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John D. Marks (born 1943) [1] is the founder and former president of Search for Common Ground (SFCG), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on international conflict management programming. [2] [ failed verification ] Marks now acts as a senior adviser to SFCG. He is also a former foreign service officer of the U.S. Department of State, and he co-authored the 1974 book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence with Victor Marchetti.
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Marks is a graduate of Phillips Academy and Cornell University. He worked for five years with the State Department, first in Vietnam and then as an analyst and staff assistant to the director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. After leaving the State Department, he became an executive assistant for foreign policy to US Senator Clifford Case (R-NJ), responsible within the senator's office for passage of the Case–Church Amendment, which eventually cut off funding for the Vietnam War. [3] [ failed verification ]
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 John D. Marks delivers remarks at the 1977 Libertarian Party National Convention (July 12–17, 1977), at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in San Francisco |
In 1973, Marks and Victor Marchetti completed writing The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. CIA officials read the manuscript and told the authors that they had to remove 339 passages, nearly a fifth of the book. After long negotiations, the CIA yielded on 171 items, leaving 168 censored passages. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, decided to go ahead and publish the book with blanks for those passages, and with the sections that the CIA had originally cut then restored printed in boldface.
The publication of the book, which became a bestseller, raised concerns about the way the CIA was censoring information. It contributed to investigative reports by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times and the decision by Frank Church to establish the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, in 1975. The report, Foreign and Military Intelligence, was published in 1976.
Documents obtained from the CIA by Marks under Freedom of Information in 1976 showed that, in 1953, the agency considered purchasing ten kilograms of LSD, enough for 100 million doses. The proposed purchase aimed to stop other countries from controlling the supply. The documents showed that the CIA did obtain some quantity of the substance from Sandoz Laboratories, in Switzerland. [4]
Marks delivered a speech on the book at Turning Point 1977, the 1977 Libertarian Party National Convention held July 12–17, at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel, in San Francisco. [5]
Marks' 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, describes a wide range of CIA activities during the Cold War, including unethical drug experiments as part of a mind-control and chemical interrogation research program known as Project MKUltra. [6] The book is based on 16,000 pages of CIA documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and many interviews, including those with retired members of the psychological division of the CIA, and the book describes some of the work of psychologists in this effort, with a whole chapter on the Personality Assessment System.
Marks later became a fellow of Harvard's Institute of Politics and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. In 1982, he founded the nonprofit conflict resolution organization Nuclear Network in Washington, D.C., which was soon renamed Search for Common Ground. [7] He served as its president until 2014. [8] He also founded and headed Common Ground Productions. [9] [ failed verification ] He wrote and produced The Shape of the Future, [10] [ failed verification ] a four-part TV documentary series that was simulcast on Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab satellite TV, and he is executive producer of the television and radio show The Team, [11] [ failed verification ] among others. [12]
John Marks is the recipient of numerous awards. These include:
Brainwashing is the concept that the human mind can be altered or controlled by certain psychological techniques. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subject's ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds, as well as to change their attitudes, values, and beliefs.
The Australian Secret Intelligence Service is the foreign intelligence agency of Australia, tasked with the covert collection of information overseas through personal contacts and other means of human intelligence. It is part of the Australian Intelligence Community and is also responsible for counter-intelligence and liaising with the intelligence agencies of other countries. ASIS was formed in 1952 but its existence remained secret within much of the government until 1972. ASIS is comparable to the American CIA and the British MI6.
Project MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals without the subjects' consent, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
Richard McGarrah Helms was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, yielding to James R. Schlesinger in early 1973.
Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was an American intelligence officer and author. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), particularly in the United States involvement in regime change in Latin America including the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration "plumbers", a team of operatives charged with identifying government sources of national security information "leaks" to outside parties. Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration. In the ensuing Watergate scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison. After release, Hunt lived in Mexico and then Florida until his death.
Sidney Gottlieb was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra.
James Jesus Angleton was an American intelligence operative who served as chief of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1954 to 1975. According to Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, Angleton was "recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world".
John R. Stockwell is a former CIA officer who became a critic of United States government policies after serving seven tours of duty over thirteen years. Having managed American involvement in the Angolan Civil War as Chief of the Angola Task Force during its 1975 covert operations, he resigned and wrote In Search of Enemies.
The United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States was ordained by President Gerald Ford in 1975 to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies within the United States. The Presidential Commission was led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, from whom it gained the nickname the Rockefeller Commission.
The Manchurian Candidate is a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959. It is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy.
Operation Midnight Climax was an operation carried out by the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the mind-control research program that began in the 1950's. It was initially established in 1954 by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston, Massachusetts with the "Federal Narcotics Agent and CIA consultant" George Hunter White under the pseudonym of Morgan Hall. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist who was chief of the Chemical Division of the Office of Technical Service of the CIA. Gottlieb based his plan for Project MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax off of interrogation method research under Project Artichoke. Unlike Project Artichoke, Operation Midnight Climax gave Gottlieb permission to test drugs on unknowing citizens, which made way for the legacy of this operation. Hundreds of federal agents, field operatives, and scientists worked on these programs before they were shut down in the 1960s.
The Battle of Qala-i-Jangi was a six-day military engagement following an uprising of enemy combatants/prisoners-of-war on November 25, 2001. The battle took place between November 25 and December 1, 2001, in northern Afghanistan. It followed the intervention by United States-led coalition forces to overthrow the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which had been harboring al-Qaeda operatives.
The "Family Jewels" is the name of a set of reports detailing illegal, inappropriate and otherwise sensitive activities conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency from 1959 to 1973. William Colby, the CIA director who received the reports, dubbed them the "skeletons in the CIA's closet". Most of the documents were released on June 25, 2007, after more than three decades of secrecy. The non-governmental National Security Archive filed a request for the documents under the Freedom of Information Act fifteen years before their release.
Victor Leo Marchetti Jr. was a special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency who later became a prominent critic of the United States Intelligence Community and the Israel lobby in the United States.
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence is a 1974 controversial non-fiction political book written by Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John D. Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the United States federal government, tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world.
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Radio for Peacebuilding Africa (RFPA) was a program founded in 2003 by the international non-profit organization Search for Common Ground. Working on the assumption that radio is the most accessible form of mass communication in Africa, RFPA trained journalists in peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and acting on commonalities.
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Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, originally released as Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, is a 1985 book by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, in which the authors document the 40-year social history of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), beginning with its synthesis by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in 1938. During the Cold War period of the early 1950s, LSD was tested as an experimental truth drug for interrogation by the United States intelligence and military community. Psychiatrists also used it to treat depression and schizophrenia. Under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, the drug was used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in cooperation with participating "colleges, universities, research foundations, hospitals, clinics, and penal institutions". LSD was tested on "prisoners, mental patients, volunteers, and unsuspecting human subjects".
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