Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories Candy Jones, the Brainwashed Fashion Model About this episode Candy Jones had an impressive résumé: Miss Atlantic City, Model of the Year, highest-paid cover model of the 1940s, entrepreneur, radio personality, author…and an unwitting undercover CIA agent, brainwashed by the government. Or, so she claimed. To find out more, we’re digging into Candy’s story and speaking with author and historian John Lisle. Check out his new book, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA, available now!
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 On New Year's Eve, 1972, Candy Jones got married. This was the second marriage for both Candy and her new husband, radio personality, Long John Nebel. They'd first met a few decades ago, back when John was a fashion photographer and Candy was the highest-paid magazine cover girl of her time. They'd stayed in touch ever since. One day, on a phone call, John suggested they get married. She gave him an enthusiastic "yes," and they got married that same year. They'd known each other through career changes, failed relationships, money troubles, and medical woes. They must have figured, "Why wait? Why not skip straight to marriage?
0:46 Speaker 00 They knew each other well enough already." Maybe not so well, it turned out. Just a few months after they said "I do," John started to believe Candy was hiding a sinister secret. He worried his new wife had been brainwashed into working undercover... for the CIA. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday, and you can watch our episodes and more on our new YouTube channel @conspiracietheoriespodcast. And check us out on Instagram @theconspiracypod.
1:31 Speaker 00 And we would love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by 7Up. Ever notice lemon is everywhere? Lemon recipes, lemon album names, lemon yellow fashion, and when it comes to lemon lime sodas, why is lemon always first? There's a reason. A shadowy organization called The Lemonati has been keeping big lemon on top of the soda world for decades. But the sip is about to be flipped.
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3:39 Speaker 00 From the 1940s through the 1980s, Candy Jones was a model, entrepreneur, radio personality, and a beauty expert who authored a dozen books. Ever heard the saying, "If you want something done, ask a busy person"? Candy was that busy person. According to some claims, she may have also been an unwilling participant in the CIA's MKUltra program. And not just that, according to Candy and her husband John, she carried out secret missions while under their control. Okay, so how does she go from a cover girl to a brainwashed agent?
4:21 Speaker 00 Well, that can all be traced to one decision Candy makes in 1959.
4:28 Speaker 00 At this point, her modeling heyday is done. Candy's running her own business out of an office building in Manhattan, training aspiring models. From her desk, she's got a good view of another office space across the hall. So when she hears about a robbery there, she reports some suspicious activity she'd witnessed beforehand. A man calling himself Ted drops by to follow up on that report. He tells Candy he's from the FBI. The two get to talking, and Ted starts to admire this nice professional... microphone she has. Well, she uses it to coach her students in reading advertisements.
5:10 Speaker 00 But he's so taken by this wonderful mic, he asks if he can take it for a while. And Candy thinks it's pretty exciting that she gets to, in some small way, help out on an FBI case. When Ted returns the microphone, he has another request. He wants to know if he can use her office as a mail drop, so that messages to the Bureau can be routed through an unassuming charm school. Candy already gets tons of mail every day. All she has to do is set aside a few envelopes every now and then, and somebody will come pick them up. And this goes on for about a year.
5:54 Speaker 00 Then, in the summer of 1960, there's another request from Ted's colleague, and it's a little more involved. Candy's about to go to San Francisco for work. A big department store there is holding a fashion show, and she's going to be a live commentator. Before she leaves on her trip, she receives a large envelope with a note to her from Ted. He says, "All she needs to know is the envelope is for some government agency. She needs to bring it with her to California and wait for further instructions once she gets to her hotel." A few days later, at her hotel in California, she gets a phone call.
6:39 Speaker 00 It's the man she's supposed to deliver this mysterious envelope to. And she realizes she's talking to somebody she already knows. A man she calls Dr. Gilbert Jensen. Back in her pinup modeling days during World War II, she'd gone overseas as part of a USO tour group. She'd met Dr. Jensen in the Philippines, where he was a medic. But she certainly wasn't expecting to hear from him under these circumstances. Now, he's asking her to help him do some work. Not for the FBI, but for the CIA. It's a lot for Candy to think about,
7:19 Speaker 00 but he assures her it shouldn't interfere with her business back in New York. And they can pay her. And right now, she really needs money. In fact, she's desperate. See, Candy comes from a pretty sad and lonely childhood. Her mother was strict and didn't let her daughter have a lot of friends. Candy invented her own imaginary ones, who she'd talk to in the mirror. She had a tendency to find her own small ways of rebelling. So when her controlling mother moved them to Atlantic City and suggested she go to secretarial school, 16-year-old Candy entered a beauty pageant instead.
8:03 Speaker 00 In 1941, she was crowned Miss Atlantic City. From there, Candy's career moved fast. So fast that even her controlling mother had no choice but to let it happen. And right after the pageant, she caught the eye of a New York modeling agency and moved to the city. She ended up signing with Harry Conover, an ex-male model who started his own successful agency. His claim to fame was cultivating the "girl-next-door" look, which he thought Candy was perfect for. Well, almost perfect. Her birth name, Jessica Wilcox, wasn't up to Harry's standards.
8:44 Speaker 00 He had a habit of giving his models' names like Choo Choo Johnson and Chili Williams. Together, they settled on Candy Jones.
8:55 Speaker 00 Get this, then they had business cards and matchbooks printed up with her photo on them and her new name spelled out in red and white like a peppermint candy. They left them all over Manhattan in nightclubs and taxicabs. Might seem like a cringey marketing gimmick today, but in the 40s, it worked. Candy started booking jobs left and right. At one point, she was on 11 magazine covers at a single time and made $35 per hour, equivalent to somewhere around $700 per hour today. In 1943, she was named Model of the Year. She was big.
9:38 Speaker 00 She even landed a role on Broadway. But the same man who helped her rise to the top, Harry Conover, also became her downfall, financially speaking. After she went on her USO tour, she returned to the States and married him. She was at the height of her career, but Harry got accused of playing favorites, booking his own wife on all the best gigs. So Candy took a step back from modeling and started her own business, which was at times pretty lucrative. Cut to 13 years later, Harry wiped out their joint banking account and ghosted Candy,
10:22 Speaker 00 leaving her to deal with a mountain of debt. And that brings us back to 1960, when Dr. Jensen makes his offer to Candy. Help us out and we can pay you. Candy can't really say no. She and Harry have three sons together. "The only good thing to come out of their marriage," she says. Now she's left to pay for their private schools alone. That's why she works so tirelessly, and it's still not enough. Jensen says she'll just be doing more courier work, like she did for Ted, when she brought that envelope to California. She already travels all over for her day job, so it should be easy.
11:07 Speaker 00 Candy accepts Jensen's offer.
11:11 Speaker 00 But here's where the timeline starts to get fuzzy, like really fuzzy. Candy knows that she knows Jensen and she remembers going to his office in California. But years later, she can barely remember anything about those visits. She can't recall where he sent her or what she supposedly delivered for the CIA. But she'll eventually piece it all back together with the help of her second husband. Okay, let's fast forward now to 1973. Candy's now married to long John Neville, and here's what you need to know about him.
11:52 Speaker 00 He's the host of a long-running late-night radio program. It comes on at midnight and runs until 5:30 in the morning. It's actually the top-rated show in his time slot. He interviews celebrity guests as well as random folks with something interesting to say. And sometimes he covers topics like UFOs and aliens. He's kind of like a proto Art Bell or George Knapp of Coast to Coast AM with one exception. John Neville is more of a skeptic, but he's known for getting great stories out of people with his hard-hitting questions. I'm liking him more and more. And Candy has plenty of radio experience, too.
12:33 Speaker 00 So a few months after she marries John, she closes down her charm school and becomes his full-time co-host. The only problem is Candy's now a professional night owl. Her sleep pattern gets so disturbed, she ends up with horrible insomnia and she's exhausted all the time. So John proposes they try hypnosis to see if he can help Candy relax. He leads her in a relaxation exercise, you know, "I want you to relax your neck muscles and you're going into a deep, deep, relaxing, natural sleep." That sort of thing.
13:17 Speaker 00 And it works. Candy finally gets a full night of sleep and they decide to make this relaxation technique a regular thing at bedtime. Only the third time they try hypnosis, something different happens.
13:35 Speaker 00 John just wants to help Candy relax as usual, but this time she seemingly goes into a hypnotic state. She's technically awake, but completely detached from what's going on around her, like she's in a trance. Then she starts talking to John in the voice of a child. Totally freaky if you ask me. This is like exorcist kind of thing. Can you imagine talking to your spouse and all of a sudden a childlike voice comes to you? You can imagine her head spinning around, but he's probably also heard about people regressing during
14:14 Speaker 00 hypnosis. It's kind of a popular therapy in the 1970s. So he thinks, well, that's what's going on here, too. Candy's speaking like she's reliving this part of her life, her childhood. She talks to him like this for a few minutes and then she drifts off to sleep. John might have forgotten all about it if it had just happened the one time. But then Candy keeps regressing while under hypnosis. And when John tells her the next day what she says during these sessions, Candy doesn't seem to remember what she said.
14:53 Speaker 00 She kind of laughs it off, says she was probably just talking in her sleep. So John goes out and buys a tape recorder and continues leading his wife through hypnosis. Obviously, who wouldn't? And the sessions, well, they only get weirder and more chilling because Candy starts regressing to another time in her life, a darker time. The visits to Dr. Jensen's office back in the 60s. Now, it seems like John has heard the name Dr. Jensen before, but it's not really clear how much he knew about the government work Candy claimed she did.
15:38 Speaker 00 He doesn't seem to know anything about her supposed work for the CIA at any rate. So, everything he's about to find out is probably pretty shocking, to say the least. Under hypnosis, Candy says that when she'd report to Jensen, he would sometimes hypnotize her. He claimed it was to help her quit smoking. Other times, he would start their sessions by giving her vitamin injections. Intravenously. I mean, this has gotta be a huge red flag for John. I mean, in her day-to-day life, Candy doesn't seem to remember much about these trips to Jensen's office.
16:21 Speaker 00 And now, John's hearing that each visit started out with either hypnosis or some mysterious vitamin IV bag? Sounds so sketchy. So, while Candy's in a trance, telling him all about this, John pretends to be Jensen. He asks her questions to lead her through these stories, and she responds to him while in her trance.
16:52 Speaker 00 I can't even with the ethics not involved here. Hey, it's the 70s. Okay, now, on the other hand, John seems open to believing all of this could be true. If his wife has a blank space in her memories, this could be his chance to get to the bottom of what happened to her. So, he keeps hypnotizing her, and usually uses that tape recorder to document the sessions. He plays some of these tapes back for her later on. Now, while Candy's interested in what she's hearing, she still doesn't think this could possibly have happened to her without her remembering.
17:38 Speaker 00 So, she doesn't really know what to make of it.
17:42 Speaker 00 John, however, has a theory. He thinks Jensen might have been drugging Candy with sodium amitriptal. The barbiturate could put her into a trance-like state and also cause temporary amnesia. And again, when he wasn't using strong drugs, Jensen was hypnotizing her. So John wonders, was it possible Candy carried out tasks for Jensen that she doesn't even remember? Well, those answers end up coming out too.
18:20 Speaker 00 Physically, it's Candy revealing them under hypnosis, but it's not Candy's voice coming out of her body. John's about to meet an entirely different side of his new wife.
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19:43 Speaker 00 Candy sometimes talks in a child's voice during hypnosis sessions like we mentioned. But there's another, more frightening voice that comes out at other times. And John's heard it before. Okay, right after they got married, on their wedding night, there was a strange moment John never forgot. This was after they'd gotten back to their hotel room. They were having a great time. Then, for a split second, John could have sworn he saw Candy turn into someone else. She snapped at him in a low voice that didn't sound like her at all, almost like a growl.
20:26 Speaker 00 A moment later, she was back to normal, but John, who almost never drank alcohol, had to settle himself with a glass of bourbon. I'd go so far as to say, he was scared. A few months later, he hears that same voice again during one of Candy's sessions. Remember, John is recording all of this. He eventually amasses over 200 hours of tape, which he later turns over to an author named Donald Bain. Donald listens to all those tapes, interviews John and Candy extensively, and follows up with his own research, and he is able to piece together this story.
21:12 Speaker 00 The low voice, her name is Arlene. She's almost like another side of Candy, an alter ego, a dark side. She actually started as one of Candy's imaginary friends from childhood, but now she's more like a second identity. She usually only comes out when Candy's in a hypnotic state, although John thinks he's talked to her when Candy's awake, like on their wedding night. Arlene is brash and looks down on Candy for being weak. Arlene explains, "That's why Dr. Jensen needed her.
21:56 Speaker 00 He used those injections, along with hypnosis, to basically coax Arlene out. Candy, who's blonde, would put on a short, dark wig and temporarily become this brooding alter ego, and she would go on these missions as Arlene. That way, when Candy came to later on, she wouldn't remember what happened, and she could therefore never expose Jensen's secrets. Not just the details of the missions she carried out, but also if the accusations are
22:34 Speaker 00 true, the secret mind-control experiments Jensen tricked her into." What's more, Arlene tells John that while under Jensen's control, she successfully made several deliveries, domestically at first, and then overseas to Taiwan. She doesn't know what was in the packages she handed over. She only remembers that whatever she brought to Taiwan made her contact very unhappy, and she claims she was tortured for information. But by design, Arlene didn't know anything.
23:17 Speaker 00 Arlene says Jensen even paraded her around at CIA headquarters in Langley. She accuses him of running tests on her in front of a crowd of doctors, who apparently were impressed. Because if what she says is true, Jensen had turned a fashion model into an agent who would do anything he told her to.
23:44 Speaker 00 Okay, let's take a step back and make something clear. Not everybody buys this story. For starters, John Neville was a Renaissance man, sure, but he had zero training as a hypnotist or doctor of any kind. But he supposedly mastered hypnotherapy by accident? And helped Candy recover years' worth of lost memories? Hmm, I don't know. And for another thing, the CIA wrote a memo in September 1977, a response to a Freedom of Information Act request. They said they found no records naming Candy Jones or anybody else named in Donald Bain's book.
24:31 Speaker 00 And yet, others say maybe Candy's story isn't so hard to believe.
24:37 Speaker 00 There is one thing we can say for sure about hypnosis. The CIA definitely dabbled in it in their quest to perfect mind control. We know they spent years experimenting with finding ways to bend subjects to their will as part of a program you've probably heard about. MKUltra. To understand whether any part of Candy's story could actually be true, I'll be speaking with a special guest, historian and author John Lisle. His new book, Project Mind Control, utilizes over 800 pages of previously undiscovered
25:21 Speaker 00 depositions with Sidney Gottlieb, the longtime head of MKUltra. John, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me, yeah, excited to talk about this exciting subject. Now, what would you say was the goal of MKUltra?
25:38 Speaker 03 Yes, the goal of MKUltra was to try to develop methods, techniques, and potentially drugs that could get someone to reveal truths in an interrogation, that could manipulate a person in a certain way to make them believe or behave certain things. In short, is mind control possible? Is it possible to manipulate someone to believe or behave certain things using particular methods, techniques, drugs, hypnosis, things like that?
26:05 Speaker 00 Now, you mentioned hypnosis. Is that something the CIA experimented with?
26:09 Speaker 03 Yes, Project Bluebird was kind of the precursor to MKUltra. It existed a few years before MKUltra, under the direction of a guy named Morse Allen, who worked within the CIA. He was a polygraph expert. And Morse Allen was particularly interested in hypnosis because he was trying to develop ways to interrogate people and get them to reveal certain truths. And the method that he hit upon was hypnosis because he became interested in magicians and how they use hypnosis on their subjects, I guess, to manipulate them from the stage, like stage magicians. So he hired a stage hypnotist to teach him these methods. And then Morse Allen started using hypnotic methods on the secretaries in his office to try to determine whether this actually works.
26:54 Speaker 03 So that's how he became interested in hypnotism originally. So that's Project Bluebird. And then that kind of morphed into a project called Artichoke, which is much more interested in drugs than hypnosis. And then a little bit after that, MKUltra was created in 1953.
27:12 Speaker 00 And did they continue to use hypnosis in MKUltra at all?
27:16 Speaker 03 A little bit. MKUltra consisted of 149 subprojects, and there are a couple of those subprojects that were geared towards hypnosis. However, most of the hypnosis that was done under MKUltra wasn't traditional hypnosis in the way that you would think of it. The main guy who was doing these experiments was named Martin Orin. He was more interested in the hypnotic situation and not hypnosis itself. So he distinguished the two. So whereas hypnosis is the Act of inducing someone into a hypnotic state. The hypnotic situation is inducing in someone the belief that they were hypnotized, even if they weren't. So if someone believes that they're hypnotized, they may act as if they are hypnotized. They may actually reveal secrets because they might think to themselves,
28:00 Speaker 03 "Well, I'm hypnotized anyway. I can't stop myself from saying something, so I might as well say it." So the hypnosis done in MKUltra wasn't necessarily geared toward hypnosis itself, but more geared toward psychological manipulation and getting someone to reveal truths based on the fact that they might think that they were hypnotized even if they weren't.
28:18 Speaker 00 And now, did they draw any conclusions in MKUltra about hypnosis?
28:23 Speaker 03 For MKUltra in general, it was very disappointing for the people who were, for the perpetrators of MKUltra. The psychological manipulation was the most successful part of MKUltra, although the actual methods and techniques they were trying to use or trying to develop, like truth drugs themselves, weren't very successful. In fact, at the end of MKUltra, when Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, was asked, "What came of this? What did you discover?" He mainly put it in the form of the negative and said, "It's not what we discovered. It's what we learned that you couldn't do. We learned that you couldn't control someone like a marionette." So it was largely unsuccessful despite the millions of dollars
29:04 Speaker 03 and dozens of people they funded and hundreds of people that were abused during this.
29:09 Speaker 00 Can you give us a sense of how big this project was? How many people were involved?
29:14 Speaker 03 Yes. Within the CIA, projects like MKUltra were heavily compartmentalized, meaning very few people knew what was going on. And that was done on purpose, of course, because you don't want a lot of people knowing about this because that just opens the door to more people potentially leaking this out. So there might have been a dozen people within the CIA who knew about MKUltra, but that doesn't mean it was a small project itself. MKUltra was composed of 149 sub-projects, which meant that it would fund, you know, there were many researchers at hospitals and prisons and universities that were being funded through this. Some of them knew that they were being funded by the CIA, but most of them didn't. Most of them were being funded through cutout organizations that the CIA created to make
29:58 Speaker 03 it seem as if they weren't behind this. So the CIA created its most famous cutout organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. But the society was a cover, it was a front. It didn't really exist. It was just a false facade for the CIA to fund people without them knowing that the CIA was funding them.
30:16 Speaker 00 And now we know a little bit about the fact that in 1973, the MKUltra destroyed some files. Can you tell us how that happened?
30:23 Speaker 03 You're right. In 1973, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, and Richard Helms, who was the director of the CIA, they were both retiring, and they decided that they wanted to get rid of the documents, the MKUltra documents that they had. So Richard Helms approved Sidney Gottlieb to basically incinerate his documents. So Sidney Gottlieb incinerated a lot of documents. We don't really know how much. We don't know exactly what was in there. However, I do think that we can kind of know the general gist of MKUltra even without a lot of the documents. Because it turns out, we still have a lot of documents. He didn't he didn't finish the job. There were a lot of documents that he didn't destroy, thousands of them that we do have. A lot of them are financial records, but within those financial
31:06 Speaker 03 records are descriptions of 146 out of the 149 subprojects. So we kind of know the gist of basically all of these subprojects. In addition to that, it's not as if those documents are the only thing we have to know about MKUltra. We have congressional investigations that happened in 1975, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, the Rockefeller Commission. We also have institutional records that were released afterwards, government reports that were released afterwards, memoirs that were written by the people involved, diary entries that are among these documents, interviews with people that were involved in this, and depositions, a lot of depositions that I found, thousands of pages that were part of lawsuits of the victims of MKUltra who sued the CIA. And as part of these lawsuits,
31:48 Speaker 03 the lawyers representing the victims took thousands of pages of depositions, of verbatim transcript of the perpetrators talking about what they did. So I actually think we can know basically what MKUltra was, even though we don't have all of the documents.
32:01 Speaker 00 And so when did the public at large learn about MKUltra? Was it after the Church Committee?
32:06 Speaker 03 Yes, 1975 is generally called the Year of Intelligence. This was when the Rockefeller Commission, which was an executive committee set up, released its findings of an investigation into the abuses of the intelligence community, as well as the Church Committee, a Senate investigation, as well as the Pike Committee, which was a House investigation. So there were these three concurrent investigations that released their reports either at the end of 1974 or during 1975. And so, once this was released, then the general public learned that the CIA had been conducting experiments on uduing people, in many cases, within the United States and even in Canada, too.
32:45 Speaker 00 That probably changed how people feel about CIA. Probably a seismic shift.
32:49 Speaker 03 Definitely. There was definitely a skeptical eye starting to be glanced towards the government. Instead of seeing the government as the protector of individual liberties, more and more, it started to be seen as the abuser of individual liberties. And it's not just because of MKUltra, but that's certainly one link in the chain that led to that skeptical movement to cast this skeptical eye toward the government.
33:12 Speaker 00 Wow. Well, thank you so much for your insights, John. That was amazing, and thank you for coming on the show.
33:18 Speaker 03 Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it.
33:20 Speaker 00 Everything John just told us is fascinating. And one thing really stood out to me, that 1975 was dubbed "The Year of Intelligence." That's when MKUltra was really put under a spotlight, forever changing how the public viewed the CIA. Donald Bain published all of his research into Candy's story in a book called "The Control of Candy Jones", which came out a year later in 1976. Now, that timing does seem a little curious, almost like a response to what was in the zeitgeist. However, Donald turned up something unexplainable in his research.
34:04 Speaker 00 He discovered Candy shared her secrets with two close confidants years before the public was aware of MKUltra's existence.
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35:22 Speaker 00 Is the story of Candy Jones a case of "truth is stranger than fiction"? Or is it unbelievable because it's not true? There are reasons to question the claims that she was an unwilling subject of mind-control experiments, especially when it comes to how her story came out through what we'd call hypnotic regression. Candy could only recall the more sinister events of her past while she was in a trance state. This could also be called "recovered memory therapy," although the person leading those sessions, John Nebel, was not a licensed mental health expert.
36:03 Speaker 00 There was a time when that kind of therapy was in style, but it's no longer considered a reliable way to resurface real memories. It's actually a controversial practice these days that's been widely discredited. Recovered memory therapy even played a huge role in launching the satanic panic of the 1980s and 90s. There was another book that came out four years after The Control of Candy Jones called Michelle Remembers, written by a psychiatrist. It detailed sessions with his patient who, he said, recovered memories of when she was just five years old. And
36:44 Speaker 00 those memories, they claimed, were of spending months in the care of a satanic cult. The book is considered a huge catalyst in the moral panic that followed, where the devil was lurking in heavy metal cassette tapes and tabletop games. Nowadays, it's mostly been debunked, so it is hard to get past the fact that Candy's memories about the mind-control experiments came from hypnosis sessions guided by her radio personality husband. Now, I'm not saying they lied. Candy, in her day-to-day life, insisted that she
37:24 Speaker 00 didn't remember anything beyond going into Dr. Jensen's office. She wasn't going around making these claims while she was awake. Even when John would play back the tapes for her, she didn't seem to believe the Arlene story herself. Seems like she just laughed it off. And the book doesn't go any deeper into explaining why that is. But my team and I have a theory. Remember, at the very beginning of this episode, when I said that maybe Candy and John didn't know each other all that well? Well, we found a clip from
38:04 Speaker 00 The Tomorrow Show from February 1976, where Candy and John are guests, and Candy's telling the story about how John proposed to her over the phone. She also points out that the two of them had never kissed or even held hands. And John seems a little embarrassed, but agrees they'd never gone on a coffee date or anything. So maybe it is possible John saw Arlene emerge on their wedding night, or maybe he just realized he'd gotten married to somebody he didn't actually know all that well. Somebody who was bubbly and beautiful
38:46 Speaker 00 and brilliant most of the time, but like anybody else, had her darker moments.
38:53 Speaker 00 And that sobering thought could have understandably scared or confused him. Maybe they both realized they just married somebody who was more of a stranger than they thought. And who knows where that could lead. Oh, and Dr. Jensen, you might be wondering what became of the man accused of experimenting on Candy without her full consent. Donald Bain wrote that Jensen was a pseudonym he used for the book, but he did track down the real doctor. He said he never did reach out to the guy. His lawyers advised him not to.
39:36 Speaker 00 And that makes sense, but it also means the one person who could have corroborated or denied what happened in that office in California wasn't even given a chance to comment on the story. It's a shame because Donald did locate other people from Candy's story, and they seemed to back up parts of it somewhat, like her close friend and book editor, Joe Vergara. They worked together on several of Candy's books and got really close over the years. Candy said Joe was the only person she ever told that she was doing undercover work for the government. When Donald reached out to Joe for comment, he said yes.
40:21 Speaker 00 Back in the 60s, Candy told him she was working for a "secret government agency." She even warned him that she might have to disappear for a few days every now and then. And this conversation happened years before John Nebel or Donald Bain started looking into Candy's past and before the public knew about MKUltra. Then, there's a letter Candy wrote her attorney in the early 1960s in which she instructed him to investigate her death or disappearance. Stranger still, she told him that this hypothetical disappearance might occur while she was
41:03 Speaker 00 using an assumed name like Arlene. The attorney specifically remembered that detail.
41:12 Speaker 00 Donald also included in his book a passport photo showing Candy in a short, dark wig, like Arlene would supposedly wear, although it's unclear what year that photo was taken. We know that tons of MKUltra files were ordered to be destroyed. We just don't know how many or which ones. And we know about most of the 149 sub projects, but there are three that remain a mystery. And that will always leave room for debate in this story and others like it. There's no way to be 100% certain if Candy or the real Dr. Jensen are named in official documents.
41:56 Speaker 00 Donald thinks they probably would have been left out of the files anyway, and that squares with what we know about how the program operated in secrecy, using cutout organizations so very few people were in the know. Even so, Donald did look for other connections between Jensen and the CIA. He never could establish any, which gave him pause. At some point during his research, he realized something was bothering him. Donald seemingly believed Candy's story, and yet, he couldn't shake the idea that Dr.
42:35 Speaker 00 Jensen had gone to extraordinary lengths just to make Candy deliver some envelopes? What could she possibly have been delivering that was so important they had to use a brainwashed secret agent, rather than just a regular CIA employee? Okay. What did he think? His theory is that the envelopes and what was in them didn't even matter. The entire point was to see how far Candy would go on Jensen's orders. The author suggests the people she delivered these envelopes to, even her contacts in Taiwan,
43:17 Speaker 00 the ones she accused of torturing her, were paid operatives. After all, he pointed out, the CIA did have a presence there. So he thinks, isn't it possible those long trips weren't really a mission? They were just another test.
43:38 Speaker 00 Interesting. At any rate, Candy was finally able to break free of Jensen. She said that in 1972, she called him and told him she was severing ties. She wouldn't be coming out to California anymore. Jensen threatened her and Candy felt like she was being followed for a while. But evidently, he never acted on those threats. Okay, I don't really know what to make of Candy's story. It seems a little unbelievable. I mean, it's like Giselle meets Jason Bourne. It's just too incredible to be true. But with MKUltra, truth really is stranger than fiction.
44:19 Speaker 00 We know a lot about what they did, which makes claims like Candy's seem possible, even if we do know exactly what happened in 146 out of the 149 sub projects under MKUltra. I mean, if you wanted to destroy any three files forever, it would probably be the ones that prove some level of success, the ones you don't want people to hear about. And even if Candy's claims are true, they wouldn't be the strangest or scariest thing that happened as part of that program, not by a long shot. I will say this, in our guest John Lisle's book, Project Mind Control, Lyle notes that
45:01 Speaker 00 Candy's story was investigated by a former State Department official, John D. Marks. Marks had actually helped expose the MKUltra program to the public. So he had a pretty good idea of what the government had been capable of. And he concluded that the entire Candy Jones story was made up. A work of fiction told by a seasoned late night storyteller, John Nebel.
45:32 Speaker 00 Now, there's one thing I want to mention, though. We listened to a radio show Candy appeared on, and at one point, she and other guests talk about what jobs they would have if they could do anything they wanted. This aired in 1966, supposedly right in the middle of the year she's being experimented on by Dr. Jensen. And Candy said what she wanted to be was... an international spy. She practically blurted this out, interrupting the other guests. More than anything, she wished to be an international spy. So was it her subconscious memory slipping out?
46:15 Speaker 00 A veiled cry for help from Arlene's perspective? "Hey, world, this is what's happening to me." Or was this whole story a case of wishful thinking? That her and John invented exactly what she always wanted to be? One thing's for sure. If you marry a stranger, sometimes strange things happen. Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram, @TheConspiracyPod, and if you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information, we found "The Control of Candy Jones" by Donald Bain extremely
46:59 Speaker 00 helpful to our research. And we'd like to give a special thanks and shout out to our guest today, John Lisle. His new book, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra, is out now. It is fantastic. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Mickey Taylor, edited by Maggie Admire and Peter Ritchie, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed
47:43 Speaker 00 by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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