I wrote my book Operation Mind Control while living in Arizona, still 'a backward state, dominated by Federal funds and jobs, and the dissociated and extremely provincial beliefs that come with it. In the 70's most of the people I spoke with about what I called, generically, "mind control" thought I was crazy. Those who were not afraid to express their opinions on the subject believed it to be impossible. They strongly believed they could not be made to do something against their will and without their own knowledge. They believed they had indomitable powers of will, like the CIA funded psychologist, Timothy Leary's fellow debater and Watergate burglar, G. Gordon Liddy. They believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they could not be broken, fragmented, and mentally enslaved by any technology, even if it included hypnosis, drugs, electronic brain stimulation or what came to be called biological process control.

My interest in this subject was piqued by a young man, David, I had known all my life. He returned from a four-year tour with the United States Air Force in a confused and deeply tormented state. You could not say that he had a destroyed mind. He suffered from complete amnesia about the past years of service in the USAF, but he was making straight "A's" in premedical courses at a prominent University.

I did not recognize him as he sat, slumped in an overstuffed chair in my living room in 1973. He had undergone a couple of years of treatment with a competent psychiatrist and was finally asked by her, "Do you want to know what this is and how it was created, or do you just want to be able to function?" He decided the functioning was good enough, and his treatment accelerated, taking a wide turn away from the historical events he remembered, which included being a "human tape recorder" and witnessing the most secret negotiations with North Vietnam and with «Royals» of the Arabic persuasion who beheaded a prisoner he had just witnessed being interrogated. The image of this decapitation still haunts him in his dreams.