In the early days of the Society, Agency officials
trusted Wolff and his untried ideas with a sensitive espionage assignment.
In effect, the new specialty of human ecology was going to telescope the
stages of research and application into one continuing process. Speeding
up the traditional academic method was required because the CIA men faced
an urgent problem. "What was bothering them," Lawrence Hinkle explains,
"was that the Chinese had cleaned up their agents in China.... What they
really wanted to do was come up with some Chinese [in America], steer them
to us, and make them into agents." Wolff accepted the challenge and suggested
that the Cornell group hide its real purpose behind the cover of investigating
"the ecological aspects of disease" among Chinese refugees. The Agency
gave the project a budget of $84,175 (about 30 percent of the money it
put into Cornell in 1955) and supplied the study group with 100 Chinese
refugees to work with. Nearly all these subjects had been studying in the
United States when the communists took over the mainland in 1949, so they
tended to be dislocated people in their thirties.
On the Agency side, the main concern, as expressed
by one ARTICHOKE man, was the "security hazard" of bringing together so
many potential agents in one place. Nevertheless, CIA officials decided
to go ahead. Wolff promised to tell them about the inner reaches of the
Chinese character, and they recognized the operational advantage that insight
into Chinese behavior patterns could provide. Moreover, Wolff said he would
pick out the most useful possible agents. The Human Ecology Society would
then offer these candidates "fellowships" and subject them to more intensive
interviews and "stress producing" situations. The idea was to find out
about their personalities, past conditioning, and present motivations,
in order to figure out how they might perform in future predicaments-such
as finding themselves back in Mainland China as American agents. In the
process, Wolff hoped to mold these Chinese into people willing to work
for the CIA. Mindful of leaving some cover for Cornell, he was adamant
that Agency operators not connected with the project make the actual recruitment
pitch to those Chinese whom the Agency men wanted as agents.
As a final twist, Wolff planned to provide each
agent with techniques to withstand the precise forms of hostile interrogation
they could expect upon returning to China. CIA officials wanted to "precondition"
the agents in order to create long lasting motivation "impervious to lapse
of time and direct psychological attacks by the enemy." In other words,
Agency men planned to brainwash their agents in order to protect them against
Chinese brainwashing.
Everything was covered-in theory, at least. Wolff
was going to take a crew of 100 refugees and turn as many of them as possible
into detection-proof, live agents inside China, and he planned to do the
job quickly through human ecology. It was a heady chore for the Cornell
professor to take on after classes.
Wolff hired a full complement of psychologists,
psychiatrists, and anthropologists to work on the project. He bulldozed
his way through his colleagues' qualms and government red tape alike. Having
hired an anthropologist before learning that the CIA security office would
not give her a clearance, Wolff simply lied to her about where the money
came from. "It was a function of Wolff's imperious nature," says his partner
Hinkle. "If a dog came in and threw up on the rug during a lecture, he
would continue." Even the CIA men soon found that Harold Wolff was not
to be trifled with. "From the Agency side, I don't know anyone who wasn't
scared of him," recalls a longtime CIA associate. "He was an autocratic
man. I never knew him to chew anyone out. He didn't have to. We were damned
respectful. He moved in high places. He was just a skinny little man but
talk about mind control! He was one of the controllers."
In the name of the Human Ecology Society, the CIA
paid $1,200 a month to rent a fancy town house on Manhattan's East 78th
Street to house the Cornell group and its research projects Agency technicians
traveled to New York in December 1954 to install eavesdropping microphones
around the building. These and other more obvious security devices-safes,
guards, and the like-made the town house look different from the academic
center it was supposed to be. CIA liaison personnel held meetings with
Wolff and the staff in the secure confines of the town house, and they
all carefully watched the 100 Chinese a few blocks away at the Cornell
hospital. The Society paid each subject $25 a day so the researchers could
test them, probe them, and generally learn all they could about Chinese
people-or at least about middle-class, displaced, anti-Communist ones.
It is doubtful that any of Wolff's Chinese ever
returned to their homeland as CIA agents, or that all of Wolff's proposals
were put into effect. In any case, the project was interrupted in midstream
by a major shake-up in the CIA's entire mind-control effort. Early in 1955,
Sid Gottlieb and his Ph.D. crew from TSS took over most of the ARTICHOKE
functions, including the Society, from Morse Allen and the Pinkerton types
in the Office of Security. The MKULTRA men moved quickly to turn the Society
into an entity that looked and acted like a legitimate foundation. First
they smoothed over the ragged covert edges. Out came the bugs and safes
so dear to Morse Allen and company. The new crew even made some effort
(largely unsuccessful) to attract non-CIA funds. The biggest change, however,
was the Cornell professors now had to deal with Agency representatives
who were scientists and who had strong ideas of their own on research questions.
Up to this point, the Cornellians had been able to keep the CIA's involvement
within bounds acceptable to them. While Harold Wolff never ceased wanting
to explore the furthest reaches of behavior control, his colleagues were
wary of going on to the outer limits-at least under Cornell cover.
No one would ever confuse MKULTRA projects with ivory-tower
research, but Gottlieb's people did take a more academic-and sophisticated-approach
to behavioral research than their predecessors. The MKULTRA men understood
that not every project would have an immediate operational benefit, and
they believed less and less in the existence of that one just-over-the-horizon
technique that would turn men into puppets. They favored increasing their
knowledge of human behavior in relatively small steps, and they concentrated
on the reduced goal of influencing and manipulating their subjects. "You're
ahead of the game if you can get people to do something ten percent more
often than they would otherwise," says an MKULTRA veteran.
Accordingly, in 1956, Sid Gottlieb approved a $74,000
project to have the Human Ecology Society study the factors that caused
men to defect from their countries and cooperate with foreign governments.
MKULTRA officials reasoned that if they could understand what made old
turncoats tick, it might help them entice new ones. While good case officers
instinctively seemed to know how to handle a potential agent-or thought
they did-the MKULTRA men hoped to come up with systematic, even scientific
improvements. Overtly, Harold Wolff designed the program to look like a
follow-up study to the Society's earlier programs, noting to the Agency
that it was "feasible to study foreign nationals under the cover of a medical-sociological
study." (He told his CIA funders that "while some information of general
value to science should be produced, this in itself will not be a sufficient
justification for carrying out a study of this nature.") Covertly, he declared
the purpose of the research was to assess defectors' social and cultural
background, their life experience, and their personality structure, in
order to understand their motivations, value systems, and probable future
reactions.
The 1956 Hungarian revolt occurred as the defector
study was getting underway, and the Human Ecology group, with CIA headquarters
approval, decided to turn the defector work into an investigation of 70
Hungarian refugees from that upheaval. By then, most of Harold Wolff's
team had been together through the brainwashing and Chinese studies. While
not all of them knew of the CIA's specific interests, they had streamlined
their procedures for answering the questions that Agency officials found
interesting. They ran the Hungarians through the battery of tests and observations
in six months, compared to a year and a half for the Chinese project.
The Human Ecology Society reported that most of
their Hungarian subjects had fought against the Russians during the Revolution
and that they had lived through extraordinarily difficult circumstances,
including arrest, mistreatment, and indoctrination. The psychologists and
psychiatrists found that, often, those who had survived with the fewest
problems had been those with markedly aberrant personalities. "This observation
has added to the evidence that healthy people are not necessarily 'normal,'
but are people particularly adapted to their special life situations,"
the group declared.
While CIA officials liked the idea that their Hungarian
subjects had not knuckled under communist influence, they recognized that
they were working with a skewed sample. American visa restrictions kept
most of the refugee left-wingers and former communist officials out of
the United States; so, as a later MKULTRA document would state, the Society
wound up studying "western-tied rightist elements who had never been accepted
completely" in postwar Hungary. Agency researchers realized that these
people would "contribute little" toward increasing the CIA's knowledge
of the processes that made a communist official change his loyalties.
In order to broaden their data base, MKULTRA officials
decided in March 1957 to bring in some unwitting help. They gave a contract
to Rutgers University sociologists Richard Stephenson and Jay Schulman
"to throw as much light as possible on the sociology of the communist system
in the throes of revolution." The Rutgers professors started out by interviewing
the 70 Hungarians at Cornell in New York, and Schulman went on to Europe
to talk to disillusioned Communists who had also fled their country. From
an operational point of view, these were the people the Agency really cared
about; but, as socialists, most of them probably would have resisted sharing
their experiences with the CIA-if they had known.[2]
Jay Schulman would have resisted, too. After discovering
almost 20 years later that the Agency had paid his way and seen his confidential
interviews, he feels misused. "In 1957 I was myself a quasi-Marxist and
if I had known that this study was sponsored by the CIA, there is really,
obviously, no way that I would have been associated with it," says Schulman.
"My view is that social scientists have a deep personal responsibility
for questioning the sources of funding; and the fact that I didn't do it
at the time was simply, in my judgment, indication of my own naiveté
and political innocence, in spite of my ideological bent."
Deceiving Schulman and his Hungarian subjects did
not bother the men from MKULTRA in the slightest. According to a Gottlieb
aide, one of the strong arguments inside the CIA for the whole Human Ecology
program was that it gave the Agency a means of approaching and using political
mavericks who could not otherwise get security clearances. "Sometimes,"
he chuckles, "these left-wing social scientists were damned good." This
MKULTRA veteran scoffs at the displeasure Schulman expresses: "If we'd
gone to a guy and said, 'We're CIA,' he never would have done it. They
were glad to get the money in a world where damned few people were willing
to support them.... They can't complain about how they were treated or
that they were asked to do something they wouldn't have normally done."
The Human Ecology Society soon became a conduit
for CIA money flowing to projects, like the Rutgers one, outside Cornell.
For these grants, the Society provided only cover and administrative support
behind the gold-plated names of Cornell and Harold Wolff. From 1955 to
1958, Agency officials passed funds through the Society for work on criminal
sexual psychopaths at Ionia State Hospital,[3]
a mental institution located on the banks of the Grand River in the rolling
farm country 120 miles northwest of Detroit. This project had an interesting
hypothesis: That child molesters and rapists had ugly secrets buried deep
within them and that their stake in not admitting their perversions approached
that of spies not wanting to confess. The MKULTRA men reasoned that any
technique that would work on a sexual psychopath would surely have a similar
effect on a foreign agent. Using psychologists and psychiatrists connected
to the Michigan mental health and the Detroit court systems, they set up
a program to test LSD and marijuana, wittingly and unwittingly, alone and
in combination with hypnosis. Because of administrative delays, the Michigan
doctors managed to experiment only on 26 inmates in three years-all sexual
offenders committed by judges without a trial under a Michigan law, since
declared unconstitutional. The search for a truth drug went on, under the
auspices of the Human Ecology Society, as well as in other MKULTRA channels.
The Ionia project was the kind of expansionist activity
that made Cornell administrators, if not Harold Wolff, uneasy. By 1957,
the Cornellians had had enough. At the same time, the Agency sponsors decided
that the Society had outgrown its dependence on Cornell for academic credentials-that
in fact the close ties to Cornell might inhibit the Society's future growth
among academics notoriously sensitive to institutional conflicts. One CIA
official wrote that the Society "must be given more established stature
in the research community to be effective as a cover organization." Once
the Society was cut loose in the foundation world, Agency men felt they
would be freer to go anywhere in academia to buy research that might assist
covert operations. So the CIA severed the Society's formal connection to
Cornell.
The Human Ecology group moved out of its East 78th
Street town house, which had always seem a little too plush for a university
program, and opened up a new headquarters in Forest Hills, Queens, which
was an inappropriate neighborhood for a well-connected foundation.[4]
Agency officials hired a staff of four led by Lieutenant Colonel James
Monroe, who had worked closely with the CIA as head of the Air Force's
study of Korean War prisoners. Sid Gottlieb and the TSS hierarchy in Washington
still made the major decisions, but Monroe and the Society staff, whose
salaries the Agency paid, took over the Society's dealings with the outside
world and the monitoring of several hundred thousand dollars a year in
research projects. Monroe personally supervised dozens of grants, including
Dr. Ewen Cameron's brainwashing work in Montreal. Soon the Society was
flourishing as an innovative foundation, attracting research proposals
from a wide variety of behavioral scientists, at a time when these people-particularly
the unorthodox ones-were still the step-children of the fund-granting world.
After the Society's exit from Cornell, Wolff and
Hinkle stayed on as president and vice-president, respectively, of the
Society's board of directors. Dr. Joseph Hinsey, head of the New York Hospital-Cornell
Medical Center also remained on the board. Allen Dulles continued his personal
interest in the Society's work and came to one of the first meetings of
the new board, which, as was customary with CIA fronts, included some big
outside names. These luminaries added worthiness to the enterprise while
playing essentially figurehead roles. In 1957 the other board members were
John Whitehorn, chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins
University, Carl Rogers, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the
University of Wisconsin, and Adolf A. Berle, onetime Assistant Secretary
of State and chairman of the New York Liberal Party.[5]
Berle had originally put his close friend Harold Wolff in touch with the
CIA, and at Wolff's request, he came on the Society board despite some
reservations. "I am frightened about this one," Berle wrote in his diary.
"If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will
become manageable ants. But I don't think it will happen."
There was a lot of old-fashioned backscratching
among the CIA people and the academics as they settled into the work of
accommodating each other. Even Harold Wolff, the first and the most enthusiastic
of the scholar-spies, had made it clear from the beginning that he expected
some practical rewards for his service. According to colleague Hinkle,
who appreciated Wolff as one the great grantsman of his time, Wolff expected
that the Agency "would support our research and we would be their consultants."
Wolff bluntly informed the CIA that some of his work would have no direct
use "except that it vastly enhances our value . . . as consultants and
advisers." In other words, Wolff felt that his worth to the CIA increased
in proportion to his professional accomplishments and importance-which
in turn depended partly on the resources he commanded. The Agency men understood,
and over the last half of the 1950s, they were happy to contribute almost
$300,000 to Wolff's own research on the brain and central nervous system.
In turn, Wolff and his reputation helped them gain access to other leading
lights in the academic world.
Another person who benefited from Human Ecology
funds was Carl Rogers, whom Wolff had also asked to serve on the board.
Rogers, who later would become famous for his nondirective, nonauthoritarian
approach to psychotherapy, respected Wolff's work, and he had no objection
to helping the CIA. Although he says he would have nothing to do with secret
Agency activities today, he asks for understanding in light of the climate
of the 1950s. "We really did regard Russia as the enemy," declares Rogers,
"and we were trying to do various things to make sure the Russians did
not get the upper hand." Rogers received an important professional reward
for joining the Society board. Executive Director James Monroe had let
him know that, once he agreed to serve, he could expect to receive a Society
grant. "That appealed to me because I was having trouble getting funded,"
says Rogers. "Having gotten that grant [about $30,000 over three years],
it made it possible to get other grants from Rockefeller and NIMH." Rogers
still feels grateful to the Society for helping him establish a funding
"track record," but he emphasizes that the Agency never had any effect
on his research.
Although MKULTRA psychologist John Gittinger suspected
that Rogers' work on psychotherapy might provide insight into interrogation
methods, the Society did not give Rogers money because of the content of
his work. The grant ensured his services as a consultant, if desired, and,
according to a CIA document, "free access" to his project. But above all,
the grant allowed the Agency to use Rogers' name. His standing in the academic
community contributed to the layer of cover around the Society that Agency
officials felt was crucial to mask their involvement.
Professor Charles Osgood's status in psychology
also improved the Society's cover, but his research was more directly useful
to the Agency, and the MKULTRA men paid much more to get it. In 1959 Osgood,
who four years later became president of the American Psychological Association,
wanted to push forward his work on how people in different societies express
the same feelings, even when using different words and concepts. Osgood
wrote in "an abstract conceptual framework," but Agency officials saw his
research as "directly relevant" to covert activities. They believed they
could transfer Osgood's knowledge of "hidden values and cues" in the way
people communicate into more effective overseas propaganda. Osgood's work
gave them a tool-called the "semantic differential"-to choose the right
words in a foreign language to convey a particular meaning.
Like Carl Rogers, Osgood got his first outside funding
for what became the most important work of his career from the Human Ecology
Society. Osgood had written directly to the CIA for support, and the Society
soon contacted him and furnished $192,975 for research over five years.
The money allowed him to travel widely and to expand his work into 30 different
cultures. Also like Rogers, Osgood eventually received NIMH money to finish
his research, but he acknowledges that the Human Ecology grants played
an important part in the progress of his work. He stresses that "there
was none of the feeling then about the CIA that there is now, in terms
of subversive activities," and he states that the Society had no influence
on anything he produced. Yet Society men could and did talk to him about
his findings. They asked questions that reflected their own covert interests,
not his academic pursuits, and they drew him out, according to one of them,
"at great length." Osgood had started studying cross-cultural meaning well
before he received the Human Ecology money, but the Society's support ensured
that he would continue his work on a scale that suited the Agency's purposes,
as well as his own.
A whole category of Society funding, called "cover
grants," served no other purpose than to build the Society's false front.
These included a sociological study of Levittown, Long Island (about $4,500),
an analysis of the Central Mongoloid skull ($700), and a look at the foreign-policy
attitudes of people who owned fallout shelters, as opposed to people who
did not ($2,500). A $500 Human Ecology grant went to Istanbul University
for a study of the effects of circumcision on Turkish boys. The researcher
found that young Turks, usually circumcised between the ages of five and
seven, felt "severe emotional impact with attending symptoms of withdrawal."
The children saw the painful operations as "an act of aggression" that
brought out previously hidden fears-or so the Human Ecology Society reported.
In other instances, the Society put money into projects
whose covert application was so unlikely that only an expert could see
the possibilities. Nonetheless, in 1958 the Society gave $5,570 to social
psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif of the University of Oklahoma
for work on the behavior of teen-age boys in gangs. The Sherifs, both ignorant
of the CIA connection,[6] studied
the group structures and attitudes in the gangs and tried to devise ways
to channel antisocial behavior into more constructive paths. Their results
were filtered through clandestine minds at the Agency. "With gang warfare,"
says an MKULTRA source, "you tried to get some defectors-in-place who would
like to modify some of the group behavior and cool it. Now, getting a juvenile
delinquent defector was motivationally not all that much different from
getting a Soviet one."
MKULTRA officials were clearly interested in using
their grants to build contacts and associations with prestigious academics.
The Society put $1,500 a year into the Research in Mental Health Newsletter
published jointly at McGill University by the sociology and psychiatric
departments. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, an international culture heroine,
sat on the newsletter's advisory board (with, among others, D. Ewen Cameron),
and the Society used her name in its biennial report. Similarly, the Society
gave grants of $26,000 to the well-known University of London psychologist,
H. J. Eysenck, for his work on motivation. An MKULTRA document acknowledged
that this research would have "no immediate relevance for Agency needs,"
but that it would "lend prestige" to the Society. The grants to Eysenck
also allowed the Society to take funding credit for no less than nine of
his publications in its 1963 report. The following year, the Society managed
to purchase a piece of the work of the most famous behaviorist of all,
Harvard's B. F. Skinner. Skinner, who had tried to train pigeons to guide
bombs for the military during World War II, received a $5,000 Human Ecology
grant to pay the costs of a secretary and supplies for the research that
led to his book, Freedom and Dignity. Skinner has no memory of the
grant or its origins but says, "I don't like secret involvement of any
kind. I can't see why it couldn't have been open and aboveboard."
A TSS source explains that grants like these "bought
legitimacy" for the Society and made the recipients "grateful." He says
that the money gave Agency employees at Human Ecology a reason to phone
Skinner-or any of the other recipients-to pick his brain about a particular
problem. In a similar vein, another MKULTRA man, psychologist John Gittinger
mentions the Society's relationship with Erwin Goffman of the University
of Pennsylvania, whom many consider today's leading sociological theorist.
The Society gave him a small grant to help finish a book that would have
been published anyway. As a result, Gittinger was able to spend hours talking
with him about, among other things, an article he had written earlier on
confidence men. These hucksters were experts at manipulating behavior,
according to Gittinger, and Goffman unwittingly "gave us a better understanding
of the techniques people use to establish phony relationships"-a subject
of interest to the CIA.
To keep track of new developments in the behavioral
sciences, Society representatives regularly visited grant recipients and
found out what they and their colleagues were doing. Some of the knowing
professors became conscious spies. Most simply relayed the latest professional
gossip to their visitors and sent along unpublished papers. The prestige
of the Human Ecology grantees also helped give the Agency access to behavioral
scientists who had no connection to the Society. "You could walk into someone's
office and say you were just talking to Skinner," says an MKULTRA veteran.
"We didn't hesitate to do this. It was a way to name-drop."
The Society did not limit its intelligence gathering
to the United States. As one Agency source puts it, "The Society gave us
a legitimate basis to approach anyone in the academic community anywhere
in the world." CIA officials regularly used it as cover when they traveled
abroad to study the behavior of foreigners of interest to the Agency, including
such leaders as Nikita Khrushchev. The Society funded foreign researchers
and also gave money to American professors to collect information abroad.
In 1960, for instance, the Society sponsored a survey of Soviet psychology
through the simple device of putting up $15,000 through the official auspices
of the American Psychological Association to send ten prominent psychologists
on a tour of the Soviet Union. Nine of the ten had no idea of the Agency
involvement, but CIA officials were apparently able to debrief everyone
when the group returned. Then the Society sponsored a conference and book
for which each psychologist contributed a chapter. The book added another
$5,000 to the CIA's cost, but $20,000 all told seemed like a small price
to pay for the information gathered. The psychologists-except perhaps the
knowledgeable one-did nothing they would not ordinarily have done during
their trip, and the scholarly community benefited from increased knowledge
on an important subject. The only thing violated was the openness and trust
normally associated with academic pursuits. By turning scholars into spies-even
unknowing ones-CIA officials risked the reputation of American research
work and contributed potential ammunition toward the belief in many countries
that the U.S. notion of academic freedom and independence from the state
is self-serving and hypocritical.
Secrecy allowed the Agency a measure of freedom
from normal academic restrictions and red tape, and the men from MKULTRA
used that freedom to make their projects more attractive. The Society demanded
"no stupid progress reports," recalls psychologist and psychiatrist Martin
Orne, who received a grant to support his Harvard research on hypnotism.
As a further sign of generosity and trust, the Society gave Orne a follow-on
$30,000 grant with no specified purpose.[7]
Orne could use it as he wished. He believes the money was "a contingency
investment" in his work, and MKULTRA officials agree. "We could go to Orne
anytime," says one of them, "and say, 'Okay, here is a situation and here
is a kind of guy. What would you expect we might be able to achieve if
we could hypnotize him?' Through his massive knowledge, he could speculate
and advise." A handful of other Society grantees also served in similar
roles as covert Agency consultants in the field of their expertise.
In general, the Human Ecology Society served as
the CIA's window on the world of behavioral research. No phenomenon was
too arcane to escape a careful look from the Society, whether extrasensory
perception or African witch doctors. "There were some unbelievable schemes,"
recalls an MKULTRA veteran, "but you also knew Einstein was considered
crazy. You couldn't be so biased that you wouldn't leave open the possibility
that some crazy idea might work." MKULTRA men realized, according to the
veteran, that "ninety percent of what we were doing would fail" to be of
any use to the Agency. Yet, with a spirit of inquiry much freer than that
usually found in the academic world, the Society took early stabs at cracking
the genetic code with computers and finding out whether animals could be
controlled through electrodes placed in their brains.
The Society's unrestrained, scattershot approach
to behavioral research went against the prevailing wisdom in American universities-both
as to methods and to subjects of interest. During the 1950s one school
of thought-so-called "behaviorism,"-was accepted on campus, virtually to
the exclusion of all others. The "behaviorists," led by Harvard's B. F.
Skinner, looked at psychology as the study of learned observable responses
to outside stimulation. To oversimplify, they championed the approach in
which psychologists gave rewards to rats scurrying through mazes, and they
tended to dismiss matters of great interest to the Agency: e.g., the effect
of drugs on the psyche, subjective phenomena like hypnosis, the inner workings
of the mind, and personality theories that took genetic differences into
account.
By investing up to $400,000 a year into the early,
innovative work of men like Carl Rogers, Charles Osgood, and Martin Orne,
the CIA's Human Ecology Society helped liberate the behavioral sciences
from the world of rats and cheese. With a push from the Agency as well
as other forces, the field opened up. Former iconoclasts became eminent,
and, for better or worse, the Skinnerian near-monopoly gave way to a multiplication
of contending schools. Eventually, a reputable behavioral scientist could
be doing almost anything: holding hands with his students in sensitivity
sessions, collecting survey data on spanking habits, or subjectively exploring
new modes of consciousness. The CIA's money undoubtedly changed the academic
world to some degree, though no one can say how much.
As usual, the CIA men were ahead of their time and
had started to move on before the new approaches became established. In
1963, having sampled everything from palm reading to subliminal perception,
Sid Gottlieb and his colleagues satisfied themselves that they had overlooked
no area of knowledge-however esoteric-that might be promising for CIA operations.
The Society had served its purpose; now the money could be better spent
elsewhere. Agency officials transferred the still-useful projects to other
covert channels and allowed the rest to die quietly. By the end of 1965,
when the remaining research was completed, the Society for the Investigation
of Human Ecology was gone.