Reddit reviews Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult

Apparently Aleister Crowley offered his services to the British Secret Service and was declined. And there's this book, whose veracity and quality I can't vouch for since I haven't read it, that supposedly tells a different story.

That certainly does sound interesting, for fiction. For a non-fiction account, I'd be more curious to read the following, which I probably will at some point:

Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult

The synopsis:

> Aleister Crowley is best known today as a founding father of modern occultism. His wide, hypnotic eyes peer at us from the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his influence can be found everywhere in popular culture.

> Crowley, also known as the Great Beast, has been the subject of several biographies, some painting him as a misunderstood genius, others as a manipulative charlatan. None of them have looked seriously at his career as an agent of British Intelligence.

> Using documents gleaned from British, American, French, and Italian archives, Secret Agent 666 sensationally reveals that Crowley played a major role in the sinking of the Lusitania, a plot to overthrow the government of Spain, the thwarting of Irish and Indian nationalist conspiracies, and the 1941 flight of Rudolf Hess.

> Author Richard B. Spence argues that Crowley—in his own unconventional way—was a patriotic Englishman who endured years of public vilification in part to mask his role as a secret agent.

> The verification of the Great Beast’s participation in the twentieth century’s most astounding government plots will likely blow the minds of history buff s and occult aficionados alike.

> Author Richard B. Spence can be seen on various documentaries on the History Channel and is a consultant for Washington, DC’s International Spy Museum. He is also the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House).

I'm not sure how much of that is accurate but it should make for a fun read, and interesting to fact-check (if feasible).

It's all shadows and mirrors of course, but I see an interest in the occult on behalf of the CIA. To begin you have to consider what kind of organization the CIA is and how it operates. In my view, without regard for what institutional creed or beliefs the CIA may have, at its core it operates like an occult/secret society. Here's a quote from William Colby, former director of the CIA, published in his memoir:

> Socially as well as professionally they cliqued together, forming a sealed fraternity. They ate together at their own special favorite restaurants; they partied almost only among themselves; their families drifted to each other, so their defenses did not always have to be up. In this way they increasingly separated themselves from the ordinary world and developed a rather skewed view of that world. Their own dedicated double life became the proper norm, and they looked down on the life of the rest of the citizenry. And out of this grew what was later named -- and condemned -- as the "cult" of intelligence, an inbred, distorted, elitist view of intelligence that held it to be above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution, which applied to everything and everyone else.

There really is a wealth of evidence out there. I can point you in a few different directions, if you're interested. But if you believe in occult or magical forces, then you should know that the use of occult power in military and intelligence circles goes back thousands of years, starting perhaps with the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Oracle of Delphi, or Crowley's connections to British intelligence, and so on.