Multiple links to CIA personality research.
The CIA’s Human Ecology Fund gave a research grant to Professor Ronald Taft of the University of Western Australia in 1961 for studies on the ‘Relationship between Health, Personality and Environmental Factors in Groups’. Martin Orne, who received HEF funding for MKULTRA Subproject 84 while at Sydney University in 1960, also received finance for ‘Attitude Formation, Decision Matrices’ in the same year as Taft. Another person of interest who received CIA funds in 1961 was Robert E. Goodnow for the purpose of‘Personality Studies’.
In 1949, Taft started work for the Rockefeller funded, Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) with “veterans of Henry Murray’s OSS Assessment team”. This is what introduced him to the early CIA mind control network.
Like A.G. Hammer, who was mentioned in Part 1, Taft became Chairman of the Australian Branch of the British Psychological Society (later the Australian Psychological Society) just two years after Hammer and just one year after his CIA sponsorship.
Both Taft and Hammer were closely tied to Prof. Jacqueline Goodnow who specialized in Personality Research and Child Psychology. She returned from the United States in 1972 to take up a position at Macquarie University in Sydney. Soon after, she would begin work with the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie. This school was founded by Prof. Ian K. Waterhouse, an early Australian Military Psychologist, a Tavistock Clinic student and President of the APS in 1983. Hammer, Goodnow and Waterhouse would all become Emeritus Professors at the School of Behavioural Sciences.
Dr. Antony Kidman also returned to Australia in 1972 after years of work at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington D.C., in the Laboratory of Preclinical Pharmacology, which was involved with LSD research and served as a hub of the Scottish Rite Schizophrenia Research Program. Both Jacqueline Goodnow and John W. Gittinger had performed research at this hospital and it was one of the major centres for MKULTRA research. A year later, Dr. Sidney Gottleib, one of the heads of the CIA’s mind control operations, fled to Australia and disappeared without a trace.
Interestingly, Jacqueline was married to Dr. Robert E. Goodnow, a CIA psychologist who founded Psychological Assessments Associates (PAA) with Dr. John W. Gittinger. Jacqueline and Robert married in 1951, which was the same year they were both working for the U.S. Military in Munich, Germany, involved with personality research and psychological assessments. Jacqueline would follow Robert on his CIA backed travel to places like Hong Kong, where she conducted assessments on Chinese children in 1960. Robert was President of PAA and had made huge contributions to the hidden research of Gittinger’s ‘Personality Assessment System’. On the demise of PAA after its CIA operation was exposed, The Washington Post in 1971 reported that “the new operating group is seeking to divest itself of the CIA financial sponsorship”. Both Goodnow’s had an association with Macquarie University before moving to Australia. According to Karen Wetmore who was a victim of MKULTRA, PAA was involved in personality assessment research on vulnerable children at Vermont State Hospital.
A nexus of these suspect researchers was the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. As an example of how closely some of the above mentioned researchers were linked, a small subgroup of this Academy, ‘Panel D’, included:
– Em. Prof. Jacquline Goodnow (U.S. Military, Wife of CIA Personality Researcher/Gittinger Associate)
– Em. Prof. Ron Taft (CIA, Human Ecology Fund, Personality Research)
– Em. Prof. Peter W. Sheehan (Part 1, Sydney Uni, Orne’s Lab, Citizens Against False Accusations of Sexual Abuse)
– Prof. John Phillip Sutcliffe (Close assoc. of A.G. Hammer, Harvard, Key hypnosis & multiple personality researcher at Sydney University)
– Prof. Kevin McConkey (Orne’s lab, President of the APS 1994)
– Prof. Alan Richardson (Close assoc. of Taft at UWA, LSD research, founding fellow of APS, CSIRO)
Fiona Barnett has detailed her abuse at the hands of John W. Gittinger and his use of Personality and Intelligence tests, plus unethical hypnosis. This abuse occurred at underground facilities in the Lucas Heights & Holsworthy Army Barracks area in the 70’s. Given that the CIA’s Project MKULTRA did in fact create a network of researchers in Australia involved with hypnosis and personality – for the purposes of mind control – it does seem very plausible that Gittinger himself could have been involved in top secret mind control research in Australia.
