A psychology department chair told the CIA he'd invented a drug mixture "so special that it could make a dumb man talk." But he refused to reveal the ingredients — unless the agency flew him and his mistress to Europe to supervise the testing on suspected spies. The CIA, hungry for a truth drug, paid up. The mixture failed. And when the agency finally got the recipe, the "special new ingredients" turned out to be a combination of barbiturate, amphetamine, and marijuana — three drugs already known not to work.1
The professor was Richard Wendt of the University of Rochester, and his little grift is a comic footnote with a serious point. The CIA's desperation for a mind-control weapon made it a mark — an institution so eager for the capability that it could be played by a con man with an old recipe and a good story. Wendt is the flip side of the program's danger: the same hunger that made MKUltra dangerous to its victims made it gullible to its grifters.
The setup is almost elegant in its exploitation of the agency's psychology. Wendt didn't offer evidence; he offered mystery — a secret mixture, too special to disclose, that could do the one thing the agency wanted most. The secrecy was the sales pitch: by withholding the ingredients, Wendt made the mixture seem proprietary and precious, and made the CIA's access to it contingent on meeting his terms.2
And his terms were personal. He'd reveal the secret only if the agency took him — and his mistress — to Europe to supervise testing on purported spies. Read that as the con it was: a professor leveraging the agency's desperation into a paid European holiday with his lover, on the pretext of a wonder drug he didn't have. The CIA, wanting the capability badly enough, went along.
The mixture failed, of course. And the reveal is the punchline that indicts the whole enterprise: the miraculous secret ingredients were barbiturate, amphetamine, and marijuana — exactly the tired old compounds the field had already established didn't reliably compel truth. Wendt had dressed up known failures as a proprietary breakthrough, and the agency's hunger did the rest.
Wendt's grift works because of a specific institutional condition, and naming it is the point of the page. The CIA had decided a mind-control weapon was a national-security necessity. That decision created a demand so strong that it distorted the agency's judgment — and a distorted judgment is a con man's opportunity.
Think about what the agency's desperation switched off. Normally, "I have a secret drug but I won't tell you what's in it unless you fund my vacation" is a transparent red flag; you don't buy a mystery from someone who ties disclosure to personal perks. But an institution that needs the capability to exist will suspend its skepticism, because skepticism threatens the hope. The same "we must have this weapon" posture that made the agency ignore Plötner's and the Yale experiments' negative results (which said the weapon was impossible) made it credulous toward Wendt's positive claim (which said the weapon was in his briefcase). Desperation doesn't just make you ignore evidence against what you want — it makes you believe evidence for it, however thin.
This is the con man's reciprocal of the true believer's blindness. Sidney Gottlieb, believing in national survival, couldn't hear that the weapon was impossible. Richard Wendt, believing in a free trip to Europe, exploited exactly that deafness by promising the impossible weapon was real. The program's founding hunger made it simultaneously immune to disproof and vulnerable to fraud — it would ignore anyone who said "this can't work" and fund anyone who said "I've got it," which is the precise profile of an institution that will be robbed.
You want to con a desperate institution. The CIA's hunger for a truth drug shows you how.
You identify what it needs so badly its judgment is compromised — here, a mind-control weapon it has declared a national-security necessity. That need is your lever; the stronger it is, the more skepticism it suspends.
You offer not evidence but mystery — a proprietary secret, too special to disclose, that does exactly the wanted thing. The secrecy is the pitch: it makes your offering seem precious and makes their access contingent on your terms. You don't prove it works; proof invites testing, and testing invites failure. You sell the hope.
You attach personal terms — your expenses, your comforts, your companion — framed as necessary conditions of the reveal. A clear-eyed institution would see the tying of disclosure to perks as a red flag; a desperate one reads it as the eccentric price of genius.
What tells you the mark is fully hooked is that it pays before it verifies, because verifying threatens the hope it's paying for. The failure comes later, and by then you've had your trip. The lesson for the institution, which it won't learn in time: the same desperation that makes you ignore the people saying "this is impossible" makes you believe the people saying "I've got it" — and that combination is a target painted on your back.
The evidence is the documented Wendt episode — his claim, his terms, the funded European trip, the failure, and the mundane reveal of the ingredients. It's a small, well-attested piece of the MKUltra record.
The tension is how much weight to put on a con that's essentially comic. Wendt didn't hurt anyone (unlike the program's real victims); he just fleeced a gullible agency. But the comedy carries the serious diagnosis: an institution that can be conned this easily is an institution whose judgment has been captured by its desire, and that same captured judgment is what let the program ignore the evidence of its own impossibility and harm real people in pursuit of a phantom. The unresolved question: is institutional desperation for a capability always this double-edged — simultaneously blind to disproof and open to fraud — and if so, is the vulnerability to grifters like Wendt actually a useful diagnostic, a visible symptom of the deeper, invisible pathology of a program chasing something that doesn't exist? The con man, on this reading, is the canary: where the grifters gather, the capability is probably a phantom.
Wendt is the comic complement to Sidney Gottlieb — Gottlieb the true believer whose faith made him deaf to disproof, Wendt the con man who exploited exactly that deafness. Together they show the two ways a program's founding hunger warps it: it can't hear no, and it'll believe any yes.
He's the fraud-side instance of The CIA Brain-War Offensive's core error. The offensive created the desperate demand; Wendt is what a desperate demand attracts. And he pairs with Truth Drugs Don't Work: The Experiments — the "secret ingredients" were the very drugs those experiments had already shown to fail, so Wendt was, in effect, reselling the field's known failures to a buyer too desperate to recognize them.
To psychology — The Ordinary Person Thesis. The Wendt con is a reminder that the ordinary-person thesis extends to institutions and their desires: a normally competent, skeptical agency, placed under the right condition (desperate need for a capability), behaves credulously — it's the institutional version of an ordinary person breaking under the right pressure. The insight the pairing produces: just as coercive conditions predictably make ordinary individuals suggestible, an intense institutional want predictably makes competent organizations suggestible, and in the same direction — toward believing what they wish were true. The CIA wasn't stupid; it was wanting, and wanting is to institutional judgment what dread is to individual judgment — a reliable degrader. This generalizes the book's central psychological claim from persons to organizations: nobody, individual or institution, is exempt from having their reality-testing bent by a strong enough motivational state.
To behavioral-mechanics — Surreptitious Drugging as Control Vector. Wendt's use of secrecy as a sales tactic — withholding the ingredients to make the mixture seem precious — mirrors the program's own reliance on secrecy, and exposes a shared vulnerability. The insight the pairing produces: secrecy that can't be checked is a con vector in both directions. The CIA used unfalsifiable secrecy against its subjects (surreptitious dosing they couldn't detect) and was, in turn, victimized by unfalsifiable secrecy from Wendt (a "secret formula" it couldn't inspect before paying). An institution built on the principle that concealment confers power is peculiarly defenseless against a con man who conceals — because it has already accepted the premise that a secret you can't examine can still be valuable. The same epistemic move (trust what you can't verify because it's secret) that let the program hide its failures from the public let Wendt hide his fraud from the program.
Sharpest implication: The CIA's hunger for a mind-control weapon made it a mark — a con man fleeced it with three known-useless drugs dressed up as a proprietary miracle and a demand for a European trip with his mistress. The same desperation that made the program deaf to everyone saying the weapon was impossible made it credulous toward anyone claiming to have it. Institutional wanting degrades institutional judgment exactly as dread degrades individual judgment, and the result is an organization simultaneously immune to disproof and open to fraud — which is the precise profile of a target. Where the grifters gather, the capability is probably a phantom.
Generative questions: