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In the summer of 1942, Stanley Lovell, a renowned industrial chemist, received a mysterious order to report to an unfamiliar building in Washington, D.C. When he arrived, he was led to a barren room where he waited to meet the man who had summoned him.

Lovell became the head of a secret group of scientists who developed dirty tricks for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Their inventions included bat bombs, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, and camouflaged explosives. Moreover, they forged documents for undercover agents, plotted the assassination of foreign leaders, and performed truth drug experiments on unsuspecting subjects.

Shermer and Lisle discuss: \\u2022 why countries have spy agencies \\u2022 from COI to OSS to CIA \\u2022 Wild Bill Donavan \\u2022 Stanley Lovell as Professor Moriarty \\u2022 Vannevar Bush \\u2022 Division 19 \\u2022 George Kistiakowsky and the Aunt Jemima explosive weapon \\u2022 cat bombs, bat bombs, rat bomb, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, camouflaged explosives, A-pills, B-pills, E-pills, L-pills \\u2022 psychological warfare \\u2022 heavy water and nuclear weapons \\u2022 Werner Heisenberg, Moe Berg, and Carl Eifler \\u2022 biological and chemical warfare \\u2022 Operation Paperclip \\u2022 truth drugs \\u2022 Sidney Gottlieb, LSD, and MKULTRA (Bluebird, Artichoke).

John Lisle is a historian of science and the American intelligence community. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas and has taught courses on U.S. history, cyberspace, and information warfare at the University of Texas, Louisiana Tech University, and Austin Community College. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, Skeptic, The Journal of Intelligence History, and Physics in Perspective. The Dirty Tricks Department is his first book. In Vol. 25, No. 2 of Skeptic he wrote about MKULTRA, the CIA program in search of mind control technology.