CIA: Take the Money and Run (a Little Magazine)

Sometimes research is a benign form of procrastination. Other times, it’s a tremulous step onto a spider’s web of curiosities and conspiracies until the afternoon’s writing hours are all but devoured.

Such is the case with my current movie project—an art-house extravaganza satirizing the usual suspects: government, religion, corporations, universities and, of course, the media. When a character questions whether the CIA would actually fund research into psychic espionage, another quips, “Well, they funded abstract expressionism, which is far more dangerous.”

This is true. The CIA also funded literary magazines and possibly the Scorpions’ 1990 power ballad “Wind of Change.” And abstract expressionism is far more dangerous (look what it did to Jack the Dripper).

Much of this has been revealed in declassified documents, first-hand testimonies, or the occasional podcast, like journo Patrick Radden Keefe’s paean to the Scorps’ hand in the Cold War, which may itself have been developed by the …