PROGRAMMED TO KILL: THE POLITICS OF SERIAL MURDER - DAVID MCGOWAN

I’m on quite a roll with these CIA books and these last two, this one and GHOST WARS, seem to represent the two bumpers of the discourse. By that I mean that GW was, as I mentioned in the review, the most mainstream and widely accepted and fully within the discourse while this book is absolutely at the other end of the spectrum. Of the dozen or so CIA books I’ve read in the past year and a half, this one and McGowan’s other joint, WEIRD SCENES IN THE VALLEY, easily the furthest out. WEIRD SCENES, as you might remember from my review, was about how various 60’s musicians and cultural figures were elaborate CIA ops, and this book expands that logic to the past 60 or so years of popular crime, especially serial killers. It’s actually a bit more elaborate than that, I’ll let McGowan break it down, “Rather than the profile of a lone predator, driven by his own internal demons, we find instead a profile of controlled assassins and controlled patsies, conditioned and programmed by a variety of intelligence fronts, including military entities, psychiatric institutions and Satanic cults.” According to McGowan, the idea of a serial killer is a cover to attribute a series of crimes to one person that were actually committed by several people, who are typically in a satanic cult of some sort, and while some of the members are sincere satanists the leaders plugged into various intelligence agencies, the CIA chief among them. This book is very big on the idea of a Satanic cult, though it remains unclear to me to what extent McGowan believes in a literal Satan. The book moves beyond just the popular serial killers, you Gacy, Bundy, and Dahmer are all here, into all sorts of True Crime events. In this way, the book reminded me of POPULAR CRIME by Bill James where James just goes through various crimes and gives his take. McGowan goes into the McMartin preschool incident, the Franklin Banking scandal, the Atlanta Child Murders, JonBenét Ramsey, The Finders and more. He certainly finds weird stuff about most of the cases. The ones involving molestation rings seem most plausible to me but that wasn’t really why I was reading this. The ostensible goal of these actions seems to be to create a climate of fear and instability, an American “years of lead” that plays into the hands of the powerful. It would be interesting to see an updated version of this that addresses the mass-shooter, who seems to be the modern version of the serial killer, an archetype that basically doesn’t exist anymore. I’d recommend this if you’re into serial killers and true crime stuff, the book is more interesting when you already know something about the case McGowan’s discussing and he always has a far-out, galaxy-brained take. In terms of wanting to know stuff about the CIA, I’m not sure this book is for that. There is some interesting Phoenix Program information but this is mostly focused on concerns I’d consider quite speculative. When you take this and GHOST WARS as the two poles you come away with a) the CIA is so incompetent they funded then were outsmarted by the people who committed 9/11 and b)the CIA so devious they created serial killers through MK-ULTRA style mind-manipulation/hypnosis and deployed them in a domestic Phoenix Program to terrorize and pacify the population. While I appreciate the general line of thinking that McGowan deploys, I would actually recommend another book, Simon Dovey’s Eye of the Chickenhawk, which covers some of these same events and networks in a much more grounded and, ultimately, more chilling.