John Lisle

But the CIA would transfer the funds to the society, who would then transfer it to the researcher.

In many cases, the researchers didn't even know they were being funded by the CIA.

They just thought, oh, I got a grant from this organization.

That's great.

So they don't even know that their true patron is Sidney Gottlieb and MKUltra.

They just know, oh, they want me to do these experiments.

And in many cases, they're allowed to still publish their work.

So they're publishing this.

Nothing's changed that much from what they were doing before.

But it turns out their patron is actually the CIA who wants to make sure they continue doing these experiments just in case they find something that could be of use.

So with the – probably the first book is more formative to the shaping of my worldview just because that was the first one I did.

Well, I'm pretty much – I would consider myself a skeptic generally.

So when stuff gets a little too outlandish, I am pretty skeptical.

But of course that –

The existence of MKUltra, and even in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, there are some projects that are even more outlandish than some of the stuff I've been talking about with MKUltra.

And so that kind of lowered my barriers to thinking that, oh, people are crazy.

Like, oh, the government does actually perform these crazy projects.

One of the ones that really lowered my barriers to that for the first book was called Operation Fantasia.

And, again, it's just a testament to the absurdity of some of the ideas that were happening in World War II and just within the intelligence community.

Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of this guy named Ed Salinger.