The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.md

created	updated	title	aliases	tags	category	summary	start	end	location	relations
2026-05-17	2026-10-09	Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology	Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology Human Ecology Fund Human Ecology Society	Organization CIA MKULTRA Front ColdWar 1950s 1960s	Intelligence & Government	The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was a CIA front foundation established around 1955 in New York City to channel MKULTRA funding to academic researchers, including Ewen Cameron at McGill University.	1955-01-01	1965-01-01	New York, New York	type with reverse start end role fn head_of James Monroe true 1957 1963 executive secretary and treasurer (1957 annual report); executive director of the renamed Human Ecology Fund 1961 to 1963 (Price) 4 type with reverse start role fn head_of Harold Wolff true 1955 president, per the 1957 annual report 4 type with start role fn funded D. Ewen Cameron 1957 project Experiments in Techniques and Methods of Psychotherapy (McGill), per the 1957 annual report 4 type with start role fn funded David R. Saunders 1957 Personality Studies project at Educational Testing Service, per the 1957 annual report; about $140,000 per Marks 5 type with start end role fn funded Klara G. Roman 1961 1963 $2,000 grant for a book on the psychology of writing, per Price's table of the Fund's 1961-1963 report; the Fund is thanked in the posthumous Encyclopedia of the Written Word 9

The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was a Central Intelligence Agency front foundation established in New York City around 1955 to channel covert funding from Project MKUltra to academic researchers, psychiatric institutions, and other organizations conducting behavioral modification research on the CIA's behalf. Operating under the guise of a legitimate foundation supporting behavioral science research, the Society provided institutional cover that allowed MKULTRA funding to reach recipients whose participation might have been refused or compromised if the CIA's role had been disclosed.¹

Function and Structure

The Society was one of two primary cut-out mechanisms through which MKULTRA funding reached institutional recipients; the other was the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation (a legitimate foundation that served as a partial conduit). The Human Ecology Fund was the Society itself under a new name from 1961.² The Society operated with a board of directors that included academics with legitimate scholarly credentials, providing the appearance of conventional foundation governance.

The cut-out structure served multiple intelligence purposes. It fragmented the institutional relationship between the CIA and individual researchers: a professor at a university receiving a Society grant knew (or was given reason to believe) only that a private foundation was funding their research. It maintained the CIA's deniability, since no CIA name appeared on grant documents. And it distributed the program across enough institutions that no single investigator could reconstruct the program's full scope from their own position within it.

Sidney Gottlieb, directing MKULTRA through the CIA's Technical Services Division, managed the Society as one of his primary funding channels. Society grants funded research in hypnosis, sensory deprivation, pharmacological behavior modification, electroconvulsive therapy, and related areas.¹

Key Grants

The Society's most consequential grant was its funding of D. Ewen Cameron's research at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute beginning in 1957. Cameron's proposals for "psychic driving" research - his theory of erasing existing behavioral patterns and installing new ones - received Society funding for several years. The Society's grants to Cameron helped sustain experiments that produced severe and permanent harm to hundreds of psychiatric patients who had not consented to research participation.

The Society also funded research at other American universities, psychiatric hospitals, and research institutions, supporting work on hypnosis, behavior modification, sensory deprivation, and pharmacological research. Many researchers who received Society funding did not know the organization was a CIA front; some knew or suspected government intelligence involvement but did not know the CIA specifically.¹

Founding by Harold Wolff and the Chinese Refugee Project

The Society was incorporated in 1955 by Harold Wolff, the Cornell neurologist who had conducted an official Brainwashing study for Allen Dulles; Wolff argued that to understand how governments manipulate behavior one had to study "human ecology," man in relation to his total environment, drawing on psychology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. In its early days the Society undertook a covert espionage assignment: under the cover of investigating "the ecological aspects of disease," it studied 100 Chinese refugee students stranded after the 1949 revolution (on an $84,175 budget, paying each $25 a day) to identify candidates who might be recruited, trained, and even conditioned to resist Chinese interrogation as agents on the mainland. Lawrence Hinkle recalled that when CIA security would not clear an anthropologist Wolff had hired, Wolff simply lied to her about the money's source.³

James Monroe and the Academic Cover Grants

In 1955 Sid Gottlieb's TSS crew took the Society over from Morse Allen and remade it to look like a legitimate foundation; in 1957, as Cornell administrators tired of it, the CIA severed the university connection and installed a four-person staff under Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe, a former Air Force Korean-War-POW researcher, to monitor several hundred thousand dollars a year in grants (Monroe personally supervised Cameron's work in Montreal). The grants built academic respectability: Carl Rogers received about $30,000, Charles Osgood $192,975 for the cross-cultural "semantic differential" research the Agency saw as relevant to propaganda, H. J. Eysenck $26,000 that a memo admitted had "no immediate relevance" but would "lend prestige," $5,000 to B. F. Skinner toward the work behind Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and a no-strings $30,000 "contingency investment" in Martin Orne's hypnosis expertise. Pure "cover grants" funded a Levittown study, an analysis of a Mongoloid skull, and a survey of circumcision's effects on Turkish boys; in 1960 the Society sponsored a $15,000 APA survey that sent ten psychologists to the Soviet Union, nine unaware of CIA involvement. By the end of 1965, having satisfied itself it had overlooked nothing useful, the Society was dissolved, having distributed roughly $400,000 a year at its peak.³

The 1957 Annual Report

The Society's annual report for 1957 gave its address as "71-58 Austin Street, Forest Hills 75, L. I., N.Y.," and listed James L. Monroe as executive secretary and treasurer. It named Harold G. Wolff as president, Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. as vice president, and John W. Gittinger as field representative. The board of directors pictured in the report was Wolff, Adolf Berle Jr., Hinkle, Joseph C. Hinsey, Carl R. Rogers and John C. Whitehorn. Walter P. Pasternak was listed as technical writer. The report says the Society's funds came from gifts by private individuals and, in one instance, from the Foresight Foundation, and that "A major portion of the money has been expended in support of the Human Ecology Study Program at the Cornell University Medical College."⁴

The report's review of projects lists the Cornell work, research at Rutgers University, Cameron's psychotherapy experiments at McGill University, Robert Hyde's work at the Butler Health Center, a study of prisoners of war by Albert Biderman, a project under Beatrice Bishop Berle, and a "Personality Studies" project under Dr. David R. Saunders of the Educational Testing Service. The Saunders project was funded in October of the year under review to examine the relation between two personality theories, the Gittinger theory and the Myers-Briggs type theory, using the Wechsler-Bellevue scale and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator on the same group.⁴ John D. Marks later wrote that the Society gave about $140,000 to Saunders, "who knew about the Agency's involvement."⁵

Wechsler Data and Graphology

Marks describes a program in which John Gittinger's Personality Assessment System, built on Wechsler scores, drew its data from the Society's grantees: "At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent him the scores."⁶ Marks writes that the Society "wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in West Germany," and that it "sponsored a study to compare handwriting analyses with Wechsler scores of actors (including some homosexuals), patients in psychotherapy, criminal psychopaths, and fashion models." He adds that Gittinger went on to hire a resident graphologist. A former colleague, not named in the note, told Marks of that work: "Something I learned very early in government was not to ask questions."⁷

CIA Summer Camps for Children

An October 1977 NBC television segment, "The Children and the CIA," reported that the Agency had used the Society to finance summer camps where children were brought together for observation and possible later recruitment, with counselors unaware of the CIA funding, the same conduit that had paid Cameron for his depatterning work.⁸

Renaming and Phase-Out

Marks states that "In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund," and continues to call the body the Society throughout his book.² The Human Ecology Fund's 1961-1963 report, as tabulated by David H. Price, lists grants including $2,000 to Klara G. Roman for "Book: The Psychology of Writing" and $39,000 to Frank Haronian for "Physique and psychological functioning." Price gives James L. Monroe as the Fund's executive director from 1961 to 1963 and David Rhodes from 1964, and states that operations shifted from New York City to Cornell University's medical school.⁹ The posthumous Encyclopedia of the Written Word (1968) thanks "The Handwriting Institute and The Human Ecology Fund" for helping Roman, and Dr. Walter P. Pasternak "of the Human Ecology Fund."¹⁰ A February 1963 CIA memorandum on MKULTRA Subproject 137 states that "The Fund will receive its usual acknowledgement in the publication of the manuscript."¹¹ At the 1977 hearing Gittinger testified that "As far as I was concerned, it was the period of time ending in 1961," and that the Society and the Human Ecology Fund were phased out. He gave the phase-out end date for the Fund as 1965: "I believe the Human Ecology fund finally phased out in 1965, but I was not involved in this phasing out."¹² Marks records that in 1962 Gittinger and his co-workers moved their base of operations from the Human Ecology headquarters in New York to Psychological Assessment Associates, a CIA proprietary company in Washington.⁵

Disclosure

The Society's role as a CIA front was disclosed during the 1977 Senate Health Subcommittee hearings on MKULTRA, when the surviving 20,000 MKULTRA documents - misfiled in a financial records annex and overlooked in the 1973 records destruction ordered by Gottlieb - provided sufficient documentary evidence to reconstruct the Society's funding relationships and its role in the program. Journalist John Marks used the same documents to document the Society's activities in his 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

The disclosure that a foundation with academic and scientific board members had served as a CIA funding conduit for human experimentation raised significant questions about the responsibilities of ostensibly independent academic and charitable institutions that accepted government-adjacent funding without adequate disclosure or oversight.¹

1977 Public Accounts

Asked at the August 3, 1977 hearing about the Society's funding, Gittinger said: "The Agency in effect provided the money. They did not direct the projects." He also said that "there are a lot of innocent people who received the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology money which I know for a fact they were never asked to do anything for the CIA," and that "They had no knowledge that they were getting CIA money."¹² Asked about the budget, he replied: "I honestly do not remember," and guessed "about $150,000 a year, but don't hold me to that."¹²

Marks reports that James Monroe told The New York Times on August 2, 1977 that "only about 25 to 30 percent" of the Society's budget came from the CIA, a figure Marks says Monroe knew to be false because "the actual figure was well over 90 percent."¹³

The New York Times reported on October 9, 1977 that "Sociological, cultural and anthropological studies were financed through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology," and that the list of 80 institutions given to Senate investigators "is still classified, but each of those institutions has been notified separately by the C.I.A."¹⁴

Footnotes

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1. Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 9 ("The Proprietaries") - primary account of the Society's structure and funding relationships using surviving MKULTRA documents. "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification." Senate Hearing, August 3, 1977. ↩︎

2. John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (Times Books, 1979), chapter 9, "Human Ecology," p. 149, note ("In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund"). ↩︎

3. John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 9. ↩︎

4. Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, Annual Report, 1957 (34 pp.). Wayback Machine capture of https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf , https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21090820/1957-annual-report-society-human-ecology.pdf . ↩︎

5. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, chapter 9, "Human Ecology," p. 168 (grant to Saunders and the move to Psychological Assessment Associates in 1962). Sole source for the dollar figure and the 1962 move: Marks. ↩︎

6. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, chapter 10, "The Gittinger Assessment System," p. 170. ↩︎

7. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, chapter 10, "The Gittinger Assessment System," p. 171, note (asterisk note on graphology). ↩︎

8. A.B.H. Alexander, "Sex, Drugs, the CIA, MIND CONTROL and Your Children," PROBE, c. 1996. ↩︎

9. David H. Price, "Buying a piece of anthropology, Part 1," Anthropology Today 23(3), June 2007, text and fig. 4 (source given: Human Ecology Fund, Report, 1963, pp. 13-42). https://archive.org/details/human_ecology_torture_suicide . Sole source for the grant rows: Price's table. ↩︎

10. Encyclopedia of the Written Word (New York: F. Ungar, 1968), acknowledgments, Internet Archive full-text index of https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofwr0000roma ↩︎

11. MKULTRA Subproject 137, CIA release DOC_0000017396, accounting memorandum of February 1963. https://archive.org/details/DOC_0000017396 ↩︎

12. Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, United States Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977, testimony of John Gittinger. Available: intelligence.senate.gov. ↩︎

13. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, "Conclusions" chapter, note on p. 207 (quoting James Monroe in The New York Times, August 2, 1977). Sole source for the Monroe statement: Marks. ↩︎

14. Jo Thomas, "Extent of University Work for C.I.A. Is Hard to Pin Down," The New York Times, October 9, 1977 (dateline Washington, October 8). CIA reading room copy: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp88-01315r000300390007-3 ; archive.org copy: https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000300390007-3 . ↩︎