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The year was 1947, and America had traded one nightmare for another.
World War II was over, but victory came with baggage nobody had ordered.
The atomic age had arrived and suddenly every shadow contained the possibility of instant annihilation.
Kids practiced duck and cover drills in classrooms, diving under desks as if wood could stop a nuclear fire, and their parents built bomb shelters and stocked them with canned food and false hope.
But the bombs weren't the worst part.
Something far more disturbing was keeping Washington's power players awake at night.
The possibility that the human mind could be turned into a weapon.
So intelligence reports trickled in.
And the Nazis hadn't just built gas chambers.
They'd conducted mind experiments in concentration camps.
And SS doctors had injected prisoners with mescaline testing whether human consciousness could be manipulated like clay.
So the question was, could a person be turned into a puppet?
And this question was horrifying.
So when the war ended, America faced a choice. prosecute these monster scientists or recruit them.
Guess which option won?
So, through Operation Paperclip, the US welcomed Nazi researchers with open arms, scrubbing their records clean because their knowledge might prove useful.
Nice going, government.
Nothing says land of the free quite like hiring your former enemies to work on a secret project.
Then came Korea, where captured American pilots emerged from communist prisons speaking like broken robots.
And they confessed to war crimes with mechanical precision, their voices flat and extremely strange.
And intelligence analysis studied the recordings with growing panic.
So these weren't just tortured men, these were reprogrammed men.
And the terrifying conclusion was that the Soviets had cracked the code of human consciousness.
And in the halls of the newly formed CIA, established in 1947 to protect American interest worldwide, a simple but monstrous question emerged.
If they can control minds, shouldn't we learn to do it better?
This question would birth a program so dark that its existence would remain buried for over 20 years.
A program that turned hospitals into laboratories, doctors into torturers and innocent citizens into unwitting test subjects in humanity's most grotesque experiments.
Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder.
All things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful.
And today we are talking about a big daddy case.
Okay, a lot of you have requested this and I will feed you.
Mommy will feed you.
Sorry, what the fuck?
But we're diving into the CIA, into MKUltra.
And if something happens to me, now you know why.
But without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 down the highway, slam on the brakes and bust through this windshield into this crazy shit together.
So the Cold War had begun and the battlefield was the human mind itself.
In CIA offices, plans were already forming.
Codenames were being assigned and budgets were being approved.
And soon a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb would be handed control of a shadow kingdom where human suffering was the currency and consciousness was the target.
So America was about to ask the question that should never be asked.
What if we could break a person's mind, rebuild it, and control it like any other weapon?
And the answer would destroy more lives than any bomb.
And it would all be in the name of freedom.
The Central Intelligence Agency was barely three years old when it decided to get into the mind control business.
Created by the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA was supposed to be America's answer to Soviet intelligence, a shield against communist infiltration and a sword to strike the enemies abroad.
But what nobody mentioned in the legislative debates was how quickly protecting America would evolve into experimenting on Americans.
So the groundwork began with projects that sounded like rejected comic book titles.
At first came Project Bluebird, and that was in 1950.
And it focused on special interrogation methods and making people resistant to enemy brainwashing.
And the name suggested something peaceful, maybe even patriotic.
But the reality involved drugs, hypnosis and psychological torture designed to shatter human consciousness like glass.
And Bluebird would eventually evolve into Project Artichoke in 1951.
Because apparently someone in the CIA had a thing for naming horrific programs after innocent objects.
So Artichoke would push further into darkness, testing whether hypnosis and chemicals could turn a person into a remote-controlled assassin.
Think the Bourne ultimatum, except with real people and no Hollywood ending.
And the man tasked with running these horrific programs was a soft-spoken chemist named Sidney Gottlieb.
And to his neighbors in suburban Virginia.
He was just another government worker who grew orchids and stuttered slightly when he was nervous.
But to his colleagues in the CIA's Technical Services Division, he was something else entirely.
He was a brilliant scientist with an unsettling enthusiasm for exploring the outer limits of human suffering.
And Gottlieb had even earned the nickname Black Sorcerer in intelligent circles.
And I can tell you what, it wasn't because of his gardening skills.
Okay.
So the man had a gift for turning theoretical chemistry into practical nightmare fuel.
He could discuss the psychoactive properties of lysergic acid, diatelthiamine, thiamine.
Sorry, these words are hard.
With the same clinical detachment other people would use to talk about the weather.
By 1953, the early experiments had proven one thing.
Breaking human minds was definitely possible.
But the question was whether America wanted to industrialize the process.
And the answer would come from the top CIA director, Alan Dulles or Dulles, I don't really care, he's kind of a piece of shit.
So
And he was a man who understood power the way sharks understand blood in the water.
Because he'd spent years watching Soviets expand their influence across the globe.
And he was convinced that they were winning the psychological warfare game.
Because at the end of the day, the government's just playing games with us.
I should not talk as much.
I feel like I'm going to disappear.
So when Gottlieb approached him with a massive centralized mind control program doulas douls doula, whatever didn't hesitate.
So on April 13th, 1953, he signed the authorization for Project MKUltra.
And the name itself was typical CIA cryptography.
MK indicated the program belonged to the Technical Services Division.
Well, Ultra was a random word chosen to sound sufficiently mysterious.
It sounds ultra fucking stupid to me, but okay.
But what wasn't random was the scope, because this would be the most extensive mind control research program in human history, with a budget that would make most university research departments weep with envy.
So Gottlieb's first move was pure genius.
You define genius as spectacularly evil, like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers.
And he would convince the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland for 240000, which is roughly 4 million in today's money, which is fucking crazy.
So overnight, America had cornered the market of the most powerful psychoactive drug known to science.
So just think about that for a moment.
The same government who would later wage a war on drugs had just become the world's largest drug dealer.
All in the name of national security.
Thanks guys.
So, with unlimited funding and unlimited LSD and unlimited government backing, Gottlieb began assembling his empire of shadows.
So universities would provide the researchers and hospitals would supply the test subjects and prisons would offer captive populations who couldn't say no.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't care about the murderers and the you-know-whats, but everybody else.
I mean, if you stole a candy bar, I don't know.
It's inhumane.
But that wouldn't even be the biggest problem, because America had plenty of citizens and most of them had no idea what the hell was coming.
So MKUltra was about to begin its reign of terror, and they had the full blessing of the United States government.
Big shock.
Because in the Cold War, apparently the only way to protect American minds was to destroy them first.
So the irony was lost on no one except the people making the decisions themselves.
So by 1953 Sidney Gottlieb had assembled something that would have made Dr Frankenstein envious as hell.
A nationwide network of human experimentation that stretched across more than 80 institutions and encompassed over 150 separate research projects.
And the budget was staggering, $10 million.
And that would equal roughly $87.5 million today.
But money was just numbers on the ledger.
The real currency of MKUltra was human suffering.
So the program's objective was deceptively simple.
Discover how to control human consciousness using chemical, biological, and radiological methods.
And whether the subjects consented was completely optional.
And whether they survived was completely irrelevant.
So the chemical key to consciousness at the center of MKUltra's arsenal was a substance so powerful that amounts equivalent to two grains of salt could shatter a human mind.
Lasurgic acid diphthalamide, which is better known as LSD.
And that's what I'm going to call it from now on because I ain't saying that shit again.
So Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1938.
So for those of you who don't know, or for those of you who have tried it and still don't know, maybe you should know some history about it.
So let's go over that real quick.
The Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1938.
And he accidentally discovered its hallucinogenic properties in 1943 when he absorbed some through his skin.
I can't even imagine how his day went, probably terrible.
But the drug works by hijacking the brain's serotonin system, basically binding to receptors that normally help interpret reality.
And this causes the brain to process far more stimuli than usual, turning reality into a kaleidoscope of distorted perceptions, where users might see music or hear colors.
And under normal doses, an LSD trip might last from seven to 12 hours, maybe even less, depending on how much you take.
Not that I would know, but mk ultra researchers weren't interested in normal doses and they would push subjects into uncharted territory with massive quantities that could trigger ego disillusion, with the complete breakdown of personal identity, and at these extreme levels subjects could experience seizures, respiratory problems and dangerous hypothermia.
But the psychological effects were even more devastating because extended exposure could trigger flashback months or years later.
And, in some cases, hallucinogen.
Persisting perception disorder, which is HPPD, a condition so severe that victims are unable to adapt to living with permanent, reoccurring trips.
But for the CIA, these weren't side effects.
They were features.
Because the more LSD could break down the human consciousness, the more useful it became as a weapon.
So Gottlieb's empire operated on a simple philosophy.
Before you could insert a new mind into somebody's head, you first had to destroy the one that was already there.
And this was not therapy.
It was psychological demolition.
And the techniques read like torturers instruction manuals, because these were massive doses of LSD that could keep subjects hallucinating for weeks on end.
And they also used electroshock therapy, which was delivered at intensities that would have killed smaller animals.
And then there was sensory deprivation, and they would use sensory deprivation so complete it could break a person's grip on reality for days.
And they would also use drug combinations that turned human beings into chemical experiments, with researchers injecting barbiturates in one arm while pumping amphetamines into the other, just to see what would happen to the human nervous system when it became a battleground within itself.
I can't even imagine the psychological pain and just the pain in general that that person would experience.
And the most extreme case would involve a patient in Kentucky who received LSD every single day for 174 consecutive days.
Not weeks, nearly six months of continuous chemical assault on the human brain.
And the patient's name was just lost in history.
And their suffering just became a statistic in Gottlieb's files, hunting the vulnerable.
Because MKUltra didn't target the powerful or connected.
As one CIA officer coldly noted, they focused on quote unquote people who could not fight back, which was mental patients prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes.
And the agency even extended its reach to children, with documented cases of subjects as young as 8 to 10 years old, which is insane, so incredibly heartbreaking.
And they would go through months of LSD, electroshock, and sensory deprivation.
And James Whitney Bulger, the notorious Boston crime boss, actually volunteered for what he was told was an experiment to find a cure for schizophrenia.
And he did this while serving time in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1957.
So for more than a year, he received LSD injections daily.
And his description of the experiment reads like something from hell's own medical journal, stating eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state, total loss of appetite, hallucinating.
The room would change shape.
Hours of paranoia and feeling violent.
We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls.
Guys turning into skeletons in front of me.
I saw a camera change into the head of a dog.
I felt like I was going insane.
And years later, Bulger would finally realize the truth, saying I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me.
So the man who would become one of America's most wanted criminals had been transformed into a case study in government-sponsored psychological torture.
And that's when we enter Operation Midnight Climax.
Yeah, it's as bad as it sounds.
So the CIA's brothel among MKUltra's most twisted operations was a program that sounds too bizarre to be real, but it is.
And that was Operation Midnight Climax, where government-employed ladies of the night lured unsuspecting men to CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York for drug experiments.
And the agency would dose the men with LSD and then they would just watch through two-way mirrors as the drug took effect.
They didn't know that they were being drugged, by the way.
They thought they were gonna go to this safe house and get lucky.
And they would just record everything for later analysis.
And CIA operative George Hunter White, who ran the operation, later described his work with disturbing enthusiasm, saying I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun fun, fun.
Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie kill cheat steal, grape and pillage with the sanction of blessing of the all highest guy was fucking two sheets to the wind, fucking twisted piece of shit.
I don't even understand what he said.
And the recording devices in the room were disguised as electrical outlets.
And the subjects never knew they were being drugged, as I said.
They were just watched and recorded.
And they were just ordinary men who thought they were paying for sex.
And instead they just became unwitting participants in the most elaborate psychological warfare experiment in human history.
And perhaps nowhere was MKUltra's brutality more systemically applied than at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, where Scottish psychiatrist Dr Ewan Cameron turned a prestigious hospital into a laboratory of horrors.
Cameron, who was paid 69000 by the CIA between 1957 and 1964, developed techniques that would make medieval torturers seem humane by comparison.
And a specialty was something he called psychic driving.
A procedure where patients were subjected to continuously repeated audio messages on looped tapes, often exposed to hundreds of thousands of repetitions of a single statement over the course of their treatment.
That sounds fucking terrible.
I can't even stand in an elevator for more than like five minutes before.
That music drives me fucking insane.
I can't even imagine, like all jokes aside, how horrible that would be.
But this was just the beginning, because Cameron used doses of Thorazine to put patients into artificial comas and what he called a sleep room.
And the drug-induced sleep usually lasted from a few days up to 86 days, far longer than any of the patients expected.
Because what's consent, right?
So, while the patients were unconscious, the patients were subjected to electroconclusive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power.
So their brains were just bombarded with electrical storms that would have killed them in any larger of a dose.
And again, they're unconscious at this point, so they obviously can't consent to what they are doing.
And the de-patterning process was designed to erase personality entirely.
And Cameron would give his subjects mega doses of LSD and would subject them to drug-induced sleep therapy for up to 65 consecutive days, and applied electroshock therapy at 75 times the usual intensity.
So the goal was to reduce patients to what Cameron clinically described as a vegetable state.
And then came the repatterning, forcing patients to listen to specific recordings for up to 16 hours a day, with messages repeated up to half a million times, which is
Awful, like horrible.
Like I feel, like I don't know if it doesn't sound like much to people, like it's just words, but the psychological torture you can put on someone by putting them through that.
I mean, there's a reason why it's called torture.
This is like actual torture methods that multiple militaries use sticking someone in a room and putting someone on something, on repeat constantly.
So for the first 10 days, the recordings contained personal, negative messages designed to destroy any remaining sense of self.
So just imagine that a million, like millions of times, just telling you how worthless you are.
And you can't think of anything else because you have to listen to what's in your ears.
And then the next 10 days featured positive messages meant to rebuild the personality according to Cameron's specifications.
And one patient subjected to recordings 45 times, expressed her distress, begged the experimenter to stop playing it and even turned red and began hyperventilating and started shaking and continued to shake even after the recording was stopped.
And the researchers noted her reaction with the same emotional detachment they might use to describe the behavior of laboratory rats.
It's just chilling.
And it is his mind, no less, which may destroy mankind.
I never saw him once in all the times that I saw him that I wasn't afraid.
Every time I went down to his office, I would shake with fear.
And every time I'd see him coming down the hall, I'd shake with fear.
But I adored him.
The human cost was just staggering.
And louis weinstein, a montreal businessman who entered the institute for anxiety and digestive problems, emerged as what his son described as a human guinea pig, a poor, pathetic man with no memory and no life.
He lost his business, he lost everything.
Like these people were walking out of here sometimes, a lot of them didn't just complete shells of themselves.
But one of the most horrifying aspects of mk ultra was its willingness to experiment on children.
So bill yarborough, who believes he was a child victim of mk ultra, recalls experiments where, they quote they asked me to draw as many squares as possible on a sheet of paper until an alarm clock rang.
If i drew enough, i'd be given a candy bar, if not, i'd be handed over to a monster Again.
It's just like.
It seems so like mundane and stupid, but just, can you imagine just drawing?
And who knows how long they're making them.
These kids draw like squares, like could be an hour, could be 16 hours.
Like I just, I can't even, they're just so fucked up.
Like these people have no souls.
But his memories suppressed for decades eventually surfaced. saying.
My father worked in the war crime staff of the U.S.
Army after World War II, where he interviewed the Nazis running the Dachau concentration camp.
And that is where the Nazis conducted mind control experiments.
And that is where the CIA recruited some mind control experts for MK Ultra.
And I believe that it is the connection that led us into this program.
Just fucking scum of the earth, like recruiting Nazi doctors for an American program to torture their own citizens.
I just, I can't, I can't fathom it.
So the irony was just crushing.
America had prosecuted Nazi doctors for experimenting on children and then recruited those same doctors to refine their techniques and use them on American children.
Just a special place in hell for the whole lot. besides the kids, obviously.
So, in one of history's greatest ironies, MKUltra accidentally launched the 1960s counterculture movement.
And Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, received his first LSD through the CIA experiments while he was a student at Stanford.
And Robert Hunter, lyricist for The Grateful Dead, was paid to take LSD, psilocybin and mescaline and report on his experiences.
And Allen Ginsberg, the poet who would preach the value of psychedelic experiences, got his first acid trip courtesy of you guessed it Sidney Gottlieb.
And Hunter's description of his LSD experience reads like poetry.
He said sit back, picture yourself a swooping up, a shell of purple with foam crests, of crystal drops soft nigh.
They fall onto the sea of morning, creep very softly mist, and then sort of cascade tinkly bell-like, and then conglomerate suddenly into a peel of silver vibrant, uncomprehendingly blood-singingly, joyously resounding bells.
By my faith that this be insanity, then, for the love of God, permit me to remain insane.
What, what, what, what, what, what?
I don't want what he's having is what I got to say.
So these particular volunteers found these experiences pleasurable and they would tell their friends.
And soon LSD spread beyond government control, fueling a generational rebellion against everything the CIA represented.
Because the agency had hoped to weaponize consciousness.
Instead, they were armed with enemies with the very tools that would challenge authority itself.
And obviously these volunteers were getting their own doses, like they weren't being heavily dosed like the people that came out of prison or mental institutions.
So it was like pleasurable for them, whereas the experiments that were going on with the CIA were just like torture chambers.
So by 1963 over 30 institutions and universities were involved in the experimentation program testing drugs on unknowing citizens at social levels, high and low, Native Americans and foreign.
And the military alone conducted three phases of LSD testing.
First phase included over 1000 American soldiers who willingly volunteered for chemical warfare experiments.
While phase two involved 96 volunteers dosed with LSD for evaluation of intelligence uses.
But we will never know the true scope of MKUltra's damage.
And Stephen Kinzer even noted, quote unquote we don't know how many people died, but a number did die and many lives were permanently destroyed.
And the deliberate destruction of the records ensures that thousands of victims remain unknown.
Their suffering just erased as efficiently as their memories.
But what we do know is that for a decade, the United States government operated the most extensive mind control program in human history, treating its own citizens as expendable test subjects in a war that existed primarily in the paranoid imagination of men who confused patriotism with psychopathy.
So the experiments would continue, subject by subject, injection by injection, shock by shock, until the day someone would ask the question that terrified the CIA more than any Soviet weapon.
And that was...
What if the American people actually found out what the government was doing to their own people?
And that day was coming.
And when it would arrive, the reckoning would be swift and merciless.
So the statistics of MKUltra read like a military casualty report over 150 experiments, thousands of subjects and over millions of dollars spent.
But behind every number was a human being whose life was completely shattered by their government's hunger for psychological weapons.
And some names we know, but most we will never learn.
But all deserve to be remembered.
And one of those people was Frank Olson.
And he would be the scientist who knew too much.
So Dr Frank Rudolph Emanuel Olson was 43 years old when he died, and he knew secrets that could have toppled governments.
And as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland Olson, occupied a unique position in America's biological warfare program.
He wasn't just another lab coat.
He was the bridge between legitimate research and the darkest corners of the CIA's mind control experiments.
So he knew about the anthrax experiments on North Korean civilians and he had witnessed interrogation sessions where prisoners were literally interrogated to death using experimental combinations of drugs, hypnosis and torture.
And he had seen the piles of dead monkeys that greeted researchers each morning and victims of chemical and biological experiments that would have violated every international law if anyone had bothered to ask.
So by November 1953 something was eating at Frank Olson's conscience, and his colleagues would notice the change, because the man who had once been the life of the party quote unquote had become withdrawn and troubled.
And he'd start questioning the work, asking uncomfortable questions about the ethics of what they were actually doing to human beings in the name of national security.
But the questioning, as we know in CIA style, would cost him his life.
So on November 19th 1953 Olson attended what seemed like a routine CIA retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland.
And about 20 CIA and army officials gathered at a remote cabin to discuss ongoing projects.
And among them was, you guessed it, Sidney Gottlieb. the devil, and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook.
So after dinner, as the men relaxed with drinks, Gottlieb and Lashbrook quietly dosed the alcohol with.
You guessed it LSD.
And they would call it just an unwitting experiment.
But none of the men knew they had been drugged until Gottlieb casually mentioned it 20 minutes later, you know, after the drugs were in their system, as if revealing the punchline to an elaborate joke.
Hey, by the way, I dosed you with a horrifying hallucinogenic at high doses.
Have fun tonight.
Don't let the bed bugs bite.
Terrifying.
But since they actually knew what was happening, most of the men handled the unexpected trip with some professionalism, which is expected of intelligence operatives.
But Frank Olson did not. and the LSD would hit him in particular like a sledgehammer to the psyche.
And he became paranoid, agitated, convinced his colleagues were plotting against him.
And by morning, he would be a broken man, repeatedly asking to be taken home to his family.
But Gottlieb had other plans.
Instead of letting Olsen return home to Maryland, the CIA arranged him to see Dr Harold Ambrimson, a psychiatrist in New York who was secretly on the CIA payroll.
All the puzzle pieces are puzzle piecing.
I didn't even need you to tell me.
I already knew. that y'all were fucking with him.
You kidding me?
So Olsen would be taken to the city by supervisor Vincent Ruitt and Robert Lashbrook.
And they'd be taken there for medical help, but really just for damage control.
No quotes, just damage control, because the agency needed to know how much Olson might reveal about their programs and whether he could be trusted to keep quiet.
So on the night of November 27th 1953, Olson was staying in the room 1018A of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, sharing the space with Lashbrook.
And at approximately 2.30 a.m. on November 28th, a thunderous crash shattered the silence.
Because Frank Olson had gone through the closed window of the 13th floor, plummeting 170 feet to the sidewalk below.
And when police arrived, they found Lashbrook sitting calmly on the toilet.
Just taking a pass of shit.
Piece of shit.
But he was fully dressed.
He wasn't actually taking a shit.
But he is a piece of shit.
But his first call wasn't to the emergency services, nay nay.
It was to his CIA contacts.
Shocking news.
Breaking news.
Just kidding, it's fully expected.
So the official story was simple.
Frank Olson, suffering from a psychotic break caused by LSD, had committed slewerslide by jumping from his hotel window.
Case closed.
And the family was just told that their husband and father had suffered a fatal nervous breakdown, but the details never added up.
And the hotel night manager, Armand Pastore, who reached Olson first, later recalled quote-unquote In all my years in the hotel business, I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across the room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtain drawn.
I think you're onto something, Armand.
In the physics, we're all wrong, because the trajectory was completely wrong.
Essentially everything about the scene suggested not slew or slide, but something far more sinister.
So in 1994, more than 40 years after their father's death, Eric Olson had his father's body exhumed for a second autopsy.
Absolutely.
Nice, Eric.
And the results would be devastating to the official narrative, because the forensic examination revealed evidence of blunt force trauma to the head, injuries consistent with being struck before the fall.
Again, we already knew this, but at least their son's actually finding out.
Because mind you, at this time, people actually trusted the government, which is crazy.
But you know, they did.
So who was to think that their own government, the people that hired on this guy's father, would kill the father, you know?
But now we know.
And, on top of the blunt force trauma, there were no cuts on the body from broken glass, suggesting he was unconscious when he went through the window.
And the New York district attorney quietly changed the classification of Frank Olson's death from sluberslide to unknown.
And Eric Olson's investigation uncovered the chilling truth.
His father hadn't just witnessed CIA atrocities.
He had been planning to quit and potentially expose them.
And, in the paranoid world of the 1950s, intelligence that made him a security threat to the highest order.
Because although people did trust the government, they were freaking out.
I mean there's Cold War, there's all these things happening where people are like what the hell is going on, you know.
So that trust was beginning to fade and this was the nail in the coffin.
And the LSD hadn't been an experiment.
It had been an interrogation drug designed to assess what Olson might reveal and how much he could be trusted.
So when the assessment came back negative, Frank Olson had to be silenced permanently.
So the case was beginning to crack.
But six months before Frank Olson's suspicious death, another man became a casualty in the CIA's chemical weapons program.
That person was Harold Blauer.
And he was 42 years old and a professional tennis player and a father who had entered the New York State Psychiatric Institute in December of 1952 for treatment of depression following his divorce.
But what Blauer didn't know is that his doctors had been recruited by the Army Chemical Corps as part of a classified program to test synthetic masculine derivative.
And in December of 1952 and January of 1953 Blauer was injected five times, with increasing doses of the experimental compound.
And the final injection was administered on January 8th, 1953.
And it contained a dose so massive it would have killed most laboratory animals.
And within two hours, Blauer was in convulsions.
And within three hours, unfortunately, he was dead.
But the official cause of death was listed as a heart attack.
And the army's involvement was scrubbed from all records.
And Blauer's family was never told that their father had been used as a human guinea pig in a governmental experiment that violated every principle of medical ethics.
And years later, when the truth would finally emerge, it became clear that Blauer hadn't just been a test subject.
He had been a deliberate sacrifice.
Because the researchers knew that the dose was potentially lethal.
But they administered it anyway to see what would happen.
And his death would just provide them with valuable pfft, valuable data about the toxic limits of their new chemical weapon.
Just, like...
The thoughtlessness and carelessness of human life during this time is, and in general, I mean Lord knows.
This is still happening somewhere and whether it's in our country or not, I'm going to safely say something's probably going on.
It's just like, Horrifying, horrifying to think about.
And then there was Linda McDonald.
So in 1963, Linda McDonald was a 25 year old mother of five who sought help for postpartum depression at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute.
And she trusted Ewan Cameron to help her feel better, but instead he destroyed her life.
McDonald was subjected to Cameron's full arsenal of de-patterning, like we talked about before.
And for 102 days she was kept in a drug-induced coma while receiving massive electroshock treatments.
And when she finally woke up, she had no memory of her husband and no memory of her five children.
And she lacked basic functions like using the toilet.
Her husband would say she was like a newborn.
I had to teach her everything, how to walk, how to talk, how to use a spoon.
She didn't know who I was.
She didn't know she had children.
So the woman who entered Cameron's Institute as a young mother emerged as a hollow shell.
Her personality just completely erased.
And she would never fully recover her memories or her sense of self.
And her children grew up with a mother who was physically present but psychologically destroyed by their own government's experiments.
And then there was Gail Kastner.
And Gail was a 19 year old McGill University student when she volunteered for what she was told were sleep experiments in 1957.
But instead, she became one of Cameron's most documented victims.
And for 88 days Kastner was kept unconscious in Cameron's sleep room, subjected to massive doses of LSD, powerful electroshock treatments and an endless repetition of those recorded messages designed to break down her entire personality.
And when she would finally emerge, she had been reduced to an infantile state, unable to recognize her own family.
And Kastner would later testify, quote unquote, I lost my memory completely.
I didn't know my name, where I was, where I came from.
I had to be toilet trained again.
I had to learn to eat again, to walk again.
And Kastner eventually recovered some of her abilities, but the damage was permanent.
And she suffered from chronic anxiety, memory problems, and PTSD for the rest of her life.
And in 2007 she finally received a settlement from the Canadian government a paltry sum that could never compensate for the decades of suffering caused by the government's complicity in torture.
But perhaps the most horrifying victims of MKUltra were those too young to understand what was happening to them at all.
So.
At various institutions across North America, children as young as six years old were subjected to experimental drugs, electroshock therapy and psychological torture.
At one facility, researchers tested how long children could withstand sensory deprivation before suffering a complete psychological breakdown.
And at another, children were given massive doses of LSD and then subjected to stroboscopic lights designed to trigger seizures.
And some children were kept in drug induced comas for months, while recorded messages played endlessly in their ears.
And most of these children were from marginalized families, indigenous communities, poor immigrant families or children in state care who had no advocates to protect them.
Just again like it's just heartbreaking to think that like Just a little kid is being subjected to this torture, just not knowing anything.
That's going on.
But they were chosen precisely because they were vulnerable, because no one would ask questions if they emerged from treatment changed or damaged.
And the long-term effects were catastrophic for these children.
As many of these children grew up with severe mental illness, unable to form normal relationships with anyone or function in society at all.
And some even took their own lives, and others spent their lives in and out of psychiatric institutions, never understanding why their minds had been shattered in their childhood.
But for every documented victim Frank Olson, Linda McDonald there were dozens of others whose names we'll never know.
Patients who entered the hospitals for minor problems and emerged as shells of their former selves.
The deliberate destruction of MKUltra records means we'll never know the extent of this carnage.
And conservative estimates suggest thousands of people were directly harmed by the program, with tens of thousands more affected indirectly, through family members and relationships just destroyed by these experiments.
But what we do know is that behind every statistic is a human being.
A person with hopes and dreams, families and futures that were callously destroyed by their own government in pursuit of an ultimate weapon.
That was never found, by the way.
Not that that would have mattered, but...
It was all futile.
So by 1963 even Sidney Gottlieb was beginning to realize that this grand experiment in human consciousness had become a spectacular failure.
Because, after a decade of torture disguised as research, tens of millions of dollars spent and countless lives destroyed, the CIA had produced exactly what any rational person could have predicted from the very beginning.
And that is that they came up with a lot of broken people and zero usable mind control techniques.
But admitting failure wasn't in the CIA's nature, nay nay.
So, instead of shutting down MKUltra completely, they simply changed the name and kept the nightmare going.
So when MKUltra officially ended in 1963, it was immediately replaced by MKSearch.
Great name change.
A program that continued the same experiments with slightly less ambitious goals.
Because if they couldn't create the perfect mind control, perhaps they could at least develop better interrogation drugs and psychological warfare techniques.
This transition was seamless because fundamentally nothing had changed, because the same researchers continued their work at the same institutions, funded by the same shadowy budget lines.
The only difference was that somebody in washington had decided the original program was getting too much internal attention and john vance, a member of the cia's inspector general staff, had discovered mk ultra's surreptitious administration to unwitting, non-voluntary human subjects and forced its official termination.
Wow.
Thanks, John.
But Vance's investigations had focused on the specific programs and procedures of MKUltra, not the underlying research infrastructure that supported it.
So the work would just continue anyways.
The prisoners were still dosed with experimental chemicals and psychiatric patients still disappeared into month-long drug-induced comas, and children still emerged from government facilities with their personalities fundamentally altered.
The only thing that changed was the paperwork, basically.
So by the mid-1960s cracks were beginning to show in the CIA's confidence about their mind control programs.
And part of this was practical, because after more than a decade of experimentation, they had precious little to show for their investment.
But part of it was moral, because a new generation of CIA officers was entering the agency, which are men and women who had come from the age during the civil rights movement and were less willing to accept the casual brutality that characterized the previous generation's approach to intelligence work.
So they weren't pieces of shit, basically.
So these agents began asking uncomfortable questions about what their colleagues were doing in the name of national security.
And the questions just became harder and harder to ignore as the scope of the experiments became more widely known within the agency.
And stories circulated about researchers who had lost all sense of ethical boundaries, treating human beings like laboratory rats in increasingly bizarre experiments, and word would start to spread about Dr Ewan Cameron's latest innovations in psychological torture, about prisoners who emerged from medical treatment medical treatment.
As vegetative shells, and about children who disappeared into government facilities and emerged, fundamentally changed altogether.
So even within the paranoid culture of the 1960s, intelligence work MKUltra and its successors were beginning to seem excessive and mad, unnecessary.
So, outside the CIA's closed world, America was undergoing a profound moral transformation that would make programs like MKUltra impossible to sustain, because the civil rights movement had forced the country to confront its treatment of African Americans.
And the Vietnam War was raising uncomfortable questions about American power and its abuse.
So a generation of young Americans was beginning to question authority in ways that would be completely unthinkable, especially in the 1950s.
And the counterculture movement, ironically fueled in part by the very LSD that the CIA had hoped to weaponize, was teaching Americans to distrust government claims about national security.
So when officials insisted certain actions were necessary to protect their country, more people were beginning to ask necessary, for whom and at what cost?
So the change was generational and fundamental.
And the men who had created MKUltra were products of World War II, accustomed to thinking in terms of total war, where any action could be justified by the magnitude of the threat.
Just fucking go, go, go.
Nobody cares.
Nobody gives a shit who dies, whatever.
Let's just fucking go.
Let's just be better.
It's a big dick measuring competition.
But the generation coming of age in the 1960s had grown up during the Cold War.
And they were less convinced that the threat from communism justified abandoning American values entirely.
And this shift in public consciousness would prove fatal to secret government programs and secret government programs that primarily depended on public ignorance.
So the break-in at the Watergate complex on June 17th 1972 seems unrelated to CIA mind control experiments, but its impact on programs like MKUltra was devastating.
Because Watergate didn't just bring down a president, it shattered America's faith in government secrecy.
For the first time since World War II, significant numbers of Americans began to question whether their government was telling them the truth about anything.
It's so funny to think about us just being like, we can't trust them?
We can't trust the really rich people that control everything in the world?
That they're not doing stuff that they're supposed to be doing?
Gosh, we were so blissfully ignorant back then.
And now we know.
We know you're pieces of shit.
Anyway.
So if the president of the United States could be involved in criminal conspiracies, what else might be happening in the shadows of Washington?
And the Watergate investigations created a new template for aggressive journalism and congressional oversight.
And reporters who had once accepted government claims at face value began digging deeper doing, you know, real journalism, which we still lack today.
But they would file the Freedom of Information Act requests cultivating sources within the intelligence community.
And congressional committees that had previously provided only token oversight of intelligence activities began demanding real answers to hard questions.
Because this new environment of skepticism and investigation was toxic to programs like MKUltra.
Who fucking who?
Programs which depended entirely on secrecy for their survival.
So as the political winds shifted against the intelligence community, CIA director Richard Helms found himself in an impossible position, because he had spent his career building and protecting the agency's most sensitive programs.
But now those same programs were becoming liabilities that threatened the CIA's very existence.
And Helms was a company man through and through.
A veteran intelligence officer who believed that the CIA's work was essential to American security, regardless of how distasteful that work might be to squeamish civilians.
But He was also a realist who understood that the times were changing.
Great.
Only took you, you know, fucking years.
So in 1973, facing retirement and increasing scrutiny of CIA activities, Helms made the decision that would haunt researchers and investigators for decades to come.
And he would order the destruction of virtually all MKUltra's records.
The purge was systemic and thorough.
Filing cabinets were empty.
Documents were shredded.
Research files accumulated over two decades of human experimentation simply disappeared.
And Helms justified the destruction as routine administrative action.
But everyone involved understood its real purpose, and that was to eliminate evidence of crimes that could destroy the agency and imprison its leaderships.
You know, consequences for your actions.
Holding people accountable for the horrible fucking criminal shit that they did, basically.
They're just like, no, nevermind, it's shredded.
We didn't do anything.
What, me?
No, not me.
I would never.
That was the CIA.
But the destruction order was carried out with military precision, and teams of CIA personnel worked around the clock to ensure that no trace remained of the programs that had defined the agency's approach to behavioral research.
And when they were finished, almost nothing was left.
No experimental protocols, no subject lists, no research findings, no records of payments to universities and researchers.
It was one of the most comprehensive coverups in American history.
So Helm's Purge was remarkably effective, but it wasn't perfect.
And in the chaos of all of the destruction, approximately 20,000 documents escaped elimination.
And not because anyone intended to preserve them, but because they had been misfiled in financial records, which is kind of hilarious.
But these surviving documents would eventually become the foundation of all subsequent investigations into MKUltra.
And without them, the program would have remained completely hidden, its existence known only to the participants and their victims.
So the survival of these documents was a pure accident.
And I think it was divine intervention.
So they were stored in the financial records building, separate from the main CIA archives, filed under budget codes that didn't immediately identify them as related to behavioral research.
So when the destruction order came down, the teams responsible for purging MKUltra's files simply overlooked this cache.
And it was a mistake that would eventually expose one of the darkest chapters in American intelligence history.
So, as MKUltra wound down in the early 1970s, Sidney Gottlieb Satan, the man who had spent two decades trying to unlock the secrets of the human consciousness, offered a brutally honest assessment of his life's work.
And in his final reports to CIA leadership, he dismissed the entire MKUltra program as useless.
Not that you want them to be useful, But the fact that it just all could have been avoided if they were just not horrible human beings is just a crazy thought to think about.
But I digress.
So after 20 years of millions of dollars and thousands of human subjects, Gottlieb had reached the conclusion that mind control was simply not possible.
Thanks, Einstein.
Because human consciousness was too complex, too resilient, too fundamentally unpredictable to be reliably manipulated through drugs or psychological techniques.
And it was an admission that came far too late for the victims who had suffered through these experiments.
But it was at least honest, I guess.
I'm not giving you that though.
So the great mind control program had been a failure from the beginning, sustained not by scientific results but by institutional momentum and the desperate hope that the next experiment might finally produce a breakthrough that had eluded all the previous ones.
So on July 10th 1972, Gottlieb officially terminated MK Search, the last remnant of the program he had begun nearly 20 years earlier.
The CIA's systemic exploration of human consciousness was over, leaving behind only trauma, destroyed lives and a massive cover-up that was designed to ensure that American people would have never learned what had been done in their own name.
So by 1973, the mind control experiments had been shut down and their records destroyed.
And the researchers had been transferred to other projects or retired entirely.
But the victims had been left to deal with their trauma in silence.
Most of them still unaware that the suffering had been deliberately inflicted by their own government.
So to outside observers, nothing had happened.
And the psychiatric hospitals returned to normal operations.
The university researchers moved on to other studies and the cia continued its work with no apparent interruption.
But beneath the surface, america was changing in ways that would make the secrets of mk ultra impossible to keep forever.
So the storm was coming, and when it hit, the carefully constructed walls of secrecy around programs like mk ultra would crumble like paper in a hurricane.
The only question was whether anyone would be left alive to tell the full story when the truth finally emerged.
So when Seymour Hersh's explosive expose hit the New York Times on December 22nd 1974, most readers focused on the headline, which was revelations about illegal CIA domestic surveillance.
But buried within that bombshell article was a single paragraph that would prove even more devastating.
The agency had conducted illegal experiments on American citizens and at least one person had died as a result.
So for the Olson family, who had lived for over 20 years, believing Frank was a slower slide, it was a thunderbolt revelation.
So President Ford's response to this article was swift.
It was to create a commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the allegations.
And the commission was designed as controlled demolition to reveal just enough truth to satisfy the public curiosity without fundamentally damaging the intelligence community.
It was a dance that they were trying to do.
They're like okay, let's give them a little bit of information, but also let's not give them all the information.
Otherwise they're going to be really mad if the CIA stays, you know, because we're torturing people, you know.
So in June of 1975, the Rockefeller's commission report contained the clinical paragraph that changed everything.
And that was... as part of a program to test the influence of drugs on humans.
Research included the administration of LSD to persons who were unaware they were being tested.
This was clearly illegal.
One person died in 1953, apparently, as a result.
And within days, the Olson family had identified Frank as the unnamed victim.
And the story exploded across national media.
And on July 21st 1975 the family found themselves in the Oval Office receiving a personal apology from President Ford and CIA Director William Colby, as if that's gonna fucking take the pain away.
But it was an extraordinary moment that was broadcast on national television, of course, because you couldn't just do it in the privacy.
You had to make sure everyone knew that you guys are good guys, that you're not doing that anymore.
Let's say sorry, and that'll make everything better.
But it was an unprecedented moment in American history.
A sitting president apologizing to a family for their government role in killing their loved one.
But the apology just raised more questions than it answered, thankfully.
Because if Frank Olson's death had been an accident caused by an LSD experiment, why had the family been lied to for over 20 years?
Because they didn't know it was a murder at this point.
They just said you know, he's in the CIA and we gave him LSD at this house party and then he went over here and then he jumped out the window.
So they still think all that.
But it would raise the question of what other experiments had the CIA conducted?
And how many families were still living with lies?
So the government offered a 750000 settlement in exchange for comprehensive release, absolving them of further liability.
Just buying their way out, like usual.
And the Olsens did accept, but it was just another layer in the ongoing coverup.
And how would they know better?
So, while the Rockefeller Commission provided limited glimpses into the CIA wrongdoing, Senator Frank Church's committee conducted the deep investigation Americans actually needed.
And they were approved by the Senate 82-4 in January of 1975.
And the Church committee was authorized to dig as deeply as necessary.
Get that shovel out.
And Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely choice to lead the most important congressional investigation since the Army McCarthy hearings.
Because he was just soft-spoken with a professional manner.
And Church just seemed more suited to debating agriculture policies than confronting the nation's most powerful intelligence agencies.
But appearances were deceiving.
Don't read a book by its cover, nay nay.
Because Church was a former military intelligence officer who understood how secret organizations operated.
And he was deeply committed to the principle that no agency should operate beyond the reach of democratic oversight.
So over 16 months they conducted 126 meetings, held 40 subcommittee hearings and employed 150 staff members.
And they would interview 800 witnesses.
And they demanded documents from agencies that had never been subject to serious congressional oversight.
And they subpoenaed officials who had spent their careers operating in complete secrecy.
So they were shedding some light on the snakes in the holes, basically. for layman's terms.
And the investigation faced enormous resistance from the intelligence community, obviously.
And CIA director William Colby was forced to testify under oath about programs he had hoped would be buried forever, would remain buried forever.
And military officials were dragged before television cameras to explain biological weapon programs that violated international law.
And researchers who spent decades conducting human experiments in secret suddenly forced to justify their actions in public hearings.
Just hilarious, hilarious.
The bullies are finally being held accountable.
And the breakthrough would come during a national television hearing in September to October 1975, where Americans received a shocking education in what their government had been doing in their name.
And the star witness was CIA Director William Colby, who found himself defending programs that were clearly indefensible.
Have you brought with you some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA to use this poison for we have indeed for killing people?
And, under aggressive questioning, Colby was forced to admit that the CIA had conducted extensive mind control experiments, that many subjects had been unwitting participants and that the agency has systemically violated American laws and constitutional principles.
And the most dramatic moment came when committee staff wheeled out actual CIA poison, dart guns and exotic toxins that were supposed to have been destroyed under international agreements.
Just embarrassing.
It's hilariously horrible to us, obviously.
But in a scene that could have been in a scripted movie.
The display demonstrated the extent to which the intelligence community had been willing to develop weapons that violated every principle of civilized warfare.
And for Americans accustomed to thinking of their governments as good guys okay, in the Cold War especially, the hearings were just a devastating revelation of how far their leaders had been willing to go in the pursuit of victory.
So the investigation might have remained limited to survivor testimony.
But in 1977 journalist John Marks Freedom of the Information Act uncovered the treasure trove Richard Helms thought he had destroyed.
Oh no.
Which was 20,000 MKUltra documents accidentally preserved in those financial records.
And these documents were a goldmine of evidence experimental protocols, university contracts, subject recruitments guidelines, research results and, most importantly, proof of the systemic nature of the program.
And the papers showed that the program had been far more extensive than anyone had imagined, involving dozens of universities, hundreds of researchers and thousands of subjects.
And the document discovery led to additional Senate hearings in 1977, where survivors of the MKUltra experiments testified publicly about their experiences for the first time.
So the cumulative impact of the church committee hearings, the document discoveries and the survivor testimonies was a profound national trauma that fundamentally changed how Americans viewed their government.
And, for the first time since the founding of the Republic, significant numbers of citizens began to question whether their democratic institutions could be trusted to respect basic human rights.
And the revelations about MKUltra were particularly devastating because they violated Americans' most fundamental assumptions about their country, because this wasn't warfare against foreign enemies.
This was the government conducting medical experiments on its own citizens, including children, without consent and without any regard for any sort of consequence.
So just the scope of betrayal was staggering.
And most disturbingly to most people was the realization that the experiments had not been conducted by rogue agents or extremist organizations, but the mainstream American establishment, Ivy League universities, prestigious medical institutions, and the nation's premier intelligence agency.
Just everyone you think you could trust most, basically.
So when Americans demanded accountability, they discovered a system designed for plausible deniability.
And orders were given verbally, documents compartmentalized and responsibility diffused across agencies and contractors.
As Sidney Gottlieb Satan, the operational heart of MKUltra, had retired safely to California by 1973, pursuing a second career as a folk dancer and speech therapist i have no words.
And the transformation was so complete.
It seemed almost designed to mock his victims, because the man who spent decades perfecting techniques to destroy human communication was now helping children overcome speech impediments.
And during his limited testimony to congressional investigators, Gottlieb presented himself as a dedicated public servant who had been forced to undertake distasteful work in service for national security.
It's not my fault.
They told me to do it.
They only, they just paid me and told me to do it.
I definitely didn't like it.
I definitely didn't like it and tell them that we should keep doing it for 20 fucking years.
And even during his testimonies he maintained that the programs had been necessary responses to Soviet threats.
And he would say I want this committee to know that I found this work very difficult, very unpleasant, but very necessary.
Shut the fuck up.
And his voice just carried the same clinical detachment he had brought to those to selecting doses of LSD for unwilling participants.
But the testimony was a masterpiece of bureaucratic deflection, if you will.
And Gottlieb acknowledged that harmful things had happened, but portrayed himself as a reluctant participant rather than an enthusiastic architect of the programs, which is what he was.
And no criminal charges were ever filed against Satan Sidney Godliab, which is fucking insane.
And he would just live quietly in California until his death in 1999.
And Alan Dulles Dulles whatever the fuck who authorized MKUltra in 1953, was already dead by the time the crimes came to light.
So I'd say he dodged a bullet, but I know he's burning in hell, so I will sleep soundly at night knowing that.
But even if he had lived, his position at the apex of American establishment would have made prosecution practically impossible.
He's untouchable, right?
And Richard Helms was defiant rather than apologetic about destroying the records, saying the CIA was not created to be Boy Scouts.
What, you were created to torture children and the vulnerable?
What?
So he defended the document destruction as a routine administrative action designed to protect the CIA sources and methods, arguing that the experiments had been legal, under the standards of the time and necessary for national defense.
Fuck you.
So because he was the one that ordered the destruction of the documents, Helms received a misdemeanor conviction and a suspended sentence.
And he was fined...
2,000 measly dollars.
And the judge who imposed the sentence praised Helms for his years of service to the country.
And, like the CIA officials who had designed the programs, most academic collaborators escaped any sort of meaningful consequence for their actions.
And the most damning aspect of academic participation in MKUltra was its violation of the Nuremberg Code, which was a set of ethical principles for human experimentation that had emerged from the Nazi war crime trials.
And American prosecutors had insisted that medical experiments on human subjects required informed consent.
And that researchers who violated this principle should be held criminally responsible.
But when American researchers committed virtually identical violations of the Nuremberg Code, the response was dramatically different, as we know.
And the university administrators expressed regret for their past mistakes, while emphasizing that the research had been conducted with good intentions and legitimate specific goals.
Not a legitimate, specific goal, you in the fucking face, you dumb fuck.
And, most remarkably, many of the researchers who had conducted MKUltra experiments continued their academic careers without any sort of interruption.
They didn't even get suspended.
They would receive their tenure, publish papers and trained new generation of students as if their participation in systemic torture had been a minor career misstep rather than a fundamental betrayal of medical ethics.
And Ewan Cameron, whose de-patterning experiments at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute had destroyed dozens of lives, died in 1967, unfortunately.
So he couldn't face any consequences because it was eight years before his crimes became public knowledge.
So the official response to all of this was carefully calibrated to acknowledge wrongdoing while limiting consequences, as we know.
So the strategy had two pillars.
One was managed apologies, which was express regret for past mistakes while avoiding admission of criminal liability.
And next was settlement strategy, which was offering compensation in exchange for broad releases, preventing further legal action, like the olsen family getting 750 000.
So, despite the overwhelming evidence of systemic violations of federal laws, no one was ever criminally prosecuted for the mk ultra crimes.
Prosecutors argued that cases would be difficult given the destroyed records and national security implications.
But the real reason was political.
As we know, protecting the intelligence community was more important than accountability.
And the decision not to pursue criminal charges was made at the highest level of the Justice Department after extensive consultation with intelligence officials and political leadership.
And criminal trials would have forced the government to reveal additional classified information information about intelligence operations, potentially which would expose sensitive programs to public scrutiny.
You know, again, more accountability.
Because God knows what else they were doing at this time and now.
And the statute of limitations provided additional cover.
By keeping crimes secret for over 20 years, officials ensured they could never be held legally accountable.
I don't know why this is.
Why is statute of limitations a thing?
It's fucking insane to me.
Anyway.
So this legal technicality became a shield for individuals who had systemically violated federal law.
So the failure to hold anyone meaningfully accountable established a dangerous precedent, which was that government officials learned that even egregious violations of human rights would result in nothing more than a congressional hearing, official apologies and modest settlements, which is horrifying.
But the message was very clear.
As long as the crimes were committed in the names of national security and kept secret long enough, there were no real consequences.
And this legacy of impunity would shape intelligence community behavior for generations, contributing to a culture where officials believed they could act outside the law as long as they could justify their actions for national security.
So the MKUltra revelations fundamentally changed how Americans viewed the government.
As we said before,
Casting a shadow that persists to this day.
And every subsequent scandal would be measured against this standard.
Because if the government could conduct a systemic torture experiment on children for 20 years, what else might they be capable of?
I don't want to know, but I also need to know.
We deserve to know.
And the victims received acknowledgement, but not justice.
And the perpetrators faced embarrassment, but not punishments.
And the institutions implemented oversight, but avoided fundamental examination of how they enabled such violations.
And, most troubling of all, the failure of accountability, sent a message that would resonate through American political culture for decades, because when government officials commit crimes in the name of national security, the system will protect them rather than the victims.
And America had looked into the mirror and seen a nation that had lost its moral bearings in pursuit of power.
So the question that would haunt the country for generations was whether anyone would be held accountable when such programs inevitably would happen again.
And that is that for MKUltra.
Y'all suggested this one.
It was, you know, it's a lot to get into.
It makes you just question...
But let me know how you felt about this.
I know this was a little different.
You know definitely crime, definitely crime, definitely conspiracy, definitely all the things basically leaning more into like a little bit different of a category.
So let me know if you guys like this.
Let me know if you want me to dive into other you know shady shit that's going on anywhere in the world.
It doesn't really matter to me.
I find this stuff extremely interesting and I feel like people should know this stuff.
Yeah, with that, I'm going to turn off my cellular device and just go walk in the grass.
I think look up at the clouds and try not to think about this stuff too much.
And until then, have a silly beautiful face.
All right, stay safe out there.
Bye.
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