In October 1960 the CIA scientists paid $9,000 to an outside consultant to develop a way of quickly hypnotizing an unwitting subject. The Technical Services Staff would do the laboratory research, while the Counterintelligence Staff was in charge of what it called “field experimentation.”
These were serious exercises in behavioral control that needed to be tested. The third was to implant durable and operationally useful post-hypnotic suggestions, to make a personal responsive to commands. The second was to create durable amnesia.
CIA INSPECTOR JOHN EARMAN CODE
This wasn’t science fiction or a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy.Īngleton’s staff had been working with the agency’s Technical Services Staff since 1960 to conduct operational experiments in hypnosis, which one counterintelligence official wrote, could provide a “potential breakthrough in clandestine technology.” The code name for the the program was Artichoke.Īrtichoke had three goals: The first was to induce hypnosis very rapidly in unwitting subjects. They dreamed of finding means to make unwilling people carry out specific tasks, such as stealing documents, provoking a fight, killing someone, or otherwise committing an antisocial act.” Surrounded by people who knew too much, they sought a way to create amnesia. “Caught in the muck and frustration of ordinary spywork, hoped for a miracle tool,” Marks wrote in his book, which was based on declassified CIA records. “Faced with liars and deceivers, they longed for a truth drug. That concept had long intrigued the CIA leadership. Having done research on the CIA’s mind control programs, Condon knew that the agency was serious about developing the capability to manipulate someone into killing. serviceman, subject him to mind control techniques, and program him to assassinate the President of the United States. The concept of mind control had been popularized by novelist Richard Condon in his 1959 best-seller The Manchurian Candidate, in which the Chinese communists capture a U.S. “Could you get somebody gung-ho enough that they would go in and get him?” “Castro was naturally our discussion point,” an unnamed CIA man involved in the CIA’s mind-control program told John Marks, a former State Department officer who wrote The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a good book about the agency’s mind control program in the 1950s and 1960s. Mind Control in Mexico City Fidel Castro, tormenter of empire and target of CIA assassins. Angleton asked tthe CIA’s ablest scientists to look into it. Since all of the many agency’s attempts to kill the Cuban leader by conventional methods (poison, bazooka attack) had failed, Angleton proposed a radically different approach: hypnotizing an unwitting person who would kill on command. Like Helms, Angleton considered assassination, but with a creative twist. government, Angleton turned to possible solutions. The international communist conspiracy was, in his conspiratorial mind, was monolithic.Īfter Helms distributed the memo to rest of the U.S. The cultural differences between the two countries were too vast Angleton didn’t care. In fact Communist China had little influence on Castro’s Cuba. “Many aspects of the Cuban programs could not have been carried out without external support in terms of funds, experience and expert training.” “In both internal and external activities the guiding hand of the Soviet Bloc, particularly the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Communist China was evident to varying degrees,” Angleton wrote. Castro’s minions were marching into Latin America aided and abetted by their masters in Moscow, he said. Angleton wrote a 16-page working paper, “Cuban Control and Action Capabilities” that was so sensitive it would remain classified for the next 35 years.Īngleton’s conclusions were stark.
In May 1963, deputy director Richard Helms asked Angleton, the legendary chief of the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff, to assess the problem of Cuba for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
James Angleton, counterintelligence chief
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