This is the story of a 30 year search by U.S. intelligence
agencies to perfect mind control.
Some of those engaged in that search have agreed to talk about
it for the first time, one said. I think every last one of us
felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing.
We knew we were crossing the line.
The search would be endless, from brothels, an agent says.
We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom, to the
mystical rites of a magical mushroom ceremony performed by
an Indian shaman to a Spanish bull.
Ray the bull has had electrodes implanted in the brain and is
controlled by a scientist. There would be victims.
One intelligence agency tried to peel this man's mind back to
reveal its deepest secrets lived.
Through it, I lived through it. This man worked on some of these
programs. He would write of his work.
It was fun, fun, fun. This is the story of the search
for mind control. A BC News close up Mission Mind
Control with a BC News correspondent, Paul Altmeyer.
Mark It's been ages. Can I buy?
Allow me two Michelob lights. Michelob makes a light beer.
A good taste of Michelob Light. Don't just compare it to other
light beers. Compare it to your regular beer.
It's that good. You always did go first class.
Your ticket to San Francisco. Thank you, Francisco.
You too. Mrs. Cooper, I need help with
all these different dog foods. I don't know what kind to feed
him. Dry saw honey, it's not the
form, it's the formula. Those are for any dog, young,
old, whatever. But cycle two dog food is
especially for dogs ages one to seven like mine.
The cycle 2 formula has just what dogs in their active years
need to help stay healthy and happy with cycle.
I know what to feed him now. Get cycle two in 25 pound bags.
We are not professing to tell you the complete story of these
activities. We are professing to tell you
the complete story that we know. But these records that we've
uncovered don't tell the story. They tell pieces of it.
This is a story that has been told in bits and pieces.
This is an attempt to pull most of it together.
We know we don't have the full story.
We do, however, have some striking new revelations and
insights. The story begins here, just off
the nation's front yard, the Mall.
The buildings behind me were the headquarters for the World War 2
Office of Strategic Services. It was here that the first
halting steps toward mind control began.
The shaper and molder of OSS was General Wild Bill Donovan, he
said of his group's work. We may have made mistakes, but
we were not afraid to try things that were never done before.
In this Anything goes atmosphere, Donovan appointed
this man, Stanley Lovell, a Boston industrialist, to break
new ground in many scientific and technical fields.
Donovan Cole level his doctor Moriarty after the fiendish
professor in Sherlock Holmes. Lovell liked the name and posed
for this Saturday Evening Post photo.
He later wrote of his OSS job that it was quote, to stimulate
the peck's bad boy beneath the surface of every American
scientist and to say to him throw all of your normal law
abiding concepts out of the window, here's a chance to raise
merry hell. It was in this atmosphere that
the search for mind control began.
This bizarre man would be an active participant in that
search over the next two decades.
His name is George White, an 0 s s captain who had formerly been
with the Bureau of Narcotics. In his Diaries, seen here
publicly for the first time, White left a legacy of the
darker side of American intelligence work.
He received his early OSS training at the British run
school at Oshawa, Canada, the same school where Ian Fleming,
the creator of James Bond, was trained.
White referred to the school in his Diaries as the Oshawa School
of Mayhem and Murder, Mike Burke, former OSS colleague of
Whites and now president of Madison Square Garden Center.
Compelling fellow A mysterious fellow, almost mystical fellow.
He was fascinating because you didn't.
You knew something about him and not not enough about him to
really get a fix on him. He also knew a great deal about
the swifter elements of society, the gamier side of life and and
he was very impressive in his technical knowledge of of the
underworld, so to speak. He said one of one of our men
gets beat up. He says you have to act real
fast. And teach these guys a lesson.
Charles Saragusa, a former narcotics officer and friend of
White's. He's all come around, he says,
and break in kneecaps. And with that, one guy laughed.
And George, well, was that little little Billy with him and
this one guy sort of naked George White trained on and
wiped him across the neck with it.
Then he picked up a pool steak and start beating everybody up.
He made his point. And he made his point.
George White was not a man of understatement or subtleties.
His boss at OSS Stanley Level referred to him as deadly and
dedicated. In this note from White's
Diaries, it says call level regarding TDTD was a rather
transparent cover for Truth Drug.
George White worked with the Truth Drug Committee here at
Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in the nation's capital.
They experimented with mescaline, scapalamine and
marijuana on unwitting victims. The committee soon learned there
was no easy panacea, no truth drug at this stage.
But White and later colleagues would not stop trying.
The goal remained the same as this 1952 CIA memo says.
The aim is controlling an individual to the point where he
will do our bidding against his will and even against such
fundamental laws of nature as self preservation.
But it was a discovery here in Basel, Switzerland, at Sandoz
Laboratories by doctor Albert Hoffman that led the
intelligence agencies of America to believe that they had found
the panacea. The discovery was lysergic acid
diethalamine LSD. The film that you see is
considered by many experts to be the closest illustration of the
effects of a hallucinogenic. It was one of the first times
that anybody had run into a powerful drug that was different
than anything else that they knew anything about.
John Gittinger, recently retired chief psychologist for the CIA.
This is the first time Getting her has been interviewed
publicly. We could disable the whole city
by putting a very small amount on a water supply.
After all of these years of us, those of us who involved and
then looking for this secret drug, this was the only thing
that began to look for the first time, like it might be something
like that. The CIA's interest in LSD was
intense. The worry was that the Russians
would get hold of it were the Soviets into LSDI.
Going to have to say, I'm sure they were, but if you asked me
to prove it, I I've never seen any direct proof of it.
But at one point, intelligence information received from
Switzerland said that Sandoz Laboratories was about to put
100 million doses of LSD on the open market and it caused enough
concern within the agency that the United States was prepared
to buy the entire supply. However, a slight mistake had
been made. The mistake is made public for
the first time. I just found out by the new CIA
document that there were no such large quantities of LSD on the
market. John Marks has filed numerous
Freedom of Information suits against the CIA and has on earth
much new material. He is the author of The Search
for the Manchurian Candidate, a history of intelligence agency
work with mind control. He is a consultant for this
report. What happened is that there was
a military attache in Switzerland, an American
officer, who got milligrams and kilograms mixed up.
In other words, he made a mistake of thinking one one
thousandth of a gram was the same as 1000 grams, which is a
mistake of a million times. So when the CIA got the
intelligence that there were 100 million doses on the market, in
fact, there were 100 doses. The man who would oversee the CI
A's research into drugs and most of the agency's behavior
programs is this man, Doctor Sidney Gottlieb, A chemist.
Dr. Gottlieb declined a BC News request for an interview in
their never ending search for the miracle weapons.
CIA operative searched here in the remote mountain areas of
southern Mexico for what up to then had been considered a myth.
Magic mushrooms. They use this man, a part time
chemist with the CIA to do this man, a vice president of a bank
and an amateur mycologist or mushroom expert, to try to get
to the magic mushrooms and turn them into a drug.
But it would be the amateur, our Gordon Wasson and his
colleagues, who would win the race and develop the drug
psilocybin from the magic mushrooms.
We went into the Mazitek area, far from the highways, remote
from Mexico City. There we found that rotten
bagasses. It's called Bagasso, covered
with mushrooms. These mushrooms I didn't know,
did, never, had never seen. They were the sacred mushrooms.
Lawson would also discover and record the ancient mystical
rites of the mushrooms from a local shaman or magical
priestess, Maria Sabina. And we were seeing incredible
sights. They would go slowly or they
would go fast. As I ordained, all your senses
are rendered acute. Did we say that you see visions,
You see hallucinations, but that that doesn't begin to tell the
story. The hallucinations are only part
of it. You hear sounds, You smell
things. The the the night was thrilling.
Word of Lawson's discovery reached the CIA quickly.
Doctor James Moore, a University of Delaware chemist, secretly
served the CIA preparing deadly chemicals on short notice.
Moore was instructed to get close to us and and accompany
him on another trip to Mexico to get the magic mushrooms.
Internal documents show the CIA felt a drug derived from the
mushrooms could remain an agency secret.
What in the world were they looking for with the magic
mushrooms? I think the best answer to that
is that they were looking for. Fundamental information on
compounds that were would be capable of causing changes in in
behavior, changes in mental attitude.
Did you ever consider what would have happened if any of these
substances were given to, say, unwitting people?
Oh, I don't remember having considered that specifically.
I What if you? I trust perhaps you've thought
about it? Well, I haven't worried about
it. I you what your question again.
What would I have thought had I known that the, the any of these
substances would have been given to unwitting persons?
You mean a a hostile agent and then of another government?
No, I mean that. Was probably, I mean, testing it
out on an American citizen. I I guess I must seem very very
coldblooded about this, but I don't recall ever having been
very much. Preoccupied with that with that
issue, but many drugs were tested in this way.
A decision was made at the highest levels of the CIA to do
testing on unwitting Americans. As one CIA document says, such
testing would be operationally realistic.
A former CIA official who worked on these programs describes for
the first time how the decision was made.
He did not wish to be filmed or recorded, thus his remarks are
read by someone else. I think every last one of us
felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing.
We knew we were crossing the line.
Every decent kid knows he shouldn't steal, but he does it
sometimes. We knew damn well we didn't want
anyone else to know what we were doing.
The decision was made to do testing on unwitting victims.
It was decided they should be on the fringes of society because
they were most vulnerable. It was the borderline
underworld. Prostitutes, drug addicts and
other small timers would be powerless to seek any kind of
revenge in case they found out and as their predecessors had a
decade earlier, the CIA turned to George White for help.
White was now a high-ranking narcotics official and by this
time the stories about George White were legendary.
So the way this says you might help you, Monsieur.
And George White was busy talking with me, paid no
attention to waiters, So the way to tap them on his shoulders is
so you might help you, Monsieur. George White turned around,
whipped his gun out, and stuck it in the guy's face like this.
In this crowded restaurant. George White did not mind
bending the law, and he knew the street well.
He was the ideal choice for what the CIA had in mind.
We were Ivy League white middle class.
We were naive, totally naive about this, and he felt pretty
expert. He knew the whores, the pimps,
the people who brought in the drugs.
White set up socalled safe houses for the CIA in New York,
here in Greenwich Village and later in San Francisco in this
hotel and in an apartment, a top Telegraph hill with a commanding
view of San Francisco Bay. While the existence of these
safe houses was disclosed last year, details of what took place
within them has not been told. A former CIA official who worked
in the safe houses reveals that they were used not only for drug
testing, but to study sexual behavior and how it could be
used to manipulate people. We did quite a study of
prostitutes in their behavior. How do you take a woman who is
willing to use her body to get money out of a guy, to get him
to talk about things which are much more important, like state
secrets? We learned a lot about human
nature in the bedroom. We started to pick up knowledge
that could be used in operations.
There would be victims in all of this, but as the agency knew,
they couldn't fight back. Some entries from George White's
Diaries. Clarice gets horrors.
Janet Sky high. As one agency memo says, we have
no answer to the moral question. The safe houses were not the
only testing rounds. Millions of dollars would be
spent on LSD research at universities throughout the
country, and word would begin to spread on campus about this
socalled mindblowing drug. Suddenly, there was the
counterculture of the 60s. I give the CIAA total credit for
sponsoring and initiating the entire consciousness movement
counterculture events of the 1960s.
Doctor Timothy Leary. The 1960s Johnny Appleseed of
LSD. The CIA funded and supported and
encouraged hundreds of young psychiatrists to experiment with
this drug. The fallout from that was that
the young psychologists began taking it themselves,
discovering that it was an intelligence enhancing,
consciousness raising experience.
I know that some of the studies in which the CIA had supported
used as subjects people who later became.
Strong proselytizes of LSD. So we know in that sense, yes, I
think it did sustain the the perpetuation of the of the use
of the drug and it's rather ironic, isn't it?
The counter case that I would make in relationship to that is
that remember that the people who were doing the research were
people who would be doing the research regardless.
Of who was a sponsor, I don't. I don't think anybody working
and then that time in the remotest ever thought that it
would blow up into the kind of thing that it did.
History will judge the role of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies in unwittingly contributing to the
counterculture of the 60s through their intense interest
in LSD and other hallucinogenics.
But for the moment at least, the argument can be made that the
CIA helped usher in the Age of Aquarius.
A BC news close up will continue in a moment.
Being careful about my body doesn't just mean major things
like regular breast exams. I'm even careful about pain
relievers. Plain aspirin sometimes upset my
stomach, so I use Bufferin. It adds protection.
I'm careful about what goes into my body.
Bufferin gives me an added relief action.
I want Tylenol doesn't. Only one leading tablet has
both. An added relief action in many
cases that Tylenol never provides, and protection
ingredients Bufferin. Now I'm careful to get both with
Bufferin because sink traps plug with grease.
Use Crystal Drano. I'll pour in liquid plumber.
Don't. It may not work on that grease
Clog. No crystal Drano will look.
Liquid plumber's quiet. It's not melting that grease.
But Drano is it broke through? Will Drano hurt metal pipes?
No. So liquid plumber didn't break
that grease clog. I'm switching to Drano and they
clogs go better use Drano. Saturday live on a BC The Forest
Hills spends Invitational from the legendary West Side Tennis
Club, then live third round coverage of the most prestigious
ladies coffee bet. Palace Stacy goes for her third
straight US Women's Open title and Red hot Nancy Lopez shoots
for her elusive first Open victory.
And on a B C's Wide World of Sports rodeo excitement from the
Wild West, plus high speeds, high thrills, hydroplane, Action
Championship, tennis, golf and a B C's Wide World of Sports
Saturday Wednesday on 8 is enough.
We got the buggy fever. The Bradford girls go disco
crazy. Hey, Hiya Hun.
What do you say we get and the summer's off to a red hot start
and Charlie's Angels play the horses?
I want to be a Jackie but end up in a dead heat with death.
Then the ghost of Jack the Ripper haunts the backstreets of
Vegas tomorrow, starting at 87 Central and Mountain on a BC.
Covering a span of history such as we are in this report, one
can get sidetracked by the socalled glamour and mystery of
espionage work, or by the exotic qualities of some drugs.
But what you can't lose sight of is what all of this would mean
in terms of individual human beings.
There would be deaths. It would be long lasting and
harmful effects. The best known case is that of
this man, Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the Army Chemical
Corps, who in 1953 was slipped LSD unknowingly at a meeting
with CIA officials. Shortly after that, Olson went
into severe depression. He ended 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.
Olson left behind a widow, Alice, and three children, but
it would be years before they learn the real story of his
death. Shortly after his suicide, Alice
Olson was visited by doctor Sidney Gutley, the man who had
administered the drug, and by Robert Lashbrook, his deputy,
who was the last person with Frank Olson the night of his
death. It was probably to check me out
and see whether I was handling myself and handling the
situation, whether I was hysterical and I'm sure they
left the house feeling ever so much better because I had been
gracious and hospitable to them, so that I must have played right
into their hand and made them feel fine. 23 years later, did
you? How did you feel about that
meeting? My anger was unbelievable at how
I had been duped for this length of time and the anguish which
was unnecessary. Anyone who knew during all of
those years never told Alice Olson the real story of her
husband's death. She would discover it by
accident more than two decades later.
In essence, it was a 22 year long cover up.
Lyman Kirkpatrick was Inspector General of the CIA at the time
of Frank Olson's death. But had not the Olsen case
occurred within the secret confines of the CIA, would not
this case have been a prosecutable case?
Perhaps many, I would think very definitely prosecutable, and
certainly from the point of view of the of Mr. Olsen, why it
should probably have been actionable.
Frank Olsen suicide slowed down the CI A's testing of LSD and
other drugs, but only momentarily.
The CIA was not the only government agency interested in
the possibilities LSD and other drugs presented for mind
control. The Army Chemical Corps first
started working with the CIA and then branched off on its own.
It, too, tested drugs on unwitting victims, and a death
would result. The case of this man, Harold
Blauer, a tennis pro seen here with his daughter Elizabeth, is
well known. In 1953, Blauer was a private
patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
He was given 5 injections of a mescaline derivative that was
being tested secretly for the Army Chemical Corps.
With the 5th injection, Harold Blauer died.
As with the Olson case, a 22 year cover up followed until
finally the army admitted the real details of Blauer's death
since the initial news stories of Harold Blauer's death close
to 5000 documents. Previously classified have been
released by the Army and obtained by a BC News.
They provide valuable insight into Army activities at the time
of Blower's death and where the Army went from there with their
own drug testing program from a previously classified deposition
of Doctor James Cattell, who administered the mesculine
derivative on the purpose of the drug testing to produce symptoms
similar to those that you see in schizophrenia.
On how much the patient knew about all this.
We didn't delineate all the possibilities of what might
happen, because then you contaminate your experiment.
Cattell then relates that he never even knew what drug he had
given Harold Blauer. Because of the secrecy of the
Army experiments, we didn't know whether it was dog piss.
This was secret. This was a secret.
We weren't in on it. We asked Blower's daughter
Elizabeth for her reaction. How can anybody react to that?
I mean, it is so far from from what you'd expect from a human
being, never mind a doctor, never mind a professional
specialist who's supposed to care about people's minds.
It's it's unbelievable. A suit filed by Elizabeth
Barrett against the Army Chemical Corps is now pending in
federal court. Other army experiments continued
on mental patients around the country.
The work done at the Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans
involves several drugs, hallucinogenics and electrodes
implanted in the brain. The chief researcher was Doctor
Russell Monroe, now head of the Psychiatry department at the
University of Maryland. These are various progress
reports written by Doctor Monroe and recently obtained by a BC
News from one of the progress reports.
A report of a woman who had electrodes implanted in the
brain and was then given LSD and other drugs.
She became agitated, cried, lapsed into a trance like state.
Tell us if she were about to have a convulsion.
Experienced waves of darkness and light, had bizarre
sensations in her neck and legs. Said somebody was trying to
manipulate her body. At this point, Dr. Monroe wrote
that the woman was obviously having paranoid ideas.
As a as a layperson, perhaps you can enlighten me.
What therapeutic effect would the type of experiment that I
just described have on a patient?
Well, the therapeutic effect would be indirect.
Was this patient aware that she was being given LSD?
Yes. I mean they they were told that
they would be given some medications and they.
Specifically, LSD. Well, we told them I don't think
that they would have even known what LSD was.
Then, at the time they were told that they were going to give,
they would be given some medications, which might make
them feel worse. Doctor Manuel, what?
What do you think the Army Chemical Corps was looking for
in all of this testing? They were looking for an
incapacitating agent, an agent that would not harm the person
permanently, but would incapacitate them temporarily.
That seemed like a a humanistic way to to wage a war, if war is
necessary. When James Thornwell was given
LSD by Army intelligence in 1961, this time it was no
experiment. This time the express purpose
was to peel back Thornwell's brain to bear any secret within
it. This time the Army had gone
operational. Thornwell, as reported on a BC
last January, was an Army private station in Orleans,
France. Classified documents were
missing from his unit. Thornwell became a suspect.
His 2 1/2 month interrogation included administration of
sodium penathol, hypnosis, isolation.
And deprivation of sleep. Army documents obtained by a BC
News refer to this interrogation as conventional.
Despite the severe questioning, Army intelligence was getting
nowhere with Thornwell and it was decided to slip in LSD for
16 years. Thornwell never knew what had
hit him. Tell me about the acid.
I'd rather not. It's a bad trip.
That was a bad trip.
The pain was so excruciating. Felt like somebody was sticking
me with a million pins, You know, just everywhere.
Just you want. To start for me, I walked
around. Oh, I can talk.
Live through it. I lived through it.
I lived through. It no charges were ever brought
by the Army against Thornwell, he was discharged for
psychological disorders. But an Army psychiatric
evaluation of Thornwell, obtained by a BC News, one which
was done prior to Thornwell having been given LSD, says of
them fairly cooperative, oriented, alert and gave no
evidence of psychosis or depression.
From the Army's point of view, this type of LSD interrogation
was a success. Other documents refer to the
exploitability of interrogation subjects, cracking them, keeping
them off balance mentally. And providing an economical,
speedy and productive aid to interrogation.
From James Thornwell's point of view, it was no success.
Thornwell still has serious problems.
He's run through two marriages, he maintains.
He can't hold a job, can't concentrate, has nightmares and
feels socially and emotionally isolated.
Last fall, Thornwell filed suit against the government in
federal court. In a moment, we will examine the
closest experimentation to brainwashing that we have
uncovered. Oh, for crying out loud,
something wrong? Will you pick up a paper?
These days, you learn life isn't as simple as it used to be and
neither's food. Is that why you eat grape nut
cereal? Yep.
You couldn't ask for a simpler cereal.
Wheat and barley. Vitamins added, no
preservatives. Sure.
Looks simple. It's got a natural nutty taste.
What's good for breakfast, guys? How about something nice and
simple? Grape Nuts.
The simple cereal. Maxwell House is coffee.
You can count on Maxwell House. Good to the last drop, but every
time. Good coffee.
Maxwell House coffee you can count on.
Always smells good. Always tastes good.
Always good to the last drop. Good news.
A BC news close up will continue.
In a moment special baseball the Yankees take on the Angels
Friday night on a BC. This is a heavy duty stickup and
this is a good place for it. New heavy duty stickups from
Airwick for small places with big odors.
This is David Shumacher in the news At this hour district
police have charged a young northeast woman with the weekend
kidnapping of that day old baby so as to say the woman was a
pregnant and afraid she lost her own child in the accident and
that's what motivated the kidnapping twas the night before
Skylab and we'll have the latest on its fate and ours.
Testimony before Congress today on battered wives Some of the
victims are battered wives. A rock'n'roll star put on
probation for income tax evasion.
The condition is he must put on 1000 hours of concerts for
charities and we'll be talking with the local.
Major, who won a gold medal at the Pan Am Games.
Join us at 11 for the sun Sunshine.
For the sun sunshine. Nothing else tastes or feels
quite like Mountain Dew, or goes down as smooth like a soft
breeze on a lazy afternoon. By far the most chilling
experiments we have uncovered took place at this gothic estate
called Ravens Crag, 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, severe experiments.
The work was done by the institute's then director,
Doctor Ewan 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. Deep patterning Dr. Maurice
Dolgier, current head of the Allen Memorial Institute, in his
psychic driving, so-called type of of therapy, he would give the
patient intensive electric treatment in order to make the
patient to regress deeply, become forgetful and then he
would attempt to implant new ideas in the mind of a patient.
Now, to a layman, it would appear that Doctor 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 Orlico of Winnipeg, Canada,
the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament, was a
patient of Doctor 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 Doctor Cameron.
And then the drug began to take hold very rapidly because it was
an IV injection and things became very furry and very
frightening and 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 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
changes in personality. I thought this was the coldest
and 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 and I stood there and
I thought, OK, go, OK, go. And then I thought, what if
you're not killed? What if you're just mean?
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 deep
patterning. 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 and 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 go by. Cameron used this combined sleep
electroshock treatment on patients as long as 30 days.
One patient he kept asleep for 65 days.
Cameron retired, and his successor, Doctor Robert
Clayhorn, ordered a follow up study on the patients treated
with Cameron's deep patterning 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 have been
deep pattern 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 Doctor
Cameron's experimentation and his treatment appear harsh?
I would say yes. This forceful type of approach
that I was describing to you 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 given sufficient fluid and food
and toileted and so on and so forth.
It was a a very difficult thing for the staff to to 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 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.
How did you feel when you
learned that Doctor 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 excuse me, but 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 the 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 Doctor 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. America is adapting to the shape
of things to come. Triumph TR7 with 5 speed
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Wide steel belted radials. Front disc brakes, front end,
spoiler rack and pinion steering.
Triumph TR7. No other sports car looks like
it. No other sports car drives like
it. Triumph TR7 the shape.
Hey, don't worry, they just got lucky.
I'm sorry I let us down. Forget it.
We'll beat them next week. No, I really let us down.
Come on, how about a make a lobe, Light make a lobe makes a
life here. Sure.
Good taste of Michelob Light. Don't just compare it to other
light beers, compare it to your regular beer.
It's that good. And this Michelob light is
great. Hey, you know what our real
problem was today? You were terrible.
Good days runs in the family. The many roles I play call the
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I'll never switch again. Thursday, I could move a few my
things over this morning. There's a scandal in the 12th
when Wojo gets a roommate hi in a Barney Miller special prisoner
on my biological urges. Sorry to hear that.
Then authorities say this Texas motorcycle gang murdered a
federal judge. People are always scared of
something they don't understand and they don't understand us, so
they're. Scared Geraldo Rivera
investigates Dope, Death and the Bandidos on 2020 Thursday,
starting at 98 Central and Mountain on a BC.
It was the Cold War, and especially the trial of Joseph
Cardinal Minsenti, 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 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 Doctor 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 were getting me in. And all this fellow does is ask
you write, 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 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. Yeah, but that was the effects
of which may be out of keeping with the individuals sort.
Of thing was never done. Those people were not that 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
CI with some other other wild ideas, OK, this is their
perception of it if if I could. Just get their perception of it
either. Now I was 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 working and all this talk.
But the situation was you see those things were never done
because of wise people on both sides we not able to do this and
are interested in it. They were, though.
Some of the low level people were but the high level people
were not. 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.
Normally conditioned American has been trained to kill and
then to have no memory of having killed.
His brain is not only being washed as they say it has been
dry Clean 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. Doctor Milton Klein, a
psychologist, A clinical and experimental hypnotist, and
unpaid consultant to the CIA, the.
Qualifications would be the subject 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, you'll be good enough to
lend Raymond your pistol, please.
Yes, ma'am. Thanks, Ben.
Sure can. 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 operationally feasible way.
I'm not in any way saying that hypnosis doesn't take 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, they're until murder.
It could, if you consider that an act of killing someone under
circumstances of war is murder. I think one has to define 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 Gettinger. It comes close to being able to
predict how humans will behave. It's really a descriptive
system, 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. Getting your system had many
uses in intelligence work. One was to draw personality
portraits of world leaders using getting your 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, we've learned, the
Korean CIA, Uruguayan National Police.
Can you tell us about this? No.
Author John Marks, the former #2CIA man in Uruguay, told me
how in 1966, John Giddinger and an assistant traveled down to
Uruguay and gave the test in order to select members of the
Uruguayan intelligence service. A psychologist who used to work
for the CIA, he 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 test to
candidates for the Korean CIA to choose the best man for their
secret police. But one of the basic functions
of getting your system was finding the vulnerabilities of
an agent, a double agent or a potential agent.
And it's applicability to intelligence work.
Isn't the PAS system looking for persons soft spot?
Well, of course the answer to that is yes.
But I had, I hasten to say soft spot.
This is what I consider a negative word.
Of the hundreds of behavioral projects undertaken by the CIA,
getting years 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,
parapsychology, manipulation of genes.
Even though past and present CIA officials have indicated this
kind of work ended in 1963 and one of those who took part in
these programs 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 perjure yourself.
That's right. Well, either that I'd have to
pressure myself or take the 5th amendment and I'm not about to
take the 5th amendment for anybody.
Former CIA chemist Robert Lashbrook testified he had no
first hand knowledge of the agency 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.
Doctor Sidney 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, Doctor 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.
Doctor Gottlieb also testified before the Senate subcommittee,
but from an ante room where he could not be filled because of
what his lawyer termed health and cardiac problems, Doctor
Gottlieb declined a BC News request for an interview.
And what of George White, the man who helped the agency and so
many of its programs? He would retire here to Stinson
Beach, CA. And shortly before his death he
wrote to his boss at the CIA, doctor Sidney Gottlieb, and
summed up his career by saying it was fun, fun, fun.
Where else could a red blooded American boy lie, kill and sheep
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 scientist
working for our country. Their work speaks for itself.
This is Paul Altmeyer for a BC News.
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Doctor's number one choice. Stay tuned for local news next,
then, live from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, ABC
News will track the approach of Skylab as it nears reentry.
Skylab the final hours right after Twiggy and Dirk Benedict
of Battlestar Galactica star. Her dead on the Tuesday movie of
The Week Tonight on ABC. This has been a presentation of
ABC News. A BC Skylab nears its final
orbit and arrest in the kidnapping of that newborn baby,
A rock star sentenced for income tax evasion and a local gymnast
talks about her winning performance in San Juan.
News 7 is next. We were concerned about our
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