During these operations, CIA operatives routinely committed serious crimes including covertly administering LSD to thousands of unwitting civilians in New York City, San Francisco, and Marin County, California, in an eleven-year operation that began in 1953. Sadly, the facts are a matter of public record (see Senate Committee Joint Hearing proceedings at The CIA formally began investigating mind control in 1950 with Project BLUEBIRD, which evolved into projects ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. Marks explores the CIA’s covert experiments in mind control technology, including their extensive research into LSD and other psychoactive drugs.įor readers unfamiliar with the events described in Marks’s book, its revelations may sound like the stuff of spy novels or conspiracy theory.

John Marks’s outstanding book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate documents an important chapter in the history of psychoactive drugs in the twentieth century. “The problem of every intelligence operation is how do you remove the human element?”-anonymous CIA psychologist, page 53

The search for the manchurian candidate