Mind Control Timeline 1950-1959

THE KOREAN WAR - CONSUMER BRAINWASHING

First, American military officials wondered just how it was that Hitler could have so mesmerized the German population into looking the other way, if not supporting, his purge of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and minorities of virtually any and every kind. Ironically, the word mesmerize comes from the name of one of the earliest mind control pioneers, Franz Mesmer, who had developed his "mesmerizing" techniques in the 1770s.

With the fall of Hitler's Third Reich, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under Operation Paperclip imported 700 Nazi rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, into the U.S., followed by another 600 of the Nazi eugenic and mind control "doctors" and scientists, thus preventing the Soviets from "getting them first."

It can convincingly be argued that these men (and women) should have stood trial as war criminals as Nuremberg with the rest of Hitler's henchmen ... but it can also be argued, just as convincingly, that the U.S. justification for Operation Paperclip was just as correct. Many of them would have been acquitted, and yet others might end up in Soviet prisons, under Soviet control.

Where the U.S. went wrong was in allowing the Nazi "death doctors" to basically take control of not only the mind control research, but of the whole medical and psychiatric professions, through the American Psychiatry Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the International Psychiatry Association and organizations such as the American Medical Association - through the funding and control of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had its own Nazi sympathies.

In doing so, the United States created a Frankensteinian monster that is decimating the American people, the Third World and is totally under the control of the giant Nazi pharmaceutical corporations such as I.G. Farben and Bayer, which were strong Hitler supporters, along with Henry Ford, the Bush family, Joseph Kennedy and other major industrialists and bankers in the U.S. This is matter of historical record, supported by thousands of pages of government documents.

1950 - Department of Defense begins plans to detonate nuclear weapons in desert areas and monitor downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates.

1950 - In an experiment to determine how susceptible an American city
would be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of bacteria from ships over San Francisco. Monitoring devices are situated throughout the city in order to test the extent of infection. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.

A Short History Of Secret
US Human Biological Experimentation

Thursday, 20 April 1950

• CIA's mind control program Project BLUEBIRD is authorized. CIA-contracted psychiatrists begin secret experiments with ice-pick lobotomies, electroshock, hypnosis, pain, and drugs, including cocaine, heroin, and LSD. In coordination with the Veteran's Administration, U.S. military veterans are used as unwitting subjects for many of the experiments.^[9][8]

Tuesday, 9 May 1950

• The book Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard is released. It decries hypnosis, and describes techniques for safely accessing in the mind the contents of incidents involving unconsciousness, hypnosis, drugs, and pain. It becomes a bestseller.^[10][11]

Saturday, 27 May 1950

With Dianetics a bestseller, L. Ron Hubbard (right) is lecturing around the country when U.S. Naval Intelligence attempts to force him into service for the U.S. government. He refuses.

• The Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C. sends an officer to put L. Ron Hubbard into civilian service in the government to continue his researches on the mind. Hubbard says no. The officer says that if he refuses, Hubbard will be ordered back to active duty, since his Naval commission has not been terminated. Hubbard quickly takes advantage of a letter of permission he has from the Secretary of the Navy to resign his commission, thereby putting Dianetics and Scientology out of the reach and control of the U.S. government.^[12][13]

July 24, 1950 - Dr. Otto John, the son of a civil servant, was born in Hesse, Germany in 1909. Educated as a lawyer John joined the Lufthansa legal department headed by Klaus Bonhoffer.

John joined the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler and after being transferred to the Lufthansa office in Madrid he made contact with British intelligence. After the failure of the July Plot he escaped to England where he worked for the BBC German Language Service.

After the war he returned to Germany where he was involved in classifying German leaders as pro and anti Nazis and the prosecution team at the Nuremberg War Trials. Later he was employed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

On 4th December, 1950, John was appointed head of Germany's new political secret service. John mysteriously disappeared on 20th July 1954.

Dr. Otto John, one of the top security and espionage officials of West Germany, told friends he was going to Charite Hospital in Berlin. The next time he was seen was in East Germany - supposedly as a defector.

He was suspected of defecting to the Soviet Union but on 12th December, 1955, he returned to West Germany.

John claimed he had been kidnapped by the KGB but he was not believed and he was arrested and charged with treason. Sentenced to four years in prison he was released on 28th July 1958.

Otto John published his memoirs, Twice Through the Lines, in 1972.

Otto John Nazi Germany

"Some para-psychologists insist today that the agent ... perhaps well-trained in hypnotic suggestion, implanted the idea of defection in John's mind during their frequent visits together without John even knowing it."

The files in the case are still secret, locked up and guarded by the German Federal Police, but we have managed to uncover some additional details. Otto John died March 26, 1997.

1950 - Korean War begins (see subsection for more details).

September 1950

• As CIA's Project BLUEBIRD expands, the CIA-contracted psychiatrists' experimental purposes and activities include inducing amnesia, inserting hypnotic access codes in subjects' minds, controlling behavior from remote transmitters with brain electrodes, administering LSD to children, and using electroshock to erase memories.^[9]

September 1950 - The Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party.” It was the first printed use in any language of the term “brainwashing,” which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—“to cleanse the mind”—which had no political meaning in Chinese.

American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter’s ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized.

Other defendants at Soviet “show trials” had displayed similar symptoms as they recited unbelievable confessions in dull, cliché-ridden monotones. Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter’s new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear.

The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who “confessed” to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
The CIA and Mind Control, Chapter 8, Brainwashing

1951 - Department of Defense begins open air tests using disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests last through 1969 and there is concern that people in the surrounding areas have been exposed.

1951

• Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), where E. Howard Hunt is working, is merged with CIA. Over the coming years, during his CIA career, Hunt has other occasions to work with Lucien Conein, who is on contract to CIA.^[1]

January 1951

• L. Ron Hubbard introduces the "Theta-MEST Theory" stating that thought (Theta) is separate from the physical universe (Matter, Energy, Space and Time—MEST): that Theta can operate in and with MEST, that Theta can consider itself integrated with MEST, and that Theta can consider itself to be MEST, but that creative thought and perception reside in Theta, not MEST.^[14]

February 10, 1951

• This is a February 10, 1951, C.I.A. Top Secret Memo, called DEFENSE AGAINST SOVIET MEDICAL INTERROGATION AND ESPIONAGE TECHNIQUES:
  
  "Hypnotism has been reported to have been used in some cases by the Soviets as an adjunct to interrogation. It would be possible for a skilled Soviet operator to lower a prisoner's resistance to questioning, and yet leave him with no specific recollections of having been interrogated. With respect to inducing specific action on the part of a subject by hypnotism, it would be possible to brief a prisoner or other individual, subsequently dispatch him on a mission, and successfully debrief him on his return, without his recollection of the whole proceeding." 

June 1951

• A June 1951 C.I.A.Memo says, "C.I.A. interest is in the specific subject of devising scientific methods for controlling the minds of individuals." And so, in the late 1940's some essentially uncontrolled experimentation was begun by various people within the C.I.A., and a more structured programme was also undertaken which had the name Blue Bird, and that name was then changed to Artichoke, and under Projects Blue Bird and Artichoke the attempt was made to bring together all known knowledge of interrogation techniques, truth serums, polygraphs, and hypnosis, to create essentially an elite interrogation team with facility in all of those endeavours, and have them do the work that would be needed, first of all to protect against infiltration by enemy agents, and also to protect the minds of American agents who might get captured by Communist individuals. It would seem that L. Ron Hubbard (see below) was very much on top of certain secret mind control projects, for he obliquely exposed Blue Bird and Artichoke within the month. Was Hubbard working with - or against - government mind control projects as early as 1951?

Monday, 25 June 1951

• L. Ron Hubbard exposes "a carefully guarded secret of certain military and intelligence organizations."

  CIA's Sidney Gottlieb

  In a new book, Science of Survival, Hubbard says: "It required Dianetic processing to uncover pain-drug-hypnosis. Otherwise, pain-drug-hypnosis was out of sight, unsuspected, and unknown." Hubbard denounces its use as a "vicious war weapon" that may be "of considerably more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb." [NOTE: It's not until decades later that CIA's pain-drug-hypnosis experimentation during this period begins to be investigated and reported by Congress. By that time, CIA's Richard Helms, Sidney Gottlieb, and others will have destroyed many of CIA's records of such activities. See January 1973.]^[15]

• CIA's Project BLUEBIRD evolves into Project ARTICHOKE, with goals such as "get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature."^[16]

• A secret internal CIA document discusses a multi-level prorgram to research and develop the use of extrasensory perception for "practical problems of intelligence."^[17]

Human mental functions may be influenced by electrical stimulation of specific areas of the brain.

José Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind

July 1952

• L. Ron Hubbard releases a book, History of Man (published also as What to Audit), that describes some of the native capabilities of thought (Theta) in the individual as including communication by telepathy and the moving of material objects by "throwing an energy flow at them." Hubbard describes Scientology processes to rehabilitate these potentials.^[18]

Wednesday, 6 August 1952

• Alexander Puharich delivers a lecture called "On the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare" to a Pentagon conference.^[19]

December 1952

• George Hunter White, on loan to CIA from the Federal Narcotics Bureau, begins administering LSD to unwitting U.S. citizens at a CIA "safehouse" in Greenwich Village.^[20]

• L. Ron Hubbard delivers a series of over 50 lectures in Philadelphia on processes for attaining a state he calls "Operating Thetan" (OT), described as a being stably exterior from the body and able to perceive, communicate, and operate in the physical universe without reliance on the sense channels or mechanics of a body.^[21]

1953

• James McCord, later to be involved in the Watergate break-in, joins CIA.^[22]

1953 - U.S. military releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent is to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents.

1953 - Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted in which tens of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco are exposed to the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii.

1953 - CIA initiates Project MKULTRA. This is an eleven year research program designed to produce and test drugs and biological agents that would be used for mind control and behavior modification. Six of the subprojects involved testing the agents on unwitting human beings.

1953 - 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.

MK-ULTRA THE SEARCH FOR
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

1955 - The CIA, in an experiment to test its ability to infect human populations with biological agents, releases a bacteria withdrawn from the Army's biological warfare arsenal over Tampa Bay, Fl.

1955 - Army Chemical Corps continues LSD research, studying its potential use as a chemical incapacitating agent. More than 1,000 Americans participate in the tests, which continue until 1958.

Social behavior may be controlled by radio stimulation of specific areas of the brain.

José Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind

Circa July 1955

• George Hunter White moves his CIA "safe house" operation, equipped with one-way mirrors and surveillance gadgets, to San Francisco, under the aegis of MK-ULTRA and Sidney Gottlieb. The code name is Operation Midnight Climax. He hires prostitute addicts who lure men from bars to the safe houses after their drinks have been spiked with LSD. White films the events. The purpose of these "national security brothels" is to enable CIA to experiment with the act of lovemaking for extracting information from men.^[25]

• Factions of the U.S. government are making efforts to "seize Scientology in the United States."^[26]

Monday, 15 August 1955

• Staff of CIA Director Allen Dulles complete "A Report on Communist Brainwashing."^[27]

1956 - U.S. military releases mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, Ga and Avon Park, Fl. Following each test, Army agents posing as public health officials test victims for effects.

Wednesday, 2 January 1957

• The Church of Scientology of California, the senior church, is granted tax exemption.^[28]

July 1957

• The CIA has file No. 156409 on L. Ron Hubbard and his organizations.^[29]

1958 - LSD is tested on 95 volunteers at the Army's Chemical Warfare
Laboratories for its effect on intelligence.

January 1958

• L. Ron Hubbard introduces the "American Blue E-meter," a transistorized improvement over earlier prototypes, to be used as an aid for Scientology practitioners. Newer Scientology technology begin to require the use of the meter as a guide to the use of processes toward the attainment of Operating Thetan (OT).^[11]

June 1958

• Daniel Ellsberg arrives at Rand to spend the summer as a consultant.^[30]

Circa July 1958

• U.S. corporations, including Westinghouse, General Electric, and Bell Telephone have begun telepathy research.^[17]

Saturday, 8 November 1958

• The Herald Tribune in New York reports that Westinghouse Electric Corporation has begun to study ESP using specially designed apparatus.^[17]

  L. Ron Hubbard discovers measurable sentience in plants, first using an E-meter with geraniums in his greenhouse at St. Hill, England, later with tomatoes

Saturday, 25 July 1959

• Westinghouse Corporation's Friendship Laboratory undertakes an experiment in ESP with the U.S.S. Nautilus, linking one person on land (the sender) with another person in the submarine (the receiver),while the vessel is submerged. Representatives of the U.S. Navy and Air Force are present during the experiments, which run for sixteen days under Air Force Colonel William H. Bowers. The experiments result in a 70% success rate.^[17]

Friday, 18 December 1959

• Garden News publishes a story, "Plants Do Worry and Feel Pain," describing experiments done by L. Ron Hubbard where he has connected plants to a Scientology E-meter and measured their reaction to threat and damage.^[31]

1959 - In June of 2000, Harvard University Invoices also linked Kaczynski to the CIA  [LA Times] as a subject in the CIA Mind Control Program MK-Ultra. The brilliant awkward 16 year old Theodore Kaczynski met with Henry A Murray (of Mk-Ultra LSD Scandal fame) in 1959 on his third day at Harvard and every week thereafter. [Atlantic Monthly][Net] Interestingly, Ted Kaczynski's Mk-Ultra Codename was "Lawful"...mind control slang for "Eureka here's our guy" ! The public has never heard Ted Kaczynski's voice to date, nor seen him speak. The murder of MK-Ultra scientist Frank Olson was later covered up by Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney [Rumsfeld]

1950 Brickner reports implanting false unconscious memories of early childhood incest in amnesic drugged persons: "Direct Reorientation of Behavior Patterns in Narcosis."

1950 Lie detector tests (biofeedback analysis) are becoming accepted by police forces.

1950 Edward Hunter's article "`Brain-Washing'Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party" introduces the term brainwashing.

1950 CIA's Roscoe Hillenkoetter approves "virtually unlimited use of unaccountable funds" (Thomas, p. 96) for new Project, BLUEBIRD. Goals include 1) learning to obtain accurate data from persons, willing or unwilling; 2) learning to condition persons so that data cannot be extracted from them by any means; 3) researching combinations of electroshock, Freudian psychiatry, hypnoid drugs, and hypnotic training techniques to achieve subconscious isolation (artificial personality splitting) and increase "compliance to suggested acts." Then comes induced am-
nesia for all those procedures. (Scheflin & Opton, The Mind Manipulators, p. 115) CIA Director Morse Allen okays terminal experiments.

1950 Soviet and U.S. governments both begin pouring money into secret research to develop and control psychic powers.

1951 Nielsen's hypnorobot, Palle Hardwick, commits second bank robbery, murders, and is arrested. Witnesses implicate Nielsen. Dr. Reiter enters case.

1951 CIA psychiatrist reports that ECT can produce varying degrees of amnesia. Morse Allen asks the CIA psychiatrist to try using the post-ECT "groggy" period to gain hypnotic control. A CIA memo says that, using hypnosis, they could "brief a prisoner...dispatch him on a mission and successfully debrief him on his return without his recollection..." (Scheflin & Opton, p. 114)

1951 CIA begins ARTICHOKE (named for the "A treatment," drug-hypnosis combinations), a joint program of BLUEBIRD-type research with the military (Army, Navy, and Air Force). The F.B.I. refuses to join.

1952 Project ARTICHOKE mission statement targets development of means to obtain data "from a person against his will and without his knowledge," preventing those means from being used on "us," and raises the question, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation?" (Chavkin, p.13) Project M-K-Delta investigates how to covertly modify a person's behavior. Amnesia is a research goal: "The greater the amnesia produced, the more effective the results." (John Marks, pp. 40-41) Parapsychology is another research area.

1952 During the Korean war, 7000 Americans are captured. None escape; 30% die; 33% collaborate. The many false confessions of germ warfare participation by U.S. and British prisoners astonish U.S. public, and stir interest in brainwashing.
1952 Prescription tranquilizers become common.

1953 U.S. signs Nuremburg Code, containing rules governing medical research. They prohibit human experimentation, unless subject is provided full information beforehand and freely consents. It states the subject can withdraw at any time.

1953 CIA begins covert testing of chemicals and technologies on unknowing citizens. ARTICHOKE becomes Project MKULTRA, a Technical Services Staff (TSS) operation, which will continue for twenty years. (Project MKDelta is absorbed into MKULTRA.) Richard Helms is the "driving force behind this" (Weinstein, p. 129). MKULTRA experiments with "electroshock, psychology, psychiatry... aversive therapy, electric shock, and...'brainwashing'." (Bowart, pp. 105-108) Improving their hypnoprogramming technology is a top goal. The Director of Security for Artichoke adds a sub-goal: "...attempting to have a hypnotic subject kill someone while in a trance."
(Lee and Schlain, Acid Dreams, p. 28)

1953 Dr. Ewan Cameron, head psychiatrist at McGill U., Montreal, Canada, reads paper at a Neuropsychiatric meeting in Arkansas which explains his concept of depatterning by electroconvulsive shock and repatterning by psychic driving (forced listening to repeated, taped message). He says, "We have explored this procedure in one case, using sleeplessness, disinhibiting agents [barbiturate], and hypnosis."

1954 Morse Allen, CIA hypnosis chief, hypnotizes office secretaries. He causes one to shoot her friend with an (unloaded) pistol. He wants to test if "hypnotically induced amnesia would stand
up to torture." (Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, p. 187). CIA gives a Soviet agent the "A"
treatment (barbiturate to induce unconsciousness, then, twenty minutes later, a shot of stimulant); the agent then accepts a male interrogator as being his beloved wife Eva, and confides in her. Suggested total amnesia is successful.

1954 Soviet defector Petrov's revelations of KGB infiltration of CIA shake up President Eisenhower. Lieutenant General Doolittle urges "every possible scientific and technical avenue of approach to the intelligence problem" and becoming "more ruthless" than the KGB.

1954 CIA Director Allen Dulles shifts hypnosis research from Morse Allen to Sid Gottlieb's MKULTRA team. Alden Sears begins experiments: "Could a hypnotist induce a totally separate personality? Could a subject be sent on missions he would not remember...?" (Ibid., p.186)

1954 Dr. Frank R. Olson's suicide becomes public (CIA slipped him LSD). Congress gives widow big monetary settlement. Director Allen Dulles writes public letters to responsible persons in the Agency accusing them of "poor judgment." However, his handwritten private memo makes clear the letters are merely for public consumption: "These are not reprimands and no personnel file notation is being made." (Scheflin & Opton, p. 112)

1954 Copenhagen Criminal Court convicts Nielsen of using hypnotic and other means to control of Hardwick cause him to commit robbery and murder. Nielsen is sentenced to prison, Hardwick to psychiatric confinement.

1955 For first time in history, twenty-six Korean War POWs elect to stay in Communist China rather than return to U.S. Others return, but then hand out flyers on street-corners urging support for
486 Part VI - Reference
1952 President Truman signs National Security Agency into existence.
Relevant Chronology: 1493 to Present 487

North Korean victory. Brainwashed becomes a household word--and a government research priority.

1955 Army pays for Tulane U. research program which implants electrodes in brains of mental patients.

1956 Dulles assigns Hinkle and Wolff to create a definitive study on the roots, history, and methods of brainwashing.

1956 The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (CIA funds conduit for brainwash research) holds Symposium No. 3 in New York on "Factors Used to Increase the Susceptibility of Individuals to Forceful Indoctrination: Observations and Experiments."

1957 Alden Sears refuses to continue experiments on artificial personality-splitting for CIA. Cameron submits grant application to Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (CIA front), gets $60,000 to test ECT amnesia and psychic driving.

1957 Vance Packard publishes The Hidden Persuaders, exposing the advertising industry's adoption of unconscious motivators. New York Times quotes ad executive who says that subliminals, messages so briefly flashed on screen as to be consciously indiscernible, do influence buying decisions.

1957 Estabrooks' Hypnotism, new edition, says: "A nation fighting with its back to the wall is not worried over the niceties of ethics." It says research on hypnoprogramming will not be made public, but discusses disguised induction, amnesia, sealing, waking hypnosis, and creation of an artificially-split personality.

1958 Seymour Fisher (Bureau of Social Science Research, Rand Corporation subcontractor) sends Air Force a report predicting that "some drugs would prove useful in reducing the amount of time required to induce complex hypnotic behavior." (Bowart, p. 23)

1959 A machine which aids hypnotic induction by putting out a repetitive electric signal in alpha or theta range is invented: the Brainwave Synchronizer.

1959 First hypnosis susceptibility scales are published; these standardized inductions enable systematic, reliable prediction of response to hypnosis at any depth in one standardized induction.

1959 Marcuse (Hypnosis: Fact and Fiction, p. 204),. states that a person involved in military hypnosis experiments told him they were "unethical" and "a dirty mess."

1959 Congress passes law forbidding the National Security Agency to disclose any information about itself.

Obedience Research

Meanwhile, a related event begins to happen. In the late 1940's, Edward Hunter in 1949 for the first time coins the term, "brain washing," and writes a book on it. This is one of the two books that Hunter wrote. It turned out that Hunter was an O.S.S. and later C.I.A. propagandist, and the word brainwashing was particularly useful because American prisoners of war were starting to give confessions of using germ warfare during the Korean War, and America needed a way of stopping that kind of propaganda, and the term brainwashing, which had been coined by Hunter to explain the thought control programme in Communist China, proved a useful vehicle. 

This is a picture of Edward Hunter. I was able to do one of the last interviews with him before his death. In the deep literature on brainwashing, the more academic literature on brainwashing, his view of it is called The Robot Theory, the notion that with brainwashing techniques you can turn somebody into an automaton. 

The Robot Theory of brainwashing is not the only theory of brainwashing, but it is the most flamboyant and it's also the most frightening. The idea of brainwashing then in the 1950's became the object of a lot of study and books like IN EVERY WAR BUT ONE, people who had actually gone through the experience wrote about what had happened to them and researchers like Biederman in books like this were reporting what happened to American prisoners of war and other prisoners of war. 

In Hawaii, an American camp was set up to be a mock prisoner of war camp to use the techniques that were being used of brainwashing. This an illustration from that camp. These are actually all Americans, but it's a simulated exercise in brainwashing because Americans were searching for a way to inoculate our soldiers if they should get captured and put through a brainwashing experience. Would it have been possible for us to inoculate them previously so that the brainwashing would not take? 

The Sensory Deprivation Experiments

While the brainwashing studies were going on, another development was happening simultaneously important to the development of mind control, and these are the sensory deprivation experiments that began in Canada with Donald Hebb and others. It was... Hebb's original work was essentially on what's called highway trance, the phenomena that people who will drive on highways in long stretches of road that's pretty monotonous will to into trance. And this is a form of sensory deprivation.  If it's dark at night, there's a long road, there's no scenery, you probably all have had the experience of realizing that suddenly you've driven a couple of miles but have no memory for that couple of miles passing, or you've gotten very drowsy. 

The phenomenon of sensory deprivation became the subject of a good deal of study in the 1950's. What would happen to the mind if it were deprived of sensory input, since the mind needs sensory input the way the body needs food? 

In a series of studies, this is on isolation, inside the black room, students across the country in Canada and other places were put in a black room. Here's an illustration of it. There's essentially almost no sensory input at all. What happens to the mind? 

Floatation tanks and other ways of decreasing sensory input, all had the effect of causing the mind when it is deprived of sensory input to throw out a hallucinated world in order to get input back from that hallucinated world. And people, in fact, kept in isolation too long could become psychotic.

Books studying the phenomena of isolation and also in conjunction with manipulating people's mind through techniques of brainwashing began to appear. THE BRAIN BENDERS is one, THE BATTLE FOR THE MIND by William Sergent is the foremost British book on the subject. Robert J. Lifton's study, THOUGHT REFORM AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALISM is the classic work on the Chinese thought reform programme. Edgar Shein's book on coercive persuasion on the Americans taken prisoner in the Korean War, RAPE OF THE MIND by Mirrileau, another classic. 

As all of this was happening, this was what you could call a form of coercive persuasion as Shein had suggested, but there was another event that was occurring simultaneously. The 1950's is, in many ways, the birth of mind control experimentation, because you have the brainwashing issue, the hypnosis issues, the isolation and sensory deprivation studies, and you now get the next stream of research, which involves obedience to authority studies. 

Social Pressure & Conformity

I mentioned the other night Solomon Ashe's studies on opinions and social pressure, and what Ashe did at Yale was the simplest of experiments on conformity. He drew on a blackboard a line that was one foot long and another line directly under it, parallel to it, that was two feet long. He then got six or seven people in a room, all of whom except one had been bribed, and the last one had no knowledge of the bribing of the others. He then asked them in order which one was the shorter line, and to the horror of the one who was not bribed, everyone reported that the two-foot line was the shorter line, and it was visually obvious that that was untrue, but everybody else in the room was reporting it as true.

What Ashe discovered was that the subject would report seeing the longer line as the shorter line, that he would conform to peer pressure. Cynics dismissed it on the grounds that it just showed the stupidity of Yale graduates, but that was not a sufficient scientific explanation, and as Walter reported the other night the experiments were done in the Navy and other places as well. 

I want to distinguish this group of work from the others that I've just reported on. Here we're talking about a form of manipulation of the mind that does not involve physical coercion. In the brainwashing work, in the isolation work, there is a form of physical intimidation that involves taking over the body and controlling the body, controlling all of the input in the mind and so forth, and so this is... A person in that situation that he or she is in that situation, that they are captive in some way. 

With this kind of experiment, we have what I call conversational persuasion. This is the beginning of the attempt to develop theories of social influence on free- standing populations where people are not aware that they are being held captive in any way, and indeed they're not. 

The next step along the lines of obedience research, and some ways the most frightening, is the work done by Milgram and his book OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY. If you're not familiar with Milgram's work I'll give you a very brief explanation of it.

Milgram wanted to test the hypothesis that people in Germany, good people in Germany, during the Nazi regime, were manipulated in a way to do evil, or let me restate that, Milgrim wondered why so many good people in Nazi Germany could allow such evil to happen around them knowingly.

His thesis was not the idea that there's something inherent in the German character, but rather that there's something inherent in people, and he was interested in showing whether or not if a Hitler-type character arose in the United States, that person would be able to get good people to do evil in this country.

And so, he built a box, I don't have a slide of it here, he built a box with thirty switches, just little light switches, and the thirty switches were in fifteen-volt increments. They were marked in fifteen-volt increments. As you moved over towards the right of the box there began to be some writing which said, "Caution! Danger! Extreme danger!," and the last group of switches were marked in triple red X's.

Now, he then put an advertisement, again this is at Yale, so you know, maybe the cynics are right. He put an advertisement in the local New Haven newspaper for people to volunteer for the experiment. People came in and they were told that the experiment involved pain and learning, and that they would be the teachers, and that there was a student and that they could see the student, and the student they were told was hooked up to an electric grid, and every time that... The teacher was to give the student a question, and every time the student gave a wrong answer one of the switches was to be pushed.

When Milgrim and his associates talked about the experiment, they concluded that nobody would push all the switches, and most people would stop pushing the switches about halfway through, because each switch was intended to deliver a higher voltage shock.

The subject as about half the switches were pulled, would increasingly flinch and then scream and then yell, would then say, "I don't want to do this any more," would then say, "I have a heart condition! Please stop!," and then would refuse to answer any question and would slump over.

If the teacher balked at pushing the next switch, there was an experimenter there in a long, white laboratory coat with a clipboard and a pencil, who was instructed to say first, "Continue," and then, "Please continue," and then, "You must go on with the experiment," and finally, "I will take responsibility." 

What Milgram discovered is that the overwhelming number of people pushed all of the switches, and that the simple reinforcement of saying, "I will take responsibility," or that there was an experiment going on, was sufficient to allow them to do that.

Now after Milgram's experiments were replicated in other places, and what eventually evolved is that the horror of what he was proving was so ghastly that the scientific literature turned away from it and instead focused on the ethics of doing that kind of experiment. Because after all, what he was doing was taking people from the street and not telling them that they were what he was studying. They thought he was studying the subject. 

A lot of these people as you can imagine had severe emotional reaction once they realized that they had shocked somebody with a heart condition on a machine that went beyond extreme danger to triple X's in red, and so the ethics of doing that type of work then created a movement in universities and other places for institutional reviews boards, etc., and the research can't be done any more, and what Milgram was proving, how easy it is to manipulate people by the simplest of commands, was no longer being studied and certainly not in that manner. 

Books like COMPLIANT BEHAVIOUR: BEYOND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY, were being written to increase and replicate and extend the work of Milgrim, and here's a report called CONFORMITY, COMPLIANCE AND CONVERSION, from the Air Force in I think around the 1950's, an Air Force report using Milgrim's work in Air Force conditioning. 

Let's go back and talk some more about hypnosis since it plays a central in the rest of the development of mind control. 

There are a lot of things about the subject of mind control, that I'm not going to be talking about in this presentation.  I'm not going to be talking to you about the physiological aspects of mind control, which includes the lobotomy, psycho- surgery, and electrical-stimulation-of-the-brain literature.  I won't be talking about the pharmacological aspects of mind control, which includes the use of drugs and botanicals and chemicals for mind control.  These areas of mind control are vast, but in this presentation we're just concentrating here on the psychological aspects of mind control. 

Hypnotic Seduction

The notion of hypnotic seduction had been noticed in the secret report to the King in France, it had been noticed by Freud in his work, and it had been noticed by many others -- a series of slides on hypnotic seduction. The idea of hypnotic seduction got, I think, its greatest impetus in a 1894 book called TRILBY. And this is illustration from it with the infamous Svengali as the hypnotist, and to this day the portrait of Svengali as a hypnotist is almost as powerful as Sherlock Holmes as a detective. It's almost the stereotype of the field. 

Trilby, today, would be a No. #1. best-seller, the equivalent of a No. #1. best-seller, and even bigger. It was probably the first block-buster novel. It was published in a magazine in serial form, and after the first issue appeared the magazine had to print an additional one hundred thousand copies because of the desire for people to continue the story. It... The author, George du Maurier, was launched into such public light that he ultimately hid from all, in order to preserve his privacy. He had lecture tours through the United States and Britain. 

Do you remember PATEN PLACE, how huge a novel that was at the time? This was the equivalent and even bigger. The story of TRILBY is the story of a hypnotist who gets total control over the personality of a young woman, and the novel itself I find to be incredibly boring, but the portrait of portrayed of the hypnotist is tremendously exciting and has lived on almost as an icon of the subject itself. There was a town in Florida, and I haven't checked to see whether this is still true, that changed its name to Trilby, and at the centre of town they have Svengali Square. There were TRILBY parties, TRILBY hats, TRILBY clothes. 

It was an enormously popular and influential novel, which introduced people to the idea of the potential for hypnotic seduction, and also even worse. Let me... Since I don't want to dwell on this aspect of mind control, let me sum it up and say that the traditional thinking has been that you cannot get people to do with hypnosis what they would not otherwise do. There is value in that thinking, because it then doesn't encourage people to try, but if you go and talk to the hypnotists who will tell you that and you talk to them in private, they will tell you the opposite story, that within certain parameters you can get people to do things they would otherwise not do, with hypnosis, and that while hypnosis is not a magic wand or a magic potion, it is an effective facilitator for seduction or anti-social conduct. 

There is an increase in court cases of hypnotic seduction now, but I want to turn to the more frightening prospect of using hypnosis for the creation of anti-social crimes. Can you get... "You are in my power, you will do what I tell you." How far can you get control of somebody using hypnosis and forms of social influence? 

This has been the subject of a lot of fiction, just from my library here are some of the books. THE DARKER THE NIGHT, WAS THE HYPNOTIST THE KILLER, SEEING IS BELIEVING, YOUR EYELIDS ARE GROWING HEAVY, MURDER IS SUGGESTIVE, TELEFON, which of course is a movie as well. And there are academic books like HYPNOTISM AND CRIME. Interestingly there has been no major work on the anti- social aspects of hypnosis either in the legal literature or in the psychiatric, hypnotic, or psychological literature for over thirty years. 

History of Mind Control

Brainwashing & the Korean War 1950-1953

June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953 - The Korean War was as much a blow to the American spirit as was the Vietnam War a mere decade later. Korea had been largely under Japanese control since the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905).

Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, at the Yalta conference, agreed to divide up Europe and parts of Asia among themselves as "buffer zones". In exchange, Russia would agree to attack Japan as soon as Germany had surrendered, which they did on Aug. 8, 1945. North Korea would be divided along the 38th Parallel, against the wishes of the Korean people themselves, who had grown tried of being constantly occupied by foreign troops.

Russia set up North Korea under Kim Il-Sung as a communist nation, while the U.S. imported Syngman Rhee as president of South Korea. Rhee hadn't even lived in Korea for 30 years. In 1949, both the Russians and Americans withdrew, leaving a splintered Korea, whose leaders - North and South - fought each other to reunite the country, but under their own respective forms of government: communist vs. republic.

U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson most likely triggered the conflict when he said America’s Pacific defense perimeter was made up of the Aleutians, Ryukyu, Japan, and the Philippines, implying that America might not fight over Korea. Acheson said Korea’s defense would be the responsibility of the United Nations. (Korean War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Russia and China saw this as weakness - just as Saddam Hussein did in the early 1990s when the U.S. ambassador said the U.S. would not get involved if Hussein invaded Kuwait to stop its theft of oil from Iraq.

North Korea had the support of China, which in turn had the backing of the Soviet Union. The North Korean Army struck in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, June 25, 1950, with a flood of 135,000 troops crossing the 38th parallel behind a firestorm of artillery.

Korea, like the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq, the Sept. 11th 2001 attacks and the subsequent Iraq war were all disastrous intelligence and diplomatic failures. In Korea, as the North Korean forces began to crumble and China threatened to intervene, the newly-formed CIA told Truman they were bluffing ... until U.S. troops were repelled by more than three-quarters of a million Chinese forces. The CIA had figured, since China had no Air Force, it could not mount an attack solely on the ground. China invaded on Oct. 19, 1950.

It was a war in which a victory was just not allowed, under orders of the United Nations and President Harry Truman. The UN policy called for "containment" only, and without the threat of annihilation or total defeat, North Korea had no incentive to halt its merciless invasion of South Korea. Truman couldn't get Congressional approval for a declaration of war, so he simply called it "a police action" - a ruse that American presidents have used in every war since.

North Korea's Kim Il-Sung quickly regrouped and poured nearly a quarter-million troops across the border, backed by 780,000 Chinese troops and 26,000 Soviet troops - more than a million men total.

The Communists claimed that they had captured 70,000 soldiers overall, but they only returned near 8,000 of them. In addition to some 12,000 deaths in captivity, about 50,000 Republic of Korea POWs have been illegally pressed into the DPRK military.

Korean War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Massacred prisoners are packed into trenches in
Daejeon, South Korea, October 1950

The term "brainwashing" hit the American media like a sledge hammer following the Korean War, when American POWs were confessing like crazy to U.S. germ warfare being committed against North Korea. The U.S. Department of Defense reported that 70% of our POWs were signing written confessions of "war crimes."

Dorland's Medical Dictionary defines brainwashing (also known as thought reform or re-education) as "any systematic effort aimed at instilling certain attitudes and beliefs in a person against his will, usually beliefs in conflict with his prior beliefs and knowledge."^[1] The American Psychological Association (APA) has neither officially accepted the concept nor officially rejected it (see below), but brainwashing has received more attention from the APA in recent years.^[2]

In September 1950, the Miami Daily News published an article by Edward Hunter (1902-1978) titled "'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party". It contained the first printed use of the English-language term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines.

Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator [2] who worked under-cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. An additional article by Hunter on the same subject appeared in New Leader magazine in 1951.

In 1953 Allen Welsh Dulles, the CIA director at that time, explained that "the brain under [Communist influence] becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

In his 1956 book "Brain-Washing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It", Edward Hunter described "a system of befogging the brain so a person can be seduced into acceptance of what otherwise would be abhorrent to him". According to Hunter, the process became so destructive of physical and mental health that many of his interviewees had not fully recovered after several years of freedom from Chinese captivity.

Later, two studies of the Korean War defections by Robert Lifton and Edgar Schein concluded that brainwashing had a transient effect when used on prisoners of war. Lifton and Schein found that the Chinese did not engage in any systematic re-education of prisoners, but generally used their techniques of coercive persuasion to disrupt the ability of the prisoners to organize to maintain their morale and to try to escape.

It would appear that the CIA deliberately downplayed the effectiveness of the Chinese efforts to hide the fact that we ourselves knew so little about it. Government archives of the period show a lot of contradiction.

The U.S. propaganda effort seemed to be trying to fire up the American public on the one hand, yet internally claiming the threat was a clear and present danger; a third approach, made to Congress in an effort to get more funding, followed the second approach. Yet a fourth approach to the rest of the world, seemed to be more bravado and non-concern by claiming, "while the Chinese attempted this, it doesn't work too well."

It would "buy time" so we could catch up. It also confused the issue so no one knew exactly what to believe.

The Chinese did, however, succeed in getting some of the prisoners to make anti-American statements by placing the prisoners under harsh conditions of physical and social deprivation and disruption, and then by offering them more comfortable situations such as better sleeping quarters, quality food, warmer clothes or blankets.

Nevertheless, the psychiatrists noted that even these measures of coercion proved quite ineffective at changing basic attitudes for most people. In essence, the prisoners did not actually adopt Communist beliefs. Rather, many of them behaved as though they did in order to avoid the plausible threat of extreme physical abuse.

Moreover, the "few" (70% is "few"?) prisoners influenced by Communist indoctrination apparently succumbed as a result of the confluence of the coercive persuasion, and of the motives and personality characteristics of the prisoners that already existed before imprisonment.

In particular, individuals with very rigid systems of belief tended to snap and realign, whereas individuals with more flexible systems of belief tended to bend under pressure and then restore themselves when the external pressures were removed.

Two researchers working individually, Lifton and Schein, discussed coercive persuasion in their analysis of the treatment of Korean War POWs. They defined coercive persuasion as a mixture of social, psychological and physical pressures applied to produce changes in an individual's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Lifton and Schein both concluded that such coercive persuasion can succeed in the presence of a physical element of confinement, "forcing the individual into a situation in which he must, in order to survive physically and psychologically, expose himself to persuasive attempts". They also concluded that such coercive persuasion succeeded only on a minority of POWs, and that the end-result of such coercion remained very unstable, as most of the individuals reverted to their previous condition soon after they left the coercive environment.

The use of coercive persuasion techniques in China

Following the armistice that interrupted hostilities in the Korean War, a large group of intelligence-officers, psychiatrists, and psychologists received assignments to debrief United Nations soldiers in the process of repatriation. The government of the United States wanted to understand the unprecedented level of collaboration, the breakdown of trust among prisoners, and other such indications that the Chinese were doing something new and effective in their handling of prisoners of war. Formal studies in academic journals began to appear in the mid-1950s, as well as some first-person reports from former prisoners. In 1961, two books were published by specialists in the field who synthesized these studies for the non-specialists concerned with issues of national security and social policy. Edgar H. Schein wrote on Coercive Persuasion, and Robert J. Lifton wrote on Thought Control and the Psychology of Totalism. Both books were primarily concerned with the techniques called "xǐ nǎo" or, more formally "sī xiǎng gǎi zào" (reconstructing or remodeling thought). The following discussion is based in large part on their studies.

Although American attention came to bear on thought reconstruction or brainwashing as one result of the Korean War (1950 - 1953), the techniques had operated on ordinary Chinese citizens after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949. The PRC had refined and extended techniques earlier used in the Soviet Union to prepare prisoners for show-trials, and they in turn had learned much from the Inquisition^{[citation needed]}. In the Chinese context, these techniques had multiple goals that went far beyond the simple control of subjects in the prison camps of North Korea. They aimed to produce confessions, to convince the accused that they had indeed perpetrated anti-social acts, to make them feel guilty of these crimes against the state, to make them desirous of a fundamental change in outlook toward the institutions of the new communist society, and, finally, to actually accomplish these desired changes in the recipients of the brainwashing/thought-reform. To that end, brainwashers desired techniques that would break down the psychic integrity of the individual with regard to information processing, with regard to information retained in the mind, and with regard to values. Chosen techniques included: dehumanizing of individuals by keeping them in filth, sleep deprivation, partial sensory deprivation, psychological harassment, inculcation of guilt, group social pressure, etc. The ultimate goal that drove these extreme efforts consisted of the transformation of an individual with a "feudal" or capitalist mindset into a "right thinking" member of the new social system, or, in other words, to transform what the state regarded as a criminal mind into what the state could regard as a non-criminal mind.

The methods of thought-control proved extremely useful when deployed for gaining the compliance of prisoners of war. Key elements in their success included tight control of the information available to the individual and tight control over the behavior of the individual. When, after repatriation, close control of information ceased and reality testing could resume, former prisoners fairly quickly regained a close approximation of their original picture of the world and of the societies from which they had come. Furthermore, prisoners subject to thought control often had simply behaved in ways that pleased their captors, without changing their fundamental beliefs. So the fear of brainwashed sleeper agents, such as that dramatized in the novel and the films The Manchurian Candidate, never materialized.

Terrible though the process frequently seemed to individuals imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party, these attempts at extreme coercive persuasion ended with a reassuring result: they showed that the human mind has enormous ability to adapt to stress (not a recognized term in common use with reference to psychology in the early 1950s) and also a powerful homeostatic capacity. John Clifford, S.J. gives an account of one man's adamant resistance to brainwashing in In the Presence of My Enemies^[5] that substantiates the picture drawn from studies of large groups that were reported by Lifton and Schein. Allyn and Adele Rickett wrote a more penitent account of their imprisonment (Allyn Rickett had by his own admission broken PRC laws against espionage) in "Prisoners of the Liberation," but it too details techniques such as the “struggle groups” described in other accounts. Between these opposite reactions to attempts by the state to reform them, experience showed that most people would change under pressure and would change back when the pressure was removed. The other interesting result was that some individuals derived benefit from these coercive procedures due to the fact that the interactions, perhaps as an unintended side effect, actually promoted insight into dysfunctional behaviors that were then abandoned.

Criticism of claims of political brainwashing

According to research and forensic psychologist Dick Anthony, the CIA invented the concept of "brainwashing" as a propaganda strategy to undercut communist claims that American POWs in Korean communist camps had voluntarily expressed sympathy for communism. Anthony stated that definitive research demonstrated that collaboration by western POWs had been caused by fear and duress, and not by brainwashing. He argued that the CIA brainwashing theory was pushed to the general public through the books of Edward Hunter, who was a secret CIA "psychological warfare specialist" passing as a journalist. He further asserts that for twenty years starting in the early 1950s, the CIA and the Defense Department conducted secret research (notably including Project MKULTRA) in an attempt to develop practical brainwashing techniques (possibly to counteract the brainwashing efforts of the Chinese), and that their attempt was a failure.

Brainwashing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chinese troops ("People's Voluntary Army") in southern Manchuria and on the march to Korea in 1950

It's genesis begins in April 1953 with a speech given by Allen Dulles who was the new CIA Director. In his speech, Dulles said that we were losing control of the battle of the mind, that we were at war with the Soviet Union.

What in God's name, U.S. generals wondered, were the "bastards" doing to turn American GIs into "traitors"? The American news media - and thus the American people - were told that these were hideous lies the Commies had somehow "brainwashed" our noble troops into spouting for propaganda purposes.

In truth, the claims were true, even if the troops shouldn't have been confessing to them. It was that fact that alarmed the Pentagon.

“Now they had the final proof that America had engaged in cowardly and loathsome germ warfare against the poor peoples of Korea and China. They had the details from the mouth of a man who had done so. What a story! Every {North Korean and Chinese] newspaper… ran the story. They were copied by hand…. Posted on countless house fronts… Farmers were approached in wet paddies where they worked by 'able Party members' who told them the news.” (Excerpt from the book Brainwashing by Edward Hunter, CIA operative working undercover as a journalist, pp. 48-49, New York: Pyramid Books, 1956)

Quotes and Excerpts - Brainwashing and Education Reform

Friday, 10 April 1953

• CIA director Allen Dulles gives a speech before the National Alumni Conference at Princeton University, lecturing on "how sinister the battle for men's minds" has become in Soviet hands.^[23]

Monday, 13 April 1953

CIA's Richard Helms

• CIA Director Allen Dulles authorizes a new expanded mind-control program, MK-ULTRA, brainchild of Richard Helms, a high-ranking member of CIA's Clandestine Services. E. Howard Hunt is working at CIA headquarters at the time as a "chief of covert operations" under Clandestine Services. ^[23][24][1]

Thursday, 19 November 1953

• On a 3-day holiday for CIA officials at Deer Creek Lodge in the mountains of Maryland, Sidney Gottlieb—head of CIA's MK-ULTRA—secretly slips LSD into the after-dinner drinks. An Army scientist and germ warfare specialist named Frank Olson, who is working on an MK-ULTRA project, experiences a "bad trip," becoming very disoriented. [NOTE: Olson soon commits suicide.]^[20]

José Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind

March 13, 1958

• Congress releases "Communist Psychological Warefare (Brainwashing)", a report by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a report largely influenced by CIA operative-journalist Edward Hunter.

Brainwashing of the Consumer 1950-1959

1950s - Subliminal mind control also plays to the suggestibility of humankind (i.e., the presumption that we are not much more sophisticated than sheep). The technique, most famously used in advertising, involves embedding secret images into harmless-looking images in order to "sneak" a message directly into the viewers subconscious.

Subliminal advertising has existed for a long time in the form of subtle visual cues embedded in still pictures, but the technique first hit the big time in the 1950s, when marketer named James Vicary invented a method for inserting subliminal messages into films.

His technique would flash a simple text message for a single frame on a movie screen. While viewers were enjoying a nice movie, the words "Eat popcorn" or "Drink Coke" would flit by on the screen too quickly for the conscious mind to see. The results were anecdotally reported to be spectacular, with massive increases in theater concessions sales.

The apparent success of the technique (which was never replicated in a controlled scientific setting) alarmed the hell out of most people and subliminal advertising was subsequently banned (although it still pops up in insidious ways, especially in liquor ads for some reason).

The use of subliminals in mind control of the "Big Brother-evil empire" variety has never been extensively documented (unlike the use of drugs, see below), but it stands to reason that if the technique is even marginally effective, someone is probably using it.

Subliminals and hypnotism have also been adopted by the "self-help" crowd, as a way to assist people in difficult tasks which they would prefer not to accomplish through self-discipline and hard work.

These include, most prominently, quitting smoking and losing weight. Retailers everywhere stock endless recordings of happy white-sound noises (such as ocean surf or New Age ambient music) which feature subliminal audio tracks running underneath, with messages such as "You don't want to smoke" or "You don't want to eat."

While scientific types are highly skeptical about the effectiveness of subliminals, science hardly matters to people who want to make a quick buck, or people who want to quit smoking without tears.

Mind Control

In my opinion (and depending on your definition of the word "subliminal"), the author of this piece is either a stooge for those who want to slip a nationwide mind control program over our eyes, or he simply hasn't done his homework.

Darren Brown's Mind Control

1954 - Again by 1954, Morse Allen was pushing hard to have operational tests of the thesis that you could construct a multiple personality and have that personality commit crimes, come back, and have no knowledge in the host that that act had been committed. In other words, The Manchurian Candidate scenario had been worked out by the CIA five years before the novel was published.

But would it work? In order to know whether it worked, you had to conduct what Morse Allen called "terminal experiments". These were experiments that could result in the death of the subject. The CIA gave clearance for those experiments to be done and in reference to one researcher who was asked if he would participate in them, he said, "if you set up terminal experiments, I will do them for free." By 1954, the literature demonstrates that Morse Allen's concerns had reached the higher levels of the CIA and that they were willing to engage in a field test for the Manchurian Candidate type scenario. By January, 1954, an ARTICHOKE memo says, "Could an individual of a certain descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?" Then later in the memo it says, as a trigger mechanism for an even bigger project, the CIA proposed that, "an individual of a certain descent, approximately 35 years old, well educated, proficient in English, and well established socially and politically in a foreign government be induced under ARTICHOKE to perform an act involuntarily of attempted assassination against a prominent foreign politician or if necessary, against an American official."

It was clear then, by summer of 1954, that the ARTICHOKE team said we can create an artificial personality, program that personality to conduct an assassinatiion, that assassination would occur. If in fact the individual was captured, he would never reveal the knowledge that he had engaged in the assassination, the host would know nothing about the alter, the amnesia would be impenetrable, and even under torture the host would not reveal the secrets. CIA research in many universities around the country explored topics such as programming people by way of telephone, whether somebody could answer a telephone, a secret word would be given, they would slip automatically into a trance, nobody around them would know they were in trance, they wouldn't know they were in trance, so forth. Experiments on pain, experiments on creating unconscious recorders, experiments were done on whether people would commit suicide under hypnotic instructions, and so on. Albert Mole had written one hundred years ago that it would be possible to give people hypnotic instructions to have them commit suicide. These were the subjects of CIA experiments. What ultimately happened, we don't know because the government files closed up at the point of reporting on the assassination attempts. But a year later, in May, 1955, a top secret report called "Hypnotism and Covert Operations begins with the following paragraph:

"Frankly I now mistrust much of was written by academic experts on hypnotism, partly because this is because many of them seem to have generalized from a very few cases, and partly because much of their cautious pessimism is contradicted by Agency experimenters. But more particularly because I have personally witnessed behavior responses which experts have said are impossible to obtain." By l954, the Manchurian Candidate scenario had already been thought of and was already under operational testing.

This is Richard Condon who wrote The Manchurian Candidate, as Walter Bowart discovered when he wrote him, he had no idea he was writing fact. He thought he was writing fiction. The only case that has come out of the literature that suggests that someone may have been an experimental subject is the control of Candy Jones. Candy was quite a beautiful woman, second only to Betty Grable. She was a pin-up girl during WWII, but her artificial personality, Arlene Grant, was programmed by the CIA according to the book to be a hypnotic courier and she was sent around the world, and occasiionally captured and tortured. Her last instruction was to have a two week vacation in Berlin and then jump off a cliff. It did not happen because her husband, John Neville, who was a very famous all night disc jockey in New York and an amateur hypnotist, shortly after they were married began to feel he had actually married two different women and could not account for the mood swings and the differences in personality. Using hypnosis with her, this story unravelled. Candy was sent to Herb Speigel for evaluation. Herb did a work-up on her using the hypnotic induction profile and other tests, and found she was very very high in the positive. And while he couldn't conclude that what she was saying was true, he could conclude that it would be true with her if it were true. In other words, she was the kind of person that this manipulation would have worked with. The Candy Jones story, which we cannot validate and we cannot invalidate ... I have seen a CIA file marked "Grant", but I have not been able to get the contents. It may be true, it may not be true. But the story about hypnotically programming couriers and assassins clearly is true. That book was published before the CIA documents were made available.

All of this of course violates the Nuremburg Standards but those Standards have had no application in covert activities. We found a document from the Attorney General of the United States to the Director of Central Intelligence which said '... if any of your agents are caught during their work, they will not be prosecuted for crimes' and therefore there is essentially the 007 license to kill that CIA agents will not be prosecuted for their crimes, therefore Nuremburg Standards do not apply.

It wasn't until the Nelson Rockefeller Report to the President in June, 1975 that we had any inkling about this material and then basically just a paragraph or maybe even a sentence mentioning mind and behavior control sent researchers looking for the files. In his testimony before Congress Stansfield Turner corroborated the existence of the mind control programs.

Some people wrote about them at the time. Peter Watson's book (from England) "The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology" touch on but do not give in any detail the experiments done by the CIA and Army, but do talk in general about the use of psychology for military purposes. The classic works are of course, Walter Bowart's book, "Operation Mind Control" which is hard to find, and a collector's item, an extremely important book. John Marks' book, "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate", and my book, "The Mind Manipulators" -- these were the only three books to appear on the subject of mind and behavior control by the CIA and the Army experimental programs.

History of Mind Control

© 2007 by The Phoenix Foundation

Body text

© 2007 by The Phoenix Foundation

Body text