Igor Smirnov

Igor Viktorovich Smirnov (April 5, 1951 to November 5, 2004) was a Russian physician and the head of the Department of Psycho-Correction at the Moscow Medical Academy, where from the early 1980s he developed a method that paired electroencephalograph readings of a subject's responses to subliminal words and images with taped, noise-masked audio "psycho-correction" programs.¹ In March 1993 he briefed officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and representatives of other agencies in northern Virginia on the technique while the Waco siege was in progress, an episode reported in 1993 and 1994 by Defense Electronics, Newsweek, the Village Voice and the Moscow Times.²³⁴

Soviet Institutions

A 2024 article in a Belarusian medical journal gives his dates as April 5, 1951 to November 5, 2004.¹ A 2022 Russian popular article (republishing material of the site Russian Semyorka) states that he was the son of Viktor Abakumov, the Soviet Minister of State Security, and "for understandable reasons" took his mother's surname.⁵

According to the same article, his career began on February 2, 1980, when the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology approved research on "physical fields of biological objects, modulated by a semantic signal," with the Sechenov Medical Institute and its department of non-drug therapy among the executors; the department became a laboratory of psycho-correction headed by Smirnov, then 28. It dates the first programs on domestic computers to 1982 and a first "psychosounding" session, held "under conditions of complete secrecy," to 1984.⁵ The Moscow Times gave the same outline from Smirnov's own account in July 1994: the Department of Psycho-Correction was established in 1980 to develop non-drug psychotherapy, and by 1984 its staff were applying the computerized method to psychiatric patients, substance abusers and psychosomatic cases. Smirnov declined to discuss the center's earlier years beyond confirming that it had been a well-funded state program.⁴

In September 1983 the American parapsychologists Russell Targ and Keith Harary, invited to the Soviet Union by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, met "Dr. Igor Smirnoff and two other researchers" in an equipment-crowded basement laboratory at the First Moscow Medical Institute. The group had "just completed" a Soviet experiment in "rat telepathy" and told the visitors that it failed when groups of rats fought in the stressful conditions; the physicist Konstantin Gubarev (spelled "Goubarev" by the authors) was involved in the experiment, and the delegation's host there was a Professor Andriankyn, whose "main concern" was the non-drug treatment of mental patients, including experimental low-frequency electric and magnetic fields. The passage appears in the "Authors' Note" of Targ and Harary's The Mind Race (1984), a copy of which is in the CIA Star Gate files.⁶ The Defense News account of January 1993 described the Moscow Medical Academy's Department of Psycho-Correction as "government-funded."⁷

In his Moscow Times interview Smirnov said the method had helped a team of Soviet women skiers cross Antarctica in 1988 without psychological breakdowns.⁴ A CIA-held record of a 1991 visit to his institute (see below) gives the skiers' trip as an "arctic" one involving "six women" and says the team was assembled using the computer-aided analysis.⁸ Elena Rusalkina, his widow and collaborator, told the journalist Sharon Weinberger in 2006 that the Soviet military had used his psychotechnology in the war in Afghanistan: "It was used for combating the Mujahideen, and also for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome" in Russian soldiers. An anonymous participant in the March 1993 Virginia meetings told Defense Electronics that "there is evidence the Soviet Army's Special Forces used the technology during the conflict in Afghanistan" and that the intelligence agencies "had been tracking Smirnov for years."²⁹ Weinberger described his former office at the institute as lined with "his once-secret patents, his awards from the Soviet government, and a calendar from the KGB's cryptographic section."⁹

The Method

In the demonstration reported to a delegation in 1991, the subject wears an EEG cap and watches a screen on which words (in that demonstration, a personal list of names) are flashed too briefly to be consciously recognized; the recorded brain responses are filtered and passed through factor and cluster analysis on an IBM-compatible 80386 computer to produce a map of the subject's attitudes. Smirnov and his colleagues said the output could reveal "actual memory content of a person (including information that the individual tried to hide)," motives such as "addictions, criminal and antisocial desires," and could be used to select personnel, forecast behavior in extreme situations and analyze truthfulness at jury trials; the delegation was told that "while a polygraph detected lies, the computer-aided process developed by Dr. Smirnov detected truth."⁸ Smirnov said the same procedure was used to build the "psychocorrective" tapes: subliminal messages placed in audio, for example through a ventilation pipe to workmen outside, who after 15 to 30 minutes came to the laboratory door and asked what they were supposed to do, and a tape he said he made for his dying mother-in-law to block cancer pain.⁸

The July 1993 Defense Electronics report described the technology as "a computerized acoustic device allegedly capable of implanting thoughts in a person's mind without that person being aware of the source of the thought," and quoted the Psychotechnologies memorandum on its stated purpose: to "determine whether psycho-correction technologies represent a present or future threat to U.S. national security in situations where inaudible commands might be used to alter behavior." The same memorandum listed possible uses of interest to Department of Defense officials, among them embassy protection, military training and "non-violently 'clearing areas of potential enemies, snipers, etc.'"² A 1993 English translation in the Star Gate files of a paper "received from Dr. Igor Smirnov," titled "Experimental Test of the Possibility of Developing and Using a Semantic Driver" (file number LN169-93), presents a cybernetic model of human memory, with conscious and subconscious layers, buffers, a "priority generator" and a "semantic field of the universe," and an annotated bibliography of Soviet physiology literature.¹⁰

The 1991 Visit and the U.S. Global Strategy Council

A trip report in the Star Gate files, filed under the heading "Computer Psychotechnology, Dr. I. V. Smirnov" on letterhead of C. C. Morris, research director of the U.S. Global Strategy Council (1800 K Street, N.W., Washington), records that on Wednesday, November 20, 1991, at about 9:00 p.m., "three members of the team" went to Smirnov's institute in Moscow, which the writer described as "about 200 people who live and work together in what begs to be described as a commune situation," dedicated to the work and "very concerned that the technology that they have developed not fall into the hands of people or organizations that would abuse it." One team member volunteered for a test session on names; the results showed a strongly negative response to one name, which "turned out" to be the volunteer's own, and the volunteer then produced a business card bearing initials instead of given names. The writer closed with the assessment that the work was "a technological advance somewhat like that of the atomic bomb," and recorded a Russian colleague's answer that it was "much worse because at least when an atomic bomb goes off you know it." The report's author is not named in the released pages and a further page is withheld as exempt.⁸

Weinberger reported in 2007 that the movement of Smirnov's technology toward the United States began in 1991 at a KGB-sponsored conference in Moscow intended to market once-secret Soviet technology, where his claims "piqued the interest" of Chris Morris and Janet Morris, writers turned Pentagon consultants widely credited as founders of the "non-lethal" weapons concept. Chris Morris told her that he accompanied Smirnov to his lab and let him wire his head to an EEG, after which Smirnov "divined" details of his subconscious "like Morris' dislike of his own first name," and that he thought "the guys back at home have got to see this." The Morrises, Weinberger wrote, "shopped the technology around to a few military agencies, but found no one willing to put money into it."⁹

Defense News reported on January 11, 1993 that "acoustic psycho-correction," pioneered by the government-funded Department of Psycho-Correction at the Moscow Medical Academy, "may soon be shared with U.S. military, medical and political officials," and that Russian senior research scientists, diplomats, military officers and officials of the Russian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology Policy "are beginning to provide limited demonstrations for their U.S. counterparts." Janet Morris of the Global Strategy Council, "a key U.S. liaison between Russian and U.S. officials," said in a December 15 interview that she and the Richmond, Virginia-based International Healthline Corp. had briefed senior U.S. intelligence and Army officials; she said Army officials were concerned about the capability being directed against armored systems and personnel through electronic communications links, and that U.S. countermeasures could include sound cancellation. An undated paper by a Moscow-based group affiliated with the department, with authors including George Kotov, "a former KGB general now serving in a senior government ministry post," listed software and hardware associated with the program that could be procured for as little as $50,000 and proposed a bilateral Center for Psycho-technologies. The article reported that the Army's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center had awarded a one-year study of acoustic beam technology to Scientific Applications & Research Associates of Huntington Beach, California; that Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood had rejected repeated plans for Army visits to the former Soviet Union; and that International Healthline's president, Jim Hovis, planned to bring a team of Russian specialists to the United States within months. Raymond Garthoff of the Brookings Institution was quoted as saying "This is not something that strikes me as requiring high-level attention."⁷

March 1993: Virginia and Waco

Defense Electronics reported in July 1993 that "in a series of closed meetings beginning March 17 in suburban Northern Virginia with Dr. Igor Smirnov of the Moscow Medical Academy, FBI officials were briefed" on his decade of research, "a few weeks before" the April 19 fire at Waco. An unnamed participant said "it was suggested to us [by other federal officials] that they bring in the FBI, which was looking for a viable option to deal with Koresh." The account, which the article said was confirmed by an executive summary memorandum of Psychotechnologies Corp., a Richmond, Virginia firm owning the American rights to the technology, described the siege as "an ongoing domestic hostage situation." After several meetings the FBI officials, who "repeatedly expressed fears" that David Koresh and his followers were suicidal, asked for a proposal describing requirements and procedures for use at Waco. "They wanted the Russians to promise zero risk," the participant said, "but the Russians wouldn't do that"; and Smirnov had brought only "entry-level equipment," with more sophisticated hardware to be "rushed over from Russia." Officials of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Advanced Research Projects Agency were also present, according to the source; spokesmen for those agencies did not return calls.²

Non-military attendees at the Virginia meetings and at a series of later briefings by "the two Russians" at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Topeka included Richard Nakamura of the National Institute of Mental Health and "Dr. Christopher Green, director of General Motors Corp. (GM) biomedical research department in Detroit." A GM spokesman said Green attended in his capacity as a member of a National Academy of Sciences panel on 21st-century Army technologies and that "this has no connection to anything being done by GM." Dr. Fowler Jones of the University of Kansas Medical Center's psychology division said the session was "really more of a presentation than an actual demonstration because, unfortunately, a lot of the software we couldn't get going," and that he and colleagues were seeking funding to test the technology in the treatment of alcoholism and other addictions.² The Green named in the article is identified in the page for Kit Green.

The memorandum described an agreement made in March in which "the Russian side agreed to commit the psycho-correction technologies still in Russia and all related know-how to the U.S. company in exchange for stock," with the Russian side to "provide all support necessary to recreate current [psycho-correction] capability in the U.S."²

Newsweek reported in its issue of August 1994 (online August 21) that "Experts from the FBI Counter-Terrorism Center secretly met in Arlington, Va., with a long-haired Russian Dr. Strangelove called Igor Smirnov," whose plan was "piping subliminal messages from sect members' families through the phone lines during negotiations," and that "for David Koresh, the self-appointed prophet, the FBI had a special voice in mind: God, as played by Charlton Heston." It added: "The FBI backed out of Smirnov's Waco strategy, and the crisis ended in blazing disaster."³ The Moscow Times reported in July 1994 that Smirnov said the FBI had explored his methods during the standoff, that a Village Voice article of that year had quoted an FBI official as saying the agency "had wanted to use Smirnov's technology to subconsciously alter the behavior of cult leader David Koresh by sending a subliminal message over the telephone while the FBI was negotiating with him," that the deal collapsed because Smirnov could not guarantee safety without a controlled trial, and that the FBI did not comment.⁴

Weinberger recorded Chris Morris's account that the FBI "was put off by Smirnov's cavalier response to questions": asked what would happen if the subliminal signals did not work, Smirnov replied that Koresh's followers might slit each other's throats. Rusalkina told her: "With Smirnov, the FBI was either demanding a yes or a no, and therefore our methods weren't put to use, unfortunately."⁹ The 2022 Russian article gives Smirnov's proposal as coding the voices of the besieged group's relatives calling them to return home, and says U.S. officials instead broadcast the appeals uncoded; it adds that in 1993 Americans offered him a move to the United States, which he refused, and quotes him: "I am Russian. I do not want to live abroad. I do not trade the secrets of the Motherland" (translated).⁵

Newsweek, 1994

The Newsweek article, by Dorinda Elliott in Moscow with John Barry in Washington, describes the basement laboratory of the "Institute of Psycho-Correction" in Moscow, where Smirnov and other Russian psychiatrists were working with schizophrenics, drug addicts and cancer patients. It quotes him: "A knife can be used to cut sausage, or cut your throat." Smirnov said government funding had been generous in Soviet times but that he now received "only $20,000 a year," that he hoped to attract Western investment, and that Russian gangsters came to see him asking for help in getting business partners to sign unfavorable contracts, which he refused as "unethical." A heroin addict named Slava was shown with electrodes on his chest and shaved head while Smirnov tried "to stimulate the child-rearing cluster" of his brain. Howard Shevrin of the University of Michigan, who had also studied brain responses and the unconscious, said: "I'm not sure this should be tampered with." After the reporter's visit, two men in suits and diamond rings came to Newsweek's Moscow office asking questions about Smirnov and said they were in business with him; he said he did not know them.³

Later Work and Death

The Moscow Times reported in July 1994 that the center had moved to small basement offices of the Moscow Medical Academy with state funding gone ("kopecks"), a staff of about 20 and about 15 patients a week, mostly referred from the academy's psychiatric clinic. It said Smirnov refused offers from Russian companies for subliminal advertising campaigns on ethical grounds, and described his method as a "truth detector": "Our machine reveals hidden information that sometimes is not realized by the person himself." The paper reported that he remarked that Americans trust Russian techniques more than their own.⁴

By 2006 the Psychotechnology Research Institute was housed in a concrete building at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, where Rusalkina showed Weinberger a windowless circular room containing a chair facing a monitor, used for human testing, and said the institute had worked "out a program with (a psychiatric facility) to study criminals." Visitors were asked to watch a half-hour television program about Smirnov, "called the father of 'psychotronic weapons,'" and Weinberger described him as "a Rasputin-like character often portrayed in the media as having almost mystical powers of persuasion." Rusalkina said the institute used the technology to treat alcoholics and drug addicts and that Russian special forces had contacted it during the Moscow theater hostage siege. Vladimir Lopatin, a member of the State Duma in the late 1990s who pushed to restrict mind control weapons, cited Smirnov's work to Weinberger as proof that such weapons are real.⁹

Weinberger wrote that Smirnov died in November 2004; a photograph caption in the same article says he "died of a heart attack in 2005." The 2022 Russian article says he died suddenly in 2004 "under unclear circumstances."⁹⁵

The institute's Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology (SSRM Tek), marketed in the West as MindReader 2.0, was distributed in North America by the Canadian firm Northam Psychotechnologies, headed by Semyon Ioffe, which sought U.S. partners and went to SRS Technologies (by then part of ManTech International). In May 2007 the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to award a sole-source contract for the first U.S. government testing of SSRM Tek for airport screening. A California contractor, DownRange G2 Solutions, told Weinberger it lost interest when Northam declined to make the software available for testing.⁹