DCOTE: “Dirty Wars” Part Two.

“In March 1951, the CIA initiated a “top secret” research program into “all aspects of special interrogation” through “exchange of information and coordination of related programs” (CIA, 19 March 1951). Consequently, in the words of a later Canadian inquiry by George Cooper, QC, “a high-level meeting took place at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal on June 1, 1951.” Attending were Sir Henry T. Tizard, the venerable senior scientist from the U.K. Ministry of Defense; Dr. Omond Solandt, head of Canada’s Defense Research Board (DRB); Dr. Donald O. Hebb, head of the Board’s Behavioral Research and chair of Psychology at McGill; and two Americans, Dr. Caryl Haskins and Commander R.J. Williams. These latter two were identified, in a “handwritten note” found in Board files, as “CIA” (Cooper, 1986, pp. 32–33, Appendix 21).

As noted in the Board’s minutes of the Montreal meeting, “Dr. Hebb suggested that an approach based upon the situation of sensory isolation might lead to some clues” to answering “the central problem” that interested this covert research coalition: that is, “ ‘confession,’ ‘menticide,’ ‘intervention in the individual mind,’—together with methods concerned in psychological coercion.” Speaking at length, Hebb suggested that by “cutting off all sensory stimulation . . . , the individual could be led into a situation whereby ideas, etc. might be implanted.” In response, Sir Henry concurred, stating that these issues “had become a matter of concern in the U.K.,” and adding that “the methods of psychological coercion . . . had been well developed by the [Medieval] inquisition” (Cooper, 1986, Appendix 21).

As consensus formed about “research methods and design,” the group adopted Hebb’s suggestion that “experimental isolation in various forms for the production of sensory isolation” might place subjects “in such a position psychologically that they would be susceptible to implantation of new or different ideas.” Despite the Board’s later claims to the contrary, its minutes indicate clearly that their priority in backing Hebb’s brainwashing work was not defensive but offensive operations against communist enemies. “With respect to . . . useful results,” the Montreal principals agreed, “present methods of offence had moved over into the psychological field and that the whole area of change in public opinion and individual attitude was assuming rapidly increasing importance” (Cooper, 1986, Appendix 21).”

“Three months after the Montreal meeting, in one of the most significant steps for gestation of the CIA’s psychological paradigm, Ottawa’s Defense Research Board (DRB) awarded Dr. Hebb a “secret” grant, under Contract DRB-X38 from 1951 to 1955, for experiments that discovered the devastating psychological impact of sensory isolation. As Hebb explained in his classified 1952 report, this experiment was measuring “whether slight changes of attitude might be effected” by shorter periods of isolation intensified by “wearing (a) light-diffusing goggles, (b) earphones through which white noise may be constantly delivered . . . , and (c) cardboard tubes over his [the subject’s] forearms so that his hands . . . cannot be used for tactual perception of the environment.” In contrast to the modest impact anticipated, Hebb reported that “motivational disturbance appears great,” and among twenty-two subjects “four remarked spontaneously that being in the apparatus was a form of torture.” Evidently encouraged, Hebb concluded, “the contract is opening up a field of study that is of both theoretical and practical significance” (Hebb, Heron, & Bexton, 1952, Appendix 22).”

“The term non-coercive is used above to denote methods of interrogation that are not based upon the coercion of an unwilling subject through the employment of superior force originating outside himself. However, the non-coercive interrogation is not conducted without pressure...” (P. 52)

“If the interrogatee is under detention, the interrogator can also manipulate his environment. Merely by cutting off all other human contacts, “the interrogator monopolizes the social environment of the source.” He exorcises the powers of an all-powerful parent, determining when the source will be sent to bed, when and what he will eat, whether he will be rewarded for good behavior or punished for being bad. The interrogator can and does make the subject's world not only unlike the world to which he has been accustomed but also strange in itself – a world in which familiar patterns of time, space, and sensory perception are overthrown.” (P. 52 – 53.)

“I think, to step back, what you need to know is that the CIA had no experience really in interrogating prisoners. They had never really held prisoners before. And so, they really had no idea how to go about getting information out of people. So they turned to an incredibly strange place, which is a secret program inside the military that had studied torture, and it had studied torture in order to teach our own soldiers how to survive it if they were ever taken captive by some kind of completely immoral regime.”

distinctly two-dimensional...”

Significantly, several follow-up experiments inflicted similarly dangerous trauma on their human subjects. In 1955, one of Hebb’s former students now at the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Maitland Baldwin, confined an Army volunteer inside a Hebbian sensory deprivation box. After forty hours, the subject began “an hour of crying loudly and sobbing in a most heartrending fashion” before kicking his way out. At the prompting of Morse Allen, chief of the CIA’s Artichoke Project, Dr. Baldwin agreed to push the experiment further into “terminal type” tests if the Agency would provide expendable human subjects—a proposal that a CIA medical officer rejected as “immoral and inhuman” (Marks, 1979, pp. 23–25, 32–33, 106, 137–138, 201–202; Brown, 2007, p. 209). Similarly, in 1957 a team of Harvard psychiatrists, funded by the ONR, confined seventeen paid volunteers “in a tank-type respirator” arranged “to inhibit movement and tactile contact.” After seventeen hours, one subject, a 25-year-old dental student, “began to punch and shake the respirator,” his “eyes full of tears, and his voice shaking.” Four volunteers terminated from “anxiety and panic,” and all suffered “degrees of anxiety” (Wexler et al., 1958, pp. 225–233). We have no way of knowing whether such trauma did lasting damage, for none of these researchers—Hebb, Baldwin, or the Harvard psychiatrists—reported any follow-up treatment.”

Our earliest indication of Beecher’s interest in interrogation is a letter, dated February 7, 1947, from Dr. Arthur R. Turner, chief of the U.S. Army’s Medical Intelligence Branch, reading: “Inclosed for your retention is a brochure, dealing with the Dachau Concentration Camp, which has just arrived. I . . . thought it might be of interest to you.” This brochure, by the German aviation medical research unit, detailed 30 mescaline experiments on Dachau inmates by SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Dr. Kurt Ploetner aimed “to eliminate the will of the person examined . . . by the Gestapo.” In words that promised to unlock the mind for interrogation, the report concluded: “If the Messkalin had an effect on the mental state of the P.E.’s, the examining person succeeded in every case in drawing even the most intimate secrets from the P.E. when the questions were cleverly put” (Harvard Medical, October 1945; Turner, 7 February 1947).”

“Although we cannot be certain that SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Ploetner’s report inspired his quest, in September 1951 Dr. Beecher criss-crossed Europe for research “on the subject of the ‘ego-depressant’ drugs, usually called truth serum in the newspapers,” paying particular attention to the Gestapo’s drug of choice, mescaline (Beecher, 21 October 1951). Reflecting the Anglo-American cooperation forged at Montreal, at his first stop, England, Beecher had access to dozens of top scientists.”

“Indeed, at Heidelberg, Dr. Beecher was sharply reminded of the immorality of his research, from a medical perspective, when the Chief U.S. Surgeon for Europe, General Guy B. Denit, advised him “that as a physician under the Geneva Convention he [Denit] could have nothing officially to do with the use of drugs for the purposes in mind and turned me over to G-II.” Consequently, U.S. Army G-II, or Military Intelligence, transferred Dr. Beecher from the moral realm of military medicine to “Oberursel, to the European Command Interrogation Center,” the dark center of the Allied interrogation effort (Beecher, 21 October 1951).”

“It is important to realize that, at the end of the war, the new enemy was the Soviet Union, even though America and Russia had been allies during the war against Nazi Germany. It was, after all, General Patton himself who tried to convince Washington that we were pointing our weapons in the wrong direction and should make all haste to invade Russia and put an end to the Soviet state once and for all. (American schoolchildren never learn that, at the end of World War One,we had tried to do just that.)” (P. 136)

Who was Dr. Schreiber, this ideal partner for Professor Beecher’s secret drug research? He was, in fact, General Walter Schreiber, former medical chief for the Wehrmacht who had presided over “concentration camp . . . experiments on inmates that usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.” After Camp King commended his “high efficiency,” the Pentagon sent him to Texas, where he joined other Nazi doctors at the School of Aviation Medicine, albeit only until May 1952 when complaints about war crimes forced his departure for Argentina (Bower, 1987, pp. 255–258; Koch and Wech, 2003, p. 94; “Nuremberg,” 28 August 1946; “German,” 27 October 1948; “Accused,” 13 February 1952).”

“Consequently, Dr. Beecher returned from Europe warning about LSD’s effect of “severe imbalance, hysteria” on, say, “a battleship’s crew.” In a secret report to the U.S. Army’s surgeon general, he advised this drug should be studied “(1) as aids to obtain suppressed information . . . (2) as threats to security when used by an enemy agent . . . (3) as tools of biological warfare.” The latter was particularly important because “the water supply of a large city could probably be disastrously and undetectably (until too late) contaminated.” Determined that “the United States . . . not get behind in this field for want of an organized plan of attack,” he now planned to intensify dosage in his Boston LSD experiments, saying: “We need to know the effects of larger doses, of prolonged administration of small doses and so on.” Fortunately for Beecher’s plans, a professor he had met in Europe “has promised to send me for study the new L.A.E. (a mono ethyl amide of lysergic acid). This is said to be more excitant to normal individuals than is L.S.D. 25” (Beecher, 4 September 1952).”

“...“There is an abundance of evidence,” intoned Dr. Beecher, condemning such experiments, “that LSD can produce, has produced, lasting, serious damage to young people”...”