New book: The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception
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CIA trickery and deception manual revealed in new book
November 3, 2009
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A CIA manual of surreptitious behavioral and signaling tricks, which
was recently discovered by researchers, has been declassified and
published in a new book. In The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and
Deception, espionage historian H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace,
former director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, have
reproduced the entire manual, which was supposed to have been
destroyed by the Agency. Remarkably, the manual’s main author was John
Mulholland, a professional magician and editor for 23 years of The
Sphinx, America’s authoritative magazine for magicians. In 1953,
Mulholland left the stage and The Sphinx to work full time for the
CIA, which he did for several years. The manual, which was originally
produced in the early 1960s, is an illustrated protocol for
sleight-of-hand techniques for use by CIA operatives in the field. It
includes tricks such as handling several small items at once and
allowing only one of them to end up in a pocket; techniques for
dumping powder into a target’s drink; or putting on convincing
expressions of various kinds. In his forward to the manual, John
McLaughlin, the CIA’s ex-deputy director, makes the point that “[a]s
best we know”, some of the manual’s more lethal protocols “were never
actually used”. What is even more interesting, however, is that the
manual was originally part of MKULTRA, one of the CIA’s most extensive
mental-related experimentation projects.
