In the years that followed, following the end of the Korean War, “brainwashing” grew into an umbrella description for all kinds of radical or nonconformist behavior in the United States. Social scientists and politicians alike have been captivated by this idea. For example, Dutch psychologist Joost Meerloo warned that television was a brainwashing machine, and anti-communist educator J. Merrill Root argued that high schools brainwash children into being weak-willed and vulnerable to communist influence. Meanwhile, popular movies such as 1962 Manchurian Candidatestarring Frank Sinatra, told the thrilling story of Chinese communists who use advanced psychological techniques to transform unsuspecting American prisoners into assassins.
In the military and intelligence community, mind control hovered between myth and science. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unusual case of a pamphlet published anonymously in 1955. Brain Washing: A Synthesis of Russian Textbooks on Psychopolitics., which is said to be a translation of the works of Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the Soviet secret police. Filled with outrageous claims about how the Soviets used psychology and drugs to control the masses, the pamphlet explains how Dianetics (a pseudoscience invented by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology) can prevent brainwashing. There is a unique section covering: As a result, it is widely believed that Hubbard himself wrote this pamphlet as black propaganda, that is, propaganda pretending to be produced by a foreign enemy.
Nonetheless, U.S. officials appear to have taken it seriously. David Seed, a cultural studies scholar at the University of Liverpool, examined National Security Council documents at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, where he found that the NSC's Operations Coordination Committee analyzed the pamphlet as part of its investigation into enemy capabilities. I discovered the truth. One board member wrote that while it may be “fake,” it contains so much accurate information that it could clearly have been written by an “expert.” When it came to indoctrination, government agents made little distinction between black propaganda and so-called expertise.
This idiotic remark may have been thought by NSC investigators to be legitimate, since Hubbard borrowed the term from the same source as many scientists of his era. For example, Hubbard chose the name Dianetics to recall computer scientist Norbert Wiener's cybernetics ideas. Cybernetics is an influential theory of information control systems that has informed both psychology and the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Cybernetics proposed that the brain functions like a machine with input and output, feedback and control. If we can optimize machines, why not brains?
An Excuse for Government Abuse
The fantasy of brainwashing has always been one of optimization. Military experts knew that torture could bring down enemies, but torture took months and was often a violent and messy process. Fast, scientifically informed interrogation methods save time and can potentially be deployed on a large scale. In 1953, that dream led the CIA to invest millions of dollars in MK-Ultra, a project that pumped cash into universities and research programs devoted to memory erasure, mind control, and “truth serum” drugs. Intelligence agencies, worried that their rivals in the Soviet Union and China were controlling minds to spread communism around the world, were willing to try almost anything to fight back. None of the surgeries were too unusual.
One of MK-Ultra's most infamous projects was “Operation Midnight Climax” in San Francisco. Sex workers lured random American men into safe houses and administered LSD, while CIA agents secretly observed their behavior. At Montreal's McGill University, the CIA funded the work of psychologist Donald Cameron, who attempted to erase and “repattern” the minds of mentally ill patients using a combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy. Despite many of his victims suffering from amnesia for years, Cameron was never successful in implanting new thoughts or memories. Marcia Holmes, a science historian who studied brainwashing for the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, said the CIA used Cameron's data to develop a new kind of torture, which the United States adopted as an 'enhanced interrogation' technique. 9/11. “You can apply a scientific interpretation and claim that this worked,” she said. “But it always came down to medieval tactics that people knew from experience.”