MISSION: MIND CONTROL

[Music] by far the most chilling experiments we have uncovered took place at this Gothic estate called Ravens Craig 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 experiments the work was done by the institute's then director Dr Yan 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 dep patterning Dr Maurice donier current head of the alen Memorial Institute in his psychic driving so-called uh type of of therapy he would give the patient intensive uh electric treatment in order to make the patient regress deeply uh become forgetful and then he would attempt to implant new ideas uh in the mind of the patient now to a Layman it would appear that Dr 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 Oro of Winnipeg Canada the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament was a patient of Dr 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 Dr Cameron and then the drug began to take hold very rapidly because it was an IV injection and um things became very furry and uh very frightening and uh 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 uh 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 control changes in personality I thought this was the coldest 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 I stood there and I thought Okay Go Okay go and then I thought what if you're not killed what if you're just maimed 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 de 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 in 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 corter that was opposite the Sleep room with our backs to the wall when we'd go by Cameron used this combined sleep electroshock treatment on patients as long as 30 days days one patient he kept asleep for 65 days Cameron retired and his successor Dr Robert clayhorn ordered a follow-up study on the patients treated with Cameron's dep 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 had been de patterned still had amnesia for periods of anywhere from 6 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 Dr Cameron's experimentation and his treatment appear harsh uh I would say yes I mean this forceful type of approach that I was describing to you uh 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 uh given sufficient fluid and food and toileted and so on and so forth it was a a very difficult uh thing for uh the staff to u to uh 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 I just how did you feel when you learned that Dr 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 um excuse me but um 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 this 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 Dr 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 it was the Cold War and especially the trial of Joseph Cardinal menenti who was forced to testify in a Hungarian court that he was a spy and then later the Korean war with a coerced and mainly fraudulent confessions of American servicemen my geration took place on the 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 Dr 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 would get him in and all this fell does is ask you right 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 a 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 uh we have examined it says that the the project that was being done here uh they intended to use everything learned about the new agents to induce them to quote to perform acts of a complex purposeful nature but that was the effects of which may be out of keeping with the individual's previous behavor 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 uh were operational type people from the CIA with some rather rather wild ideas okay this is their perception of it if if I could just it was their perception of it either no it wasn't 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 work talk but the situation wise you see those things were never done because of wise people on both sides we not able to do this nor interested in it they were though oh some of the lowlevel people were but the high level people are not to 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 lost normally conditioned American who's been trained to kill and then to have no memory of having killed his brain has not only been washed as they say it has been dry cleaned 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 see absolutely credible I would say the answer is yes but there are many qualifications to that Dr Milton Klein a psychologist a clinical and experimental hypnotist and unpaid consultant to the CIA the qualifications would be the subjects 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 admin ministering 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 will you be good enough to lend Raymond your pistol please yes ma'am thanks SP sure K 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 operational reasonable way I'm not in any way saying that hypnosis uh doesn't 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 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 that entail murder it could if you consider that an act of killing someone under circumstances of war is murder I think one has to Define uh 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 mansurian 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 Ginger it comes close to being able to predict how humans will behave it's really a descriptive system an 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 her system had many uses in intelligence work one was to draw personality portraits of world leaders using Ginger system the agency concluded the Sha of Aran 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 weer and the Korean CIA Uruguayan National Police can you tell us about this no author John Marx the former number two CI man in Uruguay told me how in 1966 John Ginger and an assistant traveled down to Uruguay and gave the tests in order to select uh members of the Uruguayan intelligence service a psychologist who used to work for the CIA 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 tests 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 in its applicability to intelligence work isn't the Pas system looking for a person's soft spot well of course the answer to that is yes but I I I hasten to to say soft spot this is what I consider a negative word of the hundreds of Behavioral projects undertaken by the CIA gingers 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 and70s brain surgery psycho surgery creation of Amnesia parasyn present CIA officials have indicated this kind of work ended in 1963 truth and what of those who took part in these programs thank you sir 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 to me not to say anything to Pure yourself that's right well either that I'd have to Pure myself will take the Fifth Amendment and I'm not about to take the Fifth Amendment for anybody okay former CIA chemist Robert Lashbrook testified he had no firsthand knowledge of the agency runs 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 Dr Sydney gutle whom we recently film 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 Dr gutle 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 Dr gutle also testified before the Senate subcommittee but from an anti- room where he could not be filmed because of what his lawyer termed health and cardiac problems Dr gutle declined ABC News request for an interview and what of George White the man who helped the agency in so many of its programs he would retire here to Stinson Beach California and shortly before his death he wrote to his boss at the CIA Dr Sydney gutle and summed up his career by saying it was fun fun fun where else could a red-blooded American Boy lie kill and cheat 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 Alm for ABC News good night [Music] [Music] this has been a presentation of ABC News [Music]