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panohchoc's review against another edition
3.0
Very interesting and disturbing. Well-written. Must have been incredibly difficult to research.
isabellesbooks's review against another edition
5.0
Absolutely mind-blowing. I was gripped from the start. I learned so much information that I was never meant to know and loved every second of it.
rotorguy64's review against another edition
4.0
In the not so far past, the OSS and later CIA ran a number of clandestine projects aimed at subjugating the human mind: Bluebird, Artichoke, MKNAOMI, and MKULTRA, among others. The key figure in all these projects was Sidney Gottlieb, an unassuming and rather eccentric character, a goat herder, folk dance enthusiast, and self-taught chemist, psychologist and operative. This books tells the story of Gottlieb, or the story we can still reconstruct after he destroyed all the files he could get his hands on.
Gottlieb assembled a team that could come straight out of a Netflix show, including a roughnecked, sadomasochistic narcotics investigator, a dangerously irresponsible spy, and a magician, and together, they fought communism. They did so by spicing the drinks of random strangers with LSD, watching prostitutes have sex with random strangers on LSD through a two-way mirror (while sitting on a portable toilet, it makes NO sense in the context), releasing bacteria in San Francisco, and abusing mentally ill children. All in the name of science and national security. I don't usually invoke that many tropes anymore but really, it's the only way to make some sense of this ridiculous story.
This book is filled with stories of unethical (and ultimately pointless) research and covert operations (also pointless), so that I obviously can't retell all of them. There are just two that I want to talk about in setail.
The first are the experiments of the Canadian psychiatrist David Ewen Cameron, who tried to extinguish old, broken personalities to replace them with new new ones. To achieve this, he used a method called depatterning, meaning he put unsuspecting patients into an artificial coma, electroshocked them and forced them to listen endless repetitions of sentences like "my mother hates me". The end result was frequently that cases of mild depression were turned into cases of permanent disability. Victims forgot the most basic skills and suffered violent mood changes, and a good deal of them never recovered. Through the CIA, your grandparents' tax dollars were busily at work financing this mad scientist.
The other story concerns Frank Olson, a colleague of Gottlieb, who began to have second thoughts about MKULTRA. Later, during a company diner Olson attended, Gottlieb drugged the participants. Olsons mental health went downhill from there; fast forward, and Olson falls from the ninth story of a hotel and dies. We still don't know what happened, neither does his family. Circumstantial evidence points to him not having committed suicide by running through a closed window, but you couldn't convict anyone of murder on this evidence in a court of law. Kinzer tends towards the opinion that Olson was assassinated to close a potential leak, as do I.
Later in his life, Gottlieb was apparently gripped with remorse, and tried to even the scales by committing good deeds for a change, from working at a leper hospital in India until his wife got fed up with it to teaching kids to speak without a stutter. At the same time, he consistently blocked every attempt by anyone to uncover the truth. He lied to every investigating body, was rewarded with immunity for his deliberately vague or falsified witness statements, and tried to paint himself as a victim because the CIA redacted all names but his on the documents it submitted with suspicious frequency. Colleagues spice each other's drinks with LSD, but they don't snitch on each other, after all. Gottliebs redemption arc falls flat, therefore. Kinzer sees as much, and asks whether Gottlieb can be seen as spiritual. He answers this question in the negative, as Gottliebs spirituality never informed his conduct to an appreciable extent. With this, I agree.
The one weakness of this book is that Kinzer downplays the brainwashing experiments of the communist bloc. He does this not without reason, as the communist states never invented mind contr as the CIA imagined them, but not for lack of trying. They just stuck to such tried and true methods as isolation, starvation, humiliation and the threat of torture, and they never achieved anything beyond inflicting trauma and enforcing outward conformity. This mistake of Kinzer makes his overall narrative of the singularly paranoid CIA possible in the first place. In the light of that, I understand Chomskys general criticism of Kinzer concerning his use (or lack of use) of evidence contrary to his position on US-Nicaragua foreign policy. Thankfully, the rest of the book is documented so well that I can trust it on the subject matter.
Gottlieb assembled a team that could come straight out of a Netflix show, including a roughnecked, sadomasochistic narcotics investigator, a dangerously irresponsible spy, and a magician, and together, they fought communism. They did so by spicing the drinks of random strangers with LSD, watching prostitutes have sex with random strangers on LSD through a two-way mirror (while sitting on a portable toilet, it makes NO sense in the context), releasing bacteria in San Francisco, and abusing mentally ill children. All in the name of science and national security. I don't usually invoke that many tropes anymore but really, it's the only way to make some sense of this ridiculous story.
This book is filled with stories of unethical (and ultimately pointless) research and covert operations (also pointless), so that I obviously can't retell all of them. There are just two that I want to talk about in setail.
The first are the experiments of the Canadian psychiatrist David Ewen Cameron, who tried to extinguish old, broken personalities to replace them with new new ones. To achieve this, he used a method called depatterning, meaning he put unsuspecting patients into an artificial coma, electroshocked them and forced them to listen endless repetitions of sentences like "my mother hates me". The end result was frequently that cases of mild depression were turned into cases of permanent disability. Victims forgot the most basic skills and suffered violent mood changes, and a good deal of them never recovered. Through the CIA, your grandparents' tax dollars were busily at work financing this mad scientist.
The other story concerns Frank Olson, a colleague of Gottlieb, who began to have second thoughts about MKULTRA. Later, during a company diner Olson attended, Gottlieb drugged the participants. Olsons mental health went downhill from there; fast forward, and Olson falls from the ninth story of a hotel and dies. We still don't know what happened, neither does his family. Circumstantial evidence points to him not having committed suicide by running through a closed window, but you couldn't convict anyone of murder on this evidence in a court of law. Kinzer tends towards the opinion that Olson was assassinated to close a potential leak, as do I.
Later in his life, Gottlieb was apparently gripped with remorse, and tried to even the scales by committing good deeds for a change, from working at a leper hospital in India until his wife got fed up with it to teaching kids to speak without a stutter. At the same time, he consistently blocked every attempt by anyone to uncover the truth. He lied to every investigating body, was rewarded with immunity for his deliberately vague or falsified witness statements, and tried to paint himself as a victim because the CIA redacted all names but his on the documents it submitted with suspicious frequency. Colleagues spice each other's drinks with LSD, but they don't snitch on each other, after all. Gottliebs redemption arc falls flat, therefore. Kinzer sees as much, and asks whether Gottlieb can be seen as spiritual. He answers this question in the negative, as Gottliebs spirituality never informed his conduct to an appreciable extent. With this, I agree.
The one weakness of this book is that Kinzer downplays the brainwashing experiments of the communist bloc. He does this not without reason, as the communist states never invented mind contr as the CIA imagined them, but not for lack of trying. They just stuck to such tried and true methods as isolation, starvation, humiliation and the threat of torture, and they never achieved anything beyond inflicting trauma and enforcing outward conformity. This mistake of Kinzer makes his overall narrative of the singularly paranoid CIA possible in the first place. In the light of that, I understand Chomskys general criticism of Kinzer concerning his use (or lack of use) of evidence contrary to his position on US-Nicaragua foreign policy. Thankfully, the rest of the book is documented so well that I can trust it on the subject matter.
slmbooks's review against another edition
5.0
Read this for a Dark Psychology class paper on MK Ultra.
paulina_papaya's review against another edition
3.0
This is such a difficult book to give a rating to. The amount that it covers and in such detail is impressive and when you look at bibliography it is truly incredible. Yet I just feel like there’s too much in here and it’s not super coherent. It fails to know what its main focus is, trying to centre the book around Sydney Gottlieb, but there’s so many unnecessary details that all of it gets lost. Nonetheless if someone is interested in CIA history and how the US has been breaking international laws it’s a good read.