Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  The term ‘brainwashing’ was first used in public in the Miami News in September 1950. A new word entered the English language and a new fear the popular imagination. At this stage of US history, the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts, the belief was widespread that communism was pure evil. Since it was unbelievable that so many millions of people could knowingly be taken in by pure evil, the idea was that they had been indoctrinated from birth. This was brainwashing – supposedly a translation of the Chinese words hsia nao, meaning ‘to cleanse the mind’. The term came into common parlance during the Korean War, and in a way guaranteed to fuel American paranoia. Over 5,000 US prisoners of war were deemed to have been brainwashed during the war, far more both numerically and proportionally than other Allied prisoners. In fact, for some US prisoners it was not enough to go on record denouncing US aggression and praising communism; on returning home, they took to handing out pro-communist leaflets. The uproar was understandable, but that was public reaction. In private, the secret services simply stepped up their search for an equivalent tool.

  However, there is a twist in this tale. It is extremely likely that hardly any of the American POWs who denounced their country had been brainwashed to do so, since they had explicit instructions from their superiors to cooperate with the enemy if they were captured, in order to make their lives as prisoners less arduous. In so far as the communists were successful in converting prisoners, the main factor was low American morale rather than any special techniques, and in any case the only successful converts were the misfits or those who were already inclined towards communism. Others paid only lip service to communism. Prisoners in Korea were subjected to heavy-handed indoctrination, but no special Pavlovian techniques describable as brainwashing. US officials must have known all this, and therefore have allowed the brainwashing scare to remain in place for propaganda purposes, to perpetuate fear of communism.

  The brainwashing scare was resurrected in May 1960 when Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his spy plane over the Soviet Union, and subsequently appeared on TV apologizing to the Soviets for the actions of his government. However, Powers himself, who was returned to the United States in 1962 in an exchange for the communist spy Rudolf Abel and later wrote a book about his experiences, denied that he had ever been subjected to hypnosis or any reconditioning methods. He said that he was simply playing it safe.

  Nevertheless, brainwashing remained a theoretical possibility, in the minds of the CIA and other US agencies, and so the research programme continued. This was the era of subliminal advertising and other attempts at mass mind control, when psychologists spoke of ‘human engineering’ and never read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as satire, when the leading behaviourist B.F. Skinner wrote his 1948 novel Walden Two, in which children were programmed to be happy, and when the picture admen had of people was so mechanical they were convinced they could just tweak our neuroses to increase sales. Vance Packard's book, largely about this psychological approach to advertising, concludes in all seriousness, as if there were a real danger: ‘The most serious offense many of the depth manipulators commit, it seems to me, is that they try to invade the privacy of our minds. It is this right to privacy in our minds … that I believe we must strive to protect.’

  But brainwashing is an extreme and rare occurrence, and the term should not be used as lightly as the tabloid press often does. It certainly does not apply to any and every conversion, nor to every person who joins a sect or New Religious Movement. It is characterized by a complete change of personality, which unless reinforced may be only temporary. It is important to distinguish between indoctrination and brainwashing. We are all indoctrinated, but few if any of us have had our beliefs, memories and so on systematically broken down and replaced with an alternate set. Few of us have the capacity for executive control over our thoughts, feelings and actions undermined.

  The theoretical mechanism of brainwashing has been well known since the time of Pavlov's famous experiments with dogs. The brain has to be stimulated until it can no longer tolerate the stresses imposed, at which point protective inhibition kicks in. This is the point of crisis or breakdown. After breakdown, the behaviour of the subject (be it canine or human) begins to differ from the normal behaviour one would expect of its type; previous behaviour patterns can be suppressed, what had been positive conditioned responses can become negative, and vice versa. In less complex terms, if you put someone under emotional stress, they become more suggestible and move towards the crisis point. In a religious context, if you assault a person's emotions by convincing her that she is in a state of sin, or is flawed in some way, that alone will increase her suggestibility to the next part of your message, which is presumably that you have the means to cleanse her of sin, or heal the flaw, or at least can teach her to do it herself.

  Interestingly, in cases of sudden conversion the crisis often resembles the breakdown of victims of shell-shock in war: weeping, sweating, quaking (the phenomenon which marked out the earliest Quakers), change of character, physical collapse – all symptoms which are familiar from Bible-belt evangelical healing meetings. Rhythmic drumming, chanting and drugs also help to bring on a rapid crisis; and the presence of others, inducing mass hysteria, is a great boon to the would-be converter. British psychologist William Sargant's fascinating book Battle for the Mind shows how deliberately these techniques have been used by hellfire Christian preachers and modern evangelists for conversion and, in a political context, for indoctrination. The trouble with sudden conversion, of course, is that it can suddenly disappear too; this is the point at which you should invite your new convert to group meetings, where she can receive positive feedback from others in your group, and generally make her the focus of your attention in some way, to reinforce the idea that she is now in a state of religious or political grace, and to give her the sense of belonging that we all crave.

  Who is vulnerable? In theory, you are, unless you are technically insane and so are following the beat of a totally different drum. The more ‘ordinary’ or conventional a person is, the better a candidate he is for hypnotism or brainwashing. This seems like a paradox, but look at it from this point of view. We measure ordinariness precisely by the extent to which a person has accepted society's norms – which is to say, by the extent to which a person has been conditioned, or has accepted external suggestions imposed on him by parents, school, peers, etc. In other words, ordinary people are suggestible people. They are the ones who are likely to join a cult; they are the ones stage hypnotists prefer as their subjects.

  Intellectual ability is no guarantee of protection, because the techniques involved in brainwashing work at an emotional level. In an appendix to The Devils of Loudun Aldous Huxley imagines the following amusing scenario:

  It would be interesting to take a group of the most eminent philosophers from the best universities, shut them up in a hot room with Moroccan dervishes or Haitian Voodooists and measure, with a stop-watch, the strength of their psychological resistance to the effects of rhythmic sound. Would the Logical Positivists be able to hold out longer than the Subjective Idealists? Would the Marxists prove tougher than the Thomists or the Vedantists? What a fascinating, what a fruitful field for experiment! Meanwhile, all we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages.

  Hypnosis actually played little part in US mind-control experiments, although the secret services were always interested in financing and hearing about the tests carried out by some clinical psychologists they knew. On the whole, the methods used were cruder: denial of sleep, large doses of drugs, repeated electric shocks, sensory deprivation – Clockwork Orange rather than The Manchurian Candidate. The US research programme included: attempting to monopolize the world supply of LSD, to prevent it getting into communist hands; dosing unwitting psychiatric patients in Canada with large quantities of LSD (two of them later successfully sued the CIA); experim
ents with the legendary drug BZ, said to be ten times as powerful as LSD and to induce an 80-hour trip with amnesic aftereffects; treating Viet Cong prisoners of war, often lethally, with electroshocks; and the CIA running a brothel in San Francisco in the hope that it would gain them insights into men's natures and sexual drives. Many of these tests were at best irresponsible and unethical, and at worst illegal, but the men and women involved felt that they were at war against communism, and that this justified their actions. Ironically, it is undoubtedly true, as John Marks claims, that it was CIA release of LSD to psychology departments and psychiatric hospitals around the country that kick-started the hippie revolution. LSD was finally made illegal in the States on 6 October 1966.

  In 1975, after CIA experimentation with drugs (and implication in the drug trade in several countries) became public knowledge, some astonishing statistics also came to light. In the previous twenty years they had tested LSD on some 7,000 subjects, 20 per cent of whom were not told in advance that they were to be given the drug. The statistics from the army and the prison service were just as alarming. In a few cases, the poor victims of these tests killed themselves. Dr Frank Olson, a scientist attached to the secret services by his work on biological warfare, was given LSD without his knowledge, though he was told after he had started tripping; he began to display agitated and erratic behaviour, and a few days later he hurled himself through the window of the hotel where he was staying and fell twelve floors to his death.

  The Real Manchurian Candidate

  The basic purpose of all this drug research was to find interrogation tools, not to create super-spies. Sometimes drugs alone were used for this, sometimes a combination of drugs and hypnosis. An internal CIA memo of 14 July 1952 reported the successful use of such a combination when interrogating two suspected Russian agents in America. Hypnosis was used not only to aid the actual interrogation process, but also to induce post-hypnotic forgetfulness that the interrogation had ever taken place. An alleged double agent in Germany, codenamed ‘Explosive’, was successfully interrogated in the same year by US agents using similar techniques. The CIA and US army also experimented with hypnosis as a means of training couriers to remember complex coded messages. They would then forget the message until triggered into recall by a cue given by another agent. The advantages of such a system, should it have worked, are obvious.

  There are only two recorded authentic attempts to use hypnotism to create hypno-assassins along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate, and both turned farcical. The first, in 1963, was on a suspected Mexican double agent; the idea was to induce rapid trance, and then convince him to kill the local KGB head, but the hypnotist, codenamed ‘Mindbender’, at the last moment refused; perhaps he knew that such rapid induction was unlikely to be successful in an unwilling and unprepared subject. In the second the hypnotist was codenamed ‘Dr Fingers’. His job was to hypnotize someone from the Cuban community in Miami to return to Cuba and assassinate Castro when triggered by the word ‘cigar’. In 1966 Dr Fingers tried his skills on three men. The first refused to respond to the trigger word, except to say that he didn't smoke; the second could not be brought out of his trance; the third became violent at the mention of Castro's name and began to smash up the motel room where the meeting was taking place. (There is in any case an obvious difficulty with using trigger words or phrases in the creation of a super-spy. Suppose you want to trigger amnesia in a spy, so that he cannot confess when captured by the enemy. What trigger word do you use? The Russian for ‘Halt! Police!’? But what guarantee is there that the arresting agents would use exactly these words?) At this point the CIA gave up using hypnotism as a means of creating a Manchurian Candidate lookalike. It remained in their arsenal only as a possible instrument of extracting information.

  Any attempt to create a super-spy by hypnosis is doomed to failure. It simply is not possible to guarantee the kind of total amnesia the project requires, and the kind of reprogramming required to make people do things contrary to their deep conditioning would be both complex and hugely time-consuming. Claims that there have been such hypno-assassins run foul of their own implausibility. In his book, conspiracy-theory author William Bowart recounts the case of one Luis Angel Castillo, who was arrested in March 1967 in the Philippines on suspicion of conspiring to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos. The case was eventually dropped, but not before Castillo had claimed to have been involved in an assassination plot three and a half years earlier, in November 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Castillo claimed not to know who the target of the assassination was. But he said that he arrived too late: the assassination had already taken place. He went into some detail about how he had been hypnotized, and hinted at Cuban involvement. His claims were checked by the Philippine authorities and the CIA, who were presumably less gullible than Bowart. Since Castillo was released without any charges being brought against him, for either assassination plot, we may assume that there was no reality to the claims of this petty criminal, whose most serious crime before this time was car theft.

  Bowart similarly gives credence to the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was hypnotized by David Ferrie, a former CIA agent, to be the fall guy in the JFK assassination; he hints that Jack Ruby, Oswald's killer, may have been hypnotized; he claims that George de Mohrenschildt, who allegedly knew all about the plot, committed suicide on having a post-hypnotic suggestion to do so triggered by a phone call. The fact that de Mohrenschildt had a history of suicide attempts is passed over. When Bowart also goes on to claim that James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King, was a hypnotized dupe of the FBI, a fall guy like Oswald, and to repeat the idea floated by Robert Kaiser in his book R.F.K. Must Die that Bobby Kennedy's killer, Sirhan Sirhan, was also hypnotized, and that all these killings were the work of what Bowart calls ‘the cryptocracy’ – the various secret services of the USA – the whole conspiracy-theory edifice seems in danger of crumbling under the weight of its own idiocy. However, the kind of silliness that one finds in Bowart's book has not gone away. Through her website, Christian writer Carla Emery offers a book called Secret, Don't Tell which repeats many of the ‘facts’ perpetuated by Bowart and others.

  Finally, a word must be said here about the incredible case of Candy Jones. In 1976 Donald Bain published The Control of Candy Jones, in which he claimed that under hypnosis Ms Jones (whose real name was Jessica Wilcox, but she had taken the name Candy Jones when she was a model) had revealed that she had, throughout the 1960s, acted as a courier for the CIA. The reason it took hypnosis to bring this out of her was that she had been hypnotized in the first place, by a doctor working for the CIA, who had effectively created an alternate personality. In a trance her other self had been sent off on all kinds of missions, on at least one of which she was tortured, and the plan was to induce her to commit suicide when her usefulness had run out.

  Given the inherent implausibility of the creation by hypnosis of any such perfect tool, I read the book with considerable scepticism. My scepticism was only increased by a remarkable parallel. If I mention that Candy ‘remembered’ under hypnosis being prodded, poked and tested, often in a sexual fashion, by a Dr Gilbert Jensen (whom Bain tried and failed to locate), the reader will recall from Chapter 8 that tales of alien abduction invariably include exactly this element. The most plausible scenario seems to be this. A person's false memories, when they are tinged by fear, attach themselves to a spectre. This spectre will change according to culture and the Zeitgeist. One would not expect such a bogeyman to be the same in a remote Pacific Island as in the USA, and one would not expect it to be the same in 1800 as in 2000. Nowadays, in the so-called space age, aliens are the great unknown; in Candy Jones's time the thing to fear was the secret police.

  Scientists Respond

  Fear and bemusement about brainwashing in the 1950s led, among other things, to the US Air Force sponsoring a study, by a number of distinguished scientists, of what really could be achieved. This study was later written up and published as The Manipulation
of Human Behavior, edited by Albert D. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer. Although most of the articles in the book are written in that uptight and jargonese fashion many academics still use to protect their professional status, it is a pity that it is not better known, because it acts as a useful counterbalance to bestselling books that alarm the general public.

  The scientists accept, of course, that one person can influence another. That is why we have the concepts ‘influence’, ‘control’, ‘manipulation’ and so on. But all their experiments and theories suggest that there are severe limitations on such influence, provided that the target person is unwilling to be influenced. The fictional or hysterical belief in the opposite, that one can be taken over despite one's best intentions, is an example of the syndrome whereby ‘the aspirations and anxieties that not so long ago were projected onto conceptions of the wizard and witch are now directed to the scientist’. Interrogators are not supermen, no technique is infallible, and all require a responsive subject in order to be successful.

  Suppose physiological methods are used, such as sensory deprivation or sleep deprivation. These methods are certainly guaranteed to impair the subject's brain functions. He will move from fatigue and inability to perform more complex tasks to irritability or depression, alternating with apathy, to lack of concern with manners and honesty and patriotism, until he ends with total confusion and disorientation, and even unconsciousness. At any point towards the latter end of this scale, he will be willing to cooperate with his interrogator, even to the extent of confessing to something he has not done: he can no longer separate fantasy from reality. In other words, ironically, the more cooperative a prisoner becomes, the less reliable his statements become at the same time.