Shift: A Novel (59 page)

6.
Timothy Leary. The high priest of not just of LSD but of the entire counterculture, Timothy Leary was once referred to as “the most dangerous man in America” by none other than Richard Nixon. His effect on American youth and popular culture was so profound that it’s almost impossible to believe now, let alone quantify. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” became the mantra of a generation, but behind the “Free to Be You and Me” attitude was a rigorous intellectual and scientific mind, one that believed LSD, far from simply offering psychedelic hallucinations for an eight- or ten-hour period, might permanently and profoundly alter brain function, unlocking heretofore unknown mental abilities in the same way that steroids permanently altered the human physiognomy a generation later. While Leary’s antiestablishment views drew flak from law enforcement agencies and political figures, eventually landing him in jail, his ideas about LSD drew attention from a different segment of American government, namely the CIA. While no one has ever definitively proved that CIA funded any of Leary’s LSD experiments at Harvard or the Millbrook, New York, colony he founded in 1963, the rumors have never quite faded away, either.

7.
The Man in the High Castle
(1962) by Philip K. Dick. Generally considered the seminal early work of Dick’s career as well as one of the founding texts of the alternate history genre,
The Man in the High Castle
postulates a world in which the Germans and Japanese defeated the United States in World War II. The idea was considered so radical that the book came to the attention of the FBI, who allegedly put Dick on a watch list based solely on ideas he espoused in fictional form.

8.
The Manchurian Candidate
(1959) by Richard Condon. This enormously successful thriller—about the son of a prominent American family brainwashed into becoming a Soviet assassin capable of being controlled not only against his will but without his knowledge—was popular not just with the American public: according to legend, it paralleled the CIA’s now-infamous MK-ULTRA program to investigate ways of creating a real-life counterpart.

9.
Millbrook, New York. A small town on the Hudson River, Millbrook became famous in the 1960s as the site of Timothy Leary’s Castalia colony, which was dedicated to exploring the uses of psychedelic drugs.

10.
James Jesus Angleton. The head of counterintelligence at the CIA, “Mother” was famous for seeing double agents everywhere—save for in one of his oldest and closest friends, Kim Philby. Although Angleton’s suspicions verged on the paranoiac, it is clear that double and sleeper agents were and continue to be a major tactic of international espionage, as attested by the recent discovery of a Russian spy ring operating up and down the East Coast.

11.
Kim Philby. Perhaps the most famous double agent of all time, Philby worked for the Soviet Union for more than thirty years, during which time his activities as an agent of England’s MI-6 earned him the OBE. When “Stanley” was finally unmasked in 1963, the intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic was rocked, and a never-ending hunt for double and sleeper agents was launched that continues to this day.

12.
Billy Hitchcock. The owner of the mansion housing Timothy Leary’s Millbrook colony. One of the heirs to the Mellon Bank fortune, Hitchcock’s motives have been variously attributed to altruism, spiritual curiosity, capitalism (he was said to believe that LSD could be “the new tobacco”), to a never-proven belief that Hitchcock was in the employ of the CIA.

13.
Jack Ruby. The man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald to save Jackie the trauma of a trial is almost as mysterious as the assassin he murdered. His ties to organized crime, including Sam Giancana, have been well documented, but whether Giancana put him up to the shooting is unknown. At one point, he claimed Oswald was the gunman of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and he also claimed that he was framed to kill Oswald; he also claimed he was injected with the cancer cells that claimed his life in 1967. Shortly before he died, however, he recanted everything, and claimed he had acted alone.

14.
Lee Harvey Oswald. Few lives in history have been more documented than Lee Harvey Oswald’s, yet few are as shrouded in mystery. An avowed Communist from early childhood, he also joined the U.S. Marines a few days before his seventeenth birthday—where, despite the fact that he read the
Communist Manifesto
in boot camp, he was still stationed at the Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, the base of the U-2 spy plane program, then the single most important weapon in the U.S. espionage arsenal. When he told his superiors that he was going to defect to the Soviet Union and tell them everything he knew about the U-2 program, he wasn’t arrested but was sent on his way. In the Soviet Union, he lived a lavish life and married a woman he knew for less than a month, only to suddenly declare himself disillusioned with Russian Communism and ask to be allowed to return to the United States, with his wife and child. Not only was this request granted by Soviet authorities, but American intelligence allowed Oswald back into the country with little more than a routine interview. All of which generates a thousand questions: Was Oswald a troubled young man whose intense Communist beliefs led him to shoot the president of the United States? Or was he actually an agent of the Soviet Union who was directed to assassinate Kennedy after being recruited into the KGB in his late teens? Or, even more nefariously, was he actually an agent of the CIA whose Communist sympathies were a cover designed to get him into the KGB, where he could spy for America, and who later collapsed beneath the burden of his fractured identity? Or did he even pull the trigger? There’s evidence—much of it contradictory—for every theory, and it’s doubtful we’ll ever be satisfied with any single answer.

15.
Umbrella Man and Dark-Complected Man. Umbrella Man and Dark-Complected Man are a pair of individuals present at Dealey Plaza who figure prominently in some of the JFK conspiracy theories. Umbrella Man, so named because he was carrying an umbrella on a sunny morning (although it had been raining earlier in the day) can be seen in various photographs and the Zapruder film opening his umbrella right after Oswald fired the first of his three shots; conspiracy theorists see this as a signal to Oswald that he had missed and needed to fire again. Dark-Complected man, seated near Umbrella Man, can be seen carrying a dark rectangular object that some conspiracy theorists believe to be a walkie-talkie, with which he is communicating with other conspirators. Neither man’s real name has ever been confirmed.

16.
MK-ULTRA. A top secret program of the CIA, along with Projects Bluebird, Chatter, and Artichoke, which researched brainwashing, mind-control, and interrogation, including the use of drugs and other techniques to influence human behavior. At its most basic level, MK-ULTRA investigated drugs such as Sodium Pentothol, MDSM, LSD, and BZ for use as incapacitants and truth serums; at its most far-fetched, the program seriously investigated various forms of ESP, including telepathy and remote viewing, and possible ways to create these abilities.

17.
Joseph Scheider. The real name of Sidney Gottlieb, the leader of the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Section. Scheider, aka Gottlieb, was the head of MK-ULTRA and also worked on various poisons and poison-delivery systems in the CIA’s decades-long plot to assassinate or otherwise remove Fidel Castro from power, including a plan to spray his shoes with thallium so that his beard would fall out—Gottlieb seeming to believe that Castro’s power, like Samson’s, was vested in his hair.

18.
LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in a Swiss laboratory in 1938 as a potential treatment for heart problems. At the time, it was by far the most powerful hallucinogen that had ever been discovered, and concomitant with its extreme power came extreme claims about its potential: from cures for schizophrenia to a life-empowerment tool to a means for creating new mental states and even abilities, LSD was a compound of intense scientific and social scrutiny.

19.
The Truman Doctrine. Harry Truman’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine stated that it was necessary for the United States to do everything within its power economically and militarily to prevent countries from “going Red,” be it voluntarily or as a result of Soviet aggression. As part of the U.S. policy of containment, the most famous applications of the doctrine were, first, in Korea and, later, in Vietnam. Although the Korean and Vietnam wars failed to save either country from partial or total Communist victory, Cold War historians believe that the expense of these and other wars contributed to the economic fragility of the Soviet Union, which led to its collapse in 1989.

20.
The Daylight Test. A catchphrase in the espionage community, the Daylight Test refers to the criterion by a particular intelligence operation is judged—that is, would you perform the same action in broad daylight that you would under cover of darkness? Although idealists see it as a moral yardstick prohibiting actions that wouldn’t stand up to direct scrutiny, pragmatists see it instead as an admonition to prepare for eventual discovery and have strategies for disavowal or plausible deniability ready to hand.

Background reading:

John Armstrong.
Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald
. Quasar Books, 2003.

Erik Hedegaard. “The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt.”
Rolling Stone
, Apr. 5, 2009.

John Clellon Holmes. “This Is the Beat Generation.”
New York Times Magazine
, Nov. 16, 1952.

George Kennan. The “Long Telegram,”
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm
.

Norman Mailer. “The White Negro.”
Dissent
, Summer 1957; reprinted in
Advertisements for Myself
(New York: Putnam’s, 1959, and subsequent reprints).

TIM KRING
is one of the creative community’s original transmedia storytellers using film, TV, broadband, computers, mobile devices, and the printed page to engage audiences around the world in narrative and immersive story arcs. Internationally, 76 million fans know Tim’s work as the creator and executive producer of
Heroes
, NBC’s Emmy-nominated epic saga that chronicles the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities.

Kring has written numerous feature films, series pilots, and television movies. Before creating
Heroes
, he was a producer for television shows including
Chicago Hope
and
Providence
. He also created the procedural drama
Crossing Jordan
.

Kring studied film at Allan Hancock Junior College and then the University of Southern California’s renowned film school. After graduation he worked his way up in production as a grip, a gaffer, and on camera crews.

Kring resides in Los Angeles with his wife Lisa, a social worker, and their two children. In his spare time, he enjoys photography and collecting acoustic guitars.

DALE PECK
is the author of nine books, including, most recently,
Body Surfing
and
Sprout
, both novels. His fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including
Atlantic Monthly
, the
London Review of Books
, and the
New York Times
. Since 1999, he has taught in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program. A co-founder of the Mischief and Mayhem writing collective, he lives in New York City.