he tackled the operations of Mexican drug cartels and their operations in South East Asia. The third in the series, The Shaman was published in February 2021. Non-fiction Perry's Hidden Power (1984) followed the factual theme in Program for a Puppet on the way the American public was manipulated into voting for candidates by slick computer-based campaigns. Hidden Power concentrated on the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. The book explained how advertising techniques had been superseded in elections by more sophisticated methods, including marketing and computer analysis. The book, as much narrative as analysis, told how the two key campaign pollsters steered their candidates. It was not critical of Reagan, but was seen by the Republican campaign as hostile to him. In the UK, The Economist opined that the book had a "frightening message: the pollsters with their state-of-the-art computers, which keep a finger on the pulse of the electorate, hope they can manipulate almost any election and have ambitions to control what the people’s choice can do in office." Oliver Pritchett in the Sunday Telegraph thought the book's main concept was "an alarming idea, and the author... plainly intends to give us the shivers." Perry's book The Exile, about Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, was published in 1988. Perry based the book on the 1974 defamation trial, when Burchett sued Jack Kane of the Democratic Labour Party for calling him a KGB agent. Stuart Macintyre dismissed the book as "a hostile life by ... a far less distinguished journalist who then turned his attention to John Monash and Don Bradman". The Fifth Man For his seventh book, published in 1994, Perry set out to discover the identity of the alleged fifth man in the Cambridge Five spy ring, most commonly thought to be John Cairncross. All members of the ring worked for the Soviet Union's KGB under the control of Yuri Ivanovitch Modin. After initial research, Perry presented a 20,000-word evidentiary statement to William Armstrong of Sedgwick & Jackson UK, who had published various books on espionage, notably by British journalist Chapman Pincher. Armstrong had been caught up in circumstances surrounding the MI5 agent Peter Wright, who published Spycatcher. The Fifth Man was published during an avalanche of spy book collaborations. The book named Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild, as the fifth member of the ring, the other four being Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and