The Problem With Congress's Oversight of the CIA

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The CIA wasn't necessarily required to inform all the members on the committee or even other committees about what was going on. So if you had a few agreeable members on the committees, then you could inform them of what was happening and then, you know, nobody in Congress would hold you accountable. There were way other laws implemented to try to get around this. Even if these measures were in place, sometimes they were just ignored. Sometimes there still wasn't much accountability.

In the summer of 1942, Stanley Lovell, a renowned industrial chemist, received a mysterious order to report to an unfamiliar building in Washington, D.C. When he arrived, he was led to a barren room where he waited to meet the man who had summoned him.

Lovell became the head of a secret group of scientists who developed dirty tricks for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Their inventions included bat bombs, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, and camouflaged explosives. Moreover, they forged documents for undercover agents, plotted the assassination of foreign leaders, and performed truth drug experiments on unsuspecting subjects.

Shermer and Lisle discuss: • why countries have spy agencies • from COI to OSS to CIA • Wild Bill Donavan • Stanley Lovell as Professor Moriarty • Vannevar Bush • Division 19 • George Kistiakowsky and the Aunt Jemima explosive weapon • cat bombs, bat bombs, rat bomb, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, camouflaged explosives, A-pills, B-pills, E-pills, L-pills • psychological warfare • heavy water and nuclear weapons • Werner Heisenberg, Moe Berg, and Carl Eifler • biological and chemical warfare • Operation Paperclip • truth drugs • Sidney Gottlieb, LSD, and MKULTRA (Bluebird, Artichoke).

John Lisle is a historian of science and the American intelligence community. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas and has taught courses on U.S. history, cyberspace, and information warfare at the University of Texas, Louisiana Tech University, and Austin Community College. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, Skeptic, The Journal of Intelligence History, and Physics in Perspective. The Dirty Tricks Department is his first book. In Vol. 25, No. 2 of Skeptic he wrote about MKULTRA, the CIA program in search of mind control technology.