THE KGB knew a thing or two about how to make a person talk. After five or six weeks in its custody, most prisoners were rendered so disoriented and anxious and so lacking a sense of reality that they would likely submit to any of their interrogator’s demands.
Note this description of a typical broken KGB victim by the American neurologists Lawrence Hinkle and Harold Wolff, who studied the effects of brainwashing in the 1950s: “He allows himself to become dirty and dishevelled. He no longer bothers with the niceties of eating. He mixes it into a mush and stuffs…
