“I can hypnotize a man — without his knowledge or consent — into committing treason against the United States,” boasted Dr. George Estabrooks in the early 1940s.
Hypnosis Mind
Control Experiments by The US Government
Hypnosis As A Mean Of
Creating Secret Couriers
Hypnosis Mind
Control As A Saboteurs-Creating Tool
Demolishing
The Myth Of Moral-Limitations In Hypnosis
Employing
Hypnosis To Induce Acts Against The Will
Hypnotically-Induced Criminal Behaviour
Hypnosis
As A Mean To Breach-Through Military Top-Secrets
The
Use Of Hypnosis During Interrogations To Obtain Confessions
Hypnosis As A Mean To Breach-Through Military Top-Secrets
Debunking The Myth Of
Low-Hypnotizability
Milton Erickson’s
Sketpicism About The Experiments
The Controversial
Question Of “Will” In Hypnosis
Investigating Hypnotic
Suggestibility
Mind-Control International
Mind Control,
Hypnosis, And The Moscow Trials
Hypnotically-Induced
Emotional Disturbances
Mind
Control Through Hypnotically-Induced Sense of Guiltiness
False-Memories Implanted
Through Hypnosis
Hypnotic
Induction Scheme For Obtaining False-Confessions
Covert-Hypnosis Techniques
Drug-Supported Hypnosis
Government Use
Of Amnesia-Induction Through Hypnosis
Ultra-Deep Hypnotic-Trance
Techniques
Electroshock Convulsions-Based
Hypnosis
Hypnotic Mind Control Being
Traceless
The Army Of Hypno-Zombies
Hypnosis As A Political Threat to Government Security
Estabrooks, chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, was called to Washington by the War Department shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since he was the ranking authority on hypnosis at the time, they wanted his opinion on how the enemy might be planning to use hypnotism. “Two hundred trained foreign operators, working in the United States,” Estabrooks told the military leaders, “could develop a uniquely dangerous army of hypnotically controlled Sixth Columnists.”
At that time, only a handful of men knew of the government’s experiments with hypnosis for the purpose of controlling minds in the interest of “national security.” In that decade there had been no concentrated assassinations of presidents, candidates, or civil rights leaders. There had not yet been Watergate, nor any disclosures of government agencies invading the privacy of United States citizens. The CIA had not yet been conceived, and even its parent, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), did not exist.
It was unthinkable at the time that an agency of the U.S. government would employ mind-control techniques on its own people. Therefore it was natural for George Estabrooks to believe that if America were threatened by hypnotic mind control, the threat would be posed by a foreign enemy working within the United States.
So in 1943 Estabrooks sounded his public alarm, and planted the seed for what would become priority top-secret research for the next twenty-five years. Couching his disclosure in hypothetical terms and saying that the hypnotized mind “could be” put to military use, he then portrayed a scene which he said could “very easily take place.”
It would be possible, he said, for “the enemy” to plant a foreign agent as a doctor in a hospital or his own office. This “doctor” could, by means of fake physical examinations, place thousands of people under his power over a period of time. Estabrooks projected how, by hypnotizing key officers and programming them to follow suggestions, this “masked maneuver” could enable a lowly first lieutenant to take over the reins of the entire U.S. Army.
His alternate scenario depicted the General Staff summoning a colonel from Intelligence to an emergency meeting in the Pentagon two days after an outbreak of war. Shortly after entering the room where Pentagon “brain trusters” were gathered, the colonel is put into hypnotic trance by an army psychologist and told there has been a change of plans for the defense of major territory. The details of the plan have to be conveyed in absolute secrecy to the Pacific Command. Since the enemy has been very successful in monitoring U.S. communications, a new, highly reliable procedure is needed to slip the message past the enemy. The colonel, under the influence of hypnosis, will carry the top-secret message.
“When you wake up,” the hypnotized colonel is told, “you will no longer have the slightest knowledge of the secret information carried in the lower layers of your mind.” The colonel is then given instructions to proceed by airplane to Honolulu. He is told that in his normal waking state he will hold the impression that he is on a routine mission and must report after his arrival to General Y.
“He is the only man in the world who can hypnotize you again. Put to sleep by General Y — and only him — you will correctly recall all the details of this conversation and disclose the secret instructions we have just given you.”
Estabrooks said later he had given the Pentagon episode only as a practical example of how the new science of hypnotism could be used for military purposes.
Going even further with his alarming predictions, Estabrooks told how disguised techniques of hypnosis could be employed to create an entire army of saboteurs within our own country. “Let us suppose that in a certain city there lives a group of a given foreign extraction. They are loyal Americans but still have cultural and sentimental ties to the old country. A neighborhood doctor, working secretly for a foreign power, hypnotizes those of his patients who have ties favorable to his plans. Having done this he would, of course, remove from them all knowledge of their ever having been hypnotized.
“Next comes a one-month period of indoctrination under hypnosis. By various means, including the offer of substantial rewards and educational processes designed to strengthen their ancestral loyalties, their cooperation is obtained.”
Estabrooks explained how individuals so controlled would have no conscious aversion to Americans and would continue to behave as good citizens. Subconsciously, however, they would be saboteurs and agents of the enemy.
“All right, you say. This sounds beautiful on paper. But what about the well-known ‘psychological principle’ that no one will do anything under hypnosis that he wouldn’t do when he’s awake?” Estabrooks asked.
“My experiments have shown this assumption is poppycock. It depends not so much on the attitude of the subject as on that of the operator himself ... In wartime, the motivation for murder under hypnosis doesn’t have to be very strong,” Estabrooks warned.
“During World War I, a leading psychologist made a startling proposal to the navy. He offered to take a submarine steered by a captured U-boat captain, placed under his hypnotic control, through enemy mine fields to attack the German fleet. Washington nixed the strategem as too risky. First, because there was no disguised method by which the captain’s mind could be outflanked. Second, because today’s technique of day-by-day breaking down of ethical conflicts brainwashing was still unknown.
“The indirect approach to hypnotism would, I believe, change the navy’s answer today. Personally,” Estabrooks concluded, “I am convinced that hypnosis is a bristling, dangerous armament which makes it doubly imperative to avoid the war of tomorrow.”
George Estabrooks may have greatly contributed to the U.S. government’s interest in hypnosis. For during the years that followed, seeking ways both to improve the mind and to control it, various government agencies, many of them with intelligence functions, secretly pursued research in hypnotic techniques.
A number of related events during the 1940s demonstrated the extent of the government’s interest in hypnosis. Beyond changing beliefs, they sought ways to motivate people to commit acts which they would not commit in a normal state.
Dr. Bernard C. Gindes wrote of an amnesia experiment he undertook for the U.S. Army in the late forties. “A soldier with only grade school education was able to memorize an entire page of Shakespeare’s Hamlet after listening to the passages seven times. Upon awakening, he could not recall any of the lines, and even more startling was the fact that he had no remembrance of the hypnotic experience. A week later he was hypnotized again. In this state, he was able to repeat the entire page without a single error. In another experiment to test the validity of increased memory retention, five soldiers were hypnotized en masse and given a jumbled ‘code’ consisting of twenty-five words without phonetic consistency. They were allowed sixty seconds to commit the list to memory. In the waking state, each man was asked to repeat the code; none of them could. One man hazily remembered having had some association with a code, but could not remember more than that. The other four soldiers were allowed to study the code consciously for another sixty seconds, but all denied previous acquaintance with it. During rehypnotization, they were individually able to recall the exact content of the coded message.”
In 1947, J. G. Watkins induced criminal behavior in deeply hypnotized subjects during an army experiment. Watkins suggested a distorted view of reality to his subjects by inducing hallucinations which allowed them to avoid direct conflict with their own moral concepts. He carefully chose his suggestions to be in line with his subjects’ preexisting motivational structures, and so was able to induce so-called antisocial behavior.
Watkins took a normal, healthy army private, a young man whose tests indicated a most stable personality, and put him in a deep trance’. Though merely striking a superior officer is a court-martial offense in the army, Watkins wanted to see if he could get his subject to strangle a highranking officer.
After the subject was deep into trance, Watkins told him that the officer sitting across from him was a Japanese soldier who was trying to kill him. He must kill or be killed, Watkins suggested, and immediately the private leapt ferociously at the officer and grabbed him by the throat. In his waking state, the private would have been aghast at the thought of trying to strangle a superior officer. But under hypnosis, believing the officer was a dangerous Japanese soldier, the young private had to be pulled off his superior by three husky assistants. The officer came within a hairsbreadth of being strangled, as the young man was most persistent in his attempt to kill what he regarded as the enemy.
Watkins repeated this experiment with other subjects. The second time he used two officers who were good friends. One of them was given the hypnotic suggestion that the other was a Japanese soldier and that he must “kill or be killed.” The man who had received the command not only made a powerful lunge at his friend, but as he did, he whipped out and opened a concealed jack knife, which neither the doctor, his assistants, nor his friend knew he had. Only the quick action of one of the assistants, who was a judo expert, prevented a potentially fatal stabbing.
In both cases, reality was so distorted that the subjects took murderous and antisocial action. If they had accomplished their “defensive” acts, both men could have been convicted of murder, since the law did not recognize motivation through hypnosis as a fact. The courts, in all but a few cases, had adopted the traditional scientific view that criminal behavior cannot be induced under hypnosis. That view still stands today.
To test the premise, which was then widely held, that a normal person under hypnotic trance could not be made to divulge information which would be self-incriminating, Watkins conducted a number of experiments where a monetary bribe was offered to withhold information. Watkins discovered that “when placed in a trance they ‘spilled’ every time, either verbally or in writing.”
The subject of one of these experiments was an enlisted WAC in military intelligence. Her commanding officer ordered her not to reveal a list of what were made to appear to be real military secrets. Under hypnosis she “spilled” everything.
Another experiment was discontinued when it was discovered that a research worker in the government arsenal was spilling vital and top-secret war information to the friendly army hypnotist, who did not have a “need to know.” He did this loud and clear while in a trance before an audience of 200 military professionals. If the subject had been allowed to continue, the disclosures of information would have resulted in a general court martial, no matter how the doctor might have tried to persuade intelligence headquarters that this was “just a test.”
Much of the army’s experimentation with manipulation by hypnosis was inspired by the reports of Wesley Raymond Wells, a doctor at Syracuse University. Wells’s research, in turn, had been inspired by the fiction of the 1880s and 1890s, which described criminal acts as being induced by hypnosis. Wells was taken by the idea that “the most striking feature in a hypnotized subject is his automatism.” Although earlier experiments had elicited no immoral or criminal behavior from subjects under hypnosis, the results of experiments which asked subjects to resist various suggestions indicated to Wells that people might be more suggestible than was generally believed.
In the late 1930s, Wells conducted a simple experiment with a student volunteer. He chose a subject who had stated that he expected he would be below average in hypnotizability and claimed he could not be put into a trance. Before inducing trance, Wells urged him to do his utmost to resist, in every possible way, first going into the trance, and then doing anything against his own moral code.
When the student told Wells that he was ready to begin the contest, the doctor put his hand on the subject’s chest, counted to seven, and found that the subject had already fallen into a deep trance! After testing the subject’s muscle control and ability to obtain amnesia and hallucinations, Wells proceeded to suggest that the subject get up from his chair, go over to Wells’s overcoat which was on a coatrack across the room, and take a dollar from the right-hand pocket. Wells suggested that the subject see the coat as his own, and take the dollar thinking that he had left it in the pocket. When the subject followed all of Wells’s suggestions, he then told him to put the dollar in his own breast pocket and return to his chair. As he was about to sit, Wells said to him that when he sat in the chair he would remember only that he had had this extra dollar when he came into the office, and that later he would spend the dollar, just as if it were his own.
Afterwards, during the student’s recall of his experiences, Wells found that everything had worked according to the hypnotic program he had implanted. This was, of course, a clinical sort of test for amnesia.
“Whether his amnesia would have withstood ‘thirddegree’ methods of the police or the lie detector methods of the psychological laboratory is another question,” Wells said. “On the basis of my previous experimental study of posthypnotic amnesia, I would state it as my opinion that hypnotically induced amnesia in the case of so good a subject ... would have withstood any possible tests, or atleast it might have been made to withstand any possible tests if added precautions had been taken in the hypnotic production of the amnesia.”
Wells’ report of this experiment, published in a psychology journal in 1941, brought a negative reaction from the scientific community. Milton Erickson was among the first to say that Wells’s experiments were at best inconclusive. Erickson reported that after attempting to duplicate similar hypnotic inducements of crime with fifty subjects, he had failed. He concluded from his own investigations that “hypnosis cannot be misused to induce hypnotized persons to commit actual wrongful acts either against themselves or others...” The so-called antisocial acts induced by Wells and others, Erickson maintained, were most likely motivated by factors other than hypnosis or suggestion.
“We know that it is possible, without recourse to hypnosis, for one person to induce another to commit a wrong, a fact we may explain loosely as the influence of one personality upon another,” Erickson explained. “To settle this question is difficult, since it involves three inseparable factors of unknown potentialities — specifically, the hypnotist as a person, the subject as a person, and hypnosis as such, to say nothing of the significant influence upon these three, both individually and collectively, of the suggestion and the performance of a questionable act.”
But even Erickson conceded that the primitive being, the libido, which dwells in everyone, makes almost any crime possible. When a hallucinatory state has been induced and the subject thinks he or she is acting out of self-preservation, the primitive mind takes over and the killer instinct is unleashed.
In the late 1930s psychologists began grappling with the problem of human will, as the theologians before them had done for centuries. Some maintained that “will” meant conscious volition; others, that it meant nothing but the manifestation of the belief system, that is to say, the result of the earliest conditioned responses. The area of will still lies outside the limits of modem psychology. Many experts are loath even to use the word “will” since it represents a most ill-defined dimension of human nature.
Summing up a carefully constructed semantic argument, psychologists often say, “A person cannot be made to do anything against his will or basic moral precepts.” That statement, taken at face value, is certainly true. A normal person would not wittingly kill a friend. But if he was made to hallucinate that his friend was an enemy, and it was a “kill or be killed” situation, he would initiate a natural response to preserve his own life. In the process he might even take the imagined enemy’s life. After the hallucination passed, he would realize he had killed his friend. This criminal act would be considered, in one sense, an act of will; but the real cause of the action would not be understood outside the hallucinated state. Only the killer’s grief would remain, to attest to his knowledge of what he did, and that he really did not want to do it.
Whether or not hypnosis can be used to deeply motivate people to commit antisocial acts despite the call of their own conscience is still an open question in academic circles.
George Estabrooks had evidence which made him conclude that “one in every five of the human race are highly suggestible, at least half are suggestible to a very considerable degree.” And he warned, “...mere figures do not tell the story. That one fifth has a power far beyond its numbers; for this type of man, acting under direct suggestion, is no mere average person. He is a fanatic, with all that fanaticism may imply for good or evil . Can this prospective subject — this one in five individual — be hypnotized against his will?”
“The answer to this very vital question,” Estabrooks concluded, “is ‘yes,’ though we prefer to say ‘without his consent’ instead of ‘against his will.’ We do not need the subject’s consent when we wish to hypnotize him for we use ‘disguised’ technique...”
Believing in Estabrooks’ logic, pragmatists in the government began to explore the possibilities of ways to change belief and motivate behavior. They let scores of contracts for research into hypnosis, behavior modification, conditioning, and virtually anything that held even a slim chance of being able to give them control over the individual human mind and will.
Meanwhile foreign governments unfriendly to the United States were involved in similar psychological research. But the U.S. government’s fear of losing superiority in this new and untested field ran away with them. Intelligence analysts believed a “mind-control gap” existed, and to close it they mobilized “think tanks” to develop a usable program of experimental research, at once.
From one such think tank, the Rand Corporation, came a report entitled Are the Cominform Countries Using Hypnosis Techniques to Elicit Confession In Public Trials? Dated April 25, 1949, it helped set the stage for using national security as the rationale for resorting to mind control to motivate criminal acts, both at home and abroad.
“The successful use of hypnosis,” the report said, “would represent a serious threat to democratic values in times of peace and war. In addition, it might contribute to the development of unconventional methods of warfare, which will be widely regarded as immoral. The results of scientific research in the field under discussion would obviously lend themselves to offensive as well as defensive applications and to abuse no less than to use. It must be assumed that almost all of the scientific personnel in the field of hypnosis are keenly aware of these social implications of their work and that they are interested in limiting the practice of hypnosis to therapeutic applications.” That assumption proved to be untrue.
The Rand report recommended “that these moral and political implications of experimental research on hypnosis be explored as fully as possible prior to official encouragement or sponsorship of such research, so as to establish the most effective safeguards against its unintended consequences.”
The Rand study dwelt at length upon Soviet experiments in hypnosis dating back to 1923. “At the State Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow,” the report stated, “it was demonstrated that hypnosis could be used in inducing an innocent person to develop intense guilt feelings and to confess to a criminal or immoral act which he did not commit. In 1932 the experiments on hypnotically implanted ‘crimes’ were reported (in English translation) by A. R. Luria, who at that time was a professor in the Academy of Communist Education.”
Quoting Luria, the report described how hypnosis was used as a device for producing emotional disturbances in order to control behavior. “We suggested to the person under test, while in a sufficiently deep hypnotic state, a certain situation, more often a disagreeable one, in which he was playing a role irreconcilable with his habits and contrary to his usual behavior — we thus obtained an actual and rather sharply expressed acute effect. After awakening the person under test . . . we had a subject who was ‘loaded’ with certain definite affective complexes, which mostly remained unknown to himself ...”
Luria described an experiment with a twenty-year-old female college student who was told under deep hypnosis that she was sitting in her room studying when a neighbor child, a boy of six, came into the room. She was told that the child shouted when he came into the room and disturbed her studies. She asked him to stop, but he did not listen. The young woman was then told that she would get angry and forget herself. She would take a stick and beat the boy, first on the back and then on the head. The boy would cry out from the wounds on his head, but she would keep on beating him. She would then feel very ashamed and would be unable to understand how such a thing could happen, how she could beat up a child. Finally, she was told that she must try to forget the incident altogether.
Luria explained that he had chosen this situation with a definite purpose. Since the hallucinated event was entirely unacceptable by the moral standards of the young woman’s personality, it was natural that she would feel repentant. He reinforced her natural desire to forget by suggesting to her that she remove the memory of the event from her mind.
In subsequent trances the subject was questioned about the “beating.” With great difficulty she reconstructed the event, but shifted the emphasis on several points so that the imagined event would conform more to her basic moral code. At first she refused to remember that she had “beaten” the child. She then conceded that she had “pulled his ears.” Then, finally, she admitted she had “beaten him,” but she maintained she had not beaten him with a stick. Luria said that this showed how unacceptable the situation was to her personality. The student said twice, “my conscience has tortured me.” Luria said this showed the effectiveness of the hypnotic suggestion.
Of the experiment, Irving Janis, author of the Rand report, observed, “in this particular case, the implanted memory was initially referred to by the examiner as a ‘dream’ rather than as a real event. But from the detailed reports of other investigators, this procedure does not appear to be necessary for eliciting a false confession: a hypnotized subject will often accept and confess to an implanted memory as a real event in his own past life.”
The Rand report itself suggested that this trick of hypnotic suggestion might be used on a defendant awaiting trial. The defendant could be “prepared” in a series of hypnotic sessions to accept guilt about a criminal act he did not commit, and then, if placed in a hypnotic trance while in the courtroom, the prosecutor’s interrogation would elicit a false confession.
Fearing the Communists’ use of hypnosis, the Rand report warned that hypnosis, once accomplished, is hard to detect. Contrary to reports in the nineteenth century, “a hypnotized subject is not blindly obedient, nor does he act like an automaton when in trance. Hypnotic suggestions are acted out and elaborated in a way that is consonant with the individual’s habitual social behavior and his basic personality traits.” The report stated that while often “the hypnotized subject seems literal and humorless ... he appears entirely unselfconscious, and very often he acts abstracted, inattentive, almost as if he were insulated against his surroundings,” this is not always the case. A number of experienced hypnotists had been able to train their subjects to perform “in such a way that observers could not tell that the subject was in a trance or that he was acting under hypnotic suggestions.”
The Rand report outlined the following procedure that would elicit a false confession. “First, make the subject feel guilty about some acts he had thought about or had actually carried out in the past. Second, make him feel guilty about having committed some crime of which he was actually innocent. The implanted guilt would compel the subject to confess when examined by a hypnotist or anyone else designated by the hypnotist. Third, train the subject, by means of posthypnotic suggestion, to go into the trance whenever a simple signal was encountered.” The subject would be trained to give his false confession in a normal, convincing manner, so that observers would not be able to detect the trance state.
To induce hypnosis in an unwilling subject, the report suggested any of three possibilities which were then well supported by research findings:
Subjects who refuse or resist the simple “talking” methods of hypnotic induction could be given a few grams of paraldehyde or an intravenous injection of sodium pentothal or sodium amytal. The appropriate dosage of these drugs invariably induces a state of light hypnotic sleep. During sleep, the subject could then be given suggestions which would produce the characteristic deep hypnotic trance. While in the first drug-induced trance, the patient could be given posthypnotic suggestions to the effect that he would be susceptible to hypnosis thereafter without the use of drugs. Subsequently the subject could be allowed to practice carrying out posthypnotic suggestions. He could then be rehypnotized, still without his conscious cooperation, but this time without the use of drugs.
The report, admitted that at the time of its writing there was no certain knowledge of just how successful each of the three methods described might prove to be with individuals “who are on their guard against being victimized by hostile authorities.”
“The drug technique,” suggested the report, “would probably turn out to be the simplest and most efficient of the three and so it would be the most likely candidate for ... hypnotizing defendants against their will.”
Another important use of hypnosis for the government, the report said, would be the induction of amnesia: “Once a deep hypnotic trance is achieved, it is possible to introduce posthypnotic amnesia so that [a subject] ... would not know ... that he had been subjected to hypnosis, to drugs, or to any other treatment.”
The report then turned to the problem of producing the deep hypnotic trance essential to posthypnotic amnesia. It stated that, based on research reports of that time, “in about 90 percent of any unselected population it should be possible to produce the deepest (somnambulistic) type of trance. According to numerous authorities, a light trance is sufficient to elicit a ‘confession’ of actual misbehavior which might otherwise be withheld; but, for carrying out complete posthypnotic amnesia, it is a somnambulistic trance that is required.”
The Rand document expressed fear that Soviet investigators had found other techniques which could produce deep hypnosis in perhaps 90 percent or more of all individuals.
Anticipating future advances, the report speculated on more efficient ways to develop greater depth in hypnotic trance. It suggested that a subject could be placed in a trance many times each day until a sufficient depth of trance was achieved. It was thought that hypnotizing the subject and then awakening him several times in the same session might speed up the process. This technique of successive and rapid trance induction would, it was hoped, make the subject easily susceptible to deep trance in a few days.
To increase speed and depth of hypnosis, special uses of hypnotic drugs were also suggested. “For example, a series of drug-induced trances, as against only one such treatment, might serve to develop the majority of cases into somnambules. Moreover, certain unique drug compounds may be especially effective in inducing very deep states of hypnosis.”
The report then said, “Conceivably, electroshock convulsions might be used as an adjunctive device to achieve somnambulism in a very high percentage of the cases. Many studies have shown that there is a temporary intellectual impairment, diffuse amnesias, and general ‘weakening of the ego’ produced during the period when a series of electroshock convulsions is being administered. From my own and others’ investigations of the psychological effects of such treatments, I would suspect that they might tend to reduce resistance to hypnotic suggestions. It is conceivable, therefore, that electroshock treatments might be used to weaken difficult eases in order to produce a hypnotic trance of great depth.”
In 1958 the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR), a subcontractor to the Rand Corporation, issued a “technical report” on hypnosis to the air force that took up where the earlier Rand report had left off. Once again a “think tank” was calling for action in the mind-control race against the Communists.
“To both the lay person and the behavior scientist,” the author, Seymour Fisher, wrote in the introduction, “hypnosis has long been regarded as a potentially powerful instrument for controlling human behavior. Undoubtedly, the intelligence divisions of many countries have given serious thought to this potential and have done classified research in various areas of hypnosis ... it is conceivable ... that these techniques could have been used and covered up so successfully that they might be impossible to recognize...”
Fisher outlined areas of future research where Americans could advance in the mind-control race. He urged the government to develop tests to determine who was and who was not a good hypnotic subject. He urged further research in pharmacology, suggesting that a number of drugs little known at the time might be effective in inducing hypnosis.
He predicted that some drugs would prove useful in reducing the amount of time required to induce complex hypnotic behavior and that others would be useful in reinforcing the lasting effects of hypnotically induced behavior control. He predicted that drugs would be developed which would permit far greater control over autonomic processes. Some drugs, he suggested, would be found to permit control over learning and perception as well. He also predicted that new drugs would be discovered which would be capable of inducing deep hypnosis in virtually any individual regardless of his degree of cooperativeness.
All of these techniques, involving drug-induced hypnosis and electroshock convulsions, were eventually developed and used to reduce some of our own citizens to a zombie state in which they would blindly serve the government. Regardless of the Constitution and the laws which supposedly protect the individual against government coercion, “zombies” were covertly created to do the government’s more unsavory bidding. Such “zombies” asked no questions about the legality of their assignments. Often their assignments were never consciously known. And if they were ever questioned about their own actions, amnesia protected them from self-incrimination.
What had started out a race against the Communists slowly turned into a private war from within.
http://www.nlp-mindcontrol.com/operation_mind_control_ch4.htm