book reviews

 When I was a postdoc in the mid-80s, the building I worked in was next door to the Washington University student union, which housed a large bookstore. While waiting for an experiment to run, I would sometimes go over to the union and browse the books. In addition to the science books, I started buying history books, beginning with Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A history, which later became the basis for a PBS series.

The Karnow book not only led me to other Vietnam histories, but to an appreciation of how the Vietnam war--from which I narrowly escaped the draft--was a manifestation of the larger Cold War. This led to books on WWII, which led to books on WWI, along with histories of the Soviet Union and China, all of which shaped the Cold War, my parents’ world and the world I grew up in.

In the past couple of weeks, I came more or less back to where I started, with two books recommended to me by Janet Michel. The first was Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer, which concerns Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA's quest during the 1950s and 60s for mind control. Gottlieb was a biochemist who eventually directed the CIA's MKULTRA program, which funded and oversaw research in LSD and other hallucinogens, as well as poisons for possible use in assassinations. The research was conducted not only on the east and west coast, but in Canada, Germany and the far East, and usually involved prisoners, drug addicts and unsuspecting citizens, none of whom gave informed consent for the experiments. Gottleib's activities were enthusiastically supported by CIA director Allen Dulles in the belief that the Soviets and Chinese were ahead of the west in perfecting mind control techniques. Their paranoia was further fueled by fiction of the time, like The Manchurian Candidate, and their unethical and immoral actions were rationalized on the basis that the US was at war with ruthless enemies and so our ruthlessness was justified. Human lives and health were merely collateral damage.

Gottleib was an eccentric. While his professional life involved the cold, impersonal attempt to dismantle human minds and reprogram them, as well as innovative toxins and techniques to deliver them without detection, he had a warm and reclusive family life raising goats and learning and teaching folk dancing. He was born with a clubfoot and stuttered throughout his life. As a Jew, he could never penetrate the WASPy CIA social world of Dulles et al. Ultimately, Kinzer's book is about the clandestine world of the CIA as it become increasingly unmoored from Congressional and Presidential oversight.

This was a good book to read in preparation for The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot, which is a history of the CIA from its founding by Harry Truman in the '40s until the death of Allen Dulles. While Gottlieb and MKULTRA are mentioned at various points, Talbot's book cover's the CIA's role in hiding and recruiting former Nazis after the war, coups in Iran and Guatemala, the Gary Powers U2 debacle, the Bay of Pigs, and the many covert efforts to assassinate Castro using the mafia. The picture that emerges is one of disastrous shortsightedness, internal and external deception and delusional thinking. Allen Dulles comes across as a sociopath who vastly overestimates his external enemies and regards anyone in a position to question his judgment as an existential threat.

Eventually, it becomes clear that Talbot is setting the stage for a re-framing of the JFK and RFK assassinations as CIA hit jobs against popular politicians who questioned the Cold War mission and supported independence of other nations from both colonial governments and international business exploitation, and who were moving towards greater CIA accountability and reorganization. Even after he was forced to retire from the CIA, Dulles was one of the most active members of the committee that produced the Warren Report, which is now widely considered a whitewash, and he continued to meet with and advise the CIA for years.

The writing in both books is excellent, and both authors draw detailed portraits of their subjects and their time. I knew little about MKULTRA and the CIA drug programs until I read the Kinzer book, but even though I knew and lived through most of the events covered in the Talbot book, I had not previously understood all the connections between these events and the role of the CIA in decisions that would have lasting and violent consequences. I recommend both books.