THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 55
“It’s only a midlife crisis if you survive.”••
delivered the entire deception plan for
D Day did Stalin begin to trust his
British minions.
The old Mad-magazine cartoon se-
ries “Spy vs. Spy,” in which two inter-
changeable agents, one black-hatted
and one white-hatted, do each other in,
over and over again, without much cu-
mulative point or purpose, seems
like a reasonable picture of the whole.
As it happens, the series was invented
by a Cuban satirist named Antonio
Prohías, a liberal anti-Batista cartoon-
ist who, witnessing Castro’s growing
hostility to a free press, fled post-revo-
lutionary Cuba, under suspicion of being
a spy for the C.I.A. You can’t escape
the game, apparently.
T
he rule that having more intelli-
gence doesn’t lead to smarter de-
cisions persists, it seems, for two basic
reasons. First, if you have any secret in-
formation at all, you often have too much
to know what matters. Second, having
found a way to collect intelligence your-
self, you become convinced that the
other side must be doing the same to
you, and is therefore feeding you fake
information in order to guide you to the
wrong decisions. The universal law of
unintended consequences rules with a
special ferocity in espionage and covert
action, because pervasive secrecy rules
out the small, mid-course corrections
that are possible in normal social pur-
suits. When you have to prevent peo-
ple from finding out what you’re doing
and telling you if you’re doing it well,
you don’t find out that you didn’t do it
well until you realize just how badly you
did it. (The simple term of art for this
effect, “blowback,” originated within the
C.I.A.) Good and bad intelligence cir-
cle round and round, until both go down
the drain of sense.
Some of these circlings are funny,
in the “Spy vs. Spy” way. Others are
tragic. In a new book, “Poisoner in
Chief ” (Henry Holt), about the C.I.A.’s
MK-ULTRA program—the attempt,
mostly in the nineteen-fifties and six-
ties, to achieve mind control through
drugs—Stephen Kinzer, a former Times
correspondent, points out that the en-
tire idea of Communist “brainwash-
ing” was a classic piece of Cold War
propaganda, popularized by a writer
with C.I.A. connections named Ed-
ward Hunter. “Brainwashing” was sup-
posed to explain American defections
in Korea, and the idea made its way to
outlets like Argosy, a pulp men’s mag-
azine of the period. But it turns out
that the upper reaches of the C.I.A.
bought into the story, and launched a
mind-control program in a desperate
effort to counter the nonexistent threat
that it had helped conjure into being.
“There was deep concern over the issue
of brainwashing,” Richard Helms, a
C.I.A. hand who eventually became
the agency’s director, later explained.
“We felt that it was our responsibility
not to lag behind the Russians or the
Chinese in this field.”
Kinzer’s antihero is Sidney Gottlieb,
a renegade chemist who oversaw the
MK-ULTRA program. Gottlieb was a
Jew from the Bronx who had worked
his way from City College to a Ph.D.
in biochemistry from Caltech, and
whose desire to serve his country was
redoubled when he was rejected by the
Army during the Second World War.
When, in 1951, Allen Dulles and Rich-
ard Helms went looking for a chemist
with imagination and no reservations
about pursuing the dark arts, Gottlieb’s
name came up.
Gottlieb, an enthusiast for biowar-
fare (though also a kind of proto-hip-
pie who apparently made his own goat’s-
milk yogurt), was eager to manufacture
mind-manipulating toxins. But his spe-
cial contribution to American culture
was introducing it to LSD; at one point,he bought up the entire supply produced
by the Sandoz company, in Switzerland.
He used it on often unwitting subjects,
including prisoners and students, to see
if it could induce a mental state extreme
enough to work as either a kind of truth
serum or a mind-control agent. (It did
neither successfully.)
Winding through the spy-loving Ei-
senhower-Kennedy years, Kinzer’s book
is a Tarantino movie yet to be made: it
has the right combination of sick humor,
pointless violence, weird tabloid char-
acters, and sheer American waste. It is
also frightening to read, since it docu-
ments the significant sums our govern-
ment spent on spy schemes as tawdry
as they were ridiculous, not to mention
spasmodically cruel and even murder-
ous. (At least one C.I.A. officer died in
a mysterious “fall” from a hotel window,
after becoming involved with MK-UL-
TRA colleagues and being given acid.)
The MK-ULTRA story is one of al-
most unqualified failure. Gottlieb was,
in the early sixties, put in charge of a
plan to depose Fidel Castro by making
his beard fall out, but he couldn’t figure
out how to deploy a depilatory. MK-UL-
TRA sponsored work in posthypnotic
suggestion that was designed to pro-
duce “programmed killers,” but it merely
confirmed what every stage hypnotist
has always known—that hypnosis is es-
sentially a form of obedience to author-
ity, and the hypnotist cannot make peo-
ple do something they really don’t want
to any more than a teacher who can