Hypnotism in Warfare

Part 5 of 5 in the series Manchurian Candidates

The perfect deep-cover agent…is the one who doesn’t know he or she is an agent. — Telefon (1975)

Hypnosis is a phenomenon used by “priests in Egypt and Greece in ‘sleep temples’ hundreds of years before Chirst,” writes Margaret O. Hyde in Brainwashing and Other Forms of Mind Control.¹ Expert Dr. George H. Estabrooks wrote in his 1943 book Hypnotism that professor Clark Hull of Yale Univeristy compared hypnosis to the conditioned reflex.² Speaking as the chairman of the Department of Psychology of Colgate University, Estabrooks said, “I can hypnotize a man without his knowledge or consent into committing treason against the United States,” writes Jerry E. Smith in HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy.³

Carla Emery noted in Secret, Don’t Tell: The Encyclopedia of Hypnotism that “Estabrooks proposed, over and over, that superspies with one-way amnesia should be created by deliberate personality splitting.” ⁴ Walter Wager writes in his 1975 Telefon, a book-turned-movie about brainwashed sleeper agents, that “the perfect deep-cover agent…is the one who doesn’t know he or she is an agent.” ⁵ Estabrooks explains in Hypnotism:

The possible uses of hypnotism in warfare cover a wide field.… The use of hypnotism in warfare represents the cloak and dagger idea at its best – or worst.… [If] we deliberately set up this condition of multiple personality to further the ends of military intelligence,…the proper training of a person…would be long and tedious, but once he was trained, you would have a super spy.…

Such a subject prepared for use as a super spy would be a nightmare to any intelligence department:… a synthetic hypnotic spy with a dual personality is extremely hard to detect.… Under the conditions of warfare they would be a constant source of danger.… First, there is no danger of the agent’s selling out. More important would be the conviction of innocence which the man himself had, and this is a great aid in many situations.… Finally, it would be impossible to “third degree” him.…

If we care to translate that into the field of crime, we can see the ease with which we could prepare a watertight alibi.… Hypnotism in crime is very close to hypnotism in warfare.…

A nation fighting with its back to the wall is not worried over the niceties of ethics. If hypnotism can be used to advantage, we can rest assured that it will be so employed.⁶

Secretly funded by the CIA, the Head of the American, Canadian and World Psychiatric Associations, Dr. Ewen Cameron, employed his “psychic driving” process from 1957 to 1964 to “depattern” hundreds of patients in Canada. Using powerful drug cocktails, extreme electroconvulsive therapy, induced comas, and playing a patient’s own recorded words back to them repeatedly, the purpose of psychic driving was to rebuild a subject’s personality. His human guinea pigs would inevitably become worse off after treatments. Eventually Cameron would admit his experiments weren’t as effective as he had hoped.

It took five decades, but several victims of Ewen Cameron’s Mind Control experiments were finally entitled monetary compensation after a successful class action lawsuit filed by lawyer Alan Stein on behalf of Janine Huard. The brooksbulletin.com news website reported that “in 1994, 77 patients were awarded $100,000 each from the federal government but more than 250 others were denied compensation because they were not ‘totally depatterned.’” ⁷

Jonathan Edwards discovered a simpler method of affecting change during a religious crusade in 1735. Dick Sutphen reports in The Battle For Your Mind: Persuasion & Brainwashing Techniques Being Used On The Public Today at his DickSutphen.com website:

By inducing guilt and acute apprehension and by increasing the tension, the sinners attending his revival meetings would break down and completely submit. Technically, what Edwards was doing was creating conditions that wipe the brain slate clean so that the mind accepts new programming.⁸