Marks, John. The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind
Control. New York: McGraw-Hill Paperback Edition, 1980. 242 pages.
MK-ULTRA was a CIA "mind-control" project backed up by the usual
Cold War rationale. Because the Soviets were supposedly on the track of a
"truth serum," the CIA set out to beat them to the punch with heavily-
funded research into hypnosis, electroshock, mind-bending drugs, and other
techniques of behavioral control. According to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb,
MK-ULTRA's resident Dr. Strangelove, the CIA's grail was discovering how
"to modify an individual's behavior by covert means." But Gottlieb's gray
language disguises what this quest meant in practice: e.g., dosing unwitting
subjects with LSD, and then standing back to watch them lose it. MK-ULTRA
compromised scientists, and left behind both scrambled psyches and a full-
blown counterculture -- all without adding to our real knowledge of the
human mind.
NameBase indexed two books that deal extensively with MK-ULTRA. Drawing
on 16,000 pages of once-classified documents, John Marks's "Search for the
Manchurian Candidate" provides a pioneering overview of CIA efforts to
control human behavior. Lee and Shlain's "Acid Dreams," a compulsively-
readable history of LSD culture, details how the CIA, apparently by accident,
promoted LSD from a chem-lab curiosity to an American folkway.
-- Steve Badrich
ISBN 0-07-040397-X
Extract the names from this source
Back to search page