Customer Reviews

The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception

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During the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employed an American sleight of hand artist, a magician by the name of John Mulholland to provide instruction on illusion and deception as part of the sinister and shadowy MKULTRA program. Two of his texts have survived and been declassified, and are reproduced here, along with a brief history of some of the CIA's spookiest programs.

The history portion; "The Legacy of MKULTRA and the Missing Magic Manuals" will entertain, delight, and provoke conspiracy theorists everywhere. This section touches on operations of the Cold War, formerly classified experimentation, and gadgets from the sublime to ridiculous. It also discusses the long-standing relationship between magicians and intelligence operations going back to WW I. There are some super vignettes about Harry Houdini and his stagecraft in there too.

The first text by Mulholland is mostly about covert (covert; "An operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor.") administration of liquids or pills, and petty theft. The first section, however, is a superb discussion of the mechanics and psychology of sleight of hand, with a special emphasis on dispelling myths.

The second text is about clandestine (clandestine; "An operation sponsored or conducted by governmental departments or agencies in such a way as to assure secrecy or concealment.") signals between operators. Again, this is based on performance magic, like the cues an assistant will give the magician during a mind reading act. Again, worth while reading for aspiring sleight of hand artists.

This book will benefit students of the history of the Cold War, the CIA, and espionage in general, as a novel snapshot of efforts by the US intelligence community between WWII and the fall of the Soviet Union. Folks interested in real-life James Bond tricks and techniques will love this book. Magicians and other practicioners of illusion will find material of interest here from a master of the craft, even though the intent of the effects, the mindset of the audience, and enthusiasm for morally dubious behavior might be pretty icky.

As a historian and amateur illusionist, this was a darkly facinating book.

E. M. Van Court

Stage magician John Mulholland wrote this pair of manuals for the CIA in the early 1950s. All copies were believed to have been destroyed, though stories of the sleight of hand and secret communication documents have carried down through the decades. One copy of each manual were discovered though, and now declassified, appear here in print. It's an interesting book for both the stage magic and the history of CIA spycraft folks. Though the cover makes it clear that they figure the market will be from those interested in the CIA "trickery and deception."

It's not as exciting as a James Bond version would be, unless you can put the movies and fiction aside and feel the thrill of the real deal. These manuals were written to help CIA case officers pass documents to agents without notice, or to hold-out hide small objects. The real nuts and bolts of espionage. Makes sense to go to the magicians who do that sort of thing daily, though with lower consequences of failure.

Anyway, it's an odd glimpse into the CIA's past, before electronics and email intercepts, before senate investigations, and with the looming threat of the Cold War a very real part of the story. I enjoyed it.

In 2007 the authors discovered a long-lost CIA file, once top secret, created by magician John Mulholl while employed as the agency's first magician. The intent was to guide CIA officers on how to use magicians' craft in clandestine operations. That lost file comprises the material in "The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception." Readers get the lowdown on 'flash paper' that burst into flame when touched by a lit cigarette, water-soluble paper, disguises, switching clothes and persons, an agent impersonating a 180-lb. large dog, how the sawing a woman in half trick works, sleight of hand in dropping pills in someone else's drink etc. Nice, but it gets old after awhile, and one doubts how useful the lessons learned were in practice.

Question: Are the tricks and deceptions described by John Mulholland in his CIA manual of magic for spies more James Bondesque or Maxwell Smartish? Answer: Definitely the latter.

Many of the hocus-pocus methods described in this CIA manual require sleight-of-hand. I say "hocus-pocus" lovingly, speaking from my vantage as an amateur magician who enjoys reading books about trickery and deception, always on the lookout for tricks that I can add to a future act.

In this book you will find descriptions of skills that require practice and lots of it. It will take more than a careful reading of this manual to teach a novice, spy or not, how to master deceptive moves that will fool an audience. Magic is a performing art, not a science.

For example, Mulholland devotes 22 pages to the handling of tablets -- poison pills ranging in size from one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter to a pill as large as three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, bigger pills requiring different handling described elsewhere in the manual. Here the CIA agent-in-training will find detailed instructions for concealing, stealing, palming, and surreptitiously dropping a poison pill into an enemy's drink under her nose. Method One, where the tablet is concealed in a matchbook, works with smokers. Method Two, where the tablet is concealed by a piece of paper, works with smokers and non-smokers alike. Both methods require patter, a smooth and plausible line of gab designed to misdirect the victim's attention to something other than your real intentions.

Without the necessary commitment to oft-repeated dry runs, this trick along with many other tricks in this manual are arrant setups for flubs, goofs, and pratfalls in the manner of Maxwell Smart. I will go out on a limb and say that very few people, CIA agents or not, would possess the digital dexterity and showmanship to master the performance skills required by the magic described in this book in the manner of James Bond.

One of the maxims of magic is practice, practice, practice. Master magicians, whether professional or amateur, will spend hundreds of hours practicing to become proficient at a sleight that will take only seconds to perform. Neglect practice and these performance skills will rapidly decline. I cannot imagine a CIA agent, for whom magic is not his first love, practicing these skills day after day and week after week (as a magician would) to be ready for a performance that may never materialize. I repeat -- preparation, patter, and performance are not quickly learned nor long maintained without rehearsal, and lots of it.

Bottom Line: I really like this book. John Mulholland is my all-time favorite writer of magic books. I recommend this book without reservation for magicians, including aspiring magicians, but not for wishful spies.

So what does magic and spycraft have in common? Actually, more than I thought. The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception by H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace take the reader back to the 1950's when the CIA was doing everything possible to counter the Soviet threat to the "American way of life." A program codenamed "Mkultra" included some non-conventional ways to match the Soviets when it came to mind control and covert activities. One of those side projects included the study of how magic techniques could help agents disguise their moves and communications. The CIA called John Mulholland, a very well-known magician of the day, and had him teach agents his ability to create distractions and misdirections. The result of this project was a manual thought to be destroyed in the 1970's. But a couple of preserved copies were later found, and we now have a look into a unique period in espionage history.

The book starts off with the two authors giving some historical background and context to the project and to Mulholland. While the CIA had a vast array of devices and drugs for use in the field, they weren't exact easy to administer and use in a covert fashion. Mulholland then started changing the mindset of agents around things like stage management, misdirection, sleight of hand, disguises, escaping, concealments, and other topics. After the introduction material, the book consists of the actual text of the Mulholland manual, complete with clarified illustrations that were present in the original report.

I found the subject interesting, in that I normally don't connect magic with the type of works a covert agent would employ. But they really are similar in many senses. Misdirection when you're trying to plant a bug or drug someone... Hiding tools on one's person to help with escape... Working with partners to establish a cover that will distract the watcher. It is certainly a worthwhile read for anyone who is interested in how to be more "sneaky" if that's something they need to be able to do on a regular basis. It's not the best read in terms of flow (remember, this *was* a classified CIA report initially), but the content stands out.

Disclosure:
Obtained From: Library
Payment: Borrowed

Really fun! This book casts some light on the funny side of covert operations.
Somehow, I cant imagine James Bond doing a conjuring trick in a bar, but it was so, to enable
agents to palm items and conduct sleight of hand when in the field. The tricks are fun to learn.
Its a very well packaged book, delivered in record time and a useful stocking filler.

There are no startling revelations in this book (either about the CIA's lawless past, or about slight-of-hand), but it's interesting to see how "ordinary citizens" (in this case, magician John Mulholland) bought into the CIA's mindset that all's fair in the Cold War. You have to wonder exactly what kind of pills John Mulholland thought the CIA operatives he was writing for would be introducing into their subject's drinks. Probably not vitamin C. As another review commented, this information is probably available for free somewhere on the internet. I don't regret buying the book, because it's an interesting snapshot of the mindset of a particular time, but it's not a must-own.

How typical of the CIA, during the Cold War years, to leave no stone unturned in the agencies attempts to get the upper hand when dealing with the Ruskies. Like the movie 'The men who stare at goats' everything had to be considered no matter how dotty, especially when the agency budget in the fifties and sixties was unlimited.

I thought Mulholland's part of the book incredibly over written. Why use one word when no one will bother if he used ten. Endless descriptions of hand movements while completing a simple task, like putting something in a pocket, go on and on. Though the explanation of how reasonably complex magic tricks are accomplished I found the text got very tedious.

Mulholland's manuscript had illustrations to back up the words. These have been redrawn by Phil Franke and he does a super job. His work really enlivened the dull text. Incidentally, that is all set in a typewriter font to give it a written report sort of credibility.

Far more interesting was the first part of the book which covers the background to the CIA MK ULTRA program and it goes into it with some detail. Would anyone be surprised to know that the agency manufactured, in 1955, an Escape and Evasion Rectal Suppository packed with nine mini escape tools (pictured on page forty-six) of course not.

This book shows how crazy government officials were during the Cold War to actually give so much funds to some weird magician, thinking that they'd dominate KGB with bunny-in-a-hat tricks. Historically interesting, but no big surprises. Good entertainment.

During the Cold War the U.S. employed a number of novel strategies to combat the numerous threats (both real and perceived) posed by the Soviet Union. The CIA in particular instituted a series of programs under the designation "MKULTRA" to combat the KGB's "brainwashing" program which sought to use psychological and pharmacological methods to alter human behavior. However, despite the success of the CIA's attempts to develop new chemical compounds, including untraceable poisons, "truth serums" and powerful sedatives for use against the KGB, it soon became obvious that all of these resources were functionally useless unless they could actually be covertly administered to targets in the field. To clear this hurdle the CIA simultaneously pursued two different paths. The first was to build new "gadgets" and "spytech" devices to deliver these chemical payloads. The second avenue, and the subject of this book, was to commission the world-famous conjuror John Mulholland to write a manual on the use of sleight of hand to secretly administer pills, powders, and liquids to enemy agents. This volume presents the sleight of hand manual in its entirety, as well as second essay by Mulholland on the application of covert recognition signals. They are preceded by a introductory article briefly discussing the history of the MKULTRA program.

Judging by some of the other reviews here on Amazon, many people had rather romanticized notions of what Mulholland's manuals contained. If you're hoping for directions on how to silently assassinate KBG operatives with ingeniously concealed weapons...you're flat out of luck. The manual instead deals with simple, relatively low-risk methods of sneakily delivering chemical payloads into a subject's food or drink utilizing very basic sleight of hand. It also briefly discusses techniques for the covert theft of small items of interest. It isn't the stuff of big-budget spy movies, but it -is- the stuff of real spies. As long as you understand this going in, then this volume is unlikely to disappoint. It's a fascinating and obscure slice of history, and while reading Mulholland's manuals it's impossible not to imagine what it must have been like for CIA agents operating deep in Soviet territory where a single slip-up meant exposure and death. Sure, a few pages about how to adhere a pill to the back of a matchbook then undetectably drop it into someone's drinking glass may seem rather pedestrian...until you think about the context in which these techniques were meant to be employed. What seems simple on paper must have been well-nigh harrowing when implemented in a field, perhaps in some smoky, dangerous bar in Moscow or Kiev. Mulholland's manuals carry a lot of history with them, and I find it very difficult not to be awed by it.

In short, if you're looking for a discussion of fancy, high-tech, high drama spy craft, look elsewhere. If you're interesting in learning about real-life techniques employed by the CIA while getting a glimpse of a document that, until recently, was thought not to even exist then this book is for you.