Secret societies

Most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative, and kind until they're not. The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Rick Spence.

You have written and lectured about serial killers, secret societies, cults and intelligence agencies. So we can basically begin at any of these fascinating topics, but let's begin with intelligence agencies. Which has been the most powerful intelligence agency in history? The most powerful intelligence agency in history. It's an interesting question. I'd say probably in terms of historical longevity and consistency of performance that the Russian Intelligence Services. Notice I didn't say the KGB specifically, but the Russian Intelligence Services, going back to the Czarist period are consistently pretty good. Not infallible, none of them are. Of course, there's a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. Very often, I think it's still the case Russians are viewed in one or two ways. Either they are Bumbling idiots or they're diabolically clever, no sort of middle ground. You can find both of those examples in this.

I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Okhrana or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence that happens. Well, one of the key elements that any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that. Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case officer, is controlling agency, he's the only one that should know who those people are, possibly his immediate superiors. But no way do you want that to be common knowledge. So information within the organization itself is compartmentalized. So you don't need everybody to be in on it. You don't even need necessarily the people who are nominally at the top. Versus the Okhrana, the real boss of the Okhrana was the Imperial ministry of the Interior, the Minister of the Interior, in fact.

What are some differences to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence in the CIA? If you look at both the Okhrana and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent is that a single organization handled foreign intelligence that is spying upon enemy or hostile governments and also internal security. So that's all part of it. Whereas if you look at the US models that evolved, you eventually have the FBI under Hoover, who insists that he's going to be the counterintelligence force. If there are commie spies running around America, it's the FBI who's supposed to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that. The Charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any ... It's often said they were barred from spying on Americans, which isn't quite true. You can always find a way to do that. What they don't have is they don't have any police or judicial powers.

I wonder how often those intelligence agencies in the 20th century, and of course the natural question extending it to the 21st century, how often they go to the assassination, how often they go to the kill part of that versus just the espionage. Let's take an example from American intelligence, from the CIA 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, MKUltra. That is a secret program which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control, which really means messing with people's heads. And what was the goal of that? Well, there seemed to have been lots of goals. But there was an FBI memo that I recently acquired quite legally, by the way, it's declassified, but it's from 1949. So this is only two years after the CIA came into existence. And it's an FBI memo because the FBI, of course, very curious what the CIA is up to and the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone, they're sort of spying on what's going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York. So it's not held in any kind of, it's essentially never really happened because it's in somebody's house. And there are a couple of guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Backster. Cleve Backster is the great godfather of the lie detector. Pretty much everything that we know or think we know about lie detectors today, you owe to Cleve Backster. He's also the same guy that thought that plants could feel, which somehow was a derivative of his work on lie detectors. So these guys are there and they're giving a talk to some military and other personnel. And there's certain parts of the document which are of course redacted, but you could figure out what it is that they're talking about. And they're talking about hypnotic suggestion and all the wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion. And two of the things they note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people's minds and implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that, just imagine how that would be done. So here to me is the interesting point. They're talking about this in 1949. MKUltra does not come along until really 1953. Although there are all sorts of Artichoke and others, everything is sort of leading up to that. It's simply an elaboration of programs that were already there. I don't think that it ultimately matters whether you can implant memories or erase memories. To me, the important part is they thought they could and they were going to try to do it. And that eventually is what you find out in the efforts made during the 1950s and '60s through MKUltra, MKSearch, MKNaomi and all the others that came out. That's one of the things they're working for. And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there's that whole question is that could you get someone to put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger and then not remember it later. Yeah, you could, interestingly enough.

On the topic of MICE, on the topic of money, ideology, coercion and ego, let me ask you about a conspiracy theory. So there is a conspiracy theory that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein. At a high level, if you can just talk about that, is that something that's at all even possible? That you have, basically this will be for coercion, you get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous and then you collect evidence on them so that you can then have leverage on them. Well, let's look at what Epstein was doing. He was a businessman who then also developed a very lucrative sideline in being a high-level procurer basically in supplying young girls. And he also filmed much of that activity. I think his partner in this, Ghislaine, and I'm hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly.

Yeah. But your work is so fascinating and it covers so many topics. So if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg group.

You've studied a lot of cults and occultism, what do you think is the power of that mystical experience? Well, what is broadly referred to... Well, we get into what's occultism, what's the occult? The occult is the hidden, that's all it really means. Specifically, hidden from sight. And the basis of it is the idea that what is hidden, well, what is hidden from us is most of the world, most of reality. So the basic concept within occultism, the basic concept within most religions, which are approved forms of occultism, is that the world, the physical world that we are aware of is only a very small part of a much larger reality. And that what the methods and practices of occultism arguably do is to allow someone to either enter into this larger reality or to access that larger reality for purposes to be exploited here. The most interesting statement about and a key element of this becomes the thing called magic.

Well, I guess we could start with what on earth is The Thule Society? So The Thule Society was a small German occult society. That is, they studied metaphysics, another fancy word for occultism, that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Okay, not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer. He was adopted by a German nobleman and got the name von Sebottendorff, and I like to say that name. So, I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who show up and do things, and trying to figure out who these people are. So we're working up the years prior to the first World War. So, the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey. There was none in the Ottoman Empire, which was a fairly tumultuous place, because in 1908 and 1909, there was the Young Turk Revolution. And, you had a military coup, which effectively overthrew the Ottoman Sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the first World War to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian Genocide. Eventually, it created a genocidal military regime which would lead the country into a disastrous first world war, which would destroy the Ottoman Empire, out of which modern Turkey emerges. Yada, yada, yada.

You gave a lecture on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's widely considered to be the most influential work of anti-Semitism ever perhaps. Can you describe this text? Well, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is probably one of the most troublesome and destructive works of literature that has ever emerged. And yet its origins remain obscure. So you get a whole variety of stories about where it came from. So the one story that is often is that it was the work of the Okhrana, the Russian Secret police. And in particular, it was all crafted in 1904 and 1905 in Paris. There's a whole description of Pyotr Rachkovsky who was the, supposedly the chief of the Okhrana at the time, was the man behind it, another fellow by the name of Matvei Golovinski was the drafter of it. And that they had this document written by a French political writer from some decades back called Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which they were then adapting. Usually it's argued that they plagiarized it into the protocols.

God, that's brilliantly put. Speaking of the tipping point, you gave a series of lectures on murderers, crimes in the 20th century. One of the crimes that you described is the Manson family murders, and that combines a lot of the elements of what we've been talking about and a lot of the elements of the human nature that you just described. So can you just tell the story at a high level as you understand it? The Manson family. Well, you begin with Charles Manson, who's the key element in this, and Charles Manson for most of his life up until the time that he's around 33, is an unexceptional, petty criminal. In and out of prison, reform school from an early age, not really associated with violent crimes. He did stuff like steal cars, write bad checks, became an unsuccessful pimp and drug dealer. So around 1967, he gets out of his latest stint in federal lockup in Terminal Island near Los Angeles, California. By that time, he has learned how to play the guitar, has ambitions to become a musician, and also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist, not that he ever seems to have practiced, but that's what he would claim that he was. Self-educated himself in prison to a certain degree. So when he gets out of prison in '67, he was a model prisoner. He behaved himself and seemed... You can imagine his life is going in a completely different direction. And here, again, I'm going to say something good about Charles Manson, which is that he actually was a decent singer. If you really listened to some of the stuff he did... He's not a great singer, but other people got recording contracts with less talent than he had, and he could play a guitar. The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him.

And again, we return to that pull towards belonging that gets us humans into trouble. So it does seem that there was a few crimes around this time. So, the Zodiac Killer. Well, California, where I'm from... I remember this period vividly. By the way, the Tate LaBianca killings occurred on my birthday, the year I graduated from high school. So I remember this.

You've studied secret societies. You gave a lot of amazing lectures on secret societies. It's fascinating to look at human history through the lens of secret societies because they've permeated all of human history. You've talked about from everything from the Knights Templar to Illuminati, Freemasons, like we brought up. Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, you've talked about in its sort of main form, lasted a short time, but its legend. Never gone away.