After my Air America escapade, I tried very hard to stay out of trouble.

Foreign journalists heading up to Laos routinely dropped by the Bangkok World looking for sources to help with their own stories. Sterling gave them my phone number and I met with all of them. It was a way I could oppose the war without getting thrown out of the Peace Corps.

I was impressed with Time magazine bureau chief Stanley Cloud – he didn’t just rely on embassy parties and press handouts for his stories. Over a heady, three-hour lunch, we talked about Brezhnev and Mao, Daniel Berrigan and Jane Fonda. Then we got down to business, swapping information and rumors about Laos. Cloud suspected the sister or wife of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Cao Ky ran the opium traffic between Laos and Vietnam. I shared what I learned from former CIA agent Bill Young, and recounted my troubling interview with Sankhamseng and the Lao refugee villagers from Taesseng Sene Noy who had been driven from their village by the carpet bombing of the Plain des Jarres. He paid the bill and asked if I wanted to string for Time in Laos. I was stoked. It could supplement my pay if I accepted the full-time Bangkok World job I planned to take after Peace Corps.

I met  with Al McCoy, a gutsy researcher heading up to the Golden Triangle to investigate the opium trade and rumors of CIA involvement in heroin trafficking. It was public knowledge some U.S. military personnel were dealing in opium and heroin. Air Force Major Delbert Fleener, a pilot who occasionally ferried U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker around Vietnam, had just been caught smuggling a half a ton of opium into South Vietnam on Air Force planes. GIs were his prime customers. Ten percent of GIs in Vietnam used heroin regularly, according to the Army’s own study. We were shipping home hundreds of heroin addicts a month, making a bad drug problem in the U.S. even worse. Sterling had already given McCoy Bill Young’s name.

Mike Morrow really tested my commitment to finish my Peace Corps assignment. Mike was co-founder of Dispatch News Service International, the small, shoestring, counter-culture news syndicate which broke the infamous My Lai massacre story that stunned America and launched Seymour Hersh’s Pulitzer Prize-winning career.

In his room at the Atlanta Hotel, we talked about what was happening in Thailand and Laos. Mike was married to a Vietnamese-Chinese girl, so he primarily worked Vietnam. Dispatch needed someone to cover Thailand and Laos on a regular basis. Was I interested?

It’s hard to put in words how excited and honored I felt. In the world of war journalism, Dispatch was legendary.  My Lai had challenged the conscience of America in a way no other Vietnam story had. You couldn’t read it and not wonder if it weren’t time to stop the madness and bring the boys home. But Mike didn’t consider himself a leftist shill. “We’re not an anti-war news service,” he told me. “We’re a pro-truth service.”

A red-haired, near-sighted 24-year-old, Mike grew up in southern Washington state and graduated from Dartmouth. He was a draft dodger, but certainly wasn’t chicken. He did combat coverage in Hue, and rode patrol boats up narrow, muddy jungle rivers into ambushes. He had just been released from 40 days captivity as a prisoner of the communists in Cambodia.

In March 1970, General Lon Nol overthrew Prince Sihanouk and turned Cambodia from a neutral kingdom into a republic allied with America and Saigon. A month later, Nixon invaded Cambodia with Lon Nol’s approval, hoping to destroy bases the North Vietnamese had established in the country on the Cambodian-South Vietnam border. Mike followed the U.S. troops in, and outside Svay Rieng, Cambodia, they ran into a communist guerilla unit and were ordered out of their car. Fortunately, Mike didn’t look like a G.I. – he wore long sideburns and leather sandals, carried no weapon, and spoke Vietnamese fluently. That’s probably what saved his life and the lives of his companions, Elizabeth Pond of the Christian Science Monitor and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They were held five weeks then released. He was impressed by his captors, he told me. They traveled light, fought smart, and were absolutely convinced they’d outlast us.  

Mike was a shot of high octane. “I got to get to Cambodia,” I told him.

“Go,” Mike said. “Lots going on."

I should have focused on my Peace Corps work. Instead, I slipped over the border for a few days. I knew the U.S. State Department prohibited Peace Corps Volunteers in active service from visiting Cambodia, but I told myself I wouldn’t travel all the way to Phnom Penh, just to Battambang, a provincial capital only 100 kilometers from the Thai border. I wouldn’t write anything, just look around.

Battambang reminded me of Vientiane – a small town with French colonial buildings lining a sleepy, slow-moving river, this time the Sanker instead of the Mekong. A big cloth banner with the newly-painted slogan “Long Live the Khmer Republic” arched across the quiet, sunny main street, but the people pedaling along on their bicycles never looked up.

The French-speaking hotel keeper refused to share with me his opinion about the future of the new republique, but he firmly assured me Cambodian girls were prettier by far than Thai girls.

“If Monsieur would like one, it can be arranged for tonight.” The military had imposed an 8 P.M. curfew on the town, so girls had to be brought to the hotel before dinner.

“Merci, non,” I said. He was disappointed.

“Lunch perhaps, and a glass of wine?” he inquired hopefully. Business was down. He no longer sold guests taxi trips to the ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat up the road. The Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s home-grown communist equivalent of the Pathet Lao, controlled it.

“C’est completement fou!” he sighed. “They use the priceless statues for target practice. They blow off their heads with rocket grenades.”

The next day, I wandered around town and ran into a knot of cheerful, young men crowded around a squatting street vendor. They were new recruits. The hawker was selling cloth Khmer Republic patches and rank stripes. Nearby a solemn-faced, older soldier in olive drab smoked a cigarette and watched.  He spoke French. He was their capitaine, he told me. I asked him what he thought of the change of government.

“Ca m’est egal,” he shrugged.  He had served under Sihanouk for many years. The people liked the Prince. But he himself was a soldier, and now took his orders from General Lon Nol.

One of the boys came over and showed the Captain a patch. He nodded, dug into his pocket and gave him a few riel. The boy paid the hawker and thumbed the stripe against his sleeve, modeling it for his friends. They mock-saluted him, then broke up giggling.

These are kids about to be killed, I thought.

They’re no match for the battle-hardened North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge Mike Morrow described to me. The capitaine and his boys boarded the truck. I asked if I could take a photograph of them. The ones who had helmets put them on, everybody smiled and waved.

I still have the photo.    

On Oct. 8, 1970, I got a surprise call at home from a man named Cornell Hawkridge.

“This is Cornell Hawkridge,” a blunt voice demanded, without any introduction. “Mr. Seagrave told me to call you.  I need your help.”

If Sterling sent him, I was ready to talk. “Well Mr. Hawkridge, tell me how I can….” He cut me off.

“I’m staying at the Victory Hotel on Silom Road. I want you to get over here. And tell your friend Scott McNabb to come too.” He hung up.

Wow, I thought, this guy’s one arrogant prick. The news office at the Bangkok World was closed so I couldn’t telephone Sterling to find out more.  I called Scott, a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer teaching at Thammassat University, and told him to meet me at the hotel. Thirty minutes later, we knocked on Cornell’s hotel door.“

Come in,” he bellowed.

We found him sitting on his bed in semi-darkness, the window curtains closed, a knapsack and small suitcase tossed in the corner. He was scribbling notes in a notebook by the light of a desk lamp. He ignored us until he finished, then he jumped up. He was short and wiry, moved with a limp, and had a crushing handshake. He seemed to be tailed by demons.

“Did Mr. Seagrave tell you about me?” he demanded. He had no time for social niceties. He had met our friend Big Boris in Cambodia, who passed him on to Sterling, who passed him on to me.

“Not really,” I started to reply. “Maybe…” I was cut off again.

"OK. I’ll tell you.” And he did, for the next hour, non-stop. Scott and I listened spellbound. We broke in when we could.  

Cornell had been ordered out of Vietnam by the U.S. Army just 24 hours earlier.  Sons of bitches! They escorted him to Tan Son Nhut airbase and put him on a plane to Bangkok. Fuckers! He was writing a book exposing the stink and corruption, the waste of billions of American dollars from crooked U.S. contractors profiteering on the war in Vietnam. Bastards!

“Cornell, wait, wait,” I said. “Start from the beginning. Who are you?” 

“Don’t you read Life magazine?” he demanded.

“We don’t get it our here.”

“I was supposed to be on the cover of Life magazine, August first, 1969,” he said bitterly. “But then your Mr. Kennedy ran off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. They put him on the cover instead. They cut my story short, but it’s in there.”

He looked off in space, remembering. He seemed to deflate a bit. He pushed his hand through his receding, close-cropped hair. He sighed, and backed up. He had a hell of a story to tell.

Cornell was born in Hungary, where his father was a police colonel in pre-World War II Transylvania, specializing in hunting down political criminals.  His family loved law and order and hated the Bolsheviks, so Cornell hated them too. He fought against the Russians in World War II and when the communists took over Hungary he spent seven years in Russian prisons, including two and a half years in solitary confinement. When Hungary rose up against its communist government in 1956, he fought with the insurgents until Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest to crush the rebellion.  When it failed, he fled to the West, eventually making his way to America where he gained citizenship.

 But America left him disillusioned. It was soft, fat and lazy.

Vietnam left him even more disillusioned. In October 1966, he landed a job as a consultant to a U.S. foundation running a refugee camp in Qui Nhon. When he got there, he discovered Vietnamese government officials were stealing 90 percent of the material and food sent to operate the camp and feed the two thousand war refugees who lived in wooden shacks, had no lavatories and shared three wells containing dirty water. Aid workers were forced to buy back the rice stolen from them to keep the refugees alive. It enraged him. I started to tell him about my visit to the Lao refugee camp, but he cut me short and plowed on with his story.

Around the corner from the squalid camp, Cornell found the Qui Nhon marketplace stocked with stolen U.S. goods – everything from C-rations, TV sets, washing machines, shirts and cigarettes to M-16s, howitzer shells, bazookas and cases of grenades. Cornell wondered if there was anything he couldn’t get on the black market.

“I asked one vendor, ‘Can you get me a tank?’” The stallholder was sorry; they were a bit difficult to get at the moment. How about an armored personnel carrier, the man suggested instead.

Apoplectic, Cornell marched into the office of the American colonel in charge of security for the province. Did he know that there were enough looted U.S. weapons, C-rations, tents and medicine in that market to supply an entire U.S. division for a month? The Colonel admitted he knew all about the black market, but couldn’t do anything. They didn’t have jurisdiction. The American government had an agreement with the South Vietnamese that barred the American military from playing policeman.

“I said, ‘Did it ever occur to you, colonel, that we’re outfitting the Viet Cong? They can simply walk into to the market and buy or steal all the guns and equipment they need to kill us.”

Two years later, they did just that, Cornell said. The Viet Cong launched their Tet Offensive against Saigon, using American weapons they turned on American soldiers.

“The American Army is a joke,” he told Scott and me. “If the Russians caught a civilian with anything of theirs – a knife, a gun, a shirt, boots, food rations – they executed you on the spot. That’s an Army. You never saw hijacked goods or Russian army stuff for sale in the market,” he said admiringly. “They’re selling over $10 million in stolen American goods a month – a month! – at just Qui Nhon market alone. And Vietnam has dozens of markets just like that, stocked with looted goods and open for business,” he said bitterly.“

And nobody is doing anything about this?” I interjected. It didn’t seem possible. Where was ABC? NBC? The New York Times?  He waved his hand in disgust. I was so fucking naïve.

Frustrated, he moved to another job, assigned to stop looting and pilferage at two civilian U.S. trucking firms hauling Army equipment and supplies in the Saigon district. The companies were required to hire only local Vietnamese drivers. Half were Viet Cong, including Philco-Ford’s labor adviser who later turned out to be a full V.C. colonel.

Same story. Cement, sheet-metal roofing, stereos, cases of M-16s were hijacked by the truckload, frequently along with the trucks that hauled the stuff. Losses were running $100 million a year.  He chased the thieves, killed a few.  He became a marked man. Twice people tried to kill him. Same outcome. He was branded a troublemaker by his own  American bosses.

He wrote a letter to General William Westmoreland, Commander of all U.S. Army forces in Vietnam, enclosing photographs, names, places, incidents. No reply from Time magazine’s 1966 Man of the Year. He wrote Congress. No reply.

It got worse. He started digging into black market currency dealing. The Viet Cong used the profits they made on the currency black market to pay China and Russia for ammunition. Others playing the game big time – South Vietnamese generals, Hong Kong Chinese, Indian money lenders, U.S. contractors and consulting execs – bought seaside villas in the Bahamas. Cornell followed the money trail back to big American banks which looked the other way, asked no questions, laundered the untaxed money and held it in secret accounts for the perpetrators. When he reported what he found, the IRS didn’t investigate the crooks; they investigated him. They tried to scare him. They audited him and found he owed $80 in taxes.

“The bastards threatened to put me in jail for five years! Put me in jail!” he roared. He paced the room.

“I wrote back and said, ‘Stop the firing in Vietnam for one second and you won’t miss my taxes.’ I didn’t pay. I told them I would take my case to court, and use it as a forum to expose the corruption and waste of taxpayers’ dollars in Vietnam.”

In May 1968, burned out and blacklisted, he left Vietnam and returned to the States. But it turned out somebody had been reading his angry letters.

Four months later, he got a call from an investigator on the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. They wanted him to testify in closed session about what he knew. But before he could do so, he was run off the road in a faked “accident”. They killed his new wife and left Cornell in a hospital, half-dead. He came out with a rebuilt skull, iron pins in his legs and a burning desire for revenge.

Cornell talked like a paranoid wacko, but both Scott and I found him believable. Evidently, so did Life magazine. Time magazine’s sister publication got wind of his Congressional testimony and put a reporter on it. But Ted Kennedy’s dramatic accident at Chappaquiddick bumped their expose off the cover, trimmed it short, reduced its impact. Nobody seemed to care.

He kicked his bag under the bed and sat down, a tired, angry man. “Why are we in Vietnam trying to solve their problems when we can’t solve problems in our own country?,” he asked the wall. “Look at the slums in the Bronx and Brooklyn; look at the poor, dumb people in Alabama and Louisiana. We’re spending billions in Vietnam, and nothing on America’s problems!”  

“No one can call me a leftist,” he growled. “I spent three years in Stalin’s jails, and I’ve been fighting and killing communists all my life.” He stared at me, then Scott. “The war in Vietnam has got nothing to do with communism. It’s a civil war between the Vietnamese, and we should get the fuck out of Vietnam on the next boat. 

“I had a dumb-fuck Colonel in Vietnam tell me ‘We’re fighting here to keep the North Vietnamese from attacking America.’ The next day, I walked into his office and said, ‘Colonel, the North Vietnamese have just landed in California and they’re shelling Los Angeles. I just heard it on the news.’ He said, ‘Major, you’re crazy. You know the North Vietnamese don’t have the capacity to invade America.’ And I said, ‘You’re right Colonel – which makes you a proven liar.’”

His voice fell to a whisper. We weren’t even there.

"America wants to help other people fight the communists? Why didn’t America help us in Hungary when we rose up against the communists?”

Cornell moved to England. A British publisher teamed him with a writer named James Hamilton-Patterson to help him tell his story to the world. Now he was back, researching a book he hoped would finally blow the lid off profiteering American multinationals making millions on the war. He was finding that nothing had changed, despite the Congressional hearings and the Life article; in fact, things had gotten worse.

The U.S. Army and the U.S. Embassy had blacklisted him from Vietnam, but Vietnam wasn’t the only country where people were making money off looted American goods. Thailand had its own black market in stolen PX goods and GI equipment and nobody was doing anything to shut it down.

“I want you to take me to Asdang Road” he told Scott and me. We both knew what he was looking for. Asdang Road ran right behind the Thai Ministry of Defence. Over twenty shops selling U.S. military gear lined the street, right under the nose of the Thai military. The first cool season I spent in Bangkok, I bought an Army blanket there for a buck.

“You guys will be my translators. I want to see what we can buy there,” Cornell said. He finally ran out of gas. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

It was an unforgettable evening. Cornell was rude and self-righteous, consumed with anger and hatred, but I gave him a pass. Nobody had ever tried to kill me or someone I loved.

Cornell was loaded for game when we picked him up the next day. In a small bag, he carried a Nikkormat with a 200 mm telephoto lens to shoot stuff at a safe distance, and a small, palm-sized Petri camera for close up work. We hopped a samlor to Asdang Road and strolled the stalls. We found camo trousers, boonie hats, equipment belts, rucksacks, tool bags, Navy medic sets, all stuff someone could claim with a straight face was “surplus” –  but curiously the supply seemed limitless. Hawkridge noticed a stall filled with dozens of U.S. Army M-65 field jackets hanging off a bamboo pole and I went to work on the vendor.

“Sawatdee, khap,” I smiled, grabbing a jacket and switching to Thai. “Nee taorai?” How much for this?

The vendor smiled. How many did I want?

“Tell him we want a hundred,” Cornell replied. I looked at Cornell.

“A hundred? Isn’t that….”

“Try it,” he said. I turned back to the vendor.

“Roi dtua,” I said and waited for him to burst out laughing.

Instead, he fiddled with his abacus a few seconds then held it up for me. I don’t remember the price, just being stunned that a hundred jackets was no problem. He could have them ready for pickup tomorrow, he assured me.  I translated for Cornell. As we walked away, the price kept dropping.

Same thing at each stall. It got ridiculous. How about 500 olive drab wrist watches? No problem.  How about a thousand Zippo lighters? No problem. As we chatted up the vendors in Thai, Cornell discretely snapped away.

It was a hot, humid Bangkok day. We bought some Fantas and downed them under a tree.

“Where the hell do you get a hundred new U.S. Army field jackets in a day?” I asked Cornell. “What do you do – rob a military base?”

“Nope,” he replied. ‘They probably just place an order.”

Thailand operated like Vietnam, he explained. A company called ETO, jointly owned by the Thai government and well-connected Thai generals, had a monopoly on delivering most U.S. military supplies from Thai ports to the dozen U.S. military bases scattered around the Kingdom. Stuff got “lost,” or paperwork was doctored at the warehouse to show fifty cases of Johnny Walker being shipped when sixty were actually loaded. Few noticed the discrepancy and, even if someone did, nobody followed up. I wondered how many bottles of scotch lining the bar at the Bacchus, my favorite Patpong pub, arrived ETO. I made a mental note to ask Aristotle, the owner.

Scott knew of a half-dozen more stalls selling PX and U.S. military gear in the Sanaam Luang Market and the three of us headed over to see what we could buy there.

I loved the Saturday-Sunday market. Every weekend, vendors filled a large, open field across from the Grand Palace with several thousand stalls. I went down there in the dry season and watched dueling kites chase each other across the sky above the market, their strings covered with razor-sharp glass to cut their competitors thread and send them into a tailspin. You could buy anything there –  plastic dishes, silks, woodcarvings, fighting fish, machetes, bananas, underwear, sapphires and diamonds, strange Chinese aphrodisiacs, and animals of all kinds – dogs, cats, gibbons, parrots, pythons – for sale as pets or food. One week I studied a salesman with a spider monkey on his shoulder as he gathered a ring of rubes from upcountry by poking and prodding a drugged-out cobra in a jar to rise up and stare at the crowd with its beady eyes. The cobra, probably milked before the show, eventually gave him a nip on the arm, the guy swooned, a pretty girl rushed over and gave him a glug from a small vial, and he bounced back from the dead, smiling, and started selling his anti-snake bite medicine. The monkey collected the money.

Scott steered us through the crowds to a stall offering boxes of mildew-resistant, straight-from-the States, U.S. Army jungle boots, all sizes, still in their original plastic bags. They had a stainless steel plate in the sole to protect the soldier from the sharpened bamboo punji stakes the Viet Cong lined jungle trails with. Next to them were boxes of brand-new U.S. Air Force pilot survival knives. I pulled one out of its scabbard. It had a leather-wound handle and a mean, five-inch long blade. The scabbard included a small pocket that held a sharpening stone.

“These things were just issued to our pilots a month ago,” Cornell whistled. “These guys work fast.”

“Taorai?” I asked the smiling vendor. How much?

“Bat sip.”

“The price is right,” I told Cornell. “Eighty baht.” Four bucks was cheaper than the cost to manufacture them, but when you got them for free, everybody still made a nice profit.

It was almost noon and Cornell had the shots he came for. Oddly enough, I felt proud of Thailand. The stealing of scotch and TVs and Crest toothpaste by the Thai military was costing American taxpayers’ money, but Thailand wasn’t Vietnam. They weren’t arming the enemy. The only weapons we found beside the pilot knives were boxes of M7 bayonets.

“Pretty tame compared to Qui Nhon, yeah?” I joked. Cornell looked at me like I was the dumbest shit on earth.

“The only difference between Vietnam and Thailand is the Thais don’t put their looted M-16s on display,” he spat out. He announced he was heading for Laos. “I want to see what stolen stuff of ours they’re selling on the black market up there.”

He returned a few days later. “Vientiane’s a jungle slum,” he told me over lunch as he forked a steak into his mouth at the U.S. military commissary. He disliked the Laotians almost as much as he did the Vietnamese. The samlor drivers were “little yellow monkeys” who couldn’t even speak decent English.“

‘You, you, ride?’” Cornell mocked, demonstrating with grunting noises.

I loved Laos, and took it personal. “They’re not supposed to speak English,” I fired back. “You were in Laos, not London. Try speaking Lao.”

“They want our money, they can learn English,” he snapped back. “When we leave, they can go back to the jungle.”  I wanted to punch him in the nose. 

Cornell returned to the “slum” that weekend to do some more investigating, this time into American involvement in the opium trade. I dropped by the Bangkok World the following week and Sterling handed me a letter. It was from Cornell. I looked at the stamp and postmark. He was in Austria. He had been threatened, but he didn’t say by whom.  

"For certain reasons, it became highly desirable that I left Laos at once and returned to Europe. I still need all the material I can get, but there was no reason to endanger everything…”   

“Do you think he’s being paranoid?” I asked Sterling.

“I don’t know,” Sterling replied, “If they really tried to kill him in the States, he’s certainly smart to be afraid out here.”  

Contract murder was cheaper, the local media was compromised, and investigations were easy to stop. An American undercover agent investigating the theft of PX goods at the Air Force base up at U-Tapao had been murdered a month earlier. No leads, no investigation, nada. Maybe Cornell pissed somebody off and they were looking for him too. They weren’t people to mess with. 

Cornell Hawkridge may still be alive, but I lost contact with him after leaving Thailand. Perhaps he is so disgusted with humanity he longer wants anything to do with us. His bitter diatribe A Very Personal War, written with the help of James Hamilton-Paterson and published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1971, begins with this quote from Nietzsche: “Shame, shame, shame – that is the history of man!”

Scott McNabb subsequently returned to America to earn a Master’s at Harvard and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Today he’s an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa. He continues to do educational research in Thailand.

Mike Morrow covered the Vietnam War to its bitter end. The Nixon administration kept a “Special Staff File” on him and other high-profile critics of the war, and the South Vietnamese government kicked Mike out of Vietnam in November 1970. Singapore’s dictatorial Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew also declared Mike persona non grata for his reporting.  After the war, Mike moved to Hong Kong where he founded Asia 2000 Ltd., a privately held Hong Kong company established to publish a magazine about the future of Asia. The magazine failed but the company survived to become Hong Kong’s largest local publisher of English-language fiction and non-fiction. He worked diligently to restore relations between the U.S. and Vietnam, and encourage American companies to invest in the country. Ironically, Vietnam’s victorious communist government kicked Mike out of Vietnam in April 1990, labeling him a “spy” conducting economic espionage on behalf of America.

Al McCoy is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He accuses the CIA of trying to kill him to stop him from researching the opium trade in the Golden Triangle and the CIA’s reported complicity in it. When his book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia was in press, the C.I.A. called up HarperCollins, his publisher in New York, and asked the publisher to suppress the book. HarperCollins compromised and offered the CIA the unusual right of prior review. HarperCollins’s legal department carefully reviewed the CIA’s 14-page critique – then published the book unchanged in 1972. Now a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, McCoy remains a severe critic of the CIA. His latest book is A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2006). A review in the New Yorker noted “From the start of the Cold War to the early nineteen-sixties, the C.I.A. spent billions of dollars developing psychological tools for interrogation. The agency cast a wide net, funding a Canadian study that involved administering electric shocks to subjects in drug-induced comas, and recruiting people like Kurt Plotner, a Nazi scientist who, in his search for a truth serum, had tested mescaline on Jewish prisoners at Dachau. The eventual conclusion was that cheap, simple methods (for example, enforced standing) worked best, and were also more acceptable to the public than outright physical violence. McCoy skillfully traces the use of these methods from the Phoenix program in Vietnam—which was designed to ferret out high-level Vietcong, although of the more than twenty thousand people it killed most were civilians—to the actions of agency-trained secret police in Honduras in the nineteen-eighties, and the treatment of hooded detainees at Abu Ghraib”