The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer --- the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders and potions that could kill or maim without a trace --- including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. Stephen Kinzer draws on new documentary research and original interviews to bring to life one of the most powerful unknown Americans of the 20th century.

How should the United States act in the world? Americans cannot decide. Sometimes we burn with righteous anger, launching foreign wars and deposing governments. Then we retreat --- until the cycle begins again. No matter how often we debate this question, none of what we say is original. Every argument is a pale shadow of the first and greatest debate, which erupted more than a century ago. Its themes resurface every time Americans argue whether or not to intervene in a foreign country. Revealing a piece of forgotten history, Stephen Kinzer transports us to the dawn of the 20th century, when the United States first found itself with the chance to dominate faraway lands.

During the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, two immensely powerful brothers --- secretary of state John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Dulles --- led the United States into a series of foreign adventures whose effects are still shaking the world. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the background of American culture and history and explores how the story and self-view of the Dulles brothers parallels that of the United States and its place in the world.