In the early days of the Society, Agency officials trusted
Wolff and his untried ideas with a sensitive espionage assignment. In effect,
the new specialty of human ecology was going to telescope the stages of research
and application into one continuing process. Speeding up the traditional
academic method was required because the CIA men faced an urgent problem. "What
was bothering them," Lawrence Hinkle explains, "was that the Chinese had cleaned
up their agents in China.... What they really wanted to do was come up with some
Chinese [in America], steer them to us, and make them into agents." Wolff
accepted the challenge and suggested that the Cornell group hide its real
purpose behind the cover of investigating "the ecological aspects of disease"
among Chinese refugees. The Agency gave the project a budget of $84,175 (about
30 percent of the money it put into Cornell in 1955) and supplied the study
group with 100 Chinese refugees to work with. Nearly all these subjects had been
studying in the United States when the communists took over the mainland in
1949, so they tended to be dislocated people in their thirties.
On the Agency side, the main concern, as expressed by one ARTICHOKE man,
was the "security hazard" of bringing together so many potential agents in one
place. Nevertheless, CIA officials decided to go ahead. Wolff promised to tell
them about the inner reaches of the Chinese character, and they recognized the
operational advantage that insight into Chinese behavior patterns could provide.
Moreover, Wolff said he would pick out the most useful possible agents. The
Human Ecology Society would then offer these candidates "fellowships" and
subject them to more intensive interviews and "stress producing" situations. The
idea was to find out about their personalities, past conditioning, and present
motivations, in order to figure out how they might perform in future
predicaments—such as finding themselves back in Mainland China as American
agents. In the process, Wolff hoped to mold these Chinese into people willing to
work for the CIA. Mindful of leaving some cover for Cornell, he was adamant that
Agency operators not connected with the project make the actual recruitment
pitch to those Chinese whom the Agency men wanted as agents.
As a final twist, Wolff planned to provide each agent with techniques to
withstand the precise forms of hostile interrogation they could expect upon
returning to China. CIA officials wanted to "precondition" the agents in order
to create long lasting motivation "impervious to lapse of time and direct
psychological attacks by the enemy." In other words, Agency men planned to
brainwash their agents in order to protect them against Chinese brainwashing.
Everything was covered—in theory, at least. Wolff was going to
take a crew of 100 refugees and turn as many of them as possible into
detection-proof, live agents inside China, and he planned to do the job quickly
through human ecology. It was a heady chore for the Cornell professor to take on
after classes.
Wolff hired a full complement of psychologists,
psychiatrists, and anthropologists to work on the project. He bulldozed his way
through his colleagues' qualms and government red tape alike. Having hired an
anthropologist before learning that the CIA security office would not give her a
clearance, Wolff simply lied to her about where the money came from. "It was a
function of Wolff's imperious nature," says his partner Hinkle. "If a dog came
in and threw up on the rug during a lecture, he would continue." Even the CIA
men soon found that Harold Wolff was not to be trifled with. "From the Agency
side, I don't know anyone who wasn't scared of him," recalls a longtime CIA
associate. "He was an autocratic man. I never knew him to chew anyone out. He
didn't have to. We were damned respectful. He moved in high places. He was just
a skinny little man but talk about mind control! He was one of the controllers."
In the name of the Human Ecology Society, the CIA paid $1,200
a month to rent a fancy town house on Manhattan's East 78th Street to house the
Cornell group and its research projects Agency technicians traveled to New York
in December 1954 to install eavesdropping microphones around the building. These
and other more obvious security devices—safes, guards, and the like—made the
town house look different from the academic center it was supposed to be. CIA
liaison personnel held meetings with Wolff and the staff in the secure confines
of the town house, and they all carefully watched the 100 Chinese a few blocks
away at the Cornell hospital. The Society paid each subject $25 a day so the
researchers could test them, probe them, and generally learn all they could
about Chinese people—or at least about middle-class, displaced, anti-Communist
ones.
It is doubtful that any of Wolff's Chinese ever returned
to their homeland as CIA agents, or that all of Wolff's proposals were put into
effect. In any case, the project was interrupted in midstream by a major
shake-up in the CIA's entire mind-control effort. Early in 1955, Sid Gottlieb
and his Ph.D. crew from TSS took over most of the ARTICHOKE functions, including
the Society, from Morse Allen and the Pinkerton types in the Office of Security.
The MKULTRA men moved quickly to turn the Society into an entity that looked and
acted like a legitimate foundation. First they smoothed over the ragged covert
edges. Out came the bugs and safes so dear to Morse Allen and company. The new
crew even made some effort (largely unsuccessful) to attract non-CIA funds. The
biggest change, however, was the Cornell professors now had to deal with Agency
representatives who were scientists and who had strong ideas of their own on
research questions. Up to this point, the Cornellians had been able to keep the
CIA's involvement within bounds acceptable to them. While Harold Wolff never
ceased wanting to explore the furthest reaches of behavior control, his
colleagues were wary of going on to the outer limits—at least under Cornell
cover.
No one would ever confuse MKULTRA projects with ivory-tower
research, but Gottlieb's people did take a more academic—and
sophisticated—approach to behavioral research than their predecessors. The
MKULTRA men understood that not every project would have an immediate
operational benefit, and they believed less and less in the existence of that
one just-over-the-horizon technique that would turn men into puppets. They
favored increasing their knowledge of human behavior in relatively small steps,
and they concentrated on the reduced goal of influencing and manipulating their
subjects. "You're ahead of the game if you can get people to do something ten
percent more often than they would otherwise," says an MKULTRA veteran.
Accordingly, in 1956, Sid Gottlieb approved a $74,000 project
to have the Human Ecology Society study the factors that caused men to defect
from their countries and cooperate with foreign governments. MKULTRA officials
reasoned that if they could understand what made old turncoats tick, it might
help them entice new ones. While good case officers instinctively seemed to know
how to handle a potential agent—or thought they did—the MKULTRA men hoped to
come up with systematic, even scientific improvements. Overtly, Harold Wolff
designed the program to look like a follow-up study to the Society's earlier
programs, noting to the Agency that it was "feasible to study foreign nationals
under the cover of a medical-sociological study." (He told his CIA funders that
"while some information of general value to science should be produced, this in
itself will not be a sufficient justification for carrying out a study of this
nature.") Covertly, he declared the purpose of the research was to assess
defectors' social and cultural background, their life experience, and their
personality structure, in order to understand their motivations, value systems,
and probable future reactions.
The 1956 Hungarian revolt
occurred as the defector study was getting underway, and the Human Ecology
group, with CIA headquarters approval, decided to turn the defector work into an
investigation of 70 Hungarian refugees from that upheaval. By then, most of
Harold Wolff's team had been together through the brainwashing and Chinese
studies. While not all of them knew of the CIA's specific interests, they had
streamlined their procedures for answering the questions that Agency officials
found interesting. They ran the Hungarians through the battery of tests and
observations in six months, compared to a year and a half for the Chinese
project.
The Human Ecology Society reported that most of their
Hungarian subjects had fought against the Russians during the Revolution and
that they had lived through extraordinarily difficult circumstances, including
arrest, mistreatment, and indoctrination. The psychologists and psychiatrists
found that, often, those who had survived with the fewest problems had been
those with markedly aberrant personalities. "This observation has added to the
evidence that healthy people are not necessarily 'normal,' but are people
particularly adapted to their special life situations," the group declared.
While CIA officials liked the idea that their Hungarian
subjects had not knuckled under communist influence, they recognized that they
were working with a skewed sample. American visa restrictions kept most of the
refugee left-wingers and former communist officials out of the United States;
so, as a later MKULTRA document would state, the Society wound up studying
"western-tied rightist elements who had never been accepted completely" in
postwar Hungary. Agency researchers realized that these people would "contribute
little" toward increasing the CIA's knowledge of the processes that made a
communist official change his loyalties.
In order to broaden
their data base, MKULTRA officials decided in March 1957 to bring in some
unwitting help. They gave a contract to Rutgers University sociologists Richard
Stephenson and Jay Schulman "to throw as much light as possible on the sociology
of the communist system in the throes of revolution." The Rutgers professors
started out by interviewing the 70 Hungarians at Cornell in New York, and
Schulman went on to Europe to talk to disillusioned Communists who had also fled
their country. From an operational point of view, these were the people the
Agency really cared about; but, as socialists, most of them probably would have
resisted sharing their experiences with the CIA—if they had known.[2]
Jay Schulman would have resisted, too. After discovering almost 20 years
later that the Agency had paid his way and seen his confidential interviews, he
feels misused. "In 1957 I was myself a quasi-Marxist and if I had known that
this study was sponsored by the CIA, there is really, obviously, no way that I
would have been associated with it," says Schulman. "My view is that social
scientists have a deep personal responsibility for questioning the sources of
funding; and the fact that I didn't do it at the time was simply, in my
judgment, indication of my own naiveté and political innocence, in spite of my
ideological bent."
Deceiving Schulman and his Hungarian
subjects did not bother the men from MKULTRA in the slightest. According to a
Gottlieb aide, one of the strong arguments inside the CIA for the whole Human
Ecology program was that it gave the Agency a means of approaching and using
political mavericks who could not otherwise get security clearances.
"Sometimes," he chuckles, "these left-wing social scientists were damned good."
This MKULTRA veteran scoffs at the displeasure Schulman expresses: "If we'd gone
to a guy and said, 'We're CIA,' he never would have done it. They were glad to
get the money in a world where damned few people were willing to support
them.... They can't complain about how they were treated or that they were asked
to do something they wouldn't have normally done."
The Human
Ecology Society soon became a conduit for CIA money flowing to projects, like
the Rutgers one, outside Cornell. For these grants, the Society provided only
cover and administrative support behind the gold-plated names of Cornell and
Harold Wolff. From 1955 to 1958, Agency officials passed funds through the
Society for work on criminal sexual psychopaths at Ionia State Hospital, [3] a mental
institution located on the banks of the Grand River in the rolling farm country
120 miles northwest of Detroit. This project had an interesting hypothesis: That
child molesters and rapists had ugly secrets buried deep within them and that
their stake in not admitting their perversions approached that of spies not
wanting to confess. The MKULTRA men reasoned that any technique that would work
on a sexual psychopath would surely have a similar effect on a foreign agent.
Using psychologists and psychiatrists connected to the Michigan mental health
and the Detroit court systems, they set up a program to test LSD and marijuana,
wittingly and unwittingly, alone and in combination with hypnosis. Because of
administrative delays, the Michigan doctors managed to experiment only on 26
inmates in three years—all sexual offenders committed by judges without a trial
under a Michigan law, since declared unconstitutional. The search for a truth
drug went on, under the auspices of the Human Ecology Society, as well as in
other MKULTRA channels.
The Ionia project was the kind of
expansionist activity that made Cornell administrators, if not Harold Wolff,
uneasy. By 1957, the Cornellians had had enough. At the same time, the Agency
sponsors decided that the Society had outgrown its dependence on Cornell for
academic credentials—that in fact the close ties to Cornell might inhibit the
Society's future growth among academics notoriously sensitive to institutional
conflicts. One CIA official wrote that the Society "must be given more
established stature in the research community to be effective as a cover
organization." Once the Society was cut loose in the foundation world, Agency
men felt they would be freer to go anywhere in academia to buy research that
might assist covert operations. So the CIA severed the Society's formal
connection to Cornell.
The Human Ecology group moved out of
its East 78th Street town house, which had always seem a little too plush for a
university program, and opened up a new headquarters in Forest Hills, Queens,
which was an inappropriate neighborhood for a well-connected foundation. [4] Agency
officials hired a staff of four led by Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe, who had
worked closely with the CIA as head of the Air Force's study of Korean War
prisoners. Sid Gottlieb and the TSS hierarchy in Washington still made the major
decisions, but Monroe and the Society staff, whose salaries the Agency paid,
took over the Society's dealings with the outside world and the monitoring of
several hundred thousand dollars a year in research projects. Monroe personally
supervised dozens of grants, including Dr. Ewen Cameron's brainwashing work in
Montreal. Soon the Society was flourishing as an innovative foundation,
attracting research proposals from a wide variety of behavioral scientists, at a
time when these people—particularly the unorthodox ones—were still the
step-children of the fund-granting world.
After the Society's exit from Cornell, Wolff and Hinkle stayed
on as president and vice-president, respectively, of the Society's board of
directors. Dr. Joseph Hinsey, head of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical
Center also remained on the board. Allen Dulles continued his personal interest
in the Society's work and came to one of the first meetings of the new board,
which, as was customary with CIA fronts, included some big outside names. These
luminaries added worthiness to the enterprise while playing essentially
figurehead roles. In 1957 the other board members were John Whitehorn, chairman
of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, Carl Rogers, professor
of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, and Adolf A. Berle,
onetime Assistant Secretary of State and chairman of the New York Liberal
Party. [5] Berle had
originally put his close friend Harold Wolff in touch with the CIA, and at
Wolff's request, he came on the Society board despite some reservations. "I am
frightened about this one," Berle wrote in his diary. "If the scientists do what
they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants. But I don't
think it will happen."
There was a lot of old-fashioned
backscratching among the CIA people and the academics as they settled into the
work of accommodating each other. Even Harold Wolff, the first and the most
enthusiastic of the scholar-spies, had made it clear from the beginning that he
expected some practical rewards for his service. According to colleague Hinkle,
who appreciated Wolff as one the great grantsman of his time, Wolff expected
that the Agency "would support our research and we would be their consultants."
Wolff bluntly informed the CIA that some of his work would have no direct use
"except that it vastly enhances our value . . . as consultants and advisers." In
other words, Wolff felt that his worth to the CIA increased in proportion to his
professional accomplishments and importance—which in turn depended partly on the
resources he commanded. The Agency men understood, and over the last half of the
1950s, they were happy to contribute almost $300,000 to Wolff's own research on
the brain and central nervous system. In turn, Wolff and his reputation helped
them gain access to other leading lights in the academic world.
Another person who benefited from Human Ecology funds was Carl Rogers,
whom Wolff had also asked to serve on the board. Rogers, who later would become
famous for his nondirective, nonauthoritarian approach to psychotherapy,
respected Wolff's work, and he had no objection to helping the CIA. Although he
says he would have nothing to do with secret Agency activities today, he asks
for understanding in light of the climate of the 1950s. "We really did regard
Russia as the enemy," declares Rogers, "and we were trying to do various things
to make sure the Russians did not get the upper hand." Rogers received an
important professional reward for joining the Society board. Executive Director
James Monroe had let him know that, once he agreed to serve, he could expect to
receive a Society grant. "That appealed to me because I was having trouble
getting funded," says Rogers. "Having gotten that grant [about $30,000 over
three years], it made it possible to get other grants from Rockefeller and
NIMH." Rogers still feels grateful to the Society for helping him establish a
funding "track record," but he emphasizes that the Agency never had any effect
on his research.
Although MKULTRA psychologist John Gittinger
suspected that Rogers' work on psychotherapy might provide insight into
interrogation methods, the Society did not give Rogers money because of the
content of his work. The grant ensured his services as a consultant, if desired,
and, according to a CIA document, "free access" to his project. But above all,
the grant allowed the Agency to use Rogers' name. His standing in the academic
community contributed to the layer of cover around the Society that Agency
officials felt was crucial to mask their involvement.
Professor Charles Osgood's status in psychology also improved the Society's
cover, but his research was more directly useful to the Agency, and the MKULTRA
men paid much more to get it. In 1959 Osgood, who four years later became
president of the American Psychological Association, wanted to push forward his
work on how people in different societies express the same feelings, even when
using different words and concepts. Osgood wrote in "an abstract conceptual
framework," but Agency officials saw his research as "directly relevant" to
covert activities. They believed they could transfer Osgood's knowledge of
"hidden values and cues" in the way people communicate into more effective
overseas propaganda. Osgood's work gave them a tool—called the "semantic
differential"—to choose the right words in a foreign language to convey a
particular meaning.
Like Carl Rogers, Osgood got his first
outside funding for what became the most important work of his career from the
Human Ecology Society. Osgood had written directly to the CIA for support, and
the Society soon contacted him and furnished $192,975 for research over five
years. The money allowed him to travel widely and to expand his work into 30
different cultures. Also like Rogers, Osgood eventually received NIMH money to
finish his research, but he acknowledges that the Human Ecology grants played an
important part in the progress of his work. He stresses that "there was none of
the feeling then about the CIA that there is now, in terms of subversive
activities," and he states that the Society had no influence on anything he
produced. Yet Society men could and did talk to him about his findings. They
asked questions that reflected their own covert interests, not his academic
pursuits, and they drew him out, according to one of them, "at great length."
Osgood had started studying cross-cultural meaning well before he received the
Human Ecology money, but the Society's support ensured that he would continue
his work on a scale that suited the Agency's purposes, as well as his own.
A whole category of Society funding, called "cover grants,"
served no other purpose than to build the Society's false front. These included
a sociological study of Levittown, Long Island (about $4,500), an analysis of
the Central Mongoloid skull ($700), and a look at the foreign-policy attitudes
of people who owned fallout shelters, as opposed to people who did not ($2,500).
A $500 Human Ecology grant went to Istanbul University for a study of the
effects of circumcision on Turkish boys. The researcher found that young Turks,
usually circumcised between the ages of five and seven, felt "severe emotional
impact with attending symptoms of withdrawal." The children saw the painful
operations as "an act of aggression" that brought out previously hidden fears—or
so the Human Ecology Society reported.
In other instances, the
Society put money into projects whose covert application was so unlikely that
only an expert could see the possibilities. Nonetheless, in 1958 the Society
gave $5,570 to social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif of the
University of Oklahoma for work on the behavior of teen-age boys in gangs. The
Sherifs, both ignorant of the CIA connection,[6] studied the
group structures and attitudes in the gangs and tried to devise ways to channel
antisocial behavior into more constructive paths. Their results were filtered
through clandestine minds at the Agency. "With gang warfare," says an MKULTRA
source, "you tried to get some defectors-in-place who would like to modify some
of the group behavior and cool it. Now, getting a juvenile delinquent defector
was motivationally not all that much different from getting a Soviet one."
MKULTRA officials were clearly interested in using their
grants to build contacts and associations with prestigious academics. The
Society put $1,500 a year into the Research in Mental Health Newsletter
published jointly at McGill University by the sociology and psychiatric
departments. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, an international culture heroine, sat
on the newsletter's advisory board (with, among others, D. Ewen Cameron), and
the Society used her name in its biennial report. Similarly, the Society gave
grants of $26,000 to the well-known University of London psychologist, H. J.
Eysenck, for his work on motivation. An MKULTRA document acknowledged that this
research would have "no immediate relevance for Agency needs," but that it would
"lend prestige" to the Society. The grants to Eysenck also allowed the Society
to take funding credit for no less than nine of his publications in its 1963
report. The following year, the Society managed to purchase a piece of the work
of the most famous behaviorist of all, Harvard's B. F. Skinner. Skinner, who had
tried to train pigeons to guide bombs for the military during World War II,
received a $5,000 Human Ecology grant to pay the costs of a secretary and
supplies for the research that led to his book, Freedom and Dignity.
Skinner has no memory of the grant or its origins but says, "I don't like secret
involvement of any kind. I can't see why it couldn't have been open and
aboveboard."
A TSS source explains that grants like these
"bought legitimacy" for the Society and made the recipients "grateful." He says
that the money gave Agency employees at Human Ecology a reason to phone
Skinner—or any of the other recipients—to pick his brain about a particular
problem. In a similar vein, another MKULTRA man, psychologist John Gittinger
mentions the Society's relationship with Erwin Goffman of the University of
Pennsylvania, whom many consider today's leading sociological theorist. The
Society gave him a small grant to help finish a book that would have been
published anyway. As a result, Gittinger was able to spend hours talking with
him about, among other things, an article he had written earlier on confidence
men. These hucksters were experts at manipulating behavior, according to
Gittinger, and Goffman unwittingly "gave us a better understanding of the
techniques people use to establish phony relationships"—a subject of interest to
the CIA.
To keep track of new developments in the behavioral
sciences, Society representatives regularly visited grant recipients and found
out what they and their colleagues were doing. Some of the knowing professors
became conscious spies. Most simply relayed the latest professional gossip to
their visitors and sent along unpublished papers. The prestige of the Human
Ecology grantees also helped give the Agency access to behavioral scientists who
had no connection to the Society. "You could walk into someone's office and say
you were just talking to Skinner," says an MKULTRA veteran. "We didn't hesitate
to do this. It was a way to name-drop."
The Society did not
limit its intelligence gathering to the United States. As one Agency source puts
it, "The Society gave us a legitimate basis to approach anyone in the academic
community anywhere in the world." CIA officials regularly used it as cover when
they traveled abroad to study the behavior of foreigners of interest to the
Agency, including such leaders as Nikita Khrushchev. The Society funded foreign
researchers and also gave money to American professors to collect information
abroad. In 1960, for instance, the Society sponsored a survey of Soviet
psychology through the simple device of putting up $15,000 through the official
auspices of the American Psychological Association to send ten prominent
psychologists on a tour of the Soviet Union. Nine of the ten had no idea of the
Agency involvement, but CIA officials were apparently able to debrief everyone
when the group returned. Then the Society sponsored a conference and book for
which each psychologist contributed a chapter. The book added another $5,000 to
the CIA's cost, but $20,000 all told seemed like a small price to pay for the
information gathered. The psychologists—except perhaps the knowledgeable one—did
nothing they would not ordinarily have done during their trip, and the scholarly
community benefited from increased knowledge on an important subject. The only
thing violated was the openness and trust normally associated with academic
pursuits. By turning scholars into spies—even unknowing ones—CIA officials
risked the reputation of American research work and contributed potential
ammunition toward the belief in many countries that the U.S. notion of academic
freedom and independence from the state is self-serving and hypocritical.
Secrecy allowed the Agency a measure of freedom from normal
academic restrictions and red tape, and the men from MKULTRA used that freedom
to make their projects more attractive. The Society demanded "no stupid progress
reports," recalls psychologist and psychiatrist Martin Orne, who received a
grant to support his Harvard research on hypnotism. As a further sign of
generosity and trust, the Society gave Orne a follow-on $30,000 grant with no
specified purpose.[7] Orne could
use it as he wished. He believes the money was "a contingency investment" in his
work, and MKULTRA officials agree. "We could go to Orne anytime," says one of
them, "and say, 'Okay, here is a situation and here is a kind of guy. What would
you expect we might be able to achieve if we could hypnotize him?' Through his
massive knowledge, he could speculate and advise." A handful of other Society
grantees also served in similar roles as covert Agency consultants in the field
of their expertise.
In general, the Human Ecology Society
served as the CIA's window on the world of behavioral research. No phenomenon
was too arcane to escape a careful look from the Society, whether extrasensory
perception or African witch doctors. "There were some unbelievable schemes,"
recalls an MKULTRA veteran, "but you also knew Einstein was considered crazy.
You couldn't be so biased that you wouldn't leave open the possibility that some
crazy idea might work." MKULTRA men realized, according to the veteran, that
"ninety percent of what we were doing would fail" to be of any use to the
Agency. Yet, with a spirit of inquiry much freer than that usually found in the
academic world, the Society took early stabs at cracking the genetic code with
computers and finding out whether animals could be controlled through electrodes
placed in their brains.
The Society's unrestrained,
scattershot approach to behavioral research went against the prevailing wisdom
in American universities—both as to methods and to subjects of interest. During
the 1950s one school of thought—so-called "behaviorism,"—was accepted on campus,
virtually to the exclusion of all others. The "behaviorists," led by Harvard's
B. F. Skinner, looked at psychology as the study of learned observable responses
to outside stimulation. To oversimplify, they championed the approach in which
psychologists gave rewards to rats scurrying through mazes, and they tended to
dismiss matters of great interest to the Agency: e.g., the effect of drugs on
the psyche, subjective phenomena like hypnosis, the inner workings of the mind,
and personality theories that took genetic differences into account.
By investing up to $400,000 a year into the early, innovative work of men
like Carl Rogers, Charles Osgood, and Martin Orne, the CIA's Human Ecology
Society helped liberate the behavioral sciences from the world of rats and
cheese. With a push from the Agency as well as other forces, the field opened
up. Former iconoclasts became eminent, and, for better or worse, the Skinnerian
near-monopoly gave way to a multiplication of contending schools. Eventually, a
reputable behavioral scientist could be doing almost anything: holding hands
with his students in sensitivity sessions, collecting survey data on spanking
habits, or subjectively exploring new modes of consciousness. The CIA's money
undoubtedly changed the academic world to some degree, though no one can say how
much.
As usual, the CIA men were ahead of their time and had
started to move on before the new approaches became established. In 1963, having
sampled everything from palm reading to subliminal perception, Sid Gottlieb and
his colleagues satisfied themselves that they had overlooked no area of
knowledge—however esoteric—that might be promising for CIA operations. The
Society had served its purpose; now the money could be better spent elsewhere.
Agency officials transferred the still-useful projects to other covert channels
and allowed the rest to die quietly. By the end of 1965, when the remaining
research was completed, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was
gone.