The Insane Tactics The CIA Used To Defeat Hitler In WWII - John Lisle

is it possible to push Hitler kind of over that threshold from either male to female or really upset his fragile masculinity so how can we do this what if we inject female sex hormones into the vegetables that Hitler eats if he eats these hormones then that's really going to push him over the edge and his mustache is going to fall out his voice is going to turn soprano and his chest is going to grow breasts this will decimate his fragile ego and he's going to lose all of his credibility and people aren't going to take him seriously and will somehow win the war this is the idea what do you do what's your job I'm a historian I'm a professor at the University of Texas but I also write books you know this one that just came out the dirty tricks Department that's the book that I've been working on for a year so I'm glad it is finally out there for people to enjoy hopefully what is the story of the dirty tricks Department what is it how did it come about yeah this this is the story of a group of scientists during World War II who created the secret weapons documents and disguises for the OSS this is the precursor to the CIA the office of strategic Services I had come across this topic when I was working on my dissertation in grad school which was on science in the intelligence community and then I came across some of the figures that appear in this book and so my while my dissertation was on a different topic I couldn't help myself but really want to learn more about this topic and so I was kind of doing a dual uh investigation in the archives I had to finish my dissertation but my heart was interested in researching this stuff so this is the product of that kind of research that I just couldn't help myself from doing on the OSS and its dirty tricks Department what is the Genesis of the dirty tricks Department then does it grow out of the OSS is it built and then tacked on how does that work yeah it's it kind of grows out of the OSS for the most part um so the OSS is in charge of uh coordinating kind of intelligence during World War II for the United States it did things like sin spies abroad and gather information and analyze that information uh and spread disinformation uh abroad one of the things that it also does is uh create these weapons and gadgets and disguises and forged documents that I mentioned and that became the job of the research and development branch of the oss the r d Branch or what I call the dirty tricks department and so that pretty quickly grew out of the OSS as the head of the OSS William Donovan realized that he needed scientists to create these things so that the spies and saboteurs who are being sent abroad are equipped and can do their jobs there is an equivalent that happened in the UK and I'm pretty sure that uh Churchill's Ministry of ungentleman the Warfare uh is kind of is that does that feel like a parallel does that feel like the anglicized sister book to what you wrote there are definitely parallels between those two organizations so the the kind of parallel to the OSS for the British is the soe the Special Operations executive I'll talk about that a little bit in my book because the OSS especially this r d branch that I talk about and the soe are sharing a lot of their ideas so there's a lot of collaboration back and forth one of the things they collaborate on are creating specialized pills for these agents so one of the pills the most well known is like the L pill lethal pill a cyanide pill another thing that the British work on that doesn't really make it to the OSS but they're doing independently that I talk about a little bit because it's almost too interesting not to include was the idea of a rat bomb so the rat bomb was you would take a a dead rat Taxidermy it you would kind of hollow it out and stuff in explosives and you would throw this rat into a coal reserve of say the Germans the idea being that the Germans would shovel the coal into their boilers of their locomotives and they're not going to stop to pick out rats if they happen to shovel in a rat and they'll just shovel in a rat well this this rat bomb it's going to have explosives inside of these rats they'll shovel it into their boilers and it's going to explode it's going to destroy their trains so that was a British invention the oss the r d Branch did something very similar called black Joe which was kind of hollowed out lumps of coal so it wasn't a rat but the same idea you'd hollow out these lumps of coal you'd stuff explosives and throw it in the cold reserve for the same effect hopefully how did the agents keep the L pill on them at all times so for the L pill they would well there are a few ways most of the time though they would just keep it in a pocket or something so I tell one story in the book of William Donovan the head of this OSS on the day after D-Day you know so he's wanting to be in the action this is kind of a common theme with William Donovan he is dying to be in the action he was a World War One war hero he had earned the Medal of Honor during World War One and he couldn't stand not being in the action sitting behind the desk so he decides he wants to get involved in the Normandy invasion so on D-Day uh or the day after he goes onto the beaches and he goes up to where kind of the German line is and he starts getting shot at and he's with one of kind of his right hand man they're getting shot at they drop beneath some bushes and they start talking to one another and this David Bruce his kind of colleague who's with him asks Jonathan what are we gonna do how are we going to get out of the you know what's going to happen and Donovan reaches in his pocket and he's rummaging around and he's looking for his L pill that he's been supplied with by this r d Branch his cyanide pill because he Figures it's better to kill ourselves than to have the Germans capture us and interrogate us and potentially get information out of us he ends up not being able to find his L pill he kind of makes a joke that I hope the you know the person who's cleaning my hotel doesn't you know see these pills and take them with them um but David Bruce this guy he Donovan tells Bruce well you know I don't have the L pill so I think I'm just gonna have to shoot first and Bruce doesn't really understand what Donovan means he assumes that oh you're gonna shoot first at the Germans and you're going to supply cover for us so that I can run away and Donovan says no you've misunderstood me I'm going to shoot your first as your commanding officer you first as your commanding officer it's my Duty that way you don't have to do the Dirty Work of killing me I'll kill you then I'll kill myself but eventually they were able to get away that didn't happen but yeah so L pills could be stashed anywhere but um one of the ways was just in a pocket another way is in that Stanley level the main character of this book he comes up with is to get hollowed out razors so like a Gillette razor hollow out kind of the inside and you can just stash pills in there and it's going to be really hard to look who's gonna think to look in this hollowed out part of a razor so there are a few kind of ingenious ways that came up William Donovan is essentially the head of the precursor to the CIA and decides that he wants to be in the action storming the beaches of Normandy the day after D-Day that's right that's what that guy decided to do okay that's psychotic okay tell me about William Donovan who is this man what sort of a person is he uh what's his working protocols like yeah so like I mentioned he was a World War One war hero he was pretty much the most decorated American uh kind of soldier in World War one so a really high highly decorated he was shot in the leg with a machine gun while he was commanding his troops um and he he eventually got the Medal of Honor he was a lawyer he had gone to Columbia Law School around the same time that FDR Franklin Roosevelt had when Franklin Roosevelt had left the governorship of New York Donovan ran to be the governor of New York he lost that but he had a close relationship with FDR um they were of differing political philosophies Donovan was a republican fdro Democrat but they were still relatively close during the 1930s before World War II begins FDR sends Donovan to Europe to kind of gauge the situation to feel out what the tensions are between countries Donovan comes back telling FDR that he thinks it's inevitable that another war is going to break out and he urges Roosevelt to create some kind of centralized intelligence organization that will be able to gather information and keep the president keep FDR as up-to-date and informed as possible on events that are happening abroad John is there no there's no other equivalent kind of agency or organization to collect this sort of information and give it to the president before this well there there are these agencies but they have some problems in Donovan Donovan's view especially associated with the military branches there's like Army intelligence Naval intelligence but Donovan is worried that they're not coordinating their information so the president you know he he's getting a bunch of different views another problem Donovan sees is that they're duplicating research so we have all these different organizations doing the same thing whereas we're just wasting money we should have a centralized group that's able to coordinate all of this and analyze it for the president that way we can trust what's being done um so that That's the basis at least of his view of what the OSS should do so he eventually persuades Roosevelt to create this organization what will become the oss the office of strategic services and he's appointed as its head so that's kind of how Donovan ends up being the head of this organization got you and what is he like once he gets in the OSS because it doesn't seem like his gung-ho War fearing warmongering ways have been left behind him not at all that the gung-ho is a good term to describe William Donovan the organization is kind of a reflection of his own personality too he is someone who flies by the by the seat of his pants he doesn't want to ask permission for anything he just wants to do it and that's kind of reflected in the organization itself like I said the main character of this book is this guy Stanley Lovell he's a chemist who's put in charge of this r d Branch Stanley level originally doesn't quite know what his job is supposed to be he's recruited by Donovan to create all these weapons and disguises but Donovan never tells him here's what you need to create he just tells level well do it create stuff that's useful for us level doesn't know what to do so we asked David Bruce that guy who had who would accompany Donovan on Normandy he asked him what do I do you're his right hand man give me some advice and David Bruce says don't ask what to do just do something and then ask for forgiveness if necessary but just do it you know so that was kind of the guiding principle fly by your seat of the pants throw things against the wall see what sticks and you know we'll try to get through this there's something so kind of almost romantic and Whimsical and nostalgic about the fact that both the UK are equivalent over here uh the ministry of and gentlemanly warfare and you guys with uh what you were doing with this research group are just trying stuff out aniseed balls as timers for Limpet minds and making foxes glow and trying to turn Hitler trans all of which we'll we'll get on to in a little bit um so William Donovan he gets introduced he gets told uh just do stuff make make chaos and and create some useful tools that are uh soldiers and our special operators can use overseas what does he start with what's the first thing that he does well the main kind of mission of the OSS again is to gather intelligence so you first have to recruit agents who are going to do that for you and develop connections abroad of people who know the geography know the terrain are able to see what the German troop movements are doing so that's kind of the main thing for the OSS but in doing that it quickly becomes evident that you're going to need this r d branch that supplies these agents how are they going to get their disguises well we need someone to create that um so Roosevelt would frequently call Donovan well Roosevelt kind of had he he was paralyzed he couldn't walk and so he called Donovan my secret legs this is someone who's going to go out and find stuff out for me and bring it back to me so that's you know that's kind of the purpose of the OSS right okay they need to get some different agents or I guess they would were they called agents at the time uh yeah so uh the recruits for the OSS if you wanted to be a recruiter if you were recruited you would have to go to a training school so in Maryland at the what's the Congressional Country Club the OSS basically took this land over during World War II it became known as area F and area F was a place where all of these recruits were trained in how to engage in this unconventional warfare so where where the driving range for golf balls had previously existed it became a rifle range where they would practice their shooting the bunkers you know with sand in them for for shots it became a target practice for their mortars and all kinds of stuff and on the Congressional Country Club there's a clubhouse in the basement floor of that Clubhouse became what's known as the Maryland research laboratory and this is the laboratory where Stanley level and his underlings tried to develop all of these weapons right so Stanley is in charge I'm gonna guess he was basically not the was no oversight or very little oversight from William Donovan is that right correct yes Stanley level is this New England chemist who gets recruited to join the OSS when he's recruited he actually is told to go to OSS headquarters and he shows up kind of after hours it's all dark no one's really there and he gets tapped on the shoulder by a security guard and he spooked oh my gosh he didn't know anyone was there and he's led to a room and he's waiting in this room for a long time not even knowing really what he's doing there because he doesn't know much about the OSS it's the secret organization all of a sudden this giant figure walks in the room he's got a medal of honor lapel pin on him and he says I want you to be my professor Moriarty and it was William Donovan saying this to Stanley level Professor Moriarty being the kind of antagonist in the Sherlock Holmes novels this is the you know the bad guy but I want Donovan tells him I want you to create all the dirty tricks for this organization so that's how Stanley level gets wrapped up in all this he's initially yeah yeah he's initially reluctant to to join because he's a chemist and he wanted to use his scientific expertise for good he thought he had kind of an obligation to do that but he realizes that he's also growing up he was an orphan basically both of his parents died very young he was raised by his sister he got a great education and he thought that he owed it to his country to do something to help in this war so one of the arcs of the story is seeing levels internal tensions he doesn't want to use his scientific expertise to harm others but at the same time he feels a debt that he owes to his country that he feels he can repay by joining this organization and creating these weapons right when does he make the exploding pens when does that happen um that's that's pretty early on there's uh kind of just to break down the hierarchy of this there's the OSS one of the branches within the OSS is this r d Branch the research and development branch that Stanley level is in charge of and then that's kind of broken into three different divisions there's division 19 which creates all the weapons there's the documents division which forges all the documents and then there's the camouflage division which creates all the disguises so division 19 is in charge of creating you know the pen guns and the all you know the exploding flower all that kind of stuff the the incendiary devices bat bombs so that's that one division that happens pretty early um after the r d branch is created okay what in terms of document forgery that seems like the least exciting group to be a part of is that fair you're just trying to create German passports all day and stuff um maybe if from a work perspective at that time yeah maybe that would be the least exciting from my perspective it's one of the most exciting because looking at the details of what they did is incredible so it's really exciting to begin what did they do um so for a document you had to be so specific that it it it really is extremely impressive for instance if you wanted to forge a German ration ticket or a or anything a license or a passport or anything not only did you have to kind of use the right signatures and Forge the right stamps to stamp on them you also had to use the right kind of like paper so you had to analyze what kind of Pulp is being used in this paper and it just gets so incredibly complex and the idea that they figured this out is really incredible one of the interesting things about the documents division two is that the characters within it are really exciting themselves some of the forgers that work for this documents division were sprung from prison because they had been forging government bonds and money and all kinds of stuff and they got caught and were sent to prison it's a Stanley level recruits them hey you've got this skill we could use the you and the war you know and maybe this will look favorably upon your you know sentencing or something like that so prisoners were used in this documents division especially people who were experts at signatures who could force Forge the signatures of all kinds of people one of the most well-known in this division was Jim the Penman his real name is kind of never really revealed but it was said that Jim the pen Penman would get his colleagues to sign their signature on a page and he would recreate their signatures up and down the page multiple times and he would bet them five bucks that they wouldn't be able to pick out their original signature and he got you know a lot of money off of this I thought he's so good okay so the camouflage division what do they create what are they working on yeah they're in charge of the disguises so they're in charge of procuring the different kinds of um anything that you might wear as an undercover agent so one of the things they did was try to get immigrants who were coming to the United States European immigrants they would offer to buy their clothes off of them so they could have authentic clothing for these agents going abroad another interesting thing they do is create secret compartments within like clothing so that you could carry messages with you without a German guard say if he were to Frisk you or something wouldn't be able to detect it so these secret message Chambers were put into all kinds of things you could hollow out the soul of your shoe you could um one of my favorite ones is involves lipsticks for female agents so the idea would be you would have a message you would roll it up really small you would melt the wax of lipstick and you would put the message in the tube and then you would pour the wax back into the tube and like mold it to look like lipstick so the lipstick would be surrounding the message and you would never know because it just looks like lipstick yeah so some of the other things that the camouflage division would do would artificially age people so putting charcoal in the wrinkles of the face would make the wrinkles look deeper and make you look older applying some white to the temples of your you know your hair makes you look a little bit older you could put stuff newspaper into your shoe to kind of throw off your gate and make you a little bit taller there were all kinds of these tricks of the trade rub your hands on Rusty metal and then on your face and it would give you a little bit different complexion wow okay so this is like you know we look at Prosthetics and Hollywood and cosmetic surgery and stuff now this is the most Village backyard equivalent of that done whatever 80 years ago yeah for the most part I I think some of the simplest uh kind of inventions and disguises tend to be the most ingenious because it's just so simple I just love the simple ones but it actually gets it does get fairly complicated there are agents who undergo like facial reconstruction surgery no they'll have their they'll have their job broken to give their face a little bit different look or they'll graft there's one person that I talk about um George langolin he was this agent for for the British actually he gets trained by American so American people but he has from a young age he had a very protruding ears very large ears that were very distinctive and he spoke French which made him very valuable because he could go to France and train these resistance forces but he knew a lot of people in this region and they were worried that he's going to be noticed you know they're going to know who he is and so he undergoes surgery to change the shape of his chin but also to kind of pin back his ears so they're a little bit less distinctive or he might have been happy about that I don't know if he's been teased about his ears all of the time okay um what about psychedelics I know that after the uh after World War II were talking about MK Ultra we're talking about the OSS and its involvements there did they decide to try and dip their toe in early during World War II with any psychedelics well one of the one of the things that Stanley level wants to do is to develop a truth drug for interrogations this has been kind of the goal of intelligence agencies for a long time if you can have a truth drug you can give it to someone you're interrogating and they have no choice but to tell you the truth that's the idea at least you know this has been around for forever basically with alcohol the idea that you can apply someone with a few drinks it'll lower their inhibitions they'll tell you the truth during the 1920s there was actually a doctor in Dallas Robert house who thought that he had come across a truth drug and this is later going to really um get the OSS interested in what he was doing he had given a drug called Scopolamine to a woman who was in labor kind of a sedative and suddenly she started talking and telling him all kinds of stuff that he thought you shouldn't be telling me this like this is not stuff that normal people would say and he starts realizing or he starts thinking to himself that perhaps this drug scopolamide had somehow dimmed her creative capacities it had prevented her from imagining things and if that was true the only thing that she could say was the truth she couldn't invent Any Lies so maybe that's why she's saying this stuff that turned out not really to be the case but you know this is the the kind of idea of this Cruise drug deal it eliminates your capacities to invent lies therefore the only thing that you can say is the truth this gets picked up during World War II when Stanley level decides he wants to test different substances to see if they have this potential truth drug quality one of the main one he catches on is kind of concentrated THC like marijuana you know this is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana this actually seems to work he does several experiments with this he's giving it to OSS personnel and literally recording what they say and measure measuring how much how many words they speak on the THC they speak a lot more than off of it now the problem is this doesn't guarantee that what you're saying is the truth it just means your inhibitions are a little bit lowered but there were all kinds of experiments with these truth drugs one of the main people that Stanley level hires to do these experiments is a guy named George White George White was an officer with a bureau of Narcotics a Narcotics officer officer his job is to clean drugs off the street but now his job becomes giving drugs to people with his true these truth drug is experiments so he's injecting THC into cigarettes and handing it to his criminal contacts the idea being if they start talking about the crimes they've committed this is probably a good indication that this truth drug is working and so he does this most famously to a gangster in New York named August Del gracio and Del gracio starts telling him about the people he could have killed and the the politicians who are taking bribes and all kinds of stuff so George White writes a report saying this stuff is great you know this this truth drug is really working um so anyways one of the lasting legacies of this r d branch that I talk about is that these experiments are going to really influence a lot of experiments that take place in the CIA especially this MK Ultra program wasn't this something about a fear of them putting LSD in the water or did that come after World War II um that's mostly afterwards during the Cold War um once the CIA is established kind of the successor to the oss the main guy who's put in charge of this MK Ultra program which is kind of the U.S CIA mind control program to figure out whether mind control truth drugs all that kind of stuff is possible either through drugs or hypnosis or something like that the guy who's in charge of that is a chemist like Stanley Lovell his name is Sydney Gottlieb and one of the main motivations for trying to see whether mind control is possible is the fear that the Soviets are going to put LSD into say a city's water supply and if they do that Sydney Godley wants to know how are people going to react you know if how how are we going to detect whether this is you know happening if someone puts LSD into our water supply are people going to start killing each other or how are they going to behave we need to know this so that we can prepare for it and so one of the motivations for giving unwitting people LSD is to see how they're affected by it without knowing that they're getting it because if the Soviets do that we need to know you know how that how that's going to turn out at least that's kind of the rationale very interesting so going back to injecting people with stuff what was this mission to try and trans Hitler yes so this is Stanley level in the r d Branch there is an OSS a psychologist who's working with the OSS who writes a report on Hitler's personality trying to understand who Hitler is maybe he has vulnerabilities that can be exploited one of the things that this psychologist points out Henry Murray he writes this report saying that Hitler has a large feminine component to his personality is what he says in the report you know he says uh that he has kind of these sexual is a masochist and all kinds of stuff is submissive and Stanley level reads this report and he he wants to figure out a way to use this to the advantage of the United States is it possible to push Hitler kind of over that threshold from either male to female or something like uh really upset his fragile masculinity so how can we do this Stanley level comes up with the idea that what if we inject female sex hormones into the vegetables that Hitler eats if he eats these hormones then that's really going to push him over the edge and his mustache is going to fall out his voice is going to turn soprano and his chest is going to grow breasts this will decimate his fragile ego and he's going to lose all of his credibility and people aren't going to take him seriously and will somehow win the war this is the idea at least so Stanley level in his Memoir he says that he got some of these female sex hormones he was able to give it to a gardener in Germany who supplied the eagle's nest with its vegetables where Hitler kind of frequently went and so Stanley level said yeah we got the sex hormones to this person but we never knew really what happened to it either the gardener got cold feet or Hitler's tasters had a there was a large turnover in them so well you know I don't know what happened to it but apparently it didn't go through well I mean when you think about Hitler's uh psychological physiological Health throughout the war Theodore morale that was his personal physician is just I mean first off completely insane in injecting him with bull semen and speed and heroin and crack and cocaine and absolutely everything by the end of the war he's done like 10 injections a day I think um but there is a lot going on like he's got a lot to deal with it seems like Hitler was pre-alco simic or something similar maybe had like a parkinsonian Tremor or something that was going on it's a famous video is it when he's meeting Mussolini and he's got one hand behind his back and the hand that's behind his back on the video won't stop trembling I think which is pretty interesting and um yeah there was another a plot kind of dealing with his ego one idea was that this doesn't come from the r d Branch but from some other kind of psychologist he's pitching it to the Air Force the the Army Air Force the idea being we should drop pornography all over Hitler's place where he's staying and he doesn't like pornography and it's going to upset him and so he's going to walk out he's gonna see he's gonna see the smut these naked women and he's gonna it's gonna throw him into a rage and you know he's going to lose this temperament and somehow that's going to help he so this psychologist actually got to a kind of an Air Force General and was explaining this plan and he was promptly thrown out of the office and that didn't go anywhere I never understood how that would actually help the war but apparently it was some kind of psychological scheme that was cooked up was there any other psychological warfare tactics that they decided to try and attempt yes several um I have a chapter in in the book that talks just about psychological warfare this is one of the most interesting ones because they really do get pretty outlandish one uh this this one's fairly well known but there's a substance called who me that the r d branch of the OSS created who me it's the sub substance that smells really bad the idea was that we can hire a chemical engineer to manufacture this substance that smells like feces or vomit or skunk or something like that and we're gonna sneak the substance in these tubes to little boys in Japan and or little boys in China and the Japanese are occupying China these little boys are going to squirt the substance on the back side of the Japanese officials and it's going to embarrass them and they're you know because it's going to smell really bad and so they'll be demoralized and maybe they'll you know make a bad decision or something that was at least the idea so it was called humi I don't know if it had too much practical value Stanley level does tell a funny story where he kept this locked up in his office in a kind of a cabinet with a lock on it well of course pretty much everyone in the OSS was taught how to pick locks so some jokester um decided to start pick the lock and take some humi and was squirting around the office level decided to set a booby trap the next time this happened so he booby trapped the lock so that whenever anyone picked it and opened the cabinet it would spray the humi back at them and so level he says one night someone came in picked the lock opened the cabinet they got sprayed he never reveals who it was but he says it was someone too highly placed for me to discipline so I you know it was someone apparently pretty high up in the OSS wasn't there a story of somebody going into the president's office and unloading a full clip of a gun behind him yeah yes William Donovan himself the head of the OSS he wanted to show Franklin Roosevelt the kinds of things that his organization was working on because it never hurt to impress the president you've got to have this guy on your side so he wants to impress Roosevelt and so how better to impress him than with a silence flashless pistol so so Donovan walks to Roosevelt's office and he he was friendly with Roosevelt so he was often just waved in so he's waved into the office by the security guard he drops a bag of sand in the corner of the office meanwhile President Roosevelt is dictating a letter to his secretary so he's not really even looking at the door he doesn't know Donovan has entered Donovan pulls out this silenced flashless 22 pistol that Stanley level in the r d branch have created and he unloads the clip into this bag of sand in the office after a little while Roosevelt smells burnt gunpowder and he turns around and he sees Donovan standing there with his empty pistol in his hand and he's flabbergasted he thinks this is a great you know I didn't even realize this thing had gone off so Donovan makes kind of a show of it he hands the pistol to the president and lets him keep it and Roosevelt kind of jokes you're the only Republican I would ever allow in my office with a gun oh man it's so this is what I mean when I say sort of whimsical and beautifully nostalgic the fact that the the gloves are off and the rules are out of the window and no one's got any rules or procedures everyone can just do what they want um one of my favorite I don't know whether you class this as psychological warfare but operation Fantasia I think is my favorite story from the entire book tell people from the beginning what operation Fantasia was yeah this might be my favorite one too I was so excited I had I had heard generally that this idea existed the idea that we would somehow use foxes to scare the Japanese and the more I looked into this and the more documents I found the more ridiculous I realized and just really incredible and insane this plot really was so this idea of operation Fantasia was the brainchild of a of a a businessman named ed Salinger he had done a lot of business before the war in Tokyo so he kind of knew Japanese culture he knew the Japanese language that's what made him very valuable to the OSS because he kind of knew the psychological profile they thought of who the Japanese were and they wanted to use that to exploit to demoralize the Japanese so he's hired Ed Salinger by the OSS he's part of What's called the morale Opera which was in charge of spreading disinformation but he gets the r d Branch to help on this project the idea with operation Fantasia kind of goes back to uh an ideal within Shinto religion that there exists these portents of Doom called kitsuni kitsuni are like Spirit beings animal glowing animal beings that if you see one it's supposed to be a bad Omen something bad is going to happen Salinger wants to capitalize on this by creating kind of fake kitsuni fake Spirit beings and if we can release them in Japan it'll make the Japanese scared and think that something bad is going to happen well what bad is going to happen well we're in a war it probably means we're going to lose this war we might as well give up now then wait for that end to come in some even worse way that's the idea at least and so Ed Salinger has a few ideas for how to capitalize on this he wants to create either glowing Foxes or the idea that there are glowing foxes to scare the Japanese and so one is one idea is to create a whistle that mimics a fox sound we'll spread these throughout Japan people start blowing these whistles they're gonna think it's the kitsuni because it's foxes and they'll be demoralized you know this didn't really go anywhere because do people really know what foxes sound like you know it sounds like yeah precisely yeah yeah like that YouTube video what does the fox say what does the fox sound like is good enough yeah exactly yeah so that was that didn't go um there are a few more kind of variations of Fantasia one is to recreate Fox odors so get a fox odor we'll spread that in Japan people smell it and think oh Fox is around this is a bad Omen but again what what does a fox smell like do people really know and so Salinger scraps all that and he decides instead we're going to capture live foxes we're going to paint them with glowing radioactive paint and we're going to release them in Japan that way the Japanese are going to see them and know this really is a glowing Fox it must be a kitsuni and it must be a bad Omen we must be about to lose this war we might as well give up now so foxes are captured they're painted with radioactive paint from the U.S radiant iridium Corporation um actually before they are just to see if paint adheres to fur animal fur they go the OSS some Personnel go to the Bronx Zoo and they paint a raccoon and they let it kind of do raccoon stuff yeah for a for a few days these raccoons are just kind of glowing they're kept away from from public cancer and glowing yeah probably but the paint actually stays on so hey this is one point for operation Fantasia maybe it works the the next experiment with this is to take a few foxes to Rock Creek Park in Maryland right by DC and release these glowing foxes the idea is that if we can see if it scares Americans well it's definitely going to scare the Japanese so if the Americans are spooked out by this the Japanese are going to be even more spooked out so let's release these foxes and see how Americans respond to them so these foxes are released in Rock Creek Park they're glowing at night walking through the trails and there's a newspaper report later that says the passers-by were terrified and had the screaming Genies when they saw these foxes these ghostly apparitions so hey point two for operation Fantasia The Americans really are scared of this thing so there's another experiment with operation Fantasia can foxes swim that's what needs to be answered because in order to get these foxes to Japan it's not like you can just drop them out of a plane or something you're gonna have to take a boat drop them in the ocean and let them swim to shore but can foxes swim this is the question and so as part of this operation Fantasia several foxes are captured they're taken into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and they're thrown overboard and it turns out the foxes actually did swim to shore so foxes do swim the problem is that that by the time they got to shore all the paint had washed off so it was kind of a bust like what's the point the paint washes off that was the whole point of the operation in the first place so that didn't really go anywhere but then Salinger this is what I discovered in the archives something that I've never seen anyone else talk about I discovered this document that talks about how he wants to carry this even further he said he had heard when he was in Japan uh one of these ideas about kitsuni that involved a skull it was said that apparently a fox with a skull on it was the worst Omen of all this is a really bad Omen so his idea to capitalize on this is to Taxidermy a fox to paint it in glowing paint to take a human skull and put it on the Fox as if it's you know its own skull and then he wanted to have a mechanical a mechanism that could raise and lower this the jaw of this skull and then he would blast audio to the Japanese as if this skull was talking saying you need to give up the war it's worth you know just put down your arms and then he would attach this fox with a skull and audio to a balloon and fly it over Japan so it would look like there was this flowing glowing stuff Fox talking with a human skull out of it apparently this is going to win the war so that's that's his idea so America tried to conduct spiritual warfare on Japan to try and make them think that the Japanese gods were mad at them with a glowing Fox that had a human skull on the top of it yes correct right there there are a couple other I mean there are a couple other similar things that are trying to be done against Japan one idea that the Army Air Force has is to drop bombs into Japanese volcanoes that are dormant and try to get them to become active and if the volcanoes start kind of looking like they're active maybe the Japanese will think that the gods are mad and then this is an indication that we shouldn't be in this war in the first place [ __ ] yeah that's what I want I want some let's do that let's anger the Japanese Gods I think oh man I mean there is something about the Advent of technology that has taken away all of this beautiful sort of wistful creativity everything's everything's what far too logical and rational now uh one of the other ones that you go through bat bombs we've spoken about rat bombs but bat bombs as well strapping a bomb to a bat I'm gonna guess uh that is pretty close yeah it's pretty close so they're yeah they're rat bombs cat bombs bat bombs if you want any variation of an at-bomb this book has got it for you but the bat bomb idea this is the brainchild of a guy named um uh uh little Adams little Adams is a dentist he's not even involved in the OSS or anything he's a dentist from Pennsylvania he goes on a vacation to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico and of course this is home to a colony of millions of Mexican free-tailed bats after he goes on that vacation he hears about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and he's a patriotic American and he wants to try to think of what can I do to help us win this war that we're now involved in and he had just been to Carlsbad and he thinks of this bat bomb idea what if we strap incendiary devices to bats and we fly them to Japan and we release them these bats will kind of be like heat-seeking missiles they will naturally Roost in warehouses and you know in buildings and they'll explode after a time delay and these incendiary devices will catch these buildings on fire so instead of flying over Japan and dropping bombs which might not even hit the target let's release these bats and the bats are naturally going to go to these houses and Roost in them and blow up and start these fires that's the idea little atoms had one thing really going for him he was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt the first lady of the United States he gave this proposal to Eleanor Roosevelt she gave it to her husband the president of the United States in turn he gives it to none other than William Donovan the head of the OSS and attached to the proposal Franklin Roosevelt writes this man is not a nut so like you know this this idea has got something going for it Donovan he gives it to the one branch of the OSS capable of actually studying this the r d Branch so that's how it gets to the r d branch Stanley leveled the head of this Branch hires a man named Louis Pfizer to develop the incendiary devices that they're going to attach to these bats Lewis Pfizer is fairly famous at the time because he was the inventor of Napalm this is kind of a jellied gasoline that if it catches you know if it sticks to anything and it'll burn at a really hot temperature it can start fires really easily actually he had invented this while he was at Harvard as he's a chemist and so his first Napalm bomb tests had occurred on the Harvard soccer fields so he had he had literally detonated Napalm bombs on just on the soccer fields at Harvard he actually got in trouble for this not so much for the bombs but because he was hogging the soccer field and they needed it for drill instruction so he was told to find somewhere else but anyway Stanley level hires Lewis uh yeah Louis Pfizer to create the Napalm bombs for these bats really small there are Personnel who go to different caves literally swing around Nets and they capture bats for for the tests that they're going to do so for one of the first tests they're not using live kind of uh incendiaries instead they just have a kind of a dummy they attach it to the bats they cool the bats down because the idea is that we'll put them in an artificial hibernation state so we can get them on the plane we'll fly them up we'll drop them they'll wake up and then you know they'll fly away and we'll see how they if they're able to actually fly with this stuff on the problem is that when they flew these bats up they had cooled them down too much so by the time they dropped them they didn't wake up and they just kind of crashed into the wall so so that was one experiment with this bat bomb another experiment they tried with actual live incendiaries Lewis Pfizer wanted to test the official package to make sure it actually worked without a live incendiaries they cooled down the bats the problem was that they did didn't cool him down enough this time the bats woke up prematurely and they flew around before they could be stopped and they actually burned down a control tower in a Barracks that was nearby so in a kind of ironic sense the bat bombs actually seem to work because they did Roost in these buildings and blow them up but you know it was never deployed against the Japanese Jesus honestly I think that you know there's an argument to be made that the atomic bomb wasn't needed we just needed to have whatever a million bats send them down into Japan everything would have been fine what I think is one of the funniest kind of parts of the book is that little Adams the guy who conceived first of this bat bomb idea he was talking to a lot of different Generals in the military to try to get funding because he really wanted to pursue this idea and make sure the OSS was kind of carrying it out so he was talking to generals he comes back and starts talking to some members of the OSS really dejected and upset because the generals didn't want to give him that much money and little Adam says yeah there's apparently this other project in New Mexico and they're kind of messing around with these atoms why should we be messing around with atoms when we have a sure thing let the bat bomb here oh man okay so in your opinion given the fact that you are currently the world living Authority on the dirty tricks Department what was the most successful contrib Fusion or the most pivotal mission that they were a part of I I think the most useful contribution is probably those other two branches the documents division in the camouflage division because this enabled agents to go undercover in Europe especially and to train resistance forces into gather intelligence which is actually useful for making decisions I think that's probably the most useful thing the most useful kind of weapon that was invented it's either that silence 22 that was actually being used up even through the Vietnam War in in some places within different military branches another one of the useful Technologies weapons that's developed by this r d branch is involves derailing trains we already talked about black Joe that you could throw in a boiler there were several other things like that and derailing trains was especially effective because not only could you destroy the train and all the material on it you could you could derail it but if you did it strategically you could really mess things up so one invention was called the mole and it was a light sensitive explosive explosive the idea being it can detect a sudden shift from light to dark and so if you have a saboteur that attaches this to a train and kind of sets it then the light sensitive mole when whenever the train enters a tunnel it'll notice that light to dark and it'll detonate and they'll derail the train not only derailing the train but plugging up that valuable tunnel and preventing any other trains from getting through so that's a really useful device one other of the most useful full devices you kind of mentioned earlier is probably the Limpet the OSS and the British soe are kind of working on this together and sharing ideas but the limit is this explosive device that a saboteur could attach to the bottom of a ship set a time pencil that would a time delay and then paddle away establish an alibi somewhere else and then after a while this Limpet will explode putting a hole in the ship and causing it to sink those were used on many ships during World War II do you know what the original trigger was that they used on the very first version of the Olympic mine they needed something that would dissolve uh consistently and was always in a reliable size I'm not sure it was an unasseed bowl a sweet like a little candy we would have called it a candy um so they're talking about it this is in uh Churchill's Ministry even gentleman the Warfare and they're talking about the fact that they need to protect it from any moisture because if it gets a tiny little bit wet during Transit that means that the timer once it gets into the ocean is actually going to be however much shorter I think it's about the for those that are interested I think it's around about 45 minutes 30 to 45 minutes is the amount of time an anise ball takes to dissolve in in the ocean um so they're talking about the fact that they couldn't tell anybody what they were doing and they had to go around the local Village buying every pack of condoms that they could so that they could individually wrap these aniseed balls in condoms so that it was protected from water and the guy that wrote the book says um it is unclear whether nine months later there was an increase in the fertility rate of this small village because there was no access to condoms for a couple of weeks um the the soe must have had a thing with condoms because there's another brief thing I mentioned in the book about how they developed this itching powder from like the seed part of this one plant and they would sprinkle it in condoms that were destined for German soldiers no way and there were apparently reports there are apparently reports of a submarine crew who kind of came back and they noticed an uptick in you know hospital visits or whatever so apparently that was when I did itching powder dude that is so funny so um we spoke earlier on about the fact that the atomic bomb is kind of happening it's being developed it's not exactly rivalrous with the with the bat bomb was the OSS involved in stopping any of the Germans or keeping tabs on what the Germans were doing I know that there was heavy water plants that obviously it was the Dam Busters there was a bunch of other operations that tried to really slow down what the Allies thought was uh Nazi development of some sort of atomic weapon absolutely the most famous well I'll start with uh I'll kind of build up to that there was pretty much any physicist in the United States knew that if the Germans were going to have an atomic bomb program the person who is going to lead it was Werner Heisenberg this is one of the most famous distinguished physicists in the world at the time he had stayed in Germany at the outbreak of the war unlike many of his colleagues who either came to the United States and would work on the Manhattan Project or go somewhere else he stayed in Germany and pretty much everyone knew if anyone is leading a German atomic bomb project it is Werner Heisenberg so the OSS has a few ways they want to deal with Werner Heisenberg the idea being if you kind of cut off the head of the snake the program is going to flounder so if you can just if you can either kidnap or even maybe kill Werner Heisenberg you could prevent the Germans from potentially acquiring an atomic bomb one of the first people who is assigned to work on this and figure out what to do with Werner Heisenberg is a guy named Carl eifler Carl eifler was head of what's called Detachment 101 in Burma this is a group of OSS Personnel that was sent to kind of the Burma India China area their their mission is to destroy a Japanese Air Base where the Japanese are launching planes from he gets recalled to the United States he has kind of he got he was on a mission he fell overboard into the ocean and he was dashed upon the rocks and he had like head damage so he he was a little all over the place but he got recalled to the United States but after that he gets assigned to kidnap Warner Heisenberg to think of a plan to figure out how to capture Warner Heisenberg and to smuggle him into Switzerland and they're going to Rendezvous with a plane or even a submarine that will carry him somewhere else so he gets assigned to this he ultimately gets called off of that because he was he was like William Donovan in the sense that he was so gung-ho he was rambunctious and wild and never followed orders and did things his way and because of that he wasn't really fit for this operation because it was going to be a very delicate Affair but he's the opposite of delicate he's someone who would just say whatever and do whatever he wanted so they needed someone who was a little bit more Discerning and Technical and skilled so instead of Carl eifler he's pulled off the OSS assigns a baseball player named Mo Berg to assassinate Warner Heisenberg moberg was a catcher for several different major league baseball teams like the the Red Sox you know he was a catcher he what made him valuable to the OSS is that he spoke many languages so he was kind of a polyglot he spoke several languages that he had studied in school or grown up with and so that's very valuable to the OSS because especially as say an agent he can pass as someone else because he can speak the language with the dialect and the emphasis and accent and whatever he gets assigned to assassinate Warner Heisenberg he's told that Warner Heisenberg is scheduled to give a talk in Switzerland on a specific date at the specific University so moberg goes over there and he's told to sit in the lecture and if Warner Heisenberg says anything that indicates that he might be working on an atomic bomb anything about fission or you know uh chain reactions he's supposed to pull out a gun and shoot Werner Heisenberg right there in the lecture hall so moberg goes to this lecture he sits down he's got a cyanide yeah for sure armed with a gun he's got a cyanide pill in his pocket the idea being after the assassination he's going to kill himself so he listens to the lecture and his notes from the lecture still exist you know he says I'm sitting you know in the third row and Warner Heisenberg is looking at me a lot because he thinks I'm taking notes and you know he thinks I'm really interested in what he's talking about and all this stuff so his notes are you know survive Mo Berg doesn't get the sense that the topic it has anything to do with an atomic bomb so he decides not to take the risk and assassinate Warner Heisenberg right there a few days later moberg gets invited to a dinner with some physicists in Switzerland who is there Werner Heisenberg so they're talking about the war and all kinds of stuff Warner Heisenberg decides that he has to leave early he's got to go do something but Mo bird takes the opportunity to leave early too so that he can leave with Warner Heisenberg and they can walk together for a while giving Mo Berg an opportunity to interrogate Warner Heisenberg of course his cover story is that he's you know this Swiss physics student so he's talking to Werner Heisenberg in Swiss accented German because Heisenberg speaks German so he's asking him questions kind of leading questions are you working on anything you know what's the state of nuclear physics and he still doesn't get the impression that Heisenberg is really doing anything with the German atomic bomb so he decides not to kill him but those were kind of the OSS attempts to assassinate Heisenberg and thus deny Germany his brain to build the atomic bomb and this guy this catcher for the Red Sox was prepared to take his own life as well that was the level advice that he was ready to do yes so um not not only that with him but with Carl eifler too Carl eifler asks William Donovan and the other uh kind of high-ranking OSS Personnel when he's launching this kidnapping Mission originally that it doesn't even go through but he asked them what am I supposed to do if I'm captured obviously I'll kidnap Heisenberg or maybe even kill him but I'm gonna be captured afterwards people are gonna think I just murdered this guy what do I do and they said we will deny you in other words we're not going to acknowledge that you're even part of our organization that's you'll just have to deal with it and so he he accepts and goes on but it never went through absolutely ruthless so what about we mentioned it earlier on and I think you're right you are right it's interesting uh levels uh ethical trajectory from the beginning of the war until the end of it about what he felt was appropriate about the kind of force um getting into chemical warfare what was uh developed used um what sort of tactics and then what kind of personal reflection and challenges did level face with that you are right because this like I said is one of the major arcs I'm following in this book is Stanley level going from someone who is reluctant to even create kind of deadly weapons like a silence pistol to someone by the end of the war he is advocating for the use of weapons of mass destruction not only the atomic bomb but also chemical agents biological agents so in the r d Branch he's involved with experimenting with some of these agents um the United States had developed a an installation in Maryland called Fort Dedrick or Camp Dedrick at that time it was kind of the biological warfare installation where mass production of Anthrax and all kinds of diseases were created the United States or Franklin Roosevelt in particular had said that he has a no first use policy so the United States is not going to use these weapons first but we're going to create them as a deterrent Force so if somebody uses them we have them to retaliate and just by having them we can deter others from using them that's his idea Stanley level disagrees with this by the end of the war he comes to think that any way that you can end the war as soon as possible is the ethical thing to do so not just something we should do but this is the ethical thing to do especially regarding biological warfare he says look at the differences here you can stab someone in the stomach with a Bayonet and it's going to get infected and they're going to die from an infection or you can infect them with Anthrax or something through the through a biological bomb and they'll get an infection and die at least with the second option we spare them the bayonet and at least we don't have to stab them first before they get this infection he comes to see chemical warfare especially as an ethical alternative to Conventional Warfare with chemical warfare he starts developing the idea that perhaps you can especially in the Pacific Theater in these islands in Japan like Iwo Jima there are these Japanese soldiers stationed on these islands instead of sending American forces to storm the island that's going to lead to tens of thousands of casualties why don't we just shell the island with chemical weapons these don't even necessarily have to kill the Japanese just like paralyze them or you know something and then we go on the island and prevent those casualties from happening so Stanley level becomes in favor of using those because he sees it as the ethical alternative doesn't he have a son somewhere as well isn't there a little bit of perverse incentive here yes this is a really important point because as the end of the war is coming to a close Stanley level's son is on a ship Midway across the Pacific waiting to engage in an invasion of Japan and so the sooner the war ends the sooner that Stanley level son gets to come back home um so he he's of course thinking personally about his son too but in general he's also thinking if we don't use these weapons to end the war as soon as possible that's just going to lead to a lot more casualties we might as well end the war now of course one of the I mean there are several kind of ways to debate with what Stanley level is arguing here what about the the precedent that it sets for future Wars what about the potential that this could spread to civilian populations at least if you you know storm an island you it's a little bit targeted if you just drop biological or chemical weapons somewhere it's not really targeted it could spread to anyone so that there are a lot of uh there are a lot of objections that you could raise to what Stanley level is saying and when Stanley level's grandson after the war years later kind of raises some of these objections especially to the atomic bomb Stanley level was in favor of using it his grandson wasn't Stanley level basically said we're an inventive people we'll figure it out so we'll figure out how to deal with this stuff we just need to end the war we just needed to end the war when we could have were there many chemical weapons used during World War II I remember hearing about mustard gas and stuff like that during World War one but I don't remember reading or hearing about many chemical weapons in World War II at all yeah um I'm not I'm not too familiar and certainly not as much as World War one I have heard reports that you know the Germans might have used it on this one particular battle and some you know somewhere so there are reports that that happened but I'm I don't actually know if they they were yeah interesting it just seems to me especially as Hitler got more and more desperate when he was fighting war on two different fronts when it we're really starting to Scrabble Stalingrad etc etc he was prepared to do pretty much anything it seems surprising to me that there would be some ethic that he was unprepared to break in service of him I mean he killed himself you know and encouraged the people around him to do it too Stanley level's explanation for this was that if the Germans used especially chemical weapons then they knew that the the Allies were going to respond in kind and the way that Stanley level explains this is that the German military was much more dependent on horses especially and so you know he he says kind of after the war he's kind of thinking about this why didn't the Germans just use chemical weapons at Normandy and kind of Stop The Invasion and you know he apparently he hears from someone but I don't know how true this is that well the Germans knew that if they did that then the Allies were going to use these chemical weapons which would ruin their basically way of transporting material which was these horses they were so dependent on so that could be one explanation um I'm not really confident in lovell's recollection of that particular incident so I don't know if that's the case but that's how he rationalized it how does libel's career finish what's his legacy level becomes a businessman after World War II he starts a chemical company they invent all kinds of stuff like different patents on shoes and filters and all kinds of stuff his most lasting Legacy though really involves his truth drug experiments that we talked about during the Cold War Sydney Gottlieb that chemist who ran MK Ultra was trying to figure out what kinds of experiments he would do to determine whether truth drugs are possible or mind control are possible and he didn't really know where to start to get inspiration for that he started looking at old records the records that he pulled from the archives Stanley levels records from the OSS and so there's this pretty direct connection between Stanley level not intentionally but influencing directly Sydney Gottlieb in the creation of this MK Ultra and trajectory of this MK Ultra program to the point where the person that Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA who he hired to perform these truth drug experiments was none other than George White that same guy that Stanley level had hired to perform truth drug experiments Sydney Gottlieb had seen White's kind of reports in the World War II files and figured I need someone to perform truth drug experiments I'll just use that same guy this was really exciting to me there are a lot more connections between Stanley level and Sydney godlib and when I was writing this I knew that there there was some connection there you know they're they're their careers were so similar during World War II in the OSS Stanley level was involved in creating deadly weapons and disguises and documents and Truth drugs and experiments and all kinds of stuff Sydney Gottlieb is involved in that exact same stuff almost to an item for the CIA and the Cold War so I had these two chemists and I I wanted to play them off each other somehow they're different careers at these different times and how they're so similar so I was in the archives and I found these depositions that Sydney Gottlieb had to give in the 1980s he was being sued by victims of the CIA and required to give these depositions and in the archives you can't read everything because you want to get as much material while you're there as possible so I would take a deposition I would take a picture of each page but I wouldn't really read the pages because I can read those later when I'm in the archives I'm just Gathering material but I was really excited because I had been looking so long for this connection between level and Gottlieb and as always flipping through these Pages taking picture I looked at one of the depositions and I saw the name Stanley level and so I knew somewhere in there Sydney got leave is talking about Stanley level and how they're connected somehow and so if you want to know what that is in more detail you got to read the book John Lyle ladies and gentlemen John I absolutely love this this kind of um very unique investigation into history uh the inventiveness of everyone that you found I think is fascinating dirty drinks department will be linked in the show notes below if people want to go and get that and if they want to keep up to date with the other stuff that you do where should they go yeah the best place is probably Twitter just at John Lyle l-i-s-l-e is my last name and if you're kind of interested in this story not only do I post stuff about my book and whatever but a lot of times most of what I post is just adventures in the archives if I find a cool photo or description or something in the archive I post it to Twitter so if you're interested in seeing what a historian does that's probably a good place to get a some exp you know to see what it's like so if you want to follow me on Twitter you can expect some of that stuff John I didn't think that you could make history being a historian cool but you've managed to do it congratulations thank you thank you I appreciate it what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace