The War

In July 1963 the Central Intelligence Agency completed a manual for the interrogation of resistant sources. It was classified secret, titled KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation after the Agency’s cryptonym for itself, and released in 1997 under a freedom-of-information request by the Baltimore Sun. Much of it is procedural. Its core is a theory. The interrogator’s aim, it explains, is to induce regression: a return of the subject to an earlier, more dependent state of mind, in which the adult’s capacity to resist has been stripped back to the child’s need to please. The means are the manipulation of the environment, sensory deprivation, the disruption of sleep and time, the alternation of threat and kindness, and the withholding of every cue by which the subject could reconstruct where he was and how long he had been there. And it records, as a finding, that the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself.

The manual’s authors had learned this from research. Through the 1950s the Agency had funded, among others, Donald Hebb’s sensory-deprivation experiments at McGill and, at the Allan Memorial Institute across the same Montreal campus where Penfield was mapping the cortex, Ewen Cameron’s program of depatterning: weeks of drug-induced sleep, electroshock at many times the therapeutic dose, and thousands of hours of a taped phrase played to the sedated patient, which Cameron called psychic driving. His subjects were psychiatric patients who had come to him for depression and anxiety. Several lost their memories permanently. The program was one subproject among more than a hundred and forty in the operation called MK-Ultra, whose records the Agency’s director ordered destroyed in 1973, and which is known today from the twenty thousand pages that survived in a financial archive by mistake.

Three fronts

Consciousness warfare is the deliberate operation against the instrument described in The Instrument, and it is conducted on the three faculties the boundary depends on. The documented programs are the clearest cases because they were written down by their operators, and the ordinary operations are the same techniques applied to populations instead of prisoners.

The first front is attention. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, opened his 1928 book Propaganda with the sentence: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. He meant it as a description of a profession he was founding, and the profession has since built the largest machines in human history for the purpose. A platform that selects, for each user, whatever will hold the eye longest is doing on a population what KUBARK’s interrogator did in the cell: controlling the environment so that the subject’s attention goes where the operator needs it and nowhere else. The difference is scale, and the absence of a cell. The War for Attention follows the machinery.

The second front is narrative. Attention held must be given something to hold, and the account a population receives of its own situation is the most contested object in the war. The techniques are old: the selected recording, the caption that supplies the motive, the repetition that makes one reading familiar, the managed opposition that ensures every disagreement stays inside the permitted frame. The manual’s word for the interrogation-room version is rapport; the operational word for the population version is narrative control; the historical instances run from the Roman triumph, staged to render a conquest as destiny, through the state theater of every regime since. What is defended is the painted sky. The paint need contain no lie. A true fragment, selected, charged and repeated until it stands for the whole, builds a captive world out of accurate parts, and the frame that arranged them is the one thing the frame never shows.

The third front is memory, and it is the deepest, because a boundary that cannot remember can be entered again and again without learning. Cameron erased memory with electricity. A civilization erases it by archive: by destroying the records, as the Agency did in 1973; by classifying them; by producing so much noise that the signal cannot be recovered; by rewriting the history taught to children so that the last generation’s crime becomes the next generation’s folklore. Documented Threshold Programs preserves the cases where the record survived. The general principle is the interrogator’s: the subject who does not know how long he has been in the room cannot plan his way out of it.

The older instruments

The twentieth century’s programs were the industrialization of techniques the ancient world practiced as ritual, and the continuity is the point. The Ferrarese deck that Adams decoded was a working: a talisman composed to bind its owner, through images and names, to a theology and a loyalty he could not thereafter escape. The Carthaginian precinct was a spectacle that taught a city what its god required. Every mass ritual, from the Roman games to the coronation to the televised state funeral, synchronizes the attention of a population and installs, beneath opinion, the sense of what is real and who is owed. Theater and magic were one art before they were two words, and the theater state, in which the performance of power is the power, has never gone out of production. Consciousness Warfare in its full form follows the ritual and theatrical instruments; what matters here is that the manual and the mass are the same operation at different scales.

The subtlest instrument is the managed opening. A population held too tightly breaks or revolts, and a competent regime knows it. So the enclosure includes its own exits: the counterculture, the licensed heresy, the awakening movement with a gift shop, the disclosure that reveals exactly as much as was already known. The aperture is real; the container around it is the operator’s. A genuine spiritual opening delivered into a captured frame produces a devotee, and the devotee’s new capacity is harvested along with the rest. The sign of a managed opening is that it enlarges the ceiling without touching the exits. The managed disclosure carries the same sign. It reveals real crimes and ends at a face, so that the apparatus which operated through the face changes costume while the public watches the sacrifice; an empire confesses through its vessel so that it never confesses to itself. An opened archive that leaves a new custodian holding the key has changed wardens; a disclosure that returns the means of judgment to the public, and reaches the allies of whoever opened it, has changed the room.

The regime also keeps a nursery. The capacities the ceiling excludes from the population are sought out in children, trained under protocol and tasked, so that what the enclosure denies to everyone it holds in custody for itself. GATE Kid Reunion follows one cohort from the pull-out room to the remote-viewing unit.

The conduct of resistance

The war is fought in the rendering, and so is its resistance. KUBARK’s own finding is the resistance’s first principle: the threat works better than the act, which means that the operator’s chief weapon is the subject’s imagination of what the operator could do. A boundary that has looked at the threat and priced it has removed most of the operator’s leverage. The second principle follows from the three fronts. What is attacked is attention, narrative and memory, and what is defended is therefore attention that can be withdrawn, an account of one’s situation that has been tested against the world, and a record that survives the operator’s account of it. These are disciplines, not attitudes. They are trained the way any instrument is trained, in the body first.

And the resistance has a direction, without which it becomes the thing it fights. The tradition that named the archangel Michael as the power that confronts the dragon also insisted that the confrontation be conducted without the dragon’s means. Courage confronts what is false; love governs what courage is for; and a resistance that adopts the interrogator’s methods has changed sides, whatever its flag. The measure of success in this war is the same as the measure of the Work: the freer, more truthful, more capable relations the resistance makes possible, and the number of people it returns to a boundary they can hold. Hatred synchronizes a population as well as any ritual, and the operator knows how to use it. So does fascination. A name repeated without action feeds what it exposes, and a resistance organized around its adversary has made the adversary its center; the naming that works locates, assigns responsibility, acts, records, and closes. The Michaelic Current develops the ethic.

What the war defends

The manual describes how to break one man in a room. The larger operation, of which it is the honest fragment, holds a population in a room it cannot see, and the question that the manual never asks is what the room is for. An interrogation has a purpose: information, confession, a broken asset who can be used. The war against a whole population’s attention, narrative and memory has one too, and it is not the war’s own. What the war defends is a wall; what the wall encloses is a crop; and the account of who eats it is The Harvest.

References

Central Intelligence Agency. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. July 1963. Declassified 1997; the quoted sentence appears at p. 90 of the released text.

Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. Times Books, 1979. On the surviving MK-Ultra financial records and Cameron’s program.

Collins, Anne. In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada. Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1988.

McCoy, Alfred W. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Metropolitan, 2006. On Hebb and the McGill research.

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. Horace Liveright, 1928. The opening sentence of ch. 1.

Geertz, Clifford. Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton University Press, 1980.

Adams, Peter Mark. The Game of Saturn. Scarlet Imprint, 2018. On the deck as a talismanic working.