#2419 - John Lisle

**Joe Rogan** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
John, what's happening, man?

**John Lisle** (0:13)
Not much, it's good to be here.

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
Very nice to meet you. You too, thanks for having me. I know you're in the middle of a project, you're doing a project with David Chase, right? It's about MK Ultra and...

**John Lisle** (0:24)
Yes, he has gotten the rights to this book, this book, Project Mind Control, and he's interested in adapting it into a series.

**Joe Rogan** (0:31)
Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject, so as soon as I heard about it, and they said the series is coming, but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book, now I'm like, let's go. So here we go, Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and the tragedy of MK Ultra, which really is a tragedy. I really got... And I knew about it, but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until Chaos, Tom O'Neill's book. Have you read that?

**John Lisle** (0:59)
Oh, yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (1:00)
And when you realize what the MK Ultra program involved and how long it ran and how insane it is, and it essentially had no oversight, and these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American citizens, and nobody went to jail for it.

**John Lisle** (1:16)
Yeah, that's part of the crazy thing. One of the things I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second half of the book, are the consequences of MK Ultra in society, but also just what happened to these people afterwards. The victims of MK Ultra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically really nothing much came out of it. They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MK Ultra, they didn't really face any consequences, and so I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things I really try to talk about in the latter part of the book are what are the failures of oversight that allowed this to happen? How is that possible? How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on people unwittingly, and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions? So I delve into that pretty deeply.

**Joe Rogan** (2:01)
How did you get interested in the subject? What was your introduction to it?

**John Lisle** (2:07)
I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people, because I didn't know that much about MKUltra, and I was doing my Ph.D. at UT, and I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of scientists within the intelligence, they had connections to the intelligence community. They were called the Science Attachés out of the State Department. The State Department would send these Science Attachés to different embassies, American embassies around the world, and the CIA was very interested in these people because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad. Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing. So that led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community, and from that, I learned about Sidney Gottlieb, but also mostly my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovell, who was essentially the Sidney Gottlieb of the OSS. So prior to the CIA, the US had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and that was the US kind of intelligence agency. And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development Branch, and that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job was to basically invent the deadly weapons, create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent abroad. So my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovell and that group, and one of the things they do are drug experiments and truth drug experiments, trying to find out whether it's possible to give someone, you know, a captured enemy agent, some kind of drug to make them tell the truth during an interrogation. And it turns out when I was researching that book, I came across a series of depositions of which Sidney Gottlieb is one of the depo ments who would later lead MKUltra. And in these depositions, he was talking about how when he was assigned to be in charge of MKUltra, he didn't really know where to begin. He didn't know anything about mind control. So one of the things that he did, he went into the old OSS files and was starting to look at the drug experiments that Stanley Lovell was doing. And so I thought that's the connection between Stanley Lovell, my first book, and now this one. So that naturally led me into becoming interested in MKUltra. So a lot of the things that Sidney Gottlieb was up to with MKUltra, his blueprint was basically Stanley Lovell.