I'm going to go the other way. He does read everyone's mind. All the time.
In fact, he projects his mind into everyone's mind. All the time.
His consciousness is no longer isolated to himself. He runs processes on every human mind nearby. These processes don't feel like thought to the people he is piggy backing on. For the most part, these processes don't impinge on the conscoius experience of the people being suborned; "Mind Quad" no more orders human minds about than we tell the cells in our skin to divide.
The original JP Stevenson is basically an antenna for the distributed "Mind Quad" hive intelligence to be able to communicate with mere mortals.
In order to engage in conventional mindreading or telepathy, "Mind Quad" has to work quite hard at it. You usually aren't aware of what your tongue is feeling; you have to focus on your tongue. "Speaking" into the mind of someone is akin to learning how to do the Spock hand gesture, or bending only the top joint of a finger; it requires flexing your finger tendons in a strange and unnatural way.
Reading someone's mind is like that; focusing on bending only the top joint of a finger. MQ is always reading everyone's mind, but not as a narrative; the reading of the mind is as a subprocess to MQ's intelligence.
This also means that MQ will sometimes know things and not know why. If MQ wants to, say, pick a lock, the hive intelligence could pick up the muscle memory and try to transcribe it to JP's movements.
What more, as MQ itself is ridiculously larger than a human consciousness, actually communicating the reasoning behind decisions is going to be difficult (heck, downloading it to JP's brain might be challenging!) You might know that JP taking a step back will cause the supervillian to miss an attack on someone else, but explaining how you knew that might be impossible.
MQ might also find dreaming individuals to be easier to hijack for processing needs. If we assume near unlimited range, brains on the other side of the planet are only 80 ms away. So sleepers will be relatively slow thoughts, but a huge supply of them.