We continue Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control...

.... "I can hypnotize a man—without his knowledge or consent—into committing treason against the United States," boasted Dr. George Estabrooks in the early 1940s.

Estabrooks, chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, was called to Washington by the War Department shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since he was the ranking authority on hypnosis at the time, they wanted his opinion on how the enemy might be planning to use hypnotism. "Two hundred trained foreign operators, working in the United States," Estabrooks told the military leaders, "could develop a uniquely dangerous army of hypnotically controlled Sixth Columnists."1

At that time, only a handful of men knew of the government's experiments with hypnosis for the purpose of controlling minds in the interest of "national security." In that decade there had been no concentrated assassinations of presidents, candidates, or civil rights leaders. There had not yet been Watergate, nor any disclosures of government agencies invading the privacy of United States citizens. The CIA had not yet been conceived, and even its parent, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), did not exist.

It was unthinkable at the time that an agency of the U.S. government would employ mind-control techniques on its own people. Therefore it was natural for George Estabrooks to believe that if America were threatened by hypnotic mind control, the threat would be posed by a foreign enemy working within the United States.

So in 1943 Estabrooks sounded bis public alarm, and planted the seed for what would become priority top-secret research for the next twenty-five years.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/09/part-2operation-mind-controlwithout.html