Mitchell-Jessen Cover Story Masks True Origins of CIA Torture Program
CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program was not just the work of two contract Agency psychologists, it was deeply embedded in the institutional operations of the CIA
It’s been ten years since Al Jazeera America (AJA) published my exposé on the connection between the post-9/11 CIA “enhanced interrogation” torture program and the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, or OTS. In the early 1950s, OTS developed the CIA’s mind and behavioral control program, MKULTRA.
The connection with OTS wasn't difficult to find. It was discussed, albeit briefly, in the Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee (SSCI) Study of the Central Intelligence Agency Detention and Interrogation Program, released December 9, 2014. Nine days later, AJA published my story revealing the connection between OTS and the CIA’s rendition to torture program, but unfortunately the rest of the press and the academic world ignored this important revelation.
The relevance of OTS in the torture story is the relevance of the continuity of CIA’s covert operations over the decades. Erase it, and you neuter the essence of what makes the CIA such a dangerous institution.
Instead, the press and human rights groups opted for the CIA’s cover story that two rogue CIA contract agents, military psychologists James E. Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, had on their own developed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program and implemented it against the protests of FBI agents and others inside the CIA. This cover story was meant to absolve the CIA institutionally, and as cover stories go, it was wildly successful.
Furthermore, the SSCI, with the blessings of the Democratic Party-led Senate and the Obama administration, classified the bulk of their report, which for all intensive purposes placed the full details of the CIA program under government seal for the rest of recorded time (or until the U.S. government dissolves).
A recent encounter with an AI version of the CIA torture history (via X.com’s “Grok” app) convinced me that my work will not survive the takeover of official history by AI programs run by U.S.-friendly companies, and beholden to mainstream news and academic sources.
With that in mind, I am reposting my article, originally titled “Torture program linked to discredited, illegal CIA techniques,” published at Al Jazeera America on December 18, 2014. I have silently corrected a few small typos I found, and added a section in brackets concerning James Mitchell’s pre-9/11 employment by the CIA. I also added a couple of links, and some brief observations regarding Mitchell’s discussion about the early evolution of the CIA’s interrogation program.
In general, after ten years this article has held up well. What’s amazing, to me anyway, is how the substance of this article failed to capture the popular imagination. Indeed, lacking the echo chamber effect that comes with mainstream media propagation, and the short-term nature of the news cycle, it’s not surprising that the story did not take off.
It’s very difficult trying to correct the historical record when you have no standing in the closed, elitist world of the media or academia. I also discovered this with my work exposing the U.S. use of biological weapons in the Korean War, and Japan’s WWII use of biological weapons in their balloon attacks on North America.
I am very grateful to the nearly fifteen hundred subscribers to this blog, and the many hundreds more who read it on a casual basis. I believe you should have access to my most important past research. The truth is like a flickering flame held up in a terrific gale.
Torture methods employed by the CIA under the guise of its “enhanced interrogation techniques” program can be traced back — through personnel and decades of research — to human experiments designed to induce the subjugation of prisoners through use of isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, psychoactive drugs and other means, according to details contained in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, a summary of which was released last week.
While many have focused on the brutal physical distress inflicted on detainees — beatings, extreme cold and heat, painful rectal force-feedings, waterboarding, and more — a close reading of the 500-page summary also suggests other disturbing aspects of the CIA’s means of breaking down prisoners.
The CIA chief of interrogations under the Bush administration, whose name was redacted in the Senate report, previously used a discredited training manual, Human Resource Exploitation (HRE), which was identified as using torture on political opponents of 1980s Latin America regimes — he was even admonished by the agency over the matter. That handbook, according to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, drew “significant portions” from an even earlier 1960s CIA interrogation handbook that advocated rapport-style interrogations and, when CIA found it was needed, the torture of suspects. [See page 19 of 499 of the SSCI report, PDF page 45.] Both manuals were heavily influenced by the work of the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
And MKULTRA is the stuff of nightmares — a multimillion-dollar program that endorsed the use of LSD, hypnotism, sensory deprivation, and sleep deprivation, among other physiological, psychological and behavioral techniques. The goal was to gain total psychological control over people and, in particular, prisoners held by the CIA or military intelligence agencies in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Any suggestion of the drugging of prisoners in the post-9/11 era could be explosive. The application of “mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality” is a serious violation of federal law, with convictions bringing sentences up to 20 years in prison.
Still, details and language in the SSCI report could be seen to be pointing in that direction.
Allegations of the use of pharmacological agents against detainees exist in the summary. Authors of the SSCI report cite repeated statements by “high-value” prisoner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri that his CIA captors drugged him. The report does not comment further on this issue, though at least one other prisoner is described as being “sedated” at one point.
The interrogators tasked with working al-Nashiri over would have been operating under instructions given to them in “approximately 65 hours” of training in a course called “High Value Target Interrogation and Exploitation,” according to the SSCI report [see pg. 470 of 499 in report, PDF pg. 496 - JK]
The course taught a program that CIA psychologists had developed through the adoption of techniques from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) handbook, meant to help U.S. servicemen withstand torture if captured by a government that did not abide by the rules of the Geneva Convention.
The chief architects of these enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) were James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen — two former Air Force psychologists who left SERE to work for the CIA.
Their roles have been well documented. But until the release of the Senate’s report, there had been no indication that the CIA already employed Mitchell at the time he was hired to work on “war on terror” interrogations.
According to new information in the summary, when Mitchell joined up with CIA black site interrogators in Thailand in April 2002, he had already been working as a contractor for a division within the agency that has a long and storied — some would say, infamous — history, the Office of Technical Services (OTS).
[In his book, which has the tendentious title, Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America, Mitchell had been “under contract” to the CIA since “August 2001 to help develop new strategies for making assessments of foreign CIA operatives (known as ‘assets’) in high-risk situations.” See Mitchell, James E.; Harlow, Bill. Enhanced Interrogation (p. 9). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Mitchell never mentions OTS, but does indicate he worked for CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T), which includes OTS. Mitchell also alludes to the conflict between DS&T and CIA’s Counterterrorism Center over who would control the CIA’s interrogation program at the black sites, a conflict that as a journalist I uniquely covered in a December 2018 article.
In the latter article, I laid out the complexities of the CIA program: “The OTS-run program was known as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) Program, and operated as a special mission or special access program within the Special Mission Division (SMD) of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). In documents, it was also referred to at times as the Rendition Group, and the Rendition and Detention Group.” Ultimately, according to the Chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, before the first year of RDI operations were completed, CTC took over primary control of the program. — JK]
The role of the OTS in the origin of the current torture scandal has not been highlighted until now. But it is not the first time the office and its predecessors have been involved with torture.
The OTS has gone by other names in its history, including Technical Services Staff (TSS), and Technical Services Division (TSD). Its purpose was to create the technologies used by the covert operations wing of the CIA, including spy satellites, secret writing ink, audio and optical surveillance, concealment devices, and novel methods of assassination.
According to one declassified CIA document, OTS receives its orders "through higher echelons (Office of the Director or Deputy Director for Operations).”
And it was through OTS’s predecessors — both TSS and TSD — that MKULTRA operated.
With well over 100 subprograms, MKULTRA cost millions of dollars in its over two decades of operation, ending in the early 1970s. It researched the possible use of many different kinds of drugs, including hallucinogens like LSD.
Its controversial techniques were the subject of more than one Congressional investigation (see this example [PDF] of one such investigation).
The lessons from the MKULTRA program were incorporated into a manual in the early 1960s. The handbook, known by its CIA acronym KUBARK, includes descriptions of drugging of prisoners — a process it called “narcosis.” A number of the KUBARK techniques migrated to the later, 1980s HRE manual.
Links to earlier torture
The link from MKULTRA to KUBARK to HRE to the post-9/11 EIT torture program was not just ideational, but organizational, even involving personnel from earlier torture programs.
According to the Senate report, the person chosen in late 2002 to be the “CIA's chief of interrogations in the CIA's Renditions Group, the officer in charge of CIA interrogations" had been elevated to the post despite having earlier been accused of “inappropriate use” of HRE techniques.
Mitchell and Jessen — who are widely acknowledged to be the men referred to in the SSCI report as SWIGERT and DUNBAR, psychologists whose contracting company was paid $81 million by the government — were “commissioned” by OTS in late December 2001 or early January 2002 to write a study of Al Qaeda techniques for resistance to interrogation.
By April 1, 2002, according to the Senate report, OTS cabled a new “proposed interrogation strategy” to the CIA interrogation group at the black site holding Zubaydah in Thailand. The new strategy was “coordinated” with Mitchell, and included manipulation of the environment “intended to cause psychological disorientation” for the prisoner.
According to the OTS cable, the plan was meant to instill in a prisoner "the deliberate establishment of psychological dependence upon the interrogator," and "an increased sense of learned helplessness." The emphasis on “psychological dependence” mirrors the language of the KUBARK manual, and the theories behind control of human behavior that were explored in the MKULTRA program.
Human experimentation
Later questions about assessing the “effectiveness” of the new “enhanced interrogation techniques” introduced by Mitchell and OTS raised fears within CIA’s Office of Medical Services that studying the EITs would violate federal policy on human experimentation.
Addressing such concerns, the CIA’s Inspector General said a review of the EIT program would not need “additional, guinea pig research on human beings” — “additional” implying that such experimentation may have already taken place.
But he added that there were “subtleties to this matter,” noting the need to study variables in how the techniques were affecting prisoners, including individual differences, and how prisoners reacted over different time periods, intensities of administration, and to different combinations of techniques.
By this time, OTS and its Operational Assessment Division had vetted the supposed safety of the program and reported to Justice Department attorneys, who were themselves trying hard to find a reason to allow the torture.
The Senate report also cited conflicts of interest where both Mitchell and Jessen administered the brutal interrogations, evaluated their supposed effectiveness, and also determined whether a detainee was resilient or healthy enough to continue applying the EIT.
The new evidence about the role of the OTS in the implementation of the CIA torture program demonstrates the conflict of interest was not limited to Mitchell and Jessen, but included other CIA personnel and divisions. It also suggests that the EIT was not a sole aberration by two psychologists looking to make money off the “war on terror,” but that the torture program they established was rooted in the CIA’s institutional history.
It also suggests that the full extent of the CIA’s program is still not yet known, but may lie in the approximately 6,000 pages of the report that have not yet been declassified by the Senate committee.