Brain-Washing: Time for a Policy

by GLADWIN HILL

1

THE Korean War confronted ns with a new secret weapon: “brain-washing” — the conquest not of a man’s body but of his mind and spirit. Some people have asserted that there is no such thing as brain-washing, or individual psychological conquest. They can hardly have been aware of the Russian purge trials; evidently they did not read Arthur Koestler; or they did not believe the harrowing stories of Robert Vogeler and William Oatis, who came from behind the Iron Curtain. But there is no question that brain-washing exists. It was to be expected that after their grisly success with civilians the Communists would try it out in the military field.

A prisoner-of-war camp is an excellent laboratory for such an experiment. The requisites for brainwashing are isolation of the subject from normal environment, time to work on him, patience, and utter ruthlessness. The prescription from there on is the administration of doses of fear, despair, fact, and fiction in combinations carefully gauged for the individual in his stages of deterioration. Eventually his discrimination between fact and fiction, or his regard for the difference, is unhinged.

With a strong personality, physical abuse may be necessary to undermine resistance. With a psychologically weaker individual, words alone may be enough. The Communists are not interested in physical torture to induce a specific act. What they want is to get a person in a state where he will do whatever is wanted seemingly of his own free will. The men in the Kremlin know they can never have enough guns to dominate everybody. But if they can confuse minds about what is true and what is false, they believe they can control the world.

The Communists have had many guinea pigs from behind the Iron Curtain, but only an occasional Westerner. For the first time, the Korean prison camps provided them with a large captive body of Westerners to experiment on. And there is considerable evidence that they used the camps for a laboratory — making a routine effort at mass conversion but principally trying their techniques on widely differing types of individuals.

Public attention has centered on the twenty-one American turncoats who spurned repatriation after the Korean truce. What is more significant is the indication of the large number of other American prisoners who may have succumbed in some degree to brain-washing.

Our code, based on the Geneva Convention, calls for prisoners to tell the enemy no more than name, age, rank, and serial number, and to resist other intercourse beyond that unavoidably incidental to everyday living. The reason for this is the wellknown psychological fact that even conversations about trivia like the weather break down mental barriers and open the way to dangerous rapport.

The barbaric pressures maintained by the enemy in the Korean camps made strict adherence to the code impossible for many men and inordinately difficult for others. The camps were crude affairs in remote, bleak country. Escape, the traditional preoccupation of prisoners of war, was nearly impossible. Many men were incarcerated for two to three years. Red Cross parcels and conventional communication with home were the exception instead of the rule. Food was meager. Medical facilities of the simplest sort often were lacking. Many men despaired of ever gett ing home.

On top of these conditions, the Communists exerted demoralizing pressure of three types. First there was the outright physical abuse — prolonged confinement in holes in the ground or tiny cells, starvation, beatings, even murder. Six thousand American prisoners of war, the Army has estimated, were murdered.

Second, there was terror. Those who didn’t suffer physical maltreatment heard about it. Men were put time after time before fake firing squads, and heard the equivalent of “Ready! . . . Aim!” with no reason to believe the final command was not coming.

More insidious was the Communist-managed “study group” — a perversion of the Geneva Convention clause calling for reasonable facilities for intellectual diversion. Some prisoners reported that attendance at study groups was voluntary. Others reported that various discriminatory pressures against nonparticipants made attendance virtually compulsory for at least several months.

That was long enough for the Communist overseers to spot the more malleable individuals and concentrate on converting them into tools. From study-group participants they were made into study-group leaders, then camp leaders of a sort. As a camp leader, a man might be asked to read “news” bulletins over a camp public-address system. This seemed innocuous enough, but it was only a short, albeit critical, step to broadcasting internationally.

Or a group of leaders would be assembled, possibly transported long distances, and cajoled — sometimes threatened — into broadcasting or signing peace appeals and germ warfare acknowledgments. To many prisoners these seemed, as they did to the outside world, preposterous and reprehensible. But to some, the enormity of what they were doing was camouflaged by the tricky path of deviation down which they had been led. Wellintentioned people in this country have endorsed Communist manifestoes with far less beguilement.

There were instances when these converts, through contacts with the more resistant prisoners, would start swinging away from collaboration with the enemy. Then they would be whisked off to Communist headquarters for weeks or months, under the pretext of special duties. Isolated from their fellows, they would be reindoctrinated until they again seemed compliant.

The Communists made elementary moves toward lining up some collaborators for a post-war underground organization in the United States; but its role was never projected beyond a loose alliance of study groups such as the Communist Party has long had. It seems more likely that what the Communists were interested in mainly was experimentation — as the Germans and Russians experimented in the Spanish Civil War — against the day of a far greater conflict.

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THE Army has stated that out of 3322 men released in the two principal prisoner exchanges, 225 had engaged in conspicuous misconduct in collaborating with their captors. The Air Force had 83 cases in which there were grounds for suspicion, although most of them were exculpated. Prisoners reported incidence of collaboration as high as 10 per cent in individual units. Among British prisoners of war, brain-washing is estimated to have involved around 20 per cent; the British War Office reported that 190 out of 946 returned prisoners were “possibly infected” with Communist. doctrines. Although the probable marginal cases were never considered actionable by the services, it seems likely that well over 10 per cent of our men came under enemy psychological influence to an abnormal degree.

Major Henry A. Segal of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, head of the interservice team that conducted psychiatric interviews with all returning prisoners, has said: “ Measured in terms of conversion to Communism, the enemy’s program was quite ineffective. . . . Nor does it appear too likely that this was the enemy’s prime intent. Measured in terms of confusion, unceasing anxiety, fear, needless death, defection, disloyalty, changed attitudes and beliefs, poor discipline, poor morals, poor esprit, and doubts as to America’s role, their efforts were highly successful.”

Our Department of Defense was not prepared to rope with this infectious weapon. In World War II, deviations from normal behavior in the face of the enemy tended to be classified as “cowardice,” a vague but supposedly perverse dereliction. Witness the execution of Private Slovik, and General Patton’s soldier-slapping.

But during the war the recognition that a man’s mind may be as vulnerable to the stresses of combat as his body — that he may crack up involuntarily, and yet can be rehabilitated just like the physically wounded — was an accepted fact. The appreciation of psychological vulnerability, however, centered on active hostilities rather than on the passive conflict of confinement in enemy hands.

The prisoner-exchange preliminaries in Korea were accompanied by repeated top-level expressions of sympathy for victims of brain-washing. On September 17, 1953, General Mark Clark, U.N. commander in Korea, referring to any prisoners who might be hesitant about returning home, expressed “our sympathy for the hardships they have suffered [and] our understanding of the pressures to which they have been subjected.”

On the same day, Brigadier General A. L. Hamblen, U.N. “explanation team” commander in the prisoner exchange, was quoted as saying that while we were not giving “any wild promises of immunity,”prison-camp “ progrossivism ” was not considered a crime in the United States.

A formal Army policy statement issued in November, 1953, said, referring to all United Nations Korean War prisoners: “Their principal means of prolonging life was to appear to submit to the Communist brain-washing and thought-cleansing programs.” But soon thereafter the Department of Defense manifested signs of uncertainty and policy disagreements on the subject which have continued up to the present.

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THE Department was confronted with two obvious fundamental questions: —

1. To what extent was the psychological conquest of our prisoners due to inadequacies in our system — our code and our training of personnel in maintaining it — and to what extent was it due to individual derelictions?

2. What should be done about the system and about the individuals?

Any answer to the second question presupposed an answer to the first. Criteria were needed, for two purposes: to distinguish involuntary dereliction from misconduct, and to guide future conduct and judgments.

No such criteria have yet been set forth. The Defense Department, as it subsequently acknowledged, is still seeking the answers to the first question. Despite this, the armed services plunged into an out-and-out race — in different directions — to dispose of the brain-washed as speedily as possible.

To the open dismay of high Defense Department officials (who, according to Washington dispatches, had been given no advance notice of the move), the Army on January 22, 1954, lodged the first collaboration charges against Corporal Edward S. Dickenson of Crackers Neck, Virginia. This accusation impelled the Department to give a green light immediately to the Marine Corps to proceed with a collaboration inquiry.

It might be supposed that the Army would explore a test case before proceeding. Yet even before Dickenson could be brought to trial, the Army launched similar charges against Corporal Claude J. Batchelor of Kermit, Texas.

These were obvious selections, because on the face of it they were the two most brain-washed of the returning prisoners. They were members of the non-repatriation group who changed their minds at the last minute.

Before either of them could be tried, a special Marine Corps inquiry board adjudged Colonel Frank H. Schwable, a flier who after months of terribly brutal treatment signed a false germ warfare affidavit, blameless — a finding that said, in effect, that any normal man would have done what he did. But then the Marine Corps, apparently only half convinced of its own verdict (or of the reality of brain-washing), turned around and imposed on Colonel Sehwable about the severest penalty it could, short of discharge: it barred him from positions of leadership in the service.

On May 4, Corporal Dickenson, twenty-three, was convicted of collaborating with the enemy. He was given a dishonorable discharge from the Army and sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

Meanwhile the Air Force established its own policy. The Air Force evidently recognized that there had indeed been such a thing as brain-washing, and that its victims were to be sympathized with — although not to the extent of being considered entirely normal. Of its 83 suspects, 74 were exonerated of blame in closed-door inquiries. Three cases at the time of writing are still under study. Six men who were not cleared were separated from the service — with honorable discharges.

Still another gradation appeared on June 29, when the Army announced that Corporal Paul F. Schnur, Jr., twenty-four, of San Francisco — a man with pre-Korea left-wing connections and a prisoncamp “progressive”—had been given an “undesirable” discharge, under an Army regulation covering disloyal or subversive activities. Such discharges normally are not announced. In this case, the Sixth Army received special authorization from Washington — which was revoked a few hours later, after the news was out.

The uncertainty intimated in these diverse actions was corroborated by Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson on August 22. He set up an interservice board of four generals to study “enemy techniques of physical and mental persuasion” as a basis for “a more effective training program for service men so that they would be better able to cope with Communist treatment of prisoners”; and also as a basis for a “uniform policy” among the services on standards of prisoner behavior under such circumstances. Clearly, Question I had not yet been answered.

But within a fortnight the Army proceeded with its prosecutions. Corporal Batchelor, twenty-two, was convicted on charges similar to those made against Corporal Dickenson, but instead of a tenyear term he drew a sentence of life imprisonment. The suggestion of a certain arbitrariness or inconsistency in this was confirmed when a reviewing authority a few weeks later summarily cut the sentence to twenty years.

Similar charges were pressed against Lieutenant Colonel Harry W. Fleming, forty-six, of Racine, Wisconsin, the first Army officer to be prosecuted. He got the lightest sentence of the three: dishonorable discharge.

Of the Army’s 225 cases of suspected collaboration, up to January, 1955, 28 individuals had been classified as blameless, 40 cases had been dropped for lack of evidence, 21 had received “undesirable” discharges and 7 “general” discharges (both categories between “honorable” and “dishonorable”); 129 cases were still under investigation.

Last September the Army indicated that, of the cases outstanding, it might prosecute only about forty, and that the remainder would receive “backdoor” non-honorable discharges. The latter cases, an Army spokesman said, just involved “simple collaboration.” He did not explain in what way “simple collaboration” differed from other collaboration. The forty, however, an anonymous senior officer was quoted by the New York Times as saying, were “a handful of rats” — a comment which should simplify the work of the court-martial boards which will judge the men.

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THE reason for this gallimaufry seems evident. The Army found itself with the bulk of the collaboration cases. Some of them involved flagrant infractions of orthodox prisoner-of-war conduct, which could not be overlooked; they had to be dealt with one way or another.

Lacking top-level rationalization of the brainwashing problem, the Army took what seemed to be the simplest way out of a woeful imbroglio. It separated out (by undisclosed criteria) men deemed not culpable enough for prosecution but too culpable for continued service, and at the same time more culpable than the Air Force men dismissed by means of honorable discharges. The remaining cases it decided to treat as plain disciplinary problems.

The fact that Corporals Dickenson and Batchelor were bemused enough to contemplate joining the enemy permanently, yet in the relatively free air of the U.N. prisoner-exchange compounds quickly changed their minds (to return to almost certain prosecution), would seem to be prima-facie evidence of abnormal psychological sway — virtual clinical studies in the hypnosis of brain-washing.

There is no question that they and Colonel Fleming committed acts which were reprehensible — ranging from prattling Communist propaganda to suggesting (according to the Batchelor verdict) that a fellow prisoner be shot for being an unreliable party-liner. But there is likewise no question that these acts were committed under extraordinary circumstances and pressures for which the Defense Department admittedly does not have behavioral norms. The assertion sometimes made that a majority of the prisoners did not succumb to brainwashing does not seem especially cogent; it has not been established that a majority were subjected to the same pressures, nor is it certain that all prisoners had uniform resources for withstanding these pressures.

Nonetheless, the Army’s position in its prosecutions has been that psychological conquest was not a factor. A smattering of psychiatric testimony on both sides has been permitted in the courts-martial. But, espousing the classic legal definition of insanity, the Army has said: Prove that the defendant was so unbalanced that he did not know right from wrong.

Aside from the fact that criteria applicable to Harry K. Thaw are not necessarily pertinent to soldiers in Korea, such proof is very difficult to establish in reference to specific acts that took place in prison camps 10,000 miles away several years previously. Analyzing the motivation behind an act such as telling the Communists the whereabouts of a motion picture camera is an assignment that might tax a covey of psychiatrists, let alone artillerymen jurors.

Instead of taking cognizance of psychological stresses, the Army’s implicit position — harking back to pre-World War II standards — has been that the only duress worthy of consideration was physical duress. “There is no evidence,” the reviewing authority in the Batchelor case declared, “to show that his support of the Communists or his other actions were caused by any form or threat of physical punishment.”

The lack of criteria has been aggravated by the fact that the Army was permitted to handle the cases with the same machinery as is employed when a soldier steals a chocolate bar from a post exchange. Theoretically, the prosecutions have occurred at the instance of the commanders of the various subarmies to which the defendants were posted on their return. Court-martial boards, performing the jury function, were formed of personnel gathered from various parts of the respective Army districts. Their yardstick was three sections of the so-called Uniform Code of Military Justice: Article 104, forbidding “communication,” “correspondence,” or “intercourse” with the enemy; Article 105, forbidding prisoners of war to curry favor with the enemy to the jeopardy of fellow prisoners; and Article 134, forbidding conduct “prejudicial to good order and discipline.”

All three regulations were drawn up before brainwashing was ever heard of. Of the three, only Article 105 relates specifically to prisoners of war. Article 104 is so indefinite as to provide no real criterion of prison-camp conduct. Article 134 is a famous catch-all regulation that will cover any allegation down to spitting on the sidewalk. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that three courts-martial came up with such different penalties for substantially the same offense.

The Army’s approach has been to decide the cases on the basis of overt acts — a basis which would have radically altered the outcome of the Air Force and Marine Corps cases.

The net result of the three services’ activities has been to obfuscate rather than clarify the brainwashing problem, and to leave unanswered vital questions concerning not only the defendants but the hundreds of men who are not being prosecuted.

Deploring the interservice divergencies and the Army’s routine court-martial approach, one of the principal veterans’ organizations, American Veterans of World War II and Korea, said in a recent communication to Secretary Wilson: “Whereas such decentralization is perfectly proper with regard to most crimes, it seems inappropriate when applied to a perfectly new situation where there is virtually no judicial precedent. . . .

“AMVETS firmly believe that those prisoners of war who informed on their fellow prisoners in order to gain personal advantages should be dealt with severely.… However, collaboration with the enemy under Communist techniques of brain-washing, starvation, and other inhuman methods of torture and duress presents an entirely new problem.…

“Although the establishment of the [Wilson study Board may eventually lead to the answer, it does not solve the problems presented by the current cases. In fact, the efficacy of the Board’s recommendations may he impaired by uncoördinated action by the military services. . .

Unscrambling eggs is not simple. An initial step toward it, however, was indicated by the president of AMYETS, Henry J. Mahady, a Latrobe, Pennsylvania, lawyer: “[We] respectfully suggest that in dealing with this problem, clear-cut uniform administrative procedures be established in the Department of Defense. Only thus can unfairness and discrimination be avoided.”

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FORMIDABLE and horrible as brain-washing is, it is by no means unbeatable. The obvious answer to psychological attack is psychological armor. It should be just as possible to educate a soldier about mental booby-traps and psychological pitfalls as about physical ones.

The most vulnerable feature of brain-washing is its essential element of isolation. To confuse a man’s standards, you have to separate him from his frame of reference, through the mental rigors of solitary confinement, by means of a psychological wedge or an iron curtain. The possible defenses against the inroads of such isolation are many and varied. General William F. Dean, in solitary confinement, anchored himself to reality by such tenuous threads as doing mathematical problems in his head. It is a question of individual stamina. Fully as deleterious as physical isolation was the manifest disunity of action the Communists managed to engender among our men.

Both individual and collective stamina can be fortified by training and by familiarization with Communist methods. Much of the impact of the enemy’s many-sided psychological offensive derived from the terror of the unknown.

The extension of psychological warfare to individuals plainly calls for another look at standards of fitness for combat personnel. Many Korean prisoners had far more exposure to mental pressures than to gunfire. The psychiatrist’s couch cannot be made the principal furniture in draft board and recruiting headquarters. But screening can be made more exacting. Present Army methods— as was shown among the twenty-one nonrepatriates— do not necessarily exclude homosexuals, let alone men with more subtle weaknesses.

However fine the screening, there always will be psychoneurotics whose weaknesses appear only under the stresses of warfare. Distinguishing them from other sorts of dereliction calls for more solid machinery than the current extremes of broadgauge disciplinary proceedings on the one hand and “back-door” discharges on the other.

The best psychological armor cannot neutralize the use of physical maltreatment in brain-washing if the enemy carries it to the point of medieval torture. The best we can do here is to find ways of minimizing the effect of such abuse.

On this, too, there is a wide divergence of opinion among the services. One school of thought is that we should adhere strictly to the name-rankand-seria1-number code, counting on our obdurateness to discourage the enemy. Another view is that under duress a prisoner should try to confound the enemy by making any acknowledgments demanded, the more nonsensical the better. Both extremes have obvious drawbacks. Under the one, we would he classifying it as a dereliction if prisoners did not resist torture to the point of death — a different thing from expecting combat personnel to risk death by bullet or bomb. Under the other, we might facilitate the betrayal of vital information. The answer may be an intermediate policy, allowing for different tactics in different situations.

These and the other manifold problems of brainwashing can and must be worked out as soon as possible, for the sake both of the military and of the civilian population, which is a potential longrange target. The hideous memories of our soldiers, and the myriad vacant faces behind the Iron Curtain, attest that brain-washing is not something that can be swept under the rug.