Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare by Gordon Thomas
JR Books, £20
WHATEVER it is about mind control and secret agents, it’s a subject which continues to fascinate us. The three spectacularly successful Jason Bourne films are about a man breaking free of the conditioning which turned him into a killing machine. Such conditioning has been practiced for more than a millennia and Gordon Thomas’ latest book considers how the CIA investigated this area for its own purposes. But while the cover is glossy and the appendices voluminous, Secrets & Lies adds little to what we already know. And it is hampered by a curious structure.
Let’s get the second part of the subtitle out of the way first. This book barely scratches the surface of germ war research. In fact it has as much – or as little – to say on biological warfare. The CIA’s involvement in this area is tangential at best. Lumping it in with mind control is a bit like writing about warships and snipers. The reason is that Thomas has framed his story around a biography of murdered CIA station chief William Buckley and one of Buckley’s jobs was collecting germ and biological warfare material from some of the proxy wars the US and Russia engaged in. Thomas obviously has enormous respect for Buckley and interviewed him on many occasions. He doesn’t attempt to hide this but it does skew the book’s perspective.
Buckley had a role in the CIA’s notorious MK-ULTRA project. This employed surgeons and psychologists to experiment on people and see if it was possible to control their minds. I say notorious because we’ve heard all this before, from Congressional hearings in the 1970s through John Marks’ groundbreaking The Search for the Manchurian Candidate published 30 years ago. Thomas talks of getting 20,000 pages of top secret material from a whistleblower. He also obviously talked to a number of key people. But all this research doesn’t seem to have produced an awful lot of fresh material.
Thomas has written a number of books on the intelligence services and several have been made into films. This accounts, perhaps, for the breathless airport thriller style which frequently lapses into the first person and conjures up personal impressions about things which he cannot possibly know. A few pages in there was a particular quote I wanted to check but the lack of footnotes seriously hampers any attempt to properly review his analysis.
Finally, I found the Robert Ludlum approach means this is, at best, a superficial history. We get the odd march of time sequence to let us know that Kennedy has been elected or someone’s invented the hula hoop but otherwise the wider driving forces in American foreign and domestic policy are ignored. If you want the real thing, rent one of the Bourne films.
Phil Chamberlain
