John Lisle

You can't trust anything he said.

But no, what was in it?

Turns out what was in it, George White wrote, I toiled in the vineyards wholeheartedly because it was fun, fun, fun.

Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with a sanction and blessing of the all-highest?

Yeah.

God.

Yeah.

So we would have known about the Frank Olson incident.

We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, though maybe not that name.

We would have known the broad outlines of MKUltra because that was already released before those files.

But the files give us a really detailed view of what happened.

Yeah.

We kind of do know a little bit about what was in them because there was an investigation that was done afterwards because it was illegal for them to destroy these files.

Not that anything ever happened to them.

They didn't face any consequences for it.

However, Gottlieb's secretary, this woman who had only been working for him for a few weeks before he retired...

he told her to basically incinerate these files, you know, to help him do this.

So she didn't know it was against protocol or whatever.

She was new to the job.

But she was interviewed later as part of a CIA investigation into the destruction of the files.