The World Keeps Looking More And More Like The Bourne Franchise
The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever.
Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.
A quick summary of the Bourne story as portrayed in the films is that David Webb, a former member of the US Army Delta Force, is recruited into a double-secret CIA program called Treadstone. This uses drugs, psychological manipulation, and elite-level special forces training to create super-assassins, who take out world political figures to further a secret CIA agenda. In the course of one such assignment, which he undertakes using the alias Jason Bourne, Webb is nearly killed himself, but he loses all memory of his former life, and he must undertake a hero's journey to recover his identity and backstory. The CIA deploys all its resources to eliminate Webb/Bourne to prevent Treadstone's exposure.This premise was credible from the start due to the CIA's proven involvement in programs like MKUltra. According to Wikipedia,
MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in altering human behavior.
. . . Project MKUltra began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects' consent. Additionally, other methods beyond chemical compounds were used, including electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
. . . Project MKUltra was revealed to the public in 1975 by the Church Committee (named after Senator Frank Church) of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford's United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission). Investigative efforts were hampered by CIA director Richard Helms's order that all MKUltra files be destroyed in 1973[.]
The problem -- and a reason the Bourne franchise still resonates -- is that nobody can quite say with assurance that MKUltra was in fact halted in 1973. Rep Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) brought matters up to date this past Tuesday (June 30) in a House hearing:
In her opening remarks, Luna called the program “crimes committed by the Central Intelligence Agency against American citizens” and “crimes against humanity.”
“This was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation… authorized by the very top of U.S. intelligence apparatus,” Luna said.
She detailed how CIA Director Richard Helms personally ordered the destruction of MKULTRA records in 1973 as he left office. Sidney Gottlieb and his team spent an entire day burning 152 files.
Gottlieb then had his personal papers destroyed. The head of the CIA’s own records center protested in writing and was overruled.
. . . Luna announced that the CIA is now working to declassify newly discovered documents tied to what she described as a previously unknown “forgery program.”
CIA whistleblower and former officer James Erdman III testified that approximately 40 boxes of sensitive records were removed from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) during declassification review efforts.
. . . Erdman testified that the CIA “took back 40 boxes of JFK files and MKULTRA files being processed for declassification by DNI Tulsi Gabbard” in what he described as “documented efforts to circumvent oversight.”
. . . Adding to the alarm, a former CIA officer testified during the hearing that “I don’t believe that the research stopped” on MKULTRA.
ZeroHedge has more details:
Investigative journalist Tom O'Neill, author of Chaos, told the committee the agency actively misled Congress in 1977. He submitted documents showing the CIA's own earlier claims about LSD experiments contradicted what it later told lawmakers. O'Neill stated flatly: "I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MK-Ultra as a failure."
He connected dots to figures like psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and his ties to Charles Manson and Jack Ruby, underscoring how deeply the program reached into real-world events. The message was clear: the full story was buried on purpose.
One of the most disturbing revelations came from historical documents referenced during the hearing. A participant in the original program documented the ability to replace true memories with false ones without the subject's knowledge.
The exact description: "It's feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual, and through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place. But that a different fictional event actually did occur."
. . . He then delivered the core warning for today: "There have been enormous advances in cyber technology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Covert agencies may have access to tools for mind control that Sidney Gottlieb could not have imagined."
O'Neill agreed. The massive investment in time, money, and research made it unlikely the capabilities were simply abandoned. The technology they built was too valuable.
Public suspicion about whether MKULTRA-style techniques ever truly ended is not abstract. In 2024, widespread speculation erupted around the Trump assassination attempt and whether the shooter could have been influenced or programmed through evolved versions of these programs.
The CIA issued a flat denial, calling the claims "utterly false, absurd, and damaging" and insisting MKULTRA ended decades ago.
. . . The question is no longer whether the CIA once crossed every ethical and constitutional line. The question is whether those lines were ever truly redrawn - or simply moved into newer, harder-to-detect territory.
My respect for Ludlum as a writer has increased. It may be that, like Lew Wallace (1827-1905), a fascinating figure who among other things wrote the novel on which the film Ben-Hur is based, Ludlum (1927-2001) had an imagination that uniquely inspired buth the public and Hollywood. According to Wikipedia,
Ludlum's novels typically feature one heroic man, or a small group of crusading individuals, in a struggle against powerful adversaries whose intentions and motivations are evil and who are capable of using political and economic mechanisms in frightening ways. The world in his writings is one where global corporations, shadowy military forces and government organizations all conspired to preserve (if it was evil) or undermine (if it was law-abiding) the status quo.
I'm not sure if Ludlum's novels are as good as the films they were made from; I haven't felt compelled to check. The critical consensus seems to be, though, that the novel Ben-Hur isn't as good as the movie, but according to Wikipedia, after its 1880 publication,
It became a best-selling American novel, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in sales. The book also inspired other novels with biblical settings and was adapted for the stage and motion picture productions.
Ben-Hur remained at the top of the U.S. all-time bestseller list until the 1936 publication of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. The 1959 MGM film adaptation of Ben-Hur is considered one of the greatest films ever made and was seen by tens of millions, going on to win a record 11 Academy Awards in 1960, after which the book's sales increased and it surpassed Gone with the Wind.
I can attest that Ben-Hur the novel is a roaring good read. I may need to look futher into Ludlum; like Lew Wallace and Herman Wouk, he may be an underrated American writer. It's good I didn't become an English prof.