Historian Alfred W. McCoy is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. The book is apparently tells the story of the CIA's decades-long development of psychological techniques for coercion. I haven't read the book yet, but YouTube has a video of McCoy lecturing on the subject at UC Santa Barbara and it's fascinating, scary stuff. MindHacks has a summary of McCoy's presentation, titled "A Short History of Psychological Terror." From the post:
McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 'Manipulation of Human Behavior' research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 'Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual'.He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.
Link to video,
Link to MindHacks, Link to buy A Question of Torture
