Kirkus
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Free-lance writer Thomas (author and coauthor of 27 titles on sensational subjects from Jesus to white slavery) gives a recklessly melodramatic rendering of an important subject: the horrific, CIA-sponsored mind-control conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University. In March 1987, William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut, was snatched by a ShiRe hostage team and delivered into the deadly hands of Dr. al-Abub. When CIA director Casey received a videotape of Buckley, drugged and obviously tortured, he spurred an international network of experts on terrorism to come up with a detailed profile of a doctor who could justify dispensing pain and death. He could have looked in his own fries. Decades before, under the fanciful name ""Artichoke"" (Allen Dulles' favorite vegetable), the CIA unleashed a campaign to learn the brainwashing techniques used on American soldiers during the Korean War. In Cameron, however, the CIA had found a perfect Dr. Frankenstein. Artichoke was renamed project MK-Ultra, and icy, Scottish-accented Cameron was drowning in money to break and ""depattern"" minds. He used electroshock on helpless victims again and again; then he plunged his patients into weeks or even months of insulin-induced sleep--and while they slept, they listened to endless tape-loops of their most painful confessions. When Cameron's patients were awake, he injected them with LSD and ordered them to write or record the ""confessions"" that would torture them while they slept. Finally, in the 60's, the CIA pulled the plug on Cameron. A vastly important subject mangled by muddy, irresponsible exposition as Thomas melodramatically animates subjects he could not have interviewed--including Dulles and Cameron. The public deserves better sources; still, the hot subject matter may attract quite a few readers. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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William Buckley, the American murdered in Beirut in 1985 after his kidnap and torture by Arab extremists, was identified in the U.S. media as a ``political attache'' or ``journalist.'' Basing his extraordinary investigative coup on interviews with scores of intelligence sources, including late CIA director William Casey, Thomas identifies Buckley as the CIA station chief in Beirut, an operative whose past operations included the surveillance of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. The author ( Voyage of the Damned ; Pontiff ) pulls back the curtain over the CIA's use of medical torture and other government operations around the world, from Angola to Israel. He describes how Buckley was injected with drugs, physically abused and mentally befuddled by mind-control expert Aziz al-Abub. This Arab doctor was but one of many disciples of Ewen Cameron, a respected Montreal psychiatrist at McGill University enlisted by CIA director Allen Dulles in the 1950s to devise techniques to scramble victims' minds irreversibly. In a well-documented dossier that reads like a thriller, Thomas spills details of various operations, among them the CIA's alleged bugging of the Vatican and the Pope. Film rights to Catalina Productions. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Thomas' many previous books have ranged from such subjects as heroes of the RAF to the life and death of Jesus. Here, the author reports on the capture, torture, and death of William Buckley, an American agent in Beirut in 1984. The killer, Thomas says, was Dr. Aziz al-Abub, an Arab physician and disciple of one Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Canadian secretly funded by CIA director Allen Dulles during the cold-war era, who used hospitalized patients as guinea pigs, subjecting them to brainwashing techniques and radical surgery. Thomas bases his book on letters, trial documents, and interviews with victims and CIA personnel (including the late William Casey). This often horrifying report should intrigue public library readers interested in the world of espionage. Notes, sources, select bibliography; to be indexed. --George Cohen