large auditorium.
BEN KISSEL No, you can ride me whenever you want, Marcus. Don't even worry about it.
MARCUS PARKS Thanks, thanks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes indeed. Just don't do it with no hands if you know what I mean. Or insert your penis into
my rectum and then that's why you would be able to hang on. You get it, you got it.
MARCUS PARKS Wild Bill Donovan was quoted as saying that he would put Stalin himself on the OSS payroll if it
meant killing Hitler and he meant it. But shit like that was the sort of thing that J. Edgar Hoover
thought was the most dangerous way of thinking you can have.
BEN KISSEL Hoover might've been right about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. The nazis, if they did not open up the western front, if they did not open the
eastern front with Russia they very well would've had Europe, they would've had it.
BEN KISSEL Oh absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were winning. It was them vs. Europe and they were winning.
BEN KISSEL Oh I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It got close.
BEN KISSEL I've had a couple conversations about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know. You've seen some documents that had to go up in smoke.
BEN KISSEL Like Snoop Dogg. Is that what the Up In Smoke tour was all about? Then burning nazi
documents?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, it was sponsored by Enron.
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Now once Roosevelt heard of the rift between the FBI and the OSS< he intervened and gave
the operation to the FBI. The OSS however just didn't give a fuck and interfered in South
American operations anyway. Another time the OSS secretly raided a Spanish embassy in DC
to photograph code books and other pro-Axis documents. But since this was a domestic
operation, Hoover felt that the OSS was stepping on his toes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is Budweiser! You get the hell out of here, you go out there with your Amstel Light! All
right? That's what you do, you do the European theater, okay? And I've actually heard that
European theater is wonderful and we should all go.
BEN KISSEL European theater's fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS So Hoover spent wartime resources assigning FBI agents to trail OSS agents.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god what are we going guys? Okay, what are we doing here guys?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This will continue for years.
BEN KISSEL Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS And anytime the FBI saw the OSS doing anything covert on American soil, the FBI tails would
turn on their sirens, causing the OSS to scurry away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Stop it! Stop doing that, it's so bad! I see you're spying, I know that you're spying in there,
okay? Listen. God my fucking panties are just fucking messing with my balls today. Listen! You
just need to stop with the magnifying glasses!
BEN KISSEL It's all of our tax money at work.
MARCUS PARKS Yup. Now even though the OSS took many of their cues from British intelligence, they also
operated under the general principle that quote "in intelligence the British are just as much
the enemy as the Germans." That was the policy.
BEN KISSEL True, true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was reading this incredible book called 'Operation Paperclip' by Annie Jacobsen and they talk
about the CIOS, the group that went in to try to investigate the German scientific steps that
they'd taken. They basically found out Germany was 25 years ahead of us in weapons
technology. And it was this group called the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee,
the CIOS.
BEN KISSEL Rolls right off the tongue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely. But it was a group of American, British, communist scientists that were over there.
And not only were they all there trying to scoop each other about information, they're all
supposed to be like, 'We're all here working together'. You know they did like trust falls and
they all hung out with each other like, 'Don't worry, this is all one front.' Meanwhile each one
of them is investigating the other while they're also trying to get technology scoops that the
others don't get and hiding information from each other.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And in the mainstream it would be known as like trust but verified, that kind of stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL But everyone knew what everyone else was doing so in a way it was kind of fair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's weird, everybody's spying and everybody knows that everybody's spying. It's like Lance
Armstrong who's innocent where everybody's fucking juicing and you're the best of the juicers.
BEN KISSEL Let's give it to Barry Bonds. Let's say Barry because Lance, I think that he did juice just a little
bit more than most.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And he had those stupid ass bracelets that didn't actually go to cancer research.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He lost one of his testicles for America.
BEN KISSEL That's cause he spent his entire life bouncing on his balls.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think it's exercise. Exercise is what hurt him?
BEN KISSEL It hurt his nuts! Oh my god that's how we're all gonna go, swollen nuts from being podcasters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god, yeah dude. I'm already getting podcaster prostate, it's already happening.
MARCUS PARKS Well the OSS, they assumed that London's secret services, they assumed they're not here to
defeat the nazis, they're here for what comes after the war. They're here to expand the British
Empire. The OSS was just as paranoid as the CIA was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well didn't we learn everything that we knew about spycraft from them?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah cause the Brits had been doing spy crafts since like the 1500s or the 1600s, that MI5 shit
had been going on forever. So we learned a lot from them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So we stole their system.
BEN KISSEL Basically.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The OSS is built off the British system.
BEN KISSEL And on Netflix there is a very fun show called Spycraft I believe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's propaganda.
BEN KISSEL Well it's not propaganda, the weapons are very real.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what I'm saying, the angle.
BEN KISSEL The angle is very pro-US but we're in America.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's a fun show. But while the OSS distrusted the Brits, they seemed to distrust America's
ability to close out the war even more. In 1945 Allen Dulles attempted to broker peace with
the nazis through connections Dulles had made in Italy with Italian industrialists and the
Catholic church. The problem was that Allen Dulles hadn't actually run this plan by the
president.
BEN KISSEL Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Him and Wild Bill thought that hey, cause they made this decision, I forget what the actual
term was. The three of them got togetherMARCUS
PARKS I think it was Operation Sunrise was what they called it.
BEN KISSEL Scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. They made a decision, FDR basically said, 'We need unconditional surrender from the
nazis. They need to lose lose, we need to strip them of everything, we need to divide up their
lands, we need to do all of this shit. We need to fucking show the world that we are gonna put
the heel on the nazis.'
BEN KISSEL The lands they took, it was never their lands, that's for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely. (German nonsense)
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know, that's where your summer home was.
BEN KISSEL Shh, what's wrong with you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But they knew, Dulles and Wild Bill were like, 'Okay but this is a little bit more complicated
than these so-called world leaders like to say it is.'
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna try to broker peace with the nazis even though everyone's saying don't, don't do
it.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And so they started having lunch with Himmler, all these people, all the number twos, looking
out to figure out... Cause all of those guys are just being like, 'What if we just give you Hitler?
Like we'll give you Hitler and then you make me new president and then I'll wear an American
flag and we'll do all this shit.' It didn't seem to want to work out that way.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, they didn't wanna become Hacksaw Jim Duggan?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously.
MARCUS PARKS I mean Dulles wasn't as clever as he thought he was. The Russian intelligence immediately saw
what Dulles was doing, they told Stalin, Stalin told Churchill and Roosevelt, and Roosevelt told
Dulles to cut it out. And that was that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cut it out. He did the Dave Coulier thing.
BEN KISSEL Oh he did, cut it out. But these are three non-elected public officials that are completely in the
shadows and they have so much power and the audacity that they were just like, 'We don't
have to run it by the most powerful person in the world, the president of the United States'
shows you their ego.
MARCUS PARKS Well the president would have still had to approve it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS But I think they were gonna come to them with this package and be like, 'Look, here's how we
end the war. Won't you do it?'
BEN KISSEL Like a spec script.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, like a spec script.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, a spec script for a peace process, a peace flag.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's a war between many people who all thought they knew what was best for everybody
else.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the problem and the fault of people who want power is that they think that they deserve it.
MARCUS PARKS But while the OSS' behavior on the ground showed all the same flaws the CIA would later
magnify, the OSS were involved in far more than just on the ground operations. As Henry said
earlier, there were the action guys but there were also the idea men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Idea guys. And who's worse? I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well the OSS' research and analysis branch was the first concentrated effort on the part
of any world power to apply the talents of its academic community to official analysis of
foreign affairs. And here's where we get closer to MK Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause we know that Nazi Germany, the way that they leapfrogged us with military technology
is that Hitler pulled all of the top of the top of every science school and he was like, 'You're a
nazi now, you're making weapons for me.' And so he did a full-fledged attack on weaponry.
And we weren't there yet but eventually our manufacturing prowess would catch us up which
is why it's so important to get all those production materials if you're playing CIV, especially if
you're doing a domination victory.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause you can go science victory but really only if you're India, science domination victory
because you're playing the long game. For the most part if you wanna do an early run up, you
wanna attack and get some cities and someone else builds it or you build it on your own, you
really gotta up the production.
BEN KISSEL All right, well that's a great piece of advice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's for CIV!
BEN KISSEL I know. No, it's exactly like real war. You can do it in your sandals from the comforts of your
home. It's perfect.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now the OSS' first forays into the psychology of the enemy were quite clumsy. One
operation was based on the idea that the nazi state would disintegrate if Hitler was
demoralized. And that's not the worst assumption. Hitler's the figurehead, he gets
demoralized, everything falls down.
BEN KISSEL Yeah but I also kinda think that was his superpower cause I can see him getting his balls
stomped and getting dookie all over his face and then he's just like, 'I feel stronger than ever.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) I'm stronger than ever!
MARCUS PARKS But in practice the OSS tried to demoralize Hitler by airdropping piles and piles of filthy
German pornography.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you! Thank you! It's really weird. This actually still goes on in the PSYOPS of the US Army
because they play like Taliban bloopers and shit on radio stations where you hear Taliban
dudes accidentally blowing themselves up in order to make you think that they're not as
dangerous as they are to inspire you to attack them.
BEN KISSEL I wonder what some of those porno mags were, MILFers for sure, it's German.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL Dookie boys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You got Team Shiza.
BEN KISSEL Team Shiza.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're out there.
BEN KISSEL Big butt, small boob, big mouth? Weird one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Big mouth, small tits.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's a strange one.
MARCUS PARKS I mean the logic is unclear on this one, I can't quite figure it out. I mean I guess they thought
that if Hitler saw German fraus in compromising positions, he'd lose faith in the whole thing
and the Third Reich would just fall apart.
BEN KISSEL I don't think so.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know. I don't know what their logic is.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Did you read about the thing where they would drop off leaflets saying like the Lonely
Women's League? They would paper the German people with this concept of and apparently
these incendiary articles that would say that German wives, while the boys are out fighting,
are cheating on them at home. And they formed these organizations. And so it's about
demoralizing them from the inside out.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. They did some really subtle things too where they would have spies put up signs in cold
bathrooms and they would say, 'Make Hitler cold and we will make the bathroom warm again.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting!
MARCUS PARKS It's really like creature comforts, that's what people go for and who likes to shit in a freezing
cold room? Nobody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So they used the same tactics as a New York City super?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, basically. Absolutely. Also isn't it just an extension or aren't we now just in an extension
of that with the meme war?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Right.
BEN KISSEL It's all just a series of memes they drop in and people are like, 'Oh, okay.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about this shit. The CIA used to use dangerous shit, now they're fucking doing Pepe the
Frog memes.
BEN KISSEL Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean the meme is a unit of information, that's the definition of the word 'meme'. So
yeah.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Memes have always been a useful means of propaganda. Always.
BEN KISSEL TikTok is a PSYOP. Facebook, perhaps a PSYOP as well. They're all PSYOPS.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who knows? Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS Oh Facebook was 1000% co-opted as a PSYOP. I would say Facebook is the most successful
PSYOP in human history.
BEN KISSEL Yeah they decentralized Central America more than we wanted. We've been trying so hard!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So hard.
BEN KISSEL They just did it with a couple of like buttons.
MARCUS PARKS Well from there Wild Bill Donovan got into the same game that Germany had been playing
before and during WWII. Better living through chemistry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
MARCUS PARKS Now Donovan asked his scientists to develop a speech-inducing drug for use in intelligence
operations, insisting that the need for such a weapon was so acute as to warrant any attempt
to find it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What I need for you to do is invent the Bud Light, something that will make someone go up
and do 2-3 minutes of rape material in an open mic somewhere in Long Island City. Something
that dares inspire a man in a stinky hoodie to go up there and talk about how bad his dick
smells.
BEN KISSEL Yes, indeed.
MARCUS PARKS Unfortunately we have not been able to crack the Bud Light code but we do have Operation
Tecate.
BEN KISSEL That makes us extra bad at comedy!
MARCUS PARKS Now the committee soon got to work researching alcohol, barbiturates, caffeine, peyote, and
the anti-nausea drug scopolamine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause scopolamine's also the zombie drug, it's a thing that they can blow in your face and they
say it can control you.
BEN KISSEL Oh that shit's scary, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it also keeps you from getting motion sickness.
BEN KISSEL Weird. I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Dramamine also. I took Dramamine once and I was knocked out for like 6 hours.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you get highly suggestible on Dramamine? Didn't they also say the same thing about
Tylenol? Does acetomenaphin technically make you more suggestible?
BEN KISSEL It did say something like that.
MARCUS PARKS It's not that it makes you more suggestible, it makes you less risk-averse.
BEN KISSEL Impulsive.
MARCUS PARKS Impulsive, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it makes you more impulsive.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But these people found that the most effective drug for inducing speech or at least the
most effective among the first ones they tried was marijuana.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Marijuana! Yeah, dude. Cause yeah it does tend to make somebody pretty chatty.
BEN KISSEL I guess so. It also makes me kinda locked in my own brain sometimes but I guess it depends on
the strain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It really does because yeah, indicouch, it really does it to me.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. So the committee made an odorless, colorless, tasteless, highly potent weed tincture.
And that tincture became the OSS' truth drug.
BEN KISSEL That's what I did during Dry January!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And honestly you spoke a lot of truths. You revealed your secret song for the audition that you
did for the school musical.
BEN KISSEL Oh, Little Toes! Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Ben, when you had the ability to speak, you did speak some truths. Some big truths.
BEN KISSEL That's it. That's all you can ask for.
MARCUS PARKS Now since this tincture was undetectable, agents could eject it into any kind of food without
the subject being any the wiser. But since it needed to be tested and since the OSS still had a
couple of scruples, OSS operatives would test it on each other.
BEN KISSEL That's must've been a fun dinner.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. They dosed their coworkers through candies, salad dressing, mashed potatoes was a big
one. Put it in the mashed potatoes, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Man we really have come far cause this is something you can get from the most beautiful
woman in Santa Barbara right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. You remember?
MARCUS PARKS I remember.
BEN KISSEL Like she'd just be like, 'We'll have weed dinner, bring your friends.' This is something that we
paid good money to have happen to us!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But dude, this is not friendly tincture.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Even using the word 'tincture'...
BEN KISSEL What's the difference between the THC strains that they're using here and the ones we have
now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The original dosages of it used to make people vomit. It's that much THC. You would go into
catatonia, like full body sweats, seizures.
BEN KISSEL Gotcha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI At first they were like, 'I think we might be giving these guys too much.' And then they started
to realize oh it needs other ways to do it. And finally they got to smoking it seems to be the
most effective.
BEN KISSEL Wait, they finally?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL They finally got to fucking smoking it? If you want another reminder of how stupid these
people are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It came from guys that they knew within the jazz scene. Because the jazz scene, they had
operatives. Cause the thing too about all of these guys is you need guys from all walks of life,
you need people that have all these different hands in all these different worlds and they had
guys who were at the time in the underground of the jazz scene.
BEN KISSEL Jazz.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they were like, 'Well you know what happens is sometimes that one guy, before he hit the
joint he was just going (hi-hat sounds) but then he hit that one cigarette and he started going
(hi-hat sounds intensify).' And so it's like I think that we've got something here. And finally he
was like, 'We should smoke it.' And they were like, 'No, no, no, we need something more
sciencey than that. We're gonna turn it into liquid.' And then he kept being like, 'We should be
smoking it.'
BEN KISSEL Smoking it, yeah. If it works at Caf Wha it can work at the White House.
MARCUS PARKS Well part of what you needed to do was to give it to a guy clandestinely. So you could just say,
'Here, smoke this joint so we can get all the secrets out of you.' You gotta get it to him in a way
that he doesn't know he's getting it. So what they ended up doing was injecting that tincture
into cigarettes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And after smoking one of these laced cigarettes, the subject would of course get high. Then
the interrogator would try to get the subject to spill the beans. Ultimately though the truth
drug proved inconsistent because while it sometimes stimulated a rush of talk, it made other
people paranoid. They'd clam up and they didn't say shit.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So the head of the CIA at the time, it became the rumor of like never take a cigarette from the
boss.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL That's not a rumor you want spread about you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because he would have a pack of cigarettes laced with this shit. Again what we'll see, this is a
common thread, they wanna see these things in an operative scene. They wanted to see it in a
place where-
BEN KISSEL Like a case study.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Normally in war we wouldn't use this on willing people. We have to see its effectiveness
when we do it on people who don't know that they're getting it. So they had to figure out a
way to do it. And in 1943 there was this guy named George White that we're gonna talk about
next series of episodes.
MARCUS PARKS George White is up there with the wackiest fucking JFK conspiracy characters you can possibly
imagine.
BEN KISSEL Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS George White is an American character.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's a real fucking... He's a skutch this guy. He's a real piece of work.
BEN KISSEL All right. How does he dress? I'm seeing suspenders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He is old school 1940s goon.
BEN KISSEL Nice!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Looking like a goon.
BEN KISSEL Gotcha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Big head, big meat head.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, bowling ball body. They said he looked like a bowling ball with a hat on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, he looked like Alex Jones. He's got that fat from whiskey body. And he went into a
field test where he wanted to see the effectiveness of this shit. So what they decided to do
was he went undercover and talked with this mafioso, this guy named August 'Little Augie'
DelGrasio, right. He was a drug dealing guy, he started getting deep into the original heroine
networks into New York City. This old school drug dealing.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he's getting in with Lucky Luciano and guys like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. And so he gave him these cigarettes, right, and he started hanging out and doing all that
stuff. It turned into DelGrasio giving him a two hour monologue about the intricacies of drug
dealing and drug networking. And telling him basically, 'You wouldn't even fucking believe
where we hide. It goes behind the potatoes!'
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he was like, 'Man, this shit's fucking wild! We hide it in the fucking spaghetti!'
BEN KISSEL You're spilling the beans, dude! Those are beans! You're spilling the beans!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI More like I'm sluicing the Ronzoni!
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS So after the marijuana experiment, Stanley Lovell, head of OSS research and development,
proposed that there might be a way to use hypnosis to program a German prisoner to hate the
Gestapo. But they decided there was no reason to stop there. If you could program someone
to hate, then you could program them to hate enough to kill.
BEN KISSEL Oh, I thought you were gonna say to love.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no, no.
MARCUS PARKS No, no, no, no. And if you directed that hatred in the right direction, you could use hypnosis to
make that German kill Hitler.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kill Hitler!
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I don't think they understood it was actually really easy to motivate people to kill Hitler
because he wasn't nice.
BEN KISSEL Seems like a lot of people wanted to kill Hitler.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he wasn't a nice boss.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he wasn't a nice guy and he wasn't a funny guy.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It wasn't like when you hear stories about other people like, 'Stalin was actually very
charming,' all this bullshit. No, Hitler was weird.
BEN KISSEL Well they say he was handsome, they say Stalin was handsome. I don't know about charming.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. It's that shit where you're like Hitler didn't have a personal magnetism. He was cool on
stage.
BEN KISSEL You wanna isolate that audio?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL That's just the part that you liked about him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well I wasn't in the audience.
MARCUS PARKS Effective. Let's say effective on stage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was effective on stage.
MARCUS PARKS Many people used how effective he was on stage to get what they wanted.
BEN KISSEL Effective, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he was a weird guy.
BEN KISSEL Yes, he was. You know what? He was a weird guy.
MARCUS PARKS He was a very weird, uncomfortable man. It was uncomfortable to be in the room with Adolf
Hitler.
BEN KISSEL Well nowadays he would just be on the fucking Masked Singer with Rudy Giuliani.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my fucking god. Where are we fucking at?
BEN KISSEL Oh my god it's Hitler! It's Hitler! He's the big cupcake, it was Hitler!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And would you believe Ken Jeong walked offstage for 5 minutes.
BEN KISSEL That show he produced and booked? Wow, I can't believe. How brave of him.
MARCUS PARKS Now when the CIA was formed years after WWII ended, they started going through old OSS
documents and they found research on the truth drug project that was giving marijuana, trying
to get people to tell the truth, and they saw the studies on hypnosis. And these two studies
formed the basis for the CIA mind control programs to come.
BEN KISSEL What's this paperwork that's rolled up like a huge massive blunt? Let me just unroll this. Dude,
we've been giving drugs out for a long time, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let me save these drugs.
MARCUS PARKS Now concerning the creation of the CIA, the idea was born from the realization that the
Russians were gonna be a problem after WWII. So Wild Bill Donovan wrote a secret memo to
FDR asking to transform the OSS into a central intelligence service. This idea however was
leaked to J. Edgar Hoover. And J. Edgar Hoover out a kibosh on the whole idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna buy every single pair of handcuffs and I'm gonna keep them in my basement! No
one is ever gonna be able to have handcuffs ever again! I'm the only cop that's allowed! It's
just me!
BEN KISSEL Are you just mad that you have to be J. Edgar Hoover because of that other person and he has
your name?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was John first!
BEN KISSEL Yeah. I know, that's sad. I'm sorry buddy.
MARCUS PARKS But when FDR died and Harry Truman took over the presidency, one of the biggest fucking
tragedies in American history-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was sick!
BEN KISSEL I think he's weak, I don't know. I don't like this Truman guy, I thinks he's too much of a pussy.
There's no way he's gonna do what we need him to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And in another cut from Naked Gun, you should've seen how FDR died, just going down the
steps of the stadium and then he hit the bottom and went out into the baseball field.
MARCUS PARKS Truman wanted no part of a secret, unaccountable agency. He had the OSS officially dissolved
in 1945. But in 1947 Harry Truman had seen the scope of the Cold War to come and he
changed his mind.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well especially there's a lot of dirty work that had to get done. There are a lot of things that
had to be done secretly.
BEN KISSEL (singing) I'm a fool to do your dirty work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) No more.
BEN KISSEL (singing) No more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he understood, like Steely Dan did, that you need somebody else to do it. Somebody else
that's not me. It can't be me.
BEN KISSEL Exactly. Who was Harry Truman gonna intimidate?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he didn't wanna be connected to it so he realized we need this spy agency, we need
somebody who's gonna be able to do all this shit and do fucked up shit in the name of the
country.
MARCUS PARKS Well yeah and you need that layer of plausible deniability.
BEN KISSEL Protection. Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS You need that layer of like, 'I don't know what they're doing, these guys are out here doing
their own thing. I didn't tell them to do any of this shit.'
BEN KISSEL You need to have a Stefan to your Steven Urkel. Did I do that? And it's like no, that was Stefan.
And Steve Urkel has no idea what Stefan is doing even though they're the exact same entity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Stefan assaulted and murdered those 12 women, not Steven Urkel.
BEN KISSEL We don't know. We just don't know.
MARCUS PARKS Well against J. Edgar Hoover's protests, the White House approved the creation of a new
organization born from the ashes of the OSS. They named it the Central Intelligence Agency,
the CIA. And they packed it with former OSS operatives like Allen Dulles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yay.
BEN KISSEL Wow, this is so crazy.
MARCUS PARKS Yes. And this is when America starts transitioning out of best intentions into fucking evil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Heroes! Fucking evil. And they didn't want Wild Bill. Wild Bill got fucking cut out cause Wild Bill
was a little bit too much for people. He would still go on to pretend as if he was in charge of
intelligence services and people would go in and out of his house, same thing that would
happen to Dulles after he got kicked out by JFK. It's interesting how that has always happened.
They were all still all running their op games without anybody knowing and any sort of
connections and then basically paying for it on their own dime.
BEN KISSEL Well I would assume also it's a competition, right. So the US government wants to make sure
that they stay in their pocketbook on their payroll. So they basically pay them to do nothing. It
was like when I worked at FOX and there was a lot of producers and there was a producer war
and they were like, 'We want this guy because he used to produce Frontline' but then FOX was
like, 'We're gonna buy him.' And they gave him 20 million dollars just to sit in his office all day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And do nothing.
BEN KISSEL Until he was escorted out because he was fired and they escorted him out via armed guard.
But he was just an old man who literally just drank tea all day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's kinda fun.
BEN KISSEL But yeah, anyway.
MARCUS PARKS And I know America had done plenty of evil shit before 1947, I know that. I know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah. Every country's done a genocide.
BEN KISSEL And some good stuff as well.
MARCUS PARKS We have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There is some good stuff in there. But there was a unique point in time when America was the
distinct good guy and we did good things and then we immediately spent that capital on
becoming everybody else and destroying the world.
BEN KISSEL May I do a small separation of the American government and the American people?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure. Somebody's campaigning.
BEN KISSEL The American people gave us wonderful hits. Vaudeville during this time was fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly it always goes back to Vaudeville.
BEN KISSEL The arts were fantastic. The American people were fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We invented jazz!
BEN KISSEL The United States government was up to no good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Barbecue.
BEN KISSEL Barbecue, thank you. Thank you American people for all of the wonderful things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Basketball.
BEN KISSEL Yes! Football! Yes!
MARCUS PARKS But by the time the OSS morphed into the CIA, a precedent for action had already been set.
When the CIA was created, it was basically understood that they operated outside of
government influence with an almost unlimited budget and very little if any accountability.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS I mean they had their official budget but we all know about black ops budget.
BEN KISSEL Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You just redact it and then no one knows what you're spending money on.
BEN KISSEL Man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's awesome, I do it to myself with booze. You know what I mean? I just redact whole
purchases for myself. There's things that my hands do that my mind can't know that I do.
BEN KISSEL I'm about to go into downtown Hollywood and just start screaming about auditing the
Pentagon. This is gonna ruin me. Where's the money!? Where is the money going?
MARCUS PARKS The CIA also had the OSS' arrogance, carrying over their belief that if your cause is righteous
there's nothing you shouldn't do to win. And the belief that nobody knew how to win better
than the CIA. And this egotism basically created MK Ultra.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because it's not even that they completed the program, it's just the act that they had no
scruples about what they did.
MARCUS PARKS They had no scruples.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. And the corruption in that, no matter how... Cause I also don't get nationalism cause
you're just born whatever the fuck it is, you randomly come out of a pussy, you don't choose
where you're born.
BEN KISSEL It's not that random.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's pretty fucking random. For me, for us, for the person coming out of the pussy it's random.
BEN KISSEL I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I don't get nationalism and so this idea that you did it all for the love of country, the love of
country is also this weird-
BEN KISSEL It can be perverted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Complicated. It's very complicated. And so you do whatever it takes for quote unquote
"America". Whatever, you're hurting people.
BEN KISSEL So at this point, the creation of the CIA, we wonder why Cartman is a bad child on South Park.
He was given everything with absolutely zero rules. So the CIA had a budget that was whatever
they wanted, they had no rules.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were the Eric Trump of government agencies.
BEN KISSEL I'm surprised they're as good as they are. And they're pretty bad.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But before we get into how the CIA built a mind control program, we've gotta talk about
the outside sources that provided some of their more nefarious ideas. For that we've gotta
backtrack just a bit to Operation Paperclip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) We gotta boogie, we gotta boogie right here. We're gonna boogie, and we're acting
over here. It's a bunch of nazis, we're gonna buy them right here, it's that paperclip.
MARCUS PARKS Now as WWII ended in Germany, the US forces marched into Munich, the birthplace of the
nazi party. They had two goals: suppress the black market and find as many high ranking nazis
as possible. Once they rounded up enough high ranking nazis, the most famous nazis were
sent to Kransberg Castle in Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, we're gonna do a full on deep dive into Operation Paperclip at some point because
it's two episodes on it's own.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the book 'Operation Paperclip' by Annie Jacobsen, this is an action movie with Tarantino
villains.
BEN KISSEL Cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like all of these guys are all master villains that were a part of the architecture of the nazi war
machine. And so they also knew they don't say anything, everything's in code, they're a bunch
of smarmy fucking greasy Gestapo fucks all hanging out in these big old castles, chumming
around with everybody like it's funny.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. They're like, 'The pretzel has no beginning and no end, the pretzel is nothing and
everything all at once.' Because technically a pretzel is forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the infinity symbol.
BEN KISSEL It's the infinity symbol, thank you.
MARCUS PARKS Well at this makeshift prison you had architect Albert Speer, automotive engineer Ferdinand
Porsche, creator of the VW bug-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Porscha! It's Porscha!
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS And the directors of the IG Farben chemical cartel, the so-called devil's chemists who had
manufactured the Zyklon B pellets used in the Holocaust.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was reading about the interrogation of the head of IG Farben and it's just so fucking
miserable cause he was like, 'We did our best. It's amazing what we can do with science these
days.' And this American officer, like a scene from a movie, is knocking around this wall, right.
He's knocking and being like, 'Oh yeah? Okay, that's interesting. So what else did you do at IG
Farben?' And then he hit the hollow point and then the man started crying and he was just
like, 'Oh, that must be bad.' and he opened up the fucking, literally pulled a bookcase aside
and there was a safe in there. They cracked open the safe and it was the building of the
chemical plant at Auschwitz.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was all of the pictures, it was a photo album of all of the pictures of them cutting the grand
opening ribbon at Auschwitz, throwing a ticker tape parade while you see all of these Jewish
workers in the background building their own Zyklon B factories.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. Ugh. It's just one of those things that's hard to believe - well it's not hard to
believe sadly. Shit takes time to build. This stuff did not happen on accident.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS But included in that motley crew were people of potentially great value to the powers that
survived WWII. Amongst many others you had rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and the
nazi's director of research into biological warfare, Dr. Kurt Blome.
BEN KISSEL We'll take those two, please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We did.
MARCUS PARKS And about 700 others.
BEN KISSEL (whispering) We'll just grab those, yeah, thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (whispering) Thank you so much. Can I have a doggy bag for nazis? Put this in your purse.
Yeah, it's a rocket scientist.
BEN KISSEL Oh thank you.
MARCUS PARKS Now von Braun will be covered much more extensively when we do a full series on Operation
Paperclip but Dr. Blome had several nazi-funded laboratories devoted to bacteriology,
pharmacology, and radiology. It was seriously called "The Tumor Farm".
BEN KISSEL Well you know what, this is where I'm gonna say can I get off this cruise? I don't wanna stop at
the tumor farm, I don't wanna be anywhere near the tumor farm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In America the tumor farmers are the only farmers we pay. We pay them to farm, it's called
cigarettes. The cigarette companies.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, a lot of tumors out there.
MARCUS PARKS And his laboratory complex, it was supposed to be given kind of a medical name but the name
was still fucking terrifying. They called it the Central Cancer Institute.
BEN KISSEL Yeah dude. It's all horrible!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It sounds like where cancer goes to school.
BEN KISSEL Exactly, where it gets stronger and stronger and stronger and it comes out as leukemia. You go
in as breast cancer and you come out as prostate cancer and you're just like, 'I think I can kill
now!'
MARCUS PARKS Dr. Blome also developed aerosol delivery systems for nerve gas that got tested on inmates at
Auschwitz, he bred infected mosquitoes and lice to be tested on inmates at Dachau and
Buchenwald, and he produced gas that was used to kill 35,000 tuberculosis patients in a
concentration camp in Poland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I don't understand, Marcus. It says right here he was quoted as saying, (German accent) 'I
know nothing!'
BEN KISSEL Very good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) I know nothing!
BEN KISSEL Yes from I believe that's Laughin' which is a 1970s comedy show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's with Gomer Pyle.
MARCUS PARKS Hogan's Heroes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hogan's Heroes!
BEN KISSEL Hogan's Heroes.
MARCUS PARKS It's Hogan's Heroes. (German accent) I know nothing!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know nothing!
BEN KISSEL Yes. For our younger viewers out there, they're gonna love that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean it's for zoomers. That's what this is all about.
BEN KISSEL That's a boomer joke.
MARCUS PARKS So in January of 1945, about 5 months before the German surrender, Dr. Blome fled the tumor
farm in advance of the invading allies. But somewhat like Mengele, what Blome really cared
about was he work to the detriment of all else. He didn't really give a fuck about being a nazi,
he just cared about the science.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL What did he think he was doing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Helping the war effort. Learning more about virology that no one was brave enough to do.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it was just about knowledge, you know?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Quote unquote.
MARCUS PARKS It was just like Mengele where it's like, 'I'm gonna find out the shit that no one else has had the
balls to find out because no one else is willing to kill for science.' Well as such, Blome
continued his research in another town in Germany until the allies captured that one as well.
He escaped to Munich but was caught with the rest of the rat bastard nazis when there was
nowhere else to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God, it still feels good to say.
MARCUS PARKS It does. No, it feels good to call them nazis. Bunch of rat bastard nazis!
BEN KISSEL Oh dude, I just finished Call of Duty: Vanguard and it was really fun hunting down some nazis.
It's a great time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Always kill them, it's so much fun.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it's fun to do, they're bad people, you know?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I just got Inglourious Basterds on fucking Blu-ray, I can't wait to watch it tonight.
BEN KISSEL Yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sweet. And you know when it's officially Allied territory? There's a Golden Corral. It magically...
we plant one.
BEN KISSEL We always drop it in. That's a part of the propaganda engine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely!
BEN KISSEL Cause you can see like could a country be so bad if we create a buffet of this style and quality
that 40 people will fight each other in a Golden Corral because they ran out of steak?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which actually happened. Could you imagine coming from Ukraine, coming to America, this is
why they say the sentence 'I love America!' Because they see a Golden Corral for the first time.
They don't realize 10 years later they're gonna lose their feet. But you know, when you first
get here it's like whoa!
BEN KISSEL That's the ultimate American deception.
MARCUS PARKS Fuck, the chocolate fountain!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cut to them dying of diabetes.
BEN KISSEL It was worth it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I didn't know I'd lose half my body to chocolate.
MARCUS PARKS Now by the time the Allies caught Dr. Blome, they already had documents proving he was an
evil son of a bitch. They were in possession of a letter addressed to Blome from Holocaust
architect Heinrich Himmler directing Blome to produce the toxins that killed all those
tuberculosis patients. Now Blome admitted that the letter was real and he did admit to killing
35,000 people. He said, (German accent) 'Yes I'm sorry, yes I did that.'
BEN KISSEL Is he gonna do a dot, dot, dot?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) Oops. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, you're gonna yadda, yadda this?
MARCUS PARKS Dot, dot, dot. However he insisted that the director of the nazi biological warfare programs
was Heinrich Himmler, not Dr. Kurt Blome. Kurt Blome, he's just following orders, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL Oh just following orders. Isn't that nice?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's just gotta do all this stuff with it.
BEN KISSEL That's great, I love when people just follow orders.
MARCUS PARKS Now one thing that became blindingly obvious to the Allies once they began sifting through
nazi research was that nazis like Dr. Kurt Blome had accumulated a unique store of knowledge
about the human body, specifically this knowledge was extremely valuable because it could
only come from experiments in which humans were explicitly made to suffer and die. Unlike
say the American Tuskegee Experiments where suffering and death was more of a possible if
likely consequence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh. Boo! Boo! Boo!
BEN KISSEL Boo! Both boos! Double boos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I got the soundboard. Boo!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. For example the nazis knew how long it took for human beings to die after exposure to
various germs and chemicals and they knew which toxins would kill most quickly and
efficiently. But in the Dachau concentration camps, nazis had also fed mescaline and other
psychoactive drugs to prisoners, hoping to find ways to either control their minds or simply
shatter the human psyche altogether.
BEN KISSEL What a fucking nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS See it hadn't occurred to Americans just yet, why don't we try psychoactive substances? They
got that idea from the nazis.
BEN KISSEL Can you imagine that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They looked at the paperwork too cause they were very crude, the experiments that they did
at the concentration camps were obviously very crude and very hitting things with a hammer.
But the United States government looked at this and as they started getting all of this intel
about what the nazi doctors were all up to, the idea of purchasing them was a slow roll. It was
eventually they started to realize oh we might quote unquote "have to" have these guys to do
shit with this stuff.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Well hear me out. We'll dress them up syphilis Pokemon and we'll just collect them all.
It'll be great. I can't imagine the first person to walk into the offices that says, 'Let's recruit the
nazis!' Must've been like, 'Earl, why don't you just go?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh no, everyone was pissed. The guy who sent the first... There was a guy that sent the first
telegram being like, 'We might wanna hire some of these guys.' And the response back was
not happy.
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL Slowly but surely.
MARCUS PARKS Well as it turned out, Dr. Kurt Blome had been involved in many of the biological experiments,
making him highly valuable to the US military because the US military had spent years
believing that biological warfare was the future. Cause remember not everyone knew about
the Manhattan Project. Not everyone knew that we had nuclear weapons. And those who did
know about the nuclear weapons, they didn't know if it was ever actually gonna work out. It
was sort of a maybe, kinda, I don't know, let's see what this fucking Oppenheimer weirdo
comes up with.
BEN KISSEL Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was the ABC warfare, atomic, biologic, chemical. And they were basically just running on
each one, being like all right see what we get first!
BEN KISSEL Right. So they have the air covered and the land covered and now they're gonna get our lungs
covered perhaps.
MARCUS PARKS Well you know we've been doing chemical warfare since WWI, mustard gas and so on and so
forth.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS See even before WWII it was discovered the Japanese scientists were producing biological
weapons and by the way before you all start screaming for Unit 731, it will be getting its own
redo series in the future. Ben, are you excited about reliving Unit 731?
BEN KISSEL I am a little bit not excited about it but it will be fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're making sleeves! Making sleeves!
BEN KISSEL Oh god. That move, what is it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Men Behind the Sun.
BEN KISSEL Men Behind the Sun. It still traumatizes me. That'll be a grotesque series but an important
series when it comes to human history, let's not repeat it.
MARCUS PARKS So after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, FDR created the War Research Service, our first agency
dedicated to biological warfare. To head the agency, FDR tapped George Merck, CEO of what is
now one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Again, not helping with the
conspiracies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm getting hot. I'm sweating. I'm gonna end up locked up. I'm gonna end up in fucking Port
Authority with a fucking bike helmet with the top cut off, screaming at people in front of
Annie's Pretzels.
BEN KISSEL Follow the money! It's not a conspiracy if it's true.
MARCUS PARKS Now the task that put this agency on the map came when British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill received intelligence reports that Hitler was planning a biological attack on England.
Tragically that report was later proven false which means that this program which caused a
domino effect with 1000 other serious consequences had been started for no real reason
whatsoever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well the German government, from what I read, they planted that rumor themselves, right.
Because Hitler was chasing after the wunderwaffe, the wonder weapons for a long time which
was really at that point the V-2, all these various rocketry things that they used to blow us up
harder than everybody else. But they were technically on the verge of creating a massive
chemical poison called Tabun that they were gonna use. Cause I guess the final idea what the
nazis were gonna do was at the very end of the war it was floated to Hitler, let's just kill
everybody.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let's literally just do a massive suicide bomb with a chemical weapon on all of Europe and kill
as many people as we can.
BEN KISSEL Well now wouldn't that also kill us?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Exactly. They wanted to commit, I mean look, they all committed suicide.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They wanted it. It was a gleam in Hitler's eye. But it wasn't there.
BEN KISSEL Did any of these experiments, did anything accidentally turn out right? Like is this how Nutella
was created by any chance? Or was all of this just a negative thing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We got the VW bug.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. We went to the moon.
BEN KISSEL We have that picture from the moon, that was cool.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If we did.
MARCUS PARKS One of the greatest accomplishments in human history, yeah, it came from nazi technology. It
came from Wernher von Braun's V-2 rocket scientist technology, that's how America got to the
moon.
BEN KISSEL They went all the way to the moon though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And we came right back.
BEN KISSEL And we came back.
MARCUS PARKS We landed on the moon! Yeah!
BEN KISSEL All right. I'm not sure if it was worth it for that trip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We'll see.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS But since the UK didn't have the facilities or the budget to build up a store of pathogens as
retaliation for a possible German bio attack, Churchill asked FDR for a little help. In turn FDR
asked his top bacteriologists if it was possible to produce deadly germs on an industrial level
using one big bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What if we just make it big?
BEN KISSEL Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Make one big one!
BEN KISSEL I love this conversation the president's having. This is so comforting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes. These are the conversations that they had.
BEN KISSEL I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They talk about this like, 'What if we made just one big bomb?' And then Grandpa Joe is like,
'What if we make it shaped like a Werthers? Let me be clear, it's all about sharing a moment
between a grandfather and his grandson.'
MARCUS PARKS Now like most scientists at this time, they didn't have a moral problem infecting an entire
population with a deadly disease. They did however have a practical one. Most said that it was
impossible to build the hermetically-sealed container on that scale. But one bacteriologist
dissented, saying that this was merely a problem of scale that could be solved. That
bacteriologist was Ira Baldwin who would later serve as a mentor for the eventual architect of
MK Ultra. Now Baldwin was an interesting figure. Simultaneously existing as both America's
first biological warrior and as a committed Quaker who abhorred violence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why are all of these guys, in stories they all are like this. Wild Bill was a fucking gardener,
Sidney Gottlieb, same thing. They lead this little provincial, cute, normal lives. They want the
silence of the country. Meanwhile bio warfare is the most nefarious thing to come out of the
human mind since the beginnings of it, since we started fucking throwing diseased bodies over
the wall to poison bunch of people.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Since the first rock was thrown.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I was gonna say it's how the Black Plague started was fucking biological warfare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously. It was a fucking bad idea to begin with and then also the idea of just the psychic rape
of a generation of people. I don't know how they can put the two together.
MARCUS PARKS Baldwin later said that it never occurred to him to say that he didn't want to produce biological
weapons because everyone was pitching in on the war effort however they could. All he
needed to do was think his way through the problem. Eventually he decided that even though
killing people is immoral, he had on the other hand spent his time in medical bacteriology
killing microorganisms that kill humans to stop those microorganisms from killing humans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There you go.
MARCUS PARKS Therefore using bacteria to kill other humans so those humans stop killing other humans, it
was no different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL It makes all the sense in the world if you're completely and utterly deranged and attempting to
rationalize your creation of a biological weapon that theoretically is gonna end the war but we
all know will just increase it and cause mass human suffering. But you talk about how scientists
did their parts, there was also a toxoplasmosis-shirt maker and he invented the term 'Hitler?
More like Shitler.' And he put that on a shirt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wish. It was so simple.
BEN KISSEL He put that on a shirt and it went viral, it went shirt viral in the 1950s and 60s. 40s!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well actually Ben you bring up a good point. Later on Ira Baldwin actually said, he was
like, 'Yeah I know it's horrifying.'
BEN KISSEL It was a mistake.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah he's looking back on it like, 'I know it was horrifying for me to make that justification.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah. That's the difference between being a scientist and a comedian because I am sorry that I
got drunk on stage 5 years ago in Minneapolis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it still comes up, like you're haunted by it.
BEN KISSEL That's really different though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Because I'm not that haunted by it, you know. I'm not haunted like oh I killed a whole
generation of people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unless you mean kill on that mic. Then yeah, we have killed millions of people.
BEN KISSEL We just murdered that show. I actually don't like that terminology for it.
MARCUS PARKS So after Baldwin was given the UK biological weapons gig, he became the scientific director of
the army biological warfare laboratories and built a new facility just 50 miles outside of
Washington, DC at a former national guard base called Detrick Field. It was soon renamed
Camp Detrick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cute!
MARCUS PARKS Actually they could see Camp David from Camp Detrick.
BEN KISSEL Oh, they could wave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wouldn't tell the David people because all the germs are over there.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you think they should ever do Ernest Saves Camp Detrick?
BEN KISSEL If he was still around to do it. Ernest has passed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Verne can't talk, Verne's perfect for these clandestine intelligence agencies.
BEN KISSEL Verne was an op.
MARCUS PARKS Well the installation was shrouded in the deepest secrecy because military commanders
thought if news of research into germ warfare leaked out, Americans would panic at the
possibility of a biological attack. It's not the worst logic, Americans can be quite skittish.
BEN KISSEL Yeah buddy. What are you even validating that idea for? Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm skittish. I'm a bit skittish about bio warfare.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. I feel like everyone has a different reaction, don't they? And some are more skittish than
others. And everyone just handles everything perfectly with total calm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Calm, calm, calm.
BEN KISSEL Calm.
MARCUS PARKS Calm, calm. And so the first rule of Camp Detrick was don't talk about Camp Detrick. And all of
them were forced to sign a vow of secrecy. They didn't even have autonomy over their own
dead bodies.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS If they died while they were working at Camp Detrick, they had to immediately be sealed in an
airtight coffin and the only people allowed to do autopsies on Camp Detrick scientists were
other Camp Detrick scientists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
BEN KISSEL At some point don't you just sit down and say, let's just say we accomplish everything, what's
the best case scenario?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the ultimate fan Patreon. You know what I mean? You're just singing like, 'My body
belongs to My Brother, My Brother And Me.'
BEN KISSEL Good. Great. I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS But these guys, they fucking loved the work they were doing. They loved being at Camp
Detrick. They adored it. Cause I mean really for them the endgame, best case scenario, they
just get to work on science for the rest of their lives and that's it. They get to accumulate
knowledge, they get to figure shit out. That's why they got into the game in the first place.
BEN KISSEL Yeah but they have to use it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They loved it, man. They had the snack bar, they had foosball tables.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know they had those spinning, the tables, the chairs look like tops and then you roll
around it.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And everyone's like, 'Oh, that's amazing!' But if you were actually sitting in one of those chairs
or using the foosball table one of your bosses would eventually come by and be like, 'What are
we doing here, Greg?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah, what are we doing here? It's there but it's like not there. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why are you using it?
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. But it just feels like, I mentioned this on Top Hat this week when it comes to having
more military troops go abroad, Romania and things like that. The old adage of theater where
if you show the gun in the first act, you better use it by the third. It just seems like they're
creating the gun to then show and by definition they're going to have to use it. Otherwise
what are they doing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Millions of dollars are wasted.
MARCUS PARKS Well that's the whole joke in Dr. Strangelove about the Doomsday machine.
BEN KISSEL Love it.
MARCUS PARKS Like what is the point of having it if nobody knows you have it?
BEN KISSEL Exactly!
MARCUS PARKS And as you know, the Premier loves surprises.
BEN KISSEL That was the best. Kubrick is the best. I'm starting to think Stanley Kubrick is a good director.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Maybe he knew shit that we didn't know that he knew.
BEN KISSEL Maybe. That would be a fun episode.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah. He did not fake the moon landing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm not saying he faked the moon landing. I'm just saying he catered it, he was there.
BEN KISSEL Craft services.
MARCUS PARKS The guys at Camp Detrick, they fucking loved being there but they also knew they had to be
secret about it but they also had fun with it where they'd have parties and a guy would be like,
'Wow there's a whole lot of fucking bacteriologists here! That's crazy. What are all these
bacteriologists...'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is this where all the germs with dicks hang out? They'd do that in the bathroom.
BEN KISSEL This one dude had a super tight 10. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. They even had their own school cheer. Henry, if you would please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Brucellosis, psittacosis, P-U-Ba! Antibodies! Antitoxin! Ra, ra, ra!
BEN KISSEL I'm just so fucking pissed off that these people killed everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They got close.
BEN KISSEL These nerds did it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well over the next 2.5 years, Baldwin and hundreds of scientists under his command
engaged in over 200 projects including breeding mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and
developing a pigeon bomb.
BEN KISSEL What the fuck is a pigeon bomb?
MARCUS PARKS A pigeon bomb was a pigeon whose feathers had been infected with toxin spores so when the
pigeon flies around, you just kinda toss the pigeon out, it fucking spreads all these toxic spores
across a city.
BEN KISSEL Spreads everywhere. Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI People get sick.
MARCUS PARKS However as scientists were solving the project that started it all, remember it all started with
Churchill saying I want a big germ bomb, Churchill abruptly changed the order from one big
germ bomb to half a million bomblets filmed with anthrax spores.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's like when I get the nuggets at Chick-fil-A. When I'm in the mood like I don't really want
the big old sandwich, I just want the little nuggets, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Break it up. So it literally is the joke would you rather fight one big germ bomb or a
thousand?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Tiny ones.
BEN KISSEL Oh fun.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, tiny ones. He'd kinda gotten that intelligence that Henry had said earlier about the
Germans might try one last crazy fucking attack because at that point they're like, 'We're
gonna beat the Germans, we've got them on the run, it's gonna happen eventually.' But
everyone was worried like what are they gonna do on the way out? Are they gonna try to blow
up the whole fucking mess?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well they were technically. They were burning everything down and burning all the documents
and destroying everything that they could and technically there was a mass order for Berlin to
be leveled by their own forces. But we already got there.
BEN KISSEL Moments of waning power are the most dangerous by far.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, wait til we're at the very end of our podcast, what happens.
BEN KISSEL Meh, nothing. We'll have a party.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We'll go to sleep.
BEN KISSEL Cake. Ooh, that'd be fun.
MARCUS PARKS Go to sleep, yeah. I'll probably just play more bass, that's pretty much all that's gonna happen.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll develop my hot sauce line.
BEN KISSEL Ooh! Can't wait.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, Dragon's Blood Elixir, that's my favorite hot sauce around. For Whom the Bell Tolls,
best hot sauce bar none. It's my favorite hot sauce, thank you Dragon's Blood Elixir.
BEN KISSEL Really? Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. For Whom the Bell Tolls, it's fantastic.
BEN KISSEL Well check out Zebrowski's Bleeding Asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Secret Aardvark. No, I would name it Dogmeat's Bleeding Assholee, it would be after you.
BEN KISSEL Aw, that'd be nice.
MARCUS PARKS Thank you. I appreciate that. Now the scientists were well on their way to filling this order but
in May of 1945, the nazis surrendered and the anthrax order was canceled. Now the scientists
at Camp Detrick had learned quite a bit about how to kill large numbers of people with germs
but they were still limited by the fact that they couldn't actually kill a human being in the
service of scientific research.
BEN KISSEL What a hassle, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Everybody's like that's a war crime, you should go to the Hague, you should be hung for
treason, whatever.
BEN KISSEL Mondays. Right. I feel so bad for you, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. The Germans however had operated under no such restrictions. The Americans had
known for a while that their Axis counterparts had been working on similar projects without
any sort of moral boundaries. So when they heard that Allied forces had captured the
infamous nazi Dr. Kurt Blome, they damn near pissed themselves with excitement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god, yay! Yay! Just so excited.
BEN KISSEL Oh I'm so mad at you guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh man, we stan Dr. Kurt Blome.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, you stan him?
MARCUS PARKS The only question was how they were gonna get Dr. Blome and Dr. Blome's knowledge. Now
put simply, the aforementioned Operation Paperclip was a program in which captured nazi
scientists would be brought to the United States to apply their knowledge to American
projects. Partly this was done to keep these nazis out of Soviet hands, although the Soviets did
end up getting away with quite a few nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But we got the good ones!
BEN KISSEL That's right. USA! USA! USA!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean the Soviet space program was full of just as many nazis as we had. However we
did get the smarter nazis, Wernher von Braun was the rockstar of the rockstars.
BEN KISSEL Stalin got the dogs though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Stalin got the dogs.
BEN KISSEL In the divorce that was the fallout of WWII.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They got the dogs.
BEN KISSEL He got the dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the story of them looking for the hidden crates of Wernher von Braun's V-2 documents, his
hidden documents, it's fantastic. It should be its own movie.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well we did this partly to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets but mostly we did
this because the nazis had put all of their chips into science at any cost and they had
knowledge that we could only dream of. Most famously we brought over rocket scientist
Wernher von Braun whose knowledge about rocket propulsion built on the backs on enslaved
Jewish prisoners, eventually landed America on the moon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The V-2 program was built underneath a mountain. It was like Mordor and they were not
allowed, the slaves that were brought from the concentration camps, they were not allowed
to have digging tools cause they thought that they would rise up against the SS people. So they
literally had to dig caverns in the mountains with their hands.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they just threw bodies at it so more and more people would die building these things. But
the thing is that when you have a group of emaciated, basically dying people build your entire
rocketry system, these rockets started falling apart. They used to blow up on the landing pads,
they used to blow up before they were supposed to because their heart really wasn't in the
work.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I would think. It sounds horrible.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well to demonstrate just how hard we ingrained these nazis into our society, Wernher
von Braun was even featured on an episode of a Disney television show in 1955 called
Disneyland to explain rocket propulsion.
BEN KISSEL Oh how fun for the kids that must have been.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS That presentation by the way? Still available on Disney fucking Plus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Go wave to him! Go say hi!
BEN KISSEL Oh great, good! I'm so happy that they still have it on Disney+.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would love to have seen Wernher von Braun in Disney before like my parents did with Mickey
like, 'Go tell Wernher von Braun you love him. Go tell him you love him, go get his autograph
please.'
BEN KISSEL Yep. This is another reminder when Disney tells us that people like James Gunn - who's just an
artistic man trying to do the best he can, The Suicide Squad the new movie is fantastic - but
when they say James Gunn's a bad person, don't forget Disney, not exactly pure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Well Busch Gardens didn't buy any nazis.
BEN KISSEL They didn't buy one nazi at Busch Gardens, not one nazi.
MARCUS PARKS But once we started bringing over rocket scientists, the rest of the commanders started
getting jealous. So they proposed opening the pipeline to the physicians, chemists, and
biologists who had conducted experiments at the concentration camps. And like Ira Baldwin,
the officers running Operation Paperclip figured there wasn't much of a difference between
the people killed by the V-2 rockets built by Wernher von Braun and the people killed by the
gas used by Dr. Blome. Is anything, von Braun's projects had probably killed more people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS So as a result, Operation Paperclip got to work whitewashing the biographies of all these
scientists. References to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave
laborers, or experiments on human subjects were expunged. Like they never even happened.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like bye, bye, delete! Delete!
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you know what would have really helped them if they had some way to give them
amnesia. That really would have helped them get over the burden over their histories cause
think about the pressure Wernher was under.
BEN KISSEL The nazi's suffering. Yes, of course. Yeah. You don't know what it's like to kill tons and tons of
people. It's hard for me. It's hard for me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What about me?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Then they doctored the applications, recategorizing scientists who had been raided by
interrogators as quote "ardent nazis" to quote "not ardent nazis".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let me just put a little 'not' in there.
BEN KISSEL They just did the 1980s t-shirt?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What they would do is be like this is Dr. von Braun, he's an ardent nazi...not!
BEN KISSEL Not! I can't. I'm done. All right.
MARCUS PARKS Finally they padded the bios of the scientists to make them sound like loving family men and
the Paperclip contracts were signed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you hear the soul of America dying? (wailing)
BEN KISSEL (wailing)
MARCUS PARKS Overall, more than 700 nazis would enter the United States with clean slates no matter what
they'd done. And after Dr. Blome somehow skated his way through the Nuremberg trials, we
brought him over as well. He was one of the few guys to be found not guilty at Nuremberg.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also this whole time Wild Bill is trying to get Goring off. Goring is in the Nuremberg trials and
they're trying to get him, they thought that maybe... He's like, 'We'll get Goring the flip and
have him rat out the other nazis.' And they're all like, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'
BEN KISSEL I'm Wild Bill, all right. Sometimes I'm too wild even for Bill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wild Bill was doing the do too much.
BEN KISSEL For my research for next week's episode I will be watching Dana Carvey's Clean Slate. Because
isn't that a wonderful example of what Mk Ultra can do?
MARCUS PARKS Now almost immediately after the nazis got wiped up like so much fucking diarrhea, the Soviet
Union replaced-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL So much diarrhea!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (guitar riff)
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. The Soviet Union replaced the Germans and the Japanese as America's next big bad.
Hatred for communists had been building for decades and citizens were soon convinced that
communism was a demonic force that morally threatened the existence of the United States
and therefore all of humanity. And since the stakes were set so high by both the government
and the citizenry, that created kind of a feedback loop. The government says that it's really
bad, the citizens go even further and so on and so forth.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS So no sacrifice of money, morality, or human life could be considered excessive which was the
perfect environment for the newly created CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It set the scene and the temperament for how they would work for the first 15 years of the
CIA.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Arguably their most destructive.
BEN KISSEL You think so?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean who knows what they do now?
BEN KISSEL It's hard to tell, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna cover more later on in the series about modern things that the CIA are up to but
this time period was (chef's kiss), it was just choice for it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Well this is when they're a newborn baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI With a gun.
BEN KISSEL With a massive gun, a lot of money, and a lot of power. And it seems as if political will is on
their side at this point. The American people are kinda like do whatever you gotta do.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the real story of Boss Baby.
BEN KISSEL Oh this is Boss Baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The original Boss Baby.
MARCUS PARKS Now by 1949 the CIA had been on the job for a couple of years, hiring Corsican gangsters to
break communist-led strikes in Italy while they sent saboteurs, spies, and commando squads
throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were really into supporting insurgencies, that is where it really started.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the OSS was doing that as well as that's how it started was the idea of you get grassroots
campaigns against these non-friendly American governments and try to flip them.
BEN KISSEL Right. You wait, we're gonna have a guerrilla war on our hands here in a second. It's crazy,
man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I can't believe they're gonna let those monkeys fight.
BEN KISSEL Aw, that's cute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is fun.
BEN KISSEL You made almost a Ben. You made a Ben, there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL It was cute.
MARCUS PARKS It was pretty good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's rubbing off.
BEN KISSEL You took something super horrific and tried to make it cute.
MARCUS PARKS But in 1949 a prelate of the Roman Catholic Church named Cardinal J zsef Mindszenty
appeared on a televised show trial in the Soviet-controlled country of Hungary. There the
cardinal confessed to attempting to overthrow the government and seeking to steal the Royal
Hungarian crown as a part of a plot to reestablish the long dead Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Now the cardinal obviously hadn't done anything so outlandish but because he confessed he
was sentenced to life in prison. This was basically a Soviet PSYOP.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now while the world leaders were outraged at the cardinal's sentence, senior officers at the
CIA had an entirely different reaction. Instead of focusing on the outcome of the trial, they
focused on the behavior of the cardinal during the trial. They observed that the cardinal
appeared disoriented, he spoke in a flat monotone, and he confessed to crimes that he
obviously had not and could not have committed.
BEN KISSEL And he seems to just like to collect little twigs and make a little home out of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh you're saying that he's a cardinal like the bird.
MARCUS PARKS He's a bird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you, honestly that's really helpful.
BEN KISSEL Thank you. You can see him on the witness stand making his little nest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We all can. And it was weird.
BEN KISSEL Because that's why he's there.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now the cardinal had been coerced into confessing with nothing more special than ill
treatment, extended isolation, beatings, and repetitive interrogation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you're also just forced. You're just forced to say these lies and you know it's lies and the
audience know it's lies and we all have to agree.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which is why the Soviets at that point, it was a bad environment because they all had to live in
this fantasy world of a government's construction.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I'm not buying into that whole modern bullshit where Soviet Russia is cute and cuddly
and fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're not.
MARCUS PARKS Soviet Russia was a fucking awful place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it was all bad.
BEN KISSEL No. Is there modern bullshit that says that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Shit was not good.
BEN KISSEL No, it was horrible.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But the CIA could not accept that a man could be made to confess to something so huge
using standard torture techniques, even though that's exactly what happened. The CIA
became convinced that the Soviets had developed drugs or mind control techniques to say
things that they did not believe.
BEN KISSEL He's a catholic priest, he lies for a living. What are we talking about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously.
BEN KISSEL There's no way he could flip a catholic!
MARCUS PARKS What started as speculation around the CIA offices soon became fact despite a complete lack
of evidence that the Soviets were doing anything like this. Most likely I kinda got a feeling that
they had read the fucking OSS files about the truth serum and about using hypnosis, I got a
feeling they read that shit about a week before. And then when they saw the cardinal's shit it
was like, 'Oh fuck, that's what they're doing.'
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS And then before you know it, it just becomes MK Ultra. That's how humans work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And as it just so happened, the former biology boys over at Camp Detrick, they needed a new
project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Project!
BEN KISSEL Yay! Arts and crafts day!
MARCUS PARKS See after WWII, military planners had concluded that since we had nuclear weapons, there
was no need to develop biological weapons. So the scientists at Camp Detrick had temporarily
been out of a job. But after the trial of the cardinal in Hungary, the scientists at Camp Detrick
had their mission changed from biological to chemical. And in 1949 the CIA formed the Special
Operations Division and began conducting research into ways that chemicals could be used as
weapons of covert action. And that is where we will pick back up next time for part 2 of our
series on MK Ultra for the introduction of a chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide, aka LSD.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI LSD!
BEN KISSEL Ooh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're on LSD!
BEN KISSEL I don't know, if only the US government and the CIA could ruin something as wonderful as LSD.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well the thing is it started bad.
MARCUS PARKS If it wasn't for them we would never have LSD.
BEN KISSEL Oh thank you. Nevermind then, they created it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We wouldn't have it. They gave it to us. They created the counterculture.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, we'll get into it later. But yeah, the creation of LSD and the counterculture by the CIA is
possibly one of the most ironic chapters of human history but we'll get into that a few
episodes from now.
BEN KISSEL I can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Guys, this twisty road just started. Just like Sheryl Crow said, everyday's a fucking winding
road.
BEN KISSEL Winding road, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You get a little bit closer.
BEN KISSEL To what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So we're gonna get to the end of this series, by the end of this series we hope to be worse
people. And more unpredictable as a person. It's gonna shred our brains a little bit because
we're really getting into it. We did immediately up top say there's not a conspiracy, blah, blah,
blah. And then all of these things pop up where like Merck is there and all these other guys are
there and you're like well I don't really know what to do here. But what we're seeing here is
that the crimes that the CIA would commit against humanity would create the platform for
modern conspiracy theory and why we are here today because it creates a place of reality for
more and more ludicrous things to be put on top of it.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it's hard to say the CIA doesn't do this shit when they've already been doing, done, doing
this shit.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Of course they love conspiracy and the propagation of conspiracy because that
creates a gray fog that they can navigate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It helps them.
BEN KISSEL So be very careful what you listen to and who you believe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So to our listeners at the CIA, honestly send a certificate, send us something.
BEN KISSEL I want more of those little pogs.
MARCUS PARKS Something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Send us something, come on. We're here, we're talking about it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean this whole thing just created a big feedback loop where it's like we started doing
evil shit but since we believe that we're the good guys and they're the bad guys, we start
thinking if we're doing this shit, imagine what they're doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're doing.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And so we stat upping the ante because we think that they're upping the ante and
they're doing the same exact fucking thing without any real goddamn reason. Paranoia is the
biggest poison in the human brain and in human society.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Nothing more powerful than an empty briefcase.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL What's in the box?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh it's his dick!
BEN KISSEL Could be. Yeah, I remember that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, thank you guys for listening to our bullshit!
BEN KISSEL Yes, thank you all so much for listening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We got Z2, our comic Last Comic Book on the Left is coming out this spring, you wanna
preorder it, you wanna go over to Z2.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Preorder that comic book, it is not shipping for another month or two, I don't know when it's
coming out but we are working on that.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We got issue 5 of Soul Plumber?
MARCUS PARKS 5. Yeah, coming out in a couple of weeks. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very soon, yes. Very soon. But again pick up issue 4, we're doing that. Very, very excited. Not a
CIA agent, am I?
BEN KISSEL Okay well just kind of a random thing there. We wanna thank everyone who came out to our
shows in DC and Richmond and Philadelphia. We had a strange thing occur, the power went
out and we can't wait to be back inside you in June.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI June 3rd.
BEN KISSEL And you know what it was kinda weird to share that moment with all of them and I hope
everyone can make it back because sorry about that, that was out of our control.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was fun. Also I wanna give a big ups to the Garrison Brothers boys, the bourbon people
because they fucking gave me another big old bottle of bourbon and I just wanna say fuck,
thank you so much, it's so fucking tasty, I fucking love it so fucking much.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's good, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It means so much to me.
BEN KISSEL That's a mind control liquor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll take it.
BEN KISSEL Yes indeed. All right everyone well thank you so much for listening, keep supporting all the
shows here on the Last Podcast Network. And again we are now wide, we are on every
platform, we are so happy to be back on whatever platform you like to listen to podcasts on.
And yeah, thank you all so much for your support, you guys made the transition just smooth as
ever and you guys have just been wonderful. So thank you for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you to our team, big ups to the LPN team, fucking crushing it out there.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, thank you so much, they did such a wonderful job, we're so #blessed to have them.
So all right everyone, hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, hey bro. It's cool, it's not an op, bro.
BEN KISSEL No it's not an op. Your entire existence is not an op?
MARCUS PARKS Is it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not an op.
BEN KISSEL (whispering) Marcus, I'm starting to think it's an op.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No because would I say it so much?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS I mean honestly the only person that you truly know is not a CIA operative in your life is
yourself. And even then-
BEN KISSEL Do you? I actually think it's probably Holden McNeely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck, I have to kill him tonight! Fuck!
MARCUS PARKS Finally the excuse you've been looking for.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, there you go.