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 alive, the cia wanted those slides and they went there after the war and promised him they would not prosecute him but they wanted to know where the slides were in the information of how the body reacts to the most extreme kind of torture. It was Something Like his counterpart in germany, he was the chief of a nazi biowarfare program. He was put on trial in bloomberg but the cia was able to get to the judges in that trial who are American Military officers and send them a message, we want to handont wantto hang him we wan. He brought all of his knowledge with him. I think this reflects at the time and has a message for today, commitment to a great cause is the ultimate justification for committing immoral acts. Patriotism is among the most transcendent and seductive of causes. When you allow yourself to get caught up, i think you lose sight of the question, is there a limit to the amount of evil that you can do pursuing what do you think is a good cause before the evil outweighs the good. I think godley lost sight of the equation. And then you can go further and ask about operation paperclip, but what struck me was a word the expendables. He referenced that. Its difficult to tell in the book how many human beings were expendables overseas and in this country and is any estimate. Can you talk a little bit about that and in the information of what happened in those places. We dont know the number of people that were experimented to death. Probably that was included in the seven cases of documents that were destroyed as he was leaving the cia. Operation paperclip was operation by which biographies of nazis were breached and converted into snaking they were into nice folks. It would be changed to not a member of it and that references the family lives would be included so they can be brought to the u. S. Or brought to work for the cia. During this period, only a very small number of scientists were aware of what godley was doing, the members of his intercourse and they traveled to the sites in east asia and in europe to conceive of and oversee and observe these torture sick experiments. So godley himself used lsd by his own account, i had to wonder when i began to understand the intensity of some of the experiments whether he mightve conceived some of them or actually tripping on acid, is the only way i can imagine that you would come up with the combinations of torments and then to convince yourself that this is something you need to do in order to defend the United States against communism. I saw when you talked about what happened in the expendables in germany and the darkside set up was a direct linkage to what happened after 9 11 can you talk about how that worked and what was utilized from learning of the 40 or 50 years prior to what happened in places like that. So the subject in the experiment outside the United States were with expendables, those were people who were suspected enemy agents, possibly refugees who did not have connection from anybody and will not be missed if they did not come up again and many of the expendables were captured north korean prisoners of war, a number of these people, we dont know how many did not survive the experiments. Godley came to know more than anybody of his generation about how to destroy a human being. And he wrote a memo explaining how to do this. How do you cut a person off from all stimulus, how do you make a person completely dependent on the interrogator, how do you make that person lose all sense of connection, anything outside the chamber in which youve imprisoned him, he wrote about techniques of doing this on an extended memo. As i discuss in my book, that memo wound up shaping guidelines that were used for officers working in the Phoenix Program in vietnam, they were used in manuals that were passed to secret Police Forces working in latin america during the 1980s and they then turned up and instruction manuals for people overseeing interrogation in guantanamo and the phrases can be put trace back to godley. There is a continuum from the experiments he conducted in the 1950s right through the tactics of enhanced interrogation that were using today. One thing that struck me was the title given some of these men the counterintelligence interrogation which evolved in the 1980s, i think you call that the Human Resource manual which is really about what . Human resource exportation is another word for mind control, how do you get into a persons head and managed to control the person, although hes never been able to figure out how to program someone to go out and commit aggressive act, he was able to find out a series of ways that you could reduce a functioning human being into a vegetable state only decades later did some of his victims slowly come to realize that that must be what had happened to them. Someone in a bar with a club foot and put something in the drink in my life was never the same again or i went into hospital complaining of depression and i was captured by a doctor and put into the Deprivation Chamber and by the time i came cannot recognize my family again for the rest of my life or eat was silverware. What happened. Decades later some of these people slowly began to connect what happened to them into godley, toward the end of his life one of these losses was actually going to come to trial after 20 years of in and outs of the American Court system, the beginning of 1999 it looked like he was going to have to testify under oath as a defendant in a case in which he had to participate in the drugging of someone whose life was destroyed from that moment. Just as the case was about to go to trial in 1999 he died at the age of 80. I worked with the lawyer who pursued the case for 20 years and he told me will never know for sure but im convinced he committed suicide he did not want to be the instrument in which this became public so he died just as the case was about to come to trial. This is a striking book drops of lsd and other drugs into peoples drinks at parties and one attic dont at the Christmas Party will happen there. December of 1954 i found a memo who is the chief of security for the cia and it says, godley and his lsd fascination began to filter around the cia and given this information and would not be recommended to test the punch at the holiday Christmas Party at the cia. I found another great story godley used to like to tell early on so his experiment with lsd were supersecret, nobody knew what lsd was in those days. And nobody was allowed to know, the mid50s godley was in an airplane and he had gone to the galley to get a drink and he was walking back to his syn seat wih his drink and he heard someone say is that lsd you are drinking. And he was horrified census was one of the greatest secrets of the u. S. Government and he turned around and it was alan douglas, the only person who knew. So the book is full of incredible characters that you stumble across in some of them are the worst Horror Stories you can imagine. The canadian doctor cameron. Can you talk about how he got hooked up with experiments and some of the horrific that you wrote about and wasnt he head of the American Psychiatric association meeting. These are deemed psychiatrists that were brought in. Cameron was one of the contractors who got 149 subcontracts that godley gave out. He was a canadian psychologist in as you said very imminent of psychological societies and institute of Mcgill University and coincidentally enough just before i walked into the room in the last hour i had a meeting whose father had his life completely destroyed by coming in to see him and he said my father had two panic attacks, he went into a psychological hospital, at this time my dad cameron had been contracted to got people for experiments. He was taking them for six weeks of deprivation and massive dosing of drugs and one of camerons techniques was to give his victims headphones and their sensory deprivation coffins and in the headphones he would have them be repeated from phrase hundreds of thousands of times over days and weeks, little phrases like my mother hates me my mother hates me, this would be streaking into your ears all the time. As i heard from the gentleman whom i met, the father in his mid40s came out and was never able to function again as a normal human being. He was psychologically crippled and destroyed for life. That was a trail that cindy godley left behind him. And cameron was one of the most extreme of his subcontractors but only the most extreme among the most we know about. So some people later have turned up including victims of camerons and have regrets. One of his victims was the wife of the member of the Canadian Parliament and he kept her case alive in the granddaughter of this victim is now an artist in canada and she has produced a whole series of artworks aimed at trying to convey what her grandmother went through under cameron and godley care if you want to call it about. And i have a photo of one of her artworks in my book, its a lost picture in the process and supposed to signify some of his work are still felt today and some people are trying to point the responsibility where it belongs. The strand of characters is astonishing but one thing is clear and that anything that he and others thought of to experiment and answer these questions that they got away with. There was no limit. Godley had the right to requisition human subject out will all over europe and asia, as many as he needed and he was hardly supervised at all. I mention that he was have a small core working for him and the secrets were the deepest and darkest of the entire cold war and there was a moment in 1953 where one of the guys had an attack of conscience a guy named frank olson he was one of godleys chemist during the summer of 1953 he made one of the normal tours that the team would make to europe to observe the experiment. During the tour olson saw these people being tortured to death using aerosol that he himself had developed. Suddenly this struck him and he did not want to do it anymore. He told people he told his colleagues in the cia i want to quit, im going to quit the cia. We found out he asked one of his friends if he knew a journalist so not so long after coming back from his trip to europe in 1953, frank olson went out the window over 13 for hotel room in new york city and plunged to his death and that was described as a suicide of an army sidekicks. He was not an Army Scientist he was a cia scientist and suicide from the perspective we have today. Doesnt have meaning . The mind control project had three names, it started out being called bloomberg, because the truth being one of the first goals, the idea we were going to try to find a potion or pill that would make a prisoner seemed like a bird and later on they named the project artichoke so supposedly allens favorite vegetable, not able to verify that. And then it became mk ultra, i think alan chose that name because it meant the ultra project. This is the most important project that we have and i think he was right, it is a fantasy but if that were true then it would be the ultra discovery for any intelligence service. One thing you mentioned, the famed world and what couldve enabled people in the American Government of what they saw hoppity. After world war ii we think we won but the rise of communists in russia and ussr, is there an explanation or an excuse . America always has trouble when we get into enemy deprivation syndrome, we need to have somebody out there to pose as a counterweight of the enemy that is out there and certainly the soviet union play that will positively in the late 40s an early 50s and beyond. I think we project the soviets the worst aspects of the enemies in one or two. If the japanese could bomb america without running, the soviets were likely to do the same if the nazis had killed millions then the soviets would want to do the same. So americans are led to believe that we faced a horrific implacable enemy that was plotting every day not only to kill us all but to destroy the internal possibility of human life on earth and fighting such horrific enemy would be worth of a sacrifice of a few hundred lives to complain about that in the climate of the early cia would have seemed naive and sentimental. So caught up in this mindset, everything was justifiable. I think that is one message that they have for eric today now were being told because of the urgency of the threat we are facing and we have to give our Civil Liberties and carry out actions of the world and being good and ethical and moral and responsible people we are we would normally never carry out but in this extreme circumstance were forced to brand our principles. I think there is a push for the situation that we have to be in right now which is so extreme that we have to depart from the melody and after a while its a new normality. One of the things you say over and over they see themselves as true patriots and really defending american values, is that part of the motivation . Definitely godley was motivated by the fact that he had not been able to serve in world war ii because his lungs made him ineligible so he was eager to serve the u. S. Government and some other way when the cia called he thought this was his chance. There is no evidence that he ever question any of the extreme experiments on the contrary he kept pushing for them for the i had to ask myself how could a person who considers himself such as decent human being allow himself to do that, maybe because he considered himself an extreme individual who in an unusual way couldve told himself as a force in the world that wanted to make it impossible for anybody in regiment the whole society is part of what we were told of what communism was in there for anything he could do to resist that would be justified. But his theory is definitely an object for all of us to get carried away with the cause and think anything is justifiable given the urgency. Needless to say, cold war historians have concluded that the way we perceive the world, the threat that we thought was greatly exaggerated but at the time it seemed so real that any kind of defense and godley certainly saw his experiment as a way to defend america was justifiable. In certain solutions the creativity and horrific nature of what is going on and listed many people. Tell us about john. I came across such fascinating characters writing this book. So john was the most famous musician of his era and godley was brought into the cia to do something magic, mind control so it was logical that he would cross paths with mulholland who was a disciple amodei man who is a great figure for the musical and performed for Eleanor Roosevelt and he had a great celebrity of friends. So godley went to see him and presented him with this problem. He said im able to make poisons and mind altering pills and devices and we have agents who can get close to the targets. How do we deliver the pill, how do you get the pill into the drink, how do you stick the needle he invented them they were so hyper then you would not feel them when they went in. How do you get to them and deliver the poisons. And he hired mulholland to write a manual based on his technique about how to draw pills in the peoples drinks without them noticing, how women could use purse hed become public not g ago actually the only document that has become fully available in one of the things that i learned from John Mulholland when he talked to the cia because he not only wrote the book but he conducted seven other training sessions for cia agents and how to drop the poison and stop people with poison surrenders th surrenders. That is not how magic works. Magic works by distracting a person and making them look at one thing why youre doing something else. So i learned this from mulholland and cia officers learn that and a lot more. Were in San Francisco we have to talk about operation midnight climax. And what they were about in some of the characters behind those operations when people are surprised of operation midnight climax. These are two related test that were carried out in San Francisco, operation sea spray was military operation that the cia was involved in in the military wanted to find out if it would be possible to spray an entire city with the toxic poison in order to test this they picked the city and decided they would spray the city with a nontoxic but traceable bacteria to see if it worked. They chose San Francisco. It became operation sea spray. They were chosen not just because is by the water but also it was thought the fog would help disguise in the cloudburst about a week especially navin minnavyminesweeper the hud homes connected to tanks of a harmless but traceable bacteria cruise along the coast of california in San Francisco insuring off a week later after the measurements were taken it turned out the poisons pray your couldve been poison had reached all of San Francisco and a dozen community surrounding. The cia found out thanks to San Francisco. People actually had in their system. I found a medical journal article written by doctors in the hospital and he and his colleagues had 11 patients check in with the urinary infection and we cannot understand where they came from the spray had red dye so they can trace it and they said there was a little bit of red dye in the urine and no explanation for the puzzling bacterial logical phenomenon. So it was as nontoxic as i thought. No officials in San Francisco or california were told about the operation. That was in 1961. Later on in the mid1950s another bizarre project unfolded. Cindy godley in his imagination decided one thing the world to find out if drugs had a special effect on men in connection with. So how did they do that, no problem the cia set up a burger lot and hire somebody to run it and sure enough he hired a guy that was in his day job one of the most colorful characters in my book. This guys job was to hire a string of prostitutes who went into an apartment at 245 Chestnut Street which was decorated in a re bordello and y would dose the men with tainted drinks which they did not even know what was in the drinks and meanwhile the agent who knew nothing about psychology or any science would sit behind a oneway mirror on his toile toit drinking martinis out of a pitcher making notes about the that was going on in the other room, this was your tax dollars at work seeking to find a way to protect the United States against communism. One thing in the book you read about some were dosed with lsd and some jumped on left but they realized the men began talking. Godley tro track the prostits to see if he stayed with them. Do you know what plane youre working on, how high does apply, they would test out these things in operation midnight climax. I went up to see the building, its a lovely spot i read ahead of view of the bay and its been demolished and theres a new building but i still got the midnight climax karma. [laughter] deep into the secret and all the files for altar were destroyed, one of the interesting ways from receipts and expense reports, but looking at the ark of the cia history going out of world war ii, what do you think is going on today, this ministration to obama to trump. When you research a project like this would mk ultra and you realize how extreme are some of the projects that unfold behind closed doors, it has to make you wonder if there are others, could there have been other godleys now, technology has advanced so tremendously from the essentially paleo lithic era of the 1950s when godley was around. When he was there there were people who could have supervised them if they wanted to but they did not want to. It was a small circle and a small system. Now our system and surveillance state is so big that i dont think theres any person or group of people that have an idea of everything that its doing. Certainly the story takes it to the edge of a Conspiracy Theory and beyond, its difficult not to read the story and wonder if there is not somebody, some person comparable who will be the subject of Stephen Kinzer 50 years from now. One of the things that was remarkable were the devices created in you briefly mentioned a few of those. Godley became the spy tools toward the end of his career he is very creative as it was was in the james bond movie there was a guy named q who created that was godley. So he created tools the bulk of the imagination. It was a prison escape kit that can be concealed. We seized a request and he responded to the request of cia officers and it turned out the cia officers with columbia were no longer able to over and here the soviet ambassador because he was suspicious and carried out his sensitive conversation. What can we do. So godley came out with a gun, a oneshot projectile and you would fire this projectile from 700 yards away through the gate of the embassy and it would hit the tree and in the projectile was a microphone and transmitter. Another one of my favorite devices that i did see had to do with the l pill and godley concocted these for all types of purposes who were given the famous device with a pin they can touch their skin and they would die and that was a toxin they created by extracting minute amounts of bacteria from thousands of butter clams. Thats the way he made his poison. So he went on to create an l pill that was going to be given to a soviet agent, somebody that the cia had who was a russian and a traitor to his own country working inside the soviet bureaucracy and this person was afraid of being found out and tortured to death. He would not work unless he got an l pill. So godley can make the l pill but thats not enough. How do you take the l pill when youre in the middle of an interrogation. You cannot ask for a pause and take it out. So godley created a provide glasses with this case prescription and if you took off the glasses for example under intense interrogation session where you are nervous and you started to chew on the end of your eyeglass, that is where the pill was, you chew on your glasses and fall over and die. This is a creativity that made him a figure toward the end of his career. In your research the goal of the lot of these was control in creating a super weapon lsd and all of that. But was there experimentation with lsd and mushrooms and other drugs they used in terms of treatment for Mental Illness and today some of these drugs are being used to treat trauma and veterans. Is there any indication that this can be used for good to help people. First of all i would say, godley would answer, everything we did with lsd was for the good to defend america. But in the sense of your question the answer is no godley never thought of lsd in a therapeutic sense. The chemist who discovered lsd did think of it that way, his first idea it should be used treat for monta on this. So now were 70 years later and i think youre right, lsd is back, there is going to be a musical on broadway this spring written by James Dantonio award winner of how huxley and grand used lsd back in the day. Just recently John Hopkins University announced a 70 million to create an institute, the first time its ever happened in america. And he has legalized magic mushrooms, i think were perhaps getting back to the point that Albert Huffman envisioned at the beginning in the 1940s were lsd and psycho actor drov drugsn be used for positive purposes. One reason we got so far off this track was sydney godley. The unfortunately we reached a point where its 100 time for one last question. In the book where you saw the evil in him he was a complicated character as you alluded to. Because first section of his time was he a patriot, killer but you wrote near the end of the book history and morality were like threatening clouds to assist in life and work. And as a patriot its fairly aborted. It requires a deep dive into the human mind and human soul. So what is your conclusion after doing all this work and writing this book . After he left the cia he went off to become the sydney godley that he always thought that he was. They sold all their belongings, they went off to help the worlds poorest people for the rest of their lives in a 1975 sydney godley and his wife are working at a hospital for leprosy patients and india when they got the most unwelcome cable from the general counsel of the cia saying essentially i have bad news somebody has figured out that you exist and they want to talk to. It was the Church Committee investigating and he did have to testify twice but he didnt in a private room and senators did not know enough to ask him the right questions, they focused on the assassinations which were headline grabbing and they never touched the heart of the mk altar ministry. I think he believed he was a patriot but i also think he understood the severity of what he was doing, pieces of his testimony are available in one point he says i want the members to know i considered this work to be very difficult and very distasteful and very unpleasant but also very necessary which you could only understand if you were there at the time. I think thats the way he justified it nonetheless his own justifications were not enough even for himself at the end. Anybody who believed in final judgment or karma payback would certainly hav great trouble loog back on sydney godley. Thank you of the senior fellow at the Washington Institute of public affairs. Chief in nicaragua and germany and turkey. This program is part of the Commonwealth Club underwritten by the Bernard Osher foundation and we also think everyone here as well as our audience on Radio Television and the internet. We want to remind you that this book is for sale in a be pleased to sign copies outside following the program. I am robert and this meaning of the Commonwealth Club the place where your into no is adjourned. [applause] cspan campaign 2020 team is traveling across the country asking voters what issue should president ial candidates address. I think one of the most unaddressed issues is reforming federal business as the u. S. Marshals if they have a more than staggering death rate of prisoners and i think its important issue that they have the power to do so. I want the candidates to focus on constituent who never get their voices heard in these constituent are not animals. As an investigator who has blown the whistle on multiple farms were animals are being abused i think felony charges and one things i want candidates to focus on is how the public has a right to know whats going on behind closed doors and were animals are being criminally abuse. 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