Today's guest is University of Texas historian John Lisle, author of the chilling and brilliantly researched Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.

Despite official attempts to destroy records of the CIA's LSD-fueled search for mind control in the 1950s and '60s, the truth has been dribbling out, especially in recent books and documentaries such as Steven Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief and Errol Morris' Wormwood.

Lisle's work draws on previously unknown depositions and documents to deliver the most definitive—and disturbing—account yet. He discusses the twisted logic of Cold War secrecy, the bizarre figures behind and victims of America's darkest experiments, and what MKUltra reveals about the dangers of unchecked power in a democracy.

And this might be the most important thing: He and Nick Gillespie talk about why conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of transparency—and how to preserve skepticism without surrendering to paranoia.

0:00—Intro

1:32—What is MKUltra?

3:42—Brainwashing origins in the Korean War

6:50—Who is Sidney Gottlieb?

10:43—The CIA's startup culture

20:37—Who is Ewen Cameron?

24:32—Jolly West and implanting memories

28:24—MKUltra gets shut down

31:08—How MKUltra documents came to light

39:38—Main lessons from MKUltra

46:57—Politicization of intelligence agencies

51:03—Conspiracy thinking and the legacy of MKUltra

58:31—COVID-19 and the collapse of righteous authority

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: John Lisle, thanks for talking to Reason.

John Lisle: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

All right, the book is Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra. I suspect that our more conspiracy-minded and history-minded listeners and watchers know what MKUltra is, but summarize what MKUltra was.

Yes, thanks for having me again. MKUltra was this program by the CIA, starting in the 1950s. And the goal of MKUltra was to determine whether methods of mind control are possible. The CIA wanted to know, for instance, whether you could create a truth drug—could you give someone you're interrogating a drug that can make them spill the truth, make them tell the truth no matter what? Could you slip something in someone's drink and make them behave in a certain way—either make them seem erratic or potentially control their behaviors and beliefs?

That's kind of the overarching goal of MKUltra. They did that through various means. Some of the reasons why the people who were in charge of it were interested in this kind of thing—someone like Sidney Gottlieb, who led MKUltra, this chemist in the CIA—he was worried about the potential for communist countries possessing these kinds of methods.

For instance, Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, he had done behavioral conditioning in the 1890s—ringing a bell and getting a dog to salivate. Well, if you could do that to dogs that far back, surely the Russians since then have been improving upon their methods. So, if they're doing it, we need to know how to do it ourselves and we know how to defend against it.

It's kind of an amazing thing, as we get more distance on the Cold War, the idea that we have to be more like the Russians or the Soviets than they were in order to defeat them—in order to be supremely American. We're doing everything they're doing, but better. It's peculiar.

The concept of brainwashing, which is kind of rattling around in the back of MKUltra and other CIA fever dreams—and, you know, some of them are legitimate. I mean, it's clear there were conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States and other free countries of Europe. But the concept of brainwashing came out of the Korean War. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because that's also—I mean, it's the first Cold War conflict, or a proxy war. But what was going on in Korea, and how did that really inflame the desire to be able to force somebody to tell the truth, or to control and manipulate them?

Yeah, you're exactly right about the importance of this Korean War, too, because during it, there were several American pilots who were captured in Korea, and while they were POWs, they started confessing to very strange crimes.

For instance, many of them started saying that they were engaging in biological warfare against the Korean people—for the Americans, while they were flying over, they were dropping anthrax bombs or germ bombs or bubonic plague germs or something like that. We now know, from some Russian archives actually, that some North Korean officials had flown to China and had gotten cultures of bubonic plague to infect their own prisoners to make it seem as if the Americans were doing this.

But still, the question remains within the CIA: why are these American POWs confessing to these crimes of biological warfare? One potential explanation they come up with is maybe they're being manipulated in a certain way to do this. Maybe they've been brainwashed or mind-controlled through drugs or through hypnotism. Again, maybe the communists possess some kind of mind control technique that's causing these POWs to do this.

Now, it turns out afterward, when many of these POWs returned to the United States, they're, of course, interviewed and asked about what happened. One of the people who interviews them, in fact, is Jolly West, who plays a prominent role in the MKUltra program. And he comes to the conclusion—again, this is ironic because he's later going to be working on MKUltra—but he comes to the conclusion that it wasn't these esoteric mind control methods that the communists were using to manipulate people. Instead, it's the typical methods of coercion that people have been using for centuries. It's sleep deprivation and fatigue and food deprivation, and having an actual…

I mean actual, right? Physical beatings and more—

Exactly, yeah. So he comes to that conclusion. And you kind of mentioned the irony of this earlier, about how the Americans are recapitulating a lot of what the communists are doing or trying to catch up to what they're doing. Again, it's ironic because they weren't doing these mind control methods in the sense that the CIA thought they were. And yet, even when the CIA figures that out—they have multiple people write reports on this—what's actually causing these POWs to confess to these crimes? It's not the mind control methods. Yet the CIA still wants to develop those methods, because, "well, it was a potential if they could've done that, therefore, if the potential exists that it could have happened, we want to know whether we can do it now."

So let's talk—we'll get to Jolly West, who's one of the most ironically named people in history. I mean, he's just not a jolly man at all. Really a deeply fucked up person who, unfortunately, was able to do a lot of bad things to a lot of people and really not pay a price for it.

But Sidney Gottlieb, who, as you mentioned, is a chemist who became the head of MKUltra—who was he, and why did he ultimately fixate on drugs and things like LSD in particular?

Yeah, LSD is going to be the big one they start using within MKUltra. Sidney Gottlieb is a chemist from New York. He went to school at Caltech. He got his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry there, and that was right around World War II in the 1940s.

He desperately wanted to join the war—he wanted to join the Army—but he was denied because he had a limp. He suffered from a limp; he had clubbed feet, he was born with. He also talked with a stutter—not that that mattered for joining the Army—but he talked with a stutter, he walked with a limp, so he was denied entry into the Army.

After that, he kind of felt this debt that he owed to his country. His parents were immigrants from Hungary. This country had given them a good life and allowed them to raise him here. And so he felt that he wanted to pay back his country in some way. He thought it would be through service in the Army during World War II. When that didn't pan out, he got a series of jobs as a chemist at different companies and universities, but eventually he decided to apply for a job at ...

How a Government Mind Control Experiment Backfired