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MKUltra: The Secret Mind Control Program That Raised Serious Questions · The conspiracy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The year was 1947, and America had traded one nightmare
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: for another. World War II was over, but victory came
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: with baggage nobody had ordered. The atomic age had arrived,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and suddenly every shadow contained the possibility of instant annihilation.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Kids practiced duck-and-cover drills in classrooms, diving under desks as
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: if wood could stop a nuclear fire, and their parents
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: built bomb shelters and stocked them with canned food and
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: false hope. But the bombs weren't the worst part. Something
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: far more disturbing was keeping Washington's power players awake at night.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: The possibility that the human mind could be turned into
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: a weapon. So intelligence reports trickled in. And the Nazis
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: hadn't just built gas chambers. They'd conducted mind experiments in
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: concentration camps. And SS doctors had injected prisoners with mescaline,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: testing whether human consciousness could be manipulated like clay. So
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: the question was, could a person be turned into a puppet?
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: And this question was horrifying. So when the war ended,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: America faced a choice. Prosecute these monster scientists or... Recruit them.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Guess which option won. So through Operation Paperclip, the US
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: welcomed Nazi researchers with open arms, scrubbing their records clean
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: because their knowledge might prove useful. Nice going, government. Nothing
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: says land of the free quite like hiring your former
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: enemies to work on a secret project. Then came Korea,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: where captured American pilots emerged from communist prisons speaking like
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: broken robots. And they confessed to war crimes with mechanical precision,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: their voices flat and extremely strange. And intelligence analysis studied
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: the recordings with growing panic. So these weren't just tortured men.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: These were reprogrammed men. And the terrifying conclusion was that
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: the Soviets had cracked the code of human consciousness. And
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: in the halls of the newly formed CIA established in
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: 1947 to protect American interests worldwide, a simple but monstrous
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: question emerged. If they can control minds, shouldn't we learn
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: to do it better? This question would birth a program
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: so dark that its existence would remain buried for over
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: 20 years. A program that turned hospitals into laboratories, doctors
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: into torturers, and innocent citizens into unwitting test subjects in
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: humanity's most grotesque experiments. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: All things that I love to consume and I know
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Do you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually minded freak? And today
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: we are talking about a big daddy case. Okay, a
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: lot of you have requested this and I will feed you.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Mommy will feed you. Sorry, what the fuck? But we're
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: diving into the CIA, into MKUltra. And if something happens
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: to me, now you know why. But without further ado,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go mock fight down the highway,
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: slam on the brakes, and bust through this windshield into
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: this crazy... shit together. So the Cold War had begun,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: and the battlefield was the human mind itself. In CIA offices,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: plans were already forming. Codenames were being assigned, and budgets
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: were being approved. And soon, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: would be handed control of a shadow kingdom where human
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: suffering was the currency and consciousness was the target. America
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: was about to ask the question that should never be asked.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: What if we could break a person's mind, rebuild it,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: and control it like any other weapon? And the answer
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: would destroy more lives than any bomb. And it would
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: all be in the name of freedom. The Central Intelligence
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Agency was barely three years old when it decided to
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: get into the mind control business. Created by the National
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Security Act of 1947, the CIA was supposed to be
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: America's answer to Soviet intelligence, a shield against communist infiltration
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: and a sword to strike the enemies abroad. But what
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: nobody mentioned in the legislative debates was how quickly protecting
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: America would evolve into experimenting on Americans. So the groundwork
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: began with projects that sounded like rejected comic book titles.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: At first came Project Bluebird, and that was in 1950,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: and it focused on special interrogation methods and making people
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: resistant to enemy brainwashing. And the name suggested something peaceful,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: maybe even patriotic. But the reality involved drugs, hypnosis, and
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: psychological torture designed to shatter human consciousness like glass. And
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Bluebird would eventually evolve into Project Artichoke in 1951. Because
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: apparently someone in the CIA had a thing for naming
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: horrific programs after innocent objects. So Artichoke would push further
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: into darkness. testing whether hypnosis and chemicals could turn a
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: person into a remote-controlled assassin. Think the Bourne ultimatum, except
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: with real people and no Hollywood ending. And the man
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: tasked with running these horrific programs was a soft-spoken chemist
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: named Sidney Gottlieb. And to his neighbors in suburban Virginia,
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: he was just another government worker who grew orchids and
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: stuttered slightly when he was nervous. But to his colleagues
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: in the CIA's Technical Services Division, he was something else entirely.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: He was a brilliant scientist with an unsettling enthusiasm for
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: exploring the outer limits of human suffering. And Gottlieb had
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: even earned the nickname Black Sorcerer in intelligent circles. And
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: I can tell you what, it wasn't because of his
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: gardening skills, okay? So the man had a gift for
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: turning theoretical chemistry into practical nightmare fuel. He could discuss
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: the psychoactive properties of lysergic acid, dietel thai thiamine sorry
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: it's hard these words are hard with the same clinical
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: detachment other people would use to talk about the weather
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: by 1953 the early experiments had proven one thing breaking
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: human minds was definitely possible but the question was whether
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: america wanted to industrialize the process And the answer would
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: come from the top, CIA Director Alan Dulles. Or Dulles,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: or Dules, I don't really care, he's kind of a
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: piece of shit, so. And he was a man who
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: understood power the way sharks understand blood in the water.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Because he'd spent years watching Soviets expand their influence across
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: the globe. And he was convinced that they were winning
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: the psychological warfare game. Because at the end of the day,
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  Speaker 1: the government's just playing games with us. It's, it's, I should,
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  Speaker 1: I should not, I should not talk as much, I
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  Speaker 1: feel like I'm going to disappoint. So when Gottlieb approached
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  Speaker 1: him with a massive centralized mind control program, doulas, douls, doula, whatever,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: didn't hesitate. So on April 13th, 1953, he signed the
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  Speaker 1: authorization for Project MKUltra. And the name itself was typical
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: CIA cryptography. MK indicated the program belonged to the technical
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: services division, while ultra was a random word chosen to
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  Speaker 1: sound sufficiently mysterious. It sounds ultra f * * * ed.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: and stupid to me, but okay. But what wasn't random
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: was the scope. Because this would be the most extensive
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  Speaker 1: mind control research program in human history, with a budget
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  Speaker 1: that would make most university research departments weep with envy.
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  Speaker 1: So Gottlieb's first move was pure genius, if you define
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: genius as spectacularly evil, like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: And he would convince the CIA to buy the entire
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: world supply of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland for $ 240, 000,
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: which is roughly $ 4 million in today's money, which is
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: f * * * ing crazy. So overnight, America had
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: cornered the market of the most powerful psychoactive drug known
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  Speaker 1: to science. So just think about that for a moment.
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  Speaker 1: The same government who would later wage a war on
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: drugs had just become the world's largest drug dealer. All
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: in the name of national security. Thanks, guys. So with
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: unlimited funding and unlimited LSD and unlimited government backing, Gottlieb
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: began assembling his empire of shadows. So universities would provide
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: the researchers, and hospitals would supply the test subjects, and
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  Speaker 1: prisons would offer captive populations who couldn't say no. Yeah.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't care about the murderers and the you-know-whats,
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  Speaker 1: but everybody else, I mean, if you stole a candy bar,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: I don't know. It's inhumane. But that wouldn't even be
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: the biggest problem, because America had plenty of citizens, and
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: most of them had no idea what the hell was coming.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: So MKUltra was about to begin its reign of terror,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: and they had the full blessing of the United States government.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: Big shock. Because in the Cold War, apparently the only
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: way to protect American minds was to destroy them first.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: So the irony was lost on no one except the
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: people making the decisions themselves. So by 1953, Sidney Gottlieb
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  Speaker 1: had assembled something that would have made Dr. Frankenstein envious
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  Speaker 1: as hell. A nationwide network of human experimentation that stretched
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: across more than 80 institutions and encompassed over 150 separate
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: research projects. And the budget was staggering. $ 10 million, and
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: that would equal roughly $ 87. 5 million today. But money was
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: just numbers on the ledger. The real currency of MKUltra
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  Speaker 1: was human suffering. So the program's objective was deceptively simple.
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  Speaker 1: Discover how to control human consciousness using chemical, biological, and
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  Speaker 1: radiological methods. And whether the subjects consented was completely optional.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: And whether they survived was completely irrelevant. So the chemical
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  Speaker 1: key to consciousness at the center of MKUltra's arsenal was
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: a substance so powerful that amounts equivalent to two grains
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  Speaker 1: of salt could shatter a human mind. which is better
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: known as LSD, and that's what I'm going to call
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: it from now on because I ain't saying that shit again.
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  Speaker 1: So Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1938.
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  Speaker 1: So for those of you who don't know, or for
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: those of you who have tried it and still don't know,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: maybe you should know some history about it. So let's
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: go over that real quick. The Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman
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  Speaker 1: first synthesized LSD in 1938. And he accidentally discovered its
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: hallucinogenic properties in 1943, when he absorbed some through his skin.
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  Speaker 1: I can't even imagine how his day went, probably terrible.
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  Speaker 1: But the drug works by hijacking the brain's serotonin system, basically,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: binding to receptors that normally help interpret reality. And this
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  Speaker 1: causes the brain to process far more stimuli than usual.
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  Speaker 1: turning reality into a kaleidoscope of distorted perceptions where users
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  Speaker 1: might see music or hear colors. And under normal doses,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: an LSD trip might last from 7 to 12 hours,
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  Speaker 1: maybe even less depending on how much you take. Not
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  Speaker 1: that I would know. But MKUltra researchers weren't interested in
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: normal doses, and they would push subjects into uncharted territory
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  Speaker 1: with massive quantities that could trigger ego disillusion with the
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  Speaker 1: complete breakdown of personal identity. And at these extreme levels,
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  Speaker 1: subjects could experience seizures, respiratory problems, and dangerous hypothermia. But
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  Speaker 1: the psychological effects were even more devastating, because extended exposure
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  Speaker 1: could trigger flashback months or years later. And in some cases,
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  Speaker 1: hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, which is HPPD, a condition so
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: severe that victims are unable to adapt to living with permanent,
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  Speaker 1: reoccurring trips. But for the CIA, these weren't side effects.
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  Speaker 1: They were features. Because the more LSD could break down
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  Speaker 1: the human consciousness, the more useful it became as a weapon.
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  Speaker 1: So Gottlieb's empire operated on a simple philosophy. Before you
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  Speaker 1: could insert a new mind into somebody's head, You first
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  Speaker 1: had to destroy the one that was already there. And
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: this was not therapy. It was psychological demolition. And the
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: techniques read like torturers' instruction manuals. Because these were massive
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: doses of LSD that could keep subjects hallucinating for weeks
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  Speaker 1: on end. And they also used electroshock therapy, which was
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: delivered at intensities that would have killed smaller animals. And
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: then there was sensory deprivation. And they would use sensory
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  Speaker 1: deprivation so complete, it could break a person's grip on
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  Speaker 1: reality for days. And they would also use drug combinations
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: that turned human beings into chemical experiments, with researchers injecting
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  Speaker 1: barbiturates in one arm while pumping amphetamines into the other.
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  Speaker 1: Just to see what would happen to the human nervous
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  Speaker 1: system when it became a battleground within itself. I can't
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  Speaker 1: even imagine the psychological pain, and just the pain in general,
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  Speaker 1: that this... that that person would experience. And the most
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: extreme case would involve a patient in Kentucky who received
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  Speaker 1: LSD every single day for 174 consecutive days. Not weeks,
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  Speaker 1: nearly six months of continuous chemical assault on the human brain.
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  Speaker 1: And the patient's name was just lost in history. And
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  Speaker 1: their suffering just became a statistic in Gottlieb's files, hunting
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  Speaker 1: the vulnerable because MKUltra didn't target the powerful or connected.
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  Speaker 1: As one CIA officer coldly noted, they focused on quote unquote,
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  Speaker 1: people who could not fight back, which was mental patients, prisoners,
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  Speaker 1: drug addicts, and prostitutes. And the agency even extended its
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: reach to children. with documented cases of subjects as young
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: as eight to 10 years old, which is. so incredibly heartbreaking.
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  Speaker 1: And they would go through months of LSD, electroshock, and
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  Speaker 1: sensory deprivation. And James Whitney Bulger, the notorious Boston crime boss,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: actually volunteered for what he was told was an experiment
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: to find a cure for schizophrenia. And he did this
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: while serving time in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1957. So
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  Speaker 1: for more than a year, he received LSD injections daily.
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  Speaker 1: And his description of the experiment reads like something from
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: hell's own medical journal, stating, Eight convicts in a panic
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: out of the walls. Guys turning into skeletons in front
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: of me. I saw a camera change into the head
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: And years later, Bulger would finally realize the truth, saying,
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: So the man who would become one of America's most
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: wanted criminals had been transformed into a case study in
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: government-sponsored psychological torture. And that's when we enter Operation Midnight Climax. Yeah,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: it's as bad as it sounds. So the CIA's brothel
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: among MKUltra's most twisted operations was a program that sounds
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: too bizarre to be real. But it is! And that
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: was Operation Midnight Climax, where government-employed ladies of the night
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  Speaker 1: lured unsuspecting men to CIA safe houses in San Francisco
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: and New York for drug experiments. And the agency would
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: dose the men with LSD and then they would just
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: watch through two-way mirrors as the drug took effect. They
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: didn't know that they were being drugged, by the way.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: They thought they were gonna go to this safe house
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: and get lucky. And they would just record everything for
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: later analysis. And CIA operative George Hunter White, who ran
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: the operation, later described his work with disturbing enthusiasm, saying,
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, grape,
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: and pillage with the sanction of blessing of the all-highest?
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: This guy was f * * * ing two sheets
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: to the wind for twisted piece of shit. I don't
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: even understand what he said. And the recording devices in
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: the room were disguised as electrical outlets. And the subjects
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: never knew they were being drugged, as I said. They
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: were just watched and recorded. And they were just ordinary
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: men who thought they were paying for sex. And instead,
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: they just became unwitting participants in the most elaborate psychological
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: warfare experiment in human history. And perhaps nowhere was MKUltra's
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: brutality more systemically applied than at the Allen Memorial Institute
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: in Montreal, where Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Ewan Cameron turned a
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: prestigious hospital into a laboratory of horrors. Cameron, who was
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: paid $ 69, 000 by the CIA between 1957 and 1964, developed
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: techniques that would make medieval torturers seem humane by comparison.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: And a specialty was something he called psychic driving, a
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: procedure where patients were subjected to continuously repeated audio messages
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: on looped tapes, often exposed to hundreds of thousands of
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: repetitions of a single statement over the course of their treatment.
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  Speaker 1: That sounds f * * * ing terrible. I can't
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: even stand in an elevator for more than like five
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: minutes before that music drives me f * * *
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  Speaker 1: ing insane. I can't even imagine, like all jokes aside,
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: how horrible that would be. But this was just the beginning.
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  Speaker 1: Because Cameron used doses of Thorazine to put patients into
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: artificial comas in what he called a sleep room. And
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: the drug-induced sleep usually lasted from a few days up
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: to 86 days. far longer than any of the patients expected.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: Because what's consent, right? So while the patients were unconscious,
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: the patients were subjected to electroconclusive therapy at 30 to
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: 40 times the normal power. So their brains were just
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: bombarded with electrical storms that would have killed them in
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: any larger of a dose. And again, they're unconscious at
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: this point, so they obviously can't consent to what they
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: are doing. And the de-patterning process was designed to erase
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: personality entirely. And Cameron would give his subjects mega doses
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: of LSD and would subject them to drug-induced sleep therapy
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: for up to 65 consecutive days. and applied electroshock therapy
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: at 75 times the usual intensity. So the goal was
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: to reduce patients to what Cameron clinically described as a
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: vegetable state. And then came the repatterning, forcing patients to
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: listen to specific recordings for up to 16 hours a day,
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: with messages repeated up to half a million times, which
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: is awful, like horrible. I feel like I don't know
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: if it doesn't sound like much to people, like it's
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: just words, but the psychological torture you can put on
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: someone by putting them through that, I mean, there's a
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: reason why it's called torture. This is like actual torture
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: methods that multiple militaries use, sticking someone in a room
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: and putting something on repeat constantly. So for the first
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: 10 days, the recordings contained personal negative messages designed to
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: destroy any remaining sense of self. So just imagine that
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: a million, like millions of times just telling you how
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  Speaker 1: worthless you are. And you can't think of anything else
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: because you have to listen to what's in your ears.
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  Speaker 1: And then the next 10 days featured positive messages meant
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: to rebuild the personality according to Cameron's specifications. And one
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: patient subjected to recordings 45 times, expressed her distress, begged
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: the experimenter to stop playing it, and even turned red
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: and began hyperventilating and started shaking and continued to shake
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: even after the recording was stopped. And the researchers noted
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: her reaction with the same emotional detachment they might use
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: to describe The behavior of laboratory rats, it's just chilling.
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  Speaker 2: And it is his mind, no less, which may destroy mankind.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: I never saw him once in all the times that
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: I saw him that I wasn't afraid. Every time I
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: went down to his office, I would shake with fear.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: And every time I'd see him coming down the hall,
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: I'd shake with fear. But I adored him.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: The human cost was just staggering. And Louis Weinstein, a
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Montreal businessman who entered the Institute for Anxiety and Digestive Problems,
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: emerged as what his son described as a human guinea pig,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: a poor, pathetic man with no memory and no life.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: He lost his business. He lost everything. Like, these people
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: were walking out of here sometimes. A lot of them didn't. Just...
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: complete shells of themself. But one of the most horrifying
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: aspects of MKUltra was its willingness to experiment on children.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: So Bill Yarborough, who believes he was a child victim
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: of MKUltra, recalls experiments where they quote, they asked me
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: to draw as many squares as possible on a sheet
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: of paper until an alarm clock rang. If I drew enough,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: I'd be given a candy bar. If not, I'd be
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: handed over to a monster. Again, it's just like, it
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: seems so like mundane and stupid, but just, can you
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: imagine just drawing? And who knows how long they're making them,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: these kids draw like squares, like could be an hour,
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: could be 16 hours. Like I just, I can't even,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: they're just so f * * * ed up. Like
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: these people have no souls. But his memories, suppressed for decades,
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: eventually surfaced, saying, My father worked in the war crime
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: staff of the U.S. Army after World War II, where
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: he interviewed the Nazis running the Dekau concentration camp. And
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: that is where the Nazis conducted mind control experiments, and
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: that is where the CIA recruited some mind control experts
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: for MKUltra. And I believe that it is the connection
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: that led us into this program. Just f * *
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: * ing scum of the earth. Like recruiting Nazis, Nazi
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: doctors for an American program to torture their own citizens.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: I just, I can't, I can't fathom it. So the
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: irony was just crushing. America had prosecuted Nazi doctors for
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: experimenting on children and then recruited those same doctors to
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: refine their techniques and use them on American children. Just
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: a special place in hell for all, for the whole lot.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: Besides the kids, obviously. So in one of history's greatest ironies,
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: MKUltra accidentally launched the 1960s counterculture movement. And Ken Kesey,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, received his
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: first LSD through the CIA experiments while he was a
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: student at Stanford. And Robert Hunter, lyricist for The Grateful Dead,
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: was paid to take LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. and report
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: on his experiences. And Allen Ginsberg, the poet who would
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: preach the value of psychedelic experiences, got his first acid
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: trip courtesy of, you guessed it, Sidney Gottlieb. And Hunter's
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: description of his LSD experience reads like poetry. He said,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Sit back, picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: with foam crests of crystal drops, soft nigh, they fall
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: onto the sea of morning creep, very softly mist, and
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: then sort of cascade, tinkly bell-like, and then conglomerate, suddenly
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: into a peel of silver, vibrant, uncomprehendingly, Blood singingly, joyously
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: resounding bells. By my faith that this be insanity, then
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: for the love of God permit me to remain insane. What, what, what, what, what, what?
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: I don't want what he's having, is what I gotta say.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: So these particular volunteers found these experiences pleasurable, and they
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: would tell their friends. And soon, LSD spread beyond government control,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: just fueling a generational rebellion against everything the CIA represented.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Because the agency had hoped to weaponize consciousness. Instead, they
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: were armed with enemies with the very tools that would
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: challenge authority itself. And obviously, these volunteers were getting their
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: own doses, like they weren't being heavily dosed like the
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: people that came out of prison or mental institutions. So
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: it was like pleasurable for them. Whereas the experiments that
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: were going on with the CIA were just like torture chambers.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: So by 1963, over 30 institutions and universities were involved
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: in the experimentation program, testing drugs on unknowing citizens at
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: social levels, high and low, Native Americans and foreign. And
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: the military alone conducted three phases of LSD testing. The
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: first phase included over 1,000 American soldiers who willingly volunteered
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: for chemical warfare experiments, while phase two involved 96 volunteers
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: dosed with LSD for evaluation of intelligence uses. But we
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: will never know the true scope of MKUltra's damage. And
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Stephen Kinzer even noted, quote unquote,' We don't know how
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: many people died, but a number did die, and many
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: lives were permanently destroyed.' And the deliberate destruction of the
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: records ensures that thousands of victims remain unknown. Their suffering
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: just erased as efficiently as their memories. But what we
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: do know is that for a decade, the United States
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: government operated the most extensive mind control program in human history.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Treating its own citizens as expendable test subjects in a
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: war that existed primarily in the paranoid imagination of men
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: who confused patriotism with freedom. psychopathy. So the experiments would
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: continue subject by subject, injection by injection, shock by shock,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: until the day someone would ask the question that terrified
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: the CIA more than any Soviet weapon. And that was,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: what if the American people actually found out what the
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: government was doing to their own people? And that day
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: was coming. And when it would arrive, the reckoning would
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: be swift and merciless. So the statistics of MKUltra read
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: like a military casualty report. Over 150 experiments, thousands of subjects,
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: and over millions of dollars spent. But behind every number
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: was a human being, whose life was completely shattered by
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: their government's hunger for psychological weapons. And some names we know,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: but most we will never learn. But all deserve to
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: be remembered. And one of those people was Frank Olson.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: And he would be the scientist who knew too much.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: So Dr. Frank Rudolph Emanuel Olson was 43 years old
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: when he died. And he knew secrets that could have
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: toppled governments. And as acting chief of the Special Operations
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Olson occupied a unique position
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: in America's biological warfare program. He wasn't just another lab coat.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: He was the bridge between legitimate research and the darkest
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: corners of the CIA's mind control experiments. So he knew
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: about the anthrax experiments on North Korean civilians, and he
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: had witnessed interrogation sessions where prisoners were literally interrogated to
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: death using experimental combinations of drugs, hypnosis, and torture. And
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: he had seen the piles of dead monkeys that greeted
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: researchers each morning and victims of chemical and biological experiments
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: that would have violated every international law if anyone had
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: bothered to ask. So by November, 1953, Something was eating
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: at Frank Olson's conscience. And his colleagues would notice the change.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: Because the man who had once been the life of
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: the party, quote-unquote, had become withdrawn and troubled. And he'd
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: start questioning the work, asking uncomfortable questions about the ethics
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: of what they were actually doing to human beings in
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: the name of national security. The questioning, as we know
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: in CIA style, would cost him his life. So on
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: November 19th, 1953, Olson attended what seemed like a routine
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: CIA retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. And about 20
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: CIA and Army officials gathered at a remote cabin to
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: discuss ongoing projects. And among them was, you guessed it,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Sidney Gottlieb. the devil, and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook. So
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: after dinner, as the men relaxed with drinks, Scott Lieb
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: and Lashbrook quietly dosed the alcohol with, you guessed it, LSD.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: And they would call it just an unwitting experiment. But
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: none of the men knew they had been drugged until
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb casually mentioned it 20 minutes later, you know, after
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: the drugs were in their system. As if revealing the
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: punchline to an elaborate joke. Hey, by the way, I
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: dosed you with a horrifying hallucinogenic at high doses. Have
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: fun tonight. Don't let the bed bugs bite. Terrifying. But
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: since they actually knew what was happening, most of the
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: men handled the unexpected trip with some professionalism, which is
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: expected of intelligence operatives. But Frank Olson did not. And
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: the LSD would hit him in particular like a sledgehammer
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: to the psyche. And he became paranoid, agitated, convinced his
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: colleagues were plotting against him. And by morning, he would
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: be a broken man, repeatedly asking to be taken home
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: to his family. But Gottlieb had other plans. Instead of
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: letting Olsen return home to Maryland, the CIA arranged him
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: to see Dr. Harold Ambrimson, a psychiatrist in New York,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: who was secretly on the CIA payroll. All the puzzle
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: pieces are puzzle piecing. I didn't even need you to
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: tell me. I already knew. That y'all were f *
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: * * ing with him. You kidding me? So Olsen
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: would be taken to the city by Supervisor Vincent Ruitt
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: and Robert Lashbrook. And they'd be taken there for medical help.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: But really just for damage control. No quotes, just damage control.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: Because the agency needed to know how much Olsen might
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: reveal about their programs. and whether he could be trusted
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: to keep quiet. So on the night of November 27th, 1953,
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: Olsen was staying in the room 1018A of the Statler
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Hotel in Manhattan, sharing the space with Lashbrook. And at
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: approximately 2.30 a.m. on November 28th, a thunderous crash shattered
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: the silence. Because Frank Olson had gone through the closed
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: window of the 13th floor, plummeting 170 feet to the
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: sidewalk below. And when police arrived, they found Lashbrook sitting
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: calmly on the toilet. Just taking a pass of shit.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: Piece of shit. But he was fully dressed. He wasn't
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: actually taking a shit. But he is a piece of shit.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: But his first call... wasn't to the emergency services, nay nay.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: It was to his CIA contacts. Shocking news. Breaking news.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: Just kidding, it's fully expected. So the official story was simple.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: Frank Olson, suffering from a psychotic break caused by LSD,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: had committed slewerslide by jumping from his hotel window. Case closed.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: And the family was just told that their husband and
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: father had suffered a fatal nervous breakdown, but the details
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: never added up. And the hotel night manager, Armand Pastore,
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: who reached Olson first, later recalled, quote-unquote, In all my
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: years in the hotel business, I never encountered a case
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: where someone got up in the middle of the night,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: ran across the room in his underwear, avoiding two beds,
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: and dove through a closed window with the shade and
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: curtain drawn. I think you're onto something, Armand. In the physics,
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: we're all wrong. Because the trajectory was completely wrong. Essentially,
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: everything about the scene suggested not slew or slide, but
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: Something far more sinister. So in 1994, more than 40
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: years after their father's death, Eric Olson had his father's
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: body exhumed for a second autopsy. Absolutely. Nice, Eric. And
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: the results would be devastating to the official narrative because
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: the forensic examination revealed evidence of blunt force trauma to
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: the head, injuries consistent with being struck before the fall. Again,
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: we already knew this, but at least their son's actually
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: finding out. Because mind you, at this time, people actually
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: trusted the government, which is crazy. But you know, they did.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: So who was to think that their own government, the
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: people that hired on this guy's father would kill the father,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: you know? But now we know. And on top of
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: the blunt force trauma, there were no cuts on the
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: body from broken glass, suggesting he was unconscious when he
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: went through the window. And the New York district attorney
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: quietly changed the classification of Frank Olson's death from sluberslide
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: to unknown. And Eric Olson's investigation uncovered the chilling truth.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: His father hadn't just witnessed CIA atrocities. He had been
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: planning to quit and potentially expose them. And in the
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: paranoid world of the 1950s intelligence, that made him a
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: security threat to the highest order. Because although people did
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: trust the government, they were freaking out. I mean, there's
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: Cold War, there's all these things happening where people are like,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: what the hell is going on? You know? So that
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: trust was beginning to fade and this was the nail
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: in the coffin. And the LSD... hadn't been an experiment.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: It had been an interrogation drug designed to assess what
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: Olson might reveal and how much he could be trusted.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: So when the assessment came back negative, Frank Olson had
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: to be silenced permanently. So the case was beginning to crack.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: But six months before Frank Olson's suspicious death, another man
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: became a casualty in the CIA's chemical weapons program. That
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: person was Harold Blauer. And he was 42 years old
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: and a professional tennis player and a father who had
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: entered the New York State Psychiatric Institute in December of
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: 1952 for treatment of depression following his divorce. But what
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: Blauer didn't know is that his doctors had been recruited
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: by the Army Chemical Corps as part of a classified
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: program to test synthetic masculine derivative. And in December of
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: 1952 and January of 1953, Blauer was injected five times
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: with increasing doses of the experimental compound. And the final
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: injection was administered on January 8th, 1953. And it contained
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: a dose so massive it would have killed most laboratory animals.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: And within two hours, Blauer was in convulsions. Within three hours, unfortunately,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: he was dead. But the official cause of death was
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: listed as a heart attack. And the army's involvement was
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: scrubbed from all records. And Blauer's family was never told
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: that their father had been used as a human guinea
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: pig in a governmental experiment that violated every principle of
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: medical ethics. And years later, when the truth would finally emerge,
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: it became clear that Blauer hadn't just been a test subject.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: He had been a deliberate sacrifice. Because the researchers knew
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: that the dose was potentially lethal. But they administered it
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: anyway to see what would happen. And his death would
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: just provide them with valuable, pfft, valuable data about the
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: toxic limits of their new chemical weapon. Just nothing. Like the,
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: the thoughtlessness and carelessness of human life during this time is,
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: and in general, I mean, Lord knows this is still
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: happening somewhere and whether it's in our country or not,
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: I'm going to safely say something's probably going on. It's
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: just like, Horrifying, horrifying to think about. And then there
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: was Linda McDonald. So in 1963, Linda McDonald was a
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: 25 year old mother of five who sought help for
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: postpartum depression at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. And she trusted
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Ewan Cameron to help her feel better, but instead he
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: destroyed her life. McDonald was subjected to Cameron's full arsenal
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: of de-patterning like we talked about before. For 102 days,
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: she was kept in a drug-induced coma while receiving massive
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: electroshock treatments. And when she finally woke up, she had
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: no memory of her husband and no memory of her
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: five children. And she lacked basic functions like using the toilet.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: Her husband would say she was like a newborn. I
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: had to teach her everything, how to walk, how to talk,
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: how to use a spoon. She didn't know who I was.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: She didn't know she had children. So the woman who
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: entered Cameron's Institute as a young mother emerged as a
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: hollow shell. Her personality just completely erased. And she would
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: never fully recover her memories or her sense of self.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: And her children grew up with a mother who was
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: physically present, but psychologically destroyed by their own government's experiments.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: And then there was Gail Kastner. And Gail was a
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: 19-year-old McGill University student when she volunteered for what she
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: was told were sleep experiments in 1957. But instead, she
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: became one of Cameron's most documented victims. And for 88 days,
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: Kastner was kept unconscious in Cameron's sleep room. Subjected to
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: massive doses of LSD, powerful electroshock treatments, and an endless
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: repetition of those recorded messages designed to break down her
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: entire personality. And when she would finally emerge, she had
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: been reduced to an infantile state, unable to recognize her
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: own family. And Kastner would later testify, quote unquote, I
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: lost my memory completely. I didn't know my name, where
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: I was, where I came from. I had to be
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: toilet trained again. I had to learn to eat again,
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: to walk again. And Kastner eventually recovered some of her abilities,
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: but the damage was permanent. And she suffered from chronic anxiety,
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: memory problems, and PTSD for the rest of her life.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: And in 2007, she finally received a settlement from the
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: Canadian government, a paltry sum that could never compensate for
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: the decades of suffering caused by the government's complicity in torture.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: But perhaps the most horrifying victims of MKUltra were those
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: too young to understand what was happening to them at all.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: So at various institutions across North America, children as young
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: as six years old were subjected to experimental drugs, electroshock therapy,
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: and psychological torture. At one facility, researchers tested how long
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: children could withstand sensory deprivation before suffering a complete psychological breakdown.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: And at another, children were given massive doses of LSD
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: and then subjected to stroboscopic lights designed trigger seizures. And
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: some children were kept in drug-induced comas for months while
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: recorded messages played endlessly in their ears. And most of
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: these children were from marginalized families, indigenous communities, poor immigrant families,
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: or children in state care who had no advocates to
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: protect them. Just again, like it's just heartbreaking to think
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: that like Just a little kid is being subjected to
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: this torture, just not knowing anything that's going on. But
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: they were chosen precisely because they were vulnerable, because no
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: one would ask questions if they emerged from treatment changed
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: or damaged. And the long-term effects were catastrophic for these children,
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: as many of these children grew up with severe mental illness,
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: unable to form normal relationships with anyone or function in
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: society at all. And some even took their own lives.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: And others spent their lives in and out of psychiatric institutions,
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: never understanding why their minds had been shattered in their childhood.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: But for every documented victim, Frank Olson, Linda McDonald, there
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: were dozens of others whose names we'll never know. Patients
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: who entered the hospitals for minor problems and emerged as
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: shells of their former selves. The deliberate destruction of MKUltra
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: records means we'll never know the extent of this carnage.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: And conservative estimates suggest thousands of people were directly harmed
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: by the program, with tens of thousands more affected indirectly
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: through family members and relationships just destroyed by these experiments.
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: But what we do know is that behind every statistic
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: is a human being, a person with hopes and dreams, families,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: and futures that were callously destroyed by their own government
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: in pursuit of an ultimate weapon. That was never found
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: by the way, not that that would have mattered, but
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: it was all futile. So by 1963, even Sidney Gottlieb
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: was beginning to realize that this grand experiment in human
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: consciousness had become a spectacular failure because after a decade
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: of torture disguised as research, tens of millions of dollars
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: spent and countless lives destroyed, the CIA had produced exactly
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: what any rational person could have predicted from the very beginning.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: And that is that they came up with a lot
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: of broken people and zero usable mind control techniques. But
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: admitting failure wasn't in the CIA's nature, nay nay. So
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: instead of shutting down MKUltra completely, they simply changed the
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: name and kept the nightmare going. So when MKUltra officially
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: ended in 1963, it was immediately replaced by MKSearch. Great
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: name change. A program that continued the same experiments with
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: slightly less ambitious goals. Because if they couldn't create the
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: perfect mind control, perhaps they could at least develop better
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: interrogation drugs and psychological warfare techniques. So this transition was
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: seamless because fundamentally nothing had changed. Because the same researchers
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: continued their work at the same institutions funded by the
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: same shadowy budget lines. The only difference was that somebody
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: in Washington had decided the original program was getting too
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: much internal attention. And John Vance, a member of the
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: CIA's Inspector General staff, had discovered MKUltra's surreptitious administration to
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: unwitting non-voluntary human subjects and forced its official termination. Wow. Wow. Thanks, John.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: But Vance's investigations had focused on the specific programs and
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: procedures of MKUltra, not the underlying research infrastructure that supported it.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: So the work would just continue anyways. Prisoners were still
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: dosed with experimental chemicals, and psychiatric patients still disappeared into
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: month-long drug-induced comas, and children still emerged from government facilities
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: with their personalities fundamentally altered. The only thing that changed
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: was the paperwork, basically. So by the mid-1960s, cracks were
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: beginning to show in the CIA's confidence about their mind
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: control programs. And part of this was practical, because after
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: more than a decade of experimentation, they had precious little
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: to show for their investment. But part of it was moral,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: because a new generation of CIA officers was entering the agency,
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: which were men and women who had come from the
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: age during the Civil Rights Movement and were less willing
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: to accept the casual brutality that characterized the previous generation's
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: approach to intelligence work. So they weren't pieces of shit, basically.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: So these agents began asking uncomfortable questions about what their
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: colleagues were doing in the name of national security. And
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: the questions just became harder and harder to ignore as
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: the scope of the experiments became more widely known within
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: the agency. Stories circulated about researchers who had lost all
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: sense of ethical boundaries, treating human beings like laboratory rats
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: in increasingly bizarre experiments. And word would start to spread
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: about Dr. Ewan Cameron's latest innovations in psychological torture, about
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: prisoners who emerged from medical treatment. Medical treatment? as vegetative shells,
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: and about children who disappeared into government facilities and emerged
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: fundamentally changed altogether. So even within the paranoid culture of
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: the 1960s intelligence work, MKUltra and its successors were beginning
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: to seem excessive and mad unnecessary. So outside the CIA's
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: closed world, America was undergoing a profound moral transformation that
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: would make programs like MKUltra impossible to sustain because the
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: civil rights movement had forced the country to confront its
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: treatment of African Americans. And the Vietnam War was raising
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: uncomfortable questions about American power and its abuse. So a
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: generation of young Americans was beginning to question authority in
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: ways that would be completely unthinkable, especially in the 1950s.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: And the counterculture movement, ironically fueled in part by the
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: very LSD that the CIA had hoped to weaponize, was
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: teaching Americans to distrust government claims about national security. So
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: when officials insisted certain actions were necessary to protect their country,
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: more people were beginning to ask questions. necessary for whom,
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: and at what cost. So the change was generational and fundamental.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: And the men who had created MKUltra were products of
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: World War II, accustomed to thinking in terms of total war,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: where any action could be justified by the magnitude of
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: the threat. Just f * * * ing go, go, go,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: nobody cares, nobody gives a shit who dies, whatever, let's
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: just f * * * ing go, let's just be better,
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: it's a big d * * *. measuring competition. But
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: the generation coming of age in the 1960s had grown
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: up during the Cold War, and they were less convinced
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: that the threat from communism justified abandoning American values entirely.
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: And this shift in public consciousness would prove fatal to
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: secret government programs and secret government programs that primarily depended
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: on public ignorance. So the break-in at the Watergate complex
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: on June 17th, 1972 seems unrelated to CIA mind control experiments,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: but its impact on programs like MKUltra was devastating because
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: Watergate didn't just bring down a president. It shattered America's
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: faith in government secrecy. And for the first time since
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: World War II, significant numbers of Americans began to question
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: whether their government was telling them the truth about anything.
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: It's so funny to think about us just being like,
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: we can't trust them? We can't trust the really rich
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: people that control everything in the world? That they're not
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: doing stuff that they're supposed to be doing? Gosh, we
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: were so blissfully ignorant back then. And now we know.
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: We know you're pieces of shit. Anyway, so if the
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: president of the United States could be involved in criminal conspiracies,
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: what else might be happening in the shadows of Washington?
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: And the Watergate investigations created... a new template for aggressive
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: journalism and congressional oversight. And reporters who had once accepted
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: government claims at face value began digging deeper, doing, you know,
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: real journalism, which we still lack today. But they would
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: file the Freedom of Information Act requests, cultivating sources within
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: the intelligence community. And congressional committees that had previously provided
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: only token oversight of intelligence activities began demanding real answers
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: to hard questions. Because this new environment of skepticism and
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: investigation was toxic to programs like MKUltra. programs which depended
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: entirely on secrecy for their survival. So as the political
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: winds shifted against the intelligence community, CIA director Richard Helms
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: found himself in an impossible position because he had spent
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: his career building and protecting the agency's most sensitive programs.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: But now, those same programs were becoming liabilities that threatened
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: the CIA's very existence. And Helms was a company man
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: through and through. A veteran intelligence officer who believed that
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: the CIA's work was essential to American security, regardless of
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: how distasteful that work might be to squeamish civilians. But
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: he was also a realist who understood that the times
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: were changing. Great. Only took you, you know, So in 1973,
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: facing retirement and increasing scrutiny of CIA activities, Helms made
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: the decision that would haunt researchers and investigators for decades
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: to come. And he would order the destruction of virtually
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: all MKUltra's records. And the purge was systemic and thorough.
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: Filing cabinets were empty. Documents were shredded. Research files accumulated
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: over two decades of human experimentation simply disappeared. And Helms
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: justified the destruction as routine administrative action. But everyone involved
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: understood its real purpose, and that was to eliminate evidence
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: of crimes that could destroy the agency and imprison its leaderships.
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: You know, consequences for your actions. Holding people accountable for
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: the horrible criminal shit that they did, basically. They're just like, no, nevermind,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: it's shredded. We didn't do anything. What, me? No, not me.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: I would never. That was the CIA. But the destruction
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: order was carried out with military precision and teams of
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: CIA personnel worked around the clock to ensure that no
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: trace remained of the programs that had defined the agency's
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: approach to behavioral research. And when they were finished, almost
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: nothing was left. No experimental protocols, no subject lists, no
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: research findings, no records of payments to universities and researchers.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: It was one of the most comprehensive cover-ups in American history.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: So Helm's Purge was remarkably effective. But it wasn't perfect.
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: And in the chaos of all of the destruction, approximately 20,000
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: documents escaped elimination. And not because anyone intended to preserve them,
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: but because they had been misfiled in financial records, which
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: is kind of hilarious. But these surviving documents would eventually
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: become the foundation of all subsequent investigations into MKUltra. And
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: without them, the program would have remained completely hidden, its
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: existence known only to the participants and their victims. So
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: the survival of these documents was a pure accident, and
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: I think it was divine intervention. So they were stored
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: in the financial records building separate from the main CIA archives,
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: filed under budget codes that didn't immediately identify them as
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: related to behavioral research. So when the destruction order came down,
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: the teams responsible for purging MKUltra's files simply overlooked this cache.
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: And it was a mistake that would eventually expose one
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: of the darkest chapters in American intelligence history. So as
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: MKUltra wound down in the early 1970s, Sidney Gottlieb, Satan,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: the man who had spent two decades trying to unlock
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: the secrets of the human consciousness, offered a brutally honest
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: assessment of his life's work. And in his final reports
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: to CIA leadership, he dismissed the entire MKUltra program as... useless.
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: Not that you want them to be useful, but the
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: fact that it just all could have been avoided if
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: they were just not horrible human beings is just a
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: crazy thought to think about, but I digress. So after
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: 20 years of millions of dollars and thousands of human subjects,
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb had reached the conclusion that mind control was simply
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: not possible. Thanks, Einstein! Because human consciousness was too complex,
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: too resilient, too fundamentally unpredictable to be reliably manipulated through
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: drugs or psychological techniques. And it was an admission that
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: came far too late for the victims who had suffered
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: through these experiments. But it was at least honest, I guess.
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: I'm not giving you that, though. So the great mind
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: control program had been a failure from the beginning, sustained
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: not by scientific results, but by institutional momentum and the
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: desperate hope that the next experiment might finally produce a
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: breakthrough that had eluded all the previous ones. So on
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: July 10th, 1972, Gottlieb officially terminated MK Search, the last
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: remnant of the program he had begun nearly 20 years earlier.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: The CIA's systemic exploration of human consciousness was over, leaving
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: behind only trauma, destroyed lives, and a massive cover-up that
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: was designed to ensure that American people would have never
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: learned what had been done in their own name. So
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: by 1973, the mind control experiments had been shut down
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: and their records destroyed. And the researchers had been transferred
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: to other projects or retired entirely. But the victims had
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: been left to deal with their trauma in silence, most
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: of them still unaware that the suffering had been deliberately
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: inflicted by their own government. So to outside observers, nothing
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: had happened. and the psychiatric hospitals returned to normal operations,
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: and the university researchers moved on to other studies, and
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: the CIA continued its work with no apparent interruption. But
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: beneath the surface, America was changing in ways that would
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: make the secrets of MKUltra impossible to keep forever. So
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: the storm was coming, and when it hit, the carefully
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: constructed walls of secrecy around programs like MKUltra would crumble
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: like paper in a hurricane. The only question was whether
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: anyone would be left alive to tell the full story
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: when the truth finally emerged. So when Seymour Hersh's explosive
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: expose hit the New York Times on December 22nd, 1974,
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: most readers focused on the headline. which was revelations about
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: illegal CIA domestic surveillance. But buried within that bombshell article
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: was a single paragraph that would prove even more devastating.
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: The agency had conducted illegal experiments on American citizens, and
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: at least one person had died as a result. So
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: for the Olson family, who had lived for over 20
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: years believing Frank was a slower slide, it was a
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: thunderbolt revelation. So President Ford's response to this article was swift.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: It was to create a commission led by Vice President
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the allegations. And the commission was
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: designed as controlled demolition. to reveal just enough truth to
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: satisfy the public curiosity without fundamentally damaging the intelligence community.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: It was a dance that they were trying to do.
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: They're like, okay, let's give them a little bit of information,
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: but also let's not give them all the information. Otherwise,
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: they're going to be really mad if the CIA stays,
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: you know, because we're torturing people, you know? So in
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: June of 1975, the Rockefeller's commission report contained the clinical
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: paragraph saying, that changed everything. And that was... As part
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: of a program to test the influence of drugs on humans,
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: research included the administration of LSD to persons who were
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: unaware they were being tested. This was clearly illegal. One
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: person died in 1953, apparently, as a result. And within days,
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: the Olson family had identified Frank as the unnamed victim.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: And the story exploded across national media. And on July 21st, 1975,
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: the family found themselves in the Oval Office receiving a
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: personal apology from President Ford and CIA Director William Colby.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: As if that's going to f * * * ing
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: take the pain away. But it was an extraordinary moment
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: that was broadcast on national television, of course, because you
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: couldn't just do it in the privacy you had to
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: Make sure everyone knew that you guys are good guys
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: and you're not doing that anymore. Let's say sorry and
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: that'll make everything better. But it was an unprecedented moment
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: in American history. A sitting president apologizing to a family
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: for their government role in killing their loved one. But
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: the apology just raised more questions than it answered, thankfully.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: Because if Frank Olson's death had been an accident caused
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: by an LSD experiment, why had the family been lied
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: to for over 20 years? Because they didn't know it
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: was a murder at this point. They just said, you know,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: he's in the CIA and... And we gave him LSD
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: at this house party, and then he went over here,
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: and then he jumped out the window. So they still
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: think all that. But it would raise the question of
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: what other experiments had the CIA conducted? And how many
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: families were still living with lies? So the government offered
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: a $ 750, 000 settlement in exchange for comprehensive release, absolving them
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: of further liability. Just buying their way out, like usual.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: And the Olsens did accept, but it was just another
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: layer in the ongoing cover-up. And how would they know better?
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: So while the Rockefeller Commission provided limited glimpses into the
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: CIA wrongdoing, Senator Frank Church's committee conducted the deep investigation
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: Americans actually needed. And they were approved by the Senate
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: 82-4 in January of 1975. And the Church Committee was
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: authorized to dig as deeply as necessary. Get that shovel out.
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: And Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely choice
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: to lead the most important congressional investigation since the Army-McCarthy hearings.
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: Because he was just soft-spoken with a professional manner. And
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: Church just seemed more suited to debating agriculture policies than
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: confronting the nation's most powerful intelligence agencies. But appearances were deceiving.
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: Don't read a book by its cover, nay nay. Because
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: Church was a former military intelligence officer who understood how
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: secret organizations operated. And he was deeply committed to the
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: principle that no agency should operate beyond the reach of
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: democratic oversight. So over 16 months, they conducted 126 meetings,
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: held 40 subcommittee hearings, and employed 150 staff members. And
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: they would interview 800 witnesses. And they demanded documents from
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: agents that had never been subject to serious congressional oversight.
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: And they subpoenaed officials who had spent their careers operating
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: in complete secrecy. So they were shedding some light on
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: the snakes in the holes, basically, for layman's terms. And
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: the investigation faced enormous resistance from the intelligence community, obviously.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: And CIA director William Colby was forced to testify under
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: oath about programs he had hoped would be buried forever,
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: would remain buried forever. And military officials were dragged before
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: television cameras to explain biological weapon programs that violated international law.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: And researchers who spent decades conducting human experiments in secret,
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: suddenly forced to justify their actions in public hearings. Just hilarious. Hilarious.
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: The bullies are finally being held accountable. And the breakthrough
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: would come during a national television hearing in September to
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: October 1975, where Americans received a shocking education in what
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: their government had been doing in their name. And the
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: star witness was CIA Director William Colby. who found himself
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: defending programs that were clearly indefensible.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: Have you brought with you some of those devices which
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: would have enabled the CIA to use this poison for,
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 2: we have indeed, for killing people?
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: And under aggressive questioning, Colby was forced to admit that
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: the CIA had conducted extensive mind control experiments, that many
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: subjects had been unwitting participants, and that the agency has
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: systemically violated American laws and constitutional principles. And the most
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: dramatic moment came when committee staff wheeled out actual CIA
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: poison dart guns and exotic toxins that were supposed to
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: have been destroyed under international agreements. Just embarrassing. It's hilariously
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: horrible to us, obviously. But in a scene that could
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: have been in a scripted movie, the display demonstrated the
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: extent to which the intelligence community had been willing to
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: develop weapons that violated every principle of civilized warfare. And
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: for Americans accustomed to thinking of their governments as good guys, okay,
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: in the Cold War especially, the hearings were just a
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: devastating revelation of how far their leaders had been willing
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: to go in the pursuit of victory. So the investigation
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: might have remained limited to survivor testimony, but in 1977,
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: journalist John Marks Freedom of the Information Act uncovered the
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: treasure trove Richard Helms thought he had destroyed. Oh no.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: Which was 20,000 MKUltra documents accidentally preserved in those financial records.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: And these documents were a goldmine of evidence. Experimental protocols,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: university contracts, subject recruitments, guidelines, research results, and most importantly,
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: proof of the systemic nature of the program. And the
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: papers showed that the program had been far more extensive
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: than anyone had imagined, involving dozens of universities, hundreds of researchers,
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: and thousands of subjects. And the document discovery led to
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: additional Senate hearings in 1977, where survivors of the MKUltra
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: experiments testified publicly about their experiences for the first time.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: So the cumulative impact of the church committee hearings, the
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: document discoveries, and the survivor testimonies was a profound national
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: trauma that fundamentally changed how Americans viewed their government. And
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: for the first time since the founding of the republic,
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: significant numbers of citizens began to question whether their democratic
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: institutions could be trusted to respect basic human rights. And
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: the revelations about MKUltra were particularly devastating because they violated
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: Americans' most fundamental assumptions about their country. Because this wasn't
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: warfare against foreign enemies. This was the government conducting medical
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: experiments on its own citizens, including children, without consent and
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: without any regard for any sort of consequence. So just
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: the scope of betrayal was staggering. And most disturbingly to
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: most people was the realization that the experiments had not
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: been conducted by rogue agents or extremist organizations, but the
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: mainstream American establishment, Ivy League universities, prestigious medical institutions, and
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: the nation's premier intelligence agency. Just Everyone you think you
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: could trust most, basically. So when Americans demanded accountability, they
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: discovered a system designed for plausible deniability. And orders were
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: given verbally, documents compartmentalized, and responsibility diffused across agencies and contractors.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: And Sidney Gottlieb, Satan, the operational heart of MKUltra, had
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: retired safely to California by 1973, pursuing a second career
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: as a folk dancer and speech therapist. I have no words.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: And the transformation was so complete, it seemed almost designed
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: to mock his victims. Because the man who spent decades
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: perfecting techniques to destroy human communication was now helping children
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: overcome speech impediments? And during his limited testimony to congressional investigators,
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb presented himself as a dedicated public servant who had
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: been forced to undertake distasteful work. in service for national security.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: It's not my fault. They told me to do it.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: They just paid me and told me to do it.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: I definitely didn't like it. I definitely didn't like it
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: and tell them that we should keep doing it for
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: 20 years. And even during his testimonies, he maintained that
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: the programs had been necessary responses to Soviet threats. And
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: he would say, I want this committee to know that
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: I found this work very difficult, very unpleasant, but very necessary.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: Shut the up. And his voice just carried the same
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: clinical detachment he had brought to those to selecting doses
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: of LSD for unwilling participants. But the testimony was a
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: masterpiece of bureaucratic deflection, if you will. And Gottlieb acknowledged
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: that harmful things had happened but portrayed himself as a
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: reluctant participant rather than an enthusiastic architect of the programs,
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: which is what he was. And no criminal charges were
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: ever filed against Satan, Sidney Godliab, which is f *
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: * * ing insane. And he would just live quietly
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: in California until his death in 1999. And Alan Dulles, Dulles,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: whatever the f * * *, who authorized MKUltra in 1953...
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: was already dead by the time the crimes came to light.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: So I'd say he dodged a bullet, but I know
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: he's burning in hell, so I will sleep soundly at
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: night knowing that. But even if he had lived, his
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: position at the apex of American establishment would have made
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: prosecution practically impossible. He's untouchable, right? And Richard Helms was
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: defiant rather than apologetic about destroying the records, saying, the
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: CIA was not created to be Boy Scouts. What, you
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: were created to torture children and the vulnerable? What? So
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: he defended the document destruction as a routine administrative action
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: designed to protect the CIA sources and methods arguing that
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: the experiments had been legal under the standards of the
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: time and necessary for national defense. you. So because he
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: was the one that ordered the destruction of the documents,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: Helms received a misdemeanor conviction and a suspended sentence. And
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: he was fined $ 2, 000. And the judge who imposed the
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: sentence praised Helms for his years of service to the country.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: And like the CIA officials who had designed the programs,
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: most academic collaborators escaped any sort of meaningful consequence for
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: their actions. And the most damning aspect of academic participation
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: in MKUltra was its violation of the Nuremberg Code, which
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: was a set of ethical principles for human experimentation that
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: had emerged from the Nazi war crime trials. And American
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: prosecutors had insisted that medical experiments on human subjects required
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: informed consent. Duh. And that researchers who violated this principle
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: should be held criminally responsible. But when American researchers committed
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: virtually identical violations of the Nuremberg Code, the response was
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: dramatically different, as we know. And the university administrators expressed
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: regret for their past mistakes while emphasizing that the research
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: had been conducted with good intentions, and legitimate specific goals.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: What I legitimate specific goal you in the f *
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: * * ing face, you dumb f * * *.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: And most remarkably, many of the researchers who had conducted
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: MKUltra experiments continued their academic careers without any sort of interruption.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: They didn't even get suspended. They would receive their tenure,
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: publish papers, and trained new generation of students as if
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: their participation in systemic torture had been a minor career
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: misstep rather than a fundamental betrayal of medical ethics. And
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: Ewan Cameron, who's de-patterning experiments at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: had destroyed dozens of lives, died in 1967, unfortunately. So
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: he couldn't face any consequences because it was eight years
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: before his crimes became public knowledge. So the official response
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: to all of this was carefully calibrated to acknowledge wrongdoing
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: while limiting consequences, as we know. So the strategy had
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: two pillars. One was managed apologies, which was expedited regret
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: for past mistakes while avoiding admission of criminal liability. And
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: next was settlement strategy, which was offering compensation in exchange
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: for broad releases preventing further legal action, like the Olson
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: family getting $ 750, 000. So despite the overwhelming evidence of systemic
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: violations of federal laws, no one was ever criminally prosecuted
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: for the MKUltra crimes. Prosecutors argued that cases would be
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: difficult given the destroyed records and national security implications. But
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: the real reason was political. As we know, protecting the
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: intelligence community was more important than accountability. And the decision
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: not to pursue criminal charges was made at the highest
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: level of the Justice Department after extensive consultation with intelligence
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: officials and political leadership. And criminal trials would have forced
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: the government to reveal additional classified information. Information about intelligence operations, potentially,
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: which would expose sensitive programs to public scrutiny. You know, again,
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: more accountability. Because God knows what else they were doing
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: at this time and now. And the statute of limitations
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: provided additional cover. By keeping crimes secret for over 20 years,
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: officials ensured they could never be held legally accountable. I
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: don't know why this is a thing. Why is statute
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: of limitations a thing?
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 2: It's f * * * ing.
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: Insane to me. Anyway, so this legal... Technicality became a
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: shield for individuals who had systemically violated federal law. So
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: the failure to hold anyone meaningfully accountable established a dangerous precedent,
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: which was that government officials learned that even egregious violations
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: of human rights would result in nothing more than a
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: congressional hearing, official apologies, and modest settlements. which is horrifying.
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: But the message was very clear. As long as the
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: crimes were committed in the names of national security and
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: kept secret long enough, there were no real consequences. And
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: this legacy of impunity would shape intelligence community behavior for generations,
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: contributing to a culture where officials believed they could act
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: outside the law as long as they could justify their
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: actions for national security. So the MKUltra revelations fundamentally changed
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: how Americans viewed the government, as we said before, casting
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: a shadow that persists to this day. And every subsequent
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: scandal would be measured against this standard. Because if the
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: government could conduct a systemic torture experiment on children for
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: 20 years, what else might they be capable of? I
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: don't want to know, but I also need to know.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: We deserve to know. And the victims received acknowledgement, but
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: not justice. And the perpetrators faced embarrassment, but not punishments.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: And the institutions implemented oversight, but avoided fundamental examination of
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: how they enabled such violations. And most troubling of all,
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: the failure of accountability sent a message that would resonate
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: through American political culture for decades. Because when government officials
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: commit crimes in the name of national security, the system
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: will protect them rather than the victims. And America had
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: looked into the mirror and seen a nation that had
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: lost its moral bearings in pursuit of power. So the
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: question that would haunt the country for generations was whether
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: anyone would be held accountable when such programs inevitably would
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: happen again. And that is that for MKUltra. Y'all suggested
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: this one. It was, you know, it's a lot to
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: get into. It makes you just question everything. But let
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: me know how you felt about this. I know this
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: was a little different, you know, definitely crime, definitely crime,
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: definitely conspiracy, definitely all the things basically leaning more into
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: like a little bit different of a category. So let
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: me know if you guys like this. Let me know
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: if you want me to dive into other... you know,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: shady shit that's going on anywhere in the world. It
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: doesn't really matter to me. I find this stuff extremely
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: interesting and I feel like people should know this stuff. Yeah,
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: with that, I'm going to turn off my cellular device
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: and just go walk in the grass. I think look
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: up at the clouds and try not to think about
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: this stuff too much. And until then, have a sweet,
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: beautiful face. All right. Stay safe out there. Bye.