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Human Ecology Fund - Magda Hassan - 18-07-2010
APA Monitor, December 1977, pp. 1, 10-11
CIA's Behavior Caper
by Patricia Greenfield
Copyright © 1977 by the American Psychological Association By its own accounts, the Central Intelligence Agency throughout its history has explored any and all means for the control of human behavior. The outline of much of the program has emerged from thousands of recently released CIA documents detaining the agency's varied and wide-ranging activities in the behavioral and medical sciences. While this is now common knowledge, the existence and nature of the program raises perennial questions about the involvement, often unwitting, of broad segments of the social science community. One major component of the CIA's program, dubbed ARTICHOKE, was described in a CIA memo of January 25, 1952, as "the evaluation and development of any method by which we can get information from a person against his will and without his knowledge." An internal review of the terminated ARTICHOKE program, dated January 31, 1975, lists ARTICHOKE methods has having included "the use of drugs and chemicals, hypnosis, and 'total isolation,' a form of psychological harassment." Another major component of the CIA's program, called MKULTRA, explored, according to a memo of August 14, 1963, "avenues to the control of human behavior," including "chemical and biological materials capable of producing human behavioral and physiological changes," "radiology, electro-shock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials."
Specific examples from the CIA's files include:
![[Image: media.gif]](http://www.cia-on-campus.org/gifs/media.gif)
- Giving LSD to unwitting citizens, some of whom were literally picked up in New York and San Francisco bars;
- Using hypnosis and drugs in interrogation;
- Attempting to recruit a neuroscientist to find the 'pain' center of the human brain;
- Shopping for methods to induce amnesia;
- And looking for methods to make persons subvert their principles.
While news of blatant attempts at behavioral control have had immediate shock value, the CIA's support of basic research has had the more lingering effect of posing many difficult and complex questions and issues for psychologists. How were psychologists and other social scientists enlisted by the CIA? What did they do? What, if any, is the scientist's responsibility for the applications of research? How are social scientists affected by social and political forces? What are the implications of covert funding?
Many of these questions and issues are raised by psychologists and other social scientists who themselves have been involved in one way or another with the CIA's program of basic research in the past. Some were interviewed for this article. But it should be kept in mind that they represent a tiny but varied sample of social scientists touched by the project. The psychologists include Carl Rogers of the Center for the Study of the Person, La Jolla, California, Edgar Schein of MIT's Sloane School of Management, Martin Orne (also a psychiatrist) of the University of Pennsylvania and Charles Osgood of the University of Illinois. Interviews were also conducted with psychiatrist Lawrence Hinkle of Cornell Medical Center, sociologists Jay Schulman of the National Jury Project, Richard Stephenson of Rutgers University, and anthropologist Edward Hall, retired from Northwestern University. The interviews yield new information and a broad range of approaches to the ethical and political questions which emerge.
The CIA's key instrument for sponsoring basic research in psychology, sociology and anthropology in the decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, later called the Human Ecology Fund. Although accounts vary, according to Lawrence Hinkle, one of the founders of the Society and a professor at Cornell Medical Center, the origins of Human Ecology lie in a friendship between Allen Dulles and Harold Wolff, a prominent Cornell neuropsychiatrist who had cared for Dulles' son following a war injury. The return of American prisoners of war who had served in Korea evoked government and popular concern about the possible existence of "brainwashing." As director of the CIA, Dulles asked Wolff, an expert on stress, to find out what had happened to the POWs, and the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was set up at Cornell Medical College to address this question through research on Chinese and Soviet methods of interrogation and indoctrination. Hinkle has said that he himself, as well as the Dean of Cornell Medical School, were aware of the Society's CIA origins.
According to Hinkle, Wolff put together a group for this project which included Colonel James Monroe, one-time head of the Psychological Warfare Research Division of the Air Force. Based on classified data, the project yielded important and seminal findings about the so-called "brainwashing" process. Hinkle says that to accomplish open publication of the findings, "a certain number of arms had to be twisted in the government." The major project report was published in the American Medical Association Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1956. For Hinkle, the real lesson of the research was "the right of people to not be forced to testify against themselves." Yet the CIA's goals were not limited to defensive applications; it was also interested in aggressive development of methods for getting information.
Was Hinkle surprised at these applications? "It's like dealing with the military. You see what the enemy is doing, but you have to suspect that your own military people are going to do something very similar. I'm chagrined, but I'm not surprised."
Annual reports to the New York State Department of Social Welfare, with whom the Society was registered as a charitable organization, indicate that, by 1957, the Society had begun to fund research beyond the confines of Cornell.
Minutes of a May 1956 meeting of a CIA Committee state: "At the present time, the Society is so closely connected with (name deleted) University that it is difficult to use it for contracting for external research in other research communities. Therefore, it was proposed that the Society be completely separated from (name deleted) University, a full-time research director of the Society (be) hired making it possible to keep closer touch with the research community and mount projects of interest as requirements developed."
On Cornell's side, Hinkle says that the proposed expansion of the Society made him and the medical school uncomfortable. The Society's headquarters were moved from Cornell to Forest Hills, Long Island, and Colonel Monroe was hired as the new director.
The high-level board included members of the intelligence establishment, as well as prominent psychologists. One board member was Carl Rogers, then at the University of Wisconsin.
In an interview, Rogers told how he became involved with Human Ecology: "James Monroe came to me and told me that Dr. Harold Wolff, a neuropsychiatrist whom I had a lot of respect for, was heading up an organization to do research on personality and so on. Then he told me more and I realized that it had secret aspects to it."
"We did get, I think, a couple of grants from them, actually among the first money we got to do research on psychotherapy. It was the research work we'd been trying to do for a long time but couldn't get money enough to do it. The fact that we got these grants, I think, helped us get the track record so that we began to get some other support. "Then he (Monroe) did ask me to go on the Board." As a board member, Rogers thought the money "was coming from intelligence funds as a cover for secret work that was going on." He said he was asked not to tell people where the money was coming from and saw helping to maintain the cover as part of his duty.
"It was an organization which, as far as I knew at the time, was doing legitimate things.... It's impossible in the present-day climate of attitude toward intelligence activities to realize what it was like in the 1950s. It seemed as though Russia was a very potential enemy and as though the United States was very wise to get whatever information it could about things that the Russians might try to do, such as brainwashing or influencing people. So that it didn't seem at all dishonorable to me to be connected with an intelligence outfit at that time. I look at it quite differently now." Rogers states that now he would not touch covert funding "with a ten-foot pole. Undoubtedly the government has to carry on intelligence activities, but I don't like fooling our people."
The last meeting Rogers remembers did have an overt intelligence angle. He and other people in the field of personality and psychotherapy were given a lot of information about Khrushchev. "We were asked to figure out what we thought of him and what would be the best way of dealing with him. And that seemed to be an entirely principled and legitimate aspect. I don't think we contributed very much, but, anyway, we tried."
Rogers furnished reports of his work to Human Ecology, but had no knowledge of its application by the CIA. While Rogers saw himself as being funded to study techniques and outcomes of nondirective therapy, the CIA seems to have had other ideas. A CIA memo from January 1960 says of Rogers' research that it could provide a mechanism for evaluating certain techniques of influencing human behavior. Rogers never saw the memo.
Edgar Schein, a social psychologist at MIT's Sloane School of Management, served as a consultant to Human Ecology. In an interview, he presented a careful historical chronology of his involvement with intelligence-related research: "It started with the exchange of prisoners of war in 1953, when literally all the psychiatric and psychological resources that were available in the three services were sent on these various teams to Korea to debrief and do therapy and counseling and whatever needed to be done to help the men readjust. All that was written up by me in an article in Psychiatry that appeared in 1956.
"That Psychiatry paper basically laid out things like breaking up groups, moving leaders, withholding mail, using men against each other. And I think, even in that paper, I made the point, which for me is the central one, that none of this seemed to be a new or unusual or esoteric technique.... At that point I was in the Army as an Army research psychologist working at Walter Reed (Army Hospital). Many of the people who subsequently have been, I think, linked to behavior control, at one point or another probably met each other in those days in Washington, either at symposia or at professional meetings, because at that point behavior control was very, very much an issue in relation to what the Communists had done to the U.S. prisoners. And there was a sizable group of people ranging from psychiatrists to social psychologists and Skinnerian psychologists.
"My hunch is that the reason the CIA got interested in all this is because they realized that what we could learn by what had happened to Americans might teach us something (about) how we could deal with enemy captives, which was very much their business. So it doesn't surprise me that they would have begun to funnel money into this kind of research. But at that time at least, the motivation was very clearly U.S. security and how to improve it....
In '56 I got out of the Army, but by then I had gotten extremely interested in the civilian prisoners who were coming out of the mainland of China. These were civilians who had been imprisoned anywhere from one to five years. They were more interesting cases because they had undergone more radical personal and attitudinal change, which had not been the case of the prisoners of war. So all of us were very curious to get a hold of these people and find out how we could explain what appeared to be a more fundamental, radical change. My book, called Coercive Persuasion, specifically deals with those civilian cases and kind of tries to put the whole problem of brainwashing in perspective.
"I was supported in doing some of the interviews and eventually writing the book with CIA money. I did know at that point that it was CIA money. I do not have in my records whether it was a direct grant to the Center for International Studies at MIT from the CIA or whether it was funneled through the Human Ecology Fund."
Schein said that his view at that time toward CIA funding was "totally positive. What people really can't grasp is how much of a change there has been in the public attitude. The CIA was a hero, and the question of taking money from them wasn't by the remotest stretch of the imagination an issue. In fact, one side of this that hasn't been stressed enough in all this is that I suspect we were vastly better off in Vietnam by virtue of this research having been done, because all of the services learned a great deal about how to train people to withstand the rigors of imprisonment....
"I knew a lot of the CIA people when I was in the Army, and they are very sophisticated people in the first place. The notion that we as social scientists really educated them I think is naive in the extreme....
"When I left the Army in 1956, I came to MIT in the Sloane School of Management. Monroe, then head of Human Ecology, proposed that I be a research consultant to look at proposals and essentially judge their scientific merit. I had nothing to do with the other aspects of the problem; in other words, whether it was an important piece of research to do or not.
"As best I can recall, I knew that the Human Ecology Fund was government money; I don't think I knew that it was solely CIA money. The most important element is ... that it didn't matter, because we were not seeing the CIA in any unusual or villainous or different role from the Navy or the Army or any other piece of the U.S. government. It's only in today's context that this even becomes an issue."
In 1961, Schein was invited by the Bureau of Prisons to present a paper entitled "Man Against Man" as part of a management development program for prison wardens. He described the techniques used by the Chinese, pretty much as presented in the original Psychiatry paper. After the talk, the training director encouraged the wardens to apply these techniques in their prisons. Basically, he had transformed Schein's description into a set of recommendations. Schein had been "struck by the degree to which the manner of our own prison management resembled in many ways what the Communists had done." Years later, prison groups linked his talk with the introduction of behavior modification, drugs and psychiatry into prisons.
In response to an article by Jessica Mitford on the subject which appeared in Harper's Magazine in June 1973, Schein wrote: "For me this matter has illustrated how far our values have shifted in ten years. Science has become politicized, and it is clearly no longer safe for the social scientist simply to describe and report his findings...."
In the interview, Schein elaborated. "I think I'm not ready to say we've got to stop publishing. I think that would be a pretty disastrous consequence if scientists began to say, 'Well, this could be misused; therefore I won't publish it at all.' I think rather what the scientist should do is think through the possible uses and misuses and state as clearly as he or she can what those uses and misuses might be and be clear about it.... I think we have enough power to influence the journals. If we haven't insisted on putting those kinds of things in our articles, then that's our problem."
He added, "I have been in a school of management now for 20 years, and I've learned from that professional school experience that you're never neutral. I've swung completely to the other direction. I think that a lot of people simply have never thought about it because they've never been confronted by a public policy issue around their research."
Martin Orne, then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania said that he was asked by Human Ecology to write an article on the use of hypnosis in interrogation. The article, which appeared in 1961 in The Manipulation of Human Behavior, edited by Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer under contract to the Air Force, was entitled "The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation." "I didn't do any work on interrogation," says Orne. I went through and I analyzed what could and could not be done with hypnosis and why."
Orne says, "If the CIA used hypnosis in interrogation after the work I published, I think they were damn fools." On the subject of using hypnosis to control behavior to the point of producing anti-social or self-destructive acts, the chapter notes an intrinsic defect to laboratory tests: "The experimental situation legitimizes much behavior which the subject, in other contexts, views as contrary to his internalized prohibitions." Orne goes on to suggest the following experiment. "A better test of the question would be an experiment performed by someone who is not known to be a university professor. For example, a carnival hypnotist might suggest to a subject obtained as a volunteer during a demonstration that he return after the performance. At that time during a reinduced trance he would suggest that he should rob the local jewelry store and bring him, the hypnotist, the stolen jewelry."
In an interview, Orne said he would only be disturbed about CIA attempts to use hypnosis for the control of agent behavior if they were successful. "I know too much about hypnosis for me to be disturbed about this; because, as is made clear in umpteen papers and umpteen lectures, hypnosis is an extremely ineffective way of controlling behavior."
In addition to money for the chapter on the potential uses of hypnosis in interrogation, Orne also received a grant from Human Ecology to study the nature of hypnosis. He said that the "foundation seemed interested in psychobiological material and subjective phenomena at a time when there wasn't much interest because behaviorism was in vogue....
"The research would have been the same no matter who supported it. And I really don't see how anything we did would help anyone do anything they shouldn't be doing. I believe that in the social sciences we are, fortunately, sufficiently ineffective so that our findings can be made available.
"I think that right now there is a kind of hysterical concern, no matter what people did. Very frankly, with the terror of the times there's no way anybody can really look at it dispassionately. I acknowledged the Human Ecology Fund on some papers because I used them as a perfectly straight thing."
Sociologist Jay Schulman sees Human Ecology from a very different perspective. He tells how he had spent two years at the London School of Economics reading Marx and returned to the United States interested in the sociology of revolution. In 1956, while putting together a project at Rutgers University on the Hungarian Revolution, he and his colleague Richard Stephenson, a sociologist at Rutgers, were offered support by Human Ecology.
According to Schulman, the foundation gave him money to go to London and Paris and interview young Hungarian Marxists. Meanwhile, Human Ecology was supporting a research team at Cornell, led by Hinkle, to interview Hungarian refugees who had come to the United States. Schulman says, "The people who came to the United States were those people who were able to get American visas; they were certainly not the people who had participated in the leadership of the revolution, by definition. Those people went to England, France and to some of the other European countries. And that was why I went to Europe to interview those people."
Although the two research teams were in contact, said Schulman, Hinkle never told him of the CIA link. To Schulman, that was one of the most distressing aspects of the whole thing. Hinkle attributes his silence to the fact that he had signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA. Communication of the data to the CIA was accomplished, says Schulman, through Monroe, who attended all of their research meetings. In addition to this channel of communication, Schulman and Stephenson tell of a seminar on the Hungarian Revolution sponsored by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology at which, he now realizes, CIA people were present. Says Schulman, "Dick Stephenson and I read a paper and I engaged in colloquy with some of these people. I think I was probably the person who spoke the most at this group." Stephenson said that he now feels the CIA was reprehensible because covert funding caused them to deceive their respondents about the source of funds. It seems unlikely Marxist Hungarians would have participated in the study had they known.
At the time, Schulman recalls, he wanted to use the Hungarian material for a PhD thesis in sociology at Columbia under the direction of Robert Lynd. Lynd, an important sociologist who pioneered the study of American class structure, rejected the thesis "on the grounds that any such study had to be tainted by the CIA."
"I didn't believe it at the time; it had to do with my own naivete. Even though my politics were socialist, I had no understanding at that time of how the real world operated.... In 1957, I was myself a quasi-Marxist and if I had known that the study was sponsored by the CIA, there is really, obviously, no way that I would have been associated with that study or that work.... "My view is that social scientists have a deep personal responsibility for questioning the sources of funding, and the fact that I didn't do it at the time was simply, in my judgment, indication of my own naivete and political innocence in spite of my ideological bent."
On October 7, 1977, the Chancellor of the University of Illinois phoned Charles Osgood, a psychology professor there, to inform him that he had received funding through Human Ecology. The University of Illinois was thus one of the 44 universities to receive documents from the CIA, notifying them of past projects in social and medical sciences covertly funded by the agency.
Interviewed on the subject, Osgood said that Human Ecology had supported his cross-cultural study of meaning for three years, from 1959 through 1961. The study used the semantic differential to investigate how people in 31 societies attribute feelings to different aspects of culture. According to Osgood, Human Ecology supported the initial "tool-making" phase of the research, which tested the cross-cultural generality of evaluation, potency and activity as dimensions of affective meaning.
Osgood said that he hit upon Human Ecology from a psychologist at Stanford who had been his boss at Illinois; Osgood was then visiting the Center for Advanced Studies in Palo Alto. This person suggested Human Ecology as a source of funding for cross-cultural research. Osgood learned on seeing the CIA documents from his project that the CIA made a decision to fund his project four to five months before he had submitted a formal proposal or made any contact with Human Ecology. However, he emphasized that, no matter how eager, the CIA never interfered with or attempted to influence the research.
Osgood recounted that while working on the project he was suspicious that one of his colleagues "might be an agent for something, but I didn't know who. He kept disappearing on our early trips. He'd say he was going to bed, and I'd think of something I wanted to ask him and he'd be out for two or three hours. It happened again and again. He had spent many years in Afghanistan as a researcher; he knew his way around other cultures. If he was an agent, he would have probably been sent to facilitate and to keep the CIA informed." CIA records of Osgood's project -- code named MKULTRA 95 -- show that there was, in fact, one witting person on the project staff.
A CIA memo of March 1960 indicates that the agency saw Osgood's project as "directly relevant to agency problems in (name deleted) and technical support of political activities." Osgood said he could well understand CIA interest in his work: "The semantic differential is used in advertising all the time to help sell products. Evaluation, activity and potency zoom out at you from every advertisement. There's nothing I can do about that, you know.
"The physicists have been worried about what was with their brainchild, nuclear energy. Well, in a small way, people like myself have the same problem. You develop a technique which is useful for measuring all sorts of things. It's like Geppetto and Pinocchio. Pinocchio kept wandering off by himself. If we had to do only things that would be safe when other people use them, then there would be very little -- damn little -- we could do in science. But I must admit that what's going on right now doesn't make me too happy."
Another person funded in the area of cross-cultural study of communication was anthropologist Edward Hall, a pioneer in the study of nonverbal communication. Hall said that he received a small amount of money from Human Ecology to support preparation of The Hidden Dimension, his 1966 book on the human use of space in public and private. He commented that funding was difficult because "it was innovative research," and that he had just had a grant renewal turned down from NIH, leaving him "stranded right in the middle of the project."
According to Hall, much of the material for both The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language, a book on nonverbal communication, came out of his work for the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department in the early 1950s. Says Hall, "I put on a very innovative program to train American technicians ... for service overseas, training in intercultural relations, one of the first of its kind."
Hall doubts he would have taken the money, had he known it was coming from the CIA: "I would want to know why were they backing me? What were they getting out of this? I still don't know."
Told that Psychological Assessment Associates, a private consulting firm which was the CIA's successor to Human Ecology, had programs to give agents cultural training, Hall said he didn't know that the CIA was doing anything in cultural training. He agreed, nevertheless, that his books could have been useful for the purpose "because the whole thing is designed to begin to teach people to understand, to read other people's behavior.
"What little I know about the agency, I wouldn't want to have much to do with it," he says of the CIA. "I don't mind training people for the State Department, the United States Information Agency, the Agency for International Development -- even the Army." After all, he notes, "the United States is a world power." Yet, he adds, "Within that overall context, here's a group of people out there doing dirty tricks. I don't know what you do about that.
"But in general (to) the degree to which people read each other accurately, they tend to make more valid decisions. I don't care who you're talking about. Promoting better and more accurate communication is an end in itself. As soon as these start being stated politically, then all sorts of things begin to happen. I'm an apolitical person."
Hall says he feels the anonymous backing of social science does pose problems, but it depends on who is doing it. "John D. Rockefeller is fine, but if it's the mafia, it's dirty pool. How do you work this out? The basic questions are what's going to be done with it and why are they funding you? I don't see how social scientists can answer those questions. Life is extraordinarily complex."
Wilse Webb, a newly-elected member of the American Psychological Associations' Board of Directors, was another beneficiary of the Human Ecology Fund. Originally interviewed two years ago, Webb said he was unaware of the Fund's CIA backing until the interview. He said he had been contacted by an old Air Force friend, Samuel Lyerly, who was then an official of the fund and known to have intelligence connections. Webb said he received a grant to review the Soviet literature on sleep therapy, concluding there was nothing in it after his review.
He also related the following incident: The Russians had developed a machine which induced sleep artificially by passing a low voltage current from the eyes to the back of the head. Sleep induced in this way was supposed to be more restorative than normal sleep; it was claimed that two hours equalled a night of ordinary sleep. One night Webb was called by the Air Force; an intelligence operation had succeeded in getting all the parts of a sleep machine out of the Soviet Union and they wanted Webb's group to investigate. Webb informed them that Lafayette Radio had put out such a machine commercially and was already advertising it in their catalogue.
Webb made a trip to Czechoslovakia to obtain literature on the sleep machine. He said he would have been nervous if he had thought he was doing it for the CIA because the fact would have cast suspicion on his Czech colleagues and friends, as well as himself. He added that he had a Czech working in his lab, and that CIA funding could have made trouble for him. Thus, in Webb's case, covert funding enabled the CIA to obtain the cooperation of foreign scientists who would not otherwise have participated.
Nevertheless, Webb acknowledges that "the atmosphere was different. What was patriotic then is unpatriotic now. Without getting back in that context, I can't figure whether I would have said yes or no. It probably would have been a matter of supreme indifference to me, because I think our attitude to the CIA was much more indifferent than it is now.... I took Air Force money even though I didn't like bombs falling on Vietnam. The fact of the matter is that I was taking away money from the bombs dropping on Vietnam for a good cause.
"Most of us don't think deeply about these things. We search for money to do our job, and I think that many a poor boy would be perfectly happy to get money from the Rockefeller Foundation or Exxon. Right now, for example, if we were terribly conscience-stricken about our money, would we take it from Exxon...? I don't know. Most of us don't think in those particular terms as to where the money comes from. It's what we're going to do with the money."
_________________
Patricia Greenfield is professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles.
http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/behavior.html
Human Ecology Fund - Magda Hassan - 18-07-2010
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
John Marks
9. Human Ecology
Well before Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle finished their brainwashing study for Allen Dulles in 1956, Wolff was trying to expand his role in CIA research and operations. He offered Agency officials the cooperation of his colleagues at Cornell University, where he taught neurology and psychiatry in the Medical College. In proposal after proposal, Wolff pressed upon the CIA his idea that to understand human behavior—and how governments might manipulate it—one had to study man in relationship to his total environment. Calling this field "human ecology," Wolff drew into it the disciplines of psychology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. In the academic world of the early 1950s, this cross-disciplinary approach was somewhat new, as was the word "ecology," but it made sense to CIA officials. Like Wolff, they were far in advance of the trends in the behavioral sciences.
Wolff carved out vast tracts of human knowledge, some only freshly discovered, and proposed a partnership with the Agency for the task of mastering that knowledge for operational use. It was a time when knowledge itself seemed bountiful and promising, and Wolff was expansive about how the CIA could harness it. Once he figured out how the human mind really worked, he wrote, he would tell the Agency "how a man can be made to think, 'feel,' and behave according to the wishes of other men, and, conversely, how a man can avoid being influenced in this manner."
Such notions, which may now appear naive or perverse, did not seem so unlikely at the height of the Cold War. And Wolff's professional stature added weight to his ideas. Like D. Ewen Cameron, he was no obscure academic. He had been President of the New York Neurological Association and would become, in 1960, President of the American Neurological Association. He served for several years as editor-in-chief of the American Medical Association's Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry. Both by credentials and force of personality, Wolff was an impressive figure. CIA officials listened respectfully to his grand vision of how spies and doctors could work symbiotically to help—if not save—the world. Also, the Agency men never forgot that Wolff had become close to Director Allen Dulles while treating Dulles' son for brain damage.
Wolff's specialized neurological practice led him to believe that brain maladies, like migraine headaches, occurred because of disharmony between man and his environment. In this case, he wrote to the Agency, "The problem faced by the physician is quite similar to that faced by the Communist interrogator." Both would be trying to put their subject back in harmony with his environment whether the problem was headache or ideological dissent. Wolff believed that the beneficial effects of any new interrogation technique would naturally spill over into the treatment of his patients, and vice versa. Following the Soviet model, he felt he could help his patients by putting them into an isolated, disoriented state—from which it would be easier to create new behavior patterns. Although Russian-style isolation cells were impractical at Cornell, Wolff hoped to get the same effect more quickly through sensory deprivation. He told the Agency that sensory-deprivation chambers had "valid medical reason" as part of a treatment that relieved migraine symptoms and made the patient "more receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist." He proposed keeping his patients in sensory deprivation until they "show an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure." Then, he said, doctors could "utilize material from their own past experience in order to create psychological reactions within them." This procedure drew heavily on the Stalinist method. It cannot be said what success, if any, Wolff had with it to the benefit of his patients at Cornell.
Wolff offered to devise ways to use the broadest cultural and social processes in human ecology for covert operations. He understood that every country had unique customs for child rearing, military training, and nearly every other form of human intercourse. From the CIA's point of view, he noted, this kind of sociological information could be applied mainly to indoctrinating and motivating people. He distinguished these motivating techniques from the "special methods" that he felt were 'more relevant to subversion, seduction, and interrogation." He offered to study those methods, too, and asked the Agency to give him access to everything in its files on "threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, 'brainwashing, "black psychiatry,' hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents." Beyond mere study, Wolff volunteered the unwitting use of Cornell patients for brainwashing experiments, so long as no one got hurt. He added, however, that he would advise the CIA on experiments that harmed their subjects if they were performed elsewhere. He obviously felt that only the grandest sweep of knowledge, flowing freely between scholar and spy, could bring the best available techniques to bear on their respective subjects
In 1955 Wolff incorporated his CIA-funded study group as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, with himself as president.[1] Through the Society, Wolff extended his efforts for the Agency, and his organization turned into a CIA-controlled funding mechanism for studies and experiments in the behavioral sciences. In the early days of the Society, Agency officials trusted Wolff and his untried ideas with a sensitive espionage assignment. In effect, the new specialty of human ecology was going to telescope the stages of research and application into one continuing process. Speeding up the traditional academic method was required because the CIA men faced an urgent problem. "What was bothering them," Lawrence Hinkle explains, "was that the Chinese had cleaned up their agents in China.... What they really wanted to do was come up with some Chinese [in America], steer them to us, and make them into agents." Wolff accepted the challenge and suggested that the Cornell group hide its real purpose behind the cover of investigating "the ecological aspects of disease" among Chinese refugees. The Agency gave the project a budget of $84,175 (about 30 percent of the money it put into Cornell in 1955) and supplied the study group with 100 Chinese refugees to work with. Nearly all these subjects had been studying in the United States when the communists took over the mainland in 1949, so they tended to be dislocated people in their thirties.
On the Agency side, the main concern, as expressed by one ARTICHOKE man, was the "security hazard" of bringing together so many potential agents in one place. Nevertheless, CIA officials decided to go ahead. Wolff promised to tell them about the inner reaches of the Chinese character, and they recognized the operational advantage that insight into Chinese behavior patterns could provide. Moreover, Wolff said he would pick out the most useful possible agents. The Human Ecology Society would then offer these candidates "fellowships" and subject them to more intensive interviews and "stress producing" situations. The idea was to find out about their personalities, past conditioning, and present motivations, in order to figure out how they might perform in future predicaments—such as finding themselves back in Mainland China as American agents. In the process, Wolff hoped to mold these Chinese into people willing to work for the CIA. Mindful of leaving some cover for Cornell, he was adamant that Agency operators not connected with the project make the actual recruitment pitch to those Chinese whom the Agency men wanted as agents.
As a final twist, Wolff planned to provide each agent with techniques to withstand the precise forms of hostile interrogation they could expect upon returning to China. CIA officials wanted to "precondition" the agents in order to create long lasting motivation "impervious to lapse of time and direct psychological attacks by the enemy." In other words, Agency men planned to brainwash their agents in order to protect them against Chinese brainwashing.
Everything was covered—in theory, at least. Wolff was going to take a crew of 100 refugees and turn as many of them as possible into detection-proof, live agents inside China, and he planned to do the job quickly through human ecology. It was a heady chore for the Cornell professor to take on after classes.
Wolff hired a full complement of psychologists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists to work on the project. He bulldozed his way through his colleagues' qualms and government red tape alike. Having hired an anthropologist before learning that the CIA security office would not give her a clearance, Wolff simply lied to her about where the money came from. "It was a function of Wolff's imperious nature," says his partner Hinkle. "If a dog came in and threw up on the rug during a lecture, he would continue." Even the CIA men soon found that Harold Wolff was not to be trifled with. "From the Agency side, I don't know anyone who wasn't scared of him," recalls a longtime CIA associate. "He was an autocratic man. I never knew him to chew anyone out. He didn't have to. We were damned respectful. He moved in high places. He was just a skinny little man but talk about mind control! He was one of the controllers."
In the name of the Human Ecology Society, the CIA paid $1,200 a month to rent a fancy town house on Manhattan's East 78th Street to house the Cornell group and its research projects Agency technicians traveled to New York in December 1954 to install eavesdropping microphones around the building. These and other more obvious security devices—safes, guards, and the like—made the town house look different from the academic center it was supposed to be. CIA liaison personnel held meetings with Wolff and the staff in the secure confines of the town house, and they all carefully watched the 100 Chinese a few blocks away at the Cornell hospital. The Society paid each subject $25 a day so the researchers could test them, probe them, and generally learn all they could about Chinese people—or at least about middle-class, displaced, anti-Communist ones.
It is doubtful that any of Wolff's Chinese ever returned to their homeland as CIA agents, or that all of Wolff's proposals were put into effect. In any case, the project was interrupted in midstream by a major shake-up in the CIA's entire mind-control effort. Early in 1955, Sid Gottlieb and his Ph.D. crew from TSS took over most of the ARTICHOKE functions, including the Society, from Morse Allen and the Pinkerton types in the Office of Security. The MKULTRA men moved quickly to turn the Society into an entity that looked and acted like a legitimate foundation. First they smoothed over the ragged covert edges. Out came the bugs and safes so dear to Morse Allen and company. The new crew even made some effort (largely unsuccessful) to attract non-CIA funds. The biggest change, however, was the Cornell professors now had to deal with Agency representatives who were scientists and who had strong ideas of their own on research questions. Up to this point, the Cornellians had been able to keep the CIA's involvement within bounds acceptable to them. While Harold Wolff never ceased wanting to explore the furthest reaches of behavior control, his colleagues were wary of going on to the outer limits—at least under Cornell cover.
No one would ever confuse MKULTRA projects with ivory-tower research, but Gottlieb's people did take a more academic—and sophisticated—approach to behavioral research than their predecessors. The MKULTRA men understood that not every project would have an immediate operational benefit, and they believed less and less in the existence of that one just-over-the-horizon technique that would turn men into puppets. They favored increasing their knowledge of human behavior in relatively small steps, and they concentrated on the reduced goal of influencing and manipulating their subjects. "You're ahead of the game if you can get people to do something ten percent more often than they would otherwise," says an MKULTRA veteran.
Accordingly, in 1956, Sid Gottlieb approved a $74,000 project to have the Human Ecology Society study the factors that caused men to defect from their countries and cooperate with foreign governments. MKULTRA officials reasoned that if they could understand what made old turncoats tick, it might help them entice new ones. While good case officers instinctively seemed to know how to handle a potential agent—or thought they did—the MKULTRA men hoped to come up with systematic, even scientific improvements. Overtly, Harold Wolff designed the program to look like a follow-up study to the Society's earlier programs, noting to the Agency that it was "feasible to study foreign nationals under the cover of a medical-sociological study." (He told his CIA funders that "while some information of general value to science should be produced, this in itself will not be a sufficient justification for carrying out a study of this nature.") Covertly, he declared the purpose of the research was to assess defectors' social and cultural background, their life experience, and their personality structure, in order to understand their motivations, value systems, and probable future reactions.
The 1956 Hungarian revolt occurred as the defector study was getting underway, and the Human Ecology group, with CIA headquarters approval, decided to turn the defector work into an investigation of 70 Hungarian refugees from that upheaval. By then, most of Harold Wolff's team had been together through the brainwashing and Chinese studies. While not all of them knew of the CIA's specific interests, they had streamlined their procedures for answering the questions that Agency officials found interesting. They ran the Hungarians through the battery of tests and observations in six months, compared to a year and a half for the Chinese project.
The Human Ecology Society reported that most of their Hungarian subjects had fought against the Russians during the Revolution and that they had lived through extraordinarily difficult circumstances, including arrest, mistreatment, and indoctrination. The psychologists and psychiatrists found that, often, those who had survived with the fewest problems had been those with markedly aberrant personalities. "This observation has added to the evidence that healthy people are not necessarily 'normal,' but are people particularly adapted to their special life situations," the group declared.
While CIA officials liked the idea that their Hungarian subjects had not knuckled under communist influence, they recognized that they were working with a skewed sample. American visa restrictions kept most of the refugee left-wingers and former communist officials out of the United States; so, as a later MKULTRA document would state, the Society wound up studying "western-tied rightist elements who had never been accepted completely" in postwar Hungary. Agency researchers realized that these people would "contribute little" toward increasing the CIA's knowledge of the processes that made a communist official change his loyalties.
In order to broaden their data base, MKULTRA officials decided in March 1957 to bring in some unwitting help. They gave a contract to Rutgers University sociologists Richard Stephenson and Jay Schulman "to throw as much light as possible on the sociology of the communist system in the throes of revolution." The Rutgers professors started out by interviewing the 70 Hungarians at Cornell in New York, and Schulman went on to Europe to talk to disillusioned Communists who had also fled their country. From an operational point of view, these were the people the Agency really cared about; but, as socialists, most of them probably would have resisted sharing their experiences with the CIA—if they had known.[2]
Jay Schulman would have resisted, too. After discovering almost 20 years later that the Agency had paid his way and seen his confidential interviews, he feels misused. "In 1957 I was myself a quasi-Marxist and if I had known that this study was sponsored by the CIA, there is really, obviously, no way that I would have been associated with it," says Schulman. "My view is that social scientists have a deep personal responsibility for questioning the sources of funding; and the fact that I didn't do it at the time was simply, in my judgment, indication of my own naiveté and political innocence, in spite of my ideological bent."
Deceiving Schulman and his Hungarian subjects did not bother the men from MKULTRA in the slightest. According to a Gottlieb aide, one of the strong arguments inside the CIA for the whole Human Ecology program was that it gave the Agency a means of approaching and using political mavericks who could not otherwise get security clearances. "Sometimes," he chuckles, "these left-wing social scientists were damned good." This MKULTRA veteran scoffs at the displeasure Schulman expresses: "If we'd gone to a guy and said, 'We're CIA,' he never would have done it. They were glad to get the money in a world where damned few people were willing to support them.... They can't complain about how they were treated or that they were asked to do something they wouldn't have normally done."
The Human Ecology Society soon became a conduit for CIA money flowing to projects, like the Rutgers one, outside Cornell. For these grants, the Society provided only cover and administrative support behind the gold-plated names of Cornell and Harold Wolff. From 1955 to 1958, Agency officials passed funds through the Society for work on criminal sexual psychopaths at Ionia State Hospital, [3] a mental institution located on the banks of the Grand River in the rolling farm country 120 miles northwest of Detroit. This project had an interesting hypothesis: That child molesters and rapists had ugly secrets buried deep within them and that their stake in not admitting their perversions approached that of spies not wanting to confess. The MKULTRA men reasoned that any technique that would work on a sexual psychopath would surely have a similar effect on a foreign agent. Using psychologists and psychiatrists connected to the Michigan mental health and the Detroit court systems, they set up a program to test LSD and marijuana, wittingly and unwittingly, alone and in combination with hypnosis. Because of administrative delays, the Michigan doctors managed to experiment only on 26 inmates in three years—all sexual offenders committed by judges without a trial under a Michigan law, since declared unconstitutional. The search for a truth drug went on, under the auspices of the Human Ecology Society, as well as in other MKULTRA channels.
The Ionia project was the kind of expansionist activity that made Cornell administrators, if not Harold Wolff, uneasy. By 1957, the Cornellians had had enough. At the same time, the Agency sponsors decided that the Society had outgrown its dependence on Cornell for academic credentials—that in fact the close ties to Cornell might inhibit the Society's future growth among academics notoriously sensitive to institutional conflicts. One CIA official wrote that the Society "must be given more established stature in the research community to be effective as a cover organization." Once the Society was cut loose in the foundation world, Agency men felt they would be freer to go anywhere in academia to buy research that might assist covert operations. So the CIA severed the Society's formal connection to Cornell.
The Human Ecology group moved out of its East 78th Street town house, which had always seem a little too plush for a university program, and opened up a new headquarters in Forest Hills, Queens, which was an inappropriate neighborhood for a well-connected foundation. [4] Agency officials hired a staff of four led by Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe, who had worked closely with the CIA as head of the Air Force's study of Korean War prisoners. Sid Gottlieb and the TSS hierarchy in Washington still made the major decisions, but Monroe and the Society staff, whose salaries the Agency paid, took over the Society's dealings with the outside world and the monitoring of several hundred thousand dollars a year in research projects. Monroe personally supervised dozens of grants, including Dr. Ewen Cameron's brainwashing work in Montreal. Soon the Society was flourishing as an innovative foundation, attracting research proposals from a wide variety of behavioral scientists, at a time when these people—particularly the unorthodox ones—were still the step-children of the fund-granting world.
After the Society's exit from Cornell, Wolff and Hinkle stayed on as president and vice-president, respectively, of the Society's board of directors. Dr. Joseph Hinsey, head of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center also remained on the board. Allen Dulles continued his personal interest in the Society's work and came to one of the first meetings of the new board, which, as was customary with CIA fronts, included some big outside names. These luminaries added worthiness to the enterprise while playing essentially figurehead roles. In 1957 the other board members were John Whitehorn, chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, Carl Rogers, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, and Adolf A. Berle, onetime Assistant Secretary of State and chairman of the New York Liberal Party. [5] Berle had originally put his close friend Harold Wolff in touch with the CIA, and at Wolff's request, he came on the Society board despite some reservations. "I am frightened about this one," Berle wrote in his diary. "If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants. But I don't think it will happen."
There was a lot of old-fashioned backscratching among the CIA people and the academics as they settled into the work of accommodating each other. Even Harold Wolff, the first and the most enthusiastic of the scholar-spies, had made it clear from the beginning that he expected some practical rewards for his service. According to colleague Hinkle, who appreciated Wolff as one the great grantsman of his time, Wolff expected that the Agency "would support our research and we would be their consultants." Wolff bluntly informed the CIA that some of his work would have no direct use "except that it vastly enhances our value . . . as consultants and advisers." In other words, Wolff felt that his worth to the CIA increased in proportion to his professional accomplishments and importance—which in turn depended partly on the resources he commanded. The Agency men understood, and over the last half of the 1950s, they were happy to contribute almost $300,000 to Wolff's own research on the brain and central nervous system. In turn, Wolff and his reputation helped them gain access to other leading lights in the academic world.
Another person who benefited from Human Ecology funds was Carl Rogers, whom Wolff had also asked to serve on the board. Rogers, who later would become famous for his nondirective, nonauthoritarian approach to psychotherapy, respected Wolff's work, and he had no objection to helping the CIA. Although he says he would have nothing to do with secret Agency activities today, he asks for understanding in light of the climate of the 1950s. "We really did regard Russia as the enemy," declares Rogers, "and we were trying to do various things to make sure the Russians did not get the upper hand." Rogers received an important professional reward for joining the Society board. Executive Director James Monroe had let him know that, once he agreed to serve, he could expect to receive a Society grant. "That appealed to me because I was having trouble getting funded," says Rogers. "Having gotten that grant [about $30,000 over three years], it made it possible to get other grants from Rockefeller and NIMH." Rogers still feels grateful to the Society for helping him establish a funding "track record," but he emphasizes that the Agency never had any effect on his research.
Although MKULTRA psychologist John Gittinger suspected that Rogers' work on psychotherapy might provide insight into interrogation methods, the Society did not give Rogers money because of the content of his work. The grant ensured his services as a consultant, if desired, and, according to a CIA document, "free access" to his project. But above all, the grant allowed the Agency to use Rogers' name. His standing in the academic community contributed to the layer of cover around the Society that Agency officials felt was crucial to mask their involvement.
Professor Charles Osgood's status in psychology also improved the Society's cover, but his research was more directly useful to the Agency, and the MKULTRA men paid much more to get it. In 1959 Osgood, who four years later became president of the American Psychological Association, wanted to push forward his work on how people in different societies express the same feelings, even when using different words and concepts. Osgood wrote in "an abstract conceptual framework," but Agency officials saw his research as "directly relevant" to covert activities. They believed they could transfer Osgood's knowledge of "hidden values and cues" in the way people communicate into more effective overseas propaganda. Osgood's work gave them a tool—called the "semantic differential"—to choose the right words in a foreign language to convey a particular meaning.
Like Carl Rogers, Osgood got his first outside funding for what became the most important work of his career from the Human Ecology Society. Osgood had written directly to the CIA for support, and the Society soon contacted him and furnished $192,975 for research over five years. The money allowed him to travel widely and to expand his work into 30 different cultures. Also like Rogers, Osgood eventually received NIMH money to finish his research, but he acknowledges that the Human Ecology grants played an important part in the progress of his work. He stresses that "there was none of the feeling then about the CIA that there is now, in terms of subversive activities," and he states that the Society had no influence on anything he produced. Yet Society men could and did talk to him about his findings. They asked questions that reflected their own covert interests, not his academic pursuits, and they drew him out, according to one of them, "at great length." Osgood had started studying cross-cultural meaning well before he received the Human Ecology money, but the Society's support ensured that he would continue his work on a scale that suited the Agency's purposes, as well as his own.
A whole category of Society funding, called "cover grants," served no other purpose than to build the Society's false front. These included a sociological study of Levittown, Long Island (about $4,500), an analysis of the Central Mongoloid skull ($700), and a look at the foreign-policy attitudes of people who owned fallout shelters, as opposed to people who did not ($2,500). A $500 Human Ecology grant went to Istanbul University for a study of the effects of circumcision on Turkish boys. The researcher found that young Turks, usually circumcised between the ages of five and seven, felt "severe emotional impact with attending symptoms of withdrawal." The children saw the painful operations as "an act of aggression" that brought out previously hidden fears—or so the Human Ecology Society reported.
In other instances, the Society put money into projects whose covert application was so unlikely that only an expert could see the possibilities. Nonetheless, in 1958 the Society gave $5,570 to social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif of the University of Oklahoma for work on the behavior of teen-age boys in gangs. The Sherifs, both ignorant of the CIA connection,[6] studied the group structures and attitudes in the gangs and tried to devise ways to channel antisocial behavior into more constructive paths. Their results were filtered through clandestine minds at the Agency. "With gang warfare," says an MKULTRA source, "you tried to get some defectors-in-place who would like to modify some of the group behavior and cool it. Now, getting a juvenile delinquent defector was motivationally not all that much different from getting a Soviet one."
MKULTRA officials were clearly interested in using their grants to build contacts and associations with prestigious academics. The Society put $1,500 a year into the Research in Mental Health Newsletter published jointly at McGill University by the sociology and psychiatric departments. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, an international culture heroine, sat on the newsletter's advisory board (with, among others, D. Ewen Cameron), and the Society used her name in its biennial report. Similarly, the Society gave grants of $26,000 to the well-known University of London psychologist, H. J. Eysenck, for his work on motivation. An MKULTRA document acknowledged that this research would have "no immediate relevance for Agency needs," but that it would "lend prestige" to the Society. The grants to Eysenck also allowed the Society to take funding credit for no less than nine of his publications in its 1963 report. The following year, the Society managed to purchase a piece of the work of the most famous behaviorist of all, Harvard's B. F. Skinner. Skinner, who had tried to train pigeons to guide bombs for the military during World War II, received a $5,000 Human Ecology grant to pay the costs of a secretary and supplies for the research that led to his book, Freedom and Dignity. Skinner has no memory of the grant or its origins but says, "I don't like secret involvement of any kind. I can't see why it couldn't have been open and aboveboard."
A TSS source explains that grants like these "bought legitimacy" for the Society and made the recipients "grateful." He says that the money gave Agency employees at Human Ecology a reason to phone Skinner—or any of the other recipients—to pick his brain about a particular problem. In a similar vein, another MKULTRA man, psychologist John Gittinger mentions the Society's relationship with Erwin Goffman of the University of Pennsylvania, whom many consider today's leading sociological theorist. The Society gave him a small grant to help finish a book that would have been published anyway. As a result, Gittinger was able to spend hours talking with him about, among other things, an article he had written earlier on confidence men. These hucksters were experts at manipulating behavior, according to Gittinger, and Goffman unwittingly "gave us a better understanding of the techniques people use to establish phony relationships"—a subject of interest to the CIA.
To keep track of new developments in the behavioral sciences, Society representatives regularly visited grant recipients and found out what they and their colleagues were doing. Some of the knowing professors became conscious spies. Most simply relayed the latest professional gossip to their visitors and sent along unpublished papers. The prestige of the Human Ecology grantees also helped give the Agency access to behavioral scientists who had no connection to the Society. "You could walk into someone's office and say you were just talking to Skinner," says an MKULTRA veteran. "We didn't hesitate to do this. It was a way to name-drop."
The Society did not limit its intelligence gathering to the United States. As one Agency source puts it, "The Society gave us a legitimate basis to approach anyone in the academic community anywhere in the world." CIA officials regularly used it as cover when they traveled abroad to study the behavior of foreigners of interest to the Agency, including such leaders as Nikita Khrushchev. The Society funded foreign researchers and also gave money to American professors to collect information abroad. In 1960, for instance, the Society sponsored a survey of Soviet psychology through the simple device of putting up $15,000 through the official auspices of the American Psychological Association to send ten prominent psychologists on a tour of the Soviet Union. Nine of the ten had no idea of the Agency involvement, but CIA officials were apparently able to debrief everyone when the group returned. Then the Society sponsored a conference and book for which each psychologist contributed a chapter. The book added another $5,000 to the CIA's cost, but $20,000 all told seemed like a small price to pay for the information gathered. The psychologists—except perhaps the knowledgeable one—did nothing they would not ordinarily have done during their trip, and the scholarly community benefited from increased knowledge on an important subject. The only thing violated was the openness and trust normally associated with academic pursuits. By turning scholars into spies—even unknowing ones—CIA officials risked the reputation of American research work and contributed potential ammunition toward the belief in many countries that the U.S. notion of academic freedom and independence from the state is self-serving and hypocritical.
Secrecy allowed the Agency a measure of freedom from normal academic restrictions and red tape, and the men from MKULTRA used that freedom to make their projects more attractive. The Society demanded "no stupid progress reports," recalls psychologist and psychiatrist Martin Orne, who received a grant to support his Harvard research on hypnotism. As a further sign of generosity and trust, the Society gave Orne a follow-on $30,000 grant with no specified purpose.[7] Orne could use it as he wished. He believes the money was "a contingency investment" in his work, and MKULTRA officials agree. "We could go to Orne anytime," says one of them, "and say, 'Okay, here is a situation and here is a kind of guy. What would you expect we might be able to achieve if we could hypnotize him?' Through his massive knowledge, he could speculate and advise." A handful of other Society grantees also served in similar roles as covert Agency consultants in the field of their expertise.
In general, the Human Ecology Society served as the CIA's window on the world of behavioral research. No phenomenon was too arcane to escape a careful look from the Society, whether extrasensory perception or African witch doctors. "There were some unbelievable schemes," recalls an MKULTRA veteran, "but you also knew Einstein was considered crazy. You couldn't be so biased that you wouldn't leave open the possibility that some crazy idea might work." MKULTRA men realized, according to the veteran, that "ninety percent of what we were doing would fail" to be of any use to the Agency. Yet, with a spirit of inquiry much freer than that usually found in the academic world, the Society took early stabs at cracking the genetic code with computers and finding out whether animals could be controlled through electrodes placed in their brains.
The Society's unrestrained, scattershot approach to behavioral research went against the prevailing wisdom in American universities—both as to methods and to subjects of interest. During the 1950s one school of thought—so-called "behaviorism,"—was accepted on campus, virtually to the exclusion of all others. The "behaviorists," led by Harvard's B. F. Skinner, looked at psychology as the study of learned observable responses to outside stimulation. To oversimplify, they championed the approach in which psychologists gave rewards to rats scurrying through mazes, and they tended to dismiss matters of great interest to the Agency: e.g., the effect of drugs on the psyche, subjective phenomena like hypnosis, the inner workings of the mind, and personality theories that took genetic differences into account.
By investing up to $400,000 a year into the early, innovative work of men like Carl Rogers, Charles Osgood, and Martin Orne, the CIA's Human Ecology Society helped liberate the behavioral sciences from the world of rats and cheese. With a push from the Agency as well as other forces, the field opened up. Former iconoclasts became eminent, and, for better or worse, the Skinnerian near-monopoly gave way to a multiplication of contending schools. Eventually, a reputable behavioral scientist could be doing almost anything: holding hands with his students in sensitivity sessions, collecting survey data on spanking habits, or subjectively exploring new modes of consciousness. The CIA's money undoubtedly changed the academic world to some degree, though no one can say how much.
As usual, the CIA men were ahead of their time and had started to move on before the new approaches became established. In 1963, having sampled everything from palm reading to subliminal perception, Sid Gottlieb and his colleagues satisfied themselves that they had overlooked no area of knowledge—however esoteric—that might be promising for CIA operations. The Society had served its purpose; now the money could be better spent elsewhere. Agency officials transferred the still-useful projects to other covert channels and allowed the rest to die quietly. By the end of 1965, when the remaining research was completed, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was gone.
Notes
MKULTRA subprojects 48 and 60 provided the basic documents on the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. These were supplemented by the three biennial reports of the Society that could be found: 1957, 1961, and 1961-1963. Wolff's own research work is MKULTRA subproject 61. Wolfs proposals to the Agency are in #A/B, II, 10/68, undated "Proposed Plan for Implementing [deleted]" in two documents included in 48-29, March 5, 1956, "General Principles Upon Which these Proposals Are Based." The Agency's plans for the Chinese Project are described in #A/B, II, 10/48, undated, Subject: Cryptonym [deleted] A/B, II 10/72,9 December,1954, Subject: Letter of Instructions, and #A/B, II, 10/110, undated, untitled.
Details of the logistics of renting the Human Ecology headquarters and bugging it are in #A/B, II, 10/23, 30 August, 1954, Subject: Meeting of Working Committee of [deleted], No. 5 and #A/B, II, 10/92, 8 December, 1954, Subject: Technical Installation.
The Hungarian project, as well as being described in the 1957 biennial report, was dealt with in MKULTRA subprojects 65 and 82, especially 65-12, 28 June 1956, Subject: MKULTRA subproject 65; 65-11, undated, Subject: Dr. [deleted]'s Project—Plans for the Coming Year, July,1957-June,1958; and 82-15,11 April 1958, Subject: Project MKULTRA, Subproject 82.
The Ionia State sexual psychopath research was MKULTRA Subproject 39, especially 39-4, 9 April 1958, Subject: Trip Report, Visit to [deleted], 7 April 1958. Paul Magnusson of the Detroit Free Press and David Pearl of the Detroit ACLU office both furnished information.
Carl Rogers' MKULTRA subproject was # 97. He also received funds under Subproject 74. See especially 74-256, 7 October 1958, Supplement to Individual Grant under MKULTRA, Subproject No. 74 and 97-21, 6 August 1959, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 97.
H. J. Eysenck's MKULTRA subproject was #111. See especially 111-3, 3 April 1961, Subject: Continuation of MKULTRA Subproject 111. The American Psychological Association-sponsored trip to the Soviet Union was described in Subproject 107. The book that came out of the trip was called Some Views on Soviet Psychology, Raymond Bauer (editor), (Washington: American Psychological Association; 1962).
The Sherifs' research on teenage gangs was described in Subproject # 102 and the 1961 Human Ecology biennial report. Dr. Carolyn Sherif also wrote a letter to the American Psychological Association Monitor, February 1978. Dr. Sherif talked about her work when she and I appeared on an August 1978 panel at the American Psychological Association's convention in Toronto.
Martin Orne's work for the Agency was described in Subproject 84. He contributed a chapter to the Society-funded book, The Manipulation of Human Behavior, edited by Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer-(New York: John Wiley & Sons; 1961), pp. 169-215. Financial data on Orne's Institute for Experimental Psychiatry came from a filing with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Attachment to Form 1023.
The quote from John Gittinger came from an interview with him conducted by Dr. Patricia Greenfield. Dr. Greenfield also interviewed Jay Schulman, Carl Rogers, and Charles Osgood for an article in the December 1977 issue of the American Psychological Association Monitor, from which my quotes of Schulman's comments are taken. She discussed Erving Goffman's role in a presentation to a panel of the American Psychological Association convention in Toronto in August 1978. The talk was titled "CIA Support of Basic Research in Psychology: Policy Implications."
Footnotes
1. In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund, but for convenience sake it will be called the Society throughout the book. (back)
2. Also to gain access to this same group of leftist Hungarian refugees in Europe, the Human Ecology Society put $15,000 in 1958 into an unwitting study by Dr. A. H. M. Struik of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. An Agency document extolled this arrangement not only as a useful way of studying Hungarians but because it provided "entree" into a leading European university and psychological research center, adding "such a connection has manifold cover and testing possibilities as well as providing a base from which to take advantage of developments in that area of the world." (back)
3. Professor Laurence Hinkle states that it was never his or Cornell's intention that the Society would be used as a CIA funding conduit. When told that he himself had written letters on the Ionia project, he replied that the Society's CIA-supplied bookkeeper was always putting papers in front of him and that he must have signed without realizing the implications. (back)
4. By 1961 the CIA staff had tired of Queens and moved the Society back into Manhattan to 201 East 57th Street. In 1965 as the Agency was closing down the front, it switched its headquarters to 183i Connecticut Avenue N.W. in Washington, the same building owned by Dr. Charles Geschickter that housed another MKULTRA conduit, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. (back)
5. Other establishment figures who would grace the Human Ecology board over the years included Leonard Carmichael, head of the Smithsonian Institution, Barnaby Keeney, president of Brown University, and George A. Kelly, psychology professor and Society fund recipient at Ohio State University. (back)
6. According to Dr. Carolyn Sherif, who says she and her husband did not share the Cold War consensus and would never have knowingly taken CIA funds Human Ecology executive director James Monroe lied directly about the source of the Society's money, claiming it came from rich New York doctors and Texas millionaires who gave it for tax purposes. Monroe used this standard cover story with other grantees. (back)
7. A 1962 report of Orne's laboratory, the Institute for Experimental Psychiatry, showed that it received two sizable grants before the end of that year: $30,000 from Human Ecology and $30,000 from Scientific Engineering Institute, another CIA front organization. Orne says he was not aware of the latter group's Agency connection at the time, but learned of it later. He used its grant to study new ways of using the polygraph. (back)
Human Ecology Fund - Magda Hassan - 18-07-2010
http://www.osaarchivum.org/files/holdings/other/blinken/pdf/B_SF_14.pdf
Board of Directors
Officers and Staff
Projects
Financial Data
Human Ecology Fund - Magda Hassan - 18-07-2010
April, 1957
A report of a visit where Hungarian refugees were interviewed by medical and psychological staff from the Society and cornell University (also Rutgers)
http://www.osaarchivum.org/files/holdings/other/blinken/pdf/B_SF_29.pdf
Human Ecology Fund - Magda Hassan - 18-07-2010
Seminar on Research on the Hungarian Revolution
http://www.osaarchivum.org/files/holdings/other/blinken/pdf/B_SF_02.pdf
Human Ecology Fund - Jan Klimkowski - 18-07-2010
Quote:Secrecy allowed the Agency a measure of freedom from normal academic restrictions and red tape, and the men from MKULTRA used that freedom to make their projects more attractive. The Society demanded "no stupid progress reports," recalls psychologist and psychiatrist Martin Orne, who received a grant to support his Harvard research on hypnotism. As a further sign of generosity and trust, the Society gave Orne a follow-on $30,000 grant with no specified purpose.[7] Orne could use it as he wished. He believes the money was "a contingency investment" in his work, and MKULTRA officials agree. "We could go to Orne anytime," says one of them, "and say, 'Okay, here is a situation and here is a kind of guy. What would you expect we might be able to achieve if we could hypnotize him?' Through his massive knowledge, he could speculate and advise." A handful of other Society grantees also served in similar roles as covert Agency consultants in the field of their expertise.
In the best tradition of joining the dots, Martin Orne was of course both a founding member and the "shadow chairman" of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, an organization whose purpose was to discredit the memories of those remembering real abuse suffered in covert intelligence projects such as "MK-ULTRA" (in its broadest sense) and at the hands of paedophile networks.
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122
Orne was an expert on using hypnosis to destroy real memories and create false ones.
There is no irony here.
Only deceit, abuse, and the stench of moral hypocrisy.
Human Ecology Fund - Phil Dragoo - 18-07-2010
Reno rode to power on children's coerced “confessions” of abuse by innocent adults.
In power, she justified her use of tanks and gas and arson and snipers to murder the eighty souls at Waco (including the eighteen children in the Concrete Room) by whining “we were getting reports the children were being abused.”
I posit it was part of the op to demonize those victims, just as the BYP and the angelic Ruth Paine sought to demonize Lee Oswald.
The miscreants badgering the children in Florida are on the same page as Hank Hernandez of the LAPD polygraph atrocity: no confession, no candy.
The Sixth Floor op is an extension of the Warren false memory utilizing the Men in Black and their light-blasters.