Lilly can be understood to have more or less sequenced through
the whole battery of Cold War techniques for dealing with a tight-
lipped foreign asset held in captivity. Initially committed, in the
late 1950s, to that spookish tool kit of techno-maniacal assaults
on the cranium (picture a Frankenstein-like cap with electrodes
penetrating the skull), Lilly gradually moved, at CRI, to less inva-
sive approaches with his animals. But he nevertheless continued
to draw on the playbook of those psy-ops intelligence services
that shaped his early training in neurophysiology. For instance,
by the early 1960s he was testing code-breaking techniques, hav-
ing been granted access to one of the very earliest programmable
electronic computers, which he used to try to sieve recordings of
dolphin vocalizations for patterns, deploying the same statisti-
cal methods as Cold War cryptographers. A little later he began
experimenting with “chronic contact” scenarios, which involved
“isolating” a dolphin in constricted quarters with a human agent,
on the assumption that a conversion of loyalties would result. To
this end, Lilly even redesigned the St. Thomas laboratory with
floodable living quarters, and initiated a set of long-term cohabi-
tation experiments in which a male dolphin and a human female
in a leotard and lipstick (to help the dolphin see her mouth move,
of course) spent weeks interacting in a confined space. Lilly had
her read Planet of the Apes to prepare for the work.
