Something of Importance Lying Hidden

The Good Doctor, the Criminally Stupid and the Montreal Experiments

Harvey watched his father disintegrate before his eyes following a return from the hospital. At thirteen years old, Harvey found his currently reality impossible to accept: the parent he knew as “an independent, kind, smart person” was gone. His father, Louis, now in a constant state of drowsiness during his waking hours, spoke sparingly and when he did, it made no sense. His memory had been wiped clean: he would ask about his parents, even though they had died many years before. Harvey witnessed his father one night enter his bedroom and urinate on the floor: “He didn’t know where he was.”

In his diminished state, Louis felt that he had done something wrong to deserve this punishment: “He’s ashamed, embarrassed,” his son recounted. Louis’ wife died before any sense of normalcy was restored. Louis was convinced the CIA was monitoring his telephone calls. As a judge later noted: “a classic manifestation of people who are afflicted with certain psychotic disorders is the irrational fear that the CIA and FBI is conspiring to harm them. In this case, the CIA involvement is real…”

Harvey, who later became a psychiatrist, was devastated to learn that someone in his profession had done this to his father. It was enough to become “ashamed” of his line of work on certain days; he would lay awake at night thinking of the man who “ruined my father's life…Left him with nothing. It’s a nightmare that never ends.”

Hess

Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler, had a problem with the food he was served after being taken as a prisoner by the British in 1941. He was immediately suspicious of any food given to him and refused to eat any for the first day. He ate with his guards and doctors to mitigate the possibility of being poisoned, but he was once “careless” in his view, drinking milk when he was not in their presence. According to his account, he became “dizzy, had a terrific headache and could not see straight any more. Soon thereafter I got into an hilarious mood and increased nervous energy became apparent.” Following this episode, he requested that milk and cheese be brought to his room; however, he only pretended to consume these items.

Hess believed he was being fed “brain poison” to cause amnesia, as the British appeared to be more satisfied the less he could remember. He attributed his stomach pain to his food being laced with so much acid that “the skin came loose and hung in little bits from my palate.” He scratched at the wall to extract lime in the hopes of neutralizing the effects of the acid, “but I was not successful.” He requested a meeting with a Swiss envoy and soon afterwards “again huge quantities of brain poison were put in my food to destroy my memory.” The envoy, during his meeting with Hess, agreed to take samples of the food for analysis. After a Swiss laboratory found nothing wrong, Hess dismissed this as a British secret service plot. His obsession with food never relented and Hess lost 40 pounds in the process. He tried to commit suicide twice, once by leaping over a staircase railing, fracturing his left leg, and the second time by stabbing himself with a bread knife, necessitating two stitches.

Assigned as the lead psychiatrist to assess Hess’ capability of standing trial, Douglas Kelley of the United States Army Medical Corps was shocked at the naivete of Hess’ “Nazi mind,” in particular the idea that Hess’ “peace mission” flying solo to Great Britain would somehow achieve success. Hess had planned to offer the Brits the ability to keep their overseas territories in exchange for allowing Germany to control the rest of Europe. Kelley scoffed at the Nazi’s profound miscalculation that “you could plant your foot on the throat of a nation one moment and give it a kiss on both cheeks the next.” Sentenced at Nuremberg to life in imprisonment, Hess spent the next 40 years complaining about the food at Spandau Prison in West Berlin. He died by suicide at age 93, having hanged himself using an extension cord attached to a window in a prison garden reading room.

Kelley had his own inner torment with which to contend. At 45 years of age, on New Year’s Day in 1958, Kelley picked up his father in San Francisco and drove him to his family’s home in Berkeley, California to watch the Rose Bowl on their new color television. As he was cooking dinner in the kitchen, he burned himself and according to his son, “exploded” with rage. In his hand he held a vial of white powder. “The next thing we knew,” his son recalled, “he was on the stairs saying he was going to swallow the potassium cyanide and that he’d be dead in 30 seconds.” Kelley’s wife, three children and his father watched in horror as he took his own life. In his book 22 Cells, Kelley had expressed admiration for how Hermann Göring had similarly used a potassium cyanide capsule, ending his life “at his own convenience and in a manner of his own choosing. His suicide, shrouded in mystery…was a skillful, even brilliant finishing touch.”

Back in 1945 during the Nuremberg trials, Kelley had assessed Hess as “a true psychoneurosis, primarily of the hysterical type, engrafted on a basic paranoid and schizoid personality, with amnesia, partly genuine and partly feigned,” but deemed him fit to stand trial. One of the other nine international psychiatrists selected for this task was Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, chosen by Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Cameron agreed with this assessment (“Rudolf Hess is not insane at the present time in the strict sense of the word”) and would later become infamous in his own right. Both Dulles and Cameron would become inextricably linked in their quest to push psychiatry beyond its normal limits for two separate, secret objectives. Cameron and two other psychiatrists wrote a supplementary statement at the time, commenting on the fact that “10 designated scientists came to unanimous conclusions on the main issues involved in the case is proof that the science of psychiatry is sound and that these representatives were independent in their work and free from political influences.”

Cameron throughout his career was to pay no heed to the Nuremberg Code, established in the wake of the trials, which stated: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”

“International treaties...have never controlled the...use of unconventional methods of warfare, such as...fiendish acts of espionage, torture and murder of prisoners of war, and physical duress and other unethical persuasive actions in the interrogation of prisoners.”

-CIA Memo, “Defense Against Soviet Mental Interrogation and Espionage Techniques” (1951)

A Lack of Guinea Pigs

After being named Director of the OSS’ successor organization, the CIA, Allen Dulles spoke at a Princeton alumni event on April 10, 1953. He referenced Soviet and Chinese brainwashing, lamenting that “we, in the West, are somewhat handicapped [in brain warfare because] there are few survivors, and we have no human guinea pigs, ourselves, on which to try these extraordinary techniques…” Three days later he approved Project MKULTRA, the successor to previous efforts codenamed ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD, each of which had been dedicated to mind control research and experiments. Part of the research was conducted on human subjects in hospitals and prisons. MKULTRA took drug experimentation to new heights of recklessness, culminating in the experimentation using LSD and others substances on unwitting American citizens and foreign nationals to examine their effects in more realistic conditions. The CIA justified their testing on strangers by stating “that testing of materials under accepted scientific procedures fails to disclose the full pattern of reactions and attributions that may occur in operational situations.” Other areas explored included “radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.”

Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born American, was recruited to work in Canada as the first Director of the Allan Memorial Institute, founded in 1943 as the psychiatry department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The Institute was administered by both the Hospital and McGill University, which used the department as its teaching hospital for medical faculty members. McGill hired Cameron at a time of little oversight for the Institute; there was no ethics or scientific review board that oversaw his work. He would be free to test any approach to psychiatry regardless of the consequences, to devastating effect for his patients. Far from a low-level researcher, he held a series of top positions in his industry, including President of the American Psychiatric Association (1952–1953), the Canadian Psychiatric Association (1958–1959), the American Psychopathological Association (1963), the Society of Biological Psychiatry (1965), and the World Psychiatric Association (1961–1966).

Dr. Donald O. Hebb, the Chairman of the Department of Psychology at McGill University, reported some disturbing findings to his funder, the Defence Research Board of Canada, in 1952. Through his own experiments testing sensory deprivation on volunteers, he noted the subjects experienced hallucinations, panic attacks, and reported their belief that the practice was tantamount to torture. He wrote to the Board, pleading his case to make his findings public at a research conference organized by Cameron in late 1953. He went as far as including a drawing of himself begging at the close of the letter to emphasize his desire, but he was turned down. After the findings were leaked to the press, the Canadian government decided to cancel Dr. Hebb’s contract with McGill.

Cameron was inspired by Hebb’s work, but due to the fact that Hebb had already conducted sensory deprivation experiments at McGill with paid volunteers and the results were known, Cameron was unable to obtain any volunteers for his own experiments or permission from his own patients. Cameron gradually arrived at a solution on how to conduct his experiments to take the research further: his patients would be his guinea pigs, without their permission.

Psychic Driving

In 1953, Cameron began experimenting with a concept he invented called psychic driving. Three years later, he chronicled his findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study consisted of 15 patients diagnosed as “neurotic,” all but one of them women in their 30s and 40s. He used similar techniques as Hebb had on student volunteers in terms of sensory restrictions related to vision, hearing, and touch. Nurses were instructed not to speak to the patients and talking was limited to two interviews per day. Unlike the Hebb voluntary study, the forced isolation was continued for longer periods, up to six days in a row. Within two days, most became disturbed, some hallucinating and experiencing an intense feeling of “depersonalization.” Two patients became psychotic and were treated with electroshock to quell their “paranoid” or “obsessional” reactions. A 25-year-old man in the study expressed his thoughts on the fifth day of being subjected to sensory isolation: “I feel I am not here...I am scared. I am in another world…I am afraid I am not going to come back...I feel like I am going out of this world...I don’t feel real.”

The women in the study who suffered from either depression or a “feeling of inadequacy” were subjected to psychic driving without their consent. In the article, Cameron explained how he planned to take the techniques further: “prolonged sleep” using sodium amytal (a sedative later known by its street name “Blue Heavens”), accompanied by 10 to 15 days of psychic driving, totaling 10 to 20 hours per day, as well as hypnosis using an experimental methamphetamine known as Desoxyn.

Psychic driving would become the cure for mental instability, Cameron claimed. Those experiencing mental illness could have their neuroses wiped clean, or “depatterned” as he termed it, with new, healthier attitudes pumped into their brains as patients listened to taped messages repeated on constant loops.

Though the Canadian government consistently funded the research, Dr. Omond M. Solandt, chairman of Canada’s Defence Research Board, claimed to have been disturbed by Cameron’s practices at the time: “In the early 1950s, the wife of one of my associates sought medical treatment from Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute. She was depatterned and after seeing her I knew that this kind of work was something the DRB would have no part in. It was my view at the time and continues to be that Cameron was not possessed of the necessary sense of humanity to be regarded as a good doctor.”

Illogical Thinking

Another institution also not subject to oversight became interested in Cameron’s research. Reading Cameron’s “Psychic Driving” journal article, the CIA was intrigued: Cameron described his “adaptation of Hebb’s psychological isolation” and subjected patients to endless loops of taped messages, usually recordings about parental rejection (for example, “my mother hates me”) or sexual thoughts, while under a drug-induced “clinical coma” or LSD-infused hypnosis sessions. The combined effects of these experiments led Cameron to believe the patient’s state became “analogous to…the breakdown of the individual under continuous interrogation.” The CIA had for years been seeking to unlock the secrets of mind control and obtain other interrogation enhancements. Under Project MKULTRA, they refined their objective as being “the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.” Open for testing was any method or drug that could be used offensively for espionage with consistent, predictable effects: “we intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible non-toxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.” A 1955 CIA document outlined the various drugs and methods being sought as part of the program, which extended far beyond brainwashing:

1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.

2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.

3. Materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity.

4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so they may be used for malingering, etc.

6. Materials which will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and loss of memory.

7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brain-washing.”

8. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.

9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.

10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.

11. Substances which will produce a chemical that can cause blisters.

12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.

13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.

14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.

15. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.

16. A knockout pill which can be surreptitiously administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.

17. A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity whatsoever.

The CIA referred to Cameron’s work as Subproject 68 under MKULTRA. To create plausible deniability, the CIA funded the research through a cut-out organization, one of three private medical research foundations in the United States used for this purpose. In this case, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology pretended to fund Cameron themselves, when in reality they were a front for the CIA’s psychological research activities.

An undercover CIA agent of the Human Ecology Fund approached Cameron requesting a grant application, which he immediately began developing. There are indications, however, that given his personal link to Allen Dulles, Cameron already knew the funding was a done deal. Cameron approached another resident doctor at the Allan Memorial Institute, offering him a research appointment a year before the CIA grant was approved. The doctor turned him down, disagreeing with his approach of using intramuscular injections of up to 150 mgs of curare (the first paralytic used in anesthesia) to render his patients receptive to psychic driving, calling it dangerous and “not within the bounds of reasonableness.” Cameron’s approved grant application to the CIA front read in part as follows:

Our studies now turned to attempts to establish lasting changes in the patient’s behavior, using verbal signals of a predetermined nature and of our own devising. After considerable experimentation, we have developed a procedure which in the most successful case has produced behavioral changes lasting up to two months. The procedure requires:

i. The breaking down of ongoing; patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intense electroshocks (depatterning).

ii. The intensive repetition (16 hours a day for 6 or 7 days) of the prearranged verbal signal.

iii. During this period of intensive repetition the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.

iv. Repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient, after the conclusion of the period, into continuous sleep for 7-10 days.

v. Finally, in association with Dr. [redacted] we have sought to bring about physiological change by repetition of appropriate verbal signals. We have used the same technique as is outlined above for the production of behavioral change…

Cameron’s technician Leonard Rubenstein later admitted the team knew the Montreal Experiments were “directly related to brainwashing…[t]hey had investigated brainwashing among soldiers who had been in Korea. We in Montreal started to use some [of these] techniques, brainwashing patients instead of using drugs.” The CIA funding, approved by Dulles, was overseen by Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Agency’s Technical Services Division (TSD), who assigned John Gittinger as project officer. Subproject 68 was only one of their many responsibilities in TSD, which ranged from devising suicide pills, to developing psychological profiles of adversaries, and to assassinating foreign leaders. The Agency funded the Montreal Experiments for a total of $60,000 (approximately $700,000 today) from 1957 to 1960.

While the U.S. kept their interest in Cameron’s experiments hidden by violating a previous disclosure agreement the Canadian government, unbeknownst to them the Canadian government was already funding the work through a series of grants labelled “psychological warfare” or “national defence,” to the tune of $162,206 (approx. $1.5M USD today) from 1950 to 1964. In what colloquially became known as brainwashing experiments, the grants went towards Cameron’s research into “sensory deprivation, psychic driving, electroshock, and the use of the male hormone testosterone on women patients.”

Jean

“It’s just like being buried alive. Somebody please do something!”

Jean had the misfortune of being admitted to the Allan Memorial Institute just as the CIA funding had begun in 1957 and Cameron intensified his experiments. She was admitted to the hospital at age 33 for postpartum depression and her medical file recorded that her words pleading for help were “said screaming at the nurse and doctor,” as she paced the hallways drugged on repeated doses of sodium amytal. She was put into a drug-induced sleep for weeks and subjected to several electroshocks and endless loops of pre-recorded messages. Her first period in the “sleep room” with other patients lasted 29 days, then 18 days, each accompanied by electroshock therapy. “She was extremely confused and disoriented but much more co-operative,” Cameron wrote of Jean in his reports. Her parents in Montreal had suggested to her to seek treatment through Cameron due to his sterling reputation, but she soon came to a differing opinion.

Jean’s daughter Alison, 4 years of age at the time, watched her mother return home as a shell of a human being. As a woman who had once been an active person, enjoying skiing and horseback riding, like many of Cameron’s patients after treatment, she had forgotten how to perform basic tasks such as using the bathroom or putting on her clothes. As a teenager, Alison realized something about her mother was different. “When you wanted to talk with her about something emotional…she just could not do it,” Alison remembered. “Her emotions were stripped. It took away her soul.” She learned her mother would write codes and numbers on the walls of their home, alone in the dark. “One time I came home and the ceiling was spray-painted with red swirls all over it," Alison recalled. “She would take wallpaper and cut out little sections of it and she would pin it to the whole room.” Discussing the possibility of returning to Cameron’s care, Jean became so upset during a car ride with her husband that she tried to jump out of the moving vehicle.

Wrong Turn

In 1958, Cameron brought in Laughlin Taylor as a full-time psychologist to test the results of psychic driving; Cameron sent him only his best short-term cases after two weeks, those most likely to improve. Taylor had only heard rumors of the Montreal Experiments, as he recalled the first whispers of this work: “This massive [electroconvulsive therapy] was going on…patients had been given hundreds and were reduced to vegetables…Everybody in the place talked about it.” In the ensuing years up to 1960 under CIA funding, Cameron selected from the general patient population of the Allan Memorial Institute: schizophrenics, manic depressives, neurotics, and alcoholics—there was no methodology to the selection process; all were worthy guinea pigs. He increased the intensity of the treatment, using psychic driving for 16 hours per day for 20 to 30 days, drugged with Sernyl (later known by its street name “angel dust”), a drug later disallowed for use in either humans or animals for its “acute psychotic episodes and even the danger of chronic psychosis in humans.” The verbal signals he would choose for a patient’s tape loop would depend “on the basis of our knowledge of the patient,” Cameron wrote.

In the 1960s, Cameron again increased the time periods of psychic driving: “it was only common sense to see what would happen if the repetition was increased tenfold, a hundredfold, or even more,” he wrote in a research paper in 1965. He forced his patients to listen from “six in the morning until nine at night, day after day, and week after week.” Cameron continued to prep the patients for psychic driving through prolonged sleep, electroshocks, and sensory deprivation. Tape loops with negative messages could go on for up to 60 days. An example of a negative taped message played on repeat was as follows:

Madeleine, you let your mother and father treat you as a child all through your single life. You let your mother check you up sexually after every date you had with a boy. You hadn’t enough determination to tell her to stop it. You never stood up for yourself against your mother or father but would run away from trouble...They used to call you “crying Madeleine.” Now that you have two children, you don’t seem to be able to manage them and keep a good relationship with your husband. You are drifting apart. You don’t go out together. You have not been able to keep him interested sexually.

Positive messages were repeated even longer, with one case lasting up to 101 days. Cameron wrote of this case: “although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favourable results were obtained.” Her only condition when she was checked in was that she was going through menopause at age 52.

Cameron expressed his gratitude to the CIA front in a 1960 letter describing his “great indebtedness” to the Human Ecology Fund, for their funding assistance was “invaluable” for his research. A study that year commissioned by the Mister of Health for Quebec on the state of mental hospitals in the province demonstrated just how extreme Cameron’s research was when it came to electroshock therapy: “Electroshock seemed to us to be used much more [at the Allan Memorial Institute] than in the other hospitals studied,” they concluded. A total of 12,000 electroshocks had been delivered under Cameron’s supervision in 1960 to a patient population of 1,000 and in the month of November alone, 766 electroshocks had been given to 100 patients. Like most aspects of Cameron’s methods, the intensity of his electroshocks was more extreme than his contemporaries. While most doctors at the time gave single doses of 110 volts in the fraction of a second, once per day, Cameron would administer two to three times daily doses of 150 volts. The inventors of the technique, Robert Russell and Lewis Page, used an initial one-second shock and 5-9 supplementary shocks in the middle of convulsions. The inventors would stop once a patient showed “pronounced confusion”; Cameron had no such compunction and the screams of patients would echo through the hospital halls as the depatterning process continued.

After a decade of attempting to proof the benefits of psychic driving, Cameron was forced to conclude that the repeated messages were not taking hold in his patients. By 1963, Cameron admitted at a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association that his attempts had been a failure: “At this point, as so often happens in a long research, we took a wrong turning and continued to walk without a glint of success for a long, long time. I won’t recount to you all the things we tried to do to stop the working of these mechanisms of defense against repetition. Let me simply say that we vastly increased the number of repetitions to which the individual was exposed, that we continued driving while the individual was asleep, while he was in chemical sleep, while he was awake but under hallucinogens, while he was under the influence of disinhibiting agents. We tried driving under hypnosis, immediately after electroshock, we tried innumerable combinations of voices, of timing and many other conditions, but we were never able to stop the mechanisms…Amazing though it may sound, my colleagues and I…found it was possible for the individual to be exposed to the repetition of verbal signals, such as I have described, a quarter to one-half million times and yet be unable to repeat these few short sentences at the end of this extraordinary large number of repetitions.” He added, with a rare admission of self-doubt: “There seemed no answer to the question, so I repeated this procedure with all the other patients I had in psychotherapy and got much the same thing—discomfort, aversion, embarrassment and resentment. And indeed I even noticed in myself a reluctance to do this—I felt that I was being unkind, insensitive, imperceptive—that in a word one simply didn’t do this sort of thing to people. For these reasons, namely, the patient’s feelings and my own, I felt increasingly sure that there must be something of importance lying hidden.”

In August 1964, Cameron left the Allan Memorial Institute. His successor, Robert Cleghorn, gradually put an end to the Montreal Experiments. First, he appointed a group to study Cameron’s depatterning technique and found that using multiple electroshocks and drugs as Cameron had done did not yield better results compared to “less dramatic treatment.” Due to the severity of the electroshock treatments Cameron administered, even beyond the norms of the time, 60% of the depatterned patients studied still reported experiencing amnesia, from a period of six months to 10 years afterwards. Cleghorn ordered by November 1965 that no more than ten electroconvulsive therapy treatments were to be given without his approval in any course of therapy being conducted under his supervision. Cleghorn found one doctor had defied this order in February 1966 with a patient who was in the process of being depatterned. After being confronted by Cleghorn, the rogue psychiatrist continued to cause trouble and use Cameron’s more unrestrained methods. Cleghorn cancelled the psychiatrist’s renewed appointment at the Institute. The doctor then sued to be reinstated to his position but lost in the Canadian courts.

Cameron had a feeling that his legacy of treatment would evaporate at his former Institute. Encountering Cleghorn at a World Psychiatric Association meeting in Madrid during the summer of 1966, Cameron realized that Cleghorn had abandoned his depatterning approach: “I thought you would want to discontinue that method,” Cameron told him. The Montreal Experiments remained a secret for the remainder of his life. Just over a year later, in September 1967, Cameron died on a hiking trip with his son in the Adirondack Mountains in Northeastern New York, suffering a heart attack at the age of 65. In a hagiographic account written at the end of his tenure at the Allan Memorial Institute, Cameron was asked to look back on his 21 years and his most worthwhile accomplishments, saying in part, “Was it the new and sometimes daring forms of treatment which in later years afforded much relief of human suffering? No one can tell since no one can yet know their full consequences.” One of Cleghorn’s team members who ran the study of Cameron’s methods after his departure could see right through “the godfather of Canadian psychiatry. I probably shouldn’t talk about this, but Cameron—for him to do what he did—he was a very schizophrenic guy, who totally detached himself from the human implications of his work…God, we talk about concentration camps. I don’t want to make this comparison, but God, you talk about ‘we didn’t know it was happening,’ and it was—right in our backyard.”

Exposure

The CIA had expressed its own doubts internally on the morality of the research they were conducting broadly, and yet they also continued to press on. By 1957, the Agency’s Inspector General (IG) examined MKULTRA and found that “some of the activities are considered to be professionally unethical and in some instances border on the illegal.” Nonetheless, the IG thought there were encouraging signs: “These difficulties have not been entirely surmounted but good progress is being made.” No progress was actually made on this front as six years later, the IG again found “the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical.” There were still “question of legality” and the wanton testing on Americans placed “the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.” If these activities were exposed, the IG predicted “serious adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion” in addition to causing “offensive and defensive action in this field on the part of foreign intelligence services.” Ten years after this report, CIA Director Richard Helms found what he thought was a solution to the latter problem of exposure: he agreed with Sidney Gottlieb’s proposal that the MKULTRA files be destroyed, giving the order on January 31, 1973, twenty years after the project had begun.

By 1975, the Rockefeller Commission gave the first hint at the extent of MKULTRA, reporting on the death of Frank Olson, a U.S. Army employee who had been drugged with LSD on the orders of Gottlieb and later fell to his death from a hotel window in 1953. The IG had recommended a “high-level intra-Agency board” oversee TSD research projects and for reprimands of the employees involved in Olson’s death. Dulles softened the draft reprimands sent to him and established a review board, but none of this had any effect on Gottlieb, MKULTRA, or the Montreal Experiments. The hearings also revealed 30 universities and institutions were funded as part of the experimentation activities.

Further details of the MKULTRA Project and the CIA’s link to Cameron would largely have been unknown were it not for someone performing their job admirably. When tasked with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in the summer of 1977, Frank Laubinger of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services (the successor to TSD) could have simply replied in the negative; the MKULTRA files, it was known, had been purposely destroyed by Gottlieb after seeking approval from the CIA Director at the time, Richard Helms. The maintenance of these documents would be too embarrassing and “misunderstood,” they claimed. Illegal record destruction aside, the Laubinger could have ended the search there. Instead, he obtained permission to search through the CIA’s Retired Records Center by hand, in every conceivable box that could have contained relevant files from branches that worked on MKULTRA. He ended up discovering seven boxes of materials, totaling thousands of pages, mostly related to proposals and the financing of MKULTRA. Commended by the U.S. Senate for his diligence, Laubinger explained that the pressure of responding to the Church Committee had died down and “when the pressure of that situation cools down, and you can start looking at things systematically, you are apt to find things that you wouldn’t under the heat of a crash program, and that is what happened here.” The pages revealed the true number of universities and institutions involved was in fact 86, among them Cameron’s experiments, one of 149 total MKULTRA subprojects.

Anatomy of a Cover-Up

“I suffer from chronic depression which sometimes becomes acute. I call those periods my ‘black holes.’ I don’t see anybody and I won’t leave the house. I can’t read and I used to love to read. I can’t write a letter. I have unexplained fears. I wake up at night afraid and I don’t know why. I’m trying to limp through my life like someone who’s been in a terrible accident that leaves them crippled.

“Dr. Cameron could be cruel if you didn’t do exactly what he wanted. He was a god figure to the patients. He’d say to me, ‘What’s the matter with you, lassie?’ I still hear his voice sometimes.”

Velma had also become a patient at the Allan Memorial Institute at the start of the CIA’s funding of Cameron in 1957. Following her treatment, she found it difficult to focus and her family could recognize the change. “I knew growing up that my grandmother was not like other grandmothers,” her granddaughter said. “She was very jumpy and her nerves were just shot.” Her records showed she had been subjected to 14 experiments with LSD. The drug gave her terrifying nightmares where she felt like a caged squirrel running endlessly in a wheel and she felt as if she were shrinking as in Alice in Wonderland, in agony over how she would get down off the bed. Alone in an empty room, she listened to taped conversations between herself and Cameron on an endless loop.

Velma’s granddaughter felt from reading about Cameron in Velma’s journals that “she fell in love with him I think. In her journals, she writes about his hands, his voice. She gave her sanity over to him. How can a person do that?” If Velma failed to comply with treatment, the doctors would explain to her that she was a bad mother and wife, cajoling her to participate in the treatment for the sake of her family. “Now lassie, you know you have to trust me,” Cameron would say. “Don’t you want to get well, so you can go home and see your husband?” Velma admitted to idolizing Cameron, which meant he was able to talk her out of quitting several times. She went back for more intensive psychic driving in 1963. “I thought he was God,” she remembered. “I don’t know how I could have been so stupid…A lot of us were naïve. We thought psychiatrists had the answers. Here was the greatest in the world, with all these titles.” Ultimately, she was driven to such a dark state of depression, she managed to convince Cameron to stop: “This stuff is killing me,” she told him. “I can’t go on.”

After Velma and her husband, a former member of Canadian Parliament, sued the Canadian government for their involvement in the Montreal Experiments, the government felt pressure given the U.S. involvement, explaining internally through the Canadian Office of the Minister of State that the “case has now taken on a political dimension that we in Canada can no on longer control on our own. The pressure is great for action which if we did it could affect the important bilateral ties we have with the USA not only politically but also with our close and effective relationship with the CIA. It is in the interest of the USA to help us settle this problem before it gets out of hand.”

To aid in this effort of getting the problem to go away, in July 1985 the Canadian government commissioned a report from George Cooper, a former member of Parliament, whose cursory look was entitled “Opinion of George Cooper, Q.C., Regarding Canadian Government Funding of the Allan Memorial Institute in the 1950s and 1960s,” which became known as the Cooper Report. It had all of the markings of a whitewash, starting with its limited scope, which excluded several key participants and potential witnesses. In accordance with the mandate he was given, Cooper interviewed only government employees on whether they believed they were liable for Cameron’s conduct. Cooper wrote: “apart from consultations with the three independent experts referred to later, I have confined my interviews to people having a past or present connection with the Government…Thus, I have made no enquiries of (for example) former patients or staff at the [Allan Memorial Institute] at the time when Dr. Cameron was there, and it is of course possible that new facts might come to light from that source…I have seen no medical records of patients at the Allan.” Also left unexplored were potential remarks from “former associates of Dr. Cameron himself” who could have “shed a great deal of light on the work of the Allan Memorial Institute.”

Despite the government’s attempt to limit the Cooper Report’s scope to reach a favorable conclusion, the report was not enough of a whitewash and additional steps needed to be taken. In a letter from December 1985, Cooper conceded: “In retrospect, Cameron’s work represented bad science, and rested on a theoretical foundation that was very weak, even when judged by the knowledge and standards of the day”; this conclusion never made it into the final report. Even content that did make it into the draft report in January 1986 required edits, with the following portion in italics on harm removed from the final report: “Almost all doctors – including certainly Drs. Cleghorn and Roberts—would however agree that these procedures were false trails in the field of psychiatric research and treatment, and that on balance the treatments were of no benefit and may very well have harmed a number of patients.”

Upon reviewing the report, one Canadian government official saw an inconsistency and wondered, “if the treatment was all above board,” why had the Allan Memorial Institute settled with Valerie for “$50,000 plus costs.” A U.S. government official identified further concerns with the draft report, including: “On pages 14 and 15, the draft report also comments on the question of CIA liability…we believe that this issue, which is the subject of the litigation in the USA, should probably not/not be touched upon directly in the Cooper Report.” Internal meeting notes from Canadian Cabinet ministers discussing the draft report revealed they understood the conclusion would be seen as a sham: with “the Cooper report concluding that the government Canadian has no responsibility in this matter, public opinion will continue to see it as an injustice and will accuse the government to try to clear his name. It will be extremely difficult to convince the Canadian public of the merits of the conclusions of this report.”

The Cooper Report purported that Cameron was a “good doctor” but conceded that the Montreal Experiments “were not based on sound principles of science and medicine” and that depatterning “represented a level of assault on the brain that was not justifiable even by the standards of the time and even in light of the rather rudimentary level of scientific and medical knowledge of those days compared to today” and yet somehow concluded that Cameron had not committed wrongdoing. Without interviewing patients, the report mentioned that there was little or no lasting harm from the experiments. The report absolved the Canadian government of any wrongdoing: “in my opinion the Government of Canada bears no legal or moral responsibility for the activities for Dr. D. Ewen Cameron.” The CIA’s defenses were incorporated in the report and presented as Cooper’s “independent” opinion. Cooper, in a memo to the Canadian government, proposed that victims be paid $100,000 for “medical misadventure” and sign a release form. He wrote: “Unless some limit is set, funding for future medical research would be rendered more uncertain than it would be in the absence of a maximum limit.”

In the interim, eight elderly victims of the Montreal Experiments sued the CIA for $1 million each, settling in 1988 for an out-of-court settlement of $93,750 each (less than $250,000 today). “It was a compromise decision to take some money now,” their lawyer explained, “given the health and age of the plaintiffs.” In 1992, the Canadian government launched the “Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan,” offering the $100,000 payments that Cooper had suggested, if the victim would agree to sign a release form and not pursue any further court action against the government. An estimated 77 former patients took the offer, though some were rejected for not having been “depatterned” enough. One victim named Gail was denied compensation as she was told “the evidence does not indicate that you were subjected to sleep therapy and/or depatterning… there is no evidence that the treatment you received reduced your mind to a childlike state.” Gail had in fact been subjected to “43 electroshock treatments, four of which were Page-Russells, each of which was six times more intense than a regular electroshock treatment, for an actual total of 63 electroshock treatments. She was also subjected to insulin comas.” Velma was also ineligible for the 1992 payment as she had died in 1990. “It’s too late,” a lawyer explained. “The conditions were they had to be alive, specifically.”

Much has been made of the CIA connection with Cameron, authors pointing to a reference to the Montreal Experiments in the Agency’s KUBARK interrogation manual from 1963: “A number of experiments conducted at McGill University…and other sites have attempted to come as close as possible to the elimination of sensory stimuli, or to masking remaining stimuli, chiefly sounds, by a stronger but wholly monotonous overlay.” Books on the subject often leave out the next two sentences, which read as follows: “The results of these experiments have little applicability to interrogation because the circumstances are dissimilar. Some of the findings point toward hypotheses that seem relevant to interrogation, but conditions like those of detention for purposes of counterintelligence interrogation have not been duplicated for experimentation.” Even the CIA did not see much utility in Cameron’s work. John Gittinger, the subproject’s monitor, never saw a report from Cameron, never visited him in Montreal, but still rated Cameron’s work as “satisfactory” in progress reports given that he had heard “word that they were having no problems.” In 1983, Gittinger testified that the Agency’s involvement with Cameron had been “a foolish mistake. We shouldn’t have done it...I’m sorry we did it. Because it turned out to be a terrible mistake.” If given the chance, Gittinger claimed he would have opted to “refuse to support him or be interested in him.”

A main source of inspiration for psychic driving, Dr. Donald Hebb, explained what he believed to be the main motivation for Cameron’s sham research: self-aggrandizement. Shortly before his death, Hebb was merciless in his assessment: “Cameron’s experiments were done without the patient’s consent. Cameron was irresponsible—criminally stupid, in that there was no reason to expect that he would get any results from the experiments. Anyone with any appreciation of the complexity of the human mind would not expect that you could erase an adult mind and then add things back with this stupid psychic driving. He wanted to make a name for himself—so he threw his cap over the windmill...Cameron stuck to the conventional experiments and paper writing for most of his life but then he wanted that breakthrough. That was Cameron’s fatal flaw—he wasn’t so much driven with wanting to know—he was driven with wanting to be important—to make that breakthrough—it made him a bad scientist. He was criminally stupid.”

Robert Cleghorn, Cameron's successor ended a more positive historical account of Cameron’s work with the following caveat: “There is a principle emanating from our experience with this dissident whose continued variance to authority made regulation of procedures to conform to desirable standards difficult to achieve. Unfortunately, his approach was tied into a system originated by the previous chief to utilize a therapeutic technique which was neither widely accepted nor based on sound experimental or theoretical grounds. In a sense, both teacher and pupil flouted authority. Deviants are sometimes creative, but deviance in thinking and behavior takes many forms in psychiatrists as well as in other ordinary mortals, and even fundamental scientists who subscribe to objectivity are not immune as they strive for recognition…If I were forced to name a single significant twisted bit of thinking other than outright cheating, I would have to say that activity associated with a blind desire to make a discovery is the chief element. This is hubris and is accompanied by a failure to assess evidence dispassionately and finally to a delusional belief in spurious evidence and a set of assumptions erected to support, justify, or explain the developed hypothesis."

None of the governments or institutions involved have issued a formal apology for the Montreal Experiments since they first came to light in the 1970s, preferring to payoff those victims they deemed worthy enough to try to forget the incidents ever occurred. One estimate is that 100 patients were subjected to the extreme treatments of the Montreal Experiments between 1948 and 1964. A judge ruled in 2004 that a further 250 victims, many of them now dead, could pursue a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government. Two decades later, a case is still making its way through the courts. Jean’s daughter settled with the Canadian government separately for $100,000 in 2017, in one of a handful of quiet out-of-court settlements brokered with victims’ family members. To this day, the webpage of Cameron’s archival papers at McGill University makes no mention of the Montreal Experiments, skipping over their existence entirely:

In 1943, Cameron entered on a new phase of his career when he was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at McGill and director of the newly-created Allan Memorial Institute. On the clinical side, he established in-patient and out-patient services, and a day-hospital programme. He developed laboratories for psychiatric research, and promoted advances in psychiatric training through undergraduate curricula and teaching hospital programmes. Cameron’s high reputation in the psychiatric field is attested by his appointment in 1945 to the American panel to examine Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg trials. After retiring from the Allan in 1964, he returned to Albany as Research Professor at the Albany Medical School and Director of the Laboratory for Research in Psychiatry and Aging at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital.

Having watched his father experience the Montreal Experiments, Harvey found it much more difficult to forget: “The frustration is incredible. It’s impossible to know, to ever know, what kind of life my father might have led, what kind of lives all these people might have led, if this had never happened. So much has been stolen from my father and everyone like him.”