Sidney Gottlieb Part 1: MK Ultra and the CIA's Search for Mind Control

Who was Sidney Gottlieb, and how did the CIA's MKUltra program attempt to use LSD and psychological warfare to create mind control during the Cold War?

In Part One of this epic two-part episode, James is joined by Jayne Friend to explore the origins of MKUltra through the remarkable life of it's chief, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who became America's leading architect of mind control research. From Operation Paperclip and Nazi biological warfare research to Cold War fears of communist brainwashing during the Korean War, this episode examines why the CIA believed controlling human consciousness was essential to national security. The discussion traces Gottlieb's journey from gifted scientist and nature lover to LSD evangelical, laying the foundations for one of the CIA's most controversial and disturbing secret project.s

What's covered in this episode

• Sidney Gottlieb's early life, including his upbringing in a Jewish immigrant family, his education at Caltech, and how his club foot shaped his early experiences.
• How Camp Detrick became the centre of America's biological and psychological warfare research during the early Cold War.
• The ethical legacy of Operation Paperclip and how former Nazi scientists, including Kurt Blome, were recruited by the United States.
• How the biological weapons experiments of Japan's Unit 731 influenced CIA programs after 1945.
• Why the Korean War and reports of American prisoners embracing communism convinced the CIA that Soviet brainwashing had become a genuine national security threat.
• The creation of Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke under Allen Dulles and Sidney Gottlieb and the search for truth serums, mind control and behavioural manipulation.
• Albert Hofmann's discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and why Sidney Gottlieb believed LSD offered the key to controlling human consciousness.
• The history of ergotism, its neurological effects, and why contaminated rye has even been linked to theories surrounding the Salem Witch Trials.
• How CIA black sites, covert experiments and unethical human testing expanded from prisoners and psychiatric patients to unsuspecting civilians and CIA employees.
• The hidden role Sidney Gottlieb played in spreading LSD through American universities, artists, writers and the emerging counterculture of the 1960s.
• The shocking case of the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, who became a test subject of MK-ULTRA. 
• How Gottlieb's research expanded despite repeated failures, culminating in the creation of MK-Ultra in August 1953.

Mentioned in this episode

Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra, Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, Allen Dulles, Ira Baldwin, Camp Detrick, Operation Paperclip, Unit 731, Kurt Blome, Joseph Mengele, Auschwitz, Werner von Braun, Shirō Ishii, Korean War, Cold War, Fidel Castro, Soviet Union, communism, brainwashing, mind control, psychological warfare, biological warfare, chemical warfare, truth serum, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, Albert Hofmann, ergotism, mescaline, peyote, sodium pentothal, heroin, Whitey Bulger, Frank Olson, Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Salem Witch Trials, propaganda, CIA black sites, patriotism, ethics in scientific research, psychiatric experimentation, memory erasure, Manchurian Candidate, counterculture, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Robert Hunter, Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Cary Grant, Esther Williams, Harold Abramson, Tokyo Harbour, Munich, California Institute of Technology, FDA, Second World War, North Korea, Soviet spies.

Chapters

00:00 – Who Was Sidney Gottlieb? The CIA's Master of Mind Control
01:10 – Sidney Gottlieb's Early Life and Scientific Career
08:17 – Camp Detrick, Nazi Science and Operation Paperclip
13:35 – Unit 731 and the Cold War Weapons Race
18:38 – The Korean War and the Fear of Communist Brainwashing
22:16 – Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke Begin
25:24 – LSD, Truth Serums and the Search for Mind Control
26:46 – Ergotism, Hallucinations and the Origins of LSD
32:32 – Can LSD Really Control Human Consciousness?
37:28 – CIA Black Sites and Secret Human Experiments
44:13 – How the CIA Helped Fuel the 1960s LSD Counterculture
51:35 – The Birth of MKUltra and Sidney Gottlieb's Expanding Empire

Thanks to SOULFULJAMTRACKS for their tune "Dark Halloween"

Follow HISTORY's DEVILS 

On Instagram @historysdevils

https://www.instagram.com/historysdevils/

On Substack

https://jamescrossland.substack.com/

Follow JAMES CROSSLAND

On Bluesky @jamescrossland.bsky.social

https://bsky.app/profile/jamescrossland.bsky.social

Tag HISTORY's DEVILS

@historysdevils

#HistorysDevils #JamesCrossland #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #History #DarkHistory #HistoricalBiography #TrueHistory #HistoryDocumentary #Deepdive #Storytelling 

History's Devils is a history podcast exploring the lives of murderers, charlatans, psychopaths, dictators, war criminals, tyrants, demagogues, revolutionaries, cult leaders, conquerors, fraudsters, and other controversial figures.

History's Devils is hosted by James Crossland, professor of international history and author of:

Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, the Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart

The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism...

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The ability to manipulate minds, to implant suggestions, to brainwash people, and to control their free will. These were the goals of MKUltra, one of the CIA's most bizarre and controversial top secret projects. This week, we're looking at the poisoner, LSD enthusiast, and would-be assassin of Fidel Castro, who ran MKUltra, Sidney Godley. A man who, despite ruining countless lives, torturing people, and killing co-workers, is mostly forgotten today. A curious relic of the Cold War's madness. That all changes on this week's episode of History's Devil. Hello folks. It's History's Devils. It's a podcast journey through the lives of murderers, charlatans, psychopaths, and shit heels. My name is James Crosson. And I am not comfortable with having my mind controlled. Nor, I suspect, is my co-host who typically joins me to discuss fascists. But today, that is your rep. That is your rep.

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Yeah, that is that is now my reputation. Thank you for that.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

You must own it. But today, Dr. Jane Friend is leaping into CIA psychological warfare efforts instead. Jane, how do you feel about having your mind controlled?

SPEAKER_03 1:46

I'm not very comfortable with it, if if I'm honest. I hope it's never happened and never will happen.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Well, you wouldn't know, would you? And that's kind of that's the trigger the thing. That's the trick of the thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:57

That is the bad bit about this.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Best not to think about it. Um we we the bottom line is we both value our free will and would rather not have our minds control, particularly if it was by our subject today, one Sidney Gottlieb. A man who, despite giving the outward appearance of a sort of kindly, you know, goat-feeding hippie, was described in one obituary as everything you have dreamed of in a mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA, except he was real, which I think perfectly sums up this man. I'm guessing a number of people listening have not heard of this guy. He's kind of he's so innocuous and yet so bad.

SPEAKER_03 2:43

He is, and and what I find fascinating is um he's sort of largely responsible for this, the the the whole mythology and and reality surrounding truth serums, right? And that's part of it's such a part of popular culture. Think about the movie, but the amount of movies where people are given a truth serum.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

It's the essential part of any spy film.

SPEAKER_03 3:04

Exactly. And and even when you proposed talking about this topic, I said, oh my god, the bet in true lies, there's a truth serum, right? And and it and and and everyone will have seen a scene in a movie or something like that where this is included. Um, and yet no one seems to know who Sidney Gottlieb is.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

No, no, but he is he is truth serum guy, he is poisoner guy, he has, as we'll get to, let's kill Fidel Castro guy, he is control minds guy, and he is drug guy. This guy loved drugs. Um, he's a fascinating individual who who's, as we'll get into, very much a product of a of a really crazy time in the early Cold War. But before we get to that, let's let's talk about where this fella comes from. Sidney Gottlieb was born on the 3rd of August 1918 in New York. His parents, Fanny and Louis Gottlieb, were Hungarian Jews who fled to America to escape persecution. So we're talking working class immigrant family. His father owned and operated a cheap clothing manufacturer in the Bronx. Much of the money he earned was used to pay for his young son Sidney's medical bills because he was born with a clubbed foot. Couldn't walk properly until he was a teenager. Even then, he had an unusual gait even into later life. Also had a stutter. So just piling it on this poor kid. We're in the 1920s, Sidney's got physical and verbal disabilities. He's Jewish as well at a time when you know anti-Semitism is rampant. He's probably getting teased a lot as a child. That's a general conclusion I think we can draw. But it wasn't all bad because whilst his body could have used some work, his brain was in very good shape. Young Sidney was an excellent student, and in 1936 he was enrolled in New York City College, studying chemistry, physics, and other stuff that involves wearing lab coats. From there, he pursued further degrees at Arkansas Tech, uh, University of Wisconsin. He really wanted to get into agricultural science. This guy just loved the idea of like making farms run more efficiently, growing cereals, tending to goats and livestock. This is all this is all good stuff. This is all, you know, productive.

SPEAKER_03 5:21

It's wholesome as well. It's surprising. Very wholesome.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

It's wholesome. He's a big nature lover, loves his nature, loves to touch grass, as the kids would say. And in pursuance of this, he commences a PhD at California Institute of Technology, none too shabby, from which he graduated as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb in 1943. During his PhD, Sidney fell in love with and soon got married to a lady named Margaret Moore, with whom he would spend the rest of his life happy with. So there's nothing awful here. We have this inspiring story. You know, son of immigrant parents raises himself up from physical disabilities, gets a PhD, gets the girl, loves nature, loves animals.

SPEAKER_03 6:03

It's very surprising, isn't it? We are we are looking for those skeletons in the closet. And well, like the only thing I can think there is that, you know, he he he has this adversity, this physical uh disability. Does that have an influence? I don't know. That's a question to think about.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

Could do. Uh as as we'll see, that there's perhaps a theory to be to be posited that this guy, uh, depending on how much abuse he got, how much teasing he got, he might have held on to that a little bit and may have wanted to vent some of that later in life. But I don't know. It's the the point is there's there's not a lot that's bad here. In fact, this is this is like a Tom Hanks film at this point. This is this is going really well, and there's there's soaring music, and everyone's happy. He's also, we'll add this to it, he's also a lover of his country, you know, deeply patriotic after getting his PhD. We're in the middle of the Second World War. Gottlieb volunteers for the army, wants to take it to the Japanese, but on account of his foot, he was rejected from service. So he's he's not gonna be a soldier, but he is credentialed all to hell academically. So he gets a job at the FDA, Food and Drug Administration. This would have been a steady, good job that he could have done for the rest of his life, except he got bored. Because he's a smart guy, he's an ambitious guy, he wants to, he's he seems to be one of these people who's very curious about life, the universe, and everything. You know, he's always reading about even at a young age, he's reading about like Eastern religions and and things like that. He's reading about alternative science and he's reading about real science as well. He doesn't just want to sit in a lab testing the quality of corn harvests. You know, that's not that's not gonna be a happy life for him. Luckily, Gottlieb had a contact who understood both his restlessness and his potential. And that was a man named Ira Baldwin, who had been one of his professors at the University of Wisconsin, who had since gone on to run a top secret US Army facility called Camp Dietrich in Maryland. So Camp Dietrich is one of a number of US Army laboratories where experiments in biological and or psychological warfare were carried out in earnest in the early 1950s as part of the Cold War. There are a number of these bases that were basically, I think it was an old uh fort or an airstrip or something. It was basically seized by the army and they said, right, we're gonna put all the eggheads here and they're gonna, they're gonna work on stuff we've discovered during the Second World War that can help us in this emerging conflict with the Soviets. Here's the moral conundrum, right? A lot of the research that's happening at Camp Dietrich, it's Nazi research. It comes from the Nazis. So the question is, how how do we get here? How have we how have we got experiments that started in in death camps being done in rural Maryland?

SPEAKER_03 9:07

That's that's a very big question. So um I I think I think it's it's fair to say it's widely known that the Nazis conducted some absolutely horrific experiments on human beings. Um this was especially apparent, of course, um when the camps were liberated, when the allies go in and liberate the camps and sort of see the aftermath of some of this. And I think one of the main villains of of the piece is um Joseph Mengele, um, who is a Nazi doctor. He uh experimented on people at Auschwitz. And this included things like the deliberate infection of um prisoners um with absolutely terrible things like TB and cholera. Um I think there were some experiments with the plague as well, which is just terrifying to think of.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

As if we don't know what that does.

SPEAKER_03 10:01

Yeah, read a book, read a history book. Well, it's true. So we we we know the effects of these terrible diseases, right? But they wanted to test an experiment with um the different delivery methods. So this is can we um for want of a word deploy these with aerosols? Um, you know, and and and and already with the experimentation with with different gases that had had occurred. And um, so it's really that delivery method, and also how can we vary the results through through dosing and you know, what's the effect on different demographics and different ages of people? So it's really about that sort of gathering, gathering data. Um and and some of these individuals that are doing this terrible work, they come to be working with the US government. And this brings us to something called operation, paperclip. Now, this was a US program. This officially began in 1946. So um the design of this is to recruit prominent German scientists, basically, after the end of the Second World War. Even, even I should say, even if they have been a large part of the Nazi regime and doing some terrible things.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

These are people who who, if not for their credentials and their experience and the research, would have been up uh in the in the trials at the end of the war.

SPEAKER_03 11:28

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. And I think all in all, it was it was hundreds of of scientists um and engineers because it wasn't just things like biological weapons, it was it was part of sort of aviation and well the the the most famous recruit would be Werner von Braun, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

And and his rockets, which you know end up taking taking man to the moon. Um or did he?

SPEAKER_00 11:52

Did that happen?

SPEAKER_03 11:54

Oh, don't don't get us started.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

No, no, no, we're not we're not gonna do it, we're not gonna do moon moon landing conspiracy theories. No, not this stuff is bad enough.

SPEAKER_03 12:02

Yeah. Um, so so essentially you've you've got these really high-profile Nazis that have done terrible things, they are being captured, they are being taken to various places, they're being interrogated and basically mined for their knowledge. Um so anyone who was involved in weapons-related research, when it was decided actually the knowledge that they possess and their skills could be valuable to the US government, their records are altered. So whilst they're being interrogated and questioned and everything, this is by no means a trial. This is not to say, well, we want you to admit your guilt. Um, this is to say we want to find out what you know. And then depending on the value of what you know, we are going to give you a gig. Yeah, we're gonna give you a gig, we're gonna recruit you, we are going to slightly alter your record. So if you are uh especially an ardent Nazi, maybe we're gonna change that and make you sound a little bit better.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Just just a little fashy.

SPEAKER_03 12:56

Just a little fashion. Just fashy. Yeah. Just I I like that. Um, and I and I think it it's it's it's worth the mention that uh a prominent figure in in this whole thing is Kurt Blohm. So he's um a Nazi scientist, he's a doctor, and I think he he spends uh a spell as the um the Reich health leader or the deputy. Um so he's he's been experimenting with various different types of chemical warfare. And and one of his things was experimenting with chemical agents, seeing how um they eventually killed their host, if you know, and implanting diseases and things like nerve agents, like all the really bad stuff. Um, so that's so he's gone through this process and he's been um he's been detained by US counterintelligence, and he's he was a first priority, it should be said.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

Because he had fingers in so many pies, like he knew so many of the different projects that were going on. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

Yeah, yeah. So it's a big win. Absolutely, absolutely. And and and also these these guys that captured these Nazis that are now being detained and questioned, they realize actually, either I go to trial and I I I am executed, um, or I take this gig, keep keep basically doing the work I've been doing for for several years, and uh this is a a good good prospect. And and I suppose also at this time you've you you've got I think I think the Soviets were doing a similar thing.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Um I forgot the name of the project now, the Soviet project. It did have its own name. But yeah, yeah, yeah. They had their own thing going on. Also, uh can't talk about paperclip and related projects without talking about the um acquisition of Japanese scientists.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

The notorious Unit 731 run by a man named uh Dr. Shirai Ishi, who who I think he brought like human tissue samples or something. Like he brought he brought like evidence of the the research here conducted about the effects of things like plague, uh blister agents, uh, anthrax, stuff like that, yeah. And and it's and its effect on on the human body. He brought that over. Uh, and that all ends up at Camp Dietrich, along with a lot of this other stuff. And and it's the it's the really whacked out stuff that ends up at Dietrich, and and it's worth just to contextualize this a little bit. This is you you mentioned before that this is anything to do with weapons research, and that is casting a very broad net because we're not talking, you know, things that you pull the trigger, they go bang, and and shells you fire, they explode. You know, warfare is is conceived of on multiple levels at this time, through owing to developments from the first right through the second world war, psychological warfare, bacterial warfare, chemical warfare, and anything that falls under this category, and now nuclear warfare even is has been invented. So you've got you've you've got the conception of warfare itself is very fluid at this time, which means that anyone who kind of knows anything about anything could be of value. If if if the thing they know could be weaponized, if you can dream it can be weaponized, then these people are worth are worth hauling in.

SPEAKER_03 16:10

Yeah, and yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Over a very short time, once we get to the end of the Second World War, our conception of of what constitutes warfare has changed so much.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Yeah. Um and continues to change, you know.

SPEAKER_03 16:23

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If you look at the the today, the the advancements that are made almost on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Yeah, that's that it starts here with this this fluid adaptation, which which leads to a lot of people coming up with strange ideas. I'm reminded at this time that this is like the early 1950s, this is when tactical nuclear weapons are starting to be developed, and you get these, you know, people imagining future battlefields where soldiers are going to be firing basically nuclear rockets at each other, and you get the the what is it, the W54 nuclear warhead. It's tiny, baby warhead, baby nuke, and and the Davy Crockett rocket launcher, this thing that's gonna fire. And this idea that you're gonna have you know infantry firing nukes at each other. That's how that's how off off the planet people are with their conception of what a future war is gonna look like. It is, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:12

And and and I think I think that that spurs on a lot of this, you know, a lot of we need to we need to recruit the brightest minds in in the field, um, despite their background. We need to keep them, we need to keep that knowledge for ourselves because we we we're we're quite scared at what everyone else is doing.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Yeah, what if the Soviets get there first?

unknown 17:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:31

There is a sense of the unknown, um, and and no one knows really how quickly some of these these things can be developed.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

And that sense of what if the Soviets get there first comes to the fore in particular in the field of mind control. So amongst this mania for experimental warfare, the CIA, which is only founded in 1947, and that's an important thing to keep in mind. We've discussed this, and this is the cheap plug part of this episode. We've discussed this on a previous episode of History's Devil's looking at Sidney Riley, uh, the notorious ace of spies in the early years of MI6. You know, he is operating, uh MI6 is founded in 1909. He is this fast and loose spy who's operating only like a decade after. When intelligence services are born, particularly in times of of crisis where there's you know uh conflicts with an enemy, experimental warfare, and so forth, you're gonna get strange, strange things happening. And one strange thing that comes out of the early CIA is something called Project Bluebird, which is launched in the spring of 1950 to investigate mind control. And the question is where on earth do the Americans get this idea that we need to get we need to understand mind control now?

SPEAKER_03 18:43

Yeah, absolutely. So this is a this is an urgent because it's considered an urgent threat because we have um we have the Korean War. So North Korea is supported by the Soviets, um, and the South is is is supported by the US. So we have accusations of biological warfare and attacks on the civilian population. Um so the the accusations were that the the US were using things like anthrax and plague, smallpox, all the juicy stuff. They were poisoning water supplies, aerosol dispersal of various diseases and public spaces. And amongst this is the capture, you know, the torture of um prisoners of war, involving, you know, a lot of being injected with these various diseases, um, and being, you know, that tried attempts to control their mind, through breaking down their bodies. Um, and yeah, it is absolutely horrific, and it is quite hard to believe that this happened now.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

Yeah. And in the midst of this, so you've got you've got experiments being conducted on on Korean POWs, but the real sort of alarm bells are ringing because there are, I think there's 22 uh Allied POWs who are released from from Korean captivity. And instead of you know being happy to be repatriated, they say, no, no, no, I love communism, I want to stay in North Korea. And the way that Washington responds to this is to say that there is no way that these guys want to be communists. This is this doesn't make any sense. They can't, they they must be devoid of free will. Obviously, they've had their minds messed with under interrogation, and it's happened successfully because these guys are uh would swear blind that communism is the future, capitalist west is doomed. And the the theory is that these men have been brainwashed into becoming communists. And this sets a lot of alarm bells ringing in the mind of Ira Wilson, who I mentioned before up at Camp Dietrich. He organizes a meeting with Alan Dulles, who is the deputy director of CIA, who will become the full director in 1953. And he says, look, we're all we're all convinced that the Soviets have understand mind control. I've got this guy, he's the most brilliant mind I've known. Taught him at at university. Um, he's he's just kind of you know sitting around. He can win us this mind control arms race with the Soviets, and that person is Sidney Gottlieb, who commences work on Operation Bluebird on the 20th of August 1951, with Alan Dulles' blessing. So just uh something on Alan Dulles worth worth mentioning. He's he's an interesting guy in a number of ways, but one thing that I think is really important to note is he's not just he's not just got Ira Wilson saying, Yeah, Gottlieb's great. He's not just looking at Gottlieb's CV and saying, Yeah, he does look, he does look pretty smart. But Dulles was also born with a club foot. Coincidence. One wonders if there's something there where he's going, well, you know, again, back to the inspirational story that we mentioned. Up until this point, this guy is this guy is captain captain fighter. Adversity, right? And Dulles is looking at that and going, Yeah, what what a guy. And I'm sure, I'm sure somewhere on the record it's got that thing about Gottlieb volunteering for the army and being rejected because of his club foot. You could see Dulles looking at that and going, my heart bleeds. I yeah, let's give this boy a job. Um, and he and he does give him a job. And this is a really important relationship because Dulles, as we'll see, he covers up a lot of shit for Gottlieb. Like he signs off on a lot of things that are gonna be really wretched because he backs Gottlieb to the hill.

unknown 22:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Gottlieb is put in charge of uh Bluebird. The name is changed to Project Artichoke for reasons I'm not really clear on. And the stated aim of Project Artichoke is to get control, I'm coding here from the from the guidelines, to get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against the fundamental laws of nature. Which I mean that that covers a lot.

SPEAKER_03 22:59

It's very ominous, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 23:01

It's very godly because he's he's he is thinking big, you know, he is drawing on a on a big canvas here. He's talking about the reprogramming people to do, for example, assassinations. We've all heard of the the Manchurian candidate and that whole theory. Great film. Um but you know, it's it's that thing of you can if you can reprogram someone's mind so that they will convince themselves that even though they're, I don't know, uh a Russian, that they desperately want to kill Stalin or whoever, um, that they will you can click your fingers and they will snap out as if in a trance and they will suddenly become the greatest killer known to humankind and go do do your bidding.

SPEAKER_03 23:41

And I it it kind of loops back to the whole movie themes, doesn't it? Where how many movies or TV shows have you all seen where that the dream is to effectively take control of of a of a person and weaponize them? You know, they're maybe they're they've got some kind of robotic exoskeleton or something, you know, just to add drama. But the essentially we are taking control of an individual.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

It's an enduring fantasy where people just kind of think, yeah, you know, imagine if you could again, it's about it's about subverting someone's free will and just being able to control them completely. And nothing less than that is what Gottlieb is aiming for. And it's based on that premise that this is what's happened to these people in the current in the Korean War, that they they have been they have been turned from from patriots into good little communists. Gottlieb has got to figure out how that works, and he's got to figure it out quick because the assumption is the Soviets are already there, and that that goes back to that context, that manic Cold War context of what if the Soviets you know get this before us? And and and that gets even more heightened once it's clear that the Soviets have got the bomb, for example, because because of Los Alamos spies and so forth. So, how on earth can you control a man's mind? What is the technique? Looking at all the data, the stuff from from the Unit 731, the stuff the Nazi scientists have brought over, all this stuff. That's all in the background, but what what Gottlieb is really, really interested in is drugs. A shit ton of drugs.

SPEAKER_03 25:14

Of course.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

Drugs are the answer.

SPEAKER_03 25:16

Drugs are the answer. No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

No, no, no, no, no, no, don't do drugs. Never do drugs. But they are the answer. But they are and they are they are certainly to Gottlieb's mind the answer to brainwashing and mind control. Early experiments during Project Bluebird, some of which had come from the notes given to the Americans by Nazi scientists. There had been experiments done with mescaline, which is basically the same as peyote, uh, the hallucinogen used by some Native American tribes. You derive it from a certain type of cactus. It's you know, it sends you on a spirit journey, basically. Um uh uh you you see visions, you you you you go off the planet. Heroin is also used. Uh that didn't produce any great results. It just just you know made people made people a little bit irritating. Sodium pentathol, as it's sometimes known, we've mentioned already the the truth serum from the spy films. Now that uh that does exist as a product, but it it's basically just a depressant. Like it's not it's not a truth serum.

SPEAKER_03 26:17

Um well, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

No, but but what it does, it just it'll just relax you, and yeah, maybe you'll say some stuff, but that ain't that ain't necessarily the truth.

SPEAKER_03 26:26

You lose your inhibitions essentially, isn't it? It's like if you're a little bit drunk and you and then you just say whatever is on your mind.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Exactly, exactly. Um none of these things are particularly useful, and this is something that Gottlieb realizes real quick. None of this stuff is useful. Um, he did, however, have a bit of an interest in ergotism.

SPEAKER_03 26:46

Yeah, so yeah, I when you said uh again, talk about this, I was like, yes, I'm gonna talk about ergotism finally.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

Um how many years have you waited to talk about?

SPEAKER_03 27:00

This is a little a little while, a little while. There's never been the opportunity. Um, but for the simple reason is um there's just some great historical examples of people being poisoned with ergot and having ergotism.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

So ergot, just for just for those of us uninitiated in the world of exotic fungi, what are we talking about here?

SPEAKER_03 27:20

Um so it's it's a fungus. Um I I think I think it's technically an ergot, uh ergot alkaloid, but it's a fungus that grows in contaminated grains. So most prominently rye. So if you if you allow your grains to go mouldy before you make your bread, there is a good chance that you'll get get ergotism, right? And it produces uh really horrible effects. So lots of um, you know, horrible physical symptoms, so like seizures, vomiting, burning sensation or tingling all over the skin. And this is partly because it it sort of constricts blood flow and um therefore you it leads to things like gangrene.

SPEAKER_01 28:01

So you know you might I'm not seeing any mind control.

SPEAKER_03 28:06

Hold hold on, hold on, it gets better.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Once you get past the burning sensation under the skin, it gets better.

SPEAKER_03 28:14

Once, once all your fingers and toes have dropped off, then you have hallucinations. Okay. So it produces these really fantastical um you know mental side effects. So you have hallucinations, psychosis, and and it has these extraordinary um neurological effects. Um there have been various outbreaks through history. There are instances where whole towns have started behaving strangely.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

And one of the theories for the Salem witch trials, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 28:45

It is, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

They basically go mad from moldy rye.

SPEAKER_03 28:50

I don't think it I don't think it's proven. I think it is just speculation, but it it sort of makes sense that actually, you know, people would go a little bit crazy because they've all eaten the same bread.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

Yeah.

unknown 29:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Wow, who knew bread could be so goddamn dangerous?

SPEAKER_03 29:05

That's well, yeah, I think if you were like, you know, eating uh loads of uh rye, just raw rye grain, then you're probably you're probably screwed at that point.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Your fingers will fall off and you'll start seeing dancing elephants or whatever. Yes, yeah. So this is I mean, this is of big interest to Gottly. Uh, probably because, as you mentioned, there's so many, there's so many ways that that ergotism can go. You can do a lot with it. And he's particularly drawn to a recent breakthrough from the field of the ergot. And that is the discovery of something called lasurgic acid diath diphthalamide. Lasurgic acid diphthalamide, otherwise known as LSD. I your boy did not attend science class.

SPEAKER_03 29:54

No.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Yeah. LSD is discovered by a Swiss scientist named Albert Hoffman on the 16th of April, 1943, during an experiment to produce a new drug for combating depression. Hoffman produces this lasergic acid dephthalamide. And because it's the 1940s, Hoffman just goes, Well, I'm just gonna ingest some of this and see what happens. Fuck it. He he does it, he does write in his notes, I I wanted to be cautious, so only took 250 milligrams, which he thought was a reasonable level to to adjudge its effects without without necessarily killing himself.

SPEAKER_03 30:30

And and is it is it well ish.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

So he he he takes 250 milligrams of this new thing he's discovered, derived from ergot. Whereupon he he embarks on a voyage to Trip Out City. This is the world's first acid trip that he goes on. He starts seeing monsters, hearing voices, he starts grabbing at doorknobs attached to doors that aren't there. The walls are rippling and they disappear. He sees colors and shapes, bursts of light, blotches of darkness. He tried to ride home on a bicycle to clear his head, but that just made the road melt before his eyes. He's tripping off his head, and he didn't come down till the next morning when he felt tired, sick, and just terrible. Like every every cell in his body feels wretched. Inexplicably, Hoffman goes, This shit's great. That was fantastic. What a what a wonderful drug. We we can do something with this. And he continues to take LSD recreationally for much of the rest of his life. He's fascinated by it, and he tells friends and colleagues, you know, he he calls it the sacred drug. So Hoffman, he's the first convert to LSD, and Sidney Gottlieb is a man after Hoffman's heart because after reading about Hoffman's experiences, he gets hold of LSD as part of Operation Artichoke, and he takes his first acid trip in 1951. And Gottlieb described it later as I experienced an out-of-bodiness, a feeling as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body and is shimmering. That sounds terrible.

SPEAKER_03 32:11

It sounds gross. Like if he told you that, why would you go? I want to be a sausage. Like, why would you do that?

SPEAKER_01 32:19

Who who has ever dreamt of being a sausage?

SPEAKER_03 32:22

Never, never, not me. No. So I'm I'm struggling at this point, right? So he's dreaming about being a sausage. How do we how do we get from this is this is a great experience to I think this can control minds? Like if I'm a scientist, how do I make that leap?

SPEAKER_01 32:43

I think the context is important here, and there's a few kind of leaps of faith. So at the heart of the concept of mind control is this this this word brainwashing, which is only really invented in 1950. It doesn't really exist before then. And it's coined as a response to the aforementioned story of the POWs from Korea. So that's where we get the origins of brainwashing. And at the heart of that is this notion that once you once you wash someone's brain, once you once you wipe out ever their their thoughts, their drives, their emotions, their personality, then you have a tabula rasa, and you can program them with whatever you want. And that's where you get mind control. So you kind of have to destroy someone first before you can rebuild them in whatever image. And before before that time, like mind control is is I mean, it's the concept has appeared in the realms of science fiction. It's there, perhaps in some some sort of spiritualism, you know, finding oneself, opening up to your true potential via meditation, which is something Gott leaves into. Like I say, he's kind of already uh he's kind of a hippie before hippies were hippies, he likes his yoga and all that kind of stuff. Um but as to the science, in response to the incident of the POWs in Korea, in 1956, an American psychiatrist called Robert J. Lifton published a book called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which posited that brainwashing had actually been developed in China in the early 20th century through a combination of societal control of information by governments, propaganda, using tricks and allusions to convince people of divine guidance. So, in other words, tapping into that same part of the brain that has faith in the existence of God. You tap into that and you convince them that no communism is God. You know, you have the same faith. That's the that's the idea. So it's it's it's interesting that Lifton what he's getting at is more like strategic propaganda and psychology and ways to control minds as we would understand it today. And there's evidence of that. I mean, look at what Josef Goebbels did in the 1930s in Germany, the the Gleischleitung, the coordination of German society, basically programming a fair swear of German society to believe that you know Hitler's Hitler's great and this is all going to go well. You can see that Lifton might have been onto something there in terms of you know strategic use of propaganda. He does not, however, mention too much in his book about drugs, but the spiritual dimension of Lifton's proposed technique, the idea of creating visions, creating self-doubt in the human subject, making them see God and believe that God is telling them this, that's where the psychedelics come in. And that's what Gottlieb is all about. So he's kind of taken the sort of crude psychology that Lifton's positing with the fact that he knows from Hoffman's notes that LSD in particular can take the mind to places that that it wouldn't normally go to. It could, for example, take the mind to places where truth is no longer something that you hold that you care about. And so that's where it becomes a truth serum. It also takes the mind to idea to places where the person's consciousness is basically wiped out, and then you can reprogram them and start again. Gottlieb thought that LSD was to quote the secret that was gonna unlock the universe. I mean, when this guy swings, he swings for the fences. He does not, he does not do things by halves. And he assumed, again, to reiterate this, he he's on the clock. He assumes the Soviets have done the same.

SPEAKER_02 36:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

And there's a quote from a I'm gonna quote from a CIA report here that was reflecting on the Korean POW incident, and this is really interesting. It says here that no Soviet data are available on LSD 25, so that's the LSD. So there's nothing to suggest the Soviets are using LSD from what they can tell. However, CIA also were adamant that it must be assumed that the scientists of the USSR are fully cognizant of the strategic importance of this new drug. So on the one hand, they're not using LSD, but we have to assume that that they know about its importance and and its imminent.

SPEAKER_03 36:51

It's a deep paranoia and distrust, isn't it? Which is which is existent anyway, but that that really exemplifies it.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

It's vibes. It's it's it's it's the the the facts tell us this is not the case, but the vibe is that the Soviets are ahead of us and everybody panic. That's that's basically it. It's vibes that dictate how Gottlieb's experiments in LSD are going to play out as well. Because initially he's dosing people, uh, the the start of the project when it when it's first introduced to Artichuk, he's dosing people at these CIA black sites, which are established after the war as places for particularly in the early Cold War, you get you get people who were captured in Korea, for example, are sent there and things. And this is the start of you know the the the long and and and rich culture of CIA black sites, which continues into our to our own age. And it's at these black sites that they they they start using these people that they refer to as the expendables, which is just astonishing. Um people, people who are you know prisoners, homeless folks who they snatch off the street, prostitutes, uh, you know, university students who are desperate for money. We're in we're into the sort of we're into the black hole of Calcutta of ethics here. We are into we are into like the darkness of ethics. Yeah, like from the start, again, this guy does not do things by half. He he immediately goes straight to the darkness. It's like, yes, black sites, homeless people, give them drugs, not telling them what they are, and and let's just see what happens.

SPEAKER_03 38:26

And and there is absolutely no way to justify this ethically, morally. It's just there is there is no way you could say that this is worth it, right? Um, I'm assuming the view is well, these, these, these, these are people that no one's gonna miss, and they are the the dregs of society, so it doesn't matter. And that's a viewpoint which like you know, you and I can't possibly understand how you could do that.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

I mean, it's yeah, I I think that's the that's where the basis starts. But the thing is that the project grows very quickly under Gottlieb's auspices, and one way that they do it is they infiltrate what are basically um uh psychological research programs that might be being done by third parties in, say, prisons, for example. And one notable early victim of Gottlieb's experiments, a sort of celebrity victim, is the gangster Whitey Bulger, who was um a Boston gangster. He gets incarcerated, I think it's in 1956, and while he's at the federal penitentiary, he he gets signed up for an experiment uh to supposedly treat schizophrenia. And turns out this was actually a CIA-backed experiment to give LSD to inmates. Because as you say, these are these are these are these are convicts, these are criminals. Who cares what happens to them? And and Bulger, and this was confirmed by CA documents that were declassified years later. Bolger Bulger always claimed the CIA messed with my head, and he uh which which sounds like proper tin foil hat stuff, but then the the actual the actual documents confirmed no this gangster we actually experimented on in film.

SPEAKER_03 40:01

I suppose I mean he he was he was an absolutely terrible individual anyway, um Whitey Bulger. So I I guess they they weren't to know that he would go on and have a further um you know prolific career as a gangster.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

I mean, I I didn't know too much about it. I assume he went to go kill some folks after after he got let out of whether whether that's because of the LSD or was he just gonna get there anyway, who knows?

SPEAKER_03 40:26

Yeah, it's it's it you you could argue, well, did did did all of that happen? You know, did he go and murder a bunch of people and and and order the murder of a bunch of people because his mind was destroyed?

SPEAKER_01 40:38

Well, and that's the thing about this. So many of these experiments are conducted without any kind of control or any kind of you know, you know, basic basics of what we would we would think of as empiricism. It is just give people LSD to see what happens. And the results of LSD are so variable depending on the individual.

SPEAKER_02 40:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

That if some people you know have have a bad trip and that's it for them, their brain is fried, other people, you know, Keith Richards. Keith Richards.

SPEAKER_03 41:03

Great example.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Still, he's still able to to play guitar. And he how you know there's a reason his body's going to medical science.

SPEAKER_03 41:11

And and forgive me if we're getting ahead of ourselves, but I know there were instances where actually people had underlying health conditions and and it wasn't known how LSD would impact them, and then they they were given this unknowingly, and then you know they suffered life-changing um effects or they died, and yeah, it's and there was one one acute example of that actually was an American-born artist in Paris.

SPEAKER_01 41:35

Because again, this is international, this isn't just so this is mainly happening initially, it's mainly happening away from US soil, in fact. And so Gottlieb's in Paris with a bunch of his guys, they they uh for some reason they pick this guy, most likely because it turns out he had hepatitis, which does not react well with LSD. Um, if you if you've got hepatitis, LSD is gonna have a really acute effect on you. And he he Gottlieb basically can manufactures an altercation with this guy, sort of you know, bumps into the bar, blah, blah, blah. And then Gottlieb smooths it over and gets, I look, I'm sorry, let me buy you a drink. Buys me a drink, puts, puts some LSD in it. This guy takes this LSD, and over the next few days, the the members of the project who are there with with Gottlieb observe this man mentally and physically collapse. Uh, he's an artist who can no longer paint because he just he just can't paint. Uh, he develops a psychological disorder that estranges him from his fiancee. Gottlieb completely ruined this random man's life. And what what did he get out of it? He got, well, you know, LSD hits some people harder than others. That was that was the conclusion. And uh yeah, it and this is and this is just the start. I mean, he it it starts in these semi-controlled environments with your you your black sites and so forth. Then we're we're slipping slipping acid into people's drinks in Parisium bars. And then he starts, he still develops a reputation for regularly dosing his unsuspecting colleagues with LSD. CIA headquarters Christmas party 1951, word is passed around saying don't let Sydney near the punch bowl. He's gonna send us on a Yuletide trip. And this becomes kind of as normalized as that can again. To my point about you know, the early stages of intelligence services, particularly in these pressure cooker situations where they feel they're at this facing this existential threat of the Soviet menace. This kind of becomes sort of normalized. It's like, ah, Sydney and his wacky, his wacky LSD, you watch out for him, you know.

SPEAKER_02 43:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

So so you've got free dosing of CIA personnel, random people in bars, university students, prisoners, mental patients, a lot of people who are unwittingly given LSD as part of Gottlieb's experiments. And yeah, I think there's an argument to say that by way of a reckless and thoroughly unethical CIA drug. Drug testing program, Sidney Gottlieb becomes the biggest LSD pusher in the United States and one of the primary instigators of the psychedelic era of the 1960s and 70s. He's the guy who makes LSD go global.

SPEAKER_03 44:13

Yes. Yeah. And that's that's what really that's it becomes really strange about this in the fact that it becomes sort of the biggest widely known secret. The very prominent people, you know, um artists, movie directors, actors, they're all taking LSD because once it starts in these little covert experiments where he's dosing people secretly, then it's sort of the word spreads. Oh, you want to try this stuff. This is really good stuff. And and it's at that time where it's converging with um, you know, as you say, it's going around university students, and actually through universities the word spreads very quickly. Um, so then there's almost this sort of clamour to to procure LSD. And um and as you say, I I think you know, he's not solely responsible, but we can absolutely credit him with advancing that counterculture that develops through the 60s. Yeah. Um, and and particularly because it it it's it's it's widely used amongst musicians, like you take the Beatles, for example.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

No white album without LSD.

SPEAKER_03 45:17

Absolutely, but you sort of got to say, well, actually, was it necessary, you know?

SPEAKER_01 45:22

And and I I wasn't I I'm not I'm not a massive fan of the white album, just as I was always more of a stone, I'm more of a stones man.

SPEAKER_03 45:30

That's this is a whole other conversation. I think that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_01 45:33

Yeah, I know, but I'm just I'm just saying I I appreciate that that that it's seen as a as yeah. I I realise there's a lot of a lot of music that is that is driven by LSD, which you know.

SPEAKER_03 45:44

And and particularly I I'm not an especial fan of the Grateful Dead, right? No, um, but in in in reading up uh for this, I you know, I thought, I'll I'll I'll listen to some Grateful Dead. Wow. What? It's good fun. But at the same time, I was loving it.

SPEAKER_02 46:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:04

So but it's not just musicians, it you know, it's it's a lot, it's poets. Um so that the poet Robert Hunter, who wrote a lot of the Grateful Dead's songs, you know, he um had access to LSD through CIA testing programs, you know. Um he he was at Stanford and he gets access to LSD through through the testing regime. So um and so so he he sort of takes a a cocktail of drugs and that that produces some arguably great work, right? But it's it's it's not just it's not just musicians and poets. It's I read somewhere that Esther Williams, um, she she began taking LSD and Carrie Grant as well, which I was I was I was very surprised.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

Um I can't imagine tripping Cary Grant.

SPEAKER_03 46:52

I was like, I I hope this is true. I don't know if this is true. I want this to be true, but it was so widely available because people are going to parties, people are going to LSD parties. Um and some of those parties that you know they're happening in the Hollywood Hills, they are being facilitated by a guy called Harold Abramson, who is a CIA doctor. Yeah, so it's it's like that direct supply chain.

SPEAKER_01 47:20

Um CIA, patrons of the arts.

SPEAKER_03 47:23

Patrons of the arts, absolutely. Um, and and the other the other one that I've read about um uh uh a lot is um Ken Keasey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:35

So you you can argue without the influence of LSD, we may not have had some of this uh amazing culture that is coming out of the the 60s, right?

SPEAKER_01 47:46

And that that's the the fun portion of this show. That's that's that's as fun as fun as that's the the fun cultural side effect of the liberal distribution of LSD by the Cotley. Not so fun is what's happening at these black sites. Gottlieb goes to a black site in Japan in 1951 to watch the interrogation of suspected Sobiet spies who had been dosed with LSD with the idea that this would be a truth serum, get them to confess. In the end, they confess nothing of substance. The experiment is deemed a failure. These spies are then shot and dumped in Tokyo Harbor. Same happens in Munich. Gottlieb and another member of uh Project Artichoke, man by the name of Frank Olsen, who's a biological warfare scientist. He's a pretty key member of Artichoke. They watch prisoners get dosed with a cocktail of drugs, not just LSD. They give them a whole bunch of stuff in one hit. These men collapse into paranoid violence or catatonia. They then have these people are then shot, the bodies are burned out of the back. Random people are also targeted. One artichoke scientist who also worked as a psychiatrist dosed a patient looking for depression treatment. Uh, dosed them repeatedly with mescaline, and they died of a heart attack. And this is all this is all being recorded, and and this is uh we'll probably get into this more in the second episode about Gottlieb, but but for now it's enough to say that Gottlieb never seems to express any kind of regret or sorrow for any of this. I'm reminded, and and reading some of his testimonies when he's eventually brought before hearings to talk about this. I was reminded of how in the Oppenheimer film, how how Oppenheimer is depicted as this guy who you know he's kind of got a little bit of a conscience there, but this idea that but I'm involved in this incredible thing. And I I have to do the thing. Like I have to, you know, with my with my you know graven face, I must just do it. You've got this sense of got leave. Because he was, I mean, he he does come across, and this goes back to this thing of him volunteering for the army and being rejected. I mean, he's a patriotic guy. I don't think he's a bullshitter in as much as he's a genuine cold warrior. Like I think he genuinely believes the Soviets have got this stuff. We need to secure democracy, we must do that. And retrospectively, we can question that and go, well, isn't he overreacting a bit? But again, in context, there's a lot of cold warriors. There's a lot of people freaking out at this time, and he does seem to be coming at this from a a place of earnestness on in that respect, doesn't justify it, but I think that perhaps explains a bit of you know, ends justify the means.

SPEAKER_03 50:35

Yeah, I I I think there's two things at play here. There's there's the ruthless pursuit of pushing those scientific boundaries. Um, as you said, he gets bored too easily, and he wants to challenge himself, and I think that's a part of it. He wants to push the boundaries of what we can achieve. So I think he almost sees it as well, because we can do it, we should. And then that is sort of converging with the problem that he is a patriot, and uh I think you can use patriotism to justify doing some terrible things. Some terrible things have been done in the name of one's country, right? Um, look at any conflict. Um and I and I think you've got those two things coming together, and that is driving him forward. And and maybe he's just convincing himself, well, actually, no, this is this is of national importance, this is this is the preservation of of the country, right? So it's my responsibility to do this.

SPEAKER_01 51:38

Um yeah, he certainly has that, he does have that thing of, you know, I I am the boss in charge of this, and this is the the weight on my shoulders. And I think that that combined with the fact that he's you know already quite beloved by Alan Dulles, yeah, means that Dulles, despite the fact that there's no tangible results coming from this project, we're now a couple of years into Project Artichuk. There is no mind control, there's a lot of bodies stacking up, but there's no mind control. Regardless, Dulles agrees to Gottlieb's proposal to expand the project and to give it more resource. And this is when the project becomes this thing called MKUltra, which is signed into existence on the 13th of August 1953 with a flick of Dulles' pen, and Gottlieb is the head. Now, a big part of MK Ultra and its expansion is that the CIA outsources research to universities and research institutes. They basically give them a you know, come up with a big van full of money, give it to them and say, Look, we want you to do this thing, we want you to test this ergot or whatever. And the people doing it, they don't know this is a CIA project, they don't know it's related to mind control, they don't know that people are dying or getting dosed, you know, with hallucinations against their will. Um, all they know is they've been given a lot of money and been told do this. And and so a lot of third parties get involved at this point. And this is where Gottlieb can develop his sub-project strategy. The sub-projects are basically looking for smaller targets within the broader field of mind control to try and accomplish. So some of these are things like memory erasure. So let's get the baseline done of how do we actually wipe someone's memories out so we can reprogram them with new memories or whatever. That's Manchurian candidate programming. Truth serums, gotta always be on the quest for truth serums. Drugs that could cause world leaders to commit suicide. You know, how can we how can we administer a drug that will make, you know, uh a communist leader in the colonial world who's going, you know, Africa, let's say, who's who's swinging, swinging communists. How can we get them to, I don't know, throw themselves off a cliff? You know, let's let's you know figure out some drug that'll reprogram them. So he's got these bizarre little sub-projects with these little goals. It's all very lawless and it's all very unchallenged. And I think a big part of it is as I mentioned, because CIA is still young, recruits are experimental and reckless, but there's gotta be more to it here. Like, like Dulles, Dulles is giving him he's giving him a blank check, basically.

SPEAKER_03 54:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:15

To do what he wants.

SPEAKER_03 54:17

And and and and why? Why why would you do that if there's no results? You know, if you did that on a a research project, your funding would be pulled if you've not produced any results.

SPEAKER_01 54:29

Well, this is where I think I think Gottlieb's personal connection with Dulles, I think, comes through. Gottlieb must have been very persuasive. He must have been able to say, look, I know we haven't got results yet, but we're we're working on it, we're making strides, we're doing this, we're doing that. Because certainly by the time we get to 1953, Gottlieb is is well and truly in charge of US mind control projects. He is the king of LSD, he is the he is the the the major domo of MK Ultra. He has Alan Dulles backing him. He is you know the most powerful drug pusher in the world at this point, basically, and he has CIA backing. The question is, what does he do with this power? And on that cliffhanger, we're gonna end part one of this episode because this had to be a two-parter. This is this is gonna go to some strange places, come even stranger places in the second episode. And just to let folks know, you know, the the second episode, this is gonna come out at the same time. So when you're done with this, just go straight to the next one. Seamless transition to continue the story of Sidney Gottlieb. Uh, thank you, Jane.

SPEAKER_03 55:38

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure as always.

SPEAKER_01 55:41

And we shall reconvene uh shortly for part two.