Transcription
[Music] the Fifth Estate good evening I'm Eric Malley. Nine Canadians who were the unwitting victims of CIA brainwashing experiments are suing the United States government, but so far, the Canadian government has done nothing to help them.
If I were in charge of the government to whom nine citizens that we are suing for have been brainwashed without their knowing, have had their lives impaired, and have it done by a foreign agency undercover without the Government of Canada knowing it, I would find a way to help those people instead of hindering them.
Four years ago, there were some startling revelations about the activities of the CIA in Canada. The American intelligence agency had paid for a series of brainwashing experiments under a project codenamed MK ULTRA. The tests were conducted in secret in the United States and in Canada at a mental hospital attached to McGill University. Experimental drugs, including LSD, were administered to human guinea pigs. The patients were never told that their treatment was part of a CIA experiment.
Nine Canadians are now suing the US government for a million dollars apiece. They charge that their lives were disrupted forever as a result of the brainwashing. Despite the fact that the CIA operated secretly in Canada to fund these medical experiments on Canadian citizens, the federal government in Ottawa has joined hands with the government in Washington to hold back vital information which might at last reveal all the sordid details.
In Winnipeg, Val Orlick au spends a lot of time tending her plants. It's one of the few hobbies she has left. She used to devour books and write long letters. Now she can't concentrate on a book for more than a single page, and writing a letter is beyond her. She's on medication 24 hours a day. If she wasn't married to David Orlick Oh, an NDP Member of Parliament, she might never have learned the full story of what happened to her.
In 1956, suffering from depression after childbirth, Mrs. Orlick Co was referred by her Winnipeg doctor to a top psychiatrist in Montreal. Unknowingly, she was about to become part of a cruel CIA experiment codenamed MK ULTRA.
In Langley, Virginia, outside of Washington, stands the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, protected by walls of secrecy as high as the trees. Stored inside computers like this one is what's left of the CIA files on the MKULTRA project. Convinced the Soviets and Chinese had perfected brainwashing during the Korean War, the agency sought to perfect its own techniques, both to protect its agents and to use as a weapon.
"Who did you meet with in the safehouse?"
The CIA man overseeing the project was John Gibbon jur. "There was continued pressure put upon anybody within the agency in connection with trying to explain or understand brainwashing. So we were charged with rather elaborate attempt to try to find out chemical, psychological, any kind of means that people could use to influence the behavior of the people."
In Montreal, on the side of the mountain overlooking the city, stands an ancestral home bearing a name worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe horror tale: Ravens cracked. Donated to McGill, Ravens Craig became the Allen Memorial Institute for the treatment of mental illness. Here, the CIA channeled money for MKULTRA sub-project 68, which became a real-life horror tale.
The project chief in Montreal was Dr. Ewen Cameron, world-renowned chairman of the department of psychiatry at McGill and director of the Allen Memorial Institute. The CIA secretly funded the medical experiments through a front in New York City called, of all things, the Society for the Protection of Human Ecology. Documents show that the agency had been impressed with earlier work done at McGill in sensory deprivation, work that was useful in designing sophisticated torture techniques. Later on, but at the time, brainwashing looked even more promising, and Dr. Cameron was the perfect one to carry out the work. An American citizen with a world-class reputation, operating outside of the United States, Dr. Cameron certainly had the credentials: at various times, president of the Canadian, the American, and even the World Psychiatric Association. In an address to colleagues from around the world, Cameron showed that he certainly knew the potential of the human mind for good and bad.
Though all echo came to the Allan for her postpartum depression, everybody in the hospital was very much in awe of Dr. Cameron. He strode the halls like a giant, and people would say, "Oh, they're but for God goes God." And to me, I thought, "How could he possibly ever take me for a patient? Who am I? I'm being this great man who's done all these marvelous things, and boy, I better work hard, and I better do everything that he tells me to do, and you know, I don't want to lose this opportunity to get well."
Like Mrs. Orlick Oh, Mrs. Janine Huard of Montreal came to Dr. Cameron depressed after childbirth. The depression was made worse by a hearing problem that coincided with the birth of her child. She too was in awe of Dr. Cameron. "He was a very, very impressive man, and I was told it was the best doctor in averag North America. I saw him. He would look at you a few minutes, ask you a few questions, and then proceed with the treatments. But I never saw him once in all the times that I saw him that I wasn't afraid. Every time I went down to his office, I would shake with fear, and every time I'd see him coming down the hall, I'd shake with fear, but I adored him."
Dr. Elliott Emmanuel knew Cameron. "He was an authoritarian, ruthless, power-hungry, nervous, tense, angry man, not really nice."
At Raven's Cregg, Dr. Cameron went further with drugs and electric shock treatments than any of the US researchers in the MKULTRA project dared. His aim was to wipe the mind clean. Then he would implant new messages by forcing the patient to listen to a hypnotic repetition as many as a quarter of a million times. This was called psychic driving. Most of the drugs used in the program were experimental and some dangerous. There was the tranquilizer Arte, a paralysis-inducing and neck tee, and curare, which pygmies tip their arrows with to paralyze victims. Alba captain, another experimental tranquilizer, and lysergic acid diethylamide, the Hallucigenia.
In her room at Raven's Craig, misses Orlick Oh waited for her first treatment. "Hypodermic with a needle syringe, and the card on it had my name. So I looked a little more closely, and it was lysergic acid diethylamide. And my husband was a druggist, and I knew a lot of drugs, but I'd never heard of that one. And so I phoned a friend who was a psychiatric nurse, and I said, 'Do you know what it is?' And she said, 'I never heard of it.' But she had a friend who was a psychiatrist. So she phoned her friend, and she called me back, and she said he said that this stuff causes poisonous psychosis. She said he just said not to take it. Well, I thought, you know, he's a very Freudian psychiatrist and doesn't believe in any medication of any kind. And after all, here's Dr. Cameron. I mean, he's the big doctor, and he's, you know, he's known all over the world, and he wouldn't do anything that would harm me, etc. And so I took the injection, and I didn't like it. And it really did create a poisonous psychosis."
LSD, with all its frightening mental images, was scarcely known at the time, but the CIA secretly brought some in from Switzerland, where it had just been developed. "The room became very distorted, and I thought my bones were all melting, and I just wanted to scream that I wanted to get out of there. And I saw the squirrels outside, and I thought, 'They're not the squirrels, I'm the squirrel. I'm in this cage, and I can't get out.' And I started to throw myself from side to side in the room, and I couldn't right. They had given me a pen, some paper, and asked me to write down, but I couldn't write. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't focus. I couldn't, I don't know. It was like some kind of funny hail I'd fallen into, and I couldn't get out. And I don't know how long that went on. It was just a terrible nightmare, and I just felt that my life was threatened. I could never go back to what I'd been."
Robert Loggia, Vancouver, was 18 when he came to the Allen complaining of trembling and severe leg pains. Diagnosed as psychosomatic, like Mrs. Orlick oh and Mrs. who are, he had no inkling he was to be part of a CIA experiment. "LSD was very horrifying, and they gave it to me for about 12 or 15 times. One minute I would see the doctor there and explained, I wouldn't see him there. And they were asking me all kinds of questions. And I remember them telling me that I was getting smaller and smaller, and I really felt myself getting smaller. And they were bringing me back in time, way back. And, you know, at one point, I almost felt like it was just about to be born, really, that far back in memory. And they're really, really probing and asking all kinds of questions. And I felt I didn't have any control. I had to answer. I didn't feel I had any control. I was completely, like they had complete control over me."
Mrs. Hugh art, like the others, was forced to pay for the so-called treatment. "Massive electric shocks and all the drugs. They would give me as much as 40 pills a day. And I would ask the nurse, 'What is that?' They would say, 'It's a new drug,' and they only named it by a number. Almost drugs do to you. How did they know I was I was very, very strong, well-powered? So these drugs kind of desensitize me. They would put my my reactions, they would lower my resistance, as well as the experimental drugs and massive electric shock treatments."
Missus who art was subjected to psychic driving. Hypnotic-like messages were repeated over and over to a sleeping patient, sometimes for as long as 16 hours in a row. They were a key part of the mind-control experiment. This is how missus who art remembers one of the messages. "I would try very strongly not to be, not to let my mind be capting all the messages, but they would lower my resistance so much with the average rugs, but I could, I couldn't do otherwise than listen."
"Did you ever ask them how any of this was making you better?"
"No, I didn't ask questions. I was just saying, 'I don't want to go through it again,' and I would cry. I didn't want, you know, I knew, way down in my heart, I knew it wasn't good. But, you know, how could you fight? You're in a hospital where it's supposed to be the best, with the best doctors. So what can you do? I'd say, 'I can't, I can't take it anymore. I can't stand it. I don't think this is doing me any good. I feel worse.' And he'd walk down the hall a little way with me and put his arm on my shoulder and come on now, lassie, you know, you're going to do it. And finally, I'd say, 'Well, okay.' And off we'd go to my room, and he would give me another injection and then pat me on the shoulder and off he'd be again."
"I had LSD, I believe, a total of 14 times. And sometimes there would be four days between the injections, and sometimes there would be one consecutive day after the other. And some of them I managed to write down things in my notes to talk to Cameron."
A newly declassified CIA document shows there was at least one voice of protest at the agency as the experiments got underway. One agent wrote, "Does Project Officer approve these immoral and inhuman tests? I suggest that all who are in favor of the above intended operation volunteer their heads for use in Dr. so-and-so's noble project." The names were deleted.
In her hospital room, a terrified Mrs. Allah Co tried to hide like a child at the sound of Dr. Cameron's approaching footsteps. "Sit on the toilet, and nobody will see me anyhow. That didn't work because he knocked on the door, and he said, 'Now come on, Lassie, you know you're in there, and come on, you come out and let me give your injection.' And I said, 'No, I'm not taking any more injections. I can't do it. I don't care if I die. I can't, I can't do it anymore because this is killing me, and that's all there is to it. I can't do it.' Well, he wasn't very happy about it. However, after a little discussion, he turned on his heel and left the room."
The electric shock treatments were administered on an unprecedented scale. It was called deep patterning. The mind was short-circuited so the psychic driving hypnotic messages could be planted on a clean slate. There is now no known use of electric shocks on such a scale, even in Soviet mental asylums where political crimes are punished. Psychiatrist and former colleague of Dr. Cameron, Dr. Elliot Emmanuel: "You probably know electroshock treatment has been given for depression for something like 40 years now. It's a very successful and useful treatment for severe depression that doesn't respond to other things. But deep patterning is a use of electroshock treatment in totally different way, in which instead of giving the shocks say two or three times a week, they're given two or three times a day for three or four weeks, reducing the patient to a sort of animal vegetable state from which it's hoped that they would recover in a more healthy state of mind. It didn't work."
"I was there for a while. I thought, 'I don't want to stay here.' Started to run away from the hospital, and they grabbed me, and then they put me on sleep treatment. And now they kept you asleep for 23 days, and while I was asleep, they were shocking the heck out of me with electric shocks and playing tapes."
"There was another lady who had same kind of psychic driving that I did, and she was a very wiry, slender lady, and with lots of pep and zip, you know, and she'd go to the dances and this and that. And one day she just wasn't there. And when we asked where she went, they said, 'Oh, well, you know, she's gone to another hospital.' Well, sometime later, I was in the day hospital, and I happened to ask a nurse if she'd heard what had happened to this lady, and she said, 'Oh, that's her sitting over there.' And I looked, and there was a fat lady that just looked like she was made out of dough. She didn't know me, she didn't know herself, she didn't know anybody. She was gone. Now, that's a death."
"Did you ever try and get away from there? Did you ever say, 'I'm just not going back'?"
"I tried. I was home for the weekend. I had a pass for the weekend, that's how they call it. So when I was there, I said, 'I'm not going back there.' So I telephoned, or somebody else in the house telephoned, and they said, 'If you're not coming back, we're sending the police after you.' So I remember being so upset. I was crying. I didn't want to go in. And it was really like a concentration camp."
[Music]
"There was a gentleman who jumped off the roof of the Allen. I don't think he had LSD, but he had sleep therapy with with psychic driving, you know, with the driving tapes under his pillow. And they told him he was going to go home, and he just come out of sleep therapy, and he just jumped. He said, 'When around, big smile on his face, said goodbye to everybody, and up on the roof and jumped off and landed at the back door of the atma.' Which was the dreadful, awful thing. I don't think he was more than 30, and he was just gone, just gone. And there was this big wash to her yet the back door. Nobody would go in and out of that back door for a long time. And everybody in the huh, and the hospital spoke in hushed tones, and everybody was affected. They would not talk about it. It was the silic did not happen."
In 1973, all MK ULTRA files under the control of the Technical Services Division Chief of the CIA were ordered destroyed by the director, Richard Helms. But in a bureaucracy as vast as the Central Intelligence Agency, it's difficult to destroy everything, and the damning evidence of the Cameron project surfaced after a Freedom of Information Act suit. It revealed Mrs. Orly Co had reason for her nightmares and her doubts. "I've heard that it was the most brutal program under that under MKULTRA in the States and in Canada, that this was the most brutal. It was an awful feeling to realize when I found this out that the man whom I had thought cared about what happened to me didn't give a damn. I was a fly, just a fly."
Her husband, David Orlick Oh, NDP Member of Parliament for 22 years, remembers the cost. "We had Blue Cross coverage, but we didn't have, but Blue Cross did not cover treatment in a mental hospital. So what we did that after the first year was to sell the house, which was really the only money that we had. And my daughter and I moved in with the house mother, and we stayed there almost three years. It was, it was tough. But the financial cost was really a small part of the cost. To be talking about cost, it really, it really disrupted our lives."
Mrs. Orlick Oh sued the our Memorial Institute, and last year, it quietly settled out of court for $50,000. But that's only the amount she estimates she had to pay for what she thought was treatment. Apart from giving Mrs. Orlick Oh her money back, the alum has done nothing to compensate Cameron's other victims.
But in the U.S., a former CIA director, Stansfield Turner, promised the Congress the agency would try and track down victims of the MKULTRA project in both Canada and the U.S. so they might get compensation. The CIA wrote the Allan this recently declassified letter addressed to Maurice Don J, then director. It said, "It has been our understanding that there are no remaining records of Dr. Cameron's research that might reveal the identities of patients under his care during the time period in question. However, by way of leaving no stone unturned, we now inquire whether this information might be reconstituted through patient records, financial records, or other hospital records. Sincerely Yours, Daniel B. Silver, General Counsel, CIA."
So even the CIA made some effort to find the victims, but little help from Montreal. There is no record of the Allen ever attempting a search of all its medical records, although Cameron's successor admits it would be easy enough to do. CIA documents show that 53 people in Montreal were subjected to the kay ultra experiments, but only nine of those have been positively identified. Apart from Orlick ohyou art and Logie, there were three Montreal housewives, one of whom is now institutionalized. There's a Montreal businessman who never really got his life together again after the experiments, and another man who has been destitute for most of the time since. Ironically enough, one of the victims is now a psychiatrist practicing in Eastern Ontario. She obviously functions well enough, but after the experiments, ten years of her memory was wiped right out.
The McGill project was abruptly terminated in 1964, and so Dr. Cameron returned to the United States. Three years later, he died suddenly of a heart attack. Subsequent evaluation of Cameron's work in Montreal by his successor showed that the intensive shock therapy was not only medically useless but potentially dangerous. Cameron, though, never revealed how much he knew about the CIA sponsorship of his work.
Robert Logie was later given cortisone treatment for the pains in his leg that brought him to the Allen in the first place. It worked, but his mind is a different story. He now has joined with Mrs. Orlick Oh, madam cured, and six other Canadians in a massive lawsuit against the United States government. They contend that they sought treatment and instead were made unwitting victims of CIA experiments. The nine Canadians are seeking 1 million dollars apiece in damages from the US government. The CIA intimidates many American law firms, but this case is being fought by a lawyer who defended Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller during the McCarthy witch hunts for communists.
In preparation, the lawyers have interrogated every CIA agent involved in MKULTRA, including former director Helms. With the trial expected to start soon, Joseph raw sums up the case with his junior partner, James Turner. "John get injure is the former CIA staff agent who testified at his request. The CIA contacted Cameron and informed him that up front and New York would support his work. As a result of that, Cameron received CIA funds to finance the LSD and brainwashing --tx. But other ways, camera on all he did was what the CIA was in effect asking him to do, and what he said he was going to do, and he did it, and they paid him money for it. And then what about Godley? Now, we got a lot of stuff out of a godly. Here's one of his depositions. We got him. 'I take it,' he said, 'I'm gonna wash my hands of this. I'm approved the project, but I don't have to take care of the Canadian citizens are gonna be affected.' Is that fair? That's very admitted that they took no steps whatsoever to guarantee that people wouldn't be injured if it could be avoided, or to make sure that people even knew that they were participating in an experiment. Well, this guy Godley, he's got quite a record of the on negligent action ahead of time. I mean, before this ever, he was personally involved in an experiment that resulted in the death of a US Army."
"Is that the one where they put the LSD and the cuatro of a guy named Olsen?"
"Yeah, and then he jumped out of a window and committed suicide in New York City. They managed to cover that up too."
"I like a man who his general counsel CIA, his name's Larry Huston. And at that time, he said this was culpable negligence. He was a general counsel, and they went on, left a guy on the job who had been guilty, according to their own lawyer, of culpable night."
"What about Helms?"
"We took his deposition. Bill is right here. Yeah, it's an awful thick deposition. He didn't remember a whole lot. There's a major case of forget me. It's the only thing that he, we really got out of him was that he instructed Gottlieb, the CIA's Dr. Gottlieb, to destroy the records."
When the story broke about the covert CIA activities on Canadian soil, the United States sent a formal apology to the Trudeau government. But External Affairs Minister Allen McKagan has refused to release that document to Mrs. Orlick oh and the others in the lawsuit. This declassified State Department letter shows why. Addressed to the Canadian embassy, it reads, "This is with reference to your request for the views of the US intelligence community concerning possible release by the Canadian government of certain documents relating to the oil echo matter. Your request was given careful review on the basis of which it has been requested that the Canadian government withhold from disclosure the documents in question."
"We've moved heaven and earth to get the correspondence and the documents of the discussions between the Canadian government and the United States. The United States won't give it to us because they're covering up, they're wrong. The Canadian government won't give it to us because they're scared of the United States government. Both of them are holding back all of the information about this. I think the case could be broken if the Canadian government would say to the CIA, 'We're not gonna cover up for you any longer. We're gonna allow then, we're gonna give this material to Mr. Arley Co for his case.'"
"Well, if the Canadian government has this apology from the U.S., why in the world do you think they wouldn't release it?"
"Oh, I just think the Canadian government's a little bit like international wimps in the case of the United States. I don't know why they're so scared of us. We're not gonna do anything. I don't think the Seventh Army is gonna attack Montreal because you give us that material."
"I understand, though, that the, the American position is that this kind of CIA material can't be released for national security reasons. Maybe that's true."
"Well, security, my neck. French, the CIA, the, that everything they forget. Then when they have to stop forgetting because it's ludicrous, then they say it's all national security. What is national security about the apologies of the United States to Canada? They get very belligerent Canadians with the Russians when they shoot down the double-oh-seven with some Canadian citizens. But when the CIA covertly does something to all the citizen, ruin the lives of many of these citizens, while the Canadian governments do it nothing. I don't know why Canada made forceful representations on behalf of the Toronto businessman who was kidnapped by bounty hunters, taken back to Florida. That wouldn't indicate that they're afraid to make a ruckus downtown. That was a pretty easy situation. I mean, my god, you kidnap a Canadian, I'd take him to the United States. Heavens above. And furthermore, you who do you have to fight? They're a couple of bounty hunters. Here, you're fighting a CIA that scares the Canada."
"I'm surprised that if your case is as strong as you say, that the American government isn't trying to get an out-of-court settlement, pay out a bunch of money, and just hope it'll go away."
"When the CIA went into this brainwashing stuff, what they call the MKULTRA program, when they went into that, they injured lots more people than the nine we are suing for. They injured a great many other here and here in the United Stated states. They may feel that they've got so many skeletons in their closet that's settling with us, even though we're clearly right, and they would like it to go away, would hurt them as a precedent. I can't think of any other reason that they're being so really rough on us."
"I think there is a duty on the government to to release in a matter such as this all of the information it has. Ala Lawrence is the conservative justice critic in the Commons. It's been government complicity or government negligence, so be it. You know, it's far better to make a full disclosure and and a full confession of your sins in a matter such as this. It's always a difficult thing for anybody to sue a government or sue an agency in the government, and if you don't have the cooperation of your own government in doing that, a few strikes against you right off the bat. If the process was reversed, it was some sort of a secretive Canadian operation taking place in the United States, I'm sure all hell would break loose down there as far as beating of breasts and waving of flags and whatnot. If the material came from the states, perhaps they're bound by, if not law, good manners to not turn it over if the source of the information doesn't want it turned over. I don't know about manners, I don't know about international matters very much. But I know this: if I were in charge of a government to whom nine citizens that we are suing for have been brainwashed without their knowing, have had their lives in pain, and have it done by a foreign agency undercover without the Government of Canada knowing it, I would find a way to help those people instead of hindering them."
"We tried to ask External Affairs Minister McKellen why the Government of Canada is not helping these Canadian citizens who were victimized by agents of another country. But for more than two months, Mr. McCracken has been unavailable to discuss the matters."
"What do you want to tell Mr. McKevitt, for example, about what happened to you? How you feel about it now?"
"I would tell him to try what we've been through and see what he would have to say after, because only when you go through such an experience, one can say how bad it can be. And hope thankful, I'd say, 'Come on, get off your horse and help us. We need some help from our government. We are innocent victims of something that happened that should never have been. And you can't make it, you can't put us back where we were, but at least do something to help us now. Do something to stand up and say, this can't happen in Canada.'"
"What can you possibly get for your clients out of this case?"
"You can't get their health back. That's not possible. And there are older people, and some of them may die during this stonewalling by the CIA, and some of them may get worse. One of them at least is in an institution now. I mean, the thing is very much needed, needing of speed. By the, you can get some money, that's all you can get. So you can get it when a doctor a miss operates on you, you know, you don't get your health back. There's no way we'd get our hell of their health back. But what we can get them is some funds to help ameliorate their old age with the damage that's been done to them by this lousy performance and occurred through the CIA by camera on mistreating him and hurting them."
One thing which triggered Mrs. Who art's initial depression was growing deafness in one ear, which was later corrected with minor surgery. But no surgery can undo Dr. Cameron's work at Raven's Craig. "I cannot go to sleep without any medication. I have migraine headaches that last for a week at the time. Doctors cannot find a cause. I have slight amnesia. I have a lot of trouble to concentrate. I've never been able to sleep without medication since. To sleep freely, I went through years and years and years of severe depressions. I dream about it. I, all my, all my waking hours to think about it. It's like it's eating me up. I've been hospitalized. When I first went home to Winnipeg, I attempted to take my own life because I couldn't enjoy the way I felt. And I have a a chronic need. I'm very dependent on other people. And I have a chronic depression which at times gets worse. Not being with my family, not being able to follow a career, not being able to study anymore, which I wanted to do very much. I would say it cost me my life."