The CIA uses thought reform, programming, and indoctrination
on its own employees. Patrick J. McGarvey, a
veteran of fourteen years in U.S. intelligence service, described
the cryptocracy's more ordinary indoctrination procedures
in his book CIA: The Myth and the Madness.
McGarvey said that his indoctrination was carried out in a
classroom which was "right out of The Manchurian Candidate.
It was a cavernous room not unlike a nineteenthcentury
surgical exhibition pit."
That training, he said, consisted of "an admixture of
common sense, insanity, old-time religion, and some of the
weirdest lectures you can imagine." The most important
result of this early training, as far as the CIA was concerned,
McGarvey said, "was the attitudes they managed to
inculcate" among the recruits.
"Many among us believed in the intelligence establishment
simply because we were part of it. This attitude lingered
for years among us, and today, in middle age, most
of us still talk about the mind-bending job they did on us
during the training period. I am convinced that this manipulation
of attitudes has been responsible for keeping silent
the many men who have since left the craft of intelligence.
Because of my indoctrination, I still get a visceral twinge—
and have qualms of conscience about writing this."
McGarvey was referring to behavior modification when
he said, "CIA has a wonderful informal system of rewards
and punishments for the faithful and unfaithful."
Other fragments of information have leaked through the memory blocks and security oaths of former CIA employees.
They can be found scattered throughout the "true confessions"
literature of former spooks. They offer further
glimpses of the CIA's interest in mind control—but they
are only glimpses.
"The most impressive part of this initial CIA indoctrination,"
writes Miles Copeland, "is the attitude toward loyalty,
security, precision, attention to detail, and healthy suspicion
that it manages to implant in the minds of the trainees
. . . The fact is that this aspect of the indoctrination
has been designed by some of the nation's best psychologists,
employing the most modern techniques of 'motivational
research.' Certainly it achieves its purpose. The psychologists
resent the insinuation that they are engaged in
'brainwashing,' arguing that the effect of what they have
contributed to the training is exactly the opposite of brainwashing
as practiced by the Chinese. Instead of conditioning
a person so that he can accept only 'approved' ideas, it
sharpens his instincts and critical faculties so that he can
recognize specious political reasoning when he encounters
it. Also the psychologists believe their course imparts a
strong sense of mission, which is lacking in other branches
of government."1
Despite the CIA psychologists' defense of their reverse
"brainwashing," terrible damage has been suffered by the
people who have matriculated from the CIA's mind-control
projects. Those techniques employed for indoctrination and
"loyalty training" of CIA personnel are but the beginning
of a mind-control operation which is the most effective security
device short of assassination.
Institutionalized secrecy came to America on the eve of
World War II. From the beginning, psychology was both
the most important external weapon against the Nazis and
Japanese and the internal control mechanism for the wartime
government.
Psychological warfare was used in World War I, but by
the beginning of World War II it had taken on a new dimension.
Previously the inspiring, depressing, persuasive,
or misleading messages of propaganda had been delivered
to target populations via the printed page or by word of
mouth. In World War II, for the first time it became possible
through radio to address the entire population of a country at the same time. The effects of propaganda, so
magnified, became an important tool in warfare.
After the war, electronic propaganda became the staple
weapon for waging the Cold War. Persuasion, argument,
propaganda, and indoctrination went out over the airwaves
not only to "enemy" populations but to our own civilian
populations as well.
The full story of the OSS and the beginnings of the CIA
was not known until 1976 when a government report, The
War Report of Strategic Services, was declassified. In 1940
Gen. William J. Donovan was appointed President Franklin
D. Roosevelt's special emissary. Upon his return from a
Mediterranean tour he reported that "neither America nor
Britain is fighting the new and important type of war on
more than the smallest scale. Our defenses against political
and psychological warfare are feeble, and even such gestures
as have been made toward carrying the fight to the
enemy are pitifully inadequate." Donovan urged the President
to prepare for combat in the field of irregular and
unorthodox warfare, as well as in the orthodox military
areas.2
Five months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
President Roosevelt added one more new bureau to the
New Deal bureaucracy. It was tagged COI, perhaps a fitting
acronym for the publicity-shy Office of the Coordinator
of Information. Its leader was, of course, William J.
Donovan.
Donovan has been called "a queer figure who comes off
three-quarters Machiavelli and one-quarter boy." According
to Anthony Cave Brown, he recruited "Communists to
kill Krauts. He feared and distrusted Communists in places
where they counted. In Italy and France, he could never
quite make up his mind what to do politically; and, since
political belief was the clandestine's primary motive, his
policies often failed and, even when they succeeded, led to
interminable muddles. Likable, even admirable on occasions,
he was in fact an Elizabethan man, swaggering about
capitals in beautiful cord, displaying a fine calf for a riding
boot, but forever dependent really upon the British for the
finesse which that secret struggle demanded."3
The British Secret Intelligence Service had developed espionage
and intelligence to a fine art during World War I. They were already masters of sabotage, guerrilla warfare,
political warfare, deception, crypto-analysis, irregular maritime
warfare, technical intelligence, and secret intelligence
when World War II began. During that war they took
intelligence into the vanguard of psychology, using drugs
and hypnosis to program couriers to carry secret messages
locked behind posthypnotic blocks.
The British were the first to employ a financing device
known as the "Secret Vote," or unvouchered funds. This
was money made available without recourse to legislation
and accounted for only by personal signature. As Anthony
Cave Brown observed, "plainly, almost unlimited opportunities
for fraud existed in this arrangement."4
Donovan's COI copied the unvouchered funds financing
idea, as well as many others, from the British. He put great
emphasis on the psychological warfare arm of intelligence.
The British had also emphasized "psy-war," but Donovan
promoted it to the-degree that he made the psychological
warfare division the central control organ of the entire espionage
agency.
In 1941, after the birth of COI, President Roosevelt
asked Donovan to make specific proposals for the implementation
of his ideas for psychological warfare and the
development of an intelligence plan. Donovan submitted to
the White House a paper entitled "Memorandum of Establishment
of Services of Strategic Information." In it he clarified
his idea of the relationship of information to strategic
planning in total war.
Pointing out the diplomatic and defense inadequacies of
the then-existing intelligence organization, Donovan said,
"It is essential that we set up a central enemy intelligence
organization which would itself collect either directly or
through existing departments of government, at home and
abroad, pertinent information." Such information and data
should be analyzed and interpreted by applying the experience
of "specialized, trained research officials in the related
scientific fields (including technological, economic, financial
and psychological scholars)." He emphasized that
"there is another element in modern warfare, and that is
the psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses
of a nation."5
In June, 1942, the Office of Strategic Service (OSS)
was created to replace COI. Some time passed between the formation of the OSS and the issuance of its charter. The
delay was created by Donovan's controversial idea that the
psychological warfare unit should be in charge of the entire
intelligence operation. The intellectuals hovering around
OSS argued with the Joint War Plans Committee about
what exactly psychological warfare was, and who should
direct it in the name of the United States of America.
Finally a definition was agreed upon. The official definition
of psychological warfare read: ". . . it is the coordination
and use of all means, including moral and physical,
by which the end is to be attained—other than those of
recognized military operations, but including the psychological
exploitation of the result of those recognized military
actions—which tend to destroy the will of the enemy to
achieve victory and to damage his political or economic
capacity to do so; which tend to deprive the enemy of the
support, assistance, or sympathy of his allies or associates
or of neutrals, or to prevent his acquisition of such support,
assistance, or sympathy; or which tend to create, maintain,
or increase the will to victory of our own people and allies
and to acquire, maintain, or increase the support, assistance,
and sympathy of neutrals."
And, as Donovan had wished, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
decreed that "All plans for projects to be undertaken by the
Office of Strategic Services will be submitted to the Joint
U.S. Chiefs of Staff through the Joint Psychological Warfare
Committee for approval. The Joint Psychological Warfare
Committee will refer such papers as it deems necessary
to the Joint Staff Planners (JSP) prior to submission to the "
Joint U.S. Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Psychological Warfare
Committee will take final action on all internal administrative
plans pertaining to the Office of Strategic Services.""
The lifespan of OSS was less than three years. During
that short period of time it developed psychological warfare
into an effective weapon against the minds of civilian and
military populations foreign and domestic alike. To wage
effective psychological war the OSS needed background information
on United States citizens. Thus the burglary of
Private files was sanctioned. The pattern of illegal clandestine
activities within the United States, which became public
knowledge with Watergate, began in 1945 when the
OSS broke into the office of Amerasia magazine, an alleged
Communist publication. The OSS illegal entry was followed by a legal FBI search three months later, but no evidence
that Amerasia was engaged in subversive activity was ever
found.
Throughout the war Donovan never lost sight of the fact
that while OSS was a wartime expedient, it was also an
experiment to determine the nature of a peacetime U.S.
intelligence structure in the postwar period. Eventually
OSS did provide the framework for the peacetime intelligence
service through which the United States continued
the bitter moral and territorial struggle against the Communists.
By a small, humorous twist of fate, it was on October 31,
1944—Halloween, the traditional day for spooks and dirty
tricks—when President Roosevelt once again turned to
Donovan for his views. The President asked Donovan to
develop a plan for the organization of an intelligence service
which would function after the cessation of hostilities.
In November, Donovan submitted to the President his proposal
for the creation of a "central intelligence service." In
his memorandum, Donovan proposed liquidation of OSS
once the wartime necessity had ceased. He was anxious,
however, to preserve the intelligence functions developed
by OSS, so he repeated his original COI concept of a central
authority, reporting directly to the President, which
would collect and analyze intelligence material required for
planning and implementation of national policy and strategy-
"Though in the midst of war," Donovan wrote, "we are
also in a period of transition which, before we are aware,
will take us into the tumult of rehabilitation. An adequate
and orderly intelligence system will contribute to informed
decisions. We have now in the Government the trained and
specialized personnel needed for the task. This talent
should not be dispersed."7
On September 20, 1945, OSS was officially terminated
by Executive Order 9620. "Research and Analysis" functions
and "Foreign Nationals Recruiting" were transferred
to the Department of State. The remainder of the OSS
functions were transferred to the Department of War. That
same day, the new President Harry S Truman sent a letter
to Donovan informing him of the executive order to close
OSS, and thanking him for his outstanding service.
The President wrote, in part, "You may well find satisfaction in the achievements of the Office and take pride in
your own contribution to them. These are in themselves
large rewards. Great additional reward for your efforts
should lie in the knowledge that the peacetime intelligence
services of the Government are being erected on the foundation
of the facilities and resources mobilized through the
Office of Strategic Services during the war."
Hidden behind the President's compliment was the fact
that Donovan was shut out from the formation of the CIA
because of a major character flaw: he had a strong dislike
of organization. Whether Donovan was really the right
man for the job of chief of America's first intelligence service
is debatable. Success in covert operations depends upon
an efficient bureaucracy and good judgment in authority.
In many cases Donovan displayed neither. At heart he was
an activist who did not even like the personalities of conventional
administrators. Stewart Alsop said that he ran
OSS "like a country editor."
"In every respect, OSS was Donovan's child," OSS historian
R. Harris Smith wrote. "He nourished the agency in
its infancy, and it bore the stamp of his personality."0 That
stamp carried over into the new peacetime intelligence
agency, the CIA, the first in American history.
But while Donovan was the grandfather of the cryptocracy,
its techniques and much of the rationale behind
them were the work of the Dulles brothers. The following
review of the Dulles' rise to prominence shows the manner
in which cryptocrats form their liaisons.
On the evening of the day South Korea was invaded,
President Truman had hastily returned to Washington from
his home in Independence, Missouri. He gathered his principal
advisors together at the White House to discuss the
emergency. Unanimously, his advisors recognized the gravity
of the situation and agreed with Gen. Omar Bradley,
then the head of the Chiefs of Staff, who said the intelligence
reports indicated Russia was "not yet ready for war,
but in Korea they are obviously testing us, and the line
ought to be drawn now."
Quickly, Truman ordered Gen. Douglas MacArthur to
provide military protection for the delivery of arms to the
South Koreans and to evacuate American dependents. He
instructed the military chiefs "to prepare the necessary orders
for the eventual use of American units." On the fol lowing day he said he was convinced that "the Republic of
Korea needed help at once if it was not to be overrun."
Truman was given CIA reports which indicated that Korea
was a repetition, on a larger scale, of the Berlin blockade.
The intelligence reports further indicated that North
Korean Communists would eventually prove to be a threat
to Japan, Formosa, and the American base on Okinawa. It
was the first time the "domino theory" was used.
The President, acting on the advice of the CIA, ordered
MacArthur to give immediate naval and air support to the
South Korean army, without allowing him to order his
troops to cross the Thirty-eighth Parallel. (This act of drawing
a political rather than a strategic boundary set the precedent
in Asia for the use of the same tactic later in the
Vietnam campaign.)
MacArthur's zeal and military instinct disposed him
to blindness concerning such arbitrary boundaries. His expressed
urge to attack China with nuclear weapons eventually
led to his unprecedented dismissal by Truman. MacArthur
may have had the knowledge and the skill to win the
Korean conflict unconditionally, but such a military victory
in the light of history did not fit into the long-range war of
attrition the cryptocracy supported as a tool of the militaryindustrial
complex, against the Communists.
Domestic politics also served to compound the power of
the new cryptocracy, which was then cutting its teeth in
Southeast Asia. In 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was
elected President of the United States, he appointed John
Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, and allowed Foster's
brother Allen, who was then the CIA's "deputy director for
plans"—the clandestine operations branch of CIA—to take
over directorship of the CIA one year later.
According to Townsend Hoopes, who served in both the
Truman and Johnson administrations, though the seeds
were sown by Truman, it was under the Eisenhower administration
that the Cold War was "pervasively institutionalized
in the United States." He described the Cold
War's chief manifestations as ". . . a strident moralism, a
self-righteous and often apocalyptic rhetoric, a determined
effort to ring the Soviet Union and China with anti-
Communist military alliances, a dramatic proliferation of
American overseas military bases, and a rising flow of American
military equipment for foreign armies accompanied by American officers and men to provide training and advice.
The posture of imperative, total confrontation," he said,
"thus came to full development during the Eisenhower period.
By 1960, the United States government was not only
positioned and determined to restrain the major Communist
powers, but also determined—through an implicit extension
of logic and the inertial momentum generated by a
large and powerful military-foreign affairs bureaucracy—to
control the pace and character of political change everywhere.""
In the chill of the Cold War, few Americans remembered
that John Foster Dulles had been pro-Nazi before Hitler
invaded Poland. No one thought, either, to question the
fact that while John Foster Dulles was running the State
Department, and therefore dealing with friendly governments,
his brother Allen was running the CIA, which he
once described as a State Department for dealing with unfriendly
governments. No one seemed at all disturbed by
the Dulles dynasty, and only a handful of people realized to
what extent the Dulles brothers held power in the Eisenhower
administration.
Lieutenant Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (USAF) was the
Pentagon's chief briefing officer assigned to the White
House during the Eisenhower administration. He worked
closely with Allen Dulles in coordinating military support
for the various clandestine political operations undertaken
by the CIA. He knew the intimate working arrangements
of the Dulles brothers and of the cryptocracy they were
building.
In his book The Secret Team, Colonel Prouty gave a
glimpse of how the Dulles brothers "worked" the President:
"That evening, before his usual tennis game on his
backyard court, Allen Dulles dropped by his brother's secluded
house just off Massachusetts Avenue and discussed
the operation [which involved an amphibious plane and a
Polish pilot to be run under a CIA business cover]. Foster
agreed that Eisenhower would go along with it. He walked
over to the wall lined with bookshelves and picked up the
special white telephone that connected directly with the
White House operator. All he said was 'Is the man busy?'
"Foster Dulles opened with, 'Boss, how did you do at
Burning Tree today? . . . Well, six holes is better than
nothing . . . Yes, I've been talking here with Allen. He has a proposal he wants to clear with you. He feels it is
very important, and it will lift the morale of Frank's boys.
[Frank Wisner was then Director of Intelligence Clandestine
Operations.] You know, since Korea and Guatemala
you haven't had them doing much. Will you see him tomorrow
morning? Fine. How's Mamie? O.K. boss, I'll speak
to Allen . . . 9:30 . . . Thank you—good night!'
"There was not much left to do," Prouty said, "the flight
would be scheduled."
A relevant analysis of "the brother act" is provided by
David Wise and Thomas Ross. "[The Dulles brothers] embodied
the dualism—and indeed the moral dilemma—of
United States foreign policy since World War II . . .
Foster Dulles reflected the American ethic; the world as we
should like it to be. While he took this public position, his
brother was free to deal with nastier realities, to overturn
governments and to engage in backstage political maneuvers
all over the globe with the CIA's almost unlimited
funds . . .
"This is not to say that the same two-sided foreign policy
would never have evolved had the director of the CIA and
the Secretary of State not been brothers. It very likely
would have. But the natural friction between the objective
and methods of the diplomats and the 'spooks,' between
the State Department and the CIA, was to an extent
reduced because of the close working relationship of the
Dulles brothers. There was consequently less of a check
and balance."10
John Foster and Allen Dulles had worked together before
coming to government. Foster was the star attorney of
the international law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. He
persuaded his partners to take Allen in "to soften up customers,"
which Allen had a great gift for. Eventually, Sullivan
and Cromwell sent Allen to Berlin to negotiate private
affairs with the German industrial barons before the war.
After the war broke out, he was sent to Switzerland with
OSS, where, under cover, he used his former business contacts
inside Germany to supply information for his many
spectacular single-handed intelligence coups against the
Axis.
Though Allen Dulles was more gifted as a diplomat than
his elder brother Foster, it was Foster who can be considered the mastermind of the Cold War Aberration. Foster
played upon the fear of Communists and implemented the
world-policing foreign policy of the Pax Americana which
eventually led to our involvement in Vietnam. It was his
Cold War campaign at home that made citizens tremble in
fear of Communist attack and their children crouch under
school desks in atomic air-raid drills. It was John Foster
Dulles, in the company of men like Senator Joe McCarthy
and Richard Nixon, who presented the specter of the Communist
menace to the American public. They convinced
the nation that the communists were about to unleash a
global war and even a direct nuclear attack upon the
United States.
During Eisenhower's 1952 campaign for the presidency,
he promised to "peacefully bring about freedom for the
captive nations." John Foster Dulles later repeated Eisenhower's
promise, omitting, however, the word "peacefully."
Lest we judge John Foster Dulles unfairly by the standards
of our own time, it must be said that, to his mind,
there must have seemed to have been good reasons for invoking
the Communist threat. As Senator Frank Church's
(1976) Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations
said: "The extent to which the urgency of the Communist
threat had become shared perception is difficult to
appreciate."
More likely, there was another, more insidious reason
for the Cold War: the economy. A glance at a historical
graph of the American business cycle will show that since
the Civil War, economic depressions tend to precede and
follow U.S. wars. Dulles' generation came to power in
World War II after having suffered the longest and deepest
depression in American history. It could be considered natural
for them to overreact to the recessions of 1945-46 and
1949-50 by fomenting war—hot or cold—to feed
the military-industrial base of the economy. The research
and development of death-dealing technology created the
need for unprecedented secrecy. The instrument of keeping
those secrets was the cryptocracy.
The Cold War strategy proved to be economically successful.
Without having to risk a full-scale nuclear war and
simply by arming the world against communism through
weapons marketing, propaganda, and the psychological warfare of the Cold War scheme, the United States
achieved a capital goods boom unequaled in modern history.
In the most simple terms, arms constituted the bulk of
United States exports from World War Two to the present
and figured as the single most important industry which
maintained the United States trade balance.
The central core of the Dulles brothers' American containment
policy grew from the CIA's covert operations and
propaganda efforts. The mood of those times is reflected in
a top-secret report submitted by the second Hoover Commission
to President Eisenhower in September, 1954, and
made public by former CIA man Harry Rositzke. The report
urged the United States to make its ". . . aggressive
covert psychological, political, and paramilitary organization
more effective, more unique, and if necessary, more
ruthless than that employed by the enemy . . . We are
facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is
world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.
There are no rules in such a game . . . We . . . must
learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by
more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods
than those used against us . . ."
According to Rositzke "The next year a National Security
Council directive reaffirmed the Executive's commitment
to covert operations. It instructed the CIA to continue
creating problems for 'International Communism,' to
reduce its strength and its control worldwide, and to 'increase
the capacity and the will of peoples and nations to
resist International Communism. It specifically reaffirmed
CIA's authority to develop underground resistance and facilitate
covert and guerrilla operations.' "11
Although the Cold War is generally said to date from
1948, with the Berlin Blockade and the Greek civil war,
John Foster Dulles contributed to its architecture before he
came to office in 1953. He epitomized the fearful gestalt of
his generation, took hold of the floundering Cold War
strategy, and molded it with his personality. He was fond
of quoting Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in the Federalist
Papers, "safety from external danger is the most powerful
director of national conduct." Hamilton's statement,
when taken at face value, seems quite innocent. But in the
context of John Foster Dulles' materialistic and puritan up bringing, it is not difficult to see how he construed it to
mean something quite different than Hamilton intended.
Hamilton's thoughts gave Dulles the moral rationale to try
to motivate national political, industrial, and economic conduct
by posing an overwhelming external danger—the
threat of a nuclear war initiated by the "international Communist
conspiracy."
If, at the end of World War II, the growth of our economy,
still the strongest and richest in the world, did depend
upon the military-industrial complex for sustenance, then
Dulles' Cold War saved the U.S. from certain recession.
Without the threat of communism, what could the free
world have armed against? And if the health of the U.S.
economy continues to depend on that merger of military
and industrial interests, then we may well expect to see
efforts at detente collapse and the Cold War resume as the
already inflated armaments industry expands.
In his farewell address to the nation in 1960, President
Eisenhower issued his famous warning about the militaryindustrial
complex:
"Our military organization today bears little relation to
that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime—or,
indeed, by fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until
the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no
armaments industry. We annually spend on military security
alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
"Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment
and a large arms industry is new in the American
experience. The total influence—economic, political, even
spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office
of the federal government. We recognize the imperative
need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend
its grave implications. In the councils of government,
we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger
our liberties or democratic processes. We should
take nothing for granted."
Eisenhower accurately predicted the course of history "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal
employment, project allocations, and the power of
money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect,
as we should, we must be alert to the equal and
opposite danger that public policy could itself become the
captive of a scientific-technological elite."
The Cold War was World War III—a war waged
largely with words. Yet the men who had won World War
II with advanced weaponry were less artful in the use of the
new psychological warfare. As the Cold War escalated,
propaganda was followed by sabotage, assassinations, "paramilitary"
covert operations, and limited "police actions."
America had traditionally been a free and open society.
But after the war, U.S. leaders held in their hands an awesome
technological superiority. While being the love object
of government, the new technologies, especially nuclear energy,
made the leaders fearful of losing their monopoly.
That fear gave rise to the belief that new secret agencies
and operations were needed to guard against technological
thefts by foreign governments. The Cold War was a "secret"
war in more ways than one.
The psychological war, originally waged only against
"enemy" countries, was nevertheless created at home. It
was used within the United States, against beliefs and free
thought, by a secret bureaucracy which is still supported by
all the power of the federal government, but which operates
outside the chain of government command. It is a secret
bureaucracy become paranoid—a cryptocracy mad with
world power.
Although the Central Intelligence Agency has long been
the convenient symbol for all those who have committed
atrocities in the name of national security, the secret bureaucracy,
the cryptocracy, does not consist solely of the
CIA. It is as well a vast network of alliances between individuals
in a number of government agencies normally
thought to be outside the intelligence field.
Since the cryptocracy violates every constitutional principle
as a matter of course, and commits every crime
known to man in the interest of "national security," it cannot
entirely rely on the patriotism of its agents to keep its
secrets. Therefore, no single individual is told more than he
has a "need to know." The cryptocracy is a brotherhood reminiscent of the ancient
secret societies, with rites of initiation and indoctrination
programs to develop in its loyal membership the special
understanding of its mysteries. It has secret codes and
oaths of silence which reinforce the sense of elitism necessary
for the maintenance of its strict loyalty. It is automated,
organized in the mode of a computer, where all
have access to general knowledge and the most obvious
aims and goals, but where the individual is isolated by
tribal rituals and compartmentalization.
It is a technocratic organization without ideology, loyal
only to an unspoken, expedient, and undefined patriotism.
Its members are anonymous. Its funds are secret. Its operational
history is secret. Even its goals are secret. It is a
degenerative disease of the body politic which has grown
rampantly, spreading so invisibly that after nearly four decades
its existence is known only to a handful of "decision
makers."
The cryptocracy is designed to function like a machine.
It also has the feelings of a machine—none at all. But, unlike
a machine, it does have ambition. To it, human beings
are so much cheap hardware who perform certain set functions
which produce certain predetermined results. They
are valued relative to cost and efficiency. The cryptocracy
is the perfect cybernetic organism—pure logic at the planning
level—nothing but automatic response in the field.
If a prospective agent cannot be recruited by an appeal
to patriotism, he is bribed. If he cannot be bribed, he is
blackmailed. If he refuses to be blackmailed, he is "programmed."
If all these fail, he is killed, for it must not be
known that he had ever been approached—so important is
"national security."
It is sometimes hard to determine whether the cryptocracy
is working for or against the interests of the U.S.
President, to whom its constituent agencies are supposed to
be accountable. Many of its crimes, now a matter of public
record, would indicate that it has often worked against, the
President. It has, we know, worked against the U.S. Constitution
and the American people. It has needlessly caused
the death of innocent people who were working for it, just
as it has tortured and murdered those who have stood in its
way. Documented atrocities and criminal blunders have
been revealed by congressional investigations, yet no one has been brought to trial.* Little congressional, judicial, or
executive action has been taken to limit its power or ferret
out its leaders. Figureheads have been changed, but the organization
and the National Security Act which has bred this
cancer remains in essence unchanged.
The cryptocracy serves big business and spends a good
deal of time and energy supplying American corporations
with industrial intelligence. These favors, offered only to
those companies friendly to the cryptocracy, may be repaid
by such things as political campaign contributions to candidates
who are either sympathetic to or compromised by the
cryptocracy. In the past the cryptocracy has supported
both foreign and domestic politicians with such campaign
contributions.
The "old boy network" of retired cryptocrats working
within major corporations plays an important role in the
cryptocracy's international influence. Secret funds are
shunted not only from one agency of government to another,
but also from agency to corporation and then, under
cover of the corporation's legal business activities, throughout
the world, wherever expediency dictates.
Through its authorized functions, the cryptocracy controls
the United States government. It feeds the executive
branch "intelligence reports" which are often slanted and
sometimes falsified, so that the policy decisions which result
will be those which fit the cryptocracy's game plan.
Like a fifteenth century Machiavellian princedom that
has been computerized and automated, the cryptocracy has
systematically manipulated the American consciousness.
By justifying its existence by citing an exaggerated danger
from communism, it has justified its own totalitarianism by
convincing key politicians that fire must be fought with
fire. The practices of the cryptocracy, once officially sanctioned
only in operations outside the U.S., have become
internalized. Those practices have included spying, stealing,
blackmail, and murder, even within the borders of the
country it is supposed to protect and defend.
There is nothing hypocritical about the KGB's employ ment of totalitarian, police-state tactics. The Soviet equivalent
of the CIA, the KGB, is an extension of the Soviet
political system, which is totalitarian. Neither is there anything
hypocritical about the Chinese use of "brainwashing"
on American POWs in Korea. The Chinese have "brainwashed"
three and a half million of their own people,
though generally they used techniques less drastic than
starvation, sleep interruption, and isolation. But the U.S.
cryptocracy is the ultimate hypocrisy, subversive to its
own government's democratic structure. It operates with
methods which are not permitted in most democracies and
certainly not permitted by the Constitution of the United
States.
In war, a successful campaign greatly depends upon the
element of surprise. Since the beginning of human disputes,
warriors have found it desirable to keep their strengths and
weaknesses concealed.
The use of new technology has been both the strength
and the surprise which so often has determined the outcome
of war. The first elephant to be outfitted with spikes
and used in battle was as great a terror to the bow-andarrow
warrior as the atomic bomb was to the Japanese.
The cryptocracy has long known that the only way it can
maintain the upper hand in the global power game is to
stay in the vanguard of technology. To that end it has employed
all the research and development the federal government
can buy.
Since World War II the cryptocracy has used electronic
technology to manipulate foreign peoples as well as the
American people through a campaign of carefully planned
Misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. The cryptocracy's
existence depends upon such manipulation of
Public belief. Since it cannot openly argue its cause, it relies
upon persuasion and indoctrination to accomplish its goals
and win support for its ends.
The existence of the cryptocracy also depends upon absolute
secrecy. Without it they are powerless. Thus the
cryptocracy's attempt to control information at its source—
the human mind.
It was the CIA which instigated and directed the initial
research, and with an invisible hand, kept each group of
scientists isolated from the other. Each group researching mind control was kept apart from other groups conducting
simultaneous interfacing experiments, so that no one except
the Agency would be able to put all the pieces of the puzzle
together.
Bases for mind-control techniques already existed in scientific
literature, but in a fragmented, incomplete, and unassimilated
state. The cryptocracy enlisted the aid of scientists
who then developed these fragments into usable
techniques. These scientists worked independently, each on
only one small part of the overall plan. And, by and large,
they were ignorant of the intended use of the final product
of their research.
Operation Mind Control was not the plan of a mere cult
of intelligence; it did not stop at intelligence gathering, but
went on to instigate active operations on its own. Those
conspiracies against freedom which were revealed by the
investigations into Watergate, the intelligence community,
and multinational corporations are minor compared to the
conspiracy of mind control which has developed in this
country. Although the first victims of Operation Mind Control
were, perhaps, especially suitable personality types for
such use, with the advances being made in the psychosciences
all but a few of us may eventually be victimized.
The power of mind control resides in its use as a superior
security technique; as such it is almost as foolproof as
that employed by the great Pharaoh of Egypt, who, entombed
with the slaves who carried him to his final resting
place, had those same slaves killed and buried along with
him so that all knowledge of access to the tomb would remain
secure for centuries. Mind control arranges that
"slaves" of the intelligence community—witnesses, couriers,
and assassins—are "protected" from their own memories
and guilt by amnesia. These "slaves" may be left alive,
but the knowledge they possess is buried deep within the
tombs of their own minds by techniques which can keep
the truth hidden even from those who have witnessed it. It
is the ultimate debriefing, the final security measure short
of assassination.
The conspiracy of mind control veils the secret of all
secrets. It hides the cabal which possesses its power, so
that, even if the CIA and the other intelligence agencies
were closed down tomorrow, the cryptocracy would continue
to function, for as with the Mafia, "once you are a member, you're a member for life." The power of mind
control, and ultimately of the cryptocracy that uses it, resides
with those who have culled the fruits of psychoscience
since the late 1930s; they now possess the mature
body of knowledge upon which the coercive art is built.
To review the labyrinth of events: Out of the natural fear
of technology grew an unnatural reliance on secrecy. Secrecy
led to covert control and produced a well-organized
institution of national security. Institutionalized secrecy directed
covert research and produced Operation Mind Control,
the ultimate technology of secrecy and control. The cryptocracy's search for reliable mind-control methods
was one of the most far-reaching secret projects ever
undertaken. In addition to research and development in
drugs and hypnosis, CIA funds and cryptocracy guidance
gave impetus to a number of behavior modification projects
carried out in federal prisons and mental institutions. Most
of the projects were arranged secretly so that recipients of
the funds would have no way of knowing that the CIA was
backing the research.
Even if they had known of the CIA's involvement, their
interest in behavior modification probably would not have
been dampened. Previously called conditioned reflex therapy
behavior modification, in the sixties and seventies, was
becoming the most popular tool of psycho-science since
Sigmund Freud asked his first patient to lie down on the
couch.
Behavior modification is based on conditioning, but "conditioning"
is a big word for a simple form of learning in
which a reaction is evoked by an outside action. The
reaction is called a response; the outside action is called a
stimulus.
In 1927 Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for bis discovery of
a method of making dogs salivate at the ringing of a bell.
Salivating dogs were not much good to anyone, and it was
not for making dogs drool that Pavlov was so honored. He
was honored with the world's most prestigious award for
making dogs drool on cue. He called his process "conditioning."
The dogs' involuntary response, he called a "re flex." Pavlov's discoveries provided the breakthrough
which behavioral science needed to begin to control the
human mind.
Pavlov had begun in 1906 by seeking a simple model of
the activity of the brain. He decided that the salivary reflex
in dogs could be just such a model, so he raided the dog
pound and cut holes in the animals' cheeks to implant measuring
devices for the flow of saliva.
By regularly ringing a bell just before feeding the dogs,
he found that the stimulus—the sound of the bellintrinsically
unrelated to food, began to evoke the salivation
that had initially been observed only when the dogs
were eating. His patient studies revealed that the quality,
rate, and frequency of salivation changed depending upon
the quality, rate, and frequency of the stimuli.
Pavlov's experiments with dogs have been repeated numerous
times by different scientists with the same results.
Science now agrees that when a hungry dog is given a
piece of meat immediately after a bell rings, and when this
procedure is repeated a number of times the bell alone will
produce the flow of saliva almost as if the bell and not the
meat were activating the glands. When the bell rings, not
only will a properly conditioned dog salivate but his ears
will stand up, he'll turn toward the food source, and even
make anticipatory chewing movements. Conditioned reflexes
in dogs, however, are a long way from the conditioning
of volitional thinking in humans.
But Pavlov established the groundwork by which anyone's
emotional stability (Pavlov called it "perpetual equalibration")
and sanity could be reliably balanced or unbalanced.
To that end the Soviets, and later the People's
Republic of China, employed Pavlov's new science for the
creation of the totalitarian state.
While the general public in the West may continue to
associate behavior modification with Pavlov's conditioning
of dogs, the science is actually an ancient one In its modern
form it has its roots in the works of Descartes who, in
1664, put forward the idea that every activity of an organism
is the reaction to an external stimulus. Experimental
studies to test Descartes' idea did not begin until several
centuries later. Then, simultaneously experimentation began
in a number of different countries.
At the same time Pavlov was experimenting with dogs in Russia, John B. Watson was experimenting with humans
in the United States. Watson was the founder of the behaviorist
school psychology in the 1920s. His most notorious
accomplishment was his series of experiments on an
eleven-month-old infant known to history as Little Albert.
Watson showed Little Albert a white rat and the child
reacted naturally and tried to pet and cuddle the animal.
After Albert had established a playful rapport with the rat,
Watson began to aversely condition the lad. Each time the
rat would come into Albert's view, Watson would beat the
floor with a steel bar and produce a deafening sound. Quite
naturally, whenever Albert heard the sound he would jump
with fright. Eventually Albert associated the loud sound
with the white rat and became frightened of it. Every time
the rat came into his view he would begin to cry.
Albert became so aversely conditioned to the rat that he
would exhibit fear whenever any small animal came into
his view. He became so conditioned that he reacted with
equal fear to rabbits, dogs, and a sealskin coat—in short, to
anything with fur.
Quite proudly Dr. Watson exclaimed, "Give me the
baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing
buildings of stone or wood . . . I'll make it a thief, a
gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in
any direction are almost endless. Even gross differences in
anatomical structure limits are far less than you may
think . . . Make him a deaf mute, and I will still build
you a Helen Keller . . . Men are built, not born."1
Watson saw things, as Pavlov did, in physical and chemical
terms. He was not interested in anything beyond overt
and observable behavior. And Watson was only the first in
a long line of American psycho-scientists who were to take
the mechanistic path to control of the mind.
Pavlov and Watson's classical conditioning did not, however,
go far in producing a reliable science of mind-control.
In the late thirties Harvard psychologist Burrhus Frederick
Skinner discovered new principles of conditioning which allowed
more complete control.
Skinner came up with what he called operant conditioning.
It was based on the idea that reinforcement (the repetition
of either a positive or a negative response to an action)
was at the root of all learned behavior. The
distinction between classical and operant conditioning was made only because different techniques were used to elicit
the responses. In essence, the effects of either kind of conditioning
were the same.
The three most common methods of modern behavior
therapy are operant conditioning, aversion therapy, and desensitization.
Operant conditioning is the reinforcement of certain behavior
by reward (usually food), often accompanied by simultaneous
sound or light stimulation. Reinforcement is
contingent upon the occurrence of the response, and the
reinforcing mechanisms are often built into the environment.
When rats are used as subjects, the device to be operated
is a bar which, when depressed, delivers the reward
of food or water. In this situation the behavior which is
reinforced is the pressing of the bar. It makes no difference
how the bar is pressed, whether the rat presses the bar with
its paw, nose, or tail. Once the bar is pressed, the operation
has been performed and the animal is rewarded. The dependent
variable in operant conditioning is the response
rate—the number of times the bar is pressed. Response
rate, or the frequency of the response, is an important factor
in judging the success of the operant conditioning.
Aversion therapy is a technique in which an undesirable
response is inhibited by a painful or unpleasant reinforcement
such as electric shock, noxious odors, or any technique
which produces fear and avoidance. It is an ancient
form of counter-conditioning, or punishment, which has
been widely used in the treatment of homosexuality, stuttering,
and alcoholism.
In desensitization the subject is first trained to relax beyond
his normal state. He is then presented with images
which evoke mild anxiety. At first the images are very
mild, and they are repeated until the subject shows no anxiety.
Then a stronger image is introduced and the process is
repeated. Finally the subject becomes desensitized to even
the strongest image. Desensitization has been used to relieve
people of phobic fears and anxieties.
Skinner began his experiments by building a number of
boxes in which pigeons were required to run mazes and
press levers to receive the rewards of birdseed. By manipulating
the way the reward was given, Skinner found that he
could control the rate and the style of the lever pressing.
Eventually Skinner was able to get pigeons to bob and weave in prescribed ways. He was even able to get birds to
distinguish colors by having them peck only at levers of
specific colors for food. He soon learned to obtain just
about any kind of behavior he desired from a number of
different animals.
Skinner concluded that every action is determined by the
environment and that all behavior is "shaped and maintained
by its consequences." The behaviorists' mechanistic
view of man was summed up by Skinner when he said, "If
by 'machine' you simply mean any system which behaves
in an orderly way, then man and all other animals are machines."
Skinner's subsequent research, however, showed that behavior
which is supported by continuous rewards stops
when the rewards are withheld. Further experimentation
showed that by shifting from continuous to intermittent rewards,
the behavior could be kept going even though the
rewards became less frequent. This discovery made behaviorism
a practical science, for now it could explain how
behavior was maintained in the real world.
With unshakable faith in his own science, Dr. Skinner
built a large box with a glass window on one side. It was a
soundproof cage, much like the ones he'd used in experiments
with pigeons and monkeys. But this box was for children,
and into it Skinner put his own child.
This "Skinner box" was about as large as a spacious crib.
The temperature of the box was carefully controlled, and
Skinner testified proudly that "crying and fussing could always
be stopped by slightly lowering the temperature."
With the soundproof box, Skinner was "never concerned
lest the doorbell, telephone, piano, or children at play wake
the baby . . ." And, he added, "soundproofing also protects
the family from the baby."2
Apparently Skinner's scheme to produce "socialized"
children was not so successful. In the opinion of the kindergarten
teacher of Skinner's youngest daughter, who had received
the "benefits'* of spending her early childhood in her
daddy's box, she was not an obedient automaton, but
a rather independent and even rebellious child.3 Somehow
Skinner's programming of his offspring must have
failed in his own terms, for it would appear from
his writings that Skinner's ideas are quite in line with the
dreams of the cryptocrats who would seek to control us all. In his popular work Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner
wrote: "The problem is to free men, not from control,
but from certain kinds of control, and it can be solved only
if our analysis takes all consequences into account. How
people feel about control . . . does not lead to useful distinctions."
Skinner is not only concerned with controlling individuals,
he desires to build a controlled society, ruled from crib
to coffin by behavior modification. "The intentional design
of a culture and the control of human behavior it implies
are essential if the human species is to continue to develop,"
he said.
Today B. F. Skinner is the center of a personality cult.
He is the guru and founder of the modern psychophilosophy
which holds that it is morally and ethically permissible
to change the behavior of others as well as to modify
others' belief. About belief Skinner writes, "People
must believe that what they are doing has some chance of
obtaining what they want or avoiding something to which
they are averse. But the chances are in the contingencies.
The relation of beliefs to other conditions, such as wants
and needs, can be easily stated: to say that desires enter
into the causation of beliefs is simply to say that the probability
of behavior with which a belief is associated depends
not only upon reinforcement but upon a state of deprivation
or aversive stimulation."4
Aversion stimulation was the process upon which the
Cold War faith was built. The Cold War faith, in turn,
loosed the cryptocracy upon the world to murder, maim,
or rape the minds of any who posed a real threat to its
goals of "defending the free world from communism."
In the words of Lewis Andrews and Marvin Karlins,
"The world is, in a sense, one large 'Skinner box' . . .'5
And if this is not already true, it soon may be, because
there are behaviorists at work in practically every federal
and state institution, as well as in the private sector.
Using federal and state institutions for testing purposes
provided many benefits to the cryptocracy. They functioned
as recruitment centers, where selected criminals
were released to the custody of career spooks who could
apply their skills in undercover work. Prisons were also
valuable testing grounds.
Philip Hilts, describing the attitude prevalent in both the cryptocracy and prison bureaucracies, wrote: "There are
three possibilities for criminals. The first is deterrent: Keep
them from doing it again. The second is punishment:
Knock the hell out of the bastards; they deserve it. The
third is treatment: They're defective; let's fix them."6 Behaviorists
who work the prison circuit hold that the last is
the only humane way of reducing recidivism. Perhaps. But
one also begins to sense in such theorizing a preview of
what is to come for the whole society.
"These behavioral engineers are growing mightily in numbers
and influence, nourished by a law-and-order administration
that though riddled by corruption itself, can still deliver
the material goods," wrote David Rorvich. "They are
not out to change the world but to make man adjust to it;
they seek results, not understanding. A thick-skinned lot
they are, not loath to admit the crudity of some of their
techniques, claiming results that would take the more elegant
psychotherapies and social reforms years to attain . . .
What the world needs now in the service of 'curing' its
deviant and miserable masses, proclaim the new psychotechnologists,
is not more prison reform, urban renewal,
and nude group gropes but a few well-placed corrective
kilovolts in the collective brain."7
The California Medical Facility at Vacaville was the
center of a number of behavioral research projects funded
by various agencies, including the Veterans Administration,
HEW, the Bureau of Prisons, private drug companies, and
others. Many of these agencies were fronting for the CIA.
In 1973, there was a "flap" in the press over the testing
of drugs by these agencies under the guise of behavior
modification. It was revealed that tranquilizers, depressants,
sedatives, narcotic antagonists, and hypnotics were
being tested in the hospitals and prisons (see Appendix B).
Dr. Leo E. Hollister, a medical investigator for the Veterans
Administration, defended the practice: "The exemplary
Medical Facility at Vacaville is one of the few places
in the country where such [drug] studies are possible . . .
at a time when the demands for such facilities are increasing,
in response to an urgent public health problem, it
would be sad to see them denied to responsible and highly
reputable clinical investigators."8
It is debatable whether you can characterize the scientists
who participated in all the projects as "responsible and highly reputable." It appears from the evidence that some
may rather have been, as Philip Hilts playfully suggests,
". . . hunchbacked wart-infested evil scientists . . ."9
Perhaps the greatest danger to freedom of thought and
behavior is posed by the breed of psycho-scientists who call
themselves "behaviorists." While most psychologists once
concerned themselves with the study of human thought and
the rich life of the mind, the behaviorists believe that man's
problems can best be understood by studying his actions.
What a man thinks, sees, feels, wants and knows—
everything that a man is, behaviorists believe, can be most
easily understood in terms of what he does.
Behaviorism would appear to be a predictable expression
of materialistic cultures, East and West, which value
externals above all else. You will seldom hear a behaviorist
speak of "will" or even "mind." These are
considered unscientific, subjective terms. Instead, the
behaviorists speak only of "reflexes" which are reinforced
by conditioning from the environment. They look
forward to the day when they can conclusively prove that
conditioning begins at the moment of conception, and that
reflexes are ultimately the very stuff of what was once
called the soul! The science of behaviorism portrays the
human being as mechanistic protoplasm. The most avantgarde
behaviorists have developed an unholy alliance with
biochemists who together are exploring genetics, hoping to
find the key for breeding selected behavioral characteristics.
Certainly a person born with all his limbs will behave
differently from a person who is born with genetic damage
and without limbs. But beyond that, what some behaviorists
are looking for is a genetic factor which controls anger,
docility, and other personality tendencies. While many new
scientific insights have come from behaviorism, so have
many new dangers—especially to the freedom of choice.
, "The day has come," said Professor James V. McConnel,
head of the Department of Mental Health Research at the
University of Michigan, "when we can combine sensory
deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis, and the astute
manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute
control over an individual's behavior." Dr. McConnel
expressed the sentiments of behavior modifiers who,
like cryptocrats, believe that mankind's salvation resides in the control of individual behavior in an engineered society.
But engineered by whom?
" . . . We want to reshape our society drastically,"
McConnel said, "so that all of us will be trained from birth
to want to do what society wants us to do. Today's behavioral
psychologists are the architects and engineers who are
shaping the Brave New World of Tomorrow."10
In the practical American way—stripped for action—the
psychology profession appears to be turning away from
psychotherapy and is becoming dependent upon the timeand
labor-saving practical mechanics of behavior modification
depending upon principles developed largely through
laboratory experimentation. Voluntary as well as involuntary
actions can be conditioned. Once a reflex is trained
into a subject, he becomes an automaton, responding to the
artificial stimulus to which he has been programmed.
When light shines into the pupil of the eye, it contracts,
and when the light is removed, it dilates. This pupillary
reflex is involuntary; the individual has no conscious control
over it, but it can be conditioned.
C. V. Hudgins demonstrated this by conditioning the
pupil to a bell using a light as the unconditioned stimulus.
He would turn on the light, which shone directly into the
subject's eyes at the same instant he rang a bell. The light
made the pupil contract every time just as meat made Pavlov's
dog drool.
Hudgins then taught his subjects to use their own hands
to operate the bell and light mechanisms. Then he would
say "contract" and the subject would press the switch.
When he said "relax" the subject would relax and turn off
both bell and light. After only a few hours' training, Hudgins
found that he could do away with the bell, the hand
switch, and the light. He had only to say the word "contract,"
and the pupil would contract.
A modern apologist of conditioning, Andrew Salter, asserts
that hypnosis in essence is the same as conditioning.
Salter said that after he had conditioned the reader of his
book to contract his pupil, as Hudgins had done, he would
take him to an ophthalmologist.
"Doctor," Salter would declare, "here is a splendid hypnotic
subject. I control this person so thoroughly that at my
command his pupil will contract, and perceptibly." "Come now," the doctor would say, "you know very
well that pupillary contraction is involuntary. You need
light for that."
Salter would then tell his conditioned reader "contract,"
and the reader's pupil would obey every time, and the doctor
would be perplexed.
"How do you like hypnotism?" Salter would ask the doctor.
"It's amazing," he would answer, but his interest would
diminish after Salter explained how, paralleling Pavlov and
Hudgins, the reader's pupil had been conditioned. "Well,"
he would say, "come back next time when you have some
real hypnotism."
"Our doctor is wrong," Salter said. "There, in the conditioned
reflex, he had seen the essence of hypnosis. (And
parenthetically, when we see that the essence of hypnotism is
conditioning—or quite loosely, that the essence of the 'unconscious
mind' is conditioning—we are in a strategic position
to develop a sound understanding of the deepest
wellsprings of human behavior) ."11
The cryptocracy, having discovered the wonders of hypnosis,
drugs, behavior modification, a

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