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Warning, this series includes discussion of inhumane medical experimentation, including
on children, violence, sexual assault, abuse of children, and cultural genocide.
“On June 1, 1951, a secret, high-level meeting took place at the Ritz Caron Hotel in Montreal.”
In attendance were eight people. They included the Chairman of Canada's Defense Research Board, which funded experiments at the Allen, a psychiatrist working at the Allen, and the Chairman of Psychology at McGill. There was also a representative from Defence Research in the UK, and two CIA officials. The official purpose of the meeting was research into the general phenomena indicated by
such terms as Confession, Menticide, Intervention in the Individual Mind. Together with methods concerned in psychological coercion, change of opinions and attitude, etc.
“Menticide, in other words, the killing or breaking down of the mind.”
The minutes of this meeting showed that Canada was about to establish a major brainwashing and mind control research center for the CIA. Dr. Youen Cameron was not at this meeting. In fact, while he was pulling the strings at the Allen, he may not have been aware of who was pulling his. What they did, ruined lives, killed people, damaged people beyond repair, and there
was enough accumulating evidence that somebody should have stepped in and said stop. We explore just how far the obsession with mind control went. And whether the researchers involved had any idea who they were really working with. I'm Dr. Julia Shaw, and this is Project Mind Control. MK Ultra was the umbrella term for a series of experiments and other research run by the CIA
between 1953 and 1964. After mounting concerns regarding the nature of this research, there was an investigation in 1975, followed by a select committee hearing in 1977, where senior members of the CIA were interviewed. The whole thing was framed as a fact-finding review, so that new, legally binding guidelines could be developed that would prevent the same kinds of abuses from
happening in the future. They wrote a report which summarized what they found. According to the report, MK Ultra had sub-projects, 149 of them. Some of them were rather unorthodox. On hypnosis and lie detection and aspects of magicians art useful in covert operations. Others were pretty standard, including sub-projects listed as library searches. There was also one category which sounded awfully familiar. Nine sub-projects on in quotes,
studies of human behavior, sleep research, and behavior changes during psychotherapy.
One of them involved Dr.
Cameron was an interesting figure. That's sociological historian Professor Andrew Skull.
He practiced in Montreal, and we now know as a result of lawsuits that he was heavily funded by the CIA. Records show that the CIA funded Dr. Yuan Cameron's work at McGill University from 1957 until at least 1960. One of the things that particularly after the Korean War much exercised, the intelligence services here in Britain and especially the CIA in America
was the phenomenon of brainwashing. The idea that you could completely transform somebody's
mental state for your various kinds of interventions.
In the 1950s, there was a widespread fear that the Communists had discovered and deployed
“mind control. If the enemy knew something the U.S. didn't, it was crucial for the U.S.”
to catch up. As the chief of the medical staff of the CIA wrote in 1952, "There is ample evidence in the reports of innumerable interrogations that the Communists were utilizing drugs, physical dress, electric shock, and possibly have noticed against their enemies. We are forced by this mounting evidence to assume a more aggressive role in the development of these techniques. There was also the sentiment that rather than torturing
people for information, wouldn't it be better if you could just drug them? Or rather than
shooting down the enemy? Wouldn't it be amazing if you could just control their minds so they
walked off the battlefield freely?" Still, it was decided that studying how to crawl into people's minds and control them, like marinettes, would be unpelled. As the CIA's Inspector General wrote in 1957, "For caution's must be taken, not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces, but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general." The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities
would have serious repercussions. So, they created MK Ultra, in order to secretly fund research
“on mind control, and when it came to it, who better defund than Dr. Cameron?”
A grant was assigned to him for research on his hetero-psychic driving experiments. The god-like power that came from his international renown was also an obvious plus. And the thing about Cameron was that because he was able to operate with absolutely no controls, no worry about patient consent or even family consent to what he was up to, very much an authority figure. Still, the CIA is a clandestine organization. How exactly does someone,
anyone, get funded by the CIA? When the CIA decided they wanted to get into studying mind control, one of the things they did was set up a public facing front for an organization that dispersed grants, called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Then, it seems they invited McGill to apply, and they got the grant. This also happens to be after the Ritzkarp meeting in 1951, which, for those in the know, as written in what looks like to be an internal CIA memorandum,
there was guidance that Dr. Cameron and his staff must remain unaware of the government's interest in his work. In fact, CIA staff were expressly told not to visit or contact Dr. Cameron, except under extreme circumstances. So it looks like, at the very least, Dr. Cameron wasn't told that he was being funded by the CIA. This helps explain why he continued to publish
“his research as usual in academic outlets. These weren't secret experiments, as much as secretly”
funded experiments. Still, can you imagine finding out that the research you've been doing was funded so it could one day be weaponized by the CIA? The grant also stipulated that Dr. Cameron
Had to search for chemical agents.
One of the drugs they specifically required him to test is one that we've heard mentioned before
“LSD. Today, LSD is sometimes used as a recreational drug. When it was discovered after World War II,”
it quickly caught the interest of the military, and from the beginning, the experiments always
had unexpected results. Like this study conducted in the UK, where royal marines were given LSD, before being asked to complete a training exercise, somewhere in a forest. The movement for the rocket launching team had become a slow and uncoordinated, and it is apparent that they are now incapable of taking proper aim. This video was posted on the Imperial War Museum website and titled a trial of an incapacitating drug. It shows a marine grinning and swaying with a rocket launcher.
Men with no specific task to perform have elapsed into laughter and inconsequential behavior.
“Though they are still capable of sustained physical effort.”
Now, one man has shown lying down in the forest, against the base of a tree trunk, laughing hysterically. 70 minutes after the administration of the drug, with one man climbing a tree, the troop commander gives up, saying, "I cannot do anything about this. I cannot control the man and I can take no action myself. I am wiped out as an attacking force." But people have very different reactions to LSD. And the next thing I knew was put into a room.
And the next thing I knew, I was the given drugs in the arm. It was probably LSD. That's Lana Ponting. We don't know whether she was part of Dr. Cameron's MK Ultra-funded
“work, or if she was just a patient of his, receiving his personal cocktail of treatments.”
But we do know that MK Ultra was predominantly focused on research related to behavioral drugs, specifically on LSD. And that research using these drugs involved tests on unwitting subjects. Except Dr. Cameron once gave me a shot of the LSD. It did my records. LSD does not kill people. But the effects from it are bad. We're bad. Here's a clip from a 1979 ABC News documentary, "Mission Mind Control."
The best known case is that of this man Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the Army Chemical Core. On-screen we see black and white portraits of him. He looks to be about 40. The end of his life at this New York Hotel, by diving through a shaded closed window in his 10th floor room.
Frank Olson was the first known fatality in the CIA's LSD program.
In the public imagination, his story became emblematic of the kinds of wild things the CIA was getting up to. Here is the CIA's version of events. On the 19th of November 1953, a group of 10 scientists attended a conference at a cabin located at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland. These weren't your typical scientists. All of them were affiliated either with the CIA or the Army. On the second day of the conference, after dinner,
Control, a liquor, was served to the attendees. About 20 minutes after they finished their control, one of the men, Dr. Gottlieb, informed the others that they had just been given LSD. It was, you would later say, a very small amount, and that they were all now part of an experiment. Dr. Gottlieb was one of the people in charge of MK Ultra, and he said that the drug had a definite effect on the group, so the point that they were boisterous and laughing, and they could not continue
the meeting or engage in sensible conversation. The men were giggling and a bit chaotic. Some of them struggled to sleep that night, but there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about their demeanor. But, a few days later, Dr. Olsen's friends and family
Began to worry, because he appeared to fall into serious depression.
It was relayed to the CIA that he was in serious trouble and needed immediate professional attention.
“Where do you take a man who knows a lot of classified information and is having a mental breakdown?”
Two of Dr. Olsen's colleagues from the CIA took him from Washington to a doctor in New York. Someone familiar with LSD, and, importantly, a doctor with CIA clearance. His two CIA colleagues stayed with him while he was on well. A couple of days later, on the 26th of November 1953, they all flew back to Washington with Olsen, so that he could spend thanksgiving with his family. But, as soon as they landed, Dr. Olsen changed his mind. He was suddenly
afraid to face his family. One of his colleagues agreed to do a U-turn and flew back with him to New York to go back to the doctor, who then said that he should be placed in regular psychiatric care closer to home in Washington. They couldn't get plain tickets for the same
“evening, so they had to check into a hotel. That night, in the middle of the night, the police”
were called out to the Statler Hotel, because according to the colleague who was there, Dr. Olsen crashed through the closed window of his room and fell to his death from the 10th floor. His death would be called in official documentation, the most tragic result of the testing of LSD
by the CIA. Ordebill presented the first horror thriller game of Sebastian, Fizzack and Anika Strauss.
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When MK Ultra first became publicly known, because the government released the information in 1975,
this LSD-related death of Dr. Frank Olson stunned the public. "There were more of these kinds of mini experiments conducted by the CIA itself, that felt more like dark pranks by fraught boys than a genuine desire to develop mind control." Sometimes these experiments were on members of the CIA, like Dr. Olson. Other times, they were on unsuspecting members of the public.
Like one, were heroin addicts were enticed into taking LSD to get a reward. "Heroen."
“Did all this shady and unethical testing at least lead to some useful insights?”
Unfortunately, not really. Even the CIA acknowledged that the tests made little scientific sense, that the agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers, and, in some instances, the test subjects became so ill that follow-up was impossible.
Still, it seems that comparatively few people were tested like this by the CIA directly. Almost all of the research done in the context of the MK Ultra program was via the funding of 185 non-governmental researchers at 86 universities and institutions around the world. And when it all came out in the 1970s, the CIA had to call up the universities and inform them that they had been part of MK Ultra.
"So I guess that leads the question of, you know, like, were these all influenced by Dr. Cameron?"
That's Alyssa, whose mother underwent similar treatments under one of Dr.
"If they were copycat things, won't this make the CIA responsible for all of the copycats that happened?"
“In other words, did the CIA's funding of research by Dr. Cameron mean that other researchers”
started to test the same problematic ideas? It actually seems to be the other way around. The CIA mostly funded existing research on ideas that were already widespread,
and might well have continued being researched even if MK Ultra had never existed.
So while researchers within the CIA were spiking each other's drinks with tragic consequences, mind-control experiments were happening around the world. "I worked on Sergeant's papers, Sergeant being the English equivalent of Cameron at a great friend of Cameron." That's his story in Dr. Andrew Skull. "William Sorgent, who was arguably the leading
“certainly the most famous British psychiatrist after World War II, and a good friend of you in”
Cameron in Canada, Sergeant used insulin comotherapy." William Sorgent worked at the Royal Waterloo Hospital in the UK, where he was in charge of the psychiatric unit, Ward 5. As part of the unit, there was something called the Sleep Room, where women were put into drug-induced comas for long periods of time. It was the same kind of thing that Dr. Cameron was doing.
Like Cameron, he also published articles, including one published in 1951, where he wrote about how he wanted to bring about rapid changes in an individual's beliefs and actions. Dr. Sergeant's work is directly cited and described in the MK Ultra Committee report. It states that his techniques had direct potential use for interrogations. Not because his techniques made people tell the truth. Rather, because people felt like they
talked a lot while they were drugged and believed that they had already confessed and told all their secrets. So, when they came to, it could be easier for the army to actually,
for the first time, extract their genuine confessions.
Dr. Andrew Skull has recently spent a lot of time going through Dr. Sergeant's files, or a book called The Sleep Room. When I worked on them, I was warned by one of his former assistants that they'd been heavily redacted and it was clear that they had been.
“I think they were destroyed because the records would have been deeply damaging to the reputation”
of Sergeant Warren in this case to Cameron. In 1960, the Minister of Health for Quebec formed the Bedar Commission in order to investigate the state of Quebec's mental hospitals. It found that the Allen Memorial Institute used more electric shocks than any other facility. In 1961, over the course of one year, 12,000 ECTs were administered to just 1000 patients. At a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association in 1963,
even Dr. Cameron was more self-critical. He said, "At this point, as so often happens in a long
research, we took a wrong turning and continued to walk with a glint of success for a long, long time." In response to his hypothesis that he could de-pattern and re-pattern people's minds, "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, affairs, embarrassment, and resentment." The patients hated him and he started to be ashamed of his work.
"I, indeed, I even noticed in myself a reluctance to do this. I felt that I was being unkind, insensitive, imperceptive. The inner words one simply didn't do this sort of thing to people." "And yet, he wouldn't let go of his pet theory." For these reasons, namely the patient's feelings, "I'm alone. I felt increasingly sure that there must be something of importance lying ahead." His failures, he counterintuitively saw as proof that he needed to keep going.
"For, if he was wrong, all this suffering, all his work would have been in vain.
But then, in 1964, Cameron abruptly resigned from his post at McGill and moved before the connections the CIA were exposed and he died not long after that. During the official investigations into MK Ultra in 1975, the investigators were told that most of the files had either been destroyed or heavily redacted because of an internal CIA request in 1973.
Other files, the CIA claimed, never existed or were destroyed closer to when they were written.
But seven additional boxes of documents were then found in the budget and fiscal section of the retired records archive. They revealed names of people and institutions. These new documents were included in the 1977 report and details continued to slowly make their way into public knowledge, often through considerable effort, repeated freedom of information requests and class action lawsuits. "It took a lot of complaints from patients and patients' relatives,
people whose relations lives had been completely destroyed by what Cameron had done to them,
before some of what had occurred spilled out into daylight."
“In retrospect, does Dr. Cameron's experimentation and his treatment appear harsh?”
This clip is from mission-mind control and the host of the documentary is speaking to Dr. Cameron's successor, Robert glycorn. "I wouldn't call it harsh. I would say it was harder on the staff that was on the patients because these people had to be fed and they had to be cared for and they had to be given sufficient fluid and food and targeted and so on and so forth. It was a very difficult thing for the staff to follow these patients properly and see that they did well.
"I'm glad he was concerned for the staff." That is Val Orlico, one of Dr. Cameron's former patients. "But damn it all. I wouldn't. I could have maybe had a different kind of life and that makes me angry and sad and I don't know how to explain how I feel really." "I heard about it and I thought I could see the CIA being involved in something like this. Yes, I can and I'm wondering why did they get involved? What was their purpose of getting involved with Dr. Cameron?
“What was Dr. Cameron up to with the CIA? He heard in brainwashing techniques from them. That's what”
he was doing." The fact that Lana is still here to tell the story of what happened to her all those years ago as a witness of the past is astonishing. "I met a nice man. He was in the Navy. We had two beautiful children and I had four beautiful grandchildren. Though I have happy life now. As happy as it can be, my son and daughter do not know the soul truth of what happened to me because I don't think they could handle it.
You know, when people do something like that to their mother, who could handle that?"
For decades after leaving the Allen, she kept what happened to her a secret. "I never told
anyone I was in the Allen. All my life I never told anyone because I thought if I tell people that haven't given me, they can look at me and say, "Well, you're a crazy person.
“And how do you explain to people what happened to you? How do you explain that?”
How would I explain it to you?" Lana kept this secret from her parents and siblings, from her husband and from her two children, and she lived a relatively normal life. "I tried to live my life as normal as I could."
Lana Ponting is one of the last remaining survivors of Dr.
And it's not just the patients themselves who were affected by the work of Dr. Cameron
“and his contemporaries. "Most people, as soon as you say the word CIA,”
you know, the fingers go in the ear and you go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not this is ridiculous. Certainly, this is a conspiracy theory, right? Like this can't be real, but because I was doing research and it came up as part of it, all of a sudden I was like faced with it. And then it was like, "Oh, gee." And I did the math and I thought, "Hmm, that's interesting. It sounds a lot like what happened to my mother." Next time, on Project Mind Control,
“then the story goes, my mother's marks went from straight days to like failing everything sort of”
fell to shit pardon me and she threatened to jump out the dorm room window at Victoria College at Miguel. "We meet a contemporary of Dr. Cameron, the man who developed something he proudly called a "chemical lobotomy." Dr. Heinz Leiman. "He gets to supply these drugs and he starts experimenting on his patients. And when they don't respond, he doubles the dose and when they don't respond, he doubles the dose again." I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. Project Mind Control was presented by me
and written by me and by producer Simonorata. The executive producers are Elce Rochester and Luisa Adams, sound design by Craig Edminson. The words of Dr. Cameron were read by Paul Livingston.
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