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BLUEBIRD AND ARTICHOKE
BLUEBIRD was approved by Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Director of the CIA, on April 20, 1950. In August 1951, the Project was renamed ARTICHOKE. The Korean War began in June, 1950. The CIA already had mind control programs in operation prior to the Korean War, therefore such programs were not a defensive reaction to the activities of the North Koreans, Russians, or Communist Chinese during the Korean War, as claimed by CIA career officer Edward Hunter136. BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE included a great deal of work on the creation of amnesia, hypnotic couriers and the Manchurian Candidate66, 184.
The Manchurian Candidate is generally regarded as fiction. However, ARTICHOKE documents prove that hypnotic couriers functioned effectively in real-life simulations conducted by the CIA in the early 1950’s. The degree to which such individuals were used in actual operations is still classified. Physicians were an integral part of the ARTICHOKE Team that conducted interrogations on U.S. soil. These interrogations were in part designed to detect mind-controlled agents of other Agencies and governments. The documents establish that Manchurian Candidate-related methods were part of CIA counter-intelligence work in the 1950’s.
The basic premise of the book The Manchurian Candidate66 is that a group of American POWs in the Korean War is brainwashed while crossing through Manchuria to freedom. They arrive back in the U.S. amnesic for the period of brainwashing and one of them has been programmed to be an assassin. His target is a candidate for President of the United States. His handlers at home control him with a hypnotically implanted trigger, a particular playing card.
A MEMORANDUM dated 15 July 1953 from the Chief, Bio-Chemistry & Pharmacology Branch, Medicine Division OSI [Office of Scientific Intelligence] to the Chief, Technical Branch, SO [Special Operations] includes a paragraph summarizing discussions about recently returned Korean War POWs who had been brainwashed:
Following this [whited out] commented on the very interesting angle that interrogations of the individuals who had come out of North Korea across the Soviet Union to freedom recently had apparently had a “blank” period or period of disorientation while passing through a special zone in Manchuria. [Whited out] pointed out that this had occurred in all individuals in the party after they had had their first full meal and their first coffee on the way to freedom. [Whited out] pointed out that [whited out] was attempting to secure further confirmatory facts in this matter since drugging was indicated.
In another memo dated 17 September 1953 the Scientific Adviser, Scientific Intelligence states that, “Detailed and valuable information has been obtained by [whited out] on “Big Switch” as a result of his interrogations of POW’s on the return voyage from Korea.” “Big Switch” was the code name for a prisoner exchange program during the Korean War; repatriated American prisoners of war released in Big Switch were interviewed by American psychiatrists including Robert Lifton163. Lifton163 (p. 6) writes:
… I arrived in Hong Kong in late January, 1954. Just a few months before, I had taken part in the psychiatric evaluation of repatriated American prisoners of war during the exchange operations in Korea known as Big Switch; I had then accompanied a group of these men on the troopship back to the United States.
It appears that American psychiatrists including or known to Robert Lifton, Louis Jolyon West and Margaret Singer must have been knowledgeable about the Chinese Manchurian Candidate program by 1953.
According to my definition, the Manchurian Candidate is an experimentally created dissociative identity disorder that meets the following four criteria:
1. Created deliberately
2. A new identity is implanted
3. Amnesia barriers are created
4. Used in simulated or actual operations
BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE were administered in a compartmented fashion. The details of the Programs were kept secret even from other personnel within the CIA. When asked why LSD research done under ARTICHOKE was hidden from the CIA Committee in charge of ARTICHOKE, Sydney Gottlieb (Human Drug Testing by the CIA, 1977, page 410), Chief, Medical Staff, Technical Services Division, CIA responded, “I imagine the only reason would have been concern for broadening awareness of its existence.”
The creation of Manchurian Candidates by the CIA was probably not subject to the usual chain of operational command. Such breaches in the chain of command are an inherent structural risk of the compartmented nature of intelligence agencies. For security reasons, CIA operations including internal counter-intelligence investigations182 are routinely kept secret from other divisions of the CIA. Although effective intelligence work could not be carried out without compartmentation, the structure makes it easier for CIA officers in charge of mind control to contract with unethical doctors.
Loss of central control occurred in the CIA’s OPERATION CHAOS and probably in BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. OPERATION CHAOS was a CIA program designed to collect information on foreign influence on student and civil unrest in the United States. It was created by the Director of the CIA in 1967 and ran until 1974. CHAOS developed files on 7,200 American citizens, and the files included mention of a total of 300,000 named U.S. citizens and organizations, all of which were entered into a computerized index (The Nelson Rockefeller Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities, 1975).
CHAOS intelligence generated 3,500 internal CIA memoranda, 3,000 memoranda for the FBI, and 37 for distribution to the White House and other top levels of government. The maximum CHAOS staff was 52 persons in 1971. Informants were recruited from student and dissident groups, and were instructed to infiltrate such groups in the United States.
According to The Nelson Rockefeller Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities:
The isolation of Operation CHAOS within the CIA and its independence from supervision by the regular chain of command within the clandestine services made it possible for the activities of the Operation to stray over the bounds of the Agency’s authority without the knowledge of senior officials. The absence of any regular review of these activities prevented timely correction of such missteps as did occur.
In other instances, senior administrators within the CIA participated in plausible denial and other disinformation and cover-up strategies concerning CIA operations run on U.S. soil. Like the activities of the ARTICHOKE Team within the United States, such operations had to be kept secret because the CIA was prohibited by its Charter from carrying out operations in the United States.
In 1952, the CIA began to survey mail between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at a New York postal facility. In 1953 it began to open and read mail. The Program was approved by the Director of the CIA and at least three Postmasters General, Summerfield, Day, and Blount, as well as by Attorney General Mitchell. From 1958 to 1973, the FBI received 57,000 pieces of mail from the CIA in this Program. In the final year of the operation, out of 4,350,000 pieces of mail between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the CIA examined the outside of 2,300,000 pieces, photographed 33,000 and opened 8,700.
Smaller mail intercept operations were run in San Francisco from 1969 to 1971, in Hawaii from 1954 to 1955, and in New Orleans in 1957. The CIA’s strategy for dealing with leaks about the Program is described in a February 1, 1962 memo sent from the Deputy Chief of Counterintelligence to the Director of Security:
Unless the charge is supported by the presentation of interior items from the project, it should be relatively easy to “hush up” the entire affair, or to explain that it consists of legal mail cover activities conducted by the Post Office at the request of authorized Federal Agencies. Under the most unfavorable circumstances, including the support of charges with interior items from the project it might become necessary, after the matter has cooled off during an extended period of investigation, to find a scapegoat to blame for unauthorized tampering with the mails.
The BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE documents available through the Freedom of Information Act, like all such documents, are heavily redacted. A great deal of text has been whit
ed out, and other documents must still be entirely classified. Nevertheless, the available documents prove that ARTICHOKE operations involving physicians were carried out on U.S. soil at least until the mid-1950’s.
A memo to the Director of Security of the CIA is entitled “report of ARTICHOKE Operations, 20 to 23 January, 1955” (see Appendix B). Paragraph two of the memo states that “these operations were the first ARTICHOKE operations undertaken in the United States.”
The operation described in the memo involved the interrogation of a foreign national CIA agent who “speaks and understands English quite well.” The Subject had previously provided high quality intelligence through penetration actions carried out in an unspecified country. The purpose of the ARTICHOKE Team’s interrogation was to provide confirmation that the Subject was not a double agent.
The ARTICHOKE Team must have been under the command of James Angleton, who was Chief of the CIA Counterintelligence Staff from December 1954, until 1974. Angleton was also involved in MKULTRA, as described in an article in the February 18, 1979 Wilmington Sunday News Journal entitled “UD prof helps concoct ‘mind control’ potions.” The article focuses on MKULTRA Subproject 51 contractor James Moore, a chemistry professor at the University of Delaware, but mentions Angleton’s involvement in MKULTRA. Angleton’s name appears in “a list of all persons who have been briefed on “Bluebird”,” in a 2 July 1951 MEMORANDUM; the list also identifies three future Directors of the CIA, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and William Webster.
The ARTICHOKE interrogation was conducted in a safe house in the remote countryside staffed by security-cleared personnel. It was conducted under medical cover of a routine physical and psychological assessment. The Subject was transported to the safe house in a “covert car” which picked him up at a secure location. At the safe house he was given a conventional interrogation and then some whiskey. This was followed by two grams of phenobarbital, which put him to sleep.
The next day a lie detector test was given, and the Subject was given intravenous chemicals. Following the chemically-assisted interrogation, according to CIA terminology, the “ARTICHOKE techniques were applied” in three stages:
1. A false memory was introduced into the Subject’s mind without his conscious control of the process, which took 15 to 20 minutes.
2. The procedure was repeated, this time taking 40 to 45 minutes.
3. The procedure was repeated again with interrogation added.
The ARTICHOKE Team used medications including barbiturates, amphetamines and scopolamine, hypnosis, interrogation, and the deliberate introduction of false memories of the procedure. The Subject was told that part of what he remembered was actually a dream. The ARTICHOKE Team concluded that the procedure was successful; “the subject, although not having specific amnesia for the ARTICHOKE treatment, nevertheless was completely confused and memory was vague and faulty.”
CIA career officer Edward Hunter 136 described the implantation of false memories by Chinese intelligence agencies in his book Brain-Washing in Red China. He wrote (page 11):
The Chinese masses were right in coining the phrases brainwashing and brain-changing There is a difference between the two. Brain-washing is indoctrination, a comparatively simple procedure, but brain-changing is immeasurably more sinister and complicated. Whereas you merely have to undergo a brain-cleansing to rid yourself of “imperialist poisons,” in order to have a brain changing you must empty your mind of old ideas and recollections … in a brain-changing, a person’s specific recollections of some past period in his life are wiped away, as completely as if they never happened. Then, to fill these gaps in memory, the ideas which the authorities want this person to “remember” are put into his brain. Hypnotism and drugs and cunning pressures that plague the body and do not necessarily require marked physical violence are required for a brain-changing. China evidently was not so “advanced” as yet. She was using brain-washing, and when that didn’t work, resorted to the simpler purge system. But in time she will use the brain-changing system too.
Since, according to Hunter, the Communist Chinese had not yet perfected the methods used by the CIA’s ARTICHOKE Team, it is evident that his knowledge of these methods was derived from their use by American doctors.
An interrogation involving ARTICHOKE techniques and physicians was conducted on Russian defector Yuriy Nosenko under James Angleton’s administration182. Angleton suspected Nosenko of being a triple agent. A triple agent is someone who pretends to be a defector or double agent but is actually working for his original, native country.
Nosenko was born in Nikolayev, Ukraine in 1927. He was trained by Russian Naval Intelligence before being transferred to MVD, the precursor of the KGB, in 1953. On June 5, 1962 Nosenko made secret contact with a U.S. State Department official in Geneva, a meeting that resulted in his being recruited by the CIA as a mole. Nosenko provided a rich fund of intelligence information to the CIA until he defected in February, 1964.
Angleton thought that Nosenko had been feeding the CIA a little bit of real information in order to cover up the fact that he was a triple agent. In late March, 1964 a decision was made to apply ARTICHOKE-like techniques to him. Whether these were administered under ARTICHOKE or some other still-classified cryptonym is unknown.
Nosenko was strip-searched, given a lie detector test and then placed in solitary confinement in a 10-foot by 10-foot cell in a safe house in Washington for sixteen months. One of his interrogators was Dr. John Gittinger, the lead psychologist for MKULTRA, who describes taking LSD himself in a documentary film210. From April 4, 1964 to August 13, 1965, Nosenko was held at the safe house and subjected to repeated interrogations.
From August 14, 1965 to October 28, 1967 Nosenko was held in solitary confinement in a tiny, windowless concrete cell at the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia. He was subjected to sleep and food deprivation and there was neither heat nor air conditioning in his cell. He was monitored by closed-circuit television 24 hours a day.
In an interview with Tom Mangold 177 on June 12, 1990, John Gittinger described being asked by CIA personnel to administer LSD to Nosenko. Gittinger claimed he did not do so. Nosenko, however, described being drugged on a number of occasions at Camp Peary. Due to administrative changes inside the CIA, Nosenko was released from confinement in 1967 and later became a U.S. citizen.
Whoever the Nosenko interrogators were, and whatever cryptonym they worked under, it is clear that physicians and mind control specialists were directly involved. It is also clear that the actions of these physicians were unethical and inhumane. The BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE documents prove that the Nosenko interrogation was not an isolated incident. If such an interrogation was conducted by physicians in a third world country it would be decried as a human rights violation and a political abuse of psychiatry. We have been lax as a medical profession in applying the same standards at home.
The need for applying the ARTICHOKE technique to Nosenko can be inferred from an undated document entitled, “IMPLICATIONS OF SOVIET SUPPLEMENTS TO STANDARD PSYCHIATRIC INTERROGATION”, which includes the statement that:
Hypnotism appears to have been used in some cases by the Soviet. It has the possibilities of (a) lowering resistance against telling the truth and (b) inducing specific action or behavior in the subject. In certain cases it would be possible for a skilled Russian operator to bring about condition (a) yet leave the subject with no specific recollection of having been interrogated. Under condition (b) it would be possible to brief an American, other prisoner or person, subsequently dispatch him on a mission, and successfully debrief him upon return home without his recollection of the briefing or debriefing.
Another undated document entitled, “DEFENSE AGAINST SOVIET MEDICAL INTERROGATION AND ESPIONAGE TECHNIQUES” echoes this point:
This proposed investigation appears to be more essential when documentary evidence leads to the belief that Russia has been conducting medical research on the subject, has actually used various
techniques, and has made provision for large scale production of uncommon special drugs for their speech-producing effects on prisoners of war.
Adequate evidence is available to indicate that the Soviet has used physical duress and/or a large number of different drugs in their attempts to enhance results of standard psychiatric interrogation.
Evidence of subconscious isolation, amnesia, and destruction of mental function have been noted in some of the victims of Soviet methods.
All of these methods were also employed in experiments conducted under BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, MKNAOMI and other Programs.
The CIA Doctors Page 4