The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

During the war, three dozen captured American pilots confessed to dropping biological weapons containing anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, and other toxins on North Korea and China. The charges were hotly denied by the U.S. government, and when the airmen returned home after the war, they retracted their charges—under the threat of being tried for treason—alleging that they had been subjected to brainwashing by their Communist captors. The Korean War “brainwashing” story worked its way deeply into America’s dream state, through the aggressive promotional efforts of CIA-sponsored experts like Edward Hunter, who claimed to have coined the term. Writing bestselling books on the alleged Communist technique and testifying dramatically before Congress, Hunter “essentially modernized the idea of demonic possession,” in the words of one observer. The self-described “propaganda specialist” described how all-American boys fell victim to an insidious combination of Asian mesmerism and Soviet torture science, which turned each captured pilot into a “living puppet—a human robot . . . with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body.”