In the years after World War II, the intelligence and scientific communities in the United States conducted almost no research on “offensive” interrogation techniques, those used to obtain information from prisoners of war or individuals accused of espionage (Educing Information). Most of the existing research focused on “defensive” tactics in order to train United States military personnel to withstand questioning if captured by the enemy.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) like the military, worked to develop protocols and guidelines agents could employ if captured and subjected to interrogation by foreign governments. For example, the agency’s internal journal, Studies in Intelligence, much of which was declassified in the 1990s published an article entitled Defense Against Communist Interrogation, in the fall of 1969. The author suggests that agents prepare themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally, both for the possibility of arrest and its consequences. Agents are advised that those who were “ideologically motivated” or held “strong religious beliefs” were more likely to withstand harsh interrogations and the deprivations of confinement. The author also recommends strategies for disrupting the interrogation process itself including vomiting on the interrogator or losing control of one’s bowels. It is advised without irony that no interrogator enjoys being in the same room with a subject that has lost control of his bodily functions.

In 1960, Wolff, a human ecologist based at Cornell University and a leading CIA researcher at this time, published a study that examined the behavior of American POWs in the Korean War. His sample was approximately 6,654 army personnel held in Korean prison camps. Wolff’s methodology is not clear nor is the basis of his data. During the Korean War many in the United States were alarmed when some American POWs gave statements to their captors denouncing their country or “confessing,” for example, to using munitions packed with “germs.” After the war, in conjunction with the Defense Department’s Special Advisory Committee on POWs, Wolff tried to determine the conditions under which captured soldiers cooperated with the North Koreans and mainland China. Also, in light of the propaganda and distress surrounding these “confessions,” the United States military decided to rewrite the Rules of Conduct for U.S. military personnel, if captured.

During the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi television broadcast interviews of a number of captured American soldiers, several of whom spoke against the United States’ decision to go to war. One, Lieutenant Jeffrey Zaun of the Navy, stated "I think our leaders and our people have wrongly attacked the peaceful people of Iraq," prompting some in the Pentagon to question if he and the others violated the Code of Conduct. The current Code of Conduct requires that American POWS provide their captors with no more than name rank and serial number. The Code specifically states that a soldier will not make “oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to its cause” when captured.

According to Wolff, soldiers noted (it is unclear if this information comes from reports and/or surveys) that conditions at the camps themselves were designed to break down an individual’s identity and “feelings of guilt were common.” The interrogators also employed threats and exploited the American’s ignorance of their captors’ culture, “values, and attitudes.” Such ignorance increased the prisoners’ level of anxiety because they did not know what techniques might eventually be used against them, including torture and murder, and “brainwashing.” Since the rise of the Soviet Union and communist China, there had been a number of published accounts that falsely described the communists’ ability to manipulate the brains of prisoners and force them to submit to their captors’ will. Alfred McCoy, in his book about the CIA and torture, describes this concern as a “general hysteria over Communist mind control.” In his review of all data to date, however, Wolf concludes that “[b]y far the most effective way of gaining information from persons or modifying their point of view is talk under friendly circumstances, when the brain is neither damaged nor impaired in any way…”