CONTROLLING HEARTS AND MINDS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200420004-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 20, 2004
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: March 6, 1979
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Release 2004/10/13 : CIA-RDP88-0135OR0002
AR i I CL.E AFFE.iutED
ON PAGE
THE BOSTON PHOENIX
6 March 1979
N NG
H A TS s N
MINDS
John Marks is riding a wave that may
carry him to his second best-seller. The
first; The CIA and the Cult of Intelli-
gence, written with former Agency of-
ficial Victor Marchetti, was the first book
published with blank spaces because of
prior censorship by the CIA. "They gave
us a best-seller by doing it," Marks told
the Phoenix.
His latest book, The Search for the
"Manchurian Candidate,:" is an account
of the CIA's mind-control projects. The
story told in the book became the subject
of a recent ABC-TV documentary for
which Marks worked as a consultant and
appeared on camera.
"Manchurian Candidate" is based on
16,000 pages of CIA documents un-
earthed by Marks through numerous
Freedom of Information Act requests
(FOIA). "Without these documents,"
Marks wrote, "the best investigative re-
porting would not have produced a book
and the secrets of CIA mind-control work
would have remained buried forever, as
the men who knew them had always in-
tended."
Marks, who grew up iri the suburbs of
New York and New Jersey, is 35 years
old. He graduated from Cornell in 1965,
"before the colleges started to,be differ-
ent than they had.been.for the 20 years
before," and joined the Foreign Service
six months later .,kind of. in the tail end of
the Kennedy enthusiasm -- he was dead,
but still it seemed like a nobler thing than
selling insurance, which was what my
father wanted me to do, and it was almost
an act of rebellion.
"I was in for four-and-a-half years. My
first assignment was supposed to have
been London, but my draft board was
about to draft me and the State Depart-
merit switched my assignment to Viet-
nam. I'm one of the few people you ever
met who went to Vietnam to avoid the
'draft," he said, laughing.
The State Department lent Marks to
the Agency for International. Develop-
ment (AID), where he worked 'with the
"pacification" program. "I was 22 and I.
was the assistant AID man in a Viet-'
namese province trying to 'win hearts
and minds.' I had a warehouse full of!
cement and roofing and food, and I fed
the hungry, I built schools for those who
needed them and it was very heady stuff.
It never ' really accomplished anything
but, on the other hand, it was heady
stuff."
' Was Marks aware of the CIA in those
days? "Yeah, well, in the provincial capi-
tal of the province in which I lived there
was the embassy compound, which was
.the . CIA compound.. Those were the
spooks and I used to play poker with
them every Monday night .... I used to
win a lot of money from them in poker."
Were they lousy bluffers? "Yeah, well,
they were contract people (i.e., not
regular CIA officers), which was told to
me later on."
After a year and a half in Vietnam,
Marks returned to the US, his doubts
about the War made worse by the 1968
Tet offensive. "I watched the war from
the roof of my apartment house ...
which was kind of disillusioning. I mean,
if the war was going as well as they said,
why were they having this battle in my
neighborhood?"
He returned in time for the McCarthy
campaign, the abdication of LBJ and the
profound social upheavals in the US. He
worked for State's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research, but found himself going
off in "different directions." "I had
access to some interesting information
and I was seeing for the first time how
American intelligence functioned ..
My glimpse of the government at the
highest levels did not encourage me. All
the more, LBJ used to say, 'If you only
saw the information I saw, you'd know
why we're fighting this war' - and I saw
it, and'it seemed even dumber from that
level."
After' the invasion of Cambodia,
Marks resigned from the Foreign Service
to become foreign-policy adviser to a
While working. for Case in' 1971,
Marks read articles about Victor Mar-
chetti, a former CIA official who had
written a novel, The Rope Dancer, about
the .intelligence nether world. Marks,
who'd written only one article at that
point, contacted Marchetti, and their
meetings led to the collaboration that pro-
duced a best-selling previously censored
book.
"It took about nine months to do the
book.-and then I decreed myself a free-
lance writer. It beats working," he said.
After four or five months of free-lanc-.
ing, he took a job at the Washington
based' Center for National Security
Studies, where he directed a CIA project
that aimed to eliminate the intelligence
agencies' abuses. lie wrote a great deal
and "switched hats when it suited me
from journalist to activist."
During that time, he became inter-
ested in the CIA's history of mind-
control experiments and began filing
FOIA requests. "There were other people
who were interested, but I was the only
one I know of who was pursuing it from
about 1975 on. I had picked up on a
couple of lines in the Rockefeller Com-
mission Report (Report to the President
by the Commission on CIA Activities,
June, 1975), which the rest of the press
had ignored.
"I got myself some fancy lawyers from
Sargent Shriver's Washington law firm -
pro bone --, and we-kind of worked out a
pattern that the government would send
me documents whenever a deadline was
coming up in return for not having to
meet the deadline. That went on into the
summer of 1977, when the government
notified my lawyers that they had found
thousands of new pages and they would
be setting up a schedule to release it to
me." Marks's "back-burner" project be-
came a book idea.
He employed several researchers to
help him get th ugh the box
f d
es o
ocu-
Republican dove, Sen. Clifford Case of
ments released by the CIA and to do some
New Jersey. He drafted several pieces of of the initial interviews for the book,
anti-war legislation, including the Case- ? which was published by Times Books,
Church amendment, which stopped the !
bombing.
Approved For Release 2004/10/13 : CIA-RDP88-0135OR000200420004-4