Human Ecology Fund

The Human Ecology Fund was a CIA supported operation that was used in covert research on 'brainwashing'. It was disbanded in 1965. According to a 1999 report in Peace Research: 'In 1955, Harold Wolff, from Cornell University's Psychiatry Department created a CIA research front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. This was later shortened to the Human Ecology Fund. The plan was to promote research that would lead to techniques for getting information out of people without their co-operation and without their even knowing that was what you were doing.'

In the process of transferring much of that information to new technology formats, such as microfiche, major American research institutions such as the Library of Congress became intimately involved with the U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA. Included among the consultants who advised librarians at various points in time were Barnaby Keeney, who was board chairperson of the Human Ecology Fund, "a CIA front organization that paid for some of the experiments in which LSD and other drugs were given to unwitting Canadian subjects," and Caryl Haskins, who in 1949 chaired the Secretary of Defense's Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare. They turned out a report that "contained some startling talk about the possibilities of 'radiological weapons' and 'weapons caus-ing epidemics, glandular or hereditary changes or other biological chain reactions.' "