The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen

It was a CIA move that was three years in the making. In fact, the word “brainwashing” had entered the English lexicon in September 1950, courtesy of the CIA, when an article written by a reporter named Edward Hunter appeared in a Miami newspaper, the News. “Brain-Washing Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party,” the headline read. Although Hunter had been a journalist for decades, he also worked for the CIA. He’d been hired by the agency on a contract basis to disseminate brainwashing stories through the mainstream press. “Brain-washing,” wrote Hunter, was a devious new tool being used by the communists to strip a man of his humanity and “turn him into a robot or a slave.” The very concept grabbed Americans by the throat. The notion of government mind-control programs had been a mainstay of dystopian science-fiction novels for decades, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic We to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 best-seller Brave New World. But that was science fiction. This was real, Hunter wrote. To be incinerated in a nuclear bomb attack was an ever-present Cold War threat, but it was also an abstraction, difficult to conceptualize on an individual scale. In 1950, the idea of being brainwashed, as if controlled by an evil wizard’s spell—that was somehow much easier to relate to. Brainwashing terrified people, and they wanted to know more.