Dominic Streatfeild
London: Hodder and Stoughton 2006, £20, h/b
One of the gaps in the parapolitical library has been a great pull-together of the material on ‘mind control’. And Streatfield has done it, and done it rather well. He is a documentary film-maker and some of the chapters here read rather like scripts. All your favourites are here: MKUltra and Delta; the CIA’s drug programmes; Ewan Cameron’s ‘psychic driving’ and reprogramming experiments in Canada – all reworked with some new material. For British readers there is new information on William Sargant, author of the 1957 landmark book, Battle for the Mind. Streatfield shows that Sargant was working for MI5 and/or MI6 – something I had assumed but had never tried to check. There is a chapter on the British Army’s torture of IRA suspects in 1971.
Streatfield shows us that these programmes involved the UK as junior partners to the US; and that by 1970 most of the experiments with drugs and gizmos had apparently ended. The NATO countries’ scientists had abandoned their search for ‘mind control’ and had discovered that to break down most people all you need is stress, sensory deprivation and/or overload, uncertainty, fear and discomfort. A few days of that and the brains/personalities of most of us will begin to wilt.
There is one nit I would pick. After describing twenty five years of experiments by the CIA and others, Streatfield comes to the most recent group of people claiming to be the victims of malevolent state experiments. At www.mindcontrolforums.com he notes the accounts of people claiming to have received electromagnetic torture, to be hearing voices, to have implants in their bodies, and dismisses them – with sympathy for their evident suffering – as nutters. How can he be so certain? There is a wide range of technology, in the hands of the US and former Soviet military that we know of (and, presumably, elsewhere) which is designed to do precisely what the some of the ‘nutters’ claim is happening to them. The existence of technology does not mean the technology works. But the existence of the ‘hearing voices’ technology, for example, which does work,(1) means that we can’t dismiss such claims as self-evidently evidence of delusions or schizophrenia. Many of those at mindcontrol forums.com do sound delusional but I’ve met people who make similar claims who do not seem generally delusional to me.
Note
1 The ultrasound version of which can be bought commercially.