The experimenters will be particularly interested in disassociate states, from the ‘abaissement du niveau’ to mental multiple personality in so-called mediums and an attempt will be made too induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.

–MK Ultra Subproject 136

This post was inspired after I realized that the Wikipedia page for George Estabrooks was a complete disaster and I spent an hour or so trying to clean it up (mostly out of curiosity if it will get edited into garbage again and if so, how quickly).

Part 1 of this post contains an extended excerpt from George Estabrooks article in ‘Science Digest’ (1971) "Hypnosis Comes of Age".  The excerpt details some of Estabrooks work in the military where he helped create spies who had zero conscious awareness of what they were doing–by intentionally creating amnesia and ‘multiple personalities.’ 

In his 1943 seminal work, Hypnotism, he observed that every legitimate case of multiple personality that had ever been subjected to a psychologist's experimentation had invariably turned out to involve an individual who was an exceptional hypnotic subject. From this observed clinical correlation, Estabrooks derived the following hypothesis: if spontaneous multiple personalities are effectively states of profound self-hypnosis utilized by the psyche to compartmentalize trauma or manifest latent desires, then artificial multiple personalities could be deliberately induced and meticulously managed by a skilled hypnotic operator.

Estabrooks and his contemporaries viewed the trance states of mediums not as genuine conduits to the afterlife, but as extraordinary examples of individuals who had mastered the art of creating multiple personalities within themselves through auto-hypnosis. The ‘spirit guide’ or ‘communicator’ was, according to this model, nothing more than a highly developed, compartmentalized psychological alter ego, granted temporary executive control over the physical body while the primary host personality remained in a deeply hypnotized, state of amnesia.

Estabrooks boasted in a 1960 Colgate College lecture that the creation of an effective spy or assassin rested entirely in splitting a man's personality, stating, "This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it"

**I feel like I have to make this explicit: I'm not making any claims about medium's one way or the other. And while this does represent his early views evidence exists which suggests these perspectives were not monolithic or absolute. He was the doctor in the 'Seth' material.

Part 2 Comes from an excerpt of the book ‘Chaos’ by Tom O’neill who stumbled onto a box of a papers by a MK Ultra scientist that contained several unredacted, original source documents.  Some of these documents had been released through the congressional investigation into MK Ultra and these definitively demonstrated that the CIA had fabricated and intentionally mislead Congress and the public.  

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Part 1

What is hypnosis, anyway? Part of the problem is that, to this day, no one really is sure. 

I have been using hypnosis in clinical psychology for half a century, in private practice and at universities such as Colgate, where I chaired the department of psychology for more than 20 years, 

Clinical hypnotists have known for a long time that subjects in the deepest state of hypnosis-somnambulism-always act and respond as though wide awake. The measurable difference is a pain test. A deeply hyрпоtized person can take an 80-volt electrical shock without experiencing pain (anyone in a normal state will suffer under 35 volts)...

… "waking hypnosis" is induced by a series of steps in a subject capable of deep hypnosis. One in five adults can manage it…No one can tell [by observation alone if someone in this state is actually hypnotized or not]...

Dr. Milton H. Erickson, Aldous Huxley's physician, and one of the founders of the American Society of Clinical Hypnotists, tells about having a subject deliver a lecture to a group of psychiatrists, all familiar with hypnosis. Not one realized their speaker was hypnotized. Тo all intents he was wide awake, responding to events around him like a normal person.

Brain wave patterns of subjects in hypnosis are similar to those of people under deep anesthesia prior to surgery...

One of the most fascinating but dangerous applications of hypnosis is its use in military intelligence. This is a field with which I am familiar through formulating guide lines for the techniques used by the United States in two world wars.

The "hypnotic courier"...provides a unique solution. I was involved in preparing many subjects for this work during World War II. One successful case involved an Army Service Corps Caрtain whom we'll call George Smith. Captain Smith had undergone months of training. He was an excellent subject but did not realize it. I had removed from him, by post-hypnotic suggestion, all recollection of ever having been hypnotized. 

First I had the Service Corps call the captain to Washington and tell him they needed a report on the mechanical equipment of Division X headquartered in Tokyo. Smith was ordered to leave by jet next morning, pick up the report and return at once. These orders were given him in the waking state. Consciously, that was all he knew, and it was the story he gave his wife and friends. 

Then I put him under deep hypnosis, and gave him-orally-a vital message to be delivered directly on his arrival in Japan to a certain colonel…Brown-of military intelligence. Outside of myself, Colonel Brown was the only person who could hypnotize Captain Smith. This is "locking." 

I performed it by saying to the hypnotized Captain: "Until further orders from me, only Colonel Brown and I can hypnotize you. We will use a signal phrase 'the moon is clear.' Whenever you hear this phrase from Brown or myself you will pass instantly into deep hypnosis." When Captain Smíth re-awakened, he had no conscious memory of what happened in trance. All that he was aware of was that he must head for Tokyo to pick up a division report.

On arrival there, Smith reported to Brown, who hypnotized him with the signal phrase. Under hypnosis, Smith delivered my message and received one to bring back. Awakened, he was given the division report and returned home by jet. 

There I hypпotized him once more with the signal phrase, and he spieled off Brown's answer that had been dutifully tucked away in his unconscious mind. The system is virtually foolproof. 

As exemplified by this case, the information literally was "locked" in Smith's unconscious for retrieval by the only two people who knew the combination. The subject had no conscious memory of what happened, so couldn't spill the beans. No one else could hypnotize him even if they might know the signal phrase.

Not all applications of hypnotism to military intelligence are as tidy as that. 

Perhaps you have read The Three Faces of Eve. The book was based on a case reported in 1905 by Dr. Morton Prince of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard. He startled everyone in the field by announcing that he had cured a woman named Beauchamp of a split personality problem. 

Using post-hypnotic suggestion to submerge an incompatible, childlike facet of the patient, he'd been able to make two other sides of Mrs. Beauchamp compatible, and lump them together in a single cohesive personality. Clinical hypnotists throughout the world jumped on the multiple personality bandwagon as a fascinating frontier. 

By the 1920s, not only had they learned to apply post-hypnotic suggestion to deal with this weird problem, but also had learned how to split certain complex individuals into multiple personalities like Jeckyl-Hydes.

The potential for military intelligence has been nightmarish. During World War II. I worked this technique with a vulnerable Marine lieutenant I'll call Jones. Under the watchful eye of Marine Intelligence I split his personality into Jones A and Jones B. 

Jones A, once a "normal" working Marine, became entirely different. He talked communist doctrine and meant it. He was welcomed enthusiastically by communist cells, was deliberately given a dishonorable discharge by the Corps (which was in on the plot) and became a card-carrying party member. 

The joker was Jones B, the second personality, formerly apparent in the conscious Marine. Under hypnosis, this Jones had been carefully coached by suggestion. Jones B was the deeper personality, knew all the thoughts of Jones A, was a loyal American and was "imprinted" to say nothing during conscious phases.

All I had to do was hypnotize the whole man, get in touch with Jones B. the loyal American, and I had a pipeline straight into the Communist camp. It worked beautifully for months with this subject, but the technique backfired. While there was no way for an enemy to expose Jones' dual personality, they suspected it and played the same trick on us later.

The use of "waking hypnosis" in counter intelligence during World War II occasionally became so involved that it taxed even my credulity. Among the most complicated ploys used was the practice of sending a perfectly normal, wide awake agent into enemy camp, after he'd been carefully coached in waking hypnosis to act the part of a potential hypпotism subject. 

Trained in auto-suggestion, or self-hypnosis, such a subject can pass every test used to spot a hypnotized person. Using it, he can control the rate of his heartbeat, anesthetize himself to a degree against pain of electric shock or other torture. In the case of an officer we'll call Cox, this carefully prepared counter spy was given a title to indicate he had access to top priority information. He was planted in an international cafe in a border country where it was certain there would be enemy agents. 

He talked too much, drank a lot, made friends with local girls, and pretended a childish interest in hypnotism. The hope was that he would blunder into a situation in which enemy agents would kidnap and try to hypnotize him, in order to extract information from him.

…Cox worked so well that they fell for the trick. He never allowed himself to be hypnotized during seances. While pretending to be a hypnotized subject of the foe, he was gathering and feeding back information. Eventually, Cox did get caught, when he was followed to an information "drop."

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Part 2: Unredacted MK Ultra Documents and Dr. Jolly West

The following excerpt is from the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill, an author who acquired access to Dr. Jolly West’s collected works which passed to his alma mater after his death.  West was instrumental to much of the scientific research which underpinned the MKultra programs.  When O’Neill received access to the material, he found that the boxes were still sealed.  Nobody had yet taken the time to even catalog what they contained.

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In a paper titled “The Psycho-physiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” West claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge…”It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.” 

The document, marked “classified,” was right there in West’s files; I had to assume that the CIA had destroyed any copies. They’ve never publicly acknowledged West’s groundbreaking deed. 

He’d done it, he claimed, by administering “new drugs” effective in “speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.” 

Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation.

When the agency was forced to disclose MKULTRA to the public, they submitted an expurgated version of West’s paper to Congress, an act of deception that’s never been exposed. 

At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility” that the CIA had turned over to the Senate. West’s name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But what shocked me was that the Senate’s version didn’t include West’s nine-page attachment, but rather an unsigned summary. 

There was no mention of West’s triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of “the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual” with a “fictional event.”

In sworn testimony, the CIA said that everything it shared with Congress was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names. 
Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely misrepresented its contents. 

The one-page summary of West’s accomplishments in the lab doesn’t exist in West’s original. The new page was only a theoretical discussion of LSD—of its possible effects on “dissociative states.” 

The summary concluded, “The effects of these agents [LSD and other drugs] upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied.” 

…West had given an address to the Mental Health Association of Oregon, letting it slip that he was inducing insanity in the lab. He framed these studies as positive developments: they might someday cure mental illness. “We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.”

The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses.”

Legally, the CIA was obligated to tell the University of Oklahoma that one of its faculty had been on the agency payroll. Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo saying that an unnamed professor—West, I confirmed through financial records—had been investigating “a number of dissociative phenomena” on humans “in the lab,” including an exceptionally rare clinical disorder known as “latah,” “a neurotic condition marked by automatic obedience.” 

West, of course, had studied those effects for years and years. I could only conclude that the CIA misrepresented the original document to mislead the Senate committee, thus striking West’s research from the official record. 

As was my habit whenever I found hard evidence of a cover-up, I started dwelling on one question after another. Didn’t this counterfeit paper cast doubt on the entire cache of documents released to the Senate in 1977?

Despite testimony to the contrary, the CIA had, in fact, learned how to manipulate people’s memories without their knowledge. Agency officials claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading newspapers to run mocking headlines like “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight.” 

It could’ve been exactly what the agency wanted—for the world to assume MKULTRA was a bust, and forget the whole thing. One thing was indisputable: The CIA’s falsified documents invalidated the Senate investigation’s findings. The agency lied, obstructed justice, and tampered with evidence, and the West documents prove it.

But was brainwashing really even possible? 

I’d always believed that Cold War–era paranoia had overstated the potential for “Manchurian Candidates” taught to kill by dastardly commies. 

Jack Ruby’s Psychotic Break At UCLA

I kept requesting boxes of West’s papers, and they kept leading me over trapdoors. Next they dropped me into a quagmire I wanted no part of: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that plausibly qualified as the most discussed crime of all time. 

Certainly it had bred more conspiracy theories, skepticism, and enmity than any other incident in U.S. history…I flipped through West’s pages cautiously, hoping that his involvement was peripheral. It wasn’t. Down through the trapdoor I went. 

Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Two days later, at the Dallas police headquarters, officers escorted Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to an armored car that would drive him to the county jail. 

A man stepped out from the crowd and aimed a revolver at Oswald’s chest. It was Jack Ruby, a nightclub proprietor with connections to Cuban political groups and organized crime. He fired once at point-blank range, sending a fatal bullet into Oswald’s stomach. According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. 

“What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.” On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. 

Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.”

Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.” Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. 

He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. 

Three documents among his papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact never before made public. 

The judge turned him down. 

For the moment, it seemed, West would be getting nowhere near Ruby, who was soon convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. 

Ruby was reportedly unmoored by the news. He’d killed the president’s assassin, and the citizens of Dallas had rewarded him with a trip to the gallows. He fired his attorney and hired Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist with a law degree who’d assisted in the trial, to represent him on appeal. 

Meanwhile, at Langley, the CIA’s Richard Helms was making the case that MKULTRA’s human guinea pigs had to be entirely unaware of the experiments performed on them. 

This was “the only realistic method,” he wrote, “to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting.” Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. 

Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the plum assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.) 

And so, on April 26, 1964, West boarded a plane bound for Dallas. He was scheduled to examine Jack Ruby in the county jail that afternoon. 

The Dallas papers reported it in their final editions that evening: West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. 

West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” 

The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.” 

In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. 

“Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” 

The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… ” 

West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. 

“He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.” 

From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar diagnoses: he was delusional. 

West, however, was hardly the first to have evaluated him. 

By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially compos mentis. 

West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them until earlier today on the airplane. 

“Tonight, my own findings make it clear that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these earlier studies were carried out.” The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. 

In the preceding five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described. 

Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d clamored to see Ruby months earlier. 

After the judge heard West’s report, he ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of it.” 

That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public, confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and “asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. 

He considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been tampered with or drugged by an outsider. 

“The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation.” 

The truth, by that point, was sealed up behind West. Beavers couldn’t have known that one of his fellow caregivers was capable of anything so diabolical as inducing mental illness in a patient. 

His report would have turned out differently, no doubt, if he’d been apprised of West’s unorthodox fortes, and his long relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Dozens of West’s colleagues offered me assessments of his character. There was praise, especially from those who’d worked with him at UCLA, but there was also condemnation, most of it from his former colleagues at Oklahoma, where he’d done the bulk of his MKULTRA research. He was a “devious man,” “egotistical,” an inveterate “narcissist” and “womanizer.” 

The few who hadn’t already suspected his involvement with the CIA accepted it readily. But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley, his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. 

Shurley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind. 

“I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.” 

Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little problem with grandiosity.” 

“He would not be averse at all to having influenced American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or not…If the president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.” 

“Even if it meant distorting American history?” 

“I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”