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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

The more one learns, the more it seems like the CIA spent the whole cold war poorly executing silly stunts,

Imagine what happened that WASN'T documented.

This is totally off-topic but related to your post: The CIA LSD testing was completely off the books. The journalists who uncovered it relied on hundreds of interviews. The CIA simply hired Sidney Gottlieb to do whatever he wanted to with zero oversight because the CIA wanted to achieve mind-control before the Russians. Gottlieb literally bought all of the LSD in the world at one point, and it was given to people such as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and Whitey Bulger.

Absolute frikken insanity:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...

https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-ci...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-ci...

It's not impossible that British efforts along those lines are even worse because we know that they did play with (not quite as "move fast and break things" as the CIA) LSD, but there's no real pressure or habit of properly declassifying material from the depths like this (MI5 do publish a little, SIS do not at all, ever... no matter how hard you ask). What little MKULTRA material exists was preserved almost purely by luck, IIRC.

I also don't even want to imagine what the Soviets got up too - they'd probably laugh at Enhanced Interrogation.

This is quite funny. Testing LSD on British soldiers:

https://youtu.be/ziqpwkhqTRs

Wow indeed. And oh, the irony -- LSD is the ultimate anti-mind-control drug.

I’m sure you’re aware of the concept of “set and setting.” The environment can greatly influence the character and content of a psychedelic experience.

Mind control can be as simple as attaching trauma to a particular ideology, or invoking a spiritual experience with some specific subject matter.

I think it could probably be done although it would be wildly unwieldy and unethical.

Yes, I'm very aware. The CIA was engaging in torture in the name of research.

My quip was based on the fact that under proper set and setting LSD has the ability to "open the mind" beyond the "normal world" and its associated conventions.

Not necessarily. LSD reduces the influence of implicit priors. What gets reintegrated depends on context ("set and setting").

Brainwashing doesn't need drugs for that, and has been far more successful.

Definitely. Just pointing out that LSD is not guaranteed to be a psychologically liberating experience.

Yep. No guarantees. I had a friend that that fried his brain on it.

It's a powerful tool that has been unfairly demonized.

Agreed!

I'm starting to suspect there this is something pretty widespread thought history. I've been reading The Anarchy, which is a history of the East India Company (EIC), and it is full of blunders on all sides.

When the EIC first set out from London on their maiden voyage to India, they we're becalmed (stuck without wind) in the mouth of the Thames for 6 months. Just sat there, maybe 50 miles from home.

During some battle, one of the leaders was so high on opium that he was just dawdling around and got shot in the head.

At one point the EIC captured a fort next to one of their factories, then got so distracted looting that a few hours later the enemy returned, re-captured the fort, then forced the EIC out of their original factory.

The more I talk to people in positions of power (which is not many, but a few) the more I get the impression that everyone is just going the best they can against the randomness of the universe. (Side note - one of the may reasons I find conspiracy theories hard to believe)

Its not just the CIA its almost everyone else at the time. I just finished Rise and Kill first, a book on Mossad's targeted killings ops. Its full of really silly and clumsy stuff. My favorite story from the book is that back in the 60's Mossad tried to do the Manchurian candidate routine with a PLO guy, they hired a hypnotist and gave it a few months. The PLO dude eventually got smart, started playing along, acting as if he got hypnotized and they believed it and let him go with a gun. Once he crossed Israel, he handed his gun to his PLO folks and told them about it. Intel agencies back in the day were more like startups.

The KGB were definitely the shrewder operation (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me). The CIA did some absolutely insane things during the Cold War (and after), but the KGB was in some ways the backbone of the Soviet Union - it doesn't even begin to compare.

The saying "No one does it better" is apt when it comes to things like active measures and the Russians.

> (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me)

It's Career Inertia.

For half a century CIA hired people who had invested massive resources in becoming completely fluent in Russian, well versed in Russian culture, and who had cultivated contacts in Russia. These are the sorts of skills that take a lifetime to develop. All of the most senior staff at the intelligence agencies fall into this category.

This is why the intelligence agencies stick their fingers in their ears and sing "LALALALALALA... I can't hear you" every time Chinese intelligence humiliates them. They're a one-trick pony: anti-Russian operations. That's all they know how to do. They're just trying to get to retirement, no matter what it costs the country.

I had a thought that it could be something worse than that.

In a normal war, you don't start off with your military at full strength before the war. Most of your people are new and drawn from your general population, and it's hard for anyone to predict who it will be. Makes it hard to infiltrate ahead of time.

But if you've been fighting a cold war using a wartime-sized apparatus for decades, in which adversarial powers have been trying to infiltrate your organizations the entire time, what happens if they succeed? Get someone into the clandestine organizations in a position to direct hiring. Then hire their own people. They're career bureaucrats, not political appointees, so once they're in, they're in. These organizations are expected to operate in secret, so there is no oversight.

Hanlon's razor and everything, but I'm not sure that applies in a situation where strong attempts at malice are actually expected. It would explain a lot about their behavior in recent memory.

We have found spies at high levels over the years. But worse still than infiltration is the internally corrosive effects of such a multigenerational secret organization. There is boundless potential for corruption. All the while, the previous existence and acclamation of such a service becomes a justification for it's existence.

A new mythology, social network and way of life are born. Once you can't remember life without it, it becomes life.

Such a status quo robs those of us who were not there to choose it of our opportunity to choose. We are not able to choose a road of peace because we are already on the road of war and our system abbores change.

For any reasonably big operation, there would statistically be a lot more opportunities for the secret to “leak”. So this sort of control over complete departments is highly unlikely.

In order to leak that way, the scope of the compromise would have to be known to the bulk of the conspirators. But only <1% of them could have the complete list of all of their spies, and the other country/countries would be pretty dumb to do otherwise.

The Russians put multiple nuclear reactors in orbit and crashed one on Canada. Many of their nuclear cores are still in storage orbits. Look up RORSAT :)

Just saying the CIA wasn't the only one acting crazy. Of course this was all before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear tech was really viewed as less dangerous than it is now.

UK too.

Bond movies give an impression of British intelligence intelligence that is unwarranted.

Riddled by KGB spies with very little inside Moscow themselves.

British Intelligence was a complete clusterfuck roughly until Peter Wright's generation came of age within the services and were finally able to institute things like Vetting(!!!!!!!!!!).

After that, however, starting slightly dubiously with Polyakov (Possibly a dangle) and highlighted by Gordievsky they were "winning". I don't have a citation on hand, but I believe Gordievsky stated that a set of diplomatic expulsions in the mid 1970s absolutely crippled KGB operations in the UK and the station never really recovered.

I personally just about (70/30) believe that Hollis was ELLI, it's just too good to be true with the lack of offical resolution and correlation with SONYA. If he was really a double agent, then the Russian's would have nearly had the heads of both MI5 and SIS in their control (Philby was in line for the throne).

I am currently writing a hands on (Zachtronics-style even, e.g. build your own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)) dialogue-y game set roughly in this time period set inside MI5, I hope to be able to capture how crap they were.

The complete failure of British Intelligence to predict the fall of the USSR shows they might have gotten better at counter espionage, but still failed at their primary job.

The tricky bit isn’t collecting intelligence, the tricky bit is being able to turn raw data into something worth all the effort of collecting it.

True, but economics predicting 2*n of the last n crashes and Noam Chomsky predicting 17 of the last 0 revolutions indicates that it's an impossibly difficult problem than mere incompetence.

SIS do not publish their archival material so we'll probably never know exactly which side of that argument they deserve to be placed.

Predicting the timing of a crash is basically impossible, but predicting instability is more straightforward. To use a recent example the US stock market basically ignored COVID until mid February, but in January people where talking about an economic risks of a possible pandemic and the signs just kept getting worse.

Lecarre's works give a better portrayal of British Intelligence than James Bond.

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