From mind control experiments to taxpayer-funded black magic to housing Nazi scientists

From mind control experiments to taxpayer-funded black magic to housing Nazi scientists in Boston Harbor, the Commonwealth has an unparalleled dark side to its noted innovation legacy—with many shadows leading to today’s technological titans.

Massachusetts, with its concentration of colleges and the presence of elite institutions like Harvard and MIT, has long been a research hub for what President Dwight Eisenhower notoriously dubbed the “military-industrial complex.”

In 2017, America continues pursuing unsustainably high levels of such spending alongside an aggressive foreign policy that has gone largely unchallenged since 2001. In these circumstances, many symbiotic and often secretive relationships between Boston’s academic world and those who plan and profit from America’s ambitious “national security” endeavors are thriving.

Navigating the convoluted alphabet soup of agencies and institutions that have contributed to this status quo is a confusing affair. Yet many key relationships can be traced to origins in the early Cold War period that informed Eisenhower’s thinking, when high-level policymakers such as the leaders of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency convinced themselves that largely imagined problems such as the “missile gap” and “mind-control gap” between us and the Soviets justified everything from cloak-and-dagger Nazi recruitment to brain mutilation.

Through a series of covert programs with codenames like Artichoke, Bluebird, and MK-Often, the CIA and other agencies devoted extensive resources to researching methods of behavior control beginning even before the 1950s. The most notorious of these, Operation MK-Ultra, was authorized in April 1953 by then-CIA Director Allen Dulles, whose brother John Foster Dulles had just become secretary of state.

By the 1970s, the CIA was destroying its own MK-Ultra files as it came under increasing public scrutiny over a wide range of misdeeds and as many areas of sensitive research were shifting to other agencies. Though largely forgotten, several horrifying anecdotes from the decades after World War II are worth revisiting today, as they shed both light and darkness on the current state of the military-industrial complex in the Commonwealth.

LSD & [CIA] MkULTRA Documentary (1979) - Mission: Mind Control [FULL]

Bright Enlightenment
LSD & [CIA] MkULTRA Mind Control Experiments Documentary (1979) - Mission: Mind Control [FULL] Delve into the dark world of actual CIA Mind Control Experiments 1950s-1970s - Uncovering government agencies (especially the CIA) that secretly tested the effects of LSD on humans. (July 10, 1979) - (Color Enhanced Video)

All Your Brain Are Belong To Us: Neuroscience Goes To War

All Your Brain Are Belong To Us: Neuroscience Goes To War

The Royal Society has just released a fascinating report entitled “Neuroscience, Conflict and Security” that examines the increasing role that neuroscientific research is playing in the military today (thanks to Nick for drawing my attention to it). Indeed, as was reported by Wired’s Danger Room a couple of years ago, the US Air Force has been soliciting research proposals for “innovative science and technology projects to support advanced bioscience research” that include “bio-based methods and techniques to sustain and optimize airmen’s cognitive performance”, “identification of individuals who are resistant to the effects of various stressors and countermeasures on cognitive performance” and “methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” Likewise, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that gave us the Internet) has long shown significant interest in the potential military applications of neuroscience.

As the Royal Society report puts it, military neuroscience can be seen to have “two main goals: performance enhancement, i.e. improving the efficiency of one’s own forces, and performance degradation, i.e. diminishing the performance of one’s enemy” (p.1). It is with reference to these two goals that I will attempt in this post to make some sense of the wider context and implications of neuroscience’s entanglement with contemporary martial practices.

Neuroscience and the Martial Brain

The first of these objectives is essentially concerned with the imperatives that guide the constitution and operation of military force and the related procedures for the recruitment, training, and command of personnel suited to the various demands of twenty-first century warfare. It has been recognised for some time that the particular tempo, lethality, and and technological-intensiveness of contemporary battlespaces is making unprecedented demands on the combatants occupying them. So much so that DARPA would warn a decade ago that “the human is becoming the weakest link in defense systems” and that “sustaining and augmenting human performance will have significant impact on Defense missions and systems.” Of particular concern is the stress being placed on the timely and reliable execution of cognitive processes such as pattern-recognition or decision-making, at least insofar as the human cannot yet be taken ‘out of the loop.’

Thus the Royal Society report tells us that:

major areas of science and technology development, and associated military applications include neuropharmacology and drug delivery for approaches to sustaining and enhancing brain function and performance; functional neuroimaging as an enabling tool for applications such as enhancing cognition or memory and augmenting learning and training; and developing human-machine interfaces as a means to enhance cognitive or physical performance. (p.5)

In one sense, we can view these developments as the continuation of the “anatomo-politics of the human body”, the origin of which Foucault located in the seventeenth century and the modern disciplinary techniques of the military. If the microphysics of power instantiated through the martial drill of Frederick the Great’s soldiers had as their primary object the kinematics of the human body and sought to govern its posture, gait and articulations, technoscientific developments now allow this power to penetrate and shape the brain’s electro-chemical structure and cognitive processes.

Attempts to alter and ‘enhance’ the state of mind of warriors are of course not in themselves new. Since the dawn of recorded history, the need to overcome the potentially paralyzing effects of fear and fatigue has led fighting men to absorb various disinhibiting mind-altering substances, from alcohol and opiates to coca leaves and amphetamines. Yet all of these past neurological hacks may come to be seen as incredibly crude and primitive in comparison to the possible military applications of contemporary neuroscience and the neuropharmacological arsenal it promises to unlock. A whole galaxy of both naturally-occurring and synthetic agents is coming online with the tasks of supporting alertness, concentration, memory, and even in-group bonding and cooperation in the case of oxytoxin.

Yet perhaps the most potentially consequential developments will be found in the area of neural interfacing and its efforts to bring the human nervous system and computing machines under a single informational architecture. The report’s authors note here the benefits that accrue from this research to the disabled in terms of improvements to the range of physical and social interactions available to them through a variety of neurally controlled prosthetic extensions. While this is indeed the case, there is a particular irony to the fact that the war mutilated (which the Afghan and Iraq conflicts have produced in abundance – according to one estimate, over 180,000 US veterans from these conflicts are on disability benefits) have become one of the main testing grounds for technologies that may in the future do much more than restore lost capabilities. Among one of the most striking suggestions is that:

electrode arrays implanted in the nervous system could provide a connection between the nervous system of an able-bodied individual and a specific hardware or software system. Since the human brain can process images, such as targets, much faster than the subject is consciously aware, a neurally interfaced weapons systems could provide significant advantages over other system control methods in terms of speed and accuracy. (p.40)

In other words, human brains may be harnessed within fire control systems to perform cognitive tasks before these even become conscious to them. Aside from the huge ethical and legal issues that it would raise, one cannot but observe that under such a scheme the functional distinction between human operator and machine seems to collapse entirely with the evaporation of any pretense of individual volition.

Winning Cardiac Muscles and Prefrontal Cortexes

There is also a more immediate sense in which neuroscience is being weaponised in that the knowledge it produces is being utilised to directly attack and degrade the adversary’s neural system. The most obvious manifestation of this is the deployment of neuropharmacological agents to incapacitate targets by inducing “loss of consciousness, sedation, hallucination, incoherence, paralysis, disorientation or other such effects” (p.43). Once again, such experimentation with ‘non-lethal’ chemical agents already has previous history, including trials with LSD such as the one below (for less light-hearted accounts, see here and here).

One of the lessons of past experimentation is that ensuring non-lethality is a significant challenge as the doses required to cause incapacitation may not differ greatly in magnitude to life-threatening ones and there remains enduring difficulties in controlling the dispersion and rate of absorption of such agents (as the Russian FSB found out during the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis). So-called non-lethal weapons therefore raise serious issues surrounding the blurring of policing and military operations and the particular status of incapacitating agents under the Chemical Weapons Convention that the report rightly points to.

But the agents considered here, from opioids and benzodiazepines to neuroleptic anaesthetics and bioregulators, may be still too blunt for the most ambitious of neuro-warriors. Indeed, would the most effective neurological weapon not be that which does not even make its target aware of its effects? A 2008 report commissioned by the US Defense Intelligence Agency thus asks:

Can cognitive states and intentions be controlled? Although conflict has many aspects, one that warfighters and policy makers often talk about is the motivation to fight, which undoubtedly has its origins in the brain and is reflected in peripheral neurophysiological processes. So, one question would be “How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight? Other questions raised by controlling the mind: How can we make people trust us more? What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?” (pp.16-17)

Only last week, DARPA revealed a new $4 million research project called “Battlefield Illusion” that will investigate technologies that can “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” through an understanding of “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs.” In 2004, Colonel Michael McKim had already argued that the military should seek to “reframe the perception-space” since in the final instance “a bridge believed to be destroyed, or felt to be unable to hold the tanks, can be just as ‘gone from the war’ as a bridge destroyed by bombs.” The holy grail of military neuroscience is therefore nothing less than the ability to directly hack into and reprogram a target’s perceptions and beliefs, doing away even with the need for kinetic force. So that when neural warfare does truly arrive, we may not even know it.

Militaries and Militarism, Neuropolitics, Science, Technology, War and Collective Violence

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Darpa’s Magic Plan: ‘Battlefield Illusions’ to Mess With Enemy Minds

Darpa’s Magic Plan: ‘Battlefield Illusions’ to Mess With Enemy Minds

Arthur C. Clarke once famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So perhaps it was inevitable that the Pentagon’s extreme technology arm would eventually start acting like magicians — and try to create illusions on the front lines.

In its new budget, unveiled on Monday, Darpa introduced a new $4 million investigation into technologies that will “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions.” Darpa calls the project “Battlefield Illusion.” Of course.

“The current operational art of human-sensory battlefield deception is largely an ad-hoc practice,” the agency sighs as it lays out the project’s goals. But if researchers can better understand “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,” the military should be able to develop “auditory and visual” hallucinations that will “provide tactical advantage for our forces.”

Ultimately, the aim is to “demonstrate and assess the operational effectiveness of advanced human-deceptive technologies on military ground, sea, and airborne systems.”

If this all sounds a little outside the military norm, it shouldn’t. Magicians and generals have had a long-standing relationship — one that produced very real effects during wartime. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to have created dummy submarines and fake tanks to distract Rommel’s army during World War II; some reports even credit him with employing flashing lights to “hide” the Suez Canal. At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment and stagecraft. It was republished in 2009 as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.”

Harry Houdini performing. Photo: Library of Congress

Nor is this the first time that military researchers have tried to confuse foes with sights or sounds that aren’t really there. The defense contractor BAE Systems recently developed an “invisibility cloak” which it says can hide vehicles’ infrared signature. In the early years of the war on terror, many in the defense tech community floated the idea of a “Voice of God” weapon. The idea was to use directed sound waves to convince would-be jihadis that Allah himself was speaking in their ears — and ordering them to put down their suicide belts. The U.S. Army’s Medusa (“Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio“) project had the same goal, but used a different slice of the electromagnetic spectrum — microwaves — to create sounds that seemed to be coming from inside the target’s head. Neither program, as far as I know, ever left the laboratory.

“Battlefield Illusion” is one of several new Darpa programs that attempt to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum to the American military’s advantage. The $3.5 million “Electro-Optical Warfare” effort will look for ways to jam laser-based communications and sensor systems — just like today’s radio frequency jammers mess with cell phones and radars. As adversaries move from old-school radars to newer-school infrared and laser systems to target our planes, these enemies get harder to track; there’s no radar “ping” to trace back. The goal of the $8.5 million “Multi-Function Optical Sensor” is designed to fill this gap, giving U.S. aircraft “an alternative approach to detecting, tracking, and performing non-cooperative target identification.”

There are all sorts of technical challenges to making such a sensor, Darpa notes. Today, there’s no “inexpensive, multiband, large-format, photon-counting, high-bandwidth receivers,” for instance. But if one can be located — and integrated onto an American jet — missile-armed enemies will suddenly become instantly visible. As if by magic.

Military Mics Are Now Being Fitted On Soldiers’ Teeth

Military Mics Are Now Being Fitted On Soldiers’ Teeth

Say hello to this magic military invention, a tiny tooth microphone that enables covert agents to communicate without a (visible) trace. The microphones – aptly dubbed Molar Mics – are clipped onto soldier’s back teeth, enabling state-of-the-art wireless communication on duty.

As with any nascent technology, it’s not yet plain sailing; the human brain requires time to adapt – about three weeks – before optimal audio processing takes place. That being said, audio is perceptible from the get go, as Peter Hadrovic, CEO of Sonitus Technologies, the device’s parent company, explained to Defense One.

“Over the period of three weeks, your brain adapts and it enhances your ability to process the audio,” said Hadrovic. But even “out of the gate, you can understand it,” he assured.

Given the heavily concealed location of the the mics, there’s no need to stress about a conspicuous external microphone giving the game away. Sonitus’s website expounds the Molar Mics’ capacity for wireless communication, eliminating the need for “ear pieces, microphones and wires on the head”.

Rather, sound is input via the users’ jawbone, skull and auditory nerves, with outgoing sound travelling via a radio transmitter on soldiers’ necks. The noise will then travel to an external radio unit manned by the operator. Signal can then be transmitted at the operator’s discretion. It’s being billed as a “new audio path “supersense” for wireless communication”.

If this all sounds a little alien, it needn’t; it’s the same premise as listening, but instead of using your ear canals, you’re using your bones. “Essentially, what you are doing is receiving the same type of auditory information that you receive from your ear, except that you are using a new auditory pathway — through your tooth, through your cranial bones — to that auditory nerve,” explains Hadrovic. “You can hear through your head as if you were hearing through your ear.”

This is no gimmick, with reports that the US Pentagon – the nucleus of American national defence – has signed a $10 million contract (£7.7 million) the California-based company. Nor is this the company’s first involvement with the US government; Sonitus was the beneficiary of early funding from In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit investment firm which supplies the CIA with the latest information technology.

The Military Now Has Tooth Mics For Invisible, Hands-Free Radio Calls

The future of battlefield communications is resting comfortably near your back gums.

Next time you pass someone on the street who appears to be talking to themselves, they may literally have voices inside their head…and be a highly trained soldier on a dangerous mission. The Pentagon has inked a roughly $10 million contract with a California company to provide secure communication gear that’s essentially invisible.

Dubbed the Molar Mic, it’s a small device that clips to your back teeth. The device is both microphone and “speaker,” allowing the wearer to transmit without any conspicuous external microphone and receive with no visible headset or earpiece. Incoming sound is transmitted through the wearer’s bone matter in the jaw and skull to the auditory nerves; outgoing sound is sent to a radio transmitter on the neck, and sent to another radio unit that can be concealed on the operator. From there, the signal can be sent anywhere.

“Essentially, what you are doing is receiving the same type of auditory information that you receive from your ear, except that you are using a new auditory pathway — through your tooth, through your cranial bones — to that auditory nerve. You can hear through your head as if you were hearing through your ear,” said Peter Hadrovic, CEO of Molar Mic creator Sonitus Technologies. He likened the experience to what happens when you eat a crunchy breakfast cereal — but instead of hearing that loud (delightfully marketable) chewing noise, you’re receiving important communications from your operations team.

Your ability to understand conversations transmitted through bone improves with practice. “Over the period of three weeks, your brain adapts and it enhances your ability to process the audio,” said Hadrovic. But even “out of the gate, you can understand it,” he said. (more below)

The Molar Mic connects to its transmitter via near-field magnetic induction. It’s similar to Bluetooth, encryptable, but more difficult to detect and able to pass through water.

Sonitus received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the nonprofit investment arm of the CIA, to develop the concept. Hadrovic declined to say whether CIA operatives had used the device in intelligence gathering. But the Molar Mic has seen the dust of Afghanistan and even played a role in rescue operations in the United States.

In Aug, 2016, a connection Hadrovic met through In-Q-Tel introduced the company to the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx (since rebranded simply DIU). They linked Sonitus to their “warrior in residence” and several other pararescuemen, or PJs, from the Air National Guard’s 131st Rescue Squadron at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, near the DIU headquarters. Pararescuemen airdrop behind enemy lines to rescue downed aircrews.

A few of the airmen took prototypes of the device on deployment to Afghanistan. Although they didn’t use it during missions, they were able to test it repeatedly and offer feedback. Hadrovic said the 14 months of testing were critical to improving the product for use by the military.

In 2017, a few of the PJs from the 131st brought Molar Mic along when they deployed to Texas to help with rescue operations for Hurricane Harvey. Hadrovic said the airmen were pleased with its performance during complicated operations involving water, helicopters, and a lot of external noise.

“This guy is standing in neck-deep water, trying to hoist a civilian up into a helicopter above. He says, ‘There is no way I would be able to communicate with the crew chief and the pilot if I was not wearing your product.’” (More below)

A graph illustrating the communications network of the “Molar Mic” from Sonitus.

The same technology holds the potential for far more rich biometric communication between operators and their commanders, allowing soldiers in the field and their team to get a timely sense of how the soldier is responding to pressure or injury, without him or her having to communicate all of that explicitly. It’s something that the military is working toward.

“As we look to the future human-machine interface… the human creates a lot of information, some of it intentional, some of it unintentional. Speaking is one form of information creation,” says Hadrovic. “Once you’ve made something digital, the information can be interspersed...We have a tremendous wealth of opportunities to communicate out of the person and back to the person, information that can be either collected from them and processed offline and given back in a nice feedback loop. What we’ve done is invested in the platform that will support these future elements.”

The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America

The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America

Fears of Communism during the Cold War spurred psychological research, pop culture hits, and unethical experiments in the CIA

John Frankenheimer's classic The Manchurian Candidate built upon the idea of brainwashed GIs in Korea. (Still from The Manchurian Candidate)

Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm. “Brain-washing Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party,” blared his headline in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. In the article, and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedong’s Red Army used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless, Communist automatons. He called this hypnotic process “brainwashing,” a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao), and warned about the dangerous applications it could have. The process was meant to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”

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It wasn’t the first time fears of Communism and mind control had seeped into the American public. In 1946 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was so worried about the spread of Communism that it proposed removing liberals, socialists and communists from places like schools, libraries, newspapers and entertainment. Hunter’s inflammatory rhetoric didn’t immediately have a huge impact—until three years into the Korean War, when American prisoners of war began confessing to outlandish crimes.

When he was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, Colonel Frank Schwable was the highest ranking military officer to meet that fate, and by February 1953, he and other prisoners of war had falsely confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation.

Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was everywhere. The U.S. military denied the charges made in the soldiers’ “confessions,” but couldn’t explain how they’d been coerced to make them. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides brainwashing? The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will?

The short answer is no—but that didn’t stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combatting it.

“The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”

The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.

Robert Jay Lifton, one of the psychiatrists who worked with the veterans and late studied doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, listed eight criteria for thought reform (the term for brainwashing used by Mao Zedong's communist government). They included things like “milieu control” (having absolute power over the individual’s surroundings) and “confession” (in which individuals are forced to confess to crimes repeatedly, even if they aren’t true). For the American soldiers trapped in the Korean prison camps, brainwashing meant forced standing, deprivation of food and sleep, solitary confinement, and repeated exposure to Communist propaganda.

“There was concern on the part of [the American military] about what had actually happened to [the POWs] and whether they had been manipulated to be [what would later be known as] a ‘Manchurian candidate,’” says Marcia Holmes, a science historian at the University of London’s “Hidden Persuaders” project. “They’re not sleeper agents, they’re just extremely traumatized.”

The early 1950s marked the debut of the military’s studies into psychological torture, and instead of concluding the American soldiers needed rehabilitation, military directors came to a more ominous conclusion: that the men were simply weak. “They became less interested in the fantasy of brainwashing and became worried our men couldn’t stand up to torture,” Holmes says. This resulted in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program (SERE), meant to inoculate men against future attempts at psychological torture by using those same torture techniques in their training.

Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.

Psychiatrists, as well as writers like Aldous Huxley, were aided by the dominant theory of the human mind at the time, known as “behaviorism”. Think of Ivan Pavlov’s slobbering dogs, trained to salivate upon hearing a bell, even if they weren’t tempted with food. The basic assumption of behaviorism was that the human mind is a blank slate at birth, and is shaped through social conditioning throughout life. Where Russia had Pavlov, the U.S. had B.F. Skinner, who suggested psychology could help predict and control behavior. Little wonder, then, that the public and the military alike couldn’t let go of brainwashing as a concept for social control.

With this fear of a mind-control weapon still haunting the American psyche, CIA director Allen Dulles authorized a series of psychological experiments using hallucinogens (like LSD) and biological manipulation (like sleep deprivation) to see if brainwashing were possible. The research could then, theoretically, be used in both defensive and offensive programs against the Soviet Union. Project MK-ULTRA began in 1953 and continued in various forms for more than 10 years. When the Watergate scandal broke, fear of discovery led the CIA to destroy most of the evidence of the program. But 20,000 documents were recovered through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977, filed during a Senate investigation into Project MK-ULTRA. The files revealed the experiments tested drugs (like LSD), sensory deprivation, hypnotism and electroshock on everyone from agency operatives to prostitutes, recovering drug addicts and prisoners—often without their consent.

Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

“Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing,” Melley writes in a 2011 paper for Grey Room. “The concept began as an [O]rientalist propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up. This fiction proved so effective that the CIA’s operations directorate believed it and began a furious search for a real mind control weapon. The search resulted not in a miraculous new weapon but a program of simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy mistreatment. This simulation in turn became the real basis for interrogating detainees in the war on terror.”

While few people take seriously the notion of hypnosis-like brainwashing (outside Hollywood films like Zoolander), there are still plenty who see danger in certain kinds of control. Consider the conversations about ISIS and radicalization, in which young people are essentially portrayed as being brainwashed. “Can You Turn a Terrorist Back Into a Citizen? A controversial new program aims to reform homegrown ISIS recruits back into normal young Americans,” proclaims one article in Wired. Or there’s the more provocative headline from Vice: “Inside the Mind-Control Methods the Islamic State Uses to Recruit Teenagers.”

“I think a program of isolation and rigorous conversion still does have a life in our concept of radicalization,” Melley says. But outside those cases related to terrorism it’s mostly used facetiously, he adds.

“The notion of brainwashing, no less than radicalization, often obscure[s] far more than it reveal[s],” write Sarah Marks and Daniel Pick of the Hidden Persuaders project. “Both terms could be a lazy way of refusing to inquire further into individual histories, inviting the assumption that the way people act can be known in advance.”

For now, the only examples of “perfect” brainwashing remain in science-fiction rather than fact. At least until researchers find a way to hack into the network of synapses that comprise the brain.

The CIA built a secret and groundbreaking mobile text messaging system in the late 1970s

 

The CIA built a secret and groundbreaking mobile text messaging system in the late 1970s

ReutersOne of the most significant US intelligence operations in modern history took place in the heart of Soviet Moscow, during an especially dangerous period of the Cold War.

From 1979 to 1985 — a span that includes President Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech, the 1983 US-Soviet war scare, the deaths of three Soviet General Secretaries, the shooting-down of KAL 007, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — the CIA was receiving high-value intelligence from a source deeply embedded in an important Soviet military laboratory.

Over a period of several years, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer overseeing a radar development lab at a Soviet state-run defense institute, passed the US information and schematics related to the next generation of Soviet radar systems.

Tolkachev transformed the US's understanding of Soviet radar capabilities. Prior to his cooperation with the CIA, US intelligence didn't know that Soviet fighters had "look-down, shoot-down" radars that could detect targets flying beneath the aircraft.

This was vitally important information. Thanks to Tolkachev, the US could develop its fighter aircraft, and its nuclear-capable cruise missiles, to take advantage of the latest improvements in Soviet detection — and to exploit gaps in Soviet radar systems.

The Soviets had no idea that the US was so aware of the state of their technology. If a hot war had ever broken out between the US and the Soviet Union, Tolkachev's information may have given the US a decisive advantage in the air and aided in guiding cruise missiles past Soviet detection systems. Tolkachev helped tip the US-Soviet military balance in Washington's favor. And he's part of the reason why, since the end of the Cold War, a Soviet-built plane has never shot down a US fighter aircraft in combat.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Hoffman's newly published book "The Billion Dollar Spy" is the definitive story of the Tolkachev operation. It's an extraordinary glimpse into how espionage works in reality, evoking the complex relationship between case officers and their sources, as well as the extraordinary methods that CIA agents use to exchange information right under the enemy's nose. And it revisits a compelling example of the unexpected ways in which technology can effect intelligence collection.

 The Billion Dollar SpyIn the 1960s, the CIA was attempting to develop a hand-held two-way communications system that would allow case officers to swap messages with sources without having to physically meet.

There were a few possible advantages to these early Short-Range Agent Communications devices (SRAC). SRAC systems could eliminate detection risks associated with face-to-face meetings. Messages could be sent directly to sources, rather than left in vulnerable "dead drops" or conveyed through risky "brush passes" in public. Agents could transmit instructions in text-form over short distances, using radio frequencies that were far more difficult to intercept than those used for long-range or telephonic communications.

Buster, an early version of SRAC, had "two portable base stations — each about the size of a shoe box — and one agent unit that could be concealed in a coat pocket," Hoffman writes. "With a tiny keyboard one and a half inches square, the agent would first convert a text message into a cipher code, then peck the code into the keypad. Once the data were loaded — Buster could hold 1500 characters — the agent would go somewhere within a thousand feet of the base station and press a 'send' button."

This "primitive text-messaging system" underwent a major upgrade in the late 1970s. The Discus, a greatly improved version of Buster, "eliminated the need for the bulky base station and could transmit to a case officer holding a second small unit hundreds of feet away." The Discus consisted of just two devices that could send and receive messages, along with a keyboard larger and more user-friendly than Buster's. The terminals were small enough to fit in an agent or source's coat pocket.

In addition, the Discus automatically encrypted its messages, eliminating the cumbersome process of converting communications into cipher code. It could also transmit a larger data load than its predecessor.

As Hoffman puts it, the device was "way ahead of its time," a hand-held personal messaging system in an era when there was "nothing remotely like the Blackberry or the iPhone" in existence — except for the Discus.

Although there are no open-source images of the Discus, the CIA has published images of early text-messaging systems used by rival agencies. This East German device from the mid-1960s could wirelessly send and transcribe morse code messages at a range of up to 300 miles. Its Central Intelligence AgencyAt one point, the CIA considered giving Tolkachev a Discus that he could use to signal his handlers for meetings, since just relaying even basic messages in Cold War-era Moscow ran a a significant risk of exposure. Some hoped the Discus could eventually be used to send intelligence: "While the traditional method of dead drops usually took a day or longer to signal, place, and collect, the electronic communicator could transmit urgent intelligence almost instantly," Hoffman writes.

The Discus could be "an invulnerable magic carpet that would soar over the heads fo the KGB."

But there were a few drawbacks. In order to send and receive a message, both users had to remain still. A user would know that a message had arrived when a red light flashed on the device, but had to remain in place until they were positive it had been received. On top of that, even something as basic as checking for a flashing light on a concealed piece of complex electronics could give an operative away in a city swarming with counter-intelligence agents.

The Discus was also obvious spy equipment. There was no plausible cover story that a source could concoct if the device were ever spotted. It would almost necessarily compromise the source and expose the CIA's work.

There was another, more fundamental problem with the technology. The Tolkachev operation was successful in large part because a succession of talented CIA case officers had built up trust with the radar researcher based on little more than hand-written notes and brief and infrequent face-to-face meetings. From that, the CIA was able to build a profile of Tolkachev, analyzing his motives and state of mind and ensuring that the Agency wouldn't alienate, needlessly endanger, or psychologically break one of the most important intelligence assets in US history.

 

Tolkachev's intelligence is part of the reason why advanced Soviet-made jets, such as the MiG-25, have been so ineffective against US aircraft in combat. Wikimedia CommonsThat was only possible because of masterful case officer handling of Tolkachev. "Human intelligence" methods that would still be essential to espionage regardless of how far technology advanced — as Hoffman writes, some of the agents involved in handling Tolkachev realized that in spite of the the Discus's impressive technology, "they still needed to look the agent in the eye, and Tolkachev needed to shake the hand of a case officer he could trust."

Tolkachev was eventually given a Discus, but never successfully used it to contact the CIA. Other, less technically sophisticated methods proved more effective in his case.

Hand-held communication devices are now ubiquitous around the world. The Discus represented a huge step forward, and it's a virtually unknown fore-runner of smart phone technology. But it's still an example of how even the most vaunted technology doesn't automatically solve every problem in intelligence and national security. The human element will always be decisive — no matter how good the technology may look.

Magic, War, and Intelligence: A Few Personalities, Tricks, and Ideas

U.S. Naval Institute
In addition to entertaining audiences for centuries, magicians have used their skills in the art of deception to help the military and the intelligence community. As a special presentation for the 2020 Naval History Conference, world-renowned magician David Copperfield and the former Acting Director of the CIA John McLaughlin discuss “Magic, War, and Intelligence”.

cia manual of trickery

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cia manual of trickery

NAZI Ufo's and The Die Glocke Footage

 "The Nazi-Bell". Witkowski wrote that he first discovered the existence of Die Glocke by reading transcripts from an interrogation of former Nazi SS Officer Jakob Sporrenberg. According to Witkowski, he was shown the allegedly classified transcripts in August 1997 by an unnamed Polish intelligence contact who said he had access to Polish government documents regarding Nazi secret weapons.[3] Witkowski maintains that he was only allowed to transcribe the documents and was not allowed to make any copies. Although no evidence of the veracity of Witkowski’s statements has been produced, they reached a wider audience when they were retold by British author Nick Cook, who added his own views to Witkowski’s statements in The Hunt for Zero Point.[4] Author Jason Colavito wrote that Witkowski's claims were "recycled" from 1960s rumors of Nazi occult science first published in Morning of the Magicians, and describes Die Glocke as "a device few outside of fringe culture think actually existed. In short, it looks to be a hoax, or at least a wild exaggeration."[5] Description[edit] Allegedly an experiment carried out by Third Reich scientists working for the SS in a German facility known as Der Riese ("The Giant")[6] near the Wenceslaus mine and close to the Czech border, Die Glocke is described as being a device "made out of a hard, heavy metal" approximately 2.7 metres (9 ft) wide and 3.7 to 4.6 metres (12 to 15 ft) high, having a shape similar to that of a large bell. According to an interview of Witkowski by Cook, this device ostensibly contained two counter-rotating cylinders which would be "filled with a mercury-like substance, violet in color". This metallic liquid was code-named "Xerum 525" and was "stored in a tall thin thermos flask a meter high encased in lead".[7] Additional substances said to be employed in the experiments, referred to as Leichtmetall (light metal), "included thorium and beryllium peroxides".[7] Witkowski describes Die Glocke, when activated, as having an effect zone extending out 150 to 200 metres (490 to 660 ft). Within the zone, crystals would form in animal tissue, blood would gel & separate while plants would decompose into a grease like substance

SOUND ALCHEMY Documentary - Hermetic Sound Science - Egyptian Roots of M...

SOUND ALCHEMY Documentary - Hermetic Sound Science - Egyptian Roots of Modern Sound Healing


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