The book is out of print, but a “Researchers Edition“ (2nd ed. 1994) is online. Walter Bowart was the first author to argue that the U.S. government conducted covert psychological experiments on unwitting Americans; he did so armed with key documents he had obtained under FOIA.
Bowart coined the name “Cryptocracy” a compound of “crypto”, meaning “secret,” and “cracy,” meaning “rule, government, governing body.”
“The ‘cryptocracy’ then is the secret government whose identity and whereabouts have slowly and reluctantly been hinted at by the Congress through its investigations into Watergate, the CIA, and the rest of the intelligence community. . . The cryptocracy invades the privacy of citizens and corporations. It meddles, often violently, in the internal politics of foreign countries, and has hired, trained, and equipped mind-controlled assassins for the murder of heads of state. . . . The story within the story, I discovered, is an astonishing one of a psychological war waged by the U.S. cryptocracy against the American people.”
This Cryptocracy, he argues, has waged a psychological war against the American people, by invading the privacy of citizens and corporations, and meddling, often violently, in the internal politics of foreign nations using trained mind-controlled assassins for the murder of heads of state. Bowart notes that the CIA is near the top of the pyramid, but it is not alone.
Richard Condon, author of the (fictional) Manchurian Candidate (1959) wrote the forward to Bowart’s book in 1977:
“. . .the American secret police has endowed hundreds of scientist at American universities to unravel methods for fracturing American minds. . .this research in so many great halls of learning has exceeded a cost of untold secret millions of dollars. . .indicates that this Grockian entertainment being produced by our secret police is a matter of ambitious policy rather than the happenchance of cloak-and-dagger adventure.”
“In this book W.H. Bowart has proven each step of this official, terminal, government anarchy even though that appears to be a contradiction in terms. To alter and control human minds is the ultimate anarchy. What is offered by official apologists as a tribute to the deeds of daring-do by romantic spies are acts of hatred and sadism against all people in an insane and degraded determination to extirpate conscience from society.”
“. . . the astonishing information published in this seminal work of investigative reporting, concerning avenues taken to decision and execution by our secret police to fracture or dissolve human minds, then to operate a Yo-Yo, for purposes of counter-intelligence military ‘efficiency,’ and the destruction of democratic institutions, was drawn directly from federal records and from official laboratory archives of the highest educational purpose — as well as from the reviving memories of those who had already undergone the dehumanizing process.”
“The prostitution of the mind by our secret police preceded the murder of the mind. The advanced techniques now available to ‘magnetic and attractive’ political personalities, it was necessary to turn out the laboratories of science as a pimp turns out his heartless whores upon the winter streets; our hallowed educators, army and navy and air force commanders and personnel, the beloved medical profession, august and inspiring temples of the law, our esteemed statesmen, and all Americans living and dead. Each one of those groups is involved in this dismembering of the mind.”
“‘Brainwashing’ per se is no news to any of us. Controlled assassins are not known to us only through fiction. Advertising assaults on behalf of poisonous materials to induce us successfully to buy and consume are early on bastions of mind control.”
“No one — not anyone — needs theologians to answer the question: ‘Where does the soul live?’ We know the soul lives in the mind because the soul is the mind of intent, of hope, of purpose, of achievement by the spirit beyond achievement by physical action.”
“W.H. Bowart’s book is also a freezing vision of the mutations of the aspirations of science. Scientists, educators, and their leaders, The Great Men, Having stumbled upon the possibility of controlling the human mind might well have withheld this knowledge from the secret police and brought it forward for all to share, would you not say? If the means are at hand actually to enter and control the mind — not through the far-off smoke signals of psychiatry and psychoanalysis — can we conceive of what might be found in terms of medical triumphs, the conquest of pain and of group hatreds, and mental energy released by unraveling the Garden knots of mental perplexity. . .
“The question the book puts is this: do you wish this immeasurably important technique to remain as a weapon to be used against you and your children by what Bowart calls the Cryptocracy, or do you wish to use it as a universal key to unlock a thousand new chances that your children will not be murdered in future wars? Today our secret police and our military establishment have demonstrated [ . . .] the powers to create assassins out of our children. The expansion of these powers, which are able to turn young men and women into murderous criminals at will, goes on unchecked by the oft-called ‘investigative’ press, by ‘morals at the bar, in the pulpits, in high government, and on campuses.”
“Zombie is a quaint, old- fashioned folklore word which [. . .] becomes obscene when our children’s minds are being controlled by any one of dozens of federal secret police agencies. The murders of a few hundred humans by a few hundred other humans is commonplace enough but, for the flavor of horror and terror, of endless nightmare rampant upon a landscape of what was once American democracy, consider this expansion of the Brzezinski epigraph which cannot be repeated often enough: ‘In the technetronic society the trend would seem to be toward the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason.’”
Walter Bowart calls attention to the fact that the scientific reports, CIA documents, and histories of CIA’s mind control projects, ignore almost entirely the human factor. “There is no written record of the mental anguish, the torture to the soul that comes from loss of memory and the resulting identity crisis. That mental anguish is the story of mind control.” In his book, Bowart tells the stories told by the “failures” of Operation Mind Control — “failures because the victims remember something; for where mind control is successful there is no memory left.”