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Was Houdini a Spy? (2021)

47 points by carlos-menezes

by ggm

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Maskelyne
A bit of flim-flam but I would argue he was better placed for his skills. Not an escapologist but in the room next door on stage doing misdirection.
His war record is a bit mixed. I think he may have been a human version of "carrots help night vision"

by megadata

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Good 3 part podcast on Houdini: https://timharford.com/2025/03/cautionary-tales-houdini-magi...

by pogue

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Here's a copy of The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception mentioned in the article. It's 179 pages and sounds interesting [1].
[1] https://archive.org/details/cia-manual-trickery-deception-20...

by rmason

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Houdini died on Halloween right after performing at the Garick theatre in Detroit. As a result he is remembered on each Halloween. When I was a kid there would be magic shows on that day.

by kmoser

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> Similarly, magician and paranormal debunker James Randi commented, “If Houdini had been a spy that would have gotten out. He never would have been able to sit on it.”
If Josephine Baker was a spy, why not Houdini?

by neilv

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> In the 1950s, as part of the MKULTRA project, the Agency hired magician John Mulholland to teach young officers techniques of deception suitable for the field, such as smuggling assets out of East Germany during the Cold War in vehicles that resembled the magic boxes used in stage illusions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra says:
> Project MKUltra[a] was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1] The term MKUltra is a CIA cryptonym: "MK" is an arbitrary prefix standing for the Office of Technical Service and "Ultra" is an arbitrary word out of a dictionary used to name this project. The program has been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an example of the CIA's abuse of power, with critics highlighting its disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.[2]
I would guess the goal of this fluffy article is to promote positive domestic perceptions of the CIA.
But did they really have to shout out some keyword that's associated with some of the craziest publicly-known things that the CIA did, without acknowledging, oh yeah, some bad stuff happened?
And is now the time to be clouding past lessons learned by the US, about the dangers of insane rogue elements in government, sabotaging our ideals from within?

by temptemptemp111

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[dead]

by nelblu

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