Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath was the chairman of the Dept. of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University; his invasive surgical brain physiology experiments were at the outer limits of existing neurophysiological knowledge. He surgically implanted electrodes into is psychiatric patients’ brains to test the effects of electrical brain stimulation (EBS)….
Alan A. Baumeister (2000), distinguished professor and the former director of Vanderbilt University Kennedy Center, analyzed Heath’s published reports and concluded that the Tulane EBS experiments refutes Heath’s claims that the experiments were motivated by a therapeutic justification. Prof. Baumeister concluded that Heath’s claim was invalid. The experiments lacked both…
In August, 1951, an outbreak of frenzied hallucinations, delirium and insanity shook the 500 inhabitants of the small French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit. The symptoms resembled descriptions of the malady known as St. Anthony’s Fire which afflicted communities during the Middle Ages. More than 500 people were affected; 7 people died,…
Dr. Frank Olson was a high level civilian U.S. biological warfare scientist who worked with CIA’s Top Secret Special Operations Division (SO) which worked as a team with the Army Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick from 1943 until his death in 1953. The mysterious circumstances of his death continue to…
Stanley Glickman’s case was less widely reported than Frank Olson. Glickman was an American artist living in Paris in 1952, when he joined a group of fellow Americans at a café, among them was Sidney Gottlieb. A heated political debate ensued and when Glickman decided to leave, he was offered…
Operation Midnight Climax was an operation known only to Richard Helms and Gottlieb’s Technical Support Division; it was a free-wheeling illicit criminal operation headed by George Hunter White, an Army Captain, OSS officer, veteran agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) who was also a CIA operative. During the…
Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to…
Richard Condon’s tour de force fictional presentation shows the validity of Oscar Wilde’s observation, “Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose.” At the time he wrote the book, Richard Condon had no inkling about the CIA’s extensive mind-control experiments. In his novel,…
Dr. Henry Murray, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations had devised a screening test for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor of the CIA) to assess the suitability of applicants for the secret service; it tested an applicant’s ability to withstand harsh interrogation. In 1950, Murray…
The book, edited by Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer, synthesizing the behavioral science contributions to interrogation techniques. The editors were funded by the U.S. Air Force. Isolation was deemed “the ideal way of ‘breaking down’ a prisoner, because, to the unsophisticated, it seems to create precisely the state the interrogator…
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but…
Behavioral research was transferred from Sid Gottlieb and his Technical Support Division to the Office of Research and Development (ORD). Dr. Stephen Aldrich took over the leadership role, and ORD continued to probe for ways to control human behavior until 1979; and they were doing so with space-age technology that…
