THE CIA AND TORTURE ON THE RECORD, PART 2
In January 1997, the CIA released the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, its 1963 guidebook on Interrogation methods for inducing mental and physical agony. Part 1 of the overview appeared in the Winter 1998 NCX.
THE MIND CONTROL CONNECTION
The 1963 CIA guidebook on interro-gation was one of thousands of government efforts to apply behavior science expertise to military and intelligence objectives deemed crucial in the early years of the Cold War.
By 1963, when the manual was authored, the CIA counterintelligence staff had a sizable foundation of government-funded psychological research on which to base their guidebook. In fact, the manual asserted, this knowledge "is of sufficient importance and relevance that it is no longer possible to discuss interrogation significantly without reference to the psychological research conducted in the past decade" (p. 2).
The manual does not explain that many of the "relevant scientific findings" that had become so useful for interrogators were the product of covert funding from the CIA. The bibliography of source materials for the manual is laced with the names of scientists involved with project MKULTRA, the secretive, multimillion dollar program of experiments in mind and behavior control. It is impossible to state definitively how many of the authors in this bibliography were recipients of MKULTRA funds, as the CIA has destroyed and withheld many records on the program. Other specialists listed in the bibliography received Pentagon grants for similar mind-control research.
The published works of some of the CIA's most experienced and relied upon scientific contacts were put to use in the interrogation manual. Two noted Cornell University medical researchers, Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle, authored the CIA's first major study on the indoctrination of prisoners of war. During the 195Os, "the team of Wolff and Hinkle became the chief brainwashing studiers for the U.S. government," according to John Marks, author of the definitive account of the CIA's mind control program. Two of the most enthusiastic academic participants in MKULTRA, Wolff and Hinkle were the president and vice-president, respectively, of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front organization.
Posing as a non-governmental scientific foundation, 1955 -1965, Human Ecology channeled CIA funds into dozens of MKULTRA studies. One researcher financed by Human Ecology, Harvard's Martin Orne, examined potential applications of hypnosis in interrogation. A chapter summarizing his research forms the basis of the ClA manual's discussion of the uses of hypnosis (pp. 96-98). Another Human Ecology grant went to Air Force researcher Albert Biderman to fund his study of "Social Psychological Needs and 'Involuntary' Behavior as Illustrated by Compliance in Interrogation"--another article referred to in the manual.
The CIA also sought help from John Lilly, a prominent researcher of the effects of sensory deprivation. Lilly declined the offer of an MKULTRA contract, but one of his studies is cited in the interrogation manual nonetheless (see pp. 96-98).
Further evidence of the CIA's leading role in applying modern psychological research to interrogation is found in the manual's list of "other bibliographies" (p. 121). A 1960 report used to prepare the manual, "Brainwashing: A Guide to the Literature," was published by none other than the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
Given the manual's repeated instructions to probe and exploit the individual mind-frame of the subject--to place "a tap on the psychological jugular"--it would not be surprising to find that yet another MKULTRA project, the PAS, was incorporated into CIA interrogation strategies.
THE TERROR TRADE
The CIA was loath to release its manuals to the American public, but the agency has readily shared its expert opinions on interrogation with military and intelligence forces around the world. In numerous cases both the CIA and the Defense Department have been implicated in the international dissemination of torture and other political terror tactics. The tricks of the trade were often exported to governments who turned the brutal methods against their own civilians. U.S. involvement in this terror trade has been so widespread that its effects can accurately be described as global in scope.
Most recently, the CIA has come under scrutiny for its training of abusive officers in Guatemala and Honduras--a sampling of the agency's experience in promoting the use of political terror in Central America. During the 1980s one of the agency's major covert operations--the contra war against Nicaragua--was repeatedly plunged into scandal due to its reliance on tactics that blatantly contradicted President Reagan's public praise of the contra guerrillas, whom he described as a force of "freedom fighters." A CIA-produced manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, schooled the contras on the use of "implicit terror," kidnapping and assassination.
U.S. Army instruction programs that spread similar methods in the region are also attracting criticism. According to declassified documents and Defense Department reports, the Army's "Project X," a set of intelligence courses taught since the 1960s in countries throughout Central and South America, included instruction on how to surveil, infiltrate, and undermine dissident groups. The training covered the use of kidnapping, blackmail, and executions. The materials were later consulted in the preparation of manuals used at the Army's School of the Americas (SOA), a Ft. Benning, Georgia, facility that trains Latin American military officers. Among the objectionable tactics later found in the SOA manuals were instructions on the use of hypnotism and "truth serum" drugs in interrogation.
Rep. Joseph Kennedy, a longtime congressional critic of the SOA, remarked that the manuals "taught tactics that come right out of a Soviet gulag and have no place in civilized society--they certainly have no place in any course taught with taxpayer dollars on U.S. soil by the members of our own military." Amnesty International issued a statement calling for full disclosure of the history of Project X and commenting that "it seems highly unlikely that it is merely a coincidence that some of the most widespread and systematic human rights violations have taken place in precisely those countries--Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru--where these materials were most widely used."
By virtue of their proximity to the United States, these countries bore the brunt of the abuses that accompanied U.S. counterp;insurgency aid-but the manuals and lesson plans that shared such tactics were extensively distributed outside this hemisphere as well. In March 1997 the Washington Post reported that according to army documents and former pentagon officials, the Project X materials "were used much more widely, by U.S. personnel working in a variety of countries," including Vietnam, Japan and Iran.
CIA ties to torturers have likewise reached every corner of the globe. The agency created and guided oppressive security programs in several Southeast Asian countries, most notably Vietnam, where the United States ran its most intensive counterinsurgency campaign. During the late 1960s, the CIA set up the infamous Phoenix Program to eradicate the Viet Cong infrastructure. Phoenix is largely remembered as an assassination program (at least 20,000 suspects were murdered), but the operation also established a network of "Provincial Interrogation Centers" that often served as torture chambers. In the years that followed, the advanced counterinsurgency tactics of Phoenix were shared with thousands of foreign police officers trained by CIA instructors in various programs run by the State Department's Agency for International Development (AID), including the Office of Public Safety and the International Police Academy.
The CIA has also been directly linked to torture-training in the Middle East, where the agency for two and a half decades reinforced the repressive state of Shah Mohammed Pahlevi, the dictator of Iran. Shortly before the Shah's overthrow in 1979, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh reported that "a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in the Savak [the lranian secret police] on torture techniques." Jesse J. Leaf, a former head Iran analyst for the CIA, told Hersh, "I do remember seeing and being told of ClA personnel who were there seeing the rooms and being told of torture. And I know that the torture rooms were toured and it was all paid for by the U.S.A."
The human rights abuses promoted by the Pentagon and CIA are compounded by the abuses of government secrecy that continue to conceal many important records on these operations from public scrutiny. In the case of the Project X program, the Defense Department says it has destroyed almost all of the original documentation, purportedly to prevent further dissemination of such unacceptable tactics.
When such crucial records are wiped out of existence, our ability to document the history of U.S. military assistance and training programs is seriously impaired. Fragmentary media reports based on the recollections of former Pentagon officials are no substitute for a complete accounting of Project X. Likewise, neither the CIA's declassification of a couple of incriminating manuals nor its "scrub" of its motley band of foreign assets is a substitute for a comprehensive Congressional investigation of CIA cooperation with regimes that regularly employed terror tactics.
Though much of the documentary evidence remains shielded by official secrecy, a close reading of this manual reveals the value of the pieces we can currently examine.
The "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual is available only through ParaScope, 1430 Willamette #329, Eugene, OR 97401, (Email: EASTERISLE@aol.com (541) 686-5771, <www.parascope.com/>