The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

  In a confidential report on Hebb’s findings, the Defense Research Board concluded that sensory deprivation clearly caused extreme confusion as well as hallucinations among the student test subjects and that “a significant temporary lowering of intellectual efficiency occurred during and immediately after the period of perceptual deprivation.”20 Furthermore, the students’ hunger for stimulation made them surprisingly receptive to the ideas expressed on the tapes, and indeed several developed an interest in the occult that lasted weeks after the experiment had come to an end. It was as if the confusion from sensory deprivation partially erased their minds, and then the sensory stimuli rewrote their patterns.

  A copy of Hebb’s major study was sent to the CIA, as well as forty-one copies to the U.S. Navy and forty-two copies to the U.S. Army.21 The CIA also directly monitored the findings via one of Hebb’s student researchers, Maitland Baldwin, who, unbeknownst to Hebb, was reporting to the agency.22 This keen interest was hardly surprising: at the very least, Hebb was proving that intensive isolation interfered with the ability to think clearly and made people more open to suggestion—priceless ideas for any interrogator. Hebb eventually realized that there was enormous potential for his research to be used not just to protect captured soldiers from getting “brainwashed” but also as a kind of how-to manual for psychological torture. In the last interview he gave before his death in 1985, Hebb said, “It was clear when we made our report to the Defense Research Board that we were describing formidable interrogation techniques.”23

  Hebb’s report noted that four of the subjects “remarked spontaneously that being in the apparatus was a form of torture,” which meant that forcing them to stay past their threshold—two or three days—would clearly violate medical ethics. Aware of the limitations this placed on the experiment, Hebb wrote that more “clearcut results” were not available because “it is not possible to force subjects to spend 30 to 60 days in conditions of perceptual isolation.”24

  Not possible for Hebb, but it was perfectly possible for his McGill colleague and academic archrival, Dr. Ewen Cameron. (In a suspension of academic niceties, Hebb would later describe Cameron as “criminally stupid.”)25 Cameron had already convinced himself that violent destruction of the minds of his patients was the necessary first step on their journey to mental health and therefore not a violation of the Hippocratic oath. As for consent, his patients were at his mercy; the standard consent form endowed Cameron with absolute power to treat, up to and including performing full frontal lobotomies.

  Although he had been in contact with the agency for years, in 1957 Cameron got his first grant from the CIA, laundered through a front organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.26 And, as the CIA dollars poured in, the Allan Memorial Institute seemed less like a hospital and more like a macabre prison.

  The first changes were the dramatically increased dosages of electroshock. The two psychiatrists who invented the controversial Page-Russell electroshock machine had recommended four treatments per patient, totaling twenty-four individual shocks.27 Cameron started using the machine on his patients twice a day for thirty days, a terrifying 360 individual shocks to each patient—far more than his earlier patients, like Gail, had received.28 To the already dizzying array of drugs he was giving his patients, he added more experimental, mind-altering ones that were of particular interest to the CIA: LSD and PCP.

  He also added other weapons to his mind-blanking arsenal: sensory deprivation and extended sleep, a twin process he claimed would further “reduce the defensiveness of the individual,” making the patient more receptive to his taped messages.29 When the CIA dollars arrived, Cameron used the grant money to convert the old horse stables behind the hospital into isolation boxes. He also elaborately renovated the basement so that it contained a room he called the Isolation Chamber.30 He soundproofed the room, piped in white noise, turned off the lights and put dark goggles and “rubber eardrums” on each patient, as well as cardboard tubing on the hands and arms, “preventing him from touching his body—thus interfering with his self image,” as Cameron put it in a 1956 paper.31 But, where Hebb’s students fled less intense sensory deprivation after only a couple of days, Cameron kept his patients in for weeks, with one of them trapped in the isolation box for thirty-five days.32

  Cameron further starved his patients’ senses in the so-called Sleep Room, where they were kept in drug-induced reverie for twenty to twenty-two hours a day, turned by nurses every two hours to prevent bed sores and wakened only for meals and to go to the toilet.33 Patients were kept in this state for fifteen to thirty days, though Cameron reported that “some patients have been treated up to 65 days of continuous sleep.”34 Hospital staffers were instructed not to allow patients to talk and not to give out any information about how long they would have to spend in the room. To make sure no one successfully escaped from this nightmare, Cameron gave one group of patients small doses of the drug Curare, which induces paralysis, making them literal prisoners in their own bodies.35

  In a 1960 paper, Cameron said there are “two major factors” that allow us to “maintain a time and space image”—that allow us, in other words, to know where we are and who we are. Those two forces are “(a) our continued sensory input, and (b) our memory.” With electroshock, Cameron annihilated memory; with his isolation boxes, he annihilated sensory input. He was determined to force his patients to completely lose their sense of where they were in time and space. Realizing that some patients were keeping track of time of day based on their meals, Cameron ordered the kitchen to mix it all up, changing meal times and serving soup for breakfast and porridge for dinner. “By varying these intervals and by changing the menu from the expected time we were able to break up this structuring,” Cameron reported with satisfaction. Even so, he discovered that despite his best efforts, one patient had maintained a connection with the outside world by noting “the very faint rumble” of a plane that flew over the hospital every morning at nine.36

  To anyone familiar with the testimonies of torture survivors, this detail is a harrowing one. When prisoners are asked how they survived months or years of isolation and brutality, they often speak about hearing the ring of distant church bells, or the Muslim call to prayer, or children playing in a park nearby. When life is shrunk to the four walls of the prison cell, the rhythm of these outside sounds becomes a kind of lifeline, proof that the prisoner is still human, that there is a world beyond torture. “Four times I heard the birds outside chirping with the rising sun—that’s how I know it was four days,” said one survivor of Uruguay’s last dictatorship, recalling a particularly brutal stretch of torture.37 The unidentified woman in the basement of the Allan Memorial Institute, straining to hear the engine of an airplane through a haze of darkness, drugs and electroshock, was not a patient in the care of a doctor; she was, for all intents and purposes, a prisoner undergoing torture.

  There are several strong indications that Cameron was well aware he was simulating torture conditions and that, as a staunch anti-Communist, he relished the idea that his patients were part of a Cold War effort. In an interview with a popular magazine in 1955, he openly compared his patients to POWs facing interrogation, saying that they, “like prisoners of the Communists, tended to resist [treatment] and had to be broken down.”38 A year later, he wrote that the purpose of depatterning was “the actual ‘wearing down’ of defenses” and noted that “analogous to this is the breakdown of the individual under continuous interrogation.”39 By 1960, Cameron was giving lectures on his sensory deprivation research not just to other psychiatrists but also to military audiences. In a talk delivered in Texas at the Brooks Air Force Base, he made no claim that he was curing schizophrenia and in fact admitted that sensory deprivation “produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia”—hallucinations, intense anxiety, loss of touch with reality.40 In notes for the lecture, he mentions following sensory deprivation with “input-overload,” a reference to his use of electroshock and endl
essly repeated tape loops—and a foreshadowing of interrogation tactics to come.41

  Cameron’s work was funded by the CIA until 1961, and for many years it wasn’t clear what, if anything, the U.S. government did with his research. In the late seventies and eighties, when proof of the CIA’s funding for the experiments finally came out in Senate hearings and then in the patients’ groundbreaking class-action lawsuit against the agency, journalists and legislators tended to accept the CIA’s version of events—that it was conducting research into brainwashing techniques in order to protect captured U.S. soldiers. Most of the press attention focused on the sensational detail that the government had been funding acid trips. In fact, a large part of the scandal, when it finally broke, was that the CIA and Ewen Cameron had recklessly shattered lives with their experiments for no good reason—the research appeared useless: everyone knew by then that brainwashing was a Cold War myth. The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative, much preferring to be mocked as bumbling sci-fi buffoons than for having funded a torture laboratory at a respected university—and an effective one at that. When John Gittinger, the CIA psychologist who first reached out to Cameron, was forced to testify before a joint Senate hearing, he called the support for Cameron “a foolish mistake…. A terrible mistake.”42 When the hearingsasked Sidney Gottlieb, former director of MKUltra, to explain why he had ordered all the files destroyed from the $25 million program, he replied that “the project MKUltra had not yielded any results of real positive value to the Agency.”43 In the exposés of MKUltra from the eighties, both in investigative accounts in the mainstream press and in books, the experiments are consistently described as “mind control” and “brainwashing.” The word “torture” is almost never used.

  The Science of Fear

  In 1988, The New York Times ran a groundbreaking investigation into U.S. involvement in torture and assassinations in Honduras. Florencio Caballero, an interrogator with Honduras’s notoriously brutal Battalion 3–16, told the Times that he and twenty-four of his colleagues were taken to Texas and trained by the CIA. “They taught us psychological methods—to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.” There was one technique he failed to mention: electroshock. Inés Murillo, a twenty-four-year-old prisoner who was “interrogated” by Caballero and his colleagues, told the Times that she was electrocuted so many times that she “screamed and fell down from the shock. The screams just escape you,” she said. “I smelled smoke and realized I was burning from the singes of the shocks. They said they would torture me until I went mad. I didn’t believe them. But then they spread my legs and stuck the wires on my genitals.”44 Murillo also said that there was someone else in the room: an American passing questions to her interrogators whom the others called “Mr. Mike.”45

  The revelations led to hearings of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, where the CIA’s deputy director, Richard Stolz, confirmed that “Caballero did indeed attend a CIA human resources exploitation or interrogation course.”46 The Baltimore Sun filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the course material used to train people like Caballero. For many years the CIA refused to comply; finally, under threat of a lawsuit, and nine years after the original story was published, the CIA produced a handbook called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. The title was in code: “Kubark” is, according to The New York Times, “a cryptonym, KU a random diptych and BARK the agency’s code word for itself at that time.” More recent reports have speculated that the “ku” referred to “a country or a specific clandestine or covert activity.”47 The handbook is a 128-page secret manual on the “interrogation of resistant sources” that is heavily based on the research commissioned by MKUltra—and Ewen Cameron’s and Donald Hebb’s experiments have left their marks all over it. Methods range from sensory deprivation to stress positions, from hooding to pain. (The manual acknowledges early on that many of these tactics are illegal and instructs interrogators to seek “prior Headquarters approval…under any of the following circumstances: 1. If bodily harm is to be inflicted. 2. If medical, chemical, or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence.”)48

  The manual is dated 1963, the final year of the MKUltra program and two years after Cameron’s CIA-funded experiments came to a close. The handbook claims that if the techniques are used properly, they will take a resistant source and “destroy his capacity for resistance.” This, it turns out, was the true purpose of MKUltra: not to research brainwashing (that was a mere side project), but to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from “resistant sources.”49 In other words, torture.

  The manual states on its first page that it is about to describe interrogation methods based on “extensive research, including scientific inquiries conducted by specialists in closely related subjects.” It represents a new age of precise, refined torture—not the gory, inexact torment that had been the standard since the Spanish Inquisition. In a kind of preface, the manual states: “The intelligence service which is able to bring pertinent, modern knowledge to bear upon its problems enjoys huge advantages over a service which conducts its clandestine business in eighteenth century fashion…it is no longer possible to discuss interrogation significantly without reference to the psychological research conducted in the past decade.”50 What follows is a how-to guide on dismantling personalities.

  The manual includes a lengthy section on sensory deprivation that refers to “a number of experiments at McGill University.”51 It describes how to build isolation chambers and notes that “the deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure.”52 The Freedom of Information Act request also produced an updated version of the manual, first published in 1983 for use in Latin America. “Window should be set high in the wall with the capability of blocking out light,” it states.*53

  It is precisely what Hebb feared: the use of his sensory deprivation methods as “formidable interrogation techniques.” But it is the work of Cameron, and his recipe for disturbing “the time-space-image,” that forms the core of the Kubark formula. The manual describes several of the techniques that were honed to depattern patients in the basement of the Allan Memorial Institute: “The principle is that sessions should be so planned as to disrupt the source’s sense of chronological order…. Some interrogatees can be regressed by persistent manipulation of time, by retarding and advancing clocks and serving meals at odd times—ten minutes or ten hours after the last food was given. Day and night are jumbled.”54

  What most captured the imagination of Kubark’s authors, more than any individual technique, was Cameron’s focus on regression—the idea that by depriving people of their sense of who they are and where they are in time and space, adults can be converted into dependent children whose minds are a blank slate of suggestibility. Again and again, the authors return to the theme. “All of the techniques employed to break through an interrogation roadblock, the entire spectrum from simple isolation to hypnosis and narcosis, are essentially ways of speeding up the process of regression. As the interrogatee slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state, his learned or structured personality traits fall away.” That is when the prisoner goes into the state of “psychological shock” or “suspended animation” referred to earlier—that torturer’s sweet spot when “the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply.”55

  Alfred W. McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin who documented the evolution of torture techniques since the Inquisition in his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, describes the Kubark manua
l’s shock-inducing formula of sensory deprivation followed by sensory overload as “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.”56 And according to McCoy, it couldn’t have happened without the McGill experiments in the 1950s. “Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron’s experiments, building upon Dr. Hebb’s earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture method.”57

  Wherever the Kubark method has been taught, certain clear patterns—all designed to induce, deepen and sustain shock—have emerged: prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, the use of electroshock is ubiquitous.

  This was not, of course, all the influence of Cameron or MKUltra. Torture is always an improvisation, a combination of learned technique and the human instinct for brutality that is unleashed wherever impunity reigns. By the mid-fifties, electroshock was being routinely used against liberation fighters by French soldiers in Algeria, often with the help of psychiatrists.58 In this period, French military leaders conducted seminars at a U.S. military “counterinsurgency” school in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which they trained students in the Algeria techniques.59 It is also clear, however, that Cameron’s particular model of using massive doses of shock not just to inflict pain but for the specific goal of erasing structured personalities made an impression on the CIA. In 1966, the CIA sent three psychiatrists to Saigon, armed with a Page-Russell, the same kind of electroshock machine favored by Cameron; it was used so aggressively that it killed several prisoners. According to McCoy, “In effect, they were testing, under field conditions, whether Ewen Cameron’s McGill ‘de-patterning’ techniques could actually alter human behavior.”60