Secret Weapons: Two Sisters' Terrifying True Story of Sex, Spies and Sabotage

by Cheryl Hersha, Lynn Hersha, Dale Griffis, Ted Schwarz

Overview

As children, two sisters became pawns in a top secret government program to train guerrilla leaders, assassins and information couriers: secret weapons for American intelligence services. Years passed; the sisters grew up, married and had children. But inside lay dormant, hidden skills - weapons training, reconnaissance work, pilot training and more - that kept them ready for the call from the government. Through analysis of CIA files and interviews with experts and participants, the chilling true story of Cheryl and Lynn Hersha is finally being told.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780882824475
Publisher:	New Horizon Press
Publication date:	04/21/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	2 MB

Editorial Reviews

Now in their late 30s, the Hersha sisters claim to have experienced chilling childhoods, recounted here by two Ohio-based investigators Schwarz (The Hillside Strangler) and former police captain and "ritual abuse expert" Griffis who say they have studied declassified CIA files and interviewed military personnel in an effort to bolster the Hersha memories. Before the age of seven, the sisters say, they were inducted into a covert, government-authorized, mind-control program designed to spawn spies and assassins. During weekends and summers, they were subjected to traumatizing experiments. Cheryl tells of her days as a caged "lab rat," released to navigate electrified mazes. The two became "psychological captives," programmed to respond to code words. Following practice in weaponry, martial arts and flight training, altered identities were purportedly introduced. At 15, Lynn "was made part of a unit that experienced murder," and she assumed the identity of team leader "Lt. Rick Shaw." As the seductive "Samantha Gooding," Cheryl would paralyze her victims, and she later became the cocky chopper pilot "Sgt. Thomas O'Neil." Naturally, these two "men," long separated, were destined to meet: "Cheryl Hersha! It's me, Lynn, your sister. You've got to let me go. You can't shoot me." Credibility collapses, as improbabilities are piled on inconsistencies, and the truth is buried beneath simplistic, pulp-adventure prose. In closing, the authors claim that "Their story is true," following with an admission that they found no government documents about the program or the sisters. An elaborate disclaimer about the "presumed thoughts and imagined words of the participants" will lead many readers to ponder just how much real events have been fictionalized. (Mar.) Forecast: Since Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control (1978) and Donald Bain's The Control of Candy Jones (1976), many books about CIA mind control have stacked up. This account of The Manchurian Candidate meets La Femme Nikita will soon work its way toward the bottom of the stack. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In the last half of the twentieth century the American government carried out secret, heinous experiments designed to create and perfect soldiers and spies. Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were two sisters who, as children, were caught up in some of these top secret programs of torture and mind control that went under such covert titles as Monarch, Artichoke, MKULTRA, and Paperclip. In Secret Weapons: Two Sisters' Terrifying True Story Of Sex, Spies And Sabotage, the sisters effective collaborate with Dale Griffis and Ted Schwarz to reveal and analyze these "black box" operations through previously classified CIA files, the sister's own personal experiences, as well as extensive and informative interviews with experts to document one of the most chilling and incredible aspects of American history — and one that never made it into any American history books.