Bat Bombs, Truth Serums, and the Masterminds of WWII Secret Warfare
Episode Stats
Summary
Many a man has been impressed by the ingenuity of secret agent operations, and intrigued by the gadgets and disguises required to pull them off. Much of what we think about when we think of spies got its start as a part of the Office of Strategic Services, the American Intelligence Agency during World War II. Here to unpack some of the history of the world of cloak and dagger operations is John Lyle, author of The Dirty Tricks Department.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Many a man has been impressed by the ingenuity of secret agent operations and intrigued by
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the subterfuge, gadgets, and disguises required to pull them off. Much of what we think about
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when we think about spies got its start as a part of the Office of Strategic Services,
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the American Intelligence Agency during World War II. Here to unpack some of the history of
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the world of cloak and dagger operations is John Lyle, author of The Dirty Tricks Department,
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Stanley Lovell, The OSS, and The Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare. Today on the show,
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Lyle explains why the OSS was created and the innovations its research and development section
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came up with to fight the Axis powers. We talk about the most successful weapons and devices
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the so-called Dirty Tricks Department developed, as well as its more off-the-wall ideas, which
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included releasing bat bombs and radioactive foxes in Japan. We discuss the department's attempt to
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create a truth serum, its implementation of a disinformation campaign involving the League
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of Lonely War Women, and its promotion of a no-holds-barred hand-to-hand combat fighting
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system. We also talk about the influence of the OSS on the establishment of the CIA and
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controversial projects like MKUltra. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
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Thank you very much. I'm so glad that you had me on here. I can't wait to talk about
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this exciting book, these stories. I'm really excited.
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Yeah, so you got a new book. It's called The Dirty Tricks Department, which is about
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the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and the individuals there that developed
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some really cool spy tech to help win the war. But your background is interesting. You're a historian
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of science, and you also use that academic approach on the history of science to look at the intelligence
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community in the United States. How did you end up in this field? Was it just like you grew up
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watching James Bond movies and other spy shows and thought, I want to make a career researching and
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Well, I don't think I consciously thought that when I was young. I do like spy stories and espionage. I
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think everyone's kind of intrigued by that, and I certainly always have been. But I never consciously
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thought, oh, that's what I want to do. I think when I got to grad school, I wrote my dissertation on
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a group of scientists during the Cold War called the science attachés. These were scientists who
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are attached to American embassies abroad. And as I was doing that research, I kind of discovered
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their connection to the intelligence community. And so that's what took me from kind of this more
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history of science approach into the intelligence community. And as I was looking at their connection
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to the intelligence community, I would come across the names of certain individuals who kept popping
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up with these really incredible stories, you know, stories of bat bombs and painting foxes with
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radioactive paint and, you know, secret weapons and all this stuff. And it all seemed to come back to
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just a couple individuals. And I thought, oh my gosh, I need to find out more about these people
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because they're the center of all these crazy stories.
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So in your book, The Dirty Tricks Department, you take readers through a history of the development of the
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OSS during World War II. This is basically the predecessor of the CIA and particularly the
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technology that they developed during this time to help the allies win the war with espionage and
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cloak and dagger stuff. And one thing you point out at the beginning of the book is that before World
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War II, the U.S. really didn't have a centralized intelligence agency for espionage. So how did the
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U.S. do espionage before World War II? Because I mean, I imagine the U.S. military did engage in
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espionage. So how did they manage that? Yeah, several of the military branches had their own
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intelligence divisions. You have the Army Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Naval
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Intelligence. Domestically, you have something like the FBI. The Postmaster General, you know,
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occasionally would make arguments that, you know, he should be the center of this intelligence because
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all information goes through him. So there were these kind of silos of intelligence before World War II,
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especially. This led to several problems. One of the problems is that there was a lot of bureaucratic
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infighting because each of these intelligence divisions wanted appropriations and there's not
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an infinite amount of appropriations to go around. And so they're kind of fighting for money. Another
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issue with this is that you occasionally get the duplication of research. If you have one division
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that's working on a certain intelligence, it might be doing the same thing or collecting the same
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information as another division. Well, instead of duplicating that intelligence, that work,
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it might be useful to have a centralized intelligence organization that can collect and analyze all
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that intelligence. That way you're not duplicating research or fighting for money. There's some kind of
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centralized place. That's the kind of impetus behind the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. Like
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you said, this centralized intelligence organization that's created right around World War II.
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So who came up with the idea of a centralized intelligence organization?
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Well, one of the main people who spearheaded this idea is Wild Bill Donovan, William Donovan.
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He's a soldier. He won the Medal of Honor in World War I. He becomes a lawyer. He runs unsuccessfully
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for governor of New York after Franklin Roosevelt. But he got sent by President Roosevelt when Roosevelt
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becomes president to Europe to kind of see what's going on in Europe. What's the state of things in
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Europe during the 1930s as tensions seem to be on the rise? And Donovan comes back from, he went on
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several of those trips, and he realizes that the United States needs to stay abreast of all these
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developments that are happening, the tensions that especially seem to be on the rise in Germany.
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And so he pleads to Roosevelt to please create some kind of central intelligence organization
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that will collect and analyze information to keep the president informed about what's happening
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abroad so that the president can make the best decisions possible for the United States.
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And so he got it going. But when it initially started, when the OSS initially started,
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it was looked down upon by those in Washington in the military. Why was that?
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Well, yeah, for a few reasons. The joke about the OSS is that its nickname in the beginning was
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Oh So Social, because it recruited people from a lot of Ivy League schools. And so it was kind of
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seemed as a little aristocratic. And one of the reasons that that developed was because people
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who were hired into the OSS typically avoided being drafted into the military. If you were working with
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the OSS, you probably wouldn't be drafted. So those were some of the knocks against the OSS.
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Another one was that military officials tended to dislike the OSS sometimes, especially because
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William Donovan, this man who was leading the OSS, was not into the strict hierarchy that you typically
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see in military organizations. He was a more of a freewheeling individual flying by the seat of his
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pants. He would try anything if he thought it would work. And he wasn't so much one for a strict
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structure of military discipline that typically you see in those other branches.
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And I imagine to the other military brass, they thought the OSS were encroaching on their turf,
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right? Like, we already got our own intelligence stuff here. We don't need you guys.
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Exactly. Yes. Well, this is so one of the problems that the OSS is wanting to solve is this idea of
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kind of bureaucratic infighting. The idea being that we'll collect and analyze all this information. And
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so we won't have to, you know, fight over funds or anything. What actually tends to happen is that
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now you just have one more horse in this race. Now you just have one more organization that's
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competing for the same funds. So instead of solving all of those issues that it hoped to,
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So the OSS was developed. They were there to collect intelligence, analyze the intelligence.
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There's departments set up for that. But then Donovan thought, you know what, we need a branch
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in the OSS that's dedicated to destroying the enemy with subterfuge. And so he thought,
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you know, I'm going to start this thing. We're going to research technology we can use to fight this
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clandestine war. And he got this guy named Stanley Lovell, who's one of the main characters.
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Tell us about Stanley Lovell. And why did Donovan recruit him to become the head scientist at the
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Yes, Stanley Lovell is the main character of my book. Everything that I came across,
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all these interesting stories, all seem to have some connection to Stanley Lovell. So I really
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wanted to find more about him when I was doing research for this book. He is a chemist from New
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England. He went to Cornell for school. One colleague described him with a quote that I think
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summarizes him pretty well, a salty little Yankee inventor. That's who Stanley Lovell was. He worked
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in the shoe and leather industry in New England for a while. During World War II, when the war broke
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out, he quit to go to Washington, D.C. and to try to aid the war effort in whatever way he could.
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He ended up signing on with a man named Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was kind of the main person who
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coordinated scientific research during World War II. Vannevar Bush was kind of President Roosevelt's
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unofficial science advisor. So Lovell, Stanley Lovell, became an aide to Vannevar Bush. And Bush
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had some connections to the OSS, knew of the OSS, and ended up recommending that Lovell go over there
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and help Donovan, who was looking for a cunning chemist, to join the ranks and help him create
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some of these devices and dirty tricks, I guess you could say, for the OSS.
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And what's interesting about Lovell, his development as a character in your book, is that when he first
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started working with the OSS, he was reluctant to develop spy weapons. Why is that? And how did that
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change throughout his career? Yeah, he did have some moral reservations about doing this. This is
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kind of the main arc of the book, kind of seeing Lovell's transformation over the course of the war.
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He felt an obligation to really do no harm. This is kind of a Hippocratic obligation that he felt.
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But at the same time, his country was in war. And this is a country, the United States,
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that had let a poor kid like him, whose mother had died when he was young, whose dad had died when he
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was young, who was basically raised by his sister, to overcome all these obstacles and be extremely
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successful. So he was very patriotic. So he had this conflict of not wanting to do harm and using
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his scientific expertise for good, but at the same time wanting to defend a country and help a country
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that enabled a person like him to achieve so much. He eventually had a meeting with William Donovan,
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the head of the OSS, in which he laid out his moral reservations about doing this job,
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about creating these deadly weapons. He told Donovan that he didn't know if he felt comfortable
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doing this. He didn't think the American people would be happy with him doing this.
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And Donovan kind of brushed him aside and said, well, you need to get over it. You're being too naive.
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The American people will be thankful for anyone who can think of a way to defeat the Germans and
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the Japanese during this war. And also, I think his inner conflict kind of,
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it highlights, I think, the tension that people have about espionage. On the one hand, I think
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people think it's kind of cool that you're using your, you're like Odysseus, you're using your wiles
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to defeat the enemy. But at the same time, you're like, man, it's kind of weenie, right? Something
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about it seems immoral that you destroy people, but secretly. And that's, I think it's a conflict
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that's existed about espionage and war for a long time.
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Yeah. And I think, you know, that gets to one of the conflict that that Lovell has about some of
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his work when he's developing biological and chemical warfares. This is traditionally seen as
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a, this unconventional type of warfare, a really negative aspect of warfare, something we should
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not do, use biological and chemical warfare. It's somewhat less kind of noble than traditional
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warfare. Lovell over the course of the war starts to change his mind about this. And he starts to think
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that maybe biological warfare is the ethical alternative to conventional warfare. Instead
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of stabbing someone, as he said, with a bayonet and letting it get contaminated and they develop
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some kind of infection and eventually die. Well, what if you could spare a soldier the wound? Maybe
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they're going to die from an infection anyway, if you use biological warfare, but it doesn't involve
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the barbarous, you know, kind of stabbing them with a bayonet or something. So he has this strange
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development where he goes from being reluctant to even help the OSS develop these weapons to being
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someone who's encouraging the use of biological and chemical weapons during the war. Right. They
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think, well, you're killing them anyway, so why does it matter how you kill them? Yeah. Well, that's
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his idea. That's his, you know, there are, of course there are objections to this, but Lovell's idea was
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that, well, we want this war to end as soon as possible. If we want to stop as much suffering as we
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can, we should use everything available to us to stop that suffering. Yeah. It's going to be
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barbarous. It's going to be, you know, different than what we're used to, but if that's what ends
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the war, then let's do it. We're going to talk about some of these specific gadgets and technology
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the OSS developed during this time in World War II. But before you do that, I think you do a good
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job in the book of talking about the scientific process, like how they, how they came up with their
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ideas. So let's talk about it. I think it's really interesting. So how did, what was the approach
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in the OSS with Lovell's department on generating ideas, prototyping? Was it a move fast and break
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things? Was it more methodical? Describe that process for us. The process within this dirty
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tricks department, this research and development branch was really kind of throw things against
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the wall and we'll see what sticks. You know, it's summarized, I guess, with a popular phrase,
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ask for forgiveness, not for permission. That's, that was kind of General Donovan's MO in general
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to do things, do what you can, see what sticks, and then, you know, see what works and continue doing
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that and then discard the stuff that doesn't. This can be good, especially in a wartime. In
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something like World War II, it was very helpful to not have all of that bureaucratic red tape around
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Lovell where he could develop these weapons. So some contexts may be more permissible of these
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things than others. But yeah, it really was, let's try out everything we can and we'll see what we come
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up with. Well, as you know, the, the, the lack of bureaucratic red tape around the OSS and Lovell,
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it was kind of interesting how you talk about with some of this stuff, the president, Roosevelt was
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told about some of the stuff they're developing, but it was done in a way that he could have
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plausible deniability. So if it ever came up that the U.S. ended up using chemical warfare,
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the president, well, I didn't know about it, but he did know about it.
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Well, this is something that you see, not just with the OSS, this is something throughout the
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intelligence community and the executive branch going throughout the Cold War, especially there are
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different committees. That's the kind of express purpose of them is to provide the president with
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some plausible deniability. When you're talking about the intelligence community in general,
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there's kind of what I think of as a vicious cycle that sometimes plays out. The vicious cycle would be
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secrecy that's inherent within the intelligence community. Secrecy enables plausible deniability.
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Plausible deniability enables kind of risky behavior. Risky behavior leads to embarrassment
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because it gets exposed, and then embarrassment leads to more secrecy. So it's just this cycle
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that kind of keeps going. Okay, let's talk about some of the specific gadgets that Lovell and his
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department developed, and let's talk about the weapons, some of the secret weapons they developed
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to kill people. So what were some of the ones that were the most successful that came out of this
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department? Some of the longest lasting ones, well, the longest lasting one is probably the silenced
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.22 pistol, silent flashless. This was used after World War II. There are some reports of it even
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being used during the Vietnam War. So that was probably the longest lasting kind of weapon that
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the R&D branch had a hand in developing. There are a lot of, sometimes the simplest weapons are the
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most useful ones. Within the R&D branch, one of the most useful kind of secret weapons they devised
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was what's called a time pencil. A time pencil is just a small device. It looks like a pencil,
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but it has some mechanism for delaying a detonation. So depending on the kind of wire that's used,
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an acid might eat through the wire more fastly or more slowly. And then when the wire is completely
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eaten through, the time pencil might explode, which can set off kind of a larger detonation,
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something like that. So those were used in conjunction with all kinds of explosives.
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One of the most common ones was what's called a limpet. A limpet was an explosive kind of charge
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that could be attached to the bottom of a ship. And the idea was that you would set your time
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pencil and your limpet, you would attach it to the ship, and then you would row away. And however
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long later, 30 minutes, an hour, the limpet would go off. It would blow a hole into the side of the
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ship and the ship would sink. So those are some of the most useful weapons that the R&D branch had a
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panda developing. One of the most famous ones is called Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima is basically a
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pancake mix. I mean, this is something you could bake and eat, but it was a pancake mix that was
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laced with some high explosive. And so although it was safe to consume, you could actually set a
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charge to it and then you could blow it up. The reason for developing Aunt Jemima was that it would
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allow you to sneak this explosive into other territories pretty easily because nobody's going to
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suspect that a pancake mix is serving as some kind of explosive. So a lot of these devices,
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you know, made to kill, but also a lot of it was made to sabotage, it sounds like.
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Yes, sabotage is kind of the name of the game, especially with the OSS. The military is handling
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the, you know, the main fighting that's going on during this war. The OSS, one of the main things
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that it's doing, it's helping to supply resistance forces in occupied Europe with these weapons to
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sabotage the German military. One big thing especially was to sabotage German trains because
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then you can't get supplies wherever it's going. So one device that the R&D branch develops
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was called the Mole. This was Stanley Lovell's, it might have been his favorite device. The Mole was
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this device that a saboteur would secretly place on the wheel well of a German train and then the Mole
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was capable of determining whether it was light or dark. And so when the train entered a tunnel,
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the Mole would detonate and it would hopefully, ideally, cause the train to derail. And so not
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only would that ruin that train, it would also plug up the tunnel so no other trains could go through
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it. So sabotage within the OSS, especially in conjunction with these resistance movements,
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Okay, so we talked about some of the more successful ideas. What were some of the zaniest ideas that this
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research and development department came up with?
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Well, you know, I mentioned that the R&D branch is just throwing things and seeing what sticks. And so
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you have a lot of stuff that doesn't stick. One of the more interesting ones, probably one of the
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most famous things, just because of how odd it is, that came out of the OSS and specifically the R&D
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branch is called the Bat Bomb. The Bat Bomb is the idea that bats will tend to roost in buildings.
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So if you release a bunch of bats, say, over Japan, they will naturally seek to roost in a
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bunch of Japanese buildings. And the Bat Bomb was the idea that what if we attach small little
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incendiary devices to bats, and then we release them over Japan? The bats will go and roost in
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these buildings, the incendiaries will explode, and they'll cause a bunch of fires, and it can burn
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a city down. Instead of having to drop bombs on Japan that might not hit buildings, we can almost
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guarantee with these bats that they're going to roost in places that the Japanese don't want to be
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caught on fire. So that's kind of the overall Bat Bomb idea, which was somewhat strange. One of the other
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strange ideas in the book is called Operation Fantasia. Operation Fantasia was kind of a
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psychological warfare scheme. The idea with this, it was targeting Japan, the idea with this is that
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within the Shinto religion, there are these kind of portents of doom in the shape of a fox. And so
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this might signal that something bad is going to happen if, you know, this fox kind of figure appears.
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The idea of Operation Fantasia was to make Japanese civilians think that they were seeing these portents
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of doom in the shape of foxes, and then maybe they would decide to lay down their arms. Maybe they would
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quit fighting. The way that the OSS, specifically the R&D branch, tried to accomplish this was by capturing
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live foxes and painting them with radioactive paint. And this radioactive paint would glow in
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the dark. And so there would be these ghostly fox apparitions that you could release in Japan
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that would supposedly kind of make the Japanese scared of continuing to fight. And maybe that
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would resort in peace. That was probably the most outlandish idea that went anywhere within the OSS.
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Well, they tested it out. And I think Washington, D.C., like released these foxes in the park,
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and there were people seeing it, and people were freaking out. They're like, what is that?
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It's like glowing dog running around in the park.
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Yeah, they tested this in a few different ways. So one of the tests that they wanted to do was to
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see even if this radioactive paint would stick to a fox. Because the idea would be that you have to
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throw these foxes onto the coast of Japan. So you release them along the coast in the water,
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and they would swim to shore. Well, if you did that, would the paint even stay on the foxes? You know,
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could foxes even swim? In order to determine this, the OSS had some people get some foxes,
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paint them, tow them out into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, and throw them overboard just to
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see what would happen. It turns out the foxes did swim to shore, but by the time they had reached the
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shore, they had lost most of that paint that made them glow in the dark. And then, as you mentioned,
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in this other test of Operation Fantasia, there were several foxes that were released into Rock Creek
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Park right by Washington, D.C. And there were newspaper reports afterwards that said that, you know,
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the people who observed these foxes had what it called the screaming jimmies. They were really
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scared of these apparitions. And so the idea was that, well, if it scared Americans, surely it's
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going to scare the Japanese even more. But they never did actually, you know, move forward with the
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releasing the ghost foxes in Japan. The bat bomb, that never got put into practice either. I mean,
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a lot of these ideas you talk about, they were just brainstorming and experimenting. They were just,
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but they never actually used them in the war. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. So mostly the technology they developed was for sabotage,
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but the OSS did think about assassination. And so they developed technology or weapons
00:22:18.680
to assassinate targeted individuals in a way so that it didn't look like an assassination. So tell
00:22:24.860
us about some of this research and development here. Yeah. Within the R&D branch, there was one
00:22:29.460
specific project called Natural Causes. And that's kind of self-explanatory. We want to
00:22:34.400
produce something that makes it look as if somebody had died by natural causes.
00:22:38.420
One of the methods of doing this was to create a capsule that was filled with some kind of sodium
00:22:44.280
metal. And then if somebody eats, or if you've, you know, slipped this into their food somehow,
00:22:49.200
and they would eat the sodium metal, it would cause them to die. But then the sodium, you know,
00:22:53.420
metal would dissolve into salt. And so you wouldn't really be able to trace what had happened to them.
00:22:58.600
Other ways of potentially killing someone that the OSS was kind of spitballing
00:23:02.320
with natural causes was to artificially raise their body temperature for a prolonged period of
00:23:07.980
time. Somehow they don't really lay out too clearly how they planned to do this, but this is just the
00:23:13.120
idea that they had that could possibly work. Or somehow injecting an air embolism into somebody's
00:23:18.360
vein and killing them that way. Those were a few ways that they plotted, or at least attempted to
00:23:23.500
think of ways to produce an assassination that looked like it could have been by any means.
00:23:28.620
So they thought about it, they actually never implemented, put it into practice.
00:23:32.320
Not these, not these, not that I know of. Yeah, not with these. There are other methods of killing
00:23:37.580
someone that were used. For instance, L-pills. L-pills are lethal pills, cyanide pills, or just kind of
00:23:44.860
generally suicide pills. These weren't really given to other people, more so they were given to OSS agents
00:23:50.600
themselves. So that they, when they went abroad, if they got caught, they might take their L-pill and kill
00:23:56.260
themselves, basically, before they were captured or interrogated and could divulge any sensitive
00:24:01.040
information. Did those ever get used? Those did get used. Yeah, those did get used. Not just by the
00:24:06.440
United States either. L-pills were developed by several different countries, so they were used
00:24:10.780
not just by the U.S., but others as well. Yeah, William Donovan, when he's traveling right after D-Day,
00:24:17.420
he has an L-pill on him and he almost uses it on one occasion. There are stories of OSS agents who use
00:24:23.480
their L-pill, and it didn't quite work as advertised, and they're writhing on the ground
00:24:27.800
for about 30 minutes. Ideally, it's supposed to kill you within a minute or two, but sometimes
00:24:31.800
they didn't quite work as advertised. So in mid-century spy movies, truth serums are often
00:24:37.720
used to get intelligence from enemy prisoners. Did the OSS develop any truth serums? They tried.
00:24:43.300
They certainly tried. One of the truth serums that they try to develop, or something that they try to
00:24:49.220
use, is THC acetate. You know, this is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. This was
00:24:55.540
experimented with pretty extensively during World War II within the OSS to determine whether you can
00:25:00.920
get someone to tell the truth. The idea with some of these drugs is that maybe you can kind of prevent
00:25:09.040
a person's part of the brain that invents lies. Maybe you can prevent that part of the brain from
00:25:13.780
operating. And if you can do that, well, they're incapable of telling a lie, so they have to tell the truth
00:25:18.500
that they say anything. This didn't really work out in practice. If you gave someone a supposed
00:25:24.060
truth drug like THC acetate, or even alcohol is used. Alcohol has been known to kind of get people
00:25:29.620
to talk for a long time. You actually can get people to talk. The OSS did several experiments on
00:25:35.400
its own personnel, but also on random people. It did experiments on some criminals, gangsters in New
00:25:41.580
York. August DelGracio was one of them. And by giving them these drugs, these people actually did tend
00:25:46.960
to talk more. The problem, however, is that you can't guarantee that what they're saying is the
00:25:51.660
truth. You can lower someone's inhibitions, but how do you know what they're saying is actually the
00:25:56.280
truth? That's the difficulty. It's almost like torture. If you torture someone, they're probably
00:26:02.680
going to talk to you. They're going to say anything to make the pain stop. But that's why it doesn't
00:26:08.480
quite work. If you are going to say anything to make the pain stop, then you can never trust what they
00:26:12.880
say. Well, I thought it was interesting. The guy, one of the guys who's heading up the truth serum
00:26:17.360
work, like experimenting with marijuana, he was actually, it was the guy, am I right that he was
00:26:22.740
actually in charge of the narcotics? Yes. Like he enforced narcotics law, but when he's worth the OSS, he
00:26:28.500
was actually giving gangsters narcotics. Exactly. He was kind of trying to clean the streets of drugs
00:26:33.900
by day and at the night he was doling out drugs to people surreptitiously to see if they actually
00:26:37.980
worked as truth drugs. I think that the guy you're referring to is George White. He is a narcotics
00:26:42.960
officer for the Bureau of Narcotics. I mean, his job is to get drugs off the street, but Stanley Lovell,
00:26:49.580
when he's trying to figure out who he's going to test these truth drugs on, he has no connections
00:26:54.440
to drugs or he doesn't know who he can try them out on. And so he basically hires George White to help
00:27:00.660
him. So Lovell gives these drugs to George White and then George White uses these drugs on his criminal
00:27:06.740
informants to see if they will talk about incriminating stuff. If the informants do,
00:27:11.820
well, that means that, you know, maybe the drugs worked and he can report back to Stanley Lovell
00:27:15.500
that this is a good truth drug. Isn't that illegal? Probably. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that was another
00:27:24.140
kind of interesting thing with the OSS with some of the stuff they were developing. A lot of the stuff
00:27:28.200
they would, they throw in an idea and someone say, well, that's illegal. I think there was one instance
00:27:32.720
where they were working on counterfeit documents, creating like phony money. And someone's like,
00:27:38.360
no, you can't do that. That's illegal. And they're like, well, we're going to do it anyways. And they
00:27:42.320
did it. Yeah. This is one of the things I kind of come back to at the end of the book thinking about
00:27:47.360
in wartime, especially wartime seems to justify otherwise criminal things. People seem to be more
00:27:55.040
forgiving of doing certain actions in wartime than any other time, because, you know, it just comes back to
00:28:00.140
the idea that when you're under distress, it's in your best interest to defend yourself, to do
00:28:06.080
anything you can to get out of that distress. So war kind of justifies these criminal acts or seems
00:28:11.360
to, it's used as a justification for these criminal acts. This is going to lead to a lot of trouble
00:28:16.700
after World War II, because some of these same things that we're talking about are going to continue
00:28:22.180
into the CIA. And they're not going to have that same kind of justification, or at least people
00:28:27.240
aren't going to view it the same way. And it's going to lead to a lot of kind of abuses of power.
00:28:32.280
Yeah, we'll talk about that. So any other mind control technology that the OSS tried to experiment
00:28:38.920
The main thing, I guess, would be the truth drugs. Something that ties into that, I guess,
00:28:43.660
are these disinformation campaigns trying to convince people of believing certain things
00:28:49.060
that aren't necessarily true. One of the most prominent disinformation campaigns,
00:28:53.820
or at least kind of the popular ones nowadays that happened during World War II from the OSS
00:28:59.200
is called the Lonely League of War Women. The idea is that the OSS would drop kind of pamphlets
00:29:07.620
over Germany or German troops. And these pamphlets would basically say, there is a League of Lonely
00:29:14.160
War Women in Germany, and they are going to sleep with any German soldier who is wearing a specific
00:29:21.380
pin on their lapel. Now, on the face of it, this seems like, why would the OSS invent this idea
00:29:27.820
that there are women who are wanting to sleep with German soldiers? That doesn't really make sense.
00:29:31.640
The idea, though, is to make the German soldiers think, well, who are these war women in Germany?
00:29:36.800
Who are these women in Germany who are willing to sleep with all these soldiers? And, you know,
00:29:40.760
obviously, the German soldiers might start to think to themselves, well, could it be my wife?
00:29:45.500
Could it be my girlfriend who's being recruited to join this League of Lonely War Women to sleep with all
00:29:50.680
these soldiers? And it might discourage the German soldiers because they're going to think of their
00:29:54.300
girlfriend sleeping with someone else, and they'll want to go back home and not really fight. So that
00:29:58.440
was one attempt to kind of manipulate ideas in Germany at the time.
00:30:02.680
So we mentioned they did some counterfeiting. So forgeries were an important part of the OSS's work.
00:30:07.540
Why was that important in their espionage work?
00:30:10.680
One of the main things that the OSS does is send undercover agents abroad to either gather information or to
00:30:16.820
train resistance groups that are operating in Europe. And so if you're sending an undercover
00:30:21.540
agent abroad, they better have a good cover story. They better have a good disguise. And
00:30:26.920
papers are necessary, completely necessary for that disguise. You're going to need a fake passport.
00:30:32.660
You're going to need fake ration tickets, fake train tickets, fake money, all kinds of not
00:30:36.860
necessarily fake, but forgeries that look real. And so that's why these forgery operations are really
00:30:42.360
important. Again, the R&D branch sponsors one of these forgery operations called the Documents
00:30:47.480
Division. And that's its whole job is to produce passports that look real, to produce money, to
00:30:52.800
produce ration tickets, all kinds of things that these undercover agents are going to need when they
00:30:58.740
This reminded me of the Great Escape, right? They had a documents department, right? To create all the,
00:31:03.680
give the papers to the escaping prisoners so that once they were in France or wherever, they could
00:31:10.340
Yeah, it's really, really impressive the amount of detail that goes into producing these documents.
00:31:16.960
You know, in order to, it's not just enough to give someone a fake document that looks real,
00:31:22.620
at least on the surface. You have to make sure that the exact kind of paper is being used,
00:31:26.880
the exact kind of ink is being used. You know, there are reports of these forgers roughing up the
00:31:32.060
edges of the paper with sandpaper to make it look like it's a little bit worn. There are cases of them
00:31:37.020
throwing it on the floor of the office and walking over it to make it look worn. You have to get the
00:31:42.040
specific stamps from the specific region, so you have to have an artist who can recreate specific
00:31:47.100
stamps from wherever this document is supposedly coming from. If you're taking pictures, you better
00:31:51.820
make sure that you're taking the picture in the same kind of style that the picture is supposed to be
00:31:56.640
in. For German passports, you weren't supposed to show one of your ears, and so if you didn't know that,
00:32:02.120
you might show someone on a passport, take a picture where they have both their ears in the photo,
00:32:05.920
but then that would be an obvious forgery because that's not supposed to be there.
00:32:10.120
Well, the other thing too, the agents, a lot of them got training on how to
00:32:16.080
Yeah. This is one of my favorite parts of the book is talking about who these forgers are and how
00:32:21.260
they're training people. In some circumstances, the OSS would hire criminals to help train people how
00:32:29.480
to forge things. Criminals who had forged like U.S. government money because they had some good
00:32:34.820
training. They were good at forging signatures and all kinds of things. One of these criminals
00:32:38.540
is referred to as Jim the Penman. He supposedly could look at someone's name, pick out a suitable
00:32:44.700
pen or quill, and recreate their signature up and down the page, and he would bet someone $5 that
00:32:50.080
they couldn't pick out their original one. And so he was hired, basically, to teach some of these
00:32:55.780
agents how to do forgeries, how to study someone's handwriting and the movements of the wrist
00:33:04.460
Did the OSS develop any Mission Impossible-like disguise technology?
00:33:09.280
There are several different ways that the OSS disguise people. The best ones actually tend to
00:33:17.520
be fairly simple. If you want to disguise someone, you can put iodine on their teeth to make their
00:33:23.360
teeth a little yellow. You might put some whitener on their temples to make them look a little older.
00:33:27.820
You might put charcoal pencil in their wrinkles to make their wrinkles deeper and make them look
00:33:32.140
older. Put some newspaper in their shoes to make them taller. Stuff their cheeks with cotton in
00:33:37.400
order to kind of change the shape of their face. But there are instances, really dramatic changes
00:33:43.300
happening. There are a few people who undergo like facial reconstruction surgery to change the shape
00:33:48.500
of their chin in order so that they would not, you know, be recognized in somewhere that they
00:33:52.880
otherwise might have been. And there are ways of altering your appearance to also help you on your
00:33:59.020
undercover mission. Not just changing your physical appearance, but also changing the things that you
00:34:03.600
carry with you. So for instance, the OSS, this R&D branch, developed all kinds of things with message
00:34:10.700
chambers in them. Like a pencil that had holes drilled into it where you could stuff a carefully rolled
00:34:16.040
up paper, a belt that had a secret message chamber in there where you could stuff messages, shoes that
00:34:21.860
had false bottoms where you could put things in. There are accounts of buttons that the OSS created.
00:34:28.280
These buttons would screw on the opposite way that a typical screw thread goes so that you could put
00:34:33.880
something in the button, screw it on in the opposite way that you would typically do. And then if someone
00:34:38.320
was suspicious of this button, they might try to unscrew it, but they probably would, you know, by
00:34:42.880
unscrewing it, they would actually screw it in because the threads were wound the opposite way.
00:34:46.740
One of the most ingenious ways to deliver messages secretly was by melting lipstick. And then you would
00:34:54.860
put a message in the lipstick, you would recast it, and then give it to, you know, some woman who would
00:35:01.220
then take it somewhere. And, you know, it's within the lipstick, so it's really easily concealed.
00:35:06.360
So besides developing spy gadgets, the OSS also developed innovative hand-to-hand combat styles.
00:35:12.240
And they brought in a guy named William Fairbairn. So tell us about this guy and his
00:35:17.260
Shanghai street fighting style that he taught OSS agents.
00:35:20.960
Yeah, this is one of the most kind of odd characters of the entire book. William Fairbairn,
00:35:28.100
he was a former British Royal Marine. He had been stationed in Shanghai, kind of deterring criminal
00:35:34.420
gangs, monitoring red light districts, that kind of thing. And while he was in Shanghai, this is before
00:35:39.720
World War II, he had been in a number of street fights. And he had been beaten up by gangs and
00:35:44.940
almost dead. And one time after he was beaten up by a gang, he woke up in a hospital and he started
00:35:51.740
thinking to himself that he needs to kind of develop the fighting skills in order to protect
00:35:57.800
himself. So he starts taking jujitsu classes and he eventually devises his own system of fighting
00:36:03.820
gutter fighting. Gutter fighting is basically, there are no rules. That is gutter fighting. There are no
00:36:09.740
rules. Gouge out somebody's eyes, throw sand in their eyes, you know, jab their chin, do anything that you
00:36:15.440
can in order to basically incapacitate someone who's trying to incapacitate you first. So he develops this
00:36:21.560
before World War II. And then when the war breaks out, he's hired by the OSS. And he works with the kind of
00:36:27.680
British equivalent as well, to train these agents in how to fight. And again, some of the most
00:36:33.660
common techniques within gutter fighting would be like the chin jab. You thrust your hand into
00:36:38.700
someone's chin. He commonly refers to grabbing someone's testicles, you know, just doing anything
00:36:45.420
you can to incapacitate someone. Yeah, it's just like, it's just cheap. Yeah, yeah, it's very cheap.
00:36:50.080
Yeah, very cheap fighting. And yeah, he drew a crowd like people like to come watch demonstrations
00:36:55.020
he'd put on. And he was kind of he was a big draw. He's a crowd pleaser. He definitely was. And in
00:36:59.760
fact, he was taken to see President Roosevelt before and he demonstrated some of his fighting
00:37:05.960
techniques. And people were really impressed by what he was doing. He would put on demonstrations
00:37:11.220
for the OSS hierarchy. And he would ask some of his recruits, some of the really large recruits
00:37:16.020
to come at him and try to throw him off the stage. And before they knew what had hit him, basically,
00:37:21.080
they had found themselves falling on the front rows of the audience. And he was standing at the
00:37:24.760
front of the stage, kind of the star of the show. So yeah, he was he was definitely something else.
00:37:30.320
So what was the track record of the OSS and the Dirty Tricks Department? I mean,
00:37:33.160
how big of a role did they play in the war effort?
00:37:36.420
Their biggest role, especially the R&D branch, is really helping these resistance forces,
00:37:42.200
supplying them with things like the mole or other ways to sabotage trains. That's probably the most
00:37:47.860
effective thing that this R&D branch specifically did. As far as the OSS in general,
00:37:52.820
it was really important that the United States had good intelligence from abroad. That's probably
00:37:57.960
the most important thing the OSS did is gather intelligence and have analysts back home who could
00:38:03.680
analyze that intelligence and figure out where are German troops moving, where are they stationed,
00:38:08.920
how many people do they have. So that's probably the most important thing the OSS did. But as far as
00:38:13.340
the R&D branch specifically, helping the resistance forces in Europe sabotage the German military
00:38:18.740
is probably its most important contribution to the war effort.
00:38:22.020
And what happened to the OSS after the war ended?
00:38:24.880
Once the war ended, the OSS pretty much dissolved. It had been effective during the war. But after the
00:38:30.620
war, there were a few reports that came out, specifically one report, the Park Report. And
00:38:35.320
it was written by someone who is affiliated with military intelligence. So there's this kind of
00:38:39.740
bureaucratic rivalry. And they just lambasted the OSS saying that it didn't do anything,
00:38:44.680
it was ineffective. And so the OSS eventually gets, basically dissolves after World War II.
00:38:50.500
A few components of it do survive, or did survive. The research and analysis branch,
00:38:56.700
which was analyzing intelligence that was coming in from abroad, that moved to the State Department.
00:39:02.080
But otherwise, most of the OSS is pretty much liquidated.
00:39:05.220
And then eventually, a couple years later, the CIA formed. How did the ethos of the Dirty Tricks
00:39:12.620
Department carry over to the CIA? Yeah, in a few ways. So a lot of the people
00:39:18.660
who have been involved with the OSS eventually join with the CIA. So a similar kind of culture
00:39:24.460
develops there. The CIA is created in 1947 by the National Security Act. And the kind of main head
00:39:35.240
of the CIA, pretty quickly after that, is Alan Dulles. He's going to be the longest serving director
00:39:40.260
of central intelligence. He starts wondering what kind of branches he should create with the CIA.
00:39:46.600
And he actually talks with Stanley Lovell, the head of this R&D branch. And he asks him,
00:39:50.300
do you think I should create a branch within the CIA that does something similar to what your R&D
00:39:54.880
branch did during World War II? And Lovell says, I think you should. And so the CIA eventually
00:40:01.280
develops a branch called the TSS, the Technical Services Staff. And it does a lot of similar things
00:40:07.180
to what the R&D branch did during World War II. Another really important kind of consequence or
00:40:12.760
influence that the OSS has on the CIA is that a lot of the people within the CIA get inspired by
00:40:20.980
what happens within the OSS and particularly what was going on within that R&D branch. So Lovell,
00:40:27.280
Stanley Lovell, had been experimenting with truth drugs and building gadgets and thinking
00:40:31.180
about assassinations. These same kind of ideas get taken up by specific people within the CIA.
00:40:37.180
And then how did that play out in the CIA? And how did that eventually lead to some controversy?
00:40:42.940
Yeah, one of the main things this is going to lead to is that in 1953, the CIA creates a program
00:40:49.560
to investigate mind control. Is mind control possible? And if so, how might we achieve it?
00:40:57.200
This program is called MKUltra, kind of a notorious program that the CIA has. The head of this program
00:41:03.560
was a man named Sidney Gottlieb. Sidney Gottlieb, like Stanley Lovell, was a chemist. And he was the
00:41:10.500
head of MKUltra, this mind control program. And when he first started this program, he was asking
00:41:16.200
himself, he didn't really know how to study mind control. You know, he hadn't been involved in this
00:41:22.200
kind of thing before. And so he starts looking at historical records, trying to figure out what
00:41:28.260
things he should do. What should he investigate? Well, he actually comes across the OSS files of
00:41:34.120
the R&D branch. And in those files, he's kind of inspired to do a lot of things that the R&D branch
00:41:39.380
had done, except this time he's now not doing it during wartime. He's doing it during peacetime.
00:41:44.480
It's Cold War, but peacetime. And so Sidney Gottlieb is pretty directly inspired by Stanley Lovell
00:41:50.680
to conduct a lot of these experiments that happen under MKUltra, especially drug experiments,
00:41:56.180
like truth drug experiments. And some of those experiments, they were basically giving LSD
00:42:00.740
to people, right? Yes. Yeah. Well, okay. So here's another connection. The OSS, remember when
00:42:05.920
it's conducting these drug experiments, Lovell had hired this narcotics officer named George White
00:42:10.760
to conduct those THC experiments. Who does Sidney Gottlieb hire for MKUltra to slip LSD to people?
00:42:17.720
George White. The same exact George White, the same person. So there's a really direct connection
00:42:22.120
between these two branches and programs. And again, that's the point you make is that
00:42:26.520
the stuff that the CIA did during peacetime, it was, you know, people kind of looked to give a blind
00:42:31.680
eye during wartime. Well, it's war. We got to do what we got to do. In peacetime, things change.
00:42:37.300
Yes. Yes. This is kind of one of the concluding things of the book. Sidney Gottlieb and MKUltra
00:42:42.220
are doing things that are pretty similar to all the things that the R&D branch was up to during World
00:42:47.280
War II. Well, John, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:42:51.200
and your work? Thank you so much. Yeah, your questions were really well thought out. So I
00:42:55.780
think that really contributed to a great conversation. If someone wants to know more, the best place
00:43:00.160
probably to learn more about this or to at least keep up with my work is on Twitter. I'm on Twitter
00:43:05.400
at John Lyle, J-O-H-N-L-I-S-L-E. So, you know, I post occasionally pictures from the archives if I come
00:43:12.760
across interesting documents. Twitter is mostly where I post, you know, kind of interesting things like that.
00:43:17.020
And I guess if anyone wants to, you can visit my website, johnlylehistorian.com. And that
00:43:23.480
doesn't have too much, but it's just kind of a summary of some of the things that I've been
00:43:26.760
interested in, the future work that I'm going to be doing. And yeah, so those are probably two best
00:43:31.580
places. Fantastic. Well, John Lyle, thanks for time. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, thank you so much.
00:43:35.540
This has been great. My guest here is John Lyle. He's the author of the book, The Dirty Tricks
00:43:39.660
Department. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about
00:43:43.460
his work at his website, johnlylehistorian.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is
00:43:48.160
slash dirtytricks, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:43:58.940
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:44:02.880
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00:44:06.960
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00:44:36.420
As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, I'm Brett McKay.
00:44:40.160
Remind you how to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.