The Human Ecology Program part 2 | Deep Dives 15 | The Wikileaks Archive

Who Is the Kubark?

The Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual is the offspring of the Human Ecology Fund. Which is not shy about directly citing the research.

"Kubark" is a cryptonym for "CIA". Cryptonyms are used as "code names" by intelligence agencies. So in truth, this is the "CIA Counterintelligence Interrogation manual".

The manual in document form can be found here. I cite from both the 1997 release, and the 2014 re-release.

Here is the manual transcribed into searchable text.

Professor David H. Price's research into MK Ultra, is also heavily cited in this article. Wikileak has both files (1) (2)

As Professor of History, Alfred McCoy describes the manual in a Wikileaks document:

"Synthesizing the behavioral research done by contract academics, the manual spelled out a revolutionary two-phase form of torture that relied on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain for an effect that, for the first time in the two millennia of their cruel science, was more psychological than physical."

Neurologist Harold G Wolff and Cardiologist Lawrence Hinkle, synthesized the Human Ecology Fund's body of research. And together they also studied how controlled stress worked in "brainwashing", and "breaking" prisoners of war. They published their findings on ‘Communist interrogation and indoctrination of “enemies of the state” in Communist countries’ (1956), of which there were classified and unclassified versions.

Later operations in the Middle East, were complimented with additional scientific literature, such as The Arab Mind, by Dr. Ralph Patai.

Torture Through Mind Control

This will be just a quick summary of the key concepts of mind control. It's important to keep in mind that these techniques are used by the CIA in conjunction with an interrogation environment (the "ecology"), whether to create fear, confusion, disgust, or provide tools for painful torture:

"If a new safehouse is to be used as the interrogation site, it should be studied carefully to be sure that the total environment can be manipulated as desired. For example, the electric current should be known in advance, so that transformers or other modifying devices will be on hand if needed." (CIA 2014: 44-51) (This kind of references the Cold War tradition of electric shock torture)

"The interrogator should use his power over the resistant subject's physical environment to disrupt patterns of response, not to create them." (CIA 2014: 92-93)

Types of Interrogatees

The manual lists the "persons who most frequently provide useful information in response to questioning are travellers; repatriates; defectors, escapees, and refugees". And the sources that usually need to undergo torture to give information, are what are classed as "transferred sources"; "agents, including provocateurs, double agents, and penetration agents; and swindlers and fabricators". However regardless of classification, any of them can be put under torture depending on the needs of the Kubark. (CIA 2014: 15)

The manual also provides nine personality types, but does warn against pigeon-holing subjects, and that socio-cultural background is complex and vital to keep in mind.

The nine types are listed as; "The orderly-obstinate character", "The optimistic character", "The greedy, demanding character", "The anxious, self-centered character", "The guilt-ridden character", "The character wrecked by success", "The schizoid or strange character", "The exception", "The average or normal character". (CIA 2014: 21-28)

The Kubark also names a type of interrogatee, known as a "Malingerer" - a person that fakes a mental illness to evade interrogation, stall it, or end it. However, it cites Psychologist Malcolm L. Meltzer who points out that an easy way to spot them, is in that they usually fake extremely rare or made-up symptoms. Meltzer adds that if the Malingerer is not a professional psychologist, he can usually be exposed through Rorschach tests. And recommends threats of "frontal lobotomy", and "electric shock treatments". (CIA 2014: 101-102)

Body Language, and Non-Voluntary Behavior

The Kubark emphasizes the importance of identifying the body language of interrogation subjects.

"It is also helpful to watch the subject’s mouth, which is as a rule much more revealing than his eyes. Gestures and postures also tell a story. If a subject normally gesticulates broadly at times and is at other times physically relaxed but at some point sits stiffly motionless, his posture is likely to be the physical image of his mental tension. The interrogator should make a mental note of the topic that caused such a reaction." (CIA 1963b: 55)

It also lists several "physical indicators of emotion", to look for. One that stands out is:

"(3) A pale face indicates fear and usually shows that the interrogator is hitting close to the mark."

The Role of Stress

• Pain

Hinkle himself had focused research on pain and its context to the physiological state of interrogation subjects. Interestingly, this was studied in a cultural context, and based on Mark Zborowksi's examination on "the cultural mitigation of pain". Some of this is related to the recruitment of Chinese and Russians into the CIA, under the reasoning that they wanted to develop ways to prepare them for possible Communist torture.

Going in line with the Human Ecology Fund's research, the Kubark emphasizes its socio-cultural perspective on pain:

"The person whose first encounters with pain were frightening and intense may be more violently affected by its later infliction than one whose original experiences were mild. Or the reverse may be true, and the man whose childhood familiarized him with pain may dread it less, and react less, than one whose distress is heightened by fear of the unknown. The individual remains the determinant." (CIA 2014: 93-95)

The Kubark condones the use painful torture, instructing to contact a CIA Deputy Director of Operations ("KUDOVE") first, to avoid getting in trouble:

"Interrogations conducted under compulsion or duress are especially likely to involve illegality and to entail damaging consequences for KUBARK. Therefore prior Headquarters approval at the KUDOVE level must be obtained for the interrogation of any source against his will and under any of the following circumstances:

1. If bodily harm is to be inflicted.
2. If medical, chemical, or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence.
3. If the detention is locally illegal and traceable to Kubark, except that in cases of extreme operational urgency requiring immediate detention, retroactive Headquarters approval may be promptly requested by priority cable". (CIA 2014: 6-9)

While painful torture has it's time and place, it is admitted that fear and the expectation of pain can be far more effective, and efficient. It also warns that false confessions are "quite likely" to come out of intense pain, however.

• Threat of Death

Attitudes and cultural values, do affect the way people grieve, whether at death, or the possibility of it. But the CIA did not find much good use for it in terms of "coercive interrogation", compared to other strategies.

The Human Ecology Fund (HEF), together with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), found how grief can produce alienation and isolation, creating a sort of psychological collapse if manipulated the correct way. This turned out to be an effective tactic. (Howard and Scott 1965)

• Arrest and Social Isolation

Certain psychological guidelines are also presented in regards to arrest:

"What we aim to do is to ensure that the manner of arrest achieves, if possible, surprise, and the maximum amount of mental discomfort in order to catch the suspect off balance and to deprive him of the initiative". "The ideal time at which to arrest a person is in the early hours of the morning because surprise is achieved then, and because a person's resistance physiologically as well as psychologically is at its lowest.... If a person cannot be arrested in the early hours..., then the next best time is in the evening...." (CIA 2014 85-86)

And for detention as well:

"The point is that man's sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided internal resources." (CIA 2014: 86-87)

"In short, the prisoner should not be provided a routine to which he can adapt and from which he can draw some comfort -- or at least a sense of his own identity. Everyone has read of prisoners who were reluctant to leave their cells after prolonged incarceration". "Familiarity with confinement and even with isolation reduces the effect." (CIA 2014: 86-87)

"While a fear of death may stem from anxieties about social isolation, it seems equally true that the process of becoming socially isolated stimulates a concern about death…When social isolation is involuntary… the individual experiencing separating from others may become obsessed with the idea of death." (Howard and Scott 1965/66: 164)

Another interesting finding:

"As is noted in the bibliography, the investigators concluded that isolation typically creates anxiety, that anxiety intensifies the desire to be with others who share the same fear, and that only and first-born children are more anxious and less willing or able to withstand pain than later-born children" (CIA 2014: 28-29)

Keep in mind that these are mind control strategies that many Americans are put under by the prison industry.

• Sensory Deprivation

Kubzansky's research into "the effects of reduced environmental stimulation on human behavior", John C. Lilly's research on isolation, and Biderman and Zimmer's "The Manipulation of Human Behavior" are cited heavily in the Kubark manual.

"The apparent reason for these effects is that a person cut off from external stimuli turns his awareness inward, upon himself, and then projects the contents of his own unconscious outwards, so that he endows his faceless environment with his own attributes, fears, and forgotten memories. Lilly notes, "It is obvious that inner factors in the mind tend to be projected outward, that some of the mind's activity which is usually reality-bound now becomes free to turn to phantasy and ultimately to hallucination and delusion." (CIA 2014, 87-90)

Several experiments inside Sensory Deprivation tanks are cited. One mentioned:

"Drs. Wexler, Mendelson, Leiderman, and Solomon conducted a somewhat similar experiment on seventeen paid volunteers. These subjects were "... placed in a tank-type respirator with a specially built mattress.... The vents of the respirator were left open, so that the subject breathed for himself. His arms and legs were enclosed in comfortable but rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and tactile contact. The subject lay on his back and was unable to see any part of his body. The motor of the respirator was run constantly, producing a dull, repetitive auditory stimulus. The room admitted no natural light, and artificial light was minimal and constant." (42) Although the established time limit was 36 hours and though all physical needs were taken care of, only 6 of the 17 completed the stint. The other eleven soon asked for release. Four of these terminated the experiment because of anxiety and panic; seven did so because of physical discomfort.

The results confirmed earlier findings that (1) the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; (2) the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; (3) the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and (4) some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects." (CIA 2014: 87-90)

Controlled Stress

One of Alan Howard and Robert Scott stress models, the 'equilibrium model', sees the human as a problem-solving organism. It seeks to preserve itself by avoiding stress, which it does by finding solutions to situations that cause it:

"disequilibrium motivates the organism to attempt to solve the problems which produce the imbalance, and hence to engage in problem-solving activity" (ibid.: 145)

Professor Price further explains that "under coercive interrogation, subjects would be expected to try and reduce the ‘imbalance’ of discomfort or pain and return to a state of equilibrium by providing the interrogator with the requested information. Their model could be adapted to view co-operation and question answering as the solution to the stressful problem faced by interrogation subjects, so that rational subjects would co-operate in order to return to their non-coercive state of equilibrium".

As per Howard and Scott's findings, individuals respond in three different ways.

1 - Assertive response - Directly confront the problem, and mobilize whatever resources are available to enact a solution. To the interrogator, this comes in the form of their subject providing them information.

2 - Divergent response - Resources and focus is shifted away from the problem. Sometimes this will be a withdrawal. During interrogation, this is usually seen as "mental drifting", or going off-topic.

3 - Inert response - Responding with paralysis. IE: Frozen with fear, or in a state of shock.

Their conclusions were that if an organism is going to respond to "externally induced stress", the only viable option is the "assertive response". In the context of "coercive interrogation" (aka torture), it means that cooperation with the Kubark is the only viable option.

Price adds that these stress models were "'reverse engineered’ for information on how to weaken a subject’s efforts to adapt to the stresses of interrogation. Thus, when they wrote that ‘stress occurs if the individual does not have available to him the tools and knowledge to either successfully deal with or avert challenges which arise in particular situations,’ they were simultaneously scientifically describing the factors mitigating the experience of stress (their purpose), while also unwittingly outlining what environmental factors should be manipulated if one wanted to keep an individual under stressful conditions (their hidden CIA patron’s purpose)" (Howard and Scott 1965: 143).

• The Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd

This is a technique where a subject is interrogated for very long periods, on "lofty topics that the source knows nothing about" (CIA 1963b: 75). This then forces the subject to honestly admit ignorance on questions asked. The stress this creates is then maintained during prolonged sessions.

The interrogation is then switched to a topic the subject knows of - this partly changes the psychological environment of the interrogation, as the subject is now given relief.

• The State of Suggestion

"The effectiveness of most of the non-coercive techniques depends upon their unsettling effect… The aim is to enhance this effect, to disrupt radically the familiar emotional and psychological associations of the subject. When this aim is achieved, resistance is seriously impaired.

There is an interval – which may be extremely brief – of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock." (CIA 1963b:65-66)

• Hypnosis

The Kubark disagress with the established claim that Hypnosis can't produce involuntary actions. According to Psychiatrist, and Hypnotist Martin T. Orne, who's research is also cited, the issue actually revolves on whether the subject is willing to be hypnotized - not what the subject is willing to say or do while in that state. However, there is a natural resistance, and most can't be hypnotized to an extreme point. (CIA 2014: 95-98)

The CIA also instructs interrogators to use expert psychologists with hypnosis backgrounds:

"Operational personnel, including interrogators, who chance to have some lay experience or skill in hypnotism should not themselves use hypnotic techniques for interrogation or other operational purposes. There are two reasons for this position. The first is that hypnotism used as an operational tool by a practitioner who is not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or M.D. can produce irreversible psychological damage. The lay practitioner does not know enough to use the technique safely. The second reason is that an unsuccessful attempt to hypnotize a subject for purposes of interrogation, or a successful attempt not adequately covered by post-hypnotic amnesia or other protection, can easily lead to lurid and embarrassing publicity or legal charges." (CIA 2014: 95-98)

Hypnosis has its uses:

"Merton M. Gill and Margaret Brenman state, "The psychoanalytic theory of hypnosis clearly implies, where it does not explicitly state, that hypnosis is a form of regression." And they add, "...induction [of hypnosis] is the process of bringing about a regression, while the hypnotic state is the established regression." (13) It is suggested that the interrogator will find this definition the most useful. The problem of overcoming the resistance of an uncooperative interrogatee is essentially a problem of inducing regression to a level at which the resistance can no longer be sustained. Hypnosis is one way of regressing people" (CIA 2014: 95-98)

Another advantage of hypnosis noted, is the post-hypnotic suggestion:

"Under favorable circumstances it should be possible to administer a silent drug to a resistant source, persuade him as the drug takes effect that he is slipping into a hypnotic trance, place him under actual hypnosis as consciousness is returning, shift his frame of reference so that his reasons for resistance become reasons for cooperating, interrogate him, and conclude the session by implanting the suggestion that when he emerges from trance he will not remember anything about what has happened." (CIA 2014: 95-98)

• Truth Serum?

During these years the CIA concluded that there was no "truth serum", but drugs were effective in a "support role". Practical mind control was more effective than drugs, at least by 1963:

"Just as the threat of pain may more effectively induce compliance than its infliction, so an interrogatee's mistaken belief that he has been drugged may make him a more useful interrogation subject than he would be under narcosis." (CIA 2014: 98-100)

The manual does mention some uses, such as "the silent drug" being effective to induce a post-hypnotic state. It adds that "the effect of most drugs depends more upon the personality of the subject than upon the physical characteristics of the drugs themselves." (CIA 2014: 98-100)

The manual does not list drugs however, as the typical interrogator is not well versed in them.

In an document from 2005, Dr. Larry Forness, does say that there are now several "three truth serums". But that is something I rather cover another time, as this article has already exceeded its expected length.

• Regression Into a Child-Like State

This is one of the most disturbing mind control aspects to come from MK Ultra:

"All of the techniques employed to break through an interrogation roadblock, the entire spectrum from simple isolation to hypnosis and narcosis, are essentially ways of speeding up the process of regression." (CIA 2014: 38-42)

Through the use of "manipulated techniques", that are " still keyed to the individual but brought to bear on himself", the interrogator creates stresses on the subject that push him to a state of "repression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence". (CIA 1963b: 41)

This regression into a state of dependency, in effect coerces the broken subject into seeing his tormentor as a savior, or as the Kubark puts it, "a father-figure" (CIA 2014: 87-90), whom the subject needs to help, to find release from the highly stressful interrogation environment:

"[a]s regression proceeds, almost all resisters feel the growing internal stress that results from wanting simultaneously to conceal and to divulge… It is the business of the interrogator to provide the right rationalization at the right time". (ibid.: 40-41)

"The usual effect of coercion is regression. The interrogatee's mature defenses crumbles as he becomes more childlike. During the process of regression the subject may experience feelings of guilt, and it is usually useful to intensify these." (CIA 2014: 103-104)

"Now the interrogator becomes fatherly. Whether the excuse is that others have already confessed ("all the other boys are doing it"), that the interrogatee had a chance to redeem himself ("you're really a good boy at heart"), or that he can't help himself ("they made you do it"), the effective rationalization, the one the source will jump at, is likely to be elementary. It is an adult's version of the excuses of childhood." (CIA 2014: 65-81:9)

The Confession

"Once a true confession is obtained, the classic cautions apply. The pressures are lifted, at least enough so that the subject can provide counterintelligence information as accurately as possible. In fact, the relief granted the subject at this time fits neatly into the interrogation plan. He is told that the changed treatment is a reward for truthfulness and as evidence that friendly handling will continue as long as he cooperates." (CIA ibid.: 84)

There is an adaptation factor however, as once the organism tastes "victory" through the assertive response, ‘the state of the organism will be superior to its state prior to the time it was confronted with the problem, and that should the same problem arise again (after the organism has had an opportunity to replenish its resources) it will be dealt with more efficiently than before’ (1965: 149)

The Kubark does acknowledge the fact an adaptation can occur where the individual will learn he can survive without having to give out accurate information, or any at all. (CIA 1963b, CIA 1983)

Modern example of sensory deprivation at Guantanamo

Sources:

Wikileaks, modern intelligence cryptonyms and lexicon

https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Useful_Baffling_and_Strange_Intelligence_Terms.pdf

The State Department's denying Dan Mitrione's reputation for electric shock torture

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/20/2033121_-latam-wikileaks-update-pup-.html

"Buying a piece of anthropology Part 1: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological
research for the CIA" by Professor of Anthropology, David H. Price

https://file.wikileaks.org/file/AT-june07-Price-PT1.pdf

"Buying a piece of anthropology Part 2: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological
research for the CIA" by Professor of Anthropology, David H. Price

https://file.wikileaks.org/file/AT-Kubark_Pt_2--Price.pdf

Above the Human Landscape: A resulting science fiction text from The Human Ecology Fund, that dwelved into psychadelics, communication, and culture.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?1525

Cryptonym: Kubark

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php?id=KUBARK

Definition of suggestion (within context)

https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/hypnotic+suggestion

Kubark Manual (document form)

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm#kubark

Transcribed Kubark Manual

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/KUBARK_Counterintelligence_Interrogation

CIA declassified code words, terms and lexicon index

https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/second-release-lexicon.pdf

CRS: Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques under the Geneva Conventions, September 8, 2004"

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS:_Lawfulness_of_Interrogation_Techniques_under_the_Geneva_Conventions,_September_8,_2004

Torture, interrogation and intelligence

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Torture,_interrogation_and_intelligence