The MKULTRA contractor about whom the most has been written is Dr. Ewen Cameron65, 105, 184, 212, 278, 301, 313. Dr. Cameron was the contractor for Subproject 68. It says in the Subproject 68 documents that Dr. Cameron was unwitting of CIA involvement, but this claim is implausible for a number of reasons. For one thing, the files often do not contain a complete account of the content or purpose of the Subproject.
A MEMORANDUM from Richard Helms, Acting Deputy Director (Plans) to Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA dated 3 April 1953 and entitled “Two Extremely Sensitive Research Programs” (MKULTRA and MKDELTA) includes the statement that, “Even internally in CIA, as few individuals as possible should be aware of our interest in these fields and of the identity of those who are working for us. At present this results in ridiculous contracts, often with cut-outs, which do not spell out the scope or intent of the work and which contain terms which the cut-out cannot incorporate in his contract with the researcher without revealing Government interest. Complete Government audits of such contracts are impossible for the same reason.”
Born in Bridge of Allan, Scotland on December 24, 1901, Cameron immigrated to Canada in 1929 to take a job as a psychiatrist at Brandon Mental Hospital in Brandon, Manitoba. He was recruited by Dr. Thomas Pincock; one of the buildings in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in the 1980’s was the Pincock Building. Dr. George Sisler and Dr. John Matas, both of whom referred patients to Dr. Cameron when he was at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, taught at the University of Manitoba into the 1980’s, as did Dr. Gordon Lambert, who treated one of Dr. Cameron’s mind control victims on her return to Winnipeg.
Despite these historical connections, I heard no conversation about Dr. Ewen Cameron or CIA mind control while a resident and then a staff psychiatrist in the Department of Psychiatry in Winnipeg from 1981 to 1991, despite the fact that plaintiffs, including Val Orlikow from Winnipeg, settled a suit with the CIA in 1988. Mrs. Orlikow’s husband, David Orlikow, had been a prominent Member of Parliament from Winnipeg for many years. There was silence in psychiatry about CIA mind control, but no conspiracy of silence. No one was told to be quiet. From the perspective of academic psychiatry, mind control experimentation didn’t exist, so there was no need to cover it up.
Throughout the twentieth century, academic psychiatry provided no public commentary, ethical guidance, peer review, or moral oversight of any kind concerning mind control experimentation, despite the fact that the leading psychiatrists and medical schools were well funded by the CIA and military for mind control research. Mental patients, cancer patients, prisoners and unwitting citizens were experimented on by mind control doctors at Yale, Harvard, McGill, Stanford, UCLA and the other major universities.
These human guinea pigs were never told that they were subjects in military and CIA mind control experiments, and they never gave informed consent. They received no systematic follow-up to document the harm done to them. The welfare of the “human subjects” was not a relevant variable in the academic equation. What counted for the psychiatrists, I think, was money, power, perks, academic advancement and the thrill of being a spy doctor.
Despite the code of silence, and despite later claims by the Canadian Psychiatric Association that Dr. Cameron was unaware he was working for the CIA (see Appendix H), unwitting investigator status for Cameron is implausible for several reasons. He was far too politically connected to be unwitting. At various times, Dr. Cameron was President of the Quebec, Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the Society of Biological Psychiatry and the American Geriatrics Society. Dr. Cameron was one of four co-founders of the World Psychiatric Association; another was Dr. William Sargant273, the foremost British authority on brainwashing. Many Board Members and Presidents of the Society of Biological Psychiatry were LSD researchers, funded by the military or otherwise in the mind control network.
A letter from the CIA to Senator Pete Wilson dated 11 December 1985 states that the CIA contacted Dr. Cameron directly. On page 4, the correspondent says:
First, the CIA did not instigate this research, create the protocol, or supervise the work. Rather, CIA contacted a prominent and highly respected Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron, who was conducting research into treatment of mental illness with drugs such as LSD, and the CIA provided minimal and partial funding for a short time period. In return, the CIA received periodic reports on his research into behavioral modification through a process which he termed “psychic driving.”
Dr. Cameron was eulogized in obituaries in the Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal15, the Canadian Medical Association Journal61, the American Journal of Psychiatry93, and Recent Advances in Biological Psychiatry129, the latter written by Hudson Hoaglund, Ph.D., who was personally referred to J. Edgar Hoover by G.H. Estabrooks. Dr. Cameron received many awards including the Adolph Meyer Award, the Samuel Rubin Award and the Montreal Mental Hygeine Institute Award, given to “a scientist who has made an outstanding contribution to the mental health of the Canadian people.”
In an article entitled “McGill University Department of Psychiatry 50th Anniversary,” Pinard and Young242 echo the sentiments of the eulogist:
Since the department’s inception in 1943, research has been a preponderant part of its mission; this was stated in the very first reports to the university by the department’s founder, Ewen Cameron …
The department’s record has not been one of unblemished success. Cameron’s drive led to the foundation and growth of the department, but also lead him to perform much publicized experiments of doubtful ethical or scientific value in which patients received multiple courses of ECT or doses of LSD.
In his obituary in the Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal61 Cameron is eulogized as follows:
Dr. Cameron began conducting unethical, unscientific and inhumane brainwashing experiments at Brandon Mental Hospital in the 1930’s. He continued this work into the 1960’s. In one paper50 Dr. Cameron describes treating schizophrenics with red light produced by filtering light from fifteen 200-watt lamps through an inch of running water and a layer of sodium salt of ditolyldisazo-bis-napthylanine s sulphuric acid impregnated into cellophane.
The color red was chosen because it is the color of blood. In these experiments, schizophrenic patients were forced to lie naked in red light for eight hours a day for periods as long as eight months. Another experiment involved overheating patients in an electric cage until their body temperatures reached 102 degrees F.
After leaving Brandon Mental Hospital in 1936, Cameron took a job at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts. The Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology received CIA money through MKULTRA Subproject 8, and was the professional home of Dr. Cameron’s eulogist, Hudson Hoaglund129. At Worcester State Hospital, Dr. Cameron massively over-utilized insulin coma therapy by putting patients in coma for 2 to 5 hours per day for up to 50 days in a row.
In a paper published in the American Journal of Psychiatry entitled “Psychic Driving,” Dr. Cameron51 describes his brainwashing techniques and says, “Analogous to this is the breakdown of the individual under continuous interrogation.”
Psychic driving was a procedure carried out in two stages; in the first stage, patients were depatterned, which meant they were reduced to a vegetable state through a combination of massive amounts of electroconvulsive shock, drug-induced sleep and sensory isolation and deprivation. When fully depatterned, patients were incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date (see Chapter 16).
In the second stage, psychic driving was introduced. This consisted of hundreds of hours of tape loops being played to the patient through earphones, special helmets or speakers in the sensory isolation room. The tape loops repeated statements of supposed psychological significance. If such procedures were carried out under third world dictators, they would be denounced as human rights violations by American and Canadian psychiatry, and would be called brainwashing.
There is a further reason to conclude that Ewen Cameron had a security clearance and was witting of CIA funding of his research; Dr. Cameron definitely had a security clearance with the U.S. government. In 1945 he was part of an American team that did psychiatric assessments of German War criminals including Rudolph Hess, who was examined at the request of the Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Dr. Cameron must have heard about the mescaline research done in the death camps by Nazi psychiatrists. He himself instituted similar work at McGill when he began experimenting with LSD.
An example of a German psychiatrist recruited to the Allan Memorial Institute is Dr. Werner Kohlmeyer, who was born in Hanover on May 21, 1921. Dr. Kohlmeyer received his M.D. from the University of Gottingen in 1945, then did a year of internship in 1946 and two years of psychiatry residency in Hamburg in 1947-48. He did post-graduate training at the Allan Memorial Institute from 1951 to 1954156. Dr. Kohlmeyer became an Instructor in Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1958 and an Assistant Professor in 1970. He was still resident in Baltimore as of 1986.
There is no evidence that Dr. Kohlmeyer was directly recruited by the CIA or military, however research he did at the Allan Memorial Institute was funded by The Medical Research and Development Division, Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the U.S. Army under Contract No. DA-49-007-MD-70 (Malmo, Smith, and Kohlmeyer, 1955). The outline of Dr. Kohlmeyer’s professional career and recruitment to the Allan Memorial Institute is included to illustrate the flow of psychiatric personnel from Germany to McGill to Johns Hopkins37. German mind control doctors could have been brought over under PROJECT PAPERCLIP and provided cover under an immigration profile like that of Dr. Kohlmeyer. Dr. Cameron is a leading candidate for involvement in the recruitment and placement of PAPERCLIP psychiatrists, in part because he himself trained at Johns Hopkins for a period129.
Rather than being the object of suspicion and investigation in the 1950’s, Dr. Cameron was well regarded in the Canadian media. Favorable articles about him were entitled “Canadian Psychiatrists Develop Beneficial Brainwashing”195; “New ‘Personalities’ Made to Order”47 and “Two-Month Sleep, Shock New Schizophrenic Cure”49. Similarly, as recently as June 6, 1987, the official position of the Canadian Psychiatric Association on Dr. Cameron’s brainwashing experiments was far from negative (see Appendix H):
… the fact that Dr. Cameron’s research would not be accepted by today’s standards of ethical and scientific inquiry, cannot be used as a retrospective critique of his work. What has to be recognized clearly is that in the intervening 20 to 30 years there has been a continuing progression of scientific and ethical research standards that included much more sophisticated peer review and ethical approval review now in place as part of standard practice. This represents the evolution of concern and control for all medical research using human subjects deriving in part out of concerns experienced in several fields of medicine. Such experiments would not be permitted in today’s research climate.
The position on Dr. Cameron taken by the Canadian Psychiatric Association is mistaken for several reasons. Dr. Cameron received a grant from Canada’s Department of Health and Welfare for $57,750.00 for the years 1961 to 1964 for “A Study of Factors Which Promote or Retard Personality Change in Individuals Exposed to Prolonged Repetition of Verbal Signals.” The Helsinki Declaration governing ethical rules for medical research was adopted in 1964; Dr. Cameron’s brainwashing experiments clearly violated the principles of informed consent and protection of the patient from undue harm contained in the Helsinki Declaration.
Dr. Cameron’s experiments also violated the informed consent provisions of the Nuremberg Code, which arose out of the war crime trials of the Nazi doctors, in which Dr. Cameron participated as a member of the American psychiatric team. He thus had direct knowledge of the medical atrocities the Nuremberg code was designed to prevent. The Canadian Psychiatric Association’s position that Dr. Cameron’s research would “not be permitted in today’s research climate” is correct, but ignores the fact that the rules of ethical conduct in medical research have not changed since Nuremberg.
The fact that medical schools were routinely lax in ensuring that prevailing ethical codes were adhered to in the 1950’s and 1960’s is a condemnation of the medical schools, not a vindication of Dr. Cameron. The Canadian Psychiatric Association’s argument concerning different ethical standards in the 1950’s and 1960’s is reminiscent of the U.S. Army’s apologist strategy concerning brain electrode implant experiments at Tulane (see Chapter 8). I consider the Canadian Psychiatric Association’s official position on the mind control experiments conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron to be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Lies and silence concerning psychiatric mind control experimentation are a betrayal of the physician’s ethical duty.
The fact that Dr. Cameron’s unethical, inhumane, and grossly damaging experiments were published in the psychiatric literature is a condemnation of the editorial standards of the journals, not a vindication of Dr. Cameron. The only argument protective of the psychiatric journals is the fact that Dr. Cameron whitewashed the experiments for publication. Dr. Cameron’s brainwashing experiments stopped in 1964, whereas the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study continued until 1972. The continuation of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study under the auspices of the Center for Disease Control until 1972 does not provide vindication for Dr. Cameron, rather it provides further grounds for criticism of organized medicine.
The U.S. Government has officially apologized to and financially compensated the victims of the radiation experiments and the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study, and the Canadian Government has established a fund that compensates victims of unethical experiments by Dr. Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute; compensation of $100,000.00 can be activated by documented victims by calling a toll-free number provided by the Canadian government. Given the positions taken by two federal governments on such medical experiments, the position of the Canadian Psychiatric Association on Dr. Ewen Cameron requires revision.
Dr. Cameron was not the only researcher at McGill funded by the CIA and the military. Another psychiatrist at McGill, Dr. Raymond Prince248 was funded through MKULTRA Subproject 121. Dr. Prince was an unwitting investigator and is the only psychiatrist to have written about CIA mind control in the peer-reviewed medical literature. He is the only MKULTRA contractor to have publicly identified himself to date. No other MKULTRA contractor has engaged in any public discussion of psychiatric participation in CIA and military mind control.
Dr. Prince’s MKULTRA work was published in a book edited by Ari Kiev150, 246. Kiev was a participant on the Hungarian refugee studies127 funded through MKULTRA Subprojects 69 and 89. From 1962 to 1964, Dr. Kiev was a staff psychiatrist at Wiford Hall, USAF Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio. In the book in which Dr. Prince’s chapter on the Yoruba appears, Dr. Kiev himself references MKULTRA contractors Carl Rogers, Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle, and British brainwashing expert William Sargant, who co-founded the World Psychiatric Association with MKULTRA contractor, Ewen Cameron. He also references Human Ecology Foundation Director, John Whitehorn (see Chapter 13).
Dr. Hassan Azima was a young McGill psychiatrist who was being groomed as a military mind control contractor prior to his death from cancer in his early forties. A colleague, Dr. Sarwer-Foner274 gave the Hassan Azima Memorial Lecture at a meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry; Dr. Cameron was a Past President of the Society.
Dr. Azima17, 18 worked at the Allan Memorial Institute, where he gave psilocybin to patients; psilocybin is the active ingredient of “magic mushrooms.” He also attended LSD symposia and performed sensory isolation experiments19 that caused damage to patients. Two patients with “obsessional neuroses manifested acute psychotic episodes. They were treated with electric shock, which resulted in improvement in both paranoid and obsessional features.” Azima and Cramer19 write:
Contrary to the above case, a hebephrenic-catatonic girl who remained in isolation for six days showed no perceptual alteration. Behaviorally, she manifested overt hostility, became quite talkative and self-assertive. Her F.D. [figure drawings] revealed gradual, but definite emergence of aggressive tendencies. She also experienced several spontaneous orgasms, and verbalized memories of her “sexual adventures.”
Another patient in the series is described as follows:
Another case of obsession neurosis, suffering severe motor compulsions, who had not responded to any form of treatment, was put in isolation with the explicit aim of provoking a psychotic disorganization. He remained five days in isolation, began to manifest signs of depersonalization on the second day, and showed several acute psychotic episodes, lasting about three hours on the fourth and fifth days. The disorganization manifested itself, in part, as a marked disinhibition. He experienced many spontaneous orgasms, and manifested overt erotic behavior toward the nurses. His eating habits deteriorated, and his behavior was like that of a very hungry child during the feeding periods. In the post-isolation period he showed some reorganization and lost some of his motor compulsions. But because of the appearance of some paranoid tendencies, he was put on electric shock therapy, which resulted in considerable improvement and subsequent discharge.
Dr. Azima21 published a paper with Dr. Eric Wittkower, who worked at the Transcultural Psychiatry Institute at McGill, where Dr. Prince was employed. Dr. Wittkower founded and edited The Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review. The Review was funded by CIA cutout the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which lists a payment to Dr. Wittkower of $7,500.00 in its 1961 Annual Report. The Board of Advisors for the Review included Dr. Ewen Cameron and Margaret Mead, who received CIA money for her anthropology research, and who was married to Gregory Bateson. Bateson took LSD supplied to him by a psychiatrist (see Chapter 7), and both Bateson and Mead were members of the Cybernetics Group, which was funded by CIA cutout, The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.
Margaret Mead was funded by the OSS during World War II, as was Gregory Bateson134. Bateson spent two years in Ceylon, India, Burma and China as an OSS psychological warfare expert, and he also taught at Columbia University under OSS and Navy auspices beginning in 1942. Mead set up an OSS training unit with Kurt Lewin and later recruited Rhoda Metraux to the OSS; Metraux became a close colleague and friend of Mead’s and lived with her for a period. Rhoda Metraux was a coauthor of MKULTRA lead psychologist, John Gittinger and MKULTRA contractor Harold Wolff128.
Margaret Mead’s sister, Priscilla, was married to Leo Rusten, who worked as a liaison with Hollywood for the Office of War Information, and later founded the social science division of the RAND Corporation. Mead’s Research in Contemporary Cultures study was funded by RAND in 1948-49, and the RAND Corporation later became an MKULTRA contractor itself (Subproject 79).
After the war, Mead received a $1,000,000.00 grant from the Office of Naval Research, which she used to assemble a team of 120 anthropologists. In addition, she maintained a personal relationship with MKSEARCH contractor Dr. James Hamilton from World War II until her last visit to him in 1978. These numerous interconnections between Mead, Bateson, MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, the OSS and the Navy illustrated how the mind control network involved the field of anthropology, as well as psychology and psychiatry.
Dr. Azima thanked Dr. Cameron and Dr. Cleghorn for their support in another paper20. Dr. Cleghorn61 wrote an obituary on Dr. Cameron, and notes of his appear in Linda MacDonald’s medical record along with notes by Dr. Cameron (see Chapter 16 and Appendix H).
Another McGill psychiatrist, Dr. James Tyhurst worked at the Allan Memorial Institute and received funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board for studies of individual reactions to community disasters304. Disaster studies were also the subject of investigation in MKULTRA Subproject 126, which was approved by the CIA in 1960. Dr. Tyhurst attended a meeting with CIA personnel in 1951 in Montreal devoted to oversight of BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE105. He also worked at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, where hundreds of patients were treated with LSD174.
In a paper entitled “An Evaluation of the Clinical Significance of Reserpine,” Tyhurst and Richman305 noted that:
In a 5-month period, while 5 out of 6 reserpine-treated patients developed complications in insulin coma, only 5 out of 36 non-reserpine patients developed complications. The complications seen in reserpine-treated patients included 2 prolonged comas, 1 cyanosis, 1 increased sensitivity to insulin, and 1 death with respiratory arrest.
Dr. Donald Hebb, Head of the Department of Psychology at McGill during the 1950’s, received funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board for experiments on sensory isolation105. The network of doctors with CIA and military funding at McGill included Dr. Cameron, Dr. Hebb, Dr. Tyhurst, Dr. Wittkower and Dr. Prince, and in addition Dr. Azima was firmly established in the mind control network and using many of the same experimental procedures. LSD research was also done at McGill and Montreal General Hospital by Dr. J.H. Quastel16. Any claim that Dr. Cameron’s CIA funding was an anomaly or isolated incident is therefore incorrect.
Medical experimentation by the Department of Psychiatry at McGill resulted in death, psychosis, vegetable states, organic brain damage, and permanent loss of memory among other damages. It resulted in the creation of amnesia, identity disturbance and depersonalization among other dissociative symptoms. Dr. Ewen Cameron was the main figure in these activities.