Omens

Chapter Fifty-five

Dr. Will Evans had indeed worked for the CIA. It wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t on his résumé, either. Gabriel said that wasn’t unusual. While his position didn’t seem to have been classified, the CIA didn’t exactly publish its employee lists.

At first, Gabriel wasn’t able to get much more than confirmation that his name appeared on old records. Evans had been young, just out of grad school, and he’d worked on various projects as a psychologist.

“What did the CIA use psychologists for in the sixties?” I asked. “Things like post-traumatic stress? Or was the party line still ‘suck it up and deal’?”

Gabriel didn’t answer, just typed in a few search terms. When the results came in, he frowned. He clicked on one. Skimmed it. Frowned deeper.

The angle of his laptop was off just enough that I could see the screen, but couldn’t read much.

“Got something?” I said.

“Mind control.”

“What?”

He turned the laptop my way. “They did use psychologists and psychiatrists for therapy, but during the Cold War, they employed more of them for experimentation. Drugs, behavior modification, and mind control.”

I read the article. “The Manchurian Candidate? Seriously?”

His frown grew.

“Not a movie buff?” I typed search terms into another browser window. “Huh, it was a book, too. From the fifties. The movie and the book were about a Korean War vet who was brainwashed into becoming the perfect assassin. He’d be ‘activated’ by seeing the queen of diamonds card. He’d kill someone and forget all about it. Complete fiction. I mean, obviously, right? But not according to that.”

I pointed at the other browser window, then scrolled through the Wikipedia entry for The Manchurian Candidate. At the bottom, I found a link for Project MKULTRA. I clicked it. I read it.

Another window. Another search, this time pulling up academic references and the proceedings of a joint Senate Select Intelligence and Human Resources committees hearing from the seventies, exposing and detailing MKULTRA.

“Holy shit,” I muttered. “Could Evans have been involved…?”

Gabriel took the laptop back and typed. Typed some more. Read and frowned. Typed. Read. Turned the laptop toward me.

There is was, on one of the pages he’d accessed through his back door. Just one reference linking Evans and MKULTRA, but it was enough. We backed up from there and spent the next hour researching the project.

MKULTRA was a code name. It didn’t mean anything—it was just an umbrella term for a wide array of CIA mind control projects starting in the fifties.

We got a few bonus history lessons from our research, the kind of thing they don’t cover in class. When the U.S. stepped onto the world stage during WWII, the intelligence community realized its intelligence programs were pathetic compared to those of the British. They set about trying to rectify that.

Most of those early projects were more amusing than frightening. That changed after the war, when the CIA realized the potential of psychology to produce the ideal soldier and assassin, and to provide foolproof methods of extracting information from enemy spies. Thus began a decade of experimentation with drugs—particularly LSD—and extreme psychiatric measures like electroshock therapy, sleep therapy, and sensory deprivation.

We could complain about government interference today, but compared to what I read, we’d come a long way. Shrinks subjecting psych patients to treatments that erased their memories permanently. Agents slipping drugs into drinks at bars, inviting people back to parties and spraying LSD in the air. Nothing said it better than a quote I found from George White, an OSS officer heavily involved in the experiments: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

That was the crazy, fucked-up piece of American history that was MKULTRA. What did it have to do with William Evans? With the murder of his son? There were no obvious answers here. We had to go deeper.

The only lead we found was the name of Evans’s supervisor, Edgar Chandler. He wasn’t just Evans’s boss at the CIA—he’d been his thesis adviser in school, too. So it seemed that Chandler had worked for the CIA then and brought his prize student along.

While Gabriel made coffee, I continued searching and learned that Evans had been in private practice since Peter was born. Did that mean he’d quit the CIA? Or only pretended to?

The deeper we went, the harder the slog. Finally, we hit a story that hammered home exactly how classified MKULTRA had been in its day.

In 1974, as word of MKULTRA was just beginning to leak, a hungry young Chicago journalist caught a whiff of it and saw a career-making break. As she researched the story, doors were slammed in her face. Colleagues advised her to drop it. CIA representatives strongly advised her to drop it. All this only seemed to strengthen her conviction that this story needed to be told. The government was trying to stop her. She would not be stopped.

Except she was. While walking to her car one night, a man approached her in the parking lot. He didn’t say a word, but she later provided a perfect description of him to the police. Not surprising, given that his face was the last thing Anita Mosley ever saw.

Her attacker had thrown acid in her eyes, blinding and scarring her for life.

When speculation arose that the man was connected to the CIA, all the local news outlets received a letter from the attacker, claiming he was simply a patriotic American teaching a lesson to a Commie woman reporter. The police never found him to test that claim.

After that, Anita Mosley disappeared from reporting for a while. She might have been scared off, but from everything I read about her, I doubted that was the case. Maybe a significant other urged her to take some time off. Maybe her employer forced her onto disability leave. All I could tell was that she went quiet until the Senate hearing on MKULTRA, and then she reemerged as an authority. That’s where I found the connection to Evans’s boss, Chandler. She’d mentioned him in an article. Nothing damning, just one name on a list. But it was a start.

“She still lives in Chicago,” I said. “Freelance these days, but there’s nothing here to suggest she’d like to put MKULTRA behind her. She spoke about it last year at Northwestern.”

“She’s still angry,” Gabriel said. “Certainly understandable, given the circumstances, though it does seem a little…”

“Pathetic?” I regretted the word as soon as I said it. Unfair to use against a woman who’d fought so hard and suffered so much. And yet I couldn’t help seeing an element of pathos. She’d fought the CIA and lost. By the time she rebounded, the “secret” was common knowledge and she couldn’t hurt those who’d wronged her. Yet she wouldn’t drop the matter, either, doggedly struggling to keep alive a scandal no one seemed to care about.

Still, it didn’t bother me enough to suggest we leave the poor woman alone. She’d chosen to make this her life’s work. We’d be foolish not to take advantage.

“She’ll see us,” Gabriel said when he hung up.

“Really?”

“Are you surprised?” he said. “I doubt anyone other than academics has asked for her expertise in a very long time. She’s quite eager to impart it. At a price, of course.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred for an hour of her time now, plus an hour of follow-up, if required. Given the usual rate for an expert, it’s a bargain.”

“It’d be more of a bargain if it was free.”

“True. But think of it as a charitable donation to the victim of a tragedy. That should make you feel better.”

“Only if I can get a tax write-off.”

He shook his head and we left.