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…
More than two hundred articles related to the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation were published in major scientific publications. For example, in 1957, Dr. Donald Wexler and three psychiatrists from Harvard University reproduced a similar experiment covertly funded by the secret Office of Naval Research. Seventeen volunteers were put…
In the early 1950s and beyond, Fink was a CIA Project Artichoke consultant. In 1951, Paul Gaynor and Morse Allen of CIA’s Security Research Service (SRS) oversaw ARTICHOKE. They worked closely with Fink in New York City to thoroughly explore the merits of electroshock techniques for interrogations. The CIA was…
Cameron was an internationally prominent psychiatrist who developed torture techniques on his involuntary hospitalized patients — mostly women. His brutal techniques involved a three-stage method for “brainwashing” in order to eliminate the will and establish control: first, “mental depatterning” achieved through drug-induced coma; massive neuroleptic drug cocktails induced extended sleep…
A Memorandum for the Record, dated Jan. 31, 1975, reviews “available file information” about ARTICHOKE, “the agency cryptonym for the study and/or use of ‘special’ interrogation methods that have been known to include the use of drugs and chemicals, hypnosis, and ‘total isolation,’ a form of psychological harassment.” The memo…
A memorandum from Paul Gaynor, CIA Security Research chief to ARTICHOKE director, Morse Allen states: “It is imperative that we move forward more aggressively on identifying and securing a more reliable ready group, or groups, of human research subjects for ongoing Artichoke work.” The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare…
Dr. Harris Isbell’s experiments can only be described as torture — on par with Nazi human experiments. Isbell tested 800 psychoactive chemicals, including LSD, using as his subjects African American male prisoners addicted to heroin. He gave them heroin in exchange for He experimented using very high doses of LSD,…
Artichoke Conference: “use of criminals and the criminally insane have been very successful.” CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor stated at an Artichoke Conference meeting at Fort Detrick, All individuals can be broken under mental and physical assaults and by such techniques as denying sleep, exhaustion, persuasion, starvation, pain, humiliation,…
Maitland Baldwin, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIH), had no moral inhibitions about carrying out CIA’s most radical experimental proposals. He had conducted “a rather gruesome experiment” on an Army “volunteer” who was kept in a box for 40 hours until he kicked his way out…
Dr. John Lilly was a scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who conducted experimental studies on monkeys in an effort to “map” the body’s functions controlled from various locations in the brain. He devised a method of pounding up to 600 tiny sections of hypodermic tubing into the…
Allen Dulles, a master propagandist demonstrated his adroit duplicity when he delivered a fear mongering speech about “brain warfare” at a national Princeton alumni conference. He described the “abhorrent” but effective vast Soviet experiment in “brain perversion techniques” when, in fact he launched a massive abhorrent CIA brainwashing manipulation project….
In a rare exchange of memos (1953) between the two men Dulles reaffirmed his support for utilizing psychiatry’s “applied medical science” for torture. And in his memo to Dulles (April 13, 1953) Helms (then chief, CIA Office of Special Operations) proposed a program for the “covert use of biological and…
