Subproject 68

Imagine being confined to a small room, being made to wear a helmet your eyes covered, this message being pumped into your ears for 16 to 20 hours per day, week after week. You're a good wife and mother and people enjoy your company. It's not a nightmare and it's not a movie. It really happened. What is this place? Why are we here?

And then they got a small beam of light again. Truth. Weird. Stuff. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. It's a name that probably doesn't mean anything to you. Doesn't ring any bells. He was a psychiatrist born in Scotland in 1901. He's not the household name that Freud or Jung is, though he gained global recognition in the field.

He served as the president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association. He was so prominent a figure that he was one of three psychiatrists tapped during the Nuremberg trials to assess the sanity of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess. And a real quick fun fact about that. The three experts diagnosed Hess with hysteria and amnesia.

Hess later confessed that he faked the amnesia part. Leave it to a diabolical Nazi to trick not one, but three experts in mental health. Anyway, Dr. Cameron's work at Nuremberg proved inspirational for the man, though, spoiler alert, not all inspiration turns out to be for the good. Prior to evaluating Rudolf Hess, Cameron had published a book called The Social Reorganization of Germany.

In it, he argued that German culture was pretty much designed to produce people who were a threat to the world, you know, wired for authoritarianism, highly regimented, aggressive and deeply mistrustful of other societies. He followed this up with his next book, Nuremberg and Its Significance, in which he reiterated that the history, culture and biology of the German people was basically a recipe for future atrocities.

Wow, he's really coming for you, Germany. And somebody get Alanis Morissette on line one because we're about to crash into a staggering irony. The doctor so fixated on the inhumanity of the German people is the very same doctor guilty of horrifying, cruel, unspeakable experimentation on human beings. Dr. Cameron believed that mental illness was as contagious as any infectious disease.

And he meant that literally, as in, if you were to encounter a person exhibiting symptoms of mental illness, you too would soon exhibit those same symptoms. He viewed the sick as a threat to society, to peace and progress. Today, we look at this kind of thinking and go, well, no, this is crazy. But at the time, Cameron's theories were pretty mainstream.

Mental illness has always been stigmatized, and people with poor mental health were isolated, shunned and discriminated against. And here was a leading authority in the field of psychiatry, basically endorsing all of that. Cameron identified certain personality types as dangerous enemies of civilization, enemies that ought best be eliminated.

And if not that, then prevent it from holding any position of leadership, including in the home. Yep, Cameron did not think these individuals should be permitted to be parents. He argued that poor mental health was transmitted from one generation to the next. And the only cure for that is to eliminate the carrier. It's a chilling take.

What personality types are we talking about? According to Dr. Cameron, the passive person, afraid to say what he or she truly thinks. The possessive or jealous individual, this being a particular threat to children, in his view. The insecure with their endless need to conform in their worship of mediocrity. And finally, the psychopath.

If you're thinking, well, jeepers, that's a pretty broad brush. And it seems unreasonable to eliminate people for such deeply human sorts of behaviors. I mean, are we really here to erase folks who tend to be a little on the passive side? If Cameron's assessment of humanity was appalling, so was his proposed solution.

He firmly believed that all flawed personalities, all mental illnesses were the result of a malformed brain. And that was something Dr. Cameron was convinced could be repaired. His tools were chemicals, electroshock therapy, isolation, and reprogramming. Which brings us to Montreal, Canada, 1957. Dr. Cameron commuted from his home in Lake Placid, New York, every week to the Allen Memorial Institute.

Which was the psychiatric hospital at McGill University. The building itself was a whole vibe. This huge Italianate mansion, complete with a tower and ballroom stables. All perched atop a rise, giving it a view of the entire city. The house had originally been named Ravenscrag. Just in case the aesthetics weren't already enough of a tribute to every gothic insane asylum cliche that ever was.

Cameron settled in and was paid $69,000 to carry out what became known as the Montreal Experiments. What few people knew was that the Montreal Experiments were being covertly funded by the CIA. As part of the secretive MKUltra program. MKUltra was all about mind control. And the CIA had a different name for what was happening at the Allen Memorial Institute.

The CIA called it MKUltra Subproject 68. I was there for a while and I thought, I don't want to stay here. And I started to run away from the hospital. And they grabbed me and then they put me on sleep treatment. And they kept you asleep for 23 days. And while I was asleep, they were shocking the heck out of me with electric shocks.

And playing tapes just over and over. I don't know what was on the tapes yet, but we're going to find out what was on the tapes through hypnosis. That's the voice of Bob Logie, interviewed on a Canadian TV news program called The Fifth Estate. Logie was a patient in Cameron's Montreal Experiment program. He was just 18 years old in 1958 when he was admitted to the Allen Memorial Institute.

Logie was suffering from leg pain, which doctors apparently believed was psychosomatic. I feel like I've been completely used. I feel like my mind has been completely invaded. I suppose if any pigs had feelings, they'd feel like I do. I'll save you the suspense and tell you right now that ultimately, Logie's leg pain was effectively addressed with cortisone.

But that came much later. Cameron opted to treat this teenager, this 18 year old boy, with his own methods. Cameron believed that the human mind could be reprogrammed, or to use his term, de-patterned. Much in the way you might wipe the hard drive on your laptop. Start over, all that malware and junk code and viruses, erased.

To accomplish this de-patterning, Cameron would use a combination of psychedelic drugs and extensive, heavy electroshock treatment. He then places subjects into a drug-induced coma. They would remain in that state for weeks, although there's at least one case where the subject remained comatose for over three months. During this so-called sleep treatment, recorded messages would be played for the patient in a continuous loop.

Sometimes, the recording was white noise. Sometimes, it was a simple, repetitive statement. Cameron called this psychic driving, as in, driving the new personality messaging home to the now de-patterned and receptive brain. You're a good wife and mother, and people enjoy your company. Helen McIntosh was suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her second child.

It was her own doctor who recommended that she receive treatment from Cameron and Allen Memorial. She wasn't informed that she'd be part of any experimental protocol. She never consented. She was never given the opportunity to consent. She didn't know that her treatment would include massive doses of electroshock therapy or of LSD.

She wasn't told she'd be placed into a drug-induced coma and bombarded with recorded messaging almost 24-7. You're a good wife and mother, and people enjoy your company. Helen McIntosh spent more than two years in and out of Allen Memorial. Her memories of that time were fragmented. But then, so were all of her memories after Cameron's de-patterning.

When she appeared on Canada's The Fifth Estate, she described how the treatment turned her into an infant once again. Her family photo albums became picture books of strangers. Helen often couldn't recognize herself in the images. Another patient, Hilda Bernstein, admitted to Allen Memorial after a nervous breakdown, told a similar story.

It's three weeks that was out of my life as far as I'm concerned because I can't remember anything about it. I didn't know my husband and my children, my brother-in-law and his wife. My sister-in-law at that time, when she saw me, she cried. My brother-in-law told me this when she saw me. She's a registered nurse, too, and she said she'd never seen such a change in a person in three weeks.

But I looked really dreadful. I still can't remember my aunt being with us. I look at the pictures that we took when she was here. We took her to New York, and we were at the museum there. I look at the pictures, and I still can't remember her being with us. And she was with me for three months. And this aunt was my mother's sister who was very near and dear to me.

Now, if you're wondering exactly why the CIA was paying Dr. Cameron to torment unsuspecting Canadians, it's a fair question. Staff at Allen Memorial, along with, it seems, the entire Canadian government, didn't know the CIA was paying the bills. That's the Canadian government's story, for what it's worth. But you gotta know that the CIA knew better than to show its hand.

The CIA could not be seen to be experimenting on human beings, never mind citizens of another sovereign country. Instead, the agency set up a bunch of organizations to serve as funding fronts, and then got busy financing research and experimentation at more than 80 institutions. And more than half of those were hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, prisons, colleges, and universities.

And this is how the Montreal Experiments came to be sponsored by something called the Human Ecology Fund. Which sounds benign, except the whole thing was bogus, and entirely under the command of the CIA's experts in brainwashing. If you're gobsmacked by these unethical shenanigans, remember the time when all this went down.

The Montreal Experiments are just one more horrifying byproduct of Cold War paranoia. In the years after the end of World War II, the CIA became obsessed with finding ways to extract information from spies and enemy combatants. In 1953, as the Korean War was winding down, something peculiar happened. The New York Times published a story about how American POWs coming home from Korea seemed to have been converted by communist brainwashers.

These soldiers were confessing to having committed crimes like biological warfare on behalf of the United States. Claims the US government forcefully denied. And more baffling, some GIs were refusing to come home at all. The newly appointed head of the CIA, Alan Dulles, was like, listen up. The Soviets are using brain perversion techniques.

In a speech at Princeton University in April 1953, Dulles warned that the West was handicapped when it came to the necessary art of brain warfare. Because experimentation on non-consenting humans went against every value the West held dear. That one falls under the category, you can tell he's lying because his lips are moving.

Dulles had no difficulty convincing Americans that brain warfare was the warfare of the future. Americans spent the 1950s fixated on the idea of brainwashing. It helped make the rapid rise of communism make sense. What other explanation could there be for so many countries and so many people choosing to embrace such an abhorrent ideology?

It was widely believed that communist governments didn't just brainwash the enemy. They brainwashed their own people. Dulles saw the moment and seized it. Just three days after that Princeton speech, he signed off on the launch of the top secret program now known as MK Ultra. Forget those precious Western values he spoke of.

Nothing was off limits for MK Ultra. Hypnosis, radiation, chemicals, electroshock, torture, anything and everything was up for grabs. And the same held true for test subjects. Volunteers were great, although many were coerced to volunteer like soldiers and inmates. Some so-called volunteer subjects lacked the capacity to understand what they were agreeing to.

Like a group of students at a state school for mentally impaired boys. Others, including the patients at Canada's Allen Memorial, had no idea that they were lab rats for the CIA. When that CIA front group, the Human Ecology Fund, made it rain on Allen Memorial, they found the perfect partner in Dr. Cameron. The CIA believed the trick to effective brainwashing was to stress the personality to the point of breaking.

The man heading up the secret MK Ultra program, Sidney Gottlieb, thought chemical agents, specifically LSD, might make the perfect tool. But Gottlieb was also very intrigued by Cameron's deep patterning and psychic driving techniques. And Gottlieb, like Cameron, wasn't much burdened by conscience when it came to his test subjects.

You can see this in one document that survived a 1973 shredding party at the CIA. That document was an application for research funding submitted by Dr. Cameron to the CIA-backed Human Ecology Fund. In it, Cameron detailed his four-step process for achieving behavioral changes in human subjects. One, the use of intensive electroshock to break down established and ongoing patterns of behavior.

Two, the use of intensive repetition of taped verbal signals or messages for a minimum of 16 hours per day for at least six to seven days. Three, the subject maintained in a state of partial sensory isolation throughout the entire process. And four, the patient is then made to forget the ordeal by being put into a state of continuous slumber for seven to ten days.

And this was not speculative or theoretical. Cameron had already given this process a real-world tryout funded by the Canadian government. And by the time the CIA came calling, Cameron was ready to throw in a few extra goodies, like chemical agents to speed up the de-patterning. Hello, LSD. But not just lysergic acid diethylamide, that is so fun to say, but also paralytic drugs like curare.

The process was intended to reduce the patient to an infantile state. Only then, detached from time, space, and identity, was the subject successfully de-patterned. With the personality wiped clean, it was time to rebuild. And this was where the endless hours of repetitive messaging came in, all aimed at constructing a new and more functional personality.

Cameron believed that he was not only curing mental illness, but helping to build a better society by eradicating what he viewed as the weak-minded. There's a word for all of this, and it's right on the tip of your tongue. A word for what we call the process of denying a human being their liberty, of restraining and restricting their mobility, of manipulating reality itself through whatever means available in service of our desired outcome.

The word for that is torture. And if you think I'm overstating it, you should know that Dr. Cameron's work at Allen Memorial contributed significantly to the CIA's KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook, published in 1963. It was Cameron's research that laid the foundation for what became the CIA's two-stage method of psychological torture, or to put it more politely, the coaxing of information from a resistant source.

The damage done to these unwitting test subjects is breathtaking. Like Linda MacDonald, a mother of five who followed her physician's recommendation to see Cameron for an assessment. Linda, whose five children were all under the age of five, was exhausted and depressed. Girl, yes, yes, you were tired with five kids under five.

But Dr. Cameron diagnosed Linda MacDonald with acute schizophrenia and placed her into a drug-induced coma for 86 days. When she awakened, she didn't know her own name. She had no memory, no sense of her own identity. She had to be toilet trained all over again. Upon discharge from Allen Memorial, Linda's depression was gone, along with the entire life she'd led up to that point.

Paging through a family photo album during a televised interview, Linda was uncertain who her own family was. I had no identity, I had no memory, I'd never existed in the world before. Like a baby, just like a baby that has to be toilet trained. She eventually went home, her depression gone, and her entire previous life gone with it.

And this is one of the twins. That was in 62 before I went to the Allen. And this is the same one, I think. I just look at the pictures and I know that is who they are. But I don't remember them as my children at all. I mean, I know that they came from my body. But there's no... that's all. I don't know, and that's because I was told that.

So these are my children. And remember Bob Logie, the 18-year-old admitted to Cameron's care for leg pain? His comatose period was significantly shorter. 23 days compared to Linda MacDonald's 86 days. But no less monstrous. I was aware of the speaker under my pillow. I was aware of the words. Which were? You killed your mother.

You killed your mother. Yeah. Who was alive and well. Who was alive and well. And... Over and over again this voice is coming. Well, like I say, it takes about two seconds to say that message. And this was going on for 23 days. And when I went home, after being there, and when I went home, my mother was there, and why was she there?

It didn't make any sense. Dr. Cameron left Allen Memorial in 1964. By the time he died, just three years later of a heart attack, the hospital had abandoned the experiments. Poor record keeping, intentional or not, means we don't even know the exact number of patients Cameron subjected to his de-patterning and psychic driving.

Looking at the fates of the people who were brutalized by the successive and reckless use of electroshock treatment, chemical manipulation, isolation, and hour after hour of audio messaging piped into their ears, I don't think it's going too far to call what Cameron did psychic murder. Years would pass before Cameron's test subjects would receive any public acknowledgement of what they had endured.

It was 1975 before the public ever really heard the phrase MKUltra, and that was only thanks to the work of a group called the Church Committee. This was a task force headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church, investigating dirty deeds and other abuses perpetrated by the CIA. Then in 1977, a joint hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence spilled the tea book good.

The director of the CIA at the time, a man named Admiral Stansfield Turner, spent hours squirming uncomfortably as the skeletons tumbled out of the CIA's closet. What skeletons hadn't been shredded in 1973, that is. As the late Senator Ted Kennedy described Project MKUltra and the 149 sub-projects embedded within it, he described human subjects, both volunteers and those who had no idea what was happening.

He referenced at least 15 categories of experimentation, ranging from chemicals and hypnosis to magician's tricks, polygraph tests. He described electroshock, ESP, and crop sabotage. Admiral Turner was like, yes, but all of that happened 12 and 24 years ago and the CIA is totally not doing any of that now and also the people who were part of that are retired and also they didn't keep great records.

So, yeah. And then Senator Kennedy was like, this is really bad. There might be Americans walking around today all jacked up thanks to this insane program and they don't understand what's happened to them and frankly, Admiral Turner, you don't seem all that bothered by this abhorrent revelation. And Admiral Turner was like, no, no, I think it's really bad too and I swear we're not doing it anymore.

Bro, come on. Let bygones be bygones. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but the transcript from that hearing is public record and it's 173 pages long, so I'm just giving you the gist of it. Parts of it are super fun, like when Senator Richard Schweiker grills Turner about using government funds to experiment on unwitting humans and Turner responds with, well, actually, we use those funds for construction.

And then Senator Schweiker was like, yes, and then you performed illegal experiments on human beings in those buildings that you constructed, to which Turner responded, yeah, but like only one-sixth of the building was used for experimentation and there's no factual evidence of what went on, so... and on and on and on.

Meanwhile, in Canada, former patients at Allen Memorial were learning for the first time just what had happened to them and who had paid for it. Thanks to the Fifth Estate, that Canadian TV news show we featured clips from in this episode, the truth slowly came out. Starting in 1980 with the revelation that the CIA had apologized to the Canadian government and the government had kept that one real quiet.

You could say from shame or you could say more accurately from fear of reprisals and the inevitable lawsuits, which soon followed. Some of the former patients took part in a class action lawsuit which settled in 1988. Those victims received $67,000 each. Then, in 1992, the Canadian government awarded 77 victims the sum of $100,000 each in exchange for signing away their rights to pursue further action against either the government or the hospital.

Roughly 250 additional victims were ineligible to receive any compensation on the grounds that they missed the filing deadline or could not produce medical records or, my personal favorite, had not been tortured enough. There are always those people who hear a story like this and immediately respond with, yeah, but. Yeah, but times were different then and they didn't do it to be evil.

That was certainly the take one Dr. Maurice Dangier had back in April of 1979. In his capacity as the then-director of Allen Memorial, Dangier defended Cameron's work telling the Calgary Herald that Dr. Cameron's research into sensory deprivation was very useful in the context of the 1950s and, furthermore, had even been published in several American medical journals.

This one falls under the category, but he made the trains run on time and that was good. And there's always at least one in the crowd who insists on reminding us that we cannot hold the people of the past to our much more enlightened contemporary standards. That argument suggests that science had less strict rules and protocols in the 1950s and 1960s regarding experiments with human subjects.

And this is precisely where Dr. Hewin Cameron gets snared by the very noose he helped to tie. Remember the Nuremberg trials? Remember how Dr. Cameron was one of only three psychiatrists in the whole wide world brought in to assess the sanity of Nazi war criminals who were being tried for crimes against humanity? Those trials resulted in the creation of the Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code basically helped make informed consent into international law by declaring that any experimentation without consent on any human being to be a war crime.

This codification of informed consent became part of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 and by 1966 was the norm in international law. Cameron knew full well he had to know that what he was doing to patients at Allen Memorial was fundamentally no different than the grotesque human experimentation the Nazis had perpetrated.

It's harsh, but it's true. Cameron wasn't just aware of what happened at Nuremberg. He was there. His former colleague, Dr. Elliot Emanuel, echoed Cameron's victims in his description of the man. He was an authoritarian, ruthless, power hungry, nervous, angry man. Not very nice. And Velma Orlikow admitted to Allen Memorial in 1956 for postpartum depression begged Dr. Cameron to stop her treatment.

I heard him coming and I hid in the washroom in my room and I thought, well, I'll go and sit on the toilet and nobody will see me. Anyhow, that didn't work because he knocked on the door and he said, now come on Lassie, you know you're in there and come on, you come out and let me give you your injection. And I said, no, I'm not taking any more injections. I can't do it. I don't care if I die.

I can't. I can't do it anymore because this is killing me and that's all there is to it. I can't do it. Well, he wasn't very happy about it and however, after a little discussion he turned on his heel and left the room. Her victory was short-lived. Treatment resumed. And Orlikow was aware that other patients at Allen Memorial were also suffering, confused, disoriented, vacant.

And as Orlikow described, at least one patient chose suicide over remaining in Cameron's care. There was a gentleman who jumped off the roof of the Allen. I don't think he had LSD, but he had sleep therapy with psychic driving, you know, with the driving tapes under his pillow and they told him he was going to go home and he'd just come out of sleep therapy and he just jumped, he said, went around big smile on his face, said goodbye to everybody, went up on the roof and jumped off and landed at the back door of the Allen which was a dreadful, awful thing.

I don't think he was more than 30 and he was just gone. Just gone. Today, Allen Memorial no longer serves as an active psychiatric hospital. Instead, as part of the McGill University Health Center, the building houses outpatient psychiatric services for Montreal General Hospital. But, like the victims of the Montreal experiments, Allen Memorial is forever shadowed by the dark history of Dr. Cameron's research.

I've heard that it was the most brutal program under MKUltra in the States and in Canada. That this was the most brutal. It was an awful feeling to realize when I found this out that the man whom I had thought cared about what happened to me didn't give a damn. I was a fly. Just a fly. And if you're wondering now what it must have been like to be one of Cameron's victims.

To be made helpless. To have everything that you are taken from you. To be restrained and drugged and returned to a terrible kind of infancy. It sounded just like this. Why are you running away from your responsibilities, Janine? Why, Janine? Why, Janine? Why are you running away from your responsibilities? Why? Why are you running away from your responsibilities?

Why? Next time on True Weird Stuff. How well do you know your neighbors? How well do you know your parents? Imagine finding out that the man who raised you and loved you was a cold-blooded killer on the lam from the law. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sutton.

Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2023.

Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.