Deep (Trance) State

Deep (state) Trance

1.

- You begin by drawing circles around names. You draw lines connecting these circles. You make the lines into arrows. In this way, you build up a profile, a diagram, a secret history. Everyone is interested in a secret history. Secret, put it in the subtitle, market the fuck out of it. That history is like the aether in physics, it fills up the space of history, it mediates between events, mysteries, cases, disappearances, suicides, cries in the asylums, the low watt shadows in solitary. You sit in Langley, to which you have moved from the old hq in D.C., and you are James Angleton, piecing together the great conspiracies over time and place, putting your finger on Nosenko, the false defector, the one you have always expected. Or you are Mark Lane, in a London Hotel, feeling the heat coming in from Swingin’ London, becoming a celebrity yourself just like Paul McCarthy, who had actually called you up on the phone, half satisfied/half afraid that you were finally sticking it to the man on a big scale, leafing through eyewitness testimonies and notes gathered from the Citizens Committee of Inquiry. You are overlaying discrepancy on discrepancy, feeling that the Warren Commission’s tropism towards a predetermined conclusion is itself a clue. “I’m just a patsy,” Oswald tells the reporters. A slogan for our time. The conspiracy theorists out in the street, among the hippies, paranoids in the Movement and beyond, were in a parallel universe to those others in offices at 2430 E Street Northwest, the great Manichean fifties, where everything was an association, an informants tip, a hint at the greater picture of Communist conspiracy. The officers looking at the “brainwashing” of American troops in Korea, or Cardinal Mindszenty in Budapest. The ones collecting files from Wehrmacht Intelligence, 1941–1945. Hiring experts in interrogation, behavioural control. The ones who did the experiments at Dachau. The ones who developed toxins at Auschwitz. The scientists from Unit 731 in Manchuria. Bring them to America, set up labs, tap their knowledge. It was war.

- Everything after World War II was a war. The war on cancer. The war on poverty. The war on communism. The war of circles and connecting arrows.

- “On the subject of being noticed, there is an inverse point that should be noted. At times tricksters have reason to credit, or accuse, some imaginary person with what has been done. A natural mistake is to describe someone of a form, and of actions, which are unusual and striking. It usually is easy to ascertain that no such person has been in the vicinity. The proper description will be of a person average in size and coloring and normal in features, but — and this is a very essential point-having some minor oddity such as the first joint missing of the little finger of the left hand, or a large mole close behind his right ear.”

Goodbye Mr. Thornhill, whoever you are.” — North by Northwest.

2.

- “It wasn’t felt necessary really to go into a lot of detail as to exactly how they were handling the subjects. In general, patients would be of low interest.”

- The man I am after: M.A. and his “derogatory associations”. The face, the voice, the experience, the traveller and desk hound under so many redacted documents. I go into the documents I can find, the ones online, the ones released. I go into the books, in which the stories grow stale, the referent tugs free from the reference, haunts the dreams of the abused. His hasty entrances and puzzling exits, his presence at the fringe of recovered memory. I go to the State Department directory for 1945 to get my bearings.

- M.A. — “b. Washington, D.C., Mar. 6, 1910; Central High Sch. Grad.: Devitt Prep Sch. Grad.: George Washington U., 1927–1940; with U.S. Govt., 1929–1938; investigator, Civil Ser. Commn., 1938–43; U.S. Navy, 1943–46, lt., overseas service; app. Asst. security officer, CAF-12, in the Dept. of State Mar. 12, 1946; married. — CON.” Slots light up on the board. This guy.

- He emerges into the light in small ways, in out of the way places, but his life, his profile, is sketchy at best. GWU — 1927–1940? Really? How is he with the U.S. Govt. all of this time as well? I have the GWU yearbooks, 1934–1938. I search, I find his picture in the Hatchet. Did he know Bob Bannerman, also at GWU in those years? Bob, his boss at State, his boss at the CIA. Bob, though, wasn’t a presence. He was never chaplain of his frat. He doesn’t seem to have had a frat. Went to night classes there.

- The photographs that exist in the old D.C. papers — they are of the “juvenile dancer”, the prodigy from the Hoffman and Hoskins Dancing school. Specialty: the cymbal dance. Dressed up as a young Russian — or Cossack.

- D.C. is a small town. Among those donating money to the Hoffman and Hoskins Dancing school: Mrs. Allen Macy Dulles, mother of Allen Dulles. M.A. enters into the Dulles circle early.

3.

- What did the Agency psychologists make of the childhood? A dancer, this kid. And the sexual connotations thereof. Not your refined Ivy League type, not your beefy FBI type, but of a kind generally unmentioned in the literature — the D.C. type, the GWU type, the type whose father or uncle or mother is in government service. It is as natural to a D.C. kid as coal mining is to a kid in Marshall County West Virginia. But behold, such zigzag routes!

- His dad, Emmet his Mom Una calls him, his dad gets his law degree in Iowa, where he no doubt met Una. He does some post-grad work in Michigan. He gets the call to go to Washington D.C., where he gets a position at Treasury. Or is it Labor? The couple get a house, Emmet calls it their “villa”, out on the Northeast edge of the District. Where the streetcar tracks, newly laid down, promise to solve the problem of getting downtown. Una has her Daughters of the American Revolution projects, her church projects. Emmet makes small investments on the side.

- In 1952, M.A. has moved from the sketchy Project Bluebird (was it all about torturing informers, double agents, communists for what info load they could lay down?) to Project Artichoke. What was Artichoke? Department heads were asking. Some wanted a piece of the pie, some were disturbed by what they heard from their people in the field. A Doctor, no less, was sent in by Technical Services — Ray Treichler’s domain — to assess Artichoke. The assessment that came back was scathing. “[redacted], the present team chief, is an investigator of twenty years experience with Civil Service. He has been thoroughly trained in the use and limitation of the polygraph, received four days of instruction from a professional non-M.D. hypnotist in New York City, and has read extensively in the overt material on hypnosis. He has had no scientific background other than that that dealt directly with his work in criminology. He has had extensive contact with the communists in this country and knows their methods. It is not known whether he has a college degree.

“He is not an unusually intelligent man but has a vivid imagination that would be most valuable in the pursuit of this project. He has on several occasions created antagonism in his co-workers because of tactless management. He tends to be cautious and cons3ervative. His long government service has soundly grounded him in the ramifications of intra-Agency politics.” I read this assessment with a pang for M.A. “It is not known whether he has a college degree.” The old farts, retired, often complained of the kind of Ivy League snobbery they bore the brunt of. An image of the multi-lingual, dashing espionage agent, for public consumption. M.A. is not even dashing — cautious and conservative. A Joe Friday. A Dragnet cop.

“He has apparently become a rather able hypnotist, but is hampered in his efforts by his lack of confidence which it is felt stems from his scientific void.”

“It is suggested that the Medical Office with the support of I&SO recommend [sic] that a high-level control of the project be set-up, to consist of civilians with no service affiliation, who are scientifically well-qualified, and who would be full time, to coordinate, evaluate and direct the ARTICHOKE PROJECT.”

- His star routine as an Indian dancer, performed in the Hoffman-Hoskins Kiddies Revue in Washington D.C. at the age of 13. Performed in New York City, where he won a prize for his age class. At that time, Gertrude Hoffmann herself called him “one of the most clever juvenile dancers in America.” But our childhood is an elaborate cut-out, no? It passes, interest wanes, a few pictures (b & w) are put in the album, which falls from the hands of M.A.’s mother, Una, sitting in her cane chair on 131 R street in 1934, dying. “I don’t feel well, Emmet”, she says. But Emmet is always out. He’s got his fingers, or his clumsy hands, in pies. Developing land in the suburbs. Retired from the stats department under Hoover. Her boy at the time was dating that girl named Dotty, whose family seemed nice — but could they trace their heritage back to one of Iowa’s premier pioneers? Back to the Revolution? A DAR girl. Marry a DAR girl, Emmet would say to their son, at the dinner table, big jovial wink. Una dies, and M.A. marries, a year later, in Baltimore.

• Dot: her childhood house on T. Street. Did she meet M.A. when he was fourteen, struggling with pimples and sexual urges, at the streetcar stop, the Eckington Station. Getting off at 13th street, still a little afraid entering the world of Central High. Or was it later?

3.

- Dotty, her family, the G.’s, was there a brother, maybe a best friend from the Interfraternity council at George Washington University? A rowhouse, 28 T street, her own room, her parents wondering about house values, what with the coloreds buying property around them. M.A. was president of the Interfraternity council then. He’d gone to the college right after getting out of his stint as a cadet in the Navy. He didn’t like the navy particularly. The big night: the Interfraternity prom at the Willard Hotel. Dot and he, leading the prom parade. The saxophone led Red Nichols orchestra, whose sounds were available nationwide on WMAL, providing the music that made this night of all nights so special. M.A. proposed that night, March 1, 1935. Dot worried a bit though — what did M.A. propose to do with his life? Journalism? Or civil service work? And then the wedding, and the job in Civil Service, without the degree. Did he finish up with night classes, after being so gloriously one of the big men on campus?

- Una worried that after all that childhood attention, M.A. was a bit aimless. Where was her son going? He certainly seemed to go on and on the last time she saw him about socialism. Didn’t approve at all of the President. She, personally, liked to listen to those fireside chats.

- Emmet died in his room at the Bellevue Hotel. Same hotel that the famous Soviet defector, General Krivitsky, committed “suicide” in ten years before. D.C. is a small town. “I had seen Walter Krivitsky in New York a few nights before he died. We had spent hours together, tramping the streets, taking circuitous routes and watching, as in the old underground days, to see if were followed. I saw no sign of trackers.” — Whittacker Chambers, Witness.

- “A sudden alertness on the part of the performer causes wariness on the part of the

spectator. The opposite of an alert appearance is a stupid one. Assuming a mildly stupid appearance during a trick will give the appearance of disinterest.”

3.

- In the post Watergate, post Vietnam War atmosphere of paranoia and narcissism, the revelations about the CIA, filtered through the shredding of materials and the redaction of names, created a mythology — or, rather, put into literal terms a feeling that had been there all along. Everybody knew that the bombs were ready. Everybody knew that the missiles were poised. Everybody knew that there were huge systematic changes that seemed, somehow, managed — the highway system, the decay of urban areas, the pollution, the tv, the assassinations, the huge outlay for the military, the wars, the rhetoric, the kids, the outsiders, the crime. The water was fluoridated, the tomatoes were rubbery, the dollar was worth 50 cents. The revelation that the U.S. was rather like that movie, Gaslight, that Hitchcock flick where Ingrid Bergman was driven mad by her smarmy husband wiring up flickering lights (a sure sign of subliminal manipulation): the husband played by the CIA, Ingrid by Lady Liberty — made the storyline fall into a familiar place. The innocent seduced, or manipulated. The villain oozing away in the corners. Such is the social cost of the out of control intelligence agency, the out of control war machine, the total war mentality that grew out of the two World Wars. A social cost that shadowed the country of second chances and shadows it now.

• ““He was unquestionably a patriot, a man of great ingenuity.” John Marks on Sydney Gottlieb, head of MKULTRA. “It is impossible in the present day climate of attitude towards intelligence activities to realize what it was like in the 1950s. It seemed as though Russia was a very potential enemy and as though the United States was very wise to get whatever information it could about the things the Russians might try to do, such as brainwashing or influencing people.” — Carl Rogers.

- The United States. The CIA. Top secret programs. Kept from the civilian population of the United States. A population that might go soft on communism. “… the nation must take it on faith that we too are honourable men devoted to her service.” — Richard Helms, Director of the CIA, 1971. “Few of the MKULTRA records still exist. Then CIA Director Richard Helms, who as a deputy 20 years earlier initiated the MKULTRA project, ordered records of it destroyed before his retirement in 1973.”

- It was another movie — The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — which became the go to reference at this time, in the 1970s, of looking back with horror — a horror that made the redactions all the more interesting. The Korean war, the hypnotically intoned speeches, Frank Sinatra (a working man star, a rat pack player), Janet Leigh, Washington D.C. senators (white haired), murder. The movie walked off the screen and into our national security institutions — or so we found out from Senators who were more fashionably coiffed, more groovy, less rat pack, more soft rock. M.A., in the new narrative, was the faceless man who propelled the plot, at least at the beginning. He was portrayed in a book, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, written by John D. Marks. Mark’s second CIA book: the first, cowritten with Victor Marchetti, a former assistant to the Deputy Director of the agency, entitled The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. The latter appeared in 1974 -the same year in which “parents” formed an organization to “fight religious cults’ hold on the young” — the same year gurus moved into consulting for managers on Wall Street. The spy, by an association that was both novel and, once made, inevitable, was linked to the religious cult leader.

- Is it a coincidence that Course in Miracles, one of the founding New Age books, was co-written by William Thetford, a psychologist consultant for the CIA? What does “coincidence” mean, here? A chance meeting of agency and cult? And how to trace a system that is structured so as to remain invisible than by taking up coincidences and shaking them? What kind of methodology do you suggest?

- Two ends of the sixties — James Bond and Guru Maharaji — met. Cult became one of the heavy words. In the same year — God’s own 1974 — the attorney general of New York subpoenaed the records of the Children of God and Clark Clifford, the SecDef who had helped draft legislation setting up the CIA in 1947 urged Congress to open an investigation of the CIA.

4.

• “Your majesty, there is one little matter they all forget. If I can cure, I can also… afflict!” Orson Welles as Cagliostro in: Black Magic, 1949.

- “I was afraid correspondence might possibly get out of hand and into the hands of un-authorized persons or persons that were not intended for them, and maybe that was a right guess, one went to the Sun by misdirection.” — James McCord, testimony before the Watergate Committee

- Speculation: that he sat in the dark all during the first week in October, 1949. He was back in D.C. instead of New York, which is a city in which he always felt uncomfortable. Big, noisy, bullying. He’d mapped the city with his index cards from the Naval intelligence year — names of subscribers to the Daily Worker. Which he carried with him. A network, a graph he would use to track communist subversion as it worked its way across the country, under the skin of the country. America, with this subcutaneous disease. His apartment, the “third-floor walk-up on East 55th Street” — bills paid by some funny name cutout. He’d go up there, he’d leave a note for Dot on the table of their apartment on 3051 Idaho, the Cathedral Heights section. Dot was advancing up the secretarial ranks down at the Commission. They rented out the R Street place. Dad was sometimes not all there now. They’d had to find a place for him. Now he, M.A., was back in his own town. Incredible, once you think of it, that a mere ten, twelve years ago he was still living the frat life. Sometimes goes by the old Sigma Nu house on R street, a mile from his own old childhood nest. A lot of changes, the streets looked somehow less bright. He saw how it would be: him returning to their apartment after midnight. She, asleep in the dark, you couldn’t wake her. Always a heavy sleeper. He’d bunk on the couch. They’d have eggs, toast, coffee, she’d catch him up on the gossip current at the Commissioner’s office, to which he always lent an ear. Gossip is an important part of hunting subversion. He had time for the show, then. The Trans-lux was a favorite theatre. He and Dot had been in the crowd when it opened in 1937. A winter’s day, the wind coming off the Potomac in the familiar blasts that brought the blood into your cheeks, the kind of weather that, as a kid, heralded fierce snowball fights. It would knife through your coat, although kids don’t mind the cold. The kids on his street didn’t like the fact that he’d been photo-ed in a costume in their parent’s paper. A dancer. A boy who was a dancer. A boy among the girls who was a dancer. The deduction from the little dispshits — the Montgomery brothers, the Paddy O’Haras — was obvious. But he’d had his own gang, and if they put rocks in the snowballs, his gang did too. Tit for tat, busted lip for busted lip. He was no sissy, why he became a cadet, did his Navy turn. Emmet’s idea. Emmet against Una his whole childhood long. He’d sit there in the dark fascinated by the hypnotist on screen. Embarrassed by his reaction when Cagliostro leans over the beautiful Margot Graham and intones, “sleep, sleep like the dead”. One ten p.m. show, way in the back, M.A. unzipped, stroked himself, released. No one saw. Cleaned up with a pocket handkerchief, which he threw in the wastebasket on the way out. He was flushed, but nobody in the crowd heading out into the sparse night traffic of 14th noticed. He’d told Dot he’d be in late.

- “ [Redacted] stated that he first put her into a hypnotic trance and then suggested he was her husband and that she desired sexual intercourse with him.” Later, sexual stimulation was seen, objectively, as an area of research and developmental exploitation. The honey-trap was a primitive, old-fashioned tactic. Combine sexuality of all varieties with narco-hypnosis, test it on the unwitting.

- Even though Cagliostro was Orson Welles, a communist sympathizer, M.A. had it on good authority he was palling around with Togliatti, the Communist leader in Italy, as the film was being shot, it was a significant cinematic achievement. You gotta hand it to him. After Artichoke got up on its feet, he got the Company to acquire a copy of Black Magic, and would show it to aides, secretaries, visiting scientists. Set it up in Building 13, Room 20, same as where they did the suggestibility research. A dramatization of what might be achieved in the field of behavioral control. Ignore the costumes, concentrate on the technique of suggestion. Could this be done operationally, out in the field, out in the prisons? They found, in the MKULTRA boxes, film strips. Hypnosis, longeurs, names. All rigorously noted on cards found with the film strips.

- The ritual: being sworn in by Robert L. Bannerman at 6 pm on March 11, 1947. In the wake of being accused by Samuel Klaus — tasked with the mission to vet the vetting of State — of being “too ignorant” to hold down the security evaluations post (or was M.A. really under the indictment of Klaus’s slander? The soft shoe boys were always acting like he was a dumb FBI bunny — like his GWU diploma wasn’t good enough. And, and … though never holding a degree in psychiatry, had he not so studied the books on the discipline, as well as the pertinent material on Marxist-Leninism and the worldwide Communist threat, that he was, for all practical purposes, as well educated a goon squad leader as you could find?). Klaus and the others at the State Department had gone soft in the New Deal days, taken the alliance with Uncle Joe too seriously.

- Robert L. Bannerman was the son of Robert C., a big big name at State. Robert C. had modernized the diplomatic security office, for which he received recognition in the newspapers. The Washington Post called him a “mystery man.” This, as M.A. knew, was both good and bad for Robert L. The good was obvious — the goodwill and clout that came with his last name. The bad was the fact that as Bannerman investigated Alger Hiss, and in general what went on in State during Roosevelt’s time, he was, however implicitly, making his Dad seem bad. M.A. admired Robert L.’s courage, his brass balls. M.A. had learned in Navy Intelligence how to create a system with security index cards, linking one name to another, revealing a spider web. You read the Communist literature, you developed informants. ”The filing boxes were about this big [indicating] and there were 3 by 5 cards in there. My estimate would be about 5,000 cards. As I recall these card cabinets, I think there were 4 large drawers and 5 of these cabinets went into these drawers.” It was in this way M.A. had fingered Carl Marzani, an OSS guy who was transferred to State. A real Red, a real rabble rouser, made propaganda films aimed at workers. “I questioned Bannerman more closely. Who had prepared the report? He said M.A., his assistant. I pointed out that A. certainly could not testify to the charges of his personal knowledge — which Bannerman admitted. I then asked Bannerman where he himself had gone below the surface of any of the confidential reports from the investigative agencies — had talked to any “flesh and blood” wintnesses…” Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments — Hearing before the subcommittee to investigate the administration of the internal security act and other internal security laws Vol. 1

- And of course in the New Dealer atmosphere, it was hard to come out against Acheson’s buddies. When Robert L. decided to go to the CIA, M.A. saw that he would be isolated if he stayed at State, so he went with his boss. Kismet. Where Bannerman was, M.A. would not be far behind. Two D.C. boys. Robert L. married Grace the same year M.A. married Dot. But it is the old story of one advantage leading to another. Bannerman fell into place at the Agency. He bought the house in McLean, he became the president of the country club there. He had two kids. While M.A. and Dot, they didn’t have kids. And Dot worked — secretary to the D.C. Commissioners. People wondered why M. couldn’t keep his wife with his own salary. No kids, and she worked. Was he a gambler, a drinker? In the backoffice, in some department, they were keeping tabs. He was keeping tabs as well. You have to protect yourself. He was not impressed with the brains he met, in the project he did. “Frankly, I now distrust much of what is written by academic experts on hypnotism. Partly this is because many of them appear to have generalized from a very few cases; partly because much of their cautious pessimism is contradicted by Agency experimenters; but more particularly because I personally have witnessed behavior responses which respected experts have said are impossible to obtain.” Cagliostro was disbelieved. Mesmer’s claims were investigated by a Royal board of experts that included Benjamin Franklin, which held that animal magnetism was so much bunk. Yet, trances kept happening. Any circus showman could tell you.

5.

- „His ethics might be such that he might not care to cooperate in certain more revolutionary phases of our project.” — From “Some of the problems involved in the procurement of a consultant or full time psychiatrist are as follows”, Office Memorandum , April 5, 1950.

- Originally, he’d been against using Mulholland as a consultant because of the magician’s arrangement with two women. Polyamory, Mulholland called it. Fucking around, M.A. called it. A security risk at the very least. A stagy presence, and M.A. was familiar with that kind of act. I’m willing to overlook the moral thing, Sid, he said, when they had the office conference about it. Hell, I’m no boyscout. But fucking around like that leaves us vulnerable. Still, when the decision was made, M.A. fell into line. He was willing to give a little on the personnel issue to push the hypnosis issue. M.A. knew the stage, knew that your actor type, your theatre type, lived on a different hormonal edge. He had taken a hypnosis course with a stage hypnotist, less flamboyant than Mullholland, but still a pervert. An unsavory character. At home, with Dot, he put these thoughts away, but sometimes he wondered if he himself were a pervert. Did he have pervert possibilities? Could they be used against him? Against the country? Mulholland proved his worth, anyway. He’d hadn’t just taken the Company’s money and produced shit. Like some of the academics.

- “Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.?”

- M.A. had to wade into all kinds of distasteful matters. It was a far piece from being the president of the Interfraternity Council, he could safely say. There were things he couldn’t tell Dot. She asked him about his trip to Germany and he told her about German foods, or the look of bombed buildings. He wasn’t going to tell her about going down the steps to the cells where they held the disposables, about the electric shock, the administration of sodium pentothal, heroin, about the screams (mostly, it is true, due to heavy action on the part of the guards), about the way they’d wet themselves, soil themselves when the current was flowing. Beefy vets, ratty Soviet agents. And what was the gain? Had to admit that the gain was not what he hoped. Yes, in Room 20 in Building 13 — and in his own apartment, which he’d have Dot leave to visit Marge so he’d have the space for the evening — he’d put women from the office pool in trances. They were good. The induction times got shorter, the post-hyp sug. more predictable. The time he’d gotten them to all fall asleep in his car and had driven them to the apartment and had them wake up in his bedroom. The time he had the unloaded pistol out there, a prop in his play, and one of his tranced ladies had shot another of them, due to suggestion. But he knew well enough that they knew well enough that he was making a movie of the experiment, and in addition the sit-downs, where he explained the whole bit, the theory. He’d go on in a voice that was a bit too teacherly. He’d break up the sessions with his store of jokes. But he wanted them to understand the seriousness. This was all about moving into the unknown terrain of the unwitting, which, paradoxically, was impossible with the arrangement he had with the girls. But that just made him more determined to find the right combination of interrogation techniques, optimally expanding to an offensive modality. It was a war of brains, Dulles said. M.A. was getting through, he knew, on the highest level. But he worried that the promises of the method — the Bluebird method, the Artichoke method — were not panning out. On the Soviet side, he suspected unimaginable breakthroughs. They didn’t value humans there like we did; hence, they had many more disposables at hand.

• “Can we “alter” a person’s Personality? How long will it hold?”
• “Parrotlike the individuals so conditioned can merely repeat thoughts which have been implanted in their minds by suggestion from outside. In effect, the brain under these circumstances becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.”

6,

- “Every effort should be made never to identify members of the Artichoke team by their true names in the presence of or in the hearing of the subject. Artichoke team members will use fictitious names in carrying out the Artichoke techniques….” “[redacted] stated that he had constantly used hypnotism as a means of inducing young girls to engage in sexual intercourse with him.” “I will take a number of men and will establish in them through the use of hypnotism the condition of split personality. Consciously they will be ardent Communists, phanatical adherence to the party line, ready and eager to submit to any discipline which the party may prescribe. Unconsciously they will be loyal Americans, just as grimely determined to thwart the Communists at every turn of the road.” — The Military Application of Hypntsm, June 22, 1954 Document AB 5 90/50 Cia Artichoke document release, April, 2018.

- From the time he was a child dancer M.A. was all about the team rather than his own ego. There were plenty of unsound associates of the Company that went around bragging. Alcoholics, the bravo boys of the OSS. George White, the Company man in the Narc squad, for instance. Set up a safe house-cum brothel, first in New York, then San Francisco. Mostly by then Syd’s territory. The stories drift back about prostitutes, George White sitting on a toilet drinking martinis, observing coitus through a two way mirror. Distasteful stories. Not anymore distasteful than the Soviet concentration camps, however. And it turns out he wrote it all down in his diary. Fucking characteristic. That his wife donates to some university library after he dies! M.A. always knew that Syd tolerated the screwballs too much, played too largely, was careless of showing his cards.

- The Agency had its informants and informants that informed on informants. M.A.’s polygraph associates in civilian life often got involved peripherally in Company business, and would leak classified stuff in, say, some cocktail bar in Omaha, bragging to the ladies. Later, some informant — there were informants in police agencies, in universities, in prison systems, in newspaper offices, they wrote him letters, they wrote anonymous and badly spelled denunciations that were carefully filed by the secretaries in the OSR office — would spill. M.A., after the Artichoke days, began to drift away himself from behavioral control. There wasn’t any advance in it for him. Polygraphs and searches in security files for years in the sixties. Narrowly missed the Oswald file. McCord probably saw it. Jim worked in M.A.’s office. Along with Bruce Solie, who finally wound up the Nosenko case. M.A.’s office was way more than polygraph science, which he knew the company shrinks looked down upon. M.A. developed a side expertise in the field he was most comfortable in — sniffing out subversives — as his way of helping in the struggle. In the sixties, it was the longhairs and the Negros. Developed an excellent source who was close to King and to Harry Belafonte. M.A. was sure Belafonte was Peking controlled. His informant speculated that King had to be got out of the way. Assassination or perhaps the administration of a drug? „… we intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible non-toxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predict for each individual. This material could potential aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control…”

- His office life — his agent life — appeared in memos and reports that were not cleared for the public record until the mid seventies. The M.A. in John Mark’s book makes a large impression, even though there is, in actuality, few pages that are devoted to him, and a mere paragraph or two of biographical information. Impatient, suspicious — those were two words M.A. underlined (perhaps) in his copy. Until the publication of that, M.A. was curiously undisturbed, uninterviewed. Sitting there in the Connecticut Avenue apartment, consulting, dabbling. When the Committees convened (the Ervin committee on Watergate, 1973, the Pike Committee, 1975, the Church committee, 1975, the Rockefeller Committee, 1975, the House Select Committee on the Assassination, 1976, the Select Committee on Intelligence, 1977), he was never called to testify. The late seventies, the early eighties, the era of resistance against the spies, the era of student protests against the CIA on campus, the waning of the counterculture, the beginning of the great return to what made the Country great, the latter being marked by the election of Ronald Reagan, the secret war against the Sandinistas, and, most particularly, the Intelligence Identities Protection act of 1982. The Clash sang: “working for the clampdown”. Who wasn’t? The Talking Heads sang: Get in line.

- When did M.A. retire? Richard Helms decided to shake up the upper directorate at the CIA in 1970 by mandating retirement at the age of sixty for certain departments. In the Office of Security Bannerman retired in 1970; Jim McCord, the same year; Paul Gaynor, M.A.’s direct boss, and Howard Osborn, Director of the Office of Security, retired in 1973. It must have been between 1968 and 1973 at the latest. There was a curious lag in his life. Most of his associates were five to ten years younger than him. Helms was three years younger. Syd Gottlieb was eight years younger. Gottlieb’s superior in the early fifties, Col. J. Trapper Drum, was five years younger than M.A. Paul Gaynor, his superior under Bannerman, was three years younger. Jim McCord, ten years younger. George White, though, was a little bit older than he was. Marguerite D. Stevens, the OS officer who handled the Oswald file, was about his age. The generational gap is deeply interesting — or perhaps it is unimportant. His age would make M.A. a prime candidate for retirement in 1969 or 1970, when the drive was on to “clear out the deadwood.” But we have no record.

- Did he practice on Dot? Getting her to forget, say, “No.” One of the girls, he put her under the suggestion that she forget the number five, and she did. If you can forget five, how much more interesting, no. That word upon which a whole world of ethics is built up. Will you do this for me, Dot? Will you do that? And her puzzled about saying yes. The sexual aspect of it.

• Setting up the camera, the drinks, the girls from the office pool, a student sent over by one of the doctors, or a man from Fort Detrick. The hypnotism routine. What was put in the drinks.

- The vocabulary being made up as the subprojects gained momentum. The interrogates. The lysergized subject. Utilizing aliens as subjects. Good amnesia.

7.

• M.A.’s second life drifted like an ectoplasmic fancy in the underculture, among deep government freaks, investigators tenured or not at marginal colleges, and the whole popular culture of conspiracy, running into the walls of induced and voluntary amnesia, broadcasting on frequencies that reach out to the vast indifferent majority who remember this time as ordinary life, high school, or mid-career, the mortgage and the sexual revolution, the cars and the oil embargo, and not to those who see it in terms of fogs and half-disclosures, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (that wondrous plural), the Church Committee, the lawsuit by Marchetti and Marks over the censoring of their book, The Cia and the Cult of Intelligence. The ones who’ve seen The Parallax View way too often. Those who have the secret libraries of documents, downloaded from the Net.

- I imagine him, those last days, fishing and reading his favorite book: Witness. Him reading in the sun room. An autographed copy. “For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the difference between themselves and those against whom it was made.” M.A. had underlined that long ago, that long ago in which the struggle mattered. He tried to get interested in golf, but there was no drama in it.

- “Hollywood movie-makers are about to latch on to the latest in psychological camera trickery- subliminal projection. The technique for communicating hidden information to an audience is to be tried out, apparently for the first time, in a feature-length motion picture.” — NYT, January 14, 1958: SUBLIMINAL FILM PLANNED BY ROACH: New Projection Technique to Be Tried in Experiment — Doris Day to Star.

- Did Dot get mugged on the street? D.C., M.A.’s D.C., a town where you knew the milkman, the grocer. When he was a kid, going with a nickel to the Piggly Wiggly on R. Street. What you could buy before inflation eroded the currency. Sometimes he drives down the old street, but it isn’t the same. His childhood house is gone, now.

- Oddly, the Post never prints his obituary. Instead, they print Dot’s. “Secretary. Dorothy G. A., 82, former secretary to the D.C. Commission, died Jan. 2 at her home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. She had emphysema and cancer. Mrs. A. was born in Washington. She graduated from Immaculate Conception High School and attended Strayer Business College, then worked 35 years for the D.C. Commissioners before retiring as head secretary in 1966. She moved to Florida about five years ago. Her husband, M.A., died in 1991. There are no immediate survivors.”