In 1949, the Rand Corporation issued a report, “Are Communist Countries Using Hypnosis Techniques to Elicit Confession in Public Trials?” The report relied on old Soviet hypnosis experiments conducted in 1923 (which were translated into English in 1932). The Soviets had reported success in implanting memories of crimes hypnotically. The…
BLUEBIRD was the first structured comprehensive, integrated CIA mind control project involving both domestic and overseas covert activities designed to study enemy techniques and test them on selected individuals, including “potential intelligence agents, defectors, refugees, Prisoners of War and “others.” Under this early program, experimental psychoactive drugs and hypnosis were…
Soviet doctors concluded that lobotomy was “contrary to the principles of humanity.” Furthermore, they concluded that “through lobotomy an insane person is changed into an idiot.” (Wikipedia). The CIA considered lobotomy as a solution for “disposal” of individuals.
A 1952 CIA memo titled: “LOBOTOMY and Related Operations” discussed the question: Is lobotomy a solution for “disposal” of an individual who might pose a security risk? Lee and Shlain (Acid Dreams) report that a group of CIA scientists entertained the possibility of using an “icepick” lobotomy to render an…
Dr. Paul H. Hoch, a psychiatrist who trained in Germany and came to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa, gained immigrant status with legal assistance by John Foster Dulles (future Secretary of State and brother of Allen Dulles). From 1948 to 1955, Hoch served as Director of experimental research at…
Dr. Milton Greenblatt, Dr. Harry Solomon, Dr. Julius Levine, and Dr. Norman Paul actively promoted bimedial lobotomy in the major journals. The lobotomy studies were funded by the U.S. Public Health Service. Levine, Greenblatt and Solomon reported the “superiority” of bimedial lobotomy over the conventional approach in The New England…
MK-NAIMI was a joint project of the CIA and the Special Operations (SO) Division at Fort Detrick. Hank Albarelli quotes an early memorandum in which a bacteriologist articulates MK-NAOMI’s mission: “Our mission was pretty simple and to the point: to provide the CIA with every means possible to maim or…
Beginning in 1952, both the CIA and Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division (SOD) had formalized a written 2-year $1,000,000 contract with the NYS Psychiatric Institute (1952–53). It was officially referred to as Project MK-NAOMI, an adjunct to the larger CIA behavior modification projects (ARTICHOKE) and MK-ULTRA. As stated in a…
Artichoke was launched by Allen Dulles, then deputy director of the CIA to replace and expand Bluebird as the major, multi-faceted military-CIA project. Within weeks, the CIA had acquired secret prisons in the Canal Zone, West Germany, and Japan; Artichoke teams were sent overseas for brutal interrogations with drugs, hypnosis…
The Dorr Professor of Anesthesiology at Harvard University, whose reputation as a paragon of ethical research rests on his article in the New England Journal of Medicine (1966) in which he listed 50 unethical U.S. clinical trials. The career of Dr. Henry K. Beecher is a cautionary tale. What follows…
The term “brainwashing” was the brainchild of Edward Hunter, a covert CIA propaganda agent who churned out a stream of books and articles warning about the threat of Communist “brainwashing.” In testimony before the House Un-American Committee, Hunter warned: the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels, [they use]…
In 1951, the Canadian Defense Research Board (DRB) convened a secret meeting in Montreal attended by military officials from the United Kingdom, Canada and two CIA officials. The focus of the meeting was — “brainwashing techniques.” Dr. Donald O. Hebb, chief of DRB Behavioral Research and chair of Psychology at…
