Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR Boston.

This is part three of our special series Madness.

If you haven't heard parts one and two yet, go listen to those first.

Also, a quick heads up that this episode contains brief references to suicide.

Previously on Endless Thread.

He just had this incredible, almost undifferentiated ambition.

Our next great adventure will be into that vastly promising world of ourselves.

My father always wanted the best and you and Cameron seemed to be the best.

You know, he did have the attitude that to make an omelet you have to crack a few hakes.

My father disappeared and what came home was a shadow, a shell of a man.

You and Cameron carried out what we can now guess in retrospect were some of the most horrifically brutal medical experiments ever connected to MK Ultra.

Your ability to put yourself in a mindset of constant existential dread has a lot to do with your place in the world and the time you're living in.

In the years after World War II ended, a lot of people felt relief. War was over.

This is Operation Homecoming, the last official mission of the All-American 82nd Airborne Division.

But at the same time, the end of the war saw the first atomic bombs detonated and the discovery of mass murder and horrible human experimentation in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

And while the Nazis had been defeated by the Allied powers in the West, there was a new threat on the horizon to the East, the Soviet Union.

By the late 1940s, the US government was focused on the next war, a war that could include nuclear weapons.

Americans were taught during that period that the Soviet Union was about to devastate us at any moment and could with the flick of a switch not only destroy our country but wipe away any possibility for meaningful human life on Earth forever.

That is author former New York Times reporter and bureau chief Stephen Kinzer, who says the weapons of the next big war imagined by the US government weren't just massive bombs.

People in the Central Intelligence Agency, newly formed in 1947, were worried about something much more insidious.

The CIA had witnessed two events on the world stage directly after World War II that had the Spooks spooked.

The first was the testimony of a witness. In 1949, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hungary was hauled up on the stand in a show trial run by communist powers there.

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