Josef Cardinal Mindszenty

Josef Cardinal Mindszenty was put on trial by the Hungarian government in 1949. With a glazed look in his eyes, Mindszenty confessed to crimes of treason he apparently did not commit. His performance recalled the Moscow purge trials of 1937 and 1938 at which tough and dedicated party apparatchiks had meekly pleaded guilty to long series of improbable offenses. These and a string of postwar trials in other Eastern European countries seemed staged, eerie, and unreal.¹

CIA Response

CIA men felt they had to know how the Communists had rendered the defendants zombielike. In the Mindszenty case, a CIA Security Memorandum declared that "some unknown force" had controlled the Cardinal, and the memo speculated that the communist authorities had used Hypnosis on him. In the summer of 1949, the Agency's head of Scientific Intelligence made a special trip to Western Europe to find out more about what the Soviets were doing and "to apply special methods of interrogation for the purpose of evaluation of Russian practices." In other words, fearful that the communists might have used drugs and hypnosis on prisoners, a senior CIA official used exactly the same techniques on refugees and returned prisoners from Eastern Europe. On returning to the United States, he recommended training and sending to Europe a team skilled in "special" interrogation methods.¹

BLUEBIRD Founded and the Behavioral Control Cascade

The Mindszenty trial directly triggered the creation of Project BLUEBIRD, the CIA's first formal behavioral control program, in April 1950. Sheffield Edwards, the CIA Security chief, took the initiative by calling a meeting to propose that interrogation teams be formed under Security's command. CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter approved the program, giving the CIA's behavior-control effort its first bureaucratic structure. BLUEBIRD would later be rechristened ARTICHOKE and eventually evolve into the much larger MKULTRA program.¹