THE CIA'S ATTEMPT AT MIND CONTROL: BAD TRIPS?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200420009-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 20, 2004
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: February 15, 1979
• Content Type: NSPR

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THE SEARCH FOR. THE "NAN-
CHURIAN CANDIDATE"; " The
CIA and Mind Control. By John
Marks Crimes Books. 242 pp.39.9s> -
Reviewer by
Bill Richards
The reviewer is a National staff re-
porter for The Washington Post..
It is probably appropriate that the
CIA's massive mind control and drug
experimentation program was launch-
ed because of a mistake, and a ludi.
Brous one at that. In 195 a U.S. mill
tary attache- reported ? that, the- Rus-
sians had purchased 50 million doses
of LSD from the-world's only manu-
acturer of the hallucinogen, the-Swiss
pharmaceutical firm Sandoz. The
problem was that the attache got his
numbers scrambled and the real Rus-
sian drug buy was 50 doses of LSD. By
the time the mistake was noticed,
_11K-ULTRA., as the CIA's code-named
program was known to a select hand-
ful, was under way From: all the
available evidence things never got
much better.
The key here-is the-.evidence. De-
spite- its bulk,. the .16,000 pages, -of
Xeroxed material the CIA chose to
share with- the public about its- dec-
ades-long mind control ' flxatfan'-' are'
just too skimpy--to get-a clear -picture-
of what- they-=-intellig'ence-=agency's.
scientists were up to: More ominous,
tbpy reveal..-almost - nothing -at' all
;about what the CIA. or the military.
did -with the results - of their mind
control work..
John Marks,- in. his book "The
Search for the 37anchuurian Candi-
date,' " readily acknowledges that gri
t;
cs;l information gap. After painstak
in_- research among the CIA's heav.
ily censored files and interviews with
those principal figures who would talk,
he admits "the final result is not- the
whole story of the CIA's attack on the
mind." There are some who. could tell,
but they, for reasons of their own,
have chosen to remain silent.
Still, in the absence of that informa-
tion, what remains makes for fascinating
reading, not only forAimraftdvffjo Release 2004/10/1.3: CIA-
follow the CIA's-doings the way people
sometimes chase fire engines, but also I
for those '.rho want to know the limits f
to which the Cold War of the 1950s
F
and an emerging new science of be-
havior control pushed their. govern-
ment: - -
Marks' book. is the. best'view so far
of that area of marginal ethics where
science and. fantasy were. allowed to
merge. In its-frantic search to uncover
the workings of the human mind and
to manipulate enemies, friends and
strangers, the CIA tapped every source
it could find, from magicians to psychia-
trists. The results were predictably
bizarre.
There '.were- terrifying trips into'the
unknown world of. LSD for those-
unsus-pecting souls who chanced to share a
drink or a woman with the CIA's
operatives. There were psychiatrists
who practiced "depatterning"-a mild
word for the horror of repeated drug
and 'shock treatments aimed. at.. rear
ranging the human mind. And there
were-and, according to Marks'. re-
search, may still be--CIA-backed ef-
forts at genetic, engineering, the
logical end to all this tinkering.
But there never was a "Manchurian
Candidate." Despite its efforts and huge
outpouring of concealed funds, the CIA
could never produce 'the programmed
killer it sought.. That is where the
fantasy stopped. In the end the entire
exercise was no more than the LSD
scare that touched it off -a mistake.
Perhaps, if ..something good had-
come out of it all, a spinoff like the
synthetics or gadgets spawned by the
space program, it' might have had
some value. But,.as? Marks points out,
the best the CIA could spawn with
its channeling of drug research into
the nation's best colleges, was the
LSD generation of: the 19606.
Last year, the CIA notified Marks
that it had uncovered yet another
cache of documents on its mind con-
trol work. They fill 130 boxes, nearly
20 times the amount- the CIA' found
when it was searching for its- MK.
ULTRA records. Stretching into then
1970s they cover a second-generation
effort by the CIA to reach its elusive
target, this time using far snore sa?
phisticated methods than were avail-
able to the men from MK-ULTRA.
When drugs failed them in the 1950s
r
and 1960s, the CIA's scientists turned
to computers and electronics in the
1091%#44 i i sve
really want to know, we'll find out;
whether they achieved their goal ,
STAT