The Secret History of MK Ultra w/Tom O'Neill | Joe Rogan

So you brought up MKUltra. Yes. MKUltra was a government program run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Originally started as something called Bluebird in 1948-49, morphed into Artichoke, and then in 1952 became MKUltra. It was a mind control program, a brainwashing program. The CIA was trying to learn how to control people's behavior without their knowledge. Now, this all came out in Senate and Congressional hearings in the 70s that was exposed, but nobody knew about it until 1974 when Seymour Hirsch, the New York Times reporter, reported it on the front page of the paper. So their main objective was to commit or to create what they called hypno-program assassins, people who would kill on command, popularly known as Manchurian Candidates, after a book that was written in 1962 and later became a movie and then a movie again. The people would be, through drugs and hypnotism, the objective was to get people to go and commit an act of murder against their moral code and have no memory of their programming and be amnesic even of the act after the fact often. That was just one of, that was their main goal, but they were also trying to create couriers, people, you know, military people that they could implant messages, send them, you know, across dangerous areas where they were, at that time it was the Vietnam War, and deliver messages and then have them wiped from their memory in case they were captured. They had all kinds of objectives. So Roger Smith was supervising Manson when he became exactly what, or he was able to do exactly what the MK Ultra program had been trying to create and do for, at that point, about 15, 17 years when it was all exposed in the 70s and there were these hearings, first the Rockefeller Commission hearings and the church hearings, and then finally, Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye held hearings. The CIA admitted that they had done this, but they, no one would say exactly what they did. All the records have been destroyed when the two people who ran it, Richard Helms, who had become the director of the CIA in the 60s, and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was kind of the mad scientist who had supervised all the, all the, they had safe houses in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, where they would experiment on people that were lured into these apartments and houses that were either look like prothels or hippie communes or whatever. And the people who were working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic that was run by another Smith, which makes it a little confusing, but Dr. David Smith, who founded it, he had given an office to a scientist named Jolly West, Louis J. West, who, was, when, when the hearings occurred in the 70s, identified as a top MKUltra researcher. He was an academic, come out of the military, had been at the Oklahoma University, or Oklahoma University, University of Oklahoma, sorry, and then UCLA running the psychiatric divisions. He denied ever being involved in MKUltra. And this was one of the moments, I think it was 2001, when, you know, things really kind of shook the course of my reporting, was I learned that West had been at the same place that Manson was in the Haight in the summer that Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create. And I knew, actually, I had interviewed West about seven years before for a story I did about celebrity stalkers, the people who were obsessed with stars and then only to kill them or try to kill them. And he was an expert in violence, hypnotism, brainwashing, and he was the chair of the psychiatry department at UCLA at that point. He was dead when his name came up in the Manson story. And there wasn't a lot of, I mean, I guess there was a lot of Google then or a little bit, but when I did a little research, I found out that there had been these allegations that he'd been involved in MKUltra. He always denied it. He was never prosecuted, never even investigated. He went to his grave threatening to sue anybody that said he would have anything to do with this kind of a program. Again, through another long story, but I got access to his files, which had been left at UCLA and never, they had never been processed when I called. And when I made the request, it took him two or three months to process the papers. I went through them through the whole summer looking for a needle in a haystack. And it was intuition. I just thought there might be something there. And sure enough, I eventually found it. It was correspondence between Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb, the doctor that ran MKUltra, beginning in 1953, about conducting experiments on people without their knowledge to get them to have amnesiacs, amnesia of the acts after they were programmed. And everything that he had been accused of and denied, he did. Not only did he do it, he created the blueprint for the whole program with Gottlieb. The fact that all these kind of interesting research programs merged at the hate at the clinic and then Manson came out of it with the power to do exactly what MKUltra had been trying to create up to that point, I thought was worth investigating further. And that's why I kept going and going and going. They did a lot of crazy shit back then. Are you aware of Operation Midnight Climax? Those were the safe houses in San Francisco. Well, that was the brothel version of it, where they lured these johns into these brothels and then dosed them up with LSD and studied them. Yeah, George Hunter White was the head CIA guy and he would sit behind a two-way or one-way mirror and watch them. The johns would be dosed with LSD. They tried aerosols or just drinks, different things. And then they would study their behaviors. Aerosols? Yeah, aerosol sprays. Really? But that would get the prostitutes too then, no? No, the prostitutes would get them in there and then they'd go to the bathroom or something or to be in the bathroom. Oh, and then they'd spray them? And again, the problem is the records are so scant because Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all the records in 1973 when the two men left the agency. And the only reason anybody ever discovered that it existed was a whistleblower, somebody who used to work for the State Department who remembered that there were records in a warehouse and they were just financial records from the beginning of the program in 52 until the end and the possible end in 73. And it was just financial records of where research took place, how much was spent, what kind of equipment was bought, but nothing about the content. The guy that found that ended up testifying to Congress and working with Seymour Hurst to expose. It was named John Marx. He wrote the first book about MK Alter that came out in the mid to late 70s called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. And after he wrote his book, he spoke, did a little bit of a tour and then retreated into obscurity and never would do an interview again until I approached him in the early 2000s. And when I told him what I had, what I had found in Westphiles, these documents, he agreed to meet with me at his townhouse in Washington, D.C. And he told me, he said, the reason I stopped talking or writing about this was people were camping out on my front lawn, you know, telling me that they'd been victims of MK Alter. He goes, I couldn't go anywhere. My whole life became crazy because everybody thought that they were subject to this because nobody knew. They did these drug tests on prisoners, hospital patients, Johns, hippies, people that had no idea that this was going on for 25 years. So Marx became the authority. So he had never given an interview till he met with me. And when he looked at my documents at that point, I think I had about 10 or 12 or 15 pages that grew eventually because I kept going back to the files and getting more. He said it was the most unredacted, uncensored account of what the real objectives were and what was really being done. He had never. He said, if I had had that, my whole book would have been different. So that's one of the problems about saying, well, how much did they do or how far did they go? There's barely any record. And that's another reason it took me 20 years because I was trying to find out whether or not Wes had actually interacted with Manson and were the girls. I mean, I knew he was in the same facility. I knew that everybody that worked there because I interviewed everybody that was alive. Most of them were still alive back in the late 90s and early 2000s when I did this. They all said, oh, yeah, Charlie was, you know, we knew it was Charlie and the girls. They come in every day or every few days to see Roger. And Wes was there recruiting subjects. Now, West, while he was there that summer, had opened something called what he called the Haight-Ashbury Project. And in his correspondence and papers that I found, he called it a laboratory disguise as a hippie crash pad. And just like the operation at midnight, safe house, they call them safe houses, which were disguised as, you know, bradellos and that type of thing or brothels. These this was an apartment that was decked out or as he called it, tricked out to look like a communal hippie place. He had six graduate students and I have his letters to them before they came to work in this. He goes, grow your hair long, wear jeans, dress like hippies and lure people in there. So they ran that for the summer of 67 and West was getting people from that Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic on Clayton Street and sending them around the corner to Frederick Street to participate in that. And I got the diaries of some of the graduate students who were there and they all in these diaries said, we have no idea what we're really supposed to be doing here. We feel like this whole thing is a cover for something else. What does Jolly want? Why is he making us bring these people in? So I imagine doing that to graduate students, telling them to bring people in and drug them up. Imagine telling them, well, some of them like to. I'm sure they were also encouraged to use. I mean, imagine being a graduate student and this is your project on people. I mean, that sets up even if you leave that program and go on to do legitimate work, the ethical foundations of your career are set up in such a strange way. You're manipulating people against their knowledge. Well, they didn't know who they were doing it for. That's why they were always questioning it. So, you know, I don't know how I found one or two of them after and they were very careful talking to me. I'm sure they felt like they were going to go to jail. Well, that's the thing. If any of these experiments or whatever was going on resulted in a death, there's no statute of limitations on murder. Right. Right. I mean, that's one of the biggest disappointments of my book is that people like West aren't alive to answer the question. You know, to answer to this. And it was really frustrating for me because, again, his name was on the front page of the New York Times in 1977 when they had the major hearings about M.K. Ultra and it identified him as the head of the psychiatry department at UCLA, a very prominent doctor, a researcher. And he said he had nothing to do with that. He'd never used LSD on humans and he wouldn't. He said they had asked them and he said, no, I have all these letters between him and the guy who was running the program describing how they're going to do it. Hide it from his colleagues. When he started it, he started at Lackland Air Force Base. He was running the psychiatry department at the hospital there in 1952 when he was there running that hospital. That's when he started his experiments on prisoners, human subjects. And one letter to Gottlieb, he says, eventually we have to take these experiments out into the field. Oh, Jesus. Exactly. What does that mean? Well, if you haven't gotten it through a Chapter 11 yet, you haven't gotten to the Jimmy Shaver case. No, I haven't. A year after, maybe Jamie did. A year after West contracted with the CIA to do these experiments, July 4th, 1954, a three-year-old girl went missing from the parking lot. From the parking lot of a bar at about 11 or 12 at night. Now, her parents was a heat wave. They couldn't sleep. They went to the bar. They brought their two kids. They let them play in the parking lot at midnight. The little girl disappeared. They organized a search party. About three or four hours later, they went to a gravel pit. And two airmen had called or two itinerary guys had called the police, the local sheriff, and said there's a guy here that wandered out of the brush with scratches and blood, no shirt, and he doesn't know how he got here or who he is. The police came. His name was Jimmy Shaver. He was an airman. They did a search and they found the little girl's body not too far away. And she had been raped and murdered by this guy who had no memory of doing it. The guy had no history of violence. He had a couple of kids and he was a flight instructor at the school. He'd been in the military for a number of years. I think it was in his early 30s. Well, guess who became his psychiatrist in preparation for the trial, Jolly West, who inserted himself into the case and then extracted his memory from him using sodium. And then he had a couple of years from him using sodium pentothal where he admitted to the murder. Now, in the context of what we found out West was doing and what his objectives were at that same time, it raises huge questions about this was an experiment gone wrong, you know, that he was part of one of these experiments at Lackland Air Force Base where he was signed up. He had had treatment for severe migraines, experimental treatment at Lackland. That's another, you know, a smaller sub-chapter in the book. Does it describe what kind of experimental treatment he received? No, no, because nobody – I mean, I have all the testimony. There was actually a trial, a retrial, and sentencing. And every time it came up, it was really frustrating because he never testified. So it was either his wife or his mother who would talk about it. It was mostly his mother saying, well, all I knew was they wanted him to be involved in this two-year study to try to relieve his migraines. He would have such horrible migraines, he would put his head in buckets of ice water. The people who described encountering him that night when he was arrested and immediately taken out of the sheriff's custody by the military police and brought to Lackland and then back to the sheriff's, he was in a trance. The doctors tested him for alcohol because they thought, well, maybe he's drunk. He had no alcohol – just a little bit of alcohol in his system, but he wasn't drunk. And after the fact, they found out that he had – I mean, I don't want to get into this because it's really getting into the weeds, but he had hallucinated that this little girl was a cousin who sexually abused him as a child, and he was trying to kill her. Her name was Beth Rainboat. All this stuff came out of the trial. Jolly West in 1955 sent a report to Sidney Gottlieb, which nobody had seen, and it was another document I found in his files, announcing that he had learned how to – or developed the technology to remove true memories and replace them with false memories and a human subject without their knowledge, which was one of the main goals – the biggest goals of the MKLTA program. And again, when the CIA – when they had the hearings in the 70s, the CIA said nothing was successful. Everything we tried was a failure. It was a waste of money. We shouldn't have done it. And not just me, but most experts think that that was a cover, that they didn't want to admit that they had developed these technologies that were effective. They also claimed that they had released everything they had. I found the same report where West said that he had learned how to replace true memories with false ones without a person's awareness, but they had removed that from the report and then released it to Congress. So that's a crime right there. So there's a lot of that stuff in the book. So the speculation is that this guy, through these experimental treatments, that they had dosed him up with LSD and experimented using these MKLTA techniques and did that to him and then do some sort of – Well, this is speculation. I'll go there for this. The guy had no history of violence, never been arrested, stellar, upstanding citizen. His only problem was he had these horrible headaches. All of a sudden, he shows up by a small girl's body who had been brutally murdered with no memory of doing it. A year earlier, Dr. West, who became a psychiatrist within a week or two, possibly had experiences with him before, but there was no record. Oh, when I tried to get the record from the medical center at Lackland, his name was Shaver. I think it was S-A-S-I was missing. So where Shaver would have been in the medical records, it was gone. So I couldn't find out whether he had actually participated in any kind of experimental program there. So is the speculation – again, this is speculation – that he did commit the crime, that he was somehow or another induced into committing this crime? Yeah. And again, this is speculation. It's completely circumstantial. The objective was to get people who would go out and do things – not even necessarily kill. That was the ultimate goal. But to do things against their will, against their moral code. Right, but how would they know that this child would be there? How would they know? Oh, no, no, no. She wasn't targeted. So was it just that they put it into his head to go do that to anyone? Yeah, something clicked and went wrong. So it wasn't a precise thing? No, no, no. Nobody really knew what – this was the very early days of experimenting with LSD in the early 1950s. West was one of the premier researchers in LSD, but he was still new to it. He had actually come out of – he had first gained national attention for being one of four or five doctors who treated Korean prisoners of war, who returned to the United States after they had made confessions of spraying the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. The United States said that we don't use that. That's against the Geneva codes. And these guys were brainwashed by the North Korean Chinese Soviets. So when they were brought back after the war, West and four other psychiatrists were assigned to deprogram them. What a lot of researchers believe is that they actually brainwashed them into thinking they'd been brainwashed by the Koreans, where they actually were telling the truth, because there's a lot of evidence that's come out recently, it's five, six years ago, that we did use these weapons in Korea. Oh, boy. You'll double-cross. Yeah.