Walter Bowart. Operation Mind Control. 1977.

Innovative spy fiction in the form of a work of journalism.

Al Martin's recommendations had led me to one interesting credible book, but then this book. When I looked up this title I learned it was out of print and used copies were selling for over $100, a fact which at least one reader took as evidence of the book's authenticity. For me, "book dog," the book's scarcity merely presented an interesting challenge, and I was able to squeeze a copy out of interlibrary loan though it took many months. However, I must conclude that it is plausible that this book went out of print because it was silly, not because it was suppressed to bury the valuable secrets it contains. Don't get me wrong, books do get suppressed, and Operation Mind Control may have a valuable and shocking secret fact or two mixed in with its paranoid speculations. But it is hard to go along with Bowart's thrilling but groundless claim that a handful of men (the Cryptocracy—great word) rule the world through the National Security Council, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and (of course) the CIA, utilizing various methods of mind control, with hypnotically controlled zombie assassins who killed JFK, RFK, and MLK. The book starts out gingerly, glossing research in behaviorism and hypnosis, but by the closing chapter is a passionate rant about how the Cryptocracy must be stopped. The sources listed at the back of the book include government documents, novels, and L. Ron Hubbard.

Seriously, even if all these techniques of mind control have been used for covert activity of any kind, the power of ignorance, fear, violence, and propaganda presents a much more dangerous (and expedient) form of mind control than drugs, electricity, and hypnosis.

I just read that the reason that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, seriously undermining the stated motivations for the US Invasion, was not because the Bush administration was lying or wrong, but because Saddam Hussein, who claimed to have no weapons of mass destruction, was bluffing. Just at the moment when Saddam Hussein seemed about to slip into the participle and become the passive object of the sentence (We ousted him from power through a military invasion justified through mistruths) the meaningless twist of grammar accomplished by this news item (He was the one with the mistruths, intentionally allowing the world to suspect him of harboring weapons he did not have, because even though he made no claims of having such weapons he resisted weapons inspection teams [after they were discovered to contain undercover agents of US intelligence]) once again restores Saddam to the beginning of the sentence where he must belong if we are to be frightened of him and what he might do and consent to anything our unelected leaders demand.

Anyway, this book is kind of silly, but I couldn't resist following the lattice of intertextual references that led me to it just one step further...