CIA Advocated Editing Interrogation Tapes to Falsely Document "Confessions"
An MDR declassification of a CIA interrogation manual revealed new info on use of torture; renditions; work with foreign "liaisons"; interrogation of defectors, penetration agents & more
This article draws upon two articles I wrote over ten years ago. These articles summarized what was new in a then-recently released version of the CIA’s famous “KUBARK” interrogation manual. (KUBARK was the CIA’s own code name for itself.) I wish I could say there was no need to repost this material, but in fact what I thought was important new information about how the CIA conducted interrogations during the Cold War was ignored by the press and almost all commentators. Adding insult to injury, one of the two articles I wrote had essentially all but disappeared from the web.
In any case, by reviewing these old works I was able to expand the material and update links. So the article you have before you is not a mere reposting, but a new article in its own right, one that illuminates the history of CIA’s use of torture and rendition.
I am grateful to the good folks at Muckrock.com, who originally had commissioned me to write up a short summary of the newly declassified KUBARK material. Muckrock published my article analyzing the updated release in April 2014.
In addition, around the same time, Firedoglake/The Dissenter published what I felt was a companion article, reporting on aspects of the newly declassified material that didn’t make it into the Muckrock piece.
The article below has a lot more to report than the issue of doctoring interrogation tapes mentioned in the title. I hope Substack readers will find the work of some value.
In January 2014, I requested the Central Intelligence Agency release a newly declassified version of the CIA’s famed “KUBARK” Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, which was originally written in 1963. The KUBARK manual was first publicly released in 1997 via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Baltimore Sun, along with another CIA torture manual from 1983, the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual.” The latter manual is a very important document in its own right, and is posted at the National Security Archive website in two parts (Part 1 and Part 2).
I didn’t use FOIA to get this latest version of the KUBARK manual. And no, it wasn’t leaked to me, either! I followed a different protocol for obtaining government classified documents called a Mandatory Declassification Request (MDR). MDRs have their pluses and minuses in regards obtaining secret documents. Interested readers should see this National Archives discussion of FOIA vs. MDR for obtaining classified government material.
Portions of the manual, originally declassified in 1997, remained censored until March 2014, when, in answer to my Mandatory Declassification Request, the CIA released an updated version [PDF] of the manual. The 2014 version contained new revelations that extended our knowledge of CIA interrogation activities. (For those interested in seeing how the 1997 FOIA version of the KUBARK manual looked, for comparison or other reasons, it is also available at the National Security Archive website.)
The first thing I noticed that seemed new to me in the 2014 declassified CIA material concerned the documentation of intelligence interrogations. Describing interrogation techniques and approaches used during the Cold War, the earlier declassified version of the KUBARK counterintelligence interrogation manual had advised covertly photographing the interrogation subject, in addition to also audio taping interrogations. (Note: from here on out, I will refer to the 1997 version of the CIA manual as KUBARK I, and the 2014 updated declassified release as KUBARK II.)
A tape player could free an interrogator from note taking, the CIA’s experts wrote, while also providing a live record of an interrogation that could replayed later. The manual’s author (or authors) noted that for some of those interrogated, "the shock of hearing their own voices unexpectedly is unnerving” (p. 46 — note: these page numbers refer to the PDF page number, which is generally 3 pages ahead of the page number of the document).
In KUBARK II, the issue of audio taping interrogations took on an even more sinister edge. The newly declassified material added that the CIA believed that doctoring of such tapes was “effective.” But effective how?
"Tapes can also be edited and spliced, with effective results, if the tampering can be hidden," the CIA manual explained in a section previously censored (pg. 46). The CIA further elaborated on the effects of having a tape "edited to make it sound like a confession." The benefit of having an “edited” proof of confession could work wonders when trying to convince a suspect’s confederates that their previous partner, or mentor, or collaborator had in fact spilled his or her guts to the CIA or an allied interrogator. The effect, of course, would be predicated on a technological fiction.
More speculatively, a false, manufactured “confession” in an interrogator’s possession would offer excellent ammunition for coercing a captive to “cooperate”, or even work for the Agency as a double agent.
Back in 2014, there was intense media controversy regarding the release of the Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” torture program, which program relied upon a worldwide network of airplanes for “extraordinary rendition” of detainees. On the other hand, the CIA’s 2014 release of the new KUBARK materials — including portions that spoke to the agency’s years-long use of foreign intelligence services for detention and interrogation — barely merited mention. This was true even though the KUBARK II material included new revelations about the CIA’s past utilization of foreign intelligence agencies for interrogation, and the rendition of prisoners for such purposes.
At the time, leaks to news media and analysis by commentators demonstrated that the CIA had lied to Congress about aspects of its post-9/11 rendition, detention and interrogation (torture) program. What the media mostly ignored was that the post-9/11 program in regards to torture, rendition and detention, both at "black sites" and by foreign intelligence services working with the CIA, was in fact the continuation of a CIA practice going back decades. Indeed, very few people are aware of this even to this day, or at least don’t know the details.
KUBARK as a Model for Interrogation and Torture
The 2014 release of the KUBARK manual still contained numerous redactions, even 51 years after the document’s origination. But the release also included new information about the CIA’s use of torture, including never before revealed discussions of the CIA’s early use of foreign intelligence services for both interrogation and detention, and the use of such foreign services as a cover for CIA interrogations.
The new unredacted material included the finding that KUBARK techniques were used at “defector reception” or interrogation centers during the Cold War.
In a January 27, 1997 article, the Baltimore Sun, which originally had gained the manual via a FOIA request it first made in May 1994, linked the KUBARK manual to later torture and interrogation techniques utilized in the 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (and later iterations of this manual) used to train Honduran and other Central American interrogators in methods of torture.
The Sun wrote:
While it remains unclear whether the KUBARK manual was used in Central America, the 1963 manual and the 1983 manual are similar in organization and descriptions of certain interrogation techniques and purposes.
The KUBARK manual is mentioned in a 1989 memorandum prepared by the staff of the Senate intelligence committee on the CIA's role in Honduras, and some members of the intelligence community during that period believe it was used in training the Hondurans. One said that some of the lessons from the manual were recorded almost verbatim in notes by CIA agents who sat in on the classes.
The product of years of mind control and interrogation experimentation and field experience, the KUBARK manual written in 1963 utilized a set of torture and other interrogation techniques, which included use of solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, fear, stress positions, electric shock, sleep deprivation, drugs, induction of “debility” or physical weakness, and other methods to induce compliance and the “exploitation” of the prisoner or subject interrogated.
After the Abu Ghraib scandal, when the kinds of abusive interrogation and detention techniques used on U.S. “war on terror” detainees were vividly visualized for U.S. and world audiences, the similarities between what the U.S. was doing and the early instructions in the KUBARK manual became front-page news in the mainstream U.S. press.
The similarity of the KUBARK techniques to certain abusive techniques used by other government agencies, such as the FBI, has been noted. But it is KUBARK’s connection with the CIA’s own Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program that resonates the most.
In 2018, a declassified memoir by the Chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS) was released. The memoir was about the formation and operations of the RDI program. The OMS chief described the influence of the KUBARK manual upon a group of CIA psychologists connected with CIA’s Office of Technical Services (OTS), a unit that had historical connections to the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
OTS was also the section that hired contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen to run (or be the front men for) the “enhanced interrogation” (EIT) program. Mitchell and Jessen had previously worked for the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel and Recovery Agency, which was attached to US Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), and oversaw the “SERE” program, about which see more below. USJFCOM was shuttered in 2011, and I believe that this was due, at least in part, to revelations about its culpability in the post-9/11 torture scandal.
In its origins, the CIA’s EIT program was carefully planned and staffed by the Office of Technical Services. Only later was it subsumed under the administration of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center, which had in fact been running a similar but administratively separate torture program. This evolution of the CIA’s post-9/11 program is almost never mentioned in contemporary accounts.
According to the OMS Chief’s narrative, in 2002 at the time the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was getting underway, OTS contained a group of “operationally-oriented psychologists whose interests in interrogation extended back almost 50 years….”
The CIA medical chief explained:
The antecedents of this unit had overseen much of the MKULTRA interrogation research in the 1950s and 1960s, published still-relevant classified papers on the merits of various interrogation techniques, contributed heavily to a 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual and its derivative 1983 Human Resources Manual, assisted directly in early interrogations, and (with OMS) provided instruction in the Agency’s Risk of Capture training. [parenthesis in original]
The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” torture techniques included, among other forms of torture, physical slapping, sleep deprivation, isolation, confinement of a prisoner in small box, stress positions, and waterboarding.
“Debility, Dependency, and Dread”
The KUBARK manual was not entirely, or even mainly, about torture. In fact, the CIA preached caution in the use of such extreme measures of interrogation. Still, approximately 20 percent of the manual was dedicated to a discussion of coercive techniques, as described above. By the time the CIA was constructing its post-9/11 torture and rendition program, the CIA appeared most interested in the aspects of Kubark that produced physical weakness, or “debility,” via use of reduced food intake, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and methods of physical torture.
The physical EIT “techniques,” such as waterboarding, slapping, water dousing, etc., focused primarily on the aspect of KUBARK techniques that emphasized “debility.” This followed from the CIA’s reliance on a theory of prisoner control known as the DDD model. “DDD” stood for “debility, dependency, and dread,” as described in the paper Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD, written by I. E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow, and Louis Jolyon West for the December 1957 issue of Sociometry. Harlow was elected president of the American Psychological Association the same year the paper was written (serving in 1958-59), while West, a psychiatrist, was notoriously associated with MKULTRA programs.
The DDD Sociometry paper was listed in the KUBARK manual’s “Descriptive Bibliography” (pg. 115). The CIA’s gloss on the Farber, et al. essay, described “DDD” as containing “the three essentials of the ‘brainwashing’ process. The article is well worth reading” (pg. 116), the CIA authors gushed. In the main text of the KUBARK manual, the CIA had placed DDD in the context of coercive (torture) interrogation:
Farber says that the response to coercion typically contains “. . . at least three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread." Prisoners “. . . have reduced viability, are helplessly dependent on their captors for the satisfaction of their many basic needs, and experience the emotional and motivational reactions of intense fear and anxiety. . . . Among the POW's pressured by the Chinese Communists, the DDD syndrome in its full-blown form constituted a state of discomfort that was well-nigh intolerable." (11). If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, however, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him. [KUBARK II, pp. 86-87]
The issue of POWs supposedly pressured by Chinese Communists is a reference to a controversy that arose during the Korean War and its aftermath. That war arguably brought about a high degree of cooperation of U.S. captives with the Communist authorities that held them. The cooperation culminated in some two dozen depositions by Air Force and Marine Corps officers that the U.S. had used biological weapons during the war.
The entire controversy was spun into the fantasy of “brainwashing” of prisoners, the better to cover-up the fact the charges of germ warfare, not to mention other wartime atrocities admitted by U.S. POWs, had been true. The fact of the use of bacteriological weapons was attested in a number of communications intelligence reports the CIA declassified in 2010, documentary evidence that has been studiously ignored by Western press and historians.
As for the officer’s BW confessions, in a bizarre twist it turned out they were actually countenanced by Pentagon authorities, who had instructed U.S. airmen during the Korean War that, if captured, they could tell their captors “all they knew.” I explored the rationale for that decision, and then the long cover-up over the policy, in a June 2024 article. Recently, I explored the documents surrounding the case of one airman who had renounced his germ warfare confession, claiming he had been tortured into the confession, but then later denied ill-treatment by his captors.
In fact, the “brainwashing” studies by the military and CIA were based on observations and experiments run at U.S. “survival schools,” which were organized into the “SERE” program. SERE stood for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape” and was oriented around teaching U.S. soldiers, intelligence agents, and other vulnerable assets how to survive in enemy territory, how to evade capture, how to act if captured, and ways to escape such captivity. Farber, Harlow and West had used Air Force SERE school students in deriving their DDD theory.
Early Evidence of CIA Black Sites and Rendition
The most extensive portions of the KUBARK II manual that were not originally declassified, i.e., which had been kept secret in the original 1997 KUBARK I release, concerned CIA interrogations conducted “with or through liaison.” Such liaison included “foreign” or “host” services, including interrogations that could “involve illegality” (KUBARK II, pg. 11).
While there is no portion of the document that specifically uses the term "rendition," there is a lot of discussion about having to use foreign intelligence services as liaison for interrogation purposes, and on the limited amount of detention time the CIA had when holding prisoners in other countries. (It is widely known now that post-9/11, the CIA held prisoners at secret prisons in Thailand, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania, while rendition to torture sent some kidnapped detainees to foreign intelligence prisons in Syria, Morocco, Egypt and other countries.)
CIA ex-Deputy Counsel John Rizzo has admitted that the CIA rendition program was a practice of long standing. “Renditions were not a product of the post-9/11 era…” Rizzo has said. In March 2014, Rizzo told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, “... renditions, in and of themselves, are actually a fairly well-established fact in American and world, actually, intelligence organizations.”
Most discussions of the U.S. post-9/11 CIA interrogation program have presumed that renditions to foreign interrogation services were something that originated after the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, or perhaps earlier, during the Clinton administration. But the newly unredacted sections of KUBARK II suggest that such activities by the CIA were common practice during the Cold War.
One example of this, not referenced in the KUBARK document, is known from other CIA documents [click on link and then click on button that says “Run Search”]. I am speaking here about what was known in CIA circles as the “Kelly Case,” which was described by H.P. Albarelli and this author in a 2010 article at Truthout.
Kelly, a code name for a Bulgarian expatriate named Dimitrov, was kidnapped by the CIA in the early 1950s and psychiatrically hospitalized in Panama. It seems Dimitrov had done work for the CIA in Greece, but it’s not exactly clear. According to an October 1977 memorandum to CIA’s General Counsel, Anthony A. Lapham, upon release from hospitalization “Kelly” was held for three years by the CIA at Fort Clayton, in the Panama Canal Zone (see PDF pg. 2). According to Albarelli’s sources, Kelly/Dimitrov was tortured at Fort Clayton using drugs and hypnosis, part of the Agency's Operation Artichoke program. (Albarelli passed away in 2019.)
In some 1952 memos attached to the memo to Lapham, there is a discussion about subjecting Kelly/Dimitrov to Artichoke. There seemed to be both proponents and opponents within CIA to using Artichoke techniques to change the Bulgarian’s hostility to the United States, a hostility that had grown since his (presumably forced) psychiatric hospitalization. “It appears… the ‘Artichoke Approach’… was never consummated,” the memo to Lapham stated.
“Consummated” is an odd choice of verbs. Elsewhere in the attached documents, a January 25, 1952 “memo to file” from the CIA’s Morse Allen, one of the Agency’s top Artichoke officials, indicated that “a re-conditioning operation” of the Artichoke type would take 30-60 days to complete. I speculate that the process was begun, but not “consummated,” that is, it was not completed, or “Kelly’s” “re-conditioning” didn’t take.
In another example of early rendition practice, the CIA and the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) allegedly ran a kidnapping program called "Snatch/Countersnatch" in Europe after World War II.
An example of an operation that crossed the line into illegality was one named “Snatch/Counter-Snatch” that ran for a number of years in the late 1940's and early 1950's. This official, if ludicrous, codename referred to a series of American and Soviet kidnappings. The oficial CIC history concentrates on Soviet kidnapping as they were thwarted by one of the "most extensive investigations ever conducted by the 430th CIC Detachment" Nevertheless a participant in the operation has revealed to that kidnappings were carried out by Americans as well. (Maris Cakars & Barton Osborn, "Operation Ohio: Mass Murder by US Intelligence Agencies," Win Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 30, 9/18/1975*, p. 15.)
There were other notable early examples of CIA kidnapping. One of these was the case of Peter Moroz, an employee of the CIA's Institute for the Study of the USSR, who "was seized by CIA operatives posing as German police," and taken to a "safe house" near Munich (“Operation Ohio,” p. 18). Munoz was subjected to loud music and bright lights for almost three months in isolation, all because the CIA wanted to question him after his son purportedly had defected to the East Germans.
According to KUBARK II, "Interrogations conducted under compulsion or duress are especially likely to involve illegality and to entail damaging consequences for KUBARK” (p. 11). The newly declassified material shows approval for such actions, including interrogations involving “physical harm” and “medical, chemical or electrical methods or materials… used to induce acquiescence” (Ibid.), was assigned to a CIA official labeled “KUDOVE,” a cryptonym that a National Archives document describes as the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations (DDO).
Such approval by the DDO was also necessary “[i]f the detention is locally illegal and traceable to KUBARK...." (Ibid.)
It appears the chain of command hadn’t changed much by the time the CIA RDI program came into being. James Pavitt was Deputy Director of Operations from 1999 to June 4, 2004. He was succeeded by Stephen Kappes, whose tenure only lasted until August 2004. Kappes was followed by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr. Rodriquez famously ordered the destruction of video tapes used in the interrogation and torture of Abu Zubaydah and other "high-value detainees" held by the CIA at their Thailand "black site." During Rodriquez's tenure, the CIA's Directorate of Operations, which was once known as the Directorate of Plans, changed its name once again to the National Clandestine Service (NCS). Whether Directorate of Plans, Directorate of Operations, or NCS, this section of CIA is responsible for covert operations.
While it seems likely Rodriquez's destruction of the videotapes was meant to destroy evidence of torture and/or illegal experimentation, the revelation about doctoring audio tapes in the new version of the KUBARK manual raises the question whether or not the evidence had to be destroyed so that no one would know the videotapes had also been altered in an effort to produce or manufacture the appearance of confessions.
The Detention Problem
Most of the discussion of working with foreign intelligence agencies is in the manual’s section on “Legal and Policy Considerations.” In 1997, much of that material was redacted, so that it was difficult to know that there was any coordination between the CIA and foreign services. But the newly unredacted material shows that the CIA turned to foreign “liaison” services because the legislation that formed the Agency "denied it any law-enforcement or police powers."
As "the necessary powers are vested in the competent liaison service or services, not in KUBARK, it is frequently necessary to conduct such interrogations with or through liaison,” the CIA wrote. The legality of such an interrogation — whether conducted “unilaterally” by either CIA or the host service — was “determined by the laws of the country in which the act occurs” (KUBARK II, pg. 9).
According to the CIA document, detention of prisoners was the primary legal problem, as the CIA had no legal power to hold prisoners. "Even if the local authorities have exercised powers of detention in our behalf," the CIA wrote, "the legal time-limit may be narrow” (Ibid.). Hence, the manual suggests that the determination as to how long a prisoner can be held in detention should be determined as quickly as possible. As the reference to “locally illegal” detention cited earlier suggests, sometimes that determination included a decision to hold prisoners unlawfully. A full paragraph on how to determine how much time could be available to CIA for interrogation in such circumstances remains censored in KUBARK II.
The issue of control over a prisoner’s detention is raised more than once in the document. "As a general rule, it is difficult to succeed in the CI [counterintelligence] interrogation of a resistant source unless the interrogating service can control the subject and his environment for as long as proves necessary," the manual states (pg. 46). While most of the ensuing discussion remains classified in the latest manual release, a portion of this section was unredacted.
The CIA expressed concern over what is done to prisoners or detainees held by foreign liaison services. Some "sources may demand immediate release," the CIA document stated, or "later bring suit for illegal detention.” There does not appear to be any easy solution to this dilemma, from the CIA’s standpoint, though the manual warns against either pressing “too hard” on a detainee or releasing him too early, before the information desired has been obtained. “Transfer to an interrogation center should not be used as an automatic solution,” the CIA manual noted (pg. 47).
It was not clear what type of "interrogation center" the manual was referring to at this point.
A recent example of a rendition to a foreign liaison service is the case of UK resident, Binyam Mohamed. The ACLU described Mr. Mohamed’s ordeal in Moroccan and then later, U.S. captivity, where he was tortured into providing false information:
In July of 2002, Ethiopian native Binyam Mohamed was taken from Pakistan to Morocco on a Gulfstream V aircraft registered with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as N379P. Flight and logistical support services for this aircraft were provided by Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. In Morocco, Mohamed was handed over to agents of Moroccan intelligence who detained and tortured him for the next 18 months….
In Morocco his interrogators routinely beat him, sometimes to the point of losing consciousness, and he suffered multiple broken bones. During one incident, Mohamed was cut 20 to 30 times on his genitals. On another occasion, a hot stinging liquid was poured into open wounds on his penis as he was being cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death. He was forced to listen to loud music day and night, placed in a room with open sewage for a month at a time and drugged repeatedly.
Under this torture, Mohamed was interrogated about Al Qaeda and suspected Al Qaeda members. He was told that the U.S. wanted him to testify against individuals then in U.S. custody, including Jose Padilla, Khalid Sheik Mohamed, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn Shiekh Al Libi. Mohamed was told to repeat what he was told: that he was a top Al Qaeda official; that he had met with Osama Bin Laden and 25 other Al Qaeda leaders on multiple occasions; and that he had told Bin Laden about places that should be attacked….”
In early 2004, Binyam Mohamed was flown from Morocco to the Salt Pit, or “Dark Prison,” a CIA black site outside Bagram Air Base. At Bagram, too, Mohamed was tortured, this time by U.S. personnel. According to the ACLU report, Binyam “was kept in almost complete darkness for 23 hours a day and made to stay awake for days at a time by loud music and other frightening and irritating recordings, including the sounds of ‘ghost laughter,’ thunder, aircraft taking off and the screams of women and children.”
In September 2004, Mohamed was transferred to Guantanamo. He was finally released and returned to England in February 2009.
Security Leaks
KUBARK’s newly declassified material showed that the CIA was very concerned about possible security leaks. A released prisoner, someone subjected to KUBARK-style interrogation and torture, is such a possible security leak, according to the manual.
If a "subject is to be turned over to a host service,” KUBARK II states, “it becomes more than usually important to hold to a minimum the amount of information about KUBARK and its methods that he can communicate” (p. 53). It is possible that these are some of the same types of concerns that, unspoken, kept dozens of detainees cleared for transfer or release held indefinitely at Guantanamo.
That the CIA wished to keep its collaboration with “foreign services” secret can be discerned from the numerous times even small references to such services, even in passing, were deleted from the original (KUBARK I) declassification release.
In an “Interrogator’s Checklist” towards the end of the manual, the CIA asks the interrogator to consider whether an arrest is "contemplated." "By whom?” the manual asks. “Is the arrest fully legal? If difficulties develop, will the arresting liaison service reveal KUBARK's role or interest?" Furthermore, "If the interrogatee is to be confined, can KUBARK control his environment fully?" (KUBARK II, p. 112)
In a tantalizing revelation of even further considerations around sharing detention and interrogation with foreign services, one of the newly declassified “checklist” items asks, "If the interrogation is to be conducted jointly with a liaison service, has due regard been paid to the opportunity thus afforded to acquire additional information about that service while minimizing KUBARK's exposure to it?" (pg. 110)
In other words, use of foreign liaison services also allowed the opportunity for CIA to spy upon their allies’ intelligence apparatus.
To date, none of the discussions about the post-9/11 RDI program have dwelled upon the intelligence activities the CIA and its allies may have conducted upon each other, or the intelligence vulnerabilities or risks the RDI program may have entailed in that regard.
“Defector Reception Centers”
One of the topics the KUBARK manual touches upon is the existence of “defector reception centers.” In the original declassification, all references to such centers were censored. This was true even though such Cold War-era centers concerned possible defectors from the Soviet Union or its allies, and the 1997 FOIA release of KUBARK occurred six years after the fall of the USSR and its East European satellite states.
Very little has been written about these “defector reception” centers. According to declassified CIA and State Department documents, and some memoirs by former CIA personnel, we know that the CIA maintained a “defector reception center” near Frankfurt, West Germany. It was housed at the primary Allied post-World War II interrogation center, Camp King, at Oberursel.
The defector centers were for Cold War defectors and refugees, and were where “preliminary psychological screening” and other activities took place. The KUBARK II material is the first evidence that torture may have taken place at such centers.
According to a memoir by former CIA Deputy Director of Covert Operations, Ted Shackley, “all people defecting in Europe from countries of the Soviet bloc were brought here" (to Camp King). They were held in villas scattered around Frankfurt. CIA documents released some years ago show the housing and resettlement aspect of this defector program was code-named HARVARD.
In Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks’s classic 1975 exposé, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, detainees at the Defector Reception Center at Camp King were “subjected to extensive debriefing and interrogation by agency officers who are experts at draining from them their full informational potential. Some defectors are subjected to questioning that lasts for months; a few are interrogated for a year or more” [pg. 159].
According to KUBARK II, all defectors, escapees, and refugees were “customarily sent to a defector center for detailed exploitation” (p. 19). “Defection reception centers and some large stations are able to conduct preliminary psychological screening before interrogation starts,” the manual states (p. 33).
While there is no direct evidence of torture of any defectors or East Bloc escapees held at any defector reception center, the fact the KUBARK manual itself describes procedures that amount to “coercion,” even by CIA standards, strongly suggests that some torture was conducted on Soviet and East European detainees held at one or more such reception centers.
Further exploration of the Defector Reception Center and activities at Camp King are a fruitful source of possible future research. Other authors have determined that the former Nazi doctor Kurt Blome, tried but released at Nuremberg after World War II, and who was the former head of the Nazi’s biological warfare program, worked as a doctor at Camp King in the early 1950s. (See Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Milk, “Epilogue: Seven Were Hanged, pp. 105-107 in The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin (eds.), Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). In addition, Camp King was known for using drugs and other experimental torture methods on Soviet bloc prisoners.
In her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown & Company, 2014), Annie Jacobsen wrote, “According to a memo in his declassified foreign scientist case file, Blome worked on ‘Army, 1952, Project 1975,’ a top secret project that has never been declassified” (pg. 364). From Jacobsen’s description, it would appear that the work at Camp King was associated with the CIA’s Projects Bluebird and Artichoke.
I have tried to get more information on Blome from the CIA, with no success. My first request in 2013 was rejected with a statement that the existence or non-existence of any such documents “is currently and properly classified.” My appeal of this decision was also rejected for the same reasons in February 2014. This CIA’s claim to the classified nature surrounding even the existence (or not) of such documents is known as a “Glomar” response. The full history of my FOIA requests to the CIA on Kurt Blome can be accessed here.
Similar requests on Blome to the U.S. State Department and the Department of the Army also went nowhere. I am planning to obtain existing records from the National Archives on an interrogation of Blome by Army Chemical Corps personnel. If interesting information comes via that request, I’ll write it up here at Hidden Histories.
“Squeezed dry”
There is a small amount of other newly unredacted material in KUBARK II. Much of it consists of quotations from Albert Biderman's secret 1959 report, "A Study for Development of Improved Interrogation Techniques." It is not clear why these sections were originally withheld in KUBARK I. The new declassification still contains a number of redactions of material in the manual’s bibliography which was referenced in the main text of the manual itself.
One of the restored Biderman quotes notes, “skilled and determined interrogations are almost invariably successful in eliciting some information from their sources.” Biderman continued, describing those “who abandon the ‘name, rank, [serial] number only’ rule or other injunctions of silence, are between 95 and 100 percent” (p. 56).
Another new section concerns the interrogation of “penetration agents.” The discussion included the pros and cons of using coercive interrogation.
"All good interrogators avoid coercive techniques whenever the necessary information can be gained without them,” the CIA manual stated. “In other words, physical or psychological duress is counter-productive when employed against a source whose voluntary cooperation can be enlisted without pressure” (pg. 21).
But if such “coercion must be used and is successful,” the interrogator is cautioned that such action is likely to leave a victim “drained and apathetic.” "A resistant source who has been 'broken' should not be disregarded as a person when squeezed dry," the manual warns. Left to his own devices after "the use of pressure exceeding his resistance (for example, narcosis [drugs - JK]] or hypnosis)... he is likely to revert to the role of antagonist and try to cause us trouble by any means available to him” (Ibid.).
There are a number of other aspects of the newly unredacted material, as well as material in the original 1997 declassification of KUBARK, which touch upon issues that are highly relevant to the current controversies over the CIA’s Black Site and “enhanced interrogation” programs. As we have seen, the new material demonstrates the CIA has had a long-term interest in the use of foreign services in interrogations, and that such interrogations could be controversial if exposed and needed to be monitored closely.
The new material also shows the CIA believed the use of torture (“coercive interrogation”) was often counterproductive, yet recognized that techniques such as isolation, use of drugs, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, stress positions, hypnosis, and other forms of torture and manipulation were part of its arsenal.
While in 2009 President Obama forbid via executive order the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding, or confinement in a small box or coffin, the same executive order cemented the use of isolation, forms of sensory deprivation, use of drugs, and sleep deprivation in the Department of Defense’s Army Field Manual 2-22.3, which is now the U.S. standard for interrogation. In that sense, irrespective of the controversies over waterboarding and the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program approved by John Yoo and other Bush-era government attorneys, much of what was KUBARK lives on.
Note: The full record of my MDR request, from the text of the request itself to the final response letter from the CIA granting the request and giving their explanation for ongoing redactions can be read here.
*Use of materials from Win Magazine comes via Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
This article deserves many orders of magnitude more engagement than it has received so far. I can’t emphasize enough how much your hard work is appreciated, and how essential it will be for future historians even as it is tragically and deliberately ignored by the mainstream western press. Thank you Jeffrey.