On its face, the mission to Southeast Asia in July 1950, led by Erskine and the diplomat John F. Melby, was a joint State Department–Defense Department diplomatic effort to determine the long-range nature of American objectives in the region. Its real purpose, classified secret, was to examine how communist-backed fighters, also called insurgents or guerrillas, were resisting and undermining French colonial rule in Vietnam. When the Melby-Erskine team arrived in Vietnam, French military officers handed General Erskine and his associates five thousand pages of reports to read. Erskine found the request ridiculous.
The French “haven’t won a war since Napoleon,” he told Godel and the team. “Why listen to a bunch of second raters when they are losing this war?” Instead, General Erskine told his team to go out into the field with South Vietnamese army units of the French Expeditionary Corps and make military intelligence assessments of their own. For several weeks the Erskine team accompanied the soldiers on tours of military installations, including forays into Vietnam’s neighbors Laos and Cambodia. One night the Erskine group accompanied a South Vietnamese army unit on a nighttime ambush of a camp of communist insurgents. The French ordered the South Vietnamese unit to capture the communist soldiers, called Viet Minh, and bring them back to French Expeditionary Corps headquarters for interrogation. The French believed that the Viet Minh soldiers had information that could help them gain a strategic edge.
The ambush was a success but the mission was a failure. In an after-action report, Godel’s colleague Captain Nick Thorpe explained why. “The Vietnamese refused to bring back heads with bodies still attached to them,” Thorpe wrote. To Godel, the ramifications were profound. The French wanted the soldiers’ minds; the South Vietnamese brought them heads. French commanders wanted intelligence; South Vietnamese soldiers wanted revenge.
The way Godel saw it, the French colonialists were trying to fight the Viet Minh guerrillas according to colonial rules of war. But the South Vietnamese, who were receiving weapons and training from the French forces, were actually fighting a different kind of war, based on different rules. Guerrilla warfare was irrational. It was asymmetrical. It was about cutting off the enemy’s head to send a message back home. When, in the spring of 1950, William Godel witnessed guerrilla warfare firsthand in Vietnam, it shifted his perspective on how the United States would need to fight future wars. Guerrilla warfare involved psychological warfare. To Godel, it was a necessary component for a win.
Halfway across the world in Korea, during some of the heaviest fighting of the Korean War, a most unusual element of ARPA’s psychological warfare programs found its origins near a hilltop called Outpost Bunker Hill. It was the fall of 1952 on the western front, and soldiers with the First Marine Division were freezing and tired in their rat-infested trenches. For months the Marines had been battling the enemy here for control of area hills. Once a hilltop was conquered, the Marines would dig in and build bunkers and trenches with their shovels. Sometimes they could rest.
The Korean War, like so many wars, began as a civil war between the North and the South. In June 1950 the conflict became international when the United Nations joined the war to support the South, and the People’s Republic of China joined the war to support the North. The international war began as a mobile campaign, with UN forces led by an American, General Douglas MacArthur. The initial ground assault was supported by U.S. airpower. But after more than two years of battle, by the fall of 1952 the conflict had devolved into trench warfare, the old-fashioned, grueling style of warfare that defined World War I and had come to symbolize stalemate.
“We hated to dig,” recalled A. Robert Abboud, First Marine Division Company commander at Outpost Bunker Hill. “The Chinese were wonderful diggers. They had tunnels they could drive trucks through,” said Abboud. “We couldn’t get to them with our air power because they were underground all the time.”
Yet these tunnels were a lifeline for the Marines at Outpost Bunker Hill. And so with their shovels they dug and dug, creating a labyrinth of trenches and tunnels that provided them with some degree of safety from enemy attack. “We had lumber, really six-by-sixes… in the trenches,” explained Abboud, “that we’d set up and then we’d put a roof of lumber on top and sand bags on top of that.” In this manner, the Marines created firing positions along a number of the topographical crests. Individual men maintained guard over their own sliver of the hill. “You had to make sure that there was integrity, that nobody came in and infiltrated your area,” said Abboud. The Marines relied on one another.
It was tough and brutal work, keeping enemy infiltrators at bay. The weather was hellish and cold. It snowed much of the time, and there were rats running around the trenches. Late at night the youngest soldiers, whom Abboud called “just kids with bayonets,” got sent out into the darkness, down the hill and into the rice paddies on patrol. Their job was to poke their bayonets around on the ground in an effort to locate Chinese land mines. Other times, more senior officers led dangerous patrols to check the integrity of the perimeter wire. Abboud himself went so many times he lost track of the number. Sometimes his deputy went, a young machine gun officer whose safety Abboud felt particularly responsible for, and whose name was Allen Macy Dulles. The young soldier’s father, Allen Welsh Dulles, was the deputy director of the CIA.
It was also personal. Abboud and the younger Dulles had known each other since they were boys. “I’d known Allen because he’d gone to Exeter and he was on the debating team,” Abboud recalled. “I was on the debating [team] at Roxbury Latin,” the venerable Boston day school. The two boys became friends, sharing a similar passion for antiquity and a desire to study ancient Greece. Both did; Allen Macy Dulles studied classics at Princeton, Abboud at Harvard. Now here they were in Korea, together serving as Marines. Despite his being the son of the deputy director of the CIA, Allen Dulles sought no special treatment in Korea. He insisted on taking his equal share of the dangerous night patrols, said Robert Abboud.
While both men came from privilege, Dulles came from extraordinary privilege. In addition to his father’s powerful position at the CIA, his uncle John Foster Dulles was about to become U.S. secretary of state. From his knowledge of classics, Abboud knew that the history of warfare—from Carthage to the present time—was riddled with stories of princes being captured by enemy forces only to be used as bargaining chips. These stories almost always had a tragic end. The thought of the young Allen Macy Dulles being captured and taken prisoner of war by the Chinese communists worried Abboud. Sometimes it kept him up at night.
Still, “we took turns going out there to the front lines,” Abboud recalled. On occasion, Abboud suggested maybe it wasn’t a good idea. “If I said, ‘Allen, I can’t send you out there. Your father is [deputy] head of the CIA. What happens if you get captured?’ He’d say, ‘I’m a Marine Corps officer and it’s my turn to go out there. I’m going to go.’”
Which is exactly what Allen Macy Dulles did one fateful night in November 1952.
“For God’s sake don’t get hurt!” Abboud called after his friend.
Dulles made his way out of the bunker. Abboud watched him climb over the sandbags and head down the steep slope of the hill, then listened on the communications system.
“I’m on the radio and I’m listening and my heart’s in my throat,” Abboud remembered. “God, don’t let anything happen here,” he prayed.
Dulles walked down the slope a good distance until he came to where the Marines had constructed a simple barbed-wire fence. The enemy had cut the concertina wire there. He pulled a tool from his pocket and began making repairs. Suddenly the area was consumed by a loud and deafening noise. The enemy was launching a mortar attack.
“Lieutenant Dulles has been hit!” cried a voice over the radio.
Robert Abboud summoned four Marines and a stretcher. The team ran out of the bunker, down the hill, and into the open terrain in search of Dulles. They discovered him not far from the fence, lying on the ground.
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p; “We found him,” Abboud recalled. The situation was grim. Dulles’s helmet had been knocked off his head. Blood and shrapnel covered the ground. He was unconscious. A low pulse. Abboud picked his friend’s helmet up off the ground.
“There was a lot of his head in the helmet,” Abboud said.
The team lay Dulles on the stretcher and ran back to the bunker with what was left of him. When a rescue chopper finally arrived, they loaded Dulles inside. Abboud remembered watching the Sikorsky fly away. News reached Washington, D.C., fast.
“Marine Lieutenant Allen Macy Dulles, son of the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has been critically wounded in Korea,” the Associated Press reported the following day. The helicopter took Dulles to the hospital ship USS Consolation, anchored off the coast of Korea. There he remained, unconscious but with signs of life. He was twenty-two years old.
“He was unconscious for three weeks, maybe a month,” recalled his sister Joan Dulles Talley at age ninety, in 2014. “Initially there was no cognition. No response to people or to environmental stimulus. Then, slowly, he came back. He reemerged. Doctors told us there would be no hearing in one ear but he could speak, just like someone who was normal. At first there was hope. Allen seemed normal when we took him home. But as month after month passed, he was not able to make a life for himself. Then we realized what had been injured was his mind.”
Dulles had suffered a catastrophic traumatic brain injury. The promising young scholar, brave Marine, and son of the deputy director of the CIA was, in the words of his sister, “caught between worlds. It was as if he were trapped in a faraway place,” Talley continued. “Allen was there, but not really there. It was so terribly tragic. He was so young. He was someone who had been so gifted in the mind. Like so many young soldiers he had everything ahead of him, and then… no more.”
In November 1952 the human brain was uncharted territory. Cognitive science, the study of the mind and its processes, was still in its dark ages. Neuroscience, as an interdisciplinary field that now includes biology, chemistry, genetics, and computer science, did not yet exist. Not for another three months would James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick announce that they had determined the structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genes. Advanced computers that can image the human brain and produce high-resolution scans had not yet been developed. Lobotomies—a neurosurgical procedure that removes part of the brain’s frontal lobes—were still being performed in U.S. hospitals as a means to treat psychiatric illness. Brain science was as mysterious in 1952 as was the center of the earth or the surface of the moon. Like a man lost in space, Allen Macy Dulles had very little hope of ever returning fully to this world.
A few weeks after Allen Macy Dulles was transported back to the United States, in January 1953, his father, Allen W. Dulles, was chosen by President Eisenhower to be the director of the CIA. Already Dulles had decided he would do everything in his power to help his brain-injured son. Most notably, he hired a top brain specialist named Dr. Harold G. Wolff, a world-renowned neurologist and director of the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. In addition to being the world’s authority on migraine research, Dr. Wolff was a pioneer in the study of general brain behavior, with a specialty in psychosomatic illness, or mental illness, which in 1953 did not mean all that much. Dr. Wolff, on the surface, was a man of distinction. Privately he was a dark, shadowy figure, though this would take decades to be known. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1923, Wolff traveled to Europe to study neuropathology, or diseases of the nervous system, in Austria. Next he traveled farther east, to Leningrad, where he worked under Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning, the idea that human behavior could be strengthened or weakened though punishment and reward. (Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1904 and will forever be remembered for his famous dog.)
When Lieutenant Allen Macy Dulles came back from Korea with his brain injury, CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles contacted Wolff in New York City, hoping Wolff could help his son get well. Dr. Wolff said he would be happy to see what he could do. But the following month a national security crisis gripped the nation, and Allen Dulles was pulled away. On February 23, 1953, a U.S. Marine colonel named Frank S. Schwable appeared on TV as a prisoner of war of the North Koreans. Schwable, a member of the U.S. First Marine Air Wing, had been shot down on a combat mission over North Korea seven months earlier, in July 1952. Now, in a six-thousand-word statement broadcast on Chinese radio, Colonel Schwable shocked the world with a startling confession.
Colonel Schwable said that he had been given detailed orders by his superior officers to participate in “various elements of bacteriological warfare.” Schwable cited specific “field tests” which he claimed had already taken place and said that military commanders had discussed with him their plans for using biological weapons against North Korean civilians in “regular combat operations.” Schwable named names, described meetings, and discussed strategy. Everything Schwable said, if true, violated the Geneva Conventions. General Mark W. Clark, UN Supreme Commander in Korea, immediately denounced the germ warfare charges, declaring them fabrications, but at the Pentagon, officials were aware how quickly such a narrative could spin out of control.
At the Pentagon, the man tasked with handling the situation was William Godel, now deputy director of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). The PSB coordinated psychological warfare operations between the Department of Defense and the CIA. In response to the Colonel Schwable affair, Godel convened an emergency meeting of the PSB. This was psychological warfare of the worst order, Godel declared; declassified minutes of the emergency PSB meeting indicate that its members agreed. The position of the U.S. government was then, and is now, that it never engaged in biological warfare in Korea. So how should the United States respond?
Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson suggested an “all out campaign to smear the Koreans.” He wanted the Pentagon to accuse the communists of “a new form of war crime, and a new form of refinement in atrocity techniques; namely mind murder, or menticide.” The CIA thought this was a bad idea. “Menticide” was too powerful a word, Director Dulles cautioned, and it conceded too much power to the communists. But time was critical, and the Pentagon had to respond. The members of the PSB agreed to a watered-down version of Secretary Wilson’s suggestion. Hours later, the Department of Defense issued a statement calling Colonel Schwable’s action the result of the “mind-annihilating methods of these Communists in extorting whatever words they want.” Defense Department officials had a very specific name for what the communists were doing to our soldiers, a word recommended by the CIA. The communists were “brainwashing” American soldiers, the Pentagon said.
It was a CIA move that was three years in the making. In fact, the word “brainwashing” had entered the English lexicon in September 1950, courtesy of the CIA, when an article written by a reporter named Edward Hunter appeared in a Miami newspaper, the News. “Brain-Washing Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party,” the headline read. Although Hunter had been a journalist for decades, he also worked for the CIA. He’d been hired by the agency on a contract basis to disseminate brainwashing stories through the mainstream press. “Brain-washing,” wrote Hunter, was a devious new tool being used by the communists to strip a man of his humanity and “turn him into a robot or a slave.” The very concept grabbed Americans by the throat. The notion of government mind-control programs had been a mainstay of dystopian science-fiction novels for decades, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic We to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 best-seller Brave New World. But that was science fiction. This was real, Hunter wrote. To be incinerated in a nuclear bomb attack was an ever-present Cold War threat, but it was also an abstraction, difficult to conceptualize on an individual scale. In 1950, the idea of being brainwashed, as if controlled by an evil wizard’s spell—that was somehow much easier to relate to. Brainwashing terrified people, and they wanted to know more.
br /> Edward Hunter wrote article after article on the subject, expanding his stories into a book. The communists, he declared, had developed tactics “to put a man’s mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue, what is right for what is wrong.” Brainwashing could turn a man into an amnesiac who could “not remember wrong from right.” Memories could be implanted in a brainwashed man whereby he would “come to believe what did not happen actually had happened, until he ultimately becomes a robot for the Communist manipulator,” Hunter warned.
In the September 1950 Miami News article, Hunter claimed to have information proving that the Chinese had created “brainwashing panels” of experts who used drugs, hypnosis, and other sinister means that could render a man “a demon [or] a puppet.” The goal of the communists, said Hunter, was to conquer America by conquering its citizens—one at a time. In a follow-up book on the subject, Hunter explained the science behind the “mind atrocities called brainwashing.” Through conditioning, the communists intended to change human nature. To turn men into ants. “What the totalitarian state strives for is the insectivization of human beings,” Hunter declared. “Brain changing is the culmination of this whole evil process,” he said. “The brain created science and now will be subordinate to it.” Even Congress invited Hunter to testify before the Committee on Un-American Activities, in a session discussing “Communist Psychological Warfare (Brainwashing).” He was presented as an author and a foreign correspondent, with no mention of his role as a CIA operative.
Psychologists across America echoed Hunter’s thinking, adding to the growing fear of mind control. In an article for the New York Times Magazine, the renowned psychologist and former prisoner of the Nazis Joost A. M. Meerloo agreed that brainwashing was real and possible. “The totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their own purposes,” Meerloo wrote.