-Caveat Lector-

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=342016

CIA mind-control trials revealed as secret inspiration behind 'A Clockwork
Orange'
By James Morrison Arts and Media Correspondent

13 October 2002

Anthony Burgess was inspired to write his most famous novel A Clockwork
Orange by his real-life involvement in CIA-run mind-control experiments, a
new biography claims.

The revelations, published next month, come as the controversial film
version gets its first mainstream British television screening.

The new biography claims A Clockwork Orange's central theme - the use of
brainwashing to quell evil impulses in the criminal mind - arose from
Burgess's involvement with the British secret service and the CIA
experiments.

It argues that many of the novel's other trademarks, including Nadsat, the
fictional slang in which it is written, stem from the author's dealings with
secret agents.

Burgess, a curmudgeonly interviewee, always refused to be drawn in any
detail on his inspiration for A Clockwork Orange. When asked about the
famous scene in which government scientists pump images of torture into the
mind of its delinquent antihero, Alex, to rid him of violent thoughts, he
dismissed it as an idea that came to him in a dream.

Now, a decade after Burgess's death, respected biographer Roger Lewis
believes he may have uncovered the truth, thanks to a mysterious retired
British intelligence agent.

According to the anonymous source, Burgess became involved with the CIA
while working as a Colonial Service education officer in Malaya in the
1950s.

There he became a party to trials for a mind-control process designed to
trigger emotional responses in the brain using pain and pleasure - the
inspiration, it is claimed, for the chilling Ludovico Technique in A
Clockwork Orange.

The ex-spy's most compelling claim was that a sequence of capital letters
seen on Alex's bedroom wall in Chapter 3 of the novel and supposedly lifted
from Alex's school trophies is actually an encryption for the location of a
US military base where "psychotronic warfare" experiments took place. The
coded wording reads: "SOUTH 4; METRO COR-SKOL BLUE DIVISION; THE BOYS OF
ALPHA."

According to the spy, the figure 4 refers to the conjunction of four US
states, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. To the south of this is a
military reservation, based in a metropolitan location. The base is a
training school (skol in Russian), initially supervised by the US Navy's
Blue Division, which experimented with the Alpha waves of the human
unconsciousness. Its name was Fort Bliss; the word "bliss" appears
repeatedly in the chapter.

Another clue, Mr Lewis argues in Anthony Burgess, is the novelist's use of
Americanisms in A Clockwork Orange. Amid the Russian-inflected flow of
Nadsat are scattered words like pretzel and liquor, yet Burgess had not
visited the US before the novel's publication in 1962.

He adds that linguistic analysis of the writings of Burgess's alleged
collaborator, the former CIA officer Howard Roman, suggests the latter may
have even worded large chunks of the novel himself.

When Mr Lewis asked the CIA for access to files pertaining to Burgess, he
was turned down with the words,"By this action, we are neither confirming
nor denying the existence or nonexistence of such records ..."

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