MK Ultra fact vs. fiction: Exaggerated claims of mind control and Manchurian candidates | with Stephen Kinzer

Along comes this other program called MKUltra. 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 erasing identity. Keep that in mind. In the 50s, they were becoming experts at erasing people's identity. With the proliferation of assassination attempts in the past several years, are you at all concerned about the possibility of Manchurian candidate type scenarios? I think the Manchurian candidate stuff has been going on for a while. It looks like Sir Hens, Sir Henn, to me. I'm 100% convinced that he was programmed to do that. Oh, shit. There are step-by-step programs they have for creating a Manchurian candidate. The CIA is on 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 get that done. MKUltra 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 MKUltra because it fits so perfectly into the conspiratorial mindset that seems best to describe the era in which we're living. Its actual history is brutal enough without having to embellish it. 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 Steven Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief. Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA search for mind control. Gottlieb was the head of the infamous government program MKUltra. If you are not familiar with MKUltra, 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 general-hearted torturer. The agency's quote, Poisoner in Chief. As head of the MKUltra 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 MKUltra 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 amassed more than 1.5 million YouTube followers. The motive for Chase Hughes to lie about what happened with MKUltra is obvious. He claims that he himself can brainwash people and install multiple personalities in people and such things. So lying about MKUltra makes his own claims that much more believable. 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 MKUltra from the fiction, the fiction about it that people like Chase Hughes spread. The fact is that there are many people who spread all sorts of myths and legends and speculations about MKUltra for various reasons. This means it can be hard to figure out what really happened. In this talk with Kinzer, we'll talk about his observations about MKUltra. 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 MKUltra apart from this talk, 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 that will negatively impact your mental health. My guest, Stephen Kinzer, has an impressive resume. Here's some info that I learned from his website, stevenkinzer.com, that Stephen spelled with a P-H, and Kinzer spelled K-I-N-Z-E-R. 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. That's the end of a quote from his website. Stephen has published 10 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 Shaw's Men, an American coup in the roots of Middle East terror. Another is Overthrow, America's century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq. Stephen's interest in MPA 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. Okay, here's the talk with Stephen Kinzer. Hi, Stephen, thanks for joining me. Good to be with you to discuss this strange subject. Yes, it's a strange one. And I've been curious about it for quite a while, even apart from the reasons I reached out to you, but maybe we could start with, I was curious how you found yourself drawn into that subject. How did you find yourself wanting to write that Poisoner Chief book? 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. And I was quite 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 would have 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 MKUltra. So I followed that trail a bit, and I saw that Gottlieb was indeed later questioned about his involvement in creating poison pills and other chemical compounds to be used against real or presumed enemies of the United States. And they asked him about his involvement in making pills that were supposed to kill Fidel Castro and a few other things. But the more I looked at Gottlieb, 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 MKUltra. 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 Gottlieb was a big one. Besides your own book, what stood out to you is some of the better books about MKUltra out there, because 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 book, you'd recommend. There's really a pretty thin file of material about MKUltra. The first book that really is the foundation of this field, if you wanna 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 MKUltra, since most of the files were illegally destroyed at the end of Gottlieb's term at the CIA. So I would be careful in reading a lot about MKUltra. A lot of things have been overlaid onto MKUltra, because it fits so perfectly into the conspiratorial mindset that seems best to describe the era in which we're living. While I was researching that book, I realized that 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. Yeah, so that's, and I do an intro where, I'll explain this obviously, but yeah, the reason I wanted to reach out to you was how I got interested in that was examining this guy, Chase Hughes, who makes all these wild and exaggerated and clearly false claims about MKUltra, 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 have other motivations in terms of sensationalism, wanting to get clicks, or they may actually be, believing in all these conspiracy minded things of all sorts, but I'm curious, 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 MKUltra versus what the reality might be, because from what I've found looking into it, including reading John Mark's book and other resources, it mainly seems like nothing impressive was done, like the ran up into the limits of what's possible with mind control and didn't actually find much there, but I'm curious, maybe you could talk about in your view, what was impressive that was done, if anything, and what's the public's perceptions versus the reality? 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 in which those people grew up. There were countless stories and books and movies about people using drugs that would make their victims say or do what they want, 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 them to you, or you turn somebody into a psychopath or you turn a psychopath into a normal person by shaking a watch in front of his eyes, something like that. So the early CIA officers who conceived MKUltra were shaped in part by fiction. Now the odd part about this is that MKUltra itself then wound up giving birth to an even larger amount of literature, books, video games, articles, everything. You're absolutely right that so Cindy Gottlieb worked for almost all of the 1950s on the MKUltra project. The goal of that project was to find a way to seize control of people's minds. Officers at the CIA believed probably correctly that if you could do that, the prize would be nothing less than global mastery. But although Gottlieb concentrated in very gruesome ways on every possible 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 he didn't wanna listen to that, he wanted to make his own experiments. And at the very end, actually there was some move in the CIA 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 just cut the cord. So MKUltra 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, the public mind was already captured by the idea. I mean, now there are so many references to MKUltra and related projects in all sorts of books and magazines, articles and movies, you see it cropping up all the time. MKUltra has become something like a code word for all the evil secret things that government does. Its actual history is brutal enough without having to embellish it. Right, and I was perusing the reviews for your book, Poisoner in Chief, and you can see some of these kinds of beliefs in the reviews and some of the reviews in your books. I'll read a couple of them. One of them said, does a superb job of purporting to exhaustively detail all the goings on within MKUltra 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 MKUltra. The real fact of the matter is that Stephen Kinzer and his book are what is called Limited Hangout, which is a reference to a term, you know, they're accusing you of like putting out a little bit of information to hide the real truths, right? And somebody else wrote, the scariest part is knowing these experiments never ended. They have just changed over time. So this is just to give the sense of, there is 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. But I'm curious, have you encountered a lot of that and where do you see, do you have a sense of where a lot of those motivations and feelings come from to create that? I know part of it is just general paranoia and related to 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. 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 Elter was and what Sidney Gottlieb did. Most of that remains unknown and probably will remain unknown forever because as I mentioned earlier, Sidney Gottlieb and the then CIA 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. It's true that in a sense, government and our political system and our economic system have come up with forms of propaganda that you could describe as a mind control, I suppose. And in that sense, maybe you can say that, 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 I can understand. Yeah, like advertising. Exactly. It's a form of mind control. Exactly. In that case, yeah, I think mind control can easily be said to exist in terms of the masses. But the fact that so many of the secrets of MKUltra were destroyed, we allows everybody to project what they think might be in that black box. And it's frustrating to me to know that 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 gonna take his word for it. On the other hand, he was speaking about 80 years ago or 70 years ago. So he might have 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 in those areas and to find a kind of revived interest in mind control through modern technologies. Now, nobody knew MKUltra was going on in the 1950s. It was one of the deepest secrets in America. 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 MKUltra and the suggestion that it continued to function decades after Gottlieb turned off the faucet, puts us into a different area. And as I said, I'm only dealing with facts in my book. So I don't go beyond that. I've heard a lot of speculation and people talk about Sirhan, Sirhan and the Unabomber and so forth. Those are kind of interesting cases, but there's no factual evidence for any connection there. And just my own style of writing is to stick to what's factual, approval. Well, that's what, yeah, in that area, I mean, not even for MKUltra, but it's a general aspect where when people are talking about kind of conspiracy-minded, dearies, paranoia, you often hear people say, well, 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. 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 if you don't have evidence for it, it's not a good reason to embrace the most paranoid views or something. I guess that's what I come down to when it comes to people who seek to, want to believe some of his stuff, it seems to me. And I just would like to add to that that MKUltra actually gives them the perfect canvas on which to paint. It was so wild in its conception and in its execution that you can allow your fantasies to run wild. And there've been fictional accounts of what might have happened and what could have been developed, but those are all fiction. I think one of the reasons that MKUltra was first launched, as I mentioned earlier, was fiction. It was the result of people 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 sensation today. Yeah, I mean, the same with the kind of remote viewing telekinetic kind of experiments, the men who stare at goats stuff. And that's like also a perfect canvas to make. If you want to imagine all of these magical things being possible, that's like a great canvas for letting you see what you want to see if you're predisposed to those things too, right? Indeed, that's exactly the way it works. And again, MKUltra was so bizarre that there's no reason for some people not to think it was even more bizarre than we know. Right, if you're up for it, I wanted to talk about a couple of specific things that 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 Easterbrooks, which was, I guess he was a psychologist in Canada who claimed that he could do extreme hypnosis and create split personalities and such. From my reading on it, it didn't seem like he actually was involved, like he was writing letters to try to be involved in MKUltra, but from the little 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. But in Chase Hughes' telling, I think in other people's telling, they've lifted him up to some sort of like, having God-like powers of hypnosis and mind control, which is like 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 Easterbrooks specifically. Need anything from Tesco? Like Tesco finest salted pretzel or caramelized biscuit chocolate Easter eggs? 12 pounds each with your Tesco Club Card? Or Tesco finest extra fruity hot cross buns? Two packs for just three pounds? Because every little helps. Selected hot cross buns, majority of larger stores and online, end 6th of April, Club Card or app required, exclusions apply. 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 MKUltra. There may have been some overlap, but people were out freelancing, particularly in Canada. Interestingly enough, Canada has done something the United States never did, which is actually to compensate some of the victims of MKUltra. But some, one thing we don't know is, what were the contractual relationships between these various figures who were doing their experiments and the CIA? So anything beyond that, 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 subjects that we don't know anything about. So you can speculate, but just keep it in the realm of speculation. A quick note here about George Easterbrooks. 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 just no evidence, at least that I've seen, that such things were done. When I read John Mark's book about MKUltra, Easterbrooks was an extremely minor figure, mentioned only a couple times, and he came across like a nutty kook. Easterbrooks was writing to people in the American military and trying to get himself involved in some way in these MKUltra-related programs. But there was nothing in John Mark's book that showed Easterbrooks being involved. Mark's just included the letters that Easterbrooks had sent as an example of how various people in psychology were interested in helping with such efforts. From reading a little of Easterbrooks writing, I think he was a strange narcissist, making grand absurd claims to promote himself. And there were quite a few people in the MKUltra era who made all sorts of inflated deceptive claims like that, just as we have such people around us today. To give you a sense of how easily this nonsense can spread, on Easterbrooks Wikipedia page, it reads, during World War II, he helped the U.S. military create, quote, hypnotic couriers, agents who could carry secret information in their subconscious without knowing they were doing so, making them, quote, uninterrogatable. But the source for that claim is just Easterbrooks own writing. But Chase and others repeat such grandiose claims as if it was fact. Okay, back to the talk. 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? Operation Mockingbird was a real project. It was an operation quite far reaching and wide ranging in which the CIA sought to influence the news that people received, particularly news about other countries. This produced a number of journalists who were on the CIA payroll and were planted in various news organizations. It involved all the way up to phone calls from the CIA director to leading controllers of media outlets, asking them 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 MKUltra. It doesn't have anything to do with using drugs. It has to do with more traditional campaigns of things that Edward Bernays came up with about how to influence people's minds rather than try to use pharmacology on individuals. 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 used and other people do where like taking Edward Bernays, for example, or the Tavistock Institute or whatever it may be. It's like, it's completely banal and understandable like 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 any kind of, 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 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 just like people trying to influence perceptions in various ways, right? So, but 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 pretty understandable outcome of people feeling under pressure and feeling like they want to try to control or influence public perception in the same way advertisers do. Well, the whole advertising idea is based on propaganda. You know, there used to be an old joke about an American and a Russian who are coming home 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. So, this is nothing unusual from one country. I mean, the effort to try to twist public opinions has always been a part of government. But that's very different from using pharmacology to influence the minds of individual people or groups. Or hypnosis. Yeah, the spraying LSD into a radio studio. They see the IAMK Alter did actually do a lot of work on hypnosis and didn't find that it was working. Their idea was, again, you can hypnotize somebody into doing something that under normal circumstances they would never do. Now, they see IAMK actually received correspondence from Carl Menager, who was one of the leading psychologists in American Ren, 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. But he'd gotten me to want to believe that. And that's where a lot of these movies about hypnosis and other kinds of mind control come into play. And it's also why so many of those kinds of movies and other media events were built on MK Alter. It's almost tailor made for exaggeration because it was itself such a crazy exaggeration. Do you have any takes on the claims that, or the beliefs that Siran Siran was brainwashed to kill Robert Kennedy, which is something Chase Hughes claims he's confident believes. He's sure of, but I'm curious if you have any, you came across any information about that, those ideas in your work. 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 evidence. You can put pieces of the story together if you want to make it come out a certain way. And I just stray, stay away from that. When I was working on the book, I looked on some of those cases, including the Siran case, to see if there could be some relation, but I didn't find any. So 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. Reading John Marks book, I was struck by, 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 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 anything extend 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? It was more like the latter. So it was a really amateur hour. There was no science there. It should have been a scientific project and rigorously carried out with scientific method, but it wasn't. I mean, for example, MK Ultra set up a bordello in San Francisco. Men were 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 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 bed. There's no experts there. There are no psychologists or people understanding about sexual practice or how the mind works. So really, it was done in a very slip-shod way. It destroyed and damaged a lot of lives. It was hugely reckless. 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 was meaningless. But really, it was like Gottlieb was throwing a lot of cement onto the wall and just seeing what would stick. He just wanted to try everything. And that's one of the reasons that he got into LSD. 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 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 they went through everything. Yeah, they tried everything. And it was not rigorous. One of the things that really jumped out of me was that this project should have been run by scientists and people who really had a concept of how to develop an experimental project. But in fact, perhaps motivated by what was perceived to be the urgency of the situation, everything was tried from electro shock to sensory deprivation to wild drug combinations. 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 by scientific standards. 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 my students at this college and they brought him over and he like brought his girlfriend over like his mistress or something. And he was doing these, 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 people are very different than my students, you know, it was very silly. But it just, I was laughing out loud at some of the stories in the Marx book. I admit I haven't read your book. I've just skimmed a little bit of it. But yeah, what stood out was just kind of this kind of a clown show of efforts, which getting to the Occam's razor of what happened with Hemgeltcher, it's like, you know, the fact that so many of these stories are like that. And, you know, theoretically they did impressive things, but when you add in all of the clownishness and the bungling that we're a parent and you add in like what Sidney Gottlieb said and other people have said about it, it's like the Occam's razor 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 that seems to me might take away. Just saying that essentially puts a target on your back by, because you're essentially denying the fact that the theory that actually it's way bigger than we know about it. This is 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. Yeah, exactly. Getting back to the idea that like, sure, there's things that are unknown, that's not a reason to embrace things that you don't know. It's like you could make the same claims about the extreme paranoid and certain views which people spread. It's like, you don't know either. So why are you embracing the most paranoid vision? Like that's what I get back to. It's like, you're also, they're the ones embracing the certainty about things that they can't be certain about. People like to chase you. And I would just repeat that MK-Elter is tailor made for this because it was so bizarre. It was totally secret. It was gruesome and brutal. It was based on wild ambitions and it was carried out with full legal approval. So Sydney Gottlieb had what amounted to a license to kill issued by the US government. So when you put all that together, it's wonderful fodder for a lot of movies and video games and stuff. Whether those are really based in reality is something different. So I don't mind people having wild speculations including about MK-Ultra, but just be sure you understand that they're speculations. It's like everything else in life. 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, in that book, Poisoner in Chief, and in my other books, I try to stay away from that lure and just stick to what I know I can prove and what I can put a footnote in my book to prove. I'm curious, I've spent time on the political polarization front, I've written some books aimed at trying to reduce toxic polarization and some of that ties into the paranoia that a lot of people have 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 unlikely to succeed because we've seen time and time again how hard it is to keep even small plots under wraps, let alone large plots. But I'm curious for your take on that and in terms of people's ideas of big plots going on around them, my take on it, one of my takes is that one of the reasons that it's less likely than it was in the past is there's so much more monitoring of all sorts of things these days, audio, emails, video recordings, surveillance everywhere. It's easy to set up systems to release information if you yourself were to get killed or something, these kinds of things. So in various ways, 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 kind of worldview. It's definitely true that 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, it's very difficult for something that large to be concealed. But this has always been a drive to do this. For example, I'm still interested in the death of Doug Hummerschal, the secretary general of the United Nations who went down on a plane over the Congo during that Lumumba crisis. And I got a report that 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'd know about it by now. That those things can't be kept secret forever. So I do think it's important to look behind the curtain that government uses to obscure what it's doing. Governments don't tell the truth and neither do political leaders. And it's important to know that and to try to act accordingly. On the other hand, it's also important not to think that everything is the result of hidden conspiracies. 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. But there's definitely plots. Yeah, there's people always trying to do various things. But sometimes I feel that too much attention to how the world is being governed by secret plots takes attention away from the over plots from what you can actually see. 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 huge projects like wars and upheavals and overthrows of governments. That's all out there. So why do we need to go to another level of thinking that there are intense secret conspiracies when there are so many ones that are easy to detect and sometimes don't get the focus they deserve? Yeah, when I've talked to people about this, some of the, I'll ask for examples of big plots that people can name that they think have been successful for a while. And 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 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 think the difficulty of keeping plots under wraps is why even like if you take Russia, for example, does various 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 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. So that's what it seems to me anyway. Let me make a couple of comments. First of all, in the 1980s, in the wake of all the scandals that shook the CIA, the US government came up with a new way of intervening in foreign countries. The CIA wouldn't destabilize governments anymore. And that reason was 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. Right, backwards. 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 independent media, building civil society. 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. So that has become the way that we influence countries and that has resulted in the overthrows of governments. It has been a successful technique. 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. That's the beauty of the whole idea or the pernicious beauty of it. And I would just add one other thing. I, when Poisoner-in-Chief first came out, I did a little book tour and 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, or she made a comment. I think it was the best thing I heard in my whole book tour. 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. But he said, she said, I want to disagree with you. I think he did manage to brainwash one person. He brainwashed himself. He made himself believe 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 trenchant comment that, although he never managed to brainwash anyone else, he brainwashed himself and a few of the people around him. Well, this has been great, Stephen. I wondered if you'd, I know you're probably getting a lot of requests because of your Iran work. Would you like to share any observations before you leave about the Iran situation? Or is that maybe too big a topic to get into? All I could say is that one way it relates back to what we've been talking about is that the American people have been fed 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 principle sponsor of state terror in the world? 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 propaganda campaigns that probably might even be more important, more valuable than anything that Sydney Gottlieb imagined doing during MKUltra. That was a talk with Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief about the head of MKUltra, Sydney Gottlieb. Learn more about Stephen at StephenKinzer.com. This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Ellwood. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.