SPIES AND DRUGS AND MIND-CONTROL
The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ – John Marks
John Marks’s excellent exposé on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) highly secretive experiments in mind-control is a riveting, troubling read.
Marks, a freelance journalist, and former US Senate aide and State Department official, ploughed through thousands of pages of begrudgingly released secret documents, as well as interviews and behavioural science studies, to provide a partial glimpse into the CIA’s obsession with controlling human minds and behaviour.
From hallucinogenic drugs and personality testing, to sexual entrapment techniques and inhumane psychological torture, the Agency left no stone unturned in its quest to understand and dominate the human will.
The disturbing smorgasbord of experiments covered in the 1991-published book also includes, of course, hypnosis. While characters such as G H Estabrooks and Morse Allen and their respective CIA capers have previously popped up on this blog, Marks’s book provides a more complete and chronological account of the Agency’s interest in, and uses of, hypnosis.
At the heart of this is the drive to create a real-life ‘Manchurian Candidate’ – an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill, as per the plot of Richard Condon’s famous book. The cultivation of hypnotic ‘patsies’ and killers is something of a throughline in the (nebulous) history of the CIA, with the Agency’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, believing it to be a good means of offing Adolf Hitler, and the plan reaching fever pitch with Fidel Castro and the Cold War.
Colgate University’s Estabrooks is the hypnotist most likely to spring to mind as being associated with the CIA, or OSS when he first began musing on hypnotism’s wartime potential in the 1930s. But he barely features beyond being a vocal expert who was ahead of the zeitgeist: after Pearl Harbour, he submitted his ideas in writing but was (seemingly) ignored. Estabrooks turned instead to writing fiction books warning of the dangers of hypnosis (watch out for a future review!)... and fending off letters from the CIA instructing him to cease-and-desist claiming his association with them.
It was Morse Allen, who headed up Project ARTICHOKE, who properly pursued hypnosis in the early 1950s – mostly, though, to farcical or tragic failure. Hypnotism’s sinister place in the American and global psyches seems to have been cemented instead by Project MK-Ultra (1953-1973), where it was mixed with everything from LSD, mescaline, and magic mushrooms, to sex, and electric shocks.
It is during this ‘hypno-heyday’ we encounter players such as academic researcher Martin Orne, best known for demand characteristics. The CIA generously funded behavioural sciences research via a web of ‘independent’ Foundations and institutions as fronts, but Orne is rare in knowing, and admitting, his work was CIA funded. Orne became a go-to expert on what could be achieved with hypnosis, and particularly provided hypnosis subjects so that the Agency’s Personality Assessment System could be mapped against hypnotisability. (Orne later concluded hypnosis cannot be used for mind-control, as recounted in Kev’s interview with academic Amanda Barnier.)
Alden Sears, a young PhD candidate seeking to define the nature of hypnosis, and Milton Kline, a New York psychologist and onetime president of the American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, also feature in the quest to create hypnotised assassins and accomplices. Kline reckoned he needed six months to create the former, and three the latter, in case you’re wondering.
Ultimately, as Marks points out in the concluding chapter of the book, we’ll never fully or truly know if, when, and how the CIA and other such forces researched and used hypnosis and other ‘mind-control’ techniques and technologies. All we can know for sure is that the inclusion of hypnotism in the arsenal of weapons used in the war against humanity’s free will ensures it remains mystically potent still today.
