Academic papers from the 1960s reveal how a CIA-funded ‘mind control’ program came to Australia

In the winter of 1960, Martin Orne, remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest psychologists, touched down in Sydney.

The American professor was due to begin a three-month sabbatical at the University of Sydney, attracted by its world-renowned psychology faculty.

Professor Orne was one of the leading researchers into hypnosis, something the Sydney team awaiting his arrival was also interested in. They were all trying to apply a scientific approach to a practice long associated with magic and mystery.

“The environment at [the University of] Sydney was electrically alive with intellectual stimulation,” says psychologist Dr Peter Sheehan, who was completing his honours in psychology at the faculty during Professor Orne’s visit.

But, unbeknownst to the Sydney university staff and students, documents recently retrieved by the ABC confirm that Professor Orne was receiving funding from the secretive intelligence program MK-Ultra, which was in turn funded by the CIA.

Orne was a keen psychologist, well regarded for his scepticism and scientific rigour, but the CIA had questionable motives.  

Sleep, drugs and Operation Midnight Climax

In the early years of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union were poised for nuclear combat.

“The United States became convinced that we were under imminent threat,” says Stephen Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent at the New York Times. 

“[The population] felt that the Soviet Union had the power, almost at a moment’s notice, not only to destroy the United States but to destroy the entire possibility of meaningful human life on Earth.”

The anxieties of US citizens were not just about their nuclear capacities.

There was a widely held suspicion that the Soviets were developing mind-control capabilities.

Reports had emerged of American soldiers, captured during the Korean war, defecting to the communist side and seemingly renouncing the US.

US intelligence concluded that the communists must be hypnotising the soldiers. Alarmed, they decided that they needed to develop similar capabilities.

This spurred the creation of the MK-Ultra program.

It was, says Mr Kinzer, “a project to find ways for the CIA to seize control of the minds of other people”.

Over 100 experimental projects were set up under MK-Ultra. The project titles included phrases like “aspects of magicians’ art useful in covert operations” or “sleep research” and “behavioural modification”

Mr Kinzer says that those working on MK-Ultra experiments, often under extreme secrecy, would push ethical boundaries in the name of national security.

For instance, in an operation known as ‘Midnight Climax’, the CIA employed sex workers in San Francisco, Mill Valley and New York. 

They were instructed to bring their clients to a safe house and dose them with LSD, so researchers could assess the impact of the drug and gauge its suitability for use in military settings.

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In another example, the CIA funded experiments at a psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, directed by the controversial Professor Donald Ewen Cameron.

Professor Cameron’s “psychic driving” involved subjecting drugged, sleep-deprived patients to continuously repeated audio messages on a looped tape.

Years later, a senate hearing on MK-Ultra concluded that some of these experiments represented “a fundamental disregard for the value of human life”. 

According to the senate committee report, many participants felt the “residual effects” of the experiments decades after the program ceased. At least two died.

The Human Ecology Fund

Arguably the most coveted of the CIA’s mind control projects were those investigating the possibilities of hypnosis, with documents showing that it occupied up to eight MK-Ultra sub-projects.

At the time, pop culture led many to believe that hypnosis could be used to create a “Manchurian candidate.” The 1962 film of the same name, starring Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh, depicts a former soldier brainwashed into becoming an assassin. Some in the CIA believed hypnosis could be weaponised in real life in a similar way.

“Instead of waging war, [the CIA thought] ‘we’ll just find a way either to hypnotise leaders, or to hypnotise entire populations to control other people’s minds from far away’,” Mr Kinzer says.

Martin Orne, then a young professor at the Harvard Medical School, became a key part of this quest in the late 1950s.

The Vienna-born American psychologist had worked in magic shows as a teenager and developed a keen interest in hypnosis.

He had continued to research it throughout his career and, according to author John D. Marks, Professor Orne’s rigorous scientific approach made him attractive to the CIA.

In the late 1970s, when researching his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, which exposed the details of the MK-Ultra program, Mr Marks interviewed Professor Orne, who revealed he was regularly consulted by the CIA. According to Mr Marks, Professor Orne knew about the program and also received funding to support his research on hypnotism.

“He was their man on the outside — their specialist who they would go to for ideas about hypnosis,” Mr Marks says.

In 1960, Professor Orne’s work took him to the University of Sydney.

The university was an intellectual spark in an at-times culturally conservative Australia. The psychology department was renowned, particularly for its work on hypnosis. 

In the 1950s, there were five significant hypnosis labs in the world — four in North America and the other at Sydney University, under the guidance of professors John Philip Sutcliffe and Gordon Hammer. 

So Professor Orne came to collaborate with some of Sydney’s esteemed psychologists. His financial backing for the trip, however, came from a source with shady motives.

An article published in a 1965 edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which Professor Orne and his colleague Professor Frederick J. Evans record the results of one of their key experiments in Australia, has been referenced by the ABC.

On the first page, the authors acknowledges the contribution of the Human Ecology Fund, a secretive organisation used by the CIA to provide grants to social scientists and medical researchers investigating questions of interest to the MK-Ultra program.

“This study was conducted at the University of Sydney, Australia, during a visit by the senior author [Orne], June-August 1960. It was supported in part … by a grant from the Human Ecology Fund,” the paper reads.

Dr Sheehan, who had studied under Professor Orne, says the researchers at the University were unaware that their work was CIA-linked.

“That particular experiment was at the University of Sydney, while I was doing my honours year, and I had never learned that was CIA-funded,” he says.

Alternative explanations

The aim of Professor Orne’s experiments in Sydney was to see if it was possible to get hypnotised people to engage in “anti-social behaviour”. If a subject could be made to perform tasks against their own wishes, the CIA could potentially use this power against opposition soldiers.

Historical experiments had recorded hypnotised subjects doing almost anything. They could be made to steal, injure themselves, even attempt murder.

Professor Orne wanted to test this. According to the article, he asked a group of hypnotised subjects, comprised of Sydney University psychology students, to perform a series of seemingly dangerous acts, including picking up a venomous snake and throwing a vat of nitric acid at an experimenter. 

While many of the subjects completed these seemingly dangerous tasks, Professor Orne did not necessarily conclude that hypnosis was responsible. 

Eager to find alternative explanations to why the participants had performed these actions, Professor Orne used a control group of non-hypnotised subjects.

They also completed the tasks, the researchers discovered.

The subjects, Professor Orne concluded, knew at some level that they would be safe, regardless of whether they were hypnotised. They judged correctly that researchers were simulating danger.

In experiments with snakes, for example, the animals had been rendered harmless by the University’s zoology department; in other experiments with nitric acid, the acid was simply a convincing “coloured solution”. The subjects were not told about this. 

“The tasks are within the broad range of activities which are perceived as legitimized by the nature of the situation,” the journal article reads.

“They were requests made by experimenters, viewed by subjects as responsible scientists, in the context of a psychological experiment.”

But if the CIA was looking to control the human mind in their Cold War battle against communism, Professor Orne’s findings would have proven disappointing.

“No conclusions can be drawn from the present investigation about the potential use of hypnosis to induce antisocial behaviour,” Professor Orne wrote in the journal article.

According to Mr Marks, this scepticism was part of the professor’s appeal to the CIA.

“Orne was the person they would go to, in terms of hypnosis, to say, do you think this is going to work — and he tended to be a sceptic,” he says.

“So, his sceptical and academic way of looking at it would have been useful in turning down half-baked ideas.”

This scientific approach is Professor Orne’s legacy.

In a career that continued for four decades, Professor Orne helped to established what hypnosis could and couldn’t do, and moved it from the realm of magic to an established academic and clinical practice.

“I learnt an awful lot from him,” says Dr Sheehan, Professor Orne’s student and collaborator.

“There are lots of people out there that would love to think that you or I could do terribly immoral things under hypnosis, but I don’t think that’s true,” he says.

“I think that experiment would have been absolutely pivotal in proving otherwise.”