Much of the research was solely based on human experimentation:
“from 1953 to 1963, MKUltra and allied projects dispensed $25 million for human experiments by 185 nongovernmental researchers at eighty institutions, including forty-four universities and twelve hospitals” (ibid.: 29). Direct and indirect CIA contracts were sent to universities including known psychologists. Additional research was being done while the war in Vietnam was occurring as part of the Phoenix programme (and others) where, in McCoy’s sarcastic words, there was “a limitless supply of human subjects” (ibid.: 65).
In 1963, the CIA refined their Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook. Throughout the forty years, the Kubark manual would not only define but also advance and be of an example to other agency interrogation methods and training programs throughout the Third World. Incorporating the behavioral research done by contract academics, the manual revealed a new form of torture that was based on sensory deprivation and “self-inflicted” pain for an effect that, for the first time in the two millenia of this cruel science, was more psychological than physical. (Ibid.: