Part 1:Operation Mind Control...The Cryptorian Candidate...Only One Mind for my Country...The Mind Laundry Myth

Operation Mind Control
By Walter Bowart

Foreword 

The father of Grock the clown, having had his legs broken in eight places by his father for professional reasons, broke Grock's legs in eight places to be certain that the child would grow up walking grotesquely so as to ensure his eminence as a clown. The act brought much pain and indignity forever but, Grock's father reasoned, was there not a wholly justifiable element involved? Was not the clowning tradition immortally enhanced by those unnatural legs? 

As demonstrated inescapably by Walter Bowart in this book, our Father who art in the American secret police has endowed hundreds of scientists at American universities to unravel methods for fracturing American minds. That this research in so many great halls of learning has exceeded a cost of untold secret millions of dollars (the only yardstick remaining by which we are willing to measure anything) indicates that this Grockian entertainment being produced by our secret police is a matter of ambitious policy rather than the happenstance of cloak-and-dagger adventure. 

In this book Walter Bowart has proven each step of this official, terminal, government anarchy, even though that appears to be a contradiction in terms. To alter and control human minds is the ultimate anarchy. What is offered by official apologists as a tribute to the needs of derring-do by romantic spies are acts of hatred and sadism against all people in an insane and degraded determination to extirpate conscience from society. 

Walter Bowart underwent a long and expensive process to assemble the hard facts which comprise this book. Each document attesting to secret police intent had to be ferreted out of government archives by badgering persistence until, page by page, the information was released to him by his right under the Freedom of Information Act. The essence of that law seems to be that one need only write away to a federal agency for information about the general areas in which the citizen is interested. Not so. Walter Bowart needed to expend large sums of money to employ researchers in Washington and elsewhere in order to discover the precise name, number, and description of contents of each document toward which he was groping through black streams of informational darkness. Without this it would have been impossible to apply for the transfer of copies of these documents to himself for this book. He had to comb the United States for people from many walks of life who knew, vaguely remembered, or suspected that they had been under the mind control of secret police and military agencies, then had to backtrack again with information gleaned from them to labyrinthine research among thousands of federal archives. 

Please keep fearfully in mind that the astonishing information published in this seminal work of investigative reporting, concerning avenues taken to decision and execution by our secret police to fracture or dissolve human minds, then to operate those minds as a small boy might operate a Yo-Yo, for purposes of counter-intelligence military "efficiency," and the destruction of democratic institutions, was drawn directly from federal records and from official laboratory archives of the highest educational purpose—as well as from the reviving memories of those who had already undergone the dehumanizing process. 

The prostitution of the mind by our secret police preceded the murder of the mind. To attain the advanced techniques now available to "magnetic and attractive"political personalities, it was necessary to turn out the laboratories of science as a pimp turns out his heartless whores upon the winter streets; our hallowed educators, army and navy and air force commanders and personnel, the beloved medical profession, august and inspiring temples of the law, our esteemed statesmen, and all Americans living and dead. Each one of those groups is involved in this dismenibering of the mind. Taxes and the collective conscience make the urination of the secret police upon the human mind possible. "Brainwashing" per se is no news to any of us. Controlled assassins are not known to us only through fiction. Advertising assaults on behalf of poisonous materials to induce us successfully to buy and consume are early on bastions of mind control. 

No one—not anyone—needs theologians to answer the question: "Where does the soul live?" We know the soul lives in the mind because the soul is the mind in all of its unfathomably intricate individual conditioning. It is the mind of intent, of hope, of purpose, of achievement by the spirit beyond achievement by physical action. When Grock's father broke his son's legs in eight places there may have been alarm, on the one hand, that a man could do such a calamitous thing to his son but, on the other, the same people responded to Grock's genius to which those hopelessly deformed legs had contributed, and roared with laughter. That was the normal reaction when we were the audience and crazy-legs Grock was the clown. But Walter Bowart demonstrates to us in this book that we have become Grock. We are the spinning, hobbling, waddling clowns in the eyes of our vividly delineated secret police. 

"Oh, no!" (Can you hear the outcry?) Oh, yes, writes Walter Bowart in this fearful record you now hold in your hands. 

Apologists rush in, hired for all such occasions from everywhere, by the secret government crying out, "You are, as usual, like all of your exaggerating kind, making a mountain out of a molehill. While it may (or may not) be true that our secret police occasionally swing the sledgehammer on little minds, it is (or is not) being done as a patriotic act to protect our beloved people." They reel backward, hands clutching chests as the full realization seems to hit them. "My Godl Bowart cannot believe that our government of the people, by the people, and for the people would use such loathsome forces against citizens. If such research were done (or was not done) then it would be for purely abstract research reasons—for the expansion of human knowledge." 

Walter Bowart's book is also a freezing vision of the mutations of the aspirations of science. Scientists, educators, and their leaders, The Great Men, having stumbled upon the possibility of controlling the human mind, might well have withheld this knowledge from the secret police and brought it forward for all to share, would you not say? If the means are at hand actually to enter and control the mind—not through the far-off smoke signals of psychiatry and psychoanalysis—can we conceive of what might be found in terms of medical triumphs, the conquest of pain and of group hatreds, and mental energy released by unraveling the Gordian knots of mental perplexity to make one straight laser line that might then pierce the doubts and fears which beset each one of us? In terms of education light-years ahead of the educational means we presently employ, in basic and advanced learning of cultures, languages, and skills; in short, understanding each other across the face of the world, this development of Mind Control makes the invention of movable type seem like a primordial grunt from the shadows of a rain forest lost in time. 

What has been achieved by the secret police in relation to mind control is scrupulously set down in Walter Bowart's extraordinary book. The question the book puts is this: do you wish this immeasurably important technique to remain as a weapon to be used against you and your children by what Bowart calls the cryptocracy, or do you wish to use it as a universal key to unlock a thousand new chances that your children will not be murdered in future wars? 

In an epigraph to this book, Zbigniew Brzezinski measures the political probabilities of mind control use when he says, "exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason." Today our secret police and our military establishment have demonstrated, in Vietnam and elsewhere (examined by Bowart herein), the powers to create assassins out of our children. The expansion of these powers, which are able to turn young men and women into murderous criminals at will, goes on unchecked by the oft-called "investigative" press, by "moral" leaders at the bar, in the pulpits, in high government, and on campuses. Yet the people they call the public have long suspected that it has become government policy to control minds. If there is general information abroad on this subject, then consider that which must be at the disposal 01 congressional investigating committees as they bugle their determination to control the powers of darkness within our secret police. Zombie is a quaint, old-fashioned folklore word but its meaning becomes obscene when our children's minds are being controlled by any one of dozens of federal secret police agencies. Have government agencies perfected methods sustained by the taxpayers to control the minds of the people who shot the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean economist and diplomat. Were the assassins programmed to forget they did it or were they programmed to do it? We may never know for they stand bewildered, idiotically grinning for the cameras. Have the technicians developed a model Giant, Economy-Size Government Assassin which can easily be turned out by the thousands? 

The murders of a few hundred humans by a few hundred other humans is commonplace enough but, for the flavor of horror and terror, of endless nightmare rampant upon a landscape of what was once American democracy, consider this expansion of the Brzezinski epigraph which cannot be repeated often enough: "In the techtronic society the trend would seem to be toward the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason." 

The threatening state of American political leadership over the last fifteen years may seem to murmur that the magnetic and attractive personalities" might rather not resist the destruction of democratic institutions by "effectively exploiting" these shocking gains into the control of minds. It might even be wise to consider Walter Bowart's real evidence herein, then to do what we can to protect ourselves if that proud right, with the love of freedom, has not been atrophied by "the latest communications techniques." There is an alternative. 

We can all forever more be transformed into the image of Grock the clown. 

Richard Condon 

Kilmoganny, Ireland 

31 May 1977

Chapter One 

THE CRYPTORIAN CANDIDATE 

It may have been the biggest story since the atom bomb. The headline, however, was small and ignored the larger issue. "Drug Tests by CIA Held More Extensive Than Reported in '75," said the New York Times on July 16, 1977. What it should have said is "U.S. Develops Invisible Weapons to Enslave Mankind." 

The testing of drugs by the CIA was just a part of the United States government's top-secret mind-control project, a project which had spanned thirty-five years and had involved tens of thousands of individuals. It involved techniques of hypnosis, narco-hypnosis, electronic brain stimulation, behavioral effects of ultrasonic, microwave, and low-frequency sound, aversive and other behavior modification therapies. In fact, there was virtually no aspect of human behavioral control that was not explored in their search for the means to control the memory and will of both individuals and whole masses of people. 

The CIA succeeded in developing a whole range of psycho-weapons to expand its already ominous psychological warfare arsenal. With these capabilities, it was now possible to wage a new kind of war—a war which would take place invisibly, upon the battlefield of the human mind. 

"Literature always anticipates life," Oscar Wilde said. "It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose." By Wilde's definition, then, Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate is literature. 

Condon published his tour de force in 1958. It was the story of an American Army sergeant who was captured by the enemy during the Korean conflict and, in an improbable nine days, was hypno-programmed to murder on cue. The sergeant returned to the United States and was post-hypnotically triggered to kill by the sight of the queen of diamonds in a deck of cards. The sergeant automatically killed several people, among them a candidate for President of the United States. After he killed, his memory of the event was forever sealed by amnesia. 

At the time The Manchurian Candidate was published, few people in the world, Richard Condon included, knew that total control of the mind was possible. Condon was writing fiction; he had merely read up on popular Pavlovian conditioning manuals and imagined the rest. He had no way of knowing then that mind control had already been the subject of eighteen years of secret research within the clandestine agencies of the U.S. government. The tricks of mind control he described were later employed (right down to the queen of diamonds cue) by the programmers of real political assassins who developed foolproof techniques for the control of thought, memory, emotions, and behavior. 

The Manchurian Candidate brought the idea of "brainwashing" to public consciousness. Brainwashing is the use of isolation, deprivation, torture, and indoctrination to break the human will. But what the book actually described was something more than brainwashing. It was mind control: a total takeover of an individual's mind by someone else. The someone else in Condon's version was a mad Chinese psycho-scientist. Always the satirist, Condon brought the Fu Manchu myth up to date. But, ironically, the techniques he described were first perfected and used not by the Chinese or the Communists, but by the United States. 

Condon's portrait of POWs during the Korean conflict went against the accepted scientific and medical opinion of the time, which held that a man could not be made to commit a criminal act against his own will or inner moral code by any known means. Although Condon's book was not completely on target about the details of GI mind control, he did accurately describe some of the motives, coercive methodology, and psychological results of real-life mind control. 

The psychological techniques described in The Manchurian Candidate were to become a reality less than a decade after Condon saw his story set in type. As if Condon's fiction had been used as the blueprint, a group of hypno-programmed "zombies" were created. Some were assassins prepared to kill on cue. Others were informers, made to remember minute details under hypnosis. Couriers carried illegal messages outside the chain of command, their secrets secured behind posthypnotic blocks. Knowledge of secret information was removed from the minds of those who no longer had the "need to know"—they were given posthypnotic amnesia. 

The ordinary foot soldiers who fought in the dirty, televised Vietnam conflict were released to civilian life without debriefing. For them there was no "decompression" from the rage of war. They were released with all the reflexes of trained assassins intact. 

Those who had been conditioned in the black science of the war of torture, terror, and technology were debriefed with special attention. Their memories were so completely erased before they were turned out of the military that they returned to civilian life with only the minimum, fragmented knowledge of who they were or what they had done. The rest of their memories had been smudged or removed by drugs, hypnosis, behavior modification, conditioned reflex therapy, or some other evil wonder of mind control. 

I encountered my first case of mind control in the midst of the Watergate scandal. A young man I'd known since childhood had returned from a tour of duty in the U.S. Air Force, with amnesia, remembering nothing of his service years, except having had a good time. He subsequently learned, through intensive private psychotherapy, that he'd been hypnotized and conditioned. His mind had been unmade, then remade: his mind had been controlled. 

I was completely fascinated by his story, but naturally, in 1973, I thought it was an isolated, single event. Then, quite by accident, a few months later, I overheard another man in my hometown telling what was essentially the same story: how he figured he'd been hypnotized and had his memory erased at a "debriefing" prior to his separation from military service. 

After hearing the second story I began to wonder how many more men had had their memories erased. I decided to run the following classified ad: "Researcher/writer interested in contacting anyone with knowledge of the use of hypnosis by the military, including ex-servicemen who have reason to believe they were hypnotized (or drugged) while in the service and subsequently exhibited signs of amnesia or hypermnesia (improved memory). All info held in strictest confidence . . ." 

I placed the ad in Soldier of Fortune (a magazine which reports on the activities of mercenaries), a number of small publications aimed at hypnotists, behaviorists, neurologists, and other professionals, and popular magazines such as Rolling Stone. To my amazement, I received more than a hundred replies to the ad. Many stated that they had amnesia. 

Ignoring the obvious crank letters, I followed up on the others and discovered that many men were unable to say just what had caused their loss of memory. In some cases, it was obviously a result of the trauma of war—what came to be called "the post-Vietnam syndrome." So I concentrated on those who had not seen combat but who either had high security clearances or were employed at the periphery of the intelligence services. 

Letter and telephone exchanges narrowed the field down to eighteen persons who fit the pattern of the first two men who had reported their amnesia to me. All eighteen had had security clearances—and could only recall isolated events from their GI experience. I narrowed the field still further to those who remembered enough to have at least some idea, however fragmentary and incomplete, of what had happened to them. 

Their stories were believable, but they shed little light on how amnesia had been induced and what behavior had been controlled. To answer those deeper questions I went to the libraries, and after two years of research I was able to find enough scientific reports and government documents to tell the whole story of what I call Operation Mind Control. 

Though the documented trail of mind control extends back many decades, it was not always called by that name. The church and the state have always engaged in psychotheology and psycho-politics, the psychological manipulation of belief, opinion, and actions for political and/or religious ends. But the complete control of the human mind was only managed in the late 1940s. Therefore, my research is concentrated on the period from 1938 to the present, the period during which I found there was an effort made by the agencies of the U.S. government to develop sophisticated techniques of psycho-politics and mind control. 

The objective of Operation Mind Control during this period has been to take human beings, both citizens of the United States and citizens of friendly and unfriendly nations, and transform them into unthinking, subconsciously programmed "zombies," motivated without their knowledge and against their wills to perform in a variety of ways in which they would not otherwise willingly perform. This is accomplished through the use of various techniques called by various names, including brainwashing, thought reform, behavior modification, hypnosis, and conditioned reflex therapy. For the purposes of this book the term "mind control" will be used to describe these techniques generically.* 

* Various meditation groups use the words "mind control" to describe meditation, contemplation, and self-hypnosis; all these are usually harmless if not beneficial practices. These techniques might more properly be called "mind self-control," for the individuals who use them seek control over their own minds and bodies to obtain desired effects. The mind control examined in this book is the control of one individual's mind by another. 

Mind control is the most terrible imaginable crime because it is committed not against the body, but against the mind and the soul. Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo expresses the attitude of the majority of psychologists in calling it "mind rape," and warns that it poses a great "danger of destruction of the spirit" which can be "compared to the threat of total physical destruction . . ."1 

Development of mind control was accomplished largely through the efforts of individual psychologists, psychiatrists, and chemists, working in isolated conditions under government contract. Each researcher or research team was allowed to know only what he or she needed to know to accomplish bis or her fragment of the research or testing. 

The contracts were let through a number of government and private agencies and foundations so that the researchers were, by and large, ignorant as to the intended use of their research. 

While the CIA was a major funder of the mind-control research, virtually every major government agency became in some way knowingly or unwittingly involved. While I began my research believing that a "cult of intelligence" was behind the mind-control program, I found that there is, in fact, no single originating force, but several. The operation is too widespread and complex for it to be created by a "cult." If a cult there must be, then it is a cult within a cult, in an interlocking chain of invisible mini-governments with unwritten rules, unwritten plans, and unwritten loyalties. It is the plan of a secret bureaucracy— what I call a cryptocracy—which conspires against our laws and our freedoms. 

"Cryptocracy" is a compound of crypto, meaning "secret," and -cracy, meaning "rule, government, governing body." The cryptocracy, then, is the secret government whose identity and whereabouts have slowly and reluctantly been hinted at by the Congress through its investigations into Watergate, the CIA, and the rest of the intelligence community. 

While the CIA, near the top of the intelligence pyramid, has been drawing most of the fire, the evidence of a cryptocracy clearly implicates the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and its subsidiaries in military intelligence, as well as the civil service. The alliance extends even among private contractors and institutions and religious organizations. With Central Intelligence in the vanguard, the cryptocracy is composed of persons operating within the Office of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Department of Justice, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Prisons, Bureau of Narcotics, Atomic Energy Commission, Veterans' Administration, General Services Administration, National Science Foundation, and even major American corporations, especially certain airlines, oil companies, and aerospace contractors. 

The cryptocracy invades the privacy of citizens and corporations. It meddles, often violently, in the internal politics of foreign nations, and has hired, trained, and equipped mind-controlled assassins for the murder of heads of state. The cryptocracy may have been involved in attempts to control U.S. elections. It may control key figures in the U.S. and world press. 

The story within the story, I discovered, is an astonishing one of a psychological war waged by this U.S. cryptocracy against the American people. The scientific reports and histories place the story in time, and at the government's door. However, the literature of the cryptocracy ignores the very real human factor. There is no written record of the mental anguish, the torture to the soul that comes from loss of memory and the resulting identity crisis. That mental anguish is the human story of mind control. 

The stories that follow are told by the failures of Operation Mind Control—failures because the victims remember something; for where mind control is successful there is no memory left.* 

*Due to editorial considerations, many of the stories I uncovered have been left on the editing room floor. Each individual in this book stands for and tells the story of many victims of mind control. In many cases the individuals I interviewed believed their lives or sanity would be in danger if their names were made public. I have honored that concern and have withheld real names and places when so requested. Except in these details, the first-person stories in this book are completely true. 

One of the characters in The Manchurian Candidate described bis recurring dream that resulted from the suppression of memory. "It's not so much that I can't sleep. It's more that I'd rather not sleep. I'm walking around punchy because I'm scared. I keep having the same nightmare . . ." The nightmare Condon's hero described was actually the memory of having killed on cue. On stage, before an audience of Communist mind controllers, he strangled one of his fellow soldiers with a scarf, and blew out another's brains with a high-powered pistol at point blank range. Several of the men I interviewed had dreams which could have been written by Condon. 

Tex was an army sergeant stationed in the Mediterranean area. He came back from service with amnesia. But in his dreams a vivid scene was replayed again and again: "In the dream my buddy—I know him real well, we've shared things together—my buddy is taken with his hands behind bis back. I'm standing in rank in a line of other soldiers and we are like a firing squad. I keep thinking I won't shoot my friend, I'll turn the rifle on the commander. But we don't have rifles. 

"My buddy is marched into an open area in front of us with his hands tied behind his back. He is blindfolded and some Ay-rab is talking to him, or reading to him. Another Ay-rab comes up and hits him behind the knees with a rifle butt and he falls to a kneeling position. 

"Then, while he's on his knees, one of the Ay-rab's takes a big sword and cuts his head off. His neck squirts blood, but surprisingly little .. . his head rolls on the ground. His face has a peaceful expression. His body twitches and squirms like a chicken. That's when I always wake up . . ." 

So Condon was right. In their sleep, the memories of atrocities surface to vivid awareness among the victims of mind control. Night after night terrible images, suppressed by deeply conditioned responses, emerge as terrifying nightmares. Are they mythological? The stuff of dreams? Or are they recovered memories? Tex's dream is a mere fragment of more than 1,200 pages of such testimony.

Chapter Two 

ONLY ONE MIND FOR MY COUNTRY 

Through the gray waters of amnesia he drifted, coming back from blind coma. First the echoes, like electronically amplified voices speaking from a deep deep well . . . then, far off, the dim pink molecules of light. . . 

David's body lay still in the military hospital bed. Only his eyes rolled beneath the lids. For several hours he lay that way, perfectly still—just eyes fluttering. The fluttering became more intense. Then his eyes opened. 

"When I woke up," David said, "I couldn't remember anything. I couldn't remember how I'd gotten there or why I was in the hospital." 

He asked nurses and aides why he was there. They told him he'd have to ask his doctor. When David finally saw him, the doctor said, "You tried to commit suicide." 

That came as a great surprise to David. He didn't think he was the suicidal type. He asked the doctor how he'd tried to commit suicide. 

"You took an overdose of Sleep-eze," the doctor told him. 

David knew that Sleep-eze was a patent medicine, that it was related chemically to an antihistamine, and that it could produce drowsiness; but David also knew it was not nearly as dangerous as prescription sleeping pills. Although he began to sense that something was fishy, he did not challenge the doctor, nor did he let on that he suspected the story to be untrue. For the next several days he simply lay in the hospital bed puzzling over the odd chain of events that had landed him there.

I interviewed David several times over a period of two years. Each interview produced additional information as David's memory returned in fragmented, isolated bursts. The following is taken from thousands of pages of transcript and has been edited so that the tedious process which uncovered David's memories is absent. It is slightly misleading only in that David did not remember his story in one continuous sequence. Nor did the other victims quoted in this book. 

David had joined the U.S. Air Force in 1969. During his high school years the draft had still been in effect, and after graduating on the honor roll, David decided to attend a small community college to get as much education as he could before his name was inevitably called by selective service. 

As his induction date approached David realized he could obtain a deferral from the draft because of his high scholastic standing, but he decided instead to take a break from education and fulfill his military obligation as profitably as he could. Although he questioned America's reasons for fighting, he did feel that military service was his duty. 

David had not been a part of the sixties' "revolution." He had never smoked marijuana nor taken LSD, nor had he demonstrated against the war in Vietnam like so many of his friends. He was a studious, intelligent young man who was not inclined to rebellion. He was described by friends and family as one possessed of unusual common sense. In keeping with his cautious and practical nature he negotiated a "contract" for medical corps service with his local air force recruiter and enlisted for a four-year tour of duty, thinking this would help him fulfill his ambition to become a doctor. 

After an uneventful in-processing, David was sent to Lackland Air Force Base for the usual six weeks' basic training, and then on to a technical school for another six weeks of special training. But when the time came for his job assignment, to his great disappointment, he was assigned to the supply corps rather than the medical corps. 

He felt betrayed by the air force, and immediately after receiving his AFSC job assignment number, he retired to his barracks to rehearse a protest to his commanding officer. Moments later, a non-uniformed man entered the empty barracks and asked him to step outside and take a walk. David was puzzled but went along without comment. 

When the two had reached a quiet spot on the base, the man told David that he guessed he was disappointed about receiving the AFSC of a "box pusher" in a supply warehouse. David was surprised by the man's knowledge of his situation. Before he could reply, the man told David that the AFSC was just a cover, that he had actually been chosen to work in a sensitive area of intelligence. 

The assignment sounded glamorous to David, and lifted his sagging spirits. He immediately decided to go along with the change of plans and accept the special assignment without protest. The unidentified man told David to be patient, and to learn well the special techniques of computer programming he would be trained in while waiting for his security investigation to be completed. 

Within a few weeks David was issued a top-secret crypto security clearance and assigned to the air base at Minot, North Dakota. At Minot, he continued to feed supply numbers into a computer, developing his already excellent memory. He did his job well and soon he received a letter of commendation and was promoted to sergeant. 

But for all his accomplishments, he had begun to grow restless. Although he knew his computer programming was just a cover for intelligence work, he was still not satisfied with air force life. 

"I was beginning to not like the extreme regimentation and, I suppose, inside myself I was beginning to build up a resentment about being there. 

"But after I woke up in the hospital I was not resentful. I was passive. I lay there thinking, trying to recall the last memories I had before I woke up in that bed. I didn't remember anything. It was like I'd been asleep for my entire life up to that point. Like I was Rip Van Winkle. 

"The memories of what had happened I did recover over a period of time. But they were fuzzy at first. It seemed like somebody was violating me—raping my mind. 

"I was strapped down in the bed. I was yelling and screaming about something. I'm not the type of person that cusses that much. I hardly ever use foul language, but I know that I said some pretty foul things to those men who were with me. They were officers, and in the service you can't call a superior officer an obscene name without getting punished. Yet I don't think I was ever reprimanded. 

"One guy would ask me questions in an accusatory manner. Another guy would come over and say comforting things. Then the first guy would come back and accuse me again. Then the second guy would come and pat my arm and be friendly. I could remember their faces and their tone of voice, but I couldn't remember the content of what they were talking about." 

David thought about his situation; suppose he had tried to commit suicide. He probably would be kicked out of the service. At best he might be given a medical discharge. So he began to prepare himself for that eventuality. He thought he wouldn't mind getting out of the service under any circumstances, even with a psychological discharge. 

It didn't happen. Instead, David was visited by men in civilian clothes who told him that he'd been chosen for a special intelligence assignment. They said the details of his assignment could not be revealed until the proper time, and then he would not be allowed to talk to anyone about it. They said he would be receiving his orders soon. 

"I had expected at least to have some stripes taken away for the suicide attempt," David said. "Instead, five different sets of orders came down. They were all typed military orders, regular orders, but they had me going to five different places at once. It was impossible. 

"I took the orders to headquarters and told them that somebody had goofed. It was plain to see that somebody had screwed up. The way the military runs, it was not unusual. No one got excited about it. The guys in the office said that they would straighten it out. 

"Then I was told that I had two weeks' leave coming. They ordered me home to wait while they got my orders straightened out." 

Happy to get a break after eighteen continuous months of military life without leave, David went home. 

"I was hoping they'd forget all about me, I was praying that this time the computer would completely lose me." 

The first evening at home something compelled David to break security. Alone with his mother, he told her that he knew he had not really attempted suicide. 

"I suppose that my first duty was to my family, and my second duty was to my country. After I'd discharged my moral duty to my mother, I was free to obey my government's wish and not remember anything about it. That's probably how it worked, in spite of their programming." 

After David had been at home for the full two weeks, and was just beginning to think that maybe the computer had lost him after all, a telegram came. There were no written orders, no official seals, just a Western Union telegram ordering him to report to a base in northern California and from there to embark to the Far East on overseas duty. There were numbers on the face of the telegram, but at the time David gave them no special notice. These numbers may have been an assignment authorization, for seldom are servicemen sent overseas on the strength of a telegram alone. 

"When I got to the base in California, I showed them the telegram and the air police hustled me to another airplane and flew me to Guam." 

On the plane to Guam David ran into an airman he'd known at Minot. The airman's name was Max. Like David, Max had been attached to the supply wing at Minot, but he had been in a different type of supply operation. 

In all the time they were together on Guam, David never learned the details of Max's assignment. Both of them were supposed to be supply men, but David thought Max had some pretty unusual qualifications for a supply man: for instance, he held a fifth-degree black belt in karate. 

"Max and I had checked into the barracks when we got there, but after preliminaries we were put on a bus and taken to an isolated place eight miles outside the base. There were six L-shaped barracks set up inside a high electrified fence with barbed wire at the top. Inside the compound there was a movie theater, a store, a barbershop, a chow hall, and a recreation center. There were several hundred guys living in that compound. 

"We could leave anytime we wanted. All we had to do was show the proper credentials to the air police at the gate. The compound seemed to be regular air force. The place was called 'Marbo,' and as far as I could tell, there were guys there who had all sorts of different functions in the air force, but nobody really discussed their jobs. 

"Several of the guys at Marbo had been in the supply wing in North Dakota. But at Marbo they were working in other areas .. . In other words, guys who'd been in the supply wing in North Dakota were in the civil engineers or the air police. One air policeman on Guam, I remember, had been shoving around boxes just like other supply men when he was at Minot. Suddenly now he was an air policeman. I couldn't figure it out, and I wasn't about to ask questions. 

"I guess we all assumed that we were all on special assignment, and I'm pretty sure that if I'd asked anyone about it, they would have avoided an answer. I certainly would have, if somebody had asked me." 

David made rank fast in the air force. He was a good airman, a good supply man. Yet anybody he talked to about supply duties didn't know what he was talking about. His duties weren't like the others. 

"My air force file shows that the first three digits of my AFSC are 647. A 647 is some kind of a box pusher. Yet, I never pushed a box all the time I was in the air force." 

After their tour of duty, Max and David returned home together on the same plane. At the airport Max was called over the intercom and went off to answer the page. Two air police returned for his luggage and David did not see Max until after he was separated from the service for some months. Then it was a strange meeting. 

David was walking down the streets of Disneyland and his eye fell on Max walking toward him in a crowd. David was delighted to see his old buddy again, but Max was strangely distant. "He didn't seem very interested in our reunion." David said, "He shook hands with me, and I began to talk, but he seemed kind of passive. I wanted to sit down and tell all the things that had happened to me since we last saw each other, but Max didn't want to talk. He cut me short, said good-bye, and left. 

"That's something that's always puzzled me. How can a guy who was your constant companion for so many months, a guy who has fought for you and gotten to know you inside and out, not want to talk to you? How could he have just brushed me off like that? 

"When I first got out of the service, all I could remember about my four years was that I'd had a lot of fun. I mean, all the pictures I have, and all the recollections I had, were of Max and Pat and I having fun, skin diving, laying on the beach, collecting shells, walking in the jungle. It never dawned on me until later that I must have done something while I was in the service." 

Pat was a young woman from the Midwest who was assigned to serve as David's secretary. Almost instantly, when they met on Guam, they fell in love. 

"Pat was something special. She was everything I would have ever dreamed of in a woman. I suppose she felt that I was everything that she wanted in a man. It didn't take long for us to go to bed after we met, and from then on, throughout my tour of duty Max, Pat, and I were inseparable." 

David was not talking about a menage a trois. Max was not attracted to Pat nor she to him. They all held each other to be good friends, but David and Pat's feelings for each other were strongest. 

David now thinks it odd that the three of them got along so perfectly from the first moment they met. Max was David's kind of man, and Pat was David's kind of woman. In the years that have passed since he got out of the air force, David has come to believe that Max and Pat and he were matched up by a computer. 

"We hit it off from the start. We had the same interests, we were nervous about the same things, and we would laugh at the same kind of jokes. We were three individuals who were very very close and where one lacked a quality another had something that filled that lack. 

"The air force takes your psychological tests—your cumes—the cumulative progress reports which have been kept on just about every individual in the United States from the first grade through high school. These records have your IQ, your aptitude tests, and all the things they accumulate on you through your school years . . . they give them a complete examination to determine your psychological profile and everything about your likes and dislikes. They feed selected information, any information they are looking to match up, into a computer and run yours with other people's until they have a psychological match. 

"In spy books I've read, undercover agents sent to foreign countries are usually teamed with a spy of the opposite sex. Even if two people are both married and have left families at home, the directors of intelligence usually send along someone who can take care of the natural human sexual needs of the other without risking a breach of security. That way, no horny agent is going to have to associate with a prostitute or someone who might turn out to be a double agent or counterspy. 

"I'd talk with the other guys in the service and they'd talk about getting laid in Hong Kong or Japan or Korea. I didn't have to talk about anything. I didn't have to brag. I'd just smile at them, secure in my love for Pat." 

David said that there were several other women in the barracks who, like Pat, were secretaries but had security clearance. And, as was the case with Pat, many of them also had close relationships with the men to whom they had been assigned. 

Two months before their tour of duty was to expire David and Max were sent home. Pat stayed behind on Guam. But David and Pat arranged to meet once they were both out of the service. They exchanged home addresses, but somehow David lost hers and he is strangely unable to remember her last name, or even the town from which she'd come. David never saw Pat again. 

"Looking back on it, it looks like it was awfully convenient. Pat was a liberated woman, she knew exactly who she was. And that's just the kind of woman I like to be around. She fulfilled every need that I ever had, to such a degree that it's a problem now. I can't meet a girl that's as good as she was. When you've been in paradise, it's hard to find paradise again. You always want to go back. 

"I think of her all the time, but I just can't remember her last name. It's a total blank. I just can't remember." 

During the entire thirteen-hour flight home David had to debrief himself into a tape recorder while sitting between two air policemen. He doesn't remember what he talked about. No one was "questioning" him; he just talked. 

Upon his return, he was assigned to a base in California. Immediately upon reporting for duty, he found that he no longer had a security clearance. His job was to answer telephones on the base and to listen to complaints. He'd take calls from the wives of air force personnel and relay their complaints to the proper channels. That's all he did during his entire last year of service. 

"When it came time to get processed out, I wanted to get the medals I earned when I was stationed in Guam. They were actually theater ribbons. I had so many ribbons when I left Guam that the officer I reported to told me not to wear them because I would attract attention to myself. 

"During the out-processing they brought out my file. They do that regularly every year anyway. They show you your records and have you go over them and make sure that they're correct. Then you sign a paper that states the records have been approved by you. The last time I was shown my records, they'd been changed. Instead of all the typed dog-eared reports that were in my file before, there was this clean computer print-out. 

"I asked the officer in charge what had happened to the notices of my being awarded those theater ribbons. He told me that since I had such a high security clearance some of the things that were in my files made it necessary to expunge a lot of the information from the record. He said that there was a top-secret file on me which was available to people who had the right clearances. The file he had me approve was the one which would be shown anyone who did not have the highest clearance. He said that because this was more or less a public record, it could not have anything on it of a sensitive nature. It was very misleading, that report. It looked like I had been a supply man, a box pusher, and I'd done nothing else, except try to attempt suicide. The phony hospital story was in the report—so deniability was built in. 

"Then I went through the normal out-processing and went home. All I can say is that everybody, my folks, my friends, everyone who'd known me before noticed how changed I was. I was fearful, and under tight control." 

David decided that he would first reorient himself to the civilian pace of life and then look for a job. But when he began to look for employment, he suddenly realized that he had some deep psychological problems. 

At his first job interview, he was routinely asked to fill out the company's job application form. He sat down at a desk and started writing. He wrote his name and noticed that his hands were sweating. As he began to enter his address his heart began pounding so loudly it was audible. He became short of breath and felt like the walls were closing in. He fought to remain calm, but within a few moments he snatched up the form and bolted out the door. 

That evening he discussed the strange physical effects that had come over him with his parents. They assured him he was probably just very anxious about getting the job. 

The next day he went on another interview. Again he was asked to fill out a job application. This time he got further in filling out the form: he put down his name . . . address . . . date of birth . . . Social Security number . . . health information . . . but when he came to the place in the form which required work information about the past four years the pounding in his ears, the shortness of breath, and the terrifying feeling of being confined in a small space came over him again, and he left the building with the form wadded up in his hand. 

Over the next few months David applied for many jobs. The results were always the same. He could not overcome the terror that gripped him whenever anyone asked him for information about how he had spent the past four years. 

David's parents suggested that he try to get a job working with computers and take advantage of the training that the air force had given him. The mere mention of computers made him fly into a rage. "I still couldn't face whatever it was that was blocking me. To this day, I can't stand the thought of a computer. I'd like to smash them all up. I realize, of course, that is irrational." 

David remained hopeful that whatever was causing his anxiety would pass with time. Meanwhile, he decided to go back to college. He had no trouble getting into a major university since his high school and community college grades were high, and no one asked him for details of his service years. But during his first semester he encountered the same blocks that had kept him from getting a job. 

"In my psychology course you had to get up in front of a circle of people and talk. You had to bare your soul. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't stand up and be calm and let people question me. They were all harmless questions, but I'd get the pounding heart, the sweaty palms, the shortness of breath and the feeling of claustrophobia again. I'd just clam up and leave the room." 

It was then that David understood that he could no longer face the problem himself. He sought out a psychiatrist who'd been recommended by a friend. 

"The first psychiatrist I went to was male. He had used hypnotherapy with me, and he found me to be a very easy subject. I'd go into a trance at the drop of a hat. But whenever he tried to regress me—saying, 'I want you to go back'—I'd just bring myself out of the trance, even if it was a deep trance. My heart would be pounding, my palms would be sweating, and I'd feel the same claustrophobia I'd felt whenever I'd confronted those application forms." 

David found that he was much more relaxed with his second psychiatrist, a woman named Alice. Alice was also more successful with hypnotherapy. David would go into a trance quickly and deeply, but whenever Alice tried to regress him to his air force period, he would bring himself out of the trance as he had done previously. But she found that by regressing David to his childhood and approaching the air force period from earlier years, remembering was less difficult for him. 

"At first she tried to have me relax. She talked in a very soothing voice, telling me to close my eyes. I felt like I was surrendering to her. It was easy to get me into a light trance. I laid down my defenses and was going deeper and deeper, but just as soon as she said, 'Now we're going to go back,' I sat straight up and was wide awake. 

"Alice couldn't get over how fast I went under. One time, she said, she was just talking to me and her voice put me completely under when she wasn't even trying. I was highly suggestible. 

"But whenever she'd say, 'Let's go back,' all the muscles in my neck would strain, and I would grip the arms of the chair until my knuckles turned white. Once I was holding a piece of paper in my hand, and when I came out of hypnosis, the paper was completely soaked with sweat. Only a minute after she'd said, 'We're going to go back,' I was wide awake. 

"Alice never did succeed completely with hypnosis, but something must have been released because of her attempts. As soon as we were able to go back to the usual talking technique of psychotherapy, I started talking about my childhood. I'd never thought that much about it, I guess, but I couldn't remember much of my childhood. For instance, my grandfather had died when I was fourteen, and he had lived with us. Everyone says he and I were very close, but I had no mental picture of him at all. That's when Alice started trying to get me to remember my childhood. I don't know if I remembered my childhood before I went into the service or not. It seems like I did, because it wasn't a problem, but to this day, still, I can't remember much, and everything before the age of ten is completely blank. 

"Alice and I kept working. At first, the memories we recovered were all painful memories. Alice thought that this was most unusual. Usually people remember the pleasurable things first. Then she tried to get me to remember only painful experiences. And once I'd remembered a lot she started trying to get me to remember the pleasurable ones." 

David and Alice continued to work with standard psychiatric techniques and with hypnosis. Finally, after sixteen months of three sessions a week, Alice asked David to make a choice. 

"We probably can penetrate the blocks around your air force years and find out how they were planted and why, but it may take a long time. On the other hand, we can work on every other area and get you to function normally without anxiety reactions whenever anyone asks you about those years," Alice said. "Now you have to decide if you just want to function normally, or if you want to unravel the whole mystery and find out who did it, why it was done, and what they have hidden from your own mind." 

Since the therapy had nearly depleted his family's savings, David knew what the answer must be. He told Alice he would be content to just function normally. After two more months of treatment, Alice and David had their last session. 

"After two hundred and six therapy sessions, Alice and I had one eight-hour session which more or less recapped all the information we had collected. She told me that when I first came in I'd' talked in a monotone. I was very, very, controlled. I showed no emotions and had no inflection in my speech. I'd talked to her for the first three months that way. She said that there was a wall that she couldn't break down . . . Alice recommended that I continue working on my own by going to group therapy. 

"I went to a couple of sessions, but when I got in front of a group I became fearful again. It was more than just stage fright, it was a horrible feeling. I still have it when I get up in front of a group to be asked questions. 

"Alice did not figure out what this was about. I am now beginning to, but figuring something out is one thing, and actually overcoming it is another." 

Alice's expert guidance and her deft use of hypnotherapy were helpful. While he did not recover his memory at once. in time David began to remember isolated events. He is now able to reconstruct a picture of at least some of the things he did while in hypno-service to his country. 

"One day I had a vivid dream. Then it was like, little by little, memory cells exploding in my brain. I began to remember certain incidents. At first I didn't know if these were real memories or just dreams. Today, I still don't know if they are accurate or not, but they are so real in all their details that I believe they are the truth. Naturally when you've had amnesia you're not really going to trust your memories at first, but if the memories settle in—if you can recall more and more detail about an event—you know that you are recalling a true event. 

"The most vivid memory I have is about Vietnam. I was standing at a long table on a beach. There were North Vietnamese soldiers sitting on one side and American officers sitting on the other. Everyone was in uniform. Our men were from the air force, navy, and marines. The marines had sidearms, and no one else had a weapon. 

"What horrified me was that out in the harbor, off shore at some distance from the beach, was one of our battleships, and another battleship or gunboat. I guess that it was Vietnamese or Russian, but I'm not expert at naval craft identification. All I know is I was terrified because the big guns on the ships were trained, not on each other, but on us .. . I guess they were prepared to blow us all up should anything go wrong on the beach, or should there be a double cross. 

"We had our interpreters, who were air force men. They did the translating and our officers waited for the translations. The discussion was very heated, but for some reason I remember vividly, nothing was being written down. That may have been the reason that I was standing there at one end of the table. I remember that they had been trying, somewhere along the line, to get me to have total recall. I can't remember the details, or the progression of events. 

"I know that I had memory training. At Marbo, for some reason, I'd get up three hours earlier than anyone else and report to somewhere I can't remember and then go to work at eight-thirty. I remember riding the bus from Marbo to the base on Guam, and I was the only one on the bus. But I can't remember where I went before I reported for regular duty.

"I suspect that the computer work was part of the memory training, but I can't say that's exactly what it was. There must have been more to it. I just don't remember the details. But I have the impression that I was used as a human tape recorder. 

"I do know one thing about that beach scene. When I came back from overseas, only three days after I came back it was announced that the North Vietnamese were going to give our prisoners of war back in an exchange. The meeting on the beach might have been an early parley about ending the war and exchanging prisoners. At least that's what strikes me as the best answer to the question of what that meeting was about. 

"I might have been a witness. I really don't understand why—or why the gunboats were pointing their guns at us. I can't remember the date, or anything that places that memory in time. 

"The thing that really bothers me about this whole thing is that I can sit here and talk to you, but I still can't sit down and say, 'Okay, I joined the service on such and such a day and this is what happened to me during a four-year period in chronological order.' Ever since I got out of the service I haven't been able to give a day-by-day account of what happened to me during those four years. 

"Some people might call what happened to me brainwashing. I've called it that, but it's not really brainwashing. I think of brainwashing as something brutal. I don't think I was treated brutally. Also, what happened to me was something that was much more sophisticated than what I have read about brainwashing. 

"I believe I'm telling the truth, and I'd like to see someone disprove it. I only have these fragments of memory, so if I went to the Air Force they'd pull out my folder and throw it on the desk and say, 'See, there it is in black and white . . . He's a nut. He tried to commit suicide by taking a patent medicine.' 

"I feel I was used. Why would they use an enlisted man who is supposed to be a supply man? Every squadron has supply personnel, so I guess it's a perfect cover. A supply man is so common he wouldn't be noticed. How well it worked out, from their point of view, I just don't know. But from mine, well, it didn't work out too well. All the doubts and fears I have now, years later, and after a lot of psychiatric help, which I paid for myself, made the experiment, if it was one, a failure to me. 

"I never thought about laying down my life, but maybe I laid down a lot more than my life in service to my country. My soul?"

Chapter Three 

THE MIND LAUNDRY MYTH 

David's own assessment of his mental confusion after his air force experience was that he had not been "brainwashed." By the time David had his mind controlled, "brainwashing" had become a catchall phrase, but what David had suffered was a much more subtle and hideous form of tyranny. 

George E. Smith was a POW during the early days of the Vietnam War. Unlike David, George did not have a good education. It can even be said that he was a little naive, and therefore a good candidate for brainwashing of both the American and the NLF (Viet Cong) varieties. He was one of the first of the Green Berets captured in the Vietnam conflict in 1963. 

It was the practice of the U.S. Army in those days to indoctrinate its men with poorly constructed lies, which, it Was hoped, would motivate them to fight a war in which the U.S. had only dubious legal business and little moral argument. The "credibility gap" existed not only within the confines of the U.S. borders, but also in the far-flung fields of battle, all the way to Southeast Asia. 

If brainwashing is making a person believe in lies, then our troops were already brainwashed by their own government. It was a simple job for the Viet Cong to gain the POWs' cooperation by telling them the truth—truth which was easily documented. 

Smith described the attitude which was instilled in the American soldiers by their military indoctrination: "We were arrogant . . . the army is a separate society; it has its own hierarchy, and I could rise to a stratum in the army that I couldn't attain in the outside world. They'd driven arrogance into us in the Airborne, which is a high level in the army, but Special Forces was the highest level you could reach, the elite of the elite. Elitism was the philosophy they taught at Bragg: 'You are professors of warfare, you shouldn't fight unless attacked. It costs thousands of dollars to train one of you and you're too valuable to send into battle.' 

"I believed it. I believed everything the army said. I never questioned anything they told me until I got to Vietnam, and then things didn't quite fit anymore." 

Smith and three other men were captured in a midnight raid which followed a heavy mortar bombardment of their location. The Viet Cong took them deep into the jungles. When they reached the VC compound they were forced to build their own prison out of bamboo. Then, after the primitive compound was completed and the POWs had settled in, the interrogations began. These were nothing like Smith had been led to expect. They were "friendly chats" with an interpreter Smith called the "Man with Glasses." Every day he would tell his prisoners about the history of Vietnam and the U.S. role in that country. "It was right out of the movies," Smith said. "The prisoner was confronted by his interrogators, who were sitting on a higher level and making him look up to them. 

"Look at you," Man with Glasses began. "You are pitiful." It was a typical brainwashing tactic, designed to make the prisoner think poorly of himself, to undermine his self image. Sergeant Smith, like many others, already had a poor self-image long before he was captured, even before he enlisted in the army. That image wasn't enhanced any by finding that the authorities to whom he had been so obedient had misinformed him. 

"We had known interrogation was inevitable and had feared it for so long, but it didn't go the way it was supposed to," Smith said. "The guards were off somewhere out of sight. No one shone lights in our eyes. In fact, I sat in the shade while Prevaricator (one of the interrogators) served me tea and candy and cigarettes. 

"Man with Glasses did most of the talking, though he encouraged me to say anything I wanted to. He insisted on giving me their side of the story—why they were there in Operation Mind Control 45 the jungle and why the NLF had gotten together and was fighting the U.S. and the Saigon regime. 'We are fighting for Vietnam. We do not try to take over your country. This is not in our plans. We are worried about our country. We love it very much. We are proud people, and we want to keep our country.' Didn't I know I was wrong to be part of the United States effort in Vietnam? And if I did, would I write a statement saying so? He talked to me for about an hour, and at the end of the session he gave me a pack of the Cambodian cigarettes. 'For your enjoyment. Take them with you. When you are resting and smoking, I would like you to think deeply of what we have discussed.' 

"If sitting in the shade drinking tea while I listened to this old guy talk was brainwashing, then it didn't fit any description I had ever heard. I recalled the stories I'd heard about Korea—the scene where they hypnotize you, or drop water on your head, or put you in complete stillness— something that will drive you out of your mind. Then once they've taken everything from your mind they start over again. When somebody says 'brainwashing,' this is what I consider they're talking about—the classic Korean example. Or the stories that came out of there, anyway."1 

The word "brainwashing" summoned a terrifying image, but like so many other words it became corrupt in usage. It was applied to describe situations in which mere propaganda or influence were used. Indeed, the word may have been corrupt from the very beginning when it was coined by a CIA propaganda specialist, Edward Hunter. In his book Brainwashing in Red China he claimed that "Brainwashing, with the even more sinister brain changing in reverse, is the terrifying new Communist strategy to conquer the free world by destroying its mind."2 

In the words of the noted Yale psychiatry professor Robert J. Lifton, brainwashing was popularly held to be an "all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind."3 It was in fact none of these things. Techniques which seemed to change the beliefs of American POWs and others behind the Iron Curtain employed no hypnosis, no drugs, no new methods for the control of the mind and certainly nothing magical. 

Hunter revised Brainwashing in Red China and reissued it in 1971. In the introduction of the updated edition he  continued his attack on the Communists, much as he does in his psychological-warfare journal Tactics. 

"Change the word China to Cuba, and this book is a description of Communist warfare against the mind— brainwashing—in Cuba, as well as in China. This is the world pattern the Communists employ; what might, in military parlance, be called mind attack. It is the new dimension in warfare, added to artillery attack, naval attack, rear and frontal attack, air attack. Brainwashing's dual processes of softening up and indoctrination have been added to the arsenal of warfare, girding the Trojan Horse in twentieth century accoutrements." Though Hunter may have been correct about the Communist use of coercive psychological techniques on its own populations, he never once hinted that the U.S. government might just be establishing similar techniques of its own. 

In 1958, in his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) he continued to present brainwashing as a Communist weapon: "Since man began, he has tried to influence other men or women to his way of thinking. There have always been these forms of pressure to change attitudes. We discovered in the past thirty years, a technique to influence, by clinical, hospital procedures, the thinking processes of human beings. . . . Brainwashing is formed out of a set of different elements . . . hunger, fatigue, tenseness, threats, violence, and in more intense cases where the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels, drugs and hypnotism. No one of these elements alone can be regarded as brainwashing, any more than an apple can be called apple pie. Other ingredients have to be added, and a cooking process gone through. So it is in brainwashing with indoctrination or atrocities, or any other single ingredient. 

"The Communists have been operating for a full generation taking strategic advantage of the American principles, exploiting the best sides in our characters as vulnerabilities, and succeeding for a generation in changing the characteristics of Americans." 

Given the anti-Communist climate of the Cold War years, Hunter's zeal did not seem excessive, even though few of his conclusions were supported by the eyewitness accounts given by the repatriated POWs. According to them, no drugs or hypnosis were used overseas; they told only of persuasion techniques. 

Was Hunter's then an exercise in projection—an unconscious defense mechanism, in which he was shifting the blame from the U.S. onto another? 

Hunter's Brainwashing in Red China was widely quoted. Through front page news stories, the American public became aware, for the first time, that governments (though only Communist ones were mentioned) could control people's thoughts and motivate them against their will and without their knowledge. 

Two years later, in May of 1960, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union and cries of brainwashing again made U.S. headlines. At his public trial in Moscow, Powers apologized to the Russian people for doing them wrong. Even though the CIA had told him that if caught, he could admit everything, the voices of the "soldiers" within the U.S. were quick to brand him a traitor, and those who were inclined to be more sympathetic said that he had simply been "brainwashed." 

One psychiatrist, William Jennings Bryan, who had been the head of an air force medical survival training program which employed hypnosis to prepare pilots for resistance to brainwashing, went so far as to coin a term for the subtle new technique which he thought the Soviets had developed since the Korean conflict and had used on Powers. The U-2 pilot, Bryan said, had been "Powerized." 

Bryan said that Powers' apologetic manner during the Moscow trial, his submissive, almost crippled words of testimony, his trancelike acceptance, all showed an amazing personality change since his capture. 

"The pilot's apparent lack of real emotion during the trial was the most startling evidence that the Russian brainwashing through hypnosis has destroyed the normal, aggressive confidence and the cockiness characteristic of the air force fliers . . . The big tipoff came," Dr. Bryan said, "when Powers apologized for his American assignment, testified he knew he was wrong and said he felt no ill will toward his country's Cold War enemy. 

23s

"It is no longer a secret that Russia uses hypnosis as a powerful instrument to destroy the resistance of individuals she wishes to conquer," he said. "Brainwashing hypnosis as apparently used on Powers is vastly different from the permissive type of medical hypnosis . . . and the self hypnosis used by air force fliers in caring for themselves after a crash . . . Powers exhibited no telltale marks of physical abuse or torture during the Moscow trial, and indeed, he may have even thought himself that he was being treated rather well, but bis manner and personality were obviously so unlike the typical American pilot that only a brand new type of other powerful technique could have changed his personality in so short a time."4 

Francis Gary Powers was returned to the U.S. in 1962 in a trade for Russian spy Rudolf Abel. He wrote in his book Operation Overflight (which was withheld from publication by the CIA until 1970) that the tactic he decided upon when captured was in accordance with his CIA instructions. He said, "When questioned, I would tell the truth." 

Powers insisted that he did not tell the Russians anything which he thought they did not already know. In fact he often agreed to things they suggested simply to mislead them. 

As for sophisticated, "Powerizing" techniques, Powers denied their existence. He even went so far as to suggest that the Russians were actually highly overrated in their intelligence-gathering methods. 

"From what I had been taught about brainwashing, I had anticipated certain things: I would be lectured about communism, given only propaganda to read. Food would be doled out on a reward-punishment basis; if I cooperated, I would be fed; if I didn't, I wouldn't. Interrogation would be at odd hours, under bright lights. No sooner would I fall asleep than I would be awakened, and it would start all over again, until eventually I lost all track of time, place, identity. And I would be tortured and beaten until, finally, I would beg for the privilege of being allowed to confess to any crime they desired. None of this happened." 

Immediately after Powers crossed the bridge from East Berlin he was examined by a West German flight surgeon under orders from the CIA. The surgeon took blood from his arm. Powers says the doctor told him "the blood samples were necessary to determine whether I had been drugged. This seemed to be the first question of almost everyone to whom I talked: Had I been drugged? They seemed almost disappointed when I told them I hadn't." 

Powers was then flown to the U.S. "I still couldn't comprehend that after twenty-one months of captivity I was once again a free man," he said, "which was perhaps best, for though I was yet to realize it, I wasn't quite free, not yet. In a sense, I had been released by the Russians to become a de facto prisoner of the CIA." 

The CIA men told Powers they would like to talk to him for a couple of days. The "couple of days" turned out to be over three weeks, in which Powers was thoroughly debriefed by a team of intelligence analysts and psychiatrists. The first question the psychiatrists asked was, again, had he been drugged by the Soviets? The second question they asked was, had he been brainwashed? When Powers answered "no" to both questions he was given tranquilizers, which were the first drugs he had received since his U-2 left Turkey for the overflight of the USSR. Powers noted, with some irony, that Americans are much more disposed to the use of drugs than are the Soviets.5 

Perhaps even more ironic was the public disclaimer issued by CIA Director Allen Dulles, which said the U.S. had no use for brainwashing: "What had popularly become known as 'brainwashing,' while of great psychological interest to the West, as it is important to study defensive techniques, is never practiced by us .. . for the simple reason that we are not interested in converting people to our way of thinking either forcibly or by trickery, which is its main intent. We have never felt, as obviously the Soviets and the Red Chinese and the North Koreans have, that there is much to gain in putting a 'brainwashed' person on the air to denounce his own countrymen. We have enough people who come over to us voluntarily from communism and who need no prompting."6 Dulles, it seemed, was either a reader of Hunter's or they both had been briefed by the same propaganda section of the CIA. 

Brainwashing was the term the psychological warfare unit of the CIA thought up to explain why American POWs cooperated with the enemy in Korea. Brainwashing was explained as severe deprivation of food, clothing, and shelter, during which time a series of punishments and rewards were applied so effectively that a person's fundamental beliefs could be made to change 180 degrees from their original position. This brutal technique was not called torture; there was no propaganda value in something as old as torture. The CIA thought up the term "brainwashing" to  lead people in the Western world to believe that the inscrutable Orientals had again, like Fu Manchu, invented a revolutionary technique controlling the human mind. The word "brainwashing" and the official government explanation of what happened to the Korean POWs was propaganda. It was aimed at fueling a home-grown fear of the Communists upon which the Cold War so greatly depended. Propaganda, of course, was nothing more than artful deception; the careful planting of "misinformation" and "disinformation," Cold War euphemisms for what had been called "the big lie" in World War II. 

Modern propaganda began when Nazi Germany perfected the art of "the big lie." The Soviet Union and other Communist countries took the methods of the Nazis and I improved upon them. The United States did not actively engage in wide-scale propaganda until World War II, when the OSS and the Office of War Information started. But then it was well understood that the guiding principles of propaganda were: "When there is no compelling reason to suppress a fact, tell it .. . Aside from considerations of military security, the only reason to suppress a piece of news is if it is unbelievable . . . When the listener catches you in a lie, your power diminishes . . . For this reason, never tell a lie which can be discovered." As far back as 1940, American propaganda services had orders to tell the truth. It was a sound premise for effective propaganda, but it was a premise which was ignored by the succeeding generations of Cold Warriors. 

Somewhere along the line the CIA's Covert Action Staff lost sight of the value of using the truth as the main weapon. Taking over from OSS, they soon became experts in "the big lie." 

This policy surfaced to the attention of the American people during isolated events such as the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba when Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy took the blame for what were obviously CIA lies. In the light of recent history it would appear that these chiefs of state were somehow convinced that it was better to issue a false confession that they had lied to the nation than to admit that they had been lied to by their own intelligence agency. 

In the years since the founding of the CIA in 1947 there were hundreds of such lies and false denials and domestic  propaganda campaigns which did not immediately gain public attention. 

Brainwashing, as planted in the press, is one little propaganda weapon in a vast arsenal. But it is a weapon that has remained effective against communism, cropping up in news accounts whenever it is needed—whenever the Cold Warriors' domestic covert action arm thinks that the public is going "soft on communism." 

Albert D. Biderman, a senior research associate of the Rand Corporation's subcontractor, the Bureau of Social Science Research, conducted a study of news items published about our POWs in Korea. Biderman's analysis confirmed that this kind of propaganda was "successively dominant in the press during and after the Korean War. During the war, Propaganda focused on prisoner atrocities; when the war had ended, the focus shifted to stories involving the brainwashing of POWs. 

"Beginning with exchanges of prisoners," he wrote, "prisoner misconduct received gradually increased attention until, several months after the war, it came to overshadow the other themes." 

Throughout the Korean conflict, propaganda and counter propaganda campaigns on both sides grew in intensity until eventually POWs became the most critical issue of the war, the "stumbling block" in the drawn-out truce talks that delayed the war's termination. 

In 1953, some 4,000 surviving American POWs became the subjects of another type of propaganda—propaganda by Americans, about Americans, directed at Americans. According to Biderman, "The theme of this propaganda was that there had been wholesale collaboration by the American prisoners with their Communist captors and that this unprecedented misbehavior revealed alarming new weaknesses in our national character. This post-truce propaganda . . . was an outgrowth of propaganda activities during the war." 

Desperately trying to believe that U.S. propaganda was motivated by good intentions, Biderman suggested that the "brainwashing theme" was pushed at home because the Cold Warriors were "apparently worried that a number of American prisoners would return espousing the Communist view." Biderman noted that "the Defense and State Departments and the Central Intelligence Agency issued a stream of press releases during the days prior to the first prisoner exchanges in Korea to prepare the public for the shock of finding that many of the POWs had been brainwashed. The theme of these releases was that evidence of Communist indoctrination or 'pro-Communist' statements by Americans when they were released would be discounted because the prisoners would have been subjected to the well-known tortures that Communists used to brainwash their opponents.'"7 

And just what were these "well-known tortures"? The general principles of the Chinese brainwashing techniques were repetition, pacing of demands, the forced participation in classes of prisoners, propaganda which would insert Communist ideas into familiar and meaningful contexts, punishment, threats, rewards, suggestion, pleas for peace, manipulative tricks, and deprivation of all but the minimum necessities of life. There was little that was new or innovative about the techniques used by the Chinese. They did not use drugs or hypnosis, nor did they invent any mysterious new devices for breaking the mind and will of a man. 

Actually the Chinese controlled information in their POW camps just as they controlled the mass media in their own country. The system they used in the camps of propagandizing through lectures, movies, reading, and testimonials was based on the same system used on the Chinese population, and is not without parallel in Western education and advertising practices. 

Nor are the punishment-and-reward techniques used by the Chinese in their interrogations exclusively Oriental. These same practices are employed by Western intelligence agents, police, and, more subtly by reporters trying to elicit information from a hostile subject. Confession and self criticism have been used in religious movements as a basis of conversion, or as a way of perpetuating the faith, from time immemorial. 

Dr. Edgar H. Schein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was one of many persons who contributed to the army study of the returned POWs. Of the central reason behind the brainwashing propaganda which the army study disclosed, he wrote "When things go wrong, it is far less ego-deflating to say that we have been brainwashed than to recognize our own inadequacy in coping with our problems. A crucial question, however, is whether such changes in our society and such preoccupations represent weaknesses and signal the deterioration of some of our highly valued institutions, or whether they are merely the symptoms of the changing world. Are we becoming mentally apathetic and hence more prone to totalitarian solutions, or are we finding new ways in which to relate ourselves to our international and internal problems? Many observers of the contemporary scene, among them the novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley, and Joost Meerloo, a psychoanalyst, feel strongly that we are headed squarely in the wrong direction—that the combination of certain social forces and the weapons against the mind now available will inevitably lead to the destruction of the democratic way of life and the freedom of mind which goes with it, unless we recognize clearly what is happening and put counter-forces into operation."8 

In succeeding years, talk of "brainwashing" continued. Usually it was heard that the Communists had "brainwashed" somebody, but on April 7, 1967, presidential hopeful Governor George Romney turned that around. Romney, who had gone to Vietnam believing in the rightness of the U.S. involvement there, came home saying that he had suffered "the greatest brainwashing that anyone can get when you go over to Vietnam, not only by the generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job." 

Nine governors who had accompanied Romney on the tour disagreed with him. Governor Philip H. Hoff said that Romney's brainwashing statement "tends to be almost incredible." Finding he had no support among his colleagues Romney quickly told reporters that he had not been talking about "Russian type brainwashing, but LBJ type brainwashing." He said he meant the same thing the press meant when you write about the credibility gap, snow job, and manipulation of the news." 

Webster's Third New International Dictionary gives the second meaning of brainwashing as "persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship," but the press and public thought that Romney had meant the word in its first sense: "A forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas." 

And the public let it be known that it would not vote for a brainwashed presidential candidate. Romney's popularity fell so dramatically in the polls that he eventually dropped out of the race for the presidency. The word "brainwashing" proved to be more charged with emotions than anyone! had supposed. 

In one of the first mass market books published on the subject following the army's release of the study of the Korean POWs, Eugene Kinkead wrote, "Unfortunately, the distinction between brainwashing and indoctrination is far from clear to the average American. The army defines indoctrination as an effort to change a man's viewpoint while he is still a thinking individual by regulating his thoughts and actions. This falls far short of the effect produced upon some defendants seen in Communist courts, defendants who had obviously been completely broken, and had ceased to be thinking individuals. I am afraid that the general conception has been that Communist techniques of manipulating human beings are so persuasive, so completely irresistible that no prisoner can keep his integrity in the face of them—and, by analogy, that no people, including ours, can stand against such an enemy. This is what distresses me so much about the popular and improper use of a word like 'brainwashing . . .' "9 

Perhaps. But by 1967, when George Romney claimed he had been brainwashed, our own government was already far beyond what Kinkead referred to as "brainwashing." The United States government did not have to stoop to the slow and exhausting process the Chinese and Russians used. In the age of electronic brain stimulation, neuro-psychopharmacology, and advanced methods of behavior modification and hypnosis, the government certainly didn't have to resort to methods as unsophisticated as brainwashing. 

The techniques of mind control developed, even by 1967, were making brainwashing seem like the metaphor it was: a washboard and scrub-bucket technique which had little use in a world where the sonic cleaner, with high" frequency sound, higher than the human ear can hear, vibrates the dirt from the very molecules of matter—or the mind. 

Brainwashing was largely a campaign waged in the United States home press. It served as a sharp-edged propaganda weapon and was aimed at the American people to add to the already considerable fear of the Communists. It also covered official United States embarrassment over a seeming rash of defections and collaborations with the enemy, and perhaps most important, offered moral justification for immoral and illegal experiments to scientists working under government contract. They were urged as a matter of patriotism to "beat the Communists in the mind control race." 

It is doubtful that all of the "collaborators" in the Korean conflict succumbed to brainwashing. The eyewitness testimony of air force Col. Laird Guttersen, one of the few heroes of the Vietnam conflict, and a real hero of the mind control war, would suggest that they didn't. 

Guttersen had been in charge of the air force seminar on Korean brainwashing at Maxwell Air Force Base. An expert hypnotist, he later used self-hypnosis to block pain and keep himself alive in a North Vietnamese POW camp where he spent more than twenty-seven months in solitary confinement. 

He took the time during his campaign for the U.S. Congress to offer me his views on brainwashing and mind control. 

As early as 1956 Colonel Gutterson realized that what was called brainwashing was nothing more than psychological indoctrination. "Controlling the mind is one thing," he told me, "but remember, this does not occur with psychological indoctrination. Nor does it occur, normally, with hypnosis. The concept of complete and total mind control was projected by the 'brainwashing' myth, and it was the theme of the book The Manchurian Candidate; but mind control is not what happened to the Korean or Vietnamese POWs. What the Chinese, the Russians, the Vietnamese did was mind influence, not mind control." 

Guttersen said that while it was generally believed that brainwashing was the result of drugs and hypnosis, to his firsthand knowledge, from the Korean conflict to Vietnam, there are no documented cases of drug- or hypnosis induced mind control. Reading the examples of what the POWs stated in both Korea and Vietnam, and what I saw in Hanoi, there are only men saying, 'I couldn't have done or said those things unless I had been drugged.' There are no specific reports of anyone saying, 'They stuck a needle into me and I did so and so,' or 'They gave me something to eat, and then I did so and so.' There were men who said, 'I acted in a very strange way, just like I was in a dream or something. I must have been drugged.'" 

There was a cover-up for a snafu in some of the original Korean briefings of our combatants who, Guttersen said, were told to cooperate if captured. 

"I remember a specific briefing, though later it was denied, where a group of us were told that we would be well advised, if we got shot down, to whip out a bottle of vodka and a red flag and start waving it. We were advised to cooperate in any possible way with the enemy because anybody back home would know that we were cooperating under duress. We were told that if we cooperated with our captors, it would not give them an excuse to torture us. That was a specific briefing given to us. Of course, now we know that a good number of our captive men followed that advice and did collaborate on the basis that 'What the hell, nobody would believe me anyway. I'll just play the game.' 

"But after they collaborated, it was denied that they had ever been told to do it. When it was brought up by the returned POWs who had received the briefing, it was denied by the military. But many of us who sat in on those briefings knew about them. This could be one of the reasons why they later came up with the Code of Conduct, in order to provide specific guidance to all military personnel, so that nobody would ever be told to collaborate with the enemy again." 

The word "brainwashing" became commonplace after the Soviet Union presented evidence before the United Nations that charged the United States with the use of germ warfare in Korea—a major violation of the Geneva Convention. The Soviet evidence contained the confessions of several captured United States pilots stating both in documents and on film that they had dropped germ bombs on North Korea. By the time these men were repatriated, their stories had changed. 

Marine Corps Colonel Frank H. Schwable was the first American to sign a germ warfare confession. His confession named names, cited missions, described meetings and strategy conferences. Before a military court of inquiry Schwable said: "I was never convinced in my own mind that we in the First Marine Air Wing had used bug warfare. I knew we hadn't, but the rest of it was so real to me—the conferences, the planes, and how they would go about their missions. . . . 

"The words were mine," the Colonel continued, "but the thoughts were theirs. That is the hardest thing I have to explain: how a man can sit down and write something he knows is false, and yet, to sense it, to feel it, to make it seem real." 

A CIA memo dated April 11, 1953 addressed to the Chief of CIA's Plans and Preparations, contained a report of an exchange that took place between then United Nations Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and an unidentified CIA agent. The CIA agent began to brief Lodge on the germ warfare confessions of Schwable and others when, according to the memo, Lodge interrupted expressing ". . . a profound distaste for the entire matter," adding that "he hoped he would never hear of it again—it had been a nasty and difficult issue, principally because of the difficulty of explaining away the film and the statements of the American fliers. . . ." (Emphasis added.) 

The CIA memo continued with the agent reporting. "I said that we fully shared his view that 'the issue was finished in the United Nations,' but that it had been our experience that 'the bug' comes from a very hardy strain and had exhibited appalling vitality. For this reason, I said that I thought it would be a mistake to be too complacent about the matter. To the last statement Senator Lodge replied with a question as to just what explanation we could give of the statements of the American fliers—how did we account for this and what could be done about it? I said that our best guess was that the statements had been in one way or another forced out of the captive airmen and that one of the techniques which we thought had possibly been used was the Soviet (and now Chinese) techniques of 'brainwashing.' Senator Lodge said that he thought the public was very inadequately informed about 'brainwashing' and that in the absence of a much larger quantity of public information than now exists on the subject, the impact of the fliers' statements is terrific. I replied by stating that we shared his view and Pointed out that the Department of Defense is expected to issue a lengthy statement. . . ." (Emphasis added.) 

Shortly thereafter, the word "brainwashing" was on the front page of every paper in America. We had not used germ warfare, CIA propaganda claimed, the Communists had used brainwashing. 

next
WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OR CONSENT 29S


Notes
Chapter 1 
1. Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind (New York, Crowell, 1956) 

Chapter 3 
1. George E. Smith, P.O.W. (Berkeley, Ramparts Press, 1971) 
2. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing in Red China, 3d ed. (New York, Vanguard, 1971) 
3. Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (New York, Norton, 1961) 
4. William J. Bryan, City News Service, September, 1960. 
5. Francis Gary Powers, Operation Overflight (New York, Holt, 1970) 
6. Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York, Harper, 1963) 
7. Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer, eds., The Manipulation of Human Behavior (New York, Macmillan, 1961) 
8. Edgar Schein, Journal of World Politics, April, 1959. 
9. Eugene Kinkead, In Every War but One (New York, Norton, 1959)