The bestselling author of All the Shah's Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA's secret drug and mind-control program in the 1950s and 1960s, destroying many subjects' lives.
...Kinzer does a thorough job of detailing how LSD affects the brain at the time of use and its aftereffects. This is not a light read and, at times, is infuriating. Exploring how hysteria fueled perverse policy decisions during the Cold War, Kinzer reveals how disturbing the ramifications of these policy decisions can be if left unchecked ... Highly recommended. This work sheds light on misdeeds done in the name of American democracy and should have wide appeal among general readers.
... adds a key detail to this fascinating history ... Kinzer’s retelling of the MK-ULTRA story is unsparing in its gruesome details, but not overwrought. Those looking for entirely new revelations, however, won’t find them here — in part, because information from the surviving records has already come to light, first through the investigations of the Senate committee headed by Frank Church of Idaho in the mid-1970s, and then a few years later, in 1978, thanks to John Marks’s book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. (Kinzer draws liberally from Marks and other secondary accounts, and occasionally one wishes he had cited more original source material.) ... Gottlieb has previously been treated as a historical footnote, but Kinzer elevates him to his proper place as one of the C.I.A.’s most influential and despicable characters ... Kinzer’s book is also a good reminder that there is rarely legal accountability for the C.I.A.’s misdeeds ... Given that this is a biography, it’s worth noting there is one Gottlieb endeavor omitted from an otherwise comprehensive book, the poisoner in chief’s role in another equally questionable, though less harmful, endeavor: parapsychology.
... a bustling narrative that sets MK-Ultra in its institutional framework of federal government, the military and the intelligence services, swerving all the while between madcap farce and grim atrocity ... The story is always the same: mind control is real, and those who know its secrets operate with impunity.
