Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual

This CIA interrogation manual, “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual” (1983) is an updated version of KUBARK manual (1963) incorporating sections of KUBARK. The 1983 CIA training manual allocates considerable space to the subject of “coercive questioning” and psychological and physical techniques and recommends: “manipulate the subject’s environment to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception.” It sought to teach foreign agents ways to extract information from people without extracting fingernails, advising against physical torture as counterproductive. Instead, it discussed using intense fear, deep exhaustion, solitary confinement, unbearable anxiety, and other forms of psychological duress against a subject as ways of ”destroying his capacity to resist” his interrogator. [A highly redacted version of KUBARK was released in 1997 in response to a FOIA request by The Baltimore Sun; a less redacted version was released in Feb. 2014 in response to a FOIA request by investigative reporter, Jeffrey Kaye].