40 years ago, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was pressured to release documents that revealed that human mind control experiments had been aided in telling victims. Without electric shocks, drugs and other terrifying methods were used.
The victims came to know about this extreme of cruelty decades later. This top secret project called ‘MK Ultra’ has a dark history.
It was launched in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War.
The American intelligence community became alarmed when some prisoners from the Korean War raised a clamor for a communist campaign in the United States.
He feared that China and the Soviet Union had discovered methods of mind control and that their agents could pass on secret information. The CIA allocated two and a half million dollars for psychological experiments on humans.
Psychologist Harvey M. Wentsen has written the book ‘Father, Son and the CIA’. “The aim of the project was to find out how to weaken humans and interrogate them,” he tells the BBC. His aim was also to protect his staff from such measures.
The CIA contacted 80 institutions and scientists in the US, UK and Canada with the help of fake companies. Historian Tom O’Neill explains that “it was the most secret CIA project in America.”
“Patients in psychiatric hospitals, inmates in federal prisons and some ordinary people were given drugs and experimented without authorization.”
Acid test
MK Electric’s early projects included ‘Operation Midnight Climax’.
They established places that were given the status of ‘safe houses’ or safe places. Here, men would bring prostitutes without warning and give them LSD so that CIA scientists could study them. He used to watch them behind the mirror.
People were invited to parties where LSD was served with live music.
These parties were called ‘acid test’ or acid test. Such invitations contributed to the rise of the ‘hippie culture’ and psychedelic movements in America a few years later.
But some of the most damaging experiments were conducted at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. It is a psychiatric hospital in Canada. Here the minds of an unknown number of patients were somehow destroyed.
The Allen
The hospital was known as ‘The Allen’ and was run by Scottish American Donald Evan Cameron. He was considered one of the foremost psychiatrists in the world.
Cameron was president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) from 1952 to 1953 and again in 1963. He was president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association from 1958 to 1959, the Society of Biological Psychiatry in 1965, and the World Psychiatric Association from 1961 to 1966.
That’s why Lowe, psychiatrist Howie Weinstein’s father, wanted him to treat her when she suddenly started having anxiety attacks. Terrible things happened. Then the MK Ultra documents surfaced. I still do not understand the reasons for the change in their behavior.
Lou was a socially active person who loved to sing. He ran his own business. When he left this hospital called The Allen, his life and family were destroyed.
He was not the only person. Rather, it happened to hundreds of people who left. “My parents were having problems with me,” says Lana Ponting. Then they put me in The Ellen. They had absolutely no idea what was going on there. I was only 16 years old. When my parents came to get me back, I looked like a zombie. I did not know who they were.
Nurse Esther Schrier was admitted to The Allen when she was pregnant and feared she would lose her baby. Earlier, one of their children had died. Her treatment was completed when she was a month away from giving birth to her baby.
Years later, she told the BBC what it was like when she got out.
‘My baby was born and I didn’t know what to do with it. A babysitter (employee) was helping me. For example, one day, while leaving, she wrote in his notebook for me, “You told me to go to the room, pick up the child.” And told how to feed the baby step by step. It was very scary.
Dr. Cameron
The CIA contacted Dr. Cameron through the Society for Human Ecology Research three years after the launch of MK Ultra. It was a fake organization of theirs from which aid was given.
He encouraged Dr. Cameron to obtain a grant from January 1957 to September 1960. The CIA gave Dr. Cameron $60,000, which is $600,000 today.
Cameron was developing a new scientific strategy whereby the mind is like a computer and can be reprogrammed by erasing its memory. In this way, a rethinking could be possible. This involved putting patients into a child-like psychological state in which doctors could take advantage of a person’s mental weakness.
In such a beginning of mindfulness, new ideas could be inserted into human memory without anyone realizing that these ideas were not their own.
Method of psychological experiments
Patients who came to the hospital for treatment of minor illnesses such as postpartum depression or anxiety states were admitted here, where they were kept in a chemical coma for days or months.
According to Cameron’s theory, their minds would have been ‘wiped out’ by electric shocks of high power and frequency, which would have put them in a state that would allow them to achieve better mental abilities.
Lana Showchuk’s father was a healthy man when he went to The Allen for asthma treatment. “My father was given 54 high-voltage electric shocks and then had 54 grand mal seizures (when you lose consciousness and have muscle spasms).
Julie Tenney, whose father was placed in one such program, says that 27 days after the electric shock, he said he was discouraged because he was still clinging to his old life. He was calling his wife again and again.
“They decided to give him more electric shocks and put him to sleep for another 30 days.”
Patients were forcibly given psychoactive drugs such as LSD and PCP without permission.
In Cameron’s ‘reprogramming’ experiment, specific messages were played to patients through headphones or speakers for 20 hours a day. These speakers were placed in the patient’s pillow. Whether they were asleep or awake, the sound of these messages kept reaching their ears.
Some messages were negative such as ‘My mother hates me’. In some, instructions were given that ‘you have to behave well.'” Documents show that this message was repeated up to five hundred thousand times per session.
According to psychiatrist Dr. Harvey Weinstein, Cameron’s research involved desensitization to the point that anyone could be transported away from reality.
“My father was kept in a cell where his hands were tied,” he says. They could not feel anything in the dark. They could not see anything. Couldn’t hear anything in the constant noise.
“He was basically deprived of his normal senses.” Lou Weinstein was kept in this condition for two months.
The condition of the children
Harvey was 12 when Lou was first admitted to The Allen. He was a teenager in 1961 when the family sold the house to cover expenses. Even during this sad time, the family had faith in the doctors’ advice.
But the boy, who later became a psychiatrist himself, had to lose his father.
This worthy man had gone into the state of a dead man. He suffered from organic brain syndrome. He would lie on the couch and not be able to do anything. His personality was completely destroyed. Sometimes they didn’t know where they were.
Some of the other patients lost their memory and forgot their family members or developed amnesia.
When many patients returned to their homes, their minds were like those of a child. He also had to be toilet trained again. Families were misled about the methods and purposes of this treatment and were affected by it for the rest of their lives.
Program termination and families’ anger
The MK Ultra project was put on hold in 1964, but was not actually finished until 1973. Evidence has been found that traces of his activities have been erased.
Tom O’Neill says that “Journalist John Marks has mentioned this in his book ‘The CIA and Mind Control’ in 1979.”
When Harvey read the book’s review, he was satisfied. He learns that there is an explanation for what happened to his father. But this calmness turned into anger.
“I was angry at the doctor who did all this at The Ellen. I was angry at the CIA who experimented on people without permission. It was a feeling of intense sadness. Especially after the Nuremberg Laws in 1946.
Cameron was among the psychiatrists called in to examine Nazi soldiers during their trials. This was the first time that moral laws were given for experimenting on humans.
In these trials, Nazi doctors were convicted of experimenting on patients without permission.
It did not end well
O’Neill explains that after these details came to light, hearings in the US Congress took place in the mid-1970s, and the CIA finally admitted that the program existed, which was probably not a good thing.
However, he says that the CIA knew that they were breaking ethical and legal rules by conducting such experiments.
Apart from some interest in pop culture, most victims coped with these situations in silence and took their last breath with their trauma.
After the documents became public, other victims like Harvey and their families spoke out about their situations. He has tried to tell the story of what happened.
Linda McDonald was hospitalized for depression at the age of 26. “I was introduced to Dr Cameron and I don’t remember him at all,” she tells the BBC.
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I found out about this after 20 years reading my file. They gave me electric shocks and huge amounts of LSD. My memory is completely gone in this regard. All is forgotten about The Alan or the life before it.’
Some victims have not yet received an apology, nor have they filed lawsuits for financial compensation against the institutions they hold responsible.
Showchak says that ‘everyone was involved in it. They knew what they were doing. They were doing it for military and political reasons.
“I’m still on medication because of what happened to me when I was 16,” Ponting says.
“I want everyone to know what was happening to me in that horrible hospital.”
Historians and victims have brought their stories to the public, but the wider impact of these experiences remains largely unknown.
Given the sensitivity of the project, it seems likely that we will learn more about this in the coming years.