Now you CIA it, now you don't.

The BBC writes the CIA, as part of the increasingly infamous MK-ULTRA (see the new film "Men Who Stare at Goats"), hired a magician to teach their operatives tricks of the trade. The book that came out of this, clearly named in a time before PR consciousness ("The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception"), teaches operatives how to spike someone's drink whilst lighting a cigarette, tie your shoe laces to send messages and so on. It's worth mentioning the MK-ULTRA programme, about which more and more is coming to light, is at times both humorous and disturbing. Humorous when you consider the CIA seriously attempted psychic abilities as plausible, disturbing when you consider they used men at brothels to test the effect of LSD (without the subjects permission or knowledge), in one cases giving a man LSD for 79 days (again, without his knowledge or informing him what was happening to him).