ILLUMINATI MESS
Operation Mind Control – Walter Bowart
I recently reflected on journalist and former US government insider John Marks’s 1991 exposé on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) mind-control programmes. It’s a feat of research and freedom of information requests – often despite the CIA’s best efforts – and is a thorough, riveting, troubling read. From hypnosis and hallucinogens to sexual entrapment and psychological torture, the CIA truly seems to have left no stone unturned in its quest to understand and dominate the human will.
Published in 1978, Operation Mind Control sees writer, editor, and US 1960s counterculture movement leader Walter Bowart (1939-2007) tackle a similar – and yet contemporary – exposé. Ultimately, this is him sounding the urgent alarm on precisely the sort of dark, dystopian shit we now know for a fact that the CIA and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – as well as contemporary global psyops ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ – were up to, and him calling for citizen action.
Bowart sounds like a fascinating person. He counted Timothy Leary, psychologist, writer, LSD-proponent, and counterculture legend, as a close contact. Operation Mind Control also boasts a foreword by The Manchurian Candidate author Richard Condon, plus namechecks ‘grandaddy of hypnosis’ Milton Erickson and Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, as well as a number of hypnosis bodies, amongst Bowart’s research sources. That he extracted the information he did, hidden as it was within reams of begrudgingly released paperwork, and then found via personally funded researchers, is a remarkable feat of what Bowart coins “citizens’ intelligence”.
The challenge with this book, I believe, is that Bowart was too close to, too shook by, the subject matter. Which is perfectly understandable. Imagine having a front-row, inside-story, no-holds-barred seat to the Cambridge Analytica shit-show, or the Trump-stirred January 6 US Capitol attack. Imagine the gaspy, outraged, horrified, terrified, patchy, skippy way you’d be writing of these grave betrayals and injustices! Then go watch Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States and be grateful for journalism, storytelling, and distance. That’s, in sum, and in my opinion, how this book compares to Marks’s.
A particular way in which the book suffers is that Bowart credits the CIA and its agents with probably far too much intelligence, planning, and Machiavellian genius. What comes across strongly in Marks’s book is that they were often corrupt buffoons, high as kites on the very drugs they were experimenting with, and just making shit up as they went along in pursuit of large blank cheques from the US government. (Do watch HBO miniseries White House Plumbers, starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, for this probably more accurate vibe.)
Bowart believes that a cryptocracy – where hidden/unknown leaders are truly in power; aka ‘The Illuminati’ – are running the USA/world. After 13 increasingly miserable, embarrassing, corrupt, and cruel years of Tory rule here in the UK, not to mention the gun-toting, right-wing Trumpian turd that just won’t flush in the US, as well as the general dereliction of leadership in favour of the capitalistic death spiral worldwide, it’s hard to buy into The Illuminati narrative today... Personally, I’d be quite pleased if a bunch of competent yet secretive bastards stepped forth to sort this mess out. I guess the scarier thought today is that the death of democracy lays at the doorsteps of incompetent, greedy imbeciles rather than a ruling elite with an actual, you know, plan of some sort. (A ruling elite with a ‘plan’ to just extract maximum money and resources til the world implodes is not ‘A Plan’ and therefore relegates such players to incompetent, greedy imbecile status IMHO.)
In expectation that Bowart’s research has uncovered some hypnosis morsels of note, I’m just going to namecheck a couple of key mentions... Colonel Laird Guttersen, an Air Force man and “one of the few heroes of the Vietnam conflict”, became an expert in hypnosis and brainwashing after using self-hypnosis to block pain and “keep himself alive” in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp during 27 months in solitary confinement. He contributed to the thinking on brainwashing, considering it to be simply psychological indoctrination, and led Air Force seminars on this perceived great threat.
We also meet Dr Bernard L Diamond, another “expert hypnotist” whose expert witness testimony sought (unsuccessfully) to acquit Sirhan Sirhan of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy on grounds of diminished responsibility. Between Marks’s book as well as Untold History and White House Plumbers, it’s possible that Sirhin was mentally meddled with, if not directly involved – there are plenty of Sirhan’s rambling notebook entries to pore over if you fancy your chances of ever definitively solving the RFK mystery.
We also gain some more detail on academic hypnosis researcher Martin Orne’s CIA-funded experiments, as well as a rather credulous account of what Israeli-British magician, illusionist, and spoon-bender Uri Geller can apparently do.
Great titbits, sure; but the book’s alarming prescience gets lost and bogged down in Illuminati theorising.
