Rick Spence

It is fair to say that there's probably some degree of cultural differences, not necessarily for institutional reasons, but cultural reasons. There could well be things that Americans might balk at doing more than you would find on the Russian or Soviet side of the equations. The other aspect of that is that Russian history is long and contentious and bloody.

One of the things it certainly teaches is you never trust foreigners. Every foreign government, anywhere, any country on your border is a real or potential enemy. They will all, at some point, if given the chance, invade you. Therefore, they must always be treated with great suspicion. That goes back to something that I think the British observed, was that countries don't have friends.

They have interests. And those interests can change over time. Well, the CIA is probably equally suspicious of all other nations. That's your job. You're supposed to be suspicious. Your job is not to be trusting. The basic job of an intelligence agency is to safeguard your secrets and steal the other guys and then hide those away.

Well, I think John Le Carre gave his pen name. He was talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence. And one of the things he remembered being told up front was if you do this, you have to be willing to lie and you have to be willing to kill. Now, those are things that in ordinary human interactions are bad things. Generally, we don't like it when people lie to us.

We expect that people will act honestly towards us, you know, whether that's being a businessman you're involved with, your employers. We're often disappointed in that because people do lie all the time for a variety of reasons, but honesty is generally considered to be it. But But in a realm where deception is a rule, dishonesty is a virtue.

To be good at that, to be able to lie convincingly is good. It's one of the things you need to do. And killing also is generally frowned upon.

You know, put people in prison for that. They're otherwise executed. But in certain circumstances, killing is one of those things that you need to be able to do. So what he felt he was being told in that case is that, you know, once you enter this realm, the same sort of moral rules that apply in general British society do not apply. And if you're squeamish about it, you won't fit in.

You have to be able to do those things.

Let's take an example from American intelligence, from the CIA, 1950s, 1960s, into the 1970s, MKUltra. that is a secret program, which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control, which really means messing with people's heads. And what was the goal of that?

Well, there seemed to have been lots of goals, but there was an FBI memo that was, I recently acquired, quite legally, by the way, it's declassified, but it's from 1949. So this is only two years after the CIA came into existence. And it's an FBI memo because the FBI, of course, very curious what the CIA is up to.

And the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone in... They're sort of spying on what's going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York. So it's not held in any kind of... It's essentially never really happened because it's in somebody's house, but... And there are a couple of guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Baxter.

Cleve Baxter is the great godfather of the lie detector. Pretty much everything that we know or think we know about lie detectors today, you owe to Cleve Baxter. He's also the same guy that thought that plants could feel, but which somehow was a derivative of his work on lie detectors. So these guys are there, and they're giving a talk to some military and other personnel.

And there are certain parts of the document which are, of course, redacted, but you can figure out what it is that they're talking about. And they're talking about hypnotic suggestion and all the wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion.

And two of the things they note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people's minds and implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that. Just imagine how that would be done. So here to me is the interesting point. They're talking about this in 1949. MKUltra does not come along until really 1953, although there are all sorts of artichoke and others.

Everything is sort of leading up to that. It's simply an elaboration of programs that were already there. I don't think that it ultimately matters whether you can... Implant memories or erase memories. To me, the important part is they thought they could, and they were going to try to do it.

And that eventually is what you find out in the efforts made during the 1950s and 60s through MKUltra, MKSearch, MKNaomi, and all the others that came out. That's one of the things they're working for. And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there's that whole question is that you get someone to put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger and then remember it later. Yeah.

You could, interestingly enough.

One person put it that the basic argument there, or the basic thing you're after, was to understand the architecture of the human mind, how it worked, how it put together, and then how you could take those pieces apart and assemble them in different ways. So this comes, this is where hypnosis comes in, which is a was then still is, fairly spooky thing.

Nobody's ever explained to me exactly what it is. The idea was that could you, you think of the whole possibilities in this case, could you create an alternate personality and use that alternate personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off so subsequently the person which that personality inhabited was

captured and interrogated, tortured, you know, had their fingernails torn out, they would have no memory of it. They couldn't give any kind of secret away because it was embedded in some part of their brain where there was a completely different person. I mean, you can just imagine the possibilities that you can dream up.