Not for the first or the last time, the point of spying—to know what the other side is likely to do—had been swallowed up by the activity of spying, a frantic roundelay in which each actor is trying to score obscure points against his internal enemies, with a certainty (often misplaced) that someone else is playing him in another complicated roundelay. Meanwhile, Andrew notes, “the great power with the best foreign intelligence during the few years before the First World War continued to be Tsarist Russia.” And we know how that worked out.

A few famous modern espionage coups do still register as coups. The Allied creation of George S. Patton’s “phantom army”—a ploy to make the Germans think that the D Day offensive in Normandy was only a feint, with the real invasion planned for the Pas de Calais—really did work. And the parallel Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project’s atomic secrets was even more impressive than is generally understood: the famous perpetrators, like Klaus Fuchs or the Rosenbergs, turn out to have been relatively small fry compared with Theodore Hall, a Harvard physicist who delivered the real goods to the Russians and went on to have a long, productive career in Chicago and then in Cambridge. (He seems to have escaped prosecution for a reason typical in the history of these things: had the government used as evidence its top-secret “Venona intercepts,” which might have identified Hall, the project would have been exposed.)

And many fabled espionage gambits seem to have been double-sided. The Cambridge Spies—the much studied and dramatized cell that formed in the thirties and included Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt—were utterly sincere about the Communist cause they had pledged their lives to, but all were assumed by their Soviet handlers to have been turned, and made double agents. Despite the spies’ strenuous efforts to provide Stalin with British secrets, the Soviets regarded them as so untrustworthy that they sent a team of additional spies to England in order to monitor them. Only after they had delivered the entire deception plan for D Day did Stalin begin to trust his British minions.

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Shopping Cartoon by John Klossner

The old Mad-magazine cartoon series “Spy vs. Spy,” in which two interchangeable agents, one black-hatted and one white-hatted, do each other in, over and over again, without much cumulative point or purpose, seems like a reasonable picture of the whole. As it happens, the series was invented by a Cuban satirist named Antonio Prohías, a liberal anti-Batista cartoonist who, witnessing Castro’s growing hostility to a free press, fled post-revolutionary Cuba, under suspicion of being a spy for the C.I.A. You can’t escape the game, apparently.

The rule that having more intelligence doesn’t lead to smarter decisions persists, it seems, for two basic reasons. First, if you have any secret information at all, you often have too much to know what matters. Second, having found a way to collect intelligence yourself, you become convinced that the other side must be doing the same to you, and is therefore feeding you fake information in order to guide you to the wrong decisions. The universal law of unintended consequences rules with a special ferocity in espionage and covert action, because pervasive secrecy rules out the small, mid-course corrections that are possible in normal social pursuits. When you have to prevent people from finding out what you’re doing and telling you if you’re doing it well, you don’t find out that you didn’t do it well until you realize just how badly you did it. (The simple term of art for this effect, “blowback,” originated within the C.I.A.) Good and bad intelligence circle round and round, until both go down the drain of sense.

Some of these circlings are funny, in the “Spy vs. Spy” way. Others are tragic. In a new book, “Poisoner in Chief” (Henry Holt), about the C.I.A.’s MK-ULTRA program—the attempt, mostly in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, to achieve mind control through drugs—Stephen Kinzer, a former Times correspondent, points out that the entire idea of Communist “brainwashing” was a classic piece of Cold War propaganda, popularized by a writer with C.I.A. connections named Edward Hunter. “Brainwashing” was supposed to explain American defections in Korea, and the idea made its way to outlets like Argosy, a pulp men’s magazine of the period. But it turns out that the upper reaches of the C.I.A. bought into the story, and launched a mind-control program in a desperate effort to counter the nonexistent threat that it had helped conjure into being. “There was deep concern over the issue of brainwashing,” Richard Helms, a C.I.A. hand who eventually became the agency’s director, later explained. “We felt that it was our responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or the Chinese in this field.”

Kinzer’s antihero is Sidney Gottlieb, a renegade chemist who oversaw the MK-ULTRA program. Gottlieb was a Jew from the Bronx who had worked his way from City College to a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Caltech, and whose desire to serve his country was redoubled when he was rejected by the Army during the Second World War. When, in 1951, Allen Dulles and Richard Helms went looking for a chemist with imagination and no reservations about pursuing the dark arts, Gottlieb’s name came up.

Gottlieb, an enthusiast for biowarfare (though also a kind of proto-hippie who apparently made his own goat’s-milk yogurt), was eager to manufacture mind-manipulating toxins. But his special contribution to American culture was introducing it to LSD; at one point, he bought up the entire supply produced by the Sandoz company, in Switzerland. He used it on often unwitting subjects, including prisoners and students, to see if it could induce a mental state extreme enough to work as either a kind of truth serum or a mind-control agent. (It did neither successfully.)

Winding through the spy-loving Eisenhower-Kennedy years, Kinzer’s book is a Tarantino movie yet to be made: it has the right combination of sick humor, pointless violence, weird tabloid characters, and sheer American waste. It is also frightening to read, since it documents the significant sums our government spent on spy schemes as tawdry as they were ridiculous, not to mention spasmodically cruel and even murderous. (At least one C.I.A. officer died in a mysterious “fall” from a hotel window, after becoming involved with MK-ULTRA colleagues and being given acid.)

The MK-ULTRA story is one of almost unqualified failure. Gottlieb was, in the early sixties, put in charge of a plan to depose Fidel Castro by making his beard fall out, but he couldn’t figure out how to deploy a depilatory. MK-ULTRA sponsored work in posthypnotic suggestion that was designed to produce “programmed killers,” but it merely confirmed what every stage hypnotist has always known—that hypnosis is essentially a form of obedience to authority, and the hypnotist cannot make people do something they really don’t want to any more than a teacher who can “make” you solve problems on a blackboard can “make” you jump out a window. Even a “Get Smart”-style suicide device that Gottlieb helped create for U-2 pilots in the event of capture—a poison-tipped needle hidden in a silver dollar—seems never to have been used.