Overview

A 'Manchurian Candidate' is an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. In this book, former State Department officer John Marks tells the explosive story of the CIA's highly secret program of experiments in mind control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide. Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that 'accomplished what two Senate committees could not' (Senator Edward Kennedy).

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9780393307948

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Reviews

A comprehensive, detailed and thoroughly readable account of the CIA safehouses, the brainwashing experiments, the involvement of the universities. Perhaps the most compelling, well-researched, organized and well-written account of CIA operations ever. A serious effort to recontruct carefully the details of intelligence agency experiments with 'mind control.' One of the most important books of the year... We see the CIA on the cutting edge of inquiry into hypnosis, drugs, brainwashing, personality assessment, psychosurgery, electric and radio stimulations of the brain, the creation of involuntary amnesia, terminal shock therapy. Fascinating reading. A wonderful piece of investigative reporting. The best account we'll ever get of one of the seamiest episodes of American intelligence. -- Seymour Hersh

A wonderful piece of investigative reporting. The best account we'll ever get of one of the seamiest episodes of American intelligence. -- Seymour Hersh

A wonderful piece of investigative reporting. The best account we'll ever get of one of the seamiest episodes of American intelligence. --Seymour Hersh

"""A comprehensive, detailed and thoroughly readable account of the CIA safehouses, the brainwashing experiments, the involvement of the universities."" -- Washington Monthly ""Perhaps the most compelling, well-researched, organized and well-written account of CIA operations ever."" -- Progressive ""One of the most important books of the year... We see the CIA on the cutting edge of inquiry into hypnosis, drugs, brainwashing, personality assessment, psychosurgery, electric and radio stimulations of the brain, the creation of involuntary amnesia, terminal shock therapy."" -- Playboy ""Fascinating reading."" -- Washington Post"

Tip-of-the-iceberg revelations on CIA mind control research, pieced together from the only evidence - mostly financial records - that survived Richard Helms' departure. According to Marks, co-author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974), Helms was always the program's chief sponsor, although in the early Fifties he deputized Sidney Gottlieb to direct it. MKULTRA snowballed as contracts, often disguised as grants from cooperative family foundations, went out to university and hospital research-centers to advance the development of behavior modification techniques. Marks explores the origins of the Agency's obsession with mind control - among them, OSS and its search for a truth drug; the Cold War and the staged Mindszenty confession - but also cites the government's commitment to the Nuremberg Code, and contends that the CIA was crossing many of the same ethical barriers that the Nazis crossed when they fostered experimentation ( terminal or otherwise) on the unwitting. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, under which Marks was reluctantly yielded the 16,000 (censored) pages on which the Rockefeller Commission had based its report, he reconstructs that experimentation - in the Lexington, Ky., Federal facility where addicts were offered chits exchangeable for heroin in return for swallowing whatever might be administered and remaining for observation; and in safehouses run by the CIA itself, using prostitutes as procurers of knock-out-able Johns unlikely to squeal. Marks' problem is that he doesn't know how much he doesn't know, and full disclosure is not in the cards; when in doubt, then, while outlining the Agency's involvement in the study of a prospective tool for control (drugs, electroshock, etc.), he assumes the worst and insinuates it. Cynicism dulls the force of his moral indignation. (Kirkus Reviews)

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