 This is the story of a 30-year search by U.S. intelligence agencies to perfect mind control. Some of those engaged in that search have agreed to talk about it for the first time. One said, I think every last one of us felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing. We knew we were crossing the line. The search would be endless. From brothels, an agent says, we learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. To the mystical rites of a magical mushroom ceremony performed by an Indian shaman. To a Spanish bull rig, the bull has had electrodes implanted in the brain and is controlled by a scientist. There would be victims. One intelligence agency tried to peel this man's mind back to reveal its deepest secrets. I'll live through it, I'll live through it. This man worked on some of these programs. He would write of his work, it was fun, fun, fun. This is the story of the search for mind control. ABC News Close-Up, Mission Mind Control. With ABC News correspondent Paul Altmeyer. Yes, can I buy it? Allow me. Two Michelobes lights. Michelobes makes a light beer? Perfect. The good taste of Michelobes light. Don't just compare it to other light beers, compare it to your regular beer. It's that good. You always did go first class. Your ticket to San Francisco. Thank you. San Francisco? You too? The tax runs in the family. Mrs. Cooper. I need help. With all these different dog foods, I don't know what kind to feed him. Dry, soft. Honey, it's not the form, it's the formula. Those are for any dog, young, old, whatever. But cycle two dog food is especially for dogs ages one to seven. Fight mine. The cycle two formula has just what dogs in their active years need to help stay healthy. And happy with cycle, I know what to feed him. Now get cycle two in 25 pound bags. We are not professing to tell you the complete story of these activities. We are professing to tell you the complete story that we know. But these records that we have uncovered don't tell the story. They tell pieces of it. This is a story that has been told in bits and pieces. This is an attempt to pull most of it together. We know we don't have the full story. We do, however, have some striking new revelations and insights. The story begins here, just off the nation's front yard, the mall. The buildings behind me were the headquarters for the World War II Office of Strategic Services. It was here that the first halting steps toward mind control began. The shaper and molder of OSS was General Wild Bill Donovan. He said of his group's work, we may have made mistakes, but we were not afraid to try things that were never done before. In this anything goes atmosphere, Donovan appointed this man, Stanley Lovell, a Boston industrialist, to break new ground in many scientific and technical fields. Donovan called Lovell his Dr. Moriarty after the Fiendish professor in Sherlock Holmes. Lovell liked the name and posed for this Saturday evening post photo. He later wrote of his OSS job that it was, quote, to stimulate the pecs bad boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to him, throw all of your normal law-abiding concepts out of the window, here's a chance to raise merry hell. It was in this atmosphere that the search for mind control began. This bizarre man would be an active participant in that search over the next two decades. His name is George White, an OSS captain who had formerly been with the Bureau of Narcotics. In his diary, seen here publicly for the first time, White left a legacy of the darker side of American intelligence work. He received his early OSS training at the British-run school at Oshawa, Canada, the same school where Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was trained. White referred to the school in his diaries as the Oshawa School of Mayhem and Murder. Mike Burke, former OSS colleague of White's and now president of Madison Square Garden Center. Very compelling fellow, mysterious fellow, almost mystical fellow. He was fascinating because you didn't, you knew something about him but not enough about him to really get a fix on him. He also knew a great deal about the swifter elements of society, the gamier side of life, and he was very impressive in his technical knowledge of the underworld, so to speak. He said, one of our men gets speed up. He says, you have to act real fast and teach these guys a lesson. Charles Siragusa, a former Narcotics officer and friend of White's. He thought, come round, he says, and break your kneecaps. And with that one guy laughed. And George White always had a little, a little billy with him. And this one guy sort of snaked. George White turned around and wiped him across the neck with it. Then he picked up a pool steak and started beating everybody up. He made his point. And he made his point. George White was not a man of understatement or subtleties. His boss at OSS, Stanley Lovell, referred to him as deadly and dedicated. In this note from White's diaries, it says, Call Lovell, regarding TD. TD was a rather transparent cover for truth drug. George White worked with the truth drug committee here at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in the nation's capital. They experimented with mescaline, scopalamine, and marijuana on unwitting victims. The committee soon learned there was no easy panacea, no truth drug at this stage. But White and later colleagues would not stop trying. The goal remained the same. As this 1952 CIA memo says, the aim is controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation. But it was a discovery here in Basel, Switzerland at Sando's laboratories by Dr. Albert Hoffman. That led the intelligence agencies of America to believe that they had found the panacea. The discovery was lysergic acid diethalamide, LSD. The film that you see is considered by many experts to be the closest illustration of the effects of a hallucinogenic. One of the first times that anybody had run into a powerful drug that was different than anything else that they knew anything about. John Gittinger, recently retired chief psychologist for the CIA. This is the first time Gittinger has been interviewed publicly. We could disable a whole city by putting a very small amount on a water supply. After all of these years of us, those of us who involved in looking for this secret drug, this was the only thing that began to look for the first time like it might be so. The CIA's interest in LSD was intense. The worry was that the Russians would get hold of it. Were the Soviets into LSD? I'm going to have to say I'm sure they were. But if you ask me to prove it, I've never seen any direct proof of it. But at one point intelligence information received from Switzerland said that Sando's laboratories was about to put 100 million doses of LSD on the open market. And it caused enough concern within the agency that the United States was prepared to buy the entire supply. However, a slight mistake had been made. The mistake has made public for the first time. I just found out on a new CIA document that there were no such large quantities of LSD on the market. John Marx has filed numerous freedom of information suits against the CIA and has unearthed much new material. He is the author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a history of intelligence agency work with mind control. He is a consultant for this report. What happened is that there was a military attaché in Switzerland, an American officer who got milligrams and kilograms mixed up. In other words, he made a mistake of thinking one-one-thousandth of a gram was the same as one-thousand grams, which is a mistake of a million times. So when the CIA got the intelligence that there were a hundred million doses on the market, in fact, there were a hundred doses. The man who would oversee the CIA's research into drugs and most of the agency's behavior programs is this man, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist. Dr. Gottlieb declined ABC News' request for an interview. In their never-ending search for the miracle weapons, CIA operatives searched here in the remote mountain areas of southern Mexico for what up to then had been considered a myth, magic mushrooms. They used this man, a part-time chemist with the CIA, to dupe this man, a vice president of a bank and an amateur mycologist or mushroom expert, to try to get to the magic mushrooms and turn them into a drug. But it would be the amateur, R. Gordon Wasson and his colleagues, who would win the race and develop the drug psilocybin from the magic mushrooms. We went into the Mazatec area, far from the highways, remote from Mexico City. There we found that rotten bagasse, as it's called, bagasso, covered with mushrooms. These mushrooms, I didn't know, I had never seen, they were the sacred mushrooms. Wasson would also discover and record the ancient mystical rites of the mushrooms from a local shaman or magical priestess, Maria Sabina. And we were seeing incredible sights. They would go slowly or they would go fast, as I ordained. All your senses are rendered acute. We say that you see visions, you see hallucinations, but that doesn't begin to tell the story. The hallucinations are only part of it. You hear sounds, you smell things, the night was thrilling. Word of Wasson's discovery reached the CIA quickly. Dr. James Moore, a University of Delaware chemist, secretly served the CIA preparing deadly chemicals on short notice. Moore was instructed to get close to Wasson and accompany him on another trip to Mexico to get the magic mushrooms. Internal documents show the CIA felt a drug derived from the mushrooms could remain an agency secret. What in the world were they looking for with the magic mushrooms? I think the best answer to that is that they were looking for fundamental information on compounds that would be capable of causing changes in behavior, changes in mental attitude. Did you ever consider what would have happened if any of these substances were given to say unwitting people? No, I don't remember having considered that specifically. I... What if you... I trust perhaps you've thought about it. Well, I haven't worried about it. I... Your question again, what would I have thought had I known that the... Any of these substances would have been given to unwitting persons. You mean a hostile agent and of another government? No, I think that was probably one of the things I had in mind. I mean testing it out on an American citizen. I guess I must seem very, very cold-blooded about this, but I don't recall ever having been very much preoccupied with that issue. But many drugs were tested in this way. A decision was made at the highest levels of the CIA to do testing on unwitting Americans. As one CIA document says, such testing would be operationally realistic. A former CIA official who worked on these programs describes for the first time how the decision was made. He did not wish to be filmed or recorded. Thus his remarks are read by someone else. I think every last one of us felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing. We knew we were crossing a line. Every decent kid knows he shouldn't steal, but he does it sometimes. We knew damn well we didn't want anyone else to know what we were doing. The decision was made to do testing on unwitting victims. It was decided they should be on the fringes of society because they were most vulnerable. It was the borderline underworld, prostitutes, drug addicts, and other small timers who would be powerless to seek any kind of revenge in case they found out. And as their predecessors had a decade earlier, the CIA turned to George White for help. White was now a high-ranking narcotics official, and by this time the stories about George White were legendary. So the way this says, you may help you, monsieur. And George White was busy talking with me. He made no attention to waiters, so the way to tap them on his shoulders may help you, monsieur. George White turned around, whipped his gun out and stuck it in a guy's face like this in this crowded restaurant. George White did not mind bending the law, and he knew the street well. He was the ideal choice for what the CIA had in mind. We were Ivy League, White, middle class. We were naive, totally naive about this, and he felt pretty expert. He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs. White set up so-called safe houses for the CIA in New York, here in Greenwich Village, and later in San Francisco, in this hotel, and in an apartment, a top telegraph hill with a commanding view of San Francisco Bay. While the existence of these safe houses was disclosed last year, details of what took place within them has not been told. A former CIA official who worked in the safe houses reveals that they were used not only for drug testing, but to study sexual behavior and how it could be used to manipulate people. We did quite a study of prostitutes and their behavior. How do you take a woman who is willing to use her body to get money out of a guy to get him to talk about things which are much more important, like state secrets? We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. We started to pick up knowledge that could be used in operations. There would be victims in all of this, but as the agency knew, they couldn't fight back. Cementaries from George White's diaries. Clarisse gets horrors. Janet, sky high. As one agency memo says, we have no answer to the moral question. The safe houses were not the only testing grounds. Millions of dollars would be spent on LSD research at universities throughout the country, and word would begin to spread on campus about this so-called mind-blowing drug, and suddenly, there was the counterculture of the 60s. I give the CIA a total credit for sponsoring and initiating the entire consciousness movement, counterculture, and culture events of the 1960s. Dr. Timothy Leary, the 1960s Johnny Appleseed of LSD. The CIA funded and supported and encouraged hundreds of young psychiatrists to experiment with this drug. The fallout from that was that the young psychologists began taking it themselves, discovering that it was an intelligence-enhancing, consciousness-raising experience. I know that some of the studies which the CIA had supported used as subjects people who later became strong proselytizes of LSD. So in that sense, yes, I think that did sustain the perpetuation of the use of the drug. And it's rather ironic, isn't it? The countercase that I would make in relationship to that is to remember that the people who were doing the research were people who would be doing the research, regardless of who was the sponsor. I don't think anybody working in that time in the remotest ever thought that it would blow up into the kind of thing that it did. History will judge the role of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in unwittingly contributing to the counterculture of the 60s through their intense interest in LSD and other hallucinogenics. But for the moment at least, the argument can be made that the CIA helped usher in the age of Aquarius. ABC News Close-Up will continue in a moment. Being careful about my body doesn't just mean major things like regular breast exams. I'm even careful about pain relievers. Plain aspirin sometimes upset my stomach, so I use buffering. It adds protection. I'm careful about what goes into my body. Buffering gives me an added relief action I want. Tylenol doesn't. Only one leading tablet has both, an added relief action in many cases that Tylenol never provides and protection ingredients, buffering. Now I'm careful to get both with buffering. Your sick tramps fog with grease kills crystal drain-o. I'll pour in liquid plummer. It may not work on that grease clog. No. Crystal drain-o will. Look, liquid plum is quiet. It's not melting that grease. But drain-o is. It broke through. Will drain-o hurt metal pipes? No. So liquid plummer didn't break that grease clog. I'm switching to drain-o. To make clogs go, better use drain-o. Saturday, live on ABC. The Forest Hill spends invitational from the legendary West Side Dennis Club. Then live, third round coverage of the most prestigious ladies' golf event. Halestacy goes for her third straight U.S. women's open title, and Red Hot Nancy Lopez shoots for her elusive first open victory. And on ABC's Wide World of Sports, rodeo excitement from the Wild West, plus high speeds, high thrills, hydroplane action, championship tennis, golf on ABC's Wide World of Sports, Saturday. Wednesday on 8 is enough. We got the buggy fever. The Bradford Girls go disco crazy. Hey, hi, hon. What do you say we get down? And the summer's off to a red hot start. And Charlie's Angels play the horses. I want to be a Jackie. But end up in a dead heat with death. Then, the ghost of Jack the Ripper haunts the back streets of Vegas. Tomorrow, starting at 8, 7, Central and Mountain on ABC. Covering a span of history such as we are in this report, one can get sidetracked by the so-called glamour and mystery of espionage work, or by the exotic qualities of some drugs. But what you can't lose sight of is what all of this would mean in terms of individual human beings. There would be deaths. There would be long lasting and harmful effects. The best known case is that of this man, Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the Army Chemical Corps, who in 1953 was slipped LSD unknowingly at a meeting with CIA officials. Shortly after that, Olson went into severe depression. He ended his life at this New York hotel by diving through a shaded closed window in his 10th floor room. Frank Olson was the first known fatality in the CIA's LSD program. Olson left behind a widow Alice and three children, but it would be years before they learned the real story of his death. Shortly after his suicide, Alice Olson was visited by Dr. Sidney Guttley, the man who had administered the drug, and by Robert Lashbrook, his deputy, who was the last person with Frank Olson the night of his death. It was probably to check me out and see whether I was handling myself and handling the situation, whether I was hysterical, and I'm sure they left the house feeling ever so much better because I had been gracious and hospitable to them so that I must have played right into their hand and made them feel fine. 23 years later, how did you feel about that meeting? My anger was unbelievable at how I had been duped for this length of time and the anguish which was unnecessary. Anyone who knew during all of those years never told Alice Olson the real story of her husband's death. She was discovered by accident more than two decades later. It was a 22-year-long cover-up. Lyman Kirkpatrick was Inspector General of the CIA at the time of Frank Olson's death. But had not the Olson case occurred within the secret confines of the CIA, would not this case have been a prosecutable case? Perhaps, my way, I would think very definitely prosecutable and certainly from the point of view of Mr. Olson, why it should probably have been actionable. Frank Olson's suicide slowed down the CIA's testing of LSD and other drugs but only momentarily. The CIA was not the only government agency interested in the possibilities LSD and other drugs presented for mind control. The Army Chemical Corps first started working with the CIA and then branched off on its own. It, too, tested drugs on unwitting victims and a death would result. The case of this man, Harold Blower, a tennis pro seen here with his daughter Elizabeth, is well known. In 1953, Blower was a private patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He was given five injections of a mescaline derivative that was being tested secretly for the Army Chemical Corps. With the fifth injection, Harold Blower died. As with the Olson case, a 22-year cover-up followed until finally the Army admitted the real details of Blower's death. Since the initial news stories of Harold Blower's death, close to 5,000 documents previously classified have been released by the Army and obtained by ABC News. They provide valuable insight into Army activities at the time of Blower's death and where the Army went from there with their own drug testing program. From a previously classified deposition of Dr. James Cattel, who administered the mescaline derivative on the purpose of the drug testing to produce symptoms similar to those that you see in schizophrenia on how much the patient knew about all this. We didn't delineate all the possibilities of what might happen because then you contaminate your experiment. Cattel then relates that he never even knew what drug he had given Harold Blower because of the secrecy of the Army experiments. We didn't know whether it was dog piss. This was secret. This was a secret. We weren't in on it. We asked Blower's daughter, Elizabeth, for her reaction. What? How can anybody react to that? I mean, it's so far from what you'd expect from a human being. Never mind a doctor. Never mind a professional specialist who's supposed to care about people's minds. It's... It's unbelievable. A suit filed by Elizabeth Barrett against the Army Chemical Corps is now pending in federal court. Other Army experiments continued on mental patients around the country. Work done at the Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans involves several drugs, hallucinogenics, and electrodes implanted in the brain. The chief researcher was Dr. Russell Monroe, now head of the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland. These are various progress reports written by Dr. Monroe and recently obtained by ABC News. From one of the progress reports, a report of a woman who had electrodes implanted in the brain and was then given LSD and other drugs. She became agitated, cried, lapsed into a trance-like state, felt as if she were about to have a convulsion, experienced waves of darkness and light, had bizarre sensations in her neck and legs, said somebody was trying to manipulate her body. At this point, Dr. Monroe wrote that the woman was obviously having paranoid ideas. As a lay person, perhaps you can enlighten me. What therapeutic effect would the type of experiment that I just described have on a patient? Well, the therapeutic effect would be indirect. Was this patient aware that she was being given LSD? Yes. I mean, they were told that they would be given some medication and they should have... Specifically LSD? Well, we told them... I don't think that they would have even known what LSD was then at the time. They were told that they were going to give... they would be given some medication which might make them feel worse. Dr. Monroe, what do you think the Army Chemical Corps was looking for in all of this testing? They were looking for an incapacitating agent, an agent that would not harm the person permanently, but would incapacitate them temporarily. That seemed like a humanistic way to wage a war if war is necessary. When James Thornwell was given LSD by Army Intelligence in 1961, this time it was no experiment. This time the express purpose was to peel back Thornwell's brain to bear any secret within it. This time the Army had gone operational. Thornwell, as reported on ABC last January, was an Army private stationed in Orleans, France. Classified documents were missing from his unit. Thornwell became a suspect. His two-and-a-half-month interrogation included administration of sodium pentothal, hypnosis, isolation, and deprivation of sleep. Army documents obtained by ABC News refer to this interrogation as conventional. Despite this severe questioning, Army Intelligence was getting nowhere with Thornwell, and it was decided to slip him LSD. For 16 years, Thornwell never knew what had hit him. Tell me about the acid. Oh, rather not. It's a bad trip. It's a bad trip. That was a bad trip. The pain was so excruciating, it felt like somebody was sticking me with a million pins. You know, just everywhere. I walked around. What's up? No charges were ever brought by the Army against Thornwell. He was discharged for psychological disorders. But an Army psychiatric evaluation of Thornwell obtained by ABC News, one which was done prior to Thornwell having been given LSD, says of him, fairly cooperative, oriented, alert, and gave no evidence of psychosis or depression. From the Army's point of view, this type of LSD interrogation was a success. Other documents refer to the exploitability of interrogation subjects, cracking them, keeping them off balance mentally, and providing an economical, speedy, and productive aid to interrogation. From James Thornwell's point of view, it was no success. Thornwell still has serious problems. He's run through two marriages. He maintains he can't hold a job, can't concentrate, has nightmares, and feels socially and emotionally isolated. Last fall, Thornwell filed suit against the government in federal court. In a moment, we will examine the closest experimentation to brainwashing that we have uncovered. Uh, something wrong, Will. You pick up a paper these days. You learn life isn't as simple as it used to be, and neither's food. Is that why you eat grape nut cereal? You can ask for a simpler cereal. Wheat and barley, vitamins added, no preservatives. Sure looks simple. It's got a natural nutty taste. What's good for breakfast, guys? How about something nice and simple? Grape nuts, the simple cereal. Maxwell House's coffee you can count on. Maxwell House. Good to the last drop. Good every time. Good coffee. Good to the last drop, Maxwell House. Maxwell House. Coffee you can count on. Smells good. Always tastes good. Always good to the last drop. Maxwell House. Good. ABC news close up. We'll continue in a moment. Special baseball, the Yankee Stick on the Angels Friday night on ABC. This is a heavy duty stick up. And this? It's a good place for it. New heavy duty stick ups from Airwick for small places with big odors. This is David Schumacher in the news at this hour. Our district police have charged a young Northeast woman with the weekend kidnapping of that day old baby. So it's to say the woman was a pregnant and afraid she'd lost her own child in the accident and that's what motivated the kidnapping. It was the night before Skylab and we'll have the latest on its fate and ours. Testimony before Congress today on battered wives. Some of the victims are battered wives. A rock and roll star put on probation for income tax evasion. The condition is he must put on a thousand hours of concerts for charities. This is David Schumacher who won a gold medal at the Pan Am Games. Join us at 11. Reach for the sun Reach for the sun Something else tastes or feels quite like Mountain Dew or goes down as smooth like a soft breeze on a lazy afternoon. One of the most chilling experiments we have uncovered took place at this gothic estate called Raven's Crag halfway up Mount Royal in Montreal. It houses the Allen Memorial Institute of Psychiatry of McGill University. It was here that the CIA funded a series of experiments, severe experiments. The work was done by the Institute's then director Dr. Ewan Cameron. It is the closest experimentation to brainwashing yet disclosed. His work unprecedented in psychiatry consisted of three areas which he called sleep therapy, psychic driving and the ultimate deep patterning. Dr. Maurice Dongier, current head of the Allen Memorial Institute. In his psychic driving so-called type of therapy he would give the patient intensive electric treatment in order to make the patient regress deeply, become forgetful and then he would attempt to implant new ideas in the mind of the patient. Now, to a layman it would appear that Dr. Cameron was trying to take the slate and wipe it clean, the slate being the mind. In other words, brainwashing. Exactly, that's a very good comparison. Brainwashing? Yes, probably. Val Orlico of Winnipeg, Canada, the wife of a member of the Canadian parliament was a patient of Dr. Cameron's. She entered the Allen Memorial Institute because of severe depression. She describes for the first time publicly the LSD therapy and psychic driving treatment that she was given by Dr. Cameron. And then the drug began to take hold very rapidly because it was an IV injection and things became very furry and very frightening and had a lot of sensations that it's very difficult to recall. Nobody explained it to me, nobody ever asked me if I was willing to do it or anything. He had this feeling that he would be able to get through the resistance of illness and to reach deep changes very quickly. I don't think that when you look at that in retrospect, the hopes that he had have been in any way fulfilled. But Cameron would plunge on. The next step was what he called psychic driving. This involved almost endless tape-recorded messages and more drugs for the patient. Cameron wrote that this was the way to make direct control changes in personality. I thought this was the coldest and most impersonal treatment that anybody could give to anybody in the world. And I became more and more despondent and more and more angry. I just became so despondent that I thought I can't live like this any longer. And I thought I would just go out and throw myself underneath the cars on McGregor. I stood on the curb of that street and I stood there and I thought, okay, go, okay, go. And then I thought, what if you're not killed? What if you're just maimed? What if you don't die and you live and you can't even talk anymore? And I couldn't do it. The most severe technique Cameron used was depatterning. He described it as breaking up the existing patterns of behavior by means of intensive electroshock therapy with prolonged periods of sleep. He carried out these experiments in something he called the sleep rooms. People in there were like babies. They cried and they were very disoriented. They were afraid of the sleep room. We used to walk very carefully against the side of the corridor that was opposite the sleep room with our backs to the wall when we'd go by. Cameron used this combined sleep electroshock treatment on patients as long as 30 days. One patient, he kept asleep for 65 days. Cameron retired and his successor, Dr. Robert Clayhorn, ordered a follow-up study on the patients treated with his depatterning method. It showed that it was no more beneficial in its result than the use of more conservative methods. But the follow-up study showed that 60% of those who had been depatterned still had amnesia for periods of anywhere from six months to ten years. That's quite a memory loss, isn't it? That is a memory loss. Indeed it is. It's, I think, more than desirable. In retrospect, does Dr. Cameron's experimentation and his treatment appear harsh? I would say yes. This forceful type of approach that I was describing to you is definitely... it can be said that it's harsh. I wouldn't call it harsh. I would say it was harder on the staff than it was on the patients because these people had to be fed and cared for and they had to be given sufficient fluid and food and toilet it and so on and so forth. It was a very difficult thing for the staff to follow these patients properly and see that they did well. Well, I'm glad he was concerned for the staff. I wouldn't... I could have maybe had a different kind of life and that makes me angry and sad and I don't know how to explain how I feel, really. I just... I'm just... How did you feel when you learned that Dr. Cameron's experimentation was financed by the CIA? Well, I thought... Oh, I can't even use the word that I thought because I thought that bastard and he was too smart. He knew. He knew who he was working for. And, um, excuse me, but I just, you know, I just can't... sometimes I can't believe it and yet I know it's true. If you had the opportunity to say something to the people at the Central Intelligence Agency who financed this study, what would you say? I... I realize the CIA is a very important organization and they have a very important job to do, but God, it surely doesn't have to be done on people who are totally incapable of knowing what's happening or having any defense against it. And I... I can't imagine the mentality of people who would do this. I just can't. As were Dr. Cameron, he died in 1966 while mountain climbing. A colleague wrote of Cameron, for him the ends justified the means and when one is dealing with a waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt this stance. Dr. Cameron seemed ideally suited for what the CIA had in mind. The shape of things to come. Don't worry, they just got lucky. I'm sorry, I let us down. Forget it, we'll beat them next week. Come on, how about a Micoloblite, huh? Micoloblite makes a light beer? Sure. The good taste of Micoloblite. Don't just compare it to other light beers. Compare it to your regular beer. It's that good. This Micoloblite is great. Hey, you know what our real problem was today? Yeah, you were terrible! The many roles I play call for many hair starts. So I use hot curlers, blow dryers, things that can be brutal to hair. I switched from one conditioner to another looking for help. Then came Alberto V05 Hot Oil Treatment. It works just like a salon hot oil treatment but takes less time and money. I just heat a tube, smooth it in, and shampoo. My hair is left silky, shiny, more manageable than I ever dreamed. Alberto V05 Hot Oil Treatment. I'll never switch again. In a Barney Miller special. I'm a prisoner of my biological urges. Sorry to hear that. Then authorities say this Texas motorcycle gang murdered a federal judge. People are always scared of something they don't understand and they don't understand us, so they're scared. Geraldo Rivera investigates dope, death, and the bandidos on 2020. Thursday, starting at 9, 8, Central and Mountain on ABC. It was the Cold War and especially the trial of Joseph Cardinal Menzanti, who was forced to testify in a Hungarian court that he was a spy. And then later the Korean War with the coerced and mainly fraudulent confessions of American servicemen. That would spark intense interest in intelligent circles about brainwashing. The CIA secretly commissioned a study of communist brainwashing methods at the Cornell University Medical Center. A leader of that study was Dr. Lawrence Hinkel. He explains first the Russian method of controlling and breaking a person. Absolutely isolated from everyone else. With one man whose job it is to get you to write the extent to which you are a criminal. In this setting, you can get people to do most anything, do you see? Because you don't have to lay a hand on them. And by the time you get through and you go up for the judge, the fellow says, were you a spy? He says, yes, I was a spy. The Chinese never really had this kind of a state police system. They would get him in and all his fellow does is ask, you write, rewrite, rewrite, and talk to him about your whole life. While the purpose of the study was to find out about communist brainwashing techniques, CIA documents show that the agency was interested in developing mind control methods of its own. To precondition and control Chinese living in this country to be sent back to their homeland by CIA agents. What do you think they were looking for? Well, I think they, no, they weren't looking for, they weren't like agents or anything like that. Yet the agency's perception of the work you were doing, in CIA documents we have examined, it says that the project that was being done here, they intended to use everything learned about the new agents to induce them to quote, to perform acts of a complex purposeful nature. Yeah, but that was never done. That sort of thing was never done. Those people were not, that was when they first came here, the first people they sent up to see us, do you see, were, were operational type people from the CIA with some rather, rather wild ideas. Okay, this is their perception of it, if I could just continue. No, it wasn't their perception of it either. Now it wasn't dangerous to us being contrary to the previous consciously expressed intentions and interests, contrary to the good of the individual and subversive to the goals for which you consciously were. Yeah, I understand all this talk, but the situation wise you see, those things were never done because wise people on both sides, we were not able to do this and are interested in it. They were though. Some of the low level people were, but the high level people were not, to tell you the truth. But documents clearly show that the CIA was attempting to develop agents over whom they had as much control as possible, agents who would perform tasks contrary to their own good. Normally conditioned American has been trained to kill and then to have no memory of having killed. His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it has been dry cleaned. Is a Manchurian candidate controlled by others to do things against his will possible? It was a remarkable film because as far as I'm concerned, it made something totally impossible. Seemed absolutely credible. I would say the answer is yes, but there are many qualifications to that. Dr. Milton Klein, a psychologist, a clinical and experimental hypnotist and unpaid consultant to the CIA. The qualifications would be the subject selected to produce the kind of behavior that you wish, the amount of time, the procedures that are utilized and the motivations of the people who are designing, executing and administering the procedures. You're asking whether an individual can be under hypnosis influenced, coerced, persuaded, shaped to perform an antisocial act or a destructive act or an act of violence. My answer would be yes. Captain Marco, you'd be good enough to lend Raymond your pistol please. Yes, ma'am. Through the forehead. Yes, ma'am. How valuable a tool can hypnosis be in the intelligence field? None whatsoever. It has absolutely no use because nobody's ever been able to do that that I know of, do it in an operationally feasible way. I'm not in any way saying that hypnosis doesn't take place. I'm not saying there's nothing to it. I would say that most government agencies concerned with intelligence operations have been looking to hypnosis as a tool for a variety of purposes, one of which is to carry out and to execute certain intelligence operations on a basis where they would not have to rely completely on some of their own emotional reactions. Actually, they're in terrible murder. It could, if you consider that an act of killing someone under circumstances of war is murder. I think one has to define what that means. Under circumstances of peace. Under circumstances of peace, it would be murder. Another former CIA agent says that Fidel Castro at one time was considered as a possible target for a Manchurian candidate. Castro was naturally our discussion point. Could you get somebody gung-ho enough that they would go in and get him? But if you have 100% control of a guy, you have 100% dependency. If something happens and you haven't programmed it in, you've got a problem. So in the end, it was decided that a Manchurian candidate was not feasible. But the search for mind control continued. But could the mind be controlled? Perhaps not. But is human behavior predictable? In this area, the CIA did make a significant breakthrough. A personality assessment system designed by the agency's chief psychologist John Gittinger. It comes close to being able to predict how humans will behave. It's really a descriptive system, an attempt to try to describe personality in a relatively systematic way that hopefully you can get some kind of an idea to predict what the behavior between different kinds of individuals. Gittinger's system had many uses in intelligence work. One was to draw personality portraits of world leaders. Using Gittinger's system, the agency concluded the Shah of Iran is a brilliant but dangerous megalomaniac whose basic problems resulted from an overbearing father. And there were other applications. Your assessment staff played a key role in helping other governments pick their police intelligence agencies, including we've learned the Korean CIA, Uruguayan National Police. Can you tell us about this? No. Author John Marks, the former number two CIA man in Uruguay, told me how in 1966 John Gittinger and an assistant traveled down to Uruguay and gave the tests in order to select members of the Uruguayan Intelligence Service. A psychologist who used to work for the CIA told me in 1961 he personally traveled to South Korea as part of an American CIA effort to set up the Korean CIA and to give the personality tests to candidates for the Korean CIA to choose the best man for their secret police. But one of the basic functions of getting your system was finding the vulnerabilities of an agent, a double agent or a potential agent. In its applicability to intelligence work isn't the PAS system looking for a person's soft spot? Well, of course, the answer to that is yes, but I hasten to say soft spot this is what I consider a negative word. Of the hundreds of behavioral projects undertaken by the CIA Gittingers appears to have been one of the more successful and more conventional. Other experiments were not as conventional. Neurophysicist Dr. Jose Delgado was financed by the Office of Naval Research. In this experiment the bull is sedated. Electrodes are implanted in its brain. Delgado transmits an electronic impulse to the center of the bull's brain. Delgado has remote control of the animal. Recently released CIA documents refer to the feasibility of remote control of animals and that special investigations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man. Other areas were examined through the 60s and 70s. Brain surgery, psychosurgery, creation of amnesia, parapsychology, manipulation of genes. Even though past and present CIA officials have indicated this kind of work ended in 1963. And one of those who took part in these programs in 1977 the Senate subcommittee heard testimony from many of them but the testimony was not that revealing. According to one of them they agreed amongst themselves to keep the inquiry within bounds that would satisfy the committee. Former narcotics officer Charles Syragusa says that he was asked to limit his testimony by the man he reported to at the CIA. He wanted me not to say anything. To perjure yourself. That's right. Well, either that I'd have to perjure myself or take the Fifth Amendment and I'm not about to take the Fifth Amendment for anybody. Former CIA chemist Robert Lashbrook runs safe houses when in fact he supervised one of them. And according to George White's diaries was at a safe house when White conducted what he called an LSD surprise experiment. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb whom we recently filmed near his California home oversaw many of the CIA behavioral programs. He retired in 1973 and destroyed the records of this work. In sort of a valedictory letter Dr. Gottlieb wrote that he and his colleagues had been able to maintain contact with the leading edge of developments in the field of biological and chemical control of human behavior. Dr. Gottlieb also testified before the Senate subcommittee but from an anti-room where he could not be filmed because of what his lawyer termed health and cardiac problems. Dr. Gottlieb declined ABC News request for an interview. With George White, the man who helped the agency and so many of its programs he would retire here to Stinson Beach, California and shortly before his death he wrote to his boss at the CIA Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and summed up his career by saying it was fun, fun, fun where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat steal to see rape and pillage with a sanction and blessing as mine control been achieved from all of the available evidence it appears doubtful the human will has prevailed up to this point but as we have seen work is continuing in this field work that we still don't know very much about how deeply are the Russians and other dictatorships into all of this we really can't say and the CIA is reluctant to give out information about it but the basic question remains what place does all of this have within a democracy one final point should be made as one of the persons who worked on these programs told us we are very capable, conscientious and very dedicated scientist working for our country their work speaks for itself this is Paul Altmeier for ABC News good night here's a great idea potato peeler nope, hair curler it's vanish bowl freshener freshness in a snap snap it under the rim and it freshens two ways it's always there to freshen then when water hits it extra deodorizer and detergents are released working best when and where you need it when the bowl's fresh the bathroom's fresher snappy idea vanish bowl freshener vanish for a cleaner bowl and a fresher bathroom what do doctors recommend for pain today those doctors number one choice is the pain reliever in anison five million recommendations last year for pain of headache backache, minor arthritis and muscle ache the ingredient in anison is the doctors number one choice anison is strong a special combination of medical ingredients free of stomach upset for millions everywhere the ingredient in anison doctors number one choice stay tuned for local news next then live from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, ABC News will track the approach of Skylab as it nears re-entry Skylab, The Final Hours right after Twiggy and Dirk Benedict of Battlestar Galactica star Ian I Want Her Dead on the Tuesday movie of the week tonight on ABC this has been a presentation of ABC News here's its final orbit an arrest in the kidnapping of that newborn baby a rockstar sentenced for income tax evasion and a local gymnast talks about her winning performance in San Juan News 7 is next for Pepco's energy-wise home audit to help