A Treatment

The "A" treatment was the ARTICHOKE program's signature interrogation technique, named for the program itself. It had been used during World War II to interrogate prisoners and treat shell-shocked soldiers. As practiced by the CIA, it consisted of injecting enough sodium pentothal into the subject's vein to knock him unconscious and then, twenty minutes later, stimulating him back to semiconsciousness with a shot of Benzedrine. This put the subject into a state somewhere between waking and sleeping, almost comatose and yet bug-eyed.¹

Regression Technique

In this vulnerable state, the CIA psychiatric consultant used the technique of "regression" to convince the subject he was speaking with someone from his past, such as a spouse, at an earlier time in his life. The consultant stated he could "create any fantasy" with 60 to 70 percent of his patients using narcotherapy or Hypnosis. The goal was to bypass the subject's defenses by removing him from his present reality and placing him in an imagined past where he would speak freely.¹

Amnesia

Inducing amnesia was an important Agency goal. "From the ARTICHOKE point of view," stated a 1952 document, "the greater the amnesia produced, the more effective the results." If a victim remembered the "A" treatment, it would cease being a closely guarded ARTICHOKE secret, and a subject who worked for the Soviets could tell them how the Americans had worked him over. This reality made "disposal" of ARTICHOKE subjects a particular problem. Killing them seems to have been ruled out, but Agency officials made sure that some stayed in foreign prisons for long periods. While team members claimed success in making subjects forget, outside consultants told them "that short of cutting a subject's throat, a true amnesia cannot be guaranteed." As early as 1950, the Agency had put out a contract to find a memory-destroying drug, to no apparent avail.¹

First Application

The first documented application of the "A" treatment occurred during Operation CASTIGATE in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1952, after Professor Wendt's truth drug failed on a suspected Russian agent. The CIA psychiatric consultant used the technique on the subject, who was given additional shots of Benzedrine when the first revival was insufficient. The subject was regressed to speak with "his wife Eva," played by a male interpreter. Roughly an hour into the session, the subject began to weep violently and the consultant ended it, suggesting the subject would remember nothing.¹