John D. Marks
Author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
Works by John D. Marks
The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979) 253 copies, 2 reviews
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Marks, John D.
- Legal name
- Marks, John David
- Birthdate
- 1943
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Cornell University
- Organizations
- United States Department of State (formerly)
Harvard Institute of Politics
Search for Common Ground - Nationality
- USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences by John D. Marks
Control of the populace is dream of every government - democratic or totalitarian. If one cannot control the populace then they will need to actually do their job in order to get re-elected. If they are in control, they can just use slogans to gain points - because lets be honest majority of people wont remember things 4 years back, let alone longer.
Book is first public presentation (and as far as I could see last one because CIA decided after a while that public information act is out of show more play for their activities) of covert projects related to individual/populace control from WW2 to first half of 1970's.
Main focus is on ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA project and people working on it. Pushed forward by that eternal "but our enemies could be doing it" CIA projects paved the way to greater incursion of narcotics into US society and city streets, experimented in rather horrible ways on willing and unwilling subjects, tested the technology and approaches in foreign countries (very very bad image for South Korea, Taiwan (ROC), Philippines and Europe - all elements that show black-sites during the current war on terror are nothing new).
Probably greatest issue is the way CIA basically raised the oh-so-popular counter-culture movement by conducting mass tests on unwilling people tripping for days on mushrooms and LSD. This just started drug abuse and later evolved into current opioid crisis of major proportions.
Less details are given on post-LSD years, use of electroshocks for "de-patterning" the patients (such harmless names for something so horrible in core), sensory deprivation and return to proven Chinese and Soviet methods of breaking and re-education of people (known in the certain circles as rape-of-the-mind). All of these, more "hardware" approaches became the focus in second half of 1970s when CIA decided that they do not have to report to the public.
At the end one has to shiver when reads about the doctors and scientists that are .... monsters. They all see themselves as people working for general good and hey "if you want scrambled eggs you need to break a few", right? Wrong. When one looks at the way how projects were deployed in US and outside of the US one has to wonder how far they were going. Without ethics to guide them medical personnel and health experts are very dangerous people. Equally chilling is statement of the author that for these projects nothing was sacred, everything had to be tried and tested - resulting in huge technological and procedural advancements for the Agency in this field (they were talking about the gene splicing and modifications in 1970's!). And then you hear statements like (paraphrasing) "people are already controlled, we are working on making that control more efficient" (in 19-bloody-60's!).
Very disturbing book that needs to be a warning for everyone (as author says (paraphrasing again) "conspiracy theories of yesterday proved again to be true" (sounds familiar, sadly...)).
Inclusion and collusion with national level organization (NIH, big medical centers, US military chemical and biological warfare centers), universities and independent researchers through charity and funding front organizations as cut-offs just deepened the shadow and gave Agency lot of liberty to experiment and mature their projects and allowed them access to as I mentioned doctors and health care professionals of dubious characters
Considering that genie is released out of the bottle and great deal of know-how ended up in private sector long ago, advertisement industry and media, we need to be very, very worried for our future and make sure people are aware of this as much as possible (or as much people want to hear about it - in last year and a half I found out that majority wants to live without anything that would force them go off the TV, tablets, phones or those we-only-transcribe-and-dont-investigate-or-write-news-sites).
Excellent book on a very interesting and disturbing subject. Excellent example of journalist-like investigation, making sure all available data is accounted for and all dots are linked and where guesses had to be made author underlines them and gives his best educated guess.
As i said there are gaps of course (not everybody was willing to give statement for the book nor were all files made available) but author shows good knowledge of the topic that helps him come to very likely answers to open questions.
Highly recommended. show less
Book is first public presentation (and as far as I could see last one because CIA decided after a while that public information act is out of show more play for their activities) of covert projects related to individual/populace control from WW2 to first half of 1970's.
Main focus is on ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA project and people working on it. Pushed forward by that eternal "but our enemies could be doing it" CIA projects paved the way to greater incursion of narcotics into US society and city streets, experimented in rather horrible ways on willing and unwilling subjects, tested the technology and approaches in foreign countries (very very bad image for South Korea, Taiwan (ROC), Philippines and Europe - all elements that show black-sites during the current war on terror are nothing new).
Probably greatest issue is the way CIA basically raised the oh-so-popular counter-culture movement by conducting mass tests on unwilling people tripping for days on mushrooms and LSD. This just started drug abuse and later evolved into current opioid crisis of major proportions.
Less details are given on post-LSD years, use of electroshocks for "de-patterning" the patients (such harmless names for something so horrible in core), sensory deprivation and return to proven Chinese and Soviet methods of breaking and re-education of people (known in the certain circles as rape-of-the-mind). All of these, more "hardware" approaches became the focus in second half of 1970s when CIA decided that they do not have to report to the public.
At the end one has to shiver when reads about the doctors and scientists that are .... monsters. They all see themselves as people working for general good and hey "if you want scrambled eggs you need to break a few", right? Wrong. When one looks at the way how projects were deployed in US and outside of the US one has to wonder how far they were going. Without ethics to guide them medical personnel and health experts are very dangerous people. Equally chilling is statement of the author that for these projects nothing was sacred, everything had to be tried and tested - resulting in huge technological and procedural advancements for the Agency in this field (they were talking about the gene splicing and modifications in 1970's!). And then you hear statements like (paraphrasing) "people are already controlled, we are working on making that control more efficient" (in 19-bloody-60's!).
Very disturbing book that needs to be a warning for everyone (as author says (paraphrasing again) "conspiracy theories of yesterday proved again to be true" (sounds familiar, sadly...)).
Inclusion and collusion with national level organization (NIH, big medical centers, US military chemical and biological warfare centers), universities and independent researchers through charity and funding front organizations as cut-offs just deepened the shadow and gave Agency lot of liberty to experiment and mature their projects and allowed them access to as I mentioned doctors and health care professionals of dubious characters
Considering that genie is released out of the bottle and great deal of know-how ended up in private sector long ago, advertisement industry and media, we need to be very, very worried for our future and make sure people are aware of this as much as possible (or as much people want to hear about it - in last year and a half I found out that majority wants to live without anything that would force them go off the TV, tablets, phones or those we-only-transcribe-and-dont-investigate-or-write-news-sites).
Excellent book on a very interesting and disturbing subject. Excellent example of journalist-like investigation, making sure all available data is accounted for and all dots are linked and where guesses had to be made author underlines them and gives his best educated guess.
As i said there are gaps of course (not everybody was willing to give statement for the book nor were all files made available) but author shows good knowledge of the topic that helps him come to very likely answers to open questions.
Highly recommended. show less
I read the original 1975 paperback edition "Published with spaces and indicating the exact location and length of the 168 deletions demanded by the CIA." (Later editions were able to return some of the expurgated passages.) The authors argue that the CIA has a “profound determinative effect on the formulation and carrying out of American foreign policy." And that is the problem they seek to expose. Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence show more Agency and a prominent paleoconservative critic of the United States Intelligence Community and the Israel lobby in the United States, is sort of a whistleblower here. The authors detail how the CIA works (in a level of granularity that veers between fascinating if dated and overly microscopic) and how its original purpose (i.e. collecting and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons in order to advise public policymakers) has, according to the author, been subverted by its obsession with clandestine operations. It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they resisted and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored. Some of the sections are so rife with deletions, it is onerous to read. However, this is rare and mostly seeing the bold-faced sections about Camp Peary, Air America, etc. are interesting.
Some historical details I find fascinating here, such as details on one of the purported Watergate triggers ITT (Hal Hendrix, control of Cuban phone system, South America, etc.) and how Oleg Penkovsky so wanted to serve the CIA, but went to the Birtish by default when the CIA was not convinced. This casts a light on The Penkovsky Papers as its development and publishing with other CIA-rleated books is explored and suggests it is a bit of a pastiche.
Other things I found fascinating are some operational details like the psywar operation that
and that
and also how unions secretly funneled money from the Central Intelligence Agency to anti-Communist unionists overseas, often without concern for any other value. Victor Reuther confirmed that he was himself the dispenser of $50,000 in C.I.A. funds to French and Italian unions not long after VE Day.
Written and published post-Watergate, post-Pentagon Papers and after embarassing CIA exposes in Ramparts etc. it feels like a bit of a feeding frenzy on an evil CIA being revealed after its war in Laos and having been found penetrating American campuses especially through penetration and manipulation of the National Student Association.
During those turbulent years, students in 1971, stormed and occupied a Harvard building. Certain documents went missing in that raid. One was a remarkable report of a 1968 meeting by CIA staffer William R. Harris, about whom little is known. Thought now easy to find, these minutes of the “The third meeting of the Discussion Group on Intelligence and Foreign Policy,” known as the “Bissell Meeting” makes up the afterwrod here. Interestingly, Bissell then predicted the rise of electronic surveillance over human operatives. show less
Some historical details I find fascinating here, such as details on one of the purported Watergate triggers ITT (Hal Hendrix, control of Cuban phone system, South America, etc.) and how Oleg Penkovsky so wanted to serve the CIA, but went to the Birtish by default when the CIA was not convinced. This casts a light on The Penkovsky Papers as its development and publishing with other CIA-rleated books is explored and suggests it is a bit of a pastiche.
Other things I found fascinating are some operational details like the psywar operation that
played on the superstitious dread in the Philippine countryside of the asuang, a mythical vampire. A psywar squad entered an area, and planted rumors that an asuang lived on where the Communists were based. Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire-fashion with two holes, hung his body until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. As superstitious as any other Filipinos, the insurgents fled from the region.
and that
that for several years the agency subsidized the New York communist paper, The Daily Worker. In fairness to the Worker's staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was indeed real.
and also how unions secretly funneled money from the Central Intelligence Agency to anti-Communist unionists overseas, often without concern for any other value. Victor Reuther confirmed that he was himself the dispenser of $50,000 in C.I.A. funds to French and Italian unions not long after VE Day.
Written and published post-Watergate, post-Pentagon Papers and after embarassing CIA exposes in Ramparts etc. it feels like a bit of a feeding frenzy on an evil CIA being revealed after its war in Laos and having been found penetrating American campuses especially through penetration and manipulation of the National Student Association.
During those turbulent years, students in 1971, stormed and occupied a Harvard building. Certain documents went missing in that raid. One was a remarkable report of a 1968 meeting by CIA staffer William R. Harris, about whom little is known. Thought now easy to find, these minutes of the “The third meeting of the Discussion Group on Intelligence and Foreign Policy,” known as the “Bissell Meeting” makes up the afterwrod here. Interestingly, Bissell then predicted the rise of electronic surveillance over human operatives. show less
First published more than 40 years ago, this book tells the unbelievable story of the CIA's experiments with mind control. Some of these even pre-date the founding of the CIA itself. Its forerunner, the OSS, had some rather hare-brained ideas of its own, including some rather bizarre plans to kill or incapacitate the German führer, Adolf Hitler, that involved his vegetable garden. The book's title is a bit of a misnomer, as only a small part of the volume considers ways to hypnotise an show more assassin. The rest of the book is far more mundane, as the CIA looked for new techniques to analyse personalities and especially locate weaknesses in their opponents. But the section on the "Manchurian Candidate" scenario is fascinating. The Agency went so far as to hypnotise one secretary into shooting another (not knowing that the gun was loaded with blanks). Some of its boffins were convinced that the scenario envisaged by author Richard Condon in his fictional account was a real possibility. Part of the reason the CIA looked into this was precisely because of the concern that America's Cold War enemies might well have been considering the same thing. Whether the Soviets or Chinese ever made their own efforts in that field is something that we may never know. show less
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