Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen: Aerospace Neurophysiology and Deep Brain Stimulation Pioneer

The Norwegian physician Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen (1912-1991) was a pioneer in deep brain stimulation and aerospace neurophysiology, but for several reasons his story has remained untold. During WW2 he collaborated with a renowned military underground resistance group against the Nazi occupants, then had to flee to neutral Sweden. He returned to participate in the liberation of Northern Norway as a Captain in the US Special Forces also working with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services – precursor for CIA) and received a citation from General Eisenhower for his contributions. Sem-Jacobsen then spent several years in the USA training in psychiatry and clinical neurophysiology at the Mayo Clinic. He constructed his own medical technical devices, was among the first to develop deep brain stimulation, and made the smallest EEG- and EKG recording systems yet produced, also used by the American astronauts walking on the Moon. But he was more an inventor than a researcher and few of his observations were published in peer-review medical journals. He built his own neurophysiological institute for neurosurgery, deep brain recordings and deep brain stimulation in Oslo’s main psychiatric hospital, but was sponsored by US military forces and NASA. He knew CIA Director William E. Colby personally, and rumours soon flourished that Sem-Jacobsen conducted secret mind-control experiments for American authorities and the CIA. These accusations were investigated, and long after his death he was officially absolved by a Hearing Committee appointed by the Norwegian Government. Nevertheless all his personal files were burnt by his family who was still harassed by investigative journalists. Sem-Jacobsen also documented some of his work on film, but the whereabouts of these films have remained unknown. I searched for them for several years and recently discovered numerous films and photos in an old barn in rural Norway. These films and photos document in-action neurophysiology recordings in divers, pilots, and astronauts, and they show how Sem-Jacobsen in collaboration with experienced neurosurgeons in Oslo conducted the very first trials with deep brain stimulation in patients with Parkinson’s Disease. He apparently even tried subthalamic stimulation as early as in the 1950s.

Abdication, Aggression, Anschluss

This tense period held the pair together almost solely through letters. Bryher was in full-tilt rescue work, passing from New York to London, Paris, and Switzerland annually. In New York, Bryher met Nella Larsen and visited Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier introduced Bryher to Walter Benjamin, who exchanged his Berlin around 1900 for her Paris 1900. Bryher sent funds and encouragement while he was interned as an enemy alien. H.D. underwent her personal terror, facing the courts when Aldington resurfaced for a divorce. Bryher coached her in preparation. After the Anschluss, Bryher carried rat poison when traveling (as she had in World War I) and leaked her fears to the Austrian psychoanalyst Walter Schmideberg and to the couple’s new scholar friend at Yale, Norman Pearson, who would soon join the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. He shared Bryher’s anxieties and a desire to foster H.D.’s hypersensitive creative intelligence.

Asian American Spies

Asian Americans were brought into the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, during World War II under the assumption of a secure loyalty. They served as research analysts, special operations members, morale operations propagandists, secret agents gathering covert intelligence, and, after the war, as war crimes investigators in East Asia where their cultural and linguistic skills, coupled with the correct racial uniforms, made them invaluable to America’s first centralized intelligence agency. These agents were drawn from New York City to Honolulu, where Asian immigrants and their American-born offspring had developed loyalties that were multiple and flexible, not singular and fixed. Despite this, European American OSS recruiters admitted them even as they believed their own loyalty was more certain and fixed, since they hailed from families with roots reaching far back into America’s past. In their joint struggle against the Imperial Japanese forces, these Asian Americans and their European American OSS colleagues generated propaganda to demoralize the enemy and encourage surrender, gathered overt intelligence from a wide variety of media sources, obtained covert intelligence inside enemy-occupied territory, and trained and executed guerrilla operations scores of miles behind the battle lines where, if captured, they faced torture and execution. Immediately after the war, they conducted war crimes investigations that included some Asian American collaborators, raising questions about the meaning of loyalty. The end result of their activities was not only the satisfaction of seeing Imperial Japan defeated, but a new understanding of loyalty, race, and Asian Americans.

Introduction

The OSS did not use race in their recruitment of Asian Americans. Instead, they used loyalty to determine which Asian American with the necessary linguistic and cultural skills could join the agency. But to understand why the OSS leaders took the risk in bringing in a potential Asian American Trojan Horse one must see race and loyalty as not fixed but fluid social constructions. Using a wide variety of sources scattered across the globe, this chapter shows that Asian Americans had broken through racial barriers as they were tasked with gathering, translating, and analyzing intelligence data, creating propaganda pamphlets and radio programs, conducting hit-and-run operations miles behind enemy lines, and hunting for enemy spies behind Allied lines. Their roles, salaries, and military rank all point to how rapidly loyalty and not race became the primary determinant of employment with and treatment in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Fake News for the Resistance: The OSS and the Nexus of Psychological Warfare and Resistance Operations in World War II

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s intelligence and special operations organization in World War II, is best known for its efforts to collect intelligence on the Axis powers and to arm and train resistance groups behind enemy lines. However, the OSS also served as America’s primary psychological warfare agency. This article will show how organizational relationships imposed by theater commanders, who often had little understanding of psychological warfare or special operations, could serve to enable or hinder the sort of coordinated subversive campaign that OSS founder General William J. Donovan envisioned. This history offers important lessons for contemporary campaign planners in an environment where psychological warfare is playing an ever-larger role in the conduct of military operations.

‘Just another Kraut’? The Wehrmacht Traitor as ‘Good German’ in Hollywood’s Decision before Dawn (1951)

Decision before Dawn (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1951) was based on the true story of a Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war, code-name ‘Happy’, who volunteered for the American Office of Strategic Services in 1945 to spy behind German lines for the Allies, exploring the issue of Landesverrat (national treason) amid the changing loyalties of the Cold War during West Germany’s post-war rearmament. Screenwriter Peter Viertel had himself been ‘Happy’s’ case-officer. The chapter uses archives from Twentieth Century-Fox studios and the US State Department to chart fruitless attempts to suppress a West German release for fear of inflaming nationalist and local Bavarian sentiment. Entscheidung vor Morgengrauen (1952) received mixed reviews, which are discussed alongside subtle changes made to the dubbed German version. The Hollywood release marked the international breakthrough for Austro-German actors Oskar Werner and Hildegard Knef.

Knocking on America's door. Basque Foreign Politics in the US during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War (1936-1945)

Este artículo analiza la denominada estrategia atlantista y cómo fue puesta en práctica por el Gobierno Vasco en el exilio a través de dos grandes etapas: por un lado, las actividades de la delegación del Gobierno Vasco en Nueva York durante la Guerra Civil española, atendiendo a su origen, composición, actuación y relación con instituciones norteamericanas como la National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), el Departamento de Estado y sus diferentes agencias. Y, por otro, se estudian las labores de lobbying vascas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Un periodo clave, pues, como se verá en las siguientes páginas, durante aquellos años se produjo una colaboración efectiva entre las instituciones vascas y las agencias estadounidenses de la Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), la Office of Coordinator of Information (COI), la Office of Strategic Services (OSS) y el Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The “Scholastic” Marine Who Won a Secret War: FRANK HOLCOMB, THE OSS, AND AMERICAN DOUBLE-CROSS OPERATIONS IN EUROPE

This article focuses on a little-known contribution to Allied victory in Europe after D-Day by a part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Special Counterintelligence (SCI) teams of the X-2 (Counterintelligence) Branch. Using a combination of private papers, unpublished studies, and OSS records, the author looks through the eyes of the commander of the SCI teams, Frank P. Holcomb, son of wartime Commandant General Thomas Holcomb. A Marine Corps reservist and OSS officer, Holcomb received a rudimentary orientation from the British in counterespionage and deception operations before creating his own highly successful units to perform those missions. In short order, the OSS went from having almost no such capability to neutralizing every German stay-behind agent in France and Belgium and turning a number of them back against the enemy to feed the Third Reich deceptive reports, accepted as genuine, thereby making a significant contribution to the security of the Allied armies. This article offers examples of OSS successes as testament to the skill and fortitude of a Marine Reserve officer serving on independent duty.

Intelligence for an American Century: Creating the CIA

This chapter is an introduction to US intelligence mechanisms before the CIA was created. The focus is on Civil War and codebreaking mechanisms in the First World War. Most of the chapter focuses on changes to the US intelligence community. Analysis of the historic record shows that change began in July 1941 with the creation of the office for the Coordinator of Information soon evolving into the Office of Strategic Services. Key figures in the evolutionary process such as William J. Donovan, Roosevelt and Truman are studies within. It also includes discussion of changes between cessation of hostilities and passing of the National Security Act, 1947, which created both the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. Document: Dulles-Jackson-Correra Report.