A cold-war case of CIA detention still echoes
The Yuri Nosenko affair unveiled US use of extreme isolation to try to 'break' the KGB defector.
from the January 8, 2008 edition
Page 3 of 4
Nosenko was held for three years in extreme isolation, first in a locked attic room in a CIA safe house in Clinton, Md. Later he was transferred to a specially built windowless concrete cell at Camp Peary, the CIA training facility near Williamsburg, Va.
He was questioned and requestioned about whether the KGB had ever approached Oswald during the three years Oswald lived in the Soviet Union prior to the Kennedy assassination. Nosenko said he had personally reviewed Oswald's KGB file and that, while the KGB had conducted surveillance of Oswald, it had never tried to recruit him.
This issue was critical because KGB involvement with Oswald might suggest Soviet involvement in the Kennedy assassination – a prospect that could have propelled the cold war into a nuclear war.
Nosenko insisted that Oswald was a "nut" and that the Soviets had deemed him unsuitable for intelligence work.
Some CIA officials were sure Nosenko was lying and was part of a larger Soviet operation. But how to make him talk? He was a trained KGB officer who knew how to resist interrogation.
According to a CIA internal investigation, agents decided to use the Soviet Union's own techniques against him. They treated him precisely as the KGB had treated Yale University professor Frederick Barghoorn, who had been arrested in Moscow on trumped-up spy charges to set up a potential swap for a genuine Soviet spy nabbed in New York. The KGB held the professor for 16 days in October 1963 before the intervention of his friend, President Kennedy, won his release.
Isolation to 'break' Nosenko
Nosenko's cell built at Camp Peary contained a metal bed bolted to the floor, a foam mattress, one light bulb, and a television camera. There were no windows. No sheets or blankets. No reading material. Just four soundproof, concrete walls – a replica of a Soviet detention cell.
"To say it was a nightmare is not enough. It was hell," Nosenko told CIA employees in a 1998 speech.
The guards were instructed not to speak with him or acknowledge his presence. They watched him via television 24 hours a day.
Such conditions of confinement are described in a 1956 US government-funded secret report titled "Communist Control Techniques." It discusses how the Soviets used prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation to drive detainees to the brink of insanity and condition them to confess. Isolation can work as a kind of tightening vise on the psyche, according to the report. Prison guards estimated that the average detainee "broke" in four to six weeks.
By then, a detainee loses "many of the restraints of ordinary behavior," the report says. "He may soil himself. He weeps, he mutters, and he prays aloud in his cell. He follows the orders of the guard with the docility of a trained animal. Indeed, the guards say that such prisoners are 'reduced to animals.' "
But there are exceptions. "Those convinced of their innocence and familiar with KGB methods may be able to stand up under isolation for a long time," the report says.
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