Author Richard Condon.
About a year ago I began to look into the work of John Marks, author of the famous 1979 book Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. Marks is managed opposition to the CIA, I explain that more fully here, but in a nutshell the agency would never have involuntarily released the sensationalist MK ULTRA documents to anyone not in their employ.
Marks’ coverage of the MK ULTRA material is dismissive and glosses over important abuses, such as the CIA’s interest in 1) manufacturing race riots and 2) election profiling with an eye to manipulating voters. Marks’ propaganda offensive would have had its genesis under director William Colby’s tenure at the CIA, but continued under George Bush Sr. and Stansfield Turner. Everything about Search for the Manchurian Candidate would have been pre-approved by ‘floor seven’ at Langley.
Marks’ CIA sponsorship makes his choice of title very interesting. ‘Manchurian Candidate’ is a reference to a 1959 book by Richard Condon, who was one of Playboy magazine’s favored contributors in the 1980s. (He had one cover feature on the September 1986 issue.) The premise behind Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate is that a Korean War veteran, Raymond Shaw, is surreptitiously brainwashed by uncouth Soviets and effete Chinamen while ‘lost on patrol’ for a few weeks. Raymond then becomes the perfect assassin, whose control is activated by seeing a playing card– the Queen of Diamonds.
Condon was exploiting popular interest in “brainwashing” during the 1950s-60s, when the American public was whipped into a frenzy about the USSR’s psychological warfare capabilities– of course, the public had as much or more to fear from the CIA but that wasn’t generally known at the time. If you’d like to know more about what the Agency was probably doing, please see my post The Banality of Mind Control.
As I’ve written in previous posts, Playboy magazine ran covers preempting many of John Marks’ revelations about the MK ULTRA project, which goes to show that Marks, Colby et alia were ‘outing’ programs which had already been compromised and that Playboy’s editor, A. C. Spectorsky, was plugged into the crowd who were conducting MK ULTRA research for the CIA. Readers will remember that a 1973 IRS investigation into the Bank and Castle Trust of Nassau showed that Playboy banked with other CIA fronts. (The investigation was scuppered on “national security” grounds, see Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin, 1992.)
Richard Condon’s Playboy cover plugging ‘Prizzi’s Family’.
Richard Condon’s connection with the CIA’s Playboy front is one of the more bizarre intelligence stories I’ve come across. Condon’s career was posthumously blighted by a very ugly plagiarism scandal: he had a penchant for lifting work from another Playboy contributor, Robert Graves, who had a total of five Playboy cover appearances between 1959-76, and who was one of the first ever featured Playboy authors.
Robert Graves is notable for his British intelligence connections: he was a close friend of T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”, and wrote the politically sensitive biography of Lawrence in 1927, after having taken a professorship at the University of Cairo. To learn more about British intelligence intrigues in the Middle East during this time, please see my post Kim Philby and Saddam Hussein. Kim Philby’s father, St. John Philby, was basically continuing T.E. Lawrence’s work.
In 2003 Richard Condon was outed for having lifted many, many sections from Graves’ I, Claudius and using them in The Manchurian Candidate without any attribution. This was not Condon’s first infatuation with Graves, throughout Condon’s career he showed a preoccupation with Graves’ work:
On p. 127 of his [Condon’s] first novel, The Oldest Confession, one of the characters in the book purchases a copy of Graves’ Antigua, Penny, Puce! Then, in Some Angry Angel, the book that followed The Manchurian Candidate, Condon makes a direct reference to Graves. In a long, convoluted passage on page 25, Condon reflects on “mistresses” and their, apparently peripheral relationship, at least to the reader, to Graves’s writings about “Major Male” Deities and “Major Female” Deities. As Some Angry Angel was published only a year after The Manchurian Candidate, there is little question about Condon’s familiarity with Graves’ works.
Tellingly, Condon never considered his own work anything more than type-for-hire, in his own words:
He never had any pretensions about his writing. “I have never written for any other reason than to earn a living, ” Condon told People magazine. “I am a pawnbroker of myth.”
I find Condon’s attitude toward his writing interesting because of the obvious favor it found with Colby’s circle. Why might the CIA director have a soft spot for The Manchurian Candidate? Consider this quote from p. 263, describing the hero Marco’s efforts to counteract Raymond’s brainwashing:
However, there was one relentless, inexorable strength on Marco’s side: in combination or singly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Army Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency represented maximum police efficiency. Such efficiency suspends the law of averages and flattens defeat with patience.
I think that quotation neatly sums up Condon’s patronage. Condon’s partisanship doesn’t end there. The Manchurian Candidate is a tour de force of what William Colby’s boy Carl calls “the milk of FDR”, of which his father had drunk copiously. Condon’s book is not about Soviet brainwashing, it’s about the ‘evils’ of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the senator most famous for having gone up against the pro-Soviet ‘fifth column’ which FDR set up in Washington during his record four terms as president– FDR’s ‘fifth column’ included the OSS, which later became the CIA. The majority of Condon’s book is spent in 2-D diatribes against his ‘McCarthy’ character, Sen. Johnny Iselin, and the political master-mind who made Iselin, his dragon-woman wife Eleanor Shaw Iselin.
The ‘twist’ in Condon’s story is that Raymond’s ultimate controller is really his mother, who by building her second husband into a ‘McCarthy’ served the ends of the Soviets against the ‘real America’– the supporters of the ACLU and FDR. I’d like to remind readers of Quinn Norton’s observation about the US ‘intelligence community’:
The question is who gets to be part of the “we” that are being kept allegedly safe by all this exploiting and listening and decrypting and profiling. When they attacked Natanz with Stuxnet and left all the other nuclear facilities vulnerable, we were quietly put on notice that the “we” in question began and ended with the IC itself. That’s the greatest danger.
When the IC or the DOD or the Executive branch are the only true Americans, and the rest of us are subordinate Americans, or worse the non-people that aren’t associated with America, then we can only become lesser people as time goes on.
By ‘IC’ Quinn Norton means ‘intelligence community’. In Condon’s world, the only “true Americans” are those who got behind FDR’s program. Long-time anolen readers will remember that these are the exact same sentiments expressed by OSS director William Donovan’s secretary Julia Child and her creepy husband Paul.
For instance, the only people for whom Condon has more contempt than the Chinese or Russians are Americans who opposed FDR’s policies. He spends most of the book building a straw-woman out of Raymond’s politically astute mother, who was as happy joining “The Daughters of the American Revolution” as “The Friends of Soviet Russia”. Raymond’s step-father, a villain, refers to WWII derogatorily as “Roosevelt’s War”; the only happy time in Raymond’s life comes from a romp with the daughter of a “radical” politician who his mother accuses of being a Soviet spy and who gives copiously to the American Civil Liberties Union. (Readers will remember that the ACLU was set up by ‘concerned citizens’ in response to the Department of Justice’s destruction of Leon Trotsky’s provocateur networks amongst American immigrants.)
It may also interest readers to know that the evil, anti-Communist Iselins were also against President David Dwight Dwight David Eisenhower in Condon’s fictional work– it seems that the people who bankrolled FDR also had a soft spot for Ike. On the opposite side, Condon reserves special contempt for the “religieuse”, “crypto-Republicans” and drunks.
There’s a heavy dose of Cultural Marxism in Condon’s work too: the only American G.I. “healthy” enough to withstand Soviet/Chinese brainwashing is Ben Marco, the womanizer who lives the perfect ‘Playboy Lifestyle‘– and gives a black eye to any woman who doesn’t ‘make nice’. His “healthy” attitude to sex allows him to stay “sane” under the pressures of mind-control, according to Condon.
Condon’s work is the worst type of pulp– pretentious pulp. He’s fond of quoting classical references and he peppers his work with clumsy, contemporary-culture fads. Condon was nothing more than a cheap hack… but a hack who appealed to minds at the CIA. How did Condon get their attention?
Condon was born in NYC and got his first break selling articles to Esquire magazine– he then married a model and became a publicist for Disney Studios, which Condon describes as “pimping”. Sometime in between all of this Condon worked for the US Merchant Marines.
According to Richard Derus at Library Thing:
For 22 years, he [Richard Condon] was a movie publicist, working for almost every major Hollywood studio. With characteristic panache, he later described himself as “a drummer boy for the gnomes and elves of the silver screen.”
I’ll remind readers of the US ‘intelligence community’s’ close ties to Hollywood, which will put the next big event in Condon’s life into context:
Employed by United Artists as an ad writer, he [Condon] complained that he was wasting time in Hollywood and wished to write a novel. Without Condon’s knowledge, his boss deducted amounts from his salary then fired him after a year giving him the amount of money he had deducted in the form of a Mexican bank account and the key to a house overlooking the ocean in Mexico. He told him to go write his book. His second novel, The Manchurian Candidate, featured a dedication to his benefactor. The movie made from it in 1962 made him famous. Prizzi’s Honor (1982) was likewise made into a successful movie.
It seems that the ground-work for Condon’s ridiculously pro-CIA novel, The Manchurian Candidate, was laid for him by the good men at United Artists. Condon’s book was published under the ‘Signet’ imprint by the New American Library which, like so many suspicious media concerns, was founded in NYC just after the establishment of the CIA in 1947. The Manchurian Candidate’s back material advertises a clutch of Signet books by British agent Ian Fleming and Klop Ustinov’s son Peter, who wrote The Loser: “A fierce and funny novel about a fanatical young Nazi soldier who comes to grief when faced with Italian temperament– and a lovely Italian girl.” Readers will remember Klop as the spy-without-a-pension from Great Users of People. Of course, Ian Fleming was all over Playboy between 1959-76, and Peter Ustinov got one cover (for his acting work). The New American Library is now part of Penguin Books USA.
What about Condon’s other famous book? Prizzi’s Honor is a mob novel. Of course the OSS, CIA and the Mafia were/are close working allies— naturally both Prizzi’s Honor and Manchurian Candidate were made into Hollywood movies starring Playboy stalwarts Frank Sinatra and Jack Nicholson.
Sinatra’s 1962 Manchurian Candidate.
Nicholson’s Prizzi’s Honor, a “comic love story” about the murderous business of organized crime.
The Manchurian Candidate was even redone in 2004 with the lead played by a refined Black actor, Denzel Washington.
Denzel plays Ben Marco, just in case you forgot who the good guys are.
I believe that the American ‘intelligence community’ sponsored Richard Condon’s career– it seems that most of this type of sponsorship was done through the CIA and their cultural programs. Condon’s Manchurian Candidate was designed to bolster public faith in the ‘intelligence community’ and counter Soviet technological superiority propaganda. Manchurian Candidate was also useful for pushing CIA mind-control programs into the background behind Soviet ones– that’s why Colby et alia were so eager to use the novel in their MK ULTRA ‘leak’ through John Marks. (You can’t reference Marks’ work without being reminded of the Soviet mind control novel: ‘justification’ by association.)
I’d also like to point out that much of what Sen. McCarthy warned the American public about in the 1950s– wide scale Soviet penetration of US power circles– has been shown to have been accurate by subsequent declassification of KGB records and the VENONA transcripts. McCarthy’s methods can certainly be criticized– though I’ve yet to hear any of his detractors explain how McCarthy should have gone about fighting the Soviet-friendly fifth column in Washington D.C. and Hollywood. The persistence and acceptance of simple-minded political tripe like Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate stands testament to the organization and power of this fifth column. The ACLU– sponsors of Edward Snowden’s public appearances— is not on the side of the people, any more than are the FBI, the CIA, Military Intelligence or fake ‘liberals’ like Richard Condon.
