The interrogation center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is not unique in American history, at least not unique in the familiar history of the United States. The CIA set up clandestine prisons for interrogation purposes during the Cold War in Germany, Japan and the largest, in the Panama Canal Zone. The "overseas interrogation program" dated to 1948 when Richard Helms realized his officers were being bamboozled by Soviet double agents in occupied Germany. An emergency program to interrogate suspected doubles and captured agents was undertaken at the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Chief of covert operations Allen Dulles asked the military to help. Only the Navy responded giving the agency a former Navy brig in the Zone which the agency adapted into a interrogation prison and a secure location in which to test techniques of "mind control". These techniques centered around the use of psychological stress, hypnosis, and psychotropic drugs, including the newly discovered LSD. In these secret cells located in legal limbos the agency conducted harsh interrogations which under today's international (and US) legal standards constitute torture. The project was code named "Project Artichoke". In one experiment codenamed, "Ultra" federal prisoners in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for 77 consecutive days. When a civilian Army employee was slipped an LSD mickey he jumped out of his New York hotel window to his death. These men were considered expendable in the war against communism. Senior CIA officials including Helms, who later became director of CIA, destroyed almost all the records of America's early use of the same techniques used by it's totalitarian adversaries for fear of adverse public reaction. The fragmentary evidence that remains strongly indicates that interrogations using harsh techniques and drugs went on throughout the fifties. CIA scientists and doctors met monthly to discuss progress in Project Artichoke until 1956. Senate investigations, notably the Church Committee, got close to the project thirty years ago, but Congress never fully investigated the true nature of the agency's first overseas interrogations.
[source: Legacy of Ashes, Weiner 2007]