Transcripts For CSPAN2 Stephen Kinzer Poisoner In Chief 2024

CSPAN2 Stephen Kinzer Poisoner In Chief July 13, 2024

Okay. Welcome to the Commonwealth Club. Im the former executive director for the investigative reporting and the current board member and moderator for tonights program. This program is part of the clubs series by the Bernard Foundation and it is my pleasure to introduce todays distinguished speaker senior fellow at the institute at Brown University brothers overthrow hes also an awardwinning correspondent for the boston globe. His new book tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the cias seat medical experiments of the 1950s and 60s. On the original interviewer int, survivors testimonies and documentary research, the book brings to light the massive hunt for the secret of mind control that spans several countries including the work of nazi scientists and led experimentations on Government Employees willing and unwilling, foreign politicians and the children, prisoners, sex workers and anyone else they deem threatening or expendable. Youre about to hear a tale of the most powerful unknown americans in the 21st century and government lies and deception. [applause] thank you. Its great to be here back at the commonwealth especially at the wonderful new home. Ive been here speaking about other books have you heard. This is now my tenth book and i have to say that ive devoted a good deal of my career to try to find out whats behind the facade of public politics and Public Diplomacy that we see. This has led me to discover a number of things that are surprising. Maybe they were shocking to some people. This is the first time i have been shocked. I am still in shock at what i discovered when i was researching this book. I cannot believe that this project happened and that this guy existed. I do believe i stumbled on it the most powerful unknown american of the 20th century unless that was somebody else who lived in total invisibility and carried out heinous experiments across three continents and had what amounted to a license to kill issued by the u. S. Government. So, in a sense, my book is a biography of a guy that didnt exist. He was so anonymous that even most of the people at the cia had no idea what he was doing. But what he was doing is something thats profoundly important as we try to understand ourselves and our modern history. So let me talk a little bit about what his job was. Mk ultra was the cia project aimed at finding the secret of mind control. How do you make a subject completely dependent on you so that he will fall you the complete truth, that he will forget everything you want him to forget, that maybe you could program to carry out acts that you want him to carry out and then he would forget who ordered him to commit them or that he ever had committed them. So, this bizarre project based on a great fantasy began in the early years of the cold war after world war ii. The cia was electrified by a couple of episodes it misinterpreted as meaning that the soviets, the communists had discovered the key to mind control. One of them was the trial of the in hungary and he confessed to crimes he had committed. He spoke in monotone from his eyes were glazed over. As it turned out he had been coerced by the normal means that people have been using to coerce prisoners for centuries, but the cia didnt see it that way. They saw that he had been brainwashed which was a word was inventethat was invented by a ca propagandist to try to promote the idea in the United States that peoplhave people who were s and didnt set the paradigm of the era had somehow been captured by foreigners. But the cia then faile filbertsn fantasy and started believing in brainwashing. The second episode came at the end of the korean war when it turned out to be members of these released american prisoners have signed statements criticizing aspects of life in the United States. It couldnt be that they were speaking honestly and the answer was brainwashing. So again, the communists they make themselves believe have come up with a way to control peoples minds. That means we, the cia t had launched a project to do the same. We have to catch up with them. So, as it later turned out, there was no pill or potion or take a peek at the soviets or any other authorities discovered to control peoples minds. But the cia was open to this, and i asked myself how did they get caught up in this fantasy. I think those particular episodes are important, but i suspect that their minds were made ready for this. By all the movies and books and stories that they read. They were almost Sherlock Holmes stories and Edgar Allen Poe and movies like gaslight and who could make people do whatever he wanted. And i think maybe whatever they could imagine, science could make real. So 1951, they decided to formalize the cia search for the key time control. He decided to go out of sight of the cia to find somebody who could direct this project. He called it an okay ultra and i think that reflects what he thought about the project. It was the ultra project. If you can find a way to control peoples minds, the prize would be nothing less than global mastery. Little successes in the early 1950s like overthrowing the government of iran or overthrowing the government of guatemala would pale in significance if you could find a way to control peoples minds. Most of the officers in those days were silver spoon in aristocratic products of investment banks that knew each other through family ties. He was the son of jewish immigrants and grew up in the bronx, went to the city college of new york and later caltech. He had a stalker comes with 32yearsold and with all of this he was brought in to be the chief chemist of the cia and probably from the three other federal employee in washington during the period because of his personal life he considered himself a deeply compassionate humanist. He lived in an eco cabin in the woods with no running water. He grew his own such tuples and meditated with candles and studied buddhism and wrote poetry, he got up and the morning to milk his goats. So, very unusual figure at the cia. The scientists mind and a small group of chemists with whom he worked started out on this project which was the most intense and systematic works for the mind control techniques that have ever been undertaken in history. So the first thing he decided us this before he could figure out how to come he first had to find a way to blast the mind david ooa the mind that was there. He had to destroy the human mind and human body and human spirit. That is what he set out to do. The next thing that was a good scientists approach was what information, what research is out there already that we could draw on so we immediately be turned to the people that had the greatest recent experience and data destroying human minds and bodies and that was the doctors at the nazi concentration camps and their counterparts in japan. These people were brought into the cia. They not only advised them on the kind of experiment and take the state might use, but they actually participated so several of these doctors were hired by the cia to bring the knowledge that they gained during the war when the experiment of people to death and they used this to inform the search for mind control. So he then set out on a series of projects aimed at testing every kind of drug and every kind of other coercive techniques that he could imagine to see how he could first destroy a mind and then try to insert another in the void. These were the most extreme experiments that have ever been conducted on human subjects by any officer or agent of the u. S. Government. He had two sets of experiments. One that was set in the United States and also conducted experiments outside of the United States. So within the u. S. , his favorite subjects were prisoners for obvious reasons. He, for example, oversaw an experiment o at the federal prin in kentucky in which seven africanamerican inmates were isolated into a cell and without being told what is happening to them, they were given overdoses every day for 77 days. This was part of the effort to find out if this technique could destroy a human mind, and guess what, yes it can. He found many ways to destroy the min linux using sensory deprivation, electric shock, all different combinations. If somebody died under their experiments the body could easily be disposed of which was more or less controlled after the Second World War and in japan and south korea and in the philippines. So, during the course of my research for the buck, i discovered what i think may be the first cia secret prisons. Its been a lovely chalet outside of frankfurt and germa germany. The young german businessman who now owns it took me down into the basement and showed me his storage rooms and said that these are the cells where the doctors and their nazi counterparts conducted experiments that were just continuations of the experiments that have gone on in concentration camps. And he also said to me the older people in the neighborhood understand what happened in this house. Its not a secret. And i found an article in the german magazine about this house that said this is the cia torture house. There were deaths, but the number is not known. We now know that he was at the top of this whole series of experiments. One of the things they did in the house for the example involved sedating people, putting them in a coma and then overdosing them in the period paper in the transition phase they would be dosed with heavy electro shocks to see if the combination might somehow be the way to open up their minds to manipulation from the outside. So he directed these experiments and he had the jekyll and hyde thing going in a big way. He would do that during the day and then go home and do his meditations and Community Service and be the loving father and husband that he was. Of all the drugs that he came across and inspected and compounded, the one that fascinated him the most was the less the. He emerged at the cia at the very beginning. He thought it could be the key for mind control it was so powerful and so small overdoses he thought it could be used to them program a persons mind. There he divided lsd into two groups, part was used for heinous experiments that i just discussed, others were used for noncoercive experience with volunteers. So he set up bogus medical foundations and he offered hospitals and clinics and universities the chance to carry out with people who come in and be told what they were doing so their actions can be observed many happening california and who were the first people to volunteer, one was kink easy who went on to write the cuckoos nest and Allen Ginsberg the poet robert hunter, all of these people got their first lsd from the cia, from mk opera. But 25 years later they came to realize that they had been part of a cia project. John lennon at was asked in the interview about lsd and he said we must always remember to think the cia. [laughter] he did not know enough to know what to say which he shouldve said we must always remember to think Sidney Godley she was a unwitting godfather of the entire counterculture. The drug that he hoped would allow the cia to control peoples minds actually wound up feeling a generational rebellion and destroying everything that the cia leapt in. So at the end of ten years of these experiments in the early 60s, he was forced to come to two conclusions, number one it is possible to destroy a human mind. He found out how to do that and left a trail of destroyed lives behind you. Number two, it is not possible to insert another mind into somebodys brain. Mind control is a myth, you cannot make people go out and commit murder despite with the movie show you do. So all that suffering was aimed that she had to admit did not exist. Godley went on to another stage in his career, he knew more about poisons and anyone in america, probably more than anyone in the world. So the spring of 1960 when president eisenhower ordered that he be sought off as he put it. Godley got the job. It was godley who got the job it was supposed to be to castro. He poisoned all 50 of them. When those cannot be delivered he compounded a series of pills i learned a whole new poisons working on this book. L pills are pills that kill. He could make him easily with his unique laboratory and those of pills also could not be delivered to castro and he even made a wet suit that was supposed to be given to castro as a gift and inside it was tainted with a fungus that would eat away his skin and kill hi wd kill him after he put it on. Later in the same summer, he personally traveled to the congo carrying poisoned that he had made to deliver to the cia station chief in the congo and killing the Prime Minister of the congo who eisenhower had ordered assassinated. He was shot by belgian before the poison could be used but godley definitely secured his reputation of the poison are in chief. Godley later went on to spend seven years as head of the Technical Service staff which is part of the cia that makes the toys and the gizmos and the tools in the spies used him. In 1973 when he and Richard Helms were forced out of the cia, they decided to destroy all records of mk ultra as they laughed. Thereby protecting themselves and the agency from embarrassment and much more. Since then its been possible to piece together some of what it was but in my favorite sentence in the book, at the very end where i say everything in this book is true but not everything that is true is in this book, im painfully aware ive only discovered a little piece of what it was and who Sidney Godley was. Turns into his life godley was very weighed down by what he had done. A section in my book where people knew him in his final years talked about how he obviously felt burdened and i talked to Seymour Hersh who went out to visit him during the period and he was a broken man and riddled with guilt he had been a catholic he wouldve gone to a monastery. In the end i look back on godley as a highly contradictory figure in different architects that contradict each other, he was the creator and destroyer. He was a gentle hearted porch or, he was an outlaw. His story is disturbing in understating our country and understanding ourselves. Thank you. [applause] los talk about ginsberg, the Washington Institute for National Affairs former New York Times bureau chief and the author of the new book poison in chief Sidney Godley in the cia for my control. We will start with q a. You said in your remarks that you are surprised what you found in research, how did you first hear about Sidney Godley and what intrigued you to start a pursuit . In an earlier book i have included a short section about how the cia had sent somebody to the congo to kill the Prime Minister. Later on that story stuck with me and i began to wonder, who was that guy was a recruiter, no it was not a career, who was the chief of the cia. Then i found out that the same guy had made the poison to kill castro in the Prime Minister of china but then i began to realize that the job of making poison to kill foreign leaders was a sidelight for godley entering godley, people investigating the cia got very excited about that. But the project was much bigger than that, that was all godleys responsibility and it never would have been the extreme, that intense had it not been for godley. I began to realize that this person had a secret life that helps us understand a little bit of what the secret life of the u. S. Government. Part of that when you talked about the assassination of castro and others, he was in a sense a tool in the same way and to listen the book you recreated a scene where eisenhower was looking at was happening in the congo and decided members should be eliminated. Eisenhower i think sal saw an even the assassination of foreign leaders as a peace project. He had to send kids out to die by the thousands in world war ii, this must have weighed on him. I think he believed that it was a great way to overthrow government and change course of history wha without having to we lives, i dont think he looked forward to what the longterm impact would be. But eisenhower symbolizes how unsupervised Sidney Godley was. So undoubtedly eisenhower remove something from secretary of state but the only people to cia who had an idea of what godley was doing where the director helms the person in between him and godley, both of those people understood if godley was doing horrific things in his experiments were variability and probably people were being killed, those of us in other kinds of work might think somebody was doing Something Like that working for us we would want to get some details and find out what was happening. His response was opposite, from where they understood but no less they wanted to know about them. They never asked and did not want to know, this is obedience not only to cia but the culture of secret service is in general. Ignorance is an asset. People want to know too much. And because of that godley was able to act completely on his own. It was extra added asset that later on when it becomes public at least they did to a certain point, people in the cia and above the cia are able to say that was one crazy guy, unfortunately they did not supervise him well enough and he did crazy things. This is a way of keeping all institutional responsibly for the cia and u. S. Government. Lets back up in the book you go into detail about the aftermath of world war ii and into the cia in the context of what was happening of communism but you mentioned in your remarks that the u. S. Brought in nazis and japanese, doctors and generals who had been involved in horrific things, but can we talk about kirk bloom was brought in and what they were doing in the lack of morality in terms of ethics that led them to become part of the process of the super weapons. If you can detail a little bit. He was a japanese doctor in general who ran a section shop in manchuria for the Japanese Army in wichita, several thousand people were essentially cut open alive and murdered so he could see how bodies reacted in extreme stress, then he would take slides, bio samples from the organs that he ripped out while they were still aliv

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