Full text of "Operation Mind Control - Researcher's Edition"

David, Young Air Force Sergeant He Was One Of The Victims. "Ever since I got out of the service I haven't been able to give a day-by-day account of what happened to me during those four years. The scary thing is that I still have a horrible fear of talking. I have a tendency to speed up my speech when I'm being pressed on something; and I get very tense when anyone asks me about my service duties. "Something has happened to my mind — " This expensive gold pin, in which is set a rare white jade, diamonds, and emeralds, was worn on special occasions by a 'Presidential Model". Each of the stones as well as the symbol of the butterfly were used in programming the woman who wore it. The pin also served as a signal to handlers. It told them that the beauty who wore it had received the 'Monarch Programming' and would fall under the spell of anyone who possessed the codes, cues and Mind Control was largely a male chauvinist's game. About The Author W.H. Bowart was awarded the McMahon Scholarship in journalism to the University of Oklahoma. In 1965 he founded the New York Weekly The East Village Other. That same year he founded The Underground Press Syndicate which quickly grew to include 200 papers around the world. Since that time he has edited The Aspen Daily News, The Port Townsend Daily News and Palm Springs Life. He has written numerous articles and several novels under a variety of noms de plume. He is on the Advisory Board of The Freedom of Thought Foundation and, at present is making a documentary based on this book. 4 Operation Mind Control Page numbering errata: Several pages had to be inserted and are marked with" a" For example if a page had to be inserted between this one and the next one h would be marked "4a". There is no page 571 so please don't look for h, or write us asking for h. OPERATION MIND CONTROL By W.H. Bowart RESEARCHER'S EDITION 6 W.H. Bowart Published by FLATLAND EDITIONS P.O. Box 2420 Fort Bragg, Ca. 95437 ©1978 by WJi Bowart Revised expanded second edition common law copyright 1994 by International Artists Trust of Eiran First Edition published by Dell Publishing Company 1978 AD rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specuicaiA lor inclusion in a magazine or newspaper. NOTICE TO COPYMACHINE OPERATORS: COPY ONLY REGISTERED COPIES, NUMBERED AND WITH THE ORIGINAL SIGNATURE AND SEAL MADE OUT IN THE NAME OF THE OWNER. DO NOT COPY THIS WITHOUT SIGNED AND SEALED SHAREWARE COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT SHOWING ROYALTIES PAID AND THE NUMBER OF COPIES AUTHORIZED TO THE UCENSCEE. ( You will be asked to mail the permits back in an attached self-addressed stamped envelope.) Cover price: $80 Photocopying of this book is permitted in this way, as shareware, by sending a royalty check for $15.00 per copy to the author, WJi. Bowart, P.O. Box 35072, Tucson, Arizona 85740-5072 Registered owners of this book shall be notified about future Researchers Updates when they occur, and will be sent appendices and additional materials. Researchers are urged to submit their corrections, criticisms and arguments to the author at the above address. Second Edition (Research Edition of 500 copies) numbered and printed November 1994 Operation Mind Control 7 This book is dedicated to the survivors of Operation Mind Control. Also, this book is dedicated to my best pal, without whose support it could not have been accomplished. 8 W.H.Bowart This is a limited Researcher's Edition of Operation Mind Control. Information in this book differs from information previously made public. This book is an inquiry into the discrepencies. Operation Mind Control 9 7 know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.* — Thomas Jefferson "In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.'' — Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 7 don 't believe the Constitution of the United States gives you the right to commit a crime if you want to; therefore, the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to maintain inviolable the personality forced on you in the first place - if and when the personality manifests strongly antisocial behavior. The new behavioral control techniques make even the hydrogen bomb look like a child's toy, and, of course, they can be used for good or evil.." — Dr. James V. McConnell, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan 'Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity" — Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt Note for the second edition A WARNING TO SURVIVORS! This book contains information that will trigger you. Give it to your deprogrammer, rather than try to read it yourself unless you have a thoroughly reintegrated personality. Some of this information is wrong and can be harmful to you. Inevitably it is impossible to weed out the triggers, since programming varies from person to person, from handler to handler. Thus, know that if you have ever been programmed you may be triggered by information in this book At the end of the book is an information sheet about the Freedom of Thought Foundation which, as of this writing, is an ad hoc committee of survivors, researchers, therapists, deprogrammers, counselors, lawyers, doctors and civil rights activists. We hope that this will, in the short terra, evolve into a reliable referral service so that more survivors can be directed to qualified deprogrammers and that more therapists, doctors and counselors can learn the efficient technologies to help victims of classical trauma- based programming. In the long term we hope that it will also become an effective political organization to curb human experimentation and attacks on the human mind on both an individual and collective basis. In order to protect us all from cross-pollination or contamination, certain specific, but trivial information is deliberately false and has been planted as a sort of "tag". Thus if suvivors start coming up with the planted information we will know that there's a probability that they have been corrupted by this book. The author, editors or publisher take no responsibility for any triggering that may occur. Operation Mind Control 13 Author's Note This book is an exercise in citizens intelligence. The editorial "we" is used herein literally. This book is the result of a collaboration of many. The author and the majority of those who have contributed to it are private citizens working on their own in a synergistic effort, without major funding or corporate support, without government privilege or "need to know," other than that need cited by Jefferson ~ the need for informed discretion in a democracy. Without the help of these many people who, like the author, were motivated by shock and outrage that citizens have been so victimized by their own government this book would not have been undertaken. Thanks first to the survivors of mind control who had the courage to come forward and tell their stories. Since this book first came out I have interviewed countless more mind control survivors. Alas, while adding much to the content of my files, few have shed new light on the processes involved. The network which produced this book will continue to look for the codes, cues and triggers by which to unlock the multi-personalities - appropriate states from the past which are moved forward to this inappropriate present - so that they can join in the life of the whole human being within whom they have been locked. A number of professional people gave valuable technical assistance and patient explanations. My thanks to Harry Arons, Robert Brauers, David Bruce, Dr. and Mrs. Sidney M. Cohen, Drs. Gary and Gwen Dean, Robert Dunn, Dr. Remo Dicenso, Betty Dumaine, Dr. Milton E. Erickson, Morris Ernst, Bernard Fensterwald, George Griffin, Col. Laird Guttersen, Dr. Corey Hammond, Averell Harriman, Dr. Paul Henshaw, Edward Hunter, Hon. Louis K. Lefkowitz, John MacDonald, Dr. Colin Ross, V.R. Sanchez, Alan W. Sheflin, Dr. Edgar Schein, David Wise, Mrs. E.D. Yeomans, and CoL Joseph H. ZiglinskL 14 W.H. Bowart I received a great deal of assistance from a number of researchers and writers around the world. Thanks to David Bareglass, Chip Berlet, Martin Cannon, Steve Bratcher, Nancy Bressler, Jeff Cohen, Loren Coleman, Richard Crowe, David Emory, Edward J. Epstein, William Grimstad, Paul Hoch, L Ron Hubbard, Trevor Harvey, John Judge, Larry Lee, Charles Maierson. John Marks, Jim Martin, John McGuffm, David McQueen, Sandra Meiersdorff, Janet Michaud, Beverly Ogden, George OToole, Kenn Thomas, Wes Thomas, Richard Popkin, Jeff Quiros, Sir William Stevenson, Scoop Sweeny, Civia Tamarkin, Harold Weisberg, David Williams, Cheryl Welsh, Peter Watson, Charles Zeps and the many people who sent me clippings, documents and testimonies over the years. Mae Brussell kept in contact with me from the time this book was originally released until her untimely death. She illuminated my understanding on Project Paperclip, the cryptocracy's illegal importation of Nazis into the U.S. intelligence systems after WWII, and called my attention to the circumstances of the probable programming of the assassin of John Lennon and the attempted assassins of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Other valuable assistance was given by the following institutions and organizations: The Rare Books and Special Collections Division of Princeton University Library, Brain Mind Bulletin, Zodiac News Service, Freedom News Service, Pacific News Service, The Fifth Estate, Network Against Psychiatric Assault, The Assassination Information Bureau, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, Sanity Now, Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Center for National Security Studies, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, World Wide Photos/ United Press, Library of Congress and the National Technical Information Service. Anthony Robbins and the staff of Robbins Research Institute trained me in Neuro- linguistics Programming and stuck with me through all sorts of adventures until I earned my certification, finally assimilating what Milton Erickson had been trying to get me to understand in 1976. So-called NLP, was a big Eureka. I saw it as ( if applied for the highest purposes ) a great tool of liberation, discovery and human achievement Even though NLP has been a valuable tool of the cryptocrats, there are always many more good guys than bad guys. My understanding of the intelligence community was molded by exchanges with a number of intelligence and military people. Most of them wish to remain nameless. Special overt thanks to Colonel L Fletcher Prouty for his patient accounts and interpretations of the Cold War history which he witnessed from within the fledgling cryptocracy. Thanks also go to Michael Kradz and Alan Bell of Dektor Counter-intelligence and Security who trained me in the use of the Psychological Operation Mind Control 15 Stress Evaluator, and Carl F. Boode of Desert Security who made his equipment available to me to examine the stress patterns of those I interviewed.. Tom Miller gave me much of his time and expertise, as citizens counter-intelligence agent extraordinary His interest in the subject never waned, and research for his own book The Assassination Please Almanac" (1977, Contemporary Books) uncovered leads for this one. Kudos to Johanna Moore Gruneck, Martha Sowerwine and my mother, for their patience and support. Between the first edition and this one, seventeen years have passed. My thanks go to all those who kept demanding that this book be brought back into print It was their demand which drove the price of the original paperback to a remarkable $250 per fine copy and finally created the market demand for this Researchers I owe a special thanks to a number who insist on anonymity. Thank you all for providing the additional research for this expanded edition and, as always, to Richard Condon who gave me early encouragement and offered his valued commentary in the mid 70's, at the beginning of my quest for the truth. Last and foremost I am indebted to my Enid High School journalism teacher, Miss Ruth Scott, who started me on the path of citizens intelligence so long ago. Edition. Walter Bowart November 11, 1994 Paradise, Arizona Operation Mmd Control 17 Contents ♦ Chapter 1 The Cryptorian Candidate ♦ Chapter 2 Only One Mind for My Country ♦ Chapter 3 The Mind Laundry Myth ♦ Chapter 4 Without Knowledge or Consent ♦ Chapter 5 Holy Arid Wars ♦ Chapter 6 The Guinea Pig Array ♦ Chapter 7 TheMKULTRANS ♦ Chapter 8 The Mata Hari of Mind Control ♦ Chapter 9 The Story of 0 ♦ Chapter 10 MINDWAR ♦ Chapter 11 Project Monarch? ♦ Chapter 12 Thanks for the Memories ♦ Chapter 13 Monarch Corroboration ♦ Chapter 14 Himmler's Guinea Kids ♦ Chapter 15 Finders, Kidnappers, Nazis ♦ Chapter 16 May The Force Be With Us! ♦ Chapter 17 The Slaves Who Buried the Pharoah ♦ Chapter 18 Brave New World in a Skinner Box ♦ Chapter 19 A School for Assassins ♦ Chapter 20 The Four Faces of a Zombie ♦ Chapter 21 The Lone Nuts ♦ Chapter 22 The Ignored Confessions ♦ Chapter 23 Another Hypno-Patsy? ♦ Chapter 24 Confession by Automatic Writing ♦ Chapter 25 The Patriotic Assassin ♦ Chapter 26 Sleeper Agent ♦ Chapter 27 Deep Probe ♦ Chapter 28 From Bionic Woman to Stimulated Cat ♦ Chapter 29 Invisible Warfare ♦ Chapter 30 Tuned to A Mental Radio? ♦ Chapter 31 The Warrior's Tongue ♦ Chapter 32 Cult Control 18 WM Bowart ♦ Chapter 33 The Fire In Waco ♦ Chapter 34 Have Buck Rogers Ray Gun - Will Travel ♦ Chapter 35 Human EM Targets ♦ Chapter 36 A Satanic-UFO Reich? ♦ Chapter 37 TheCOM-12 Briefing ♦ Chapter 38 Project Greenstar? ♦ Chapter 39 False Memory Spindrorae ♦ Chapter 40 Dangerous Free Thinking ♦ Chapter 41 A Repealing Thought ♦ Shareware order form ♦ Freedom of Thought Foundation Membership Application Operation Mind Control 19 Foreword by Richard Condon Author of The Manchurian Candidate father for professional reasons broke Crock's legs in eight places to be certain that the child would grow up walking grotesquely so as to ensure his eminence as a clown. The act brought much pain and indignity forever but, Grock's father reasoned, was there not a wholly justifiable element involved? Was not the clowning tradition immortally enhanced by those unnatural legs? As demonstrated inescapably by W.H. Bowart in this book, our Father who art in the American secret police has endowed hundreds of scientists at American research in so many great halls of learning has exceeded a cost of untold secret millions of dollars (the only yardstick remaining by which we are willing to measure anything) indicates that this Grockian entertainment being produced by our secret police is a matter of ambitious policy rather than the happenstance of cloak-and-dagger adventure. In this book W.H. Bowart has proven each step of this official, terminal, government anarchy, even though that appears to be a contradiction in terms. To alter and control human minds is the ultimate anarchy. What is offered by official apologists as a tribute to the deeds of daring-do by romantic spies are acts of hatred and sadism against all people in an insane and degraded determination to extirpate conscience from society. W.H. Bowart underwent a long and expensive process to assemble the hard facts which comprise this book. Each document attesting to secret police intent had to be ferreted out of government archives by badgering persistence until, page by page, the information was released to him by his right under the Freedom of Information Act The essence of that law seems to be that one need only write away to a federal agency for information about the general areas in which the citizen is interested. Not so. W.H. Bowart needed to expend large sums of money to employ researchers in Washington and elsewhere in order to discover the precise name, number, and description of the contents of each document toward which he was groping through black streams of informational darkness. Without this it would have been impossible to apply for the transfer of copies of these 20 W.H. Bowart documents to himself for this book. He had to comb the United States for peopl from many walks of life who knew, vaguely remembered, or suspected that they had been under the mind control of secret police and military agencies, then had to backtrack again with information gleaned from them to labyrinthine research among thousands of federal archives. Please keep fearfully in mind that the astonishing information published in this seminal work of investigative reporting, concerning avenues taken to decision and execution by our secret police to fracture or dissolve human minds, then to operate a Yo-Yo, for purposes of counter-intelligence military "efficiency," and the destruction of democratic institutions, was drawn directly from federal records and from official laboratory archives of the highest educational purpose - as well as from the reviving memories of those who had already undergone the dehumanizing process. The prostitution of the mind by our secret police preceded the murder of the mind. To attain the advanced techniques now available to "magnetic and attractive" political personalities, it was necessary to turn out the laboratories of science as a pimp turns out his heartless whores upon the winter streets; our hallowed educators, army and navy and air force commanders and personnel, the beloved medical profession, august and inspiring temples of the law, our esteemed statesmen, and all Americans living and dead. Each one of those groups is involved in this dismembering of the mind. Taxes and the collective conscience make the urination of the secret police upon the human mind possible. "Brainwashing" per se is no news to any of us. Controlled assassins are not known to us only through fiction. Advertising assaults on behalf of poisonous materials to induce us successfully to buy and consume are early on bastions of iti u \ d control. No one ~ not anyone - needs theologians to answer the question: "Where does the soul live?" We know the soul lives in the mind because the soul is the mind in all of its unfathomably intricate individual conditioning. It is the mind of intent, of hope, of purpose, of achievement by the spirit beyond achievement by physical When Crock's father broke his son's legs in eight places there may have been alarm, on the one hand, that a man could do such a calamitous thing to his son but, on the other, the same people responded to Crock's genius to which those hopelessly deformed legs had contributed, and roared with laughter. That was the normal reaction when we were the audience and crazy-legs Crock was the clown. But W.H. Bowart demonstrates to us in this book that we have become Crock. We are the spinning, hobbling, waddling clowns in the eyes of our vividly delineated secret police. Operation Mind Control 21 "Oh, no!" (Can you hear the outcry?) Oh, yes, writes W.H. Bowart in this fearful record you now hold in your hands. Apologists rush in, hired for all such occasions from everywhere, by the secret government crying out, "you are, as usual, like all of your exaggerating kind, making a mountain out of a molehill. While it may (or may not) be true that our secret police occasionally swing the sledgehammer on little minds, it is (or is not) being done as a patriotic act to protect our beloved people." They reel backward, hands clutching chests as the full realization seems to hit them. "My God! Bowart cannot believe that our government of the people, by the people, and for the people would use such loathsome forces against citizens. If such research was done (or was not done) then it would be for purely abstract research reasons - for the expansion of human knowledge." W.H. Bowart's book is also a freezing vision of the mutations of the aspirations of science. Scientists, educators, and their leaders, The Great Men, Having stumbled upon the possibility of controlling the human mind, might well have withheld this knowledge from the secret police and brought it forward for all to share, would you not say? If the means are at hand actually to enter and control the mind - not through the far-off smoke signals of psychiatry and psychoanalysis - can we conceive of what might be found in terms of medical triumphs, the conquest of pain and of group hatreds, and mental energy released by unraveling the Garden knots of mental perplexity to make one straight laser line that might then pierce the doubts and fears which beset each one of us? In terms of education light-years ahead of the educational means we presently employ, in basic and advanced of cultures, languages, and skills; in short, understanding each other across the face of the world, this development of Mind Control makes the invention of movable type seem like a primordial grunt from the shadows of a rain iorest lost in time. What has been achieved by the secret police in relation to mind control is scrupulously set down in W.H. Bowart's extraordinary book. The question the book puts is this: do you wish this immeasurably important technique to remain as a weapon to be used against you and your children by what Bowart calls the Cryptocracy, or do you wish to use it as a universal key to unlock a thousand new chances that your children will not be murdered in future wars? In an epigraph to this book, Zbigniew Brzezinski measures the political probabilities of mind control use when he says, "exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason." To day our secret police and our military establishment have demonstrated in Vietnam and elsewhere (examined by Bowart herein), the powers to create assassins out of our children. The expansion of these powers, which are able to turn young men and women into murderous criminals at will, goes on unchecked by the oft-called "investigative" press, by "moral" leaders at the bar, in the pulpits, in high 22 W.H.Bowart government, and on campuses. Yet the people they call the public have long suspected that it has become government policy to control minds. If there is general information abroad on this subject, then consider that which must be at the disposal of the congressional investigating committees as they bugle their determination to control the powers of darkness within our secret police. Zombie is a quaint, old-fashioned folklore word which, by its meaning, becomes obscene when our children's minds are being controlled by any one of dozens of federal secret police agencies. Have government agencies perfected methods sustained by the taxpayers to control the minds of the people who shot the Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, and Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean economist and diplomat Were the assassins programmed to forget they did it or were they programmed to do it? We may never know for they stand bewildered, idiotically grinning for the cameras. Have the technicians developed a model Giant, Economy-Size Government Assassin which can easily be turned out by the thousands? The murders of a few hundred humans by a few hundred other humans is commonplace enough but, for the flavor of horror and terror, of endless nightmare rampant upon a landscape of what was once American democracy, consider this expansion of the Brzezinski epigraph which cannot repeated often enough: "In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be toward the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason." The threatening state of American political leadership over the last fifteen years may seem to murmur that the "magnetic and attractive personalities" might rather not resist the destruction of democratic institutions by "effectively exploiting" these shocking gains into the control of minds. It might even be wise to consider W.H. Bowart's real evidence herein, then do what we can to protect ourselves if that proud right, with the love of freedom, has not been atrophied by "the latest communications techniques." There is an alternative. We can all forever more be transformed into the image of Grock the clown. Kicnard Condon Kilmoganny, Ireland 31 May 1977 THE CRYPTORIAN CANDIDATE It may have been the biggest story since the atom bomb. The headline, however, was small and ignored the larger issue. "Drug Tests by CIA Held More Extensive Than Reported in 75," said the New York Times on Jury 16, 1977. What it should have said is "U.S. Develops Invisible Weapons to Enslave Mankind." The testing of drugs by the CIA was just a part of the United States government's top-secret mind-control project, a project which had spanned thirty-five years and had involved tens of thousands of individuals. It involved techniques of hypnosis, narco-hypnosis, electronic brain stimulation, behavioral effects of ultrasonic, microwave, and low-frequency sound, aversive and other behavior modification therapies. In fact, there was virtually no aspect of human behavioral control that was not explored in their search for the means to control the memory and will of both individuals and whole masses of people. The CIA (and the Pentagon) succeeded in developing a whole range of psycho-weapons to expand its already ominous psychological warfare arsenal With these capabilities, it was now possible to wage a new kind of war - a war which would take place invisibly, upon the battlefield of the human mind. "Literature always anticipates life," Oscar Wilde said. "It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose." By Wilde's definition, then Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate would appear to be literature. Condon published his tour de force in 1958. It was the story of an American Army sergeant who was captured by the enemy during the Korean conflict and, in an improbable nine days, was hypno-programmed to murder on cue. The sergeant returned to the United States and was post-hypnotically triggered to kill by the sight of the queen of diamonds in a deck of cards. The sergeant automatically killed several people, among them a candidate for President of the United Stated. After he killed, his memory of the event was forever sealed by amnesia. At the time The Manchurian Candidate was published few people in the world, Richard Condon included, knew that total control of the mind was possible. Condon was writing fiction; he had merely read up on popular Pavlovian 24 W.H. Bowart conditioning manuals and imagined the rest He had no way of knowing then that mind control had already been the subject of years of secret research within the clandestine agencies of the U.S. government The tricks of mind control he described were employed (right down to the queen of diamonds cue) by the programmers of real political assassins who developed foolproof techniques for the control of thought memory, emotions, and behavior. The Manchurian Candidate brought the idea of "brainwashing" to public consciousness. Brainwashing is the use of isolation, deprivation, torture, and indoctrination to break the human will. But what the book actually described was something more than brainwashing. It was mind control: a total takeover of an individual's mind by someone else. The someone else in Condon's version was a mad Chinese psycho-scientist Always the satirist Condon brought the Fu Manchu myth up to date. But ironically, the techniques he described were first perfected and used not by the Chinese or the Communists, but by the United States. Condon's portrait of POWs during the Korean conflict went against the accepted scientific and medical opinion of the time, which held that a man could not be made to commit a criminal act against his own will or inner moral code by any known means. Although Condon's book was not completely on target about the details of GI mind control, he did accurately describe some of the motives, coercive metnoaoiogy, ana psycnoiogical results 01 real-life mind control. The psychological techniques described in The Manchurian Candidate had secretly become a reality a decade before Condon saw his story set in type. A decade later it appeared was as if Condon's fiction had been used as the blueprint for the creation of an army of hypno-programmed "zombies". Some were assassins prepared to kill on cue. Others were informers, made to remember minute details under hypnosis. Couriers carried illegal messages outside the chain of command, their secrets secured behind posthypnotic blocks. Knowledge of secret information was removed from the minds of those who no longer had the "need to know" -- they were given posthypnotic amnesia. The fact is, induced amnesia had been used at least since World War Two. In the Journal of Traumatic Stress 1 we find the story of a World War two veteran who had been discharged from the service in 1947. According to Karen L Cassiday and Judith A. Lyonns, the veteran had been treated at a VA hospital for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) since the war and had enjoyed good health and a lasting relationship until he had his first cardio- vascular accident (CVA), known in layman's terms as a stroke. Then he began to recall all the memories of his intelligence service in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. In 1988 1 Kutn L Cuiidiy »nd Judith A. Lyoru, Recall of Traumatic Memories Following Cerebral Vascular Acaderi. JOURNAL OP TRAUMATIC STRESS, VoL 5. No. 4. October, 1992. p. 627, Plenum Publishing Corp, 233 Spring Street, NYC. 10013. Operation Mind Control 25 he suffered two CVA's that resulted in right side weakness, speech difficulties, loss of motor control, and disorientation to situation, time, and place. These symptoms gradually resolved and he was able to resume psychotherapy in 1989. During therapy he began to recall combat memories and details of his service as an intelligence officer for which he had previously been amnestic According to the journal he particularly recalled "being captured and tortured by administration of intravenous hallucinogens. He also recalled being bayoneted in the right side during hand-to-hand combat, thus explaining the scar previously noted. Newly recalled memories depicted the content of many of his nightmares and dissociative episodes... He recalled his escape and military debriefing in which he underwent hypnotic procedures to help him forget his combat experiences. Although his recall of these procedures is sketchy, he remembers that these hypnotic sessions occurred almost daily for several weeks during which time he was also given medications. These procedures focused upon helping him develop an identity and personal history that excluded intelligence service and traumatic evens... Additionally while hospitalized, (he) had a flashback in which he mistook IV (intravenous) apparatus for being bayoneted. An Asian physician observed him speaking an Asian dialect during this flashback. Collectively, these data led us to conclude that military events occurred as reported and cannot be dismissed as delusions or fabrications." The authors noted that in this man's case, "it appears that amnesia for traumatic memories was disinhibited... His case indicates that cognitive impairment, such as that due to declining health and aging, may also impair previously successful defenses and lead to delayed PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)." Those who led us to believe that the intelligence agencies were searching for a "Manchurian Candidate" have to go back and rewrite their false assumptions. The fact came well before the fiction. Most of the ordinary foot soldiers who fought in the dirty, televised Vietnam conflict were released to civilian life without debriefing. For them there was no "decompression" from the rage of war. They were released with all the reflexes of trained assassins intact Those who had been conditioned in the black science of the war of torture, terror, and technology were debriefed with special attention. Their memories like those of the World War Two veteran mentioned in the Journal of Traumatic Stress were completely erased before they were turned out of the military that they returned to civilian life with only the minimum, fragmented knowledge of who they were or what they had done. Their memories had been smudged or removed by drugs, hypnosis, behavior modification, conditioned reflex therapy, or some other evil wonder of mind control. During my 1978 tour promoting this book , a call came to the KPIX-TV Good Morning San Francisco Show while we were on the air. It was a retired Navy 26 W.H.Bowart Commander who spoke of losing his memory after being admitted to a Navy hospital after a lengthy tour of duty in which he and his "black pajama team" had assassinated "charismatic" local political leaders behind a "fixed border in Southeast Asia". In a private phone conversation later, the Commander told me that the "fixed border" was indeed that of China. "1 got the flu. Almost everybody on the returning team got this heavy flu. We went to the hospital and came out with cardboard memories," he said. "It's taken me 13 years to remember what we had been doing. I'm not proud of it, and I'm afraid to talk." I had encountered my first case of mind control in the midst of the Watergate scandal. A young man I'd known since childhood had returned from a tour of duty in the U.S. Air Force, with amnesia, remembering nothing of his service, except having had a good time. He subsequently learned, through intensive private psychotherapy, that he'd been hypnotized and conditioned. His mind had been unmade, then remade: his mind had been controlled. I was completely fascinated by his story, but naturally, in 1973, 1 thought it was an isolated, single event Then, quite by accident, a few months later, I overheard another man in my hometown telling what was essentially the same story: how he figured he'd been hypnotized and had his memory erased at a "debriefing" prior to his separation from military service. After hearing the second story I began to wonder how many more men had their memories erased- I decided to run the following classified ad: "Researcher/writer interested in contacting anyone with knowledge of the use of hypnosis by the military, including ex-servicemen who have reason to believe they were hypnotized (or drugged) while in the service and subsequently exhibited signs of amnesia or hypermnesia (improved memory). All info held in strictest confidence..." I placed the ad in Soldier of Fortune (a magazine which reports on the activities of mercenaries), a number of small publications aimed at hypnotists, behaviorists, neurologists and other professionals, and popular magazines such as Rolling Stone. To my amazement, I received more than a hundred replies to the ad. Many stated that they had amnesia. Ignoring the obvious crank letters, I followed up on the others and discovered that too many were unable to say just what had caused their loss of memory. In some post- Vietnam syndrome." So I concentrated on those who had not seen combat but who either had high security clearances or were employed at the periphery of the intelligence services. Operation Mind Control 27 Letter and telephone exchanges narrowed the field down to eighteen persons who fit the pattern of the first two men who had reported their amnesia to me. All eighteen had security clearances - and could only recall isolated events from their GI experience. I narrowed the field still further to those who remembered enough to have at least some idea, however fragmentary and incomplete, of what had happened to them. Their stories were believable, but they shed little light on how amnesia had been induced and what behavior had been controlled. To answer those deeper questions I went to the libraries, and after two years of research I was able to find enough scientific reports and government documents to tell the whole story of what I call Operation Mind Control Though the documented trail of mind control extends back many decades, it was not always called by that name. The church and the state have always engaged in psycho-theology and psycho-politics, the psychological manipulation of belief, opinion, and actions for political and/or religious ends. But the complete control of the human mind was only managed in the late 1940s by the U.S. government It had to have existed in a variety of sub-cultures throughout human history. My research concentrated on the period from 1938 to the late sixties, the period during which I found there was an effort made by the agencies of the U.S. government to develop sophisticated techniques of psycho-politics and mind control in the modem sense (I thought). The objective of Operation Mind Control 2 during this period has been to take human beings, both citizens of the United States and citizens of friendly and unfriendly nations and transform them into unthinking, subconsciously programmed "zombies," motivated without their knowledge and against their wills to perform in a variety of ways in which they would not otherwise willingly perform. I learn that this is accomplished through the use of a number of various techniques most of which amount to pain and trauma-based classical conditioning. Mind control is the most terrible imaginable crime because it is committed not against the body, but against the mind and the souL Dr. Joost AM. Meerloo expresses the attitude of the majority of psychologists in calling it "mind rape," and warns that it poses a great "danger of total physical destruction..." ' Various meditation groups use the words 'mind controf to describe meditation, contemplation, and self-hypnosis; all these are usually harmless if not beneficial practices. These techniques might more properly be called 'mind self-control," for the individuals who use them seek control over their own minds and bodies to obtain desired effects. The mind control examined in this book is the control of one individual's mind by another, against the target's will and without their conscious knowledge. 28 W.H.Bowart Development of mind control was accomplished largely through the efforts of individual psychologists, psychiatrists, and chemists, working in isolated conditions under government contract Each researcher or research team was allowed to know only what he or she needed to know to accomplish his or her fragment of the research or testing. The contracts were let through a number of While the CIA was a major hinder of the mind-control research, virtually every major government agency became in some way knowingly or unwittingly involved. While I began my research believing that a "cult of intelligence" was behind the mind-control program, I found that there is, in fact, no single originating force, but several. The operation is too widespread and complex for it to be created by a "cult" If a cult there must be, then it is a cult within a cult, in an interlocking chain of invisible mini-govermnents with unwritten rules, unwritten plans, and unwritten loyalties. It is the plan of a secret bureaucracy - what I call a cryptocracy - which conspires against our laws and our freedoms. "Cryptocracy" is a compound of crypto, meaning "secret", and - cracy, meaning "rule, government, governing body." The cryptocracy, then, is the secret government whose identity and whereabouts have slowly and reluctantly been hinted at by the Congress through its investigations into Watergate, the CIA, and the rest of the intelligence community. (The word cryptocracy is conspicuously absent from all dictionaries, even to this day. I was told by one source within the cryptocracy that this word alone was reason enough to keep this book off the market, for if, whenever the word democracy is used, the word cryptocracy is placed against it, a powerful propaganda effect takes place. As if one word alone could awaken the U.S. citizenry to the fact that their democracy was overthrown by the National Security Act of 1947.) While the CIA, near the top of the intelligence pyramid has been drawing most of the fire, the evidence of a cryptocracy clearly implicates the National Security Agency, the National Programs Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and its subsidiaries in military intelligence, The Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as the Civil Service. The crypto- alliance has extended in an ever expanding network among private contractors and institutions and religious organizations. With the Central Intelligence in the vanguard, the cryptocracy is composed of persons operating within the office of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Department of Justice, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Prisons, Bureau of Narcotics, Atomic Energy Commission (Department of Energy), Veteran's Administration, General Services Administration, National Science Foundation, and even major American corporations, especially certain airlines, oil companies, and aerospace contractors. Operation Mind Control 29 The cryptocracy invades the privacy of citizens and corporations. It meddles, often violently, in the internal politics of foreign nations, and has hired, trained, and equipped mind-controlled assassins for the murder of heads of state. The cryptocracy may have been involved in attempts to control U.S. elections. It controls key figures in the U.S. and world press. When CIA Director Robert M. Gates publicly promised "a greater openness and sense of public responsibility" at the intelligence agency in April of 1992, he was acting on the recommendations of a special task force that had studied ways to make the agency more visible, credible and responsive to the outside world. But when Task Force Report on Greater CIA Openness" was submitted to Gates, it was stamped "Secret" CIA officials refused to disclose any of the report After receiving a public scolding at a House hearing, Gates approved the declassification of almost the entire report Significantly, the report touted the accomplishments of the agency's existing "media program:" PAO (the Public Affairs Office of the CIA) now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some 'intelligence failure 1 stones into 'intelligence success' stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold or even scrap stones that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods. 3 The story within the story, I discovered, is an astonishing one of a psychological war waged by this U.S. cryptocracy against the American people. The scientific reports and histories place the story in time, and at the government's door. However, the literature of the cryptocracy ignores the very real human factor. There is no written record of the mental anguish, the torture to the soul that comes from loss of memory and the resulting identity crisis. That mental anguish is the story of mind control. The stories that follow are told by the failures of Operation Mind Control - failures because the victims remember something; for where mind control is successful there is no memory left (Due to editorial considerations, many of the stories I uncovered have been left on the editing room floor. Each individual in this book stands for and tells the story of many victims of mind control In many cases the individuals I interviewed believed their lives or sanity would be in danger if their names were made public. Others wanted their names mentioned. I have, for a variety of reasons, chosen to Wastovton Post National Wm*. May 3. 1992. 30 W.H.Bowart withhold real names and places whether requested or not Except in these details, the first-person stories in this book are completely true, and in this edition I have risked committing the literary crime of redundancy so that the researcher can get a more well-rounded sense of the varieties of the mind control experience as described by several individuals. A video documentary is now in progress which shows many heartbreaking moments of abreaction from victims of mind control which could not be included in this book. ) One of the characters in The Manchurian Candidate described his recurring dream that resulted from the suppression of memory. "It's not so much that I can't sleep. It's more that I'd rather not sleep. I'm walking around punchy because I'm scared. I keep having the same nightmare..." The nightmare Condon's hero described was actually the memory of having killed on cue. On stage, before an audience of Communist mind controllers, he strangled one of his fellow soldiers with a scarf, and blew out another's brains with a high-powered pistol at point blank range. Several of the men I interviewed had dreams which could have been written by Condon. Tex was an army sergeant stationed in the Mediterranean area. He came back from service with amnesia. But in his dreams a vivid scene was replayed again and again: "In the dream my buddy - 1 know him real well, We've shared things together - my buddy is taken with his hands behind his back. I'm standing in rank in a line of other soldiers and we are like a firing-squad. I keep thinking I won't shoot ray friend, I'll turn the rifle on the commander. But we don't have rules. "My buddy is marched into an open area in front of us with his hands tied behind his back. He is blindfolded and some Ay-rab is talking to him or reading to him. Another Ay-rab comes up and hits him behind the knees with a rifle butt and he falls to a kneeling position. Then, while he's on his knees, one of the Ay-rabs takes a big sword and cuts his head off. His neck squirts blood, but surprisingly little... his head rolls on the ground. His face has a peaceful expression. His body twitches and squirms like a chicken. That's when I always wake up..." In their sleep, the memories of atrocities surface to vivid awareness among the victims of mind control. Night after night terrible images, suppressed by deeply conditioned responses, emerge as terrifying nightmares. Are they mythological? The stuff of dreams? Or are they recovered memories? Tex's dream is a mere fragment of many thousands of pages of such testimony. 2 ONLY ONE MIND FOR MY COUNTRY Through the gray waters of amnesia he drifted, coming back from blind coma- First the echoes, like electronically amplified voices speaking from a deep, deep well... then, far off, the dim pink molecules of light.. David's body lay still in the military hospital bed. Only his eyes rolled beneath the lids. For several hours he lay that way, perfectly still -just eyes fluttering. The fluttering became more intense. Then his eyes opened. "When I woke up," David said, "I couldn't remember anything. I couldn't remember how I'd gotten there or why I was in the hospital." He asked nurses and aides why he was there. They told him he'd have to ask his doctor. When David finally saw him, the doctor said, "You tried to commit suicide." That came as a great surprise to David. He didn't think he was the suicidal type. He asked the doctor how he'd tried to commit suicide. "You took an overdose of Sleep-eze," the doctor told him. David knew that Sleep-eze was a patent medicine, that it was related chemically to an antihistamine, and that it could produce drowsiness; but David also knew it was not nearly as dangerous as a prescription sleeping pill. Although he began to sense that something was fishy, he did not challenge the doctor, nor did he let on that he suspected the story to be untrue. For the next several days he simply lay in the hospital bed puzzling over the odd chain of events that had landed him there. I interviewed David several times over a period of two years. Each interview produced additional information as David's memory returned in fragmented, isolated bursts. The following is taken from thousands of pages of transcript and has been edited so that the tedious process which uncovered David's memories is 32 W.H.Bowart absent It is slightly misleading only in that David did not remember his story in one continuous sequence. Nor did the other victims quoted in this book. David had joined the U.S. Air Force in 1969. During his high school years the draft had still been in effect and after graduating on the honor roll, David decided to attend a small community college to get as much education as he could before his name was inevitably called by selective service. As his induction date approached David realized he could obtain a deferral from the draft because of his high scholastic standing, but he decided instead to take a break from education and fulfill his military obligation as profitably as he could. Although he questioned America's reasons for fighting, he did feel that military service was his duty. David had not been a part of the sixties "revolution." He had never smoked marijuana nor taken LSD, nor had he demonstrated against the war in Vietnam like so many of his friends. He was a studious, intelligent young man who was not inclined to rebellion. He was described by friends and family as one possessed of unusual common sense. In keeping with his cautious and practical nature he negotiated a "contract" for medical corps service with his local air force recruiter and enlisted for a four year tour of duty, thinking this would help him fulfill his ambition to become a doctor. After an uneventful in-processing, David was sent to Lackland Air Force Base for the usual six weeks basic training, and then on to a technical school for another six weeks of special training. But when the time came for his job assignment to his great disappointment he was assigned to the supply corps rather than the medical corps. He felt betrayed by the air force, and immediately after receiving his AFSC job assignment number, he retired to his barracks to rehearse a protest to his commanding officer. Moments later, a nonuniformed man entered the empty barracks and asked him to step outside and take a walk. David was puzzled but went along without comment When the two had reached a quiet spot on the base, the man told David that he guessed he was disappointed about receiving the AFSC of a "box pusher" in a supply warehouse. David was surprised by the man's knowledge of his situation. Before he could reply, the man told David that the AFSC was just a cover, that he had actually been chosen to work in a sensitive area of intelligence. The assignment sounded glamorous to David, and lifted his sagging spirits. He immediately decided to go along with the change of plans and accept the special assignment without protest The unidentified man told David to be patient and to leam well the special techniques of computer programming he would be trained in while waiting for his security investigation to be completed. Operation Mind Control 33 Within a few weeks David was issued a top-secret crypto-security clearance and assigned to the air base at Minot North Dakota. At Minot he continued to feed supply numbers into a computer, developing his already excellent memory. He did his job well and soon he received a letter of commendation and was promoted to sergeant But for all his accomplishments, he had begun to grow restless. Although he knew his computer programming was just a cover for intelligence work, he was still not satisfied with air force life. "I was beginning to not like the extreme regimentation and, I suppose, inside myself I was beginning to build up a resentment about being there. "But after I woke up in the Hospital I was not resentful I was passive. I lay there thinking, trying to recall the last memories I had before I woke up in that bed I didn't remember anything. It was like I'd been asleep for my entire life up to that point Like I was Rip Van Winkle. The memories of what had happened I did recover over a period of time. But they were fuzzy at first It seemed like somebody was violating me -- raping my mind. "I was strapped down in the bed. I was yelling and screaming about something. I'm not the type of person that cusses that much. I hardly ever use foul language, but I know that I said some pretty foul things to those men who were with me. They were officers, and in the service you can't call a superior officer an obscene name without getting punished. Yet I don't think I was ever reprimanded "One guy would ask me questions in an accusatory manner. Another guy would come over and say comforting things. The first guy would come back and accuse me again. Then tile second guy would come and pat my arm and be friendly. I could remember their faces and their tone of voice, but I couldn't remember the content of what they were talking about" David thought about his situation; suppose he had tried to commit suicide. He probably would be kicked out of the service. At best he might be given a medical discharge, so he began to prepare himself for that eventuabty. He thought he wouldn't mind getting out of the service under any circumstances, even with a psychological discharge. It didn't happen. Instead, David was visited by men in civilian clothes who told him that he'd been chosen for a special intelligence assignment They said the details of his assignment could not be revealed until the proper time, and then he would not be allowed to talk to anyone about it They said he would be receiving his orders soon. 34 W.H.Bowart "I had expected at least to have some stripes taken away for the suicide attempt," David said. "Instead, five different sets of orders came down. They were all typed military orders, regular orders, but they had me going to five different places at once. It was impossible. "I took the orders to headquarters and told them that somebody had goofed. It was plain to see that somebody had screwed up. The way the military runs, it was not unusual. No one got excited about it The guys in the office said that they would straighten it out Then I was told that 1 had two weeks leave coming. They ordered me home to wait while they got my orders straightened out" Happy to get a break after eighteen continuous months of military life without leave, David went home. "I was hoping they'd forget all about me, I was praying that this time the computer would completely lose me." The first evening at home something compelled David to break security. Alone with his mother, he told her that he knew he had not really attempted suicide. "I suppose that my first duty was to my family, and my second duty was to my country. After I'd discharged my moral duty to my mother, I was free to obey my government's wish and not remember anything about it That's probably how it tiin«l<A<l mmt . — It. _ i M^m a*h Mian if .im W worKea, in spite oi tneir programming. After David had been at home for the full two weeks, and was just beginning to think that maybe the computer had lost him after all, a telegram came. There were no written orders, no official seals, just a Western Union telegram ordering him to report to a base in northern California and from there to embark to the Far East on overseas duty. There were numbers on the face of the telegram, but at the time David gave them no special notice. These numbers may have been an assignment authorization, for seldom are servicemen sent overseas on the "When I got to the base in California, I showed them the telegram and the air police hustled me to another airplane and flew me to Guam." On the plane to Guam, David ran into an airman he'd known at Minot The airman's name was Max. Like David, Max had been attached to the supply wing at Minot but he had been in a different type of supply operation. In all the time they were together on Guam, David never learned the details of Max's assignment Both of them were supposed to be supply men, but David Operation Mind Control 35 thought Max had some pretty unusual qualifications for a supply man: for instance, he held a fifth- degree black belt in karate. "Max and I had checked into the barracks when we got there, but after preliminaries we were put on a bus and taken to an isolated place eight miles outside the base. There were six L-shaped barracks set up inside a high electrified fence with barbed wire at the top. Inside the compound there was a movie theater, a store, a barbershop, a chow hall, and a recreation center. There were several hundred guys living in that compound. "We could leave anytime we wanted. All we had to do was show the proper credentials to the air police at the gate. The compound seemed to be regular air force. The place was called Marbo, and as far as I could tell, there were guys there who had all sorts of different functions in the air force, but nobody really discussed their jobs. "Several of the guys at Marbo had been in the supply wing in North Dakota- But at Marbo they were working in other areas... In other words, guys who'd been in the supply wing in North Dakota were in the civil engineers or the air police. One air policeman on Guam, I remember, had been shoving around boxes just like other supply men when he was at Minot Suddenly now he was an air policeman. I couldn't figure it out, and I wasn't about to ask questions. "I guess we all assumed that we were all on special assignment, and I'm pretty sure that if I'd asked any one about it they would have avoided an answer. I certainly would have, if somebody had asked me." David made rank fast in the air force. He was a good airman, a good supply man. Yet anybody he talked to about supply duties didn't know what he was talking about His duties weren't like the others. "My air force file shows that the first three digits of my AFSC are 647. A 647 is some kind of a box pusher. Yet 1 never pushed a box all the time I was in the air force- After their tour of duty, Max and David returned home together on the same plane. At the airport Max was called over the intercom and went off to answer the page. Two air police returned for his luggage and David did not see Max until after he was separated from the service for some months. Then it was a strange meeting. David was walking down the streets of Disneyland and his eye fell on Max walking toward him in the crowd. David was delighted to see his old buddy again, but Max was strangely distant "He didn't seem very interested in our reunion." David said, "He shook hands with me, and I began to talk, but he seemed kind of passive. I wanted to sit down and tell all the things that had happened to me 36 W.H. Bowart since we last saw each other, but Max didn't want to talk. He cut me short, said good-bye and left That's something that's always puzzled me. How can a guy who was your constant companion for so many months, a guy who has fought for you and gotten to know you inside and out, not want to talk to you? How could he have just brushed me off like that? "When I first got out of the service, all I could remember about my four years was that I'd had a lot of fun. I mean, all the pictures I have, and all the recollections I had, were of Max and Pat and I having fun, skin diving, laying on the beach, collecting shells, walking in the jungle. It never dawned on me until later that I must have done something while I was in the service." Pat was a young woman from the Midwest who was assigned to serve as David's secretary. Almost instantly, when they met on Guam, they fell in love. "Pat was something special. She was everything I would have ever dreamed of in a woman. I suppose she felt that I was everything that she wanted in a man. It didn't take long for us to go to bed after we met, and from then on, throughout my tour of duty Max, Pat, and I were inseparable." David was not talking about a menage a trois. Max was not attracted to Pat nor she to him. They all held each other to be good friends, but David and Pat's feelings for each other were the strongest David now thinks it odd that the three of them got along so perfectly from the first moment they met Max was David's kind of man, and Pat was David's kind of woman. In the years that have passed since he got out of the air force, David has come to believe that Max and Pat and he were matched up by a computer. "We hit it off from the start We had the same interests, we were nervous about the same things, and we would laugh at the same kind of jokes. We were three individuals who were very close and where one lacked a quality another had something that filled that lack. The air force takes your psychological tests - your cumes - the cumulative progress reports which have been kept on just about every individual in the United States from the first grade through high school. These records have your IQ, your aptitude tests, and all the things they accumulate on you through your school years... they give them a complete examination to determine your psychological profile and everything about your likes and dislikes. They feed selected information, any information they are looking to match up, into a computer and run yours with other people's until they have a psychological match. Operation Mind Control 37 "In spy books I've read, undercover agents sent to foreign countries are usually teamed with a spy of the opposite sex. Even if two people are both married and have left families at home, the directors of intelligence usually send along someone who can take care of the natural human sexual needs of the other without risking a breach of security. That way, no homy agent is going to have to associate with a prostitute or someone who might turn out to be a double agent or counterspy. "I'd talk with the other guys in the service and they'd talk about getting laid in Hong Kong or Japan or Korea. I didn't have to talk about anything. I didn't have to brag, I'd just smile at them, secure in my love for Pat" David said that there were several other women in the barracks who, like Pat, were secretaries but had security clearance. And, as was the case with Pat, many of them also had close relationships with the men to whom they had been assigned. Two months before their tour of duty was to expire David and Max were sent home. Pat stayed behind on Guam. But David and Pat arranged to meet once they were both out of the service. They exchanged home addresses, but somehow David lost hers and he is strangely unable to remember her last name or even the town from which she'd come. David never saw Pat again. "Looking back on it, it looks like it was awfully convenient Pat was a liberated woman, she knew exactly who she was. And that's just the kind of woman I like to have around. She fulfilled every need that I ever had, to such a degree that it's a problem now. I can't meet a girl that's as good as she was. When you've been in paradise, it's hard to find paradise again. You always want to go back. "I think of her all the time, but I just can't remember her last name. It's a total blank. I just can't remember." During the entire thirteen-hour flight home David had to debrief himself into a tape recorder while sitting between two air policemen. He doesn't remember what he talked about No one was "questioning" him; he just talked. Upon his return, he was assigned to a base in California. Immediately upon reporting for duty, he found that he no longer had a security clearance. His job was to answer telephones on the base and to listen to complaints. He'd take calls from the wives of air force personnel and relay their complaints to the proper channels. That's all he did during his entire last year of service. "When it came time to get processed out I wanted to get the medals I earned when I was stationed in Guam. They were actually theater ribbons. I had so 38 W.H.Bowart many ribbons when I left Guam that the officer I reported to told me not to wear them because I would attract attention to myself. "During the out-processing they brought out my file. They do that regularly every year anyway. They show you your records and have you go over them and make sure that they're correct Then you sign a paper that states the records have been approved by you. The last time I was shown my records, they'd been changed. Instead of all the typed, dog-eared reports that were in my file before, there was this clean computer print-out "I asked the officer in charge what had happened to the notices of my being awarded those theater ribbons. He told me that since I had such a high security clearance some of the things that were in my files made it necessary to expunge a lot of the information from the record. He said that there was a top-secret file on me which was available to people who had the right clearances. The file he had me approve was the one which would be shown to anyone who did not have the highest clearances. He said that because this was more or less a public record, it could not have anything on it of a sensitive nature. It was very misleading, that report It looked like I had been a supply man, a box pusher, and Td done nothing else, except try to attempt suicide. The phony hospital story was in the report - so deniability was built in. Then I went through the normal out-processing and went home. AD I can say is that everybody, ray folks, my friends, everyone who'd known me before, noticed how changed I was. I was fearful and under tight control." David decided that he would first reorient himself to the civilian pace of life and then look for a job. But when he began to look for employment he suddenly realized that he had some deep psychological problems. At his first job interview, he was routinely asked to fill out the company's job application form. He sat down at a desk and started writing. He wrote his name and noticed that his hands were sweating. As he began to enter his address his heart began pounding so loudly it was audible. He became short of breath and felt like the walk were closing in. He fought to remain calm, but within a few moments he snatched up the form and bolted out the door. That evening he discussed the strange physical effects that had come over him with his parents. They assured him he was probably just very anxious about getting the job. The next day he went on another interview. Again he was asked to fill out a job application. This time he got further in filling out the form: he put down his name... address... date of birth... Social Security number... health information... but when he came to the place in the form which required work information about the past four years, the pounding in his ears, the shortness of breath and Operation Mind Control 39 the terrifying feeling of being confined in a small space came over him again, and he left the building with the form wadded up in his hand. Over the next few months David applied for many jobs. The results were always the same. He could not overcome the terror that gripped him whenever anyone asked him for information about how he had spent the last four years. David's parents suggested that he try to get a job working with computers and take advantage of the training that the air force had given him. The mere mention of computers made him fly into a rage. "I still couldn't face whatever it was that was blocking me. To this day, I can't stand the thought of a computer. I'd like to smash them all up. I realize, of course, that is irrational." David remained hopeful that whatever was causing his anxiety would pass with time. Meanwhile, he decided to go back to college. He had no trouble getting into a major university since his high school and community college grades were high, and no one asked him for details of his service years. But during his first semester he encountered the same blocks that had kept him from getting a job. "In my psychology course you had to get up in front of a circle of people and talk. You had to bare your soul. I just couldn't do it I couldn't stand up and be calm and let people question me. They were all harmless questions, but I'd get the pounding heart, the sweaty palms, the shortness of breath and the feeling of claustrophobia again. I'd just clam up and leave the room.'' It was then that David understood that he could no longer face the problem by himself. He sought out a psychiatrist who'd been recommended by a friend. "The first psychiatrist I went to was male. He had used hypnotherapy with me, and he found me to be a very easy subject I'd go into a trance at the drop of a hat But whenever he tried to regress me -- saying, 'I want you to go back' - I'd just bring myself out of the trance, even if it was a deep trance. My heart would be pounding, my palms would be sweating, and I'd feel the same claustrophobia I'd felt whenever I'd confronted those application forms." David found that he was much more relaxed with his second psychiatrist a woman named Alice. Alice was also more successful with hypnotherapy. David would go into a trance quickly and deeply, yet whenever Alice tried to regress him to his air force period, he would bring himself out of the trance as he had done previously. But she found that by regressing David to his childhood and approaching the air force period from earlier years, remembering was less difficult for him. "At first she tried to have me relax. She talked in a very soothing voice, telling me to close my eyes. I felt like I was surrendering to her. It was easy to get me into a light trance. I laid down my defenses and was going deeper and deeper, but as 40 W.H.Bowart soon as she said, 'Now we're going to go back," 1 sat straight up and was wide awake. "Alice couldn't get over how fast I went under. One time, she said, she was just talking to me and her voice put me completely under when she wasn't even trying. I was highly suggestible. "But whenever she'd say, 'Let's go back,' all the muscles in my neck would strain, and I would grip the arms of the chair until my knuckles turned white. Once I was holding a piece of paper in my hand, and when I came out of hypnosis, the paper was completely soaked with sweat Only a minute after she'd said, "We're going to go back,' 1 was wide awake. "Alice never did succeed completely with hypnosis, but something must have been released because of her attempts. As soon as we were able to go back to the usual talking technique of psychotherapy, I started talking about my childhood. I'd never thought that much about it, I guess, but I couldn't remember much of my childhood. For instance, my grandfather had died when I was fourteen and he had lived with us. Everyone says he and I were very close, But I had no mental picture of him at all. That's when Alice started trying to get me to remember my childhood. I don't know if I remembered my childhood before I went into the service or not It seems like I did, because it wasn't a problem, but to this day, still, I can't remember much, and everything before the age of ten is completely blank. "Alice and I kept working. At first the memories we recovered were all painful memories. Alice thought that this was most unusual. Usually people remember the pleasurable things first Then she tried to get me to remember only painful experiences. And once I'd remembered a lot she started trying to get me to remember the pleasurable ones." David and Alice continued to work with standard psychiatric techniques and with hypnosis. Finally, after sixteen months of three sessions a week, Alice asked David to make a choice. "We probably can penetrate the blocks around your air force years and find out how they were planted and why, but it may take a long time. On the other hand, we can work on every other area and get you to function normally without anxiety reactions whenever anyone asks you about those years," Alice said. "Now you have to decide if you just want to function normally, or if you want to unravel the whole mystery and find out who did it why it was done, and what they have hidden from your own mind." Since the therapy had nearly depleted his family's savings, David knew what the answer must be. He told Alice he would be content to just function normally. After two more months of treatment Alice and David had their last session. Operation Mind Control 41 "After two hundred and six therapy sessions, Alice and I had one eight-hour session which more or less recapped all the information we had collected. She told me that when I first came in I'd talked in a monotone. I was very, very, controlled, I showed no emotions and had no inflection in my speech. I'd talked to her for the first three months that way. She said there was a wall that she couldn't break down... Alice recommended that I continue working on my ovi going to group tnerapy. "I went to a couple of sessions, but when I got in front of a group I became fearful again. It was more than just stage fright, it was a horrible feeling. I still have it when I get up in front of a group to be asked questions. "Alice did not figure out what this was about I am now beginning to, but figuring something out is one thing, and actually overcoming it is another." Alice's expert guidance and her deft use of hypnotherapy were helpful. While he did not recover his memory at once, in time David began to remember isolated events. He is now able to reconstruct a picture of at least some of the things he did while in hypno-service to his country. "One day I had a vivid dream. Then it was like, little by little, memory cells exploding in my brain. I began to remember certain incidents. At first 1 didn't know if these were real memories or just dreams. Today, I still don't know if they are accurate or not, but they are so real in all their details that I believe they are the truth. Naturally when you've had amnesia you're not really going to trust your memories at first, but if the memories settle in ~ if you can recall more and more detail about an event -- you know that you are recalling a true event The most vivid memory I have is about Vietnam. I was standing at a long table on a beach. There were North Vietnamese soldiers sitting on one side and American officers sitting on the other. Everyone was in uniform. Our men were from the air force, navy, and marines. The marines had sidearms , and no one else had a weapon. "What horrified me was that out in the harbor, off shore at some distance from the beach, was one of our battleships, and another battleship or gunboat I guess that it was Vietnamese or Russian, but I'm not expert at naval craft identification. All I know is I was terrified because the big guns on the ships were trained, not on each other, but on us... I guess they were prepared to blow us all up should anything go wrong on the beach, or should there be a double cross. "We had our interpreters, who were air force men. They did the translating and our officers waited for the translations. The discussion was very heated, but for some reason I remember vividly, nothing was being written down. That may have been the reason that I was standing there at one end of the table. I 42 W.H.Bowart remember that they had been trying somewhere along the line, to get me to have total recall. I can't remember the details, or the progression of events. "I know that I had memory training. At Marbo, for some reason, I'd get up three hours earlier than anyone else and report to somewhere I can't remember and then go to work at eight-thirty. I remember riding the bus from Marbo to the base on Guam, and I was the only one on the bus. But I can't remember where I went before I reported for regular duty. 1 suspect that the computer work was part of the memory training, but I can't say that's exactly what it was. There must have been more to it I just don't remember the details. But I have the impression that I was used as a human tape recorder. "I do know one thing about that beach scene. When 1 came back from overseas, only three days after 1 came back it was announced that the North Vietnamese were going to give our prisoners of war back in an exchange. The meeting on the beach might have been an early parley about ending the war and exchanging prisoners. At least that's what strikes me as the best answer to the question of what that meeting was about "I might have been a witness. I really don't understand why - or why the gunboats were pointing at us. 1 can t remember trie date, or anything that places that memory in time. "The thing that really bothers me about this whole thing is that I can sit here and talk to you, but 1 still can't sit down and say, 'Okay, I joined the service on such and such a day and this is what happened to me during a four-year period in chronologi' ' -g~ r ' Ever since 1 got out of the service I haven't been able to give a day-by-r' Tf * P u*!£diS r H Up ' those four years. ^Ome Uords issues and .v,«L ? mft ' <*n talk ™£T ,, 7T,u,s <kv michr "5ToT le ^ but if *** ^tBS^j^&t^SS «AT|g brutal. I ••<> off*™ Discussion. * o;.J;" Hi "«c*, c „ .&P«ed to be a Comm UH J y ^^"^^Ji 30 PM <M after a lot of noma (Tea,, musir^2. ebr30o, > for ,hr T K °Wer 4ik b,sex u Operation Mind Control 43 psychiatric help, which I paid for myself, made the experiment, if it was one, a failure to me. "I never thought about laying down my life, but maybe I laid down a lot more than my life in service to my country. My soul?" [Sixteen years later David is still sleeping only two hours a night He is still having nightmares, hearing voices and seeing shadows. Otherwise he functions normally. Yet, many of his symptoms are identical with the symptoms of those psychiatrists call people with Dissociative Identity Disorder. I hadn't talked to David in, what, ten years? And now that I'd learned so much more about the survivors of Operation Mind Control, I thought I'd check in to see how he was doing. I found him fascinated with tattoos. "Every time I see a tattoo anywhere, on anyone, I'm drawn to it" David said. "I've got to look at it I want to find out if it's a butterfly, a rose or a..." and in 1994 we said the word together "...bluebird." -923- •tomenade. tAarch btcastcan' sorted,*; Laura t*ft The*"*, * 3363. March Discuss A readers I roeeurf* » 44 W.H. Bowart An early U. S. Army test of hypnosis circa 1940. The enlisted man is being guided in a test" of his trance state. From the physiology of the enlisted man, it would appear that a deeply dissociated state has been achieved. Some experts who have viewed this photo suggest the subject is under the influence of "narcc-hypnosis" which was the focus of a lot of the experimentation in the early mind control experiments. 3 THE MIND LAUNDRY MYTH David's own assessment of his mental confusion after his air force experience was that he had not been "brainwashed." By the time David had his mind controlled, "brainwashing'' had become a catchall phrase, but what David had suffered was a much more subtle and hideous form of tyranny. George E. Smith was a POW during the early days of the Vietnam War. Unlike David, George did not have a good education. It can even be said that he was a little naive, and therefore a good candidate for brainwashing of both the American and the NLF (Viet Cong) varieties. He was one of the first of the Green Berets captured in the Vietnam conflict in 1963. It was the practice of the U.S. Army in those days to indoctrinate its men with poorly constructed lies, which, it was hoped, motivated them to fight a war in which the U.S. had only dubious legal business and little moral argument The "credibility gap" existed not only within the confines of the U.S. borders, but also in the far-flung fields of battle, all the way to Southeast Asia. If brainwashing is making a person believe in lies, then our troops were already brainwashed by their own government It was a simple job for the Viet Cong to gain the POWs' cooperation by telling them the truth - truth which was easily documented. Smith described the attitude which was instilled in the American soldiers by their military mdc>ctrination: "We were arrogant., the army is a separate society; it has its own hierarchy, and I could rise to a stratum in the army that I couldn't attain in the outside world. They'd driven arrogance into us in the Airborne, which is a high level in the army, but Special Forces was the highest level you could reach, the elite of the elite. Elitism was the philosophy they taught at Bragg: Tou are professors of warfare, you shouldn't fight unless attacked. It costs thousands of dollars to train one of you and you're too valuable to send into battle.' 46 W.H. Bowart "I believed it I believed every thing the army said. I never questioned anything they told me until 1 got to Vietnam, and then things didn't quite fit anymore." Smith and three other men were captured in a midnight raid which followed a heavy mortar bombardment of their location. The Viet Cong took them deep into the jungles. When they reached the VC compound they were forced to build their own prison out of bamboo. Then, after the primitive compound was completed and the POWs had settled in, the interrogations began. These were nothing like Smith had been led to expect They were "friendly chats" with an interpreter Smith called the "Man with Glasses." Every day he would tell his prisoners about the history of Vietnam and the U.S. role in that country. "It was right out of the movies," Smith said. "The prisoner was confronted by his interrogators, who were sitting on a higher level and making him look up to them. "Look at you," Man with Glasses began. "You are pitiful." It was a typical brainwashing tactic, designed to make the prisoner think poorly of himself, to undermine his self-image. Sergeant Smith, like many others, already had a poor self-image long before he was captured, even before he enlisted in the army. That image wasn't enhanced any by finding that the authorities to whom he had been so obedient had misinformed him. "We had known interrogation was inevitable and had feared it for so long, but it didn't go the way it was supposed to," Smith said. "The guards were off somewhere out of sight No one shone lights in our eyes. In fact I sat in the shade while prevaricator (one of the interrogators) served me tea and candy and cigarettes. "Man with Glasses did most of the talking, though he encouraged me to say anything I wanted to. He insisted on giving me their side of the story - why they were there in the jungle and why the NLF had gotten together and was fighting the U.S. and the Saigon regime. *We are fighting for Vietnam. We do not try to take over your country. This is not in our plans. We are worried about our country. We love it very much. We are proud people, and we want to keep our country.' Didn't I know I was wrong to be part of the United States effort in Vietnam? And if I did, would I write a statement saying so? He talked to me for about an hour, and at the end of the session he gave me a pack of the Cambodian cigarettes. 'For your enjoyment Take them with you. When you are resting and smoking, I would like you to think deeply of what we have discussed.' "If sitting in the shade drinking tea while I listened to this old guy talk was brainwashing, then it didn't fit any description I had ever heard. I recalled the stories I'd heard about Korea - the scene where they hypnotize you, or drop water on your head, or put you in complete stillness - something that will drive Operation Mind Control 47 you out of your mind. Then once they've taken everything from your mind they start over again. When somebody says 'brainwashing,' this is what I consider they're talking about -- the classic Korean example. Or the stories that came out of there anyway." 4 The word "brainwashing" summoned a terrifying image, but like so many other words it became corrupt in usage. It was applied to describe situations in which mere propaganda or influence were used. Indeed, the word may have been corrupt from the very beginning when it was coined by a CIA propaganda specialist, b award Hunter, in nis book Brainwashing m Kea China ne claimed that "Brainwashing, with the even more sinister brain changing in reverse, is the terrifying new Communist strategy to conquer the free world by destroying its mind." 5 In the words of the noted Yale psychiatry professor Robert J. Lifton, brainwashing was popularly held to be an "all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind." 6 It was in fact none of these things. Techniques which seemed to change the beliefs of American POWs and others behind the Iron Curtain employed no hypnosis, no drugs, no new methods for the control of the mind and certainly nothing magicaL Hunter revised Brainwashing in Red China and reissued it in 1971. In the introduction of the updated edition he continued his attack on the Communists, much as he did in his psychological-warfare journal Tactics. "Change the word China to Cuba, and this book is a description of communist warfare against the mind - brainwashing - in Cuba, as well as in China. This is the world pattern the Communists employ; what might, in military parlance, be called mind attack. It is the new dimension in warfare, added to artillery attack, naval attack, rear and frontal attack, air attack. Brainwashing's dual processes of softening up and indoctrination have been added to the arsenal of warfare, girding the Trojan Horse in twentieth century accoutrements." Though Hunter may have been correct about the Communist use of coercive psychological techniques on its own populations, he never once hinted that the U.S. government might just be establishing d radices employing similar techniaues of its own. In 1958, in his testimony before the House Committee on Un- American Activities (HUAC) he continued to present brainwashing as a communist weapon: "Since man began, he has tried to influence other men or women to his way of thinking. There have always been these forms of pressure to change attitudes. We discovered in the past thirty years, a technique to influence, by clinical, hospital procedures, the thinking processes of human beings... Brainwashing is formed out of a set of different elements... hunger, fatigue, tenseness, threats, violence, 1 George E. Smith. ROM'- /Berkeley, Ramparts Press, 1971) ■ Edward HmtB.BmmvashhvmRtdCfma, 3rd ed. (New York. Vanguard, 1971) 48 W.H.Bowart and in more intense cases where the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels, drugs and hypnotism. No one of these elements alone can be regarded as brainwashing, any more than an apple can be called apple pie. Other ingredients have to be added, and a cooking process gone through. So it is in brainwashing with indoctrination or atrocities, or any other single ingredient Given the anti-Communist climate of the Cold War years, Hunter's zeal did not seem excessive, even though few of his conclusions were supported by the eyewitness accounts given by the repatriated POWs. According to them, no drugs or hypnosis were used overseas; they told only of persuasion techniques. Hunter's Brainwashing in Red China was widely quoted. Through front page news stories, the American public became aware, for the first time, that governments (though only Communist ones were mentioned) could control people's thoughts and motivate them against their will and without their knowledge. Two years later, in May of 1960, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union and cries of brainwashing again made U.S. headlines. At his public trial in Moscow, Powers apologized to the Russian people for doing them wrong. Even though the CIA had told him that if caught, he could admit everything, the voices of the "soldiers" within the U.S. were quick to brand him a traitor, and those who were inclined to be more sympathetic said he had simply been "brainwashed." One psychiatrist, William Jennings Bryan, who had been the head of an air force medical survival training program which employed hypnosis to prepare pilots for resistance to brainwashing, went so far as to coin a term for the subtle new technique which he thought the Soviets had developed since the Korean conflict and had used on Powers. The U-2 pilot, Bryan said, had been "Powerized." Bryan said that Powers' apologetic manner during the Moscow trial, his submissive, almost crippled words of testimony, his trancelike acceptance, all showed an amazing personality change since his capture. "The pilot's apparent lack of real emotion during the Moscow trial was the most startling evidence that the Russian brainwashing through hypnosis has destroyed the normal, aggressive confidence and the cockiness characteristic of the air force fliers... The big tip-off came," Dr. Bryan said, "when Powers apologized for his American assignment, testified he knew he was wrong and said he felt no ill will toward his country's Cold War enemy. "It is no longer a secret that Russia uses hypnosis as a powerful instrument to destroy the resistance of individuals she wishes to conquer," he said. "Brainwashing hypnosis as apparently used on Powers is vastly different from the permissive type of medical hypnosis... and the self-hypnosis used by air force fliers Operation Mind Control 49 in caring for themselves after a crash... Powers exhibited no telltale marks of physical abuse or torture during the Moscow trial, and indeed, he may have even thought himself that he was being treated rather well, but his manner and personality were obviously so unlike the typical American pilot that only a brand new type of other powerful technique could have changed his personality in so short a time." 7 Francis Gary Powers was returned to the U.S. in 1962 in a trade for Russian spy Rudolf Abel. He wrote in his book Operation Over/light (which was withheld from publication by the CIA until 1970) that the tactic he decided upon when captured was in accordance with his CIA instructions. He said, "When questioned, I would tell the truth." Powers insisted that he did not tell the Russians anything which he thought they did not already know. In fact he often agreed to things they suggested simply to mislead them. As for sophisticated, "Powerizing" techniques, Powers denied their existence. He even went so far as to suggest that the Russians were actually highly overrated in their intelligence-gathering methods. "From what I had been taught about brainwashing, I had anticipated certain things: I would be lectured about communism, given only propaganda to read. Food would be doled out on a reward-punishment basis; if I cooperated, I would be fed; if I didn't, I wouldn't Interrogation would be at odd hours, under bright lights. No sooner would I fall asleep than I would be awakened, and it would start all over again, until eventually I lost all track of time, place, identity. And I would be tortured and beaten until, finally, I would beg for the privilege of being allowed to confess to any crime they desired. None of this happened" Immediately after Powers crossed the bridge from East Berlin he was examined by a West German flight surgeon under orders from the CIA. The surgeon took blood from his arm. Powers says the doctor told him "the blood samples were necessary to determine whether I had been drugged. This seemed to be the first question of almost everyone to whom I talked: Had I been drugged? They seemed almost disappointed when I told them I hadn't" Powers was then flown to the U.S. "I still couldn't comprehend that after twenty-one months of captivity I was once again a free man," he said, "which was perhaps best for though I was yet to realize it I wasn't quite free, not yet In a sense, I had been released by the Russians to become a de facto prisoner of the CIA." » r, 1960. 50 W.H. Bowart The CIA men told Powers they would like to talk to him for a couple of days. The "couple of days" turned out to be over three weeks, in which Powers was thoroughly debriefed by a team of intelligence analysts and psychiatrists. The first question the psychiatrists asked was, again, had he been drugged by the Soviets? The second question they asked was, had he been brainwashed? When Powers answered "no" to both questions he was given tranquilizers, which were the first drugs he had received since his U-2 left Turkey for the overflight of the USSR. Powers noted with some irony, that "Americans are much more disposed to the use of drugs than are the Soviets." 8 Perhaps even more Ironic was the public disclaimer issued by CIA Director Allen Dulles, which said the U.S. had no use for brainwashing: "What had popularly become known as 'brainwashing,' while of great psychological interest to the West, as it is important to study defensive techniques, is never practiced by us~ for the simple reason that we are not interested in converting people to our way of thinking either forcibly or by trickery, which is its main intent We have never felt, as obviously the Soviets and the Red Chinese and the North Koreans have, that there is much to gain in putting a brainwashed person on the air to denounce his own countrymen. We have enough people who come over to us voluntarily from communism and who need no prompting." 9 Dulles, it seemed, was either a reader of Hunter's or they both had been briefed by the same propaganda section of the CIA. Brainwashing was the term the psychological warfare unit of the CIA thought up to explain why American POWs cooperated with the enemy in Korea. Brainwashing was explained as severe deprivation of food, clothing, and shelter, during which time a series of punishments and rewards were applied so effectively that a person's fundamental beliefs could be made to change 180 degrees from their original position. This brutal technique was not called torture; there was no propaganda value in something as old as torture. The CIA thought up the term "brainwashing" to lead people in the Western world to believe that the inscrutable Orientals had again, like Fu Manchu, invented a revolutionary technique controlling the human mind. The word "brainwashing" and the official government explanation of what happened to the Korean POWs was propaganda. It was aimed at fueling a home-grown fear of the Communists upon which the Cold War so greatly depended. Propaganda, of course, was nothing more than artful deception; the careful planting of "misinformation" and "disinformation," Cold War euphemisms for what had been called "the big Lie" in World WarIL Modem propaganda began when Nazi Germany perfected the art of "the big lie." The Soviet Union and other Communist countries took the methods of the Nazis Pnnai Cry Power*. Operator, OrerOgH fNew York. Holt 1970) Alien Dulles, The CroH of Mergence ( New York. Harper. 1963) Operation Mind Control 51 and improved upon them. The United States did not actively engage in wide-scale propaganda until World War n, when the OSS and the Office of War Information started. But then it was well understood that the guiding principles of propaganda were: "When there is no compelling reason to suppress a fact, tell it- Aside from considerations of military security, the only reason to suppress a piece of news is if it is unbelievable... When the listener catches you in a lie, your power diminishes... For this reason, never tell a lie which can be discovered." As far back as 1940, American propaganda services had orders to tell the truth. It was a sound premise for effective propaganda, but it was a premise which was ignored by the succeeding generations of Cold Warriors. Somewhere along the line the CIA's Covert Action Staff lost sight of the value of using the truth as the main weapon. Taking over from OSS, they soon became experts in "the big lie." This policy surfaced to the attention of the American people during isolated events such as the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba when Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy took the blame for what were obviously CIA lies. In the light of recent history it would appear that these chiefs of state were somehow convinced that it was better to issue a false confession that they had lied to the nation than to admit that they had been lied to by their own intelligence agency. In the years since the founding of the National Security Act in 1947 there were hundreds of such lies and false denials and domestic propaganda campaigns which did not immediately gain public attention. Since the administration of Lyndon Johnson, the executive branch of government seemed to be following Machiavelli's advice: "If you don't get caught, it can't be wrong." The executive privilege, the legacy of the National Security Act ~ the art of falsehood ~ lies have left our history strewn with the rubble of uncovered cover-ups and stonewalls. The administrations of Nixon, Reagan and Bush lied, not because they were misled by the cryptocracy - but because they were part of it If they hadn't been, they probably wouldn't have been elected. Few seemed to notice that George Bush was an intelligence agent before he was appointed Director of the CIA. That was before he was elected Vice President of the United States, during which time his hand articulated a mentally impaired puppet a movie actor playing President to succeed him after eight years. Through Bush the cryptocracy had its hands directly on the helm of state for twelve highly visible years. Brainwashing, as planted in the press, was one little propaganda weapon in a vast arsenal. But it was a weapon that was supposed to be effective against communism, cropping up in news accounts whenever it was needed - whenever 52 W.H.Bowart the Cold Warriors' domestic covert action arm thought that the public was going "soft on Communism." Albert K Biderman, a senior research associate of the Rand Corporation's subcontractor, the Bureau of Social Science Research, conducted a study of the news items published about our POWs in Korea. Biderman's analysis confirmed that this kind of propaganda was "successively dominant in the press during and after the Korean War. During the war, Propaganda focused on prisoner atrocities; when the war had ended, the focus shifted to stories involving the brainwashing of POWs. 10 "Beginning with exchanges of prisoners," he wrote, "prisoner misconduct received gradually increased attention until, several months after the war, it came to overshadow the other themes." Throughout the Korean conflict, propaganda and counter-propaganda campaigns on both sides grew in intensity until eventually POWs became the most critical issue of the war, the "stumbling block" in the drawn-out truce talks that delayed the war's termination. In 1953 some 4000 surviving American POWs became the subjects of another type of propaganda - propaganda by Americans, about Americans, directed at Americans. According to Biderman, The theme of this propaganda was that there had been wholesale collaboration by the American prisoners with their Communist captors and that this unprecedented misbehavior revealed alarming new weaknesses in our national character. This post-truce propaganda... was an outgrowth of propaganda activities during the war." Desperately trying to believe that U.S. propaganda was motivated by good intentions, Biderman 