Control of the populace is dream of every government - democratic or totalitarian. If one cannot control the populace then they will need to actually do their job in order to get re-elected. If they are in control, they can just use slogans to gain points - because lets be honest majority of people wont remember things 4 years back, let alone longer.

Book is first public presentation (and as far as I could see last one because CIA decided after a while that public information act is out of play for their activities) of covert projects related to individual/populace control from WW2 to first half of 1970's.

Main focus is on ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA project and people working on it. Pushed forward by that eternal "but our enemies could be doing it" CIA projects paved the way to greater incursion of narcotics into US society and city streets, experimented in rather horrible ways on willing and unwilling subjects, tested the technology and approaches in foreign countries (very very bad image for South Korea, Taiwan (ROC), Philippines and Europe - all elements that show black-sites during the current war on terror are nothing new).

Probably greatest issue is the way CIA basically raised the oh-so-popular counter-culture movement by conducting mass tests on unwilling people tripping for days on mushrooms and LSD. This just started drug abuse and later evolved into current opioid crisis of major proportions.

Less details are given on post-LSD years, use of electroshocks for "de-patterning" the patients (such harmless names for something so horrible in core), sensory deprivation and return to proven Chinese and Soviet methods of breaking and re-education of people (known in the certain circles as rape-of-the-mind). All of these, more "hardware" approaches became the focus in second half of 1970s when CIA decided that they do not have to report to the public.

At the end one has to shiver when reads about the doctors and scientists that are .... monsters. They all see themselves as people working for general good and hey "if you want scrambled eggs you need to break a few", right? Wrong. When one looks at the way how projects were deployed in US and outside of the US one has to wonder how far they were going. Without ethics to guide them medical personnel and health experts are very dangerous people. Equally chilling is statement of the author that for these projects nothing was sacred, everything had to be tried and tested - resulting in huge technological and procedural advancements for the Agency in this field (they were talking about the gene splicing and modifications in 1970's!). And then you hear statements like (paraphrasing) "people are already controlled, we are working on making that control more efficient" (in 19-bloody-60's!).

Very disturbing book that needs to be a warning for everyone (as author says (paraphrasing again) "conspiracy theories of yesterday proved again to be true" (sounds familiar, sadly...)).

Inclusion and collusion with national level organization (NIH, big medical centers, US military chemical and biological warfare centers), universities and independent researchers through charity and funding front organizations as cut-offs just deepened the shadow and gave Agency lot of liberty to experiment and mature their projects and allowed them access to as I mentioned doctors and health care professionals of dubious characters

Considering that genie is released out of the bottle and great deal of know-how ended up in private sector long ago, advertisement industry and media, we need to be very, very worried for our future and make sure people are aware of this as much as possible (or as much people want to hear about it - in last year and a half I found out that majority wants to live without anything that would force them go off the TV, tablets, phones or those we-only-transcribe-and-dont-investigate-or-write-news-sites).

Excellent book on a very interesting and disturbing subject. Excellent example of journalist-like investigation, making sure all available data is accounted for and all dots are linked and where guesses had to be made author underlines them and gives his best educated guess.
As i said there are gaps of course (not everybody was willing to give statement for the book nor were all files made available) but author shows good knowledge of the topic that helps him come to very likely answers to open questions.

Highly recommended. ( )

First published more than 40 years ago, this book tells the unbelievable story of the CIA's experiments with mind control. Some of these even pre-date the founding of the CIA itself. Its forerunner, the OSS, had some rather hare-brained ideas of its own, including some rather bizarre plans to kill or incapacitate the German führer, Adolf Hitler, that involved his vegetable garden. The book's title is a bit of a misnomer, as only a small part of the volume considers ways to hypnotise an assassin. The rest of the book is far more mundane, as the CIA looked for new techniques to analyse personalities and especially locate weaknesses in their opponents. But the section on the "Manchurian Candidate" scenario is fascinating. The Agency went so far as to hypnotise one secretary into shooting another (not knowing that the gun was loaded with blanks). Some of its boffins were convinced that the scenario envisaged by author Richard Condon in his fictional account was a real possibility. Part of the reason the CIA looked into this was precisely because of the concern that America's Cold War enemies might well have been considering the same thing. Whether the Soviets or Chinese ever made their own efforts in that field is something that we may never know. ( )