Page 39 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October 2015

CIA Experimented On Canadians
The McGill mind behind
'soft torture'
In 1949, Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty
appeared before the world's cameras to
mumble his confession to crimes against
the Hungarian church and state. For
resisting communism, the Second World
War hero had been subjected for 39 days
to sleep deprivation, alternating with
long hours of interrogation, by Russian-
trained Hungarian police. His staged
confession riveted the Central
Intelligence Agency, which theorized
that Soviet-trained experts were
controlling Mindszenty by "some
unknown force." If the Communists
had interrogation weapons that were
more subtle and effective than brute
physical torture, the CIA decided, then it
needed such weapons, too.
In 1949, Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty appeared
before the world's cameras to mumble his
confession to crimes against the Hungarian
church and state. For resisting communism, the
Second World War hero had been subjected for
39 days to sleep deprivation, alternating with
long hours of interrogation, by Russian-trained
Hungarian police. His staged confession riveted
the Central Intelligence Agency, which
theorized that Soviet-trained experts were
controlling Mindszenty by "some unknown
force." If the Communists had interrogation
weapons that were more subtle and effective
than brute physical torture, the CIA decided,
then it needed such weapons, too.
Months later, the agency began a
program to explore "avenues to the control of
human behaviour." During the next decade and a
half, CIA experts honed the use of "chemical
and biological materials capable of producing
human behaviour," according to a retrospective
CIA catalogue written in 1963. And thus soft
torture in the United States was born.
In short order, CIA experts attempted to would attack their analyst or try to leave the
induce Mindszenty-like effects. An interrogation
team consisting of a psychiatrist, a lie-detector
expert, and a hypnotist went to work using
combinations of the depressant Sodium Amytal
and certain stimulants. Tests on four suspected
double agents in Tokyo in July 1950 and on 25
North Korean prisoners of war three months
later yielded noteworthy results. (Relevant CIA
documents do not specify exactly what, but
reports later claimed that the special
interrogation teams could hold a subject in a
"controlled state" for a long period.) Meanwhile,
the CIA opened the door to pre-emptive
psychosurgery: In a doctor's office in
Washington, D.C., one unfortunate man was
lobotomized against his will during an
interrogation. By the mid-to-late 1950s,
experiments using "black techniques," as the
agency called them, moved to prisons, hospitals
and other field-testing sites with funding from
the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate.
One of the most extreme 1950s
experiments that the CIA sponsored was
conducted at a McGill University hospital in
Montreal, where the world-renowned
psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron had been
pioneering a technique he called "psychic
driving."
Dr. Cameron was widely considered the
most able psychiatrist in Canada, and patients
were referred to him from all over. A disaffected
housewife, a rebellious youth, a struggling
starlet and the wife of a Member of Parliament
were a few of the patients who became
nonconsenting experimental subjects. Many
were diagnosed as schizophrenic (a diagnosis
since contested in many of the cases).
Cameron's goal was to wipe out the
stable "self," eliminating deep-seated
psychological problems in order to rebuild it.
The CIA wanted to know what his experiments
suggested about interrogating people with the
help of sensory deprivation and psychic
disorientation.
Cameron's technique was to expose a
patient to tape-recorded messages or sounds that
were played back for long periods. The goal was
a condition Cameron dubbed "penetration": The
patient experienced an escalating state of
distress that often caused him or her to reveal
long-buried past experiences. At that point, the
doctor would offer "healing" suggestions.
Frequently, his patients didn't want to listen and behavioural science program in the mid-1960s,
room.
In a 1956 American Journal of
Psychiatry article, Cameron explained that he
broke down their resistance by continually
repeating his message using "pillow and ceiling
microphones" and different voices; by imposing
periods of prolonged sleep and by giving
patients drugs like Sodium Amytal, Desoxyn
and LSD-25, which "disorganized" thought
patterns.
To further disorganize his patients,
Cameron isolated them in a sensory deprivation
chamber. In a dark room, a patient would sit in
silence with his eyes covered with goggles,
prevented "from touching his body -- thus
interfering with his self image." Finally,
"attempts were made to cut down on his
expressive output" -- he was restrained or
bandaged so he could not scream. Cameron
combined these tactics with extended periods of
forced listening to taped messages for up to 20
hours per day, for 10 or 15 days at a stretch.
In 1958 and 1959, Cameron went further.
With new CIA money behind him, he tried to
completely "depattern" 53 patients by
combining psychic driving with electroshock
therapy and a long-term, drug-induced coma. At
the most intensive stage of the treatment, many
subjects were no longer able to perform even
basic functions. They needed training to eat, use
39
the toilet, or speak. Once the doctor allowed the
drugs to wear off, patients slowly relearned how
to take care of themselves -- and their
pretreatment symptoms were said to have
disappeared.
So had much of their personalities.
Patients emerged from Cameron's ward walking
differently, talking differently, acting differently.
Wives were more docile, daughters less inclined
to histrionics, sons better-behaved. Most had no
memory of their treatment or of their previous
lives. Sometimes, they forgot they had children.
At first, they were grateful to their doctor for his
help. Several Cameron patients, however, later
said they had severe recurrences of their
pretreatment problems and traumatic memories
of the treatment itself and together sued the
doctor as well as the U.S. and Canadian
governments. Their case was quietly settled out
of court.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, CIA
experts thought they understood the techniques
necessary for "breaking" a person. Under a strict
regime of behavioural conditioning, "the
possibility of resistance over a very long period
may be vanishingly small," researchers
concluded in an analysis used in the CIA's 1963
manual Counterintelligence Interrogation.
At the agency, pressure increased to
field-test coercive interrogation tools. As part of
the now notorious MK-ULTRA program, the
CIA set up a safe house in San Francisco where
agents could observe the effects of various drug
combinations. They were in search of a "truth
serum," and thought LSD might be it. Prostitutes
were hired to bring unwitting johns back to the
house, where the women slipped acid and other
strong psychoactive substances into the men's
drinks. From behind a one-way mirror,
investigators watched, notebooks and martinis
in hand.
At least officially, the CIA ended its
before scientists and operatives achieved total
control over a subject. "All experiments beyond
a certain point always failed," an operative
veteran of the program said, "because the
subject jerked himself back for some reason or
the subject got amnesiac or catatonic."
In other words, you could create a
vegetable or a zombie, but not a robot who
would obey you against his will. Still, the CIA
had gained reliable information about how to
disorient a person who was reluctant to co-
operate. An enemy could quickly be made into a
desperate human being.
Since 9/11, the CIA's experimental
approach to coercive interrogation has been
revived. This month, as the Washington Post
revealed the existence of secret CIA-run prisons
-- "black sites" -- in eastern Europe, U.S. Vice
President Dick Cheney continued to campaign
to ensure that the agency will not be prevented
from using "cruel, inhumane and degrading"
methods to elicit intelligence from detainees.
The operatives of the 1940s would
approve. []
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