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This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com there's a particular kind of silence that only comes from a compromised record. Not the silence of nothing happened. The silence of something happened. But how do we prove it? And that's on purpose. In 1973, the CIA destroyed files connected to a mysterious initiative called MK Ultra. The records weren't misplaced or lost. If you were looking for a clean ending, this should have been it. No files, no story. But a small batch of records survived. Not because anyone meant them to, but because they were stored elsewhere under a budget category that didn't announce what was actually being funded. The truth lived on by accident, misfiled, under described, and still sitting on a shelf. And those fragments don't tell a complete story, but they do outline its shape with a pattern consistent enough to make a broad conclusion. The CIA ran a program to explore whether human beings could be pushed past consent and made to comply. Methods shifted over time. Drugs appeared early isolation and psychological pressure followed in other hands. Contractors changed, yet the objective stayed remarkably consistent. And that objective was controlled. MK Ultra was not an acronym. It was a CIA codename. MK was the internal prefix used for projects handled on the agency's technical side, Ultra signaled extraordinary secrecy, so the name didn't describe the nature of the program or what it was all about. On its face, it described how deeply it was compartmentalized. It's tempting to treat this as a Cold War intrigue and move on. Men in narrow ties, ashtrays, unfortunate ideas from an era when everyone was looking over their shoulder. Blue But MK ULTRA isn't interesting primarily because it's strange or disturbing. It's definitely those things. It's fascinating because it's administrative. It ran on memos, budgets, sub project numbers discussed in calm meetings where people talked about destabilizing minds as if they were adjusting office equipment. November 1953, New York City. The Statler Hotel. A man went out a window and fell 13 stories to the sidewalk. His name was Frank Olson. Olson wasn't a spy. He wasn't a criminal. He wasn't a volunteer. He was a civilian scientist connected to US government. Days earlier, he had been given LSD without his knowledge during a CIA linked retreat. After that, everything unraveled. He was frightened, disoriented, treated as a security concern rather than a patient. Then he was dead. The official story was it was suicide. And then it changed. And each revision arrived with fewer records and more unanswered questions. This pattern is part of the story. MK ULTRA didn't just experiment on people. It trained itself to make accountability difficult. Hard for families, hard for courts, hard for Congress, and hard for history. And Frank Olson's death wasn't an isolated tragedy. It was an early warning flare. This episode isn't about urban legends or mind control fantasies. The record is disturbing enough without embellishment. What we're going to do is follow what the evidence supports, note where it thins out, and pay attention to where it goes dark on purpose. Once you accept that parts of this story are missing by designs, MK ULTRA stops being a historical curiosity. It becomes a study in how institutions behave when they don't expect to be seen. So before we follow the consequences, we need to tighten the lens. What did MK ULTRA actually mean inside the agency? Where did it sit? How did it function? What did it authorize, and what did it quietly absorb? That's where we start today on flipping tables. Hello everyone. No real announcements today. This episode versus last week's a little bit on the longer side. Um, and as of the time of this recording, I'm getting ready for my last kind of long trip tomorrow and I'm going to be gone for a week. This one is thankfully more rest oriented than work oriented, but I'm even anxious about that. Uh, but after that I will not be traveling as extensively, so these schedules should tighten up a little bit. We'll get more, more merch and more interactive stuff out with the travel really since Renee Goode's death has been really brutal for me. So I have one more week and then I'll be home for a while. I Do have some upcoming speaking engagements that I will be announcing on social media as well, my newsletter. But outside of that, we're just going to jump right into today's episode inside the CIA. MK Ultra was program designation approved in 1953, used to organize and fund a spread of behavioral research the agency believed might serve intelligence operations. It functioned as an administrative container. So this was not a method. It wasn't a breakthrough. It was a structure. The structure allowed separate efforts to move forward without reading. As one coordinated project, each proposal could look narrow, each sub project routine while accumulation did the work that no single memo announced. Sub Project 54, for instance, was approved as research into the physiological thresholds of disorientation, studying how sound and air pressure could induce concussion, like states without physical contact. On paper, this is a neurological study. In practice, it was mapping how to incapacitate a person without leaving a mark. The gap between how a proposal was framed and what it authorized was in many cases. In many cases, the program's core mechanism. The clearest internal review comes from a 1963 inspector general report. The document does not describe a tightly bounded initiative with a defined endpoint. It describes research already underway, dispersed across contractors and carrying ethical exposure the agency had begun to recognize and only after the fact. The report also clarifies where the program lived. MK ULTRA sat inside the technical services staff, the office responsible for clandestine operational support such as chemicals, devices, specialized research rather than policy or analysis. That placement shaped how proposals were evaluated. The question was less should this line of inquiry exist? And more can it be made useful and can it be kept secret? Ethical concern didn't disappear, but it was translated into terms of exposure and managing that exposure. As funding expanded, work flowed outward. Universities, hospitals, private laboratories and individual researchers appear repeatedly on the record. One mechanism was direct. The CIA established the Society for Investigation of Human Ecology, a front organization with a board and mailing address to route money to academic researchers who believed they were working with a legitimate foundation. Cornell, Stanford, Columbia appear elsewhere in the archive. Distance offered expertise and installation at the time, and it made oversight harder to consolidate. Sub projects differed wildly in the program. Some centered on pharmacological agents. Others examined interrogation conditions, hypnosis and environmental manipulation. What linked them was not a shared technique, but a shared funding channel. The central office approved proposals and requested reports, but it did not impose a single standard across the whole portfolio. That's why what we know about MK Ultra reads so unevenly in the archive. The documentation shows sustained interest in drugs because chemical disruptions seem to offer leverage without the use of force. It shows attention to hypnosis because suggestion appeared to bypass resistance. It shows experimentation with isolation because prolonged stress was believed to narrow choice. What those categories obscure is that the subjects, the patients in psychiatric wards, prisoners, civilians who answered ads for paid studies, often had no idea what they had consented to or that they had consented to anything at all. The archive records, the researchers observed. It rarely records what subjects understood or what they carried afterward. Very in line with the Tuskegee study about these lines being blurred around consent. We did not have clear consent laws until the 70s. And after the Tuskegee Institute changed the laws. Excuse me, The Tuskegee study changed the laws. The investigative Senate record describes parallel efforts moving forward without a clear measure of success. Projects that produced little simply ended. Projects that raised discomfort were restructured or shifted, and the motion continued even when the results did not cohere. The surviving documentation doesn't support claims of a proven system for controlling belief. Or it doesn't show a seamless master plan directed at a single point. Instead, it was a bureaucratic response to perceived threat, structured to pursue sensitive research without public exposure. They had a lot of things they wanted to know about controlling human behavior, human choice, submission. And they didn't want the public to know about it. The consequences of this clandestine secret design. Well, they showed up. When research could be justified as national security support, limits were easier to bend. When work moved across institutions, responsibility became harder to trace. When programs could be renamed or absorbed, continuation required, required less explicit defense. And when records were ordered destroyed in 1973, as they were by the agency's own directive, what was lost was not just documentation of the method, but any account of outcomes from the perspective of people on which those methods had been used. These archival gaps are not neutral. They reflect a choice about whose experience would survive and what evidence would remain. These dynamics helped explain why later investigators struggled to reconstruct the scope of the project. Authorizations and funding trails survive more than clearly lived outcomes. So when we use the term MK Ultra, we mean a CIA program that sponsored behavioral modification research under that code name that was documented in the Inspector General report and Senate investigations. We're not using it as shorthand for every kind of Cold War era abuse. This is very, very specific. But this is a case study in how an intelligence institution operationalized experimentation under secrecy on humans. And this raises the next question. If MK ULTRA was not unified by a proven method, what allowed it to persist across years and budgets? Why did it survive leadership changes? And why did oversight arrive only after much of the Record had already been erased. And these questions don't begin with the techniques. They begin with fear and with precedent. By 1953, the dangers of coercive human experimentation were not theoretical. They had been exposed in court, they had been documented in transcripts, and they were debated publicly. The record already existed, and the warnings were on paper. By the time the Cold War began, the ethical dangers of coercive human experimentation were already part of the public record. Allied prosecutors had assembled transcripts, correspondence, medical charts, sworn testimony detailing how physicians had used professional authority to justify harm. The archive was evidenced by design built to withstand denial. What it revealed was drift. Not sudden collapse, not chaos, but a profession that had accommodated harm so gradually that the accommodation really wasn't even noticed. And, of course, this is around the experimentation. In Nazi Germany, before concentration camps became the sites of experimentation, German medicine had already been integrated into state policy through the language, language of what was called racial hygiene. Biology was treated as a natural resource to be managed, and physicians were positioned as administrators of that resource. In 1933, the law for the prevention of offspring with Hereditary Diseases. That's a mouthful. Authorized compulsory sterilization for people with diagnosed conditions that were labeled hereditary, such as intellectual disability, schizophrenia, epilepsy, any physical deformities, or chronic alcoholism. Doctors initiated cases, medical panels reviewed them, and courts issued the orders. Coercion moved through procedure. So again, and we see this pop up in so many different episodes for sterilization, because of whatever cultural norm was allowed to be pushed on, people that were seen as less than. The danger was normalization, not secrecy. Medical judgment became paperwork, and ethical questions were recoded as administrative decisions about classification and capacity. By 1939, that logic extended further. The program later known as Acteon T4 targeted institutionalized people with disabilities justified as a medical response to wartime scarcity. Not enough beds, staff, and resources. Physicians identified, patients deemed incurable or burdensome, transferred were transfers were approved, and deaths were certified through medical channels. Language did not obscure the violence. It structured it. They just got rid of anybody they thought of as less than inconvenient or not productive. Actaeon T4 also functioned as training. Repetition built fluency, and institutions learned how to classify lives, route authority, and process legal outcomes without framing them as exceptional acts. When you see death all the time, you get desensitized to it. When you are programmed from the time you're a child, that someone with a disability is less than, it doesn't phase you as much when someone enacts violence on them. At the center of this administrative evolution stood Karl Brandt. Brandt was not a fringe ideologue. He was born in 1904. Trained as a surgeon during the unstable Weimar years, he emerged from a professional culture that rewarded decisiveness and hierarchy. After treating Hitler following a car accident in 1934, he gained proximity that translated into power. By the later war years, he served as the Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation. Positioned inside the core of civilian medical administration, his importance lay less in the direct experimentation than it did in translation. He translated ideology into governance. Under his authority, programs like Action T4 could be framed as clinical necessities rather than violence. Administrative language absorbed the moral weight and decisions appeared technical even when they were fatal. That framing became unmistakable at the doctor's trial, which would begin in 1946 at Nuremberg. Formally prosecuted as the medical case, the proceedings documented experiments conducted on prisoners who had no meaningful capacity to refuse participation. Participation. High altitude stimulations, freezing experiments, deliberate infection and other invasive procedures carried out under coercive conditions. Proving suffering wasn't the challenge. The challenge was confronting the assumption that hierarchy could absorb responsibility. And if you've ever been to the Holocaust Museum in dc, there is a whole section dedicated to the experimentation that they would do on people. Really based on Brandt's ideologies, Brandt defended himself as an administrator operating under extraordinary circumstances. Scarcity required action, war required hard choices, blah, blah, blah. I'm already seeing this now on social media with the war on Iran and how the US struck a girls school and killed 160 of them. And I see so many comments. Well, I mean, it's unfortunate, but war always has casualties. We're so accurate we can take out the ayatollah, but so inaccurate we just accidentally hit a school. Give me a break. Responsibility, Carl Brand argued, moved through hierarchy rather than resting on the individual physician. And of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that defense. Its judgment articulated principles governing human experimentation that became known as the Nuremberg Code. The Code required voluntary meaningful consent, which the US would violate later. It placed responsibility squarely on the investigator and rejected appeals to emergency national survival or superior orders as justification. It was no longer good enough to say, I was told to do it. This was not theoretical ethics. It was a response to documented, severe, horrific abuse. The obligation to protect subjects was framed as non transferable. You are a physician or a researcher, you are responsible. The Code circulated widely in the years that followed, appearing in medical journals, legal commentary and professional discussions. It was sometimes treated as binding, sometimes as guidance, sometimes as a lesson about a particular regime, about those guys over there. And the last framing is significant because it suggested the Ethical rupture had been contained. That this is specifically a German problem, not a structural one. But it wasn't. Eugenic reasoning hadn't originated in Germany. In the United States, compulsory sterilization laws had been enacted across much of the country decades prior. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld one such law. In Buck vs Bell. Justice Oliver Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr writing for the majority, concluded that the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, a young woman who had been raped, whose resulting daughter Vivian was later found to have been of normal intelligence and who would live until 1983, did not violate the Constitution. I'll read that again. The forced sterilization of a woman named Carrie Buck did not violate the Constitution. His opinion ended with a single sentence. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. In 1933, German sterilization statute had drawn explicitly on model legislation that was developed in the United States. And Nazi jurists cited that rule approvingly during its drafting. What American courts had sanctioned German lawmakers studied and borrowed, the Buck decision remained settled law in the US for decades. By mid century, tens of thousands of Americans had been sterilized under state authority, often with minimal consent, and under the banner of public health and social welfare. And we mentioned this in the Tuskegee syphilis study episode that Virginia's Western State Hospital alone staff initiated hundreds of sterilization cases through the same procedural channels that the Court had sanctioned. Medical review, administrative approval, institutional sign off, coercion dressed as care. The patients didn't get a say. The Nuremberg Code did not arrive into a neutral landscape. It landed inside systems that already practiced at classifying vulnerability, projecting social burden and presenting those judgments as just science. These were systems that had built habits around ranking lives. Those habits didn't dissolve because the vocabulary changed. Consent could be affirmed in principle while being narrowed in application. Responsibility could be acknowledged formally while being diffused in actual practice. And expertise, whether that was medical or administrative or scientific, had long since learned how to present harm as procedure. By the early 1950s, the ethical boundaries around human experimentation were not obscure. They'd been exposed in court, codified into explicit standards as well as debated publicly. So Cold War officials were not unaware of these boundaries. They weren't unaware of the harm. What they faced was fear pressing in. And when fear pressed against established ethical limits, the tension was not between knowledge and ignorance. They did know better. It was between urgency and restraint. And that pressure reshaped intelligence priorities in the early Cold War. Before MK Ultra existed on paper, the groundwork had already been laid in the 1950s, anxiety inside US intelligence agencies had stopped being general. It had settled into planning, altering assumptions, reorganizing priorities, and narrowing toward a specific technical question whether judgment could be weakened in stages. And that's specifically the judgment of people, the ability to control people's actions. If resistance eroded through fatigue, isolation, controlled inflammation, and incremental concessions, rather than collapsing all at once, then coercion was not only a moral problem, it was an operational one. How do we exert control without collapse? During the Korean War, American prisoners appeared in broadcast confessions and signed statements that unsettled officials at home. Public debate focused on whether those statements reflected ideological conversion. Inside intelligence channels, the emphasis shifted to process. Transcripts circulated not as propaganda to rebut, but as material to examine. They didn't always describe overt brutality. They described conditions disrupted sleep, restricted contact, controlled routines, small agreements that widened over time that impacted the judgment, decision making, and consent of the prisoners. What struck analysts was not the violence, but the pattern. Cooperation appeared to build gradually under managed conditions rather than erupt under a single threat. And the implication of that distinction was operational coercion that left no marks, produced no visible injuries, and generated no immediate evidence of abuse was coercion that could be sustained, repeated, and most importantly of all, contained plausible deniability. The first formal response took bureaucratic form. Under the name Project Bluebird, Bluebird was authorized to examine how individuals behaved under interrogation and constraint. It stated rationale. So the reason we're doing this was defensive. We're going to protect American personnel from coercion. We're going to improve our resistance, and we're going to detect compromise. But the mandate didn't stop there. It also asked whether pressure observed in captivity could be understood well enough to be used deliberately when officials believed that leverage was required. And of course, we would later find out about the US's own treatment of prisoners throughout several wars. The internal language makes the shift clear. The focus was not dramatic torture, but what documents describe as degraded judgment. So the point at which you use fatigue and isolation and your environment to narrow a person's range of choice before they themselves recognize that you've narrowed it. If judgment could be degraded predictably, then cooperation could be produced without injury or force. Memoranda framed around the problem in practical terms what sleep loss did to resistance, how isolation altered compliance, and how restricted information shaped dependency. We see that a lot in propaganda, but we also can see in our own lives. If you think about, if you have a period of time in your life, whether you're heartbroken or stressed, and you can't sleep. You think about how long it takes you to do a task. You think about how your judgment is impaired. And often we can look back at those times in our life and realize, like, why was I making these decisions? What was I doing? Often much of that is connected to sleep. And there would be a lot of manipulation of sleep in these. In these studies, in this research, in this testing. So the internal language within the beginning of this research makes this shift very clear. The focus was not on dramatic torture. They don't want people to look like they've been manipulated or beaten, but they want to create a sense of degraded judgment and a way to do that predictably so that they can alter someone's consent, resistance and dependency, make them more compliant. The tone has always been clinical in all of these documents, but the because the aim was repeatability. How do we measure this? How do we replicate it? Inside Bluebird, the environment itself became an instrument. Rooms, routines, time and contact were not background elements. They were variables to be arranged. Within a few years, Bluebird was replaced by Project Artichoke, where Bluebird had mapped individual form vulnerability. Artichoke examined what happened when pressures were combined and sequenced. So if you have one stressor that weakens resistance, would layering to produce a greater effect? Could they disrupt your memory? Could suggestion be strengthened under strain? The files show increasing attention to combination. So isolation combined with fatigue, Disorientation alongside suggestion, chemical agents alongside environmental control. The transition from Bluebird to Artichoke was not an escalation. It was a normalization. It was kind of the gradual progression. It was the next step. Each approved proposal became the precedent for the next. Well, we've already approved this. We've done this before. We've had this research. What stops us from doing again? Each stage made the following one feel like a natural extension. What made that possible was the closed environment that the work moved. Obviously, very small groups of people knew about these studies, knew about this research, knew about the desire to control behavior. This was not public knowledge, and there was no external review and no requirement to justify the decisions to anyone outside the system. Ethical hesitation does appear in the record, but it's consistently rebranded. Not as a reason to stop, but as a problem of, okay, well, how do we contain this? How do we authorize it? How do we document it? The activity continued because inside that system, continuous continuation felt like a structural, a structured inquiry rather than escalation. By the time artichoke gave way to MK Ultra, officials weren't crossing a threshold. They were just on the path they'd always been on. And this is where Morse Allen becomes extremely significant. And before I dive into Allen, it is time for our first of three mid show sponsor breaks. As a reminder, you can get these episodes ad free by subscribing on Patreon.com Monty Mater for ad free episodes, bonus contents, and of course, the gift box. Tears would really be cool. And we'll do the White House the next day. We'll just have some fun. We have medals for you guys. And we have to. I must tell you, we're gonna have to bring the woman's team. You do know that the video you just heard is our president talking to the men's U.S. hockey team after they had just won gold at the Winter Olympics in Milan. And he invites them to the White House for a little bit of partying and of course, jokes. I mean, unfortunately, we're gonna have to invite the women's hockey team, who also won gold. As a matter of fact, the US women's hockey team, since 1998, since women's hockey was allowed in the Olympics, has meddled every time. And the men have not won since 1980. But they sit there in the locker room mocking them. And of course, true to form and as they should have, the women's US Hockey team has said, we're not going to the White House. They declined the invite after the video was published with Cash Patel in the locker room mocking them after their win. After their landslide win. I might point out, run like a girl. You throw like a girl. You're just gonna do this like a girl. It's not a joke. It's only a joke if everyone's laughing. Otherwise, it's just bullying. I think a lot of us can learn a lot from the women's hockey team that we shouldn't be tolerating disrespect. It's never just a joke. It's about mocking women and making sure those women, even though they're better athletes, know their place, make sure they stay small. And to the ladies that are listening, I would say, don't allow a man to joke at your expense like this. It's. It's mocking, it's degrading, and it is meant to be bullying. It is meant to make you feel small. Eight of the 12 medals won by the United States in Milan were won by women. And they deserve respect and they deserve celebration for those achievements. And ladies, I don't care what man it is in your life, if someone is making jokes at your expense, I encourage you to learn from the women's U.S. hockey team and say no and say I'm not going to engage with you. I'm not going to be in your presence. And ladies, that also means that with our leadership, you stay informed whether that person is a celebrity or a political leader. Staying informed as to how does this person actually believe about me? Will this person advocate for me? You as a woman have everything you need in your arsenal to make informed decisions to better your life, to follow your dreams. And you can start by using Ground News. And Ground News is a great way for you to check the news every single day, both globally and in the United States and make sure that you are well informed of who is running in your district, what's going on on a national level and be able to make decisions to better your life. Because ladies, you are not a joke. We never were. It was about humiliation and degradation. And if you want to take another step to be able to stay informed, make the best decisions you can and ignore men who would mock and ridicule you like this. You can get 40 off Ground News's Vantage plan, which comes to about $5 a month by subscribing@groundnews.com tables to stay informed, start making better choices and do not tolerate anyone who disrespects you. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase. 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Ask your doctor about EVGLIS and visit evglis.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. Morse Allen was a psychologist in the CIA Security Office who worked at the administrative point where proposals were shaped into something that they could actually execute. His role was not about invention more than it was translation. And his paper shows that translation operating in precise, mundane detail. In one exchange, a field proposal described efforts to, quote, induce compliance under controlled conditions. Allen didn't reject this proposal. He adjusted the language. He changed induced compliance to observe behavioral response much different. We see this, this language change in our headlines in speeches today. Always got to listen to the words people use. Break resistance became assess threshold, threshold under stress. Compel cooperation became evaluate responsiveness. And the goal remained. But the phrasing shifted plausible deniability every time. These were not cosmetic revisions. The language, the language that suggested coercion would trigger scrutiny. So the language that suggested research would just let it fly under the radar. This pattern repeats over and over. In a separate exchange involving a proposal to administer chemical agents to an unknowing subject, Allen returned the draft, reframed the setting as a controlled environment and the subject as a participant. And the intended outcome was the observation of physiological response under conditions of stress. The person being drugged without their knowledge did not appear in the language at all. What appeared was just a research paper, research design. Allen also asked about the location, documentation and distribution. Whether a proposed site ensured sufficient privacy, what dosage parameters would be recorded and how widely findings would circulate. Each answer reduced uncertainty and made repetition more manageable. A revised draft would return with moderate language and a site would be confirmed. Then funding would be routed and distribution lists would narrow with no dramatic decision marking the moment the work proceeded. Because the pathway had been cleared and the paperwork called what the paperwork called a controlled environment and a participant and an observation of physiological response was on the other end, a human being that had no idea that any of this was happening. The programs didn't depend on the belief in omnipotent mind control. They rested on narrower claims that sounded reasonable inside a closed system. Pressure shaping behavior and that judgment can be disrupted and environments can be arranged to influence someone to do what you want them to do without ever touching them. Those assumptions didn't exist again in the abstract. These had already been proven, and the CIA was continuing to test them on people that hadn't agreed to be tested on. Once that became normal, and once it felt like structured inquiry was what it was, the only thing left to Change was the scale. So sometime in 1953, a proposal arrives inside the CAA that looks CIA. That looks really routine. Looks like paperwork. It's a very brief memo. The language is cautious, a little too clean, little too professional. It asks for a limited amount of funding to explore a behavioral question under controlled conditions. No promises, no urgency, just another request kind of moving through the agency. Sydney Gottlieb reads it. Gottlieb has a stammer and a club foot and a chemistry PhD and he runs the CIA's technical services staff with quiet efficiency of someone who's learned that the most dangerous ideas move fastest when they don't announce themselves. So by this point, Gottlieb's accustomed to uncertainty. He's trained as a chemist. He knows that unanswered questions don't stall progress, they just redirect it. His job is not to decide what intelligence should become. It's to make experimentation possible. When someone believes the answer might prove useful, if a proposal seems plausible, discreet and containable, it moves forward. This very simple memo, this very quiet, clean cut memo moves. A number is assigned and the request is routed. Approval follows established channels. No one announces that a threshold has been crossed. No one writes that something new has begun. But it does. By the early 1950s, the CIA had already unresolved questions about behavior under pressure. Bluebird and Artichoke had explored interrogation, resistance, psychological vulnerability, and they hadn't produced a reliable technique yet. What they had produced was momentum and questions that kept generating more questions in need of more funding. Funding. Each new solution needed funding, a sponsor, and a place to live inside the bureaucracy. MK ULTRA doesn't solve the science, it solves the paperwork. So instead of debating every proposal from scratch, the agency created a container. Existing efforts are folded under one designation. The new ideas are routed into the same channel. Once that structure exists, proposals no longer need to justify the entire enterprise. They only need to present themselves as reasonable next next steps. The engine for that is the sub project. So in the surviving summaries around the project, the Senate reconstructions, MK Ultra doesn't read like a single coordinated experiments. It reads like a. Like a clearinghouse. One sub project studies memory. Another one looks for alertness. Another one studies interrogation variables. Extended questioning, restricted contact, controlled information. All of it is described in very neutral, technical, scientific language that doesn't announce what it's for or that it was specifically done without consent or in the presence of coercion. Each request is small and each budget is modest. Most significantly, it looks so routine. One of the the biggest Things about MK Ultra, and we're going to get into some of these conversations and some of these cases, is that it looks on the surface so mundane. Later investigations fix MK Ultra's authorization to 1953 and connect it to senior approval. But the more consequential change inside the agency is procedural. There is now a predictable path from idea to funding. And now that path has essentially become a highway. Inside the technical services staff, behavioral questions are handled like operational problems. Proposals move forward if they appear testable, containable and unlikely to attract attention. Ethical concerns don't disappear. They're just changed. No one is writing on these memos like, is this the right thing to do? They write, can this be controlled? So like, if this gets out, can we control it? Those efforts of translation shape the record. We do have budgets. Objectives are summarized. What happens later, especially when the project moved into hospitals, universities and off site settings, is documented pretty unevenly, if at all. High classification narrows the audience further, and over time the paper trail captures motion more than any clear consequences from these sub projects. So Gottlieb is well suited for this structure. As the head of technical services, he is not issuing grand theory. He's managing simply the flow. Requests from field officers and requests from outside researchers seeking support. His correspondence is logistical access, timing, dosage and cost. And rarely does anyone pause to ask what the line of inquiry itself is and should that exist. The oldest professional alibi here is, I'm just doing my job, I'm just doing what I was told to do. And inside the system that was designed to kind of distribute the responsibility. It wasn't even a wrong, it was just incomplete in the ways that it happened in laboratory science. Unclear results generate new trials. Under MK Ultra, the experimental posture merges with secrecy and this sense of institutional urgency. Each step is framed as limited and each approval is just an exploration of the next logical question. And as a result, accumulation happens quietly. The funding practices also reinforce the distance. MK ULTRA is moving money outward. So it's funding into universities, hospitals, private research settings. Where pharmacology study resembles a routine grant or a behavioral project reads like a research on stress or compliance. The path from CIA sponsorship to the lived experience runs through multiple institutions, each only holding part of the documentation. By the time someone attempts reconstruction, the story is already fragmented and it doesn't look like it came from the CIA at all. The system doesn't expand by accident. It expands because no one at the top creates parameter. And again, Gottlieb manages the flow. Others execute the work. But the boundaries of what Counts as acceptable are defined by the leadership. And Alan Dulles is the one who sits on top of this machine. In April of 1953, one month into his tenure as director, Dulles stood before Princeton alumni and warn of Soviet quote, brain warfare. He told them the Soviets were using brain perversion techniques as a Cold War weapon and that some of those techniques were so abhorrent to our way of life that they have, that we have recoiled from facing up to them. Three days later, he authorized MK Ultra. So we again, something else that we've seen, oh, they've got a weapon or they're going to do this. So we have to proactively engage in this unethical behavior that I was already planning to do, but now I'm giving you this reason why I'm doing it. So Dulles didn't need to micromanage the sub projects. The speech explained everything. Look at this threat from the Soviets. Look at him. If the enemy was already doing it, then doing it ourselves isn't a transgression. It's not wrong. It's, it's us being prepared to defend ourselves. It's national security. It's necessary. And this framing would not evaporate when later scrutiny would arrive. It actually hardened it years later, when investigations began pulling at programs the agency would have preferred them not to see. Defense wasn't built around the success of any of these projects. It rested on something more basic that the intelligence work couldn't be fully exposed without harming the nation, without national security risking the security of Americans. By then, records had already begun to be destroyed when any investigation started. The archive was incomplete before outsiders began asking questions. Which means that as we go through today and we talk about these key figures and key studies that happened, there's so much more, probably much worse that we'll never see, that we'll never get an opportunity to see. Richard Helms carried the version of the same instinct, though expressed itself differently. Where Dulles believed in the mission, Helms believed in the insulation. It's the same results. Helms rose through the CIA's internal ranks beginning in the OSS in World War II and spending decades inside the Clandestine Service before becoming the Director of Central Intelligence in 1966. By the time questions of past programs surfaced in the 1970s, he wasn't defending a theory of mind control. He was defending the secrecy that they needed to protect America. When pressed, Helms didn't argue that every decision was wise. He returned to a narrower claim that intelligence operates under constraints outsiders can't safely evaluate. You don't understand because you don't do this work. You haven't seen what I've seen. Disclosure becomes risk. Secrecy is a condition of legitimacy. And the machine that began with modest proposals in the early 1950s was now shielded by an argument about necessity and national security. So MK ULTRA is not unusual in that way. We still hear this today, even, even with recent government actions. It's all about security. It's all about secrecy. It's all about. You can't know. MK ULTRA kind of fits right into that conversation, as if not much has changed in several decades. This looks like more of a stream of work routed through an office designed to test these ideas quietly and contain them. And now we know about it. Now we know that these things happen. We know that the well, my government would never is typically not true. And the next question isn't who signed which memo, it's what happened when the memos came to life. Because at some point, administrative design becomes lived experience. And that lived experience has names. And in this section we're going to get into some of these quote, experiments. Sometimes it was an apartment dressed to seem casual. A drink poured. Music is playing low, conversation is drifting where it pleases. But behind a wall, a microphone is humming, and a mirror hid those who were listening. Other times, it was a hospital ward. Language was clinical. The patient signed forms. It looked totally normal. And I mean, how many of us have signed a form without actually fully reading it? And the authority feels formal. Different settings, same origin. Both began at the same administrative channel. And this is where MK ULTRA really came to life, in these constructed environments. Enter George White. White had spent years as a federal narcotics agent running undercover operations, cultivating informants, staging buys, and watching people reveal more than they intended. He wasn't a laboratory scientist and he had no interest in being one. But he understood something a little bit more practical. That behavior shifts when a person believes that they're safe. Curate the setting, you influence the response. When White began collaborating on CIA linked drug research, he didn't request university space or institutional oversight. He requested apartments. Safe houses solved several problems at once. They were rented under false names and furnished to feel ordinary, like couch, you know, couches, lamps, a nice little bar. They could be wired for sound and observed through one way glass. They required no intake desk, no formal record of participation, and no signed consent forms. The apartment did something more important, though. It removed the signal that anything official was happening. Make people comfortable, have them relax. And let's talk about Operation Midnight Climax, which honestly sounds like the name of a sex Tape. To be honest with you, men were brought in under false pretenses, often by sex workers. There it is. Cooperating with the operation. Alcohol would lower their inhibition. The conversation would be really casual. At some point, LSD or a similar substance was introduced without the subject's knowledge. Again, not testing ideology here. White was watching for what happened in the first moments of confusion. Did a subject become more talkative? Did they get suspicious? Were they open to suggestion? Did their anxiety spike? These weren't philosophical questions. They were questions about leverage and oh my gosh, to be given LSD and not realize that you have, you, you would legitimately think that your mind broke. Now, I've worked with psilocybin in the past, and psilocybin is the chemical that makes magic mushrooms magic. And it has, you know, the, these psychological effects, these hallucinatory effects sometimes. But you go in knowing what you're getting into. And even then you wouldn't take mushrooms, which are way less intense than lsd without making sure you're in a good place, a safe environment, or you like, you know, you know what you're getting into to do that with lsd. And, and I don't know if you've ever read into LSD, but sometimes, like trips can last up to 14 hours, so depending on how much someone is dosed with. But you would, you would genuinely think that you had lost your mind. Like, it would be so incredibly scary to be given anything in that realm without knowing what had happened. And this misdirection isn't incidental. This is the condition of the experiment. Because the subject didn't know that they were part of a study to begin with, their reaction wouldn't be filtered. Right. A man who believes he's on a date or he's meeting with an escort responds differently than someone who shows up at a medical office knowing he's being tested from headquarters. This could be described as research. Right? They can just say, we just, we. We saw how he responded to stress. Reports would go upward in the language of, this is the dosage, this is the response. But they didn't talk about the texture of the room, the uncertainty, the fear, the way footing disappeared before a subject understood why. Again, LSD especially, oh, can be so intense for people. And, and some people have done it once and have never been the same. So again, to give it to someone without them knowing is so terrifying. You and Cameron's world looked nothing like whites. He didn't operate under an alias because his authority was visible. In the early 1950s, Cameron's reputation had outgrown Montreal. He was the chair of psychiatry at McGill University and the director of the Allen Memorial Institute. He stood at the helm of one of North America's most prominent teaching hospitals. His resume carried institutional weight. He was the former president of the American Psychiatric association, later the head of the World Psychiatric Association. Frequent expert witness. He was a mentor to physicians who would lead departments of their own. When MK Ultra Link funding intersected with his research, it entered an institution that already had authority, already was trusted. There was no hidden microphones here. These were intake interviews, charts, nurses, family consultations, very different from the apartment setting. Patients arrived seeking help for depression, anxiety, postpartum depressed, distress and other psychiatric conditions. They did enter voluntarily to seek treatment, at least at this first step. Cameron described his work as innovation. In published writing, he outlined a method he called psychic driving, which relied on repeated playback of recorded messages intended to dismantle harmful patterns of thought and replace them with healthier ones. On paper, this sounds therapeutic. In practice, the regimen could be far more extreme. Later accounts would describe patients heavily sedated for extended periods of time, subjected to repeated electroconvulsive treatments beyond ordinary standards of the time that exposed to tape, messages played continuously while they drifted in and out of consciousness. Families reported profound memory loss, personality changes, and lasting cognitive impairment. Some patients forgot basic skills like tying their shoes. Others lost large sections of their own story, their own autobiographical memory. Cameron didn't describe this as coercion, of course. People that participate in this never do. He believed that he was advancing treatment. And whether he did or not, or he was just a cruel sadist, who knows? In White's apartment, Coision hid behind the informality. This is just a date. This is just a casual get together. In Cameron's hospital, it hid behind authority. You know, you go in, you're trusting the doctor to help you. You're trusting that they know what they're doing. One depended on misdirection, the other depended on trust. And in both settings, the subject's ability to understand and to refuse was narrowed. Oversight failed differently in each. And in the apartment, it was so secret, there was no oversight. In the hospital, it was prestige. This is someone who's one of the most trusted psychiatric practitioners in the world. And in both places, approval sat far from the actual lived experience. White and Cameron didn't look like partners. One worked in the shadow and in secrecy, the other in daylight. But the funding path that supported them ran through the same organization. The distance matters again because it lowers resistance to escalation. Drugs can be Introduced without consent and interrogation techniques can migrate into the clinical space. Outcomes, disorientation, compliance and memory loss can be summarized without describing the pressure that produced them. What reads is data just may be a destabilization of the record. And again, this machine was specifically created to create distance, to create questions, to create gaps in the data. Make it all sound so boring, mundane, full of research. This is another reason that it's, I think it's really important to go through and read bills that are being proposed locally and on state levels. They sound so boring. And the headlines of headlines, the titles of them are usually like, oh, that doesn't seem like a bad thing. But when you go in and you actually read the bill, oh my gosh, it's terrifying. But sometimes these tests did give the wrong kind of results. And let's talk about one such instance. 10:15am the dose is administered. Harold Abrahamson sits across from the subject in a clinical office. The room is spare, it's orderly. A notebook sits on the desk. The subject has agreed to participate. The amount of LSD measured in micrograms is recorded before the session begins. For several minutes, nothing happens. Abramson asks neutral questions. He watches the posture, the breathing, the eye movement. Around the 20 minute mark, speech begins to accelerate. The subject talks more freely and emotional tone sharpens. Connections feel meaningful. As Abramson asks the subject to describe memories associated with specific events, confidence increases, answers arrive quickly. The subject speaks as if distances collapse. They're friends. Now there's access. Abrams, Abramson makes notes about fluency and emotional engagement. And from above, the exchange looks very productive. The subject is cooperating and the conversation is easy. But then it shifts. When Abramson asks for clarification like dates, sequences or details, the subject answers without hesitation. Yet the responses begin to drift and events slide out of order. It's not making sense anymore. Assertions are contradicting earlier statements and confidence is remaining high. So this person is now the things are out of order. They don't realize they're contradicting themselves. They are saying it with a hundred percent confidence. At one point, the subject corrects Abramson's notes with visible irritation, insisting on precision while describing a timeline that doesn't make any sense anymore. Emotional intensity rises as the coherence breaks down. So as the subject begins to lose their ability to stay on target, to keep track of the story, they're emotional, they start to get upset. At 90 minutes, the session winds down. Abramson's got a page of notes. He's a New York psychiatrist who's already published on LSD and is consulted precisely because he's cautious about what altered states can do and what they cannot deliver. When the material is reviewed later, the same fault line appears. Assertions cannot be verified. Emotional vividness has outpaced reliability. So the emotional response in these studies is not giving them the test results that they want. Want. Abrams Abramson's conclusion was unambiguous. He simply said LSD produces powerful subjective experience, but it does not reliably produce truth. Really the core of this was can I get someone to tell the truth by giving them lsd? And not every session looked like this. In some, the drug didn't loosen anything. It ignited it again. LSD is administered under controlled conditions. The subject knows a substance has been given. Sometimes, sometimes they don't. Anxiety surfaces quickly and suspicion follows. Ordinary questions feel threatening, right? Because you're, you're in this altered state that you don't understand. And then of course, the examiner makes adjustments as the, the session goes on. Then the subjects sometimes fixate on imagined danger in the room. This is a huge danger of something like lsd. So after they're fixated in a danger in the room, structured questioning is losing its footing. Observation continues as interrogation collapses and the session yields extensive notes. But nothing usable. Right, because. Because everyone's reaction is going to be different. Again. A lot of these people don't know that they've been dosed. And it's not like producing truth. It's not like a truth serum, which is in some ways what it seems they were trying to get. So at first, LSD had been treated like a promising tool, something that might loosen defenses or restore buried memory. There is some research about it being able to help with things like depression, but that's not what they were studying. But the repeated trials replace speculation with pattern is it doesn't behave in a way you can't direct lsd. You can't give LSD in a tiny little tablet and expect it to show up consistently in everyone. It doesn't. It amplifies what's already present. The question was no longer whether altered states affect behavior. Of course they do. The problem was that the effect couldn't be directed. With lsd, interrogation depended on calibration. Questions that can build resistance that can be tested, answers that can be measured. And LSD disrupts interrogation structure because it produces volatility and a setting that's built on control and that volatility in the room is an interference to what they were trying to achieve. In some sessions, barbiturates are introduced as A corrective. The goal shifts from revelation to manageability. Sedation is expected to quiet the anxiety, lower the inhibition, smooth the edges of resistance before the questioning begins. At first, this actually seems to work. They notice that subjects grow calmer, speech slows, answers come more easily. But then we get more issues. Their memory starts to loosen along with their. As their inhibition goes down, their memory loses clarity and statements start to wander. On review, apparent cooperation dissolves into inconsistency. Barbiturates reduce resistance, but again, they don't restore reliability. Other sessions move in the opposite direction. They decide to give people amphetamines, are used to push back fatigue and prolong the questioning, extend the wakefulness. The subject is upright and responsive and engaged, but accuracy doesn't increase. And the longer that interrogation goes, their irritability sharpens. They can't focus again. The control of the narrative disintegrates. The stimulation delays collapse, but the distortion deepens. So none of these. They were spiking all these people with all these different drugs and not getting the reliable results that they wanted. Different substances alter different surfaces of the same problem, but none produce truth. And again, the goal of this was, if a substance is given to someone with or without their consent, can it be used as a truth serum to increase the reliability and the ease with which they answer questions? The standard shift is almost imperceptible. The question is no longer about whether information is accurate, but whether the subject is easier to steer. All right, now let's move to another room. This is one set of experiments as they move and as they change as they shift. Let's talk about Louise Joylyn west, who sits with a subject whose reaction to LSD is already underway. West is a UCLA psychiatrist with training in both psychiatry and experimental psychology. Sorry, I said Louise. It's Lewis. His work centers on dissociation, suggestibility, and the reshaping of belief under pressure. He approaches altered states not as noise to be corrected, but conditions to be examined. His subject's sense of self begins to slip as statements start to shift mid sentence and certainty often fails. West doesn't press for dates or sequence, but he alters tone. He gently suggests, what if memory connects to something earlier? What if that memory connects to something earlier? The subject pauses and then nods. Now we have a new narrative thread. West moves again. You seem calmer now. The subject agrees, even though agitation is visible seconds earlier. The emotional state reorganizes around West's cue. West is using suggestion to modify how this person responds to him. A subject who insisted on one interpretation now adopts another the instability Abramson treated as a warning west treats as a signal. West is able to use this distortion to be corrected and to shift. When LSD proves erratic, the barbiturates blur more than they clarify. The conclusion is not that, hey, this project isn't really working that well. It is rather that no single substance is sufficient. So now drugs become one element inside a larger testing pattern of fatigue, isolation and stress layered together. The question changes. It's not, does this produce truth? It changes to does this weaken footing? Does this give us more access? It's not, Is the statement accurate? It's Can I steer this subject now? And before I go into how the MK Ultra was used on colleagues of people working in the CIA on this research, it's time for our second of three mid show sponsor break again. You can subscribe at patreon.com montemater to be able to get these episodes ad free. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Co. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in with a full lineup of non alcoholic beer styles you can enjoy. Bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stock the fridge for tip off with a variety of non alcoholic craft styles. Available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com near Beer Fit for all times. New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're gonna crush start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian so in November of 1953 Frank Olson traveled to a retreat in rural Maryland with colleagues from the Army's Biological warfare and CIA linked research. It was framed as a professional discussion of place to come and talk about work, drinks, report, it's, you know, easy conversation. How do we move these projects forward? These were colleagues who had worked together for years. And at some point that evening LSD is slipped into the drinks of several attendees as part of the CIA's test. No warning, no consent. Some of the men were told the next morning what had occurred. But Olsen was, was not told. In the days that followed, colleagues noticed a shift in him. Olson appeared unsettled, preoccupied, unable to regain his footing. He told associates that he'd made a terrible mistake in his work. He's his concern centered on biological weapons research and his participation in it. Those around him interpreted as instability, maybe stress, not the aftermath of undisclosed drug exposure. So he was referred to physicians already connected to the same research network that had dosed the him. The people positioned to help him were the people with the most reason to contain him. The circle closed in on itself. He was taken to New York for further consultation and his wife was told that he needed observation and rest. She wasn't told what was been done to him. So he doesn't know that he's been spiked with LSD and neither does she. And then of course on November 28, 1953, just after 2am, Olsen fell from a window of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan. He crashed through the closed glass and fell 13 stories to the sidewalk. His family was told that he had suffered a psychological break and his own life. And of course this explanation is swift, it's self contained. I mean it seems reasonable considering the type of death. Again, no mention of lsd, no mention of the retreat, no mention of his colleagues spiking him. And they said nothing about the fact that senior officials had known about the dosing immediately, like they knew it had happened. And for more than 20 years that version of the story held. It wasn't until 1975, amid congressional investigations into CIA conduct, that Olsen's widow and children were invited to the White House where President Gerald Ford apologized and acknowledged publicly for the first time that Olson had been given LSD without his consent. A financial settlement would follow, but an apology and some cash doesn't reconstruct, doesn't bring someone back to life and it certainly doesn't give you back your time with them. Frank's son Eric would later describe the moment of learning the truth not as closure, but as rupture. The family had built Their understanding of Frank's death around one story for two decades now. They knew that that story was incomplete and completely bogus. Grief. It's like relearning the grief. You have to re experience the death and the grief. Grief all over again. Trust had to be rebuilt for not from nothing or abandoned. And what his son Eric would emphasize years later was not only a dosing, it was the delay. It was the 22 years of not being told and the slow realization that key facts had been withheld while official explanations remained confident and final. And what scares me about things like that is I feel like we witness this now. I think about we recently found out that Ice had shot and killed a 23 year old and were able to hide it for a year. And I grew up with this idea of American exceptionalism, which is why Project MKUltra fascinates me so much. Because I grew up with this idea that, you know, the United States has problems, but overall we get it right, we try to do the right thing. We're honest, we're free, we're this, we're that. My government would never insert things that governments do. And the older I get, the more I see how common this is and especially with the release of the Epstein files, how we see how involved members of our government are. And nothing has been done. And it makes it to the point where sometimes I don't think there's a lot that would truly surprise me anymore. And I think MK Ultra is kind of a small. A small window into that. Let's talk about Harold Blauer. Harold Blauer was a professional tennis instructor in New York. He had a life, a career, people who knew him. After a divorce and a small period of depression, he admitted himself voluntarily into a psychiatric hospital seeking treatment. And by small period, I don't mean mean that it wasn't clinical because obviously he took himself to the hospital. I mean that it wasn't extremely prolonged. This was not a prolonged problem that he had had throughout his life. Blauer arrived as a patient expecting care again, intake, interviews, stabilization. Instead he became. He becomes part of a classified research arrangement between the hospital staff and U S. Army researchers. Blauer was selected for drug experimentation without his knowledge. The compounds were supplied through military channels and administered under the COVID of therapy. He was injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative and after one injection his body reacted violently. Witnesses later described severe distress, sweating, agitation, psychological collapse. Sorry. Physiological collapse. Medical staff attempted to intervene, but within hours he was dead. His family was told he had died of natural causes. No mention of the experiment, no mention of the government being involved, no public inquiry at the time. Records were limited and shielded under national security claims. And the explanation given was meant to conclude the matter matter. And for years it did. Unlike the Olson family, however, the Blauer did not receive. The Blauer family did not receive a White House apology in the 1970s. There was no public acknowledgment at the outset. His case resurfaced only when broader investigations into secret research programs exposed contradictions in the official accounts. Litigation would eventually reveal the COVID experimentation and the deliberate misdirection. The New York State Supreme Court acknowledged the deception, though even then the documentary. The documentary record remained incomplete. Blauer died in 1953, the same year as Olson. His case took decades longer to surface. And even then we still don't have all of the information. Placed side by side, the two cases show uneven mechanics of accountability. But also how many other people did this happen to that they never had any idea? The difference is not only what happened, but it's whether anyone was compelled to explain. And in most cases they were not. Not. And the consequences of this research, you know, these, the CIA during this time is acting like, I mean, we're just researching, we're just looking into it. And as these people die like they're. The real life consequences are showing up someone jumping out of a skyscraper in Manhattan, someone dying in a hospital room, someone in a living room where they cannot explain why they're in a state of psychosis is just brushed off as administrative. And the real reason that there has been no extensive accountability for MK Ultra, as well as we don't really have. Have the full, we don't have the full story, we don't have all the information was the secrecy with which the CIA operates. And they don't reserve this for just sensitive subjects. This is a agency wide program, an agency wide standard. And few figures would shape this instinct more decisively than James Jesus Angleton. Angleton joined the Agency in its earliest years and became Chief of counterintelligence in 1954, a position that he would hold for roughly two decades. Decades. He was very, very smart, intensely private, and deeply suspicious of surface explanations. Before the war, he had studied poetry at Yale under the critic Clint Brooks, whose method insisted that a text surface was never the whole story. That meaning lived in tension, ambiguity, and was withheld as much as was was stated angled and carried that sensibility into his work in intelligence. Deception, as he understood it, rarely announced himself itself. Angleton had a phrase for the World of intelligence officers that he inhabited. He borrowed it from T.S. eliot, which was qu a wilderness of mirrors, and used it to describe an environment where reflections multiplied, signals doubled back, and what looked solid might be misdirection. What felt obvious might have been planted. That worldview reshaped how the agency protected itself. Compartmentalization stopped being merely a safeguard. Again it became like it just became standard. It became the ethic. Programs were broken into discrete elements. Everything's on a need to know basis. This isn't framed as distrust. It's framed as just being professional, being protective. Again, national security. The assumption was simple, that the less any one person knew, the less damage a breach could cause. We have to protect the country. So within, as all of these studies are continuing, everyone is fragmented. So a lot of the people conducting research or, or putting these tests together or seeing a memo don't have the whole story about each of these projects. They don't know what's going on in the apartment. They don't know that this is also going on in a hospital. Very few people, and typically the upper echelon of people within the CIA actually knew that these tests and this study was going on in such a wide net. By the late 1950s, Angleton had become convinced that Soviet intelligence had penetrated the CIA at a high level. Oh, here we go. So we get the paranoia. Not a minor leak, not a compromised courier, a mole close enough to distort policy and poison analysis from within. Now, this evidence was incomplete, and it the evidence points in different directions. Some defectors contradicted, others, records piled up. But clarity seemed to thin. So for Angleton, this ambiguity is not reassuring, it's alarming. If deception was sophisticated enough, he argued, it wouldn't leave clean proof. The absence of confirmation could itself be evidence of how well his adversaries had concealed it. Operations slowed under review. Careers stalled while backgrounds were re examined. Colleagues found themselves suspected not because of anything they'd done, but because something somewhere didn't add up. And because the agency was so fragmented, it was hard to find out just where. Some officers believe that research, that the search had outrun the facts. Others defended it as the unavoidable cost of counterintelligence taken seriously. No definitive resolution would emerge, though Angleton would eventually be removed, but without public answer as to whether the mole he hunted ever existed. And eventually, though all of the secrecy, all of these tests, all of these people tested on people that died, it eventually came out. Exposure always comes. It just came quite late, and it didn't come all at once. It didn't come cleanly, but it came by the mid-1970s. MK Ultra had stopped operating by that time. Right. Remember that? Their tests, testing, all these different drugs, they're not getting reliable results. What hadn't stopped was the question of what it had done to whom it had done it to, and whether anyone would ever be required to say exactly what it had done. What survived were fragments because financial records that hadn't been shredded, many of them were destroyed. Testimony from people whose memories now carried more weight than paper. Families who knew something had happened, even if the government wouldn't say what. And the investigation that brought MK ULTRA into public view was conducted by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activity Activities. That was known as the Church Committee. From the beginning, the committee knew it was chasing a record that had already been thinned. They knew that documents had been destroyed. And that was an optimistic assessment. What followed happened in the public, in hearing rooms, under oath and on the record, which I think all of these type of investigative hearings should be on. Which meant for the first time, this machine that had done all of these tests, all of these horrific things, had to answer publicly. The first witness is William Colby. He's taken over the CIA in the aftermath of Watergate. And unlike his predecessor, he arrived promising a measure of cooperation with Congress. He spoke publicly about restoring trust and understood the agency was under scrutiny. Now he sits before the committee as Director of Central Intelligence. Senator Frank Church begins quietly saying, Director Colby, were records relating to Project MK Ultra destroyed? Yes. Yes. Were they destroyed after this committee was formed? Yes. So these records were destroyed after Congress began examining intelligence activities? That is correct. Church narrows the question. Did these records concern experiments conducted on human beings? Yes. Was there any effort made to preserve them for the purposes of oversight? I am not aware of such effort. Colby does not evade. He confirms exactly what everyone is afraid of. Then Richard Helms follows oss, Cold War Director of Central Intelligence. During the years that MK ULTRA was expanded and during the years its files were destroyed, Church resumes his questioning. Mr. Helms, did you order the destruction of MK Ultra Records? I do not recall. Do you approve of their destruction? I do not recall. Would the destruction of records documenting human experimentation normally come to your attention as directed, Director? I cannot say. You cannot say that that would normally be brought to your attention? That is correct. Church pressed further, saying, do you deny the destruction occurred while you were Director of Central Intelligence? I do not recall. He does not deny, he does not confirm. He simply refuses to remember on the record under oath, in public. This is the same thing that happened in the Epstein case with Acosta. When he was asked about the sweetheart deal he gave to Epstein, he was just like, I just. I just can't remember what happened. Major case involving a minor. Minor. I just don't remember. Next is Sinley. Sydney Gottlieb that we talked about earlier. The chemist, the quiet administrator, the man who moved those proposals that just seemed so boring, so casual. Senator Walter mondale questions him. Dr. Gottlieb, were individuals administered drugs without their knowledge? Yes. Did that include lsd? Yes. How frequently did this occur? I can't give a precise number. Were the subjects informed afterwards? In some cases. Cases. And in others? No. Mondale tightens the frame again. Did you believe this research was ethical? We believed it was necessary. Necessary? Even without consent? Yes. Who authorized proceeding under those conditions? The agency. Mondale doesn't let it rest there. He says, did you ever object to the lack of consent? No. Did anyone above you object? Not to my knowledge. Did you ever consider stopping the. The work? No. And he's, like, very flat. There's no outrage, no defense. He answers as someone who would use the. The answer of, I was just doing my job. I was just doing what my superiors told me very casually. And with this idea that the system that he inhabited and helped build really didn't cause any harm. Now the committee turns to the culture of the agency. James Jesus Angleton, that we just talked about, the longtime head of counterintelligence, now testifies. Senator Church shifts his approach a little bit with Mr. England Angleton. Mr. Angleton, was the agency concerned during this period about internal penetration? Yes. To what extent? It was considered a serious possibility. And that concern affected how information was shared? Yes. How? Through compartmentalization. So fewer people had full visibility into sensitive programs? That's correct. And oversight? Yes, it was affected. So someone could have authorized experimentation on human beings and the people responsible for oversight might never have been known? That is possible. And that was considered acceptable? It was considered necessary. With the documents gone and the operational testimony exhausted, the committee names the problem. Senator Mondale again speaks to Director Colby. We are trying to reconstruct a program where most of the documentation no longer exists. That is true. Colby replies. We're relying on memory rather than records. Yes. At some point, that makes accountability extremely difficult. Difficult. That would be fair. Another senator follows. There's no way to know how many subjects were involved? No. No way to get the full range of experiments? No. And no way to know how many people were harmed? That is correct. The Void is now on record. So that is a very public admission of there may be thousands of people who were experimented on with various drugs, sleep deprivation, hypnosis, other types of coercion that were never told what was happening to them, never told that they were dosed, never told that they were studied. Many of them could have died, and we have absolutely no way to prove how many there are. I am tend to be of the opinion that someone in the agency at this time knew and just refused to say. But because they had destroyed the documents, no one could prove it. So the committee would later acknowledge. Something else. Senator Church would ask Director Colby, again, much of this information did not come from the agency itself. Did, did it? No. It came from press reporting because again, just like the syphilis study, it was the press that made this investigation possible. Director Colby says yes. Without that reporting, would these matters have come before Congress? Possibly not. Would the public have known? No. Journalists at outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post had forced disclosure reporting preceded confession. This is why freedom of the press is so important. It's so important. They're one of the very few people that can hold hold those who are in power accountable. Church again asks. Press stories appeared describing human experimentation. Yes, says Colby, journalists forced declassification. In part. They forced this investigation. Yes. And without them, none of this would be on the record. That would be fair. The Church committee took what it had and forced the fragments into public view. It confirmed what had happened, that human beings were used without consent, records were destroyed, oversight had not worked. By the time Congress arrived, the archive had already been severely degraded. And what could be proven depended on what had survived. What had been erased stays erased. And again, you have an entire group of people who are working in an agency that's only true ethic is secrecy. Hearings didn't close the story, but they did change who was allowed to tell it and of course allowed the American public to know that these studies had gone on. And part of me wonders if they ever stopped and if they just shifted. So once the secrecy failed to contain this story, something shifted. The question is no longer how to hide, it's how to endure being known. So being known now that Americans know this is going on, it changes the vocabulary and it changes the paperwork. The intelligence linked behavioral research could remain classified, internally supervised and beyond the reach of people that it affected. It didn't end the institution, it just forced them to adapt. Which again brings me so many questions about what else has flown under the radar that Americans, we have never found out about or that are going on right now, now that we don't know about. Behavioral research inside the CIA didn't vanish. Of course it didn't. It was renamed and rechanneled. MK Search emerged in place of MK Ultra. So inside the agency this was presented as a correction. We've learned from our sins of MK Ultra. We're going to do it differently. Approval procedures did tighten. Documentation expanded and proposals were described more carefully. The risk was no longer framed as open ended exploration, but was bounded under review. Review. But does the secrecy itself ever submit to the same standards demanded elsewhere? Don't think it does. So where MK Ultra era documents often relied on bright, broad authorization and very sparse description, MK Searches are. Proposals are a little bit more contained. The objection. The objectives are a little bit more narrowly defined. Duration is specified, funding is tied to discrete phases, memoranda, reference, internal review. So the tone shifts as well. So while MK ULTRA was kind of like we're exploring this new frontier, MK Search really talks a lot more about risk, something to be monitored and justified in advance. One declassified document makes the specific nature of that narrowing concrete. Under MK Search, the behavioral drug research that had once sprawled across hospitals, universities and safe houses was reduced to a single defined inquiry. The effect of certain drugs on learning ability and memory retention. Testing would take place in a state prison described in the record as involving volunteers. 18 other surviving sub projects weren't transferred to MK search at all. Gottlieb moved them quietly back into the regular agency funding channels where they no longer needed to announce themselves as behavioral research. So nothing really changes. Emphasis does, language does. They're able to go back essentially to their original programming because nothing could be proven. MK Search materials more consistently frame research in relation to foreign intelligence requirements. Requirements such as resistance to interrogation, counterintelligence, vulnerability, behavioral effects relevant to overseas operations. The stated mission is less diffuse, the connection to the operational need is more explicit. So again, this isn't really strictly cosmetic. There are some procedural changes, but the bulk of it remains the same, that people are still being tested. We're still in this effort to see how we can sway intelligence, sway, mind control sway and interrogation. And the reality is that if the CIA was brought before Congress again today, there would likely be less than no accountability. The question was never whether behavioral research should continue. It was how to continue it in a way that would withstand inspection. The presentation and containment changed. But the underlying premise that intelligent linked behavioral research could remain classified and only supervised internally did not change. In 1966, anesthesiologist Henry Beecher published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Medicine that unsettled the profession from the inside. He did not expose a single kind of rogue Laboratory. He identified 22 studies conducted at respected institutions, research involving deception, withheld treatment or risk imposed without meaningful consent. These weren't secret intelligence programs. These were published studies conducted at prestigious institutions. This wasn't just a Langley problem. What. What he did here was expose that this is a structural program. Beecher's argument was precise. The problem is not sad sadism, it's normalization. Investigators convinced themselves that the scientific promise outweighed disclosure and institutional prestige substituted for permission. It's kind of this, well, let's act first and act, ask for forgiveness later. Subjects, of course, often poor people, people who were institutionalized or medically dependent, were treated as available rather than autonomous. They were treated as bodies to be included in research without any consideration to the fact that they could not consent. The article didn't accuse individuals of monstrosity. It accused the whole system of drifting into the monstrous. And the drift didn't stop there. Revelations about government sponsored radiation experiments showed patients exposed without their knowledge in the name of research. And of course, the public exposure of the Tuskegee syphilis study revealed that hundreds of black men had been observed for decades watch as this disease progressed, denied available treatment and never told what was being studied or why. The study had federal support. This was a government run run study. Again, these weren't covert CIA interrogations. They were federally supported programs operating in daylight by credentialed researchers and institutions. The problem wasn't confined to a single agency or a single decade. It was a structure. It was the way that our system is built. By the early 1970s, the pattern can't be dismissed as isolated misconduct. This is in millit like the military research, intelligence work, civilian medicine, the same structure keeps resurfacing over and over that authority operating without meaningful consent and using urgency to override restraint, especially when it comes in the name of national security. This is a much bigger problem than just MK Ultra. It could no longer be managed internally. Congress responded by creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Its mandate was not to adjudicate a single scandal, but to define principles that would govern research wherever power and vulnerability intersected. And like we spoke about in this Tuskegee study study, the Belmont report in 1979 said that there was three principles that should guide research, which was respect for persons, beneficence and justice. These words were written after a system that was built abused Thousands and thousands and thousands of people in different categories without their consent. And Belmont, the Belmont report didn't assume that good intentions were enough. It treated autonomy as a requirement for the very first time. Time and again, the people who built these programs saw what happened in Nazi Germany. They knew about the Nuremberg Code, they knew about all of this. They chose to take these steps anyway. And once federal money was on the line, institutions were forced to demonstrate compliance. Of course, review boards became standards, protocols become established and this alters the terrain so abuse isn't impossible. But the secrecy, especially in public institutions, can't function as sufficient enough defense by itself. Self procedure can regulate conduct, but it can't dissolve instinct. And the pressures that shaped NK Ultra didn't vanish with reform. Authority we still see concentrates under secrecy. Responsibility still fragments when things are compartmentalized. But now that there are at least standards, now that there are protocols, there is at least a durable boundary that does not guarantee immunity. MK Ultra didn't prove that minds could be controlled, but it demonstrated that institutions operating under secrecy, secrecy can normalize harm, distribute responsibility so widely that no one holds any, and later reform themselves without fully confronting what they made possible. I think it's a really good kind of image for what we're seeing happen with our institutions today. And what we're seeing. The machinery survived the outrage. It survived reform, it survived, oh my God, we're so sorry, we won't do it again. And it. And it survived because none of those things required it to account for itself specifically in specific terms in front of people who wouldn't expect accept a summary. And also because they destroyed all the evidence. What are you going to convict them of? The tension between urgency and restraint didn't belong to the 1950s. We still see that language. It didn't. That logic didn't originate in the Cold War, and it certainly lived long past it. We still see this type of language used to justify wrong actions. National security get them before they get us. Well, our enemy has access to. And often it's. It's the average person, especially the poor, the disabled, the imprisoned that get caught in the crossfire. And in. In the midst of all this, even with CIA trying to bury everything, fragments of it survived, which is why we know about it. Families persisted. Thank God for journalists who published it. Investigators refused to accept the summary. And slowly and incompletely, but at great cost to people who've already paid the highest price, the shape of moving forward became visible. The people in Cameron's ward did not get their memories back. Harold Blauer's family didn't get a White House apology, and Frank Olson's son spent decades trying to understand why his father killed himself. But visibility is not nothing. And I do not recall works only when no one insists on remembering and when no one insists on accountability and boundaries. And one of the things about MK Ultra is that there was no accountability in this instance because it wasn't demanded, ended, because there wasn't transparency. And as we move into the world that we live in now with a lot of question marks, a lot more questions than we have answers for, and a lot of absolutely no accountability, again, especially in the wake of the Epstein files, I hope that what this teaches is that keep asking, keep speaking up, because without journalists, these last two episodes, without journalists being willing to speak up and say something, none of these things would have came to life. None of these things would even remotely. And even though the people that responsible for MK Ultra didn't suffer the consequences, they should have, what they did is it at least gave some answers to some of the families. It at least gave the American people a little bit of an idea of what their government and what their agencies are doing. And that's what's important. So I hope that you listen to this episode and you're encouraged to speak up. Even if you feel like I don't know who's going to listen to me or my voice isn't that powerful, continue to speak up. Because when it comes to authority, authority that operates in secrecy can be as corrupt as it wants to be. But when we use our voices to hold it accountable and pull it into the light, we can at least make the system better each step of the way. And I will see you next week on Flipping Tables.