Project Mind Control tells the lurid tale of the CIA's attempts to discover the scientific principles that would allow people to control subjects' thoughts and actions. The author, University of Texas historian John Lisle, relies largely on legal testimony from Sidney Gottlieb, who managed the notorious MKUltra program the agency operated from 1953 to 1973.

Lisle is careful not to speculate beyond the available evidence about what the program that launched a hundred conspiracy theories did, even granting that Gottlieb and the CIA destroyed a lot of that evidence. What is on the record is dire enough: The agency used powerful drugs such as LSD on fellow agents, on prisoners, on mental patients, and on people they sucked into prostitution honeypots in San Francisco. (Though yes, there also

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