How a Government Mind Control Experiment Backfired

Today’s guest is University of Texas historian John Lisle, author of the chilling and brilliantly researched Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.

Despite official attempts to destroy records of the CIA’s LSD-fueled search for mind control in the 1950s and ’60s, the truth has been dribbling out, especially in recent books and documentaries such as Steven Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief and Errol Morris’ Wormwood.

Lisle’s work draws on previously unknown depositions and documents to deliver the most definitive—and disturbing—account yet. He discusses the twisted logic of Cold War secrecy, the bizarre figures behind and victims of America’s darkest experiments, and what MKUltra reveals about the dangers of unchecked power in a democracy.

And this might be the most important thing: He and Nick Gillespie talk about why conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of transparency—and how to preserve skepticism without surrendering to paranoia.

 

0:00—Intro

1:32—What is MKUltra?

3:42—Brainwashing origins in the Korean War

6:50—Who is Sidney Gottlieb?

10:43—The CIA’s startup culture

20:37—Who is Ewen Cameron?

24:32—Jolly West and implanting memories

28:24—MKUltra gets shut down

31:08—How MKUltra documents came to light

39:38—Main lessons from MKUltra

46:57—Politicization of intelligence agencies

51:03—Conspiracy thinking and the legacy of MKUltra

58:31—COVID-19 and the collapse of righteous authority

 

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: John Lisle, thanks for talking to Reason.

John Lisle: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

All right, the book is Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra. I suspect that our more conspiracy-minded and history-minded listeners and watchers know what MKUltra is, but summarize what MKUltra was.

Yes, thanks for having me again. MKUltra was this program by the CIA, starting in the 1950s. And the goal of MKUltra was to determine whether methods of mind control are possible. The CIA wanted to know, for instance, whether you could create a truth drug—could you give someone you’re interrogating a drug that can make them spill the truth, make them tell the truth no matter what? Could you slip something in someone’s drink and make them behave in a certain way—either make them seem erratic or potentially control their behaviors and beliefs?

That’s kind of the overarching goal of MKUltra. They did that through various means. Some of the reasons why the people who were in charge of it were interested in this kind of thing—someone like Sidney Gottlieb, who led MKUltra, this chemist in the CIA—he was worried about the potential for communist countries possessing these kinds of methods.

For instance, Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, he had done behavioral conditioning in the 1890s—ringing a bell and getting a dog to salivate. Well, if you could do that to dogs that far back, surely the Russians since then have been improving upon their methods. So, if they’re doing it, we need to know how to do it ourselves and we know how to defend against it.

It’s kind of an amazing thing, as we get more distance on the Cold War, the idea that we have to be more like the Russians or the Soviets than they were in order to defeat them—in order to be supremely American. We’re doing everything they’re doing, but better. It’s peculiar.

The concept of brainwashing, which is kind of rattling around in the back of MKUltra and other CIA fever dreams—and, you know, some of them are legitimate. I mean, it’s clear there were conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States and other free countries of Europe. But the concept of brainwashing came out of the Korean War. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because that’s also—I mean, it’s the first Cold War conflict, or a proxy war. But what was going on in Korea, and how did that really inflame the desire to be able to force somebody to tell the truth, or to control and manipulate them?

Yeah, you’re exactly right about the importance of this Korean War, too, because during it, there were several American pilots who were captured in Korea, and while they were POWs, they started confessing to very strange crimes.

For instance, many of them started saying that they were engaging in biological warfare against the Korean people—for the Americans, while they were flying over, they were dropping anthrax bombs or germ bombs or bubonic plague germs or something like that. We now know, from some Russian archives actually, that some North Korean officials had flown to China and had gotten cultures of bubonic plague to infect their own prisoners to make it seem as if the Americans were doing this.

But still, the question remains within the CIA: why are these American POWs confessing to these crimes of biological warfare? One potential explanation they come up with is maybe they’re being manipulated in a certain way to do this. Maybe they’ve been brainwashed or mind-controlled through drugs or through hypnotism. Again, maybe the communists possess some kind of mind control technique that’s causing these POWs to do this.

Now, it turns out afterward, when many of these POWs returned to the United States, they’re, of course, interviewed and asked about what happened. One of the people who interviews them, in fact, is Jolly West, who plays a prominent role in the MKUltra program. And he comes to the conclusion—again, this is ironic because he’s later going to be working on MKUltra—but he comes to the conclusion that it wasn’t these esoteric mind control methods that the communists were using to manipulate people. Instead, it’s the typical methods of coercion that people have been using for centuries. It’s sleep deprivation and fatigue and food deprivation, and having an actual…

I mean actual, right? Physical beatings and more—

Exactly, yeah. So he comes to that conclusion. And you kind of mentioned the irony of this earlier, about how the Americans are recapitulating a lot of what the communists are doing or trying to catch up to what they’re doing. Again, it’s ironic because they weren’t doing these mind control methods in the sense that the CIA thought they were. And yet, even when the CIA figures that out—they have multiple people write reports on this—what’s actually causing these POWs to confess to these crimes? It’s not the mind control methods. Yet the CIA still wants to develop those methods, because, “well, it was a potential if they could’ve done that, therefore, if the potential exists that it could have happened, we want to know whether we can do it now.”

So let’s talk—we’ll get to Jolly West, who’s one of the most ironically named people in history. I mean, he’s just not a jolly man at all. Really a deeply fucked up person who, unfortunately, was able to do a lot of bad things to a lot of people and really not pay a price for it.

But Sidney Gottlieb, who, as you mentioned, is a chemist who became the head of MKUltra—who was he, and why did he ultimately fixate on drugs and things like LSD in particular?

Yeah, LSD is going to be the big one they start using within MKUltra. Sidney Gottlieb is a chemist from New York. He went to school at Caltech. He got his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry there, and that was right around World War II in the 1940s.

He desperately wanted to join the war—he wanted to join the Army—but he was denied because he had a limp. He suffered from a limp; he had clubbed feet, he was born with. He also talked with a stutter—not that that mattered for joining the Army—but he talked with a stutter, he walked with a limp, so he was denied entry into the Army.

After that, he kind of felt this debt that he owed to his country. His parents were immigrants from Hungary. This country had given them a good life and allowed them to raise him here. And so he felt that he wanted to pay back his country in some way. He thought it would be through service in the Army during World War II. When that didn’t pan out, he got a series of jobs as a chemist at different companies and universities, but eventually he decided to apply for a job at the CIA—to serve that debt that he felt he owed to some government organization.

And it just so happened that the CIA was looking for brilliant scientists like himself to fill certain roles, because World War II had just shown how integral science was to national security. So we better have some scientists on our staff. He wound up there.

And it’s interesting, though—for a mind control guy, he’s not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He’s an agricultural chemist, right?

He is a chemist. You’re right. You mentioned LSD earlier. One of the main reasons why the CIA becomes interested in this drug is—well, one is just happenstance. LSD is first developed by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938, I believe.

’38, and then he accidentally ingested it 5 years later.

Yes, exactly. So it’s kind of a new drug. And when the CIA gets hold of it, it is an extremely potent drug too. It’s a powerful hallucinogen. Just a tiny amount can have such profound effects. So they’re immediately interested in this drug, because it obviously has profound effects on human psychology.

And if that’s the case, then it makes itself very useful, potentially, in covert operations, because such a small amount can be slipped into someone’s drink or put into a cigar or something. It could make someone potentially behave in a certain way. If that’s the case, then it might have a lot of potential use.

And it was starting to be used by therapists and whatnot. I mean, Sandoz Laboratories, where Hofmann worked, didn’t quite know what to do with it. So they actually were sending it out to researchers and saying, “Hey, here’s a compound that has these qualities, which are pretty off the charts. Do you have a use for it?”

You know, it’s funny—LSD is a new drug in the early ’50s and the mid-’50s. MKUltra officially starts in 1955 or— 

’53.

And so the CIA is also a very new organization. Your previous book was about the OSS, the wartime CIA that gave rise to what we now know and all love and patriotically support to the max as today’s CIA.

Did the CIA know what it was doing, just broadly, in terms of countering… I mean, the main thing was, “we’ve got to keep the Soviets at bay.” Because at that point, China was kind of in the orbit or under the umbrella of the Soviet Union. The big break between the Soviets and the Chinese communists hadn’t yet happened.

Talk about—it’s weird to think of the CIA as kind of like a startup, but they had so many different things going on, many of which, when you look back now, you’re like, what were people thinking? But how important to the development of MKUltra—and one thing that you stress throughout the book, which I find fascinating—is that one of the lessons or questions that needs to be studied is: Why didn’t anybody say, “What? Why are you doing this? This is insane.”

How did that young startup culture kind of affect how the CIA was doing? 

A lot, I think, because a lot of the freewheeling attitude of the OSS—this wartime intelligence organization, kind of the precursor to the CIA—a lot of those same people would end up in the CIA, and that same kind of mentality carried over. So I think that’s part of the reason why you have that freewheeling mentality in the CIA. It’s because, well, during wartime, that’s what the OSS was doing, and it’s the same people within the CIA.

And these were twilight—I mean, again, this is outside the purview of this conversation, but World War II was a twilight struggle between forces of fascist authoritarianism—from imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—and so anything went in order to preserve whatever we called freedom. And that mentality was just ported over in the CIA from World War II, right?

It was, exactly. Instead of the Germans and the Japanese, now it’s the Soviets who potentially might be the existential risk. And so, well, if we were resorting to those kinds of methods during World War II—in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department—I talk about how there are truth drug experiments, there are all kinds of wacky experiments about bat bombs and painting foxes with glowing radioactive paint and all kinds of things these scientists were doing.

So if we had to do anything we could to potentially stop this existential threat during World War II, well, of course we have to do that to the Soviets as well, because this might be even more of an existential threat in a certain sense—because they actually have nuclear weapons now. The Germans didn’t have that, but the Soviets actually do. So yes, that mentality got carried over. So that’s one of the reasons why it is fairly freewheeling.

And the last point you made in your original question is a very important one. Raising the questions of: Why was nobody stopping this? One of the things that also makes this a very freewheeling CIA in the 1950s is that there’s such heavy compartmentalization that hardly anyone knows what anyone else is doing. When we think of MKUltra, we think, “oh, the CIA—this huge organization—is masterminding this. There must be hundreds of employees who are working on this and performing these experiments.” That’s not actually how it was.

Within the CIA, there might have been a couple handfuls of people who knew about MKUltra. Within these hundreds and thousands of employees, there might be a dozen who know that this is going on. And so with that compartmentalization, without people being able to peer into what their peers at the CIA are doing, there’s no one to really stop or ask questions. “Hey, why are we performing these experiments? Why are we funding these researchers at universities to dose kids with—you know—university students with LSD, or prisoners, or so on?”

There are several reasons that make that happen, and the compartmentalization is definitely one.

And then, on a larger scale, the original CIA director, he understood that the way he was going to operate is that he would tell the president what was going on if he was asked.

As one of Allen Dulles’ codes, you know.

Yeah. When you look at the history of the FBI, there’s something parallel going on. It starts a few decades earlier—officially as the FBI in the ’20s or whatever—but J. Edgar Hoover understood that it was in national security interests not to really offer any information to the president. And it was kind of chilling, actually, to read in the book the way that that gets described here—especially because Eisenhower, who’s the president during this, he knows how to fight and win world wars. And I guess he didn’t want to know too much either, right? Like, everybody wanted plausible—

That’s a good point, because it’s in the president’s personal interest to preserve his or her’s plausible deniability. For instance, I talk about assassination attempts in this book, and Sidney Gottlieb is intimately involved in those.

And that was MKChaos—or what was the code name for the assassination stuff?

I don’t know if there was a code name within the CIA for that, but there was a kind of group within the CIA called the Health Alteration Committee—you know, kind of a flippant name. That’s what they were in charge of.

During one meeting, Eisenhower kind of tells his CIA counterparts, “I’m interested in having Patrice Lumumba kind of knocked off. What can you do about that?” And of course, whenever they refer to this in writing afterward, they never say Eisenhower. They say, “We’ve been told this.” But it’s preserving the plausible deniability, which leads to this vicious cycle of abuse that happens because nobody’s going to be held accountable if there’s no paper trail to name anybody associated with what’s going on.

Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, was the subject of a biography a couple years ago called Poisoner in Chief, which is a fascinating read. And one of the things that’s fantastic about your book is that it covers similar territory, but it also looks at it in a different way—in a definite frame that adds a huge amount to it.

What more can you tell us about Gottlieb when he was running the show at the CIA? How quickly did he understand that there really are no such things as mind control drugs?

I think it took him a while to understand that. But one of the things I think that makes my book unique and exciting, too, is I found dozens of depositions that happened as part of a lawsuit in the 1980s. It never went to trial—it was settled out of court—so these depositions sat in the Library of Congress for many decades.

I found them, and it’s verbatim transcript of not only the perpetrators of MKUltra, like Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, and even Richard Helms—the director of the CIA—he is deposed. But also the victims of MKUltra. These depositions—it’s thousands of pages of them being asked questions by these lawyers: What did you do? Why did you do it? How did you feel about it?

So I feel like my book allows the reader to get into the head, in a certain sense, of these people. And that’s what makes it especially exciting.

It is terrifying to read—and also exciting. I was thinking, as you describe these documents and then start quoting from them, I mean, as a historian, that must have been like discovering the—I don’t know—the Grand Canyon or something. It’s like, holy cow, is this real?

I was very excited, yes.

So with Gottlieb—he’s a true believer. He is a patriot and all of that kind of stuff, and he wants to help the U.S. and the free world defeat the communists. When did he start to realize that this whole project was just kind of wrong.

Yeah, it depends on which kinds of subprojects. MKUltra was composed of 149 subprojects, and most of those were where Gottlieb and MKUltra would fund independent researchers who were at universities or hospitals or prisons to either continue doing the research they’re doing or alter it in a certain way.

So not all the experiments that are part of MKUltra were done by the CIA. This is funding many people to do this. I would say by the late ’50s, it was fairly obvious to Gottlieb that drugs might not be the way to do this.

He says in his depositions, “we kind of understood with something like LSD, you could make someone lose their mind, you could make them appear crazy, but you couldn’t control them like a marionette. You couldn’t make them do what you wanted them to do.” In other words, you couldn’t create a Manchurian Candidate or something like that.

However, after the drugs, he turned to psychiatric techniques. Well, if you can’t do this through drugs, maybe we should fund other subprojects that don’t use drugs but instead focus on sensory deprivation, or electric shock therapy, or what was called psychic driving—like repeated messages playing through headphones, thousands and thousands of times for hours on end, for days on end.

The idea was that maybe we can break down a person’s psyche and then kind of build them back in our own image. If we induce enough stress in them, then maybe they will forget their previous behaviors, and we can control them with new behaviors by implanting those in them. That was kind of the idea.

There are several subprojects that are funded—most notably Ewen Cameron—that focus on psychiatry. Of course, after several years, Gottlieb also comes to realize that you can’t really create someone in your own image in that way.

People aren’t behaviorists. It’s

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