Lawrence Hinkle

Dr. Lawrence Hinkle was a physician at Cornell University Medical College in New York City who, together with his colleague Harold Wolff, conducted the definitive U.S. government study on communist Brainwashing techniques for the CIA. Hinkle handled the administrative part of the study and shared in the substance. Before going ahead, the two doctors made sure they had the approval of Cornell's president, Deane W. Malott, and other high university officials who checked with their contacts in Washington. Hinkle recalls a key White House aide urging Cornell to cooperate. "It was done with great secrecy," he recalls. "We went through a great deal of hoop-de-do and signed secrecy agreements, which everyone took very seriously."¹

The Brainwashing Study

Hinkle and Wolff pored over the Agency's classified files on brainwashing. CIA officials helped arrange interviews with former communist interrogators and prisoners. Their secret report to Allen 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, no drugs, exotic mental ray-guns, or fanciful machines. Instead, the report pictured communist interrogation methods resting on skillful, if brutal, application of police methods.¹

Their portrait of the Soviet system anticipated, in dry scholarly form, the work of novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Hinkle and Wolff showed that the Soviet technique rested on the cumulative weight of intense psychological pressure and human weakness. This thesis earned them the enmity of more right-wing CIA officials such as Edward Hunter, who was fond of saying that the Soviets brainwashed people the way Pavlov had conditioned dogs.¹

The Soviet Method

Hinkle and Wolff documented the Soviet interrogation technique in detail. Guards placed a new prisoner in solitary confinement, watched him constantly, humiliated and demeaned him at every opportunity, and made clear he was totally cut off from all outside support. They banned all outside stimuli: books, conversation, or news of the world. After four to six weeks of this routine, the prisoner usually found the stress unbearable. "He weeps, he mutters, and prays aloud in his cell," wrote Hinkle and Wolff.¹

Then the interrogation began. Night after night, guards brought the prisoner to face the interrogator, who told him that he knew his own crimes all too well. Together they reviewed the prisoner's life in detail. The interrogator seized on any inconsistency as evidence of guilt. "The regimen of pressure has created an overall discomfort which is well nigh intolerable," they wrote. "The prisoner invariably feels that 'something must be done to end this.' He must find a way out." A former KGB officer told the researchers that more than 99 percent of all prisoners signed a confession at this stage.¹

The Chinese System

The Chinese took on the more ambitious task of re-educating their prisoners. After confession, they moved the prisoner into a group cell where indoctrination began. From morning to night, prisoners studied Marx and Mao, listened to lectures, and engaged in self-criticism. Since the progress of each member depended on that of his cellmates, the group pounced on the slightest misconduct. "The prisoner must conform to the demands of the group sooner or later," Hinkle and Wolff found. In many cases, this process produced an exultant sense of mission, not so different from religious conversion.¹

The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology

Hinkle served as vice-president of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology board of directors after Wolff incorporated the CIA-funded study group in 1955. He appreciated Wolff as "one of the great grantsmen of his time" and understood that Wolff expected the Agency "would support our research and we would be their consultants." After the Society separated from Cornell in 1957, Hinkle remained on the board. He states it was never his or Cornell's intention that the Society would be used as a CIA funding conduit. When told he had written letters on the Ionia State Hospital project, where LSD and marijuana were tested on sexual offenders, he replied that the Society's CIA-supplied bookkeeper was always putting papers in front of him and that he must have signed without realizing the implications.²