David McCloskey
Sunday Times bestselling spy novelist and former CIA analyst who wrote for the President's Daily Brief and served on field rotations across the Middle East.
“There's no press office. There's no gift shop yet, Gordon. There's no former analysts running their mouths on podcasts constantly every week talking about what's going on at CIA.”
The Rest Is Classified · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
McCloskey, himself a former CIA analyst, is stressing how secret the agency was in 1970. He says the public knew little beyond rumours, and memoirs by former officers did not start appearing until the mid-1970s.
Transcript
…action that they're running, he will raise it with the White House and with a few members of Congress. It's not particularly formal. It is very much an arrangement in which the CIA more or less does what it's asked or told by the White House, and it basically promises not to embarrass anybody.
…about MK Ultra, which is this famous kind of work on mind control and LSD, in which it's testing it on people within the United States, including at brothels and things like that. So it's prisoners, brothels. So it's already got its hand inside the U.S. in a way which now seems pretty unusual.
My favorite sub-project under MK Ultra and a sign of how out of control some of this had gotten was when an agency contractor injected a gigantic bull elephant named Tusco at the Oklahoma City Zoo with I think 350,000 micrograms of LSD to see what would happen and the elephant died. And the only reason we know about this is because the agency had to compensate through cutouts, the Oklahoma City Zoo for the loss of Tusco. All of the stuff, though, that we're talking about, it's important to say, is not public in this period. Really, nobody outside of CIA knows much of any of this. I mean, there have been some rumors about Castro assassination plots. And obviously, the Bay of Pigs is very public. But what specifically the CIA got up to in Iran, what it did in Guatemala, all of the mind control and LSD experiments. It's totally secret. I mean, this is the culture of secrecy around the agency at this point is almost total. There's no press office. There's no gift…
were the days those
were the days there aren't really memoirs published by former CIA officers until the mid-1970s and as we'll see in this story officers who wanted to write spy novels had tremendous hurdles to overcome yeah to do so so the agency is a very different a very different animal and going back to your…
so there i think with the nixon white house under siege filled with paranoia and a secretive cia primed to help the president let's take a break and when we come back we'll see how a new batch of leaks sends us down the long road to the cia Involvement in the biggest political scandal in American…
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