HENRY ZEBROWSKI I had this voice class that was all dudes except for one girl. It was a nice, normal class but we
had this mid 30s woman-
BEN KISSEL Is this bukkake 101?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Essentially. This woman came in and she was teaching us quote unquote "tremor work", I love
experiments in art and science and it leads right into this episode. She was doing tremor work
and it was this very tight mid 30s woman who came in and she was like, 'Okay, you guys
ready? We're gonna unleash these emotions that are hidden inside of our muscles.' And she
got down on her back and she went full spread eagle.
BEN KISSEL I think I saw that in Florida.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it was just all these dudes, we were all watching her like an umpire in the World Series
just like, 'Interesting, yes.'
BEN KISSEL Fascinating, fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because she kept going like (wailing) while her legs just shook in the air, it was fantastic.
BEN KISSEL That's great. You wanna start the episode like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
BEN KISSEL Welcome to The Last Podcast on the Left everyone. I am Ben hanging out with Henry and
Marcus. An impromptu intro and of course that is fantastic for today's topic. We are onto Part
II of MK Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Marcus? Hey, Marcus?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why don't you wanna believe that the medical mafia's gonna kill us with the vaccines? Marcus.
BEN KISSEL Is that what we wanna do today? We're gonna take a hard right and just talk vaccines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think that if we are gonna talk about the fact that, Marcus, if you just change the way you
hear conspiracy theories, maybe it allows them to not be as dangerous.
MARCUS PARKS Interesting.
BEN KISSEL So if you interpret them through the mind of Forrest Gump's mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is it true that Kurt Blome invented the chemtrails? And it's the clouds that are making us sick.
And the vaccines, they make us extra sick?
BEN KISSEL I wish chemtrails were real, man. Free drugs!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Chemtrails are real but it's about whether or not they're taking our drugs and making our
wives leave us.
BEN KISSEL Okay, interesting. We'll get into it.
MARCUS PARKS So when we last left our story the year was 1949 and the CIA had become convinced that
Soviet Russia had developed either a drug or a technique to control the minds of men with the
purpose of making them say or do out of character things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you just have to give them an exclusive contract with an advertising agency.
MARCUS PARKS Only problem was the Soviets were in possession of no such drug or technique, nor had they
even attempted such a thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were nowhere near it and the main thing that they said that the Soviets had was old
school, right, where you stand in one position for a long time, stress positions where they
would tie your wrists behind your back and lift you up, hold you up by your wrists.
BEN KISSEL Aw. That's what they did to Puffin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes! Because they wanted to make him tender. They would read from the transcripts of
the Sex and the City reboot.
BEN KISSEL Kim Cattrall is not coming back, by the way. I read a long, lengthy response from Sarah Jessica
Parker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She's too good for it.
BEN KISSEL I guess.
MARCUS PARKS Well as a result of this paranoid notion, the CIA had created the Special Operations Division to
conduct research into ways that we could use drugs or special techniques to control minds, all
in the service of winning the Cold War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yay.
BEN KISSEL Everyone in the division, you know they work in that division cause they all walk backwards.
It's kinda fun like that movie that was supposed to be good that was horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All of them?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS So a search for the perfect drug to use for interrogation and behavior modification began. And
after a long search that will be the subject of today's episode, the CIA settled on a new
psychedelic that had been synthesized just a few years earlier called LSD.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI LSD!
BEN KISSEL Synthesized. Bring in the synth, more synth!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) LSD!
MARCUS PARKS LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland
through experimentation with the ergot enzyme. Ergot, you may already know, is a naturally
occurring hallucinogenic fungus that quite possibly created the mass hysteria surrounding the
Salem Witch Trials through tainted rye bread.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly stick around for the rest of this year's programming and you might get further
information on that subject.
BEN KISSEL Can't wait to hear more about Salem.
MARCUS PARKS Indeed. Now Hofmann's original intention was not to create a hallucinogen but to synthesize a
respiratory and circulatory stimulant to replace a drug called Coramine that was known to
have negative side effects on a lady's uterus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man, it made it go like (barking). I don't know, dude.
BEN KISSEL It turned it into a puppy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sometimes a uterus would sneak out, it would sneak out and it would grab things. It would
untie a man's shoes a lot and you're like, 'What is this? Is Dax Shepard inside of you?'
BEN KISSEL Wow. Ma'am this will turn your uterus into a puppy that plays pranks. Whoa, I don't like this
drug. Do you have any LSD?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. They gotta stay inside.
BEN KISSEL Please. Yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Well coincidentally Coramine was also later used in mind control experiments and it was one
of the drugs favored by Adolf Hitler's personal physician who would fill Hitler's veins with the
stuff to pop Hitler back to life when he'd been given too many barbiturates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like Judy Garland.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, just like Judy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or Zendaya. You know she's on that fucking drip, dude. She's in like 9 movies, she's so skinny,
she's a hybrid first of all. Because if you look at the cheekbones, she's a hybrid, she's been
given to us by fucking Eisenhower who's still alive.
BEN KISSEL She's a reptilian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no.
MARCUS PARKS A hybrid gray is what he's saying.
BEN KISSEL Oh, I see.
MARCUS PARKS A part of the alien breeding programs, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look at her!
BEN KISSEL Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS Now LSD was created in 1943 but it sat on a shelf for 5 years before Hofmann returned to the
drug, thinking that maybe he'd missed something. In the process of handling it though,
Hofmann accidentally got some on his fingertips and found that it had a psychoactive effect.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God, just that moment of looking at your hands, just being like, 'Something's going on right
now...' Seeing it shoot through time, like you see your hand in front of an old western carriage
and all of a sudden you're in a waterfall and you're just back home.
BEN KISSEL Oh man. Mozart hits different on this, man. This is crazy.
MARCUS PARKS So three days later Hofmann decided to test a larger dose of 250 mcg on himself.
BEN KISSEL So honey, there's just something I gotta go do at work. This is work, babe! This is work. It's just
bizarre that he decided to test again three days later with a fuckton more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why don't we just turn this up a bit? You just know that was one weekend, all his clothes are
on backwards. There's just something different today. Honey, did you change our coffee?
BEN KISSEL This is crazy.
MARCUS PARKS 30 minutes later Hofmann wrote in his journal that he felt no trace of any effect. So he climbed
on his bicycle and rode home. But as he was riding his bike, the acid took hold.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Turned him into the Wicked Witch of the West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, seriously. (Wicked Witch theme) This was Tuesday, April 19th. This was bicycle day.
BEN KISSEL No kidding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That I found out accidentally, we talked about this on Side Stories. During quarantine when I
had no clue what was going on, right, it was the very beginning of quarantine. I was walking
around my neighborhood, this was when we were all still masked up outside, hyper paranoid. I
was walking down the street and this dude on a bicycle was doing donuts in this area and then
he came up to me, he was like, 'Hey man, you want some fucking acid?'
BEN KISSEL On bicycle day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I was like we just got COVID. This is all bran new to me, dude. I'm not ready to open my
fucking mind right now in the street.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that could've led to a lot of fetal position sweating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Well the acid took hold and once Hofmann got home he wrote another entry. This one was a
scrawled note that trailed off after the words, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Difficulty in concentration, visual disturbances. I guess you could fucking call it that or
something. "Marked desire to laugh."
BEN KISSEL Aw, isn't that nice? It's always amazing when you wake up and you see what you were writing
in your notebook or joke book after you tripped acid or mushrooms and it's always just like
'stores are weird'. And it never makes any sense but when you write it down you're like,
'Yeah!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool, cool. No I remember the first time I did acid, I had this whole thing where I was talking
about how the penny is the ingenue of the coin system. The penny's the hot young woman
and the quarter's the producer. I had this long thing and it sort of made sense.
BEN KISSEL I totally disagree with you, actually.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know. Now it's worthless.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it's totally worthless. It costs more to make a penny than the penny is worth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just a different color.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah the last time I did a lot of drugs and wrote down something that I thought was the
funniest thing in the world, I remember giggling the whole time I wrote it. And then I woke up
the next morning and looked at the paper and it just said, 'The smell is the same.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Goddamnit.
BEN KISSEL It probably was funny though. I'm not sure what that's about but that was funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you could get back to that moment.
MARCUS PARKS Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like in your dream. Like when I have a sketch or a joke idea in my dream and I'm just seeing
it crush and change the world and I wake up like, 'Oh yeah I gotta write it down!' It was like
waffles are gay pancakes. This is what I've done?
MARCUS PARKS Well from what Hofmann later reported about the first ever acid trip in history, the most
outstanding symptoms were vertigo, marked motoric unrest alternating with paralysis, and
intermittent heavy feeling in the head, limbs, and body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Got it.
MARCUS PARKS The illusion that other people's faces were grotesque masks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Happened to me.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS And the shouting of half insane incoherent babble.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Joke's on you, assholes. I built a career on that.
BEN KISSEL Wow so he was tripping hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS He was tripping real hard. But Hofmann also noticed extreme senses of wellbeing and deeper,
more comprehensive, almost mystical view of reality. Therefore Hofmann began thinking of
LSD as a drug that could be used to treat mental illness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's nice that the first thought wasn't to make it a weapon.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was the second thought.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, predictably when word of Hofmann's experiments with LSD reached L. Wilson Greene,
the head of the chemical and radiological laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal, the only
application Greene saw was LSD's potential as a weapon.
BEN KISSEL God, you can almost see the thunder crash and the dark clouds go over the building.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, seriously.
BEN KISSEL Laboratory!
MARCUS PARKS Meanwhile at the chemical and radiological laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (evil laughter) How do I make the anti-groovy drug? But at Edgewood, if you remember our
episodes when we covered them, Edgewood is the groovy version of MK Ultra. It was them
really just throwing the LSD experiments at a wall, see what would stick amongst their people.
But the research from Edgewood would come into the back door of Project Artichoke and all
of these various things that would allow them to then use it during MK Ultra.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Edgewood, they just gave a whole company of army dudes acid and then just gave them
missions and tried to see if they could do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Operation Brownie Pockets.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god that is so fun! God, that would be great. Just to go and talk to a Vietnam
veterinarian with no legs and you're like, 'How as your service?' And he's like, 'It was really
bad, I lost my legs. How was your service?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I played with a balloon for 6 months.
BEN KISSEL Fucking sweet, bro.
MARCUS PARKS I mean they did also give them sarin gas and mustard gas, they really fucked them up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Like LSD was the one fun day they had.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I love watching these videos, I got into a little bit of a hole of soldiers on LSD. Have you
ever watched these videos?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where it's them trying to do stuff and you just see a bunch of like... Which I also love cause it's
WWII so everybody's in those official green uniforms, you see the GI Joe versions on all the
propaganda posters and stuff so it's like they all look buttoned up.
BEN KISSEL Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's them with their shirts half done and their helmets to the side and they're trying to do
the wall climb and they're all laughing and rolling on the ground and shit.
BEN KISSEL Oh good for them, they need a break.
MARCUS PARKS Now L. Wilson Greene at Edgewood almost immediately became obsessed with using
psychoactive chemicals in ground warfare. And after collecting all the information available on
the subject, he published a report entitled 'Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War'.
BEN KISSEL Oh yay, you ruined it!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah honestly if you wanna go ruin a weekend, just print out a PDF of that and start reading it
at your college parties this weekend.
MARCUS PARKS Well in the report Greene talked about the possibility of using psychoactive drugs on general
populations which would hopefully, in his mind, cause mass hysteria and panic so armies could
march in and take over a country city by city without bloodshed. Now admittedly, this is a
more compassionate rollout of total war than say firebombing or nuking entire populations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's weird though because to me this is a middle thing where yeah, sure, it's not setting them
on fire but it's also creating mass hysteria.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. People are still gonna die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI People are gonna die almost in a way, I would posit, I mean nothing's worse than being set on
fire I imagine but-
MARCUS PARKS Boiled alive, yeah.
BEN KISSEL With the napalm and all that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah that's bad obviously, that's very bad.
MARCUS PARKS Firebombing of Dresden and all that, yeah, and Tokyo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But have you ever seen the movie Mom and Dad? Like something of that style?
BEN KISSEL Oh fantastic. Nicholas Cage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like how everybody fantasizes on Twitter about the end of American civilization being like,
'Ugh, the end of society, blah, blah, blah.' But it's like you don't know what that would look
like. That would actually turn into a wave of rape and murder and suicide and people running
around like lemmings.
BEN KISSEL Society never ends until you die. It just gets worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It just keeps going.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And well considering how every war since the American Civil War had become
increasingly more destructive and deadly with each consecutive war, it's easy to see why
they'd wanna go another way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS They're coming out of WWII here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Get it. They just saw the concentration camps so they're like, after this...
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I eman the concentration camps were the worst of it but just in general, the devastation
of Europe and Asia and pretty much every country, every continent except for North and
South America, it's hard to fathom really how horrific WWII was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We dropped the bombs. We dropped the two biggest bombs in the entire thing.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And we're like, 'Hey, we need to really be reasonable now.' And it's like we just did this!
MARCUS PARKS And we'd also firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, killing about 300,000 people in the process.
BEN KISSEL It's more difficult to be the person that breaks up with the person than to be the person that's
broken up with. And so the US is like yeah, we dropped the bomb but have you thought about
how that made us feel? Think about that. Also the recipe that they're going with is the recipe
that we've been using which leads to 20 years of guerrilla warfare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL That's the compromise? Everyone on acid and it could just last forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're just so excited to go back to a new one.
BEN KISSEL Yay.
MARCUS PARKS Well considering all the destruction they'd just witnessed, Greene's report about psychoactive
warfare was taken seriously and President Truman authorized the proposed drug research.
Unfortunately though, Truman handed over the application of psychedelics and other drugs to
the most paranoid, bad vibes organization in the government: the CIA.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It feels like one of those, how do you put it? Fate, destiny, that type of thing that comes
together.
BEN KISSEL Are you trying to do that thing where it's like work and effort meets something and then you
get successful?
MARCUS PARKS It's an old Seneca quote. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I live my life by that
quote.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's true!
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. When do you marry your own daughter like Woody Allen?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean that's when you have been snubbed by the Oscars several times.
BEN KISSEL Okay, I see. I get it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the CIA, them getting a hold of this program is very bad for modern times.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the fact that it happened like this, I really feel like if LSD went to maybe one of the other
branches where like yeah they just blow people but... There's a quote unquote "softer side" to
the US Navy because they're with the UFO branch and they had kind of softer sciences.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like you could have put it in another spot.
BEN KISSEL I think the Navy and acid, yeah, that would have been fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's could have been, who knows?
MARCUS PARKS The Navy did pay $300,000 to a guy to give heroin to college students.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's all bad, okay. It's all bad.
BEN KISSEL Okay, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just saying that the CIA was especially bad to give LSD.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, they were. They were the worst. You're definitely giving it to the most paranoid people.
The biggest psychic explosion for the collective unconsciousness in hundreds of thousands of
years and you give it to the CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You put them in charge of the new version in counterculture that all of this will create.
BEN KISSEL Yikes.
MARCUS PARKS But since the CIA was mostly an action agency, they needed a partner to conduct the deep
research and since biological weapons had fallen out of vogue, the Special Operations Division
at the aforementioned Fort Detrick needed a new project. And I apologize for that, Camp
Detrick became Fort Detrick, so if I refer to Fort Detrick as Camp Detrick in the last episode, I
apologize to all you army fucking nerds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Good.
BEN KISSEL Did you see what biological weapons were wearing yesterday? So lame.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were all covered in anthrax.
BEN KISSEL It's disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's so 2001.
BEN KISSEL It's out of vogue.
MARCUS PARKS So a covert joint program was created between the SOD and the CIA, codenamed MKNAOMI
after one of their secretaries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She must've been so flattered.
BEN KISSEL I mean kind of! It's pretty cool!
MARCUS PARKS Now the main thrust of MKNAOMI was to carry out field tests to learn how airborne biological
and chemical agents worked in crowded environments, partly to test the theories of L. Wilson
Greene, the psychoactive chemical test.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I thought bioweapons was the 6 year anniversary.
MARCUS PARKS By like 10...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, Dogmeat. Come on, guys.
BEN KISSEL I get it.
MARCUS PARKS Well as their first experiment, 6 members of the SOD entered the Pentagon in 1949
pretending to be air quality monitors. They sprayed mock bacteria into the air ducts and found
that had their operation been malicious, they could have killed half the people in the
Pentagon.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the meetings afterwards, you know what I mean? You go, you spread all of this bullshit
inside of the buildings and then afterwards be like, 'Hey, you feel a tingle on Wednesday?
Covered you in bacteria from the air conditioning units. Not sick though, huh? Right? Right?'
MARCUS PARKS Well having tried it on a smaller scale, the MKNAOMI team escalated rapidly with Operation
Sea Spray in San Francisco, choosing the city because it had a coastline, tall buildings, and
chronic fog that would disguise the germ clouds they were about to spray into the bay area.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Here's a conspiracy alert. The reason why we have all of these problems with this idea of
chemtrails, you know now chemtrails, even that's kind of pass but at the time-
BEN KISSEL Gwyneth Paltrow talks about them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's cause it changed the smell of her vagina. But I mean it made it marketable.
BEN KISSEL It did.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But Sea Spray involved planes dumping trails of bacteria on American cities, so it's happened.
It's another thing that has happened.
BEN KISSEL So that's the kernel of truth within the conspiracy that then sprouts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They would literally spray it on the coast.
BEN KISSEL It doesn't sound that unbelievable.
MARCUS PARKS I don't think they used planes, they used minesweepers. They didn't use planes in Sea Spray,
did they?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They had crop dusters, I know that they used many different ways. They used many ways of
spreading it. So they did stuff that was on the ground. Crop dusting was a thing that they
would do oftentimes when they were running experiments outside of-
BEN KISSEL I'll crop dust you right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kissel, he seriously got the fucking Medal of Honor.
BEN KISSEL I crop dusted 10 people at a bar last night. But no, to that point my mom used to tell me a little
bit of a different scenario. But DDT, they used to just have a truck that would come by in North
Dakota, spray everything with DDT, and they used to play in the fog. So yeah, they have that
ability to just spread a bunch of shit around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, they had crop dusting operations which were in Antigua which we're gonna talk about
prob next episode with Frank Olson. These were done by ship, so they were sprayed by ship.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well using a minesweeper provided by the Navy and without notifying locals, the
MKNAOMI team used large aerosol hoses to spray a supposedly harmless bacterium called
Serratia marcescens into the coastal mist.
BEN KISSEL If it was played by a character it would be Bendelbing Humberbump. What's his name?
Benedict Cumberbunch?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah that's fine. I like Cumberbunch.
BEN KISSEL It's a fancy name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI His name is Benedict Cumberbunch and that's from now on.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS This bacteria was chosen because it had a red tint making it easier to trace. And it wasn't
thought to cause ill effects.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Assholes.
MARCUS PARKS Now the experiment was an unqualified success in the eyes of the MKNAOMI team.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes! Yes! Everyone was like yes! It's everywhere, yes!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Wait why was it an unqualified success?
MARCUS PARKS Because they were able to surmise that the spray reached all 800,000 San Francisco residents
as well as people in Oakland, Berkeley, Sausalito, and five other cities.
BEN KISSEL That's great!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow!
BEN KISSEL It's even more of a success!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You got extra! You got more than you though!
BEN KISSEL Wow, that's so great, I'm so happy you guys did that.
MARCUS PARKS But the casualties of Operation Sea Spray were by no means negligible. Over the next few
weeks 11 people were hospitalized for serious urinary infections and red drops were found in
their urine. In one case a man recovering from prostate surgery actually died from the bacteria
they sprayed over San Francisco.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So is Naomi still flattered that all of this was named after her?
BEN KISSEL Do you get flattered if your cat brings home a dead bird?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some people do. You'd like it.
MARCUS PARKS I do.
BEN KISSEL So in a way, Naomi would say yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah like, 'I'm glad you killed him. I'm glad you killed him with that bumpy ass prostate. Fuck
his prostate!'
BEN KISSEL That's why we named it after you, Naomi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this is just one example of them doing it. I remember I was watching a documentary about
this time period, the biowarfare shit leading up to Project Artichoke. And the way these guys
talked about it is very similar to the way everybody else talked about everything else in terms
of the OSS, it was like a game, it was like a clumsy game that they would play. And the one
thing that they would always lament is that they never got to use actual live unwilling people
like the nazis got to do because they got to have all these people, they got to test all the
efficacy of all this shit on. But also it's the way they talked about it cause everything was in
code and everything was super casual. So one guy was talking about how the way it would go
down, they'd be like, 'So tell me, do you wanna come over to the ding dong hut and play with
the hot stuff?' These were all conceptsBEN
KISSEL Wait a second, yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The ding dong hut, that wasn't an actual name but they would have names.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the 'hot stuff' is what they would call fucking anthrax, they would call these things where
they would work in controlled lab scenarios.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this idea of them all joking around being like, 'You gotta come over and check out the hot
stuff sometime.' Just kind of sends a shiver up my spine.
BEN KISSEL It is bizarre to think of them listening to Frank Sinatra's regrets, I've had a few-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) I've had a few!
BEN KISSEL When you're like what are your regrets? 'We never got to test it on actual people.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously.
BEN KISSEL That's your regret? You didn't kill enough people?
MARCUS PARKS No, when these scientists started working with Operation paperclip nazis, they welcomed
them as colleagues because these were the guys that had done the shit that they wanted to
do. They would sit down with them and have these conversations like, 'Alright, tell me the real
shit. Really tell me the real shit, what really goes on?' And the nazi would tell them like,
(German accent) 'Yeah, we fucked them up, man.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) You would not believe a man dies if you just pump him full of glue. He just
fucking dies and you're just sitting there, I thought he'd become like sticky on the outside. We
were all hoping and then I lost that bet to Gunter, Gunter said he'd die because Gunter's a
fucking party pooper.
MARCUS PARKS Fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fascinating.
BEN KISSEL Fascinating, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Now since agents had proved that they could infect a city population with a biological agent,
the first director of the CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, directed his agents to start experimenting
with chemicals on a smaller scale. This undertaking, the first step towards MK Ultra, was called
Operation Bluebird. Now Bluebird, so named because its goal was to find ways to make
prisoners sing like a bird-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cute.
MARCUS PARKS Was mostly concerned with experiments using chemicals for interrogation purposes on foreign
agents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I bet you that they were more likely to actually make bird noises than give credible
information.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Therefore the subjects of these experiments were people the CIA was gonna interrogate
anyway, prisoners, defectors, refugees, prisoners of war, or basically any noncitizen the United
States just didn't like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, who's that like? Who's that like? Is that like the nazis?
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Weird, it's almost we're learning from them.
MARCUS PARKS Now this was a time of change in the CIA and it was decidedly a change for the worst. A new
director took over in 1950 and one of this new director's first decisions was to hire the
aforementioned OSS psychopath Allen Dulles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You say psychopath, to me that makes him more exciting than anything. Allen Dulles in my
mind is a ghost of a human being.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He loved the secret hallways of power, he existed as one person to his family, he had multiple
mistresses, his family didn't know anything about what he did until after he died. And they
were all like, 'We had these lovely summers on the hill.' And they would go to this wonderful
little farm town where he'd go and he'd fish and stuff.
BEN KISSEL They had fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. And it wasn't until they went through his documents, much like Kissel when his fun
vacation to Uruguay, when you look at all of this stuff-
BEN KISSEL No, it wasn't Uruguay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You look at all of this stuff and they were like, 'Our daddy was a bad. He was some kind of
bad.' And they were like, 'Maybe.'
MARCUS PARKS Allen Dulles is one of the great villains of United States history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Another example of a person who thought he knew what was best for everyone and that
everybody else can go fuck themselves.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Fuck US history, I would say Allen Dulles is one of the great villains of world history. Yeah,
certainly one of the greatest villains in the world of the 20th century. He changed the world,
he really was one of those Dan Carlin's 'great men'. Now Dulles had become a student of the
work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung during WWII and when Dulles began his long career in the CIA,
he became obsessed with the prospect that science could discover ways to manipulate the
human psyche.
BEN KISSEL Science!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Carl Jung was also an OSS agent, he would flip over his psychological records of nazis that he
was working with at the time and just gave them to the US government for them to find out
how to psychoanalyze these guys.
MARCUS PARKS So Dulles was put in charge of all mind control projects along with most other covert
operations, making Dulles the spook's spook.
BEN KISSEL Whoa. He's like Dave Attell. He's the comedian's comedian.
MARCUS PARKS Well Dulles saw mind control as an indispensable part of the secret war against communism.
And just about every time these programs accelerated, it was Allen Dulles' foot on the gas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was really obsessed with this because there's something about these types of guys, these
true dictators-in-waiting. You see this I think all over the world where it's not just you're
supposed to absorb a political ideology, you have to love it. He really wished to have total
control over the world's mind. He wanted it. He wanted to figure out how to treat all of us like
puppets if he could.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And in the minds of paranoid Cold Warriors like Allen Dulles, the Cold War appeared to
be escalating. 11 leaders of the Communist Party in the US had been convicted of seeking to
overthrow the US government and 2 British intelligence officers had been revealed as Soviet
double agents.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, double agent!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The thing was that when you start to realize all these espionage worlds, it was so casual,
everybody had somebody everywhere else. Like yeah sure, I honestly do think there might
have been people on the inside of all these things.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But we had people on the other side too. We hired a bunch of nazis, specifically Allen Dulles
hired a bunch of nazis to be our espionage group in Germany.
BEN KISSEL Henry, you don't understand. We also need to have fall guys.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Of course! Of course.
BEN KISSEL Please, we need these people to take the fall so we can say, 'See, we're good!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See?
BEN KISSEL See? We got one!
MARCUS PARKS So with the belief that commies were everywhere, Dulles tasked Operation Bluebird with
finding ways to crawl into the brain of just about anyone using any means available, no matter
how cruel or destructive those methods might be. Additionally early memos also directed
researchers to investigate ways that a person could be made to commit acts under posthypnotic
suggestion along with ways their own agents could be trained to resist such tactics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was reading the book 'Of Spies & Stratagems' by Stanley Lovell, the guy who first started
experimenting with weed back in the day in the OSS times, using all the liquid weed to control
people's brains.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Sweet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he was talking about the first time he saw hypnosis, right, the first time he saw it happen
in front of him, the very, very first experiments where you had two army privates. Where it
was this guy, he had a hypnotist come in, they took these two guys where he said they came
just so directly from South Carolina that he thought that the army boots that they were issued
were the first shoes they had ever worn. Right? It was these two guys like, 'Yuh, we're ready.'
And he was just like, 'Okay, show me how you do this, let me show you how the hypnotism
works.' And this hypnotist came in and literally it's like, 'At 11am today when you are in
training your feet are going to become very itchy and you're gonna have to take off your boots
and scratch them.' And so they're like okay. Lovell met there with these two guys and they're
looking at their watch, at 11am the two guys were like, 'Man, my feet itchy!'
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They took the shoes off and starting itching their feet and he said this hypnotist was like, 'See?
Against their will!'
BEN KISSEL See? Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then Lovell was like, 'I think that these men would pay for a chance to show me their god
awful feet and break the dress code of this army just because they get to. They're allowed to
do it.'
BEN KISSEL Right. So the question is was it more suggestion than hypnosis?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why my feet is done itchy?
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Well as far as where they were gonna test these interrogation techniques, Dulles maintained
that these quote unquote "augmentations" could only be carried out overseas because many
of these experiments would be frowned upon if they were conducted on US soil.
BEN KISSEL See that's why I put all these letter Cs on the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL C? So we can do the experiment right here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What? Oh overseas! Wow.
BEN KISSEL Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god, wow.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Holy shit.
BEN KISSEL Put all the Cs on the ground so we can do the experiment here.
MARCUS PARKS Overseas. Over Cs.
BEN KISSEL It's a fucking play on words.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa. That's like Blue's Clues humor.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, whatever. And there's nothing wrong with that man, they fired him because he went
bald, it wasn't cause he did anything wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Time happened to him!
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Just bring him back.
MARCUS PARKS So the CIA began a search for what would become its first black site.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yay.
MARCUS PARKS Now black sites didn't come to be known to the general public until the mid 2000s when the
dirtier parts of the war on terror were exposed. But these secret CIA prisons, mostly but not
always located on foreign soil, have been in operation since at least 1950. The first black site
that we know of was established in a former nazi POW camp called Camp King that was
converted by counterintelligence officers into a US installation for quote unquote "special
interrogation". Ben, can you guess what special interrogation means?
BEN KISSEL Probably get an interior decorator over there if they're gonna change it all around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And don't listen to any of their suggestions.
BEN KISSEL Don't listen to any of them. No it's probably like ripping off toenails, putting your dick in
people's mouths, stuff like that.
MARCUS PARKS It's torture, yeah. It's 100% torture, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah of course that's something that people do to other people.
MARCUS PARKS Using freezing water immersion and baseball bat beatings amongst other traditional torture
techniques, the officers at Camp King also clumsily experimented with mescaline, heroin, and
amphetamines without any real goal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They threw a bunch if shit at the wall quote unquote because they-
BEN KISSEL Well what was the goal? There had to be some actual goal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The goal was to (German accent) make them talk! Make them talk!
MARCUS PARKS (German accent) I know nothing! Nothing!
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But they just beat them within an inch of their life and put them out in the middle of nowhere
and tried to scare them. They really just tried to scare them. Cause that was also the thing too
is to create an atmosphere of discomfort.
BEN KISSEL Of fear, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know you're out here, you're in a very scary-looking castle in the middle of the Bavarian
mountains, you've got nowhere to go. All of these guys have licenses to kill, none of them are
wearing a badge, and they're all from everywhere, they're from Russia and UK and America.
You don't know who you're talking to, you don't know what acronym you're talking to.
BEN KISSEL You're tripping on a different drug every day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS But since these guys were the sorts of soldiers who'd do just about anything to a nazi, they're
sort of like Tarantino's Basterds.
BEN KISSEL Nice!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Camp King became known as the Kraut Gauntlet and the officers who ran the place
came to be known as the rough boys.
BEN KISSEL Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And these days, if you look up the movie Rough Boys at the Kraut Gauntlet, it's a different
thing now.
BEN KISSEL Oh it's not a documentary about this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, now a movie featuring a bunch of quote unquote "rough boys" in a German castle has a
different plot.
BEN KISSEL Oh weird, I've been watching so much of it.
MARCUS PARKS Now the rough boys' willingness to do just about anything certainly appealed to Allen Dulles.
But what really caught his attention was the fact that disposal of bodies at Camp King in the
parlance of CIA memos written at the time quote "would be no problem".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No problems.
BEN KISSEL No problem, good.
MARCUS PARKS You see that again, it's so weird how flippant they refer to it in these CIA memos. They just say
body disposal would be no problem.
BEN KISSEL No problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No shirts, no bodies, no problems.
BEN KISSEL No problems. Keep the shoes.
MARCUS PARKS See, Camp King was a site where the CIA could test any drug or any coercive technique on a
steady supply of human subjects and if any of these subjects died, no one would notice
because the subjects were considered quote unquote "expendable".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And not in the treasured film franchise sense of Expendables.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause they were actually not expendable cause they were actually very good at their jobs.
BEN KISSEL You are correct. You're talking about elderly people's retirement movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, them all just collecting checks and then doing the Lord of the Rings handshake every 5
minutes. But these guys, these expendables, a lot of them were sourced by a group called the
Gehlen Organization which was fronted by Reinhard Gehlen, it was this guy that I've been
talking about, Allen Dulles' nazi friends. They were the espionage wing for Hitler and Hitler
loved them.
BEN KISSEL I'm sure he did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that was a big thing that Allen Dulles would tout, being like, 'They were Hitler's favorite
spies!'
BEN KISSEL That's a good thing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're all like, 'Great.'
MARCUS PARKS Dulles could be such a weird objective person at times where he just looks at everything in
such terms of we can use them because they're good, who gives a shit?
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is when centralism turns to fascism, right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's this idea that everybody is just fine, they all get whitewashed. In this scenario it is a hyper
extreme version of looking at these war criminals and deciding oh we can use them because
it's the same fallacy that the fucking chancellor had about Hitler to begin with, this idea that
we can control these guys though. Don't worry, yeah they might be hardcore nazis that are
fucking working on their own agenda but we'll control them in the end. Which you won't.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because they were already having their own inner plot, knowing that one day if the so-called
democratic experiment here we can flip this whole thing and we'll be the new nazis in charge.
Because it was all about being afraid of Russia.
BEN KISSEL Like a little pauper. It reminds me of Antonio Brown, Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They did win a
Superbowl with him but they could not control him and in the end he ended up running off the
field, taking his shirt off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna go on the record as saying so Antonio Brown is the Reinhard Gehlen of the NFL.
BEN KISSEL Yes, that's correct. Because he will be productive until he's not.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well expendable in CIA terms meant that if a prisoner disappeared, no one would come
looking for them. Many of these expendables were Soviet agents but just like it was with the
war on terror, there were a fair amount of innocent refugees mixed in who were just at the
wrong place at the wrong time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just people that the Gehlen Organization didn't like. And various people.
MARCUS PARKS But no matter who they were, all prisoners were treated the same in what came to be known
as the CIA's torture house. Now the rough boys were seen as somewhat inelegant so the CIA
sent their own men to Camp King to carry out experiments in the service of Project Bluebird.
Bluebird however was considered so secret that even a secure army base like Camp King
wasn't secure enough. So the CIA opened their own site just a few miles away under the
protection of Camp King at a large estate called Villa Schuster. Now from the outside Villa
Schuster appeared to be a regal old house at the end of a country lane. Inside it also appeared
normal with high ceilings, a dozen bedrooms, and an imposing fireplace on the ground floor.
But the true terror of Villa Schuster was the basement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was unfinished and it was gonna take months and months of work, grouting was gonna be a
nightmare.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, horrible, horrible.
MARCUS PARKS There you had a complex of bricked-in storerooms which converted easily to sealed cells that
could be used for both prisoner housing and human experimentation. Basically Villa Schuster
was the house from Resident Evil.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We talk about these things.
BEN KISSEL That also reminds me of the house for Dieter Laser.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Seems like some Human Centipede stuff could be going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What we're seeing here is again, what has been now seeded by pop culture again and again.
Like we talk about with Ed Gein's house, all these things that existed, they were real. And then
now they've become a clich , now it's a thing that people talk about all the time, oh yeah that
house in the back of the field, you wanna go there. They come from somewhere which is this.
They literally invented this whole thing of we're just gonna make it real evil.
BEN KISSEL Dude, it's scary, man.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And in Villa Schuster, they talk about these times where you would have these former
concentration camp doctors talking to these Project Bluebird scientists in front of the fire at
Villa Schuster, drinking brandy, having a grand old time. Meanwhile right below their feet are
cells full of political prisoners being experimented upon.
BEN KISSEL That's what I was thinking, if you're the neighbor who just comes over with some borscht and
you're like, 'Hey, you wanna have some?' You're sitting there at the dinner table. (slurping)
Help me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) We have ways of making you talk!
BEN KISSEL Help me! (slurping)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) Here's a nice brandy and let's have some lava cake because I just want some
local gossip.
BEN KISSEL Help me! I'm down here! Is somebody downstairs?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) No, that's my sleep app. That's my sleep app.
BEN KISSEL Oh okay, good.
MARCUS PARKS Now the person that the CIA officers at Villa Schuster looked to for guidance was a German
physician known by the innocent name of Doc Fisher. In reality Doc Fisher was General Walter
Schreiber, former surgeon general of the nazi army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ew.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Schreiber had approved experiments at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau in which inmates
were frozen, injected with mescaline, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones
could be monitored.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, how else are you gonna know how far it goes inside the bone?
BEN KISSEL Okay, let's take that for a second. Are there other ways to get these answers?
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ask them. You can ask them.
MARCUS PARKS No, there aren't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You stick a stick in like measuring a quart of oil and see how far the stick goes.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, all right.
MARCUS PARKS Well that was the whole reason why they took a lot of these nazis and also why the protected
the guy in charge of Unit 731 because these experiments and this information could not be
gleaned unless you killed the subject. They just couldn't be.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Specifically Schreiber seemed to specialize in experiments involving the slow and agonizing
deaths of his subjects.
BEN KISSEL So what's your specialty?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Slow and agonizing death.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now Schreiber had first been captured by the Soviets in the post-WWII nazi roundup. But
eventually he convinced the USSR to let him take a teaching position in Soviet-occupied East
Berlin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Those who can't teach.
BEN KISSEL Also Sirius Radio has Nazi Roundup every Saturday. It's Nazi Roundup!
MARCUS PARKS Well Schreiber soon escaped to West Berlin and gave himself up to the Americans who offered
a choice Operation Paperclip contract. Now Operation Bluebird interrogators directed by Dr.
Schreiber worked without supervision from anyone but other CIA agents, setting a precedent
for the CIA to detain and imprison people in other countries without regard for domestic or
international law. And that precedent lives to present day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How dare you ever defy the art of improv! This is yes and, Marcus. This is follow the fear.
BEN KISSEL So you're blaming Del Close for all of this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I always do.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS Once the CIA got a taste for it at Villa Schuster in Germany, they soon copied the formula and
opened black sites in Japan. There they captured and interrogated North Korean soldiers using
sodium amytal and stimulants like Benzedrine, the aforementioned Coramine, and picrotoxin.
Under the effects of these drugs, CIA experimenters subjected prisoners to hypnosis,
electroshock, and debilitating heat. The goal was to induce violent cathartic reactions by
alternating between deep sleep and high alertness, confusing a prisoner's nervous system until
they could be coerced into spilling the beans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now they thought it lowered their inhibitions but it does also seem like it just makes you want
everything to stop which is the problem with quote unquote what we call these days
"advanced interrogation" or at least what they called it.
BEN KISSEL Oh it's still called torture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah but quote unquote. The problem is that then they'll say anything.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They'll just say we have to end this, I'll tell you whatever you want.
BEN KISSEL My asshole is a tomato, I'll tell you whatever you need to know. But I think we can all agree
out of all of these the hypnotism isn't so bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're not even near the real hypnotism part.
BEN KISSEL Do they make two students who don't like each other kiss?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They want to. They wish they could! But we'll have that debate next episode when we talk
about whether or not you can truly hypnotize somebody to do something against their will.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Are we secretly empowering the hypnotist class in this episode?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, I don't want to be anywhere near them. I'm afraid of them!
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Now eventually Dr. Schreiber got tired of his life at Camp King and tried to go to the United
States under the terms of his Operation Paperclip contract.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) Seriously, this place is freaking me out. It's the screams. Honestly I love
screams, I kind of like it but I'm getting burnt out.
BEN KISSEL I know. Okay. He's had it up to here with the screams.
MARCUS PARKS But when a reporter discovered the transfer, he published testimony from the Nuremberg
Trials rightly implicating Schreiber in concentration camp experiments. So Schreiber quit the
whole program and fled to backup Germany - Argentina - leaving Camp King without a quote
unquote "staff doctor".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What a fucking bitch.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just cause he couldn't move to California and work for Disney? That's why?
BEN KISSEL That was his dream, Henry. That was his dream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whatever. (German accent) I wanted to be an imagineer. That's why I got into the
concentration camp business to begin with.
BEN KISSEL And you know sadly there might be a truth to that.
MARCUS PARKS Well luckily for the CIA they had a replacement in another sociopathic nazi doctor called Dr.
Kurt Blome who we covered in episode one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS See Blome had never actually entered the United States because even though he had been
acquitted of war crimes at Nuremberg, he was still a highly public nazi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very famous nazi. Very big old famous, big time capital 'N' Nazi.
BEN KISSEL You never wanna just be like hey, weren't you accuse of all those war crimes? And then you
have to be like, 'I was acquitted.' Oh okay but there was a trial and everything.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he was the Casey Anthony of Nuremberg.
BEN KISSEL I work here. I work here. Thank god they never checked my Firefox account.
MARCUS PARKS Well it was thought that Blome's presence in America might draw attention to the hundreds of
other nazis we'd already brought over. So when Walter Schreiber fled to Argentina, the staff
doctor position at Camp King was open. And since Dr. Blome liked the idea of quote "a return
to biological research"-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yay! He got to go back to his dream! Yas, queen!
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS He left his new life as a small town doctor and accepted the CIA's offer to oversee the
experiments at Villa Schuster, the Resident Evil house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) 'I will tell you I don't know if I have the love of the game of giving people
different viruses and watch what happens to them. I've just sort of fallen out of it but maybe
just this one last time.' And you just have this little boy with cancer just being like, 'Mr. Dr.
Blome, do you think you could give the boy cancer one last time?'
BEN KISSEL One last time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Make the pain go in the bomb, Dr. Blome. For me. (coughing)
MARCUS PARKS (German accent) Well I have been working on this idea to maybe make a virus as big as a man.
Like a big virus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) I want to be a man who shows up with a shovel and hits you in the head and
his name is Mr. Virus.
BEN KISSEL Oh wow, that's a great idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's an amazing idea, Dr. Blome. (coughing) I hate John Cena. I hate him.
BEN KISSEL Why?
MARCUS PARKS Well Dr. Blome's specialty in the concentration camps had been both biological and
hallucinogenic experimentation. So he was technically the most qualified nazi to do Project
Bluebird work at Villa Schuster. There Dr. Blome and Operation Bluebird operatives were
tasked by Allen Dulles with answering a series of questions. If answered, the information
gleaned would be considered to be of great value to the CIA and these questions would form
the basis of all CIA mind control programs to come. Among other things they wanted to know
if accurate information could be obtained through drugs, if these techniques could guarantee
total amnesia, if they could alter a person's personality, and how long that alteration would
hold if they could make unwilling subjects into willing agents, and how quickly all of it could be
done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Everywhere there's executive producers all over LA just going like, 'Me too. Tell me as well.
How do I get that?'
MARCUS PARKS But even though Dr. Blome could oversee these experiments, Allen Dulles realized that he and
other Project Bluebird agents lacked both the scientific background and the imagination to
really answer the questions they were asking. I mean sure, Blome could inject mescaline into
someone's spine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS But he, like other concentration camp doctors like Josef Mengele, were like a gang of
psychopathic little boys setting cats on fire then timing how long they took to burn to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And those are the nerdier versions of those little boys.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. They had great knowledge in how to kill other human beings and they had great
knowledge of how long it took to do so. But these nazi doctors were hammers and Dulles
needed a scalpel. So Dulles and a Bluebird operative named Richard Helms, director of the CIA
after Allen Dulles by the way-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Weird.
MARCUS PARKS Decided that they needed a chemist with imagination.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't think there should be! This is how we got here!
BEN KISSEL No, you need a creative chemist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, we don't!
BEN KISSEL Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We need a non-creative chemist!
BEN KISSEL Nothing is gonna go wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We need an empirical, fact-based chemist.
BEN KISSEL No way. Nope, this is gonna be perfect.
MARCUS PARKS Furthermore they needed someone who was willing to ignore legalities and conscience in the
service of national security.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the truly important part.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. The man who ticked all these boxes was Sidney Gottlieb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah it's me! It's me. I play with chemicals, it's fun to do, eh? Come on! Look at me.
BEN KISSEL Sidney, don't forget to come in on Tuesday for your horse blinders fitters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Excellent! I look right down the tunnel, I don't look anywhere else.
BEN KISSEL Right down the tunnel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm weaponizing parmesan next week.
BEN KISSEL Oh that'll be great.
MARCUS PARKS Now Sidney Gottlieb was not your typical military man, nor was he a former OSS officer like a
lot of the other guys in the CIA. Instead Gottlieb was among the first in a long line of weirdos
employed by the CIA to run or inform covert operations. A committed gardener who lived in a
lodge in the woods with outdoor toilets, Gottlieb meditated, wrote poetry, raised goats in his
spare time, and was a lifelong enthusiast of folk dancing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how they humanize him in all of these various things. They said, 'You could never find
Gottlieb without the newest folk music sheets in his hands and he was playing the piano and
his little elfen knees would lift as he plays his folk music while thinking of botulism.'
BEN KISSEL Folk is notoriously nonviolent, folk is a peaceful music. What is it, Arlo Guthrie?
MARCUS PARKS No, not folk music, folk dancing.
BEN KISSEL Oh he didn't listen to music while doing it?
MARCUS PARKS He did but when you say folk dancing, it's not folk music that he's dancing to.
BEN KISSEL Hold on a second!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't see this but look at this. You can see how I'm dancing. How would you describe how
I'm dancing?
BEN KISSEL Like a teddy bear that came to life and realized it had no brain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's folk dancing.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's folk dancing where it's more cultural-type stuff.
BEN KISSEL Okay, hold up.
MARCUS PARKS You know like Irish dancing? Like the tippity-tap-tip-tap-ti-tip-tip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What I just did.
BEN KISSEL What he just did.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL So if I go to a Ren Faire I will folk dance.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, kind of.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kind of
MARCUS PARKS Kind of, sort of. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You galumph dance. You stomp, you big man stomp.
BEN KISSEL Galumph dance? That sounds like a cancer.
MARCUS PARKS Well it's like, to put it into your perspective Ben, the guys that wear the lederhosen and they
do the slap dance, like slap-slap-clap-slap-slap-clap-clap?
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS That's folk dancing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Folk dancing.
BEN KISSEL Now I understand!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Sidney Gottlieb loved it.
BEN KISSEL Thank you, Marcus. Thank you for putting it in lederhosen terms.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, of course. In addition to having all these sweet, innocent fucking hobbies, he was also
the director the the CIA's mind control programs for two decades and as senior chemist he
worked as the CIA's chief poison maker. Gottlieb was born in the Bronx, the son of Orthodox
Jews which is ironic considering how much of his work was built on nazi research.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Inspired! Come on, just inspired by. It's like story by in the movies. Nobody listens to that guy,
they just gotta give that guy a credit so he doesn't fukcing sue everybody.
BEN KISSEL Right. Yeah, okay.
MARCUS PARKS Gottlieb was also born with deformed feet that reportedly made his mother scream when he
was born.
BEN KISSEL Aw, like Eugene Levy's character in Best In Show when he has two left feet?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS And while his feet were corrected by the age of 12, Gottlieb walked with a lifelong limp. After
starting his academic career at City College in New York, Gottlieb transferred to the University
of Wisconsin where he made a strong connection with Ira Baldwin. Baldwin, if you remember,
would one day head government research into biological warfare during WWII.
BEN KISSEL Hold on a second, so you mean to tell me that they were planning to poison and kill thousands
of people all in a Wisconsin accent? So yeah, so we're gonna, we'll take 'em down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well you know what we need is we need the plague.
BEN KISSEL We need a plague. I love my people but nothing should ever be said seriously. If you've ever
watched any of the most recent trials, a Wisconsin accent is not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not judicial.
BEN KISSEL No it's not.
MARCUS PARKS Well after graduating magna cum laude - is it magna cum laude?
BEN KISSEL I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't fucking know. I was 664 out of 666 students in high school.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I graduated with like a 2.3 in college so I was not magna cum laude.
BEN KISSEL I had a 2.7, you fucking idiot.
MARCUS PARKS Whoa, whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
BEN KISSEL It's the math classes that really drug me down.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, same here. Well Gottlieb earned a doctorate in biochemistry from Caltech just after
America entered WWII. But since Gottlieb still had clubbed feet, he couldn't enlist even though
he badly wanted to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS This inability to fight for his country during the war might have skewed his perspective a bit
because once he did get a chance to serve his country working with the CIA, he would do
anything without question. Eventually Gottlieb got a job at the FDA developing tests to
measure drugs in humans which led to a job at the National Research Council in 1948. There,
Gottlieb was exposed to what he called quote unquote "interesting work" concerning ergot
alkaloids as vasoconstrictors and hallucinogens. That of course meant Albert Hofmann's LSD
research.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, man. By interesting work he means I'm tripping balls.
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Now by this time, 1951, Operation Bluebird was already studying the effects of drugs,
hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation on foreign prisoners. And they were
convinced that what they were doing was not only right but essential to the survival of the
United States. See as author Stephen Kinzer put it in his book, 'Poisoner in Chief', senator Joe
McCarthy, another Wisconsin boy, had convinced a large swath of the American public that
communists had infiltrated the State Department. They hadn't. But even people who should
have known better like Allen Dulles believed they had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They wanted to.
BEN KISSEL You know who did infiltrate the US government? Alcoholics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL They were hammered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were spies against themselves.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Alcoholism makes you a double agent against yourself. But they wanted to believe it. They
wanted to think that this was true because then it validated what they did. And then they just
acted like it was and then just moved on with no problem.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Therefore Dulles believed it justified in using any technique to root out the commies. And even
though Sidney Gottlieb had openly flirted with socialism in his youth, Dulles took a cue from
Wild Bill Donovan from the OSS in his opinion that he would put Stalin himself on the payroll if
it meant defeating the enemy.
BEN KISSEL You know how you decide someone's Russian or not? You ask them if they can recreate an
episode of Everybody Loves Raymond and see how they do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And see what they do with it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If they make it a crushing realization about the authority and what it's like to live in kind of a
poverty state then yes.
BEN KISSEL They're Russian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But your mother lives across the street.
MARCUS PARKS I watched a bunch of German dubs of King of Queens the other day, it was highly unsettling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean he's (spluttering). What's his name? Oh my god.
BEN KISSEL Kevin James?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I went fat man blind.
BEN KISSEL (spluttering)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know what happened.
BEN KISSEL You're talking about Kevin James.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, Kevin James. He doesn't hit the same in the hinterland.
MARCUS PARKS So after three months of intelligence training, Gottlieb was given the official title of chief of the
chemical division of the technical services staff and was charged with developing, testing, and
building tools of espionage without oversight or limit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now you're gonna hear the term the TSS, it's gonna come up a lot in the next couple of
episodes as well. What they did, so within the CIA remember we had the idea guys and we had
the guys that liked to beat people up.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So you had the hard boys and you had the soft boys. This was when the soft boys were no
longer really giving the government what they wanted, they were frustrating. Project Bluebird
was frustrating for them. And then also they were all complaining about the emotional
burnout they all had from torturing people, blah, blah, blah. So they created the TSS as like a
new, new brand within the CIA that would actually then cover the even more nefarious, hard
shit to again further compartmentalize it, make it farther away from everybody else so
eventually no one would know what anybody was doing at any time.
BEN KISSEL You make a great point. There should be a new Hostel movie where the torturer, it begins
where he is clocking out and I wanna see what happens when he goes home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Gets home.
BEN KISSEL And he's just like, 'Man, I'm getting bored with this shit.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, I'm over it.
BEN KISSEL I broke so many knees, I'm over it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. TSS, they also did fun stuff though.
BEN KISSEL What?
MARCUS PARKS All the stuff you see at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, that was the TSS.
They did rubber airplanes, they made escape kits that could be concealed as rectal
suppositories.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. And the best part about the International Spy Museum is that you don't know what's
propaganda and what's not and they list all these funny little things, what was also put out in
'Of Spies & Stratagems', that was the first time we see all of the fun things that they did and
the weapons they made and all the technology they did. And it seems in my mind that none of
it worked in operation and a lot of it was just plans and ideas that they put out to project an
ability to do things that they didn't have the ability to do.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. Well once Sidney Gottlieb's position was established, Allen Dulles decided that
Operation Bluebird had not gone far enough. It needed to be expanded, intensified, and
centralized. So in 1951 it was reworked and renamed to Project Artichoke.
BEN KISSEL It is a funny name though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a spiky vegetable, it's hard to get to the center of.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's true.
MARCUS PARKS It was named Artichoke, they're not quite sure, it was either named because artichokes were
Allen Dulles' favorite vegetable-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's disgusting. The idea that it's your favorite vegetable? Like I like artichokes.
MARCUS PARKS I love artichokes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I like them.
MARCUS PARKS They're wonderful, yeah.
BEN KISSEL That makes sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But to make them your favorite vegetable?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I guess.
BEN KISSEL I don't think that's the biggest indictment on his character to be fair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no.
MARCUS PARKS No. Or it was named after a New York gangster known as the Artichoke King.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why him?
MARCUS PARKS I don't know. Cause I looked up the Artichoke King and his whole thing was that he bought all
the artichokes that were coming into New York City and then he would charge three times
what he bought them for.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you're talking about capitalism at work, capitalism at its finest.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's another victim of the artichoke killer. You can tell cause the artichoke's in his ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's a simple man and that's why I understand him.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well at the same time, Allen Dulles was also rising in the ranks of the CIA. He was promoted to
Deputy Director the same year Artichoke was christened, making Dulles the #2 man, giving him
carte blanche to carry out whatever experiments he deemed necessary. Now the goals of
Artichoke were similar to Bluebird but the scope was much larger. The program was extended
to more black sites outside of Germany and Japan, specifically to Fort Clayton in the Panama
Canal zone. There a Bulgarian prisoner named Dimitri Dimitrov codenamed Kelly became the
first subject of Project Artichoke.
BEN KISSEL Wait a second, hold on. They were like, 'What was your name? Dimitri Dimitrov? We'll call you
Kelly.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean what are you gonna do?
BEN KISSEL What happened here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You just pick random ass names, they're not supposed to have anything... Technically all of the
secret names, top secret operation names, they're supposed to have nothing to do with
anything cause it would appear random.
MARCUS PARKS See Dimitrov had been working with the CIA but his handlers had become suspicious of his
motives despite his insistence that his only loyalty was to the CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the problem. They're like, 'The thing is man, okay we're the CIA.'
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I don't trust me, right, because I'm the CIA. And because you just said that you're CIA, I
can't trust you because everybody says that they're CIA again and again and again and
everybody knows the only people who are CIA are podcast comedians that are out there
pumping disinformation to really fuck with the Webbys.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL God knows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's about destabilizing the iHeartRadio Awards.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, everyone loves their Webby.
MARCUS PARKS So after the CIA tortured Dimitrov for 6 months in a Greek prison-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS He was shipped to Fort Clayton where he was subjected to Artichoke interrogation
experiments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The A treatment.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now most of the experiments prisoners were subjected to under Project Artichoke
would qualify as medical torture, it was not too far off from what the nazis had been
prosecuted for about 5 years previous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But no, Marcus, we won the war. Okay?
MARCUS PARKS That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You remember? We won. So it's different now. Now it's a celebration.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well also America did not take on any of the Nuremberg laws that most other countries
did, we just said, 'Nah, we're not gonna do it.' Cause a lot of them did have to do with human
experimentation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How convenient!
MARCUS PARKS Well part of the Nuremberg laws was that you had to have the unqualified permission of a
person to experiment upon them and the United States looked at that and said, 'Nah.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nah.
BEN KISSEL Also did you get a chance during the Nuremberg Trials when the Germans pretend like they
were not antisemitic?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL When they pretend that they had no idea what was going on with the Jews? It's some of the
greatest German acting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well they try to act. They go like, 'Wha?'
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like you can see them practicing their surprised faces when they look at the pictures of the
concentration camps going like, 'Wha? Oh!'
BEN KISSEL It's something special.
MARCUS PARKS Well unwilling prisoners like Dimitrov would be dosed with potent drugs, subjected to
extremes of temperature and sound and strapped to electroshock machines, all in the service
of finding the best way to ride a man's mind like a broken horse.
BEN KISSEL Dang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now we'll find that these techniques, we'll go through them especially in the next couple
episodes, where they would become more refined. But I was trying to look up what exactly
was the sequence of events that would happen when you'd go in one of these interrogation
rooms during this time period. And I can't find one.
BEN KISSEL As far as the order or...?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well just how did the process go? So truly it does seem, and if you know any different,
sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com, I'd love to know-
BEN KISSEL Yeah, please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But from what I've seen it really does seem like it was a game of what are we gonna do today?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It was very slapdash from what I could tell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Let's see how he responds when we take the puppy away, you know what I mean? All
the Ghostbusters II shit.
BEN KISSEL Judging by our most recent example with Abu Ghraib, I think it is improv.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, they just sit there and be like, 'Okay let's see what he does now.'
BEN KISSEL What are we gonna do today? Put electrodes on their nuts!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See what he does, see if he screams.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, doesn't like it. Check.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He doesn't like it!
BEN KISSEL Doesn't like it, check.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like it, doesn't like it. It's just two big columns.
BEN KISSEL Mostly doesn't like it. This one guy comes every time. Really weird.
MARCUS PARKS Somehow though Dimitrov survived for three years.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh, what a nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS Until the CIA decided, ah he's all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're all right.
BEN KISSEL We did it just to see if you're alright?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Got it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Dude, that's what we did... How many guys are still in fucking Guantanamo Bay that we
put in there in 2002? They still haven't decided, ah you're all right.
BEN KISSEL Come on. You're all right, get outta here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What do you do?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I heard a thing the other day about a guy who's still in there, he's like, 'I don't know why
the fuck I'm here, no one will tell me.'
BEN KISSEL Well now it's scary cause they're like if we let him go, he's gonna be mad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL So I don't know, maybe we just keep him in here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Apparently he knows what that secret spice is that goes into the KFC chicken.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS And after three years they just released Dimitrov back into the world to rave for decades
about the ill treatment he'd received from the CIA. The experiments performed on Dimitrov,
just like those performed in Germany and Japan, produced no worthwhile results nor did they
come any closer to answering the questions Dulles wanted answered. But Dulles had
convinced himself that the Soviets had definitely discovered the secrets of mind control
especially after America was introduced to the concept of brainwashing. Now these days
'brainwashed' is sort of a hokey term used mostly to describe people who fall in with cults. But
back in the early 50s this was a legitimate terms used by anti-communist propagandists to
terrify the American public.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean it's still out there, it still floats. Just so you know cause if you type in Dr. Kurt Blome into
my search engine it is all anti-vax shit, it's all really intense conspiracy theories. You'd be
surprised how affected people are about the idea of brainwashed.
BEN KISSEL Oh absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We just had fucking Rudy Giuliani on the fucking Secret Singer bullshit.
BEN KISSEL Masked Singer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whatever.
BEN KISSEL Masked Singer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who gives a fucking shit? Where it's just another being like, 'No, we're all the same, it doesn't
matter that you tried to flip the government, it doesn't matter.'
BEN KISSEL Totally normal, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well in September of 1951 a rabid anti-communist and former OSS propaganda specialist
named Edward Hunter published an article in the Miami Daily News entitled 'Brainwashing
Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party'. This article claimed that a secret
communist Chinese program had been developed that controlled people's minds. This
program was called 'xinao' which Hunter claimed roughly translated to 'wash brain'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not good. But who knows? Again, who knows? Cause what does it mean? What exactly
were they doing over there vs what we were doing? It seems that we really expanded upon
the concept in a truly American way.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Well you can say culture is no more than brainwashing and that is our major export.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting. I know that's how you win. I won a cultural victory in CIV VI, it's the most boring
way to do it but I won.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well from what I know about what they talked about, at least the Chinese interrogators
at this time, they would basically take a guy out, they would torture him for a while, and then
bring him back and kind of use positive reinforcement with the other prisoners.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Where the prisoners would say, 'Have you become a communist yet? We would love it if you
would.' And so they just, it was a good cop bad cop thing but with the other prisoners.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS I mean certainly psychological but...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, of course. But thats interesting.
MARCUS PARKS It's a psychological thing but it's very much a long term thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause they'll show you a lifestyle too, they'll go and be like, 'You could live like this, we have
these things where you come here and you can find a nice communist wife and you can
literally do all of this kind of shit.' It's communist birth right is you go.
MARCUS PARKS Well eventually Hunter expanded this article into a book called 'Brainwashing in Red China'
which urged Americans to prepare for psychological warfare on an unimaginable scale, not
realizing that the true psychological warfare would not come until the age of social media.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nice!
MARCUS PARKS Now no matter what the Chinese were actually doing, the American public seized on the
brainwashing concept as a way to explain nonconformist behavior, especially anything that
they deemed anti-American or unorthodox. In turn the CIA backed this propaganda and
publicly announced that the communists had definitely mastered brainwashing techniques.
Secretly Dulles became convinced that the mind control gap was widening, therefore more
extreme measures became, in Dulles' view, a moral duty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's very interesting to see how the CIA, they still wanted public opinion on their side. There is
something also inherently, I'm gonna put this in a way, people who listen to the CIA, my bosses
are gonna be so mad. The thing about the CIA is they're so needy.
BEN KISSEL They just wanna be loved like everybody else.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They really feel like this, they want to be these heroes, right. They have this idea that they are
the hero, that they're the center of the story when actually it turns out that that actually
means you're very evil because you do all these things on an ideological basis which ends up...
Because you get tunnel vision, right, you think that you're doing this for the good of the world.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When no, you're hurting people, all you do is create more pain and then that's a cycle of
violence that just reverberates psychically throughout all of us because it goes through the
human unconscious and it makes us all more violent.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Well it's not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nope.
BEN KISSEL Well that's not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's weird how they did a full publicity campaign for brainwashing and propagandized in
America to convince the people that this was so important that they then would have a
mandate to go do it. I don't really know why they even needed one.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I don't think they really did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well I will say it probably did help them get back up from the quote unquote "officials" up top.
So if you have the president believing in it too where he's looking at his poll numbers and he's
saying well everybody's believing in it and then it does help them I guess get funds.
MARCUS PARKS Well funds and permission. Keep doing what you're doing.
BEN KISSEL Keep the paranoia going.
MARCUS PARKS Well Project Artichoke also had subset assignments to glean other kinds of practical
knowledge in the pursuit of the main goal. It was suggested, by the way we're about to get
into a lot of suggestions-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh hey, these are just suggestions! We're just throwing out ideas here, we're spitballing!
BEN KISSEL Is this a moment where I could say or could it be?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, yeah. Big if true.
BEN KISSEL Big if true
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is your time.
MARCUS PARKS It was suggested that gas guns, gas jets, and gas sprays should be studied as delivery devices.
Additionally it was suggested they study the problem of permanent brain injury following
exposure to these gases as well as suggesting finding out what depriving a brain of oxygen for
long periods of time might do. Suggesting just in case you come across this eventuality, make
sure to study it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We know what it does! It makes your buddy Timmy pass out at the sleepover.
BEN KISSEL Well that is true. That is kinda nice the CIA was just playing the choke out game, drinking
Mountain Dew. Getting a little wild.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! Getting Pizza Hut and shitting your pants cause you passed out.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, bring it back, huh?
BEN KISSEL So much Pizza Hut you shit!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just choking each other out.
BEN KISSEL So much Pizza Hut I shit!
MARCUS PARKS Echoing Unit 731, it was also suggested that Project Artichoke examine the effects of high and
low pressures on the human body as well as the effects of vibrations, monotonous sounds,
concussion, ultra high frequency, and ultrasonics. In the bid to break the mind of a prisoner,
they also suggested testing the efficacy of constantly repeated words, sounds, continuous
suggestion, nonrhythmic sounds, and whispering, all to see what it would do to a prisoner's
psyche.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just had a fucking chill run up my spine, it's literally hashtags, trending topics, and ASMR.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just all there. It's the whole internet culture.
BEN KISSEL If I would be like we're gonna put a nail in your fucking brain, we're gonna waterboard you,
we're gonna grab you dick and do whatever with it. Or I'm gonna whisper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (whispering) I'll take the whispers!
BEN KISSEL You can whisper all day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (whispering)
BEN KISSEL You know what, now that I think about it, wrap my dick around my leg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I hate this. Unless you're that Amouranth woman cause she has big boobies.
BEN KISSEL You must hear them.
MARCUS PARKS Well in practical application, they developed moving or vibrating rooms, distorted rooms,
phobia rooms, overly damp or overly dry rooms, and perhaps worst of all completely
soundproof rooms.
BEN KISSEL One day this will be known as Hollywood Horror Nights.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly it just sounds like a New York City apartment building except for the soundproof
rooms.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's very true.
MARCUS PARKS Soundproof rooms, it's supposed to be a torture that you cannot imagine, being in a
completely and totally soundproof room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Have you seen those rooms? Cause you can hear your blood, you can hear your brain going
like (croaking).
BEN KISSEL These new prisons that we're making that are supposed to be so wonderful are much more
inhumane and they do that now in solitary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sound dampening?
BEN KISSEL They do sound dampening. There's two doors and yeah, the people after a couple of years in
there, they come out and then they just sit down and do an interview on camera and it really is
like an alien conversation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well finally Project Artichoke was also told that under no circumstances would the
agency consider lobotomy or brain surgery as an operative measure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We have rules here!
BEN KISSEL Hold on a second!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This isn't Outback, okay? There are rules here.
MARCUS PARKS But they did feel that the subject quote "could be examined if the opportunity presented
itself".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's a back door.
BEN KISSEL Hold on a second, so you are gonna do lobotomies?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No!
MARCUS PARKS Under no circumstances should you do a lobotomy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Except for some specific circumstances.
BEN KISSEL This is great. I wonder why no one trusts the government.
MARCUS PARKS But if you walk into a room and a guy's doing a lobotomy, pay attention.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're already here, we're already doing it. He's got the ice picks out.
BEN KISSEL Wow. Sure. Oh man, now you're rationalizing how I buy pork at the store.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL I'm like it's already dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's already dead.
BEN KISSEL It would be rude not to eat it.
MARCUS PARKS Well from a result standpoint, the biggest problem faced by Project Artichoke was that the
researchers were scientists and doctors with no training in psychology which was ostensibly
the whole thrust behind this fucking thing. Therefore everything was trial and error, done
without any real knowledge of why they were doing anything.
BEN KISSEL I mean if you're going to experiment on me, figure something out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just tell me you got something.
BEN KISSEL Figure out how to get the hole just right in the bagel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can break my mind with hypnotism and barbiturates but also make my dick bigger. You
know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL Do something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Throw me a bone here.
BEN KISSEL Be the person that suggests having a Bud Light backer with a Bloody Mary. Whatever it might
be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
MARCUS PARKS That's not bad. Now on the chemical research side of things, scientists back at Fort Detrick
outside of Washington, DC were hard at work producing chemical compounds for what they
called Artichoke work in addition to delivery systems for said chemicals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then also now I got an email basically what they called the Fort Detrick cancer bubble
which is this idea that to this day the cancer rates around Fort Detrick skyrocket. There's a
couple of articles I was reading, it's wild and very scary.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS The Fort Detrick scientists constructed a 4 story high, 131 ton chamber officially called the
One-Million-Liter Test Sphere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is kinda metal.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's scary.
MARCUS PARKS But to the men who built it, it was known only as the Eight Ball.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The Eight Ball!
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. Like Puddy from Seinfeld? Eight Ball. Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS This structure consisted of 5 air tight humidity and temperature controlled ports for which
toxins could be sprayed on subjects trapped inside. These chambers allowed scientists to test
potency of toxins under different conditions, meaning they can see if certain chemicals, fungi,
or bacteria would work better in say Moscow or Cuba. Could it be cold and dry or hot and wet?
Which one's gonna be better?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They do it like how they test GORE-TEX for raincoats.
BEN KISSEL Seriously, yeah. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS But among the most active men who would fly back and forth between Fort Detrick and the
German torture house at Villa Schuster was Morse Allen, director of Project Bluebird. Morse
Allen was particularly fixated on the application of electricity and he became obsessed with
using electroshock to induce amnesia or put subjects into vegetative states.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's definitely a thing that what it does is it cooks your brain. And a lot of times after these
experiments you don't go back to normal, they can induce amnesia, they can quote unquote
"erase" your memory, but you don't come back as Tommy anymore.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're not Tommy, you're Grigor, you're Mr. Electro Man after you got shocked 66 times.
MARCUS PARKS I mean electroshock therapy these days, they've figured it out. It's very small, tiny (buzzing).
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Of course.
MARCUS PARKS But back then it's just turning on the fucking juice and seeing what happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was to melt your personality.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Morse Allen was also one of the first in the program to become interested in hypnosis
which would become highly important to MK Ultra later on. In search of hypnotic knowledge,
Allen studied with an unnamed hypnotist who freely and proudly said he used hypnotism to
rape women.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not a good party line, it doesn't make anybody laugh, no one likes it.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS No. More Allen brought these techniques back to the CIA and found that he could put
employees into trances that could turn the most chaste employees into flirts or the most tightlipped
secretaries into gossips.
BEN KISSEL I don't remember this Cathy comic strip. I don't remember when she got hypnotized and
fucked the office.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, it's just why we can't ever trust a single person with a watch, a stopwatch, anything.
This idea that he used it immediately to be like, 'This is so Debbie wants to look at my penis.'
This is what we've done?
BEN KISSEL It's a good point. John Brennans of the world, anytime you see CIA, secret intelligence,
anything in the Chiron, can't trust them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS No. But for Project Artichoke the holy grail was the discovery an application of a single wonder
drug that would loosen tongues, open the mind to programming, or wipe memories. All of this
depending of course on the guidance that agents gave the subject. Now the OSS had already
proved that marijuana was effectively useless but Project Artichoke figured they'd give it
another shot.
BEN KISSEL All right!
MARCUS PARKS Again dosing each other with candies, salad dressing, and mashed potatoes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is fun, now there's a whole industry.
BEN KISSEL Breathe into my mouth, bro. Take a big hit and then breathe it into my mouth, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fucking shotgun!
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS When they finally just smoked it though, they found that it produced nothing more than quote
"a state of irresponsibility, a relaxing of inhibitions, and an accentuation of humor to the point
where any statement can become extremely funny."
BEN KISSEL That's so easy to monetize!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They didn't understand how good it was. And I actually don't think that this weed is very good.
I think the tincture was probably good but I imagine that... We got good now.
MARCUS PARKS No we don't. We have too strong weed now.
BEN KISSEL Whoa! Grandpa corner!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's levels. You're still in New York, you don't get the full gradient yet.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Once you get the full gradients, now it's all hyper specific.
BEN KISSEL It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not like the shit that they smoked in Vietnam out of the fucking barrel of a shotgun, you
know, that kind of shit.
MARCUS PARKS No man, this is just jazz bones, man. Just fucking hitting it hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jazz bones!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (hi-hat sounds) It created that noise. Imagine being like what if I hit the drums with these tiny
fucking fans I found, dude? They're all like fuck yeah, tiny little drum noises, man!
BEN KISSEL People love it when people drum hard but what if you drum really soft?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The whole point is I skip like 5 notes in the song and everybody calls me a fucking genius!
BEN KISSEL I get a boner. This is a great day to be in the CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is.
MARCUS PARKS Well after weed was deemed useless, Artichoke scientists tried cocaine by experimenting on
mental patients.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Talk about getting them to talk.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I mean, okay.
MARCUS PARKS They said that cocaine produced elation and talkativeness which was good but found that
what subjects said was ultimately unreliable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. It was like I did the experiment with Grigor and then the next thing I know is he didn't
show up to the half marathon that he promised that he was gonna show up with me for at
11am.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I know. His feet were itchy. Yeah it was unfortunate. But if you wanna find out what are
the effects of cocaine, ask anyone in congress. I mean you don't think that Joseph McCarthy
was lit off his fricking ass?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Matt Gaetz is what happens with cocaine in the government.
BEN KISSEL Oh my lord. God. A human used condom.
MARCUS PARKS Yep. Next was heroin which CIA memos noted was used frequently by police and intelligence
officers to either disorient or hook prisoners on the drug.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about how common it was that it was listed as an operative measure. Cops used this to
fucking fuck with people all the time and you're like, 'Oh, what? What was that? Who said
that?'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. They'd hook them on heroin and then take it away to produce a talkative desperation for
of course more heroin. Additionally the US Navy had already sponsored a secret program
called Project Chatter to study the effects of heroin amongst other drugs. No, Project Chatter
is fucking terrifying.
BEN KISSEL That is scary, dude. That's a cenobite.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And they paid a psychologist at the University of Rochester $300,000 to do it. His name,
interestingly enough, George Wendt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, Norm!
BEN KISSEL Whoa! Dude if George Wendt gave me all of my acid I'd be like yeah, I don't want to do this
but you're still George Wendt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck yeah, dude! Who is the Norm of acid? Is it Jerry Garcia?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Jerry!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jerry!
BEN KISSEL Jerry Garcia. I think that's fair.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well students were paid a dollar an hour to take heroin so George Wendt could watch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Boring.
MARCUS PARKS But ultimately George Wendt declared that heroin held little value for interrogation. But
speaking of Project Chatter, it also involved chemical research done by the nazis at the
concentration camps with mescaline.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We already paid for it. It's another thing. We've already paid for all this research, we might as
well use it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. They're like, 'Well it's already done.'
MARCUS PARKS Mescaline synthesized in laboratories from peyote had been a top contender for a mind
control drug by the nazis. And by the way those nazis in Operation Paperclip, they were saying
we still haven't reached the limit of mescaline, we need to look into mescaline more. Artichoke
scientists however deemed it too unpredictable to be useful. Now it seemed like the CIA had
hit the end of the road as far as the search for the pharmacological holy grail went. But as
Gottlieb poured through reports of drug experiments, he noticed that very little research had
been done concerning LSD. Being a curious man, Gottlieb tried LSD himself first. For a trip
guide he chose a former officer in the WWII chemical warfare service named Harold
Abramson.
BEN KISSEL I don't know if that's a good idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the thing, man. Is he gonna bring you orange slices? Is he gonna change the TV when it's
fucking harshing your shit?
BEN KISSEL No. Is he gonna do what Marcus did when we were tripping balls off of mushrooms and we
couldn't figure out how to turn the music on and then Marcus fixed it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He saved everyone, he saved the night.
BEN KISSEL Saved the entire night.
MARCUS PARKS That is true, that is true. And I did that even after you were mean to me.
BEN KISSEL Well I said one mean thing to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You were out of control on acid.
MARCUS PARKS Well this guy, Harold Abramson, he was one of the few scientists who had actually done LSD.
So yeah, he was a pretty good trip guide. Gottlieb's trip was first rate. He reported out of body
feelings, a sense of wellbeing and euphoria, and the sensation that his entire body was
encased in a shimmering, semi-transparent sausage skin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa. Harry, Harry, wait, Harry. Am I a hotdog?
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, bro. Be serious with me, bro. Am I a fucking hotdog right now, bro?
BEN KISSEL No, no, you're still a person, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck. Fuck, man.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I get it, dude. Yeah man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know that feeling. I know exactly what he's saying.
BEN KISSEL We're all encased in just meat, we're in a meat case.
MARCUS PARKS Well soon Gottlieb began testing LSD on volunteer CIA colleagues and scientists at Fort
Detrick. Some agreed to trip in controlled settings but others gave permission to be surprised
with a dose.
BEN KISSEL No! No! No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a no. I don't wanna be dosed.
BEN KISSEL No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't wanna be dosed ever, it's not fun to not know you're about to go insane.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, what a nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the breakdown of the experiences of the various officers are really interesting because a
lot of the officers that got it, they were very professional and they would be like,
'Disorientation. I feel dizziness. I feel there is an accentuated... There's something in my vision.'
BEN KISSEL Relax, have some fun with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But some of these guys, every once in a while you had what's called enlightenment, they
became enlightened officers. Where there was one dude that started weeping when they gave
it to him and he was crying cause he did the thing where he was just like we're all layers of the
same consciousness and we are the same matter of birds and trees, we're all in the same
global economy and stuff. And he started crying.
BEN KISSEL I'm starting to think this guy's a communist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But they looked at him and they note, being like, 'Seemed that this dose caused sadness.' They
couldn't understand crying from beauty, they just thought, 'Subject sad. Must eliminate.'
BEN KISSEL Also make fun of Barry on Monday for being a pussy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Don't forget that, guys.
MARCUS PARKS Well eventually those fair warning tests reached their limits and Gottlieb began dosing CIA
trainees without warning.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, what is happening?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Man, they had no rules.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Then once the trainee was high he would be interrogated to see if he would violate
oaths and promises.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh, god.
BEN KISSEL I would rather be abducted by aliens. I would rather be Barney Hill.
MARCUS PARKS The breakthrough for Gottlieb came when an officer was dosed and revealed a secret he
swore he would never reveal. Then he forgot the entire episode once he was no longer
tripping.
BEN KISSEL He's fucked up! He's just fucking hammered!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. He's like, 'Yeah man, we all fucking kissed our roommates in college. I'll fucking admit it.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah, dude. I'm starting to think this guy's a communist.
MARCUS PARKS With this, Gottlieb felt that they were finally on the right track. However LSD proved to be
almost as unpredictable as mescaline. Those who got surprise doses experienced intense
distortions of time, place, and body image which more often than not culminated in full-blown
paranoid reactions. They didn't know they're on acid so they think they're losing their fucking
minds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah!
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And acid's a hard way to go.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Even mushrooms, if you lightly have mushrooms, you can kind of slide into a trip and
understand what's going on. But acid comes on hard, especially this shit.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Old school shit.
MARCUS PARKS Old school government acid? Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Directly from old owl eyes' fucking spout. You trip hard fast.
BEN KISSEL It's also like you don't work at a nightclub which theoretically if you get dosed you'd be like, 'At
least I'm here.' But you're at the CIA headquarters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which is not trip-friendly.
BEN KISSEL Around some of the most buttoned-up, stuck up people in the world.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It must smell horrible. The office setting and tripping.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, then you're getting interrogated by your boss.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, that's horrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We should try it here at the network.
BEN KISSEL That'd be great.
MARCUS PARKS Oh we should, yeah. That'd be nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fernando's shaking his head.
BEN KISSEL Fernando!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay no. Oh it's a violation against human rights.
BEN KISSEL You guys never got an office. Step into the hallway then! Fernando step into the bathroom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna meet over at Kissel's office, Big Wangs.
MARCUS PARKS But on the other side, trippers would also ride the wave and have ecstatic or transcendental
experiences in which they would become convinced that they could defy their interrogators
indefinitely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
BEN KISSEL Dude, I love it. It is kinda fun if you can flip it and be like, 'So I'm not gonna get fired for this,
huh?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna interrogate you.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Therefore hallucinations either way were more of a hindrance than an aid to interrogation. But
since LSD was so unpredictable, it was suggested by security officers that it be used as a kind
of psychedelic suicide pill where agents would take it in the event of capture so all they'd say
during their interrogations was pure gibberish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god, I can't even imagine tripping in an enemy jail, like a combatant jail.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Contradictory to this method though, security officers also drugged CIA agents with LSD
as a kind of mind control vaccine in case the Soviets ever captured them and gave them LSD.
So you would know what LSD was like if the Soviets ever captured you and gave you LSD.
BEN KISSEL Okay, gotcha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will tell you what though, each trip is different.
BEN KISSEL It is.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You really don't get used to it. Like I love it, I love tripping on acid but definitely each time I've
done it has been a unique time.
BEN KISSEL I don't know why, for me acid hurts my bones. I don't know why.
MARCUS PARKS Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, you say that. I think it's cause it's like an upper and you're up, like you run around.
BEN KISSEL I have no idea.
MARCUS PARKS Interesting. While LSD was proving to be more slippery than Gottlieb had hoped, he was still
convinced that chemicals were the future. And in 1951 he flew to Tokyo with CIA scientists to
test what they'd learned from chemical interrogation experiments on four Japanese citizens
suspected of being covert Russian agents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The key word there is 'suspected'. We don't know if they were.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Gottlieb and these CIA scientists injected these prisoners with an alternating variety of
depressants and stimulants under questioning. And when all four confessed to being Russian
agents, false confessions or not, they were executed and their bodies were dumped in the
Tokyo Bay.
BEN KISSEL Oh, so you're really gonna kill me. I thought this was all a trip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no. You're tripping then you die.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS Soon after, the CIA team flew to South Korea where the experimentation was repeated on 25
North Korean prisoners of war.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS This time however the goal was not confession but renunciation. These POWs were drugged
and told to renounce communism. But when they refused, all 25 were executed.
BEN KISSEL Were executed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL I thought you were gonna say were given small franchises with McDonald's to understand that
capitalism does have some merit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, they were executed. No.
BEN KISSEL Maybe a mix of both.
MARCUS PARKS But even though the flip hadn't worked, the confessions had. So one out of two, that ain't bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're just also saying whatever, they're just saying shit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But at the time they're like okay, well these guys confessed so we gotta keep going with
this. So Dulles again expanded the program in 1952 and set up a safehouse in Munich for
Project Artichoke scientists. There they were given permission to experiment on hundreds of
so-called expendables. For months they gave prisoners massive amounts of drugs and
sometimes given electroconvulsive shocks on the insistence of Morse Allen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why don't we shock them a little bit? Come on! Give them one more! And they're all like,
'Alright, Morse.'
BEN KISSEL Bro, have you thought about just like tanning or vitamin D would help you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No man, no!
MARCUS PARKS Every single attempt failed and every single expendable was killed and had their bodies
burned. But Dulles figured that they just hadn't found the right angle. And since he had a good
feeling about Gottlieb, Dulles got to work making formal arrangements to give Gottlieb the
power to take Project Artichoke in whatever direction he deemed necessary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna spike the New York Mets' water so that they lose in the
Subway Series to my fucking Bronx Bombers! The Yankees.
BEN KISSEL Well don't forget the dude, what was it, Doc something who pitched a perfect game tripping
balls on acid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI On LSD.
BEN KISSEL So maybe it'll make the Mets better.
MARCUS PARKS This agreement gave Gottlieb the authority to feed drugs in much larger doses under far more
torturous conditions to prisoners and other helpless subjects such as mental patients, all to
see what he could see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And we are going to see a lot of that in the coming episodes as we go, when this thing really
fucking expands.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Soon after, Gottlieb's power increased when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president.
Eisenhower appointed Truman's CIA director as his Under Secretary of State which meant that
Allen Dulles was promoted from #2 to Head of the CIA.
BEN KISSEL Am I number one?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm the number one guy.
MARCUS PARKS Additionally Allen Dulles brother, John Foster Dulles, was named Secretary of State which
meant that the CIA had the full support of the State Department.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS This gave Dulles all the diplomatic cover he needed to continue running black sites all over the
world. And this truly was how the black sites got established where the CIA has black sites and
that's just the way it fucking is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's what we do.
BEN KISSEL It's what we do now, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS So with total freedom from consequence or question, Gottlieb got to work following any
avenue that he thought might lead to results. And since he needed more doctors willing to
expand the program, he brought in a sociopath from the New York Psychiatric Institute named
Albert Hoch. Now instead of confining experiments to prisoners of war, Gottlieb was now
expanding the scope to include unwitting American citizens and he was putting non military
personnel in charge of said experiments.
BEN KISSEL It always comes home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And these are like the pilot programs for what come next. So this is them starting the
beginning works that would become the octopus of malice that is MK Ultra.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And since Albert Hoch had no conscience or scruples whatsoever, he agreed to inject
mescaline into his unwitting patients without their consent or knowledge just to see what he
could see. Hoch's first subject was a professional tennis player named Harold Blauer who'd just
gone through a nasty divorce and was seeking treatment for depression.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause honestly love is like a game of tennis.
BEN KISSEL Is it really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because love starts at 0 but it can go all the way to 45. You're never really out til you're out.
You gotta play close to the net. That's what I know about love. I'm a professional tennis player.
MARCUS PARKS Well for some reason Dr. Hoch figured Blauer was the perfect subject, so he began injecting
Blauer with mescaline without telling him what he was doing.
BEN KISSEL What in the hell?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I bet you he thought that he's secure, he's got great ankles, he does his cardio, he's fit.
BEN KISSEL I guess! How happy do you think a tennis player in the 50s going through a divorce is?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know, they throw their rackets a lot.
BEN KISSEL I know that.
MARCUS PARKS Well over a period of about a month, Blauer was injected with mescaline 6 times and each
time he complained of highly unpleasant hallucinations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know if this is helping me not be sad anymore, doctor.
BEN KISSEL No. You gotta stop going to that doctor.
MARCUS PARKS Finally for some reason Hoch gave Blauer a dose of mescaline 14x larger than any previous
dose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not a good idea.
BEN KISSEL They don't know what they're doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, they really just make it up as they go. This is the thing we keep saying. They just make it up
and there's nobody in charge!
MARCUS PARKS That's the whole point. Six minutes later Blauer was flailing out of fear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (wailing)
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he spent 8 minutes flailing, then his body stiffened. After 2 hours had passed, Harold
Blauer was dead.
BEN KISSEL What a great test.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He died from bad vibes. He bad tripped himself to death.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you imagine how terrifying those last 8 minutes of his life was?
BEN KISSEL Nightmare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where he's just like locked, just going (rasping).
BEN KISSEL Just seeing some demonic force staring at you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seeing hell.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. No, not 8 minutes, 2 hours. 2 hours of rigidly tripping until you die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god, what a nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Cause you know how it's like when you're tripping and time feels like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is never gonna end. I've broken my mind, I'm always like this.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and time just slows down. Imagine that for 2 hours.
BEN KISSEL That's like some Freddy Krueger shit, dude.
MARCUS PARKS As one medical assistant later confessed, this is a direct quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.
BEN KISSEL Wait but the option wasHENRY
ZEBROWSKI Oh dog piss was in the office, yeah. Honestly I was taking it for my ADHD and I've never been
so focused.
BEN KISSEL Yeah? Okay.
MARCUS PARKS And this wasn't even the worst experiment Hoch performed. He would also give LSD to
patients before and after lobotomizing them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh not good, man.
BEN KISSEL What is wrong with people?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's evil!
MARCUS PARKS Once he gave a patient LSD and a local anesthetic before a lobotomy then asked the patient to
describe his visual experience as chunks of his brain were removed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa. I'm getting a lot of, I don't know...
BEN KISSEL Does this smell like flowers to you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It smells like flowers. I'm getting a flower smell.
BEN KISSEL Am I a shoe?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI To be honest I'm blind.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Are you taking chunks of my brain out?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, wait a second. Is that what this is?
BEN KISSEL Wait. Wait, what?
MARCUS PARKS But even though Gottlieb had gotten the power to do whatever he wanted, he was still
frustrated. After 18 months of experiments, he'd been forced to admit that none of these
drugs had answered any of the questions Dulles had wanted him to answer.
BEN KISSEL I'm still not sure what the questions are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Literally. He's like, 'Actually now that we've been doing this for a year and a half, what was I
supposed to be doing?' Because these guys are just screaming to death. Half of them are dead
and a lot of them are just screaming.
MARCUS PARKS So as author Stephen Kinzer put it, Gottlieb had to choose between two conclusions: either
there was no such thing as a mind control drug or he just hadn't discovered the right one. Or if
he had discovered the right one he hadn't discovered the right way to use it.
BEN KISSEL All right well you better try, try, try again until everyone's dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Actually that's what he said. He said, "I was hired to explore, not give up."
BEN KISSEL Oh my god!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh wow. Oh wow.
BEN KISSEL Oh lord. My friend, you're a horrible doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like Jimmy Fallon with his NFTs.
BEN KISSEL Is he doing NFTs now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah and he also interviewed the robot military dog on his show.
BEN KISSEL Did he really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's an arm of the US propaganda machine.
BEN KISSEL Fucking disgusting. They're coming home to roost.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's a part of the government.
BEN KISSEL Folks, don't even get me going, folks. They're coming home for you!
MARCUS PARKS So Gottlieb concluded that the secrets to mind control were locked away in LSD. Also Gottlieb
was taking a lot of acid himself at this time. His imagination was what you'd call fertile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what they did. They literally said this cause he talked about getting into a creative
headspace. He was so laced with acid that they're just zip-zap-zopping.
BEN KISSEL Does it make it better that he was full of acid? I mean at least he was also experimenting on
himself?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know, I don't have these thoughts on acid. I just party, dude.
BEN KISSEL I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS At the same time though, Gottlieb was taking on another role in the CIA besides just chief
mind control expert. Since he was the CIA's senior chemist and had experience introducing
toxins into the human body and since he had all that nazi concentration camp research to
draw upon, Gottlieb became the so-called poisoner in chief. His first official action as poisoner
came in March of 1953 when Allen Dulles told Gottlieb that he needed a clean way to get rid
of a senior officer named James Kronthal. See Kronthal and Dulles had worked together in the
OSS during WWII. But the CIA had discovered that Kronthal was a pedophile who'd been
blackmailed into being a double agent for first the nazis and then the Soviets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Bit of a liability.
BEN KISSEL Okay, I would say so.
MARCUS PARKS So Dulles informed Kronthal at a dinner that his services would no longer be needed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, we're gonna have to let you go. And I wonder if he knew then what that meant. Was he
just being like, 'Yeah, maybe we should part ways. Maybe this is best.'
BEN KISSEL Is it the pedophilia or the double agent thing?
MARCUS PARKS I would say it's actually more the double agent thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. For him, for Dulles.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, probably. It's disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, for Dulles.
BEN KISSEL Yeah cause Dulles was like, 'Well if we kick every pedophile out of the CIA I don't have a
company anymore, okay?'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah I mean if he used nazis so casually, yeah, he'd use a pedophile. But this guy was such a
pedophile that he was caught twice. First the nazis used him, then the Soviets used him.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS So Kronthal was escorted home by CIA security officers and Kronthal was found dead the next
morning with an empty vial laying on his body because he had been killed by an untraceable
poison made by Gottlieb.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So they left the thing that could be traced which is the vial that the poison had on his chest like
the mafia does when they kill you.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It's there and the poison is untraceable but anybody who knows, knows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Knows that we did it.
BEN KISSEL Is that how they Killed Marilyn Monroe?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Marilyn Monroe, I mean again, I've been set back years by this series.
MARCUS PARKS Well having proven his loyalty, Gottlieb's request to further explore the possibilities of LSD in
the search for mind control was approved by Allen Dulles and the resulting project was
entitled MK Ultra.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS And that's where we'll pick back up for Part III of our series.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, NAOMI is not Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We've got some stories ahead of us, folks. We're gonna get deep into hypnotism, we're gonna
talk about Frank Olson, we're gonna talk about continued CIA experimentation over the next
what, three episodes? We're thinking five, we don't quite know, probably five.
BEN KISSEL I like that you addressed the audience as folks because this is a, 'Folks!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Folks!
BEN KISSEL This is a 'Folks!' series here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's gonna just get thicker and meaner and more fucked up. And then we're also gonna
get into a little bit more conspiracy territory, especially there was a couple of choice named
words that these self-published books about MK Ultra really use. It's very, very intense and
we're gonna cover every last squirming inch of it.
BEN KISSEL Stick with us, folks. Well thank you all so much for listening, we hope you're doing well out
there. Don't forget to check out the comic books, Soul Plumber #5.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It got pushed because of supply lines.
BEN KISSEL Supply chain line. That's all very real and happening. And then of course the Z2 comic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Z2, preorder from that. Z2, Last Comic Book on the Left. Get the coffee, Mothman Coffee, it's
delicious, I'm still drinking it, it's absolutely delicious.
BEN KISSEL It's the best. And I believe he was able to purchase a larger machine recently which is
awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He did, oh no, he's ready to go. And purchase the other things that are not just the Mothman
line. Spring-Heel'd Jack Coffee, it's so delicious.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah. High Strangeness is delicious, I love High Strangeness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's got a lot of torque in it!
BEN KISSEL That's what you need more of, you need more torque.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean I am sort of maybe in the possibility of, in the range of having panic attacks while I'm
watching hours and hours of footage of MK Ultra subjects.
BEN KISSEL I love Henry Zebrowski Tokyo Drift, it's really great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's really good, man.
BEN KISSEL Yeah and keep on supporting all the shows here on the Last Podcast Network and as I'm sure
you all know we are now wide and that means we are on all platforms. So please listen to it.
And we're working on the transition, things do take a little bit of time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Things are updating.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We've heard the thing about Google Podcasts, we're in communication with them, they say it's
gonna take a second for all of the feeds to catch up and that's what we're doing.
BEN KISSEL Yep. So we're just taking a second as always.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI One app at a time.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. So thank you all so much for your support throughout that entire process and
yeah, I guess that's about it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dogmeat, any last words for the folks at home?
BEN KISSEL Not final words, just last words for this week.
MARCUS PARKS Okay, not final words.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not you're about to die.
MARCUS PARKS Not final words.
BEN KISSEL NO, you don't have to be like enjoy every sandwich, this isn't your Warren Zevon moment, no.
Just any.
MARCUS PARKS No. Let's get back to using psychedelics for mental health.
BEN KISSEL Woo!
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, fucking microdose pills like a motherfucker! Two days on, three days off. Fuck yeah,
bro!
BEN KISSEL If you combine them that becomes a macrodose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, now he's having fun.
MARCUS PARKS I was macrodosing for a while, I am now microdosing and it's not quite as fun but it works
better, I'll say that.
BEN KISSEL Well take care of your brains out there otherwise the government's gonna try to take it from
ya. All right everyone, hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein. Be careful if you try any sort of the psychedelic mental health stuff, do it under the
care of a doctor.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah I mean or talk to your buddy fucking Daryl, cause he knows what's up. Ask him how much
he took and then do half what Daryl took.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, then take the other half after you're like this isn't kicking in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, give it a couple hours.
BEN KISSEL But then you realize that it did kick in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Of course. It always takes long.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And I do mushrooms, not LSD. So yeah. I've only actually taken acid once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I can't wait, I have some sitting, waiting.
BEN KISSEL Well now you are admitting to felonies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What are you talking about? I'm excited, what are you gonna do?
BEN KISSEL Thank you for listening, hail yourselves! Goodbye.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See you, fuckers.