Harvey and Lee vs. Richard Case Nagell

[Jan Klimkowski]

David - thank you for those comments.

The Americans, British and Russians all scrambled to recruit the Nazi mind control doctors as fervently as they sought to recruit the Nazi rocket scientists. However, this was to complement their own extant programmes.

Here's the late, great, Walter Bowart on Prof Estabrooks of Colgate University

"I can hypnotize a man without his knowledge or consent into committing treason against the United States," boasted Dr. George Estabrooks in the early 1940s.

Book 1994: CHAPTER 4. Operation Mind Control by Walter H. Bowart

"HYPNOSIS COMES OF AGE" by G. H. Estabrooks, PH.D.

There is not space here to detail all the techniques and methods that have received attention from the CIA and others. The basic methodology was revealed decades ago by George Estabrooks - a prominent psychologist under contract to the intelligence services - in his book Hypnotism, first published in 1943. Estabrooks candidly acknowledged that his "main interest has always been the military application of hypnosis." While 'Esty' notes that the "intelligent reader ... will sense that much more is withheld than has been told," there is nevertheless enough information given to construct a fairly accurate picture of the fundamentals of mind control.

What is needed is a subject suffering from what used to be termed Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), and what is now termed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This condition can already exist within the subject or can be created by the therapist. In all cases, however, the condition is created by severe trauma - so severe in fact that the traumatic episode cannot be integrated into the experiences of the core personality.

Far and away the most common cause of MPD is early childhood abuse, usually inflicted by a parent or other adult guardian. As Dr. Frank Putnam stated in 1989: "I am struck by the quality of extreme sadism that is reported by most MPD victims. Many multiples have told me of being sexually abused by groups of people, of being forced into prostitution by family members, or of being offered as sexual enticement to their mother's boyfriends. After one has worked with a number of MPD patients, it becomes obvious that severe, sustained, and repetitive child abuse is a major element in the creation of MPD."

When the abuse is of an extreme nature, the natural human reaction is to build a wall around such experiences, so to speak, by creating a separate and distinct personality to deal with future episodes of abuse. Once the core personality is split, it is then possible to control one or more of the alters that have been created, without the conscious knowledge of the main personality. This, according to Estabrooks, creates the 'Super Spy,' willing to follow orders unquestioningly without even being aware that he is doing so.

Estabrooks only alludes to the severe trauma that is required to create a true multiple, often referring to the trauma euphemistically as a form of hypnotism. At one point, he notes that "[multiple personalities] are caused by a form of hypnotism in the first place! We will see that emotional shock produces exactly the same results as hypnotism." Later, he comes closer to the grim reality when he states: "multiple personality could be both caused and cured by hypnotism. Remember that war is a grim business. Suppose we deliberately set up that condition of multiple personality to further the ends of military intelligence."

Elsewhere, Estabrooks acknowledges that he himself had written previously that: "everyone could be thrown into the deepest state of hypnotism by the use of what termed the Russian method - no holds barred, deliberate disintegration of the personality by psychic torture ... The subject might easily be left a mental wreck but war is a grim business." Also noted is that children make especially good subjects, given that they "are notoriously easy to hypnotize." Which is to say, children are particularly vulnerable to abuse and have more of a tendency to dissociate traumatic experiences, thereby creating alter identities that can be later exploited and controlled.

Bowart and I agree that Estabrooks' reference to the extreme "Russian method" is disingenuous.

As does Dr Colin Ross.

There's the transcript of a radio talk by Ross here. It's all good, provocative, stuff.

Ross and a researcher went to Colgate University and managed to find some original Estabrooks documentation which hadn't been destroyed.

Ross talks about it as follows.

(Martin Orne was a lead MK-ULTRA practioner, who later became a key player in the False Memory Syndrome, which was an attempt to discredit the testimony of victims of abuse and of programmes such as MK-ULTRA. See DPF thread here.)

Colin Ross says:

Martin Orne is tied in to a man named G.H. Estabrooks who was one of probably the top ten leading experts on hypnosis in the 20th Century ... Martin Orne would probably be in the top handful ... G.H. Estabrooks was actually a Canadian by birth, he was a Rhodes Scholar, moved into Upper State New York, and basically spent his professional career in New York at a little college called Colgate College in Hamilton, New York which is not too far from Buffalo. And he published starting in 1943 and going all the way up to 1971 ... very very detailed accounts of creating Multiple Personalities during WWII for various branches of the U.S.A. military. Basically, he called these people Multiple Personalities. He talked about the Multiple Personality literature, and he referred to them as super-spies. The idea is that you create somebody artificially, using hypnosis and other mind control techniques who had no multiple personality before, but now has this second identity. And the second identity is hidden behind a memory barrier, an amnesia barrier, and there is a verbal access code that is used to call out the second identity. So, say this person is a Marine, they will be given some kind of courier assignment to take some documents to ie. Tokyo, but G.H. Estabrooks then calls out the second personality and sticks in some classified information into this second personality. Then there is a switch-back to the main identity, and the person is just going on this routine trip to take documents or technical material over to Tokyo. When he gets to the far end, he uses the example of a Col. Brown who then uses the code signal, and the example he uses in the description is, "The moon is clear." As soon as Col. Brown says "The moon is clear", the second identity pops out, gives the classified message. Col. Brown inserts a classified response, then the person pops back to their regular identity, goes back to the States and thinks they have just gone on a routine assignment. But Estabrooks again says "The moon is clear", the identity pops out, and Estabrooks gets the classified message. He describes using these people in classified courier missions for actual operations, extensively many times during WWII.

W.M. So this is in George Estabrooks's own documentation that he is describing this?

C.R. Right. And he also describes using them for infiltration operations. His idea there is to take somebody who is a loyal, patriotic Marine, and create in him a new identity, of a Communist, and you submerge the previous identity of the patriotic Marine. Now this person who is a created really diehard Communist, goes and infiltrates cells or political organizations and does whatever spy work is required. The idea is that if one of these couriers, or infiltration agents is captured and interrogated, they actually have no idea that they are spies. They generally think they are just on a regular mission, or they generally believe they are Communist, so they can't be interrogated and they can't be made to reveal information so easily. So of course they go in and do whatever infiltration operation is required, and then they come back and they are debriefed by Estabrooks who knows how to get through to the original personality. Some of these people, according to Estabrooks, were actually given dishonorable discharges as part of their cover. One question about that is ... is Estabrooks just telling tall tales? I have been able to build up a lot of documentation about him, and his personal archives are still housed at this Colgate College. I photocopied probably a pile of paper at least a foot deep.

W.M. And what did those documents reveal to you?

C.R. Well, it's all his personal papers, correspondence, background. So I have original documents now photocopies showing that he was employed by the War Department during WWII. He marketed his ideas to every branch of Military Intelligence in the U.S.A. There is tons of correspondence with him and all kinds of Navy, Army, Air Force intelligence people. He did a lot of training at Fort Holobird (?) and other locations. One of the most interesting things about him was that he corresponded pretty regularly with J. Edgar Hoover from the 1930's through to the 1960's. There is a lot of correspondence with Hoover and there were a lot of FBI personnel who came out and visited him and attended his different teachings, and a lot of these people talk about reading his book which came out in 1943, "Hypnotism". In this textbook, he describes these artificial multiple personalities in a lot of detail. I have good documentation that the CIA in Bluebird and Artichoke did pretty much the same experiments. They describe several different things. They don't describe actual operations, but they describe real-life simulations where they are testing these people. They describe the same things that Estabrooks is talking about where they hypnotize somebody, condition a second personality that can stand up to a lie detector test. Also they describe having amnesia barriers and having people go on assignments where they go to another building and rifle through some materials, take some documents and bring them back, and then have no memory of doing this whatsoever. In MKULTRA there was a contractor named Alden Sears who did experiments at the University of Minnesota and the University of Denver which were very similar and there is a lot of documentation of him procuring CIA safe houses for some of his experiments and doing demonstrations with some of these techniques for military and CIA personnel, and creating hypnotic couriers, and so on. So there are several sets of documents that back up that this was done at an experimental level by the CIA successfully. But I don't have documents about their use in operations.

Ameriican mind control research did not begin as a defensive response to Nazi or Soviet brainwashing.