Operation Mind Control
By Walter Bowart
Chapter Nine
By Walter Bowart
Chapter Nine
THE SLAVES WHO
BURIED
THE PHARAOH
The CIA uses thought reform, programming, and indoctrination on its own employees. Patrick J. McGarvey, a
veteran of fourteen years in U.S. intelligence service, described the cryptocracy's more ordinary indoctrination procedures in his book CIA: The Myth and the Madness.
McGarvey said that his indoctrination was carried out in a
classroom which was "right out of The Manchurian Candidate. It was a cavernous room not unlike a nineteenth century surgical exhibition pit."
That training, he said, consisted of "an admixture of
common sense, insanity, old-time religion, and some of the
weirdest lectures you can imagine." The most important
result of this early training, as far as the CIA was concerned, McGarvey said, "was the attitudes they managed to
inculcate" among the recruits.
"Many among us believed in the intelligence establishment simply because we were part of it. This attitude lingered for years among us, and today, in middle age, most
of us still talk about the mind-bending job they did on us
during the training period. I am convinced that this manipulation of attitudes has been responsible for keeping silent
the many men who have since left the craft of intelligence.
Because of my indoctrination, I still get a visceral twinge—
and have qualms of conscience about writing this."
McGarvey was referring to behavior modification when
he said, "CIA has a wonderful informal system of rewards
and punishments for the faithful and unfaithful."
Other fragments of information have leaked through the memory blocks and security oaths of former CIA employees. They can be found scattered throughout the "true confessions" literature of former spooks. They offer further
glimpses of the CIA's interest in mind control—but they
are only glimpses.
"The most impressive part of this initial CIA indoctrination," writes Miles Copeland, "is the attitude toward loyalty,
security, precision, attention to detail, and healthy suspicion that it manages to implant in the minds of the trainees .. . The fact is that this aspect of the indoctrination
has been designed by some of the nation's best psychologists, employing the most modern techniques of 'motivational research.' Certainly it achieves its purpose. The psychologists resent the insinuation that they are engaged in
'brainwashing,' arguing that the effect of what they have
contributed to the training is exactly the opposite of brainwashing as practiced by the Chinese. Instead of conditioning a person so that he can accept only 'approved' ideas, it
sharpens his instincts and critical faculties so that he can
recognize specious political reasoning when he encounters
it. Also the psychologists believe their course imparts a
strong sense of mission, which is lacking in other branches
of government."1
Despite the CIA psychologists' defense of their reverse
"brainwashing," terrible damage has been suffered by the
people who have matriculated from the CIA's mind-control
projects. Those techniques employed for indoctrination and
"loyalty training" of CIA personnel are but the beginning
of a mind-control operation which is the most effective security device short of assassination.
Institutionalized secrecy came to America on the eve of
World War II. From the beginning, psychology was both
the most important external weapon against the Nazis and
Japanese and the internal control mechanism for the wartime government.
Psychological warfare was used in World War I, but by
the beginning of World War II it had taken on a new dimension. Previously the inspiring, depressing, persuasive,
or misleading messages of propaganda had been delivered
to target populations via the printed page or by word of
mouth. In World War II, for the first time it became possible through radio to address the entire population of a country at the same time. The effects of propaganda, so
magnified, became an important tool in warfare.
After the war, electronic propaganda became the staple weapon for waging the Cold War. Persuasion, argument, propaganda, and indoctrination went out over the airwaves not only to "enemy" populations but to our own civilian populations as well.
The full story of the OSS and the beginnings of the CIA was not known until 1976 when a government report, The War Report of Strategic Services, was declassified. In 1940 Gen. William J. Donovan was appointed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's special emissary. Upon his return from a Mediterranean tour he reported that "neither America nor Britain is fighting the new and important type of war on more than the smallest scale. Our defenses against political and psychological warfare are feeble, and even such gestures as have been made toward carrying the fight to the enemy are pitifully inadequate." Donovan urged the President to prepare for combat in the field of irregular and unorthodox warfare, as well as in the orthodox military areas.2
Five months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt added one more new bureau to the New Deal bureaucracy. It was tagged COI, perhaps a fitting acronym for the publicity-shy Office of the Coordinator of Information. Its leader was, of course, William J. Donovan.
Donovan has been called "a queer figure who comes off three-quarters Machiavelli and one-quarter boy." According to Anthony Cave Brown, he recruited "Communists to kill Krauts. He feared and distrusted Communists in places where they counted. In Italy and France, he could never quite make up his mind what to do politically; and, since political belief was the clandestine's primary motive, his policies often failed and, even when they succeeded, led to interminable muddles. Likable, even admirable on occasions, he was in fact an Elizabethan man, swaggering about capitals in beautiful cord, displaying a fine calf for a riding boot, but forever dependent really upon the British for the finesse which that secret struggle demanded."3
The British Secret Intelligence Service had developed espionage and intelligence to a fine art during World War I.They were already masters of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, political warfare, deception, crypto-analysis, irregular maritime warfare, technical intelligence, and secret intelligence when World War II began. During that war they took intelligence into the vanguard of psychology, using drugs and hypnosis to program couriers to carry secret messages locked behind posthypnotic blocks.
The British were the first to employ a financing device known as the "Secret Vote," or unvouchered funds. This was money made available without recourse to legislation and accounted for only by personal signature. As Anthony Cave Brown observed, "plainly, almost unlimited opportunities for fraud existed in this arrangement."4
Donovan's COI copied the unvouchered funds financing idea, as well as many others, from the British. He put great emphasis on the psychological warfare arm of intelligence. The British had also emphasized "psy-war," but Donovan promoted it to the-degree that he made the psychological warfare division the central control organ of the entire espionage agency.
In 1941, after the birth of COI, President Roosevelt asked Donovan to make specific proposals for the implementation of his ideas for psychological warfare and the development of an intelligence plan. Donovan submitted to the White House a paper entitled "Memorandum of Establishment of Services of Strategic Information." In it he clarified his idea of the relationship of information to strategic planning in total war.
Pointing out the diplomatic and defense inadequacies of the then-existing intelligence organization, Donovan said, "It is essential that we set up a central enemy intelligence organization which would itself collect either directly or through existing departments of government, at home and abroad, pertinent information." Such information and data should be analyzed and interpreted by applying the experience of "specialized, trained research officials in the related scientific fields (including technological, economic, financial and psychological scholars)." He emphasized that "there is another element in modern warfare, and that is the psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses of a nation."5
In June, 1942, the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) was created to replace COI. Some time passed between the formation of the OSS and the issuance of its charter. The delay was created by Donovan's controversial idea that the psychological warfare unit should be in charge of the entire intelligence operation. The intellectuals hovering around OSS argued with the Joint War Plans Committee about what exactly psychological warfare was, and who should direct it in the name of the United States of America.
Finally a definition was agreed upon. The official definition of psychological warfare read: ". . . it is the coordination and use of all means, including moral and physical, by which the end is to be attained—other than those of recognized military operations, but including the psychological exploitation of the result of those recognized military actions—which tend to destroy the will of the enemy to achieve victory and to damage his political or economic capacity to do so; which tend to deprive the enemy of the support, assistance, or sympathy of his allies or associates or of neutrals, or to prevent his acquisition of such support, assistance, or sympathy; or which tend to create, maintain, or increase the will to victory of our own people and allies and to acquire, maintain, or increase the support, assistance, and sympathy of neutrals."
And, as Donovan had wished, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decreed that "All plans for projects to be undertaken by the Office of Strategic Services will be submitted to the Joint U.S. Chiefs of Staff through the Joint Psychological Warfare Committee for approval. The Joint Psychological Warfare Committee will refer such papers as it deems necessary to the Joint Staff Planners (JSP) prior to submission to the Joint U.S. Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Psychological Warfare Committee will take final action on all internal administrative plans pertaining to the Office of Strategic Services."
The lifespan of OSS was less than three years. During that short period of time it developed psychological warfare into an effective weapon against the minds of civilian and military populations foreign and domestic alike. To wage effective psychological war the OSS needed background information on United States citizens. Thus the burglary of Private files was sanctioned. The pattern of illegal clandestine activities within the United States, which became public knowledge with Watergate, began in 1945 when the OSS broke into the office of Amerasia magazine, an alleged Communist publication. The OSS illegal entry was followed by a legal FBI search three months later, but no evidence that Amerasia was engaged in subversive activity was ever found.
Throughout the war Donovan never lost sight of the fact that while OSS was a wartime expedient, it was also an experiment to determine the nature of a peacetime U.S. intelligence structure in the postwar period. Eventually OSS did provide the framework for the peacetime intelligence service through which the United States continued the bitter moral and territorial struggle against the Communists.
By a small, humorous twist of fate, it was on October 31, 1944—Halloween, the traditional day for spooks and dirty tricks—when President Roosevelt once again turned to Donovan for his views. The President asked Donovan to develop a plan for the organization of an intelligence service which would function after the cessation of hostilities. In November, Donovan submitted to the President his proposal for the creation of a "central intelligence service." In his memorandum, Donovan proposed liquidation of OSS once the wartime necessity had ceased. He was anxious, however, to preserve the intelligence functions developed by OSS, so he repeated his original COI concept of a central authority, reporting directly to the President, which would collect and analyze intelligence material required for planning and implementation of national policy and strategy-
"Though in the midst of war," Donovan wrote, "we are also in a period of transition which, before we are aware, will take us into the tumult of rehabilitation. An adequate and orderly intelligence system will contribute to informed decisions. We have now in the Government the trained and specialized personnel needed for the task. This talent should not be dispersed."7
On September 20, 1945, OSS was officially terminated by Executive Order 9620. "Research and Analysis" functions and "Foreign Nationals Recruiting" were transferred to the Department of State. The remainder of the OSS functions were transferred to the Department of War. That same day, the new President Harry S Truman sent a letter to Donovan informing him of the executive order to close OSS, and thanking him for his outstanding service.
The President wrote, in part, "You may well find satisfaction in the achievements of the Office and take pride in your own contribution to them. These are in themselves large rewards. Great additional reward for your efforts should lie in the knowledge that the peacetime intelligence services of the Government are being erected on the foundation of the facilities and resources mobilized through the Office of Strategic Services during the war."
Hidden behind the President's compliment was the fact that Donovan was shut out from the formation of the CIA because of a major character flaw: he had a strong dislike of organization. Whether Donovan was really the right man for the job of chief of America's first intelligence service is debatable. Success in covert operations depends upon an efficient bureaucracy and good judgment in authority. In many cases Donovan displayed neither. At heart he was an activist who did not even like the personalities of conventional administrators. Stewart Alsop said that he ran OSS "like a country editor."
"In every respect, OSS was Donovan's child," OSS historian R. Harris Smith wrote. "He nourished the agency in its infancy, and it bore the stamp of his personality."8 That stamp carried over into the new peacetime intelligence agency, the CIA, the first in American history.
But while Donovan was the grandfather of the cryptocracy, its techniques and much of the rationale behind them were the work of the Dulles brothers. The following review of the Dulles' rise to prominence shows the manner in which cryptocrats form their liaisons.
On the evening of the day South Korea was invaded, President Truman had hastily returned to Washington from his home in Independence, Missouri. He gathered his principal advisors together at the White House to discuss the emergency. Unanimously, his advisors recognized the gravity of the situation and agreed with Gen. Omar Bradley, then the head of the Chiefs of Staff, who said the intelligence reports indicated Russia was "not yet ready for war, but in Korea they are obviously testing us, and the line ought to be drawn now."
Quickly, Truman ordered Gen. Douglas MacArthur to provide military protection for the delivery of arms to the South Koreans and to evacuate American dependents. He instructed the military chiefs "to prepare the necessary orders for the eventual use of American units." On the following day he said he was convinced that "the Republic of Korea needed help at once if it was not to be overrun."
Truman was given CIA reports which indicated that Korea was a repetition, on a larger scale, of the Berlin blockade. The intelligence reports further indicated that North Korean Communists would eventually prove to be a threat to Japan, Formosa, and the American base on Okinawa. It was the first time the "domino theory" was used.
The President, acting on the advice of the CIA, ordered MacArthur to give immediate naval and air support to the South Korean army, without allowing him to order his troops to cross the Thirty-eighth Parallel. (This act of drawing a political rather than a strategic boundary set the precedent in Asia for the use of the same tactic later in the Vietnam campaign.)
MacArthur's zeal and military instinct disposed him to blindness concerning such arbitrary boundaries. His expressed urge to attack China with nuclear weapons eventually led to his unprecedented dismissal by Truman. MacArthur may have had the knowledge and the skill to win the Korean conflict unconditionally, but such a military victory in the light of history did not fit into the long-range war of attrition the cryptocracy supported as a tool of the military industrial complex, against the Communists.
Domestic politics also served to compound the power of the new cryptocracy, which was then cutting its teeth in Southeast Asia. In 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President of the United States, he appointed John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, and allowed Foster's brother Allen, who was then the CIA's "deputy director for plans"—the clandestine operations branch of CIA—to take over directorship of the CIA one year later.
According to Townsend Hoopes, who served in both the Truman and Johnson administrations, though the seeds were sown by Truman, it was under the Eisenhower administration that the Cold War was "pervasively institutionalized in the United States." He described the Cold War's chief manifestations as ". . . a strident moralism, a self-righteous and often apocalyptic rhetoric, a determined effort to ring the Soviet Union and China with anti-Communist military alliances, a dramatic proliferation of American overseas military bases, and a rising flow of American military equipment for foreign armies accompanied by American officers and men to provide training and advice. The posture of imperative, total confrontation," he said, "thus came to full development during the Eisenhower period. By 1960, the United States government was not only positioned and determined to restrain the major Communist powers, but also determined—through an implicit extension of logic and the inertial momentum generated by a large and powerful military-foreign affairs bureaucracy—to control the pace and character of political change everywhere.""
In the chill of the Cold War, few Americans remembered that John Foster Dulles had been pro-Nazi before Hitler invaded Poland. No one thought, either, to question the fact that while John Foster Dulles was running the State Department, and therefore dealing with friendly governments, his brother Allen was running the CIA, which he once described as a State Department for dealing with unfriendly governments. No one seemed at all disturbed by the Dulles dynasty, and only a handful of people realized to what extent the Dulles brothers held power in the Eisenhower administration.
Lieutenant Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (USAF) was the Pentagon's chief briefing officer assigned to the White House during the Eisenhower administration. He worked closely with Allen Dulles in coordinating military support for the various clandestine political operations undertaken by the CIA. He knew the intimate working arrangements of the Dulles brothers and of the cryptocracy they were building.
In his book The Secret Team, Colonel Prouty gave a glimpse of how the Dulles brothers "worked" the President: "That evening, before his usual tennis game on his backyard court, Allen Dulles dropped by his brother's secluded house just off Massachusetts Avenue and discussed the operation [which involved an amphibious plane and a Polish pilot to be run under a CIA business cover]. Foster agreed that Eisenhower would go along with it. He walked over to the wall lined with bookshelves and picked up the special white telephone that connected directly with the White House operator. All he said was 'Is the man busy?'
"Foster Dulles opened with, 'Boss, how did you do at Burning Tree today? . . . Well, six holes is better than nothing . . . Yes, I've been talking here with Allen. He has a proposal he wants to clear with you. He feels it is very important, and it will lift the morale of Frank's boys. [Frank Wisner was then Director of Intelligence Clandestine Operations.] You know, since Korea and Guatemala you haven't had them doing much. Will you see him tomorrow morning? Fine. How's Mamie? O.K. boss, I'll speak to Allen . . . 9:30 . . . Thank you—good night!'
"There was not much left to do," Prouty said, "the flight would be scheduled."
A relevant analysis of "the brother act" is provided by David Wise and Thomas Ross. "[The Dulles brothers] embodied the dualism—and indeed the moral dilemma—of United States foreign policy since World War II .. . Foster Dulles reflected the American ethic; the world as we should like it to be. While he took this public position, his brother was free to deal with nastier realities, to overturn governments and to engage in backstage political maneuvers all over the globe with the CIA's almost unlimited funds . . .
"This is not to say that the same two-sided foreign policy would never have evolved had the director of the CIA and the Secretary of State not been brothers. It very likely would have. But the natural friction between the objective and methods of the diplomats and the 'spooks,' between the State Department and the CIA, was to an extent reduced because of the close working relationship of the Dulles brothers. There was consequently less of a check and balance."10
John Foster and Allen Dulles had worked together before coming to government. Foster was the star attorney of the international law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. He persuaded his partners to take Allen in "to soften up customers," which Allen had a great gift for. Eventually, Sullivan and Cromwell sent Allen to Berlin to negotiate private affairs with the German industrial barons before the war. After the war broke out, he was sent to Switzerland with OSS, where, under cover, he used his former business contacts inside Germany to supply information for his many spectacular single-handed intelligence coups against the Axis.
Though Allen Dulles was more gifted as a diplomat than his elder brother Foster, it was Foster who can be considered the mastermind of the Cold War Aberration. Foster played upon the fear of Communists and implemented the world-policing foreign policy of the Pax Americana which eventually led to our involvement in Vietnam. It was his Cold War campaign at home that made citizens tremble in fear of Communist attack and their children crouch under school desks in atomic air-raid drills. It was John Foster Dulles, in the company of men like Senator Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who presented the specter of the Communist menace to the American public. They convinced the nation that the communists were about to unleash a global war and even a direct nuclear attack upon the United States.
During Eisenhower's 1952 campaign for the presidency, he promised to "peacefully bring about freedom for the captive nations." John Foster Dulles later repeated Eisenhower's promise, omitting, however, the word "peacefully."
Lest we judge John Foster Dulles unfairly by the standards of our own time, it must be said that, to his mind, there must have seemed to have been good reasons for invoking the Communist threat. As Senator Frank Church's (1976) Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations said: "The extent to which the urgency of the Communist threat had become shared perception is difficult to appreciate."
More likely, there was another, more insidious reason for the Cold War: the economy. A glance at a historical graph of the American business cycle will show that since the Civil War, economic depressions tend to precede and follow U.S. wars. Dulles' generation came to power in World War II after having suffered the longest and deepest depression in American history. It could be considered natural for them to overreact to the recessions of 1945-46 and 1949-50 by fomenting war—hot or cold—to feed the military-industrial base of the economy. The research and development of death-dealing technology created the need for unprecedented secrecy. The instrument of keeping those secrets was the cryptocracy.
The Cold War strategy proved to be economically successful. Without having to risk a full-scale nuclear war and simply by arming the world against communism through weapons marketing, propaganda, and the psychological warfare of the Cold War scheme, the United States achieved a capital goods boom unequaled in modern history. In the most simple terms, arms constituted the bulk of United States exports from World War Two to the present and figured as the single most important industry which maintained the United States trade balance.
The central core of the Dulles brothers' American containment policy grew from the CIA's covert operations and propaganda efforts. The mood of those times is reflected in a top-secret report submitted by the second Hoover Commission to President Eisenhower in September, 1954, and made public by former CIA man Harry Rositzke. The report urged the United States to make its ". . . aggressive covert psychological, political, and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique, and if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy . . . We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game . . . We . . . must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us . . ."
According to Rositzke "The next year a National Security Council directive reaffirmed the Executive's commitment to covert operations. It instructed the CIA to continue creating problems for 'International Communism,' to reduce its strength and its control worldwide, and to 'increase the capacity and the will of peoples and nations to resist International Communism. It specifically reaffirmed CIA's authority to develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations.' "11
Although the Cold War is generally said to date from 1948, with the Berlin Blockade and the Greek civil war, John Foster Dulles contributed to its architecture before he came to office in 1953. He epitomized the fearful gestalt of his generation, took hold of the floundering Cold War strategy, and molded it with his personality. He was fond of quoting Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in the Federalist Papers, "safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct." Hamilton's statement, when taken at face value, seems quite innocent. But in the context of John Foster Dulles' materialistic and puritan upbringing, it is not difficult to see how he construed it to mean something quite different than Hamilton intended. Hamilton's thoughts gave Dulles the moral rationale to try to motivate national political, industrial, and economic conduct by posing an overwhelming external danger—the threat of a nuclear war initiated by the "international Communist conspiracy."
If, at the end of World War II, the growth of our economy, still the strongest and richest in the world, did depend upon the military-industrial complex for sustenance, then Dulles' Cold War saved the U.S. from certain recession. Without the threat of communism, what could the free world have armed against? And if the health of the U.S. economy continues to depend on that merger of military and industrial interests, then we may well expect to see efforts at detente collapse and the Cold War resume as the already inflated armaments industry expands.
In his farewell address to the nation in 1960, President Eisenhower issued his famous warning about the military industrial complex:
"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime—or, indeed, by fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
"Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted."
Eisenhower accurately predicted the course of history. "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
The Cold War was World War III—a war waged largely with words. Yet the men who had won World War II with advanced weaponry were less artful in the use of the new psychological warfare. As the Cold War escalated, propaganda was followed by sabotage, assassinations, "paramilitary" covert operations, and limited "police actions."
America had traditionally been a free and open society. But after the war, U.S. leaders held in their hands an awesome technological superiority. While being the love object of government, the new technologies, especially nuclear energy, made the leaders fearful of losing their monopoly. That fear gave rise to the belief that new secret agencies and operations were needed to guard against technological thefts by foreign governments. The Cold War was a "secret" war in more ways than one.
The psychological war, originally waged only against "enemy" countries, was nevertheless created at home. It was used within the United States, against beliefs and free thought, by a secret bureaucracy which is still supported by all the power of the federal government, but which operates outside the chain of government command. It is a secret bureaucracy become paranoid—a cryptocracy mad with world power.
Although the Central Intelligence Agency has long been the convenient symbol for all those who have committed atrocities in the name of national security, the secret bureaucracy, the cryptocracy, does not consist solely of the CIA. It is as well a vast network of alliances between individuals in a number of government agencies normally thought to be outside the intelligence field.
Since the cryptocracy violates every constitutional principle as a matter of course, and commits every crime known to man in the interest of "national security," it cannot entirely rely on the patriotism of its agents to keep its secrets. Therefore, no single individual is told more than he has a "need to know."
The cryptocracy is a brotherhood reminiscent of the ancient secret societies, with rites of initiation and indoctrination programs to develop in its loyal membership the special understanding of its mysteries. It has secret codes and oaths of silence which reinforce the sense of elitism necessary for the maintenance of its strict loyalty. It is automated, organized in the mode of a computer, where all have access to general knowledge and the most obvious aims and goals, but where the individual is isolated by tribal rituals and compartmentalization.
It is a technocratic organization without ideology, loyal only to an unspoken, expedient, and undefined patriotism. Its members are anonymous. Its funds are secret. Its operational history is secret. Even its goals are secret. It is a degenerative disease of the body politic which has grown rampantly, spreading so invisibly that after nearly four decades its existence is known only to a handful of "decision makers."
The cryptocracy is designed to function like a machine. It also has the feelings of a machine—none at all. But, unlike a machine, it does have ambition. To it, human beings are so much cheap hardware who perform certain set functions which produce certain predetermined results. They are valued relative to cost and efficiency. The cryptocracy is the perfect cybernetic organism—pure logic at the planning level—nothing but automatic response in the field.
If a prospective agent cannot be recruited by an appeal to patriotism, he is bribed. If he cannot be bribed, he is blackmailed. If he refuses to be blackmailed, he is "programmed." If all these fail, he is killed, for it must not be known that he had ever been approached—so important is "national security."
It is sometimes hard to determine whether the cryptocracy is working for or against the interests of the U.S. President, to whom its constituent agencies are supposed to be accountable. Many of its crimes, now a matter of public record, would indicate that it has often worked against, the President. It has, we know, worked against the U.S. Constitution and the American people. It has needlessly caused the death of innocent people who were working for it, just as it has tortured and murdered those who have stood in its way. Documented atrocities and criminal blunders have been revealed by congressional investigations, yet no one has been brought to trial.* Little congressional, judicial, or executive action has been taken to limit its power or ferret out its leaders. Figureheads have been changed, but the organization and the National Security Act which has bred this cancer remains in essence unchanged.
* Since the completion of this book, former CIA Director Richard Helms was given a two-year suspended sentence and fined $2,000 for lying to the United States Congress about the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Chile's Allende government.
The cryptocracy serves big business and spends a good deal of time and energy supplying American corporations with industrial intelligence. These favors, offered only to those companies friendly to the cryptocracy, may be repaid by such things as political campaign contributions to candidates who are either sympathetic to or compromised by the cryptocracy. In the past the cryptocracy has supported both foreign and domestic politicians with such campaign contributions.
The "old boy network" of retired cryptocrats working within major corporations plays an important role in the cryptocracy's international influence. Secret funds are shunted not only from one agency of government to another, but also from agency to corporation and then, under cover of the corporation's legal business activities, throughout the world, wherever expediency dictates.
Through its authorized functions, the cryptocracy controls the United States government. It feeds the executive branch "intelligence reports" which are often slanted and sometimes falsified, so that the policy decisions which result will be those which fit the cryptocracy's game plan.
Like a fifteenth century Machiavellian princedom that has been computerized and automated, the cryptocracy has systematically manipulated the American consciousness. By justifying its existence by citing an exaggerated danger from communism, it has justified its own totalitarianism by convincing key politicians that fire must be fought with fire. The practices of the cryptocracy, once officially sanctioned only in operations outside the U.S., have become internalized. Those practices have included spying, stealing, blackmail, and murder, even within the borders of the country it is supposed to protect and defend.
There is nothing hypocritical about the KGB's employment of totalitarian, police-state tactics. The Soviet equivalent of the CIA, the KGB, is an extension of the Soviet political system, which is totalitarian. Neither is there anything hypocritical about the Chinese use of "brainwashing" on American POWs in Korea. The Chinese have "brainwashed" three and a half million of their own people, though generally they used techniques less drastic than starvation, sleep interruption, and isolation. But the U.S. cryptocracy is the ultimate hypocrisy, subversive to its own government's democratic structure. It operates with methods which are not permitted in most democracies and certainly not permitted by the Constitution of the United States.
In war, a successful campaign greatly depends upon the element of surprise. Since the beginning of human disputes, warriors have found it desirable to keep their strengths and weaknesses concealed.
The use of new technology has been both the strength and the surprise which so often has determined the outcome of war. The first elephant to be outfitted with spikes and used in battle was as great a terror to the bow-and arrow warrior as the atomic bomb was to the Japanese.
The cryptocracy has long known that the only way it can maintain the upper hand in the global power game is to stay in the vanguard of technology. To that end it has employed all the research and development the federal government can buy.
Since World War II the cryptocracy has used electronic technology to manipulate foreign peoples as well as the American people through a campaign of carefully planned Misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. The cryptocracy's existence depends upon such manipulation of Public belief. Since it cannot openly argue its cause, it relies upon persuasion and indoctrination to accomplish its goals and win support for its ends.
The existence of the cryptocracy also depends upon absolute secrecy. Without it they are powerless. Thus the cryptocracy's attempt to control information at its source— the human mind.
It was the CIA which instigated and directed the initial research, and with an invisible hand, kept each group of scientists isolated from the other. Each group researching mind control was kept apart from other groups conducting simultaneous interfacing experiments, so that no one except the Agency would be able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
Bases for mind-control techniques already existed in scientific literature, but in a fragmented, incomplete, and unassimilated state. The cryptocracy enlisted the aid of scientists who then developed these fragments into usable techniques. These scientists worked independently, each on only one small part of the overall plan. And, by and large, they were ignorant of the intended use of the final product of their research.
Operation Mind Control was not the plan of a mere cult of intelligence; it did not stop at intelligence gathering, but went on to instigate active operations on its own. Those conspiracies against freedom which were revealed by the investigations into Watergate, the intelligence community, and multinational corporations are minor compared to the conspiracy of mind control which has developed in this country. Although the first victims of Operation Mind Control were, perhaps, especially suitable personality types for such use, with the advances being made in the psycho-sciences all but a few of us may eventually be victimized.
The power of mind control resides in its use as a superior security technique; as such it is almost as foolproof as that employed by the great Pharaoh of Egypt, who, entombed with the slaves who carried him to his final resting place, had those same slaves killed and buried along with him so that all knowledge of access to the tomb would remain secure for centuries. Mind control arranges that "slaves" of the intelligence community—witnesses, couriers, and assassins—are "protected" from their own memories and guilt by amnesia. These "slaves" may be left alive, but the knowledge they possess is buried deep within the tombs of their own minds by techniques which can keep the truth hidden even from those who have witnessed it. It is the ultimate debriefing, the final security measure short of assassination.
The conspiracy of mind control veils the secret of all secrets. It hides the cabal which possesses its power, so that, even if the CIA and the other intelligence agencies were closed down tomorrow, the cryptocracy would continue to function, for as with the Mafia, "once you are a member, you're a member for life." The power of mind control, and ultimately of the cryptocracy that uses it, resides with those who have culled the fruits of psychoscience since the late 1930s; they now possess the mature body of knowledge upon which the coercive art is built.
To review the labyrinth of events: Out of the natural fear of technology grew an unnatural reliance on secrecy. Secrecy led to covert control and produced a well-organized institution of national security. Institutionalized secrecy directed covert research and produced Operation Mind Control, the ultimate technology of secrecy and control.
Even if they had known of the CIA's involvement, their interest in behavior modification probably would not have been dampened. Previously called conditioned reflex therapy behavior modification, in the sixties and seventies, was becoming the most popular tool of psycho-science since Sigmund Freud asked his first patient to lie down on the couch.
Behavior modification is based on conditioning, but "conditioning" is a big word for a simple form of learning in which a reaction is evoked by an outside action. The reaction is called a response; the outside action is called a stimulus.
In 1927 Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for bis discovery of a method of making dogs salivate at the ringing of a bell. Salivating dogs were not much good to anyone, and it was not for making dogs drool that Pavlov was so honored. He was honored with the world's most prestigious award for making dogs drool on cue. He called his process "conditioning." The dogs' involuntary response, he called a "reflex." Pavlov's discoveries provided the breakthrough which behavioral science needed to begin to control the human mind.
Pavlov had begun in 1906 by seeking a simple model of the activity of the brain. He decided that the salivary reflex in dogs could be just such a model, so he raided the dog pound and cut holes in the animals' cheeks to implant measuring devices for the flow of saliva.
By regularly ringing a bell just before feeding the dogs, he found that the stimulus—the sound of the bell intrinsically unrelated to food, began to evoke the salivation that had initially been observed only when the dogs were eating. His patient studies revealed that the quality, rate, and frequency of salivation changed depending upon the quality, rate, and frequency of the stimuli.
Pavlov's experiments with dogs have been repeated numerous times by different scientists with the same results. Science now agrees that when a hungry dog is given a piece of meat immediately after a bell rings, and when this procedure is repeated a number of times the bell alone will produce the flow of saliva almost as if the bell and not the meat were activating the glands. When the bell rings, not only will a properly conditioned dog salivate but his ears will stand up, he'll turn toward the food source, and even make anticipatory chewing movements. Conditioned reflexes in dogs, however, are a long way from the conditioning of volitional thinking in humans.
But Pavlov established the groundwork by which anyone's emotional stability (Pavlov called it "perpetual equilibration") and sanity could be reliably balanced or unbalanced. To that end the Soviets, and later the People's Republic of China, employed Pavlov's new science for the creation of the totalitarian state.
While the general public in the West may continue to associate behavior modification with Pavlov's conditioning of dogs, the science is actually an ancient one In its modern form it has its roots in the works of Descartes who, in 1664, put forward the idea that every activity of an organism is the reaction to an external stimulus. Experimental studies to test Descartes' idea did not begin until several centuries later. Then, simultaneously experimentation began in a number of different countries.
At the same time Pavlov was experimenting with dogs in Russia, John B. Watson was experimenting with humans in the United States. Watson was the founder of the behaviorist school psychology in the 1920s. His most notorious accomplishment was his series of experiments on an eleven-month-old infant known to history as Little Albert.
Watson showed Little Albert a white rat and the child reacted naturally and tried to pet and cuddle the animal. After Albert had established a playful rapport with the rat, Watson began to adversely condition the lad. Each time the rat would come into Albert's view, Watson would beat the floor with a steel bar and produce a deafening sound. Quite naturally, whenever Albert heard the sound he would jump with fright. Eventually Albert associated the loud sound with the white rat and became frightened of it. Every time the rat came into his view he would begin to cry.
Albert became so adversely conditioned to the rat that he would exhibit fear whenever any small animal came into his view. He became so conditioned that he reacted with equal fear to rabbits, dogs, and a sealskin coat—in short, to anything with fur.
Quite proudly Dr. Watson exclaimed, "Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood . . . I'll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless. Even gross differences in anatomical structure limits are far less than you may think . . . Make him a deaf mute, and I will still build you a Helen Keller . . . Men are built, not born."1
Watson saw things, as Pavlov did, in physical and chemical terms. He was not interested in anything beyond overt and observable behavior. And Watson was only the first in a long line of American psycho-scientists who were to take the mechanistic path to control of the mind.
Pavlov and Watson's classical conditioning did not, however, go far in producing a reliable science of mind-control. In the late thirties Harvard psychologist Burrhus Frederick Skinner discovered new principles of conditioning which allowed more complete control.
Skinner came up with what he called operant conditioning. It was based on the idea that reinforcement (the repetition of either a positive or a negative response to an action) was at the root of all learned behavior. The distinction between classical and operant conditioning was made only because different techniques were used to elicit the responses. In essence, the effects of either kind of conditioning were the same.
The three most common methods of modern behavior therapy are operant conditioning, aversion therapy, and desensitization.
Operant conditioning is the reinforcement of certain behavior by reward (usually food), often accompanied by simultaneous sound or light stimulation. Reinforcement is contingent upon the occurrence of the response, and the reinforcing mechanisms are often built into the environment. When rats are used as subjects, the device to be operated is a bar which, when depressed, delivers the reward of food or water. In this situation the behavior which is reinforced is the pressing of the bar. It makes no difference how the bar is pressed, whether the rat presses the bar with its paw, nose, or tail. Once the bar is pressed, the operation has been performed and the animal is rewarded. The dependent variable in operant conditioning is the response rate—the number of times the bar is pressed. Response rate, or the frequency of the response, is an important factor in judging the success of the operant conditioning.
Aversion therapy is a technique in which an undesirable response is inhibited by a painful or unpleasant reinforcement such as electric shock, noxious odors, or any technique which produces fear and avoidance. It is an ancient form of counter-conditioning, or punishment, which has been widely used in the treatment of homosexuality, stuttering, and alcoholism.
In desensitization the subject is first trained to relax beyond his normal state. He is then presented with images which evoke mild anxiety. At first the images are very mild, and they are repeated until the subject shows no anxiety. Then a stronger image is introduced and the process is repeated. Finally the subject becomes desensitized to even the strongest image. Desensitization has been used to relieve people of phobic fears and anxieties.
Skinner began his experiments by building a number of boxes in which pigeons were required to run mazes and press levers to receive the rewards of birdseed. By manipulating the way the reward was given, Skinner found that he could control the rate and the style of the lever pressing.
Eventually Skinner was able to get pigeons to bob and weave in prescribed ways. He was even able to get birds to distinguish colors by having them peck only at levers of specific colors for food. He soon learned to obtain just about any kind of behavior he desired from a number of different animals.
Skinner concluded that every action is determined by the environment and that all behavior is "shaped and maintained by its consequences." The behaviorists' mechanistic view of man was summed up by Skinner when he said, "If by 'machine' you simply mean any system which behaves in an orderly way, then man and all other animals are machines."
Skinner's subsequent research, however, showed that behavior which is supported by continuous rewards stops when the rewards are withheld. Further experimentation showed that by shifting from continuous to intermittent rewards, the behavior could be kept going even though the rewards became less frequent. This discovery made behaviorism a practical science, for now it could explain how behavior was maintained in the real world.
With unshakable faith in his own science, Dr. Skinner built a large box with a glass window on one side. It was a soundproof cage, much like the ones he'd used in experiments with pigeons and monkeys. But this box was for children, and into it Skinner put his own child.
This "Skinner box" was about as large as a spacious crib. The temperature of the box was carefully controlled, and Skinner testified proudly that "crying and fussing could always be stopped by slightly lowering the temperature." With the soundproof box, Skinner was "never concerned lest the doorbell, telephone, piano, or children at play wake the baby . . ." 'And, he added, "soundproofing also protects the family from the baby."2
Apparently Skinner's scheme to produce "socialized" children was not so successful. In the opinion of the kindergarten teacher of Skinner's youngest daughter, who had received the "benefits'* of spending her early childhood in her daddy's box, she was not an obedient automaton, but a rather independent and even rebellious child.3 Somehow Skinner's programming of his offspring must have failed in his own terms, for it would appear from his writings that Skinner's ideas are quite in line with the dreams of the cryptocrats who would seek to control us all.
In his popular work Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner wrote: "The problem is to free men, not from control, but from certain kinds of control, and it can be solved only if our analysis takes all consequences into account. How people feel about control . . . does not lead to useful distinctions."
Skinner is not only concerned with controlling individuals, he desires to build a controlled society, ruled from crib to coffin by behavior modification. "The intentional design of a culture and the control of human behavior it implies are essential if the human species is to continue to develop," he said.
Today B. F. Skinner is the center of a personality cult. He is the guru and founder of the modern psychophilosophy which holds that it is morally and ethically permissible to change the behavior of others as well as to modify others' belief. About belief Skinner writes, "People must believe that what they are doing has some chance of obtaining what they want or avoiding something to which they are averse. But the chances are in the contingencies. The relation of beliefs to other conditions, such as wants and needs, can be easily stated: to say that desires enter into the causation of beliefs is simply to say that the probability of behavior with which a belief is associated depends not only upon reinforcement but upon a state of deprivation or aversive stimulation."4
Aversion stimulation was the process upon which the Cold War faith was built. The Cold War faith, in turn, loosed the cryptocracy upon the world to murder, maim, or rape the minds of any who posed a real threat to its goals of "defending the free world from communism."
In the words of Lewis Andrews and Marvin Karlins, "The world is, in a sense, one large 'Skinner box' . . ''5 And if this is not already true, it soon may be, because there are behaviorists at work in practically every federal and state institution, as well as in the private sector.
Using federal and state institutions for testing purposes provided many benefits to the cryptocracy. They functioned as recruitment centers, where selected criminals were released to the custody of career spooks who could apply their skills in undercover work. Prisons were also valuable testing grounds.
Philip Hilts, describing the attitude prevalent in both the cryptocracy and prison bureaucracies, wrote: "There are three possibilities for criminals. The first is deterrent: Keep them from doing it again. The second is punishment: Knock the hell out of the bastards; they deserve it. The third is treatment: They're defective; let's fix them."6 Behaviorists who work the prison circuit hold that the last is the only humane way of reducing recidivism. Perhaps. But one also begins to sense in such theorizing a preview of what is to come for the whole society.
"These behavioral engineers are growing mightily in numbers and influence, nourished by a law-and-order administration that though riddled by corruption itself, can still deliver the material goods," wrote David Rorvich. "They are not out to change the world but to make man adjust to it; they seek results, not understanding. A thick-skinned lot they are, not loath to admit the crudity of some of their techniques, claiming results that would take the more elegant psychotherapies and social reforms years to attain . . . What the world needs now in the service of 'curing' its deviant and miserable masses, proclaim the new psycho technologists, is not more prison reform, urban renewal, and nude group gropes but a few well-placed corrective kilovolts in the collective brain."7
The California Medical Facility at Vacaville was the center of a number of behavioral research projects funded by various agencies, including the Veterans Administration, HEW, the Bureau of Prisons, private drug companies, and others. Many of these agencies were fronting for the CIA.
In 1973, there was a "flap" in the press over the testing of drugs by these agencies under the guise of behavior modification. It was revealed that tranquilizers, depressants, sedatives, narcotic antagonists, and hypnotics were being tested in the hospitals and prisons (see Appendix B).
Dr. Leo E. Hollister, a medical investigator for the Veterans Administration, defended the practice: "The exemplary Medical Facility at Vacaville is one of the few places in the country where such [drug] studies are possible . . . at a time when the demands for such facilities are increasing, in response to an urgent public health problem, it would be sad to see them denied to responsible and highly reputable clinical investigators."8
It is debatable whether you can characterize the scientists who participated in all the projects as "responsible and highly reputable." It appears from the evidence that some may rather have been, as Philip Hilts playfully suggests, ". . . hunchbacked wart-infested evil scientists . . ."9
Perhaps the greatest danger to freedom of thought and behavior is posed by the breed of psycho-scientists who call themselves "behaviorists." While most psychologists once concerned themselves with the study of human thought and the rich life of the mind, the behaviorists believe that man's problems can best be understood by studying his actions. What a man thinks, sees, feels, wants and knows— everything that a man is, behaviorists believe, can be most easily understood in terms of what he does.
Behaviorism would appear to be a predictable expression of materialistic cultures, East and West, which value externals above all else. You will seldom hear a behaviorist speak of "will" or even "mind." These are considered unscientific, subjective terms. Instead, the behaviorists speak only of "reflexes" which are reinforced by conditioning from the environment. They look forward to the day when they can conclusively prove that conditioning begins at the moment of conception, and that reflexes are ultimately the very stuff of what was once called the soul! The science of behaviorism portrays the human being as mechanistic protoplasm. The most avantgarde behaviorists have developed an unholy alliance with biochemists who together are exploring genetics, hoping to find the key for breeding selected behavioral characteristics. Certainly a person born with all his limbs will behave differently from a person who is born with genetic damage and without limbs. But beyond that, what some behaviorists are looking for is a genetic factor which controls anger, docility, and other personality tendencies. While many new scientific insights have come from behaviorism, so have many new dangers—especially to the freedom of choice.
"The day has come," said Professor James V. McConnell, head of the Department of Mental Health Research at the University of Michigan, "when we can combine sensory deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis, and the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior." Dr. McConnell expressed the sentiments of behavior modifiers who, like cryptocrats, believe that mankind's salvation resides in the control of individual behavior in an engineered society. But engineered by whom? ".. .
We want to reshape our society drastically," McConnell said, "so that all of us will be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. Today's behavioral psychologists are the architects and engineers who are shaping the Brave New World of Tomorrow."10
In the practical American way—stripped for action—the psychology profession appears to be turning away from psychotherapy and is becoming dependent upon the time and labor-saving practical mechanics of behavior modification depending upon principles developed largely through laboratory experimentation. Voluntary as well as involuntary actions can be conditioned. Once a reflex is trained into a subject, he becomes an automaton, responding to the artificial stimulus to which he has been programmed.
When light shines into the pupil of the eye, it contracts, and when the light is removed, it dilates. This pupillary reflex is involuntary; the individual has no conscious control over it, but it can be conditioned.
C. V. Hudgins demonstrated this by conditioning the pupil to a bell using a light as the unconditioned stimulus. He would turn on the light, which shone directly into the subject's eyes at the same instant he rang a bell. The light made the pupil contract every time just as meat made Pavlov's dog drool.
Hudgins then taught his subjects to use their own hands to operate the bell and light mechanisms. Then he would say "contract" and the subject would press the switch. When he said "relax" the subject would relax and turn off both bell and light. After only a few hours' training, Hudgins found that he could do away with the bell, the hand switch, and the light. He had only to say the word "contract," and the pupil would contract.
A modern apologist of conditioning, Andrew Salter, asserts that hypnosis in essence is the same as conditioning. Salter said that after he had conditioned the reader of his book to contract his pupil, as Hudgins had done, he would take him to an ophthalmologist.
"Doctor," Salter would declare, "here is a splendid hypnotic subject. I control this person so thoroughly that at my command his pupil will contract, and perceptibly."
"Come now," the doctor would say, "you know very well that pupillary contraction is involuntary. You need light for that."
Salter would then tell his conditioned reader "contract," and the reader's pupil would obey every time, and the doctor would be perplexed.
"How do you like hypnotism?" Salter would ask the doctor.
"It's amazing," he would answer, but his interest would diminish after Salter explained how, paralleling Pavlov and Hudgins, the reader's pupil had been conditioned. "Well," he would say, "come back next time when you have some real hypnotism."
"Our doctor is wrong," Salter said. "There, in the conditioned reflex, he had seen the essence of hypnosis. (And parenthetically, when we see that the essence of hypnotism is conditioning—or quite loosely, that the essence of the 'unconscious mind' is conditioning—we are in a strategic position to develop a sound understanding of the deepest wellsprings of human behavior) ."11
The cryptocracy, having discovered the wonders of hypnosis, drugs, behavior modification, and even more revolutionary electrical and sonic manipulations of the brain, learned how to reliably control individual behavior. Whether or not the Constitution protects the individual's free thought and speech, and whether one regards mind control as bondage or a necessary tool for social engineering, one must recognize that the power to control the mind exists—and is being used.
Did Philip Hilts know how close he'd come when he offered his chilling description of the crypto-behaviorists? He wrote: "Suppose a dozen controllers with that incurable twitch for power are meeting, now, in some secret mountain cabin. There, amid piles of rat-behavior charts, rows of cumulative recorders, and reams of human-foibles data, they are designing an environment. They are creating blueprints for a system that would produce the most terrible, violent, and antisocial people possible.'12
notes
Chapter 9
1. Miles Copeland, Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1975)
2. Anthony Cave Brown, ed., The Secret War Report of the OSS (New York, Berkeley, 1976)
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972) Operation Mind Control 295
9. Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973)
10. David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government, 5th ed. (New York, Random House, 1964)
11. Harry Rositzke, CIA's Secret Operations (New York, Reader's Digest Press, 1977)
Chapter 10
1. John B. Watson, Behaviorism, rev. ed. (New York, Norton, 1930)
2. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York, Knopf, 1971)
3. Interview. Name withheld by request.
4. Skinner, op. cit.
5. Lewis M. Andrews and Marvin Karlins, Requiem for Democracy? (New York, Holt, 1971)
6. Philip J. Hilts, Behavior Mod (New York, Harper, 1976)
7. David Rorvich, Behavior Control: Big Brother Comes, Intellectual Digest, Jan. 1974.
8. Leo Hollister, letter to Thomas Clauson, July 3, 1973.
9. Hilts, op. cit.
10. James McConnel, Psychology Today, May, 1970.
11. Andrew Salter, Conditioned Reflex Therapy (New York, Creative Age Press, 1949)
12. Hilts, op. cit.
After the war, electronic propaganda became the staple weapon for waging the Cold War. Persuasion, argument, propaganda, and indoctrination went out over the airwaves not only to "enemy" populations but to our own civilian populations as well.
The full story of the OSS and the beginnings of the CIA was not known until 1976 when a government report, The War Report of Strategic Services, was declassified. In 1940 Gen. William J. Donovan was appointed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's special emissary. Upon his return from a Mediterranean tour he reported that "neither America nor Britain is fighting the new and important type of war on more than the smallest scale. Our defenses against political and psychological warfare are feeble, and even such gestures as have been made toward carrying the fight to the enemy are pitifully inadequate." Donovan urged the President to prepare for combat in the field of irregular and unorthodox warfare, as well as in the orthodox military areas.2
Five months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt added one more new bureau to the New Deal bureaucracy. It was tagged COI, perhaps a fitting acronym for the publicity-shy Office of the Coordinator of Information. Its leader was, of course, William J. Donovan.
Donovan has been called "a queer figure who comes off three-quarters Machiavelli and one-quarter boy." According to Anthony Cave Brown, he recruited "Communists to kill Krauts. He feared and distrusted Communists in places where they counted. In Italy and France, he could never quite make up his mind what to do politically; and, since political belief was the clandestine's primary motive, his policies often failed and, even when they succeeded, led to interminable muddles. Likable, even admirable on occasions, he was in fact an Elizabethan man, swaggering about capitals in beautiful cord, displaying a fine calf for a riding boot, but forever dependent really upon the British for the finesse which that secret struggle demanded."3
The British Secret Intelligence Service had developed espionage and intelligence to a fine art during World War I.They were already masters of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, political warfare, deception, crypto-analysis, irregular maritime warfare, technical intelligence, and secret intelligence when World War II began. During that war they took intelligence into the vanguard of psychology, using drugs and hypnosis to program couriers to carry secret messages locked behind posthypnotic blocks.
The British were the first to employ a financing device known as the "Secret Vote," or unvouchered funds. This was money made available without recourse to legislation and accounted for only by personal signature. As Anthony Cave Brown observed, "plainly, almost unlimited opportunities for fraud existed in this arrangement."4
Donovan's COI copied the unvouchered funds financing idea, as well as many others, from the British. He put great emphasis on the psychological warfare arm of intelligence. The British had also emphasized "psy-war," but Donovan promoted it to the-degree that he made the psychological warfare division the central control organ of the entire espionage agency.
In 1941, after the birth of COI, President Roosevelt asked Donovan to make specific proposals for the implementation of his ideas for psychological warfare and the development of an intelligence plan. Donovan submitted to the White House a paper entitled "Memorandum of Establishment of Services of Strategic Information." In it he clarified his idea of the relationship of information to strategic planning in total war.
Pointing out the diplomatic and defense inadequacies of the then-existing intelligence organization, Donovan said, "It is essential that we set up a central enemy intelligence organization which would itself collect either directly or through existing departments of government, at home and abroad, pertinent information." Such information and data should be analyzed and interpreted by applying the experience of "specialized, trained research officials in the related scientific fields (including technological, economic, financial and psychological scholars)." He emphasized that "there is another element in modern warfare, and that is the psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses of a nation."5
In June, 1942, the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) was created to replace COI. Some time passed between the formation of the OSS and the issuance of its charter. The delay was created by Donovan's controversial idea that the psychological warfare unit should be in charge of the entire intelligence operation. The intellectuals hovering around OSS argued with the Joint War Plans Committee about what exactly psychological warfare was, and who should direct it in the name of the United States of America.
Finally a definition was agreed upon. The official definition of psychological warfare read: ". . . it is the coordination and use of all means, including moral and physical, by which the end is to be attained—other than those of recognized military operations, but including the psychological exploitation of the result of those recognized military actions—which tend to destroy the will of the enemy to achieve victory and to damage his political or economic capacity to do so; which tend to deprive the enemy of the support, assistance, or sympathy of his allies or associates or of neutrals, or to prevent his acquisition of such support, assistance, or sympathy; or which tend to create, maintain, or increase the will to victory of our own people and allies and to acquire, maintain, or increase the support, assistance, and sympathy of neutrals."
And, as Donovan had wished, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decreed that "All plans for projects to be undertaken by the Office of Strategic Services will be submitted to the Joint U.S. Chiefs of Staff through the Joint Psychological Warfare Committee for approval. The Joint Psychological Warfare Committee will refer such papers as it deems necessary to the Joint Staff Planners (JSP) prior to submission to the Joint U.S. Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Psychological Warfare Committee will take final action on all internal administrative plans pertaining to the Office of Strategic Services."
The lifespan of OSS was less than three years. During that short period of time it developed psychological warfare into an effective weapon against the minds of civilian and military populations foreign and domestic alike. To wage effective psychological war the OSS needed background information on United States citizens. Thus the burglary of Private files was sanctioned. The pattern of illegal clandestine activities within the United States, which became public knowledge with Watergate, began in 1945 when the OSS broke into the office of Amerasia magazine, an alleged Communist publication. The OSS illegal entry was followed by a legal FBI search three months later, but no evidence that Amerasia was engaged in subversive activity was ever found.
Throughout the war Donovan never lost sight of the fact that while OSS was a wartime expedient, it was also an experiment to determine the nature of a peacetime U.S. intelligence structure in the postwar period. Eventually OSS did provide the framework for the peacetime intelligence service through which the United States continued the bitter moral and territorial struggle against the Communists.
By a small, humorous twist of fate, it was on October 31, 1944—Halloween, the traditional day for spooks and dirty tricks—when President Roosevelt once again turned to Donovan for his views. The President asked Donovan to develop a plan for the organization of an intelligence service which would function after the cessation of hostilities. In November, Donovan submitted to the President his proposal for the creation of a "central intelligence service." In his memorandum, Donovan proposed liquidation of OSS once the wartime necessity had ceased. He was anxious, however, to preserve the intelligence functions developed by OSS, so he repeated his original COI concept of a central authority, reporting directly to the President, which would collect and analyze intelligence material required for planning and implementation of national policy and strategy-
"Though in the midst of war," Donovan wrote, "we are also in a period of transition which, before we are aware, will take us into the tumult of rehabilitation. An adequate and orderly intelligence system will contribute to informed decisions. We have now in the Government the trained and specialized personnel needed for the task. This talent should not be dispersed."7
On September 20, 1945, OSS was officially terminated by Executive Order 9620. "Research and Analysis" functions and "Foreign Nationals Recruiting" were transferred to the Department of State. The remainder of the OSS functions were transferred to the Department of War. That same day, the new President Harry S Truman sent a letter to Donovan informing him of the executive order to close OSS, and thanking him for his outstanding service.
The President wrote, in part, "You may well find satisfaction in the achievements of the Office and take pride in your own contribution to them. These are in themselves large rewards. Great additional reward for your efforts should lie in the knowledge that the peacetime intelligence services of the Government are being erected on the foundation of the facilities and resources mobilized through the Office of Strategic Services during the war."
Hidden behind the President's compliment was the fact that Donovan was shut out from the formation of the CIA because of a major character flaw: he had a strong dislike of organization. Whether Donovan was really the right man for the job of chief of America's first intelligence service is debatable. Success in covert operations depends upon an efficient bureaucracy and good judgment in authority. In many cases Donovan displayed neither. At heart he was an activist who did not even like the personalities of conventional administrators. Stewart Alsop said that he ran OSS "like a country editor."
"In every respect, OSS was Donovan's child," OSS historian R. Harris Smith wrote. "He nourished the agency in its infancy, and it bore the stamp of his personality."8 That stamp carried over into the new peacetime intelligence agency, the CIA, the first in American history.
But while Donovan was the grandfather of the cryptocracy, its techniques and much of the rationale behind them were the work of the Dulles brothers. The following review of the Dulles' rise to prominence shows the manner in which cryptocrats form their liaisons.
On the evening of the day South Korea was invaded, President Truman had hastily returned to Washington from his home in Independence, Missouri. He gathered his principal advisors together at the White House to discuss the emergency. Unanimously, his advisors recognized the gravity of the situation and agreed with Gen. Omar Bradley, then the head of the Chiefs of Staff, who said the intelligence reports indicated Russia was "not yet ready for war, but in Korea they are obviously testing us, and the line ought to be drawn now."
Quickly, Truman ordered Gen. Douglas MacArthur to provide military protection for the delivery of arms to the South Koreans and to evacuate American dependents. He instructed the military chiefs "to prepare the necessary orders for the eventual use of American units." On the following day he said he was convinced that "the Republic of Korea needed help at once if it was not to be overrun."
Truman was given CIA reports which indicated that Korea was a repetition, on a larger scale, of the Berlin blockade. The intelligence reports further indicated that North Korean Communists would eventually prove to be a threat to Japan, Formosa, and the American base on Okinawa. It was the first time the "domino theory" was used.
The President, acting on the advice of the CIA, ordered MacArthur to give immediate naval and air support to the South Korean army, without allowing him to order his troops to cross the Thirty-eighth Parallel. (This act of drawing a political rather than a strategic boundary set the precedent in Asia for the use of the same tactic later in the Vietnam campaign.)
MacArthur's zeal and military instinct disposed him to blindness concerning such arbitrary boundaries. His expressed urge to attack China with nuclear weapons eventually led to his unprecedented dismissal by Truman. MacArthur may have had the knowledge and the skill to win the Korean conflict unconditionally, but such a military victory in the light of history did not fit into the long-range war of attrition the cryptocracy supported as a tool of the military industrial complex, against the Communists.
Domestic politics also served to compound the power of the new cryptocracy, which was then cutting its teeth in Southeast Asia. In 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President of the United States, he appointed John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, and allowed Foster's brother Allen, who was then the CIA's "deputy director for plans"—the clandestine operations branch of CIA—to take over directorship of the CIA one year later.
According to Townsend Hoopes, who served in both the Truman and Johnson administrations, though the seeds were sown by Truman, it was under the Eisenhower administration that the Cold War was "pervasively institutionalized in the United States." He described the Cold War's chief manifestations as ". . . a strident moralism, a self-righteous and often apocalyptic rhetoric, a determined effort to ring the Soviet Union and China with anti-Communist military alliances, a dramatic proliferation of American overseas military bases, and a rising flow of American military equipment for foreign armies accompanied by American officers and men to provide training and advice. The posture of imperative, total confrontation," he said, "thus came to full development during the Eisenhower period. By 1960, the United States government was not only positioned and determined to restrain the major Communist powers, but also determined—through an implicit extension of logic and the inertial momentum generated by a large and powerful military-foreign affairs bureaucracy—to control the pace and character of political change everywhere.""
In the chill of the Cold War, few Americans remembered that John Foster Dulles had been pro-Nazi before Hitler invaded Poland. No one thought, either, to question the fact that while John Foster Dulles was running the State Department, and therefore dealing with friendly governments, his brother Allen was running the CIA, which he once described as a State Department for dealing with unfriendly governments. No one seemed at all disturbed by the Dulles dynasty, and only a handful of people realized to what extent the Dulles brothers held power in the Eisenhower administration.
Lieutenant Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (USAF) was the Pentagon's chief briefing officer assigned to the White House during the Eisenhower administration. He worked closely with Allen Dulles in coordinating military support for the various clandestine political operations undertaken by the CIA. He knew the intimate working arrangements of the Dulles brothers and of the cryptocracy they were building.
In his book The Secret Team, Colonel Prouty gave a glimpse of how the Dulles brothers "worked" the President: "That evening, before his usual tennis game on his backyard court, Allen Dulles dropped by his brother's secluded house just off Massachusetts Avenue and discussed the operation [which involved an amphibious plane and a Polish pilot to be run under a CIA business cover]. Foster agreed that Eisenhower would go along with it. He walked over to the wall lined with bookshelves and picked up the special white telephone that connected directly with the White House operator. All he said was 'Is the man busy?'
"Foster Dulles opened with, 'Boss, how did you do at Burning Tree today? . . . Well, six holes is better than nothing . . . Yes, I've been talking here with Allen. He has a proposal he wants to clear with you. He feels it is very important, and it will lift the morale of Frank's boys. [Frank Wisner was then Director of Intelligence Clandestine Operations.] You know, since Korea and Guatemala you haven't had them doing much. Will you see him tomorrow morning? Fine. How's Mamie? O.K. boss, I'll speak to Allen . . . 9:30 . . . Thank you—good night!'
"There was not much left to do," Prouty said, "the flight would be scheduled."
A relevant analysis of "the brother act" is provided by David Wise and Thomas Ross. "[The Dulles brothers] embodied the dualism—and indeed the moral dilemma—of United States foreign policy since World War II .. . Foster Dulles reflected the American ethic; the world as we should like it to be. While he took this public position, his brother was free to deal with nastier realities, to overturn governments and to engage in backstage political maneuvers all over the globe with the CIA's almost unlimited funds . . .
"This is not to say that the same two-sided foreign policy would never have evolved had the director of the CIA and the Secretary of State not been brothers. It very likely would have. But the natural friction between the objective and methods of the diplomats and the 'spooks,' between the State Department and the CIA, was to an extent reduced because of the close working relationship of the Dulles brothers. There was consequently less of a check and balance."10
John Foster and Allen Dulles had worked together before coming to government. Foster was the star attorney of the international law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. He persuaded his partners to take Allen in "to soften up customers," which Allen had a great gift for. Eventually, Sullivan and Cromwell sent Allen to Berlin to negotiate private affairs with the German industrial barons before the war. After the war broke out, he was sent to Switzerland with OSS, where, under cover, he used his former business contacts inside Germany to supply information for his many spectacular single-handed intelligence coups against the Axis.
Though Allen Dulles was more gifted as a diplomat than his elder brother Foster, it was Foster who can be considered the mastermind of the Cold War Aberration. Foster played upon the fear of Communists and implemented the world-policing foreign policy of the Pax Americana which eventually led to our involvement in Vietnam. It was his Cold War campaign at home that made citizens tremble in fear of Communist attack and their children crouch under school desks in atomic air-raid drills. It was John Foster Dulles, in the company of men like Senator Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who presented the specter of the Communist menace to the American public. They convinced the nation that the communists were about to unleash a global war and even a direct nuclear attack upon the United States.
During Eisenhower's 1952 campaign for the presidency, he promised to "peacefully bring about freedom for the captive nations." John Foster Dulles later repeated Eisenhower's promise, omitting, however, the word "peacefully."
Lest we judge John Foster Dulles unfairly by the standards of our own time, it must be said that, to his mind, there must have seemed to have been good reasons for invoking the Communist threat. As Senator Frank Church's (1976) Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations said: "The extent to which the urgency of the Communist threat had become shared perception is difficult to appreciate."
More likely, there was another, more insidious reason for the Cold War: the economy. A glance at a historical graph of the American business cycle will show that since the Civil War, economic depressions tend to precede and follow U.S. wars. Dulles' generation came to power in World War II after having suffered the longest and deepest depression in American history. It could be considered natural for them to overreact to the recessions of 1945-46 and 1949-50 by fomenting war—hot or cold—to feed the military-industrial base of the economy. The research and development of death-dealing technology created the need for unprecedented secrecy. The instrument of keeping those secrets was the cryptocracy.
The Cold War strategy proved to be economically successful. Without having to risk a full-scale nuclear war and simply by arming the world against communism through weapons marketing, propaganda, and the psychological warfare of the Cold War scheme, the United States achieved a capital goods boom unequaled in modern history. In the most simple terms, arms constituted the bulk of United States exports from World War Two to the present and figured as the single most important industry which maintained the United States trade balance.
The central core of the Dulles brothers' American containment policy grew from the CIA's covert operations and propaganda efforts. The mood of those times is reflected in a top-secret report submitted by the second Hoover Commission to President Eisenhower in September, 1954, and made public by former CIA man Harry Rositzke. The report urged the United States to make its ". . . aggressive covert psychological, political, and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique, and if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy . . . We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game . . . We . . . must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us . . ."
According to Rositzke "The next year a National Security Council directive reaffirmed the Executive's commitment to covert operations. It instructed the CIA to continue creating problems for 'International Communism,' to reduce its strength and its control worldwide, and to 'increase the capacity and the will of peoples and nations to resist International Communism. It specifically reaffirmed CIA's authority to develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations.' "11
Although the Cold War is generally said to date from 1948, with the Berlin Blockade and the Greek civil war, John Foster Dulles contributed to its architecture before he came to office in 1953. He epitomized the fearful gestalt of his generation, took hold of the floundering Cold War strategy, and molded it with his personality. He was fond of quoting Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in the Federalist Papers, "safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct." Hamilton's statement, when taken at face value, seems quite innocent. But in the context of John Foster Dulles' materialistic and puritan upbringing, it is not difficult to see how he construed it to mean something quite different than Hamilton intended. Hamilton's thoughts gave Dulles the moral rationale to try to motivate national political, industrial, and economic conduct by posing an overwhelming external danger—the threat of a nuclear war initiated by the "international Communist conspiracy."
If, at the end of World War II, the growth of our economy, still the strongest and richest in the world, did depend upon the military-industrial complex for sustenance, then Dulles' Cold War saved the U.S. from certain recession. Without the threat of communism, what could the free world have armed against? And if the health of the U.S. economy continues to depend on that merger of military and industrial interests, then we may well expect to see efforts at detente collapse and the Cold War resume as the already inflated armaments industry expands.
In his farewell address to the nation in 1960, President Eisenhower issued his famous warning about the military industrial complex:
"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime—or, indeed, by fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
"Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted."
Eisenhower accurately predicted the course of history. "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
The Cold War was World War III—a war waged largely with words. Yet the men who had won World War II with advanced weaponry were less artful in the use of the new psychological warfare. As the Cold War escalated, propaganda was followed by sabotage, assassinations, "paramilitary" covert operations, and limited "police actions."
America had traditionally been a free and open society. But after the war, U.S. leaders held in their hands an awesome technological superiority. While being the love object of government, the new technologies, especially nuclear energy, made the leaders fearful of losing their monopoly. That fear gave rise to the belief that new secret agencies and operations were needed to guard against technological thefts by foreign governments. The Cold War was a "secret" war in more ways than one.
The psychological war, originally waged only against "enemy" countries, was nevertheless created at home. It was used within the United States, against beliefs and free thought, by a secret bureaucracy which is still supported by all the power of the federal government, but which operates outside the chain of government command. It is a secret bureaucracy become paranoid—a cryptocracy mad with world power.
Although the Central Intelligence Agency has long been the convenient symbol for all those who have committed atrocities in the name of national security, the secret bureaucracy, the cryptocracy, does not consist solely of the CIA. It is as well a vast network of alliances between individuals in a number of government agencies normally thought to be outside the intelligence field.
Since the cryptocracy violates every constitutional principle as a matter of course, and commits every crime known to man in the interest of "national security," it cannot entirely rely on the patriotism of its agents to keep its secrets. Therefore, no single individual is told more than he has a "need to know."
The cryptocracy is a brotherhood reminiscent of the ancient secret societies, with rites of initiation and indoctrination programs to develop in its loyal membership the special understanding of its mysteries. It has secret codes and oaths of silence which reinforce the sense of elitism necessary for the maintenance of its strict loyalty. It is automated, organized in the mode of a computer, where all have access to general knowledge and the most obvious aims and goals, but where the individual is isolated by tribal rituals and compartmentalization.
It is a technocratic organization without ideology, loyal only to an unspoken, expedient, and undefined patriotism. Its members are anonymous. Its funds are secret. Its operational history is secret. Even its goals are secret. It is a degenerative disease of the body politic which has grown rampantly, spreading so invisibly that after nearly four decades its existence is known only to a handful of "decision makers."
The cryptocracy is designed to function like a machine. It also has the feelings of a machine—none at all. But, unlike a machine, it does have ambition. To it, human beings are so much cheap hardware who perform certain set functions which produce certain predetermined results. They are valued relative to cost and efficiency. The cryptocracy is the perfect cybernetic organism—pure logic at the planning level—nothing but automatic response in the field.
If a prospective agent cannot be recruited by an appeal to patriotism, he is bribed. If he cannot be bribed, he is blackmailed. If he refuses to be blackmailed, he is "programmed." If all these fail, he is killed, for it must not be known that he had ever been approached—so important is "national security."
It is sometimes hard to determine whether the cryptocracy is working for or against the interests of the U.S. President, to whom its constituent agencies are supposed to be accountable. Many of its crimes, now a matter of public record, would indicate that it has often worked against, the President. It has, we know, worked against the U.S. Constitution and the American people. It has needlessly caused the death of innocent people who were working for it, just as it has tortured and murdered those who have stood in its way. Documented atrocities and criminal blunders have been revealed by congressional investigations, yet no one has been brought to trial.* Little congressional, judicial, or executive action has been taken to limit its power or ferret out its leaders. Figureheads have been changed, but the organization and the National Security Act which has bred this cancer remains in essence unchanged.
* Since the completion of this book, former CIA Director Richard Helms was given a two-year suspended sentence and fined $2,000 for lying to the United States Congress about the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Chile's Allende government.
The cryptocracy serves big business and spends a good deal of time and energy supplying American corporations with industrial intelligence. These favors, offered only to those companies friendly to the cryptocracy, may be repaid by such things as political campaign contributions to candidates who are either sympathetic to or compromised by the cryptocracy. In the past the cryptocracy has supported both foreign and domestic politicians with such campaign contributions.
The "old boy network" of retired cryptocrats working within major corporations plays an important role in the cryptocracy's international influence. Secret funds are shunted not only from one agency of government to another, but also from agency to corporation and then, under cover of the corporation's legal business activities, throughout the world, wherever expediency dictates.
Through its authorized functions, the cryptocracy controls the United States government. It feeds the executive branch "intelligence reports" which are often slanted and sometimes falsified, so that the policy decisions which result will be those which fit the cryptocracy's game plan.
Like a fifteenth century Machiavellian princedom that has been computerized and automated, the cryptocracy has systematically manipulated the American consciousness. By justifying its existence by citing an exaggerated danger from communism, it has justified its own totalitarianism by convincing key politicians that fire must be fought with fire. The practices of the cryptocracy, once officially sanctioned only in operations outside the U.S., have become internalized. Those practices have included spying, stealing, blackmail, and murder, even within the borders of the country it is supposed to protect and defend.
There is nothing hypocritical about the KGB's employment of totalitarian, police-state tactics. The Soviet equivalent of the CIA, the KGB, is an extension of the Soviet political system, which is totalitarian. Neither is there anything hypocritical about the Chinese use of "brainwashing" on American POWs in Korea. The Chinese have "brainwashed" three and a half million of their own people, though generally they used techniques less drastic than starvation, sleep interruption, and isolation. But the U.S. cryptocracy is the ultimate hypocrisy, subversive to its own government's democratic structure. It operates with methods which are not permitted in most democracies and certainly not permitted by the Constitution of the United States.
In war, a successful campaign greatly depends upon the element of surprise. Since the beginning of human disputes, warriors have found it desirable to keep their strengths and weaknesses concealed.
The use of new technology has been both the strength and the surprise which so often has determined the outcome of war. The first elephant to be outfitted with spikes and used in battle was as great a terror to the bow-and arrow warrior as the atomic bomb was to the Japanese.
The cryptocracy has long known that the only way it can maintain the upper hand in the global power game is to stay in the vanguard of technology. To that end it has employed all the research and development the federal government can buy.
Since World War II the cryptocracy has used electronic technology to manipulate foreign peoples as well as the American people through a campaign of carefully planned Misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. The cryptocracy's existence depends upon such manipulation of Public belief. Since it cannot openly argue its cause, it relies upon persuasion and indoctrination to accomplish its goals and win support for its ends.
The existence of the cryptocracy also depends upon absolute secrecy. Without it they are powerless. Thus the cryptocracy's attempt to control information at its source— the human mind.
It was the CIA which instigated and directed the initial research, and with an invisible hand, kept each group of scientists isolated from the other. Each group researching mind control was kept apart from other groups conducting simultaneous interfacing experiments, so that no one except the Agency would be able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
Bases for mind-control techniques already existed in scientific literature, but in a fragmented, incomplete, and unassimilated state. The cryptocracy enlisted the aid of scientists who then developed these fragments into usable techniques. These scientists worked independently, each on only one small part of the overall plan. And, by and large, they were ignorant of the intended use of the final product of their research.
Operation Mind Control was not the plan of a mere cult of intelligence; it did not stop at intelligence gathering, but went on to instigate active operations on its own. Those conspiracies against freedom which were revealed by the investigations into Watergate, the intelligence community, and multinational corporations are minor compared to the conspiracy of mind control which has developed in this country. Although the first victims of Operation Mind Control were, perhaps, especially suitable personality types for such use, with the advances being made in the psycho-sciences all but a few of us may eventually be victimized.
The power of mind control resides in its use as a superior security technique; as such it is almost as foolproof as that employed by the great Pharaoh of Egypt, who, entombed with the slaves who carried him to his final resting place, had those same slaves killed and buried along with him so that all knowledge of access to the tomb would remain secure for centuries. Mind control arranges that "slaves" of the intelligence community—witnesses, couriers, and assassins—are "protected" from their own memories and guilt by amnesia. These "slaves" may be left alive, but the knowledge they possess is buried deep within the tombs of their own minds by techniques which can keep the truth hidden even from those who have witnessed it. It is the ultimate debriefing, the final security measure short of assassination.
The conspiracy of mind control veils the secret of all secrets. It hides the cabal which possesses its power, so that, even if the CIA and the other intelligence agencies were closed down tomorrow, the cryptocracy would continue to function, for as with the Mafia, "once you are a member, you're a member for life." The power of mind control, and ultimately of the cryptocracy that uses it, resides with those who have culled the fruits of psychoscience since the late 1930s; they now possess the mature body of knowledge upon which the coercive art is built.
To review the labyrinth of events: Out of the natural fear of technology grew an unnatural reliance on secrecy. Secrecy led to covert control and produced a well-organized institution of national security. Institutionalized secrecy directed covert research and produced Operation Mind Control, the ultimate technology of secrecy and control.
Chapter Ten
BRAVE NEW WORLD
IN A SKINNER BOX
The cryptocracy's search for reliable mind-control methods was one of the most far-reaching secret projects ever
undertaken. In addition to research and development in
drugs and hypnosis, CIA funds and cryptocracy guidance
gave impetus to a number of behavior modification projects
carried out in federal prisons and mental institutions. Most
of the projects were arranged secretly so that recipients of
the funds would have no way of knowing that the CIA was
backing the research. Even if they had known of the CIA's involvement, their interest in behavior modification probably would not have been dampened. Previously called conditioned reflex therapy behavior modification, in the sixties and seventies, was becoming the most popular tool of psycho-science since Sigmund Freud asked his first patient to lie down on the couch.
Behavior modification is based on conditioning, but "conditioning" is a big word for a simple form of learning in which a reaction is evoked by an outside action. The reaction is called a response; the outside action is called a stimulus.
In 1927 Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for bis discovery of a method of making dogs salivate at the ringing of a bell. Salivating dogs were not much good to anyone, and it was not for making dogs drool that Pavlov was so honored. He was honored with the world's most prestigious award for making dogs drool on cue. He called his process "conditioning." The dogs' involuntary response, he called a "reflex." Pavlov's discoveries provided the breakthrough which behavioral science needed to begin to control the human mind.
Pavlov had begun in 1906 by seeking a simple model of the activity of the brain. He decided that the salivary reflex in dogs could be just such a model, so he raided the dog pound and cut holes in the animals' cheeks to implant measuring devices for the flow of saliva.
By regularly ringing a bell just before feeding the dogs, he found that the stimulus—the sound of the bell intrinsically unrelated to food, began to evoke the salivation that had initially been observed only when the dogs were eating. His patient studies revealed that the quality, rate, and frequency of salivation changed depending upon the quality, rate, and frequency of the stimuli.
Pavlov's experiments with dogs have been repeated numerous times by different scientists with the same results. Science now agrees that when a hungry dog is given a piece of meat immediately after a bell rings, and when this procedure is repeated a number of times the bell alone will produce the flow of saliva almost as if the bell and not the meat were activating the glands. When the bell rings, not only will a properly conditioned dog salivate but his ears will stand up, he'll turn toward the food source, and even make anticipatory chewing movements. Conditioned reflexes in dogs, however, are a long way from the conditioning of volitional thinking in humans.
But Pavlov established the groundwork by which anyone's emotional stability (Pavlov called it "perpetual equilibration") and sanity could be reliably balanced or unbalanced. To that end the Soviets, and later the People's Republic of China, employed Pavlov's new science for the creation of the totalitarian state.
While the general public in the West may continue to associate behavior modification with Pavlov's conditioning of dogs, the science is actually an ancient one In its modern form it has its roots in the works of Descartes who, in 1664, put forward the idea that every activity of an organism is the reaction to an external stimulus. Experimental studies to test Descartes' idea did not begin until several centuries later. Then, simultaneously experimentation began in a number of different countries.
At the same time Pavlov was experimenting with dogs in Russia, John B. Watson was experimenting with humans in the United States. Watson was the founder of the behaviorist school psychology in the 1920s. His most notorious accomplishment was his series of experiments on an eleven-month-old infant known to history as Little Albert.
Watson showed Little Albert a white rat and the child reacted naturally and tried to pet and cuddle the animal. After Albert had established a playful rapport with the rat, Watson began to adversely condition the lad. Each time the rat would come into Albert's view, Watson would beat the floor with a steel bar and produce a deafening sound. Quite naturally, whenever Albert heard the sound he would jump with fright. Eventually Albert associated the loud sound with the white rat and became frightened of it. Every time the rat came into his view he would begin to cry.
Albert became so adversely conditioned to the rat that he would exhibit fear whenever any small animal came into his view. He became so conditioned that he reacted with equal fear to rabbits, dogs, and a sealskin coat—in short, to anything with fur.
Quite proudly Dr. Watson exclaimed, "Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood . . . I'll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless. Even gross differences in anatomical structure limits are far less than you may think . . . Make him a deaf mute, and I will still build you a Helen Keller . . . Men are built, not born."1
Watson saw things, as Pavlov did, in physical and chemical terms. He was not interested in anything beyond overt and observable behavior. And Watson was only the first in a long line of American psycho-scientists who were to take the mechanistic path to control of the mind.
Pavlov and Watson's classical conditioning did not, however, go far in producing a reliable science of mind-control. In the late thirties Harvard psychologist Burrhus Frederick Skinner discovered new principles of conditioning which allowed more complete control.
Skinner came up with what he called operant conditioning. It was based on the idea that reinforcement (the repetition of either a positive or a negative response to an action) was at the root of all learned behavior. The distinction between classical and operant conditioning was made only because different techniques were used to elicit the responses. In essence, the effects of either kind of conditioning were the same.
The three most common methods of modern behavior therapy are operant conditioning, aversion therapy, and desensitization.
Operant conditioning is the reinforcement of certain behavior by reward (usually food), often accompanied by simultaneous sound or light stimulation. Reinforcement is contingent upon the occurrence of the response, and the reinforcing mechanisms are often built into the environment. When rats are used as subjects, the device to be operated is a bar which, when depressed, delivers the reward of food or water. In this situation the behavior which is reinforced is the pressing of the bar. It makes no difference how the bar is pressed, whether the rat presses the bar with its paw, nose, or tail. Once the bar is pressed, the operation has been performed and the animal is rewarded. The dependent variable in operant conditioning is the response rate—the number of times the bar is pressed. Response rate, or the frequency of the response, is an important factor in judging the success of the operant conditioning.
Aversion therapy is a technique in which an undesirable response is inhibited by a painful or unpleasant reinforcement such as electric shock, noxious odors, or any technique which produces fear and avoidance. It is an ancient form of counter-conditioning, or punishment, which has been widely used in the treatment of homosexuality, stuttering, and alcoholism.
In desensitization the subject is first trained to relax beyond his normal state. He is then presented with images which evoke mild anxiety. At first the images are very mild, and they are repeated until the subject shows no anxiety. Then a stronger image is introduced and the process is repeated. Finally the subject becomes desensitized to even the strongest image. Desensitization has been used to relieve people of phobic fears and anxieties.
Skinner began his experiments by building a number of boxes in which pigeons were required to run mazes and press levers to receive the rewards of birdseed. By manipulating the way the reward was given, Skinner found that he could control the rate and the style of the lever pressing.
Eventually Skinner was able to get pigeons to bob and weave in prescribed ways. He was even able to get birds to distinguish colors by having them peck only at levers of specific colors for food. He soon learned to obtain just about any kind of behavior he desired from a number of different animals.
Skinner concluded that every action is determined by the environment and that all behavior is "shaped and maintained by its consequences." The behaviorists' mechanistic view of man was summed up by Skinner when he said, "If by 'machine' you simply mean any system which behaves in an orderly way, then man and all other animals are machines."
Skinner's subsequent research, however, showed that behavior which is supported by continuous rewards stops when the rewards are withheld. Further experimentation showed that by shifting from continuous to intermittent rewards, the behavior could be kept going even though the rewards became less frequent. This discovery made behaviorism a practical science, for now it could explain how behavior was maintained in the real world.
With unshakable faith in his own science, Dr. Skinner built a large box with a glass window on one side. It was a soundproof cage, much like the ones he'd used in experiments with pigeons and monkeys. But this box was for children, and into it Skinner put his own child.
This "Skinner box" was about as large as a spacious crib. The temperature of the box was carefully controlled, and Skinner testified proudly that "crying and fussing could always be stopped by slightly lowering the temperature." With the soundproof box, Skinner was "never concerned lest the doorbell, telephone, piano, or children at play wake the baby . . ." 'And, he added, "soundproofing also protects the family from the baby."2
Apparently Skinner's scheme to produce "socialized" children was not so successful. In the opinion of the kindergarten teacher of Skinner's youngest daughter, who had received the "benefits'* of spending her early childhood in her daddy's box, she was not an obedient automaton, but a rather independent and even rebellious child.3 Somehow Skinner's programming of his offspring must have failed in his own terms, for it would appear from his writings that Skinner's ideas are quite in line with the dreams of the cryptocrats who would seek to control us all.
In his popular work Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner wrote: "The problem is to free men, not from control, but from certain kinds of control, and it can be solved only if our analysis takes all consequences into account. How people feel about control . . . does not lead to useful distinctions."
Skinner is not only concerned with controlling individuals, he desires to build a controlled society, ruled from crib to coffin by behavior modification. "The intentional design of a culture and the control of human behavior it implies are essential if the human species is to continue to develop," he said.
Today B. F. Skinner is the center of a personality cult. He is the guru and founder of the modern psychophilosophy which holds that it is morally and ethically permissible to change the behavior of others as well as to modify others' belief. About belief Skinner writes, "People must believe that what they are doing has some chance of obtaining what they want or avoiding something to which they are averse. But the chances are in the contingencies. The relation of beliefs to other conditions, such as wants and needs, can be easily stated: to say that desires enter into the causation of beliefs is simply to say that the probability of behavior with which a belief is associated depends not only upon reinforcement but upon a state of deprivation or aversive stimulation."4
Aversion stimulation was the process upon which the Cold War faith was built. The Cold War faith, in turn, loosed the cryptocracy upon the world to murder, maim, or rape the minds of any who posed a real threat to its goals of "defending the free world from communism."
In the words of Lewis Andrews and Marvin Karlins, "The world is, in a sense, one large 'Skinner box' . . ''5 And if this is not already true, it soon may be, because there are behaviorists at work in practically every federal and state institution, as well as in the private sector.
Using federal and state institutions for testing purposes provided many benefits to the cryptocracy. They functioned as recruitment centers, where selected criminals were released to the custody of career spooks who could apply their skills in undercover work. Prisons were also valuable testing grounds.
Philip Hilts, describing the attitude prevalent in both the cryptocracy and prison bureaucracies, wrote: "There are three possibilities for criminals. The first is deterrent: Keep them from doing it again. The second is punishment: Knock the hell out of the bastards; they deserve it. The third is treatment: They're defective; let's fix them."6 Behaviorists who work the prison circuit hold that the last is the only humane way of reducing recidivism. Perhaps. But one also begins to sense in such theorizing a preview of what is to come for the whole society.
"These behavioral engineers are growing mightily in numbers and influence, nourished by a law-and-order administration that though riddled by corruption itself, can still deliver the material goods," wrote David Rorvich. "They are not out to change the world but to make man adjust to it; they seek results, not understanding. A thick-skinned lot they are, not loath to admit the crudity of some of their techniques, claiming results that would take the more elegant psychotherapies and social reforms years to attain . . . What the world needs now in the service of 'curing' its deviant and miserable masses, proclaim the new psycho technologists, is not more prison reform, urban renewal, and nude group gropes but a few well-placed corrective kilovolts in the collective brain."7
The California Medical Facility at Vacaville was the center of a number of behavioral research projects funded by various agencies, including the Veterans Administration, HEW, the Bureau of Prisons, private drug companies, and others. Many of these agencies were fronting for the CIA.
In 1973, there was a "flap" in the press over the testing of drugs by these agencies under the guise of behavior modification. It was revealed that tranquilizers, depressants, sedatives, narcotic antagonists, and hypnotics were being tested in the hospitals and prisons (see Appendix B).
Dr. Leo E. Hollister, a medical investigator for the Veterans Administration, defended the practice: "The exemplary Medical Facility at Vacaville is one of the few places in the country where such [drug] studies are possible . . . at a time when the demands for such facilities are increasing, in response to an urgent public health problem, it would be sad to see them denied to responsible and highly reputable clinical investigators."8
It is debatable whether you can characterize the scientists who participated in all the projects as "responsible and highly reputable." It appears from the evidence that some may rather have been, as Philip Hilts playfully suggests, ". . . hunchbacked wart-infested evil scientists . . ."9
Perhaps the greatest danger to freedom of thought and behavior is posed by the breed of psycho-scientists who call themselves "behaviorists." While most psychologists once concerned themselves with the study of human thought and the rich life of the mind, the behaviorists believe that man's problems can best be understood by studying his actions. What a man thinks, sees, feels, wants and knows— everything that a man is, behaviorists believe, can be most easily understood in terms of what he does.
Behaviorism would appear to be a predictable expression of materialistic cultures, East and West, which value externals above all else. You will seldom hear a behaviorist speak of "will" or even "mind." These are considered unscientific, subjective terms. Instead, the behaviorists speak only of "reflexes" which are reinforced by conditioning from the environment. They look forward to the day when they can conclusively prove that conditioning begins at the moment of conception, and that reflexes are ultimately the very stuff of what was once called the soul! The science of behaviorism portrays the human being as mechanistic protoplasm. The most avantgarde behaviorists have developed an unholy alliance with biochemists who together are exploring genetics, hoping to find the key for breeding selected behavioral characteristics. Certainly a person born with all his limbs will behave differently from a person who is born with genetic damage and without limbs. But beyond that, what some behaviorists are looking for is a genetic factor which controls anger, docility, and other personality tendencies. While many new scientific insights have come from behaviorism, so have many new dangers—especially to the freedom of choice.
"The day has come," said Professor James V. McConnell, head of the Department of Mental Health Research at the University of Michigan, "when we can combine sensory deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis, and the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior." Dr. McConnell expressed the sentiments of behavior modifiers who, like cryptocrats, believe that mankind's salvation resides in the control of individual behavior in an engineered society. But engineered by whom? ".. .
We want to reshape our society drastically," McConnell said, "so that all of us will be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. Today's behavioral psychologists are the architects and engineers who are shaping the Brave New World of Tomorrow."10
In the practical American way—stripped for action—the psychology profession appears to be turning away from psychotherapy and is becoming dependent upon the time and labor-saving practical mechanics of behavior modification depending upon principles developed largely through laboratory experimentation. Voluntary as well as involuntary actions can be conditioned. Once a reflex is trained into a subject, he becomes an automaton, responding to the artificial stimulus to which he has been programmed.
When light shines into the pupil of the eye, it contracts, and when the light is removed, it dilates. This pupillary reflex is involuntary; the individual has no conscious control over it, but it can be conditioned.
C. V. Hudgins demonstrated this by conditioning the pupil to a bell using a light as the unconditioned stimulus. He would turn on the light, which shone directly into the subject's eyes at the same instant he rang a bell. The light made the pupil contract every time just as meat made Pavlov's dog drool.
Hudgins then taught his subjects to use their own hands to operate the bell and light mechanisms. Then he would say "contract" and the subject would press the switch. When he said "relax" the subject would relax and turn off both bell and light. After only a few hours' training, Hudgins found that he could do away with the bell, the hand switch, and the light. He had only to say the word "contract," and the pupil would contract.
A modern apologist of conditioning, Andrew Salter, asserts that hypnosis in essence is the same as conditioning. Salter said that after he had conditioned the reader of his book to contract his pupil, as Hudgins had done, he would take him to an ophthalmologist.
"Doctor," Salter would declare, "here is a splendid hypnotic subject. I control this person so thoroughly that at my command his pupil will contract, and perceptibly."
"Come now," the doctor would say, "you know very well that pupillary contraction is involuntary. You need light for that."
Salter would then tell his conditioned reader "contract," and the reader's pupil would obey every time, and the doctor would be perplexed.
"How do you like hypnotism?" Salter would ask the doctor.
"It's amazing," he would answer, but his interest would diminish after Salter explained how, paralleling Pavlov and Hudgins, the reader's pupil had been conditioned. "Well," he would say, "come back next time when you have some real hypnotism."
"Our doctor is wrong," Salter said. "There, in the conditioned reflex, he had seen the essence of hypnosis. (And parenthetically, when we see that the essence of hypnotism is conditioning—or quite loosely, that the essence of the 'unconscious mind' is conditioning—we are in a strategic position to develop a sound understanding of the deepest wellsprings of human behavior) ."11
The cryptocracy, having discovered the wonders of hypnosis, drugs, behavior modification, and even more revolutionary electrical and sonic manipulations of the brain, learned how to reliably control individual behavior. Whether or not the Constitution protects the individual's free thought and speech, and whether one regards mind control as bondage or a necessary tool for social engineering, one must recognize that the power to control the mind exists—and is being used.
Did Philip Hilts know how close he'd come when he offered his chilling description of the crypto-behaviorists? He wrote: "Suppose a dozen controllers with that incurable twitch for power are meeting, now, in some secret mountain cabin. There, amid piles of rat-behavior charts, rows of cumulative recorders, and reams of human-foibles data, they are designing an environment. They are creating blueprints for a system that would produce the most terrible, violent, and antisocial people possible.'12
notes
Chapter 9
1. Miles Copeland, Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1975)
2. Anthony Cave Brown, ed., The Secret War Report of the OSS (New York, Berkeley, 1976)
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972) Operation Mind Control 295
9. Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973)
10. David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government, 5th ed. (New York, Random House, 1964)
11. Harry Rositzke, CIA's Secret Operations (New York, Reader's Digest Press, 1977)
Chapter 10
1. John B. Watson, Behaviorism, rev. ed. (New York, Norton, 1930)
2. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York, Knopf, 1971)
3. Interview. Name withheld by request.
4. Skinner, op. cit.
5. Lewis M. Andrews and Marvin Karlins, Requiem for Democracy? (New York, Holt, 1971)
6. Philip J. Hilts, Behavior Mod (New York, Harper, 1976)
7. David Rorvich, Behavior Control: Big Brother Comes, Intellectual Digest, Jan. 1974.
8. Leo Hollister, letter to Thomas Clauson, July 3, 1973.
9. Hilts, op. cit.
10. James McConnel, Psychology Today, May, 1970.
11. Andrew Salter, Conditioned Reflex Therapy (New York, Creative Age Press, 1949)
12. Hilts, op. cit.
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