ALTERED STATE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200420003-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 20, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: May 7, 1979
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

02? TAbE~ ppproved For Release 0f 1 IGAt?PP88-0
- SAGE 7 MAY 1979
Books/Ron Rosenbaum, Tom Bethell
Z, PX 3z "A 4, D
"... Was the psychedelic counterculture the result of CIA drug
experiments? Were the sixties the ultimate `dirty trick'? . .
The Search for the "Manchurian
Candidate," by John Marks. Times
Books, S9.95. Is our fascination with the secret
history of things unappeasable? Will
we never tire of pursuing the great
white whales that roam the murky wa-
ters of conspiracy theory? Of these
new books on the CIA and Howard
Hughes---two leviathans of that realm
-one surfeits our curiosity, the other
provokes it even more. -
John Marks has written the ultimate
CIA book. His sober account of the
CIA's freaked-out experiments in its
search for the perfect mind-control
substance is as quietly horrifying as
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It's now evident that the use of the
word "cult" in the title of the book
Marks wrote with Victor Marchetti
(The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence)
was no accident. On the evidence of
its own confidential files, the CIA re-
garded the LSD molecule with the
same religious veneration as did that
other acid cult of the sixties, the Man.
son family-and with almost the same
lack of moral scruples about its use.
Marks's astonishing tales of innocent
minds raped by surprise, druggings
make this book the CIA expose to end
all CIA exposes. No revelation of any
assassination plot against a foreign
political leader could prove more shock-
ing than the torture, maiming, and as-
sassination of the minds of our own
citizens by government-sponsored cult
doctors. If the CIA did anything worse
than this, I'rk not sure we want to
know about it.
But Marks's book is not all horror
and outrage. He makes an invaluable
contribution to the ongoing revisionist
.history of the sixties with his specula-
tion that the psychedelic counterculture
was itself a creature of CIA drug ex-
Ron Rosenbaum, a contributing editor
of New York, is the author of Murder at
Elaine's: Tom Bethell is a Washington
editor of Harper's.
periments. He demonstrates how charis-
matic acid evangelists such as Ken
Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Allen Gins-
berg all ingested powerful psychedelics
provided them by researchers whose
work was funded or inspired by the
CIA. "It would become the supreme
irony," writes Marks, "that the CIA's
enormous search for weapons among
drugs, fueled by the hope that spies
could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control
life . . . would wind up helping to
create the wandering, uncontrollable
minds of the counterculture." Were the
sixties the CIA's ultimate "dirty trick"?
W`` -L, TAT
Approved For Release 2004/10/13 : CIA-RDP88-01350R000200420003-5