Was Houdini a Spy? (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Was Houdini a Spy? (2021)

cia.gov

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Maskelyne

A bit of flim-flam but I would argue he was better placed for his skills. Not an escapologist but in the room next door on stage doing misdirection.

His war record is a bit mixed. I think he may have been a human version of "carrots help night vision"

Good 3 part podcast on Houdini: https://timharford.com/2025/03/cautionary-tales-houdini-magi...

I just finished this too! It really brought back my childhood fascination with the man.

Here's a copy of The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception mentioned in the article. It's 179 pages and sounds interesting [1].

[1] https://archive.org/details/cia-manual-trickery-deception-20...

> Similarly, magician and paranormal debunker James Randi commented, “If Houdini had been a spy that would have gotten out. He never would have been able to sit on it.”

If Josephine Baker was a spy, why not Houdini?

She was in a war in a way Houdini was not so their circumstances were rather different.

Houdini died on Halloween right after performing at the Garick theatre in Detroit. As a result he is remembered on each Halloween. When I was a kid there would be magic shows on that day.

He has a cool museum in Appleton too

> In the 1950s, as part of the MKULTRA project, the Agency hired magician John Mulholland to teach young officers techniques of deception suitable for the field, such as smuggling assets out of East Germany during the Cold War in vehicles that resembled the magic boxes used in stage illusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra says:

> Project MKUltra[a] was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1] The term MKUltra is a CIA cryptonym: "MK" is an arbitrary prefix standing for the Office of Technical Service and "Ultra" is an arbitrary word out of a dictionary used to name this project. The program has been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an example of the CIA's abuse of power, with critics highlighting its disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.[2]

I would guess the goal of this fluffy article is to promote positive domestic perceptions of the CIA.

But did they really have to shout out some keyword that's associated with some of the craziest publicly-known things that the CIA did, without acknowledging, oh yeah, some bad stuff happened?

And is now the time to be clouding past lessons learned by the US, about the dangers of insane rogue elements in government, sabotaging our ideals from within?

> the goal of this fluffy article is to promote positive domestic perceptions of the CIA

Or someone is just writing? Not everyone has an agenda.

I intended that as the uncontroversial part of the comment.

The article was a story on cia.gov. Are you suggesting that the CIA does things for no reason?

No, I am saying not everything they do is a targeted information campaign.

If a company featured an analogous story on their corporate Web site, there would probably be a reason, and one of the likely ones is to promote positive perceptions of the company.

Are you playing devil's advocate? Or do you think the meat of the comment is invalid? Or do you want to derail thought and discussion on the topic?

I am not trying to derail. I am just pointing out the fact that you have no convincing evidence to claim what you are stating.

To me it reads as, "MKULTRA had elements that were universally recognized as being ethically unsound, so we can't talk about it in a neutral light at all".

I think this is a terrible dichomatic way of thinking that supplants neutral interpretation.

Furthermore, I think an appeal to the reputation of the source of information equates to an ad hominem attack and presents no substantive argument against said information.

I assume that most people who'd heard of MKUltra think it was some combination of insane, horrifying, and unconscionable, and therefore a big negative mark on the history of the CIA.

When the publisher of the article was also the actor in that scandal, I don't think it's ad hominem to wonder whether they're trying to whitewash the term.

Are you saying that MKUltra was actually so much more than the scandalous parts, to the extent that the CIA can just throw the term as innocuous into fluff pieces, as if there weren't overwhelmingly negative associations?

> When the publisher of the article was also the actor in that scandal, I don't think it's ad hominem to wonder whether they're trying to whitewash the term.

No one working at the CIA today was there during MKULTRA, which was founded around the time Eisenhower was elected.

> Are you saying that MKUltra was actually so much more than the scandalous parts, to the extent that the CIA can just throw the term as innocuous into fluff pieces, as if there weren't overwhelmingly negative associations?

Again, I am saying that you don't know or have not presented convincing evidence otherwise, and to me, it sounds like you are just saying speculative shit.

1. It's an organization. The organization is the one with the tarnished reputation.

2. The Wikipedia article is full of scandal. And I have never heard anything about the topic that's not scandal (except for this one very strange reference, which is the original point of this thread). I don't know why you're going to the mat to dispute that. But if you're not done, you'd be better off getting the Wikipedia article updated, because it's like you're derailing critical discussion with textbook sabotage tactics (whether or not that's intentional).

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