BEN KISSEL What are frogs?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What's not an op?
BEN KISSEL We do you mean what's not an op?
MARCUS PARKS It's an interesting question, yeah. I'd say it's a valid question actually.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What is not an op?
BEN KISSEL You know what's not an op? Switch the 'O', make it an 'A'. An appetizer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh I thought you were gonna say an app. I was like no, no more apps!
BEN KISSEL No more apps. You can still trust the mozz stick, you can still trust the buffalo chicken, you can
still trust a quesadilla, baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I dunno. It depends on who's serving them to you and where you're at in the context of eating
these so called appeteasers. What are we teasing, invasion?
MARCUS PARKS I could actually argue that appetizers could be an app because if you look at the quality of fast
food over the last couple of decades, you can see that the quality has dropped precipitously.
Therefore I believe that it's quite possible that the American government is getting us used to
a lower quality of food that will one day result in us eating cockroach cubes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They want us to live in a cave.
BEN KISSEL I completely agree.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what's happening and that's why we need to start changing it from appeteasers to
oppeteasers.
BEN KISSEL Oppesteasers. The Oppenheimer oppeteaser. Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left
everyone, I am Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus. This episode is officially the most
powerful we've ever done because now I can't even trust cheese.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See? Broken. We broke him. Am I still Henry?
BEN KISSEL I don't know anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because if I'm just the framework of Henry, you would never know the difference if you just
had an actual sort of walking avatar version of myself, it would be hiding a fucking assassin.
BEN KISSEL You know what the moment would be where we would realize that's not the real Henry,
Marcus? Remember when we were in Scotland we passed a dude playing the fiddle?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And all of us, our knees started moving and we just started instinctively white person dancing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I felt my racial history come through the generations.
BEN KISSEL If we are walking with you and we find out and we pass a fiddle and we see them knees not
moving, that's not Henry, man.
MARCUS PARKS Not anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Please, you better be there to pull the plug.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. All right everyone, let's get into MK Ultra part four.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now by this point in our series, I wouldn't blame you if the sheer amount of information we've
conveyed about MK Ultra is causing your head to spin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Welcome to the fucking party, all right. Fucking get on the level, catch up.
BEN KISSEL I feel like I'm on the Gravitron.
MARCUS PARKS So we figured it might be helpful to do a small recap of how we got to this point and we also
thought it would be helpful to address why MK Ultra is such a slippery and confusing subject.
Now the operative words here are secrecy and arrogance. The roots for MK Ultra lay in the
OSS, the precursor to the CIA That we covered in episode one. Their freewheeling style of
doing whatever they felt was right, no matter what anyone else said or dead gave the CIA let's
say an independent streak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I learned it from watching you!
BEN KISSEL Whoa, man. What are you talking about? Is that why you masturbate by pushing it in until it
gets hard and then you stroke it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wish you had covered up them keyholes, papi because I knew them keyholes were going to
show me things that I didn't want to know but I kept coming and looking.
BEN KISSEL I learned watching you.
MARCUS PARKS And since the higher ups at the OSS were all men of privilege and great wealth from the richest
families in America-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Coincidence?
MARCUS PARKS I think really what it is more than that, it's a certain masters of the world arrogance that got
baked into the CIA's DNA along with a healthy disdain for people that they considered lesser
than. Again it's not necessarily conspiracy, it's just classism.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just straight up classism that is just baked in, it is not a bug, it is a feature.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. I can just see them in the cafeteria line looking at the cookie tray being like,
'There's no raisin cookies. We love raisin cookies. And could you please just bring back more
raisin cookies?' And it's like you get out of here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how you know you're a member of the black nobility is that you like raisins in your
cookies.
BEN KISSEL Raisins in your cookies. Please god.
MARCUS PARKS I fucking love oatmeal raisin cookies, they're fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
BEN KISSEL Okay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See? See? Oppeteaser.
BEN KISSEL The oatmeal kinda changes it a little bit. It gives it a working class flare.
MARCUS PARKS So after WWII and the OSS came the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the CIA. And
Americans decided that the Soviets were both an all powerful enemy with agents everywhere
and an inferior state with a political belief system that no American would ever willingly
choose. They got two opposite ideas in their head.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And while the Soviets were indeed lethally clever and dangerous, make no mistake, they were
nowhere near as powerful as we made them out to be. And while Soviet communism was
indeed a bad idea, poorly executed, communism is not evil in and of itself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We looked at them as if and we projected a fantasy villain onto their substructure in terms of
this realm of villainy. The idea of brainwashing, behavior modification and what we did was
that we created the villain that we wanted to see in our own minds and then decided to out
joust that fake villain for supremacy in the world of behavior modification when there was no
competition to begin with.
BEN KISSEL And of course communism as we learned from the movie Clue is just a red herring. Also
communism, it is just a...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's an economic system that talks about like the idea you know, there's things to be learned
from.
BEN KISSEL It's a government system and economic system and in itself it is just a tool but humans make it
impossible to achieve.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're the bad ones.
BEN KISSEL Also this reminds me of the time that in the military, for the Russian military, they would have
parades and they would fly the same planes over and over and over again and the US would be
like, 'They have to have thousands of them!' But it was just the same four and they just kept
refilling. So yes, it was exaggerated, the power of the Soviets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They weaponized show businesses.
BEN KISSEL They really did, they really did.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well since many in the American government and the American public believed in the
power of the Soviets and to be honest the Soviets cultivated that belief to great effect, it
generated a level of paranoia that led to some terrible decisions. Biggest example, the Vietnam
war. But that paranoia did not just fuel foreign policy, it also contributed heavily to the
projects pursued by the CIA who, as Henry said, had come to erroneously believe that the
communists, both Soviet and Chinese, had developed mind control techniques.
BEN KISSEL Oh man. The word 'erroneous' has been ruined by Ernest Goes to Camp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Eggs erroneous.
BEN KISSEL Eggs erroneous.
MARCUS PARKS So building off previous research done by the nazis and by the OSS, the CIA began
experimenting on humans in a series of projects that would fill this non existent mind control
gap, starting with Operation Bluebird.
BEN KISSEL So you mentioned Marcus, don't the nazis do a bit of what you like to do? Research.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
BEN KISSEL Isn't that interesting that we all we have something in common.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Holy fucking shit. It's coming from inside! He is the oppeteaser and I am the entr e of America.
BEN KISSEL No, no, no!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Maybe I'm not the CIA operative.
BEN KISSEL Ding ding. Oh I'm sorry, my mozz sticks are done.
MARCUS PARKS You know, it's you and Pol Pot, you both do that thing. It's called breathing. Isn't that
interesting?
BEN KISSEL Oh, interesting!
MARCUS PARKS Isn't that interesting?
BEN KISSEL Well I don't even know anyone named Pol and I would never trust anyone with the last name
Pot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There has to be a burlesque dancer, a boil-esque dancer named Pol Pot.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, that's so funny. It's very offensive but funny.
MARCUS PARKS And so as the Cold War escalated, so too did the CIA's research into mind control. And with
each iteration, the experiments got more intense and more widespread. Project Bluebird
morphed into Project Artichoke which itself became MK Ultra. And once MK Ultra was
established, the gloves were off. Whereas before the subjects in these mind control
experiments were mostly confined to foreign nationals, MK Ultra expanded the subject pool to
American citizens. Some were forced into participating while others quote unquote
"volunteered" but none had any idea that many of these experiments were tailor-made to
destroy their minds forever. The nefariousness of MK Ultra experiments cannot be
understated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It cannot be.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So to sum up, the last three episodes were the rise of the OSS and the creation of the OSS
using research that they we purchased from the nazis, various things, in order to start the
trails into the world of a truth serum and how that became Project Artichoke and then it
became MK Ultra. And what I forget is I've now been reading this material for two months and
we had a call yesterday, Marcus and I were talking yesterday on the phone-
BEN KISSEL That is like 1/4 of the year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a lot, it's a lot.
BEN KISSEL Wait, oh my god I'm bad at math.
MARCUS PARKS It's 1/6 of the year.
BEN KISSEL 1/6 of the year. It's a lot of the year is all I'm saying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm not concentrating on fractions right now, there's no time for that right now.
BEN KISSEL I'm sorry, go on. I'm sorry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So I forget that you as a listener are not reading the same material I'm reading for two months.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So I was saying like as when we were doing Aleister Crowley episodes, by the time I got to
Liber 4 it all started to kind of click in my mind, I started to kind of see the substructure that
Aleister Crowley really was the master of and why I ended up kind of gaining more and more
respect for him as a thinker as the episodes went because I really started to see the structure
as a whole. Same thing with MK Ultra. I would recommend to you, if you really want to know
what's going on and this is not just a plug for our show, listen to these episodes several times.
Start to see the map of where the tentacles go.
BEN KISSEL This is good. This is a great PSYOP.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this is real, this is real.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, get your fucking yarn board out, man. Start connecting the dots.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously. We talk about the octopus of malice for a reason, it's because it really is difficult.
Marcus is now going to explain why it's so difficult to kind of put this all together in a timeline
because it's purposely obfuscated. What we need you to do as a listener is do your fucking
homework and get into this shit. If you want to learn about Project Monarch, which we're
going to get to the next episode, you're gonna need to start doing the walk yourself to
understand how you get to Project Monarch from the OSS. And that is what we are
desperately trying to contain in an audio way here on the show. And yeah, Natalie walks away
from me when I try to explain to her the PAS system, right.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Natalie walks away from me when I try to explain how they put children in cages and then feed
them chocolate in order to rip apart their minds.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Well, I don't understand why.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll tell you what!
BEN KISSEL You mentioned homework, there is a French candidate right now who happens to be a
communist who's running on a platform of no homework.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's got my vote.
BEN KISSEL He's running to the leader of the country, not the leader of a middle school.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now as to why the subject of MK Ultra is so slippery, we know for a fact that MK Ultra existed
and engaged in human experimentation on a large scale. But most of the CIA files pertaining to
MK Ultra were destroyed decades ago. The reason why we have the particulars however is
because many MK Ultra experiments were done out in the open at universities and mental
hospitals, both in America and abroad. And the results were published in dozens, if not
hundreds, of scientific journals that anyone could read. The hidden scandal of MK Ultra is that
the CIA And therefore the American public secretly paid for all of it, commissioning hundreds
of studies and experiments that practiced near nazi levels of cruelty in the vague hope that all
of it would somehow add up to mind control.
BEN KISSEL Your tax dollars hard at work. Just cut to a kid just like (screaming).
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's tied to a bed with ping pong balls taped to his face while he's just screaming about his
mother.
MARCUS PARKS And one of the most interesting parts of MK Ultra is that these scientists would have been
doing all of this highly unethical research even if the Cold War wasn't happening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like if we never got an ad deal for Last Podcast.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, we'd still be doing it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, still would have done it. But very few of these scientists even knew that their funding
was coming from the CIA because the money had been laundered through other agencies.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS In the 50s and 60s, the CIA funded projects at 44 universities including the universities of
Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Denver, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, Rochester, and Indiana as well as
Harvard, Berkeley, City College of New York, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Baylor, Emory, George
Washington University, Cornell, Florida State, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, and Tulane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, man. And it's all over the place and then not even to talk about the various
anthropological groups that took money too to find out, the term was 'international stressors'.
BEN KISSEL That's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the idea was just trying to figure out what stresses out other people? What stresses you
out?
BEN KISSEL Today we're gonna practice tickling. Don't tickle me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Don't tickle me!
BEN KISSEL I'm tickling you. Also don't forget all the experimentation involving crystal meth with our
community colleges.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean a lot of those brave volunteers, they really took it upon themselves.
BEN KISSEL It was pretty intense. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah. I think South Plains University in Levelland, Texas was one of the top crystal meth
research labs in the entire country, at least from 2001-2006.
BEN KISSEL And I went to community college, I know.
MARCUS PARKS (M)But because of the CIA's laundering of MK Ultra funds, we have no way of knowing the full
scope of how many universities actually furthered the CIA's quest for mind control, nor do we
know how many lives were destroyed as a result.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fritz Springmeier says over 3.5 million people were programmed to be sex slaves.
MARCUS PARKS Don't fucking bring Fritz Springmeier into this goddamn episode. You wait until next week
before you bring that crank into this.
BEN KISSEL Mom? Dad?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay. Hey, he was only arrested for assault and robbery one time.
BEN KISSEL Mom? Dad? Can I just get the Happy Meal, please? Can we just get out of this drive thru for
Mcdonald's?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Welcome to the awakened meals, son.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS Well for an example of how far the octopus of malice inserted its tentacles into academia, the
infamous Milgram Shock Experiments in which regular people were commanded by men in lab
coats to torture people with an escalating series of electric shocks, they were funded by the
Office of Naval Research which was funded in part by MK Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also what's fun is that we'll get into a little bit of detail here is that they would fund many
legit things as well, "legit" quote unquote not MK Ultra involved businesses and research
groups and all this kind of shit.
BEN KISSEL Was that the official title? Not MK Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not MK Ultra, wink wink. With all the emojis. And they would do that to buy an air of
legitimacy of being like, 'We're not the CIA. Would we talk about everybody's favorite color of
M&M in this massive campaign to choose a new color of M&M? Would we dare? How would
the CIA possibly be involved in that?'
BEN KISSEL M&M is a PSYOP, I believe.
MARCUS PARKS Well outside of laundering money through other governmental agencies though... Actually
Ben, I can't let this go. The man who actually created the term 'melts in your mouth, not in
your hand' was also responsible for one of the very first times that an advertising campaign
got involved in a a presidential campaign, for Dwight D Eisenhower's campaign. And one could
say that advertising is what ruined American politics forever which could be a part of an
overall control structure that the people in charge might have put into place so we would no
longer have any sort of sucking freedom over our goddamn government ever again!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, whoa.
BEN KISSEL There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a conspiracy b-b-b-b-b-b-breakdown.
BEN KISSEL Branding, baby! Branding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love when Dogmeat's here. I love it when you're here, buddy.
BEN KISSEL That was Dogmeat right there, he came out with fangs.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah man, fucking M&Ms.
BEN KISSEL You are correct.
MARCUS PARKS Well outside of laundering money through other governmental agencies, there were men who
were not only aware of where their money was coming from but actively assisted the CIA in
funding other MK Ultra subprojects. One of these men was a neurologist named Harold Wolff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Harold Wolff might as well, truly his title was that he was an expert and the leading field
researcher in pain.
BEN KISSEL In pain?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In pain.
BEN KISSEL In trying to aleve pain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is completely true, just in pain. The idea of yes, pain management, that's a part of it.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's also the source of pain. He's a pain doctor.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, that's what we're going to get into a lot on this episode is men who know the source
really well, like they know the negative side of it really well. And they figure that as far as the
solution goes, they'll figure that out later. But you really got to figure out the source first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We'll do it in post!
BEN KISSEL All right. We'll do it live.
MARCUS PARKS Well Harold Wolff had come into the CIA's orbit when he treated the son of CIA Director Allen
Dulles after Dulles' son suffered permanent brain damage from shrapnel during the Korean
War. Again that most likely fueled Allen Dulles hatred of communism. But as Dulles got to
know Wolff, he became aware of a theory dreamed up by Dr. Wolff called 'human ecology'.
Basically Wolff believed that with a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation, one could
wipe a mind clean and open it up to programming which of course was one of MK Ultra's main
goals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But our minds are filled with all these pesky memories and skills that we've learned and all of
these things you accrue.
BEN KISSEL Right, it's difficult.
MARCUS PARKS Personalities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Personality. You know how many gigs of brain space your personality takes up?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So what you really have to do is delete it, you just delete it and then you've got all this other
room for activities.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Well it's funny cause it's just unbelievable to think that this is something, and I believe
it's still happening to this day, but it reads like a cheesy horror movie. It reminds me of this
new movie Severance which is out now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's not a paid plug.
BEN KISSEL It's not a paid plug.
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL But it's just it's amazing that this is government funded which should be in a Hollywood studio
but this government funded idiocy but taken very seriously. And isn't idiocy? I don't know.
Anyway, go on.
MARCUS PARKS Well what we're going to get into Ben is that it's not necessarily as government funded as you
think it is. The CIA found these guys already doing this stuff, they just gave them more money
to do more of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They got a raise. They went pro.
BEN KISSEL Oh sweet! Sweet, we're going pro!
MARCUS PARKS Well after Dulles found out about all this human ecology stuff, all this mind wiping stuff, he
connected Wolff to Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK Ultra. And together they formed a research
foundation that would appear to be independent but would actually be a conduit through
which MK Ultra money could be funneled directly to physicians, psychologists, chemists and
scientists. Thus the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was founded with Dr. Wolff
as the president and Sidney Gottlieb as secret director. It's also known as the Human Ecology
Fund. Correct, Henry?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, absolutely. And this was the legit description of the 1961 directory of the encyclopedia of
associations, this is what they said the Human Ecology Fund was for: "To stimulate and support
studies of man's adaptation to the complex aspects of his environment, conducts
investigations at universities and research centers in such subjects as psychic and physical
brain function impairments, sudden environmental change in the health and attitudes of a
large immigrant population, undergraduate adjustments, and ethnopsychiatry." Which ends
up turning into a whole thing of like how can we control everybody?
BEN KISSEL Right. So you guys are gonna put that glass tube in my pee hole, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just to see what it does!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it hurts man.
MARCUS PARKS Fascinating.
BEN KISSEL Fascinating. Wow, so they are hiding in plain sight but with creative intellectual language. So
maybe the layman doesn't understand, they're just saying we're going to fuck with your brain
quite a bit and see how it works.
MARCUS PARKS Or they just kind of wave it off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a part of it, that's a part of it. You guys are all missing the point here, that's the problem.
It's just a part of the experiment.
MARCUS PARKS Well Ben, I do think you do make somewhat of a point. I think when they say all these words
that sound very academic and very impressive, I think most people just went oh.
BEN KISSEL I see, interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You pass the yams? Oh yeah, huh? Wow, great. Yeah, well. Them Rams!
BEN KISSEL Go Rams.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Are a football team.
BEN KISSEL They are. Perfect.
MARCUS PARKS Well under Gottlieb's guidance, this organization, the Human Ecology Fund, funded dozens of
MK Ultra subprojects both bizarre and nefarious. In one study they lured 100 Chinese refugees
into an experiment with the false promise of academic fellowships, then tested them to see if
they could be reprogrammed to return to China to commit acts of sabotage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they're all just like, 'What do you want? We'll bring orange chicken there. Sure, yeah.
That's what you want to debilitate your entire economy?'
BEN KISSEL I mean all of this could have just been done with corn dogs, man.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Corn dogs and county fairs, that's what brainwashes people to hate where they come from.
Butter. All butter-related things, just give them butter. They'll be like, 'I'm never leaving again'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was their version of brainwashing. Ostensibly the North Korean and Chinese version of it
was to do that. Be like you could live like this, where they show them a village and a suppliant
woman comes out and she just goes like, 'I'll massage you'. And you set up this scenario where
like it could be pretty nice to live over here.
MARCUS PARKS But make no mistake, not every MK Ultra subproject was a large scale undertaking with dozens
of subjects being tortured and experimented upon. Other subprojects under the Society for
the Investigation of Human Ecology, the Human Ecology Fund, included studies of the
mongoloid skull, the effects of owning a fallout shelter on foreign policy viewsHENRY
ZEBROWSKI It does seem to make you kind of tight-lipped about leaving town.
MARCUS PARKS Honestly I grew up with a fallout shelter in my backyard and it definitely fucks with you a little
bit. When I was finally told like, oh yeah they built that because this house was built during the
Cold War and Abilene is one of the number one targets for nuclear bombs. Yeah, people built
fallout shelters just in case. It kind of fucks with you a little bit.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I believe it man.
MARCUS PARKS But it was also the place where my dad would store prickly pears for prickly pear margaritas. It
was a fun little concrete box.
BEN KISSEL Oh very nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He made the Cold War fun.
BEN KISSEL Yes. Also if there's any journalists out there listening when it comes to our new current
perhaps conflict, don't give out all their safe spaces. Because I was watching journalists being
like if the bombs go off, they're going to come right here. Maybe you don't wanna tell on
everybody. They're gonna go to this cathedral right here, so if you want to bomb that too.
MARCUS PARKS And also one more small subproject, the emotional impact of circumcision on Turkish boys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They love it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. That is what they found is they absolutely fucking adored it.
BEN KISSEL They love it!
MARCUS PARKS Cut more! Cut more!
BEN KISSEL Wow, I just feel like we have so many... What about cancer research? Have we gotten to that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's about causing cancer.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Actually it was about causing cancer. There were other projects that were not a part of MK
Ultra, they were just a part of American governmental research where we gave cereal laced
with uranium to mentally challenged children.
BEN KISSEL How'd it go?
MARCUS PARKS They died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was a success.
BEN KISSEL Wow. And that's where we came up with the worst cereal of all time, I'm just gonna say it, Kix.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nice.
BEN KISSEL I don't like Kix.
MARCUS PARKS I love Kix.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just fucking laced with uranium since fucking 1987.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS But all these small subprojects, in my opinion, this shows just how scattershot and piecemeal
MK Ultra really was and that is part of what makes it so hard to cover and so hard to
understand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because they did not fully have an endgame with any bit of any of this research. It really was a
giant data aggregation front where they were just trying to get as much data about every
single thing that could possibly be attached to mind wiping, assassinations, the effectiveness
of psychotropic drugs, all this type of thing. It was all just kind of like throwing spaghetti
against the wall and see what sticks.
BEN KISSEL And would you say that's because of competence or total incompetence? Because the point
was to be confusing, right? So was it competent for them to not dot every 'i' and cross every 't'
and put a period of every sentence?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sidney Gottlieb called the Human Ecology Fund the eyes and ears of MK Ultra. So basically MK
Ultra itself was supposed to be about soldiers being experimented on and trying to weaponize
soldiers into creating like quote unquote the "Manchurian candidate".
BEN KISSEL Right, super soldier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Super soldier, super spies. But the the rest of this is just about like we need to feed the beast
with more information. So they all became guilty by association, some more guilty than others
because of what they were already doing when MK Ultra arrived with a checkbook but the rest
of them were most of the time working and having no clue that they were working for the CIA
and they were just generating these random ass experiments and just being like, 'Okay, I'll give
it to this guy with his briefcase, to this codename bullshit, I guess it must be something from
the university.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah, codename Blork. I was I was really wishing they weren't gonna codename me Blork but I
am codenamed Blork.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I am Blork.
MARCUS PARKS Unfortunately. It's also hard to see exactly what the plan was because it's quite possible that
the overall plan was in those MK Ultra files that were destroyed. There might have been a
much better plan than we think but from what we see now it seems to be extremely
scattershot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS But out of all the scientists who got funding for their insane projects from the Society for the
Investigation of Human Ecology, none fueled future conspiracy about MK Ultra more than Dr
Ewen Cameron.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can we get a lightning crash, like a thunder crash? We need a horror soundboard for this.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Cameron was the pioneer of the cruelest and most damaging subproject in all of MK
Ultra: psychic driving. Now in the psychic driving process, subjects were forced to listen to
continuously repeating audio messages on a looped tape in the hopes that those messages
would somehow alter the patient's behavior. This would be done in conjunction with medically
induced sleep therapy and electroshocks.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS Which altogether were supposed to cure all manner of mental illnesses, most specifically the
oft misdiagnosed schizophrenia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because again, the idea is to create a green space for other people's ideas to go into, right.
That's MK Ultra, that's their main goal.
BEN KISSEL The brain? Green space in the brain?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. You're trying to create a little beltline, people in Atlanta know what I'm talking about.
They're trying to create a beltline in your brain that will then allow little shops to spring up, like
one's called 'here's how to poison people' and another one's like 'how to be gay for pay in the
Soviet Union'. There's so many different things that you can see on your brain beltline once it's
been manufactured but in order to get there you just have to destroy all the condos that are
there, that are your memories.
BEN KISSEL So much like Atlanta, the beltway, they're the art installations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL All of the different jobs that you might do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But Dr. Ewen Cameron understood, we just have to break you down to build you back up.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. That's the thing, just for a little bit about the word schizophrenic, keep in mind that
when we say schizophrenia in this episode, much like in our lobotomy series, we're talking
about the mid 20th century diagnosis of schizophrenia. Back then schizophrenia was a catch all
term for everything from bipolar disorder to severe depression to actual schizophrenia.
Therefore it's hard to know whether these experiments we're about to get into were done on
actual schizophrenics. Now ultimately Dr. Ewen's goal with psychic driving was not to create an
MK Ultra agent. Rather driven by ambition and a need to be recognized, Cameron really
wanted to cure schizophrenia and win a Nobel Prize for it, no matter what the cost. He
believed that through psychic driving, he could standardize the treatment for schizophrenia to
the point where a patient could check in at 9 and check out at 5 with a clean bill of mental
health.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And much as when we discussed during our episodes on lobotomies and the idea of the rise of
lobotomies, again when you treat the human body, especially the mind, as if it's a flat tire that
you can fix, a lot of times what it does is completely jack up everything inside of you because
the wobbly fucking jelly that's in our brain make up every single thing that we know about the
universe.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS But as it just so happened, Dr. Ewen's goals dovetailed with the CIA's. Incredibly Cameron had
been performing his experiments for years before the CIA even showed up. Their starting
points however had been the same because both believed that their ultimate goals were
completely justified.
BEN KISSEL It's like when Macaulay Culkin met the old lady in Home Alone 2 and they had turtle doves.
And they shared the turtle doves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just like that. MK Ultra is a lot like that. Psychic driving.
BEN KISSEL It is. It really is. Turtle doves, they come together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It really is. Especially when Kevin started waterboarding her with the tape of her saying 'my
mother didn't love me enough, my mother didn't love me enough, my mother didn't love me
enough'. That was a wild scene.
BEN KISSEL Right, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But before we get into the specifics of psychic driving, let's get to know the man who created
the technique, Dr. Ewen Cameron.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, we need that board.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Dr. Cameron was born in Scotland in 1901 and grew up insular and moody, obsessed
with Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We have a lot of Scottish goths that listen to this show, I know for a fact that we do. And you
really need to think about where you're headed in your fucking life.
BEN KISSEL They're doing great!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Every one of us has commiserated with Frankenstein's monster at some point. Haven't we felt
like another separate?
BEN KISSEL The only problem I had with Scotland was that one bar that had a bunch of carpet on the
ground because it was disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS It was gross, yeah. That's the thing Henry is that Ewen Cameron was not an identifying with
Frankenstein's monster. He was identifying with Dr. Victor Frankenstein.
BEN KISSEL Frankenstein!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how you know you're incorrect. You should never identify with the doomed doctor.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS He learned all the wrong lessons. Instead of taking the obvious lesson of what comes of
intellectual hubris and arrogance, Cameron came to believe that there were no barriers when
it came to science.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Scottish accent) Holy shit I can't believe what lightning can do!
BEN KISSEL He literally is Chevy Chase in dirty work where it's like, 'You bet on Mr. T to win?' Like he just
did not understand Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' at all. I feel bad for Mary Shelley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She loves the fucking attention.
BEN KISSEL But also it reminds me of 'Catcher in the Rye' with Chapman, right, where it's just like you've
got it all wrong, man! Please don't shoot anyone because of a book or do mass experiments
because of 'Frankenstein'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey, no one's ever done anything because of fucking 'The Da Vinci Code.' I'll tell you what, 'The
Da Vinci Code' has inspired no murders.
BEN KISSEL No but maybe they kissed, you look at Tom Hanks and you kiss your wife a little bit. That's
what people do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's fucking weird. I don't like black haired, long haired Tom Hanks. I don't like that.
MARCUS PARKS Well by the late 30s, Dr. Cameron's imagination was captured by some of the more
experimental scientists in the field of mental health, men who would have made Dr. Victor
Frankenstein proud. At the University Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Rome, Cameron
observed Umberto Castelli in some of the first experiments in electroshock treatment. Castelli
was unable to explain how or why electroshock therapy worked but he was confident that it
worked all the same.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean do you have an idea how unbelievably difficult it is to electroshock somebody through
all of that hair product?
BEN KISSEL It's a lot!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Italy, their brains are immune to microwaves.
BEN KISSEL It really is possible. Also what was it? The University of what?
MARCUS PARKS The University Hospital for Nervous Diseases.
BEN KISSEL Did they all look like Woody Allen?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very funny.
BEN KISSEL I literally just see a bunch of future comedians.
MARCUS PARKS I put the emphasis on the wrong word, it's more University Hospital for NERVOUS Diseases,
not Nervous DISEASES.
BEN KISSEL All right. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well in addition to electroshock, Castelli also strapped patients to chairs so he could spin
them around at incredibly high speeds until they passed out. And in this you really see the
willingness to try anything no matter how stupid in the men who served as Dr. Ewen
Cameron's inspiration.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because the idea is we'll see what it does.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's a there's a part of me that loves the imagination that's like yeah, spin 'em around. I
mean we got funding, just fucking do it. But then it's just hard because people are in there.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what I mean? Like people are experiencing these things and then all you do is make
them super confused and then afterwards you're like, so we've learned nothing. And you're
destroyed. And then it's a guy just going like, 'I thought we were gonna learn like a single,
single thing. Like it could have been worth something.' And they're like, 'Yeah unfortunately
no, you're just gonna have to deal with the drama. Here's some orange juice and a cookie.'
BEN KISSEL Right. Also here's your 50 cents off your next coffee at Mcdonald's. Yeah, it's not an episode of
Schoolhouse Rock, is it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no.
MARCUS PARKS Cameron was also a follower of Dr. Egas Moniz, pioneer of the lobotomy. We talked about him
so fucking much in our lobotomy episode, you want to know more about him, go listen to that
series. But in other words, Dr. Cameron was not concerned in the least with the consequences
of human experimentation just so long as they could be justified with results of a sort. Now
even though Cameron sounds like a crank, he was actually highly respected in the field of
mental health. He served as the head of multiple psychiatric organizations, including president
of the American Psychiatric Association and President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association,
America the early 50s, Canada late 50s. This is all during this psychic driving shit.
BEN KISSEL Holy hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. And if you listen to the people that were researchers during the same time, like the
people that were all doing the same shit all around and the way they bend over backwards to
validate what they were all doing for so long... I was watching that Fifth Estate documentary
that was like the first time all of this shit had been revealed and it's just guys with weird
Canadian ascots going like, (Canadian accent) 'Well you know if there wasn't a reason for it, we
wouldn't have done it!'
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you're like, 'All right, Canadian.' (Canadian accent) You come over here, you would think
you guys got things pretty special down there but I'll show you how to drive. What you want to
be doing when you're psychically driving someone-
BEN KISSEL Oh my God, I'm gonna die!
MARCUS PARKS Well before being president of all those associations though, Cameron had been one of the
several psychiatrists asked to attend the Nuremberg trials to analyze Rudolf Hess in 1945 after
Hess fled to the allies to negotiate a peace treaty behind Hitler's back. Now for some reason
studying the psychology of nazis opened a new area of thought to Dr. Cameron. For one, he
believed that every German over the age of 12 needed to be electroshocked to quote "burn
out any remaining vestige of nazism."
BEN KISSEL That'll do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think we missed the point.
BEN KISSEL That'll do it. Electroshock, that'll do it, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But his main takeaway was that he began to believe that mental illness was an ailment that
could be treated like a broken bone, a one and done deal. And his theories from then on we
were mostly based on this hunch because remember it's a hunch and that's all. Now by the
time WWII ended, Dr. Cameron climbed the ranks of the psychiatric profession to become
head psychiatrist at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal which was
funded of course by the Rockefeller Foundation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Coincidence?!
MARCUS PARKS Maybe, maybe! We'll talk about it in a bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS Well specifically Cameron's institute, where all of the psychic driving experiments were
performed, was set up in a creepy old mansion called Ravenscrag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (evil laughter)
BEN KISSEL Jesus! What the hell?
MARCUS PARKS It gives a little bit of that Resident Evil vibe. I'm starting to think that MK Ultra is just the
fucking Umbrella Corporation with creepy ass mansions all over the world.
BEN KISSEL More lightning strikes, more lightning strikes! The cloud cover, you can see it all. You can just
see the old car pulling up to the front gate. Nothing bad could happen in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's about setting setting.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now at that time, talk therapy was considered to be the future of psychiatry. But as we
know, talk therapy is a time consuming process, sometimes taking years to see any sort of
meaningful breakthrough although it is absolutely worth it. It just takes a really long fucking
time. But for Cameron, the slow pace of talk therapy was unacceptable. Remember Cameron
was after a streamlined one size fits all mental health cure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like a kilt! (Scottish accent) That's all you need, you're not naked anymore! You need to do it
for your mind!
MARCUS PARKS He was an extremely quiet, soft spoken man. He was not a screaming Scot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Scottish accent) You've got to do it!
MARCUS PARKS I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. I'm cutting it off now. Not a screaming, insane
Scotsman. I knew it was coming.
BEN KISSEL Wow. He sounds like a screaming, intense Scotsman to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Scottish accent) You've got to do it like a kilt.
BEN KISSEL So basically this is the medical equivalent of when you order a shirt and they're like one size
fits all. And then you get it and be like doesn't fit me because they're always extra larges, so it's
always too big or too small.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like the scorpion costume I bought from the Halloweentown.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Well that fits you pretty well.
MARCUS PARKS So in the pursuit of this one size fits all medical cure, Dr. Cameron began experimenting on
patients at Ravenscrag to find a process to mentally stun them out of their afflictions, like for
example popping a dislocated shoulder back into the socket with a swift tug.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Scottish accent) Yeah we'll handle it. Okay, you've been crying about you've been sexually
assaulted, eh? Let's just pop it back in.
BEN KISSEL That didn't help. This is horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Scottish accent) You need a chiropractor.
BEN KISSEL Oh my God.
MARCUS PARKS In his early experiments, Cameron placed naked schizophrenics under a red light for eight
hours a day for eight months.
BEN KISSEL What the fuck?
MARCUS PARKS Well this was based on the discovery that red light promoted growth in plants and lab rats. So
he thought maybe it could work for schizophrenics.
BEN KISSEL It also cooks rotisserie chicken! What are we trying to do here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just remember the episode of Seinfeld with Kramer on the sunroof.
BEN KISSEL I know. Very funny.
MARCUS PARKS None of them did well in that. 14 patients were subjected to these experiments with results
that were at best inconsistent. Moving on, Cameron tried another experiment in which
patients were placed into an electric cage and overheated until their body temperature
reached 102 .
BEN KISSEL Yeah, what happened then?
MARCUS PARKS Deemed inconsistent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man.
BEN KISSEL Okay, that's just great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some people liked it, some people were like oh, this is like Florida. And then some people
were like this is like Florida!
BEN KISSEL I'm more of a snowbird. Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually though, Cameron began experimenting with electroshock combined with what
amounted to medically-induced near comas which led to the discovery of a process called depatterning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI De-patterning is one of the most... This is also why when the next episode we will get to
whatever it is, whatever Project Monarch is, whether it is real or whether it is fake, this is the
shit that allowed all of that to grow. Like the idea of destroying your personality is real.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now de-patterning was a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It
wiped a patient's mind clear of not only mental illness but also everything else that made them
a human. Then theoretically the patient's psyche could be reshaped into a healthy mind with a
process called re-patterning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cute!
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But since you can't re-pattern a mind until you de-pattern a mind, Cameron got to work
on the former first without any idea of how the latter could be achieved.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, if you don't have a pie tray, how are you supposed to make apple pie for
thanksgiving, Marcus?
BEN KISSEL I guess, man.
MARCUS PARKS I mean basically Cameron's process was akin to someone deleting Windows from a computer,
then trying to rewrite Windows from scratch without any knowledge of coding nor any
understanding of how a computer actually works. Now de-patterning was a three stage
process. The first was memory loss but with an awareness from the patient as to why they
were in the hospital. So they couldn't remember the last couple of days but they remembered
why they were there. The second was a complete loss of what Cameron called space-time
image.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Space-time image.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah he had a whole set of fucking jargon terms that he made up himself. In the loss of spacetime
image, a patient didn't know who they were, where they were, or why they were there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they did that by blindfolding you, literally taping ping pong balls to your eyeballs, they
would they'd say limit your ability to communicate which means put a gag in your mouth, the
would tie you to a bed, they would shut off all the lights and shit, and they would sit there and
wait for you to not know who you were anymore.
MARCUS PARKS Finally the patient would achieve a loss of their anxieties that also came with complete
amnesia. That's the throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. And thus the patient could
be re-patterned. But Cameron of course never came close to figuring that part out. Now the
most famous example of de-patterning came from a woman named Lauren G. Lauren G had
been referred to Dr. Cameron by her family doctor because her life was in shambles and she'd
suffered a mental breakdown after suffering from sustained insomnia combined with an eating
disorder. So Dr. Cameron put Lauren G on a drug cocktail of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal,
Veronal, and Phenergan for 30 days, making sure that she was almost constantly unconscious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was unconscious. She was fucking asleep for 30 days.
BEN KISSEL So am I wrong to get comparisons to our exorcism series where science is a new religion and
they're like well exorcisms are ridiculous. Let's send her to Ravenscrag!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I don't think they're incorrect.
MARCUS PARKS But when Lauren wasn't unconscious, Dr. Cameron was waking her up from a near coma to be
electroshocked in the midst of a confused medicated haze. Now commonly electroshock was
done at 110V for a fraction of a second, once every other day. But in Dr. Cameron's depatterning
process, he cranked the voltage up to 150, shocked his patients 5-10 times for a full
second each time every session, and did 2-3 sessions a day.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And what he also pioneered was putting a little turkey thermometer inside of their belly so
when you hit 'em with the proper amount of volts, it pops up to show that they're done.
BEN KISSEL Really? Is that true?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no. But see? This is where we're at. This is where Project Monarch comes from.
BEN KISSEL You could tell me anything right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what I'm saying.
BEN KISSEL It sounds like he's in Spinal Tap, like turn it to 11! But it's not music, he's torturing his patient.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. You'll see what's going to happen.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS Now after a month of this, Lauren G found that her anxiety had indeed receded.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, she wasn't anxious anymore.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But what else had receded was everything that made her a person, meaning that Cameron had
achieved full de-patterning at the cost of Lauren's personality.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She had to be re-taught how to use the bathroom, she had to be re-taught how to walk, she
had to read to be re-taught how to communicate. She says in this very harrowing interview I
saw with her, she talks about how she opens up a family book and she's like, 'I know these are
my kids because someone has told me that these are my kids. I don't remember their birth, I
don't remember any of these memories.'
BEN KISSEL But she doesn't know it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just fucking Dana Carvey'd her from Clean Slate.
BEN KISSEL Clean Slate, yeah. I got it. I got it, baby.
MARCUS PARKS Clean Slate, yeah. And with this we bring ourselves back to the goals of MK Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're back!
BEN KISSEL Oh, great.
MARCUS PARKS Now this wiping of a personality was exactly what the CIA was looking for because it was the
next step towards creating agents that could carry out missions without any knowledge of
what that mission was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And what this story here is a direct example because in our series for MK Ultra, right, the last
couple of episodes we have just been trying to show examples much the way that John Mark's
book did and the 'Poisoner in Chief' book did, right.
MARCUS PARKS Sidney Gottlieb, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're just showing examples of this is what we quote unquote "know" about MK Ultra, these
scenarios.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where this is how the mechanism works.
BEN KISSEL Okay. This is the process.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which is now that MK Ultra is active and moving is that they are going to bring Dr. Ewen
Cameron under the fold of the Human Ecology Fund so that they can use whatever the fuck it
is that he's already been doing as a hobby and for the US government.
MARCUS PARKS And what they can do is they can take the research that he's done and they can direct it in the
ways that are useful to them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They want to use it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Is the theory to wipe a brain so they could be the best operative possible, is it like Johnny Depp
in the movie Blow where he's like when you're carrying five gallons of cocaine through the
airport you have to pretend like you're not, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the idea, of course.
BEN KISSEL Is that the basic idea where if they are too ignorant to understand how severe the
consequences are for what they're doing are, they'll do it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Partly, yeah. Partly. And another part of this is that they could use it to erase memories of
missions undertaken at the CIA's behest. Because from what Henry was telling me, the CIA Had
and still has a bit of a retirement problem on their hands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't retire these guys. You can't retire 'em.
BEN KISSEL What do you mean? They go on MSNBC every day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They are continuing to be CIA officers.
BEN KISSEL What? No! Henry it says ex-CIA. It says ex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They are never retired.
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because guess what, I believe this, if they are actually retired, they're not talking to you,
they're not talking to a camera, they're not anywhere talking about the shit. Most of them die
in obscurity. You know how many emails I've gotten from people who talk about their
grandparents or somebody being involved in this type of shit? The real guys don't talk about it.
The ones that are talking about it are still on some level, shape, or form employed by the CIA.
BEN KISSEL What are you talking about? My grandpa didn't talk about it at all. Oh shit.
MARCUS PARKS Oh no, god.
BEN KISSEL Oh goddamnit, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Did it again.
MARCUS PARKS Now it's difficult to pin down exactly when the CIA became aware of Dr. Cameron's work.
Cameron's de-patterning experiments began in the early 50s but Cameron did not accept any
MK Ultra funding until 1957. Cameron had however run in CIA circles since WWII and in fact
one agent remembered that Cameron was one of the few non CIA men who attended CIA
parties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just like the little cocktail hot dogs.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, those are great. Little wienies.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah? We also know that the CIA laundered money through other organizations. And as we
said, the Rockefeller Foundation funded Cameron's institute from the start, extrapolating from
this it's hard to say that it's merely a coincidence that Cameron just happened to be doing
work that lined up perfectly with what the CIA Was hoping to accomplish with MK Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Coincidence?!
MARCUS PARKS But if we look at the human element here, it could very well be that because Dr. Cameron and
the CIA hung out together socially, these parallel ideas might have come from simple shop talk
at parties.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that is the mechanism of what conspiracy theorists could call the quote unquote "secret
government", right? The idea of an entire covert government that does things underneath the
auspices of the United States, quote unquote "government", right? And that all of these
decisions are made, something like we want to get into Bohemian Grove where it's just a big
gay everybody sucks each others dicks party, right, that's really what it is. But while you're
sucking Richard Nixon's fucking cock and balls-
BEN KISSEL Now why do we have to do it like this? Why do you say it like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just saying while we're all hanging out and doing what we do.
BEN KISSEL They're just kinda hanging out, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you are going to make fundamental decisions about things that these various
organizations do but you're doing it off the record, doing it outside of the buildings where
you'd have your conversations recorded, where you'd have to put them in the various minutes
of the various places you work within the government.
BEN KISSEL The two words that are said the most at these parties that follow some of the most nefarious
conversations of all time are 'more punch?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously, dude.
BEN KISSEL Want some more punch? Yeah we're just gonna have an invasion in Cambodia more punch?
MARCUS PARKS I mean it's not even necessarily people making decisions, it's 'so what are you working on?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS And it follows from there. I mean hell, this fucking show came from conversations at parties.
So many things come from drunken conversations and then you fucking wake up the next day,
barely remember what you talked about, but still have that little inkling of an idea in your head
that you fucking run with.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why you guys need to leave your houses more because you never know what comes out
and just hanging out.
BEN KISSEL Oh you have to hang out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It might just be MK Ultra but it might be an improv group.
BEN KISSEL It could be, it could be. In which case get out of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Get out of it.
BEN KISSEL No, improv's a tool. It is a good tool, we use it everyday. I'm using it right now.
MARCUS PARKS Now when Allen Dulles of the CIA and Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK Ultra, when they learned
that Cameron's experiments were bearing fruit, they gave him funding through the Society for
the Investigation of Human Ecology and put him in charge of MK Ultra Subproject 68 in 1957.
Did that make sense? Was that clear?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, absolutely. I mean if you want to look at money funneling, look at the NRA for example,
they're a classic money laundering organization. It happens all the time. The Lincoln Project,
there's a lot of stuff out there. Anything where it's like I'm giving you money but then I don't
see anything tangible, all of that's called money laundering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Those think tanks.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it's a think tank, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now as I said earlier, Dr. Cameron had already been doing these experiments for years
by the time the CIA showed up and what the CIA wanted from Dr. Cameron was for Dr.
Cameron to do all of his experiments all over again but this time for the CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Reboot!
BEN KISSEL Oh my God, what are we on season 2? We're on season 2.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, this is a reimagining as if the first season didn't happen.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL So this is the female Ghostbusters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a requel.
BEN KISSEL Okay, great. Awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it's just as infamous.
BEN KISSEL It is. Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS Well mostly these experiments for the CIA focused on psychic driving which was developed
four years before the CIA came on board. So let's go back to 1953 and cover the evolution of
psychic driving. Before Dr. Cameron even heard the words MK Ultra. So everyone, we're all on
board right here, we're in 1953, Dr. Cameron's not working for the CIA, he's just a man that's
trying to find a cure for schizophrenia and doesn't care how many people he has to kill to get
it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And as we describe psychic driving and what he does, these actual processes are the actual
processes that will be lifted and used by the US government in order to - which I have kind of
swung to the other side - to actually hypnotize people to do various shit and and it just kind of
depends on the severity of it.
MARCUS PARKS I do not believe that it is possible in any way whatsoever. We will both go on record.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's our beliefs.
BEN KISSEL Point, counterpoint. And that's what it's all about.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah cause you've been reading that crazy fucking Fritz HavemeierHENRY
ZEBROWSKI It's Fritz Springmeier! Don't you dare. He'll come for us.
BEN KISSEL Mom? Dad? We have been in line for an hour and a half.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the problem too is I got these emails from people that are professional hypnotists too
and the way that they kind of talk about it, because I'm going to bring it back around-
BEN KISSEL Yeah the way they talk about it, they need job security, they have to say it to you.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know, big hypnotism is huge out there. You don't talk about it.
MARCUS PARKS Look at you how easily you flipped, going from never trust a magician to 'I got all these emails
from all these professional hypnotists that really sound like they're on the ball'.
BEN KISSEL I feel like I am losing my mind!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he made such a compelling case, I gave him $10,000.
BEN KISSEL Henry, you were scammed, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. I ain't no fopper. Cause that's what they called guys who are easily hypnotizable.
BEN KISSEL Is that right? 1953.
MARCUS PARKS Now the seeds for the psychic driving concept were planted when Cameron was in the middle
of a talk therapy session with a young woman who was recounting a traumatic sexual
relationship that she'd had with her father.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fascinating.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, god.
MARCUS PARKS See Cameron like to tape sessions for posterity but during this session his patient said
something that was highly traumatizing to the patient but fascinating to Cameron. So Cameron
rewound the tape and replayed it for the young woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fucker. What a fucking asshole.
MARCUS PARKS Then he did it again and again and again until finally the patient fled the session in distress.
BEN KISSEL What is more difficult than hearing your own voice for the first time? And then especially in
this scenario.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He actually addresses that in his paper, he said that's actually the most traumatic thing for
most people is to hear their voices played because it's an alienness of you don't ever hear your
voice the way other people hear your voice. So it's like you actually finally hear yourself talking
to yourself.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS But instead of realizing that he'd done something wrong, Cameron decided that he discovered
something worth pursuing here. He thought that since the patient reacted to the playback so
viscerally, then whatever she'd reacted to should be exactly what he should focus on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS Basically this realization linked with his theory that mental illness could be treated like a
broken bone. In effect, the traumatizing statement was the broken bone and if he could heal
these deep seated emotional wounds with a kind of psychic surgery, then he could conceivably
cure their mental illness. Bada bing, bada boom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Bada boom! The guy comes over here, he ain't sad no more once I give him a little of my
mental spaghetti.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Maybe charging her father with rape would have helped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No!
BEN KISSEL To get that man incarcerated or something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that's where Dr. Ewen Cameron accidentally stumbles into Scientology, a whole wing of
Scientology which is ideas that you numb yourself to the trauma, that you just say the trauma
again and again and again because that is-
BEN KISSEL Callous.
MARCUS PARKS E-meters?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When you go do E-meters.
BEN KISSEL Oh, E-meters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When you go to do all your fucking sessions, it's all about you no longer having an emotional
reaction to you saying something traumatizing. And you know who else did it? Keith Ranieri.
It's also the same thing that he did with their test sessions.
BEN KISSEL Also you're allowed to have emotional reactions to trauma. It's part of grief, coping with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No! No! I will not! I've built a strong wall! No!
BEN KISSEL It's okay, we're all suffering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seems resistant.
BEN KISSEL Fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS Well as it was, Cameron was about to develop nothing more than a technological lobotomy,
removing personality with sustained torture in lieu of cutting out the cerebral cortex with a
scalpel. And like lobotomy, he needed a catchy name to sell the procedure and he settled on
psychic driving. Now a simple form of psychic driving was first used on a manic depressive
woman in June of 1953. Cameron conducted and recorded an initial interview, then edited the
recording to find key phrases that could be played back to maximize disturbance in the
patient.
BEN KISSEL (whispers) Get the gun, shoot, shoot, shoot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, fucking ozzied 'em.
MARCUS PARKS The point, Cameron figured, was to desensitize the patient to her own trauma which would
cause her to lower her defenses and allow the doctors to identify and reorganize her neuroses.
So after editing the initial interview, Cameron rejoined the woman and played back her own
traumatizing recollections mostly involving her mother over and over and over again.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, what a nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS On the 11th play through, she cried out that she hated the process which to Cameron was a
revelation. He made the assumption that because the patient resisted, he was moving in the
right direction. By the 19th play through, the patient was crying and trembling, saying that she
hated the sound of her own voice. By the 30th she was hyperventilating, moaning that she
hated her mother. At 35 she simply started shouting 'I hate! I hate!' over and over again.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS At 38 she begged Cameron to stop. And finally at 45 playthroughs she was reduced to a
whimpering mess. And with this, Cameron wrote in his notes, he had successfully penetrated
the woman's defense system.
BEN KISSEL What are we doing here?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And in his notes, always next to her name he would write 'TFU' which as his scientific
adjudication that she was Totally Fucked Up.
BEN KISSEL FUBAR!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well that's kind of what he said.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In his paper he said that he did have an idea of like quote unquote "re-patterning" of what he
thought would happen with this specific branch of psychic driving.
BEN KISSEL But he didn't build her back up at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he thought that basically we start like this and then you start to come around.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like what we'll do is truly make you numb to it and then eventually you won't feel it. And that
the reason why some people are hyper resistant is the various reasons, all of his other bullshit,
basically calling them weak.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Saying that they couldn't handle it or they weren't ready. And so that's why he needed to add
other things to rope-a-dope your personality to get it ready to be less resistant. And that's
when we start the torture.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL That's when we start the torture? I feel like we're kind of tiptoeing around torture right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is just fucking being tortured by your own podcast right now.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it really is.
MARCUS PARKS The only problem was that Cameron felt that he needed to go further with constant repetition
over sustained periods of time, days and weeks, months and years, but that wasn't feasible in
a hospital setting. In addition, sitting in a room himself and playing a tape over and over again
got him no closer to the streamlined mental health process that he was after. But he did
discover a solution and it came in the form of the cerebrophone.
BEN KISSEL Cerebrophone?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's always when it has a good name, that's how you know it's a bad instrument.
BEN KISSEL Is it an instrument?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS The cerebrophone was a device consisting of a speaker that could be placed inside a pillow
connected to a tape containing foreign language lessons. Supposedly you could listen to this
tape night after night while you slept and eventually you'd just wake up one day knowing
Spanish. Learn while you sleep!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI One of the most nefarious uses of the cerebrophone was when U2 put their album on it
without telling anybody and then they made us all listen to it.
BEN KISSEL Oh my God! It reminds me of Garfield when he taped all the books to himself and he said I'm
learning through osmosis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, I remember that bumper sticker.
MARCUS PARKS Now this was a really stupid idea that didn't work at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS But the technology of replaying a tape through a speaker in a pillow opened up new worlds for
Dr. Cameron because that meant that he could play messages for his patients on a constant
loop as much as he wanted without anyone being present.
BEN KISSEL This is great, I get to be like Jim Jones!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also what you could do is put someone to sleepy time for a very long time and put that little
speaker right under their head while they're doing sleepy time. And so eventually as they've
been asleep for a month, you'll put thoughts into their head while they're asleep.
MARCUS PARKS Now Cameron needed a lot of help in setting up these experiments. So he hired an Englishman
with a cockney accent and no formal medical training named Leonard Rubenstein to
essentially be Igor to Cameron's Dr. Frankenstein.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, really.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Someone's got to be. He's a job creator.
BEN KISSEL I suppose.
MARCUS PARKS Tall and thin, Rubenstein wore a lab coat and walked around Ravenscrag delivering one-liners
and an impression of Groucho Marx as he sidled past heavily sedated patients pissing
themselves in the hallways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey, how you doing there? I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member. I
see you pissing yourself. That's kind of fun, let me taste it. That's not apple juice.' I don't need
bits. I don't need a patch Adams in this.
BEN KISSEL Why not? Bit of a synchronicity there. I watched Duck Soup for the first time yesterday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Really?
BEN KISSEL A classic satire of government and wars. So check out Duck Soup if you haven't seen it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What a good plug for ancient film.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it was made before WWII.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually Cameron's Igor got his own Igor in the form of a Polish-born engineer with no
medical qualifications named Jan Zielinski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's 'Yan'! It's fucking 'Yan'!
BEN KISSEL We are going down the Russian doll of Igors. So now each Igor is gonna get more Igor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep, yep. It's a TaskRabbit. That's what he is, he's a TaskRabbit.
MARCUS PARKS In a way Zielinski was the creepiest one of all. He rarely spoke and he peered at patients with
huge owlish eyes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (incoherent muttering) Just having Balkan muttering as you're sitting here wondering whether
or not you're fucking not schizophrenic anymore.
BEN KISSEL Scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Being like, 'Hey doc, I was pretty mad about the Marlins losing last week and all of a sudden
I've been lobotomized, all of a sudden I'm being driven everywhere which is kind of fun.'
BEN KISSEL I mean it sounds like, oh you have a fear of jump scares, huh? We're gonna put you right here
in this haunted house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously.
BEN KISSEL It sounds like this place would make you insane if you went in without any medical issues
whatsoever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Jan Zielinski just sounds like fucking Riff Raff.
MARCUS PARKS Well I mean the thing is that the people that went in, like I said before, when I say
schizophrenic, I'm going by the mid 20th century diagnosis meaning that a lot of these people
were in there just because they were going through a bout of depression or because they were
anxious or because they were bipolar.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Postpartum depression is a big one.
MARCUS PARKS Postpartum depression is a huge one, yeah. Now once Cameron began fiddling with the
psychic driving process, he found that he got better results if the messages played to the
patients on a constant loop were custom made and recorded by Cameron himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cameo!
MARCUS PARKS These messages were targeted and each one was recorded with a specific goal in mind. The
first set of messages played to the patients were known as negative psychic driving sessions in
which the patient would be tortured by their own neuroses.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS This is an example of one of those messages recorded by Dr. Cameron for a patient named
Madeline:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Madeline. You let your mother and father treat you as a child all throughout your single life.
You let your mother check you up sexually after every date you had with a boy. You haven't
had enough determination to tell her to stop it. You never stood up for yourself against your
mother or father but would run away from trouble. They used to call you crying Madeline.
Now that you have two children, you don't seem to be able to manage them and keep a good
relationship with your husband. You're drifting apart. You don't go out together. You have not
been able to keep him interested sexually. Is this from Cosmo?
BEN KISSEL I don't know man. I hate this new season of Serial.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It just begins to feel like you're being gaslit by commercials.
MARCUS PARKS Over and over and over again. That same message over and over and over again. Weeks,
months. But while many of the messages were long and specific, some were short and more
general but no less maddening. One said, "You are an angry person. You are angry at the
doctors. You are angry at the nurses. Why are you so angry? Is it because you hate your
mother?"
BEN KISSEL No, it's because I fucking hate you, man! Get out of here, dude!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Get out of here!
BEN KISSEL Get me out of here! I want a mozz stick right now. Give me a mozz stick right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seems to be resisting.
MARCUS PARKS But how brilliant is that?
BEN KISSEL What?
MARCUS PARKS Because it turns it around. Because of course these people are extremely angry at the doctors,
they're extremely angry about the nurses. But what they're doing is they're fucking with your
reality. They're showing you that you're not angry at them, you're angry at your mother. It's
turning it inward again and again and again. It's torture.
BEN KISSEL It's just comedy. You just flip the thing at the end, it's just comedy. It's very simple.
MARCUS PARKS And naturally the patients didn't want to listen to these messages over and over again because
it was in effect torture. Therefore they made every effort to avoid them. But Cameron had a
particularly cruel method to get around this avoidance. He developed a football helmet with
speakers wired into the ears, which would be locked onto the patient's heads so they had no
choice but to listen to Cameron's messages day in day out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Somebody's getting the talking hat!
BEN KISSEL Oh I don't want the talking anymore. This is horrible. I'm not Aaron Rodgers, I'm not a football
player. This is awful.
MARCUS PARKS Actually that's where he got the idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Football!
BEN KISSEL Football!
MARCUS PARKS He got the idea from football, from coaches giving place to quarterbacks. He was like oh that's
perfect.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, not quite in the earphones yet but yeah, all right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Cameron also discovered that if the recordings were modified to sound like bad radio
reception with varying pitch, tone, and volume, the patients would involuntarily listen more
attentively.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Literally Resident Evil shit.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's patterning. It's weird man, right? They've done this on purpose.
BEN KISSEL Of course, man. The only thing that would be cool if you actually got like Bill Cooper or some
cool AM radio stations and you could rock out to that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some of those people might have done V/O for MK Ultra and not know.
BEN KISSEL Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS Now when the patient's sedation wore off while they were wearing these helmets they would
often bang their heads against the walls to try to break the helmets off but to no avail. In
response, Cameron would put these rowdier patients into drug-induced comas where the
helmet would be left on, playing messages endlessly for up to a month.
BEN KISSEL God, that is horrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You are an angry person. You are angry at the doctors. You are angry at the nurses. Why are
you so angry? Is it because you hate your mother?
BEN KISSEL Oh my God!
MARCUS PARKS Again. You're an angry person. You're angry at the doctors. You're angry at the nurses. Why
are you so angry? Is it because you hate your mother?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hate your mother?
BEN KISSEL I don't even remember who she is anymore.
MARCUS PARKS But after Cameron decided that the patient had enough of the negative psychic driving, the
tapes were switched to positive psychic driving which would go on from anywhere between 2-
5 weeks. Here's an example of a positive one which I think tellingly is a lot shorter than the
negative one:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah. "You mean to get well. To do this you must let your feelings come out. It is all right to
express your anger. You want to stop your mother bossing you around. Begin to assert
yourself first in little things and soon you will be able to meet her on an equal basis."
BEN KISSEL What if I just choking to death?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You will be free to be a wife and mother just like other women.
BEN KISSEL Oh god, I'm gonna kill you. I don't know which one I hate more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just like other women.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. You know what, Ben? I knew that would be your reaction too. I knew that you would
find them both equally distasteful.
BEN KISSEL Yes because the thing about the mean one is at the very least you could be like fuck you. I
want to strangle both.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have an opportunity to be a wife and a baby factory.
BEN KISSEL You're gonna fucking sell me a timeshare as well?
MARCUS PARKS Now while psychic driving was the stuff of nightmares and nothing to be proud of, Cameron
promoted psychic driving in Canadian publications like Weekend Magazine, referring to the
technique as beneficial brainwashing. Like I said, all this is out in the open.
BEN KISSEL (Canadian accent) Oh and you're gonna want to read that over the weekend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Canadian accent) You're gonna want, that's not during the weekday, the weekday is for the
stock market.
MARCUS PARKS Now as far as where psychic driving occurred in Ravenscrag mansion, most of it happened in a
dormitory of 20 beds kept in semi darkness, terrifyingly called the sleep room.
BEN KISSEL Man, can we just call it like fun time big room?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think that's worse. You don't like the positive messaging. If you called it like Bongo's Fun Hut
and that's where they psychically destroyed you.
BEN KISSEL You know, something that I could laugh with or at or something.
MARCUS PARKS Each morning nurses would enter the sleep room to dispense hundreds of pills and inject
hundreds of syringes into patients, most of them strapped with psychic driving football
helmets.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS Some had their helmets removed for bouts of electroshock while others simply took it lying in
their beds as their psychic driving tape repeated itself from a speaker inside their pillow. After
that the sleep room became a gallery of shuffling zombies wearing football helmets, all of
them oblivious to anything except what played through their speakers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You want a water? You want some gum, you crazy yet? You remember everything? We need
to keep you in the helmet a little bit longer, yeah. But here's some skittles!
BEN KISSEL With any luck they'll learn how to be a wide receiver or offensive lineman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If only.
BEN KISSEL Do they even practice football?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's Canada. I think at the time, this before the CFL, right?
BEN KISSEL Yeah way before the big field.
MARCUS PARKS Sometimes patients would be taken out of the sleep room and placed in the isolation
chamber.
BEN KISSEL Oh man!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. This was a padded prison cell, the classic rubber room built to quote "remove the
patient from their distressing surroundings".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, like chairs. I'm so distressed by having a table, a toilet. It's just so distressing to me to
have a way to leave.
MARCUS PARKS See Cameron believed that sometimes mental illness was caused by disharmony between a
patient and their environment. So he would place patients in the isolation chamber for weeks,
months, sometimes years, all while recordings, sometimes of their own voices, were played
back at them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And we will see how this directly influence things like the Kubark Interrogation Manual for the
CIA and understanding that the first thing you gotta do is strip a POW of any single thing that
would remind them of who they are as a person. So you have to strip them down, you gotta
shave their head, you have to fucking hit them with the hose, and you gotta put them in a
room with no stimulus because eventually they begin to unmoor in a way that allows you to
manipulate them more easily.
MARCUS PARKS Now as far as who was in charge of the sleep room, that task was left to Cameron's Igors,
Leonard Rubenstein and Jan Zielinski. They came in and out of the room at all hours to change
tapes or put helmets on uncooperative patients. But neither man had any grasp on what it was
they were actually doing. Rubenstein was said to walk in and hit on the nurses in the sleep
room amidst a torrent of awful jokes and bad impressions punctuated with self amused
laughter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a nice butt, it'd be a shame if something happened to it. Deborah! Deborah!
BEN KISSEL That's not even a joke! Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's making content!
BEN KISSEL He is creating content.
MARCUS PARKS And remember he's got a cockney accent as well and he's very loud and laughs really hard at
all of his jokes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Funny guy.
BEN KISSEL This is just the 1950s, so all of the parents of these people are just like, 'Well Barbara's getting
her help at the hospital.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, very much so.
BEN KISSEL Meanwhile just cut to Barbara wearing a fricking football helmet and being screamed at by a
hacky Marx brother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because she just probably expressed dissatisfaction with being a wife and a mother.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Zielinski meanwhile almost never spoke and just walked into the room to observe everything
like, as one of the nurses put it, "a barn owl".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a lot.
MARCUS PARKS Now after Dr. Cameron began to receive MK Ultra funding in 1957, his work with psychic
driving began to reflect the goals of the CIA more and more because he was then doing
experiments at their request. Specifically the CIA supplied Dr. Cameron with LSD and Cameron
began adding unsupervised acid trips to the psychic driving torture.
BEN KISSEL No, no, no!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you research anything into what's called crypto hypnotism, right-
BEN KISSEL That Matt Damon commercial?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes. You got 'em!
BEN KISSEL I got 'em!
MARCUS PARKS You got 'em!
BEN KISSEL I'm back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this is really where the twain come together because what they have discovered is that
what you can do is make someone highly susceptible to any form of hypnotic messaging by
dosing them without their knowledge with a psychedelic, it really helps them to dissociate
from who they are as a human being especially if they don't know that they're taking it. And
then when you do is you do that where in my mind you can kind of see the direct correlations
to how something like an operational setting, working with soldiers where you do a version of
talk therapy with soldiers, where you interview them. We say talk therapy, they mean
interrogation.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They go in, they find out information about our boys, right. And then they use their specific
settings in order to create a kind of comforting frame in order to hypnotize you using your own
voice.
BEN KISSEL I would have ground my teeth into my gums. You have a football helmet on, you're hearing
your own words, and you're tripping on acid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a lot.
BEN KISSEL That is horrifying.
MARCUS PARKS Ben, I remember one time, didn't you trip acid and listen to Roundtable episodes for like 7
hours?
BEN KISSEL Yeah but I didn't have a football helmet on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he didn't have a football helmet on.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, exactly. That's slightly different. Also Roundtable was quite funny and humorous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's true.
MARCUS PARKS That's true.
BEN KISSEL And the only person that laughed at their own jokes was Eddie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He loves his jokes.
BEN KISSEL It wasn't Igor.
MARCUS PARKS Well by 1960, Dr. Cameron was moving on to sensory deprivation techniques, building off the
work of Dr. Donald Hebb. We talked about him last episode. But unlike Hebb, Cameron was
trying to find ways to use sensory deprivation specifically to irreversibly scramble a person's
brain. That was on the request of the CIA.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS For this, Cameron had a simple box built behind the hospital and he kept a 52 year old woman
inside that box for 35 days from then on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI From then on she was called Tupperware Tanya and no one knew where she got the nickname
from.
BEN KISSEL I have no idea. What the hell was the point of this?
MARCUS PARKS Well he followed that with comatose sleep therapy then rounded it out with psychic driving
for 101 days. According to Cameron's report, quote: "No favorable results obtained."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're just gonna have to put another TFU next to this name.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh. I could have just told him that was going to happen before the experiment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Perhaps inspired by the work of Sidney Gottlieb, Cameron also got into the poison game,
proposing a sensory deprivation test to the CIA that involved a poison called curare that
paralyzed body functions at low doses. Multiple paralysis experiments were done on patients
with this drug, most likely with LSD. But again no favorable results were obtained.
BEN KISSEL Nothing favorable. Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would also like to point out we haven't really even said, we haven't gotten to the woo-woo
territory, we're gonna get into that a little bit more next episode. But this idea that constantly
diving into the subconscious, maybe even the collective unconscious with these barbaric
systems of just torturing us, I think it could have affected like everybody.
BEN KISSEL It could have.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I think it fucked us up real bad. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL You moved the gravestones but you didn't move the bodies!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel like somebody's been fucking pissing in the collective unconsciousness and it just fucking
pops up everywhere.
BEN KISSEL Seriously.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Either that or it was all the lead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can't it be both? There's room for everyone in my house.
BEN KISSEL Exactly. Is it a dinner without an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert? No, I don't think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oppetizer.
BEN KISSEL It all goes together.
MARCUS PARKS So by 1963 the CIA had come to conclude that Dr. Cameron's research wasn't giving them
what they wanted. So the grants from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology
stopped and the CIA cut ties with Cameron completely. So Cameron began begging for funding
wherever he could. But by the next year he very suddenly resigned. Perhaps not so
coincidentally, his resignation came immediately after the Canadian Psychiatric Association
adopted the Helsinki Declaration governing ethical rules for medical research.
BEN KISSEL You know something's wrong with your practice when you have to stop after that is passed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, then you realize like I think the temperature's changing. It's getting hot in here.
BEN KISSEL This is gonna put a wrench in what we're doing here.
MARCUS PARKS Within 24 hours of Cameron's resignation, all de-patterning and psychic driving projects were
shut down, his laboratory was closed and dismantled ,and all of Cameron's methods were
banned in Canada. Four years later, Cameron died of a heart attack having answered for not
one bit of the torture he'd caused hundreds of people.
BEN KISSEL Well there you go. Sometimes a heart attack is a good thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey sometimes it's a nice warning to make sure you change your diet.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's a good point too. Actually you know what? Now that I think about it, I'm taking it
back. It would have been nice if there was some justice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well some of his patients did get a payout years and years later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. $100,000 each.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And the sad thing is they delivered it inside of a football helmet and I just feel like why trigger
them like that? Why trigger them? I don't need a gift package.
MARCUS PARKS Most of them however, most of the people in that lawsuit weren't able to get payouts because
they weren't able to prove that they had been a part of these experiments.
BEN KISSEL Of course not! They're messed up, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They destroyed the records, they buried the whole fucking program.
BEN KISSEL I can't prove where I was on Super Bowl Sunday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a mistake. Every day you should take a picture with yourself next to a newspaper. Every
day so you know you've been somewhere.
MARCUS PARKS But notice that I said that Cameron's techniques were banned in Canada. Even though
Cameron's de-patterning, re-patterning project had been a bust overall, his legacy was felt in
the CIA for decades after in both experimentation and interrogation. Using Cameron's
research, the CIA rebuilt Cameron's isolation chamber at the National Institutes for Health in
Bethesda, Maryland for one of the more bizarre experiments of the Cold War: Operation
Resurrection.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is sweet.
MARCUS PARKS Using bogus radio techniques created by Cameron's assistant Leonard Rubenstein, scientists
adapted radio frequencies so that radio energy could be beamed directly into the brains of
disturbed and violent animals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hank the Tank is a fucking victim of MK Ultra. We should talk about this!
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. Hank the Tank, it's possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He has been weaponized.
BEN KISSEL Free Hank the Tank. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS The animals were then decapitated. Then their heads were transplanted onto the bodies of
other animals to see whether the energy from the radio frequency could bring the animals
back to life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, cool!
BEN KISSEL This is what they did to Sarah Jessica Parker's character in Mars Attacks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In Mars Attacks!
BEN KISSEL I can't believe the CIA funded this. You know what? I guess I can believe it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Did it work?
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL If it didn't work, how do explain Martha, my goat wife?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (barking)
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's right, she's also part dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Head of a goat, pussy of a woman, body of a horse.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, explain that then. You tell me she's not real.
MARCUS PARKS Of course that was mostly done on monkeys. It was a monkey experiment for the most part.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Monkey brains.
BEN KISSEL Leave 'em alone.
MARCUS PARKS Concerning monkeys, let's take a quick side quest into monkey experimentation, shall we?
BEN KISSEL Oh do we have to?
MARCUS PARKS Just a bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll tell you right now, they should have figured out how to use weapons that they don't want
to be experimented on. I put it on them. I victim blame.
BEN KISSEL I've seen some footage of use. It was very funny.
MARCUS PARKS Well the CIA also tried enlisting the help of a doctor named John Lilly who had devised a
method of connecting electrodes directly into a monkey's brain. Through this method, Lilly
discovered the parts of a monkey's brain that caused pain, fear, anxiety, and anger. And he
could activate those centers through electrodes. Famously, Lilly connected an electrode to a
monkey's orgasm center, then connected the other end to a button that the monkey was
given control of. And the monkey thereafter pressed the button at least once every three
minutes for 16 hours a day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That monkey knew what was good. This my pussy wet button?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I was that monkey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I bet. Yep. Got my boner trigger. But John Lilly also famously would go on to have sex
willingly with a dolphin. That is true.
BEN KISSEL Is that true?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS That was him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI John Lilly was a man who thought outside of the box.
BEN KISSEL Hold on a second. Wait, wait, wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was a very creative guy.
BEN KISSEL What do you guys talk about on your phone calls? Because Marcus' reaction to 'and then he
went to fuck a dolphin', he was like, 'Yep, that's right.' What are we talking about here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's an interesting guy.
MARCUS PARKS No, I just knew a bit of the history of dolphin fucking, that's it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah but also let's not forget that we should still be shocked by it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Too late.
BEN KISSEL Otherwise we just end up like doctors-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honk-honk. That's that boat leaving the harbor with my sanity and my taste. There it goes, bye
bye! Bye bye. It's never been there.
BEN KISSEL So by day he makes monkeys come and by night-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He makes dolphins come.
BEN KISSEL Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS Well the thing is the CIA wanted Lilly for mind control projects but lily insisted that all of his
work remain unclassified which made the CIA think about him a little suspiciously. So Lilly
wasn't actually a part of MK Ultra. Although they wanted him to be a part of MK Ultra. But that
doesn't mean that the CIA did not use his technology. In 1968, American forces anesthetized a
group of Viet Cong prisoners in Saigon and implanted tiny electrodes into their brains through
a hinged flap that they cut into the back of their skulls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my fucking god. It's Dr. Satan, man.
BEN KISSEL It really is Dr. Satan.
MARCUS PARKS When the prisoners awoke they found that they had been placed in a room filled with knives
and scientists behind a fucking one way mirror observed and pressed buttons connected to
the implanted electrodes for a week because they thought that they could activate the
violence and aggression centers in the men's brains and make them kill each other. When all it
did was give the prisoners a massive headache, they were all executed by Green Berets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That is just such an example of our foreign policy and what we do.
BEN KISSEL It's very sad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like it's just such an example of American thought. It's really fucked up to just think that you
could do all of that and then just kill them.
BEN KISSEL The dehumanization is just horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also to think that this started with jerking off a dolphin. You know what I mean? That's
where it started.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then it ended in that.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, so we're in '68. So '53 were football helmets, someone screaming in the ear and by '68
we're testing this on human beings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI On people.
BEN KISSEL It's just horrible.
MARCUS PARKS Well concerning Dr. Cameron's work on humans though, the CIA tried continuing his
experiments and spent $700,000 on research at Georgetown University. There they tested
whether Cameron's psychic driving techniques could be replicated on the mentally challenged
and terminal cancer patients.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Leave 'em alone!
BEN KISSEL Jeez, I just want to audit the Pentagon.
MARCUS PARKS They could not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They could not.
MARCUS PARKS They could not replicate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Learning nothing, Dr. Cameron's research was replicated and used again during the Vietnam
War when doctors attempted to use de-patterning to change the political views of Viet Cong
prisoners. After three weeks they ended up killing every single one through thousands of
electroshock treatments. Got a little impatient.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We could have brought them to America and just given them McDonald's, like the OG
McDonald's, and they would have just been like this is incredible, we'll just stay. They could
have could have just brought them to beautiful sunny California and put them in a convertible
and shit. They could have done a lot of things.
BEN KISSEL They could have just brought them an Arby's, an Arby's could have popped up over there. I
mean this is American culture, this is before we realized all that we have is culture as an export
and that's what we should have done then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. And weapons though.
BEN KISSEL Well yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And our versions of little governments and our versions of little dictatorships, we create those
two.
BEN KISSEL We are wonderful weapons dealers.
MARCUS PARKS The CIA also tried de-patterning and psychic driving on a KGB defector, starving him and
playing a cacophony of sounds through earphones for up to 23 hours at a time, all while they
injected massive amounts of amphetamines, barbiturates, and LSD into his veins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He liked it though. These KGB guys are hardcore, look at Putin. They like this type of shit
because then it kind of feels like, (Russian accent) 'Now I'm KGB'.
BEN KISSEL Now he can come, yes. Now we can officially ejaculate.
MARCUS PARKS Now all of this, I describe it as absolute fucking bonkers to say the least, from the psychic
driving to the push button violence to the monkey head swapping. There's a lot of weird shit
going on here.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But those experiments were but one part of the widespread MK Ultra experimentation that
occurred during the 1950s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah because this shit's also gotta go wide, you're still talking about POWS, mental patients.
BEN KISSEL Or niche.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're niche and they are highly vulnerable and they are what they could get, right. They're
what they could get.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But what they also understood inherently, the main crux of MK Ultra is that it needs to work in
the wild. It needs to work out there and with little control, it needs to be able to work.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So what can we discover if we just turn our Sauron eye onto us.
BEN KISSEL So this is just a long spring training. They haven't even played the game yet. This is just laying
the groundwork for them eventually going live with it I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yep. And they never truly went live with it, not necessarily.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS But what they did do was open up experimentation to the general public with Operation
Midnight Climax.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the famous one and honestly it's wild. I guess that's a part of it too is that with the regoing
through this topic is that it really is that and more just re-checks me in to just how wild
this time period was and what the fuck they did. It's just oh wow.
BEN KISSEL Alright, what's the Midnight Climax?
MARCUS PARKS Operation Midnight Climax was an extension of the project started in Greenwich Village by
former narcotics detective George Hunter White. Remember him? He was the menacing
bowling ball with the massive appetite for sex and drugs that we discussed in a previous
episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he's the fun guy. He's the cool guy. He's the guy in the know. He loves spaghetti, he's a
fucking big fat piece of shit.
BEN KISSEL Right, right.
MARCUS PARKS By 1955, George Hunter White had taken a promotion that moved him from New York City to
San Francisco. So Sidney Gottlieb saw an opportunity to create a new safe house where the
program would be extended from just LSD dosing to LSD dosing combined with sex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it's the sexual component that I think is why conspiracy theories also went fucking crazy
because they started to understand that the true vulnerable spot of a human's life is right
before and right after you fucking come in a bed that you think is secure, right. It's this thing
where people are willing to open themselves up in a way that it might take months to
psychically drive them to this point of vulnerability. Where sometimes you might never see a
guy fucking cry until you can make him shoot.
BEN KISSEL I don't know what kind of sex you're having but that's all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just saying.
BEN KISSEL No, absolutely. Where they're most vulnerable.
MARCUS PARKS Thinking himself highly clever, George Hunter White himself named this undertaking
Operation Midnight Climax.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know, it sounds like a fucking orgasm.
BEN KISSEL I get it, thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It sounds like an orgasm.
BEN KISSEL It's pretty on the nose, don't you think?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck you!
BEN KISSEL Okay, I'm just saying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What is this fucking The New Yorker?
BEN KISSEL I'm not The New Yorker, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You want me to come up with some fucking bullshit being like, 'That's what Ukraine said.' Is
that what you want me to fucking do?
BEN KISSEL So you're just gonna make people come right around midnight?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Got it, thank you.
MARCUS PARKS So he opened his new safe house at 225 Chestnut Street on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. As
author Stephen Kinzer put it, this apartment was decorated in bordello chic with pictures of
can-can dancers on the walls, red curtains, and large mirrors scattered amidst a selection of
porno and 1950s sex toys.
BEN KISSEL Ironically chestnut was how most days ended.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh this is The New Yorker.
BEN KISSEL Put that little comic, come all over someone's chest and be like chestnut.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what Ukraine said.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS In addition to massive amounts of acid, the apartment was also well stocked with liquor and
George Hunter White could often be seeing quote "drinking from a pitcher of martinis while
sitting on the toilet".
BEN KISSEL Wait a second!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the guy who's in charge of a CIA operation. If you want to see where the boss is, he is
drinking a marg, eating chips, on the toilet.
BEN KISSEL No, not a marg, brother. He said a martini.
MARCUS PARKS Martini.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh whoa.
BEN KISSEL That is just vodka!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL He was just drinking a pitcher of straight vodka being like, 'It's a martini.' No it's not!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel like the pitcher part of it is what eliminates the martini part of it.
BEN KISSEL Yes! You can't just put a fucking olive in it and be like, 'It's a martini'. No, dude!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. That's a martoonie.
BEN KISSEL Oh that's funny.
MARCUS PARKS So with Gottlieb's direction, White put together a team of sex workers who would bring clients
to the safe house. There the john's would be dosed with LSD or any number of other drugs
before sex all while the CIA recorded every moment. In essence the goal of Operation
Midnight Climax was to study how sex in combination with drugs could be used not to make
men talk against their will but to see how much information a man would voluntarily let loose
after he blew his load.
BEN KISSEL I trust someone who was being waterboarded more than a man before he has come, during
his come, or after.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Before he has come he'll say anything.
BEN KISSEL After also. The whole thing is blurry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI After you do it. Because if she does it good-
BEN KISSEL After you do it you say you'll get married to her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what happens, sometimes you get caught. But the one tactic they used to do was like
when you're fucking you get him real hard and be like, 'So, where are you going in Russia next
week?' You just get 'em to the peak of hard and then you just ask them an innocuous question.
And he's like, 'Vablinksy!' and all of a sudden he's coming. It's like no, I didn't say that, that's
my come noise. 'Vablinsky!'
BEN KISSEL Well I'm just wondering if we can trust the information received from a man pre, during, or
post orgasm.
MARCUS PARKS Well assisting White in the recruitment of sex workers was a former military intelligence
officer named Ike Feldman. Feldman paid each woman between 50-100 bucks for every john
they brought in and provided a get out of jail free card printed with White's phone number
that could be used in future busts. Honestly not a bad gig.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not a bad gig.
BEN KISSEL It's great to be here but Ike, I kinda want you. Do you think you wanna...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh you want me to be one of the first girls? I can get in there.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Come on, Ike.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, okay.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now after watching a fair amount of these poor dopes having sex through a one way mirror,
Ike Feldman was amazed with how freely men spoke about anything and everything under the
influence of drugs after sex. To him it got to the point where he was almost convinced it was
preferable to traditional interrogation. He said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and you slam the drawer, right? If it was a guy, he
took his cock and you hit it with a hammer.
BEN KISSEL What is happening?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they would talk to you of course. But now with these drugs, you can get information
without ever having to abuse people.
BEN KISSEL Well honestly, it could be totally utopian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well this is kind of what he's saying.
BEN KISSEL If torture was literally just we jerk you off, you tell us the truth. Man, that would have been a
nice scandal as opposed to what we have with Abu Ghraib.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have to remember you're being dosed without your knowledge. So that's the other thing
too. It's not just post nut clarity. There's either aerosol, they would spray literally acid into the
room. Because she would have a waiting period.
BEN KISSEL How did the gals not get messed up?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She'd go into the bathroom and then they dosed the dude or she would have a hypodermic
needle and she would slice it through the cork of a wine bottle and squirt LSD into it, pour him
a glass and say I'm gonna go clean up, he goes drinks it and all of a sudden he's tripping balls.
BEN KISSEL That's the movie I want to see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I wanna see the sex gals doing all the CIA work.
MARCUS PARKS Now White and Feldman arranged for these sex workers to stay with clients for hours
afterward and they immediately observed that having a sex worker stay after sex boosted the
man's ego. It's much like how an exotic dancer will tell you that you're not like the other losers
who usually come in here because they're just trying to bilk you out of money.
BEN KISSEL The fuck are you talking about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kissel, listen.
BEN KISSEL I'm not like the other losers that come in here.
MARCUS PARKS That's right, No, Ben, you're not like that, I'm not talking about you. You're not like the other
losers who go in there, that's not you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dogmeat, you have just become the sex worker.
BEN KISSEL All I know is I heard I'm not like the other boys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm unique. Mine always comes up being like, 'You're different.'
BEN KISSEL You're different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it just starts as that. You're different.
MARCUS PARKS Well this is an ego boost. And white and Feldman found that it made the subject feel
vulnerable and the longer the sex worker stayed, the more this guy felt like he was a big man.
The more he felt like he was a big man, the more he wanted to prove that he was a big man
and how he proved that he was a big man was talking about his fucking business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL But also exaggerating, correct?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure, definitely. Oh yeah, there's a mixture of all of that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's intelligence in general, though.
MARCUS PARKS Well the thing is about it is that it's trying to find the kernels of truth, it's basically finding
leads. You're having this guy talk about it and then you check on the lead and you see where
else that leads you. So going off the success of the first San Francisco safehouse, they opened
up another in Marin County that was nowhere near as fun as the one on Chestnut Street. In
the second safehouse, Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK Ultra and so-called poisoner in chief,
provided George Hunter White with stink bombs, sneezing powders, and diarrhea inducers to
be tested on unwitting johns.
BEN KISSEL Did we all just get into a time machine and make this as if we met in seventh grade? What are
we going to do to Mrs. Kilstog, man? I got the stink bombs, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's all like Tom Green remote bits. Because that's the thing too, this one is you think you're
about to have awesome sex but instead of the LSD, kind of makes you all loose and fun, she
puts a poo poo fucking drug in your wine and then you spend the rest of it reenacting the
scene from Dumb & Dumber while she's being like, through the door, 'So where are you gonna
be in Russia next week?' While he's just like, 'Ugh, I really could us some more TP.'
MARCUS PARKS Gottlieb's compounds would be introduced with such fun CIA spy toys as drug laced swizzle
sticks, the ultra thin hypodermic needles that Henry mentioned, and glass capsules that
released stinky dinkies when they were crushed underfoot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fart eggs.
BEN KISSEL Stinky dinky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Stop it. Stop it! Stop it!
BEN KISSEL Watch the intro of The Pest and that's it. But it is phenomenal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's my Manchurian candidate. That is what I'm gonna start. Stinky dinky but kill the queen.
Even though she's been dead for three months.
BEN KISSEL Apparently she might be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She's fucking.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well these dosings in San Francisco however weren't just relegated to safe houses. In
1957, a deputy marshal named Wayne Ritchie attended a Christmas Party at the federal
building in San Francisco. In attendance at that Christmas Party was George Hunter White and
Ike Feldman. They're not just doing this shit on john's, they're doing it on whoever they feel
like fucking with. After several drinks, Wayne Ritchie became disoriented, grabbed his two
revolvers, and left the party for a bar in the Fillmore district. There Ritchie inexplicably aimed
his pistols at the bartender and demanded money in an LSD haze, stopping only when a
customer knocked him out from behind.
BEN KISSEL Weird.
MARCUS PARKS Ritchie's sudden madness was baffling because remember, this guy is a deputy marshal. He
pled guilty to armed robbery although the judge let him off without prison time. He spent the
rest of his life in a depression and didn't put the pieces together as to what happened to him
until he read a story about LSD dosing 22 years later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sound familiar?
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Now Sidney Gottlieb's motivation for Operation Midnight Climax are to say the least suspect.
According to Ike Feldman, Gottlieb was quote "cock crazy".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And the safehouses gave him ready access to sex workers which he would regularly visit and
never pay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We'll bill the government!
BEN KISSEL You gotta pay! Oh my god. That's literally your tax dollars hard at work. His cock hard at work.
MARCUS PARKS Furthermore, Ike Feldman remembered Sidney Gottlieb having sex with George Hunter
White's wife in the San Francisco safehouse while White was passed out on the bathroom
floor. And according to Feldman this happened many, many times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is really where you see how an unhinged it had become.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And just how fucking, we keep using the word slapdash, just how little they were even thinking
about how it was going to come out. No one gave a fucking shit, they were just now living
there in the fantasy roles that they had created for themselves.
BEN KISSEL It reminds me of, I forget where the reference is from, but it's like you're so fucking dead and
you don't even know it yet. These guys were just in the middle of it, right? So they have no
clue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What they're even thinking, yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's all so stupid and crazy and horrible.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But the safehouses were scaled back in 1963 following a report by CIA Inspector General
John Earman which strongly suggested closing both the San Francisco and New York locations.
By 1966, both were gone completely. Now it seems like the good times were coming to an end
for MK Ultra but not without a fair amount of assassination attempts. And that my friends is
where we'll conclude our series on MK Ultra next week with Fidel Castro, the creation of 60s
counterculture, and exactly how MK Ultra came to be public knowledge as well as of course
Cathy O'Brien. We're not gonna skip her folk, don't worry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, we're gonna talk about Cathy O'Brien, maybe a little bit of Candy Jones, we're gonna
talk about whatever Project Monarch is, what the fuck that is, if that's even closely resembling
what MK Ultra really was or if it's just total fan fiction. This is a lot.
BEN KISSEL It is.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's an MK Ultra frame of mind, baby. That's what you got to get yourself into. You want to
fucking get on my level? You want to figure out what any of this shit means? You got to just
give up reading things for pleasure and only consume MK Ultra content for a period of time.
And it'll affect things.
BEN KISSEL Kind of like Tammy from 600 pound sisters or 1000 sisters being like, 'You want to diet like me
for a day?' I don't know if anyone wants to get in your head space, Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, it's helping me see a little bit more clearly, hold my friends a little bit more dearly,
and understand that we are a part of a fucking opoplypse, an apocalypse of ops and we are
just the center of.
BEN KISSEL I love it. Well this is thick, if it was a book they would call it a bible blister, it would smack a
blister with a pop. Remember that? I had one on my hand.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think we've used more sources in this series than any other series that we've ever done,
trying to put together the story lines. It's about 8.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I think we used three more books on Dr. Cameron today. We'll post them somewhere
but yeah, we used a fair more amount of books, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I want to put up all my evil books so you guys can also see what I've been doing.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. All of the information came directly from the Pentagon, so you can trust us. In no way is
this also an op.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa.
BEN KISSEL All right, everyone.
MARCUS PARKS Did you say app-op-alypse?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI App-op-alypse, yes.
BEN KISSEL App-op-alypse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I tried.
MARCUS PARKS I like app-op-alypse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I didn't write that down. I came up with it.
BEN KISSEL That's all we do. Thank you all so much for listening. All right, we hope you're doing great out
there. We're going to be in Chicago and we can't wait to be inside of Chicago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can't wait.
BEN KISSEL So we will see you early March, you guys have those dates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's next week. It's next week, it's happening very, very quickly.
BEN KISSEL Next week. I can't wait. Also check out the Z2 comic book, also check out Soul Plumber.
MARCUS PARKS #5 is out in the stores right now.
BEN KISSEL Woo! And thanks to everyone who listened to our debut episode on Sirius Radio Open lines,
thank you all for calling in. We have a really fun topic for you this next Monday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, yes we do. We will be out there Monday, 4pm PST, 7pm EST, faction talk 103, come
and join us, we're gonna talk to you live on the air.
BEN KISSEL And we change our voices.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, we certainly do more of this.
BEN KISSEL I do more of a (high pitched voice) Slugo! I do like a slugo! It's like Kevin and the Bean! No,
we're the exact same as always.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Faction Talk 103, Sirius XM Radio, this Monday 7pm, tune in ladies and gentlemen.
We're gonna have a wild time.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Get the lead out!
BEN KISSEL Get the lead out. No, we're the exact same whether we like it or not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And keep on supporting all the shows here on the Last Podcast Network. We're keeping up to
date on what's going on the best we can with Top Hat and of course you have a new No Dogs
coming out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No Dogs coming soon.
MARCUS PARKS It's coming out soon. It's under wraps but it's coming, we're about to record episode 2 next
week. So we're about to start releasing episodes once we've got a bit of a backlog.
BEN KISSEL Hope you love a 5 parter on Steve Winwood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Steve Winwood, baby!
BEN KISSEL All right everyone, thanks so much for listening. Hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) We'll be back in the high life again!
BEN KISSEL Be safe out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS And Hail Gein, y'all.
BEN KISSEL Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Steve Winwood, man. Hail Steve Winwood, dude.
BEN KISSEL Yeah sure, why not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I hope he didn't beat his wife or anything, right?
BEN KISSEL I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know. I'll look into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
BEN KISSEL He's on tour right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh great.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.