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to modify his own opinion and even to reject known facts and conform to the group, to the large majority.

Returning prisoners frequently reported that in the restricted environment of the prison camp they soon began to doubt what they knew to be true with regard to the ongoing Korean war, the battles and so on. Some of them felt the need to check with new prisoners to find out whether the captor was really telling them the truth in his news reports and others said that one of the first things that they wanted to do after liberation was to validate or reject the news that they had been getting.

Under the circumstances in Korea it is not surprising to find prisoners doubting their own opinions and facts. This is an outgrowth, as basic research has shown, of the intense one-way news and opinion to which they were subjected.

The question which remains, considering this heavy flow of indoctrination and news, is to what degree our prisoners of war, speaking now again of the total prisoner population who returned, showed evidence in their repatriation interviews of a conversion to communism as a way of life.

Before identifying these figures, I want to describe the basis by which we arrived at these figures.

Our results in this connection are based on the statements made by returning prisoners of war, statements in response to direct questions of attitude as well as descriptions by the prisoners of their response to the enemy's indoctrination program and content. There was room here, of course, for defensiveness on the part of the prisoners of war in not relating their true attitude, but we culled together every bit of information relating to this that a prisoner of war may have given in his interrogation by the Army.

As an example, a prisoner of war may have indicated that communism is a fine system for an underdeveloped country like China, but would never work in a country like the United States and should be rejected obviously in a country like the United States. There were large numbers who scoffed and jeered and rejected completely all of the ideas which the enemy attempted to flood them with while they were in captivity. There was also a small proportion who made statements like, "Communism is the highest system which man can attain on this earth."

I cite these quotations simply to indicate the kinds of data on which we based the results shown on this chart.

Our results indicate that 88 percent of the returning prisoners of war accepted none of the ideology of the captor.

Of the remaining 12 percent, over half accepted little. That is, 7 percent. 4 percent gave evidence of a moderate degree of affection for communism, and only 1 percent can be regarded as being converted to communism to a large degree.

Mr. O'DONNELL. Do you have any information as to whether or not those particular individuals before they went over had any degree of affinity for communism?

Dr. SEGAL. None whatsoever, sir. There are only fragmentary data in these men's dossiers, not enough for us to treat statistically. We have no data regarding their previous attitudes toward communism, nor, moreover, their attitude toward communism at the present time.

Mr. O'DONNELL. Then the Defense Department or the Department of the Army particularly does not know what the present-day status is of that 1 percent?

Dr. SEGAL. I have, sir, no idea what the Army or Defense Department knows. I only know that as researchers we stopped our research and our evaluation of these men at the point that we processed these data, and that there was no attempt by us as members of a civilian research agency to follow through on these men.

What steps have been taken by military and civilian legal officers is something on which I have absolutely no knowledge.

The CHAIRMAN. The Chair wishes to make an announcement.

There is not a quorum of the committee present at this time. We will proceed as we did on yesterday. You may continue making your statement. It will not be under oath at this time. When a quorum is again present, you will be asked then if the statements you make during the absence of a quorum are true under your oath.

Dr. SEGAL. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. You may proceed. We are making this departure from the regularly established rules and procedures simply to expedite this hearing, because the nature of the testimony is not controversial in the sense that we anticipate that any one is going to take the fifth amendment or to try to withhold information. Our witnesses are all cooperative.

You may continue with your statement, and later you will be asked to state under oath if it is the truth.

Proceed.

Dr. SEGAL. A third major goal of the enemy was to extract valuable military information from the prisoners of war during the interrogation procedure. Again we have certain data descriptive of these interrogation procedures covered in part yesterday. I shall summarize them at this point.

Virtually all of the prisoners of war who returned from Korea were interrogated to some extent by their captors. The most common number of separate interrogations among the prisoners as a whole was two. Twenty-eight percent of the prisoners experienced two interrogations, although 18 percent had five or more. The number reached 100 or more in the cases of some resisters who, from our data, we find were resistive in yielding military information and therefore had to be interrogated by the enemy to a larger degree. In other words the resisters were interrogated to a larger degree, more intensively and more extensively than were the participators, by virtue of the fact that they were slower in yielding the information which the enemy desired.

Very briefly, the enemy covered autobiographical information in their interrogatory procedures with virtually all of the prisoners of war. That was presented explicitly yesterday.

In addition, they sought the following kinds of information: Half of the prisoners were questioned about matters dealing with tables of organization and equipment, Army organization techniques and other military unit data; 40 percent report being asked their name, rank, and serial number and only isolated cases, less than one-half of 1 percent of all the prisoners, report being asked only this information.

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One-fourth of the prisoners were interrogated about military equipment and supplies, and 15 percent about Army tactics and strategy. In addition, data regarding the prisoners' personal political attitudes and psychological attitudes were gone into to some degree by the enemy captors, in addition to the written autobiographical statements which were provided by the POW's.

Mr. O'DONNELL. Can you tell us to what extent resisters or collaborators were subjected to interrogation insofar as percentages?

Dr. SEGAL. As I noted earlier, every prisoner of war, with the exception only of those few captured late in the war, was subjected to enemy interrogation to some degree. The only contrast I can draw between resisters and collaborators is that the resisters were interrogated more than the collaborators, but to some degree virtually all POW's were interrogated.

Mr. O'DONNELL. Under indoctrination were more collaborators subjected to indoctrination than resisters?

Dr. SEGAL. Yes, sir. Collaborators, or participators were subjected to more indoctrination than resisters by virtue of the fact that they volunteered for more. In other words, there was a required indoctrination procedure by the enemy which all prisoners had to attend. Beyond that, the enemy chose those seemingly cooperative prisoners of war to engage in voluntary indoctrination procedures run by the prisoners themselves about which descriptions were given in prior testimony.

Mr. O'DONNELL. Doctor, do you classify what happened to the prisoners of war as brainwashing and would you define the term?

Dr. SEGAL. Yes. There are a number of definitions of brainwashing which I have read and which are available. For my purpose I would prefer to use the definition of brainwashing which is given in the publication "Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination, and Exploitation of Prisoners of War," which was presented in evidence yesterday by Captain Cumby, and to which Captain Cumby contributed the major effort.

On page 51 of that publication we find this statement:

The term “brainwashing” has caught the public imagination and is used very loosely to describe any act committed against an individual by the Communists. Actually, brainwashing is a prolonged psychological process designed to erase an individual's past beliefs and concepts and to substitute new ones. It is a highly coercive practice which is irreconcilable with universally accepted medical ethics. In the process of brainwashing the efforts of many are directed against the individual. To be successful, it requires among other things that the individual be completely isolated from normal associations and environment.

We cannot say that the environment in which the prisoner in Korea lived was normal; but by abnormal is meant here, I am certain, complete solitary isolation, deprivation of food and water, and face-to-face indoctrination for long periods of time under conditions of extreme mental and physical duress.

In terms of this definition, although of course we made no attempt to draw parallels between this definition and the experiences of our POW's, I would say in answer to your question that very few of the prisoners of war in Korea met experiences which fit this definition of brainwashing.

Mr. O'DONNELL. Based on your study I understand you submitted to the Defense Department 10 days ago, would you submit any specific recommendations you made for the Defense Department?

Dr. SEGAL. Sir, that will form the final portion of my presentation as soon as I conclude the description of the major findings of our research.

There is a point in elaboration of my response to your question about brainwashing. Everything I say this morning has to do with the Army prisoners who were the sole subjects of our research. This does not apply to the experiences of members of the Air Force, Marines, Navy, et cetera; or certainly to civilians, some of whom were in fact by this definition brainwashed. We have no data to present from my agency regarding these other personnel.

What were the over-all techniques utilized by the captor in their attempts to exploit the prisoners of war for these purposes? May I have the next chart, please.

(The chart follows:)

CHART NO. 8

THE ENEMY'S TECHNIQUES

1. Rewards and punishments. 2. Divide and conquer.

Dr. SEGAL. The primary technique utilized by the enemy was a simple system of rewards and punishments to be described in more detail subsequently. The Communist captor called upon no hypnotic powers to influence our men, nor did he wantonly physically mistreat and abuse all prisoners of war. In their very debased and deprived condition in captivity, the very deprived conditions which obtained within the prison camps in Korea, the enemy instituted a system of rewards and punishments and appealed to the drive among human beings to search for pleasure and to avoid pain. By cooperating with the enemy the drives were satisfied. Cooperation meant reward. Resistance frequently meant punishment.

A secondary overriding technique is what we might call divide and conquer. Quite apart from the normal prison camp separation of officers and men, the captor successfully encouraged divisiveness and suspicion among the prisoners. The prisoners themselves hardly helped the situation since, as will be shown later, there was a glaring lack of espirit and cohesiveness and mutual concern among them. Among the more potent techniques with regard to divide and conquer was the encouragement and rewarding of informers by the enemy. Our data indicate that 10 percent of the Army prisoners of war in Korea informed on a fellow prisoner at least once during their internment.

The CHAIRMAN. What percent?

Dr. SEGAL. Ten percent, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Informed on their fellow prisoners?

Dr. SEGAL. Yes.

If I may, we shall now contrast the groups of prisoners whom we studied, the resisters, middlemen, and collaborators. For the purpose of clarity we shall speak first about the comparison between the two extreme groups, between the resisters and the participators, and sub

sequently I shall describe how the middle group, that large proportion of the prisoner population, differed from both of the extremes.

Did the participators and resisters differ in their civilian background? Very little. No significant differences between these two groups were found with respect to age, education, civilian occupation, marital status, or geographic origin, that is, the region of the country from which they came or in which they were born. We did find that the intelligence level of the participators was somewhat lower than that of the resisters.

Mr. O'DONNELL. Was any pattern established as to geographical location, religious conviction, education, or anything like that?

Dr. SEGAL. No, sir; there are no statistically reliable distinctions between these two groups based on those points.

May I point out just this: Our data on religious preference concerned only those data on a man's personnel form or dogtag indicating simply what his religious preference is. We have absolutely no data to indicate a man's religious orientation within any preference, within any denomination or the intensity of his religious experience. These were data which we would very much have wanted to have, but were nowhere to my knowledge available for this large sample of prisoners of war.

The same applies to education. We have data describing the level of education which a man achieved, his grade, but nothing to describe the quality or content of that education. That was nowhere available to us.

What about the military background of the prisoners? No significant differences were found between participators and resisters when they were compared with respect to their ranks, their branches of the Army, or the degree of their prior military experience or their prior combat experience. One major difference did appear. We found that the resisters were more frequently decorated by the Army prior to Korea than were the participators. The implication of this finding is simply that the aggressively resistive prisoner tended to act in a meritorious fashion even before he was captured as far as the Army was concerned, and lends support to the efforts of the Defense Department to view soldiers in no different light as combatmen in the field and as men who are fighting the enemy behind barbed wire enclosures.

Altogether the few differences in background found between resisters and participators give us little insight into the dynamics of their behavior in captivity.

What role did attitudes toward communism play? We found little relationship between the degree to which a man accepted communism as an ideology and the extent to which he complied with the captor's demands for collaboration. All of our results point to the conclusion that participation with the enemy was based on grounds other than ideological ones.

How did the participators and resisters compare on this score? May I have the next chart.

(The chart follows:)

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