Transcription
[Music] By far the most chilling experiments we have uncovered took place at this Gothic estate called Ravens Craig, halfway up Mount Royal in Montreal. It houses the Allen Memorial Institute of Psychiatry of McGill University. It was here that the CIA funded a series of experiments, experiments. The work was done by the institute's then director, Dr. Yan Cameron. It is the closest experimentation to brainwashing yet disclosed.
His work, unprecedented in psychiatry, consisted of three areas which he called Sleep Therapy, Psychic Driving, and the ultimate Depatterning. Dr. Maurice Donier, current head of the Allen Memorial Institute, in his psychic driving, so-called, uh, type of, of therapy, he would give the patient intensive, uh, electric treatment in order to make the patient regress deeply, uh, become forgetful, and then he would attempt to implant new ideas, uh, in the mind of the patient. Now, to a layman, it would appear that Dr. Cameron was trying to take the slate and wipe it clean, the slate being the mind. In other words, brainwashing. Exactly. That's a very good comparison. Brainwashing, yes.
Val Oro of Winnipeg, Canada, the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament, was a patient of Dr. Cameron's. She entered the Allen Memorial Institute because of severe depression. She describes for the first time publicly the LSD therapy and psychic driving treatment that she was given by Dr. Cameron. And then the drug began to take hold very rapidly because it was an IV injection and, um, things became very furry and, uh, very frightening and, uh, had a lot of sensations that it's very difficult to recall. Nobody explained it to me. Nobody ever asked me if I was willing to do it or anything. He had this feeling that he would be able to get through the resistance of illness and, and, and to reach, uh, deep changes very quickly. Did he? I don't think that when you look at that in retrospect, the hopes that he had had been, has, have been in any way fulfilled.
But Cameron would plunge on. The next step was what he called psychic driving. This involved almost endless tape-recorded messages and more drugs for the patient. Cameron wrote that this was the way to make direct control, control changes in personality. I thought this was the coldest, most impersonal treatment that anybody could give to anybody in the world, and I became more and more despondent and more and more angry. I just became so despondent that I thought, I can't, I can't live like this any longer, and I thought I would just go out and throw myself underneath the cars on McGregor. I stood on the curb of that street and I stood there and I thought, okay, go. Okay, go. And then I thought, what if you're not killed? What if you're just maimed? What if you don't die and you live and you can't even talk anymore? And I couldn't do it.
The most severe technique Cameron used was depatterning. He described it as breaking up the existing patterns of behavior by means of intensive electroshock therapy with prolonged periods of sleep. He carried out these experiments in something he called the Sleep Rooms. People in there were like babies. They cried and they were very disoriented, and we were very afraid of the Sleep Room. We used to walk very carefully against the side of the corridor that was opposite the Sleep Room with our backs to the wall when we'd go by. Cameron used this combined sleep electroshock treatment on patients as long as 30 days. Days. One patient he kept asleep for 65 days.
Cameron retired, and his successor, Dr. Robert Clayhorn, ordered a follow-up study on the patients treated with Cameron's depatterning method. It showed that it was no more beneficial in its result than the use of more conservative methods. But the follow-up study showed that 60% of those who had been depatterned still had amnesia for periods of anywhere from six months to 10 years. That's quite a memory loss, isn't it? That is a memory loss indeed. It is. It's more, I think, more than desirable.
In retrospect, does Dr. Cameron's experimentation and his treatment appear harsh? Uh, I would say yes. I mean, this forceful type of approach that I was describing to you, uh, is definitely, it can be said that it's harsh. I wouldn't call it harsh. I would say it was harder on the staff than it was on the patients because these people had to be fed and they had to be cared for and they had to be, uh, given sufficient fluid and food and toileted and so on and so forth. It was a, a very difficult, uh, thing for, uh, the staff to, uh, to, uh, to follow these patients properly and see that they, they did well. Well, I'm glad he was concerned for the staff, but damn it all, I, I wouldn't, I, I could have maybe had a different kind of life, and that makes me angry and sad, and I don't know what, how to explain how I feel, really. I just, I just.
How did you feel when you learned that Dr. Cameron's experimentation was financed by the CIA? Well, I thought, oh, I can't even use the word that I thought because I thought, that bastard. And he was too smart. He knew. He knew who he was working for. And, um, excuse me, but, um, I just, you know, I just can't, sometimes I can't believe it, and yet I know it's true.
If you had the opportunity to say something to the people at the Central Intelligence Agency who financed this study, what would you say? I, I realize the CIA is a very important organization and they have a very important job to do, but God, it surely doesn't have to be done on people who are totally incapable of knowing what's happening or having any defense against it. And I, I, I can't imagine the mentality of people who would do this. I just can't.
As for Dr. Cameron, he died in 1966 while mountain climbing. A colleague wrote of Cameron, for him, the ends justified the means. And when one is dealing with a waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt the stance. Dr. Cameron seemed ideally suited for what the CIA had in mind. It was the Cold War, and especially the trial of Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, who was forced to testify in a Hungarian court that he was a spy, and then later the Korean War with the coerced and mainly fraudulent confessions of American servicemen. My generation took place on the that would spark intense interest in intelligence circles about brainwashing.
The CIA secretly commissioned a study of communist brainwashing methods at the Cornell University Medical Center. A leader of that study was Dr. Lawrence Hinkle. He explains, first, the Russian method of controlling and breaking a person, absolutely isolated from everyone else, with one man whose job it is to get you to write the extent to which you are a criminal. In this setting, you can get people to do most anything, do you see, because you don't have to lay a hand on them. And by the time you get through and you go up before the judge, the fellow says, were you a spy? He says, yes, I was a spy. The, the, the Chinese never really had this kind of a state police system. They would get him in, and all this fellow does is ask you, rewrite, rewrite, and talk to him about your whole life. Graduated from pilot training in 1949.
While the purpose of the study was to find out about communist brainwashing techniques, CIA documents show that the agency was interested in developing mind control methods of its own to precondition and control Chinese living in this country to be sent back to their homeland as CIA agents. What do you think they were looking for? Well, I think they, no, they weren't looking for, they weren't looking for agents or anything like that. Yet the agency's perception of the work you were doing, in CIA documents, uh, we have examined, it says that the, the project that was being done here, they intended to use everything learned about the new agents to induce them to quote, to perform acts of a complex purposeful nature, but that was the effects of which may be out of keeping with the individual's previous behavior. Was never done. Those people were not, that was when they first came here. The first people they sent up to see us, do you see, were, were operational type people from the CIA with some rather, rather wild ideas. Okay, this is their perception of it. If, if I could just, it was their perception of it. Either no, it wasn't dangerous to his being contrary to any previous consciously expressed intentions and interests, contrary to the good of the individual, and subversive to the goals for which he is consciously work. Talk, but the situation wise, you see, those things were never done because of wise people on both sides. We're not able to do this, nor interested in it. They were, though. Oh, some of the low-level people were, but the high-level people are not, to tell you the truth.
But documents clearly show that the CIA was attempting to develop agents over whom they had as much control as possible, agents who would perform tasks contrary to their own good. Lost normally conditioned American who's been trained to kill and then to have no memory of having killed. His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it has been dry-cleaned. Is a Manchurian Candidate controlled by others to do things against his will? Possible. It was a remarkable film because, as far as I'm concerned, it made something totally impossible seem absolutely credible. I would say the answer is yes, but there are many qualifications to that.
Dr. Milton Klein, a psychologist, a clinical and experimental hypnotist, and unpaid consultant to the CIA. The qualifications would be the subjects selected to produce the kind of behavior that you wish, the amount of time, the procedures that are utilized, and the motivations of the people who are designing, executing, and administering the procedures. You're asking whether an individual can be under hypnosis influenced, coerced, persuaded, shaped to perform an antisocial act or a destructive act or an act of violence. My answer would be yes.
Captain Marco, will you be good enough to lend Raymond your pistol, please? Yes, ma'am. Thanks. SP, sure. K. Shoot Bobby Raymond through the forehead. Yes, ma'am. How valuable a tool can hypnosis be in the intelligence field? None whatsoever. That has absolutely no use because nobody's ever been able to do that that I know of, do it in an operational, reasonable way. I'm not in any way saying that hypnosis, uh, doesn't place. I'm not saying there's nothing to it. I would say that most government agencies concerned with intelligence operations have been looking to hypnosis as a tool for a variety of purposes, one of which is to carry out and to execute certain intelligence operations on a basis where they would not have to rely completely on some of their own emotional reactions. Actually, that entails murder. It could, if you consider that an act of killing someone under circumstances of war is murder. I think one has to define, uh, what that means. Under circumstances of peace, under circumstances of peace, it would be murder.
Another former CIA agent says that Fidel Castro at one time was considered as a possible target for a Manchurian Candidate. Castro was naturally our discussion point. Could you get somebody gung-ho enough that they would go in and get him? But if you have 100% control of a guy, you have 100% dependency. If something happens and you haven't programmed it in, you've got a problem. So, in the end, it was decided that a Manchurian Candidate was not feasible, but the search for mind control continued.
But could the mind be controlled? Perhaps not. But is human behavior predictable? In this area, the CIA did make a significant breakthrough. A personality assessment system designed by the agency's chief psychologist, John Ginger. It comes close to being able to predict how humans will behave. It's really a descriptive system, an attempt to try to describe personality in a relatively systematic way so that hopefully you can get some kind of an idea to predict what the behavior between different kinds of individuals. Ginger's system had many uses in intelligence work. One was to draw personality portraits of world leaders. Using Ginger's system, the agency concluded the Shah of Iran is a brilliant but dangerous megalomaniac whose basic problems resulted from an overbearing father. And there were other applications. Your assessment staff played a key role in helping other governments pick their police intelligence agencies, including Uruguay and the Korean CIA. Uruguayan National Police. Can you tell us about this?
No author, John Marx, the former number two CIA man in Uruguay, told me how in 1966, John Ginger and an assistant traveled down to Uruguay and gave the tests in order to select, uh, members of the Uruguayan intelligence service. A psychologist who used to work for the CIA told me in 1961, he personally traveled to South Korea as part of an American CIA effort to set up the Korean CIA and to give the, the personality tests to candidates for the Korean CIA to choose the best man for their secret police. But one of the basic functions of Ginger's system was finding the vulnerabilities of an agent, a double agent, or a potential agent. In its applicability to intelligence work, isn't the PAS system looking for a person's soft spot? Well, of course, the answer to that is yes, but I, I, I hasten to to say, soft spot. This is what I consider a negative word.
Of the hundreds of behavioral projects undertaken by the CIA, Ginger's appears to have been one of the more successful and more conventional. Other experiments were not as conventional. Neurophysicist Dr. Jose Delgado was financed by the Office of Naval Research. In this experiment, the bull is sedated. Electrodes are implanted in its brain. Delgado transmits an electronic impulse to the center of the bull's brain. Delgado has remote control of the animal. Recently released CIA documents refer to the feasibility of remote control of animals, and that special investigations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man. Other areas were examined through the '60s and '70s: brain surgery, psychosurgery, creation of amnesia, parasyn. Present CIA officials have indicated this kind of work ended in 1963.
Truth. And what of those who took part in these programs? Thank you, sir. In 1977, the Senate subcommittee heard testimony from many of them, but the testimony was not that revealing. According to one of them, they agreed amongst themselves to keep the inquiry within bounds that would satisfy the committee. Former narcotics officer Charles Siragusa says that he was asked to limit his testimony by the man he reported to at the CIA. He wanted me not to say anything to pure yourself. That's right. Well, either that I'd have to pure myself or take the Fifth Amendment, and I'm not about to take the Fifth Amendment for anybody, okay? Former CIA chemist Robert Lashbrook testified he had no firsthand knowledge of the agency's run safe houses when, in fact, he supervised one of them, and according to George White's diaries, was at a safe house when White conducted what he called an LSD surprise experiment.
Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, whom we recently filmed near his California home, oversaw many of the CIA behavioral programs. He retired in 1973 and destroyed the records of this work. In sort of a valedictory letter, Dr. Gottlieb wrote that he and his colleagues had been able to maintain contact with the leading edge of developments in the field of biological and chemical control of human behavior. Dr. Gottlieb also testified before the Senate subcommittee, but from an anteroom where he could not be filmed because of what his lawyer termed health and cardiac problems. Dr. Gottlieb declined ABC News' request for an interview.
And what of George White, the man who helped the agency in so many of its programs? He would retire here to Stinson Beach, California, and shortly before his death, he wrote to his boss at the CIA, Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, and summed up his career by saying, it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, and cheat, steal, deceive, rape, and pillage with a sanction and blessing of the all-highest? Has mind control been achieved? From all of the available evidence, it appears doubtful. The human will has prevailed up to this point. But as we have seen, work is continuing in this field, work that we still don't know very much about. How deeply are the Russians and other dictatorships into all of this? We really can't say. And the CIA is reluctant to give out information about it. But the basic question remains, what place does all of this have within a democracy?
One final point should be made. As one of the persons who worked on these programs told us, we are very capable, conscientious, and very dedicated scientists working for our country. Their work speaks for itself. This is Paul Alm for ABC News. Good night.
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