The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind ControlHere is the extraordinary story of how the Central Intelligence Agency waged a careful and systematic assault on the human psyche. Former State Department official John Marks reveals what was perhaps the most sinister activity ever engaged in by an organ of the United States government. He describes how the government conducted a series of secret programs to find ways to control human behavior. Responding to the assumption that the Soviets (and before them the Nazis) were trying to do the same, Marks asserts that high officials of the CIA and military intelligence believed they could enhance American security if they make a recalcitrant subject talk or otherwise act against his will. Experimenting with drugs, hypnosis, and a host of other behavior modification techniques, the Agency went off on its own LSD trip, testing that drug and others on Agency operators, students, mental patients, and prisoners. In a bizarre series of tests, unwitting drug subjects were picked up by Agency-paid prostitutes whose own working behavior was studied as part of the development of the technology of sexual entrapment. Marks' investigation reveals that the Agency was also deeply involved in research concerning hypnosis, psychosurgery, electroshock and the whole gamut of advanced techniques of behavioral control. At the height of the Cold War, defectors and suspected double agents were subjected to these procedures in an effort to find out what they knew. Marks details case after case, experiment after experiment in which the CIA obsessively pursued methods of controlling human behavior that had enormous implications and unintended results for the whole of American society. Thus, for example, he shows how the LSD experiments led directly to the countercultural fascination with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s, and how Agency funding influenced the work of some of America's best known academics and distorted the emphasis of much of the innovative work in the behavioral sciences. More than a spy story, John Marks has both documented a major portion of the concealed history of our time and spelled out the tragic costs of secrecy and lack of accountability to the democratic system.--Dust jacket. |
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