Categories
podcast

MK Ultra fact vs. fiction: Debunking mind control and Manchurian candidate myths | with Stephen Kinzer

Did MK Ultra actually accomplish anything impressive in brainwashing- and mind-control-related areas? Did the US government, as some people claim, create “Manchurian candidates” who would kill on command? In this episode, I talk with Stephen Kinzer, author of “Poisoner in Chief,” a book about the head of MK Ultra, Sidney Gottlieb. We discuss the strange, disturbing reality of MK Ultra—and the many exaggerations made about it over the years. While pop culture and deceptive gurus (e.g., Chase Hughes) spread tales of the program achieving impressive psychological control, Kinzer describes a disorganized and amateurish series of experiments that harmed many people but failed to demonstrate anything impressive. We explore why MK Ultra has become a perfect canvas for all sorts of paranoid ideas and wild speculations, and why the lack of evidence of anything approaching actual mind control hasn’t stopped people from confidently claiming otherwise. If you’ve ever wondered what’s real—and what’s myth—about MK Ultra, you’ll probably appreciate this talk.

Topics discussed: the myths versus the realities of the MK Ultra program; what makes MK Ultra such a perfect case for people to imagine and believe all sorts of things; what Operation Mockingbird was and its relation to MK Ultra; the hypnotist George Estabrooks and his wild claims of mind control; the likelihood of large plots succeeding in the modern age; the more realistic and banal ways that governments try to “control people’s minds” by persuading and shifting opinions in the modern age; and more.

Episode links:

Resources mentioned in or related to this episode:


TRANSCRIPT

(Transcripts are automatic and will contain errors)

[Several clips play…]

Chase Hughes:  Along comes this other program called MK Ultra. The CIA went full-blown mad scientist. It was about breaking minds completely open in the cleanest way that they possibly could, and it was about a racing identity. Keep that in mind. In the fifties, they were becoming experts at erasing people.

Shawn Ryan: With the proliferation of assassination attempts in the past several years, are you at all concerned about the possibility of Manchurian candidate type scenarios?

Chase Hughes: I, I think the Manchurian candidate stuff has been going on for a while. It looks like Sirhan Sirhan to me. I’m 100% convinced that he was programmed to, to do that.

Shawn Ryan: Oh shit.

Chase Hughes: There, there are step by step programs they have for creating a candidate. The CIA is. One record creating manchurian candidates that can assassinate, quote American officials, and it’s not that hard to do. You don’t need a bunch of advanced training to, to get that done.

Stephen Kinzer:  MK Ultra produced, I guess one big conclusion, which was Gottlieb’s conclusion that there’s no such thing as mind control. A lot of things have been overlaid onto MK Ultra because it fits so perfectly into the conspiratorial mindset that seems best to describe the era in which we’re living. It’s actual history is brutal enough, uh, without having to embellish it.

Zach Elwood: The person in the first few clips I played, the guy talking as if brainwashing and Manchurian candidates are real things, is a con artist named Chase Hughes who spreads all sorts of false information about behavior and psychology. 

The second person in those clips is Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Gottlieb was the head of the infamous government program MK Ultra. 

If you aren’t familiar with MK Ultra, it was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the CIA to develop procedures and drugs that could be used to alter and control human behavior. It began in 1953 and ended in 1973. 

I’ll read from the description of Kinzer’s book Poisoner in Chief: 

The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer―the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace―including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world.

End quote. 

There’s a lot of bullshit about MK Ultra out there spread by many different people. As stated, one of those people is Chase Hughes, whose clips I started this episode with. Despite his obvious con artistry, Chase has succeeded in gaining some decent online popularity; he’s appeared on the popular podcasts Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO, and he’s now amassed more than 1.5 million youtube followers. The motive for Chase Hughes to lie about what happened with MK Ultra is obvious; he claims that he himself can brainwash people and install multiple personalities in people and such things, so lying about MK Ultra makes his own claims that much more believable. If you can swallow his claims about MK Ultra, you might start to think that maybe Chase Hughes’ claims of mysterious and awe-inspiringa abilities might be real. It’s a real Wizard of Oz kind of playbook.  

So I wanted to talk to Stephen Kinzer to try to separate the reality of MK Ultra from the fiction about it that people like Chase Hughes spread. The fact is there are many people who spread all sorts of myths and legends and speculations about MK Ultra, for various reasons… some want to get attention and clicks and sell books; some are truly conspiracy-minded believers; some are a combination of the two. This means it can be hard to figure out what really happened. 

In this talk with Kinzer, we’ll talk about his observations about MK Ultra, and the inflated and paranoid views versus the reality of what was found. I’ll also ask him about other myths and conspiracy theories that Chase Hughes and others spread; for example, ideas that there are secret groups controlling the world with sophisticated psychological operations, and how that relates to theories about Operation Mockingbird , the Tavistock Institute, and more. We’ll talk about paranoia and conspiracy theories in general, and how likely it is for groups to actually pull off large secret plots, especially in the modern digital age when so much is recorded and monitored. 

If you want to learn about the reality of MK Ultra, apart from this interview, I recommend being very careful with the books and other resources you consume. The truth is there is just so much demand for paranoid content, like the stuff Chase Hughes spreads. And high demand equals high supply. And aside from just filling your head with nonsense, there’s a real risk you’ll make yourself more paranoid, and that it will negatively impact your mental health. 

My guest Stephen Kinzer has an impressive resume. Here’s some info that I learned from his website stephenkinzer.com; that’s Stephen spelled with a ph and Kinzer spelled KINZER. 

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him “among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling.” Kinzer spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent. His foreign postings placed him at the center of historic events and, at times, in the line of fire.

Stephen has published ten books, with one of his areas of focus being America’s attempts to manipulate and affect what happens in other countries. For example, one of his books is Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Another is All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Another is Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Stephen’s interest in MK Ultra can be seen as related to his interest in documenting how America has sought to affect and control people, whether that plays out in other countries or in this country.   

Ok here’s the talk with Stephen Kinzer.

Zach Elwood: Hi, Steven. Thanks for joining me.

Stephen Kinzer: Good to be with you to discuss this strange subject.

Zach Elwood: Yes. Uh, it’s, it’s a strange one and, uh, I’ve been curious about it for quite a while, even apart from the reasons I reached out to you. But, uh, maybe we could start with, uh, I was curious how you found yourself drawn into that, uh, subject.

How did you find yourself wanting to write that poisoner in Chief book?

Stephen Kinzer: I was working on a book that covered a series of US interventions in other countries. One of those was the intervention in which the United States participated in the overthrow and assassination of the Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

In researching that story, I discovered that the CIA. Had sent a guy with poison to the Congo. Uh, and I was quite, uh, taken aback by this. I think it might be the only time, certainly that I know of where an employee of the US government was sent to a foreign country with poison. Aimed at killing the leader of that country.

So I wanted to figure out who, who would’ve brought that poison? Would it have been perhaps a courier or somebody who does that kind of thing, carrying stuff as a job at the CIA turned out? No, it was not a courier, it was the guy who actually made the poison. And that was Sidney Gottlieb, who was then head of the CIA’s chemical branch at the same time that he was running, uh, MK Ultra.

So. I followed that trail a bit and I saw that Gottlieb was indeed later questioned about his involvement in creating poison pills and, uh, other chemical compounds to be used against, uh, real or presumed enemies of the United States. Uh. And they asked him about his involvement and making pills that were supposed to kill Fidel Castro and a few other things.

But the more I looked at Godly, the more I realized that his work in making poison pills was just a sidelight really, that wasn’t so important. He was just acting as a pharmacist. If he weren’t there, somebody else could probably have done that. But he was involved in something much bigger, much different, and much more the result of his own conceptions, and that was MK Ultra.

So I began to realize there was a big story that was hidden behind a small footnote. And since I’m always looking for untold stories, I sense that Gotlieb was a big one.

Zach Elwood: Uh, besides your own book, um, what, what stood out to you as, uh, some of the better books about MK Ultra out there? Because I think it’s, I think for a lot of people it’s hard to separate fact from fiction in that area, so I’m just curious what resources besides your, besides your book you’d recommend.

Stephen Kinzer: There’s really a pretty thin file of material about MK Ultra. Uh, the first book that really is the foundation of this field, if you want to call it that, was the search for the Manchurian candidate by John Marks. He was the one that filed the Freedom of Information Act request that produced what little we know about MK Ultra since most of the files were illegally destroyed at the end of Gottlieb’s term, at the CIA.

Um. So I would be careful in reading a lot about MK Ultra. Um, a lot of things have been overlaid onto MK Ultra because it fits so perfectly into the conspiratorial mindset that seems best to describe the era in which we’re living. Um, while I was researching that book, I realize that, uh, all you’re only, you’re always only a few clicks away.

From wild theories, although the more I got into the book, the more I thought that some of those wild theories maybe weren’t so wild after all.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, uh, that’s, uh, and I will, I, I do an intro where I’ll explain this obviously, but the, yeah. The reason I wanted to reach out to you was how, how I got interested in that was examining this guy, chase Hughes, who makes all these wild and exaggerated and clearly false claims about.

MK Ultra, which in his case the motives are there to exaggerate those claims because he himself claims to be able to brainwash people and such. So he has obvious motivations, which I think map over to other people’s can, can have other motivations in terms of like sensationalism wanting to get clicks, or they may actually be, you know, believing in all these conspiracy minded things of all sorts.

Uh, but I’m curious, uh, it might be a. Wide area to touch on, but I’m curious what you see in terms of like the public’s perceptions of the amazing and impressive things that were done during MK Ultra versus what the reality might be. Because what, from what I’ve found looking into it, it including reading John Mark’s book and other resources, it mainly seems like nothing impressive was done.

Like the ran up into the, the limits of, um. What’s possible with mind, mind control and didn’t actually find much there. Uh, but I’m curious, maybe you could talk about in your view, what, what was impressive that was done, if anything, and what’s the public’s perceptions versus the reality?

Stephen Kinzer: I think one of the reasons that the CIA was interested in pursuing this possibility of.

Seizing control of people’s minds had to do with the cultural context, uh, in which those people grew up. There were countless stories and books and movies about, uh, people using drugs that would make, uh, their victims say or do what they want. Uh, you give a guy a drink and then he goes back to the embassy where he works and he takes all the files out and gives ’em to you.

Uh, or you turn somebody into a psychopath or you turn a psychopath into a normal person by, uh. Shaking a, a watch in front of his eyes, something like that. So, uh, the early CIA officers who conceived MK Ultra were shaped in part by fiction. Now, the odd part about this is that MK Ultra itself then wound up giving birth to an even larger amount of, uh, literature, books, video games, articles, everything.

Um. You’re absolutely right that, uh, so Sidney Gottlieb worked for almost all of the 1950s on the MK Ultra Project. The goal of that project was to find a way to seize control of people’s minds. Uh, officers at the CIA believed probably correctly, that if you could do that, the prize would be nothing less than Global Mastery.

Um, but. Uh, although Gottlieb concentrated in very gruesome ways on every possible, uh, approach to the secret of mind control, he finally. Confirmed in the end that he was barking up the wrong tree. That there was no such thing as mind control. There were psychologists who were telling him this as he went along, but, uh, he didn’t wanna listen to that.

He wanted to make his own experiments. And at the very end, actually, uh, there was some move in the ccia A to try to curb him and limit what he’d be able to do. And he, in his typical zen fashion, went even further and said, you don’t need to curb me, I just wanna end it. Let’s, let’s just cut the cord. Uh, so.

MK Ultra produced, I guess one big conclusion, which was Gottlieb’s conclusion that there’s no such thing as mind control. But by the time the CIA reached this conclusion, uh, the public mind was already captured by the idea. I mean, now there are so many references to MK Ultra and related, uh, projects in all sorts of books, and.

Magazines, articles and movies. You see it cropping up all the time. MK Ultra has become something like a code word for all the evil secret things that government does. Um, its actual history is brutal enough, uh, without having to embellish it.

Zach Elwood: Right. And I was perusing the reviews for your book, poisoner in Chief, and you can see some of this, uh, these kinds of beliefs in the reviews and some of the reviews in your book.

So I’ll read a couple of them. You know, one of ’em said, does a superb job of purporting to exhaustively detail all the goings on within MK Ultra while hide, while hiding the most important truth of all. We did in fact discover how to effectively control the human mind, and we were able to systematize various approaches to doing so.

And with great and ongoing success, another person says. The author goes out of his way to deny things that are obviously MK Ultra. The real fact of the matter is that Steven Kinser and his book are what is called Limited Hangout, which is a reference to a term, you know, he, they’re accusing you of like putting out a little bit of information to hide the the real truth.

Right? And somebody else wrote, the scariest part is knowing these experience experiments never ended. They have just changed over time. So this is just to give a sense of. There was just a lot of public perception that there were all of these successful mind control experiments and that these things even went even further and they might still be ongoing.

Uh, but I, I’m just, I’m curious if you, have you encountered a lot of that and where do you see, uh, do you have a sense of where a lot of those motivations and feelings come from to, to, to create that? I, I know, I know part of it is just general. Paranoia and related to political, political polarization and pessimism and things like this, but I’m curious if you’ve encountered that in the wild and where you see those kinds of views Emanating from

Stephen Kinzer: my book, poisoner in Chief is strictly factual.

I don’t speculate. Everything in there has a footnote. On the other hand, I’m painfully aware that I have only discovered a small portion of what. MK Ultra was and what Sidney Gottlieb did, uh, most of that remains unknown and probably will remain unknown forever because as I mentioned earlier, um, Sidney Gottlieb and the then CI, a director, Richard Helms, agreed to destroy all the records of that project.

So that leaves a void onto which everybody can project their own fantasies, right? It’s true that, uh, in a sense, uh. Government and our political system and our economic system have come up with forms of propaganda, uh, that you could describe as a mind control, I suppose. Um, and in that sense, maybe you can say that, uh.

Although Gottlieb was looking at it in the wrong direction, like trying to use drugs to control people’s minds. Maybe there are other ways to do it and maybe governments have managed that. Yeah, that yeah. Like a, like advertising. Exactly. Um,

Zach Elwood: it’s a form

Stephen Kinzer: of

Zach Elwood: mind control.

Stephen Kinzer: Exactly. So in that case, yeah, I think, uh, mind control can easily be said to exist in terms of the masses.

Um, but the fact that. So many of the secrets of MK Ultra, uh, were destroyed. Lee allows everybody to project what they think might be in that black box. And, uh, it’s frustrating to me to know that, uh, many of the protocols for all the experiments that were carried out have been destroyed. But I still left with the conclusion that Gottlieb came up with at the end of the 1950s, which is that there’s no such thing as mind control Now.

He probably knew more about that subject than anybody else in the world at that time. So I’m going to take his word for it. On the other hand, he was speaking about 80 years ago, uh, or 70 years ago. And so he might’ve been right when he was talking about it. But now there’ve been so many advances in neuroscience and cyber technology and computer programming that you have to wonder if now there might not be experiments going on.

Um. In those areas and, and to find a, uh, uh, a kind of revived interest in mind control through modern technologies. Now, nobody knew MK Ultra was going on in the 1950s. It was one of the deepest secrets in America. Um, so it’s not so unreasonable to speculate that some agencies in the US and abroad today might be experimenting with mind control again.

But as for. Hidden aspects of MK Ultra and, and the suggestion that it continued to function, uh, decades after Gottlieb, uh, turned off the faucet, uh, puts us into a different area. And as I said, uh, I’m only dealing with facts in my books, so I don’t go beyond that, that. I’ve heard a lot of speculation and people talk about Sirhan Sirhan and, uh, the Unabomber and so forth.

Those are kind of interesting cases, but there’s no factual evidence for any connection there. And, um. Just my own style of writing is to stick to what’s factually provable.

Zach Elwood: Well, that’s what, yeah, in that area. I mean, not, not even for MK ter, but it is a general, uh, aspect where when people are talking about kind of conspiracy minded, uh, theories, paranoia, you often hear people say.

We don’t know. It didn’t happen. It could have happened, but it’s like that’s not a reason to believe in something. Right? Like it’s not a reason to believe somebody like Chase Hughes who tells you confidently that these things, these various things happened. It’s like, yeah, sure, many things could have happened, but we don’t, if you don’t have evidence for, it’s not a good reason to embrace the most paranoid views of something.

Right. I, I guess that’s what I. Come down to when it, when it comes to people who seek to want to believe some of this stuff, it seems to me,

Stephen Kinzer: and I just would like to add to that, that MK Ultra actually gives ’em the perfect canvas on which to paint. Uh, it was so wild, uh, in its conception and in its execution that you can allow your fantasies to run wild.

And there have been fictional, uh, accounts of, uh, what might have happened and what could’ve. Have been developed. Uh, but those are all fiction. I think. Um, one of the reasons that MK Ultra was first launched, as I mentioned earlier, was fiction. It was a result of people think con concluding that what screenwriters and novelists could imagine the CIA could make real.

And I think there’s also a kind of a bleeding of reality into that kind of, uh, sensation today.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I mean, the same with the, the, uh, you know, kind of, um, remote viewing, um, you know, telekinetic kind of experiments, the men who stare at goats stuff. I mean, that’s like also a perfect canvas to make, you know, if you want to imagine all of these magical things being possible, that’s like a great canvas for letting, letting you see what you want to see if you’re predisposed to those things too.

Right?

Stephen Kinzer: Indeed, that’s exactly the way it works. And, uh, again, MK Ultra was. So bizarre that there’s no reason for some people not to think it was even more bizarre than we know.

Zach Elwood: Right. Um, I want, if you’re up for it, I want to talk about a couple specific things that, um, this guy Chase Hughes talks about specific exaggerations, and I’m curious if you have takes on them with the research you’ve done.

One person he focuses on is George Estabrooks, which was a, um. I guess he was a, a psychologist in Canada who claimed that he could do extreme hypnosis and create split personalities and such. From my reading on, it didn’t, it didn’t seem like he actually was involved, like he was writing letters to try to be involved in MK Ultra from, but from the little I’ve, I’ve found about it, it doesn’t seem like he did much.

There wasn’t evidence that he was involved much. He seemed like a kook. Uh, but in Chase Hughes’s telling, and I think in other people’s telling. You know, they, they’ve, they’ve li lifted him, him up to some sort of like, you know, have, having God-like powers of hypnosis and mind control, which is like in their, in their telling of the story evidence of the amazing things that were done.

But I’m curious if you came across anything about George Estabrooks specifically.

Stephen Kinzer: I don’t think that a number of these people, that all of the people who were involved in experimenting in this area in the 1950s were actually connected to the CIA or to MK Ultra. Uh, there may have been some overlap, but people were out freelancing, and particularly in Canada.

Um, interestingly enough, Canada has done something the United States never did, which is actually to compensate some of the victims of, uh, MK Ultra. But, uh. Some one, one thing we don’t know is, uh, what were the contractual relationships between these various figures who were doing their experiments and the ccia A so, uh, every, anything beyond that in, in this case or in others, in which we try to figure out what exactly this person was doing and whether that person was under contract and whether the CIA was aware of what he was doing are, uh, uh.

Subjects that we don’t know anything about. So you can speculate, uh, but just keep it in the realm of speculation.

Zach Elwood: Just a quick note here about George Estabrooks: He’s a guy who had made all sorts of claims about being able to create multiple personalities and do extreme hypnosis and essentially program people, and these over-the-top claims are why Chase Hughes focuses so much on him, as it lends credibility to Chase’s claims about being able to do the same. But there’s no evidence that such things were done. When I read John Marks book about MK Ultra, Estabrooks was an extremely minor figure mentioned only a couple times, and he came across like a nutty kook;  Estabrooks was writing to people in the American military and trying to get himself involved in some way in these MK Ultra-related programs, but there was nothing in John Marks’ book that showed Estabrooks being involved; Marks just includes the letters Estabrooks had sent, as an example of how various people in psychology were interested in helping with such efforts. From reading a little of Estabrooks’ writing, I think he was a strange narcissist making grand, absurd claims to promote himself. And there were quite a few people in the MK Ultra era who made all sorts of inflated, deceptive claims. Just as we have such people around us today. 

To give you a sense of how easily this nonsense can spread, though: on Estabrooks’ wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Estabrooks, it reads: During WWII, he helped the US military create “hypnotic couriers”—agents who could carry secret information in their subconscious without knowing they were doing so, making them “un-interrogatable.”  The source for that claim? Estabrooks’ own writing. But Chase and others repeat such things as if it was fact. 

Okay, back to the talk. 

Zach Elwood: Uh, what about Operation Mockingbird? That’s another thing I hear about. Have you, do you know much about that and the claims people make about that thing?

Stephen Kinzer: Operation Mockingbird was a real project.

It was an operation quite far reaching and wide ranging in which the CCIA sought to influence the news that people received, particularly news about other countries. This produced, uh, a number of journalists who were on the CIA pay role. And were planted in, uh, various news organizations. It involved, uh, all the way up to phone calls from the CIA director to leading, uh, uh, controllers of media outlets, asking ’em to publish or not to publish things.

So Operation Mockingbird definitely was a real operation that was aimed at controlling what Americans get to hear about the world. And also as a subset, what they don’t get to hear about the CIA and what it actually does. But it was not connected to MK Ultra. It doesn’t, it doesn’t have anything to do with using drugs.

It has to do with more traditional campaigns of things that Edward Bernas came up with about how to influence people’s minds, uh, rather than, uh, try to use pharmacology on individuals.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, like you said before, there’s these various areas where it’s just about public persuasion and you can paint a very pessimistic and scary portrait of that, which is what Chase Hughes and other people do where like taking Edward Bernas for example, or the Tavistock Institute or whatever it may be, it’s like it’s completely banal and understandable that governments.

Seek to control perceptions, right? Like that’s not surprising. And in some sense it’s entirely banal. They may be doing various unethical things or bad things in the pursuit of that, but it’s not any more surprising than, uh, you know, any, any kind of, you know, during a war effort trying to change public perceptions.

And it’s not, even if we may criticize it in various ways, it’s not anything like amazingly, uh, controlling in the sense that some of these people would paint the image of like. These people have perfected these amazing psychological control mechanisms. It’s, it’s just like people trying to influence perceptions in various ways.

Right? Um, so, but there, there, it’s possible to paint this picture of like tying in with MK Ultra and all these things, which is what some of these people do. But it’s also just a, a, a pretty. Understandable, uh, outcome of, you know, people feeling under pressure and feeling like they, they want to try to control, uh, or, or influence public perception in the same way advertisers do.

Stephen Kinzer: Well, the whole advertising idea is, is, uh, based on propaganda. You know, there used to be an old joke, uh, about a, an American and a Russian who are coming home on a, on a plane together. This was during the Soviet days. And they’re talking about Russia. The American guy says, well, I really liked Russia, but there’s so much propaganda there.

And the Russian guy says, it’s true. We have a lot of propaganda, but our propaganda is nowhere near as good as yours in America. And the American guy says, what do you mean we don’t have propaganda? And the Russian guy says Exactly. Yeah. So, uh, it’s, this is nothing unusual from one country. I mean, the effort to try to twist public opinion has always been a part of government.

Um, but. That’s very different from using pharmacology to influence the minds of individual people or groups, uh, or

Zach Elwood: hypnosis. Yeah.

Stephen Kinzer: Yeah. The spraying LSD into a radio studio, uh, they, the C-C-I-A-M-K Ultra did actually do a lot of work on hypnosis and didn’t find that it, it was working, that their idea was.

Again, you can hypnotize somebody into doing something that under normal circumstances they would never do Now, uh. And the CIA actually received correspondence from Carl Menninger, who was one of the leading psychologists in America, ran the famous manager clinic, and he told them there is no way that a human being can be made to do something that’s against his fundamental principles.

Uh, but he, he godly didn’t wanna believe that. And, uh, that’s where a lot of these movies about hypnosis and uh, other kinds of mind control come into play. And it’s also why. So many of those kinds of movies and other media, uh, events, uh, were built on MK Ultra. It’s, it’s almost tailor made, uh, for exaggeration because it was itself such a crazy exaggeration.

Zach Elwood: Do you have any takes on, um, the claims that, uh, or the beliefs that Sirn Sirhan, um, was brainwashed to kill, uh, Robert Kennedy, which is something Chase Hughes claims. He’s, he confident believes he, he’s sure of, but I’m curious if you have any, uh, he came across any information about that, those ideas in your work?

Stephen Kinzer: It’s a curious case. There’s some interesting aspects to it, but that’s all as far as I know. I mean, there’s no, there’s no evidence. Uh, you can put pieces of the story together if, if you wanna make it come out a certain way. Um, and I, I just. Stray, stay away from that. When I, when I was working on the book, I looked on some of those cases, including the Sirhan case, to see if there could be some relation, but I didn’t find any.

So, uh, poisoner in chief doesn’t venture into those areas. It’s crazy enough the story that I tell in that book without me having to go off into areas that nobody’s sure about.

Zach Elwood: Uh, reading John Mark’s book, I was struck by, uh. I mean, the one thing that stood out to me the most was just the bungling aspect of so many of the situations.

It was almost comical, not not just disturbing, but just downright comical some of the anecdotes from that time period about what they were doing. But I’m curious, is that mainly your perception, or do you feel like, did, did anything stand out to you as things that you were actually like, wow, that was really impressive, something they did?

Or was it mostly just like, this is a bunch of bungling and weirdness?

Stephen Kinzer: Uh, it was more like the latter. So it was really amateur hour. There was no science there. It should have been a scientific project and rigorously, uh, carried out with scientific method, but it wasn’t, I mean, for example. Uh, MK Ultra set up a bordello in San Francisco.

Uh, men were, uh, brought there and then the girls would give them a drink in which had been poured. Whatever compound MK Ultra wanted to test that day. And then the, uh, man’s reactions would be monitored, but who’s monitoring them? Some big overweight drug. Agent who’s sitting behind a one-way mirror on a portable toilet, drinking cocktails out of a pitcher and just watching what’s going on in the, in the bed.

There’s no, there are no experts there, there are no psychologists or people understanding about sexual practice or how the mind works. So, uh. It really, it was, uh, it was done in a, a very slip shot way. It destroyed and damaged a lot of lives. It was hugely reckless. Uh, and the reason for that was that people felt the threat from the Soviet Union was so great that the loss of a few lives or a few hundred lives, it was meaning.

Right. Uh, but, uh, really, uh, it was like Gottlieb was throwing, uh, a lot of cement onto the wall and just seeing what would stick. He just wanted to try everything and, um. Well, that’s one of the reasons that he got into LSD. They, they were fascinated when LSD was invented because they thought it might be, as one of gottlieb’s scientists put it, the key that could unlock the universe.

But on their, in their LSD experiments, they found out that surprise LSD is very unpredictable. It might make some people tell the truth. It might make some people tell wildly exaggerated lies. So, uh, they went through stabilizing everything. Yeah, they tried everything and it was, it was not rigorous. One of the things that really jumped out at me was that this project should have been run by scientists and people who really had a, a concept of how to develop a, an experimental project, but in fact, perhaps, uh.

Motivated by what was perceived to be the urgency of the situation. Everything was tried from electroshock to sensory deprivation, to wild drug combinations. Um, and there didn’t seem to be any real scientific monitoring when we were carrying out these experiments in Germany. We would, there wouldn’t be anybody in the room that spoke German, who would even know what the person was talking about.

So really it was very amateurish, uh, by scientific standards.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. That was, that might be one of the anecdotes I was thinking of where they brought this guy over this kind of clownish figure from America to, I think it was Germany, where he was claiming like, oh. I know how to do this. I’ve done some hypnosis stuff with the, my students at this college, and they brought him over and he like brought his, uh, you know, girl girlfriend over, like his, his mistress or something.

And he was doing these, uh, trying, they were trying to use him to do stuff to these prisoners, trying to get information out of him. And it was just like a clown show. Like he didn’t have the slightest idea. And it was clear, very clear that he didn’t know what he was doing. And he was like, oh, these. These people are very different than my students.

You know, it was very, it was very silly, but it just, I was laughing out loud at some of the stories in the, in the, in the Marks, uh, book. I, I, I admit, I haven’t read your book. I, I’ve just skimmed a little bit of it. Uh, but yeah, what stood out was just kind of this, uh, kind of a clown show of, of efforts, which getting to the Occam’s razor of what happened with hemp.

K It’s like, you know, you would, the, the fact that so many of these stories are like that. And, you know, theoretically they did impressive things. But when you, when you add in all of the clownish and the bungling that were apparent and you add in like what Sidley Sidney Gottlieb said, and other people have said about it, it’s like the Occam’s razor, uh, uh, of what happened seems to be that it was largely this bungling ineffective affair that they.

Ran up against the limits of what you can do with such things and recognize that. But, uh, that seems to be my, my takeaway. Well,

Stephen Kinzer: just, just saying that essentially puts a target on your back by you because you’re sexually denying the fact that the, the, the theory that. Actually, it’s way bigger than we know about it.

This is you just seeing the type of the iceberg, which is true, but it’s not true that anyone knows what’s in the rest of the iceberg.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, exactly. Getting back to the idea that like, sure, there’s things that are unknown, but that’s not a reason to embrace things that you don’t know. Right? It’s like you could make the same claims about the extreme paranoid in certain views, which people spread.

It’s like you don’t know either, so why are you embracing the most paranoid vision? Right? Like that’s, that’s what I get back to. It’s like. You’re, you’re also, they’re, they’re the ones embracing the certainty about things that they can’t be certain about. You know, people

Stephen Kinzer: like Chase people. And I, I would just repeat that MK Ultra is tailor made for this because it was so bizarre.

It was totally secret. It was gruesome and brutal. Uh, it was based on wild ambitions and, uh, it was carried out, uh, with full legal approval. So Sidney Gottlieb had what amounted to. A license to kill issued by the US government. So when you put all that together, um, it’s wonderful fodder for a lot of movies and video games and stuff, uh, whether those, uh, are really based in reality.

Is something different. So I, I don’t mind people having wild speculations including about MK Ultra, but just be sure you understand that there’s speculations, it’s, it’s like everything else in life, you know, it’s great to have a fantasy life. I think it’s very important, but it’s really important to understand what’s fantasy and what’s reality.

Then you can let your fantasies run wild as long as you realize that they’re just fantasies. And in my work, uh, in that book, poisoner in Chief and in my other books. Uh, I try to stay away from that, uh, lure and just stick to, uh, what I know I can prove and what I can put a footnote in my book to prove.

Zach Elwood: Uh, I’m curious. Uh, you know, I’ve, I I’ve spent time on the, uh, political polarization front. I’ve written some books aimed at trying to reduce toxic polarization and, and some of that ties into the. Paranoia that a lot of people have, you know, across the political spectrum, there’s just a lot of pessimism about what the other side is doing or what political enemies of various sorts are doing, and that increases in highly polarized times.

But one of the things that I’d be curious to get your take on is I’ve spent a good amount of time explaining how these big plots that people imagine happening are just very unlikely. I mean, a. They’re, they’re unlikely to succeed because we’ve seen time and time again how hard it is to keep even small plots under wraps, let alone, uh, large plots, you know?

Uh, but I’m curious for your take on that, and in terms of people’s ideas of big plots going on around them. My, my take on it, one of my takes is that one of the reasons that it’s, uh. Less likely than it was in the past is there’s so much more monitoring of all sorts of things these days. You know, audio, emails, video recordings, surveillance, everywhere.

It’s easy to set up the systems to release information if you yourself were to get killed or something. These kinds of things. So in various ways, these, these systems make big plots less likely, including even an attempt to make a big plot because people know how easy it is for people to leak information.

But I’m curious to get your take on that, that kind of worldview.

Stephen Kinzer: It’s definitely true that, uh, there was a time probably during the Eisenhower administration was the last moment when people really thought all these operations would remain secret forever. Nobody believes that anymore. In the age of leaks and surveillance and journalism, uh, it’s very difficult for something that large, uh, to be concealed.

But this is always, there’s always been a, a drive to do this. For example, I’m still interested in, uh, the, uh, death of Doug Alt, the Secretary General of the United Nations, who went down on a plane over the Congo during that Lumumba crisis. Um, and I, uh, got a report that. Or I, I read that maybe there could have been a joint operation between the Belgian, French and American Secret Services.

And I talked about this with a guy that I know who’s had a lifetime inside the CIA, and he told me that that secret could never have been kept if there were three different agencies all working on a plot to kill a major figure like that, you would know about it by now, that those things can’t be kept secret forever.

Um. So I, I do think it’s important to look behind, uh, the curtain that government, uh, uses to, uh, obscure what it’s doing. Uh, governments don’t tell the truth and neither do political leaders, and it’s important to, to know that and, and to, to try to, uh, uh, act accordingly. Um, on the other hand, uh. It’s also important not to think that everything is the result of hidden conspiracies.

Um, it’s, it’s, you don’t wanna be a non conspiracy theorist and believe that everything is the way that it seems to be because it isn’t. Um, but Right.

Zach Elwood: There’s definitely plots. Yeah. There’s, there’s people always trying to do various things. Yeah.

Stephen Kinzer: But sometimes I feel that too much attention to how the world is being governed by.

Secret plots takes attention away from the fact, from the overt plots from what you can actually see, right? You don’t have to speculate about the world to understand that there are a lot of dark webs and networks out there that are pushing, uh, huge projects like wars and upheavals and overthrows of governments.

Uh. That’s all out there. So why do we need to go to another level of thinking that, uh, there are intense secret conspiracies when there are so many ones that are easy to detect and sometimes, uh, are, don’t get the focus they deserve.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, when I’ve talked to people about this, you know, some of the, you know, I’ll ask for examples of big plots that people can name that they think have been successful for a while, and you know, some of the things that they name are just not good examples.

For example, there’s the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which a lot of people thought was a conspiracy, but it was actually completely in the open, like the, the people talked about that experiment openly, and it only just got attention for it later. So that’s just to say some of the things that are in people’s minds about.

Various big conspiracies and bad conspiracies aren’t even conspiracies. They’re just misunderstandings of what actually happened. And I and I, and I think the difficulty of keeping plots under wraps is why, you know, even like if you take Russia for example, who does various, you know, underhanded operations, it’s like they seem to know that.

You can’t really keep much of that under wraps. And it’s like they, they seem to have come to the conclusion like, well, even if the word gets out that we’re doing this, it doesn’t really matter because it can still be effective. Right. So that’s what it seems to me. Anyway.

Stephen Kinzer: Let me make a couple of comments.

First of all. In the 1980s, in the wake of all the scandals that shook the CIA, um, the US government came up with a new way of intervening in foreign countries. The CIA wouldn’t destabilize governments anymore, and the reason was that those projects always wind up becoming public and it’s very embarrassing to the CIA and to the United States and it’s harmful to our foreign policy

Zach Elwood: right

Stephen Kinzer: back FARs.

Yeah, so the US created something called the National Endowment for Democracy, which was a government funded organization that wound up spending hundreds of millions of dollars around the world in countries where we wanted political change, where we didn’t like the government. These projects were all branded as democracy promotion, or, um.

Independent media building civil society. Uh, so these were the same kind of projects that the CIA used for years. But there’s no danger of the secrets being revealed because there are no secrets. They just do it out in the open.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Stephen Kinzer: So that has become the way that we influence countries and that has resulted in the overthrows of government.

It has been a successful technique,

Zach Elwood: right. And it’s all done in the open. Yeah. The nice thing is you don’t have to hide anything. It’s just, it’s basically just. Persuasion and propaganda or what, you know?

Stephen Kinzer: Yeah. That’s the beauty of the whole idea or the, the pernicious beauty of it. And I would just, uh, add one other thing.

I, I, uh, when, when Poisoner in Chief first came out, I did a little book tour and, uh, I actually gave a talk at my own university, brown University. And one of my colleagues, another professor raised her hand and asked the question, which I really think, uh. Or she made a comment. I, I think it was the best thing I heard in my whole book to her.

She said, you know, you say that Sidney Gottlieb admitted there was no way to brainwash people. And you say that he never managed to brainwash anyone. He said, she said, I wanna disagree with you. I think he did manage to brainwash one person. He brainwashed himself. He made himself believe in that. There was mind control out there.

There was a holy grail and all he had to do was find the right place to dig and he would find it. So in a sense, I thought that was a very trenched comment that, uh, although he never managed to, uh, brainwash anyone else, he brainwashed himself and a few of the people around him.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Uh, well, this has been great, Steven.

Uh, I, I, I wondered if you’d, uh, I, I know you’re probably getting a lot of, um, requests because of your Iran work. Um, do, would you like to share any observations before you leave about the Iran situation or, um, is that maybe too big a topic to, um, get into?

Stephen Kinzer: All I can say is that one way it relates back to what we’ve been talking about.

Is that the American people have been fed a constant diet of attacks on Iran. How many times have you heard that Iran is so close to building a nuclear bomb, that it’s the, uh, principal sponsor of state terror in the world? Um. You don’t hear about the richness of the story in Iran. Most people don’t even know that the whole slide toward tyranny in Iran began in 1953 when the CIA destroyed the only democracy that Iran ever had.

So Iranians are very aware of this, but we aren’t. And that shows a great success of, uh, propaganda campaigns that probably might even be more. Important, more valuable than anything that Sidney Gottlieb imagined doing during MK Ultra.

Zach Elwood: Right. Right. Okay. This has been great, Steven. Thanks a lot for your work and thanks for taking the time for this.

Stephen Kinzer: Okay. Good to have been with you. Thanks.

Zach Elwood: Okay. Uh, Steven, don’t turn it off or anything. I need to.