MARCUS PARKS I'm recording.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ah, recording. Very good. That means this is gonna go out to everyone, right?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Everyone's gonna hear this. I mean everyone who's anyone.
BEN KISSEL At some point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Anyone who's in the know, who wants to be in on the scene is listening to this episode.
MARCUS PARKS Of course, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Well it's a pretty cool scene.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The pizza is done. That meant nothing, don't worry about it, man.
BEN KISSEL I mean honestly you're talking to Marcus and it could just be code for the pizza's done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The pizza is done.
BEN KISSEL What is the code for?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nothing. Let's just say there's a new tier on our Patreon that will be coming up. $10,000, you
willingly volunteer to be a part of Henry Zebrowski's new behavior modification and training
program, how to be a comedy assassin.
BEN KISSEL Oh wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will teach you how to drop those scruples. No more scruples.
BEN KISSEL Get rid of your scruples.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No mas scruples.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Right? If you're Spanish.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then we're going to get you in there, we might do a little bit of...we'll do some dabbling
under the hood.
BEN KISSEL Under the hood!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's for the hood on the top of your eyebrows. (creaking)
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the pizza is done.
BEN KISSEL Alright, welcome to Last Podcast on the Left everyone. I am Ben hanging out with Marcus and
the hyper cryptic or hungry, Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm hungry.
BEN KISSEL I don't quite know.
MARCUS PARKS The raspberries are back in season.
BEN KISSEL He's bleeding from his asshole.
MARCUS PARKS The raspberries...
BEN KISSEL Marcus is bleeding from his asshole once again. That's great to know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That is his code.
MARCUS PARKS Darling, the raspberries are back in season again. I got to go back to the gastroenterologist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess it's time for me to be the berry farmer again.
BEN KISSEL Oh man. Why does he cry every time he talks about being a berry farmer? I thought it was kind
of fun. Some people go out there on the weekends to do it with their children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, not his wife. Not Carolina.
BEN KISSEL No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, she is forced into that. She is drafted.
MARCUS PARKS I force no one.
BEN KISSEL It's marriage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this series, again I've been joking about being set back and all this kind of horseshit-
BEN KISSEL You haven't been joking about it, you've just said the sentence over and over again. I don't
think at any point it's inferred that you were joking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But to be completely fair, I literally put up walls to a lot of conspiracy theory thought over the
years because especially the last six years it's been extra stupid and an extra waste of time.
Nowadays though, because when we went through the JFK series, everything has been largely
debunked. Everything has already been worked over for years and years and years. And then
the thing about this series, back into MK Ultra, is that this is all the stuff that is real, this is all
the stuff that truly is very real and there's all this documentation, all these witnesses, all this
kind of shit. And you slowly, in my mind it's like poaching an egg but it's my brain, it's like my
brain is being lowered slowly in the vinegar-filled, slightly simmering boiling water of
conspiracy theories again.
BEN KISSEL That's the government's war on drugs commercial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes but they're doing it to me and now I'm hard boiled. All right? I got crusted over because it's
the shit man. It's like there was a van outside my fucking house that I stared at for 15 minutes.
Because it happens in waves where someone tries to get into my social media accounts or my
various things, you could see a ping where a bunch of people like tried to break their way into
my accounts and you see all this kind of shift happening at the same time. I'm having all these
emails come in from people saying they were experimented on by the government. I've done
this to myself. I'm back into this conspiracy goggle world.
BEN KISSEL Yes, well there's always medication. All right everyone.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah man. You're this close to attracting another guy, like remember the Chase bank manager
that told you all about the reptilians? You're this close to finding another one of those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Richard Bunch.
BEN KISSEL Richard Bunch out there at Chase Bank in Manhattan, make sure you do all your banking and
get all your banking needs accomplished with Richard Bunch. All right everyone, we're on to
part three of MK Ultra.
MARCUS PARKS Now by the time the CIA decided to up the ante on their mind control program, psychiatrists
outside of the CIA had surmised years before that you cannot program a person to do
something that they are deeply and morally opposed to doing. Furthermore Sidney Gottlieb,
head of the MK Ultra program, was aware of this research by the time he escalated his mind
control programming experiments from Project Artichoke levels to the debacle that was MK
Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The octopus of malice! Yeah!
BEN KISSEL I don't know, I feel like people have changed. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump called his wife a fat
bitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he loved it. He rolled around in it.
BEN KISSEL So I feel like people maybe now are easier to flip because there's such, I don't know, people
are power hungry monsters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI People have been subjected to years of propaganda that has also been blasted into
hyperspeed by the rectangles that are in our pockets. The research that I did for this episode
about hypnotism shows that these motherfuckers have known since the 1940s, they had this
funny little idea... George Estabrooks who we'll cover, he had this great little sentence in his
book 'Hypnotism' by George Estabrooks where he's like, 'The radio will one day be a
fascinating tool for mass hypnotism.' And we realized they have been thinking about this.
BEN KISSEL I mean it was mostly anal ring toss.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure. But they've been thinking about this for a while.
BEN KISSEL People say that stuff all the time.
MARCUS PARKS But I think, well concerning Ted Cruz and you know that whole sort of turning, all that, Ted
cruz has always been a shivering turd of a human being.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS He's always been out for power.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Spineless.
MARCUS PARKS So the whole point is that like he was able to be turned but that's because his only motivation
is power. So he's willing to do anything for it. It's in his nature, in other words.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the thing about these hypnosis programs and the CIA also as well is that they are looking
for people. This is where Marcus and I had our discussion, which is interesting. Then the goal is
alright, you can't turn someone where all of these actions are completely against their will.
Sure. But why don't we find people where it's not necessarily just against their will and then
we create a situation where they have a way to validate what they do and get out of it later?
BEN KISSEL I think that's called dating. Well that's interesting. And this brings me up to another great point
here. Small jackets for cold turds. I've seen a lot of cold turds out there and I think it's
important we give them small turd jackets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah. If they're cold. If you're cold, they're cold.
BEN KISSEL That's right.
MARCUS PARKS But as we said last episode, Gottlieb felt that he had been hired to explore not to give up. And
as it happened so often, it was the exploration that turned out to be the nasty business.
Incredibly though or perhaps predictably considering the amount of Cold War paranoia at the
time, this all occurred with very little internal pushback with the exception of one fatal
objection that we'll discuss near the end of this episode.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now as opposed to Projects Bluebird and Artichoke which mostly used foreign nationals or
government employees as subjects in their experiments, MK Ultra expanded the scope to
include American citizens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why leave us out?
BEN KISSEL Yes, yes, I'm so happy to be part of this wonderful program.
MARCUS PARKS Specifically they wanted to experiment on urban populations and prisoners. And since they
certainly weren't going to conduct these experiments in Levittown, they needed a proxy who
could find a new kind of expendable. Someone who could move in the more salacious circles
of society without giving off a CIA vibe.
BEN KISSEL Now I just wonder why I can't put my finger on the mistrust of the US government.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. What could it be?
BEN KISSEL What could it be?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is it Mel Gibson? He knows what women want and if he knows what women want, he can
control a lot of other people as well.
BEN KISSEL He makes on average 100,000 women orgasm a day, Mel Gibson. Women love him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know it as much anymore.
BEN KISSEL They don't care. They don't care about anything. They just want him in Braveheart and come
and come.
MARCUS PARKS Oh no. I think that more women go for Kevin Costner, the man who cannot act yet still gets
work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're just speaking for your mother.
BEN KISSEL Wow. Wow. Yes, exactly.
MARCUS PARKS My mother and my wife. Oh my God. We watched dances with wolves once. Holy shit.
BEN KISSEL Wow. Okay, we'll talk about it later.
MARCUS PARKS And that my friends is where a former OSS man named George Hunter White comes into the
picture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This guy's a straight up bastard.
BEN KISSEL Okay, cool. Bastard has entered the picture.
MARCUS PARKS George Hunter White was a narcotics detective described by author Stephen Kinzer as a vastly
obese slab of a man who looked like an extremely menacing bowling ball.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nothing wrong with that.
BEN KISSEL (blubbering) Now the thing is did you have to say vastly obese?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When it really comes down to it, obese really covers it.
BEN KISSEL Vastly obese, that's just that's just getting rude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he's a cop. He's a cop.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now White was your classic dirty cop, simultaneously busting drug traffickers while also using
the drugs that he confiscated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How would you know what it is if you're not using it? I always love that in cop shows when
they see the white powder and then they stick two fingers in it and rub it in their mouth. Yeah,
that's pure cocaine.
BEN KISSEL Unfortunately that was 100% fentanyl.
MARCUS PARKS White was also a hard drinker, known to put down a full bottle of gin every night at dinner.
That's just dinner.
BEN KISSEL Wow, a full bottle. How long is dinner for a bloviating big drug busting bastard though? It
could be an hour and a half affair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It could be.
BEN KISSEL It's still a lot, I'm just saying.
MARCUS PARKS That's a lot in an hour and a half.
BEN KISSEL I'm just saying he's not having a Mcdonald's five minute meal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS True. And continuing the theme of moral crusaders with sexual secrets like J. Edgar Hoover,
White was also heavily into sadomasochism, although his appetites were harsher than the fine
S&M enthusiasts we have listening right now. Really about the only thing that was sweet
about George Hunter White was his devotion to his pet canary. When his bird died Hunter
journaled, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Poor little bastard just couldn't make it. I don't know if I'll ever get another bird or pet. It's
tough on everyone when they die.
BEN KISSEL Oh here, you know what? Because you lost your pet canary or maybe you're thinking about it,
here's a free steak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Alright that's fine but I'm just gonna go kill a hooker. Honestly that's the only thing that makes
me feel better.
BEN KISSEL No, eat the steak! Also isn't it ironic the cop has the most snitch of all animals, the canary.
MARCUS PARKS Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting.
BEN KISSEL Yes, indeed.
MARCUS PARKS Now before White was involved with MK Ultra or even the OSS, he had gained national
notoriety before WWII for busting a Chinese-American opium ring in Seattle called the Hip Sing
Tong whom he'd infiltrated by agreeing to 'death by fire' if he betrayed any of their secrets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
BEN KISSEL What does that mean?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They set you on fire.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Set you on fire, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah yeah, roast me up. That seems kind of fun. Honestly you're not going to like the
smell.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely not. Pork rinds.
MARCUS PARKS But once WWII began, George White joined the OSS and was sent to a secret paramilitary base
in Ontario called, no shit, Camp X.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man. Shit comes from somewhere. Everything in the culture comes from something.
BEN KISSEL It is the dumbest... We'll call it Camp X.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously. But this is when it was scary and not corny.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And George described Camp X as a school of murder and mayhem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well during the OSS days they were very proud of their spy and assassin training schools. That
was part of the thing that Wild Bill was obsessed with because they treated everything like
fucking kids at summer camp. They were like, 'Yeah! We get to put our murder school
together. Yes! Yes!' Which I'd do in a way.
BEN KISSEL You think that sounds fun?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would love to be the Dean of a murder school, I feel like I could really be like, 'Murder. You
get a B. You're not good enough at it.' It'd be really fun to do. But they really liked this. But
again the Project Artichoke story of this, the part of that was much more containable because
they thought that they could just have everybody do it in one building but now we're seeing
what contractors can bring to the table.
MARCUS PARKS Well after training, George White became a teacher himself at Camp X and instructed such
future CIA leaders as Frank Wisner, James Jesus Angleton, and the aforementioned future
head of the CIA Richard Helms.
BEN KISSEL He does know that Professor X didn't find himself in a wheelchair because of diabetes, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this was back in the day.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This was before Professor X.
BEN KISSEL Oh this is before Professor X.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah. Professor X didn't come about until '62 I believe, maybe '63.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Now additionally White was also involved in the OSS' first experiments to produce a truth
serum using marijuana.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We brought him up in I believe the second episode. He's the guy who talked to that gangster
dude and gave him the weed tincture that made everybody else throw up and he went and
spilled the beans in his entire drug operation to George White.
BEN KISSEL Dang.
MARCUS PARKS Well after WWII White became a narcotics detective again, this time in new york city where he
led the narcotics bureau's campaign against jazz music.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No! They were like, 'It's boring, it has no point. They don't even play the song, they only play
chunks of it.'
BEN KISSEL I like a little bit of jazz because you can stay at the bar for three hours and feel like you were
there for three minutes because the song never changes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep. I've only been here for one song.
BEN KISSEL That's it.
MARCUS PARKS I mean this is actually some serious shit. White spied on and entrapped musicians like Billie
Holiday who was framed by George White after she started singing the anti-lynching protest
song Strange Fruit. This is like the beginnings of like COINTELPRO-type shit.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's really weird to really kind of roll back and just see this shit has just been a part of what they
do. Now the CIA just revealed that whole echelon thing that they have been spying on us again
and it's like we're nothing. I don't know what's going to change.
BEN KISSEL Spying on us now more than ever before.
MARCUS PARKS Now eventually White continued his path in participating in the worst campaigns of the 20th
century by going to work for Senator Joe McCarthy in 1950. And White took part in the anticommunist
witch hunts investigating the State Department. After that White moved to
investigating organized crime where he leaked information that President Truman and New
York Governor Thomas Dewey had mob connections. Truman did kinda have some
connections from back in his early days in politics and like Kansas city mob shit, but Dewey was
the guy who had convicted the most famous gangster in new york city history, Lucky Luciano.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS He had no mob connections.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. So this is the type of shit that then he did all this irresponsible stuff and then the CIA was
like, 'Great.'
BEN KISSEL You're our guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're our guy.
BEN KISSEL Number one guy.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. For these reckless claims, George Hunter White was fired. And just when George White
had nothing to do, he got a call from Sidney Gottlieb who was looking for a man on the street
to procure subjects for civilian MK Ultra experiments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because the goal is to open wide operations, right? Because in an operational theater the
people you would use these things on would not know that they were going to be receiving
these drugs and this various shit. They would be getting them by surprise. So in order for them
to see how it works, I mean it makes sense. Look at the facts.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Look at the facts. And who doesn't want to follow what a fat man says in New York City.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean as long as we're talking about pizza.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Well Gottlieb wanted to see how ordinary people reacted to LSD. So he opened a safehouse at
81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village and directed White to find new expendables.
BEN KISSEL So this basically lays the groundwork for the hippies that we came to know and love.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dude, this is what we've been saying man, he rips open the psychic veil of the entire country
accidentally.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah. Well he was out there to find drug addicts, petty criminals, and other people that
nobody of consequence would miss. For this purpose the program bought two apartments.
They'd lure the subjects to one apartment and drug them while in the other, MK Ultra
scientists would monitor and record the results, listening on surveillance equipment and
watching through a one way mirror.
BEN KISSEL Oh my God, the first ever live podcast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS To attract their victims, George White developed a persona, sometimes posing as a merchant
seaman and sometimes as a bohemian artist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'd love to see him with a fucking scarf and a hat on. 'Yeah, I work in paint! You should come
over here. You want drugs? You wanna get your dick sucked? Come on, I'm an artist.'
MARCUS PARKS But he always used the alias Morgan Hall because Greenwich Village, it's not quite the folk
scene. The folk scene, there are some rumblings of it, you've got the beat writers that are
hanging out. Greenwich Village is starting to become a counterculture center but it is definitely
where you want to pick up some people that would eventually become known as hippies, drug
addicts. And since White had already built a social circle of drug addicts, sex workers, gamblers
and pornographers during his time in vice, he could provide an almost endless supply of
subjects to MK Ultra scientists.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He just flipped his covert intelligence people, all the people that he used as info sources when
he was working for the narcotics.
MARCUS PARKS COs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he's flipped them over and he's like, 'All right now we're all in the CIA. I know. New
office, huh? New header, that's it. It's the same shit.'
BEN KISSEL He obviously has a skill set.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep, he does.
MARCUS PARKS He does. Now the CIA's time at Bedford Street was later described by a retired officer as quote
"wild and wooly".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh man.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS And that wouldn't even compared to what would come later with operation Midnight Climax
which we'll cover next episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL I would love to see all the all the back hair stuck to the lube on all the random tarps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, man. That's where you get the information from.
BEN KISSEL Wild and wooly!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Men with back hair need love. And that's the thing, they're out there pining for love and then
they get flipped, they get turned!
BEN KISSEL I know. You have hinted that you are CIA for quite a while now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, who knows? I just talk to a guy with a hat in a park.
BEN KISSEL Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS From what that same officer said, those experiments at the Bedford safehouse were so out of
control because they were still operating under an OSS mentality, meaning that it didn't
matter if what you were doing was a good or a bad idea, you didn't question it, you just did it
because anything can be justified during a war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The common thread is we don't even know what this experiment's gonna show us. We're
going to do a bunch of shit and then see what comes out of the end of the tube and then see if
that's collectible and see if it's worth it. But if not, well you just leave leave a bunch of
shattered people in its wake.
MARCUS PARKS They had a vague goal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah they had a goal, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But it was still a somewhat vague goal. And they didn't have anywhere near any sort of idea
how they were going to reach that goal.
BEN KISSEL I wonder if they did help someone though, if there was one moment where it's like, 'Who who
did you just release from here? What was his name? Lenny Bruce?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dude, no.
MARCUS PARKS Actually yes. No, it's all of them. It's Ken Kesey, it's so many.
BEN KISSEL How many people do we love or that our historic got drugged off the government dime?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The entire beat movement.
MARCUS PARKS Not the entire but a lot of them. I would say at least 5 major counterculture figures had their
minds opened at least by CIA experimentation with LSD.
BEN KISSEL All that was CIA drugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You would not have gotten acid in the 1950s if it was not from the CIA.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Doesn't that show you that sometimes it's difficult to be a parent because yeah, you gave and
you gave and all of a sudden they turn into someone who hates you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what it is. That's what being a parent is. You just raise an enemy.
BEN KISSEL To some degree.
MARCUS PARKS Well as far as the CIA was concerned, the Cold War was ready to turn hot at any moment.
While MK Ultra scientists were drugging people in the village, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were
being executed for stealing nuclear secrets for the Soviets. At around the same time, and this
is all how it's kind of laid out by Stephen Kinzer in 'Poisoner in Chief', at around the same time
leftist governments were taking off in South America, the Prime Minister of Iran had
nationalized oil reserves, and rebels in Vietnam, some communists, some not, were well on
their way to casting off the shackles of French colonialism. Now of course everything but the
Rosenbergs have been pure paranoia. There was no good reason for us to meddle in South
America or Iran and while we should have seen the defeat of the French at the hands of the
Vietnamese as the end of colonialism in Southeast Asia, we only saw it and everything else in
Cold War terms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, Marcus. This is like Mount Everest for the CIA. They were like, 'Why did you go down there
in meddle in South America? Because it was there.'
BEN KISSEL Because it was there. Absolutely. You said there was no good reason, but there was reason.
Doesn't that matter?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There was reason but it's not... Yeah, exactly. Come on. Again, last episode. Us flipping these
governments in South America, how do you think it made us feel?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, absolutely. And in no way is that began a trend that is now constantly being seen.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, our misreadings of all these situations still have major consequences that affect our lives in
both small and large ways to this day, from the border crisis to the destabilization of the
Middle East, not to mention, Vietnam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, I forgot about that one! It's a conflict. We're not calling it a war, all right, it's a
conflict.
BEN KISSEL You remember when we changed our rider and I was like I would love a meat and cheese tray,
back that conflict.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Conflict.
BEN KISSEL That was what Vietnam was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, that's all it was.
MARCUS PARKS But from the viewpoint of CIA director Allen Dulles and many directors after him, all of it was
justified. And while we now know that MK Ultra was a fool's errand, Dulles believed that it was
just as important as anything else the CIA was doing. Well as it was, Dulles' insistence that
mind control was real and in possession of the communists, that kept getting validated or at
least it was validated from Dulles' point of view.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS In July of 1952 when the armistice, the end of the Korean war, came about over 7000
American soldiers were released from communist prisons in North Korea. But to the American
public's astonishment, almost 70% of those prisoners came back criticizing the United States
and praising communism.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How fucking dare they, coming with baby bangs on Tumblr.
BEN KISSEL Perhaps a little Stockholm syndrome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How dare they?!
MARCUS PARKS Well some prisoners even refused to leave. They settled in China or Korea and that prompted
the pentagon to announce that any soldier who stayed behind would be labeled as a deserter
and executed if they were ever found.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. Of course that's what they call me after I have dinner. I have dessert.
MARCUS PARKS The deserter. Ben Kissel, The Deserter, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Really, really good.
BEN KISSEL Nice. A deserter. I would have stayed in South Korea, man. I heard South Korea is awesome.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it is supposed to be nice. Hopefully we'll do a live show there.
BEN KISSEL Well that would be awesome.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, love to. Well furthermore several pilots who came back confirmed that they had been
directed to drop biological weapons on the enemy, which they most likely had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No way, what!? No! Marcus, I watched several old newsreels on this. We only had biological
weapon facilities in order to defend ourselves against their weapons. How dare you?
BEN KISSEL It makes all the sense in the world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. We were never doing. And it's not like everybody's doing it in any way, shape, or form,
trying to figure out a way to make everybody sick from far away.
BEN KISSEL No. I mean of course when you have government contracts with large pharmaceutical
companies, they don't want money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They don't want the money!
BEN KISSEL They don't wanna execute us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They don't even keep the money, they give it to the children!
MARCUS PARKS No, this doesn't have anything to do with that. I mean we did most likely drop anthrax bombs
on the North Koreans, not to make money, but to just fucking kill them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI My uncle was saturated with Agent Orange during Vietnam.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It changed his whole life and it ruined it. I mean all these kids with developmental disabilities.
BEN KISSEL Well they are wonderful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes but I'm saying it did not bode well.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
BEN KISSEL Yes. No one got better.
MARCUS PARKS But the evidence of biological weapons used in Korea is still to this day circumstantial. People
still argue about this shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now the American media waved off these reports of defectors by saying that the men who
had stayed behind in those communist states had poor upbringings, emotional problems,
Asian lovers, or homosexual tendencies.
BEN KISSEL Thank the media.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey, some of us have all of the above and we love it. And that's fine.
BEN KISSEL That's fine. Welcome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you know what's interesting though is that I found a debriefing that was given by the
Department of the Army in 1956. So they said in this thing, it was about communist
interrogation, indoctrination, and exploitation of prisoners of war. And in this they even
debunked the idea of brainwashing.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They say in this report, the term brainwashing came out and they are immediately saying they
have rudimentary brainwashing, mostly what they do is make you physically tired and then it's
classic good cop, bad cop where they give you propaganda and then they set you up. They'll do
a thing where you could live a life like this, where you show this peaceful pastoral because it's
beautiful. I'm sure you go to these beautiful places in Korea and they're like, 'Do you want to
go back to Cleveland or do you want to be here amongst these hills?' They do these things
where they convince you to flip.
BEN KISSEL Well Cleveland is nice.
MARCUS PARKS Cleveland is great, I love Cleveland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean they beat you within an inch of your life but eventually you do get the Stockholm
syndrome thing that they are slowly building up. But it's not what we think it is that they're
doing but they need this in 1956.
BEN KISSEL The term 'brainwashed' could be replaced with 'brainfucked'. You just kinda get brainfucked
and you're like, 'Alright, I don't know.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS I mean, that's the funny thing about this is that it's so fucking childish where these guys, they
have thoughts that are different from the American public and the best they can come up with
is it's probably because you're fucking gay.
BEN KISSEL You're gay.
MARCUS PARKS Because you're fucking gay, you fucking piece of shit. You're so fucking gay.
BEN KISSEL Yeah me and my 10 inch cock and this this beautiful woman that I'm married to?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Exactly. The most delicious street food in the world.
MARCUS PARKS Super fucking gay. Some members of the media even said, and tell me if this sounds familiar to
any generation listening, but the defectors were a sign of quote "the weakening American
masculinity and its replacement by a generation of pampered kids and mama's boys".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Mama's boys!
BEN KISSEL Oh god. That's why every morning I wake up and I slap my mother, I call her a bitch. Every
goddamn day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck the postman to show him, just to dominate him.
BEN KISSEL I'm not gay with my with my love of man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Shut up! Shut up!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I'm no pansy boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's no such thing as gay in the foxhole.
MARCUS PARKS But to the CIA the fact that even a few men decided to forsake the democratic paradise that
was America for the communist hellscapes of North Korea and China was a sign that
communist mind control was a definite reality. There was however further information that
the CIA didn't make public. Some prisoners who returned from North Korea or the Soviet
Union apparently had a blank period of disorientation that occurred only when they passed
through a zone in Manchuria.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Manchurian candidate!
MARCUS PARKS This to the CIA was a sign that at least mind meddling had been achieved and the word
'Manchuria' or as it came to be known 'Manchurian' got introduced into the mind control
lexicon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think it's more like mind muddling.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah that's what I said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You turn your brain into-
MARCUS PARKS Like a mimosa? You're muddling it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, what's it called?
MARCUS PARKS Not a mimosa, a mojito.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A mojito!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL A mojito. Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a mojito. Then you're not gay anymore, you're an assassin.
BEN KISSEL Maybe. That's a horrible memory I have with the mojito summer when I faked all those
bartending jobs by telling everyone I know how to bartend and then I constantly broke glasses
when I was trying to muddle and then everyone made fun of me and then they made me a
bouncer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah that's probably best. Seeing you break wine glasses...
BEN KISSEL I broke so many glasses. Man it was horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Watching a huge man break glasses while he's trying to make cocktails. Yeah, he becomes the
bouncer.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I know. I just wasn't prepared for mojito summer, it's not a Wisconsin beverage.
MARCUS PARKS So extrapolating from these observations about Korean war POWs, the CIA claimed that
communists were using drugs, physical duress, electric shock and possibly hypnosis against
their enemies. In reality the CIA was assuming this because that's what they were doing and
since the CIA considered themselves the ultimate good, they assumed that the communists
whom they considered to be the ultimate evil, had to be doing something far worse.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Did no one ever said at one point, being like, 'Hey guys though, the thing is that if we keep
doing like worse and worse shit and we think they're doing worse and worse shit, aren't we
just making them worse by us doing our shit?'
BEN KISSEL I think that's why it's the cold war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh wow, great. And then they're like yes, yes, yes!
BEN KISSEL Let's just keep on doing this forever. Escalation, this is gonna be perfect.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, there's a reason why this war almost ended the entire world.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Multiple times. Now MK Ultra was different from Project Artichoke in that it was not a
single undertaking trying to answer all of the questions concerning mind control that Allen
Dulles had tasked Gottlieb with answering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He just thought one building of dudes could do it originally.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're like we'll just have one group of guys putting this all together.
MARCUS PARKS But while Gottlieb was certainly a sociopath of a kind, he was also a genius. He realized that if
he was going to answer Dulles' questions, he needed dozens of teams to answer those
questions one at a time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The octopus of...! (heavy metal drumming)
BEN KISSEL Oh bro, I'm pretty stoned right now, dude! That octopus just picked up a guitar, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (growling) Malice!
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Additionally, this worked well in keeping MK Ultra a secret because if you've got a lot of
scientists working on pieces of the question here and there, then nobody knows the full
picture except the men up top. Therefore the MK Ultra subprojects were born.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is where we see the fracturing of the whole thing and this is why it's so difficult to put
together as a story because there's so many avenues and there's so many places that were
connected to MK Ultra through various things we'll talk about next episode, like the Human
Ecology Fund and all these types of things that they figured out how to break it all up. It's all
these different little corporations and companies.
BEN KISSEL See now you're there, let's get rid of this ecology stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now you're getting it, buddy.
BEN KISSEL It reminds me of the mural, you look at it and oh that's a little penis and then it pans out and
it's a picture of Donald Trump made out of little penises. You got 'em!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They got you.
BEN KISSEL But really if you just look at the penis, you're like that's just a little penis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's just a nice little penis.
BEN KISSEL So sometimes, long lens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Then you see Donald Trump.
BEN KISSEL How fun. An artist wasted hours and hours of their lives focused on that man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah. I hate it.
BEN KISSEL Ruined art for four years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS It truly is a mosaic of pain, Ben. You're very correct. While LSD was certainly a large part of MK
Ultra, not all subprojects involved drug experimentation. Others included social psychology,
group psychology, psychotherapy, and sleep and sensory deprivation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I also was reading a very interesting article that I want to cover a little bit later on about the
CIA's involvement in anthropology places all over the world and what they used and how they
format and framed the way people viewed cultures for years as well.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, cultural anthropology.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like they found out something like 70% of funding during this time period was CIA shell
groups giving money to anthropology departments and then framing the way that they look at
cultures. It's bad man, it's really fucking bad dude. There's so many things that we don't even
know the truth of anymore, man. There's no objective reality, bro.
BEN KISSEL You're turning into ice cream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's no fucking objective reality, bro! We live in a fucking CIA metaverse, dude!
BEN KISSEL We gotta get this frozen turd a jacket. Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Please.
BEN KISSEL He's turning into a street turd.
MARCUS PARKS So you're telling me all those fucking ethnography is that I studied in college are all worthless?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Shill! Shill!
BEN KISSEL I'm sure not all of them are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're a shill just like Burton J. Muntash is.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Shill. CIA shill.
MARCUS PARKS But specifically the sensory deprivation techniques were based on the work of Dr. Donald
Hebb in Montreal. In 1951, Hebb received a $10,000 grant under contract X-38.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also my favorite AXE flavor. I call it a flavor.
BEN KISSEL I love X-38, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. X-38 was meant to study sensory deprivation on students. In one study Hebb paid 22
students a pittance to lay in a lighted cubicle 24 hours a day with all sensory stimuli muted.
BEN KISSEL You know how many college kids were like that's all I gotta do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Light was defused by translucent goggles, auditory stimulation was limited by soundproofing
and constant low noise, and tactual perception was blocked by thick gloves and a U-shaped
foam pillow around the head. Dr. Hebb found that after just four hours subjects were unable
to follow a train of thought. After 24 hours of being deprived sensory input, it caused quote
unquote "serious disturbance".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know when they write that in the book, it's not pretty.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a guy going like (screaming).
BEN KISSEL Yes Nancy, put that down as serious disturbance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Actually put a bit of a temper tantrum in there because he's being a bit of a baby right now.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, bit of a baby. Sure.
MARCUS PARKS After 48 hours though, subjects experienced hallucinations similar to what one experiences on
mescaline.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS One subject said he saw rows of little yellow men with their mouths open, wearing little black
caps.
BEN KISSEL It's a minion!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a fucking minion! Oh I came from the CIA! It's another fucking disinformation project right
in the middle of the whole Despicable Me movement! It's made by the CIA.
BEN KISSEL In downtown LA there's a massive minion that watches you like the dumpy eye of Sauron and I
believe it is a CIA PSYOP and I believe that he is watching. Henry is tinkering on the truth. This
is gonna get bad.
MARCUS PARKS All right, well let me see if you can find some CIA head meaning in this one. Another
hallucination was a guy who saw a procession of squirrels with sacks over their shoulders
walking quote unquote "purposefully".
BEN KISSEL Yes because they are going to the funeral of RFK jr, they are the working class with their nuts
in their bag and all they wanted was freedom. And he was killed by the CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They are going there to make sure that he's dead and then they can call Sirhan Sirhan who
we're going to get into probably episode 5, we'll talk a little bit about Sirhan Sirhan and how he
was a robot of the CIA.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. I actually think I'm losing my mind too because on Top Hat I was doing like there's a lot
of surveillance going on right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Things are starting to really dovetail in a way that's bad for my mental health.
BEN KISSEL We need to go to Vegas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS In the auditory realm, one subject heard a choir singing in full stereophonic sound, which is
fucking awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's sweet.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But in the tactile realm, another subject actually felt pellets being fired from a miniature
rocket ship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you can't even pay for this shit anymore, dog. That's just what your brain cooks up, dude.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, this is like Doom Patrol shit, like how they created Mr. Nobody. It's fucking amazing.
Now it's worth pointing out that these experiments were not conducted in a CIA torture
house. According to Dr. Hebb, every experiment occurred in purposefully cheery and happy
surroundings. They made sure that everyone was comfortable.
BEN KISSEL Oh god, that would drive me freaking nuts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well so one can only imagine what these techniques might do to someone and say the bowels
of a CIA black site.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What we now know, the CIA is really good at setting the vibe, right?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's kind of what we learned from a lot of their work is that it's really all about creating an
environment where we can get the most impact from what is that we're doing. And then these
guys were doing these experiments in these various places because to them, to this guy this is
science, this is just innocent science and we are doing this for the good of America. To him it's
all like yeah of course we're doing this. While meanwhile they have cubicles with men
screaming inside of it and they're just like, 'Fascinating.'
BEN KISSEL Right. Turns out people like to sleep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They do.
BEN KISSEL Wow, shocking.
MARCUS PARKS Well the other side of this is that, this is something I've really been thinking about especially
when writing this episode, is you really have to question like I think these guys would have
been doing it anyway even if the CIA hadn't paid for it, they still would have done it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the center of the secret schools' knowledge of this entire subject is that I think.
BEN KISSEL Well isn't that what we did? We did it for free for 7 years, this show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because we love to do it. Literally it's cause we love to do it and we would do it for free,
honestly. But I think the idea is that you find people that would be into it in the first place.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean think about it, the CIA didn't pay all those fucking surgeons to create lobotomies.
They did it because they felt like doing it and because they wanted to know more about the
human brain. And these people are doing the same shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. All of those Harvard professors knew what Jeffrey Epstein was doing but they took his
money because it allowed them to do all the fucking hypothetical weird fringe science stuff
that they always wanted to do but no one would give him the money to do it.
MARCUS PARKS But since the experiments with sensory deprivation were showing results, the CIA saw the
value of Dr. Hebb's work and therefore they funded hundreds of other projects on sensory
deprivation. Eventually these projects produced 230 articles in scientific journals over just 7
years and that was just for one relatively small subsection of MK Ultra research.
BEN KISSEL Wait, this whole point was just so they could write articles? Oh yuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the thing because those guys get-
MARCUS PARKS You sir don't understand academia at all.
BEN KISSEL I read The Economist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow. Wow, whoa. Give him a medal.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Should I give you a pile of coins, Mr. Economist?
BEN KISSEL That's the whole point with Epstein and Harvard, they took his name off. They kept the money.
But whenever we're in Ohio, Les Wexner's name is everywhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Everywhere!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL He may have even been worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he just got his dick sucked by Epstein. I don't know what they did.
BEN KISSEL I don't know what they did. You know they touched tips.
MARCUS PARKS But as intriguing as sensory deprivation was, nothing outside of LSD of course was more
important to MK Ultra scientists than hypnosis. With hypnosis the CIA could conceivably create
assassins who would carry out a mission then forget both the crime itself and who had
ordered it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was at least the dream. That was the dream.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. That was the goal.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And as far as hypnosis went in the CIA, the main man was psychiatrist George
Estabrooks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Old Esty, that's what they called him.
BEN KISSEL Is that what they called him? Sounds like he smells.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He smells like something.
BEN KISSEL Yes he does.
MARCUS PARKS Estabrooks told the CIA that he could create a hypnotic messenger who would not be able to
betray his mission because he or she would have no conscious knowledge of what their
mission actually was.
BEN KISSEL This is great, we can use them for the US Postal Service.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're gonna love the mail.
MARCUS PARKS In this, Estabrooks claimed that he could establish a condition of split personality where two
consciousnesses unaware of each other could exist within the same person which is of course
one of the most common MK Ultra tropes. Now personally I think Estabrooks' claims were a
case of a man who over-promised and under-delivered in just about everything that he did.
But Henry is of a different opinion when it comes to the possibility of split personalities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When we attack these subjects, quite often the goal we keep coming back to is the human
element. Like what is it about people that make these things work and why people do it?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And how the human element, the X factor like like Dan Carlin talks about, these types of things
that are what make history happen. The right people and the right place kind of have to be
there. And George Estabrooks, he wrote this book called 'Hypnotism' that when you read it
you realize there's a lot of ideas in that book that are subtle that then he puts forward that I
think that you realize permeated the intelligence community in a way that started subtle and
then it became obvious. Where George Estabrooks, yes, he said that it was real easy to train
people to do this.
BEN KISSEL Like super easy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Anybody can do it.
BEN KISSEL Really? Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What he talked about, it's really weird because the introduction of hypnosis is supposed to be
the idea of you either slip somebody from a sleeping state into a hypnotic state, into a trance
state or what he called stage magic hypnosis where you put somebody up in front of a crowd
and you berate them to do things. And then people who follow along do it, right?
BEN KISSEL Right. And this is used in evangelical, a lot of religions as well, you could almost argue it's
similar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. Trance talking and people talking in tongues.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you could very much argue that. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Benny Hinn, all of his chorus will fall over and stuff and it's like I don't think you really did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But what he'd do, right... So he wrote this thing in there that was very interesting. He basically
surmised that 1 in 5 people are incredibly hypnotizable, that they're like Canaries, right.
BEN KISSEL How did he get to that number?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. He made shit up. But also he would run tests and one thing that he'd do because
the goal is to find out who is highly suggestible.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you would do things like he put a hypnotic suggestible thing, he said he did it under a
yodeling record, think about this.
MARCUS PARKS (soft yodeling)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he put subliminal messages in this recording and he played it in a room and basically he'd
see who'd fall asleep and not because of just boring, like he would see people who would fall
into a hypnotic trance. And then he's like oh that's somebody who's really good for it. Because
he has an example of it where he says that he trained a guy to do this thing where he basically
said, 'Okay, we're going to hypnotize you to have a secret bit of information that we're going
to give to this other Colonel in Japan. I'm gonna hypnotize you and then I'm gonna lock you in.'
It's called locking.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're going to hear the word 'the moon is clear'. And then when you go there, that guy you
meet is gonna say 'the moon is clear', you're gonna shift back into a hypnotic state, you're
gonna give him the statement that you said that you could, right.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then the other guy then puts you back into a trance, you go back to America, right.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the thing is I do believe in a way because the idea of hypnotism working or not is up for
debate, no one really is sure of hypnotism works, but I think that if you do it on somebody
who's so fucking... Like let's put it this way, stupid or highly suggestible, highly, highly, highly
suggestible.
BEN KISSEL Spongey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Spongey. Super, super spongy. That it works every once in a while but it's not dependable.
BEN KISSEL But wouldn't the suggestion itself work?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well who knows because also what it does is it gives you a way out too. We were talking about
this is that you find people that are willing to do these things, quote unquote "under
hypnosis", but then afterwards if they get caught, they could be like, I must have been
hypnotized, I was a part of this thing.
BEN KISSEL Isn't that what Patty Hearst said?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Well not really, kind of, sort of. That's an oversimplification.
BEN KISSEL That's a whole other episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, we'll do that story one day.
BEN KISSEL Oh totally. I love that story.
MARCUS PARKS It's fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But no, it's just this idea of it's about finding the right people that would fall into these things.
But yes, he talked about using the radio to hypnotize the entire population in the United
States of America and he just kind of talked about this idea of like fooling people-
BEN KISSEL But didn't it work?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You fool people. What you do is they don't know they're being hypnotized. You set them up
like it's in a medical experiment where he used this as an example and you put like a blood
pressure cuff on them to do measure their blood pressure and then you still be like, 'The thing
is before we can do your blood pressure, we're gonna have to calm you down. So you're going
to really want to listen to my voice and you want to fall deeper, deeper.' Like we're going to do
the bit, right? It is that where all of a sudden you got him and he didn't even know he was
being hypnotized.
BEN KISSEL Not to be too corny here but isn't there truth to the radio being, you look a Rush Limbaugh for
example, the Limbaugh Congress, those things he actually changed the minds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI LRH, Jim Jones, all these people.
BEN KISSEL Facebook, isn't that all mind control? Isn't it all the same thing?
MARCUS PARKS What I would say is that it's the same thing that's happened very recently, it's not about
changing people's minds, it's about awakening what's already there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, sick.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And that's pretty much the same deal with hypnotism is that hypnotism, you can't make
anyone do anything they wouldn't normally do. We'll get into this a little bit more later on.
And I think with George Estabrooks, the people that he's talking about, if he's able to
accomplish what he says he'll accomplish, the people that he could accomplish it on our such
fucking dullards that they would not be able to accomplish anything of consequence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. They're also expendable.
MARCUS PARKS They're expendable but you also can't depend on them because there's no CIA operation that's
done by just one guy, it is an entire team of people that has to put this thing into motion and
you're not going to risk the whole operation on Gummy Steve that's just a fucking moron.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wait a second, I thought I was getting a free sandwich when I got back from Vietnam.
BEN KISSEL Gummy Steve, you know you can't have any sandwiches.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh man, I'm gonna get shot in the head, aren't I?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, here's the slosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All right, well I'm glad it's you.
BEN KISSEL Here's your bucket of slosh, enjoy. So they're basically looking for the kind of people that
would get into a fight at the Old Country Buffet or the Golden Corral because they didn't get
their stake when they wanted it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just people that are ready to go, people that are willing to do it. But again, imagine you take
100,000 candidates for this and then 100 people can actually be useful for it and then they're
one shots. They can only do it one time.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And that's the other thing too is that you don't know if they're gonna be able to do it
that one time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which is the reason why they started abducting children and growing children in vats in order
to train them from the birth age.
BEN KISSEL That's The Matrix, I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You guys have not read 'MK Ultra Candidates: The Step-Whored Wives of MK Ultra'.
BEN KISSEL All right, I'll listen to it on tape.
MARCUS PARKS Well the CIA believed in the split personality principle enough to produce a short film called
The Black Art to educate their own agents. In this film, an American intelligence officer drugs
and hypnotizes an Asian diplomat then forces him to enter his embassy, steal documents, and
turn them over to the intelligence officer. The film ends with this voice over: "Could what you
have just seen be accomplished without the individual's knowledge? Yes. Against an
individual's will? Yes. How? Through the powers of suggestion and hypnosis."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I believe it because he said it deeply.
BEN KISSEL He did. I also just love the CIA is like, 'We do shit without people's consent!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. They love it. We love it!
MARCUS PARKS Now as I said at the top of this episode, the OSS had tossed aside hypnosis as a possible
espionage weapon back in WWII because they'd been told by multiple psychiatrists that you
cannot hypnotize a person into doing something that they would never do. For example, we
spoke in the last episode about how Morris Allen, director of Project Bluebird, was able to use
hypnotism to turn chaste employees into flirty girls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But that's cute.
BEN KISSEL I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS Well that's the thing is that's not all that hard because it's possible that those employees
wanted to flirt but believe that it was not appropriate to do so or not appropriate to do at
work. It's a common feeling. It's a good guess.
BEN KISSEL I'm introducing gropey Thursdays.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We know that every secretary is here to find a husband.
BEN KISSEL We know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're just gonna make it easy. So we're gonna put your bare butts through holes in these
walls and the these men, your bosses, are gonna smell your butts and choose one of you to be
a wife.
BEN KISSEL Gummy Steve, get out of here, Gummy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I never get to be a part of the butt experiment!
BEN KISSEL No you don't, Gummy Steve. Go have your slosh.
MARCUS PARKS But to take that same employee and turn them into an assassin against their will is a different
matter altogether because even if that person is capable of murder, there's no way to know
they're capable of murder unless you put them in a situation where killing is a possibility.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS But even though Gottlieb knew all this, he decided that those initial studies had missed
something. So he continued with MK Ultra subprojects. There was subproject 5 which included
100 subjects at the University of Minnesota and according to a surviving memo, Gottlieb
wanted the subproject to investigate the following areas: hypnotically induced anxieties,
hypnotically increasing the ability to learn and recall complex written matter, polygraph
response under hypnotism, the relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You gotta have a marshmallow mind.
BEN KISSEL I mean I just like this is all with the backdrop of the Midwest accent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS And most importantly, the recall of hypnotically acquired information by very specific signals.
To that last point, Gottlieb had also assigned the chair of the psychology department at the
University of Oklahoma, a guy named Dr. Jolyon West, Joly to his friends, with Subproject 43,
researching dissociative states. Well under Joly's supervision, subproject 43 tested drugs in a
special chamber that attempted to use hypnotic pharmacological and sensory environment
variables to manipulate the subject into altered personalities. In other words, if Subproject 43
could figure out how to alter personalities and Subproject 5 could use hypnosis to acquire
information through specific signals, then Sidney Gottlieb was that much closer to delivering
an MK Ultra agent.
BEN KISSEL You know how Mormons were so happy? They're like, 'We're finally gonna fix our son, Greg.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is it.
BEN KISSEL He's not gonna be gay anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're going to make him love not having coffee.
BEN KISSEL That's right.
MARCUS PARKS But concerning Joly West, he like many MK Ultra subcontractors had a mad scientist streak.
BEN KISSEL Oh good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. This story is fucked up.
BEN KISSEL That's what I like. I love that mad scientist streak.
MARCUS PARKS In 1962 Joly shot a dart containing 300,000 micrograms of LSD into an elephant named Tusko
at the zoo in Oklahoma City.
BEN KISSEL Oh no, no, no.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know what he was trying to accomplish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Maybe if LSD is in a bigger thing it will have more of an effect.
BEN KISSEL I mean honestly he may just have wanted to see this elephant fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He might have truly just wanted to see the pink elephants from fucking Pinocchio.
BEN KISSEL Do you think if elephants are alcoholics they see pink humans?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just wanna end myself.
BEN KISSEL Here's a blow dart!
MARCUS PARKS He gave this elephant 100,000 times the regular LSD dose or at least what you give a human.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He should have just started small, waited 45 minutes, then add a little bit, add a little bit.
MARCUS PARKS You wait an hour and a half. You don't wait 45 minutes, you wait an hour and a half.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just trying to have fun.
BEN KISSEL Also an elephant never forgets. This is a nightmare. It's a fucking lost cause.
MARCUS PARKS Oh dude, the elephant didn't need to fucking forget. Five minutes later it fell over, shat itself,
had a seizure, and died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep. Science.
BEN KISSEL That's horrible! What science?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Useful.
BEN KISSEL What is the science?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what you just did? You just made four end tables, that's from the legs. You gotta
throw the rest of the corpse away because it's fucking useless.
BEN KISSEL I don't know now.
MARCUS PARKS Now one might think that MK Ultra would contain its experiments to medical or scientific
professionals but since the Cold War was all hands on deck, one of the very first people
recruited into the program was a magician named John Mulholland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would like to hope because magicians show up all the time and you always want to do like,
'Hello!' like that style. But I'm thinking he's a Criss Angel type.
BEN KISSEL Really?
MARCUS PARKS You think so?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Brooding, going off, being like, 'Where's your girlfriend? I'll make her panties disappear.' Like
he has a very long happy trail, he's that guy who has like a fucking 3 ft long happy trail that
goes right up to the shaft of his beautiful penis.
BEN KISSEL Okay, so we have kind of a Criss Angel type magician.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A lot of necklaces.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Well Mulholland had been a close friend and protege of Harry Houdini and claimed that no
man could be considered a magician until he was able to quote "skillfully perform the cup and
balls".
BEN KISSEL What's the cup and balls?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I've heard that line before. And I'm sick of applying to these magician schools to only get
raped, all right.
BEN KISSEL It's disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I am sick of it.
BEN KISSEL The cup and balls, my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS The cup and balls, it's when you get three cups and you get you get the ball.
BEN KISSEL I know what the cup and balls is. Yes, indeed.
MARCUS PARKS Now Mulholland was somewhat of a celebrity who rubbed elbows with Dorothy Parker, Jimmy
Durante, Eddie Cantor, and Orson Welles. I know you recognize at least one of those names.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jimmy Durante!
BEN KISSEL I know Jimmy Durante.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI None of these kids know.
BEN KISSEL Jimmy Durante.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They'll never know.
BEN KISSEL Jimmy Durante, he may have transferred over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't think Jimmy Durante is alive in the Zoomer generation.
BEN KISSEL I feel like Jimmy Durante was his generation's Abe Vigoda, where he was just kind of known
but I don't know why.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know. John Mulholland also edited a professional journal for illusionists called The
Sphinx.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But every time I put it on the table, it disappears. Where's this fucking magazine!?
BEN KISSEL Whoa! The only magic trick is the price keeps going up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Inflation!
MARCUS PARKS And john Mulholland had a personal library of over 6000 books on magic that was eventually
purchased by David Copperfield.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or George H. W. Bush.
BEN KISSEL His favorite joke, David Cop-a-feel. Yes, indeed.
MARCUS PARKS Mulholland was also an accomplished author of books about stage magic and once WWII
began Mulholland's book, this is my favorite magic book title ever, 'The Art Of Illusion: Magic
For Men To Do'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is magic for men to do, all right. Stuff like how you can magically make a pussy on yourself
if you take your dick and you shove the head of it in your asshole.
BEN KISSEL Now you're not so lonely, are ya?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. That was distributed to members of the armed services as entertainment.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now since Mulholland's book, 'Magic For Men To Do' had been so popular with the military,
his name was well known to intelligence services. Additionally, Mulholland also had the same
failed patriot complex as Sidney Gottlieb because Mulholland had been denied the chance to
fight in WWI because of rheumatic fever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was going to go to the war but I was sick.
BEN KISSEL That's too bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what I would do. If you drafted me into a future war I'd just go (cough cough) I don't
think I can get... I just am so (cough).
BEN KISSEL You're a Navy boy. You're immediately gonna be put on a Navy ship.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah dude. So when Gottlieb approached Mulholland to serve his country with MK Ultra, the
magician jumped at the chance. Now since Mulholland was a master of illusion, his first job
was to train CIA agents to covertly deliver poisons both hallucinogenic and deadly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look at the bird, look at the birds, look at the bird, look at the bird, you're poisoned. It's that's
easy to do. It's that easy.
BEN KISSEL That was great but what if I don't have a bird?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're fucked!
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You need to get a bird! First of all, honestly if there's not a bird budget here then this entire
operation is a bust.
BEN KISSEL Alright, well every every member of the CIA now gets a bird.
MARCUS PARKS Oh man, that would be amazing if we had a whole fucking branch of our covert services that's
just dudes with birds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Bird sciences. (bird calls)
BEN KISSEL You'd know what they were up to, that's for sure.
MARCUS PARKS These instructions about covertly slipping poisons were so successful that Gottlieb
commissioned Mulholland to write a training manual for CIA officers. And Gottlieb requested
this using his alias Sherman Grifford.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sherman Gifford.
MARCUS PARKS It sounds like one of those stupid fucking names Holden used to make up on Roundtable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, Sherman Grifford.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well we find out that the CIA's got to make up names all the time. So eventually they get
stupider and stupider.
BEN KISSEL They're busy, yeah. I mean look at what parents are doing these days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah!
BEN KISSEL Hey, have you not noticed that names are different than when I was a kid?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, wow. The names.
BEN KISSEL Whatever happened to names like Pete?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, now they're all named like Peter. But it's like P-E-T-E/her and it's very interesting.
BEN KISSEL There you go. Yeah, it's hard to be a teacher.
MARCUS PARKS Now this manual called 'Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception' was long
thought to be lost. Recently however, it resurfaced in totality making it - and this is serious -
the only MK Ultra document to survive completely intact.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's wild. It's a fun document, I was reading through it. It's very fun. It's a lot of party tricks.
BEN KISSEL Cool.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. For an example of how weird all this shit was, the manual refers to everything in
euphemisms. CIA officers were 'performers', toxins were 'materials', targets were 'spectators',
and the act of poisoning was called 'a trick'. In total Mulholland's manual was divided into five
sections, starting with the basis for successful performance and the background psychological
principles by which they operate. From there it moved on to quote "tricks with pills, tricks
whereby small objects could be obtained, tricks with liquids, and tricks with loose solids".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Been there. Honestly with loose solids, it's better just leave them alone. We don't need to be
all tactile with it.
BEN KISSEL I don't know, loose solid is so gross.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't even know what that means.
BEN KISSEL Jello?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It just feels like, are we weaponizing Jello? Is that where we got to in fucking 1950s?
BEN KISSEL Mayonnaise.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa. We already saw the weaponized mayonnaise story in Side Stories.
BEN KISSEL Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS In practice, the manual taught such tricks as how to flick a pill into a victim's drink while
distracting him by lighting a cigarette.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Over here! Over here! Over here!
BEN KISSEL Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look over here!
MARCUS PARKS It also told how capsules could be hidden in, then ejected from wallets, notebooks, or paper
pads. It told of how venom could be concealed in a ring.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
MARCUS PARKS How toxic powders could be dispensed from the eraser cavity of a lead pencil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
MARCUS PARKS And how to spray liquid on a solid like bread without either the action or the result being
noticed.
BEN KISSEL It's Binaca.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's Binaca! What you do is you pump it up your butthole and take it to the bathroom and then
you just kind of let it fall out onto the bread. And then you're like, 'Here's your bread.'
BEN KISSEL That something 1000x more difficult than just spraying it on the bun though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I didn't write the manual. The guy is just like, 'You just brought bread from the bathroom?'
Yep.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay well, great. I always liked dry bread.
MARCUS PARKS Now so far we've discussed interrogation techniques, hypnotism and practical spycraft but MK
Ultra's main focus was how LSD could be used in the service of mind control.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the special sauce of MK Ultra. That's where they were like this is what's going to be the
real key and we're just going to apply all of these other various tricks and trades of spycraft to
this because they'd already been interested in all this magic trick bullshit. Sidney Gottlieb's
book is all full of that horseshit and Stanley Lovell's is all the same thing where that's where
they put forward. The CIA always puts all of these fun bits of trivia about them.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They love talking about that. The International Spy Museum is all about that where it's just like
look at all these fun things we do and meanwhile I don't know if any of this shit works. I don't
think any of these guys are magicians.
BEN KISSEL Mind control was the main goal though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL At all times. So these are just little fun side quests. They just wanted to hang out with
magicians.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean they are fun side quests but you know it's also-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's for a purpose.
MARCUS PARKS But with the magician it's also about delivering these poisons. It's about delivering LSD
because they wanted this both for practical field use and for interrogation use and for creating
their own agents. MK Ultra had a lot of different tentacles out there but mind control really
was the main thing and they thought that LSD was the secret key to mind control.
BEN KISSEL Sounds like an octopus or something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some kind of bad repute.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS So Gottlieb started with the basics, commissioning tests to see just how much LSD a guy could
take.
BEN KISSEL Sign me up, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, bro. There was one summer there.
MARCUS PARKS From there Gottlieb moved on to how much LSD it would take to completely shatter a man's
consciousness so it could be replaced with a new personality or new impulses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm going to cover this more in later episodes but if you look at the KUBARK interrogation
manual the CIA uses, they talk about this. That's kind of when the idea of hypnosis would
come in, like ideas that you'd just fuck up a guy for a while and then you start doing things.
BEN KISSEL Right. Why don't they just realize the person that they're dealing with and retroactively trying
to figure out how to convince them to do these things without breaking their brains?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's because people don't want to do them. They don't want to do the things, they don't want
to do anything against the government, they don't want to get executed but they're released.
They don't want to be in a prison anymore but they also don't want to cooperate with you.
BEN KISSEL I could find you someone who wants to get executed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean no, that's easy now.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Especially because of TikTok.
BEN KISSEL TikTok? I was thinking of Craigslist.
MARCUS PARKS Well they had this first bit of research, Gottlieb hired a man named Harris Isbell, Director of
Research at the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky. There Isbell had his pick of inmates
from the prison system. Mostly Isbell used black inmates because they were considered the
most expendable of all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is again we're going to see a common thread where we talked about in our true crime
episodes and serial killer episodes about the less dead. What these guys understood too is that
what you do is you you look at the least protected members of society, prisoners and and
people that are insane asylums and all this kind of shit and you use those guys. And we'll get
information from these guys and it's going to happen again and again and again and again
throughout this whole story.
BEN KISSEL Indigenous people as well. Of course, very sad.
MARCUS PARKS Under many different subprojects, Isbell conducted such experiments as testing whether LSD
or mescaline could make users more susceptible to hypnosis, the effects of drugs that produce
delusion or delirium, and pharmacological studies to develop new quote unquote
"psychochemicals" just in case LSD didn't work out.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now even though this research was funded by the CIA, Isbell, like many others who
experimented with mind altering drugs, made no secret of what he was doing. He wrote
hundreds of scientific articles based on his research. But in those articles, he always referred
to his subjects as quote unquote "volunteers".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Anybody is a volunteer if you ask them to do something and then you put hands on either side
of their heads and you make them nod. You just force their head up and down, you're like,
'See? See, he's volunteering.'
BEN KISSEL Oh man, you made me think about Gordon Ramsay when you put the slices-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The sandwich. (British accent) We call that an idiot sandwich!
BEN KISSEL It's an idiot sandwich. He made that person an idiot sandwich, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I remember. Very mean.
BEN KISSEL It was amazing.
MARCUS PARKS You fucking donkey. Now technically I suppose you could call these men volunteers in the
loosest sense but the manner in which their cooperation was gained was by no means ethical
and could very well be considered evil. None of the so-called volunteers were told what drug
they were taking nor what the effect might be. And many were bribed with high grade heroin
which is not the most ethical reward when you're running a place called the Addiction
Research Center.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're like, 'Oh shit. I can get the best stuff here at the center?'
BEN KISSEL Wow, this is awesome, yeah. It doesn't seem like they're volunteers, that's for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're really experimenting on just how groovy this smack is and whether or not an ounce will
help you enjoy the Velvet Underground to the peak of enjoyment.
BEN KISSEL Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS In one experiment, Isbell gave an inmate 170 micrograms of LSD which caused the inmate to
feel that he might die or become permanently insane. And the inmate said he'd never do it
again but agreed to repeat the experiment after quote unquote "considerable persuasion".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's forced to.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well no, no, not really.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Everything's taken from you.
MARCUS PARKS No, it's not what you get taken from you, it's what you get given. What they did with these
experiments, it was about it was about positive reinforcement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh wow. Oh wow.
BEN KISSEL I mean it's just horrible.
MARCUS PARKS In a horrible way. I mean considerable persuasion meant more comfortable cells, better prison
jobs, or good time credit that could go towards early release. But mostly Isbell was just
exploiting the addictions of these prisoners. Mostly he used heroin, that's what they chose
most of the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the goal of the experiment is not to see how LSD just works, it's to see how much LSD a
human brain and mind can take.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So it's not a fun time. I cut tabs in half now, that's where I'm at. I cut a tab in half and I do half
of it and that's 12 hours of acid.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, because you're not a prisoner who said their constitutional rights completely stripped
away from them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not yet.
BEN KISSEL You still have autonomy and stuff. But the whole thing, the saddest part is all of this is for
fucking... It's so stupid. They just want to figure out how fucked up you get on a drug that gets
you fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. And what it's like, it's what they did in Nazi fucking Germany, it's the same thing.
BEN KISSEL Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's unit 731 again but light, right?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's a light version. Well that's what they're doing is they're trying to create a theory,
they're trying to create a working theory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A body of knowledge.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, a body of knowledge. You know the whole idea that the sum is greater than the equal of
its parts? Like if you have all of the pieces of a car, a car is fucking useless but if you put it all
together then you have a car.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And what they're trying to do is they're basically trying to build a car without knowing what a
car looks like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Right, interesting.
MARCUS PARKS So they're just trying fucking anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See what's there.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, they're trying to gain as much knowledge as they can.
BEN KISSEL That's the new award that I'm presenting, analogy of the day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Really? Thank you. Thank God. We need more awards in this society, they really help.
MARCUS PARKS Now as the experiments continued, Isbell found 5 inmates who volunteered to take LSD every
day.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS And after months of continual dosing, Isbell almost doubled the dosage to 300 micrograms
which in layman's terms is a tripping balls amount.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah. This is when you can taste the acid, it's like so much acid you can have a flavor.
MARCUS PARKS These men reported massive anxiety as well as feelings of unreality, electric shocks on the
skin, tingling sensations, choking, abnormal coloration, spinning circles of color, and
distortions in the sizes of inanimate objects.
BEN KISSEL Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS Taking things further, Isbell expanded his experiment group to 7 inmates and kept them on
LSD For 77 days straight, doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the doses from previous
experiments.
BEN KISSEL What happened?
MARCUS PARKS Perhaps not surprisingly, these experiments were only between Isbell and Stanley Gottlieb.
These weren't published.
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah because the guy turned into a gargoyle or at some point do you think one of them just
turned into pure energy, just disappeared? Just like, 'Bye! I'm going through the bardo!'. You
hope that the idea, you're tripping that hard for that long, that you've seen through the veil,
you know how to time travel.
BEN KISSEL I think you just end up in the fetal position puking on yourself every now and again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. You become a shattered ventriloquist dummy of a person.
BEN KISSEL Right. And you start calling your penis a faucet and start drinking out of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Look, I make my own water.
MARCUS PARKS Well think of it this way, all of us have decades of cultural experience with LSD, we have so
much context.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. Movies that taught us what to do with it, music that we have, all that kind of shit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. We know what it is, we know what a trip is like. We know all of this shit, it's a part of the
fucking collective unconsciousness now. Back then, this is 1952-53, these guys have no idea
what's happening to them. No idea at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They might as well get abducted by aliens.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But Isbell didn't just experiment on black inmates. In one case he chose a white former
senator named William Henry Wall who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for
illegally taking the painkiller Demerol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm rooting for this one. Fucking give it to him, let's see what he does. I think every senator
should be fucking dosed.
BEN KISSEL Why? This was the middle of the communist Witch Hunt, Joseph McCarthy never was sent to
prison. This man was sent to prison for Demerol?
MARCUS PARKS Demerol, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Did he put it up his asshole?
MARCUS PARKS No, it's what happens nowadays where you get people who get prescribed oxy and then they
get addicted to oxy and then they go to prison for getting more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They gotta go up.
BEN KISSEL Prison's not the answer.
MARCUS PARKS They go to prison for illegally buying oxy. This is exactly what happened with this guy but with
Demerol.
BEN KISSEL The Sackler family should be in prison.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Oh yeah. No this guy, it was just Demerol after a fucking dentist appointment. He had
been given Demerol after a root canal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was like, (slurred speech) 'I like bagels.'
BEN KISSEL Now how many more teeth do you have? How many more teeth do you think you can pull?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm pretty certain you give me enough Demerol, them teeth are gonna grow back.
BEN KISSEL All right, so he's in there for Demerol.
MARCUS PARKS Reportedly the LSD experiments left Wall mentally crippled and for the rest of his life he
suffered from delusions, paranoia, panic attacks and suicidal impulses. However the Addiction
Center was by no means the only American prison where LSD experiments happened. Carl
Pfeiffer, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Emory University ran four MK Ultra
subprojects that studied ways to induce psychotic states in normal and schizophrenic human
beings using LSD and other drugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What's a thing that we can give you to make you go into berserker mode so you'll do a bunch
of fucked up shit in an afternoon?
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And he's doing this on schizophrenic prisoners.
BEN KISSEL Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But apparently the schizophrenic prisoners, of what I was reading, when he went to do this
experiment he found that people with schizophrenia reacted to LSD different than the people
who didn't have schizophrenia.
BEN KISSEL That makes sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where honestly the LSD in the schizophrenic patients, it had no effect.
BEN KISSEL It may have just been like, 'Welcome to the party'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously. They'd be like, 'Well now y'all thinking like me. Now do I make sense?'
BEN KISSEL You do make sense. Yeah. That makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS Well pursuant to the CIA, this guy evaluated hallucinogenic materials of interest to the CIA's
technical services, reporting induced psychosis on inmates that lasted for days, characterized
by repeated waves of depersonalization, visual hallucinations, and feelings of unreality.
Interestingly infamous Boston gangster James Whitey Bulger was one of Pfeiffer's subjects.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We have to cover him eventually because he's fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, absolutely. Because he was an undercover informant the whole time. We'll get into
something like that. But yeah, that's a crazy story.
MARCUS PARKS Well Bulger was incarcerated at the Atlanta Federal Prison for armed robbery and truck
hijacking but had not yet committed the 19 murders for which he was later charged. From
what Bulger was told in prison though, he was volunteering for an experiment that was testing
drugs to find a cure for schizophrenia. So he and 19 other inmates were given LSD every day
for 15 months.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a lot.
BEN KISSEL Well that's how you get the nickname Whitey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL Wow. Holy shit.
MARCUS PARKS Later in one of the few credible MK Ultra reports from a victim's perspective, Bulger wrote that
he constantly heard voices and saw movements in his cell but refused to tell anyone what he
was seeing because he was afraid he'd be committed for life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Isn't that weird? That's like the superpower of a mobster, that until later when they move to
Florida and they start talking, where it's the idea of keeping his mouth shut as he's just
watching all the shit happen around. That's a true criminal.
BEN KISSEL There's something about Florida, it makes people very talkative.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It does.
BEN KISSEL I don't know why.
MARCUS PARKS After being injected with large doses of LSD, Bulger said that 8-10 men in suits would give the
subjects tests to see their reactions, inducing hallucinogenic states of panic and paranoia for
hours at a time in what Bulger called a living nightmare.
BEN KISSEL This is like when I was forced to do pull ups in gym and everyone fucking knew I couldn't do a
pull-up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they're all laughing and laughing.
BEN KISSEL But they made you go try to do it. Oh, what a horrible situation.
MARCUS PARKS From what Bulger said, he saw blood coming out of the walls, he saw men turning into
skeletons before his very eyes.
BEN KISSEL Whoa! Could be cool in a different context.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (guitar riff)
MARCUS PARKS He saw a camera change into the head of a dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's too much acid, man. If you walk up to a camera going be like ps-ps-ps-ps.
BEN KISSEL Here boy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Being like, 'Oh he's gone.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Then While the men were hooked up to machines, the scientists would ask questions. They'd
ask, 'Hey, you ever killed anyone? Hey, you ever thought about killing anybody?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I mean constantly thinking about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can we put some fucking Felice Brothers on?
BEN KISSEL Just gotta relax. Yeah, some Drive-By Truckers or something.
MARCUS PARKS Now while Bulger came out the other end, others in this experiment lost their mind
completely. Some had to be pried loose from under their beds, growling, barking, and frothing
at the mouth.
BEN KISSEL This I understand.
MARCUS PARKS Bulger said that after these men were taken to a strip cell down the hall, none of them were
ever seen again.
BEN KISSEL whoa. That's fucking horrifying.
MARCUS PARKS They might I mean they might have taken them to a different part of the prison but they also
might have just took them out back and shot him in the head.
BEN KISSEL that's horrible!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah and buried them in one of the nameless, graveless prison graveyards.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Now outside of the prison system, Gottlieb also contracted a psychiatrist at Stanford
University named James Hamilton who'd worked with George Hunter White on the OSS truth
serum project and had advised the Chemical Corps on biological warfare. Among the three MK
Ultra subcontracts Hamilton headed, he studied quote "synergistic actions of drugs that may
be appropriate in abolishing consciousness".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's not good. I need my consciousness.
BEN KISSEL Wait what are you studying?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're trying to get rid of the operating system that you live in.
BEN KISSEL Oh, okay.
MARCUS PARKS And he was researching methods to enable the administration of these drugs without the
patient's knowledge.
BEN KISSEL Now that I think about it, it seems like most of the names we're talking about are male other
than MKNAOMI which is the secretary. Maybe a woman could have helped here. Maybe just
one to be like, 'Guys? What are you doing?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The woman they'd trot out that is like the friendly face of the CIA at this time, I forget what her
name is, it's like the former director and she's this cute little lady and she's like, 'Oh you know
we just sit at the desk and we read files.' You fucking traitorous bitch! You all need to go to The
Hague!
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, we all know what happened when that wonderful woman Janet Reno was put in
charge.
BEN KISSEL Oh yes, we love Waco.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We do.
MARCUS PARKS We love you, Waco. Also in the Ivy League, a psychiatrist named Robert Hyde experimented on
students from Harvard, Emerson, and MIT. And all of these people were unwittingly
participating in the CIA's research into mind control.
BEN KISSEL No I got the conclusion here, they're all spoiled brats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, bunch of nerds.
BEN KISSEL Hello, spoiled brats.
MARCUS PARKS For the paltry sum of $15, students drank a vial of clear, colorless, odorless liquid that they
were told might produce a quote unquote "altered state" maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I remember licking a powder out of an altoid can at the Creek. And that was for free. I didn't
get paid to do that.
BEN KISSEL They got paid $15, yeah. I used to pay $5 for a cup of that.
MARCUS PARKS However no one involved in the study had the proper training to guide the participants nor did
they have the proper training to even know what the participants were going through. And the
reactions were so severe, one girl hanged herself in the clinic bathroom.
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were destabilized.
BEN KISSEL No, don't do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You don't go back. It's very difficult especially if you have other undiagnosed mental illnesses
with it and then you just get shot hardcore down sucking tube of your own mind.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. You gotta put them in soft rooms, blow up castles, man. Come on!
MARCUS PARKS Well, they have no idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They had no idea.
BEN KISSEL The CIA has the best fricking drugs, they need a Chip and Jo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL They someone to come and fix up these places.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which is why they hired them.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Well once they got the fucking drugs to the right people we got 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest'. It's fucking insane what happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. It helps.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic movie.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well book.
BEN KISSEL They made a book out of that movie? Yes! Never fails.
MARCUS PARKS But perhaps the most infamous Ivy League study that is suspected to have been funded by MK
Ultra money involved Ted Kaczynski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will have my revenge!
BEN KISSEL Yes Ted, you actually will.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's got cancer now.
BEN KISSEL Does he really?
MARCUS PARKS Well he's had a run. He's like in his 80s. Yeah. And Ted Kaczynski of course is the Unabomber.
In Ted's second year at Harvard when he was just 17 years old he volunteered for a study run
by a doctor named Henry Murray. Now there was no drugs involved in this study, this was
pure psychological mumbo jumbo. And over the course of three years Kaczynski and other
students were subjected to aggressive traumatizing sessions in which Murray had them
confessed to their most revered beliefs. Then once Murray had all of their beliefs all typed up
in a nice little file, he'd go in and rip those beliefs and the subjects apart during brutal
interrogation sessions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, that's what you believe in? Let's see what Reddit thinks. They just went through and just
showed all of the various shithead opinions.
BEN KISSEL The comments. You need to see the Ted Kaczynski file, just like I'm actually gonna file this one
under 'will come back to haunt me'. That's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Smells like old milk.
BEN KISSEL Nice. Okay, good.
MARCUS PARKS Well the point of this study, Murray said, was to test house subjects would emotionally
respond to extreme stress and interrogation. But all it did to Ted Kaczynski, who was never
what you'd call well adjusted, was destroy his entire sense of self. He was never the same after
the experiments at Harvard. And it's not a coincidence that almost half of Kaczynski's mail
bombs were sent to universities after he escaped society to a remote shack in Montana.
BEN KISSEL They made a supervillain.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then you can see why when you start to read 'Programmed to Kill' how it begins to start to
make sense in some ways where 'Programmed to Kill' jumps off the reservation. This is one of
those where you're like well, that's a direct fucking result of MK Ultra. So they got 1:
Programmed to Kill, 0: America.
MARCUS PARKS But they did not program him to kill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, they just programmed him to not be him anymore.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well they just didn't give a shit. That's the whole thing about all of this, they just don't
fucking care what happens. It's all chaos, all of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Right, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Outside of academia, Sidney Gottlieb trusted his fellow MK Ultra scientists with LSD in social
settings.
BEN KISSEL Oh that's going to work out great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI To get any idea you gotta see how it works operationally.
BEN KISSEL Start dancing like Elaine from Seinfeld.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, people did a lot more than that.
MARCUS PARKS Actually they would say that sometimes Sidney Gottlieb would do a bunch of acid and show off
his folk dancing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI His folk dancing? Yeah! Do that thing where they click their feet together and then they slap
forearms at the same time.
BEN KISSEL Dang.
MARCUS PARKS Well specifically, Gottlieb would supply acid for recreational use to Harold Abramson who if
you'll remember guided Gottlieb through his first acid trip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you think you have to sit and talk about fucking soccer with Gottlieb for an hour after you
get it? Is this is where the actual ceremony of hanging out with your dealer began?
BEN KISSEL Oh that would suck, dude.
MARCUS PARKS Reportedly Abramson would distribute acid to guests at his long island home during parties.
These parties were, according to a source, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wild and crazy along with all the sex and what have you. So fondue, salsa was everywhere.
BEN KISSEL Everywhere, yeah. Wild and crazy. And the other one was wild and wooly, I believe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And these are just LSD fuck parties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The thing is I don't get horny on hallucinogens.
BEN KISSEL No, man.
MARCUS PARKS To each his own, then. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Excellent, excellent.
BEN KISSEL Marcus is always a little horned up, he's a little horny dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm horny too but...
MARCUS PARKS Yeah on hallucinogens it can be an absolutely beautiful experience.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS But from what that same person said, you would be very, very surprised. And those are the
words that he used, "very, very surprised" at who attended some of these LSD fuck parties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was all celebrities which is why they get pulled into this shit too. It's the same thing cause
they all started kind of mixing.
BEN KISSEL Oh I thought you were going to say hard working middle class people with families.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You would be very surprised. There's like five line workers in Carhartt jackets.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS But outside of the hallucinogenic sex parties, Gottlieb gave Abramson $85,000 in MK Ultra
funding to perform LSD experiments that were supposed to surmise disturbance of memory,
the eliciting of information, suggestibility, creation of dependence, and of course alteration of
sex patterns.
BEN KISSEL Oh they're going to unlock so much magical information in the mind of those actors.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's all about eating ass. Yeah, it's eating asshole and sucking dick.
MARCUS PARKS Well among these experiments with adults though, Abramson is also the only MK Ultra
scientist known to experiment on children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well we know, we have proof that he did.
BEN KISSEL So it had probably happened more than this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Probably yeah, I think so.
MARCUS PARKS Abramson gave prepubescent boys psilocybin and fed 14 children between the ages of 6-11
that were all diagnosed with schizophrenia 100 micrograms of LSD every day for six weeks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean Dweezil Zappa was on the same diet and look how successful he is now.
BEN KISSEL I guess so. Man, that's horrible.
MARCUS PARKS But also back in the 1950s, diagnosed with schizophrenia doesn't mean schizophrenia because
schizophrenia was the catchall back then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you were like a little boy who kind of wanted to play with dolls and they were like,
'Schizophrenic, we need to fucking blast his brain.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean these are probably kids with emotional problems but still, you're giving 100
micrograms of LSD to a child. But while many of the subjects of MK Ultra experiments were
drug addicts, prisoners, students, and mental patients, the scientists in charge also
experimented quite a bit on themselves. Now they had already been dosing each other here
and there during Artichoke but during MK Ultra they took it to the next level. Since there was a
considerable difference between testing LSD in a laboratory and using it in the real world,
Gottlieb and his colleagues began in-house experiments designed to find out what would
happen if you gave LSD to a subject in a normal life setting without warning.
BEN KISSEL Oh my God. I wonder what's going to happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI High paranoia.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that checks out.
MARCUS PARKS To prepare for these experiments, scientists would go into a room two at a time, drop acid
together, and observe each other for hours, taking notes and analyzing their separate
experiences.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We should do this with the three of us.
BEN KISSEL Like Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin in that fantastic movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Chubby Girls Wear Plaid. Two Girls Go to the Execution Chamber.
MARCUS PARKS Prince of Beaches.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Beaches.
BEN KISSEL No, you guys wouldn't even know the movie I'm thinking of.
MARCUS PARKS I think it's Beaches.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 9 to 5.
BEN KISSEL 9 to 9. No but it was a fantastic movie, they played twins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I remember. I don't remember.
MARCUS PARKS I don't remember at all. But once everybody was comfortable with tripping on LSD, they
agreed to have acid slipped into their drink at any time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like being on set for Jackass movie.
BEN KISSEL I'm good, dude.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And they never knew when their turn would come. But once the acid was ingested, they
were eventually told that they've been dosed and they were told they could also take the rest
of the day off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, man. Your day is over. You're working day is now done.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. So I guess it must be kind of nice too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But when the limits of testing experienced psychonauts was reached, they started
dozing agency personnel who had never tripped before to the point where surprise acid trips
became an occupational hazard for CIA operatives. The tests actually went so far that a few
members of the technical services staff actually planned to put acid in the punch served at the
CIA Christmas party in 1954.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're still doing this shit. I know they're still doing this shit.
BEN KISSEL Hey honey, I was drugged at work today and I loosened my tie just a little bit. I got pretty
crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We need to put you in the sanitarium.
MARCUS PARKS But when the office of security learned of the plan, they put the kibosh on the whole scheme.
Don't put the acid in the punch bowl at the Christmas party, it's a bad idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wait till New Year's Eve!
BEN KISSEL I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS Now these surprise acid trips didn't always work out well. When one operative realized he'd
been dosed, he fled out into the streets of Washington DC, hallucinating that every car had
turned into a living monster with horrific eyes and all of them were out to get him.
BEN KISSEL You're gonna want to escape from that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know exactly that feeling. I remember leaving the Creek, I remember just walking the streets,
somehow I got home. I don't remember how I got to a bus station.
BEN KISSEL I remember spending some time in the bush.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah dude, this agent would hide behind parapets every time a car would drive by.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't fucking get me, man!
BEN KISSEL Oh man. It could be a great day but I think he was probably not having fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS He said that it was like living a horrific dream about someone chasing you that never stops.
Seems real bad. Although I'd love to trip in Washington DC.
BEN KISSEL Washington DC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That place gives me high paranoid vibes, man.
MARCUS PARKS Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That city drives me crazy.
MARCUS PARKS Love DC. But without a doubt the most well known story of a surprise dosing involved Frank
Olson, whose death nearly blew the lid off the whole MK Ultra project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Frank Olson played incredibly by Peter Sarsgaard in the Wormwood series, the Errol Morris
documentary series on Netflix is fantastic. But this guy was not a good fit for the job that he
was chosen for.
MARCUS PARKS No. He was not the type of person who was built for MK Ultra work but he did also participate
in biological research that some might consider evil. Frank Olson was not a blameless citizen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. I feel like he's a sad sack who got pulled into these various things because before this he
was working in the agricultural sciences and then he kind of got got.
MARCUS PARKS He got drafted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS I mean he definitely got drafted into like the whole WWII scene, everybody's got to do
everything they can for the country, don't ask questions about what we're asking you to do.
Frank's introduction to the world of covert operations began when Ira Baldwin called on him
to assist in research into biological warfare at Edgewood Arsenal. And Olson was actually one
of the first scientists assigned to Fort Detrick. Remember that's the place where they sent the
nazis and such.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. And Frank Olson, what's also interesting in just about his story is that his is an
encapsulation of the entire movement from Project Artichoke to MK Ultra because he was
featured in all of the original biological experiments that they were doing for biowarfare and
moved through all of the darkest chapters of intelligence spook history, he was there for.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah. He's an MK Ultra centerfold.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He showed up at Fort Detrick and oh my god, there's a fucking nazi here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's like, (German accent) 'I hope you like sausages'. And Olson's like, 'Actually I kind of do like
sausages.'
BEN KISSEL That's the thing, a Bavarian pretzel is actually good, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS By 1949 Frank Olson was acting chief of the Special Operations Division, the SOD, and he was
tasked with collecting data on medico-biological aspects by the CIA. So Frank traveled to
Antigua for Operation Harness which tested toxic clouds on animals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And guess what? It spilled over. Some people got sick as well. What a coincidence.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. How did the animals do? They didn't do well, huh?
MARCUS PARKS He participated in Operation Seaspray in San Francisco which we talked about last episode,
one fatality there. And on Plum Island just off the coast of Long Island, he tested toxins
deemed too deadly to be brought to the US mainland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So you're going to want to give it a good 10 mile radius.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, you wanna take that to Plum Island there, right near Long Island. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well you don't want these guys to have too long of a commute. They got to be home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, they charge by the hour.
BEN KISSEL No, I love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They've gotta get gas.
BEN KISSEL I love the idea of a bunch of drugged up Mafioso dudes. That's a great idea. It's a great idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS Weapons-wise, Olson developed handheld anthrax aerosols disguised as cans of shaving
cream, asthma spray that induced pneumonia, and a lipstick that would kill on contact. But by
1953 Olson had to step down as acting chief of the SOD because the pressures of the job were
giving him massive ulcers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But he still stayed with the SOD and the SOD was by then working closely with the CIA on MK
Ultra. Working out of Fort Detrick, Olson mostly conducted experiments involving poisoning
animals. According to his son, Olson would come to work in the morning and see just piles of
dead monkeys and Frank Olson was not the right guy for that kind of job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because everybody is high fiving each other, right? Because it means it worked.
BEN KISSEL Oh no. Great work, great work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Meanwhile Frank Olson, he's a sad sack, right? He's a bit of an Eeyore already.
BEN KISSEL I think that would make me sad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes. But he was already not fit for any of this stuff and he kept kind of being dragged along
with these various things because love of country, feeling of duty, he's supposed to do these
things, he has the skill set to do it, he's already killed people so he might as well just kill these
monkeys as well.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I don't think Eeyore would do anything like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You get Eeyore involved in the bio weapons industry.
BEN KISSEL Eeyore should have used some acid probably.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I bet you Eeyore would be like, 'Yeah, let's drop the bomb.' He's ready to go. He's suicidal
himself.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. You put someone like that in charge of a bunch of shit and we're all living in a fucking
crater.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're in his world now, we're in Eeyore's world.
BEN KISSEL Or Maybe that's exactly what he wanted and he would handle it all really well. Maybe he just
wanted a little bit of fucking respect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh so we now have an Eeyore defender? I say we give it to Tigger. Where's Tigger in this?
BEN KISSEL I love Eeyore! He's having fun, he's already successful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he's playing basketball.
MARCUS PARKS No, Frank Olson just didn't have the temperament for this sort of work but he was also there
while all of this work was going on and he watched all of it happen. He didn't torture humans
directly but since he was a part of this program going all the way back to the OSS days, he
observed and monitored quite a bit of torture. He was at Villa Schuster in Germany. He saw
this shit, he watched it, he wrote reports.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will say he didn't like it. He didn't do anything about it but he didn't like it.
MARCUS PARKS He didn't, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, maybe his hands were tied I guess.
MARCUS PARKS Now Frank Olson wasn't feeling great about his work with the CIA and it was amidst this
uncertainty that Frank was invited to an SOD group retreat at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake near
Frederick, Maryland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I feel like this was done kind of on purpose, that they were brought out there and they
would do these fun little trips.
BEN KISSEL Are they fun?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI His son found a document that said, because it was a hunting trip right, that was the idea that
they go out to this hunting lodge and they will fucking hang out and they're going to maybe
talk some business. But it was kind of like a mixer. But I think they brought guys out there to to
kind of see what's your loyalty like?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What's your thing? How much are you willing to-
BEN KISSEL Like Surviving The Game?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, very much so.
MARCUS PARKS Typically these retreats held every few months by Sidney Gottlieb were made up of the four
CIA scientists who ran MK Ultra and five army scientists from the SOD. And one of those
scientists was Frank Olson. But on this occasion, on the first night Gottlieb announced after
dinner that he dosed all of them with LSD.
BEN KISSEL Yay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not good because you're with these guys.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And the rest, they just kind of took it in stride. They laughed it off. But Olson became
very upset.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS He was very confused and very agitated because he'd never dropped acid nor had he ever
wanted to. And you're dropping acid with the four dudes in charge of MK Ultra.
BEN KISSEL Well have fun with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI These are not the trip sitters you want.
BEN KISSEL I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because the thing is that he kept saying, 'They laughed at me, they laughed at me.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah of course they were laughing at him, they're CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you know sometimes all it takes is one, that's the Ben Folds story, guy up in the tree.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know.
BEN KISSEL I don't know that one.
MARCUS PARKS Well the next day Olson returned home and refused to speak to his wife about what had
happened on the retreat, saying only quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I've made a terrible mistake.
BEN KISSEL Oh man. She probably thinks he did something a lot worse than he actually did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well because her first question is did you break security protocol? And he's like, 'Of course
not, I would never do that. But I've made a terrible mistake. They laughed.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And there are many theories proposed over the years as to what Frank Olson's terrible
mistake statement actually meant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He could have pooped his pants.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I mean it's acid, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Still.
BEN KISSEL But everyone else is on acid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You forget that perspective.
MARCUS PARKS I mean the most popular theory is that in the midst of the trip, Olson lost his cool and
threatened to expose MK Ultra along with all the other shady shit that he'd done in the
government's name over the years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's such a - not to be anything - he's such a company man and he was not a dynamic
personality.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So I don't know if it went that far but I like what his son said. His son, his point makes more
sense.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. According to Frank Olson's son, his father probably just finally realized the sort of people
he'd actually been working for this whole time because as all three of us know, hallucinogens
have a way of putting shit into perspective.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah because this is the danger of acid within these groups, right. Because we've said this,
most of them like had no reaction, they were like, 'Alright, whatever, I'm seeing things.' But
every once in a while they had the enlightened agent that would get what acid is supposed to
do and it opens your perspective and then all of a sudden they're not as good at their job
anymore.
BEN KISSEL Right. I gotta get out of here, I'm gonna go join the circus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's true.
MARCUS PARKS Well it's all the shit over the years that he has known is wrong but he's kinda pushed to the
back of his head by using patriotism or using service for his country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're fighting the communists!
MARCUS PARKS Fighting the communists. And now he's taken acid and he finally sees oh my god, what have I
done?
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Now after Olson returned to work he was obviously disoriented and kind of pissed. He openly
considered resignation which was really bad news for both the SOD and the CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think you mean it was bad news for Frank Olson.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because if you are a part of the literal war crimes system of the United States armed forces
and then you say I'm going to quit. It's not chill for them because you're supposed to harbor
the secrets, the most closely held darkest secrets within our military arm and now oh, you
want to be a free agent now. Oh sure, okay, yeah. We'll let you go.
MARCUS PARKS See Olson had spent 10 years at Fort Detrick and therefore knew almost everything about the
SOD and MK Ultra. He knew shit that was bad enough to cause international incidents if they
ever got out. For one, Frank had been in France with several other SOD scientists in 1951 when
an entire French village had been mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dude, look this up, look this up. It's called the 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning. It's a wild
story and there's an hour long documentary on it about these people that might have been a
part of an MK Ultra experiment but they didn't know.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. 7 people died. The official cause was ergot poisoning but it's very likely that this was an
MK Ultra or maybe even a Project Artichoke experiment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This episode's so thick. This is so conspiracy thick.
MARCUS PARKS Additionally, Frank Olson knew the truth about the use of biological weapons during the
Korean war which again has circumstantial evidence but no proof. Frank Olson might have
given us real evidence. Furthermore, Olson had also watched a 20 year old soldier in London
volunteer for sarin testing then very quickly foam at the mouth, collapse, and die. In other
words Frank Olson knew about a lot of dirty deeds which is very dangerous knowledge to have
when you're spinning out of control in a fit of sudden conscience.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Now it seems like the CIA gave Olson a chance to snap out of it. But five days after his trip it
was obvious to the CIA that Frank Olson was permanently and massively fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's out of pocket.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, dude. The thing is he still seems pretty upset.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. He's like all upset about us dosing him or whatever.
BEN KISSEL Yes. It's like I thought he'd be over it by like five days ago, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I gave him like 72 hours to be chill.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Whatever, Frank. Get over it, dude.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually word got to Sidney Gottlieb and after a few minutes of chatting with Olson, Gottlieb
decided to deliver Frank to MK Ultra scientist Harold Abramson in New York City. Remember
Abramson's the guy with the Long Island fuckhouse. And once Olson arrived he told Abramson
that since he'd been dosed, he couldn't sleep, couldn't focus, and he couldn't work. So after a
6 hour conversation, Abramson gave Olson a bourbon and barbiturate cocktail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Here take this, it's gonna make you sleep for like 19 hours, you're gonna love it. It's gonna be
good.
BEN KISSEL Okay. Am I being drugged again?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, absolutely not, no, no, no, no, no. It's just barbiturates.
BEN KISSEL Oh wait, what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no, just take this.
BEN KISSEL Oh I'll just drink it? Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Then Abramson woke him up the next morning so they could go see John Mulholland, the
CIA's magician.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey wake up, we gotta go see a magician. No, no, no, I know you're reeling from whatever, all
this kind of shit, you don't know what's real or not. But we've got to go see a guy who does
tricks for a living.
BEN KISSEL I don't know if I'm ready for this, but all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm not really in it, I don't want to play any choose your card games or anything, okay? I don't
want a balloon animal.
BEN KISSEL He's gonna perform for us buddy.
MARCUS PARKS Well in one account of this meeting, Mulholland tried hypnotizing Olson in an attempt to
probe his mind, see if he could find what was wrong. But in another account, which I think is
actually the more likely account, Olson freaked out on Mulholland because he thought the
magician was gonna make him disappear like a rabbit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So this guy, this is this super fucking cryptic MK Ultra psychiatrist that you're working with. He
says we're going to go see a magician which in my mind that's code for assassin, right?
BEN KISSEL Could be, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the thing in mafia movies.
BEN KISSEL Let's go see the magic man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna go take a drive out to the beach. And you're like oh fuck. And then it's you and
two guys wearing ponchos in the back of it being like 'Why are you wearing ponchos?'
Splashback. Oh, we're going to a park or something? Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I mean it could be worse, you could actually go to the beach with a bunch of mobsters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, absolutely. And then hang out all day.
MARCUS PARKS Once the magician got to be too much, Olson jumped from his chair and ran out of the house
while one of his two handlers, Vincent Ruwet, followed behind. Once Ruwet caught Olson, he
and Olson's other handler, Robert Lashbrook, took him to see, and this is a fun day, a magician
and a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on Broadway called Me and Juliet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We need to have a fun day.
BEN KISSEL Fun day so far.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean, I guess, I guess I could go see a play or whatever. I mean plays are boring, I don't
wanna go.
BEN KISSEL Buddy you are being a buzzkill and we've drugged you so much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know, I should like all this. You really should.
MARCUS PARKS It's a Broadway musical. It's Rodgers and Hammerstein. Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Come on!
BEN KISSEL Have fun with it.
MARCUS PARKS Now Frank did make it all the way to intermission but once they were out in the lobby, Olson's
paranoia kicked in and he became convinced that he was going to be arrested by somebody at
any moment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're next to two members of the CIA, right. You know that something's going on. You're
being bodily handled by two men all day long that then forced you to go see a musical. That's
not what I want to go. That's not where I wanna be.
BEN KISSEL It's not as bad as it could be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because you know you're just loitering for something, like you're just waiting, there's
something that's supposed to happen.
BEN KISSEL They're gonna paper the room for the fricking theater, dude. You need to go in there and
support the arts.
MARCUS PARKS Well it's hard to say exactly what is happening and exactly what they're trying to do or exactly
what they're trying to figure out. Because that night they went back to the hotel and Olson
was sent to a room by himself. They didn't keep an eye on him, they didn't stay in the room
with him. In fact the next morning when they went downstairs they found Olson in the lobby.
Olson had wandered New York City all night long, he'd even thrown away his wallet and his
identification in the process.
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what I truly think it is, it all tracks, it's been their philosophy all along, it's them being
like, 'Let's just see what happens.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because again Frank Olson has been a good company man for a very long time and he's really
close and Frank Olson, even though he's not acting like it, he has his own ships because he has
all this fucking information. So they are watching him guardedly and trying to decide, maybe
he'll pop out of it. That's what I really think that they're kind of doing, waiting to see maybe
he'll come around.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're in this safe place for the CIA, we've got places everywhere we could take him, and then
maybe we'll just kind of see what he does and then figure out how we'll react depending on
what he does.
BEN KISSEL Could be. They might just love the chaos of it all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They do.
MARCUS PARKS Now since this all happened close to Thanksgiving, Olson returned to his family in Maryland.
But after Ruwet and Lashbrook reported Olson's state of mind to Sidney Gottlieb, Gottlieb
ordered them to bring him back to New York City. On the way they stopped off in Long Island
and picked up Harold Abramson, then all four drove to Manhattan where Abramson convinced
Olson to voluntarily commit himself to a mental hospital.
BEN KISSEL Oh great.
MARCUS PARKS Olson agreed and from what Agent Lashbrook said, Frank was actually looking forward to the
break, commenting that he was excited to catch up on his reading.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I can't wait to be forced into rehab at some point.
BEN KISSEL That'll be great, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Rehab. My god, one day, once quote unquote "exhaustion" catches up to me. Holy shit, I can't
wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fingers crossed.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Passages of Malibu seems nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, that's where I wanna go. You can apparently get great drugs there.
BEN KISSEL I'm sure, yeah. It's really expensive though.
MARCUS PARKS Frank Olson however would never make it to that hospital.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what his son said, his son said like, 'Dad died? No, he disappeared. He went to New York
and he just never came back.'
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, no way that means he's dead.
MARCUS PARKS At 2:25 am that night, Frank Olson crashed through his hotel window at The Statler 10 stories
up and he died in a pool of blood on the 7th Avenue sidewalk.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS Reportedly he tried saying something to the hotel's doorman right before he expired but
couldn't get out the words.
BEN KISSEL Oh I know what it was. So my room is on the first floor, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes!
MARCUS PARKS Now when police went up to Frank's room, they found one of his handlers, Robert Lashbrook,
sitting on the toilet because the two of them had been sharing the space. That's the funny
thing, Robert Lashbrook and Frank Olson had been staying in the same room.
BEN KISSEL He did a horrible job as a handler.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel like or he did exactly what his job as a handler, much like the baggage handlers that I've
seen in various airports and the way they treat-
BEN KISSEL You're gonna take this time to bitch about airport security? Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I am just saying the way they treat our bags might be the way they treated a certain Frank
Olson.
BEN KISSEL Do you want to talk about how men and women drive a little different?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I am just saying they don't necessarily view our luggage as it's their luggage.
BEN KISSEL And that is a shoehorn from Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What's the deal with air traffic, guys? See, I'm now doing you. I'm you.
BEN KISSEL It's pretty funny.
MARCUS PARKS Well interestingly, Lashbrook said that he hadn't heard Olson flinging himself through the
window.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Definitely not, man.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. What is this, Ace Ventura?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (operatic shouting)
MARCUS PARKS But when police questioned the switchboard operator at the hotel, they got a different story.
The operator said that she'd connected Lashbrook to MK Ultra scientist Harold Abramson after
Olson went out the window. Lashbrook said, 'Well, he's gone.' And to that Abramson said,
'Well, that's too bad.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Didn't seem genuine though. We need a sarcasm font.
BEN KISSEL Well that's too bad. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Now the police figured for some reason that this was a homosexual affair gone wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why is it always... They were in separate beds, man.
BEN KISSEL They're just lazy.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know. Was the '50s, was every fucking man on man violence, every man on man
murder, was it a homosexual affair gone wrong? Because that seems like every fifth murder,
that's what the cops say. I don't know.
BEN KISSEL I don't think that's the case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS But when Lashbrook was taken to the police station and questioned, he said that he and Olson
worked for the Defense Department and that Olson had become mentally unstable. According
to Lashbrook, Olson had jumped and that was all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because you know suicidal guys, they always take a running jump, closed window.
BEN KISSEL Difficult way to do it, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Always, just to show you how fucking (guitar riff). They are like super metal. They want it to be
metal always, they don't ever open the window and tumble out.
BEN KISSEL No, no, I like to do it the most painful possible way.
MARCUS PARKS But since these men worked in defense, Lashbrook said, the whole matter had to be kept quiet
for national and security reasons.
BEN KISSEL All right. So you're not gay?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So you guys ain't kissing, huh?
BEN KISSEL But you guys were in the same room?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Listen, listen. You kiss me, show me you're not gay.
BEN KISSEL Kiss my partner, make sure he's not gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now let me watch. Okay, now you guys all tumble around on the ground a little bit. Let me see
if you get hard.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it turns out I'm gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Arrest me. Put the handcuffs on me.
MARCUS PARKS Congratulations!
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah! Oh, everyone's gay? This is great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 1953!
BEN KISSEL Wonderful time.
MARCUS PARKS And once Lashbrook's status as a government employee was confirmed, he was set free and a
CIA fix it man made sure everyone at the crime scene kept their mouth shut as well. Now no
one will ever know what really happened with Frank Olson that night but it's thought that
Sidney Gottlieb had decided that Frank Olson was so ill that he threatened the security of MK
Ultra.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS And it might have been, you know what? Frank Olson might have just said one thing that night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. I'm gonna talk. All you have to say is I'm gonna talk, I'm gonna tell everyone.
MARCUS PARKS Not even that. He might have just fucking joked like, 'Man, you guys are sending me in the
mental institution. You're really trusted me with all these secrets. What if I fucking tell
somebody about this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If he started surmising what he could do.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL He may have also just inferred his actions, maybe he didn't say anything and they're just like,
'Don't think we can trust him.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Or he's going to a mental hospital and they're thinking what's he gonna tell that
psychiatrist?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Exactly. Well to be honest they would just put him in an MK Ultra hospital. He wasn't going out
of network for this.
BEN KISSEL they would also rely on everyone just not believing him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI True. Right. Absolutely. Maybe sometimes but that's what they shifted to which is the idea of
like that's where all the satanic ritual abuse stuff kind of gets hidden and stuck into this and all
that kind of shit where you make it so outlandish no one will believe you this. This I just think
they were already killing people, they were already killing guys.
BEN KISSEL That's another one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They'd just throw him the window.
MARCUS PARKS And since MK Ultra was seen as one of the most important projects in the CIA, Gottlieb had no
qualms ordering Olson's death or so the story goes. But what's interesting here is that even if
Frank Olson did just kill himself, it still happened as a result of Sidney Gottlieb dosing him. It
had been the direct result of an MK Ultra experiment, yet nobody really cared. As far as Allen
Dulles was concerned, Gottlieb had exercised nothing more than quote unquote "poor
judgment".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Over here at the CIA we call that a whoopsie doopsie.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's a whoopsie doopsie indeed. That's a double whoopsie doopsie I think.
MARCUS PARKS Therefore he was given a light reprimand. But since MK Ultra was considered so vital, that's a
slap on the wrist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Gottlieb?
BEN KISSEL No, get away from the honey mustard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna spray you with this spray bottle.
BEN KISSEL That's right. No honey mustard at lunch, Gottlieb.
MARCUS PARKS But since MK Ultra was considered so vital, Sidney Gottlieb was given permission to take MK
Ultra even wider and even weirder. And that's where we'll pick back up for Part 4 with
Operation Midnight Climax and psychic driving.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It truly does only get worse from here.
BEN KISSEL Getting into Season 9 when they adopt a duck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously. Yeah, we're just getting wilder and woolier here in the next episode because we're
really gonna start getting into what y'all know about MK Ultra, what comes up all the time in
pop culture. We're actually really starting to just hit that part and then we'll wrap it all up with
an Episode 5 talking about where it left America and all the rest of us now which is a shattered
group of people. It's really fucked up. It's a rough story.
BEN KISSEL It is a fascinating story, a true story, and a story that I'm so happy we are covering. Thank you
all so much for supporting the show. I hope you guys are enjoying this series of thus far. We
have some big news regarding our Sirius show, we're going to start that the 21st.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 21st!
BEN KISSEL So that'll be 5pm PST and 8pm EST. So call in, we'll have a number and stuff, we'll put it on our
social media.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL We can't wait to talk with you guys. And the comic book is out there. Check that out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Soul Plumber coming out soon, Episode 5. Supply lines!
MARCUS PARKS Issue 5. Issue 5.
BEN KISSEL Supply lines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I keep calling them episodes, I keep doing that. We just finished writing it and we can't wait to
do more, hopefully we get to do more comic books. We love it so much, it's been so much
fucking fun.
MARCUS PARKS So cool.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We got Z2, go check it out, Last Comic Book on the Left, you can preorder that. Then we got
our coffee, I have some Spring-Heel'd Jack Mothman blend and I'm still drinking it and it's only
gotten better. He's a wizard.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. We'll keep you up to date on what's going on with our THC and hopefully we'll get
some flower at some point for ya. And just keep on supporting all the shows here. How's No
Dogs doing? Is No Dogs coming back?
MARCUS PARKS No Dogs is absolutely coming back. We just recorded the first part of our new series yesterday,
it's going to be coming out soon. We're going to bank a couple before we release it. But if I can
give you a little bit of a hint, Tommy is about to get his tonsils taken out.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You just activated an MK Ultra agent.
MARCUS PARKS Tommy is getting his tonsils taken out.
BEN KISSEL They are covering Steve Winwood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god. And then Some Place Under Neith is also coming back for Season 2 very soon, they
just recorded their first episode of Season 2 and that will start coming out soon as well.
BEN KISSEL And Fraudsters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fraudsters is now cooking again, we're back up.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, it's been so nice just getting back into the groove. We got Side Stories, gonna start
video episodes on our Patreon, you're gonna say some of that shit.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Can't wait for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, fuckers. We got this motherfucking on lock.
BEN KISSEL We got Top Hat, we got Brighter Side, Wiz/Bru, you know where to check out all the shows.
Thank you so much for supporting our network and our family and you all are wonderful. And
don't forget, ahil yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail me. Don't take a vial from anybody from the government.
BEN KISSEL No, no. Unless you are willing and ready to trip fucking balls and perhaps assassinate Putin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We don't do it anymore!
BEN KISSEL This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support
our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listen to go to
lastpodcastnetwork.com.