MKULTRA: THE BLACK BOX (AE266)

0:30Welcome to American Exception. I'm Aaron Good. This is the excerptive first portion of a full episode of the American Exception Podcast. If you would like to view or listen to the rest of the episode, subscribe to the American Exception Podcast on Patreon. We have hundreds of episodes available for subscribers. If you want to better understand the deep politics and history of the US Empire, American Exception is the best place to go. The URL is patreon.com slash American exception. Subscribe if you can and either way, please kindly like this video and subscribe to this American Exception channel. Max Arvo, it's great to be with you again. Yeah, great to be back.

1:31You've taken a bit of a hiatus related to work and family and travel, but we're really happy to have you back. And you've been working on a few new articles and one of them is going, you plan for this to be published around the time that this episode will come out. So we will put a link to that in the show notes. If it's ready and if it's a day or so late, then we'll edit it and go back and do it, but hopefully it'll be there by the time this gets posted to the Patreon. And this deals with Artichoke and MK Ultra. And how do you want to begin this? Because this is something we've talked about in the past. We've talked about John Lee in West and his operations with Ruby. I've interviewed Jeff K talking about some of the MK Ultra angles established in the wake of the Korean War, supposed Manchurian candidate Fiasco or whatever spectacle, whatever one to call it. So this is a fascinating subject that I think all my listeners will be interested in. So let's get into it.

2:31Tell us about what the conventional wisdom is on Artichoke and then what you've discovered. Yeah, well, so I think... It's been a while since I've known what the conventional understanding is of this stuff, but I think it's basically... I mean MK Ultra is becoming more and more popular and getting more and more attention, I think, in a kind of... Well, everywhere. On Rogen and all these places. And it's talked about in a very kind of casual way as this particular thing and the most spectacular, I guess, way of describing it, which I would suggest is probably in the official story for reason and convenient, is that it was purely an effort to create these, you know, Manchurian candidates like HIPNO program killers and that it was just a research effort that was experimental for a brief period of time and that it failed, which I think it

3:32tends to be part of the official story of... Well, I think the official histories are... Well, maybe not official, but, you know, client histories, or client historians of the CIA tend to portray the CIA as a failure, as an inept thing. And I think that tends to be... My sense is that that tends to be a convenient story is to... If you present yourself as incompetent and take some of the heat off your back. But I think with MK Ultra, the story remains that it was ultimately a failed effort to create this outlandish thing that was an experimental research program, which is to say not operational really, not actually implemented because it failed, supposedly. And it's still spectacular and the revelations are still horrific and that still means...

4:33You can still claim that and that can still be the official story and there's still the... I mean, God awful... Numerous cases of people's lives and minds being destroyed permanently and people being getting unwitting tests on civilians and soldiers as well. So that's bad enough. I think, you know, you can look at that and be like, how could that be a convenient story? So I think... And then, yeah, then looking into the details of it all and looking at what documents we actually have. And there's a surprising amount. So the context with MK Ultra, it was, I think, originally first exposed by... It was John Marks, who I think found... Because the story is that Gottlieb, Sydney Gottlieb, who ran MK Ultra out of the technical services division, the CIA, in conjunction with Helms, decided to...

5:37When they were both being ousted in the early 70s, they decided to destroy all the MK Ultra documents and materials. So... Well, right, yeah, so... As your saying. Yeah, well, so, yeah, so... They supposedly did that, but then at John Marks, who wrote the... I think, still the best single volume on it, the search for the mentoring candidate. He... I think it was him who got... Maybe it was through fire or something, but there was a... Several boxes found in a warehouse of... Primarily like the accounting stuff for the MK Ultra subprojects. And so we have them in with the redacted forms of the names on there. You can guess, or you can figure out clearly who certain people were by knowing what... If you know what some subproject was, then you know that ex-person, ran it, or whatever. But... So that's where we got a lot of the details of it. There's quite a lot there, but...

6:39There's also a surprising amount of documentation more than I realised. And I think that's from other foyers. The Black Vault website has a lot of it about the... Earlier versions of it, which are... I think people will... If people definitely know about MK Ultra, some people will also know about things called Artychrocan Bluebird. And I think the... General understanding is that it went... Project Bluebird then became Project Artychrocan, and then that became MK Ultra. And they all were folded into each other. And then MK Ultra was like the conclusion, like the pothiosis of the whole thing. And that they were all kind of research programmes that were wild mid-century kind of... You know, another part of official stories tends to be... There was some bad actors and bad exes, but you know, we got rid of them and... We didn't even know they were doing it. Thanks for being here. Yeah, right. Yeah, break it. Break... Was it?

7:40Break... Extimate. Extimate. Yeah, you know, stuff happens. But we, as soon as we realised we shut it down. And if we knew we wouldn't have let it, you know, blah blah blah. So yeah, the... And you shut down also at the time that it gets shut down is just fascinating, because it was shut down by Helms when he... I believe it has... It's in the Watergate area and it... I don't think it was just when he got fired, although it may have been, but it was basically... It was when Gully was fired, I think. Yeah, maybe it was just a... It was a realisation that it could... That the Watergate thing was going to potentially expose a lot of secrets and an effort to unearth, you know, what the CIA was up to, because I think Helms understood that Nixon believed that... CIA elements were involved in this scandal and were essentially wanting to destroy Nixon. And so Helms, for good reason, you know,

8:41realises that this is a vulnerability. And then it's similar to how... It's when James Sleshinger, who is the guy that replaces Helms, it's when he looks at how the CIA was involved in facilitating the activities of the Watergate Berklers, that's what made him realise, holy shit, we need to... I need to get a handle on what the CIA has been up to. And I want to know everything that they've done that's violated their charter because if they seem to be this force that's not under the control of the president and is actually hostile to him, perhaps catastrophically so. So that's the reason that he created the family jewels and he assigned William Colby to do this. Yeah, I mean, I've got... I'm just in general now suspicious of any time... Any... Any... Certainly the CIA or anyone comes out and says, we found the worst stuff and here it is. Like... Why would they... You know, I figured they would leave things out and... But yeah, actually one side point there is an article

9:43that Jeff Kay co-wrote with Albert Reilly years ago and Jeff Kay's part of it was about torture side of things and that's another crucial point with all this. That basically these... It's really behavioral modification is more what it is rather than mind control and I think mind control is another way of sort of... Making it sound like a kooky thing when it's actually something very... Again, the bleak-a-truth of all these things tends to be like the more like banal like the penalty of evil kind of stuff. It's like it's not... You can make... If you make it sound sort of wild and crazy, then you know, it can sound more like it's a fringe thing but it's just sort of a bleak... Like... Just reality to all this stuff that is more of the truth. But... Yeah, so in the article... It's... There's a bit from Albert Reilly and my understanding is that...

10:44Albert Reilly never actually confirmed the sourcing of this. But... There's a claim in it which tracks with my sense of what probably happened with MK Elch and he says... It's very... I still think it's still explosive but there's no... He never revealed where he got it from so... I think he can really do with it. But it's that... He says Lawrence Houston, the longtime CIA general council... Met with... Of all people, I think it was Cheney and Romsfeld. I think it was them... Oh no, not... Yeah, I think it was at that time. And the plan was to... Release MK Elch to the public to obscure... The more serious stuff. The stuff that they didn't want... The limited hangar kind of thing. Or just diversion. Which anyway, it's... I'm very interested in that claim. I don't think we'll ever find anything to know if it's technically as true or not. But that kind of tracks with my... It lines up with my sense of what probably happened with these things.

11:46And so I guess my first point here that... The stamp size is MK Ultra, although it looks really, really bad and is really, really bad, I think it's worse and I think it's a slight distraction. Or a slight diversion in some ways. So... Yeah, so I can get into the kind of the brief kind of history of it, I guess. Right, because it has become, as you say, sort of... Yeah. Simpop culture, reference... You know, a phenomenal... Like it signifies something else. Right. But as being like the worst of the worst and they destroyed all the secrets, so we're never gonna really know about it, but we'll always wonder, maybe they're still doing some of these things. And that part of it is reasonable enough to assume, but there are different aspects of it as you pointed out. You pointed out in the past that MK Ultra seems to have been a useful mechanism for putting

12:50other covert operas, you know, to mask other covert operations, that because of the secrecy involved around MK Ultra, you can just piggyback onto that or use that. It used that as kind of a stalking horse to do other things, which is similar to what to the way that Angleton and Harvey handled their operations with Cuba. They put a lot of them under the auspices of NSA. Like I think the ZR rifle was under NSA CIA liaison program, and the reason being that because signals intelligence is treated with such supreme secrecy, and because this is a liaison agreement, it's like the CIA, neither the CIA, like the main part of the CIA, nor the main part of the NSA could really have access to that whole black box. And so these guys were just masters of finding ways. I mean, this was just their job. I don't want to make them seem smarter than they are. It's like any person that works on whatever they work on, like hydroelectric dams or something,

13:53you're going to know more about that shit than any regular person would ever even want to think of, not even because you're a genius, just because he was specialization, right? But this was their specialties, finding ways to put in a fairies, to carry out in a fairies project, obviously, but then to hide them within their own bureaucratic maze that they are given the authority to create in the first place. Yeah, so about MK Ultra, I mean, the documents are there, so it's very, very clear, like you can't argue this, that when you look at, you know, partly this was just wanting to figure out like what exactly was it? Like what actually actually is, was it said, what was written, what specifically was it when you say MK Ultra? And when you look at the documents, so it was set up in, I think, April 10th or April 13th of 1953 by Dallas.

14:54And the document that he signed and Helms also wrote some of the founding memos for it, they say that it was a, it had become clear that over the last year, the research that Gottlieb's technical services division, TSD, were doing, there were some things that were so sensitive that they could not be, there would be too much of an issue to subject them to the usual accounting and reporting requirements of the agency. So MK Ultra technically was a funding mechanism. And then CIS, Inspector General reports also say this, they state this very, very clearly that it was a technically, it was a funding mechanism whereby, in their words, the most ultra sensitive or highly sensitive research that was being conducted would be exempted

15:57from the regular requirements of reporting and accounting, like receipts and invoice, whatever. So that, I think in part, it could even just be essentially, well, the angle to the line of intelligence supersedes writing, I think it's that, from his, yeah, that testimony. Which is such a profound statement in its implications, you know, what does intelligence even mean in that context? It doesn't mean what we think of it is. Well, I think that's, he mentions that when he's, it's the one, one of those moments where he sort of doesn't quite manage to, he sort of, I think, struggling to handle the line of questioning. It's, it's, it's in a way, it is a great synectic key for the deep state. Yes. Yeah, I go, because I think that's the part where it's not formal, it's not. Yeah. I think that's the, you don't know what the decision is, you don't know who made it,

16:57and you don't know who is really aware, even of what the decision was. Yeah, I play. So it's like, it's, it's really it, it's astounding. Yeah. I think that's the part where he's talking about that they're pushing on, it might actually be, I think it's where the McCone was told about the assassination operations. Yeah, so that's perfect. Because that's, that's such an amazing, inner document. Yeah, we might even be talking about whether he told McCone about what you found, the Israeli Yeah. I mean, I've come across the quote, and of course I spent a good bit of time looking at that, church committee testimony and that whole past. And the missing page, which I think I still think people don't give the significance of it. I agree. Like he lied about it, and then the, but the gist of it is, yeah, the McCone didn't know that the whole Cuban operations were being run through a Mossad officer. Yeah. And it's that or it's, well, it's the Cuban stuff in general where Angleton sort of, I mean, an earring a bit, not being his usual kind of brilliantly sort of deflecting

18:02and obscure self. And he ends up basically, yeah, that his excuse as well, intelligence supersese writing. I would, I know, other than then he also says about McCone, I wouldn't want to bother him with this kind of stuff. You know, he's got other better things than me. Anyway, with DM, yes, the MK Ultra thing is technically a funding mechanism whereby they could exempt all these the most sensitive things from basically what you see is exactly that it supersese writing because it's so sensitive. And also they knew that implicitly if we have to put on the record what we're doing, we couldn't do it. I'm just going to string us up. Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. So it's like this is too important and too sensitive national security, I guess they'd say. But I'm, yes, the state, it's, it puts the state at grave risk. I mean, this is what I did get into in the, in American exception, the way dissertation I was just saying that like, look, what's you define things this way than the like defense of state secrecy and the secrecy surrounding these crimes, that itself becomes a prime directive

19:03in terms of what the, what the national security state has to make secure. Yeah. And if that's the case, then you would have to have a rationalization to be able to kill people, manipulate the media, it says, tell, tell investing, if, tell police agencies or elected officials that they absolutely cannot go here, full stop, or they will be, you know, punished in some way. Yeah. I mean, I think you've suggested that might have been something like that might have been triggered with Kennedy, in terms of getting, and with Watergate as well. I mean, that's the whole deep throat statement to, oh, yeah, what would we're doing like? It's not about the break in. It's not even about the cover up. It's about the entire covert operations of the United States, the apparatus, and it's incredible. Yeah. The people are going to start dying. Yeah. It's exactly what we're talking about here. And people that, that's in the movie and it doesn't even make sense in the context of the movie at all. Yeah. At all. Yeah. I'm sorry.

20:04I think they, that line sort of near the end and then the movie just kind of ends shortly after here. Yeah. But yeah, that's kind of the, that's the biggest bit of it, I think. Yeah. So this was that, and in writing, they say that the two areas, there's a couple of different documents which both list the two areas that they specify that would fall under this. I'm sure it was whatever they wanted to do in the end, but, and in each one, a different thing is redacted. So I'm not sure if we have both of them from both documents, but one of them says, in one of them, the one that isn't redacted is biological and chemical warfare. And in the other one, the one that isn't redacted is basically behavioral modification. So I think when you add in the biological and chemical warfare side of it, that's pretty significant because also I think that can include kind of, by definition, lethal capabilities, poisons which you know got leave was, he had a some forest collection of poison to personal

21:07he and stuff, and then provided them for a member, which they didn't use in the end. So yeah, that's kind of from the start, specifically MK culture. So that's to say MK culture was not from the start, Dallas putting in writing MK culture as a program to create hypnoprogrammed assassins. It was a mechanism to keep stuff off the books, and it was biological and chemical warfare. And behavioral modifications. So sort of counter, I think ostensibly it was count, it's sort of like what they do with bio warfare, you know, where they where it's like we're doing all this research, you how to protect us against biological warfare. And it entails the creation of extremely powerful and dangerous pathogens, but it's for defensive purposes. I think that the way that they rationalized MK culture was like that. These are the diabolical, oriental techniques of the Korean masterminds. Yeah, I mean it's kind of like them changing it to the Department of War. I'm like, no, you're supposed to be Department of Defense.

22:09That's so bad. That's not a goal. It's just that's so typifies the idiocy of the guys. It was always the department of war you dumbass. Double speak. Come on. I feel rip off the fig leaf. The ball sack of the state. Like no, put it back on man. We get, well, yes, so that then gets like a sin to the, because I think it's nothing. It's really helpful to understand like the origins of this and you could take forever doing this, but I'll try and be quick about it. Part of it, one of the earliest things we know is that during the war the OSS did truth drug experiments or TD experiments. That was involving George Hunt and White and who tested the stuff himself. And they were trying out various things like masculine, marijuana, marijuana lace cigarettes, alcohol or various drugs here and there.

23:12And that was trying to find a truth drug. And I think the context there is, it's interrogation specifically. And that becomes really important because then this ends up leading into the torture side of it as well. But the point being, as you said, from the start, it's how can we interrogate others better and get the truth out and how can we protect our own, train and protect and develop the resistances of our own people to interrogation and various techniques and stuff. Like what might they have to deal with? What can you do? At least that's what they said. And so there's that and then it basically never stops. And after the war, so you have CIA, there's OSS's ended and then there's like SSU and then a couple of other things and then CIA comes in in 47. But the same people were just working through all these things and just moved between all

24:14of them as they get folded into each other. Yeah, so after the war, there is a effort that basically, yeah, is there from the get-go and never stops. And it's about interrogation, it's about manipulation, modifying people and their minds and seeing how people can be controlled again with the pretext of this is defensive. And then the, in Jeff Kay's written about this in the context of the Korean War, around that time you also have the word brainwashing into the lexicon. And that term was created by, I think it was Edward Hunter who was a journalist who had been CIA or OSS, maybe also CIA and then left in a vote commas. And then he wrote articles, pointing that term in the context of the Chinese, the communist

25:18Chinese and the Koreans doing these diabolical things to somehow control people's minds. And I think in part that sort of how can people believe in communism? This must be something sinister going on here because no red blooded American would ever believe such a thing. So there's that and then there's also the Korean War, what Jeff Kay's written about is the F-Horse guy who was shot down and became prisoners of war, they confessed to biological warfare and journal warfare and things over career. And the US said that those confessions had to have been the result of brainwashing. Right. Yeah. Because Jeff Kay's outwounded to detail. I think he's period to be the case then. Yeah, I think he was doing all those things. Yeah, I mean, he's completely proved it and one thing he also confirmed is that they were actually told the pilots it's fine to confess it.

26:20So they were told to confess that they did and then when they came back, it was how did they get these guys to say this thing, isn't true. And people like Jolly West, Jolly West was involved in that and a lot of the MK Ultra guys were that the first formal involvement that we know with all this stuff was dealing with the interrogation of the Korean prisoners of war. And when the prisoners of war came back, they were subjected to a tons of like testing and examination by a man who produced reports about Chinese communist methods of indoctrination and manipulation and Korean, you know, all their methods. So it was kind of a retrofit of excuse for essentially. What they were on doing. Yeah, it was like, we've done this war crime essentially, I guess, you have to call it

27:21that. Now, how can we do that and then pretend that we didn't and that they actually made up? Yeah, that's the only somehow merged our war crimes as a with our criminal brain control experiments and somehow come out even better than before. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it. And so then as you're saying also, so brainwashing, I think I'm just saying that that was a CIA term that came from a CIA guy and and it's all, yeah, it's saying that there is this terrible threat. I mean, as with all of this stuff, I think when you really pick apart the layers, what lies under it is the threat of communism, what they perceive as the threat of communism. And that's where this originates from. And then painting it as like, there's this terrifying and serious communist apparatus

28:21in the east who are who can do anything and we'll do anything to people and one thing they'll do is brainwash people. So we have to figure out how are they doing that. And that becomes the pretext for all this stuff. And yes, so then again, it's important to, I think in contrast to the official story of like the hypnoprogramm assassins, it's like, it's interrogation. It's and then what Jeff Kay has written about what Al McCoy wrote about is book question of torture is that this was, well, they make the point very clear. It's, you can't argue it. It's absolutely clear that this stuff directly has actually produced the torture program. Well, it seems to be used, I certainly used during the war on terror. It used it, apparently used intentionally to create, to generate false confessions about weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links to Iraq and so on.

29:23So I mean, they will know the arguments have been made in the past. Like, oh, they don't they know that that's not how you want to interrogate people. They want to get the truth, but they didn't, the people at the top didn't want the truth. Because if you really got the truth about all of these things and you follow the, you know, the leads where they led, you would point back to the apex of the western, clandestine state. So they, they never were interested in, they weren't misled about, oh, the efficacy of torture. Like, not at all. They knew what torture, their new torture was effective for getting false confessions for whatever you want people to confess to. Yeah. And maybe simply as like strategy of just terror as well. Yeah. Terrorizing people. But yeah, I mean, yes. At Guantanamo, I think, all Abu Ghraib, one of them, or both, they had on the wall a, the something called a charter coercion, create about Albert Biedemann, who was one of the,

30:29one of the absolute central figures of all this. And a real big coordinating guy, maybe bigger than West or you, a central guy back to the 50s and the charter coercion was basically, you can look it up. And so that was created in the 50s and they had it on the walls at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib. And it's, it's on Wikipedia, it's just like a 10, 12 step process by which you can, a coercion is a nice word for it. I would say it's how you essentially dismantle someone's sense of reality. I think it'll lead to strife on one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if anyone's ever been in or known of just a toxic or abusive dynamic in any, any kind of thing, like you just, it's that it's like, it's the thing of, yeah, just completely manip, it includes things like, so this is what their experiments were again in the context of what the official story is.

31:29It's stuff like figuring out how you manipulate people in this way and kind of dismantle their defenses and then dismantle their sense of reality so that maybe you can then replace it with something else. And so that includes things like, also like, unpredictably between being really caring and it's just sociopathic when you, but it's also like between being like really caring and supportive and then suddenly being horrifically abusive so that the person just completely, of course, they're just stuck in a cell, not able to sleep as well. And it's just things like make everything completely unpredictable, given no sense of like what time is made so they don't know what to believe, they don't know what to trust. They, and yeah, just completely unmoor someone from any sense of like that they can have a handle on anything. It's just horrific, you know, and it's, that's about collapsing the mind and the personality.

32:32So that's kind of what underpins a lot. This really is the interrogation side and then it's busy torture and I think in terms of, again, if, and I think Sirham Sirham is a clear case where this was kind of something was implemented or used in some way. And again, another point is I don't know that you'd need something I've thought for a while. Why would you put so much work into creating a hypoprogrammed assassin's like plenty of killers as Trump said, plenty of killers, you think we're so perfect or whatever he said about the US, but plenty of killers, I think they've ever had a hard time finding people who will kill and stay quiet. That's easy enough to find. Patsy is more, yes, patsys are what you need. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I see some, I mean, honestly, it's horrifying to think of like how much it would cost to hire a hitman to kill somebody, you know, and then I really would be that this is what is scary for me

33:34and not to, for anybody to contemplate as this empire breaks down and collapses like what is the, what is the, what is this panicked phase going to look like because man, it is that human life is very fragile and there are plenty of people that will extinguish it for essentially, you know, peanut, something a small amount of the money that the regime is able to create it will anyway. So it's frightening to contemplate. Yeah, well, you know, this article, the article that you're writing on this, and we haven't even touched on the artichoke stuff. So maybe even though it's next couple of weeks, it's going to be a little dicey, we should return to this because I want to read the article and I think it may be worth another episode and plus even I have another project we're going to do to try to summarize this the gray alliance business to make it more digestible and perhaps more easily to edit, more easy to edit for an article in a journal. So we have these things coming up, coming up, but presumably by the time this is this episode goes out, you'll have posted the artichoke article on your sub stack.

34:37And so I will encourage people to check that out. And I love talking about these things as you're always doing all this awesome research on these. And I'm excited to get this out and to work on these other subjects as well. And we're really we're really glad to have you back. And I'm glad that you're doing well out there. And until until next time, Max, thanks so much. This was yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it was great. See you soon. For access to the rest of this episode and the rest of our vast and growing library, subscribe to the American exception podcast on Patreon. The URL is patreon.com slash American exception. Thanks to Danish of Arya for producing this episode and thank you for tuning in. I also want to express my deep appreciation to all of our American exception subscribers on Patreon. Please do consider subscribing to the American exception podcast on Patreon. The URL is patreon.com slash American exception. American exception exists thanks to our Patreon subscribers. On YouTube,

35:39we will never be viable. You may notice that we have dropped the devil's chess club title from these episodes. After David Talbot had to leave our team due to his second more debilitating stroke, I kept the devil's chess club name and theme song and intro. I didn't want to close the book on David's partnership with Bryce and me. I had hopes that he would return. David and I had planned to write two books together after 2024. One on the ultra Zionist neo-con takeover of US foreign policy and another on the RFK assassination. It now seems very unlikely that David will return to podcasting or to writing. As such, it didn't make sense to keep using the devil's chess club brand. Still to pay homage to David and the outstanding books that David wrote with his wonderful research assistant Karen Croft, we're going to keep using the devil's chess club theme song intro for our video episodes. David, if you're listening, know that we miss you very much. Finally, and again,

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