The Art of Manliness - Bat Bombs, Truth Serums, and the Masterminds of WWII Secret Warfare

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.420 Many a man has been impressed by the ingenuity of secret agent operations and intrigued by

00:00:15.580 the subterfuge, gadgets, and disguises required to pull them off. Much of what we think about

00:00:20.580 when we think about spies got its start as a part of the Office of Strategic Services,

00:00:24.940 the American Intelligence Agency during World War II. Here to unpack some of the history of

00:00:29.480 the world of cloak and dagger operations is John Lyle, author of The Dirty Tricks Department,

00:00:34.660 Stanley Lovell, The OSS, and The Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare. Today on the show,

00:00:40.060 Lyle explains why the OSS was created and the innovations its research and development section

00:00:44.300 came up with to fight the Axis powers. We talk about the most successful weapons and devices

00:00:48.620 the so-called Dirty Tricks Department developed, as well as its more off-the-wall ideas, which

00:00:53.440 included releasing bat bombs and radioactive foxes in Japan. We discuss the department's attempt to

00:00:58.480 create a truth serum, its implementation of a disinformation campaign involving the League

00:01:02.840 of Lonely War Women, and its promotion of a no-holds-barred hand-to-hand combat fighting 1.00

00:01:07.740 system. We also talk about the influence of the OSS on the establishment of the CIA and

00:01:12.580 controversial projects like MKUltra. After the show's over, check out our show notes at

00:01:16.880 awim.is slash dirtytricks.

00:01:34.640 All right, John Lyle, welcome to the show.

00:01:40.940 Thank you very much. I'm so glad that you had me on here. I can't wait to talk about

00:01:45.260 this exciting book, these stories. I'm really excited.

00:01:48.500 Yeah, so you got a new book. It's called The Dirty Tricks Department, which is about

00:01:51.460 the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and the individuals there that developed

00:01:57.780 some really cool spy tech to help win the war. But your background is interesting. You're a historian

00:02:03.120 of science, and you also use that academic approach on the history of science to look at the intelligence

00:02:10.600 community in the United States. How did you end up in this field? Was it just like you grew up

00:02:14.540 watching James Bond movies and other spy shows and thought, I want to make a career researching and

00:02:18.900 writing about the history of spy science?

00:02:21.220 Well, I don't think I consciously thought that when I was young. I do like spy stories and espionage. I

00:02:27.220 think everyone's kind of intrigued by that, and I certainly always have been. But I never consciously

00:02:31.240 thought, oh, that's what I want to do. I think when I got to grad school, I wrote my dissertation on

00:02:37.400 a group of scientists during the Cold War called the science attachés. These were scientists who

00:02:42.900 are attached to American embassies abroad. And as I was doing that research, I kind of discovered

00:02:47.960 their connection to the intelligence community. And so that's what took me from kind of this more

00:02:52.640 history of science approach into the intelligence community. And as I was looking at their connection

00:02:57.860 to the intelligence community, I would come across the names of certain individuals who kept popping

00:03:03.340 up with these really incredible stories, you know, stories of bat bombs and painting foxes with

00:03:09.580 radioactive paint and, you know, secret weapons and all this stuff. And it all seemed to come back to

00:03:14.500 just a couple individuals. And I thought, oh my gosh, I need to find out more about these people

00:03:18.680 because they're the center of all these crazy stories.

00:03:21.620 So in your book, The Dirty Tricks Department, you take readers through a history of the development of the

00:03:26.020 OSS during World War II. This is basically the predecessor of the CIA and particularly the

00:03:31.220 technology that they developed during this time to help the allies win the war with espionage and

00:03:35.820 cloak and dagger stuff. And one thing you point out at the beginning of the book is that before World

00:03:40.000 War II, the U.S. really didn't have a centralized intelligence agency for espionage. So how did the

00:03:46.960 U.S. do espionage before World War II? Because I mean, I imagine the U.S. military did engage in

00:03:51.860 espionage. So how did they manage that? Yeah, several of the military branches had their own

00:03:56.260 intelligence divisions. You have the Army Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Naval

00:04:01.180 Intelligence. Domestically, you have something like the FBI. The Postmaster General, you know,

00:04:06.940 occasionally would make arguments that, you know, he should be the center of this intelligence because

00:04:10.720 all information goes through him. So there were these kind of silos of intelligence before World War II,

00:04:16.500 especially. This led to several problems. One of the problems is that there was a lot of bureaucratic

00:04:22.040 infighting because each of these intelligence divisions wanted appropriations and there's not

00:04:27.400 an infinite amount of appropriations to go around. And so they're kind of fighting for money. Another

00:04:32.260 issue with this is that you occasionally get the duplication of research. If you have one division

00:04:37.780 that's working on a certain intelligence, it might be doing the same thing or collecting the same

00:04:42.300 information as another division. Well, instead of duplicating that intelligence, that work,

00:04:47.760 it might be useful to have a centralized intelligence organization that can collect and analyze all

00:04:53.360 that intelligence. That way you're not duplicating research or fighting for money. There's some kind of

00:04:58.020 centralized place. That's the kind of impetus behind the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. Like

00:05:03.860 you said, this centralized intelligence organization that's created right around World War II.

00:05:08.800 So who came up with the idea of a centralized intelligence organization?

00:05:12.720 Well, one of the main people who spearheaded this idea is Wild Bill Donovan, William Donovan.

00:05:18.240 He's a soldier. He won the Medal of Honor in World War I. He becomes a lawyer. He runs unsuccessfully

00:05:24.720 for governor of New York after Franklin Roosevelt. But he got sent by President Roosevelt when Roosevelt

00:05:30.900 becomes president to Europe to kind of see what's going on in Europe. What's the state of things in

00:05:37.260 Europe during the 1930s as tensions seem to be on the rise? And Donovan comes back from, he went on

00:05:43.420 several of those trips, and he realizes that the United States needs to stay abreast of all these

00:05:48.480 developments that are happening, the tensions that especially seem to be on the rise in Germany.

00:05:53.280 And so he pleads to Roosevelt to please create some kind of central intelligence organization

00:05:58.400 that will collect and analyze information to keep the president informed about what's happening

00:06:04.120 abroad so that the president can make the best decisions possible for the United States.

00:06:08.840 And so he got it going. But when it initially started, when the OSS initially started,

00:06:12.620 it was looked down upon by those in Washington in the military. Why was that?

00:06:16.900 Well, yeah, for a few reasons. The joke about the OSS is that its nickname in the beginning was

00:06:22.040 Oh So Social, because it recruited people from a lot of Ivy League schools. And so it was kind of

00:06:27.980 seemed as a little aristocratic. And one of the reasons that that developed was because people

00:06:35.160 who were hired into the OSS typically avoided being drafted into the military. If you were working with

00:06:40.720 the OSS, you probably wouldn't be drafted. So those were some of the knocks against the OSS.

00:06:46.420 Another one was that military officials tended to dislike the OSS sometimes, especially because

00:06:52.340 William Donovan, this man who was leading the OSS, was not into the strict hierarchy that you typically

00:06:59.700 see in military organizations. He was a more of a freewheeling individual flying by the seat of his

00:07:05.120 pants. He would try anything if he thought it would work. And he wasn't so much one for a strict

00:07:10.340 structure of military discipline that typically you see in those other branches.

00:07:15.400 And I imagine to the other military brass, they thought the OSS were encroaching on their turf,

00:07:20.420 right? Like, we already got our own intelligence stuff here. We don't need you guys.

00:07:24.800 Exactly. Yes. Well, this is so one of the problems that the OSS is wanting to solve is this idea of

00:07:30.980 kind of bureaucratic infighting. The idea being that we'll collect and analyze all this information. And

00:07:35.740 so we won't have to, you know, fight over funds or anything. What actually tends to happen is that

00:07:41.260 now you just have one more horse in this race. Now you just have one more organization that's

00:07:45.340 competing for the same funds. So instead of solving all of those issues that it hoped to,

00:07:50.420 sometimes it contributed to them, ironically.

00:07:53.460 So the OSS was developed. They were there to collect intelligence, analyze the intelligence.

00:07:58.100 There's departments set up for that. But then Donovan thought, you know what, we need a branch

00:08:02.520 in the OSS that's dedicated to destroying the enemy with subterfuge. And so he thought,

00:08:09.320 you know, I'm going to start this thing. We're going to research technology we can use to fight this

00:08:12.540 clandestine war. And he got this guy named Stanley Lovell, who's one of the main characters.

00:08:17.760 Tell us about Stanley Lovell. And why did Donovan recruit him to become the head scientist at the

00:08:22.800 research and development arm of the OSS?

00:08:25.380 Yes, Stanley Lovell is the main character of my book. Everything that I came across,

00:08:30.380 all these interesting stories, all seem to have some connection to Stanley Lovell. So I really

00:08:34.280 wanted to find more about him when I was doing research for this book. He is a chemist from New

00:08:39.640 England. He went to Cornell for school. One colleague described him with a quote that I think

00:08:45.540 summarizes him pretty well, a salty little Yankee inventor. That's who Stanley Lovell was. He worked 0.90

00:08:50.860 in the shoe and leather industry in New England for a while. During World War II, when the war broke

00:08:55.320 out, he quit to go to Washington, D.C. and to try to aid the war effort in whatever way he could.

00:09:00.760 He ended up signing on with a man named Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was kind of the main person who

00:09:07.060 coordinated scientific research during World War II. Vannevar Bush was kind of President Roosevelt's

00:09:12.320 unofficial science advisor. So Lovell, Stanley Lovell, became an aide to Vannevar Bush. And Bush

00:09:18.540 had some connections to the OSS, knew of the OSS, and ended up recommending that Lovell go over there

00:09:24.540 and help Donovan, who was looking for a cunning chemist, to join the ranks and help him create

00:09:29.400 some of these devices and dirty tricks, I guess you could say, for the OSS.

00:09:34.040 And what's interesting about Lovell, his development as a character in your book, is that when he first

00:09:38.480 started working with the OSS, he was reluctant to develop spy weapons. Why is that? And how did that

00:09:44.140 change throughout his career? Yeah, he did have some moral reservations about doing this. This is

00:09:48.500 kind of the main arc of the book, kind of seeing Lovell's transformation over the course of the war.

00:09:53.240 He felt an obligation to really do no harm. This is kind of a Hippocratic obligation that he felt.

00:09:59.540 But at the same time, his country was in war. And this is a country, the United States,

00:10:04.160 that had let a poor kid like him, whose mother had died when he was young, whose dad had died when he

00:10:10.160 was young, who was basically raised by his sister, to overcome all these obstacles and be extremely

00:10:15.260 successful. So he was very patriotic. So he had this conflict of not wanting to do harm and using

00:10:20.760 his scientific expertise for good, but at the same time wanting to defend a country and help a country

00:10:25.920 that enabled a person like him to achieve so much. He eventually had a meeting with William Donovan,

00:10:32.800 the head of the OSS, in which he laid out his moral reservations about doing this job,

00:10:38.920 about creating these deadly weapons. He told Donovan that he didn't know if he felt comfortable

00:10:42.900 doing this. He didn't think the American people would be happy with him doing this.

00:10:47.080 And Donovan kind of brushed him aside and said, well, you need to get over it. You're being too naive.

00:10:52.300 The American people will be thankful for anyone who can think of a way to defeat the Germans and 1.00

00:10:56.820 the Japanese during this war. And also, I think his inner conflict kind of,

00:11:00.820 it highlights, I think, the tension that people have about espionage. On the one hand, I think

00:11:06.200 people think it's kind of cool that you're using your, you're like Odysseus, you're using your wiles

00:11:10.920 to defeat the enemy. But at the same time, you're like, man, it's kind of weenie, right? Something

00:11:14.740 about it seems immoral that you destroy people, but secretly. And that's, I think it's a conflict

00:11:21.680 that's existed about espionage and war for a long time.

00:11:25.280 Yeah. And I think, you know, that gets to one of the conflict that that Lovell has about some of

00:11:29.860 his work when he's developing biological and chemical warfares. This is traditionally seen as

00:11:35.620 a, this unconventional type of warfare, a really negative aspect of warfare, something we should

00:11:40.980 not do, use biological and chemical warfare. It's somewhat less kind of noble than traditional

00:11:45.640 warfare. Lovell over the course of the war starts to change his mind about this. And he starts to think

00:11:51.100 that maybe biological warfare is the ethical alternative to conventional warfare. Instead

00:11:56.540 of stabbing someone, as he said, with a bayonet and letting it get contaminated and they develop 0.59

00:12:02.180 some kind of infection and eventually die. Well, what if you could spare a soldier the wound? Maybe

00:12:06.800 they're going to die from an infection anyway, if you use biological warfare, but it doesn't involve

00:12:10.980 the barbarous, you know, kind of stabbing them with a bayonet or something. So he has this strange

00:12:16.480 development where he goes from being reluctant to even help the OSS develop these weapons to being

00:12:21.920 someone who's encouraging the use of biological and chemical weapons during the war. Right. They 0.68

00:12:26.360 think, well, you're killing them anyway, so why does it matter how you kill them? Yeah. Well, that's 1.00

00:12:29.920 his idea. That's his, you know, there are, of course there are objections to this, but Lovell's idea was

00:12:34.620 that, well, we want this war to end as soon as possible. If we want to stop as much suffering as we

00:12:40.100 can, we should use everything available to us to stop that suffering. Yeah. It's going to be

00:12:44.520 barbarous. It's going to be, you know, different than what we're used to, but if that's what ends

00:12:48.260 the war, then let's do it. We're going to talk about some of these specific gadgets and technology

00:12:52.200 the OSS developed during this time in World War II. But before you do that, I think you do a good

00:12:56.340 job in the book of talking about the scientific process, like how they, how they came up with their

00:13:01.140 ideas. So let's talk about it. I think it's really interesting. So how did, what was the approach

00:13:04.900 in the OSS with Lovell's department on generating ideas, prototyping? Was it a move fast and break

00:13:11.360 things? Was it more methodical? Describe that process for us. The process within this dirty

00:13:17.340 tricks department, this research and development branch was really kind of throw things against

00:13:21.920 the wall and we'll see what sticks. You know, it's summarized, I guess, with a popular phrase,

00:13:26.320 ask for forgiveness, not for permission. That's, that was kind of General Donovan's MO in general

00:13:31.680 to do things, do what you can, see what sticks, and then, you know, see what works and continue doing

00:13:37.360 that and then discard the stuff that doesn't. This can be good, especially in a wartime. In

00:13:42.580 something like World War II, it was very helpful to not have all of that bureaucratic red tape around

00:13:47.320 Lovell where he could develop these weapons. So some contexts may be more permissible of these

00:13:52.860 things than others. But yeah, it really was, let's try out everything we can and we'll see what we come

00:13:58.760 up with. Well, as you know, the, the, the lack of bureaucratic red tape around the OSS and Lovell,

00:14:04.040 it was kind of interesting how you talk about with some of this stuff, the president, Roosevelt was

00:14:08.940 told about some of the stuff they're developing, but it was done in a way that he could have

00:14:11.960 plausible deniability. So if it ever came up that the U.S. ended up using chemical warfare,

00:14:17.840 the president, well, I didn't know about it, but he did know about it.

00:14:22.180 Well, this is something that you see, not just with the OSS, this is something throughout the

00:14:26.400 intelligence community and the executive branch going throughout the Cold War, especially there are

00:14:30.780 different committees. That's the kind of express purpose of them is to provide the president with

00:14:35.920 some plausible deniability. When you're talking about the intelligence community in general,

00:14:41.440 there's kind of what I think of as a vicious cycle that sometimes plays out. The vicious cycle would be

00:14:47.340 secrecy that's inherent within the intelligence community. Secrecy enables plausible deniability.

00:14:53.500 Plausible deniability enables kind of risky behavior. Risky behavior leads to embarrassment

00:14:59.560 because it gets exposed, and then embarrassment leads to more secrecy. So it's just this cycle

00:15:04.420 that kind of keeps going. Okay, let's talk about some of the specific gadgets that Lovell and his

00:15:08.360 department developed, and let's talk about the weapons, some of the secret weapons they developed

00:15:12.000 to kill people. So what were some of the ones that were the most successful that came out of this

00:15:18.700 department? Some of the longest lasting ones, well, the longest lasting one is probably the silenced

00:15:24.440 .22 pistol, silent flashless. This was used after World War II. There are some reports of it even

00:15:30.540 being used during the Vietnam War. So that was probably the longest lasting kind of weapon that

00:15:35.220 the R&D branch had a hand in developing. There are a lot of, sometimes the simplest weapons are the

00:15:41.600 most useful ones. Within the R&D branch, one of the most useful kind of secret weapons they devised

00:15:47.620 was what's called a time pencil. A time pencil is just a small device. It looks like a pencil,

00:15:53.220 but it has some mechanism for delaying a detonation. So depending on the kind of wire that's used,

00:15:59.260 an acid might eat through the wire more fastly or more slowly. And then when the wire is completely

00:16:03.960 eaten through, the time pencil might explode, which can set off kind of a larger detonation,

00:16:08.200 something like that. So those were used in conjunction with all kinds of explosives.

00:16:12.540 One of the most common ones was what's called a limpet. A limpet was an explosive kind of charge

00:16:19.480 that could be attached to the bottom of a ship. And the idea was that you would set your time

00:16:23.860 pencil and your limpet, you would attach it to the ship, and then you would row away. And however

00:16:28.560 long later, 30 minutes, an hour, the limpet would go off. It would blow a hole into the side of the

00:16:32.680 ship and the ship would sink. So those are some of the most useful weapons that the R&D branch had a

00:16:38.020 panda developing. One of the most famous ones is called Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima is basically a

00:16:44.740 pancake mix. I mean, this is something you could bake and eat, but it was a pancake mix that was

00:16:49.180 laced with some high explosive. And so although it was safe to consume, you could actually set a

00:16:55.320 charge to it and then you could blow it up. The reason for developing Aunt Jemima was that it would

00:17:00.000 allow you to sneak this explosive into other territories pretty easily because nobody's going to

00:17:05.060 suspect that a pancake mix is serving as some kind of explosive. So a lot of these devices,

00:17:10.100 you know, made to kill, but also a lot of it was made to sabotage, it sounds like.

00:17:15.260 Yes, sabotage is kind of the name of the game, especially with the OSS. The military is handling

00:17:19.860 the, you know, the main fighting that's going on during this war. The OSS, one of the main things

00:17:25.960 that it's doing, it's helping to supply resistance forces in occupied Europe with these weapons to

00:17:32.780 sabotage the German military. One big thing especially was to sabotage German trains because

00:17:39.240 then you can't get supplies wherever it's going. So one device that the R&D branch develops

00:17:44.760 was called the Mole. This was Stanley Lovell's, it might have been his favorite device. The Mole was

00:17:50.960 this device that a saboteur would secretly place on the wheel well of a German train and then the Mole

00:17:58.320 was capable of determining whether it was light or dark. And so when the train entered a tunnel,

00:18:03.780 the Mole would detonate and it would hopefully, ideally, cause the train to derail. And so not

00:18:09.480 only would that ruin that train, it would also plug up the tunnel so no other trains could go through

00:18:14.480 it. So sabotage within the OSS, especially in conjunction with these resistance movements,

00:18:20.360 was definitely the name of the game.

00:18:21.780 Okay, so we talked about some of the more successful ideas. What were some of the zaniest ideas that this 0.98

00:18:25.980 research and development department came up with?

00:18:28.880 Well, you know, I mentioned that the R&D branch is just throwing things and seeing what sticks. And so

00:18:34.260 you have a lot of stuff that doesn't stick. One of the more interesting ones, probably one of the

00:18:38.620 most famous things, just because of how odd it is, that came out of the OSS and specifically the R&D

00:18:44.480 branch is called the Bat Bomb. The Bat Bomb is the idea that bats will tend to roost in buildings.

00:18:51.340 So if you release a bunch of bats, say, over Japan, they will naturally seek to roost in a

00:18:56.460 bunch of Japanese buildings. And the Bat Bomb was the idea that what if we attach small little 0.90

00:19:01.660 incendiary devices to bats, and then we release them over Japan? The bats will go and roost in

00:19:07.200 these buildings, the incendiaries will explode, and they'll cause a bunch of fires, and it can burn

00:19:12.060 a city down. Instead of having to drop bombs on Japan that might not hit buildings, we can almost 0.97

00:19:17.840 guarantee with these bats that they're going to roost in places that the Japanese don't want to be 0.98

00:19:22.120 caught on fire. So that's kind of the overall Bat Bomb idea, which was somewhat strange. One of the other

00:19:28.640 strange ideas in the book is called Operation Fantasia. Operation Fantasia was kind of a

00:19:35.960 psychological warfare scheme. The idea with this, it was targeting Japan, the idea with this is that 0.71

00:19:42.280 within the Shinto religion, there are these kind of portents of doom in the shape of a fox. And so

00:19:48.860 this might signal that something bad is going to happen if, you know, this fox kind of figure appears.

00:19:53.880 The idea of Operation Fantasia was to make Japanese civilians think that they were seeing these portents

00:20:00.260 of doom in the shape of foxes, and then maybe they would decide to lay down their arms. Maybe they would

00:20:05.900 quit fighting. The way that the OSS, specifically the R&D branch, tried to accomplish this was by capturing

00:20:11.680 live foxes and painting them with radioactive paint. And this radioactive paint would glow in

00:20:17.480 the dark. And so there would be these ghostly fox apparitions that you could release in Japan

00:20:21.740 that would supposedly kind of make the Japanese scared of continuing to fight. And maybe that

00:20:27.280 would resort in peace. That was probably the most outlandish idea that went anywhere within the OSS.

00:20:32.820 Well, they tested it out. And I think Washington, D.C., like released these foxes in the park,

00:20:37.640 and there were people seeing it, and people were freaking out. They're like, what is that?

00:20:40.580 It's like glowing dog running around in the park.

00:20:43.940 Yeah, they tested this in a few different ways. So one of the tests that they wanted to do was to

00:20:49.620 see even if this radioactive paint would stick to a fox. Because the idea would be that you have to

00:20:54.260 throw these foxes onto the coast of Japan. So you release them along the coast in the water,

00:20:59.220 and they would swim to shore. Well, if you did that, would the paint even stay on the foxes? You know,

00:21:03.980 could foxes even swim? In order to determine this, the OSS had some people get some foxes,

00:21:09.960 paint them, tow them out into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, and throw them overboard just to

00:21:14.220 see what would happen. It turns out the foxes did swim to shore, but by the time they had reached the

00:21:18.660 shore, they had lost most of that paint that made them glow in the dark. And then, as you mentioned,

00:21:23.040 in this other test of Operation Fantasia, there were several foxes that were released into Rock Creek

00:21:28.820 Park right by Washington, D.C. And there were newspaper reports afterwards that said that, you know,

00:21:34.480 the people who observed these foxes had what it called the screaming jimmies. They were really

00:21:38.540 scared of these apparitions. And so the idea was that, well, if it scared Americans, surely it's

00:21:43.780 going to scare the Japanese even more. But they never did actually, you know, move forward with the 0.97

00:21:48.020 releasing the ghost foxes in Japan. The bat bomb, that never got put into practice either. I mean, 1.00

00:21:53.280 a lot of these ideas you talk about, they were just brainstorming and experimenting. They were just,

00:21:58.060 but they never actually used them in the war. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:22:04.480 And now back to the show. So mostly the technology they developed was for sabotage,

00:22:12.480 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 0.94

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 0.99

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. 0.63

00:28:32.280 Yeah, we'll talk about that. So any other mind control technology that the OSS tried to experiment

00:28:37.160 with during World War II?

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 1.00

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? 0.94

00:29:36.800 Who are these women in Germany who are willing to sleep with all these soldiers? And, you know, 1.00

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 1.00

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

00:30:57.620 go into Europe.

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

00:31:08.140 get to safety.

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 0.73

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

00:32:13.520 forge signatures or forge handwriting.

00:32:16.080 Yeah. This is one of my favorite parts of the book is talking about who these forgers are and how 0.99

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

00:33:00.860 in order to recreate exactly how they write.

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 0.96

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 0.99

00:36:45.420 you can to incapacitate someone. Yeah, it's just like, it's just cheap. Yeah, yeah, it's very cheap. 0.99

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

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The Art of Manliness - March 15, 2023

Bat Bombs, Truth Serums, and the Masterminds of WWII Secret Warfare

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