Harold Wolff

Harold Wolff was a world-famous neurologist at Cornell University Medical College in New York City, known primarily as an expert on migraine headaches and pain. A skinny little doctor with an overpowering personality, he had served on enough military and intelligence advisory panels that he knew how to pick up a mandate and expand on it. CIA Director Allen Dulles turned to Wolff to conduct an official study of communist Brainwashing techniques. Dulles and Wolff had developed an intensely personal relationship: Wolff was treating Dulles' own son for brain damage suffered from a Korean War head wound. Together they shared the trauma of the younger Dulles' fits and mental lapses. Wolff, who had become fascinated by the Director's tales of the clandestine world, eagerly accepted the assignment in late 1953.¹²

The Brainwashing Study

Wolff formed a working partnership with Lawrence Hinkle, his colleague at Cornell. Hinkle handled the administrative part and shared in the substance. Before going ahead, the two doctors secured the approval of Cornell's president and high university officials. CIA officials helped arrange interviews with former communist interrogators and prisoners. Their secret report to Dulles, later published in a declassified version, was considered the definitive U.S. government work on the subject. It stated flatly that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese had any magical weapons. Instead, communist methods rested on the skillful, if brutal, application of police methods.²

The Research Proposal

Separately from the brainwashing study, Wolff proposed an extensive research program to the CIA on coercion and interrogation. He explained in his proposal that when any of the tests involved doing harm to the subjects, "We expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments." This statement encapsulated the division of labor between the Agency and its academic consultants: the CIA would provide the unwitting subjects and the overseas locations where experiments could be conducted beyond the reach of American law. Working with Hinkle, Wolff outlined research covering drugs, Hypnosis, sensory manipulation, and psychological pressure techniques. Any professional caught trying the kinds of things the Agency came to sponsor would have been arrested for kidnapping or aggravated assault. Under the CIA's banner, researchers had no worry from the law, their colleagues could not censure them because they had no idea what was being done, and they could take pride in helping their country.¹

The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology

In 1955 Wolff incorporated his CIA-funded study group as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, with himself as president. He carved out vast tracts of human knowledge and proposed a partnership with the Agency for mastering it for operational use. He offered to devise ways to use the broadest cultural and social processes for covert operations, distinguishing motivating techniques from "special methods" more relevant to "subversion, seduction, and interrogation." He asked the Agency for access to everything in its files on "threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, 'brainwashing,' 'black psychiatry,' hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents." He volunteered the unwitting use of Cornell patients for experiments, so long as no one got hurt, and offered to advise on experiments that harmed subjects if performed elsewhere.³

Wolff bulldozed his way through colleagues' qualms and government red tape. Having hired an anthropologist before learning that CIA security would not clear her, he simply lied about where the money came from. "It was a function of Wolff's imperious nature," says Hinkle. "If a dog came in and threw up on the rug during a lecture, he would continue." Even CIA men found him formidable. "From the Agency side, I don't know anyone who wasn't scared of him," recalls a longtime associate. "He was an autocratic man. I never knew him to chew anyone out. He didn't have to. We were damned respectful. He moved in high places. He was just a skinny little man but talk about mind control! He was one of the controllers."³

Wolff bluntly informed the CIA that some of his work would have no direct use "except that it vastly enhances our value as consultants and advisers." Over the last half of the 1950s, the Agency contributed almost $300,000 to Wolff's own research on the brain and central nervous system. After the Society separated from Cornell in 1957, Wolff and Hinkle stayed on as president and vice-president of the board of directors.³