MKUltra: The Dark History of CIA Mind Control and Frank Olson

[00:00:00] Kyle Risi: After the second World War America had a new fear, Not bombs, not tanks, but the mind.

What if the enemy could brainwash soldiers? What if they could plant thoughts? What if they could break a person, empty them out and build somebody new?

[00:00:19] Adam Cox: That is absolutely terrifying.

[00:00:22] Kyle Risi: The CIA's answer was not, how the hell do we stop this? It was, how do we get there? First Project Bluebird became Project Oke. Project Artichoke became MK Ultra, a secret programme. of Drugs, hypnosis, And interrogation ,

and Adam suddenly hospitals, universities, prisons, psychiatric wards, became part of the experiment

[00:00:48] Adam Cox: on Americans,

[00:00:49] Kyle Risi: on Unsuspecting Americans. Used as test subjects

all in the name of National Security.

[00:01:23] Kyle Risi: Welcome back to the Compendium, an Assembly of Fascinating Things, A week Leave Writer podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

[00:01:33] Adam Cox: We explore strange, true stories from the worlds of true crime, dark history, scandals, mysteries, and remarkable people.

[00:01:41] Kyle Risi: Of course.

I'm Kyle Reese, your ringmaster for this week's episode,

[00:01:44] Adam Cox: and I am Adam Cox, the sneeze guard cleaner for this week.

[00:01:49] Kyle Risi: The sneeze guard cleaner.

[00:01:51] Adam Cox: Well, yeah, we've been away for a few weeks and come back to the canteen and it is a sight to behold.

[00:01:57] Kyle Risi: Why? Because people have been sneezing everywhere.

[00:01:58] Adam Cox: Yeah, no one's been cleaning up. So I am now in place. My only duty is just to make sure that screen is clean.

[00:02:05] Kyle Risi: Hang on. What is the sneeze guard?

[00:02:07] Adam Cox: It's like a plastic screen where the food's behind.

[00:02:10] Kyle Risi: Oh, I thought you meant like there's a sneeze guard, like in the ring, in the big top. So, oh, Imagine you are at a hockey game.

Do you know what I mean? There's that glass. It's purely so people don't sneeze onto the ice. Everyone knows that's what that's for.

[00:02:21] Adam Cox: I mean, that is some good projection. I'm a long sneezer.

[00:02:25] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Okay. So you're just protecting the food, you're protecting us from, um, I don't know. Viruses,

[00:02:30] Adam Cox: yeah. And just, bogies,

[00:02:31] Kyle Risi: of course, who's wiping bogies? But yeah, we are, we're back. Hey.

Season four. Who would've ever thought four seasons of this? I

[00:02:39] Adam Cox: didn't.

[00:02:40] Kyle Risi: I honestly didn't. But somehow when you guys just keep coming back

[00:02:44] Adam Cox: fools,

[00:02:48] Kyle Risi: guys, if you are new to the show and you want to support us, then of course we are very happy for you to do so. And the best way that you can do that is by joining our Patreon because signing up is free and you will get access to next week's episode a whole seven days early.

[00:03:02] Adam Cox: And for as little as $5 a month, you can become a fellow freak of the show, which will unlock our entire back catalogue of our classic episodes.

[00:03:11] Kyle Risi: Yeah. let's be honest, and actually we haven't said this for a while. It's been six weeks and we haven't gotten and out of our system, so we've gotta make this one count.

[00:03:19] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:19] Kyle Risi: The real reason to sign up as a certified freak or a big top tier member is that you get access to our exclusive compendium key chain. so that we can always be there. Should we say it like in tandem this week?

[00:03:32] Adam Cox: Oh God,

All right.

[00:03:33] Kyle Risi: So that we can always be there

[00:03:35] Adam Cox: dangling near your crutch.

That was gross.

[00:03:40] Kyle Risi: Oh God. But also, I think this year we are finally in a position to start creating some exclusive episodes just for our PATRO members. I've said it now. It's kind of out of the bag now

[00:03:52] Adam Cox: outta the bag. It's, that means that you have to do it.

[00:03:53] Kyle Risi: I have to commit.

[00:03:54] Adam Cox: Otherwise you're gonna have to come back and edit this episode.

[00:03:56] Kyle Risi: Exactly. That's right. Retrospectively.

Quick scrub it all. But yeah, so if you are a Pat member, look out for some exclusive episodes that are just for you guys.

[00:04:06] Adam Cox: And lastly, guys, please follow us on your favourite podcast app and leave us a review because your support helps others find us and keeps these amazing stories coming.

[00:04:15] Kyle Risi: Adam, that is enough of the housekeeping because today on the compendium, the first episode of season four, we are diving into an assembly of broken minds, buried files, and the chilling price of secret power.

Dun dun.

[00:04:34] Adam Cox: I'm gonna be honest with you, Kyle, your cryptic clue as I, as cryptic as ever.

[00:04:38] Kyle Risi: You do know this story, I think Adam, but I'm gonna set the scene for us. It is the 28th of November, 1953. It is 2 25 in the morning, inside room 10 18 A of the hotel Statler in New York City on the 10th floor. Robert Lash Brook, a CIA research scientist and chemist is asleep in his bed. In the next room is his colleague Frank Olson. Suddenly Robert is woken up by the sound of shattering glass.

[00:05:09] Adam Cox: Ooh,

[00:05:11] Kyle Risi: that sounded forced. Now this obviously would be unsettling at any time, right?

But when you are 10 stories up in a New York hotel room, the sound of a window breaking is not really something that you can easily explain away, right? Yes.

[00:05:26] Adam Cox: Not like a kid with a baseball.

[00:05:28] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Robert, of course, he rushes into the living room. There he finds the window smashed open. But also Adam Olson is not in the room.

[00:05:37] Adam Cox: Where's he gone?

[00:05:38] Kyle Risi: 10 floors below on the pavement. Frank Olson's body is lying in the streets.

[00:05:42] Adam Cox: Oh,

[00:05:43] Kyle Risi: Adam. He's dead. And according to Robert Ashbrook and the CIA's testimony, Frank's death was eventually ruled a suicide.

The claim was that Frank had been struggling with his mental health, and while his family attested to this, they were shocked because his unravelling seemed to escalate very, very fast. His mood had only shifted within the last few weeks.

Now, to Frank's family, this didn't seem like a long, drawn out struggle that had reached the point of Frank wanting just to end it all right?

Certainly not in the way that the CIA were making it out to be.

[00:06:16] Adam Cox: So has he jumped out the window or is that what we're led to believe?

[00:06:19] Kyle Risi: Well, that's an interesting thing, right? Because he's jumped out the window. That's not what he's done. He's smashed himself out of a closed window.

So if you were gonna be committing suicide, you would think that you would at least open the window.

[00:06:34] Adam Cox: Yeah. You'd open the window, stand on a ledge, and then jump out or whatever.

[00:06:39] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:06:39] Adam Cox: But this sounds like he's ran at a window that, and then that's right out the building, which I dunno if I buy.

[00:06:46] Kyle Risi: Now here's the thing. In the decades following Frank's death whispers began to emerge about a very dark, troubling, highly classified project that the CIA had been working on for decades without anyone knowing.

It was something called MK Ultra.

[00:07:01] Adam Cox: Ah, the MK Ultra Story.

[00:07:05] Kyle Risi: Adam, what do you know about this story?

[00:07:07] Adam Cox: when it came up in the research for another story we did. the Charles Manson case.

[00:07:11] Kyle Risi: Oh, yeah.

[00:07:12] Adam Cox: Because there was, I guess a belief that maybe he was involved with MK Ultra.

[00:07:17] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:17] Adam Cox: He wasn't just a cult leader. Yes. Um, 'cause he was so good at being persuasive and, rounding up these people to be part of his cult, that actually they thought he had some kind of mind control ability connected with MK Ultra.

[00:07:31] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:07:31] Adam Cox: But that was never really proven. I guess it's just part of the conspiracy theories

[00:07:35] Kyle Risi: That's right Now, I mean, you've just said a lot of things there that listeners who have never even heard of MK Ultra will not even know, like mind control. What the hell are you talking about?

There is a conspiracy that Charles Manson was in some way connected as well as a lot of other people to this secret, highly classified projects called MK Ultra.

But it is a conspiracy. And remember this story goes all the way back to the end of the second World War.

There's a lot of time that's gone by and a lot of developments in the story. And so this story is vast. We can't possibly cover everything.

And yes, there are gonna be obviously some conspiracies like, Charles Manson, which are not gonna make it into this episode because we have to keep it on track. Remember, we are the compendium. We tell you a brilliant story in one

[00:08:21] Adam Cox: hour-ish

[00:08:22] Kyle Risi: and 30 minutes.

Here's the thing. At the time, only a handful of people really knew the details of what was involved. Frank was one of those people. When those whispers slowly started turning into demands for answers, the CIA were not exactly eager to open that filing cabinet and invite people into kind of have a look.

And it's because this project was built around a single terrifying question.

Was it possible to take the mind of our enemies, break it, reshape it, and then control it?

And the reason why the i a were not forthcoming about the project's details was because in their pursuit to answer this very question, a belief rose that it wasn't enough to just apply these mind shaping techniques on their enemies in the interrogation chair.

They needed a way to do it so that enemies would never even know that their minds had even been infiltrated in the first place.

They needed the enemies to be essentially unsuspecting, but it was impossible to test this on an enemy that hadn't been captured, like someone who was free in their own country. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Like if you were trying to Im infiltrate their mind, they would know that you would trying to brainwash them or shape their brain.

[00:09:32] Adam Cox: You would think. Yeah,

[00:09:33] Kyle Risi: And so MK Ultra needed a new strategy, and so their experiments started spilling into America's own hospitals, universities, prisons, psychiatric wards and research centres.

The CIA were using the US' own infrastructure and Adam, its own people to test mind control techniques without their people's knowledge.

And it was all been done in the name of National Security with the highest level of clearance and without impunity.

[00:10:05] Adam Cox: So was this all part of the Cold War then in terms of America's fight or, battle with Russia?

[00:10:11] Kyle Risi: Exactly. This is where it gets its roots from. Right. And we'll go through a little bit of the history of how Mkt Ultra even started and how it evolved.

But yes, it's very much part of the Cold War kind of fight that America got itself into following World War ii.

[00:10:23] Adam Cox: And was it something that America had learned that Russia was doing and so they wanted to do it because there's always a case of who did it first, right?

[00:10:30] Kyle Risi: Yes, exactly. It's an arms race, right? They got wind that maybe the communists had developed this kind of power, and so America were like, we need to get there first.

[00:10:40] Adam Cox: Yeah. I'm pretty sure that was the same thing with like remote viewing. Mm. Now that wasn't part of this, I don't think

[00:10:46] Kyle Risi: it is.

[00:10:47] Adam Cox: Oh, is it?

[00:10:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:10:48] Adam Cox: But I know that's another sort of operation whereby they could train people to almost like see through their mind events. Like if a plane went down, for example, they would have these people that have been trained with this remote viewing to work out exactly where that plane had gone down. Yeah. Within like a three mile radius.

[00:11:06] Kyle Risi: But also even more practical describing what it's like in the Kremlin, for example, getting a psychic in like where is Putin right now?

Oh, I can see him. He's sitting in his chair in the Kremlin somewhere. Or do you know what I mean?

[00:11:17] Adam Cox: Yeah. It seems so farfetched. Yeah. But actually there were these operations that were doing this.

[00:11:22] Kyle Risi: Yes, absolutely. And so Adam, when these whispers started to emerge, they were troubling, right? Because these insinuation here is that they were testing these things on their own people, and suddenly Frank Olson's death stopped looking like a suicide and started looking like something much more sinister.

That perhaps he was murdered by the CIA. Either willfully or as a result of their mind control experimentation.

And so Adam, today on the Compendium, I'm gonna tell you about the story of MK Ultra, one of the most disturbing secret programmes ever carried out by the CIA. And I have to stress right now, this is not conspiracy theory, this is fact.

This happened and we know it happened.

The speculation comes around what the actual project entailed because so many of the documents have been destroyed. But we have enough of a paper trail to definitively know they did this shit.

[00:12:22] Adam Cox: Yeah, that's one thing that I remember is the fact that there's only like a small portion of this programme that we know.

And so like, What else went down?

[00:12:31] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And this story is still going on today, may the 13th this year was the latest update in the story, which is just wild, and we'll get onto that in a little bit.

But today we're gonna look at the catalyst that sparked the MK Ultra Project, how it evolved over time, the experiments they undertook on ordinary Americans.

And of course the coverup and the story, like I said, is far from over.

While MK Ultra is technically retired, we will also look at some of the actions by the CIA throughout the coverup that suggests MK Ultra wasn't just retired.

Instead it just evolved.

[00:13:08] Adam Cox: That's what I mean. Like the MK Ultra project could have been closed.

But it could be now called the Tyrannosaurus Rex Project.

[00:13:16] Kyle Risi: And here's the creepy thing, because what it evolved into might just be staring you in the face every single day, controlling how you think, how you feel, and what you believe. And I know that sounds cryptic, but the second I give you just one other word.

The penny's gonna drop for you,

[00:13:36] Adam Cox: Am I a sleeper agent? And you're gonna activate

[00:13:39] Kyle Risi: Yes, that's right. Boom. The sleep agent activation word is banana.

[00:13:43] Adam Cox: Banana,

[00:13:45] Kyle Risi: banana. Anyway, Adam, we'll come back to Frank later in the episode because Frank is instrumental in how the details of MK Ultra eventually came out.

But first, to understand how MK Ultra even began. We are going back to 1945 to the point when the second World War ended, Hitler is of course dead.

Nazi. Germany has collapsed, and allied forces are now beginning to move through Europe to uncover the full extent of what the Nazis had done.

The process led Allied forces directly into many of the Nazi concentration camps, where soldiers saw firsthand the extent of the starvation and the mass murder of millions of human beings.

But they also discovered something else, Adam. They began finding hundreds of thousands of documents detailing horrific experiments that were being carried out on prisoners. And some of these experiments were physically brutal because the Nazis were testing the limits of the human body.

They were studying the effects of hypothermia, heat, pressure, all sorts of things.

But Adam, some of these tests went even darker.

They were also trying to see what it would take to break the human mind. They wanted to empty it out. They wanted to recondition it, and they wanted to turn it into something that was useful to the Nazis.

They were testing cruel interrogation, conditioning, and manipulation techniques. They toyed with things like sleep deprivation, stress, and fear.

They wanted to take the human mind to a point where the subject could no longer control their own thoughts.

[00:15:11] Adam Cox: And this was all on the Jewish or homosexuals or whoever, basically, that were being put in these concentration camps,

[00:15:18] Kyle Risi: correct?

Yes. Even children. It was horrific.

[00:15:21] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:15:22] Kyle Risi: When all this came to light, it naturally shocked the world, right? And so these documents were packed up. They were catalogued and submitted as evidence into what would become known as the Nuremberg Trials, where prominent Nazi leaders would be brought before a court and how to account for what they've physically done.

From a humanitarian point of view, these documents were essentially the voices of the millions of people killed and tested on by the Nazis, and then buried in mass graves all over Europe.

And even though their names were missing, these documents essentially stood as their voice.

[00:15:52] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:53] Kyle Risi: But here's the thing, not all of those documents, ended up being submitted to Nuremberg because the end of World War II didn't just mark the end of one war.

It actually marked the beginning of a whole new war.

And as we said at the very beginning, that was the Cold War, Cause suddenly the world was being carved up by two dominant superpowers, right? You've got the United States on one side, and you've got the Soviet Union on the other, and they're both competing for power, for influence, for ideology, and for control over the entire globe.

So it was essentially a race.

And so in this atmosphere, the US made a very morally compromising decision about what to do with all of this research.

They could have just thrown it away, right? But what if the enemies didn't do the same thing?

What if they decided to advance this research that had been started up by the Nazis and then started using it against the United States and the Allied forces in the future?

[00:16:46] Adam Cox: Yeah. Am I Ryan saying that Russia and the US or the West, it wasn't like they had a, a great relationship before the war, but they put that to one side to fight Nazi Germany?

[00:16:56] Kyle Risi: That's possible. Yeah. I completely see how someone would do that, right?

[00:16:59] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:00] Kyle Risi: And so Adam. What the United States did was they quietly launched something called Operation Paperclip.

Are you familiar with that?

[00:17:08] Adam Cox: No.

[00:17:09] Kyle Risi: This is shocking.

This was a programme designed to bring many of those same German scientists, engineers, and technical specialists who had been testing on their own people into the American military and intelligence functions.

Either to explain their research or even to pick up where it left off.

[00:17:27] Adam Cox: Really

[00:17:28] Kyle Risi: Remember these academics were labelled as war criminals during the Nuremberg trials. And so they were let off scot-free in many cases, as long as they surrendered their services to the United States.

[00:17:38] Adam Cox: I mean, they were experimenting on humans and fair enough, they might be advancing whatever scientific knowledge, I can understand that the Americans would wanna know what they were doing.

Mm-hmm. And maybe how they were doing it, but then to pick up exactly where they left off.

[00:17:52] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:17:52] Adam Cox: That's horrifying.

[00:17:53] Kyle Risi: In some areas, and remember like some of the things, and we haven't really included too much of what they were doing in terms of some of the specific tests, but Adam, some of the things that the Nazis were doing were horrific.

They did a lot of like twin tests where they would bring twins in. They would infect one with a virus just to see how they were impacted by it.

They would, oh my God, inject like chemicals into their eyeballs to see if it was possible to change the colour of their eyes. Yeah. All sorts of things.

They were horrific, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

America understood this, and yet they were using some of these same scientists to pick up on the research that they had left off on back in Germany,

[00:18:34] Adam Cox: but in a more humane way or just

[00:18:36] Kyle Risi: Well, let's, let's find out. We can decide that for ourselves as we go through.

But on the plus side, like some of these academics were experts in like rockets, chemicals and biology, academics operating literally at the cutting edge of science.

And so for the United States, the stakes were high. Either bring them to the United States or risk losing them to the Soviets,

and so over the next several years, operation Paperclip brought more than 700 German scientists, engineers, and technical specialists to the United States.

These were people like Werner von Braun, who, and I probably butchered that, who was sent to work for NASA Von Braun had originally helped Germany develop the V two rockets, and so with his help the United States were able to get to the moon.

[00:19:18] Adam Cox: if we are to believe that they actually went to the Minn conspiracy.

[00:19:24] Kyle Risi: And at the same time, other scientists, they were sent to a place called Camp Derick in, Maryland, where they worked on advanced biological and chemical warfare programmes. Again, programmes that only a few years earlier had proved effective against allied forces and had killed thousands of soldiers on the battlefield.

Like these were highly, highly illegal things chemical warfare on the battlefield was a big no-no. And yet, here is America under Operation Paperclip, bringing these scientists over to continue to advance that research.

[00:19:53] Adam Cox: It's one of those things. Are they using it as a deterrent for

[00:19:57] Kyle Risi: the future?

Well, again, it's, yes, possibly, but it's also because if Russia are going to develop this technology, then they also want the ability to have that as well.

[00:20:05] Adam Cox: I think Yeah, I can understand as like national defence, like you wanna be ahead of the game and know potentially what your opponent could be doing, so you kind of want that in your back pocket.

[00:20:16] Kyle Risi: I disagree with that wholeheartedly. Because if you're doing all of this in the interest of national security, The purpose of national security is to protect your people, and yet you're doing all these experiments and tests that could potentially harm your own people It should be, okay. We need to make sure that Russia aren't gonna do this, and we'll put all of energy into stopping them from doing this rather than getting there before they do.

[00:20:38] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:39] Kyle Risi: Especially when you think of America as the peacekeeper of the world, right? Mm-hmm.

And like I said, again, as terrible as the sounded, the horror of this was washed away by framing this in the interest of national security, would you rather the USA, the peacekeepers of the world have this technology or our enemies, the communists.

But here's the thing, to allied forces like Britain, France, and the rest of Europe, this was a no brainer. And so they did turn a blind eye to what America was doing under Operation Paperclip.

And so the story of MK Ultra begins to really take its next leap forward. During the Korean War when American who had been captured during the war were starting to be released and sent home.

However, a handful of these soldiers decided to defect and started to publicly denounce the United States.

Some even went on camera confessing to various crimes that they did not commit, including dropping biological weapons on civilians.

When these recordings were then later analysed, the US noticed that these denunciations and these confessions, they seemed kind of flat in a way, almost monotone in how they were delivered, almost as if they were rehearsed.

The conclusion was that somehow the communist had managed to brainwash the mind, which is actually where the original term comes from, the term brainwashing.

Oh, really? It comes from this moment

[00:21:53] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:21:53] Kyle Risi: The insinuation was that the communist had managed to override the soldiers' personalities and turn them into a automatons, willing to denounce United States, which was such a sobering thought to Americas, because Americans they're so patriotic and they're so proud of their country and everything they stand for, that this thought of an American soldier denouncing its own country

[00:22:16] Adam Cox: and publicly

[00:22:16] Kyle Risi: and publicly was just like not even fathomable.

[00:22:19] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:20] Kyle Risi: And it's this actually that then moves the story forward.

If their enemies were now able to control the mind itself, they could potentially plant a brainwashed agent behind enemy lines, possibly close to power, and then gut the entire Western system from the inside.

That was literally the fear.

[00:22:37] Adam Cox: And so what happened to these soldiers that didn't wanna go back to America?

[00:22:41] Kyle Risi: I guess they just stayed in Korea.

[00:22:43] Adam Cox: And there's nothing proven that they were brainwashed at this point, or

[00:22:47] Kyle Risi: absolutely nothing. It was just an assumption.

All rooted in why would you not be patriotic? Why would you not love America?

[00:22:55] Adam Cox: I guess just the fear. It invokes some kind of fear, if they turned on America, who else could?

[00:23:00] Kyle Risi: And so in response to this growing fear, the CIA approved a project called Project Bluebird in the year 1950, exploring whether interrogation techniques like drugs, hypnosis, and other methods could be used to break down and control a person's mind.

At first, the scope was wide. They didn't really know if the communists had managed to master this or even how far they'd even gotten, they explored almost everything that would show any degree of potential they explored different interrogation and torture techniques. explored the effects of different chemicals and drugs on the human mind as well as hypnosis and electroshock therapy.

Most of this work was carried out at secret US interrogation facilities in Japan and Germany.

they call them black sites, and they were usually against detainees or suspected informants or prisoners that they captured in these areas. In Germany and Japan.

This was because, of course, the CIA had far more room to operate outside US soil. Officially, the agency had no police or law enforcement or internal security powers inside the United States. It was a big no-no, it was not their REIT to operate inside the United States.

The results of Project Bloomberg did show some promising signs. People would talk, maybe even do something they wouldn't ordinarily do.

But the problem was, Adam, that the CIA could not be sure that these subjects were telling the truth or whether or not they were just telling the CIA, whatever they wanted to hear, right? To make the torture stop.

And so eventually the project reached a stalemate. If the project was going to be successful, then they needed more scope, more money to explore basically other avenues.

And so in 1951, just a year later, project Bluebird was expanded and renamed to Project Artichoke.

So you can really see we're progressively getting closer and closer to MK Ultra, right?

Mm-hmm. We've got this new project that's important because these projects evolve. The buck stopped with MK Ultra as far as we know what it evolved to following that.

And so project Aoke was started in 1951. It contained the same basic idea, but now they wanted to be sure subjects weren't just speaking for the sake of speaking either to make the interrogation stop or because of the effects of the chemicals.

They wanted to get to a point where the subject was completely unaware or forgotten that they had even been interrogated in the first place. And so two years go by. They try a bunch of new techniques and methods but eventually, Adam, even Project Aoke reached the limits of what the CIA scope and funding was able to achieve at this moment in time.

Again, the biggest problem was that it was very difficult to condition and try to reprogram a subject when they were already a prisoner held in a secret facility somewhere in Japan or Germany.

What they needed was subjects who were completely unaware that anything was even happening to them in the first place.

And so they toyed with the idea of testing on unsuspecting civilians. But Adam, even doing that openly overseas would've been almost impossible. Right? Like No foreign government was going to sign off on the CIA, another country secretly experimenting on their own civilians.

[00:26:03] Adam Cox: And so that is why they looked closer to home.

[00:26:06] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Because on US Oil, the CIA figured they would be able to manoeuvre things differently. Not legally, and certainly not openly, but they could potentially use even the country's infrastructure, like hospitals, universities, prisons and research centres, to orchestrate their experiments covertly.

[00:26:23] Adam Cox: I was just thinking, yeah, could you do it on really horrible criminals that are in prison, but then does that go against the whole, like, these are people that shouldn't be captured, they're going about their everyday life, not knowing they're being brainwashed or whatever.

[00:26:35] Kyle Risi: That is definitely the starting point, right?

It's the easiest thing to test on prisoners. A a lot of them are criminals. They're already captured and they're ready, detained. They're not gonna go anywhere. They're very easy to test on.

these prisons, hospitals, universities, meant that they could hide these experiments behind something that looked legitimate, but also provide access to unwitting test subjects.

Basically American citizens.

So Adam, on the 10th of April, 1953, Alan Jewels, he is rising up the ranks in the CIA. He's not the director of the CIA yet, but he's getting there. I think he's like the director of plans. What's the plan today guys?

[00:27:08] Adam Cox: The director?

[00:27:09] Kyle Risi: What are we doing today?

[00:27:10] Adam Cox: Um, we're gonna get some coffee.

[00:27:12] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:27:12] Adam Cox: Have some pastries.

[00:27:14] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And so Alan gives a speech called Brain Warfare at a Princeton alumni conference in Hot Springs in Virginia.

Adam, in his speech, he talks very, very seriously about how the Cold War was not just a fight on the battlefield, it was now a fight for the human mind. And he argued that the communists were using what he called brain warfare techniques designed to condition the mind so that it could no longer react freely or rationally, but respond to impulses, pla from the outside.

Basically, he's talking about brainwashing.

And what is wild is he wasn't really talking about stopping this in any way. He's not saying, we have to prevent this from happening. This is outrageous. This is awful.

What he's saying is that we have to understand it and we have to get there before the communists do.

It was literally an arms race for the mind.

This is a public speech. It is on the record. This is what he said.

And again, remember the wild thing is that there is no evidence that the communists at this moment in time had even worked out how to brainwash people at all. It's all just an assumption built around the recordings of these captured soldiers in North Korea appearing to denounce America and praise communism.

Do you know what I mean?

[00:28:21] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:28:22] Kyle Risi: It's crazy that they are moving forward with this so ferociously and it's all just based on an assumption from a few recordings.

[00:28:30] Adam Cox: But do you think, um, Russia or the Soviet Union was doing this then

[00:28:34] Kyle Risi: Possibly. They're probably doing their own research as well. Who knows? I don't know.

But the reality is they're jumping thinking. They could have cracked it.

[00:28:42] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:28:43] Kyle Risi: And so following Alan's speech, just three days later, Adam, he signs off on a new programme project MK Ultra.

[00:28:51] Adam Cox: Ah, finally this one starts.

[00:28:53] Kyle Risi: Yes. This new project would come with far less oversight, looser controls, and a special funding mechanism designed to keep everything essentially buried.

They were confident enough that they could keep the actual project documents classified and secreted away from the public. That was gonna be the easy bits.

And so the name itself, MK Ultra, was part of that camouflage, right. MK Ultra didn't explain itself. It didn't invite questions, and that was literally the whole point. But the way MK Ultra was structured also helped because it wasn't just a single project.

It was actually an umbrella project that contained 149 sub-projects underneath it all with their own unique project names like Project 68 or whatever it might be.

All of these subprojects had the same basic goal. They all were set up to master techniques that could be used in clandestine operations to control human behaviour.

The only thing that was different between the different Subprojects was the method, right? Are we going to be exploring chemicals in this particular experiments? Is it biologically focused? Is it psychological or physical experiments?

[00:29:53] Adam Cox: Hypnosis? Is it with chickens?

[00:29:55] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Yes. so The things that are probably coming to mind is, men who ster goats with George Clooney.

[00:30:00] Adam Cox: Oh, yeah.

[00:30:01] Kyle Risi: I believe, from my research that might have been a sub-project of MK Ultra. Seeing whether or not they could control animals with the mind.

[00:30:08] Adam Cox: I like the sound of that project.

[00:30:10] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

And so another way that they were gonna conceal everything and honestly make the entire process easier, as I said, was to route all their studies through American colleges, universities, hospitals, federal prisons, military bases, and pharmaceutical companies. Adam, they ended up using 80 different US institutions and at least 185 known private researchers, all American.

And none of them had any idea that their research had been funded in any way by the CIA. , largely because all of the money that was funnelled into these various sub-projects were funnelled through fake organisations, which on paper looked honestly just like ordinary academic and medical funding.

[00:30:51] Adam Cox: So these, medical centres or institutions, they're getting money from MK Ultra to help them with MK Ultra's research.

[00:30:58] Kyle Risi: Yes.

[00:30:58] Adam Cox: Obviously, they don't know that they're brainwashing people, whatever. But what are they doing

[00:31:02] Kyle Risi: They have goals and they want to test whether or not they can fix the mind with drugs or whatever it might be. But they don't know that they're doing this research or that their findings are being sent back to the CIA. Okay. Like, it's these research sensors that are doing essentially all these experiments, on behalf of the CI remember the CI is still calling the shots. They're the ones who are saying, we want to test this. Let's go find, someone who wants to test this. And we can kind of use our strings behind the scenes to say, now test this a little bit, see what happens if you do this

[00:31:31] Adam Cox: right.

[00:31:31] Kyle Risi: Kind of thing.

[00:31:32] Adam Cox: And I guess these, different centres or institutions, they're all under NDA or whatever. And they probably don't know the full extent of what they're doing.

[00:31:38] Kyle Risi: They don't, no. They absolutely have no idea that the US government is involved in this.

And so Adam, with all of this set up, Alan DOLs, the, now he's the director of the CIA. He puts a guy called Sydney Gottlieb at the centre of MK Ultra.

He's essentially handed him the keys. Sydney would later become known as the poisoner in chief. Just basically because a lot of his work revolved around chemicals, toxins, and drugs.

[00:32:02] Adam Cox: Was that his actual title?

[00:32:03] Kyle Risi: No. No, it wasn't.

[00:32:05] Adam Cox: Just wonder if that was on his business card.

[00:32:06] Kyle Risi: His, his little nickname that he got within the kind of the CIA offices Poisoner in Chief.

[00:32:12] Adam Cox: And did he know that was his name?

[00:32:13] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like he was happy about it. He, he's the chemist, right?

[00:32:17] Adam Cox: Yeah.

That's such a, I wouldn't feel proud about that.

[00:32:19] Kyle Risi: not now, I don't think. But at the time, I think, he quite liked it.

[00:32:22] Adam Cox: Uhhuh.

[00:32:23] Kyle Risi: And so now we've got these 149 different projects under MK Ultra. They all start getting to work. It seems that a lot of the more promising results under the MK Ultra kind of umbrella came from the chemical experiments.

Things like mescalin, which is a naturally occurring psychedelic from like a cactus plant. It can be used as like a truth serum But they also experimented with other chemicals like heroin, cocaine, and THC, which of course, as you know, is marijuana.

Many of the subjects knew that they were given something, they just didn't know what it was. So often they were told that they were being given like pain medication, but in reality they were given things like literally heroin

[00:32:58] Adam Cox: That's awful. I'm guessing they're not giving this to heroin addicts at the time.

[00:33:01] Kyle Risi: Oh yeah. Oh no. What they would do is reward heroin addicts with heroin for taking other drugs.

Imprisons

[00:33:08] Adam Cox: God.

[00:33:08] Kyle Risi: the CIA massive drug dealers. It's wild. It's so crazy.

[00:33:13] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:33:14] Kyle Risi: But here's the thing. Remember, part of these tests were about administering these drugs without subjects even knowing they had taken anything. And so in some CIA experiments, they would hire like, stage magicians to write up manuals and how the CIA and their operatives could slip pills and drugs into people's drinks without ever being detected.

[00:33:30] Adam Cox: Are you using magicians now?

[00:33:31] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:33:32] Adam Cox: like a sleigh of hand. yeah, this feels very spy like

[00:33:35] Kyle Risi: Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It's so wild.

And so of course this was a way for them to be able to slip them something into their drink, see how they react, and then test to see whether or not they could influence these people under the influence of these drugs is out of these experiments that Sydney Gotlib stumbles upon a chemical, he believes is the thing that the CIA had been waiting for.

And at the time the drug was relatively new, it was discovered almost completely by accident when a Swiss chemist, a guy called Albert Hoffman, was experimenting with a synthesised derivative of, uh, got, this is like a fungus that affects right crops.

He was actually on his 25th derivative of the substance when he accidentally absorbed a trace amount through his skin and started to experience hallucinations.

[00:34:18] Adam Cox: Ah, so this is LSD.

[00:34:20] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[00:34:21] Adam Cox: So that's how it was, created is almost like an accident then.

[00:34:24] Kyle Risi: Yeah, it was a, it's a derivative of an ergot. So actually the ergot, this fungus that affects this rib bread is actually people suspect is responsible for causing the steria around some of the m witch trials.

[00:34:36] Adam Cox: Oh yeah. And then there was that, the dancing plague, I think in France where they all just got up and danced.

[00:34:41] Kyle Risi: Was that also related to OTTs as well?

[00:34:43] Adam Cox: Yeah. They said it was some kind of weird infection or fungus that they might have ate. And it could have been like bad bread or something.

[00:34:49] Kyle Risi: And so these are derivatives of that kind of, that molecule structure

it's synthesised and in his reports, the substance was labelled as LSD 25 because it's the 25 derivative of this ergots.

When Sidney Gottlieb hear about this, he's very intrigued and so fearful that the Soviets might hear about this substance and start stockpiling the drug for themselves.

Sydney makes a call to literally buy up the entire world supply of LSD.

[00:35:17] Adam Cox: Really,

[00:35:17] Kyle Risi: the United States are the only entities on the planet to own all of it.

[00:35:22] Adam Cox: And they're having a good time.

[00:35:23] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

I think it ends up costing the CIA like $240,000, which is equivalent of like $4 million today. Which doesn't sound a lot, but actually when the entire future of human behavioural control lies in the balance. You gotta agree.

That's a steal, right?

[00:35:37] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:37] Kyle Risi: But also they needed a lot of it, especially Adam if we believe later leaked memos where they were seriously considering mass domestic experimentation on American citizens.

[00:35:48] Adam Cox: Well, the fact that this guy accidentally discovered it or whatever, it feels like they could plant this on anything, like on food packaging at the bus stop on door handles, and that's how you basically infiltrate it without people knowing,

[00:36:00] Kyle Risi: very insightful.

[00:36:01] Adam Cox: Is that right?

[00:36:02] Kyle Risi: Possibly.

[00:36:02] Adam Cox: Oh,

[00:36:03] Kyle Risi: if, if we believe the memos.

[00:36:04] Adam Cox: Ah, okay.

[00:36:05] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Now of course there's no evidence that they ever did this. But again, remember MK Ultra has already evolved from two other projects. It will evolve from MK Ultra and will evolve from there Has the paper trail been lost?

That's the question.

[00:36:20] Adam Cox: I did go to Tesco one time. I did feel a bit funny afterwards. I was drugged.

[00:36:24] Kyle Risi: Oh my God. Someone slipped me at Roofie.

So Adam Sydney, he now has the total world supply of LSD. What do you think the first thing that the CIA are gonna do with this

[00:36:34] Adam Cox: party?

[00:36:34] Kyle Risi: Absolutely right. They are going to take it all for themselves. Literally in the early days they have staff around the CIA offices try it for themselves.

It was routinely handed out a Christmas parties and at like company retreat days.

CIA staff were literally Sydney's earliest test subjects. he would spike the officer's party punch bowl just to observe what would happen at these parties, and then write everyone up the next day. You sat on Santa's lap?

[00:37:02] Adam Cox: but then I also understand, yeah, they wanna understand how this affects human body first. Right. So

[00:37:07] Kyle Risi: Yeah, but they're testing it straight away on their own people. Their own. What about if it was a lethal drug and they gave everyone the CIA, this LSD, and then everyone died and then America's left without an essential intelligence agency?

[00:37:19] Adam Cox: Probably just, uh,

[00:37:20] Kyle Risi: the Russians would zoom in. That's the bigger national security risk right there.

[00:37:24] Adam Cox: I guess they didn't know what the extent or the, the bad effects for LLSD could do at that point, right?

[00:37:29] Kyle Risi: No, they, that's exactly what they wanna start doing these. Especially the long-term effects because the short-term effects are bloody great, right?

[00:37:35] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like everyone's licking at each other's face and all sorts, and like chasing invisible mice.

[00:37:41] Kyle Risi: Have you ever tried LSD?

[00:37:42] Adam Cox: I have not ever tried. LSD.

[00:37:44] Kyle Risi: Would you like to try LSD

[00:37:45] Adam Cox: In a No.

[00:37:46] Kyle Risi: Why would you not wanna try LSD?

[00:37:48] Adam Cox: It sounds like it could be fun, but then I feel like it could also be horrible.

[00:37:52] Kyle Risi: Like you hear people have bad trips, right?

[00:37:53] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:37:54] Kyle Risi: Like environments is apparently very important.

[00:37:56] Adam Cox: I don't want to end up accidentally eating a baby and mistaking it for a muffin. Okay.

[00:38:02] Kyle Risi: I can't tell the difference between babies and muffins anymore. That's the effect that LSI has had on me.

[00:38:06] Adam Cox: Exactly.

[00:38:07] Kyle Risi: Why is this muffin crying? Oh, well

[00:38:09] Adam Cox: hum.

[00:38:11] Kyle Risi: So of course through this testing, it obviously becomes very apparent to the CIA agents that this LSD thing that they've been spiked with is amazing.

And so they wanna get their hands on it. so a lot of these CCIA agents start taking recreationally Some agents even start dosing each other as pranks, like putting it in your morning coffee just before meetings.

There's even the story about one CI, a agent who had dosed up before work one day. Basically Adam, he does not get into work that day because he becomes so convinced that every car that passes him has a monster inside of it.

And so he has seen running through the streets of Washington DC freaking the hell out. And apparently he's later found carrying underneath the fountain.

[00:38:51] Adam Cox: Oh my God. This must have been like one of the most inefficient times working at the CIA because they're like, oh yeah, we're just testing this. And they're literally all high off their head.

[00:39:01] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that's it. It's not like it's Adderall, which is increases your faculties and makes you more efficient

[00:39:06] Adam Cox: and the fact they're spiking each other. I

[00:39:07] Kyle Risi: know

[00:39:08] Adam Cox: before a meeting,

[00:39:09] Kyle Risi: Adam, these are the people who are literally running the country's national security, right? So While this is all going on actual tests are being conducted across the country in US institutions in the early days, like I said, a lot of the tests that were carried out in federal prisons, largely because subjects were already captive and they could be easily monitored, right?

But also there were a lot of people in these prisons who were already addicts. And so it was not hard to persuade them.

And so what they would often do is they would give them rewards like high grade heroin or morphine as payment for taking some of these drugs that they wanted to test, which a lot of it included LSD.

[00:39:52] Adam Cox: So not only are they getting high from the stuff that they want to give these prisoners, they then get rewarded. Would more drugs.

[00:39:57] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So the CIA have got the total world supply of LSD and they're dealing heroin

[00:40:05] Adam Cox: and that's not gonna, although to be fair, they're probably all gonna be pretty mellow. I'm just thinking is that gonna like create like rage in these presents and stuff?

[00:40:11] Kyle Risi: Possibly like ones an upper, ones a downer. Yeah. Like, do you know what I mean? What the fuck are they doing?

[00:40:15] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:40:16] Kyle Risi: But eventually these tests go further it's because they wanna start testing the long-term effects of LSD exposure. Right now they only know the short-term effects.

And so in some of these experiments, mostly involving African American men, they would dose 'em up for upwards of 80 days consecutively.

Wow. So they were totally dose up on LSD just to see if prolonged exposure would permanently alter or break the human psyche.

[00:40:39] Adam Cox: And why African American men?

[00:40:41] Kyle Risi: I dunno if it was a deliberate attempt to target African American men. This was around about the civil rights movement. I dunno if there's a lot of institutional racism there. Maybe they felt that if they could test on these African American men and they got busted, maybe maybe there would be less consequences. I don't know.

[00:40:57] Adam Cox: That is gross. If that is the case. I'm just trying to work out if these people volunteered or whether they were targeted.

[00:41:03] Kyle Risi: there are a few other really big experiments that were conducted in America, I think like the syphilis experiments where they tested the effects of syphilis almost exclusively on African American men.

And I think possibly for some of these, scientists and researchers, African American men and African Americans were just expendable.

[00:41:19] Adam Cox: Wow. That's awful.

[00:41:21] Kyle Risi: It is awful. But maybe one of our listeners can write in and tell us a bit about those experiments. I'd definitely like to do, an episode on him.

But also in universities, Adam, the CIA, also ly funded drug trials, which as you can imagine, took very, very little persuading amongst the students

[00:41:37] Adam Cox: free drugs.

[00:41:38] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And actually some very famous people were part of these experiments. One of them being the author of The One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. He basically volunteered, for one of these medical experiments, completely unaware that it was a CIA front it's this exact experience that helped inspire his physical novel

[00:41:56] Adam Cox: Oh.

[00:41:56] Kyle Risi: Which is set like in and out of different kind of psychiatric units and things like that.

[00:42:00] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:01] Kyle Risi: also, Robert Hunter, the lyricist from the Rock band, the Grateful Dead, also volunteered for one of these trials in the seventies.

But the CIA also allowed researchers to target very, very vulnerable people too. And also not just in the United States, but also across the border in Canada in 1957.

Velma Orley Cow, a 41-year-old mother from Winnipeg. She basically, Adam checked herself into the Allen Memorial Institute because she was suffering from postpartum depression after giving birth to her baby.

Like all she wanted was she just feel better about being a mom.

Do you know what I mean?

Velma was assigned to a guy called Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. And at the time he's Billy, big potatoes around this hospital. Right. He's one of the most decorated psychiatrist alive Docer Cameron has this theory that mental illness was caused faulty patterns of thinking, which become reinforced over time and were therefore way more difficult to break out of because they cemented themselves.

And his thinking was that if there was a way to erase or disrupt this pattern of thinking, it would clear the path for you to be able to rebuild those patterns in a way that would fix the problem.

And so when treating Velma, Dr. Cameron would administer huge quantities of sedatives to basically keep her asleep for 20 to 22 hours a day for several weeks at a time.

[00:43:17] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:43:18] Kyle Risi: While she's then under to then erase the mind. Mm-hmm. He would administer all sorts of treatments, one of which was insane amounts of LSD designed to basically erase or disrupt her problematic patterns of thinking.

He would then also have his team administer while she's high on LSD, massive doses of electroconvulsive therapy.

[00:43:39] Adam Cox: It feels like torture.

[00:43:40] Kyle Risi: it is.

And at the time, remember the standard dose of ECT was roughly six to eight treatments in total. That's the maximum that you were allowed to give.

Dr. Cameron was giving Velma as many as a hundred treatments at one and a half times the standard voltage up to three times a day.

[00:43:57] Adam Cox: So a hundred times up to three times a day.

[00:43:59] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:44:00] Adam Cox: Like how that's, so,

[00:44:01] Kyle Risi: it's awful. The goal here is to disrupt their thinking to raise that mind.

[00:44:06] Adam Cox: And how is she coping with this?

[00:44:07] Kyle Risi: She's asleep, she's passed out. She's sedated. So she can't even protest. They can't like take her out and say, how are you getting on this? Is it, she's under, and she's going through this treatment for several weeks.

[00:44:17] Adam Cox: And so they're just like measuring her like brain waves and patterns and stuff like that.

[00:44:20] Kyle Risi: Adam, this is 1950s, right? 1947. Do they have the technology to do that?

[00:44:25] Adam Cox: Okay.

[00:44:26] Kyle Risi: And so after weeks of this in Dr. Cameron's own words, Velma's mental slate was now effectively wiped clean. And now the next phase of psyche driving could begin.

This is phase two, where he can start reprogramming her pattern of thinking to fix her. And so while Velma is still drugged up, still kept asleep, he would place her in a room where, through a speaker that was tucked under a pillow, he would just play short recorded messages on repeat things like.

Velma, you are a good mother, Velma, your husband loves you. You are confident, you are not afraid, Adam. This would go on for 20 hours a day, again for several more weeks.

[00:45:06] Adam Cox: It's almost like this, hypnosis that's

[00:45:08] Kyle Risi: happening

[00:45:09] Adam Cox: at this point.

[00:45:09] Kyle Risi: Yes.

Yeah, that's right. So it's building upon a lot of the things that we are already familiar with, but it's so intense.

[00:45:15] Adam Cox: And well, did it work then?

[00:45:17] Kyle Risi: When Velma finally gets home, Adam, she literally cannot be left alone. She has lost so much of her memory that she's even forgotten that she even has a baby.

[00:45:25] Adam Cox: Ah, geez. There is no recovery from her, from all that,

[00:45:29] Kyle Risi: I

[00:45:30] Adam Cox: dunno. Yeah,

[00:45:30] Kyle Risi: she completely unravels. To the point that she can't even function according to Velma's family. She's never the same person again.

The only reason why we know about Velma is 'cause her husband was a parliamentary member.

[00:45:42] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:43] Kyle Risi: And so it's one of the high profile cases, but she represented just one of dozens and dozens of people that Dr. Cameron experimented on in very similar ways.

[00:45:52] Adam Cox: That is horrendous.

[00:45:54] Kyle Risi: And Adam, like I said, there were 149 other sub-projects that were just as deranged, just as cruel, all given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. by the CCIA with zero impunity.

So Adam, another experiment that targeted ordinary members of the public was an operation. The CIA actually ran for 10 years.

This one was titled Operation Midnight Climax.

[00:46:21] Adam Cox: That sounds like something else.

[00:46:23] Kyle Risi: It was started in 1955 and initially operated just outside of Greenwich Village in New York City.

They had two other sibling sites as well. One operating in San Francisco and Mill Valley in California. That was opened up later on, These operation sites were essentially Adam Apartments that the CIA had kitted out with all sorts of furniture and surveillance equipment, like recording devices that were like hidden inside the electrical outlets.

They also installed like a one-way glass mirror or a two-way glass mirror that they could use to basically observe the effects of their tests.

The man Sidney put in charge of this particular sub-project. Adam is a real piece of work. His name is George White from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Years later in his journal he wrote, I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toyed wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun.

Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanctions and the blessings of the all highest?

He's referring to the government.

[00:47:30] Adam Cox: What the hell did he do?

[00:47:31] Kyle Risi: Yeah, this guy is deranged. The aim of this experiment was basically to recruit sex workers with a promise of full immunity for what was about to happen.

The sex workers would then lure unsuspecting clients back to these apartments where the clients were then given drinks that were laced with LSD or whatever other chemical that they wanted to test.

And of course the clients have no idea what the hell is going on.

And then behind this one way or two way mirror, George White and his team just sat there and watched taking notes or while martinis, they even had a toilet inside this little compartment room.

Just so like they wouldn't have to inconvenience themselves by leaving.

[00:48:07] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:48:08] Kyle Risi: Basically his diary describes how these men just completely unravelled, which is really scary, especially when you have no idea even what LSD is.

[00:48:16] Adam Cox: Yeah. You're probably not even aware of those kind of lucid genetic kind of

[00:48:19] Kyle Risi: drugs. Exactly.

[00:48:20] Adam Cox: Right.

[00:48:20] Kyle Risi: And Adam, it's not like these guys can go to the cops because they had just solicited a sex worker for sex. Right. So if they did, they would just be arrested.

[00:48:27] Adam Cox: And so what they're at this apartment until what they, I don't know, sober up or anything.

[00:48:32] Kyle Risi: Sometimes they just run away and so they're out in the streets high on LSD not knowing, terrified.

[00:48:37] Adam Cox: And even though they're like one of these sex workers, how do you know that you are not gonna be, I don't know.

[00:48:41] Kyle Risi: I guess they need the sex workers because that's how they get these men back to the apartments, but Yeah.

[00:48:46] Adam Cox: But would they trust the government? How do they know it's the gov? I don't know.

[00:48:50] Kyle Risi: They don't know. It's the government. They just think it's this George White guy.

[00:48:52] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:48:53] Kyle Risi: Adam and George gets a real sick sense of satisfaction from doing this. So much so that eventually his experiment starts spilling outside of these apartments, and he starts dosing unsuspecting people in bars and restaurants.

Some of it is research, but most of it is just to see what the hell happened potentially based on what he wrote in his diary.

his method of getting women back to his hotel room.

[00:49:12] Adam Cox: Oh, that's gross. Yeah. I thought like maybe he was just doing it for fun in terms of like on seeing what other people would do, but Yeah. Now that you've said that he clearly probably used it to his own advantage.

[00:49:23] Kyle Risi: 100%.

And I just have to iterate. These examples only represent a handful of the 149 other programmes set up under MK Ultra.

They didn't all involve LSD. Some of them involve hypnosis and other chemicals.

They even had psychic studies where they would bring in psychics to describe fire away places in Russia.

This is what you were talking about earlier. They called it psychic warfare.

[00:49:44] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:45] Kyle Risi: Which is actually what brings us back to Frank Olson, a guy who fell to his death from his hotel room in New York City. Do you remember him?

[00:49:51] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:49:52] Kyle Risi: So Frank was a civilian biochemist and a biological warfare expert for the US Army. A lot of his work involved developing biological toxins that could be delivered using aerosol technologies like a spray.

[00:50:04] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:04] Kyle Risi: Around 1953, Frank is actually sent to work at some of the CIA black sites, that they had set up across Europe.

It's here that he actually discovers Adam that his research was effectively used in terminal interrogation sessions, basically where the subjects were tortured to death and then killed using the toxins that he had developed.

[00:50:24] Adam Cox: And he didn't know about that.

[00:50:25] Kyle Risi: He didn't really understand the full extent to what these interrogations involved, or that they were routinely killing some of these suspects. And so actually gets a bit much from me, especially when it starts taking this dark turn.

Frank does make the decision to quit the Ccia A which he had tried to do before, saying that he just couldn't cope with what was expected of him.

But each time the Ccia a they just convinced him to stay. But this time, Frank is adamant, And so the CIA, they agree to off ramp him However, on the 18th of November, 1953 in the lead up to him leaving the CIA invite Frank to Deep Creek Lake in Maryland for a retreat weekend.

He isn't alone. 'cause there's gonna be several other of his colleagues also joining him.

Also attending is Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy Robert Lash Brook.

He's the guy that was inside the hotel room with Frank when he plummeted to his death.

And so Robert Lash Brooke is one of the lead scientists in these experiments, especially around LSD.

It's on one of these evenings at this retreat after a long day of whatever they're doing right, like meetings and golf and I don't know that the drinks start flowing

[00:51:33] Adam Cox: and there's gonna be some spiking

[00:51:34] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Because within 20 minutes all of the men start realising that something was terribly wrong and that they had been spiked with massive quantities of LSD.

So for context in the timeline, this is 1953. This is the year MK Ultra physically starts. So Sydney is like a kid with a new toy. He's carrying out all these experiments all over the place. He's testing on the ccia a agents, dosing them in their offices.

Remember Frank is a biochemist, works at a completely different place. So he's probably not involved in those kind of recreational testing of the LSD.

So when he starts coming down with this, he's what the hell is happening?

[00:52:09] Adam Cox: Yeah. He probably thinks that he needs a hospital.

[00:52:11] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And so Sydney is carrying out all these experiments all over the place with very little understanding of what LSD can do, especially in huge quantities. Most of them, do eventually come down from this.

Frank Olson does not. For whatever reason, his mind appears to be permanently altered, at least in the short term. And so in the days that follow, Frank Olson essentially becomes a completely different person.

His wife says that he becomes more and more withdrawn, refusing to speak to her. He stops eating, he barely speaks to their kids.

And when he does speak to his wife, he seems really fixated on just getting away, And so, according to her, running away from the CIA seems to be the intention behind those words.

[00:52:48] Adam Cox: So with everyone else, it's, well, this, these effects, they last for a few hours or whatever it is. Then they calm down and But something with Frank is actually, it's affected him longer term. Like it's actually affected his memory or his brain in some capacity.

[00:53:02] Kyle Risi: Long term, we don't know, this is very shortly afterwards, but, so it could be the medium term we could say.

Mm-hmm.

[00:53:08] Adam Cox: got you.

[00:53:08] Kyle Risi: And so the CIA, they pick up on the fact that Frank is not doing so great. There are two things here, right? Yes.

They're concerned for Frank, but with his recent resignation, there's also a fear there might be a risk of him blabbing. Especially if he is not doing so well mentally. They don't know to what degree he is mentally affected.

[00:53:25] Adam Cox: Yeah. You said like his mental health changed for a few weeks prior to his death.

So is this that period? Yes. Then whilst he's still recovering from this incident

[00:53:34] Kyle Risi: That's right.

Yeah. And so the feeling is that Frank is potentially a risk to the entire MK Ultra Project. Remember, this is very early on as well.

So Sydney arranges for Robert Lash Brook to take Frank to see a psychiatrist in New York City. His name is harold Abramson.

Now again, he is a CIA guy. So he's acting in the interest of the agency, not in the interest of Frank. We don't know what happened at that appointment or whether or not there was any confidence that they could physically fix Frank. It's a possibility that they determined that they couldn't.

[00:54:04] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:04] Kyle Risi: But we do know what happens next because that same evening on the 28th of November, Frank Olson and Robert Lash Brook check into Room 10 18 A at the Hotel Statler in New York City.

They have dinner, they have a few drinks, they end the evening with some light television before they both went to bed.

And then it's at 2:25 AM that Robert is woken up by the sound of breaking glass. And as we know, Frank's body was found on the pavement on that street.

The official explanation is that Frank Olson took his own life because he was depressed. But people today, knowing some of the details of MK Ultra, they question that.

For one, why would Frank launch himself out of a glass window rather than opening it first?

[00:54:43] Adam Cox: Yeah. And like he's sharing a room with Robert, right? So again, that feels odd. Like I feel like if someone's gonna do that, they're gonna do it in their own time or in private,

[00:54:53] Kyle Risi: yeah.

[00:54:54] Adam Cox: So for someone to just run out a window.

[00:54:55] Kyle Risi: To people.

This sounded like someone who threw themself through that window. What we didn't know at the time was the context of the LSD experimentation, right? Mm-hmm.

And so did Robert? Dosed Frank and he freaked out.

As a result of a bad trip.

[00:55:08] Adam Cox: And is that why they perhaps shared a room so he could keep an eye on him?

[00:55:12] Kyle Risi: Who knows

[00:55:12] Adam Cox: It just seems a bit odd. They've got enough money for all these drugs.

They can afford two different rooms. Right. So I'm just wondering if he was there to keep an eye.

[00:55:19] Kyle Risi: I think they were sharing a suite.

[00:55:20] Adam Cox: Ah, okay.

[00:55:21] Kyle Risi: So yeah. With a shared living room.

[00:55:22] Adam Cox: Got you.

[00:55:22] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Now there is an alternative explanation, right?

That may be frank. Knowing that his research was being used to kill people, and knowing the inner workings of MK Ultra, coupled with him wanting to lead the CIA and how unstable his mental health was, did he pose a threat to the project? And so was eliminated because of what he knew.

[00:55:42] Adam Cox: And so what pushed out the window?

[00:55:44] Kyle Risi: Pushed out, thrown out? Was there a fight, an altercation?

Who knows?

[00:55:48] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:55:48] Kyle Risi: Either way. The official ruling was that he committed suicide. And that's the story that Frank's family accepted. And so this is where Frank's death sat for a long time, Adam.

And throughout the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s, all the experiments continued. Remember this was very early on.

Ultimately though Sydney's experiments with LSD honestly proved to be a complete failure, especially as a mind control weapon.

And it's because while it unravelled the mind, especially with prolonged exposure, the drug and the people on the drug, they were just too unpredictable. Not in a way that you can use them in the field.

[00:56:24] Adam Cox: It feels like these people, they've got some long-term effects or some of them do. So how could you comfortably rely on these people to do work for the ccia?

[00:56:32] Kyle Risi: That's exactly it. Because afterwards they were often left with intense paranoia and psychosis as we saw with Frank.

And so eventually, even the CIA had to face that orca truth. After all the money, all the secrecy, literally after all the ruined lives and all the human rights, they overrode under the guise of national security. MK Ultra never ever produce anything that they wanted.

[00:56:58] Adam Cox: So all they did is they spent all that time and money getting people high.

[00:57:02] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:57:03] Adam Cox: That's just,

[00:57:03] Kyle Risi: yeah, to be fair, don't forget, there is also a darker side of things. They were doing these interrogations and they were killing people with chemicals.

[00:57:09] Adam Cox: Yes. Sorry. Yeah. That as well.

[00:57:10] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:57:11] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:11] Kyle Risi: And so Adam, by 1963, the CIA's inspector general reviewed project, MK Ultra, when he literally zoomed out, he was like, what the hell are we even doing?

[00:57:24] Adam Cox: Someone with some common sense.

[00:57:26] Kyle Risi: it had gotten so far outta control at this point.

And so MK Ultra and all of its sub-projects were eventually wound down in 1964.

They restructured the projects under project MK search, which was now way more narrow in scope. more operational in nature and more focused on what actually worked out in the field. Good old traditional interrogation techniques, hopefully without the terminal kind of aspect of it.

Which I doubt.

Meanwhile, all the original MK Ultra files, they were neatly packed up, stored inside the CIA. Largely within the technical services division.

And for years, Adam, that's exactly where they stayed until 1972 when the Watergate scandal started ripping through American politics.

Do you know much about the Watergate scandal?

[00:58:14] Adam Cox: So this is Richard Nixon.

is he at some hotel and then he, someone like secretly records him on a tape

[00:58:23] Kyle Risi: kind of No. No. Okay. There's definitely a hotel involved. we did touch upon this in the Monica Lewinsky episode we did, but basically in the run up to the 1972 presidential election, president Nixon was getting ready to run for a second term.

[00:58:35] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:36] Kyle Risi: Several people were busted breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex. And this is where they installed spying equipment the allegation is to help Nixon's campaign.

[00:58:50] Adam Cox: So there was a secret tape recording. I'm sure there

[00:58:52] Kyle Risi: was No, all that's true. But you were like, did they It was a hotel. Were they recording President Nixon? No, they were recording the Democrats.

[00:58:59] Adam Cox: Oh, okay.

[00:59:00] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So following this, Nixon tries to cover it up and basically this leads to him resigning or else he will face certain impeachment. And so he was like, I don't wanna be impeached, I'm just gonna resign.

[00:59:10] Adam Cox: I feel like he was seventies Trump. Do you think? I feel like that's the last time there was like a Trump-like president.

[00:59:17] Kyle Risi: Oh, okay. I dunno much about Nixon, if I'm honest.

[00:59:20] Adam Cox: I get the sense, or at least the parodies that I've seen since obviously I wasn't around at the time, that the way that they portray him is almost like he's a bit of buffoon, he's a bit gross. He's a bit this and he did piss off a lot of people.

[00:59:32] Kyle Risi: Yeah, I imagine so. I don't know a huge amount about him, but he doesn't look very pleasant to look at.

So following this, Nixon does try to cover all this up and basically like I said, it leads to his resignation. Otherwise he's gonna face certain impeachments.

Now the key men who planned and executed these break-ins were former CIA operatives or assets.

So even though the CIA itself wasn't involved, it does not look good for them '

[00:59:57] Adam Cox: cause there's a load of XCIA people.

[00:59:59] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And so it did not stop the scrutiny towards the agency.

[01:00:03] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:03] Kyle Risi: By this point, Alan Doles was no longer the CIA director.

The new man in charge was a guy called Richard Helms. And he knew that if Congress ever started digging into the CIA's past, triggered by obviously the Watergate scandal, then they were gonna find Adam a lot of legal shit.

[01:00:20] Adam Cox: I see.

[01:00:20] Kyle Risi: And so in 1973, Richard Helms orders the complete destruction of a bunch of CIA project files, including all files related to MK Ultra.

So the natural question is, Adam. If the files were destroyed, how do we even know this was not just some conspiracy theory?

[01:00:40] Adam Cox: I think I know this wasn't it the fact that there was a proportion of those files that weren't destroyed? Now, I dunno if someone had deliberately kept some back or whether someone just forgot about this specific set of files.

[01:00:53] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:53] Adam Cox: That bit. I don't know.

[01:00:54] Kyle Risi: turns out that when the CIA destroyed all the MK Ultra documents in 1973, they completely forgot about the accounting department. Every funding receipts, every cash advance budget, request payment to a university, hospital or federal prison, which routinely sent to a separate archive.

And so when they were destroying the files, they forgot to check the financial archives and so, In total more than 20,000 pages, which included lease agreements for secret apartments under operation, midnight climax receipts for all the bedroom furniture, the alcohol, the two way mirrors, hidden microphones.

also all of George White's expense reports, including payments to sex workers.

[01:01:32] Adam Cox: So that is a record of people, materials and people that were on the books essentially. And so from that, have we pieced together what we think has then happened? Or has someone then come forward and gone? Yeah, there were some sex workers.

[01:01:45] Kyle Risi: Yes. So like they, these are the threads that they start pulling at. They then get testimony, they then start piecing things together. People go, hang on a minute. I was part of that experiment by Dr. Ewing. Cameron.

[01:01:56] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:01:56] Kyle Risi: They come forward they can see the paper trail and how, like why would a random fund called, human anthropology from Asia or whatever, beyond the CIA's books, funding these experiments to these hospitals.

[01:02:09] Adam Cox: I see.

[01:02:10] Kyle Risi: Do you know what I mean?

[01:02:10] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:02:11] Kyle Risi: They also contained funding contracts, like I said, from Dr. Cameron that he routinely had to outline his goals, like psychic driving, ah, and chemical sleep deprivation.

Basically everything to keep justifying why the CIA should continue sending him grant money.

[01:02:27] Adam Cox: See, this is the bit I was trying to get at. How do we know so much context? And it's because of that I was thinking there's not gonna be any reports or whatever.

[01:02:33] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:02:34] Adam Cox: It's that. Yeah. Wow.

[01:02:35] Kyle Risi: They also contain justifications from the technical services staff. This is the CIA explaining what the money was for. So it'd be literal things like substances to promote illogical thinking, knockout pills and materials to produce temporary blindness or physical disablement.

[01:02:53] Adam Cox: I feel like anyone in the finance department they question every expense with like such scrutiny, like, does this make us money? Yeah. What's the RO? Why is it worthwhile? And so there is someone in finance going, yeah, that's fine. I'll sign that off.

[01:03:07] Kyle Risi: Yes. is this also how we found out about Operation Bluebird and artichoke 'cause

Yeah. So there's A whole bunch of things that happen. There's freedom of information requests, acts as well that kind of get enacted after a certain amount of time.

All sorts of people are coming out and testifying to certain things and the pieces are being put together slowly.

But it also outlined the coding system for all 149 sub-projects, it told them basically just how deep this project went.

But also it listed all the fake medical research foundations and private researchers. The money was going to, which is how we know the CIA was using US infrastructure to carry out this bidding.

All of it was there inside these 20,000 forgotten financial records basically.

[01:03:49] Adam Cox: That is crazy. Do you think they've learned from this now?

I, I just mean that was obviously an oversight by someone. And we wouldn't have known about this otherwise. But now do you think they encrypt it in a certain way or they use code words for certain finance logging? I don't know. It just feels like they would never make the same mistake again if they can avoid it.

[01:04:09] Kyle Risi: Honestly, I think it's someone else's problem. By the time these files become declassified, because 70 years, right?

[01:04:17] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:18] Kyle Risi: And so you're probably dead. Do you even care? And so it's the administration of 70 years in the future whose problem that is.

[01:04:24] Adam Cox: Yeah, that's true.

[01:04:25] Kyle Risi: Adam, and this is where these financial records stayed until 1977. And were the files that were basically key to exposing everything.

The expose actually happened completely by chance because following the Watergate scandal on the 22nd of December, 1974, a reporter for the New York Times called Seymour Hirsch, published a story that actually wasn't even about MK Ultra at all.

The article talks about how the CIA had been involved in massive domestic surveillance programmes aimed at anti-war activists and American citizens and that this had been happening for more than 20 years, since the

The article then this a huge range of like illegal activities from break-ins, surveillance, and even wiretapping, basically, this is the thing that Richard Helms was afraid would pull the CIA right back into the Watergate scandal.

And cause Congress to now start, come sniffing around and then discover these files. And that's exactly what happened.

' Cause before the CIA would say those men were just former agents, right? It had nothing to do with us. And technically that was true, but the article made the bigger point. Spying on American civilians was not some shocking line. The CIA would never cross. It was the exact thing the CIA had been doing for years, essentially.

[01:05:39] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:05:40] Kyle Risi: And so because the CIA is directly answerable to the president, the White House cannot ignore the story. They have to be seen to be doing something or else risk congress stepping in. Right.

And So in the 4th of January, 1975, president Gerald Ford creates the Rockefeller Presidential Commission to investigate whether or not the CIA had been carrying out illegal activities inside the United States.

And basically their findings confirmed everything that Seymour Hirsch's article was claiming.

[01:06:08] Adam Cox: Wow.

[01:06:09] Kyle Risi: But also buried in the Rockefeller findings. With some very vague details about how the CIA had been experimenting with drugs on people. This is the first kind of seed that the public are hearing about MK Ultra.

[01:06:23] Adam Cox: What was the fallout? Because this is what, 50, 60 years ago? Are they mad?

[01:06:29] Kyle Risi: They wanna know more because remember, this is a very small paragraph in this report because also in this little section was a two paragraph long passage, small enough for you to easily miss it if you're not paying attention. Those paragraphs talked about how an unnamed army scientist who had been given LSD without his consent in 1953, had later died.

They are talking about Frank Olson.

[01:06:53] Adam Cox: Ah,

[01:06:54] Kyle Risi: now they don't name Frank directly, but it's enough for Frank's family to go. Hang on Is this unnamed scientist. Our father, Frank Olson, the man who the government told us had committed suicide.

And so of course they start demanding more information, which was not what President Ford had even anticipated. It was such a small little passage. He was like, they just overlooked it.

Yeah, yeah. They didn't think it would be this massive thread that people would stop pulling on.

[01:07:19] Adam Cox: Ah.

[01:07:20] Kyle Risi: Like he literally saw the Rockefeller Commission as a way for him to show the world that we are being super transparent and that we can be trusted. But it just opened up an entire Pandora's box.

[01:07:28] Adam Cox: I mean, he was being transparent to a level,

[01:07:30] Kyle Risi: but this two paragraph passage just made everything worse. And so President Ford, along with a CIA guy, William Colby, they both stepped forward. They personally apologised for what has happened to their father and their husband.

And basically they admit that the CIA has given Frank as d against his will and that it had resulted in his suicide.

Eventually, Frank's family then offered a $750,000 settlement, roughly $4 million today in exchange for just dropping their lawsuit. That they were in the process of bringing,

[01:07:59] Adam Cox: I dunno if I would in that instance, yes, that's a lot of money, but I feel like, hang on a minute, that's not justice.

[01:08:06] Kyle Risi: Yeah, it's not, is it? It's really not.

[01:08:07] Adam Cox: Just give us a payoff and then we would go, all right, we're done. Sure. Now someone needs to come to, I dunno, be held account for this.

[01:08:14] Kyle Risi: And so as you can imagine, all of this is happening behind closed doors. The settlement, we don't, it's not public, . We don't know the details of it, but it looks shady.

And so now Congress, they want answers.

On the 27th of January, 1975, the Senate vote 82 to four to create its own investigative body. This becomes known as the church committee chaired by Senator Frank Church from Idaho.

However, they don't just want to investigate the CIA, they want to investigate the entire intelligence community.

This includes the FBI, the NSA, the IRS, all of them.

Because if the CIA were up no good, you can almost guarantee that the others worth to no good too. Right?

[01:08:50] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:08:50] Kyle Risi: And they find the same kind of stuff, not just for the CIA, but across the board. They find evidence of domestic surveillance.

They find evidence of mail opening FBI disruption campaigns, but also Adam assassination plots against foreign leaders. Do you remember when we did the episode on the Summerton Man and how we talked about one of the theories being that he may have been poisoned through his cigarettes?

[01:09:12] Adam Cox: Yes.

[01:09:13] Kyle Risi: This is where we find out about how the CI aises a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro through his cigars.

This all comes out in this investigation.

[01:09:22] Adam Cox: So you've got the CIA doing this, then we're also saying the FBI. Oh, so no good. Yeah. So good. Was that similar sort of drug trials or just other things

[01:09:30] Kyle Risi: that, just other illegal activities?

Yeah.

[01:09:33] Adam Cox: God, that is opening a whole can of worms

[01:09:36] Kyle Risi: Yeah, absolutely.

But of course through this investigation, Congress really want to know more about these LSD tests. Right. That's the most disturbing thing. It was two paragraphs and like, why is it just two paragraphs? We wanna know more details.

[01:09:47] Adam Cox: Yeah. Is there any leftover

[01:09:48] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Yeah. Can we have some?

Congress needs a chill.

And so they request all the files relating to the project only. Of course, for the CIA to say, oh yeah, about that. We would love to provide you with all those files. Genuinely. We really would.

But sadly, they were all destroyed in 1973. LOL sauce.

[01:10:09] Adam Cox: There was this raccoon and, uh,

[01:10:12] Kyle Risi: and the reasons they gave for destroying all these files was to protect non-government researchers. But also to avoid exposing the CIA's network of collaborators, which they say, again, and we'll hear this a lot, pose a national security risk.

[01:10:25] Adam Cox: Hmm, no, just a risk for you lot.

[01:10:27] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It's crazy. They claim that destroying the files also was just part of routine file management. They're like, just, sorry. This is just what we do. This is how we manage these files. Just wild.

[01:10:39] Adam Cox: Is there any repercussions for that?

[01:10:40] Kyle Risi: There should be. Shouldn't there? They should be. They definitely want answers.

[01:10:44] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:44] Kyle Risi: And so by 1975, the world, Adam now knows that something was happening. We just don't know the true extent of what it was or what they were doing.

And so now all Congress could do was just try piece together what went down basically from the ashes of what was left.

But the investigation doesn't stop there because now the House of Representatives wanna do its own investigation, except their investigation takes 'em away from what happened and down the route of who is paying for it. So where's that gonna lead them, madam?

[01:11:14] Adam Cox: Well, those financial records or report, right?

[01:11:16] Kyle Risi: The 20,000 pages? Yes. Mm.

And so in July, 1975, they formally launched their own investigation called the Pike Committee, headed by some guy called Pike.

[01:11:26] Adam Cox: Yeah. Who's naming these committees after themselves?

[01:11:28] Kyle Risi: It's normally the person who's chairing the committee. So like the first one was Frank Church Uhhuh. And that's called the, just the church committee, the Rockefeller Commission with the president. That was by the Vice President Rockefeller. So it's called just after who's ever chairing it.

Yeah, so 9 75, they launched their own investigation. Sydney Gottlieb is pulled into a hearing I think they pull him outta retirement, and I think at some point they even give him immunity. I'm not sure if it's at this point or if it's at the second hearing, but he gets immunity at some point.

But he does admit to some parts of MK Ultra, including the drug tests, but that's as deep as it goes, Adam, because largely he's very evasive about the details, just saying things like he can barely remember what the projects entailed and things like that.

And so he leaves that hearing, basically sitting pretty because he's under the belief that all these files have been destroyed.

[01:12:14] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:15] Kyle Risi: However, it's following this, that an archivist stumble across the 20,000 pages of the surviving MK Ultra financial records just sitting in the budgets and fiscal records.

The files that I remember Sydney said were all destroyed.

And as we said earlier, they revealed the fuller inner workings of MK Ultra and how it was structured, who was paying for it and what they were paying for.

But of course, they didn't detail the actual project details of what happened. And so the government, now they want answers.

New hearings are initiated for August that year. And now Sydney has to come back and explain why he claimed that he had no memory of any of these files and to use these financial records to re jog the motherfucker's memory.

[01:12:55] Adam Cox: Yeah, I may have done that. Yeah. Yeah. I may have hired a few prostitutes.

[01:12:59] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So I think at definite this point, he's given immunity from any repercussions, and so he starts talking a lot more.

And this is where we find out, it was an umbrella project made up of 149 projects involving 80 institutions, 44 universities and college, dozens of hospitals, federal prisons, military basis, pharmaceutical companies, and at least 185 private researchers in the United States involving US citizens.

It was wild.

And that all of this was a CIA machine conducting strange experiments on American citizens. Just wild.

[01:13:31] Adam Cox: And for like over a decade, right?

[01:13:33] Kyle Risi: 20 years.

[01:13:33] Adam Cox: 20 years,

[01:13:34] Kyle Risi: yeah. More than 20 years.

[01:13:35] Adam Cox: Just think and this is only what we know,

[01:13:38] Kyle Risi: and so Adam, at this point, following Sidney's kind of testimony a bunch of people start coming forward to say, yeah, I was part of this experiments, or Yeah, this happened to me given their testimonies.

And so following this, a whole tonne of lawsuits are starting to be filed from people who claim that they were tested on, including Velma and eight other victims of Donald U and Cameron.

[01:14:00] Adam Cox: And so they didn't know at the time necessarily how big this was.

[01:14:04] Kyle Risi: Yeah. They didn't know. They thought that Dr. Cameron was trying to help them.

[01:14:07] Adam Cox: Trying to help. Yeah.

[01:14:08] Kyle Risi: But either way it starts to look very bad for the CIA, right. With all these lawsuits coming at them.

And so in response to this, Adam, the CIA, they go to the Supreme Court and they request that all MK Ultra files remain classified and immune to any future freedom of information requests. Because when combined, they could reveal intelligence sources, which again may risk national security.

[01:14:30] Adam Cox: And does that go through

[01:14:31] Kyle Risi: Adam? It is so wild because the Supreme Court agrees completely. Yeah.

[01:14:35] Adam Cox: Really?

[01:14:35] Kyle Risi: And so this means that the files can never be released.

[01:14:38] Adam Cox: Oh, so we only know based on what happened or the investigation at the time. So there could be stuff that was in those files that weren't really, like if we dug into them now, we'd find new information.

[01:14:47] Kyle Risi: Possibly. Again, they're all financials and so they're like just a piece of the puzzle. Mm-hmm. Again, so we can never really know what the projects entailed or how dark they went. Yeah. We know it happened. We just dunno how dark they went.

And Adam. That's how things ended until 1994, because this is also the year that Frank Olson's son Eric petitioned to have his father's body exhumed. He basically wanted another autopsy When the pathologist Adam reviews Frank's remains, he finds two things.

First, the original CIA report claimed that Frank Olson blindly crashed through the glass window. However, the forensic team found no cuts or glass lacerations on Frank's body

[01:15:23] Adam Cox: Interesting.

[01:15:24] Kyle Risi: Secondly, they also discover a large hematoma above Frank's left eye, which was consistent with a blow to the head, a significant amount of time before he would've fallen from that window.

And so Frank's family become convinced that because of the CIA's repeated lies and attempts to cover up what was in the MK Ultra files, the father may have been killed because of what he knew.

[01:15:49] Adam Cox: It sounds about right.

[01:15:51] Kyle Risi: Isn't that crazy?

[01:15:51] Adam Cox: And what So they hit him over the head. That's what potentially killed him, and then they pushed him out.

[01:15:57] Kyle Risi: I think what could have happened was they killed him. They opened up the window, threw him out, and then to make it look like he had thrown himself out the window, they just smashed the window.

[01:16:06] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:16:07] Kyle Risi: Because remember he had no last celebrations on him. Right?

[01:16:09] Adam Cox: Yeah. That's odd. But you'd have thought that there would've come up at the time, like there's no like small cuts or anything.

[01:16:15] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

I guess falling 10 stories maybe fucks you up quite a lot.

[01:16:18] Adam Cox: Mm, yeah.

[01:16:19] Kyle Risi: Here's the thing, Adam, the pathologist findings are so persuasive that two years later in 1996, the Manhattan district's attorney's office officially reclassify Frank's death from suicide to homicide.

[01:16:32] Adam Cox: Really?

[01:16:32] Kyle Risi: That's how convincing it is. Get this to this day though, not a single person's ever been charged with his murder.

[01:16:38] Adam Cox: Well, surely it's that Robert Guy

[01:16:40] Kyle Risi: who knows. Does he have a team with him? Did he go to the psychiatric kind of assessment? They realise actually he's a little bit messed up. He does pose a threat to us. Exterminate him.

[01:16:51] Adam Cox: Yeah, but this is all they're doing. If he didn't get him high or whatever,

[01:16:55] Kyle Risi: yeah.

[01:16:55] Adam Cox: He could have left and he probably would've, kept his mouth shut.

[01:16:58] Kyle Risi: Sure. Now, of course, the details of what actually went down with Frank is conspiracy. We do know that obviously his death was rule of suicide.

What really happened is up for debate, it could be a bunch of things. He got high, he got dosed again, and he did throw himself out the window. Or maybe he did get high, threw himself out the window, and then they wanted to make it look like a suicide to cover up the fact that it was LSD and so they broke the window to say, Hey, he committed suicide, or he was killed For what he knew.

[01:17:22] Adam Cox: Yeah. Well that, that injury to his head mm-hmm. That suggests true. Something went down's true.

[01:17:27] Kyle Risi: Anyway, Adam. From here, the story doesn't really go away because there are still so many questions.

We know what came out through the investigations, the lawsuits, the hearings and the declassified documents that were declassified before they were then sealed again.

But we do not know everything that was destroyed. What was in those files that the CIA felt that they needed to destroy.

Right. And this is the exact thing that helped fling MK Ultra back into the mainstream again after 20 years. When someone posted a declassified CIA document going all the way back to the 1950s, the document was connected to projects artichoke. Do you remember that?

[01:18:01] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:02] Kyle Risi: As we know, it's the precursor to MK Ultra and it discussed different ways that researchers could conceal behaviour altering substances in ordinary delivery systems On mass.

We are talking through food, water supplies, but also consumer products like Coca-Cola beer and even cigarettes.

But also standard medical treatments including vaccinations and shots.

Now to be very clear, there is zero evidence that the CIA actually carried out any of these specific things, albeit we'll never know because all these files were destroyed.

But also I think that if they did, it would be very difficult to conceal the fact that all of a sudden all of Los Angeles is just like freaking out and high and being psychotic.

[01:18:44] Adam Cox: You would think so, unless it was a very I don't know, controlled area where they did it or more rural maybe. Yeah. But then even then, I dunno, would it have made the news that much?

So I think it'd be very hard to prove.

[01:18:56] Kyle Risi: I honestly don't think that they did it. There's no evidence that they ever did. But Adam, it does show you the kind of things that they're willing to sit around and debate very seriously. In some ways, that is almost worse because it reveals the mindset and how far they were willing to go if someone gave them the all clear.

[01:19:11] Adam Cox: Yeah, I do get that. But I also think there is like a hypothetical thing where you do have to think about this scenario in case an enemy was to do this. If we were to do it, how would we do it? So I do feel like there's a theory where you do need to think about these things.

[01:19:25] Kyle Risi: Possibly. And that could be legitimate, right? But the point is that this document that does the rounds actually feeds a wider demand for declassification of projects like this.

And that demand actually starts to become politically useful when Trump returns back to office. And one of the first things he does is sign an executive order calling for the declassification of records linked to the assassination of J-F-K-R-F-K, Martin Luther King. Now these are assassination kind of cases, MK Ultra is not really named under this order.

A, because they weren't related to assassinations and B, there are no files. But what the order does do is help create a broader transparency push inside the intelligence community.

And in April, 2025, a woman called Tulsi Gabbard, she's the Director of National Intelligence, she set up a task force called the Director's Initiative Group, or dig, for example, which I think is Aply named. 'cause they're gonna be digging For files.

[01:20:23] Adam Cox: Yeah. And she didn't name it after herself.

[01:20:25] Kyle Risi: Yeah, she didn't.

Its job is to basically review sensitive intelligence materials, work out what can be declassified, and prepare those files for release.

Now, according to a later whistleblower's testimony, this year, tulsi GA's team didn't just receive files on the assassinations. They'd also received a bunch of files on a previously known project called MK Ultra. So these are

[01:20:47] Adam Cox: new files, these aren't the finance records?

[01:20:49] Kyle Risi: Nope. These are new files? They were mistakenly sent to her office for possible declassification.

Ah, do you wanna know what happened?

[01:20:58] Adam Cox: Yes.

[01:20:59] Kyle Risi: So either way, t's team, they're processing all these files. Right? Indiscriminate Simply when they're done, they set the files that are fit for release aside and they send back all the remaining files.

Her job is basically done. And now the task force, winds down. All that is left to do is wait for someone, maybe the president to say, release the files.

Now here's where he gets nets, because this year on the 13th of May, 2026, a former CIA operative named James Mond ii, what a name he testifies at a hearing saying that the second that Tulsi Gabbs office finished processing those files and started winding down operations, the CIA marched straight back into her offices and took back 40 boxes of documents that had been processed for declassification.

Some of those files were JFK assassination files. But also files relating to MK Ultra?

[01:21:51] Adam Cox: So what we're saying then is there was gonna be potentially additional information, whether it had been new information we wouldn't know. Maybe it would've retreaded stuff we already knew.

Mm-hmm.

[01:21:59] Kyle Risi: But

[01:21:59] Adam Cox: that's been taken back from the CIA so we'll never know now.

[01:22:03] Kyle Risi: We'll never know.

And so Adam, the question becomes a where did these additional files come from in the first place they were supposed to have been destroyed and B, what is a CIA hiding if they defied an executive order and took back all those files.

And so all of this happened just on the 13th of May, 2026. In response to this Congress gave the CIAA 24 hour ultimatum to return those documents or they would face subpoena.

They never return those files.

Citing that James Erdman II's testimony was basically a lie. So it was his word against theirs.

And this is where we are right now in terms of MK Ultra and uncovering the truth.

[01:22:42] Adam Cox: Ah, so there could have been more.

[01:22:44] Kyle Risi: But it's so frustrating that the CIA are doing all of this manoeuvring clearly to hide something. And I have a feeling it's very bad, Adam, because people do suggest that what's in those files potentially points to not what happened in MK Ultra, but what came after MK Ultra.

One that might still be very relevant today and would pose a serious risk to national security if it came out.

And honestly, that's not too difficult for me to believe.

Especially when you look at his history. Remember MK Ultra didn't just come outta nowhere. It started as Project Bluebird. It evolved into project arts choke and then later evolved into MK search.

Even though these projects were different, they all share the same objective, right?

So it is not unreasonable to think all of this just evolved into something different again. And the CIA wants to keep whatever that is a complete secret.

In today's modern world. What could that look like?

[01:23:37] Adam Cox: Social media.

I think there's a strong argument. 'cause isn't there a case that a lot of these social media companies that are aligning themselves with sort of government Trump, things like that. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say actually there's something here.

Which fair enough, if they want to keep that information to themselves, that could be good in that, because we don't want, I don't know, China, Russia, whoever they consider their enemy getting hold of this information.

But equally, could they be using it to manipulate voting or whatever it is? Violence. Yeah.

[01:24:07] Kyle Risi: And we've seen examples of all of these things, right?

[01:24:09] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:24:09] Kyle Risi: And so, yes, you're right. a lot of people think it's an Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok algorithm.

So not those platforms themselves. And these things are very effective in shaping what people see, feel, and believe.

These things are driving forces in influencing people. One of the most influential algorithms on the planet right now, which a lot of these social media sites have followed in their footsteps of is TikTok.

Sure. It's used to sell and make money right now. But it can also be used to influence people's views and beliefs.

The USA 100% believe this to be true, because it was only in January, 2026 that the USA pushed for the US division of TikTok to be sold to a US company, right?

Mm-hmm. Lawmakers and intelligence officers have warned that if their platform stays under Chinese ownership, Beijing could potentially use this algorithm to shape American public opinion. If we go back, remember to the Cold War mindset, it makes real dark sense, right?

Remember, the USA believed that the North Koreans had cracked brainwashing.

The USA's response wasn't, we have to stop this. It was, we have to get there first. And so years later, after the US realised that LSD is not the way to control populations on Mass, did it lead us to the algorithm and social media?

[01:25:25] Adam Cox: Yeah, I can definitely believe that. We're a generation that are more lonely. We're attached to our devices, more isolated in our way of thinking.

So I think that's way of breaking down people Yeah. And kind of causing these arguments or more of a divide. And equally, isn't it the case that China doesn't have Instagram or they block certain us apps and products for exactly the same reason?

[01:25:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah, sure.

And remember when we did the Julia Charles episode as well, America, we're trying to disseminate propaganda, across Europe with setting up things like art galleries all over showing like American artworks and stuff.

Mm-hmm. To kind of show the American ideals.

That's a form of propaganda and shaping minds and things like that. It was all part of the Cold War effort. I completely believe that this would be it. And is this the thing that America's trying to cover up as , a, a follow on from MK Ultra

I was listening to the news the other day and they were saying that the amount of time that people use their phones now for unproductive stuff, like they're just doom scrolling. Some people are saying five hours a day, that's a lot of time for behaviour changing and belief changing things to kind of syphon itself into your brain. Right.

[01:26:31] Adam Cox: So I'm gonna ask you a question now.

[01:26:32] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

[01:26:33] Adam Cox: How many hours do you spend doom screening a

[01:26:35] Kyle Risi: day? I'm doing the podcast most of the time. I'm doing finances. I'm doing research. So

[01:26:39] Adam Cox: you're doing finances?

[01:26:41] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:26:41] Adam Cox: Well, finances,

[01:26:42] Kyle Risi: um, MK Ultra finances. And so it's a perfect system, right? Where it can be used to shape what people think, how they feel, distract attention away from certain issues, right? Mm-hmm.

Possibly even breed fear, insecurity at an even loyalty, because you can start targeting people based on demographics, right? Who is a Trump supporter? Let's make sure that they never leave us right? Who is a Democrat supporter? Let's make sure like they're, they can rise up with us against. The Republicans, for example, do. Do you understand what I mean?

[01:27:09] Adam Cox: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:27:10] Kyle Risi: And so the question is, is this is what the CIA are trying to protect. Is this, what the entire history from Bluebird to MK search has led to MK Ultra 2.0, the algorithm.

And so obviously, Adam, this is just speculation. But I honestly don't think that the ultimate dream of controlling and influencing people in America ever went away for the Americans just because the trial with LSD and and other experiments failed. I don't think it dissolved the ultimate objective. Americans still have enemies all over the world, and if anything, we are at a point in history where America's control on the global stage does look a little bit shaky right now.

Do you know what I mean?

[01:27:45] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:27:45] Kyle Risi: So there's no doubt in my mind that the CIA would still be looking for that silver bullet, but maybe now they found it and maybe it's an algorithm in all of our pockets on whichever app you prefer to use.

But just cause they have likely moved on from experimenting on people. I don't think that means we should ever give up on demanding transparency on what MK Ultra involved or how deep it went.

[01:28:07] Adam Cox: Yeah. I agree. Clearly the government or CIA or whoever, and it's not probably just America, it's the uk It's other places in Europe are probably doing similar things. I would've think to a level,

and whether it's the algorithm as part of this next iteration of MK Ultra as this coverup, I still think that's true. Whether that's this mind control,

[01:28:26] Kyle Risi: yeah.

[01:28:26] Adam Cox: There's definitely manipulation there. And like you said, with that TikTok in the us, clearly that's something there that they're trying to do to either protect or at least influence citizens

[01:28:35] Kyle Risi: And I don't think America should get a whole pass for what they did with MK Ultra, because even though it didn't get what they wanted from it, there are still strong evidence to suggest that countless of people were left, broken families were ruined, victims were lied to, and frankly, human rights were violated.

And it seems to have all been done with impunity under this banner of national security.

But in my opinion, Adam, national security should never trump human rights ever. And if you have to violate human rights for the sake of national security, the national security is not operating in the interest of its own people.

[01:29:08] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:29:08] Kyle Risi: Instead, it tells us that the US government in this case, thinks that national security is more about global dominance and protecting its own people.

[01:29:17] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:29:18] Kyle Risi: It's so sickening.

And Adam, that is the unfinished story of Project MK Ultra.

[01:29:23] Adam Cox: Wow.

[01:29:24] Kyle Risi: Did you know the story to that extent?

[01:29:26] Adam Cox: I knew about the coverup and the limited amount of files. I knew about the LSD and I knew the experiments, but I didn't know the individual stories of some of the people that we cover today.

[01:29:35] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:29:35] Adam Cox: And equally the extent and lies and how we came about really, yeah, it doesn't feel real. We talk about it, but it still feels a bit like sci-fi.

[01:29:44] Kyle Risi: I had never heard of this story before. This is brand new to me.

[01:29:48] Adam Cox: Really?

[01:29:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I'd heard the term MK Ultra. I just didn't know what it meant. I honestly thought it was, had something to do with a ship.

[01:29:57] Adam Cox: This could have been a very different podcast.

[01:29:59] Kyle Risi: I don't know. But yeah, what a wild story. And to think that it very likely has progressed into a social media algorithm where America is probably way more effective with controlling populations than they've ever been, is a real scary sombre thought.

And here we are spending five hours on our phones scrolling through TikTok and Instagram.

It's scary.

[01:30:21] Adam Cox: I've removed Instagram. I'm barely on TikTok.

[01:30:24] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:30:24] Adam Cox: And I've just got a foot in Facebook, so I'm almost out of this.

[01:30:27] Kyle Risi: Yeah, I'm trying to get out of Facebook

[01:30:30] Adam Cox: We'll always communicate with our group page, the compendium. Oh, that's, that doesn't change. But I think my personal page, yeah, I've taken a step back from that.

[01:30:38] Kyle Risi: How do you, uh, manipulate and control me?

[01:30:40] Adam Cox: I just ask you to cook dinner when you usually do it.

[01:30:43] Kyle Risi: So you think you've got your interrogation tactics or properly? Sadly. Just guilt trip. Yeah. Guilt trip. Adam,

[01:30:49] Adam Cox: I won't eat.

[01:30:51] Kyle Risi: Like Kyle, I want to talk to you. Um, I don't think you feed me enough anyway. Do you fancy, uh, running the outro this week?

[01:30:58] Adam Cox: Let's do it.

[01:30:59] Kyle Risi: And so that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did.

[01:31:07] Adam Cox: And if today's episode has sparked your curiosity, then please do us a favour and follow us on your favourite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people discover the show

[01:31:18] Kyle Risi: right dedicated freaks out there please don't forget, the next week's episode is waiting for you on our Patreon, and as always, it is completely free to access.

[01:31:26] Adam Cox: And if you want even more, then you can join our certified Freaks Tier to unlock the entire archive, you get to delve into some exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next.

[01:31:36] Kyle Risi: We drop new episodes every Tuesday and until then, remember Adam, when a government hides behind national security, it's worth asking who security it actually means,

[01:31:46] Adam Cox: not mine.

[01:31:47] Kyle Risi: See you next time.

[01:31:48] Adam Cox: See you.