Secrets and Lies: A history of CIA mind control and germ warfare
Gordon Thomas
JR Books (www.jrbooks.com) 2007, h/b, £20
Gordon Thomas has written a number of books on the intelligence services and this has a glossy cover, voluminous appendices and some admiring quotes. But it adds little to what we already know about the CIA’s research into mind control. Further, it is hampered by a curious structure.
Let’s get the second part of the sub-title out of the way. This book barely scratches the surface of germ warfare. The reason it is included is that Thomas has framed the story around a biography of murdered CIA station chief William Buckley. Thomas obviously has enormous respect for Buckley and interviewed him on many occasions. He doesn’t attempt to hide this, but it does skew the book’s perspective.
One of Buckley’s jobs during his career was collecting possible germ and biological warfare material from some of the proxy wars the US and Russia engaged in. There’s some padding to put this in context but otherwise that’s it for the history part.
Buckley also had a role in MK-ULTRA and we get a detailed run through on that project. However from the congressional hearings in the 1970s through John Marks’ groundbreaking The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, published 30 year ago and more, we’ve already got a much better perspective on this project and associated research.
Despite Thomas talking of receiving 20,000 pages of top secret material and interviewing key people there’s just not an awful lot of fresh material.
Several of Thomas’s books have been made into films and this might account for the breathless airport thriller style. It is a superficial history without footnotes. We get the odd March of Time sequence to let us know that Kennedy has been elected or someone’s invented the hula-hoop, but otherwise the wider driving forces in American foreign and domestic policy are ignored.