The paranoia began to drift into American culture, with books like The Manchurian Candidate and The Naked Lunch playing on themes of unhinged scientists and vast political conspiracies. Western Psychiatry” offered sensational accounts of new mind-control techniques and technologies that no man could fully resist. Newspaper headlines like “New Evils Seen in Brainwashing” and “Brainwashing vs. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)įear of brainwashing and a new breed of “brain warfare” terrified and fascinated the American public throughout the 1950s, spurred both by the words of the CIA and the stories of “brainwashed” G.I.’s returning from China, Korea, and the Soviet Union. He expressed fears and uncertainty–were they using chemical agents? Hypnosis? Something else entirely? “We in the West,” the CIA Director conceded, “are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.” This sort of non-consensual experiment, even on one’s enemies, was antithetical to American values, Dulles insisted, as well as antithetical to what should be human values.Īllen W.Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency at an executive session of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee. “We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”ĭulles proceeded to describe the “Soviet brain perversion techniques” as effective, but “abhorrent” and “nefarious.” He gestured to the American POWs returning from Korea, shells of the men they once were, parroting the Communist propaganda they had heard cycled for weeks on end. “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” he continued. “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies,” he told the attendees. WATCH: Full episodes of America's Book of Secrets online now.ĭulles had just become the first civilian director of an agency growing more powerful by the day, and the speech provided an early glimpse into his priorities for the CIA.
was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran.
Others were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the United States at all. Some GI’s were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the Communists–a charge the U.S.
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