The Unknown Story of CIA's MK-DECOY & "Subproject 61"
One MKULTRA project studied how to create a covert concussion-inducing device, one "as small & as silent as possible." Another program compared brain damage with cerebral changes under interrogation.
On a warm, drizzly summer afternoon in Washington, D.C. almost fifty years ago, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Frank Laubinger, an official with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services (OTS), came to Capitol Hill.
The two CIA bigwigs had arrived for special hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and another Senate subcommittee examining “Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification” (PDF). Laubinger was present because for much of its existence OTS (under its various organizational titles) had been the section of the CIA that organized MKULTRA operations. Much later, with the help of two contractors from the Pentagon’s SERE program, OTS would create the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program.”
CIA drug experiments on unsuspecting targets had been revealed in the June 1975 Rockefeller Report on CIA Activities in the United States. More information came out in the April 1976 release of the Senate’s Church Committee report on secret government operations. Only a month before that, columnist Jack Anderson had revealed the existence of a “super-secret program code-named MK ULTRA-DELTA.”
There was plenty that was revealed by the Church Committee, later Senate investigations, and many books and articles that poured out over the following years. But except for a very partial and mostly non-informative reveal by the late historian Hank Albarelli in his book, A Terrible Secret (see pg. 258), no one (including Albarelli) has ever told the story of the CIA’s program to develop a touchless method to effect brain concussions at a distance, a program that in part had an aim to produce amnesias in its experimental subjects, and condition prisoners and detainees for interrogation.
Abu Zubaydah and Mohammed Al Qahtani were touted as major Al Qaeda terrorists. Neither prisoner turned out to be key figures in any terrorist network. But both of them shared one thing in common, something which has long bothered me as it seemed beyond mere coincidence: both men had histories of serious head trauma prior to their capture by U.S. forces.
The CIA’s program was codenamed MKDECOY (“Em-kay Decoy”). (Albarelli had wrongly identified the program as “HKDECOY.”) It began as a CIA-funded project run through the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 1954 to investigate the effects of blast concussions on the brain. Though the program ultimately passed organizationally to the CIA, ONI had contributed some funds to its initial stages. To this day, the Department of Defense still does research on the effects of explosive blasts in traumatic brain injuries. (See this fiscal year 2020 report by the DOD Blast Injury Research Coordinating Office at U.S. Army Medical Research & Development Command.)
This essay will look in some detail into the workings of MKDECOY, insofar as a documentary record is left to us. I will also examine what appears to be a related program, MKULTRA’s Subproject 61, which concentrated on the mechanisms of brain damage or pathologies, including those stemming from stressful environments “such as concentration camps, or prison procedures aimed at interrogation and indoctrination.”
Finally, I will consider whether or not this type of CIA research continued into more recent times. In particular, we will look at the use of brain damaged individuals, such as Abu Zubaydah and Mohammed al Qahtani, as “guinea pigs” in the CIA and Department of Defense’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” torture programs.
The essay ends with a consideration of whether or not the kinds of research undertaken by the CIA as part of MKDECOY and MKULTRA Subproject 61 has any connection with the so-called Havana Syndrome, with its emphasis on symptoms that are similar to those of persistent post-concussion syndrome. According to one paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, individuals suffering from Havana Syndrome “appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma.”
Interrogation and “Brainwashing”
The ONR study on brain damage was transferred in early 1956 to CIA’s MKULTRA program, where it became Subproject 54, and given its own codename, MKDECOY. (It’s possible that this was the code name even earlier, when the CIA was funding the program under ONR auspices.) “MK” was the code prefix for Technical Services Staff (TSS), as OTS was called back in the early 1950s.
Code name prefixes indicated what division within the CIA was responsible for a particular project. The OTR and TSS departments were also labeled at one point as CIA’s Technical Support Division, or TSD, but all three names always identified essentially the same department.
According to a 1957 in-house CIA history, TSS itself had been formed in 1952 by merging CIA’s Operational Aids Division of the Office of Special Operations (OSO), and the Research Division of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). In CIA’s early years, these two covert action entities (OSO and OPC) overlapped and the merger of their support divisions was coincident with the merger of CIA’s two black operations branches.
By late 1955, the Navy’s brain damage research program had moved towards a very sensitive set of ends, and changes were needed. After a year of “theoretical studies” by a CIA-financed ONR outside contractor, according to a January 10, 1956 Memorandum for the Record, “it became apparent that development might be expected in the second year which would make it impossible to operate the program securely under the previous cover.”
The classified memo, nicely titled (for our purposes) “The Conversion of Project MKDECOY from ONR Cover to MKULTRA,” continued:
“Specifically, human experiments of a type not easily justifiable on medical-therapeutic grounds would be involved. In addition, certain items of equipment are likely to be developed which according to Dr. [Shirley Leon] Quimby of ONR could not be covertly handled under the present ONR setup.…
“For the reasons given above and because this project in a general way will begin to become involved in the subjects of interrogation and some aspects of brain-washing, TSS/CD [Chemical Division] has decided that it should be funded through project MKULTRA rather than by less secure methods.” [Bold italics added for emphasis, pg. 14 of PDF]
The “MKDECOY” codename for the project appears on only one existing document, namely the “Conversion” memo just quoted above. It is censored in all other documents, including a duplicate of the Conversion memo included in a group of documents on subproject 54 released by the CIA (see PDF pg. 3). The CIA appeared to try and blur the names MKDECOY and ONR on a different copy of the memo, which was part of an April 1978 release of documents to Department of Defense General Counsel Deanne Siemer (see PDF pg. 43).
This latter set of documents was not declassified until 2004, twenty-seven years after some details on MKDECOY were revealed in the Senate hearing to which Admiral Turner and Frank Laubinger were headed that August morning.
Unfortunately for CIA censors, the names still show through on the Siemer document release, though barely, as evidenced in the screenshots below.
Also censored in one of the two releases, but not in the Siemer documents, was the identification of “Dr. Quimby of ONR” with the project (which Hank Albarelli had already noticed in his book); and the fact that some or much of the ONR research had taken place in Los Angeles, California. I assume that Quimby had been in charge of the DECOY project at ONR, or had been CIA’s liaison to ONR on the work done there.
An obituary for S.L. Quimby in the November 1986 issue of Physics Today noted that besides being professor emeritus in physics at Columbia University, and a long-time official of both the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society, “Quimby was known as an accomplished amateur magician, and had served as president of the parent organization of the Society of American Magicians.”
Quimby’s association with magicians even extended to a friendship with famed magician Harry Houdini. According to Hank Albarelli in A Terrible Mistake, Quimby “had maintained a long association and friendship with [magician John W.] Mulholland,” and had even assisted the latter “with his stage acts” (pg. 257).
Mulholland was long ago identified as working with CIA’s MKULTRA program. He was the CIA’s “in-house magician,” teaching agents sleight-of-hand, the better “to steal items, exchange secret messages, or slip poison pills into drinks.” He also wrote “two manuals for the spy agency that give deft advice about psychology and deception.”
Albarelli identified Quimby as “a key player in an EYES ONLY secret program called Project HKDECOY [sic]”, a “TOP SECRET” project that “initially involved the development of ‘protective gear and other materials and products,’ as well as ‘delivery mechanisms’ for clandestine agents” (A Terrible Secret, pg. 258). Albarelli never knew or noticed, or unaccountably withheld, DECOY’s true purpose.
But Albarelli’s research on Quimby has been helpful. He explained, “Professor Quimby was also a close associate of CIA contractors Dr. Harris Isbell, Dr. Paul Hoch, and Dr. Harold Abramson, as well as several other physicians and university-based scientists who covertly worked for the Agency and the U.S. military” (A Terrible Mistake, pg. 257). Quimby had “participated in LSD experiments conducted by Dr. Isbell at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky.” CIA’s research on LSD will figure in our examination of MKULTRA Subproject 61 later on in this article.
Albarelli did not mention Quimby’s links to ONR, though he did note that Quimby had been “a former wartime Navy lieutenant commander” (pg. 258). In any case, Quimby’s association with MKDECOY meant that the brain damage and concussion-making research had penetrated into the inner sanctum of CIA MKULTRA researchers.
In his notes to the material on “HKDECOY” in his book, Albarelli stated that Henry Bortner was the author of the January 10, 1956 “Conversion” memo, which was about moving DECOY from ONR to the CIA. (See page 791.) I could find no corroborating evidence of Bortner’s authorship, but he seems an apt candidate for the task.
Bortner was a chemistry Ph.D. who was identified in John Marks’ book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, and in various newspaper articles, as a CIA official who worked closely with Sidney Gottlieb. He was one of a number of MKULTRA figures present at the famed 1953 meeting where CIA and Ft. Detrick Special Operations Division officer Frank Olson was reportedly surreptitiously dosed with LSD, or some other drug. A February 1979 article by Joe Trento identified Bortner as “CIA’s liaison with the scientific community.”
The “Perfect Concussion”
Revelations about a bizarre CIA program seeking “techniques to cause brain concussions and amnesia” via sound waves or other methods first surfaced in the August 3, 1977 Senate hearing to which CIA Director Turner and OTS’s Laubinger had come to give testimony.
CIA crimes and policies had been the subject of repeated revelations, reports and hearings ever since the Watergate scandal had broken. In summer 1977, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearings on MKULTRA were a big deal, and were covered closely by the press. Given all the different topics covered in those hearings, I’m going to stick closely to the topic that interests us here, MKDECOY, a subject that has been either overlooked or misinterpreted by the press and subsequent historians.
Consider first this interchange from the August 1977 hearing, and note, as a sign of the times, the seeming distain for the CIA in the attitude of Republican Senator Schweiker:
Senator [Richard S.] SCHWEIKER. The other question I had relates to the development of something which has been called the perfect concussion. A series of experiments toward that end were described in the CIA documents. I wonder if you would just tell us what your understanding of perfect concussion is.
Admiral [Stansfield] TURNER [Director, Central Intelligence Agency]. Is that in my testimony, sir, or in some other document?
Senator SCHWEIKER. Subproject 54, MKULTRA, which involved examination of techniques to cause brain concussions and amnesia by using weapons or sound waves to strike individuals without giving warning and without leaving any clear physical marks. Someone dubbed it "perfect concussion"— maybe that was poetic license on the part of our staff rather than your poets over there. I wonder if you could just tell us what brain concussion experiments were about?
Admiral TURNER. This project, No. 54, was canceled, and never carried out.
Senator SCHWEIKER. Well, I do believe the first year of the project in 1955 was carried out by the Office of Naval Research, according to the information that you supplied us. The CIA seems to have been participating in some way at that point, because the records go on to say that the experimenter at ONR found out about CIA's role, discovered that it was a cover, and then the project was transferred to MKULTRA in 1956. Again, this is all from the backup material you have given us. So, it was canceled at some time. I am not disagreeing with that, but apparently for at least a year or two, somebody was investigating the production of brain concussions with special blackjacks, sound waves, and other methods as detailed in the backup material.
Admiral TURNER. The data available to me is that this project was never funded by the CIA, but I will double-check that and furnish the information for the record for you as to whether there was ever any connection here and if so, what the nature of the work was. [Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, 95th Congress, First Session, August 3, 1977, pgs. 40-41 (PDF pgs. 44-45)]
Some six weeks later, during the September 21, 1977 hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, on the subject of CIA drug testing, OTS’s Laubinger clarified that CIA funding of the ONI concussions project was “really a conduit for the CIA.”
But going back to the August 1977 testimony, we can see that CIA was doing all it could to play down the topic of Subproject 54. Laubinger from CIA’s OTS offered his testimony on the concussion project:
Mr. LAUBINGER. Senator, if I may try to say a few words on that, the files that were available to us for inspection, which are limited, indicated that there was a project being carried on by the Navy having to do with the effects of brain concussion. The CIA developed an interest in that, and considered funding it, but actually never did, and as the admiral testified, the MKULTRA is merely a funding mechanism, a place they go for money to do such things, but there is no evidence that I know of that that project was ever funded.
Senator SCHWEIKER. Well, I am confused, because here again is another quote from a document that we have seen, which you have released and supplied to us:
“Following is the technical progress made under the current [deleted] contract: (a) Specializing instrumentation and numerous testing techniques have been developed to obtain the desired dynamic data; (b) considerable data has now been obtained supporting the resonance-cavilation theory of brain concussion; and (c) preliminary acceleration threshold data has been obtained for a fluid-filled glass simulated skull.”
It goes on to talk about a blast range and a 2,500-square-foot laboratory. The document notes that "Three blast test series have been run to date." It describes a special blackjack device, "a pancake-type blackjack giving a high peak impact force with a low unit surface pressure." I agree the records are inconclusive as to the results of this work, but it certainly seems that some testing was done.
Mr. LAUBINGER. Senator, you are putting us in the same position I think you were stating that you were in earlier referring to documents not before us, but I believe you are quoting from a proposal that someone sent to the Agency to fund this work, and he is referring to past work. The past work would have encompassed a lot of things like that, but CIA was not involved with that.
It’s evident that both Turner and Laubinger were being less than truthful about what was known about the program. But I would expect them to do that. CIA did fund the program after transfer from ONR to MKULTRA, and I have posted the January 11, 1956 memo to that effect earlier in this article.
What’s amazing is that faced with obvious CIA truculence about the program, Schweiker then let the subject drop. It briefly surfaced again during the September 1997 hearings mentioned above, but so far as I can tell, never again.
The press noticed the interchange at the Senate hearing, but besides the soundbite of the “perfect concussion,” had little to say about the topic.
An August 21, 1977 article by Al Larkin at The Boston Globe referenced MKDECOY, though not by name. Larkin commented on the effect of the destruction of most MKULTRA documents, as revealed during testimony:
What has happened is that the details of one of the nation’s most elaborate covert operations — aimed in part at determining the effects on human beings of everything from LSD and alcohol to knockout drugs and brain concussions — have already been put through the paper shredder…. From those [remaining] documents we know now that the CIA… used cadavers to determine just how and where to strike the human skull to cause concussion….” (pg. 54)
A more complete, if brief, description of the August 1977 revelations appeared in an August 5, 1977 article by Nicholas Horrock and Joseph Treaster in The New York Times. At the close of an article primarily about CIA experiments with drugs on “sexual psychopaths,” the Times reporters mentioned a project wherein the Agency “exploded liquid-filled glass models of heads and human cadavers in an attempt to test the levels of brain concussion” (pg. A10).
Horrock and Treaster elaborated: “Although the documents were heavily edited, it appeared that the agency was testing not only brain concussion levels, but also brainwashing techniques.”
In experiments that supposedly did not rely on human subjects, “the agency tested a blackjack shaped like a pancake, an air gun that shot a small sack filled with lead shot and a soft pad that exploded when it came in contact with the body. In another experiment it tested a sound wave so forceful that only a minute blast of sound could cause concussion” [bold italics added for emphasis].
“A tool in brain-wash therapy”
The document Senator Schweiker quoted to Frank Laubinger — the one that cited the 25,000-square-foot laboratory” and the “pancake-type blackjack” — was in fact the December 16, 1955 “Proposal” by the CIA’s contractor for continuing work on the project for fiscal year 1956. It’s from this Proposal that we can understand what MKDECOY was all about, so we will turn now to an examination of its contents. A reproduction of the Proposal can be found on PDF pages 21-27 of the April 1978 Siemer document release. (The bulk of the Proposal also was reproduced in the Senate Select Committee August 1977 report on MKULTRA, on pages 165-168.)
The proposal was a request for funding “for research on the mechanism of brain concussion.” The funding period was from February 1956 to February 1957. The research itself was based on something called the “resonance-cavitation theory” of concussion. I’m not going to go into technical details about the theory, which I’m not sure I totally understand in any case (and which it appears may be outdated), but will concentrate on the “potential applications” of the research, which is what primarily interested the CIA.
I think the contractor-author of the proposal to the CIA was likely Arthur G. Gross, who had made a name for himself with his resonance-cavitation theory of brain concussion. The evidence of Gross’s participation is based on a September 20, 1977 memorandum for the record from DoD General Counsel Dianne Siemer to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown which briefly outlined the ONR project that would be transferred to CIA in early 1956.
According to Siemer, the Navy program on “Identification of effects of blast concussion…. began in October, 1954 and was terminated, at least with respect to the Navy, in December, 1955.” The work “was performed by a contractor located in California. The involvement of the Navy was primarily as a conduit of funds from the Central Intelligence Agency to the contractor.” Siemer stated that after the program was terminated, “it thereafter apparently became subproject 54 of the MKULTRA project…. The contractor was investigating the theory of the dynamics of brain concussion. Fluid-filled flasks were used to meaure the effect of blast impacts from a 2 1/2 lb. charge of dynamite 10 feet away. The results of this work were published in 1957 in a 17-page report entitled ‘On the Impact Thresholds of Brain Concussion.’”
Siemer identified the latter document as originating from Gross Research Laboratories, Inc. (See Appendix B, Item 19, of Siemer’s memorandum.) In addition, a 1957 article by Arthur G. Gross in the September 1958 Journal of Neurosurgery identified Gross as associated with “Gross Research Laboratories, Inc., Inglewood, California.” Inglewood is a suburb near Los Angeles International Airport. Gross’s article was titled, “A New Theory on the Dynamics of Brain Concussion and Brain Injury,” which with its discussion of the use of “fluid-filled flasks simulating the human head” (p. 548) sounds totally in sync with the ONR-funded CIA research program.
Neither Gross or his eponymous organization appears in any other searches on the subject of brain pathology or research. He probably was a CIA researcher. Even so, despite the likelihood Gross was the ONR/CIA contractor for MKDECOY, I can’t say I have definitive proof of that. Hence for the purposes of this essay I will assume the author of the “Proposal” for MKDECOY is unknown.
The Proposal author made a point that, per a famous quote by Wilfred Trotter, a British neurosurgeon who died in 1939, a concussion, which is “an essentially transient state due to head injury which is of instantaneous onset… is always followed by amnesia for the actual moment of the accident” (emphasis in original). The Proposal author emphasized the point about amnesia probably because he knew that topic was of high interest to his putative CIA sponsors.
Indeed, the Proposal continued, “if a technique were devised to induce brain concussion without giving either advance warning or causing external physical trauma, the person upon recovery would be unable to recall what had happened to him.” Under such circumstances, the procedure could be repeated “many times without disclosure of its nature.”
The author of the proposal thought the research to be undertaken could ultimately determine an “optimal design” for a concussion impact device. The work to be undertaken would study “optimum points of impact on skull or body for the specific effects desired,” as well as the “intensity of the blow for the effect desired.”
Almost coyly, the Proposal’s author laid out “certain design requsites [sic] that are apparent at this time.” Such design requisites were necessarily consistent with a covert device. First, “The impact should be delivered without advance warning.” Second, there should be no visible evidence of surface trauma. No blood, or swelling or abrasions! Third, “The intensity of the impacting force and its duration should be such as to obtain the desired effect.”
Finally, “The device should be as small and as silent as possible.”
What would such a CIA concussion-making device look like? The Proposal author described “a pancake type black-jack,” as already mentioned in The NY Times article. But also there was the possibility of developing "Concealed or camouflaged spring-loaded impacting devices that trigger upon contact with the head.” There were two other suggestions for a concussion-causing weapon: an “air gun” type projectile “using a small shot filled sack for a projectile,” and an "explosive pad detonated in contact with the head or the body." Grisly stuff!
Still, if you don’t want physical evidence of external physical trauma, then you want something that can produce a brain injury without direct physical impact, and that is precisely what the Proposal author considered next.
The author felt that “resonance cavitation,” which produces bubbles in the cerebrospinal fluid that then impacts brain cells, could be produced without physical impact via “A blast wave propagated in air (blast concussion),” which needed “considerable intensity in order to produce brain concussion.” The work on blast concussion is likely what had involved ONR, as the Navy was already concerned with the effects of such explosions. One wonders how many concussions sailors on destroyers experienced from the blasts of the ship’s huge guns.
Another touchless method would rely upon "physical excitation with a mechanical driver or horn, tuned to the resonant frequency of the head.” The contractor-author of the Subproject 54 proposal argued that use of a “tuned driver” to excite resonance-cavitation in the brain could possibly induce “neurotic-like manifestations normally associated with blast concussion.”
Such a “tuned driver” excitation device seemed to the Proposal author to be “well within the realm of possibility.” Its action would be remarkably swift and easy to hide, and likely to produce the amnesia states and other forms of impaired brain functioning sought for “brainwashing.”
The Proposal author elaborated:
Concentration of the sound field at some remote point could be effected with acoustical lenses and reflectors. The blast duration would be in the order of a tenth of a second. Masking of a noise of this duration should not be too difficult. It would possibly be advantageous to establish the effectiveness of both of the above methods as a tool in brain-wash therapy. A full knowledge of the method and the resulting sequela should be of aid to any person forced to submit to such treatment.
By “brain-wash therapy,” it’s clear that the CIA contractor was not referring to any therapeutic technique. Still, the Proposal set forth the idea, hinted in the last sentence in the quote above, of the defensive use of the knowledge gained by such procedures.
“Possibly the most significant potential aspect of this study would be in the development of practical means of giving a person immunity, even though temporary, to brain concussion,” the Proposal stated. It’s not clear how “practical” such means might be, as the contractor’s example involved introducing "a small quantity of gas, approximately 1 cc, into the spinal cord" where it could "expand under dynamic loading" and "be most effective in preventing resonance cavitation from occuring [sic[.”
The total proposal budget request for fiscal year 1956 was $60,000, or somewhat over $700,000 in today’s dollars. The proposal was submitted on December 16, 1955. On January 10, 1956, in a memo both cited and reproduced earlier in this article, Subproject 54 was approved. If it was indeed later cancelled, as CIA Director Turner declared, the CIA has never produced any evidence of that.
I do want to point out, however, that the documents we have on Subproject 54, aka MKDECOY, do not include the various accounting slips and financial reports that accompany many other MKULTRA subprojects. This could be considered circumstantial evidence that the project was indeed cancelled, or otherwise never went forward. However, since it is a matter of record that the CIA destroyed the bulk of materials surrounding MKULTRA, we cannot use the absence of records as proof of anything.
MKULTRA Subproject 61
Before leaving our historical retrospective on this issue, it’s worthwhile considering another MKULTRA subproject, namely Subproject 61, which concerned “studies on brain damage in human beings” (PDF, pg. 29). So far as I can see, this MKULTRA project has not been the subject of any journalistic or historical analyses to date.
This lack of attention to a CIA MKULTRA project is not simply due to a lack of will, or even government repression, although both of these play a role. I assess the paucity of analysis as stemming from journalists’ and academics’ fears that one’s career will not move forward if these kinds of analyses are the subject of one’s work. The same issue haunts historical accounts of the biological warfare allegations from the Korean War.
According to a declassified set of documents on Subproject 61, the purpose of that MKULTRA research, like that of Subproject 54 (aka MKDECOY), centered around damage to the brain resulting in loss of cerebral tissue and the resulting psychological and behavioral consequences of such damage.
Purpose: To study the role of the human brain in overall adaptive behavior. Specifically, to show the relationship of changes in behavior to stress (mental disorders, sensory deprivation, peptic ulcers, threatening life situations, etc.) to changes in behavior brought about by actual loss of cerebral tissue (MKULTRA 61). [PDF pg. 1]
According to this same (undated) document, work on Subproject 61 began in 1956 as part of another project, the identity of which is still classified. This same document stated that the “current” research on the project commenced in August 1960. Given the subject matter, I’m going to guess that Subproject 61 was related to or evolved out of MKDECOY research. The amount budgeted for the fiscal year September 1960 through August 1961 was similar to that slotted for MKDECOY in 1956, namely a little over $58,000. However, a few years earlier, Subproject 61’s program received significantly more per annum. In 1958, there were at least two payments made of $50,000 each. (See PDF, pgs. 46-47.)
The 1961 budget included items for purchase of “animals,” presumably for experimental purposes (including cats, as we shall see below); various chemicals; books; lab apparatus; a machine “for scanning EEG alpha waves for brain function studies”; and $1800 to pay experimental human subjects “for brain function studies.”
Another totally bizarre CIA experiment along these lines included the production of a “catatonic state” in “unanesthetized cats” by means of “intraventricular injections of neurokinin.”
In addition, over $40,000 was set aside for salaries for two doctors, two technicians (whose specialty or specialities have been classified), a “Biochemical Technician” and a “Psychological Technician,” a Secretary, and a “Part-time Diener.” (A “diener”, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a laboratory helper especially in a medical school.”) A different list of salaried employees, dated November 20, 1961, ran to 21 total personnel, including five consultants and three secretaries (see PDF, pg. 2).
The money was funded via a “cutout,” which according to a conspiratorial-looking online list of MKULTRA projects at a website called “IlluminatiRex,” was the “Medical Sciences Research Foundation and Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.” Ordinarily I wouldn’t link to any site pushing conspiracies about the “Illuminati”, but in this case their information concerning Subproject 61 appears to be correct and can be corroborated to a large extent.
The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was associated, at least in its origins, with Cornell University. According to a note from the archivist at Medical Center Archives of New York - Presbyterian/Weill Cornell:
The human ecology program was established in 1954 as a joint program of the Departments of Medicine, Division of Neurology and Psychiatry. Dr. Harold Wolff was the head of the program, which studied the interaction of people and their environment and its impact on their health. Some of the research was funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which had connections to the CIA. After Dr. Wolff's death in 1962, Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, Jr. took over the program, which became a separate division in 1963. [pg. 2]
One of the documents in the collection on Subproject 61 described a transfer of $14,614.75 to an unnamed institution (PDF, pg. 15). The money was the third such transfer made as part of a grant to that institution for work in “Human Ecology.” This would seem to indicate the institution in question was Cornell University, or rather its medical center. The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology began its existence as a CIA front group, or financial cut-out, at Cornell University. (Note: There are other such notices of monetary transfer in the document set.)
The contractor is named by “IlluminatiRex” as CIA stalwart, Dr. Harold Woolf at Cornell University Medical Center. Cornell was itself the site of a secret CIA program related to MKULTRA, known as CHICKWIT. (For more on CIA’s CHICKWIT program, see A.M. Grotto & J. Moon, Weill Cornell Medicine: A History of Cornell's Medical School, Cornell University Press, 2016, pages 115-117.)
[Update, Jan. 19, 2025: Thanks to one of my readers, @surreal_news at X/Twitter, I’ve learned that an “MKULTRA Briefing Book” released by the CIA in 1999 provided more information about the CIA programs considered in this article (alternate link). According to this document, originally obtained by TheBlackVault.com, Subproject 54 was indeed meant “to study the mechanism of brain concussion” (pg. 163). The MKDECOY codename is not mentioned, and the entry for this study says it was not funded by CIA.
The document, like the rest of the material in the “Briefing Book,” is likely a form of “limited hangout.” The entry never mentions ONR. It never mentions the goal of creating a covert concussion-making device. It claims that its funding mechanism was the Geschickter Fund, a well-established CIA cut-out. This belies the claim that CIA did not fund the work. The project was said to be cancelled. Even so, the names for both the “Research Participant” and one of the two “CIA monitors” is censored. The one monitor named was Sidney Gottlieb.
As for Subproject 61, the declassified, formerly Secret document states that the “Principal Researcher and Location” was Cornell University Medical School in Ithaca, New York. The program ran from approximately 1956-1960, i.e., the project appears to pick up after MKDECOY was either cancelled, or to otherwise complement the work of that subproject. The name of Subproject 61’s “witting” Research Participant is redacted. CIA claimed it didn’t know if the seventeen research assistants who worked on the project were “witting” or not, i.e., aware of the project’s clandestine purposes.
The Briefing Book also states that Subproject 61’s primary objective was “Spefically [sic] to show the relationship of changes in behavior due to stress to changes in behavior brought about by actual loss of cerebral tissues” (pg. 178). The funding was through the cover agencies, the Medical Sciences Research Foundation and Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, Inc., just as claimed at the IlluminatiRex website. There were three CIA monitors on the project, but only “Mr. Robert V. Lashbrook” is mentioned by name; the other names were redacted. (Wolff is not mentioned, or his name is redacted.) Lashbrook was an aide to MKULTRA chief Gottlieb. Notoriously, Lashbrook was present in the hotel room when Frank Olson was defenestrated by, it would seem, CIA assassins. — End Update]
According to an August 29, 1960 memo, “Continuation of Project MKULTRA, Subproject 61,” “In the course of this research new techniques of measurement and new instrumentation is being developed with application in other areas of TSD/[redacted] interests.” The memo was signed by the Chief of TSD’s Research Branch, Sidney Gottlieb, though the name is redacted in the document linked in the PDF (pg. 10-11). Gottlieb noted in the memo that 1961 would probably be the last year of CIA support for this project, and that funding would likely shift to other governmental and/or private sources.
According to a “Proposed Activities” document, marked “Sensitive Intelligence,” covering the period from September 1, 1960 through August 31, 1961 (PDF, pgs. 12-14), one focus of the project was "concerned with extending and analyzing phenomenon established in previous studies, that the functional capacity of the nervous system is impaired following prolonged periods of inadequate and unsuccessful adaptation."
The CIA’s analysis would necessitate psychological tests and observations upon patients with both “chronic” and “severe” conditions. The specific types of conditions remain classified and therefore are censored in the available documentation. However, I believe the CIA is talking about patients with cerebral cortex lesions, as elsewhere in the document they specify the study of patients “with lesions of the brain in regions other than the cerebral hemispheres.”
The “Proposed Activities” description of Subproject 61 also states that a major aspect of their research concerned “the observation that subjects with [approximately five or six words redacted] as well as ostensibly intact patients with prolonged and [approximately three words redacted] are defective in their capacity to form ‘temporary cerebral connections’ or ‘conditioned reactions’ as demonstrated by the electroencephalograph.”
The censorship makes this passage hard to follow, but it appears to concern brain damaged individuals. The passage above is followed by reference to other research subject groups, including “patients with schizophrenic reactions,” the patients with non-cerebral brain lesions, and “subjects who are experiencing severe stress and/or anxiety, especially in subjects who are adapting to a new environment.” This particular document doesn’t say what difficult new environment they might be concerned with, but it doesn’t take much imagination to think that they could be including those stressed by recent arrest or imprisonment.
The documents never state where this research was to take place, but given all the talk of “patients”, there’s little doubt the research took place at a hospital, or the researchers had access to a hospital, or perhaps a clinic. The CIA worked with a number of hospitals and clinics during the MKULTRA years, so it’s not clear which hospital the research occurred at, or whether in fact it didn’t occur over a range of different hospital or clinical settings.
One clue as to where some of the research might have taken place can be found in a Summary of Expenses for fiscal year 1957-1958. The list of expenditures includes an entry for an “Amount Obligated for Unpaid Bills (including security on Phipps House).” Unfortunately there are many “Phipps Houses,” though most are in New York City. A 2003 New York Times article on the subject noted, “In the 1950's, Phipps Houses built and operated staff housing for New York Hospital,” which was associated with Cornell Medical School.
Another focus of Subproject 61 concerned “axon reflex vasodilatatian [sic] (neurokinin)… implicated in the mechanism of a variety of disease states.” According to the ScienceDirect website, “neurokinins are a class of peptide signaling molecules that play a role in various functions such as pain processing, gastrointestinal function, stress responses, and anxiety.”
The CIA’s pursuit of the effects of neurokinins ranged from examining the relationship (if any) between neurokinins and migraine headaches, as well as the presence of neurokinins in the “abdominal viscera” of human subjects during interviews “dealing with aspects of the patients‘ life situation that are particularly threatening.” The latter necessitated the study of patients with colostomies and ileostomies. Studies of neurokinins in cerebrospinal fluid were also discussed in the “Proposed Activities” document.
A related focus of the subproject work concerned biochemical and pharmacological studies on neurokinin. Where was such research headed? One interesting comment said, “it has been observed that LSD-25, an agent that induces delirium when administered in extremely small amounts, strongly potentiates one apparent action of neurokinin (stimulation of respiration)” (PDF, pg. 13). Examining the effects of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs on unwitting experimental subjects was a major aim of MKULTRA studies.
Another totally bizarre CIA experiment along these lines included the production of a “catatonic state” in “unanesthetized cats” by means of “intraventricular injections of neurokinin.” The author(s) of the “Proposed Activities” document assured those perusing the information therein that the experiment on cats would help “guide studies with human subjects concerning the role of neurokinin in the impairment of the highest integrative functions of the brain observed in those with psychosis” (PDF, pg. 14). Given the previous mention of LSD, such psychoses would seem to include those that were drug-induced. Still, one wonders how the cat experiments really informed the work with human subjects.
All of this research was supposed to culminate in a book length monograph summarizing the work of the research group.
Attacking the ‘highest integrative functions’ of the organism
One undated document, which was a “Progress Report, and Proposal for the Coming Year” was probably written towards the close of 1957, according to references made within the document. This Progress Report provides the best documentation we have for the history of the initiation of Subproject 61. The full “Progress Report, and Proposal” takes up PDF pgs. 53-60 in the CIA’s release of Subproject 61 documents.
At this early point in the history of Subproject 61, the initial emphasis was not on the study of brain damage per se, though that was its obvious goal. Instead, the entire enterprise was grandiosely packaged as a “Study Program… of Highest Integrative Functions.” The author or authors of the Progress Report wrote that the current program “arose out of our laboratory and clinical experience during the past twenty years, and especially out of our interest in the phenomena exhibited by men exposed to extremely threatening life situations; and they were initiated during the period when we were investigating the untoward effects of Communist police procedures.”
If this document was written in 1957 or 1958, the lab experience the author(s) speak of goes back to the late 1930s, well before the establishment of the CIA, or even its predecessor, the WW2-era Office of Strategic Services. So what the report is speaking about here is the work of an independent, probably university-domiciled laboratory project. If Dr. Wolff was the key contractor, we can assume that the program that stretched back some twenty years originated at Cornell University Medical Center (CUMC), which was headquartered in New York City. But, since the CIA’s “mind control program” was spread over “eighty-five universities, medical research institutions, and government hospitals in the United States and Canada, including CUMC,” I can’t be sure where the pre-CIA-era program originated (PDF pg. 142).
The document’s description of Subproject 61 (or even, perhaps, MKDECOY before that) was linked to the investigation of the effects of “Communist police procedures,” marking 61’s origination as in the late 1940s, or possibly the early 1950s, i.e., in the early days of the Cold War, when the CIA was concerned with the confessions in East European show trials of Hungary’s Cardinal József Mindszenty and ITT businessman Robert A. Vogeler, among others. What set MKULTRA in motion was certainly the shock of the confessions of numerous Air Force and Marine airmen, some of them colonels and majors, to U.S. use of biological weapons during the last two years of the Korean War.
The first CIA mind-control program was Project Bluebird, followed by Project Artichoke, programs which were obsessed with the idea that the two superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR, were in a competitive race to control or “brainwash” people’s minds. In particular, U.S. intelligence services were looking for a way to produce amnesia in its agents, and to combat resistance to interrogation in captured foreign agents. The popular 1960s movies, The Iprcress File and The Manchurian Candidate, played off the paranoia generated by this “mind control” race.
Such is the background that informs our understanding of the brain damage studies under MKULTRA which we are considering in this article.
The “Progress Report” on Subproject 61 describes what was understood thus far from the CIA’s brain pathology research, which was based on an extensive study of 250 brain-damaged individuals undertaken over a four-year time span. This group was compared with two other subject groups, namely 50 individuals with psychiatric diagnoses of depression, anxiety, and psychosis, and another 25 individuals “with bodily illnesses such as peptic ulcer, ulcerative colitis, and migraine headaches” (PDF, pg. 54).
The researchers believed that thanks to this research “it has been possible to define some of the adaptive functions of the human [sic] that are primarily subserved by the neopallius” [what we would call the neocortex or cerebral hemispheres - JK]. These adaptive functions represented “the ‘highest integrative functions’ of the organism” (PDF pg. 54). Such integrative or adaptive functions include those involved with expression, memory, frustration tolerance, planning and purposeful task behavior, and the world of normative psychological defenses, including use of fantasy, repression, denial, rationalization, projection, etc.
The CIA researchers found that when significantly stressed, the adaptability of those with neurotic and psychotic mental difficulties, as well as those with chronic health problems, was as poor as that of a brain damaged individuals. The author of the Progress Report for MKULTRA’s Project 61 wrote:
“Evidence from the study of the chronically anxious, tense, depressed, and schizophrenic subjects indicates that their highest integrative functions… falls off in a manner not distinguishable from that of people who have sustained brain damage…. in their ability to express their feelings appropriately, to utilize their goal-achieving mechanisms effectively, to tolerate frustration and failure, and to maintain well-modulated defense reactions, they are indistinguishable from those who have sustained direct damage to their brains.” (PDF, pg. 55)
Similar results were obtained from their sample of subjects “with disturbances of bodily adaptive reaction patterns such as peptic ulcer.”
Faced with such results, CIA scientists (or CIA contract scientists from academia) considered the data and wondered if “substances associated with disturbed cerebral metabolism might appear in the spinal fluid” of both those with “only symptoms of disturbed function” (such as those chronically anxious, schizophrenics, etc.), and those with actual brain damage (PDF, pg. 56).
The CIA’s “Progress Report” on Subproject 61 found the search for such spinal fluid substances to be “unexpectedly fruitful”!
The “Progress Report” described the discovery of “a substance with the characteristics of an enzyme,” which “has many of the characteristics of a polypeptide found in blister fluid and other inflammatory exudates, which has been called ‘bradykinin.’” (PDF, pg. 56]
According to a 2006 article in the scientific journal Peptides, “Bradykinin is one of the most important products released by pathophysiological processes that are activated following tissue injury…. [it] plays an important role in cerebrovascular pathologies….”
This new enzyme or polypeptide (which resembled bradykinin), was found in a majority of people CIA researchers studied with brain damage. They also found the substance in the spinal fluid of those who had symptoms of vascular headache, and in ninety percent of subjects with “active schizophrenia” but no “other active evidence of disease.” It seems possible that this new enzyme or polypeptide was related to the later Subproject 61 work on neurokinin, a related but different substance from bradykinin. However, I can’t be sure of that, and I would need more biochemical expertise to determine if there were any such association.
Whatever this new enzyme was, the CIA felt it was something that would help them understand a person’s physiological reactions, with particular possible insights into brain pathologies, which resulted from exposure to environments of extreme stress. Examples of such “environments” included those “to which [individuals] can make no adequate adaptation, such as concentration camps, or prison procedures aimed at interrogation and indoctrination” (PDF, pg. 57, italics added for emphasis).
“Therefore, it seems reasonable to infer,” CIA researchers wrote, “that exposure to such a situation in itself produces an impairment of cerebral hemisphere function; and that this impairment may sometimes be very grave” (ibid.).
As we shall see in the next section of this essay, I believe the CIA moved beyond inference and decided to test whether their hypothesis on exposure to environments of extreme stress, such as were present at Guantanamo and CIA black sites, caused brain damage.
If true, it may help us understand perhaps why a number of seriously wounded prisoners were renditioned from the battlefields of Afghanistan to Guantanamo in the early months of 2002, an exercise that apparently resulted in a number of unreported deaths at the U.S.-run Cuban base. Were these prisoners needed for an elaborate experiment on the effects of brain damage, one that required the presence of newly brain-injured subjects, or even fresh human cadavers? — Macabre, I know, but then the entire subject of MKDECOY and Subproject 61 is macabre.
Looking towards the work going into 1958 and beyond, Subproject 61 project leaders suggested further research comparing groups of young diabetes patients with patients who had a portion of their cerebral hemispheres surgically removed. Another proposal concerned a study of “a carefully selected group of working women,” which would be divided into women in good health and those in poor health. Additionally, the subproject would conduct a “follow-up study” on a group that had already been studied, the identity of which was censored in the document.
The researchers also planned to continue studies of the enzyme CIA had discovered in spinal fluid. One such study included examining the effects of an “anti-bradykinin” agent, such as chymotrypsin, on people “with migraine headache and schizophrenia” (PDF, pg. 59), anong other studies considered. At this point, the CIA researchers evidently were interested in the effects of bradykinin itself.
Another report on plans for Subproject 61 for the period July 1957 through June 1958 made a consequential observation crucial to CIA interrogation plans. It determined “that the functions of the human brain and possibly its structure may be damaged as a consequence of prolonged stress. This thesis is now almost fully documented,” the researchers wrote. It was CIA’s intention to continue to document “the biologic mechanisms behind these damaging processes,” with the hope of “avoiding and eliminating” the damages done by such prolonged stress (PDF, pg. 63).
This last statement makes it appear that CIA sought to ameliorate brain damage from stress. Perhaps they sincerely wanted to help those who had been caught by an “enemy,” imprisoned and either tortured, or otherwise exposed to serious stressors. Still, a June 22, 1956 “Memorandum for the Record” on Subproject 61 indicated that the program was based on three major goals, some of which involved “exploitation” of the knowledge gained, including use of such information for “predictive” purposes. “Exploitation” is a term used by the intelligence world for “obtaining intelligence information from any source and taking advantage of it for intelligence purposes.”
Accordion to the June 1956 memorandum, the goals were:
1) To evaluate current research on the central nervous system “in order to understand better what types of research on modification and exploitation of CNS function will be most productive.”
2) To understand better “the elements of frustration adaption” in both brain-damaged and non-brain damaged subjects.
3) “To evaluate these reactions to see what extent frustration adaptation can be prevented, postponed, modified and predicted.” (PDF, pg. 76)
It’s from the goals of “exploitation,” “modification,” and the prevention of “frustration adaptation” that a pernicious use is suspected. For instance, there is always a problem of predicting how much stress a prisoner can manage, and still be exploited for either information or other collaborative use. The entire controversy over waterboarding inside the government was not about its ethical misuse as torture, but whether or not it induced too much stress and overwhelmed the adaptive capacities of a prisoner, making them unavailable for exploitation by the government.
Furthermore, for what purposes would CIA wish to be able to prevent, postpone, or modify “frustration adaptation”? The latter represents the means whereby a human being adjusts to all sorts of frustrating circumstances or environments. “Frustrating” such adaptation or adjustment would render an individual — most likely a prisoner or interrogation subject — helpless to that same environment, and at risk of psychological breakdown, if not stress-induced brain damage.
This seems like a good place to bring us back, after a long digression into CIA’s pursuit of cerebral science, to something like the present day.
Post-9/11 Brain-damaged Guinea Pigs for the CIA and the Pentagon
I came across both MKULTRA subprojects 54 and 61 based upon an observation and a hunch. The observation concerned the irrefutable fact that both the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense singled out two individuals, respectively, as test cases for their experiment in using a special torture program on post-9/11 detainees. These two prisoners were Abu Zubaydah, held initially at CIA’s “Cat’s Eye” black site in Thailand, and Mohammed Al Qahtani, imprisoned at Guantanamo. (Zubaydah, too, was held from September 2003 to March 2004 at the CIA black site at Guantanamo’s Camp Echo, as well as at other CIA black sites after he was transferred out of “Cat’s Eye,” also known as “Detention Site Green.” He was returned to Guantanamo in September 2006.)
Both prisoners were touted as major Al Qaeda terrorists. Neither prisoner turned out to be key figures in any terrorist network. But both of them shared one thing in common, something which has long bothered me as it seemed beyond mere coincidence: both men had histories of serious head trauma prior to their capture by U.S. forces.
Zubaydah had suffered a grave brain injury in December 1991, when he was hit by a mortar battling the Soviet-backed Afghanistan government, afterward undergoing a long rehabilitation, and even a period of amnesia.
Al Qahtani had received his brain injury in childhood, when at age eight “he was thrown from the car and suffered a traumatic brain injury, after which his performance in school, which had been excellent, suddenly collapsed,” according to a Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) webpage dedicated to his legal case.
The CCR website elaborated more on Al Qahtani’s subsequent mental illness:
In late adolescence, the classic age for onset of schizophrenia, his family witnessed uncontrolled crying and inability to deal with basic life functions. At one point the Riyadh police pulled [Al Qahtani] naked from a garbage dumpster he had thrown himself into. Later, in Mecca in May 2000, he was arrested by police after throwing himself half-naked into traffic and was involuntarily confined to a psychiatric hospital where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Does this sound like the profile of an Al Qaeda mastermind or high-level terrorist? Of course not. So why did they pick him out, and why hide for many years his history of brain damage and psychosis?
Abu Zubaydah was the paradigmatic case for the CIA’s testing of the efficacy of its new “enhanced interrogation” (torture) protocol. As an October 2017 op-ed at The Washington Post put it:
Zubaydah was the "guinea pig" of the CIA torture program. He was the first prisoner sent to a secret CIA "black site," the first to have his interrogation "enhanced " and the only prisoner subjected to all of the CIA's approved techniques, as well as many that were not authorized. He is the man for whom the George W. Bush administration wrote the infamous torture memo in the summer of 2002. [links in original]
Zubaydah suspected that he was part of some kind of experiment. “It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people,” he told a representative for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
For its part, the CIA determined early on that because of their experiment, Abu Zubaydah would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life”! Who gives an “intelligence” agency the power to make such a determination?
The “incommunicado” decision was discussed in a July 15, 2002 CIA cable:
“If [Abu Zubaydah] develops a serious medical condition which may involve a host of conditions including a heart attack or another catastrophic type of condition, all efforts will be made to ensure that proper medical care will be provided. In the event that he dies, we need to be prepared to act accordingly, keeping in mind the liaison equities involving our hosts... regardless which [disposition] option we follow however, and especially in light of the planned psychological pressure techniques to be implemented, we need to get reasonable assurances that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”
As for Mohammed Al Qahtani, a May 2008 essay by Rafael Behr at The Guardian/Observer explained that the Saudi prisoner “was alleged to be an accomplice in the 9/11 plot, a hardcore terrorist. He seemed immune to the established army interrogation techniques, which [supposedly - JK] complied with the Geneva Conventions. So al-Qahtani was made the guinea pig for a new set of techniques. They included the use of ‘stress positions’, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, pushing, prodding, forced nudity, exploitation of phobias, simulated drowning.”
Nor were they the only high-profile prisoners who were tortured despite a history of brain injuries and related later symptoms. Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif, a young Yemeni prisoner who suspiciously died from a drug overdose at Guantanamo in September 2012, had suffered significant head injuries in a 1994 automobile accident, losing partial vision and hearing. The ongoing medical difficulties had led Latif to seek medical treatment in first Jordan, and then Pakistan.
Al Qahtani was released from Guantanamo in March 2022, and was transferred to Saudi Arabia, where he expected to receive treatment for his mental illness.
Abu Zubaydah still sits in a prison at Guantanamo. Al Jazeera published his diaries in 2013, which mostly covered his time fighting Soviet forces and the Afghanistan government in the early 1990s. Zubaydah’s entry for July 28, 1992 describes what happened to him when he was seriously wounded over seven months earlier (on Dec. 22, 1991). The abbreviation “IL” used in the published diary apparently stands for “illegible.”
What happened is that I had a "head" injury [IL] a mortar shell exploded suddenly near by us ... "Smoke, dust and terrifying sound." [IL] But thank God, nothing happened, and we returned to our locations [IL] laughing and making comments.
I held the ablution pitcher and I started laughing and making comments myself. But suddenly I could no longer see anything [IL] and I could no longer hear a sound. I even was no longer able to move, as if I were an electric device and the electricity is disconnected from it!!
Suddenly again a second rocket shell exploded at the same distance or even closer "I knew these information [IL] latter" I was hit by a sharp and hot shrapnel that traveled to the depth of my scull [IL]. "Very small [IL], the size of a fly ... I didn't feel anything except darkness.
It is not clear to me exactly how aware U.S. government interrogators were of the preexisting injuries of these men. Secrecy still surrounds many of the events surrounding their capture and their incarceration. The interrogation videotapes of Abu Zubaydah’s “enhanced interrogation” were purposefully destroyed. The head injuries of all these men were more substantial than a concussion or mild TBI (traumatic brain injury), which make up the bulk of most brain injuries in combat.
I wondered, could the government have chosen these men precisely because they had a history of serious brain trauma? If these men were meant to be test cases for the use of “extraordinary” interrogation measures (torture), then wouldn’t a history of head injury make their findings suspect when it came to generalizing out to effects on all possible interrogation subjects? Rather than “test cases,” were Abu Zubaydah and Mohammed Al Qahtani instead key comparative cases in a study on the differential effects of torture and incarceration stress on prisoner nervous systems?
While such questions are speculative, perhaps the decision to use two brain-damaged individuals as special initial cases in the new torture protocols being tested out by the CIA and the Department of Defense, was because there was another covert operation, or rather experiment, going on.
Could it be that the kinds of research that went on during MKDECOY and MKULTRA Subproject 61 necessitated the presence of a control group of brain-damaged individual to compare the effects of the stress of torture with other prisoners who were not so cerebrally-impaired or damaged? Was this not the kind of cross-group experiment done under the aforementioned programs? Was the CIA’s intention to derive a new protocol that would determine when an individual under torture was mentally disabled enough to become cooperative, while at the same time avoiding a situation where torture would either totally disable or substantially temporarily disable the prisoner, which would render him unavailable for “exploitation”?
In my mind, these questions are not outside the realm of possibility. The CIA, and by extension its media and academic assets, have made a concerted effort over the years to hide the particulars of their covert work on the science behind how to affect brain damage. The information compiled and discussed in the present essay was only made possible after a brief window of revelatory declassifications occurred in the heady post-Watergate years of the Church report, and a cascade of journalistic exposes riding upon the U.S. crushing defeat in Vietnam.
Havana Syndrome?
It seems worthwhile pondering as well whether the CIA’s past research into both the study of brain damage, and attempts to develop a covert concussion device, are at all relevant to the mysterious outbreaks of symptoms gathered under the rubric of “Havana Syndrome,” or “Anomalous Health Incidents” (AHIs).
According to the Pentagon’s Military Health System, AHIs are “rare conditions that first occurred in 2016. Employees of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, described sudden unexplained head pressure, head or ear pain, dizziness, and more.”
“In recent years, other federal employees reported a series of sudden and disturbing sensory events. The scientific community’s understanding of AHI is still evolving.”
Havana Syndrome has a controversial history. Were the symptoms a kind of mass hysteria? Were they the consequences of a diabolical foreign-based assault on U.S. intelligence personnel, as some maintained? Most recently, a January 10, 2025 report issued by the National Intelligence Council documented the ongoing controversy over what the medical claims are really all about, and the fact that there is ongoing disagreement within the government about the causative factor (or factors) behind the complaints.
But much earlier, in early 2018, the University of Pennsylvania released a study that found that while AHI patients studied had no history of having “‘suffered any type of blunt head trauma, yet the symptoms they describe and evaluations demonstrate [the symptoms] are remarkably similar to those found in persistent concussion syndrome,’ said the study’s senior author, Douglas H. Smith, MD, the Robert A. Groff Professor and vice chair of Research and Education in the department of Neurosurgery and director of Penn’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair. ‘It appears that we have identified a new syndrome that may have important public health implications’” [link in original].
The neurological examinations on the Penn subjects “were mainly performed at the University of Miami, revealing that the neurological signs resembled concussions.”
But a more recent study in early 2024 by the National Institutes of Health “found no significant evidence of MRI-detectable brain injury, nor differences in most clinical measures compared to controls, among a group of federal employees who experienced anomalous health incidents (AHIs).”
Utilizing MRI scans on “more than 80 U.S. government employees and their adult family members, mostly stationed abroad, who had reported an AHI,” the study found no “consistent set of imaging abnormalities that might differentiate participants with AHIs from controls.” The same results showed lack of discrimination between AHI subjects and controls “with respect to most clinical, research and biomarker measures, except for certain self-reported measures.”
Sounds like Havana Syndrome couldn’t involve concussions then, right? Not so fast. It turns out that even after only 14 days — the soonest AHI patients were examined after initial complaint in the NIH study — brain scans do not diagnose concussions.
According to a webpage on concussions managed by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS), “Brain imaging studies with MRI and CT scans should not be performed routinely in the diagnosis of concussions. They typically do not show any significant changes and, with CT scans, expose individuals to unnecessary radiation. While such tests are more useful for identifying structural defects, an injury from concussion is metabolic and microscopic in nature that often presents normally on neuroimaging.”
The AANS doctors added:
Following a concussion, some people may suffer persisting symptoms, such as memory and concentration problems, mood swings, personality changes, headache, fatigue, dizziness, insomnia and excessive drowsiness for several weeks to months. This is known as post-concussive syndrome. [link and bold font in original]
It is worth repeating from the 1955 proposal for MKDECOY, quoted earlier in this article: “if a technique were devised to induce brain concussion without giving either advance warning or causing external physical trauma, the person upon recovery would be unable to recall what had happened to him.” Under such circumstance, the procedure could be repeated “many times without disclosure of its nature.”
Perhaps doctors working with AHI patients should consider looking for neurokinin markers in the cerebrospinal fluid.
Of course, the latter recommendation is not made with medical seriousness, and I am not a medical doctor. (My educational background is as a clinical psychologist, though I have had some graduate coursework in both physiological psychology and neuropsychology.) But given the history of MKDECOY, a history that is truncated in the public record, perhaps there is some association with the mysterious Havana Syndrome and the kind of research the CIA undertook in MKULTRA subprojects 54 and 61, and perhaps in other research projects still unknown.
Following this line of speculation, Havana Syndrome could represent a lingering post-concussive syndrome caused by covert devices that U.S. entities secretly were testing either directly on their own personnel, or was unintentionally effected via blowback from such experiments. It also is not entirely impossible that a foreign agency, either as an experiment, or accidentally, or as retribution from a similar attack, engaged in attacks on U.S. intelligence, military, State Department, or other personnel utilizing this otherwise unknown weapon.
In conclusion, I could be wrong in my reasoning about both the use of brain-damaged test subjects in U.S. interrogation and torture programs, and about any connection between Havana Syndrome and past U.S. research into making a covert concussion device, or other research on the causes of brain damage. But it seems unlikely that the government’s secret studies on the effects of brain damage, and ways to exploit such damage, or even cause it, simply ended with no particular result or further endeavors.
If anything, the resurrection of MKULTRA-style torture methods after 9/11 — and even admitted interest within CIA in the old MKULTRA research during the post 9/11 period — argues that the possibilities entertained in this article about the continuation of CIA’s brain damage research into the 21st century is not out of the question. In any case, even without such speculations, the CIA’s pursuit of such knowledge, and the weaponization of such knowledge, deserves a place in our history books, and in our assessment of ongoing CIA and military intelligence activities.
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“Kroeber's opinion, expressed after the second World War, about the presumed civilized opposition to slavery, torture and slaughter of prisoners of war, is hardly worth considering. It does not distinguish between the various forms of "slavery," primitive, archaic and modem. Nor is torture ethnologically interpreted. For the torture of prisoners of war among the Iroquois, for example, was a cruel test and a challenge, but it was not ideologically based; they had no intention of “brainwashing” the enemy. In fact, Iroquois prisoners of war were frequently adopted into the tribe, supplying labor, but eventually they could regain their dignity and achieve Iroquois status, either directly or through their children.”
Stanley Diamond — In Search of the Primitive, 1971
he probably was having his other professional acquaintances in mind, those who were complicit in the MKultra fuckfest (and other government programs, this era was filled with those)
“and, bespeaking of love and lie detectors in venuvarities, whateither the drugs truth of it, was there an iota of from the faust to the lost.”
Finnegans Wake, 335
Wowie zowie. I don’t suppose those nice Russians did anything like that.