December 28, 2010 | 7:00 am |
Courtesy Of "Wired's Danger Room"
It was an innocent time, the mid-1950s. America wasn’t yet cynical about its geopolitical games in the Cold War. Case in point: In order to maintain its spying edge over the Russkies, the CIA considered the benefits of hypnosis.
Two memos from 1954 and 1955 dredged up by Cryptome show the CIA thinking through post-hypnotic suggestion in extensive, credulous detail. How, for instance, to pass a secret message to a field operative without danger of interception?
Encode it in a messenger’s brain, an undisclosed author wrote in 1954, so he’ll have “no memory whatsoever in the waking state as to the nature and contents of the message.” Even if a Soviet agent gets word of the messenger’s importance, “no amount of third-party tactics” can pry the message loose, “for he simply does not have it in his conscious mind.” Pity the poor waterboarded captive.
But the counterintelligence benefits of hypnosis are even greater.
Picture this course of action, the memo’s author proposes: Hypnotize a group of “loyal Americans” to the point of inducing a “split personality.” Outwardly, they’d appear to be “ardent Communists,” who will “associate with the Communists and learn all the plans of the organization.” Every month, CIA agents will contact them, induce a counter-hypnosis, and these Manchurian Candidates will spill. (Meanwhile, Communist Party meetings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan were open to the public.) While admittedly “more complicated and more difficult,” the agency’s hypno-enthusiast wrote, “I assure you, it will work.”
That’s the level of assurance the memos’ authors provided. A 1955 follow-up openly sneered at the “cautious pessimism” and “congealed pig-headedness” of “academic experts in hypnotism,” waving it away with a pitch to dabble in hypnosis “in a way no laboratory worker could possibly prove.” Indeed, the memo concludes, the CIA had already made some headway: Narcotics were iffy choices for inducing intelligence-useful trances, but on the whole, “drug-assisted hypnosis is essential in CIA work.”
The agency’s mind-control experts gave up some helpful tips, according to the 1955 memo. It’s easier “to hypnotize large numbers of people” than individuals” — alas, there’s no useful elaboration on that point — and in no circumstance can the hypnotizer fail to get a subject to snap out of his trance.
Still, responsible mind-control advocates could scarcely avoid presenting the potential drawbacks of their own courses of action. Since there’s no rigorous scientific way of determining “what limits ‘belief’ may be changed by hypnosis,” that means a “double-think Orwellian world of hypnosis, while unlikely, is not utterly fantastic.”
As it turns out, successful mind control could get out of hand rapidly. Who would have thought?
The CIA’s aborted experiments in hypnosis are long-documented. (There was a pretty good National Geographic Channel exploration of them not long ago.) Its impulses to master the human mind led to the mass LSD tests called MK-ULTRA, which became the subject of acrimonious congressional inquiries.
And three years ago, the CIA’s document dump of its so-called “Crown Jewels” of decades-old secrets went into further detail about its hypnotism fetish.
But in case you find yourself unmoved by the disclosures, consider that you have no foolproof way to determine that you aren’t yourself the subject of mental conditioning.
One of the many benefits of hypnosis, the 1955 memo notes, is a resistance to Commie brainwashing. “Hypnosis may be able on the one hand to pre-condition a subject against the pressure” of enemy influence, it asserts, “or after the fact to help undo the damage.” How do you know they haven’t gotten to you, too?
Check out the full memos:
Image: Library of Congress, via Ephemera Assemblyman
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