MK Ultra Expert on CIA’s “Truth Serum,” Assassination Program, & JFK Files | John Lisle • 312
Julian Dorey · 20 Jun 2025 · 3h 2m
Guest: John Lisle · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
A historian who has spent years mining declassified documents and rediscovered court depositions walks through the CIA's Cold War mind-control program, tracing it back to a World War II OSS chemist whose wartime dirty tricks (bat bombs, hormone plots against Hitler) supposedly seeded the later program's methods. The conversation covers the structure of MK Ultra as an umbrella of roughly 149 sub-projects funding outside researchers rather than a single centralized operation, and walks through specific cases: the CIA-run brothels of Operation Midnight Climax where unwitting men were dosed with LSD while agents watched through one-way glass, the psychic-driving and sensory-deprivation experiments conducted on psychiatric patients in Montreal, and the death of scientist Frank Olson after being secretly dosed with LSD. The guest lays out his own theory about Olson's death, pushes back on some claims made in other well-known books about MK Ultra and the Manson murders, and explains how the destruction of the program's files in 1973 relates to what can still be verified through depositions and testimony. Along the way the host and guest discuss institutional secrecy, congressional oversight failures, the psychology of conspiracy belief and cognitive dissonance, and how MK Ultra's use of drugs and hypnosis to manufacture the appearance of truth-telling connects to later disputes over torture and interrogation. The discussion closes with a detour into the history of science, paradigm shifts, and the guest's academic background studying scientists tied to intelligence agencies.
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Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Origins of Stanley Lovell and OSS dirty tricks
- Bat bombs and wartime weapon experiments
- Sydney Gottlieb and the founding of MK Ultra
- Ewen Cameron's psychic driving and sensory deprivation
- OSS-to-CIA continuity and Cold War paranoia
- False confessions, Korean POWs, and Jolly West
- Compartmentalization, oversight failure, and the Family Jewels leak
- Operation Midnight Climax and George White
- Death of Frank Olson
- Remote-controlled animals and assassination sub-projects
- Destruction of MK Ultra files and later depositions
- History of science, Newton, and paradigm shifts
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“Our ultimate goal is to apply this to humans, basically, which is obviously like assassination attempt.”
“I toiled in the in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage in with the sanction and blessing of the all highest?”
“I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed about what we did.”