The team of Wolff and Hinkle became the chief brainwashing
studiers for the U.S. government, although the Air Force and Army ran parallel
programs.[1] Their secret report
to Allen Dulles, later published in a declassified version, was considered
the definitive U.S. Government work on the subject. In fact, if allowances
are made for the Cold War rhetoric of the fifties, the Wolff-Hinkle report
still remains one of the better accounts of the massive political re-education
programs in China and the Soviet Union. It stated flatly that neither the
Soviets nor the Chinese had any magical weapons-no drugs, exotic mental
ray-guns, or other fanciful machines. Instead, the report pictured communist
interrogation methods resting on skillful, if brutal, application of police
methods. Its portrait of the Soviet system anticipates, in dry and scholarly
form, the work of novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn in The Gulag Archipelago.
Hinkle and Wolff showed that the Soviet technique rested on the cumulative
weight of intense psychological pressure and human weakness, and this thesis
alone earned the two Cornell doctors the enmity of the more right-wing
CIA officials such as Edward Hunter. Several of his former acquaintances
remember that Hunter was fond of saying that the Soviets brainwashed people
the way Pavlov had conditioned dogs.
In spite of some dissenters like Hunter, the Wolff-Hinkle
model became, with later refinements, the best available description of
extreme forms of political indoctrination. According to the general consensus,
the Soviets started a new prisoner off by putting him in solitary confinement.
A rotating corps of guards watched him constantly, humiliating and demeaning
him at every opportunity and making it clear he was totally cut off from
all outside support. The guards ordered him to stand for long periods,
let him sit, told him exactly the position he could take to lie down, and
woke him if he moved in the slightest while sleeping. They banned all outside
stimuli-books, conversation, or news of the world.
After four to six weeks of this mind-deadening routine,
the prisoner usually found the stress unbearable and broke down. "He weeps,
he mutters, and prays aloud in his cell," wrote Hinkle and Wolff. When
the prisoner reached this stage, the interrogation began. Night after night,
the guards brought him into a special room to face the interrogator. Far
from confronting his captive with specific misdeeds, the interrogator told
him that he knew his own crimes-all too well. In the most harrowing Kafkaesque
way, the prisoner tried to prove his innocence to he knew not what. Together
the interrogator and prisoner reviewed the prisoner's life in detail. The
interrogator seized on any inconsistency-no matter how minute-as further
evidence of guilt, and he laughed at the prisoner's efforts to justify
himself. But at least the prisoner was getting a response of some sort.
The long weeks of isolation and uncertainty had made him grateful for human
contact even grateful that his case was moving toward resolution. True,
it moved only as fast as he was willing to incriminate himself, but . .
. Gradually, he came to see that he and his interrogator were working toward
the same goal of wrapping up his case. In tandem, they ransacked his soul.
The interrogator would periodically let up the pressure. He offered a cigarette,
had a friendly chat, explained he had a job to do-making it all the more
disappointing the next time he had to tell the prisoner that his confession
was unsatisfactory .
As the charges against him began to take shape,
the prisoner realized that he could end his ordeal only with a full confession.
Otherwise the grueling sessions would go on forever. "The regimen of pressure
has created an overall discomfort which is well nigh intolerable," wrote
Hinkle and Wolff. "The prisoner invariably feels that 'something must be
done to end this.' He must find a way out." A former KGB officer, one of
many former interrogators and prisoners interviewed for the CIA study,
said that more than 99 percent of all prisoners signed a confession at
this stage.
In the Soviet system under Stalin, these confessions
were the final step of the interrogation process, and the prisoners usually
were shot or sent to a labor camp after sentencing. Today, Russian leaders
seem much less insistent on exacting confessions before jailing their foes,
but they still use the penal (and mental health) system to remove from
the population classes of people hostile to their rule.
The Chinese took on the more ambitious task of re-educating
their prisoners. For them, confession was only the beginning. Next, the
Chinese authorities moved the prisoner into a group cell where his indoctrination
began. From morning to night, he and his fellow prisoners studied Marx
and Mao, listened to lectures, and engaged in self-criticism. Since the
progress of each member depended on that of his cellmates, the group pounced
on the slightest misconduct as an indication of backsliding. Prisoners
demonstrated the zeal of their commitment by ferociously attacking deviations.
Constant intimacy with people who reviled him pushed the resistant prisoner
to the limits of his emotional endurance. Hinkle and Wolff found that "The
prisoner must conform to the demands of the group sooner or later." As
the prisoner developed genuine changes of attitude, pressure on him relaxed.
His cellmates rewarded him with increasing acceptance and esteem. Their
acceptance, in turn, reinforced his commitment to the Party, for he learned
that only this commitment allowed him to live successfully in the cell.
In many cases, this process produced an exultant sense of mission in the
prisoner-a feeling of having finally straightened out his life and come
to the truth. To be sure, this experience, which was not so different from
religious conversion, did not occur in all cases or always last after the
prisoner returned to a social group that did not reinforce it.
From the first preliminary studies of Wolff and
Hinkle, the U.S. intelligence community moved toward the conclusion that
neither the Chinese nor the Russians made appreciable use of drugs or hypnosis,
and they certainly did not possess the brainwashing equivalent of the atomic
bomb (as many feared). Most of their techniques were rooted in age-old
methods, and CIA brainwashing researchers like psychologist John Gittinger
found themselves poring over ancient documents on the Spanish Inquisition.
Furthermore, the communists used no psychiatrists or other behavioral scientists
to devise their interrogation system. The differences between the Soviet
and Chinese systems seemed to grow out of their respective national cultures.
The Soviet brainwashing system resembled a heavy-handed cop whose job was
to isolate, break, and then subdue all the troublemakers in the neighborhood.
The Chinese system was more like thousands of skilled acupuncturists, working
on each other and relying on group pressure, ideology, and repetition.
To understand further the Soviet or Chinese control systems, one had to
plunge into the subtle mysteries of national and individual character.
While CIA researchers looked into those questions,
the main thrust of the Agency's brainwashing studies veered off in a different
direction. The logic behind the switch was familiar in the intelligence
business. Just because the Soviets and the Chinese had not invented a brainwashing
machine, officials reasoned, there was no reason to assume that the task
was impossible. If such a machine were even remotely feasible, one had
to assume the communists might discover it. And in that case, national
security required that the United States invent the machine first. Therefore,
the CIA built up its own elaborate brainwashing program, which, like the
Soviet and Chinese versions, took its own special twist from our
national character. It was a tiny replica of the Manhattan Project, grounded
in the conviction that the keys to brainwashing lay in technology. Agency
officials hoped to use old-fashioned American know-how to produce shortcuts
and scientific breakthroughs. Instead of turning to tough cops, whose methods
repelled American sensibilities, or the gurus of mass motivation, whose
ideology Americans lacked, the Agency's brainwashing experts gravitated
to people more in the mold of the brilliant-and sometimes mad-scientist,
obsessed by the wonders of the brain.
In 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles made a rare public
statement on communist brainwashing: "We in the West are somewhat handicapped
in getting all the details," Dulles declared. "There are few survivors,
and we have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques."
Even as Dulles spoke, however, CIA officials acting under his orders had
begun to find the scientists and the guinea pigs. Some of their experiments
would wander so far across the ethical borders of experimental psychiatry
(which are hazy in their own right) that Agency officials thought it prudent
to have much of the work done outside the United States.
Call her Lauren G. For 19 years, her mind has been blank about her experience. She remembers her husband's driving her up to the old gray stone mansion that housed the hospital, Allan Memorial Institute, and putting her in the care of its director, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. The next thing she recalls happened three weeks later:
They gave me a dressing gown. It was way too big, and I was tripping all over it. I was mad. I asked why did I have to go round in this sloppy thing. I could hardly move because I was pretty weak. I remember trying to walk along the hall, and the walls were all slanted. It was then that I said, "Holy Smokes, what a ghastly thing." I remember running out the door and going up the mountain in my long dressing gown.
The mountain, named Mont Royal, loomed
high above Montreal. She stumbled and staggered as she tried to climb higher
and higher. Hospital staff members had no trouble catching her and dragging
her back to the Institute. In short order, they shot her full of sedatives,
attached electrodes to her temples, and gave her a dose of electroshock.
Soon she slept like a baby.
Gradually, over the next few weeks, Lauren G. began
to function like a normal person again. She took basket-weaving therapy
and played bridge with her fellow patients. The hospital released her,
and she returned to her husband in another Canadian city.
Before her mental collapse in 1959, Lauren G. seemed
to have everything going for her. A refined, glamorous horsewoman of 30,
whom people often said looked like Elizabeth Taylor, she had auditioned
for the lead in National Velvet at 13 and married the rich boy next
door at 20. But she had never loved her husband and had let her domineering
mother push her into his arms. He drank heavily. "I was really unhappy,"
she recalls. "I had a horrible marriage, and finally I had a nervous breakdown.
It was a combination of my trying to lose weight, sleep loss, and my nerves."
The family doctor recommended that her husband send
her to Dr. Cameron, which seemed like a logical thing to do, considering
his wide fame as a psychiatrist. He had headed Allan Memorial since 1943,
when the Rockefeller Foundation had donated funds to set up a psychiatric
facility at McGill University. With continuing help from the Rockefellers,
McGill had built a hospital known far beyond Canada's borders as innovative
and exciting. Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric
Association in 1953, and he became the first president of the World Psychiatric
Association. His friends joked that they had run out of honors to give
him.
Cameron's passion lay in the more "objective" forms
of therapy, with which he could more easily and swiftly bring about improvements
in patients than with the notoriously slow Freudian methods. An impatient
man, he dreamed of finding a cure for schizophrenia. No one could tell
him he was not on the right track. Cameron's supporter at the Rockefeller
Foundation, Robert Morrison, recorded in his private papers that he found
the psychiatrist tense and ill-at-ease, and Morrison ventured that this
may account for "his lack of interest and effectiveness in psychotherapy
and failure to establish warm personal relations with faculty members,
both of which were mentioned repeatedly when I visited Montreal." Another
Rockefeller observer noted that Cameron "appears to suffer from deep insecurity
and has a need for power which he nourishes by maintaining an extraordinary
aloofness from his associates."
When Lauren G.'s husband delivered her to Cameron,
the psychiatrist told him she would receive some electroshock, a standard
treatment at the time. Besides that, states her husband, "Cameron was not
very communicative, but I didn't think she was getting anything out of
the ordinary." The husband had no way of knowing that Cameron would use
an unproved experimental technique on his wife-much less that the psychiatrist
intended to "depattern" her. Nor did he realize that the CIA was supporting
this work with about $19,000 a year in secret funds.[2]
Cameron defined "depatterning" as breaking up existing
patterns of behavior, both the normal and the schizophrenic, by means of
particularly intensive electroshocks, usually combined with prolonged,
drug-induced sleep. Here was a psychiatrist willing-indeed, eager-to wipe
the human mind totally clean. Back in 1951, ARTICHOKE's Morse Allen had
likened the process to "creation of a vegetable." Cameron justified this
tabula rasa approach because he had a theory of "differential amnesia,"
for which he provided no statistical evidence when he published it. He
postulated that after he produced "complete amnesia" in a subject, the
person would eventually recover memory of his normal but not his schizophrenic
behavior. Thus, Cameron claimed he could generate "differential amnesia."
Creating such a state in which a man who knew too much could be made to
forget had long been a prime objective of the ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA programs.
Needless to say, Lauren G. does not recall a thing
today about those weeks when Cameron depatterned her. Afterward, unlike
over half of the psychiatrist's depatterning patients, Lauren G. gradually
recovered full recall of her life before the treatment, but then, she remembered
her mental problems, too.[3] Her
husband says she came out of the hospital much improved. She declares the
treatment had no effect one way or another on her mental condition, which
she believes resulted directly from her miserable marriage. She stopped
seeing Cameron after about a month of outpatient electroshock treatments,
which she despised. Her relationship with her husband further deteriorated,
and two years later she walked out on him. "I just got up on my own hind
legs," she states. "I said the hell with it. I'm going to do what I want
and take charge of my own life. I left and started over." Now divorced
and remarried, she feels she has been happy ever since.
Cameron's depatterning, of which Lauren G. had a
comparatively mild version, normally started with 15 to 30 days of "sleep
therapy." As the name implies, the patient slept almost the whole day and
night. According to a doctor at the hospital who used to administer what
he calls the "sleep cocktail," a staff member woke up the patient three
times a day for medication that consisted of a combination of 100 mg. Thorazine,
100 mg. Nembutal, 100 mg. Seconal, 150 mg. Veronal, and 10 mg. Phenergan.
Another staff doctor would also awaken the patient two or sometimes three
times daily for electroshock treatments.[4]
This doctor and his assistant wheeled a portable machine into the "sleep
room" and gave the subject a local anesthetic and muscle relaxant, so as
not to cause damage with the convulsions that were to come. After attaching
electrodes soaked in saline solution, the attendant held the patient down
and the doctor turned on the current. In standard, professional electroshock,
doctors gave the subject a single dose of 110 volts, lasting a fraction
of a second, once a day or every other day. By contrast, Cameron used a
form 20 to 40 times more intense, two or three times daily, with the power
turned up to 150 volts. Named the "Page-Russell" method after its British
originators, this technique featured an initial one-second shock, which
caused a major convulsion, and then five to nine additional shocks in the
middle of the primary and follow-on convulsions. Even Drs. Page and Russell
limited their treatment to once a day, and they always stopped as soon
as their patient showed "pronounced confusion" and became "faulty in habits."
Cameron, however, welcomed this kind of impairment as a sign the treatment
was taking effect and plowed ahead through his routine.
The frequent screams of patients that echoed through
the hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his associates in their attempts
to "depattern" their subjects completely. Other hospital patients report
being petrified by the "sleep rooms," where the treatment took place, and
they would usually creep down the opposite side of the hall.
Cameron described this combined sleep-electroshock
treatment as lasting between 15 to 30 days, with some subjects staying
in up to 65 days (in which case, he reported, he awakened them for three
days in the middle). Sometimes, as in the case of Lauren G., patients would
try to escape when the sedatives wore thin, and the staff would have to
chase after them. "It was a tremendous nursing job just to keep these people
going during the treatment," recalls a doctor intimately familiar with
Cameron's operation. This doctor paints a picture of dazed patients, incapable
of taking care of themselves, often groping their way around the hospital
and urinating on the floor.
Cameron wrote that his typical depatterning patient-usually
a woman-moved through three distinct stages. In the first, the subject
lost much of her memory. Yet she still knew where she was, why she was
there, and who the people were who treated her. In the second phase, she
lost her "space-time image," but still wanted to remember. In fact, not
being able to answer questions like, "Where am I?" and "How did I get here?"
caused her considerable anxiety. In the third stage, all that anxiety disappeared.
Cameron described the state as "an extremely interesting constriction of
the range of recollections which one ordinarily brings in to modify and
enrich one's statements. Hence, what the patient talks about are only his
sensations of the moment, and he talks about them almost exclusively in
highly concrete terms. His remarks are entirely uninfluenced by previous
recollections-nor are they governed in any way by his forward anticipations.
He lives in the immediate present. All schizophrenic symptoms have disappeared.
There is complete amnesia for all events in his life."
Lauren G. and 52 other subjects at Allan Memorial
received this level of depatterning in 1958 and 1959. Cameron had already
developed the technique when the CIA funding started. The Agency sent the
psychiatrist research money to take the treatment beyond this point.
Agency officials wanted to know if, once Cameron had produced the blank
mind, he could then program in new patterns of behavior, as he claimed
he could. As early as 1953-the year he headed the American Psychiatric
Association-Cameron conceived
a technique he called "psychic driving,"
by which he would bombard the subject with repeated verbal messages. From
tape recordings based on interviews with the patient, he selected emotionally
loaded "cue statements"-first negative ones to get rid of unwanted behavior
and then positive to condition in desired personality traits. On the negative
side, for example, the patient would hear this message as she lay in a
stupor:
Madeleine, you let your mother and father treat you as a child all through your single life. You let your mother check you up sexually after every date you had with a boy. You hadn't enough determination to tell her to stop it. You never stood up for yourself against your mother or father but would run away from trouble.... They used to call you "crying Madeleine." Now that you have two children, you don't seem to be able to manage them and keep a good relationship with your husband. You are drifting apart. You don't go out together. You have not been able to keep him interested sexually.
Leonard Rubenstein, Cameron's principal assistant,
whose entire salary was paid from CIA-front funds, put the message on a
continuous tape loop and played it for 16 hours every day for several weeks.
An electronics technician, with no medical or psychological background,
Rubenstein, an electrical whiz, designed a giant tape recorder that could
play 8 loops for 8 patients at the same time. Cameron had the speakers
installed literally under the pillows in the "sleep rooms." "We made sure
they heard it," says a doctor who worked with Cameron. With some patients,
Cameron intensified the negative effect by running wires to their legs
and shocking them at the end of the message.
When Cameron thought the negative "psychic driving"
had gone far enough, he switched the patient over to 2 to 5 weeks of positive
tapes:
You mean to get well. To do this you must let your feelings come out. It is all right to express your anger.... You want to stop your mother bossing you around. Begin to assert yourself first in little things and soon you will be able to meet her on an equal basis. You will then be free to be a wife and mother just like other women.
Cameron wrote that psychic driving provided a
way to make "direct, controlled changes in personality," without having
to resolve the subject's conflicts or make her relive past experiences.
As far as is known, no present-day psychologist or psychiatrist accepts
this view. Dr. Donald Hebb, who headed McGill's psychology department at
the time Cameron was in charge of psychiatry, minces no words when asked
specifically about psychic driving: "That was an awful set of ideas Cameron
was working with. It called for no intellectual respect. If you actually
look at what he was doing and what he wrote, it would make you laugh. If
I had a graduate student who talked like that, I'd throw him out." Warming
to his subject, Hebb continues: "Look, Cameron was no good as a researcher....
He was eminent because of politics." Nobody said such things at the time,
however. Cameron was a very powerful man.
The Scottish-born psychiatrist, who never lost the
burr in his voice, kept searching for ways to perfect depatterning and
psychic driving. He held out to the CIA front-the Society for the Investigation
of Human Ecology-that he could find more rapid and less damaging ways to
break down behavior. He sent the Society a proposal that combined his two
techniques with sensory deprivation and strong drugs. His smorgasbord approach
brought together virtually all possible techniques of mind control, which
he tested individually and together. When his Agency grant came through
in 1957, Cameron began work on sensory deprivation.
For several years, Agency officials had been interested
in the interrogation possibilities of this technique that Hebb himself
had pioneered at McGill with Canadian defense and Rockefeller money. It
consisted of putting a subject in a sealed environment-a small room or
even a large box-and depriving him of all sensory input: eyes covered with
goggles, ears either covered with muffs or exposed to a constant, monotonous
sound, padding to prevent touching, no smells-with this empty regime interrupted
only by meal and bathroom breaks. In 1955 Morse Allen of ARTICHOKE made
contact at the National Institutes of Health with Dr. Maitland Baldwin
who had done a rather gruesome experiment in which an Army volunteer had
stayed in the "box" for 40 hours until he kicked his way out after, in
Baldwin's words, "an hour of crying loudly and sobbing in a most heartrending
fashion." The experiment convinced Baldwin that the isolation technique
could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed. Hebb,
who unlike Baldwin released his subjects when they wanted, had never left
anyone in "the box" for more than six days. Baldwin told Morse Allen that
beyond that sensory deprivation would almost certainly cause irreparable
damage. Nevertheless, Baldwin agreed that if the Agency could provide the
cover and the subjects, he would do, according to Allen's report, "terminal
type" experiments. After numerous meetings inside the CIA on how and where
to fund Baldwin, an Agency medical officer finally shot down the project
as being "immoral and inhuman," suggesting that those pushing the experiments
might want to "volunteer their heads for use in Dr. Baldwin's 'noble' project."
With Cameron, Agency officials not only had a doctor
willing to perform terminal experiments in sensory deprivation, but one
with his own source of subjects. As part of his CIA-funded research, he
had a "box" built in the converted stables behind the hospital that housed
Leonard Rubenstein and his behavioral laboratory. Undaunted by the limits
set in Hebb's work, Cameron left one woman in for 35 days, although he
had so scrambled her mind with his other techniques that one cannot say,
as Baldwin predicted to the Agency, if the prolonged deprivation did specific
damage. This subject's name was Mary C., and, try as he might, Cameron
could not get through to her. As the aloof psychiatrist wrote in his notes:
"Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation
(35 days) and by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days
of positive driving, no favorable results were obtained."[5]
Before prescribing this treatment, Cameron had diagnosed the 52-year-old
Mary C.: "Conversion reaction in a woman of the involutional age with mental
anxiety; hypochondriatic." In other words, Mary C. was going through menopause.
In his proposal to the CIA front, Cameron also said
he would test curare, the South American arrow poison which, when liberally
applied, kills by paralyzing internal body functions. In nonlethal doses,
curare causes a limited paralysis which blocks but does not stop these
functions. According to his papers, some of which wound up in the archives
of the American Psychiatric Association, Cameron injected subjects with
curare in conjunction with sensory deprivation, presumably to immobilize
them further.
Cameron also tested LSD in combination with psychic
driving and other techniques. In late 1956 and early 1957, one of his subjects
was Val Orlikow, whose husband David has become a member of the Canadian
parliament. Suffering from what she calls a "character neurosis that started
with postpartum depression," she entered Allan Memorial as one of Cameron's
personal patients. He soon put her under his version of LSD therapy. One
to four times a week, he or another doctor would come into her room and
give her a shot of LSD, mixed with either a stimulant or a depressant and
then leave her alone with a tape recorder that played excerpts from her
last session with him. As far as is known, no other LSD researcher ever
subjected his patients to unsupervised trips-certainly not over the course
of two months when her hospital records show she was given LSD 14 times.
"It was terrifying," Mrs. Orlikow recalls. "You're afraid you've gone off
somewhere and can't come back." She was supposed to write down on a pad
whatever came into her head while listening to the tapes, but often she
became so frightened that she could not write at all. "You become very
small," she says, as her voice quickens and starts to reflect some of her
horror. "You're going to fall off the step, and God, you're going down
into hell because it's so far, and you are so little. Like Alice, where
is the pill that makes you big, and you're a squirrel, and you can't get
out of the cage, and somebody's going to kill you." Then, suddenly, Mrs.
Orlikow pulls out of it and lucidly states, "Some very weird things happened."
Mrs. Orlikow hated the LSD treatment. Several times
she told Cameron she would take no more, and the psychiatrist would put
his arm around her and ask, "Lassie," which he called all his women patients,
"don't you want to get well, so you can go home and see your husband?"
She remembers feeling guilty about not following the doctor's orders, and
the thought of disappointing Cameron, whom she idolized, crushed her. Finally,
after Cameron talked her out of quitting the treatment several times, she
had to end it. She left the hospital but stayed under his private care.
In 1963 he put her back in the hospital for more intensive psychic driving.
"I thought he was God," she states. "I don't know how I could have been
so stupid.... A lot of us were naive. We thought psychiatrists had the
answers. Here was the greatest in the world, with all these titles."
In defense of Cameron, a former associate says the
man truly cared about the welfare of his patients. He wanted to make them
well. As his former staff psychologist wrote:
He abhorred the waste of human potential, seen most dramatically in the young people whose minds were distorted by what was then considered to be schizophrenia. He felt equally strongly about the loss of wisdom in the aged through memory malfunction. For him, the end justified the means, and when one is dealing with the waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt this stance.
Cameron retired abruptly in 1964, for unexplained
reasons. His successor, Dr. Robert Cleghorn, made a virtually unprecedented
move in the academic world of mutual back-scratching and praise. He commissioned
a psychiatrist and a psychologist, unconnected to Cameron, to study his
electroshock work. They found that 60 percent of Cameron's depatterned
patients complained they still had amnesia for the period 6 months to 10
years before the therapy.[6] They
could find no clinical proof that showed the treatment to be any more or
less effective than other approaches. They concluded that "the incidence
of physical complications and the anxiety generated in the patient because
of real or imagined memory difficulty argue against" future use of the
technique.
The study-team members couched their report in densely
academic jargon, but one of them speaks more clearly now. He talks bitterly
of one of Cameron's former patients who needs to keep a list of her simplest
household chores to remember how to do them. Then he repeats several times
how powerful a man Cameron was, how he was "the godfather of Canadian psychiatry."
He continues, "I probably shouldn't talk about this, but Cameron-for him
to do what he did-he was a very schizophrenic guy, who totally detached
himself from the human implications of his work . . . God, we talk about
concentration camps. I don't want to make this comparison, but God, you
talk about 'we didn't know it was happening,' and it was-right in our back
yard."
Cameron died in 1967, at age 66, while climbing
a mountain. The
American Journal of Psychiatry published a long
and glowing obituary with a full-page picture of his not-unpleasant face.
D. Ewen Cameron did not need the CIA to corrupt
him. He clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research long before
the Agency front started to fund him. With his own hospital and source
of subjects, he could have found elsewhere encouragement and money to replace
the CIA's contribution which never exceeded $20,000 a year. However, Agency
officials knew exactly what they were paying for. They traveled periodically
to Montreal to observe his work, and his proposal was chillingly explicit.
In Cameron, they had a doctor, conveniently outside the United States,
willing to do terminal experiments in electroshock, sensory deprivation,
drug testing, and all of the above combined. By literally wiping the minds
of his subjects clean by depatterning and then trying to program in new
behavior, Cameron carried the process known as "brainwashing" to its logical
extreme.
It cannot be said how many-if any-other Agency brainwashing
projects reached the extremes of Cameron's work. Details are scarce, since
many of the principal witnesses have died, will not talk about what went
on, or lie about it. In what ways the CIA applied work like Cameron's is
not known. What is known, however, is that the intelligence community,
including the CIA, changed the face of the scientific community during
the 1950s and early 1960s by its interest in such experiments. Nearly every
scientist on the frontiers of brain research found men from the secret
agencies looking over his shoulders, impinging on the research. The experience
of Dr. John Lilly illustrates how this intrusion came about.
In 1953 Lilly worked at the National Institutes
of Health, outside Washington, doing experimental studies in an effort
to "map" the body functions controlled from various locations in the brain.
He devised a method of pounding up to 600 tiny sections of hypodermic tubing
into the skulls of monkeys, through which he could insert electrodes "into
the brain to any desired distance and at any desired location from the
cortex down to the bottom of the skull," he later wrote. Using electric
stimulation, Lilly discovered precise centers of the monkeys' brains that
caused pain, fear, anxiety, and anger. He also discovered precise, separate
parts of the brain that controlled erection, ejaculation, and orgasm in
male monkeys. Lilly found that a monkey, given access to a switch operating
a correctly planted electrode, would reward himself with nearly continuous
orgasms-at least once every 3 minutes-for up to 16 hours a day.
As Lilly refined his brain "maps," officials of
the CIA and other agencies descended upon him with a request for a briefing.
Having a phobia against secrecy, Lilly agreed to the briefing only under
the condition that it and his work remain unclassified, completely open
to outsiders. The intelligence officials submitted to the conditions most
reluctantly, since they knew that Lilly's openness would not only ruin
the spy value of anything they learned but could also reveal the identities
and the interests of the intelligence officials to enemy agents. They considered
Lilly annoying, uncooperative-possibly even suspicious.
Soon Lilly began to have trouble going to meetings
and conferences with his colleagues. As part of the cooperation with the
intelligence agencies, most of them had agreed to have their projects officially
classified as SECRET, which meant that access to the information required
a security clearance.[7] Lilly's
security clearance was withdrawn for review, then tangled up and misplaced-all
of which he took as pressure to cooperate with the CIA. Lilly, whose imagination
needed no stimulation to conjure up pictures of CIA agents on deadly missions
with remote-controlled electrodes strategically implanted in their brains,
decided to withdraw from that field of research. He says he had decided
that the physical intrusion of the electrodes did too much brain damage
for him to tolerate.
In 1954 Lilly began trying to isolate the operations
of the brain, free of outside stimulation, through sensory deprivation.
He worked in an office next to Dr. Maitland Baldwin, who the following
year agreed to perform terminal sensory deprivation experiments for ARTICHOKE's
Morse Allen but who never told Lilly he was working in the field. While
Baldwin experimented with his sensory-deprivation "box," Lilly invented
a special "tank." Subjects floated in a tank of body-temperature water
wearing a face mask that provided air but cut off sight and sound. Inevitably,
intelligence officials swooped down on Lilly again, interested in the use
of his tank as an interrogation tool. Could involuntary subjects be placed
in the tank and broken down to the point where their belief systems or
personalities could be altered?
It was central to Lilly's ethic that he himself
be the first subject of any experiment, and, in the case of the consciousness-exploring
tank work, he and one colleague were the only ones. Lilly realized
that the intelligence agencies were not interested in sensory deprivation
because of its positive benefits, and he finally concluded that it was
impossible for him to work at the National Institutes of Health without
compromising his principles. He quit in 1958.
Contrary to most people's intuitive expectations,
Lilly found sensory deprivation to be a profoundly integrating experience
for himself personally. He considered himself to be a scientist who subjectively
explored the far wanderings of the brain. In a series of private experiments,
he pushed himself into the complete unknown by injecting pure Sandoz LSD
into his thigh before climbing into the sensory-deprivation tank.[8]
When the counterculture sprang up, Lilly became something of a cult figure,
with his unique approach to scientific inquiry-though he was considered
more of an outcast by many in the professional research community.
For most of the outside world, Lilly became famous
with the release of the popular film, The Day of the Dolphin, which
the filmmakers acknowledged was based on Lilly's work with dolphins after
he left NIH. Actor George C. Scott portrayed a scientist, who, like Lilly,
loved dolphins, did pioneering experiments on their intelligence, and tried
to find ways to communicate with them. In the movie, Scott became dismayed
when the government pounced on his breakthrough in talking to dolphins
and turned it immediately to the service of war. In real life, Lilly was
similarly dismayed when Navy and CIA scientists trained dolphins for special
warfare in the waters off Vietnam.[9]
A few scientists like Lilly made up their minds not
to cross certain ethical lines in their experimental work, while others
were prepared to go further even than their sponsors from ARTICHOKE and
MKULTRA. Within the Agency itself, there was only one final question: Will
a technique work? CIA officials zealously tracked every lead, sparing no
expense to check each angle many times over.
By the time the MKULTRA program ended in 1963, Agency
researchers had found no foolproof way to brainwash another person.[10]
"All experiments beyond a certain point always failed," says the MKULTRA
veteran, "because the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the
subject got amnesiac or catatonic." Agency officials found through work
like Cameron's that they could create "vegetables," but such people served
no operational use. People could be tortured into saying anything, but
no science could guarantee that they would tell the truth.
The impotency of brainwashing techniques left the
Agency in a difficult spot when Yuri Nosenko defected to the United States
in February 1964. A ranking official of the Soviet KGB, Nosenko brought
with him stunning information. He said the Russians had bugged the American
embassy in Moscow, which turned out to be true. He named some Russian agents
in the West. And he said that he had personally inspected the KGB file
of Lee Harvey Oswald, who only a few months earlier had been murdered before
he could be brought to trial for the assassination of President Kennedy.
Nosenko said he learned that the KGB had had no interest in Oswald.
Was Nosenko telling the truth, or was he a KGB "plant"
sent to throw the United States off track about Oswald? Was his information
about penetration correct, or was Nosenko himself the penetration? Was
he acting in good faith? Were the men within the CIA who believed he was
acting in good faith themselves acting in good faith? These and a thousand
other questions made up the classical trick deck for spies-each card having
"true" on one side and "false" on the other.
Top CIA officials felt a desperate need to resolve
the issue of Nosenko's legitimacy. With numerous Agency counterintelligence
operations hanging in the balance, Richard Helms, first as Deputy Director
and then as Director, allowed CIA operators to work Nosenko over with the
interrogation method in which Helms apparently had the most faith. It turned
out to be not any truth serum or electroshock depatterning program or anything
else from the Agency's brainwashing search. Helms had Nosenko put through
the tried-and-true Soviet method: isolate the prisoner, deaden his senses,
break him. For more than three years-1,277 days, to be exact-Agency officers
kept Nosenko in solitary confinement. As if they were using the Hinkle-Wolff
study as their instruction manual and the Cardinal Mindszenty case as their
success story, the CIA men had guards watch over Nosenko day and night,
giving him not a moment of privacy. A light bulb burned continuously in
his cell. He was allowed nothing to read-not even the labels on toothpaste
boxes. When he tried to distract himself by making a chess set from pieces
of lint in his cell, the guards discovered his game and swept the area
clean. Nosenko had no window, and he was eventually put in a specially
built 12' X 12' steel bank vault.
Nosenko broke down. He hallucinated. He talked his
head off to his interrogators, who questioned him for 292 days, often while
they had him strapped into a lie detector. If he told the truth, they did
not believe him. While the Soviets and Chinese had shown that they could
make a man admit anything, the CIA interrogators apparently lacked a clear
idea of exactly what they wanted Nosenko to confess. When it was all over
and Richard Helms ordered Nosenko freed after three and a half years of
illegal detention, some key Agency officers still believed he was a KGB
plant. Others thought he was on the level. Thus the big questions remained
unresolved, and to this day, CIA men-past and present-are bitterly split
over who Nosenko really is.
With the Nosenko case, the CIA's brainwashing programs
had come full circle. Spurred by the widespread alarm over communist tactics,
Agency officials had investigated the field, started their own projects,
and looked to the latest technology to make improvements. After 10 years
of research, with some rather gruesome results, CIA officials had come
up with no techniques on which they felt they could rely. Thus, when the
operational crunch came, they fell back on the basic brutality of the Soviet
system.