When the CIA Used Magic and Mind Control for Espionage

Until the seventies (pre-Watergate), the CIA enjoyed exceptional freedoms for its operations due to the competition against the powerful KGB. Within the framework of the secret program MK Ultra, these freedoms were exploited for experimentation on humans with LSD, hypnosis, and magic. Generally, these unorthodox tests aimed to somehow interfere with the enemy's or suspect's perception, to gather information or inoculate misleading information.

In this surge of international espionage, the CIA hired illusionist John Mulholland. They likely considered, just as we can easily associate, that magic and espionage are two arts that share a trait: the deception of perception. As professions, they require training in manipulating the public or the enemy. From a Hollywood imagination, we can also imagine they share other techniques, such as concealment devices, disguises, sleight of hand, and a certain seductive charm.

Mulholland was an illusionist, a magician with a wand and rabbit. He was part of the school of illusionists who work with tricks, whose formula involves making the false appear true. By principle, his discipline operates within the limits of the audience's consciousness under a theatrical pact.

Until the seventies, the CIA enjoyed exceptional freedoms for its operations. Within the framework of the secret program MK Ultra, these freedoms were exploited for experimentation on humans with LSD, hypnosis, and magic.

Before being hired by the CIA, Mulholland had a very successful career, with popular shows (he even performed at the White House) and the direction of specialized magic magazines. Among his publications were manuals with tricks, as one would expect from a successful magician, but also a book dedicated to discrediting occultism, spiritualism, and other parapsychologies, which bore the enviable title Beware Familiar Spirits. The magician defended the prestige of his craft by targeting a defined enemy: black magic magicians, sorcerers or witches, considered frauds, charlatans, and liars. An enthusiast of illusion methods, he dissected the tricks of false enchantment artists.

One day, Mulholland announced his retirement and was no longer seen in social circles of magic. His retirement, it is said, was a cover to accept the CIA's proposal to train its agents in the arts of deception, for which he would write manuals with instructions that were useful for both the use and detection of enemy maneuvers. He was considered particularly qualified to unmask the moves of the Soviet enemy.

The area of the CIA where Mulholland made his most significant contributions is counterintelligence, which is the sector tasked with studying the enemy's methods and countering them. By definition, it is first an analytical discipline because it studies organizations, and then an applied one. It is a field where the rules are that one will deceive and be deceived, and information about the rival is a fundamental part.

Mulholland was not just an illusionist. He performed a sort of counterintelligence when he unmasked occultists because he dedicated himself to studying the competitor's methods of deception. As in chess, the player seeks to anticipate the competitor in front of them. As in games, deception is justified.

Counterintelligence

On the last day of 2025, while we were getting ready for New Year's celebrations, President Milei signed a DNU that modified the National Intelligence Law. Several of the changes address the aspect of counterintelligence.

Article 2, before the modification, contained a definition of the term:

the activity carried out with the purpose of preventing intelligence activities of actors that represent threats or risks to the security of the National State.

The modified Article 2 no longer targets intelligence activities as the objective to avoid, but rather:

infiltration actions, leaks of classified information, espionage, attacks against constitutional order, sabotage, influence, interference, or interference by external factors detrimental to the decision-making process of the constituted authorities of the republican system of government, national strategic interests, and/or the population in general.

This lengthy quote from the decree illustrates the degree of expansion of what will be understood as counterintelligence; the terms influence, interference, and intervention suggest a redirection of the SIDE's action towards the murky terrain of detecting discursive threats. As is publicly known, the agency is controlled by political consultant Santiago Caputo, which would suggest an intelligence doctrine more related to communication. What is clear is that this modification profanes the original conception, literally, of counterintelligence, which is to detect and counteract intelligence operations, and not to monitor the “influence” of private communications, journalistic interventions, and other internal flows of information. Even before the news of Russian infiltration in Argentine media or the “scandal” of the “hidden camera” in the Rosada, there has been an official discourse that recurrently invokes the figure of the journalist spy.

Counterintelligence, by definition, allows for wielding the idea of an offensive defense, an oxymoron of paranoid hues, because it leads to activating a state of preventive reaction. When deception can be met with deception, anyone is suspicious and any suspicion can be the basis for activating a counteroffensive. Beneath the word counterintelligence lies the full semantic instrument of the watchful State.

Infomagic and psychic control

In his book Tecgnosis, researcher and journalist Erik Davis maps various circumstances of the 20th century in which spiritual beliefs and premodern superstitions found new forms of relevance among technology users, particularly in the media. One of his invocations is that of the Gnostic tradition, a heretical mystical branch of Christianity that opposed the mission of atonement for sin. Instead, it proposed a salvation provided by the pursuit of knowledge and the accumulation of wisdom, a sort of informational transcendence. In Gnostic mythology, there was also an informational antagonist: the dark figure of the demiurge or archon, the enemy of clarity, who attacks the believer with deceptive images or falsehood. In the tecgnostic update of the 20th century, this creature is the enemy with control over media.

Davis mentions the mid-20th century postulation by mathematician Claude Shannon of an information theory, a model for representing, measuring information, and evaluating communication channels. His idea of communication (simplified here in the formula sender-signal-channel-receiver), along with the early computational theories of the mind, establishes a language linked to a mechanical and calculable communication, which is reproduced in business environments and the humanities. For example, the myth of the creative advertising genius arises, a kind of magician who works on the plasticity of the human mind and its short attention span.

By the 1960s, cognitivism solidified as a paradigm in North American psychology. In its most experimental facet, it tested the non-conscious processing of information in the mind. Subjects were exposed to images with “subliminal” stimuli to prove that they could identify and process them without the participation of consciousness. The conclusion was that the mind performed processes that exceeded the complexity of weak consciousness, expanding and blurring the terms of intelligence and perception. This vein of cognitive exploration would lead to flirting with the idea of the subliminal introduction of ideas into people.

It was a time when, under the guise of a supposed scientific approach to the mind and information, official institutions staged scenes that seem to evoke more of spiritualism than of the laboratory.

The young CIA (founded in 1947) wanted to explore the limits of consciousness and was obsessed with controlling the flaws in human perception, its lapses in attention. The MK Ultra program delved deeply into this quest. It is believed that, through the agency, research was funded for neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, and artists, with the aim of mastering the art of cognitive manipulation. The hiring of the magician occurred within this framework. It was a rather literal interpretation of the idea of learning and training the techniques of perception deception.

The CIA wanted to explore the limits of consciousness and was obsessed with controlling the flaws in human perception, its lapses in attention. The MK Ultra program delved deeply into this quest.

Mulholland was not the first magician spy. The most famous occultist in history, Aleister Crowley, self-styled The Beast 666, had worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service, willing to use his extravagant reputation to infiltrate enemy territories to monitor their actions. Crowley is a distinguished exponent of that magic which Mulholland dedicated himself to unmasking, the school of black magic, based on the alteration of reality. Occultism, unlike illusionism, takes place within homes, where it develops rituals and experiments with the alteration of consciousness. The two traditions correspond to two distinct schools of epistemology. Illusionism makes the false appear true, and involves a theory of knowledge that separates what our senses can provide us from reality as it is. Black magic, with its mystification, directly seeks to transform the perception of its practitioners.

Those sixties obsessions with magic and cognitive experiments came to an end with the Cold War. What a shame.