The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control

New York: Times Books, 1979. First edition. Good/Very Good. First edition, first printing. Signed by John Marks on the front free endpaper and inscribed to the recipient "To Dan, With best wishes and respect and admiration for your work. JM." xii, [2], 242 pp. Bound in publisher's black paper-covered boards over red spine cloth lettered in gilt. Good with slight bowing to boards, sunning and light dampstaining to spine cloth, and softening at head and tail of spine. Heavy foxing to textblock edges and scattered foxing to prelims. In a Very Good unclipped dust jacket with light soiling, creasing and foxing along upper edge, and scattered foxing along (truncated) foldlines chiefly visible on verso.

A signed first edition of a generally well-regarded expose of CIA mind control experiments, based on 16,000 pages of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. One of the most influential nonfiction works of covert history or parapolitics of the 1970s, covering the death of Frank Olson, Cold War concerns about communist "brainwashing" and how that led US agencies to fund decades of psychological experiments, the testing of LSD and other drugs as truth serums, and the use of The Human Ecology Fund as a cover for intelligence activity. (Inventory #: 140947923)