According to Lifton, factors such as these award the group life-and-death authority over individual members. And yet, despite the Communists’ absolute control of the environment, of the forty victims that Lifton studied, only three were “apparent converts” to the ideology. That figure has been used to discredit the notion of brainwashing, although Lifton himself later said that he was impressed by the extent to which minds could be altered and “truth blurred to the point of near extinction.”
The CIA, alarmed by the reputed success of Chinese indoctrination, started its own research into mind control, through a program called MKUltra. In the mid-1950s, the agency began funding Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born American citizen who was then directing the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Cameron was one of the most eminent psychiatrists of his time: earlier in his career, he had been a part of the Nuremberg tribunal that examined the atrocious human experiments of Nazi doctors; later he became president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and—when the CIA stumbled onto his work—president of the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron hoped to cure mental illness by eliminating painful memories and reordering the personality through positive suggestion. The agency’s goal was somewhat different, of course; the stated reason was to uncover effective methods of mind control and then train American soldiers in ways of resisting such efforts. The CIA eventually destroyed the files of the MKUltra program, saying that it had acquired no useful information, but the real intention of the agency may have been to learn scientific ways of extracting information from unwilling subjects. (After 9/11, documents emerging from the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base showed that the methods used by US interrogators to question al-Qaeda suspects were based on Chinese Communist techniques.)
The methods that Cameron used to erase his patients’ memories certainly meet the definition of torture. Electroshock therapy was administered to break the “patterns” of personality; up to 360 shocks were administered in a single month in order to make the subject hyper-suggestible. On top of that, powerful drugs—uppers, downers, and hallucinogens—were fed to the incapacitated patients to increase their disorientation. According to author Naomi Klein, who wrote about these experiments in The Shock Doctrine, when Cameron finally believed he had achieved the desired blank slate, he placed the patients in isolation and played tape-recorded messages of positive reinforcement, such as “You are a good mother and wife and people enjoy your company.” Some patients were put into an insulin coma to keep them from resisting; in that state they were forced to listen to such mantras up to twenty hours a day. In one case, Cameron played a message continuously for more than a hundred days.
Cameron was a perfect archetype for the evil that science has done in the name of mental health, and in the minds of many Scientologists, his work justifies the campaign the church has waged against psychiatry. It is intriguing to compare these actual experiments with Hubbard’s mythic vision of Xenu and the R6 implants, in which the disembodied thetans were forced to sit in front of movie screens for thirty-six days of programming at the hands of psychiatrists.
Although it is unlikely that Hubbard would have known about MKUltra when it was going on, he had become fascinated by the mind-control scare. In 1955, he distributed a pamphlet, which he probably wrote, called “BrainWashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.” For some former Scientologists, “BrainWashing” provides a codex for Hubbard’s grand scheme. There is an eerie mirroring of the techniques described in the pamphlet and some Scientology practices, especially those put into effect in the RPF.
The pamphlet opens with what is claimed to be a purloined speech given by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police under Joseph Stalin, to American students studying at Lenin University, on the subject of “psychopolitics.” The term is defined as “[t]he art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through ‘mental healing.’ ”