Former CIA Agent Gives Background Info on MK Ultra, Midnight Climax, and Charles Manson

The J.Rogan Experience. Did you get a chance to look at that chaos book that I told you about? Yeah. Yeah. Tom O'Neill, who is a friend of my good friend, Greg Fitzhimmons, wrote an insane book that took him 20 years about Manson and the CIA and LSD. What did you think about all that? Well you've touched on some, I mean it's, or Tom touched on some really interesting things. What I liked about his book, and I went through it, I read it, is that he's actually, I think, very honest about the shortcomings of what he ended up doing and the research that he went through and where he couldn't draw connections. So I give him a lot of credit. I think it's well worth the read and it's a hell of a personal story that it took him this fucking long to make his way through with a variety of reasons. But luckily it's been a tremendous success. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's really, he sold out almost immediately and the paperbacks are sold out too. I mean he's, I think... Well look, Manson is a huge draw. It is that, but it's also a fantastic account of all the things that happened with the Manson family and all those people that were alive back then about how this guy kept getting out of jail. They kept arresting him and they kept saying, this is above my pay grade and they would let him out. Yeah. And that's, for me, that's the strangest part about the whole story. I mean this idea that was Manson a lab rat for the CIA and how far down that rabbit hole do you want to go? Well, O'Neill is pretty clear about that. It's not a particularly solid connection. It's a tenuous connection, I think he called it, between one of what used to be a contractor or a researcher for that old chestnut MK Ultra. Jolly West. Yeah. Yeah. Jolly West. Yeah. What did you think about all that? I'm sure you know about Operation Midnight Climax and all this stuff that's absolutely true. Yeah. I don't know. It'd be interesting to know how many people are aware. I mean I know some people that, that's what they do. Let's explain Midnight Climax. Operation Midnight Climax was a CIA funded program where they dosed up johns, they created brothels and dosed up johns with LSD against their knowledge. And without their knowledge. And let them fornicate and have a good old time with these ladies of the evening. Man, my God. And watch them and film them and studied them. And when you say it that way, I'm in if you want money to produce that movie. Yeah. It is actually, yeah, it's true. It fell under the sort of umbrella of this MK Ultra, which is public knowledge. I'm not, obviously we're not talking about that at turn. Let's also give them the benefit of the doubt. When LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman, they really needed to figure out what the fuck this was. And they needed to figure out like, could this be used against Americans? Could this be used against the president? What is this? Is this a truth serum? What are the benefits? What's the pros and cons? What are the dangers of this stuff? Well, that's a national security angle. It's very important that they did study it. Right. And so from context, and again, we talked about that towards the beginning is, you know, which something we don't normally do, right? So you were judging people from history now under the, and so we're not using context of what was the, what were the conditions? We're talking about the 1950s, the 1960s. Well, early, yeah, late 40s. I mean, so what have you got? You got the the end of the World War Two, you got the Cold War. It's the late 40s. You've got the Soviet Union that is heavily invested in a variety of experiments. Mind control, brainwashing was sort of the term of the culture, right? And brainwashing was a big issue. Not a big issue, but it was, it captured people's imagination back then. So the late 40s, early 50s, it was a Korean War. Yeah, we had an existential threat, right? We had nukes pointed at each other. We had, you know, drills in schools, kids hiding under desks. I mean, what the fuck? So with the fear that the Chinese or the Soviets were going to develop mind control abilities was pervasive. And it sounds, you know, you talk about it now and everybody rolls their eyes and goes, oh my God. But you're absolutely right that you have to understand the context with which then Alan Dulles, who was the, at the time, the director of the CIA. By the way, the guy who Kennedy fired and wound up being a part of the Warren Commission after Kennedy was murdered, which was very strange. Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, I like that. I like where that could go. So, so anyway, we got, we got Alan Dulles, who in 53, early in 53, says, all right, we have to understand what the Soviets are doing, particularly the Soviets. But we also had, you know, again, I'm sure some folks listening know all this, but a lot of folks probably don't. We had POWs returning, American POWs returning from Korea. That was a big issue, right? Because some of them came back, again, quote unquote brainwashed, you know, and some of them didn't want to return because, you know, again, brainwashing, you know, mind control that, you know, perhaps the Chinese had developed these techniques. So initially the idea was defensive. How do we protect ourselves against this new threat within this Cold War, against these enemies who appear to be devoting great deal of resources against this? Well, so initially it started out as a defensive effort. MK Ultra was the umbrella name for a whole bunch of over 140 projects, sub projects underneath MK Ultra. It was all based around chemical substances, use of chemicals, use of drugs, behavioral issues with human beings, creating false memories, deleting memory, influencing the behavior, again, of individuals. There were a variety of projects that fell under this MK Ultra. And it was, again, starting out as a defensive issue, but then quickly became sort of an offense. How do we become the leader in all of this, which is typical, right? It's typical in how things develop. It's like cyber warfare. You know, initially it's defensive and now you think, okay, now we got to figure out how to make it work on our behalf. And sometimes it's important, like when they shut down the Iran nuclear program with a virus, essentially a computer virus. No, absolutely. And where this went off the rails in a handful of ways, in many ways, was testing on unwitting subjects. Unwitting such as LSD and a variety of other substances. Yeah. Whoops. And those subjects, unwitting subjects, ranged everything from in federal prisons to state mental hospitals. And that's where Manson comes in. And that's where Manson comes in. And a variety of other people, you know, who, it's just, it's, I would recommend people, you know, dig in. Don't, you know, don't settle on just one account. And one of the things that people should also do if they want to read about this is read any testimony that came out of the CIA. And there was some testimony. There were documents written by the Inspector General back in, and this time period was about 53 through, at least officially acknowledged, 1964. And then the program was wrapped up. And I believe there were still federal programs, military programs, others that were still looking into issues related to the use of chemical substances for everything, again, from interrogation to behavioral adjustment. And a lot of these things were funded through cutouts. So you'd set up, again, this is, you know, early 50s, mid 50s, early 60s, set up financing vehicles, you know, through, say, you know, what appear to be nonthreatening grant programs, you know, from research institutes. So you'd loop in academic institutions or researchers. And MKUltra had, at least acknowledged anyway, over 80 academic institutions and others that were either wittingly or unwittingly working on their behalf in various research programs. So yeah, this Midnight Climax program, basically, they'd kit out a safe house as a brothel, and they would have the hookers slip LSD or whatever substance to the Johns. And then behind a mirror, you'd have a, suppose, like a researcher, right? I mean, this is where it got weird, sitting there, you know, having a drink and watching these, you know, the hooker and the john have sex, and then they'd be analyzing the impact of the LSD on them in terms of their ability to talk. And would they... Was the hooker in on it? Yeah, the hooker was in on it. Was she an employee of the CIA? You know, and it wasn't just the agency, you know, like the Army was involved in these things as well. But they would get, you know, cash payments, and oftentimes the... Are any of those guys alive? Get out of jail free card. You know what... Ladies, if you're out there, listen to me. Come on. Whatever you need. Come forward. I'm here for you. Come on the show. There was a... You could wear a Boba Fett mask. We'll hide your identity. I don't know why I said Boba Fett. But I mean, just imagine. I mean, so it's... Okay, so this was clearly, you know, clearly was off the rails, right? And they had one of the guys that was involved in this... He was with what used to be called the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a guy named George White, was, you know, involved in like the San Francisco cat house. And, you know, according to the stories, he'd sit there, you know, with a martini in his hand and watch the couple have sex. And then he... And he would have like prepped the hooker to say, okay, after sex, now this appears to be the best time to get them talking. So ask them about their job and let's see if they'll talk about their job. The idea being, could we influence and like entrap potential assets overseas for operational reasons? You know, was there some use, you know, for operational purposes? But basically it was just, you know, George getting his rocks off, watching couples having sex and, you know, very, very strange shit. But you're right in that... And so again, this went on till 64. MKUltra, interestingly enough, not to spend too much time on it, but Richard Helms was the director at the time in the early 70s. And he and a guy named Gottlieb, Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of technical services at the agency, they agreed that the smart thing to do in 73 before Richard Helms left and Gottlieb left the agency was to destroy all the records. So they purged all the records of MKUltra that they thought existed. This was investigating the church committee back in 75. And then 76, I think it was, they found a bunch of financial records, you know, that had not been purged because they had been kept, you know, audits of... And again, you're talking about like 149 sub-projects of MKUltra. So you can imagine each sub-project has its own accounting and you got to turn in your receipts for the LSD that you bought or the hooker you're paid off or whatever, you know, it's all here's my receipt, can I have my $12 or whatever you paid for a hooker back then. And so probably not 12 bucks. But they found some financial records. And so that became then a matter of another investigation up on the Hill. And Stansfield-Turner, the time the CIA director testified at that point. And that's why I brought my laptop is because Stansfield-Turner's testimony is actually pretty interesting as far as MKUltra goes. And he talks about, we've attempted to group the activities covered by the 149 sub-projects into categories under descriptive headings, wouldn't you? In broad outline at least, this presents the contents of these files. The headings of the categories of all these various projects that ran under MKUltra, and this gives you a pretty good quick sense of what they were doing at the time, research into the effects of behavioral drugs and or alcohol. There were 17 sub-projects probably not involving human testing. This is a testimony from the director of the CIA, Stansfield-Turner. 14 sub-projects definitely involving tests on human volunteers. Volunteers. 19 sub-projects probably including tests on human volunteers. While not known, some of these sub-projects may have included tests on unwitting subjects as well. While not known. While not known. And then six sub-projects definitely involving tests on unwitting subjects. Research on hypnosis, acquisition of chemicals or drugs, aspects of magician's art. What? Magician's art? Yeah. Yeah, like slipping them a Mickey or something. How do you do that sleight of hand? Studies of human behavior, sleep research, behavioral changes during psychotherapy, motivational studies, studies of defectors, assessment and training techniques, polygraph research, funding mechanisms for MK-Ultra external research activities, research on drugs, toxins and biologicals in human tissue. Activities whose sub-objectives cannot be determined from available documentation. Anyway, it goes on. But it gives you a sense of what the hell was happening during this period of time. But again, this doesn't justify it. Obviously it doesn't. But you're absolutely right that to have a full understanding of this, you have to look at the context of where we were at that time. And where we were was smack dab in the height and elevation of the Cold War. Knowing that our adversaries, our existential threats were engaged in this sort of behavior. Now, George White was not really a researcher or anything. He would just sit behind a mirror watching some people get off. So clearly, and all the unwitting subjects involved. But look, they were slipping LSD to agency employees without telling them. Really? Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's just... Yeah. It's not that long ago, but we have to think about it in terms of the same way we thought about Abraham Lincoln. In the context of the times, this wasn't such a horrendous thing to do. They didn't know any better. Because it was really... They didn't know what these substances would do to people. And there wasn't a lot of ways to find out. The Harvard LSD studies that they did that they believe in part were responsible for the Unabomber. There's a lot of other shit that was responsible for the Unabomber, including particularly his childhood. But they did a lot of these studies because they didn't know. I mean, there's one way to find out. How do you get responsible human subjects? How do you get people to do... Well, there's not a lot of ways other than just test people. And unfortunately, yeah, what this ended up being was using the most marginalized people out there, like sex workers or prisoners or whatever. Or Johns. Or Johns. But that whole thing. But where Tom O'Neill's book is really interesting in a couple of ways is if you jump. So MKUltra kind of finished up in 64 officially. That's when the Inspector General came out from the agency and said, you got to know. You can't do this. They had a new Inspector General and they looked and said, this is clearly not where we are supposed to be. But interestingly, funding mechanisms that were used to, again, to dole out grants or to provide a cutout between government and research that was being done. But some of those continue to exist for other programs, other research. And in 67, you have the Summer of Love, San Francisco. And Tom O'Neill writes about this and it's very, very interesting. But you had the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which in part was running a couple of projects that were supposedly getting funding from the National Institute for Mental Health, which had previously been a funding mechanism also for MKUltra a few years in the past. And Roger Smith was a guy who was getting his PhD in Criminology. He was working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. And he was also Manson's parole officer. And to your point, Manson was like a brook trout or a rainbow trout that is in some catch and release stream. He was constantly arrested during the 67-68 period. Remember the killings happened in August of 69. And he kept getting released. And he had been in prison. In 67, early in that year, he had been released from prison. So he was on probation. Any violation, certainly some of the things he was getting arrested for, should have sent him back to prison, but he wasn't. So that to me is one of the most interesting parts of the book is this revolving door that Manson was in. And eventually we all know what happened to him. But yeah, working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, that's where Manson would go along with some of his followers. And they were part of a study. And they were, I'm sure, getting their LSD from there. But also this guy, Jolly West, who was involved in MKUltra, also ended up having an office at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. But again, to Tom O'Neill's point. Do you know that clinic closed down about four months after Tom's book came out? Been open for over 50 years? It's crazy. What are the odds? Yeah, I know. What are the odds? I didn't see that coming. Yeah, but again, I like the book because he does seem to be trying to let the facts of all his research lead the way rather than trying to prove a point that he comes up with at the beginning of his book. Well, he also exposed the prosecutor, Bugliosi, and all the issues that was going on with him that led to him wanting to follow the narrative that they had laid out that Manson was trying to incite a race war and ignore all the other indicators that there was some deeper connections. And yeah, was Manson a... was he an informer for the Bureau or for local law enforcement or some other outfit? That's... Hard to tell. Hard to tell, but it's compelling in light of the fact that he kept getting released. He seemed to have a get out of jail free card. He also seemed to have an unlimited supply of acid. That was what's fascinating. And he also seemed to employ the same techniques that apparently the CIA had employed when they had done experiments on prisoners, including the fact that he would force them into weird sexual situations and pretend to take LSD himself, but not really participate and then influence them. And he seemed to be doing things to them in terms of trying to alter their behavior and getting them to do things that were outside the norm, including murder. Yeah. I mean, did he see... Yeah. Did he have a sense from his time there at the clinic or dealing with... What's his name? Roger Smith, his parole officer, who again was also a criminology doctor, a doctoral candidate, I guess. And so it was... But look, Manson was... He was not a rocket scientist. He was illiterate for the most part until he ended up in prison and maybe... Which is why it was so weird that he was able to manipulate so many people so well. But it was also... He was the perfect guinea pig. I mean, you're talking about a guy who spent half his life in federal penitentiaries. Yeah. Yeah. And also, you're putting it in context of the time. What else did you have going on? You had sort of this, again, this awareness of the impact of LSD on the counterculture. So you had federal agencies like the bureau, for example, worrying about, oh my God, what's what are these hippies going to do next? And they were worried, obviously, about the Black Panthers, but it was also more than that. It was the... The anti-war movement? Yeah. Just the general counterculture and the impact of drugs on it. So it's a fascinating... I think it's a very interesting read. And I think it's worth the read because, again, he spent so much time trying to make his way through and get this book. 20 years. Yeah. It's a crazy story. If you haven't heard the podcast, please listen to it with Tom O'Neill.