Brainwashing

Brainwashing entered the English language in September 1950 when the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled "'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator working under cover as a journalist, coined the word from the Chinese hsi-nao, "to cleanse the mind," which had no political meaning in Chinese. The term quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. The controversy intensified during the Korean War, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive featuring recorded confessions by captured U.S. pilots to war crimes including germ warfare.¹

The Prisoner Crisis

By the end of the Korean War, 70 percent of the 7,190 U.S. prisoners held in China had either made confessions or signed petitions calling for an end to the American war effort. Fifteen percent collaborated fully, and only 5 percent steadfastly resisted. This contrasted poorly with British, Australian, Turkish, and other prisoners, among whom collaboration was rare despite similar treatment. Worse, many prisoners stuck by their confessions after returning to the United States, failing to recant as expected.¹

The Wolff-Hinkle Study

CIA Director Allen Dulles turned to Harold Wolff, a world-famous neurologist with whom he had developed an intensely personal relationship, to conduct an official study. Wolff partnered with Lawrence Hinkle at Cornell University Medical College. Their secret report became the definitive U.S. Government work on the subject. It stated flatly that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese had any magical weapons, no drugs, exotic mental ray-guns, or fanciful machines. Instead, communist interrogation methods rested on skillful, if brutal, application of police methods.¹

The Soviet system started with solitary confinement, constant humiliation, and total sensory deprivation. After four to six weeks, the prisoner usually broke down: "He weeps, he mutters, and prays aloud in his cell." Then the interrogation began, with the prisoner and interrogator reviewing the prisoner's entire life. A former KGB officer told the researchers that more than 99 percent of all prisoners signed a confession at this stage. The Chinese system went further, moving prisoners into group cells for ideological study, self-criticism, and group pressure. "The prisoner must conform to the demands of the group sooner or later," Hinkle and Wolff found.¹

The CIA's Own Program

While the Wolff-Hinkle study showed that communist techniques relied on police methods, not technology, CIA officials reasoned that if brainwashing were even remotely feasible through scientific means, the communists might discover it first. The Agency built its own program, grounded in the conviction that the keys to brainwashing lay in technology. Dulles stated publicly that "we have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques," even as CIA officials acting under his orders had begun finding scientists and subjects. Some experiments went so far that Agency officials had much of the work done outside the United States.¹

After 10 years of research, the CIA had found no foolproof method. "All experiments beyond a certain point always failed," says an MKULTRA veteran, "because the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got amnesiac or catatonic." Officials found through work like Cameron's that they could create "vegetables," but such people served no operational use. When the operational crunch came with the Nosenko case in 1964, the CIA fell back on the basic brutality of the Soviet system.¹ The term "brainwashing," supposedly a Chinese Communist development, was actually coined by Hunter, who was later confirmed to be on the CIA payroll as an agent of influence, using the premise of a "brainwashing gap" to justify funding for the Agency's own behavioral modification programs.²

Chinese Origins of Hsi-nao

"Hsi-nao" in Chinese carried no political meaning; it referred literally to "washing the brain" in a neutral sense. Edward Hunter, the CIA-connected journalist who introduced the term into English, appropriated and politicized the phrase. Chinese Communist thought-reform techniques, as actually practiced, drew on existing Confucian traditions of self-criticism and public confession as social control mechanisms, not on any novel scientific method. The apparent power of the technique owed more to total institutional control, isolation, and relentless group pressure than to any psychological innovation.³

William Sargant's Model

William Sargant, the British psychiatrist and author of Battle for the Mind (1957), proposed that the physiological mechanisms underlying religious conversion and political conversion were identical. Sargant argued, drawing on Ivan Pavlov's conditioning experiments, that extreme stress could produce a state of "transmarginal inhibition" in which the nervous system collapsed its normal inhibitory functions and became maximally susceptible to new conditioning. Korean War prisoner behavior, on this model, resulted from physiological breakdown induced by cold, hunger, disease, and isolation rather than from any ideological persuasion. Sargant's model was influential within British military and intelligence circles and circulated in restricted government documents alongside the Wolff-Hinkle findings.³

Korean Prisoner Statistics

British, Australian, and Turkish prisoners, under substantially similar conditions of captivity, showed almost no collaboration. The divergence by national contingent indicates that individual-level physiological or psychological explanations are insufficient; cultural and institutional factors were decisive. The US Army provided little preparation for captivity, while other armies maintained stronger group cohesion norms among prisoners.³

CIA Assessment

The CIA's own institutional verdict was that "CIA attempts to counter brainwashing almost invariably failed." Even with unlimited funding, willing researchers, and full access to the scientific literature, the agency never developed a reliable behavioral modification technique for use on resistant subjects. The program ended where it began, with the conclusion that police methods of coercion, not scientific innovation, remained the effective interrogation approach. The widely publicized 1977 CIA disclosures, though dramatic, confirmed the pattern of failure: attempts to alter the behavior of intelligence targets through chemicals or hypnosis consistently fell short.⁴