Investigating The True History Of MKUltra & CIA Mind Control - John Lisle - #963

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How did you find all of this out? Like, where did you do all of the research for this stuff? This is, I didn't think that you could top the insanity of the last book that you wrote, but you've managed to do it. Congratulations.

**John Lisle** (0:12)
Thank you. Thank you. This book was really exciting because I found a lot of new documents about MKUltra, specifically some depositions, about maybe over a dozen depositions that were taken in the 1980s as part of a lawsuit against the perpetrators of MKUltra, against the CIA. And as part of these depositions, I have the perpetrators, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, his right hand man, Robert Lashbrook, the head of the CIA, Richard Helms. They are questioned by these attorneys. And I have the verbatim transcript of them talking about what they were doing in the CIA as part of MKUltra, why they wanted to do this, how they got away with it. So I have some great transcripts. So that's really the basis of the book, are these verbatim dialogues, which is so exciting for a historian, because usually in history, you never get dialogue because nobody's there to write it down. You know, I'm not going to quote something if I don't have the verbatim quote. That's usually a thing you can do in fiction to get inside the heads of the readers, or into the heads of the characters. But for me, I now have this dialogue, so I get to play with it and work with it. And it's just been so fun getting into their heads and seeing what they say.

**Chris Williamson** (1:18)
How I'm interested in why the CIA was keen to look at mind control in any case. What happens during the 40s and the 50s for them to consider? Yeah, this would be a good idea.
This seems like an appropriate direction to go in.

**John Lisle** (1:37)
There are a few triggering events that lead them to want to perform experiments in mind control. And it's not just from the 40s or 50s, even further back, if you go back to the 1890s, you have Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who's doing his famous behavioral conditioning experiments. You know, if you ring a bell, can you get a dog to salivate?
And the thinking within the CIA was, well, if this Russian is doing that back in the 1890s, surely they've since extended that work in order to include human subjects now. And if they could get a dog to salivate at the bell, what might they be able to get a human to do with drugs or something else? So it's that kind of slippery slope thinking that leads into this. Another event that precipitated MKUltra was the Moscow show trials. This is when Stalin was purging kind of his enemies from political power. And he put them on trial for charges that they didn't do. And yet they admitted to doing them. So there are these charges. And then they on their hands and knees are begging to be found guilty. Why would they do this? One explanation that develops within the CIA is maybe they've been mind controlled. Maybe there's drugs or hypnotism or something they've been manipulated with. And if that's the case, we need to know what they are doing so we can prevent it. And so maybe we can do it ourselves. But then the most important event that precipitated MKUltra was the downing of several American POWs during the Korean War. These pilots are downed in their planes. They're taken prisoner. And while they're prisoners in Korea, these American pilots admit to doing things like dropping germ bombs on the Koreans, dropping typhus and cholera and bubonic plague, trying to spread these diseases throughout the Korean population. Now, we know now from Russian archives, especially, that there are some Korean officials who flew to China and who got samples of bubonic plague and took it back and infected their own Korean soldiers in order to make it seem as if the Americans had done this. But the question within the CIA, they didn't know that at the time, the question was, why would these Americans admit to this? Why would they say this? The same with the Moscow show trials. Are they being drugged? Are they being hypnotized? And so that spurs interest in answering these questions, which is eventually what leads to the development of this program, MKUltra.

**Chris Williamson** (3:46)
Okay. Sidney Gottlieb, this mastermind.
How does he get selected for this? What makes him an attractive candidate? What's his sort of comeuppance?

**John Lisle** (3:58)
Yeah. He is a chemist within the CIA. His background is in bioorganic chemistry. He has a PhD in it from Caltech. And during World War II, so a few years before this, in 1943, he gets his PhD and he desperately wants to volunteer for the army. He wants to join the army because his parents were immigrants from Hungary. And he felt that he owed this country a debt for allowing his immigrant parents to come over and for allowing him to live a life here. And so he wanted to join the army, but he was refused service because he had a limp. He was born with club feet. He also talked with a stutter. And that had a really psychological effect on him. The fact that he had always seen himself from a young age as an outsider. Kids would always make fun of him for his limp and stutter. And this seemed to reinforce that fact that he's an outsider. I was denied service in the army. And he was looking for a way that he could repay the debt that he felt that he owed his country. And so it just so happened that the CIA in particular was looking for some brilliant scientists like himself to join. Because right after World War II, science is now seen as integral to national security. We just had this war that ended with these atomic bombs. That was physicists doing this. We need scientists within the intelligence community now to determine whether not only are the Soviets doing some kind of project themselves that we might figure out, but also how can we do those projects ourselves? So the fact that he was a brilliant scientist, that's what led him into this role. And it didn't hurt also that Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA at the time, he was also born with a club foot. And so he kind of took a liking to Sidney Goldberg.