SUMMARY OF REMARKS BY MR. ALLEN W. DULES AT THE NATI ONAL ALUMNI COUNCIL OF THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY HOT SPRINGS,, VA,., APRIL 10, 1953

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70-00058R000100250074-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: November 17, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 7, 2000
• Sequence Number: 74
• Publication Date: April 10, 1953
• Content Type: SPEECH

9UP4MARY OF REIVi BY MR. ALLEN W. DULLES
AT THE NATIONAL ALUMNI CONFERENCE OF THE
GRADUATE COUNCIL OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
HOT SPRINGS, VA., APRIL 10, 1953
BRAIN WARFARE
In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much
about the battle for men's minds -- the war of ideologies -- and indeed our
government has been driven by the international tension we call the "coldf
war" to take positive steps to recognize psychological warfare and to play
an active role in it. I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the
full magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle
for men's minds has become in Soviet hands. We might call it, in its new
form, brain warfare".
The target of this warfe.re is the minds of men both on a collective
and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the ,:Lind so that it no
longer reacts on a free will or rational basis but responds to impulses
implanted from outside. If we are to counter this kind of warfare we must
understand the techniqe..:s the Soviet is adopting to control men's minds.
There is an old adage that "everyone is crazy but :.e and thee and
sometimes I suspect thee". There is more truth than we realize in this saying.
The human mind is the most delicate of all instruments. It is so finely
adjusted, so susceptible to the impact of outside influences that it is
proving a malleable tool in the hands of sinister men. The Soviets are now
using brain perversion techniques as one of their main weapons in prooecuting
the cold war. Some of these techniques are so subtle and so abhorrent to our
way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.
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We take for granted a society where human beings ~+e fee to thiAR 6s
they please. We read and see and hear such a variety of things that the mind
adopts no single pattern. Our society produces all kinds of people thinking
and believing all manner of thoughts. Fortunately, in our drive for standardi-
zation in other fields we have not consciously tried to standardize the mind.
In the Soviet world, however, this is being done.
In the freedom that we enjoy -- and freedom of thought is possibly the
most precious freedom that we do enjoy -- it is hard for us to realize that
in the great area behind the Iron Curtain a vast expcririent is underway to
change men's minds, working on them continuously from youth to old age.
Such an experiment has never before been undertekcn en so vast and
so well organized a scale. In Hitler's Germany and in Fascist Italy some
effort was made to make men into a single pattern. In Germany it was called
eichschaltun,
the leveling process. This effort covcrarx only a few
years and may have had little permanent effect on the :~erman mind, though
it did have its effect on history in conditioning the Germans in vast numbers
to follow Hitler's mad experiments. Japan had its thought control which,
while highly efficient in combatting sedition and wcldinr, the Japanese people
into apparent unity behind an intense nationalism, seems also to have had
little permanent effect.
The Soviet e periment is very different. It takes two forms: First,
the attempt at mass indoctrination cf hundreds cf millions of people so that
they respond docilely to the orders of their master. This permits the creation
of a monolithic solidarity in the Soviet state which outwardly gives it the
appearance of great unity.
Second, the perversion of the minds of selected individuals who are
subjected to such treatment that they are deprived of the ability to state
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ths.,ir own thoughts. Parrot-like the individuals so conditioned can merely
repeat thoughts which have been implanted in their minds by suggestion
from outside. In effect the brain under these circumstances becomes a phono-
graph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it
has no control.
The Chinese, who are seldom at a loss for a word, have given us thy:
term which has come generally to be applied to this treatment of individual
minds; "brain washing". Actually, the Chinese subjected to Communist "thought
reform" techniques experienced two treatments: a "brain washing" which
"cleansed the mind of the old and evil thoughts spawned by imperialists of
the West," and a "brain changing" which implanted th "new and glorious
thoughts of the Communist Revolution". In our conception of the perversion
of individual minds the term "brain washing" seems aptly to describe this
phase of brain warfare.
This campaign for the control of men's minds, with its two particular
manifestations, has such far reaching implications that it is high time for
us to realize what it means and the problems it presents in thwarting our
own program for spreading the gospel of freedom.
To create conditions which permit the mass indoctrination of millions
of people certain prerequisites are necessary. In particular it is neces-
sary to close off with an impenetrable barrier the area within which the
operation is to take place. This is what Winston Churchill described so
graphically in 1946 as "the Iron Curtain". It is the physical and spiritual
barrier by which the Soviet Union has isolated itself and its satellites from
the outside world.
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Today this screen, whether of iron or bamboo, stretches some 21,00
r.i.les around the' Soviet dominated Eurasian land mass and effectively cuts off
normal intercourse between East and West. The land frontiers in Europe are
normally divided into three zones : A forward zone which is the actual borcl._r
area about a mils. deep; an intermediate zone of about 10 miles; and a rear
area which may be as much as 150 miles deep. This rear area is cleared of
politically unreliable elements of the population and those who come into it
must have special passes issued by the Frontier Trocp Adr~!inistration. The
intermediate belt of 10 riles is being cor_-rpletely d po7;pua.lated. The forward
area is a no man's land cleared of underbrush and other cover and equipped
with physical obstaclee.e such as barbed wire and mines. Many sectors arcs
plewcd and kept rake' to reveal telltale. footprints. These physical barriers
are supplemented by patrols of frontier troops equipped with the latest
weapons and technical aids including aircraft and radio, and such time honored
auxiliaries as specially trained dogs. Interestingly enough these border
troops are subordinated not to the armed forces but to the internal police.
The intensity of border controls naturally varies with the nature of the
frontier, the character of the population, and the terrain.
Along the sea fr~;ntiers in the Baltic and the Far East fishing crews
are selected from among the most reliable elements of the population, and as
a double insurance against defection, member. s of the various boat crews are
rotated so that no one group serves together for any lcntth of time. As a
result of some defections to Sweden from the Baltic areas, the fishing fle"ts
in most instances are not allowed out farther than about 60 miles. They are
often accompanied by a guard vessel, and are also closely watched by aircraft.
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The modern way to get ideas across national frontiers is through ra:lio
broadcasting. Even here the Communists are trying to draw the curtain.
Powerful jamming equipment has been installed at strategic points in order to
produce electronic interference and eliminate the reception of foreign radio
messages. These measures, so far, are only partially successful. To reinforce
them the sale of radios capable of picking up foreign broadcasts is being
curbed. In their place, public loud-speakers controlled from Moscow are being
installed in the public squares cf towns and villages in the Soviet Union.
In this way mass indoctrination can take the place of individual choice in
radio reception.
Except for official use, foreign publications have been almost wholly
eliminated from the Soviet Union. For a long period, the official publica-
tion "Amerika" was tolerated on the theory that its circulation was so limited
that it did no harm. That has now been stopped. Of course nothing is
published in the Soviet Uni ~n that is not Government approved.
If, by chance, Soviet artists, scientists, doctors, or technicians
deviate from the official line they are quickly forced to recant or are
purged. To be differ.-?at is a crime. These days it seems a bit dangerous even
to be a doctor in the Soviet Union.
Racial minority groups within the Soviet which once enjoyed their
own individual cultures have been largely eliminated by mass purges or forced
migrations to "safe" areas. The persecution of the Jews and their prospective
elimiziation was one of the latest evidences of this phase of the Soviet
campaign.
Religion has been made a State affair. Belief in God has been the
hardest deviation which the Soviet leveling machine has had to face and this
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has not yet been wholly solved. It is most certainly on their books as the
final obstacle to the complete realization of their ideal of the Bolshevist
State, but neither Lenin nor Stalin has yet been accepted as a substitute for
God by the Russian people.
The program of isolation which has been followed in the Soviet Union
with ever increasing intensity since the Revolution of 1917 has approached
its climax during the last few years. Within the heartland of Russia, this
program has been carried to near completion.
In the European satellites, the progress has been slower, differing
from State to State depending upon the length and completeness of Soviet
domination,, and on the time and attention that the master minds in Moscow
have been able to give to this particular task. In these States, with
centuries of Christian tradition behind them, the leveling task will take
some time -- but is being ruthlessly pressed forward.
All of these facts are well known to us -- it is only when we put them
together and see their cumulative effect that we can appreciate their full
meaning. W have, none of us, ever been subjected to conditions where year
by year we have been told one thing, read one thing and allowed to think one
thing. It is otherwise in the Soviet Union. There thought is prescribed.
No alternative is offered.
In our own daily lives, by contrast, we are given choices. We can
make up our minds as between possible alternatives. It is hard for us to
conceive how our own minds would operate if, say for the last twenty years,
we had been given only one choice and heard only one message. I can only assure
you of my firm belief that few of us would have withstood such treatment and
kept an open mind.
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During the past few years in particular, the people of the Soviet
Union and of the Satellites have been given one theme song about the Western
democracies and especially the United States, namely, that we are the enemy
of the Soviet people, that we are plotting their downfall and attempting
their encirclement. We are portrayed as the protagonists of atomic and
bacteriological warfare, and our government is said to be dominated by the
magnates of Wall Street -- the oppressors of the working man. It is the
most vicious campaign of hatred that any country has over attempted against
another. It is a campaign intended to condition the Iieds of the Russian
people so that their leaders could embark on any type of aggressive action
against the free world. Unfortunately, it is a ca~pai_`;n that is making
steady progress and r conditions where no dissenting voice is allowed to
interrupt the hate tirade, even though the crescendo may be toned down during
"peace offensives".
The second phase of the brain-conditioning program of the Soviet is
directed against the individual, case by case. Here they take selected human
beings whoa they wish to destroy and turn them into h::wblc confessors of
crimes they never cemritted or make them the mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda.
Here new techniques wash the brain clean of the thoughts and mental processes
of the past and, possibly through the use of some "lie serum", create new
brain processes and new thoughts which the victim, parrot lik:, repeats.
The development of these new techniques has been under way in the
Soviet Union for a long time. We first had some inkling of what they were
doing during the notorious purge trials of the late 1930's. Then we saw
hardened old Bolsheviks, veterans of many revolutions, who became like docile
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children in the hands of the boviet prosecutor, Vishinsky. With alacrit;;
and seeming enthusiasm they confessed to all manner of extraordinary crimes
against the Soviet State and hastened to invite the death sentence. How far
then, confessions were truth and how far they were fiction remains teday a
mystery; but certainly the men who made these confessions had gone through
a :rental metarnorphosis when they appeared before the State prosecutor.
Maybe the techniclucs of those days were crude, but they served well
the bosses of the Kremlin and demonstrated beyond any doubt that anyone whom
the Kremlin rulers decided to destroy and had put through the necessary period
of indoctrination would state just about what these crt7.in rulers wanted
him to say. And a tougher, more case-hardened group of men probably never
appeared before the bar of "justice".
After the war, Soviet science and ingenuity made rapid stridces in the
study of mental reactions and in the nefarious art of breaking down the
hurian mind. Possibly the case that most startled the West was that involving
the confession of Cardinal. Mindszenty, in Hungary. here a man of proven
courage and outstanding intellect was brought to a point ^f publicly con-
fessing actions which those who knew this outstanding character could not
possibly have attributed to him. More recently, in Czechoslovakia, we have
had the trial of Slansky, Clementis and their associates who had fallen into
disfavor with Moscow. Hire, again, we had hardened products of the C ormunist
system. The only trouble with Slansky & Co. was that M,~ccow wanted someone
else to have their jobs so they up and confessed to those crimes and mis-
demeanors against the Communist State which would assure their removal from
the scene.
There is one interesting feature about this type of trial; it is the
length of time between arrest and confession. It is rarely less than six
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months. This is not because "Commtihist justice" cannot move with rapidit
when it wants to. In fact, few things can be more rapid. But in cases where
detailed confessions in open court are desired, there must be a consid rabiL
period -- probably a minimum of around three months -- to properly indoctrinate
the intended victims. Mere written confessions could be much more quickly
extracted by torture.
What does this indoctrination consist of?
We, in the West, are somewhat handicapped in getting all. the details.
There are few survivors, and we have no human guinea r , ourselves, on
which to try ou" these extraordinary techniques. TILL. -lets have their
political prisoners, their slave camp inmates and finally, and most tragic
~f all, our own co.. -trymcn who.1 they hold as prisoners.
We now 'cave, however, some evidence on which to base a judgment.
A few have esc ?ed from the ordeal. of brain-washing to tell their story. One
of the first was Michael Shipkcv, a young Bulgarian f fficer educated at
Robert College in Ista_obul. He served for a time with the American Mission
in Bulgaria following the end of the war. In 1949, he was arrested by the
Bulgarian Communists, subjected to the brain-washing; technique, miraculously
managed to escape, reported on his experiences to the Ar._