Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), his colleagues, and his antagonists, are among the most influential groups of people of the 20th century. As a part of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic movement in Vienna, Reich is hailed as an innovator. His later work in the United States brought him to an ignominious end when he died in federal prison.
Author and researcher James Edward Martin took up the subject of the controversial psychoanalytic pioneer and natural scientist, expecting to disprove Reich's suspicions that his detractors were predominantly communists and even Soviet spies. This led the author to dusty university archives across the United States and Europe, and to interview Reich's associates and relatives. He also made Freedom of Information Act searches of FDA, FBI and CIA files, investigating not only their files on Reich, but also of his major detractors. In this book, you'll meet Karl Frank, the leader of an underground anti-Nazi group of Germans, calling themselves "New Beginning." Frank was a friend of Reich's in Vienna in the 20s; he later worked for Allen Dulles' intelligence agency Office of Strategic Services. It was Karl Frank who confirmed to Reich that Mildred Edie Brady, the instigator of the FDA's persecution of Reich, was indeed a fully committed Soviet agent. You'll listen in on conversations with Michael Straight, who was the publisher of Mildred Brady's article in "The New Republic" magazine. You'll hear his explanation of his tangled past involvement with a notorious den of Soviet moles, the Cambridge Five spy ring that included Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. You'll learn how Stalin's agents used Reich's own techniques of character analysis in a perverted way, in order to find psychological hooks into the minds of innocent people, conforming them to the red thread of conspiracy. You'll see what Mildred Brady, a cheerleader for the Emotional Plague, did to her own daughter. You'll travel to Arizona, and visit the places where Reich conducted his atmospheric medicine, under the noses of officials in the government's weather modification center, the Institute of Atmospheric Physics. You'll join Albert Einstein at Princeton as he tests Reich's discoveries, confirms them experimentally but not pursuing them. You'll meet the famed Dr. James E. McDonald and his colleagues at the University of Arizona, about McDonald's groundbreaking work on weather modification and UFO research - he was one of the first mainstream scientists to blow the whistle on a government cover-up.
"Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War" is exceptionally well documented with numerous citations, in a fully indexed edition including an Appendix with newly uncovered documents from FDA and FBI files, damning Reich's persecutors.