Patricia Greenfield
CIA's Behavior Caper
Sat Mar 13 00:55:29 2004
64.140.158.99

APA Monitor, December 1977, pp. 1, 10-11
CIA's Behavior Caper
by Patricia Greenfield
Copyright © 1977 by the American Psychological Association
http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/behavior.html

By its own accounts, the Central Intelligence Agency throughout its history has explored any and all means for the control of human behavior. The outline of much of the program has emerged from thousands of recently released CIA documents detaining the agency's varied and wide-ranging activities in the behavioral and medical sciences. While this is now common knowledge, the existence and nature of the program raises perennial questions about the involvement, often unwitting, of broad segments of the social science community.

One major component of the CIA's program, dubbed ARTICHOKE, was described in a CIA memo of January 25, 1952, as "the evaluation and development of any method by which we can get information from a person against his will and without his knowledge." An internal review of the terminated ARTICHOKE program, dated January 31, 1975, lists ARTICHOKE methods has having included "the use of drugs and chemicals, hypnosis, and 'total isolation,' a form of psychological harassment." Another major component of the CIA's program, called MKULTRA, explored, according to a memo of August 14, 1963, "avenues to the control of human behavior," including "chemical and biological materials capable of producing human behavioral and physiological changes," "radiology, electro-shock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials."

Specific examples from the CIA's files include:

* Giving LSD to unwitting citizens, some of whom were literally picked up in New York and San Francisco bars;
* Using hypnosis and drugs in interrogation;
* Attempting to recruit a neuroscientist to find the 'pain' center of the human brain;
* Shopping for methods to induce amnesia;
* And looking for methods to make persons subvert their principles.

Although the CIA recognized (in a memo of August 14, 1963) that "research in the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical," they managed to assemble what a recent New York Times article called "an extensive network of nongovernmental scientists and facilities," almost always without the knowledge of the institutions where the facilities were situated.
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