Front Burner - Canadian CIA MK-Ultra victims still fight for justice

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

What was MK-ULTRA? What brought the CIA to McGill University? What effects did the covert mind-control program have on its unwitting test subjects? How were the experiment results used in Guantanamo Bay? Why are survivors and their families still fighting for justice? Lisa Ellenwood, a producer with CBC’s The Fifth Estate and co-author of the book Les cobayes oubliés: l’histoire du programme MKULTRA à Montréal, tells the story. For more information on MKULTRA, you can check out the CBC Podcast Brainwashed that investigates the CIA’s covert mind control experiments. All episodes from the series are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/brainwashed

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. Tonight we report on a secret CIA research project carried out in Montreal in which mental patients felt they were used as the CIA's guinea pigs.

In the 1980s, CBC's The Fifth Estate released a series of investigations into an operation codenamed MKUltra. Nine Canadians who were the unwitting victims of CIA brainwashing experiments are suing the United States government. But so far, the Canadian government has done nothing to help them. Throughout the 50s and into the 60s, people turned up at a Montreal hospital seeking medical care, but unwittingly became test subjects. I thought, how could he possibly ever take me for a patient? Who am I? I mean, this great man who's done all these marvelous things. You know, I don't want to lose this opportunity to get well.

They kept you asleep for 23 days. And while I was asleep, they were shocking the heck out of me with electric shocks. These experiments took place more than half a century ago. But legal action is still dragging on. Because the survivors and their loved ones say that they haven't received the justice they deserved. CBC Podcasts and The Fifth Estate teamed up to cover the nightmare story of these mind-control experiments for the podcast Brainwashed. Lisa Ellen would produce that series, as well as a number of

other documentaries on MKUltra for the Fifth Estate. She's also co-writing a book about it. She's here with me today, and she's going to explain how a Montreal hospital became a testing ground for mind control techniques, the twisted legacy of those experiments, and the ongoing fight by survivors and their families for accountability, truth, and transparency. Hey, Lisa, thanks for coming on FrontBurner. Thanks for having me. So we heard a bit in the intro about MKUltra, that it was a covert CIA mind control program. Can you tell me a little bit about it and its focus? Yeah. So it was a program that was established in 1953.

It ran for about 10 years and it was a program that was, yeah, looking into brainwashing research with drugs and other techniques and stuff. So it was huge in the United States. There was 162 different secret projects and 149 sub-projects relating to drugs and behavior modification. 80 institutions, 185 researchers. So you get a sense, like 12 hospitals, three penal institutions. So it was a really big program. And so there were only a few projects like part of the social zeitgeist at the time too. I'm thinking about like the Manchurian candidate, the book and the movie with Frank Sinatra came out around that time too. Now Raymond, now the big one.

Why? Why is all of this being done? What have they built you to do? So why was it that the CIA devoted those resources and all those people, all these programs to this idea of mind control? So it wasn't just the CIA. It wasn't just the Americans. It was the British and Canadians as well. And so there were a bunch of things that were happening at the beginning of the Cold War. There were POWs, American POWs during the Korean War who refused to return to the United States. And they were filmed saying things, you know, against the United States, and they were

telling military secrets to the Koreans and things like that. And so the Americans, kind of the only way they could explain it was, well, they were probably brainwashed by the Russians and the Chinese and the Koreans. And so if this is possible, we need to get on top of this and we need to start our own research and figure out how to brainwash people. Okay, so with that goal in mind, the CIA also uses a front organization called the Human Ecology Fund, and that funds research that wasn't quite as above board as we'll get into, but it also supported several projects out of McGill. So there's a study on indigenous healers in Nigeria. News of his connection to the CIA came as quite a surprise to Dr. Raymond Prince. I couldn't imagine why the CIA would be

interested in my work in looking at indigenous healers in West Africa. That seemed really strange. I couldn't understand how the CIA would be interested in that. They funded a whole publication called, it's a psychiatric review, it's called the Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review. And then they also funded the work of Dr. Ewan Cameron out of the university's psychiatric hospital, the Allen Memorial Institute. I want to get into his work in a minute, but before that, tell me a bit about the Allen. What's this place like? So the Allen Memorial is this magnificent building on the slopes of Mont-Royal in the complex of Royal Victoria Hospital.

It was a mansion with 34 bedrooms and stables and ballrooms. This is Ravenscrag. It was called Ravenscrag, yeah, which is kind of a spooky name. And it's a bit ominous looking, like it's not... If I were going to look for a good film set for a spooky movie about psychiatric patients being mistreated, I'd probably want to film it at the rate it's going. So Wilder Penfield, actually one of Canada's famous neurologists, he recruited Dr. Ewan Cameron to come to McGill. Dr. Ewan Cameron to come to McGill. And so Cameron was tasked with changing this mansion basically into a research institute and training facility for psychiatrists. And I think we need to remember that this was still very early days for psychiatry. There were hardly any medications. They were still doing lobotomies

on people. There were not a lot of options to treat people. And people's understanding of what an institute was for psychiatric patients was pretty dark. People were locked away forever at that time. And so the Allen Memorial was really at the forefront of a change in how psychiatry was practiced at the time. The modern mental hospital still has a long way to go. But here and there are models of science, of intelligence, and of compassion. Such a model is the Allen Memorial Institute of Psychiatry of Montreal, one of the foremost mental health institutions in the world. So it was actually the first psychiatric institute that had a day program where you didn't have to stay for weeks on end to get your treatment. You

could come in in the morning and leave in the evening. So it was the first in the world, I believe, to have a day program. The person who comes to the Allen Memorial Institute comes voluntarily and leaves voluntarily. There are no bars. There are no locked doors. So it sounds like it's innovative for its time, but also its reputation as an institution. It's seen as a legit, formidable institution. That's right. And Dr. Ewan Cameron was really at the top. He was one of the top psychiatrists in North America at the time. And he ended up being the head of the American Psychiatric Association, head of Canadian, and one of the co-founders of the World Psychiatric.

Wasn't he one of the psychiatrists at the Nuremberg trials too? Yeah, he was invited. They were responsible for making an assessment of Rudolf Hess as to whether he could stand trial, whether he was mentally capable of standing trial, and they did determine that he was. There's a really deep irony there that Ewan Cameron was at the Nuremberg trial. And out of that came the ethical principles of the Nuremberg Code, part of which was the need for patient consent. One of the things that led the CIA to Ewan Cameron was his work on this concept of psychic driving. Can you break down psychic driving for me?

So the goal was to kind of reprogram people in a way. He wanted to have people listen to these messages and positive messages that would make them think in a different way. And they listen, like you mean audio messages, right? Yeah, people would be subjected to looping messages, positive and then negative, for days and days and days on end. But what he quickly realized was that people didn't want to listen to these things. So he had to figure out a way to kind of force them to listen to it. The part of his experiments that caused the most damage was something called de-patterning. The electric shock treatments were administered on an unprecedented scale. It was called de-patterning. The mind was

short-circuited so the psychic driving hypnotic messages could be planted on a clean slate. So ECT was a very old technique that was effective, but he took it to the extreme. He was using something called page rustles, which was multiple shocks, and he was using them extensively over long periods of time. And so he would get people into a state where they couldn't function, they were incontinent. Depatterning is a use of electroshock treatment in a totally different way, in which instead of giving the shocks, say, two or three times a week,

they're given two or three times a day for three or four weeks, reducing the patient to a sort of animal, vegetable state, from which it's hoped that they would recover in a more healthy state of mind. It didn't work. And ECT really affects memory too, right? Right. So the ECTs were combined with a cocktail of barbiturates and other drugs to put people to sleep for often months. Like I think there was someone who was asleep for 54 days or something. That was combined with sensory deprivation. Weren't there huge doses of LSD too?

Well, so yeah, he also tried that. of LSD too? Well, so yeah, he also tried that. What Cameron was doing, and we know this from patient statements like Velma Orlico, she was given the LSD and left on her own and not told what she was getting. So it was this horrifically traumatic experience for her. The room became very very distorted and I thought my bones were all melting and I just wanted to scream that I wanted to get out of there and I saw the squirrels outside and I thought they're not the squirrels I'm the squirrel I'm in this cage and I can't get out and I started to throw myself from side to side in the room and I just felt that my life was threatened. I could never go back to what I'd been.

And there were others as well. So he was subjecting people to all of these things in order to make the psychic driving work better. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share

with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. So I think the thing that's really important to understand is that people were coming to the Allen as patients. This was a psychiatric hospital, and people would be presenting with mental health issues. Can you tell me about who was coming there? What kind of issues people were presenting with at the time?

Yeah. I mean, I've talked to, over the years, probably over 50 people who are patients or victims themselves. A lot of them were from wealthy families. This wasn't free. It wasn't covered by health care at the time. You needed to have a lot of money to go to the facility. And they were people who wanted the best treatment. And so they wanted Cameron, and they wanted to be at the Allen Memorial Institute. They paid a lot of money. They trusted him. I thought, how could he possibly ever take me for a patient? Who am I? I mean, this great man who's done all these marvelous things. And, boy, I better work hard, and I better do everything that he tells me to do. And, you know, I don't want to lose this opportunity to get well. I mean, I found there was a really large

number of young women who were part of the experiments. They were young women, young mothers who had probably very mild postpartum depression. There were also a few young girls who they were just causing trouble and they were kind of put there to try and figure out how to, you know, make these girls behave better. And then there were other people who had one person in particular who really just had a nerve issue in his face. He had excruciating pain in his face, and they thought that it was maybe psychosomatic. So he was subjected to it. There were other people who had major anxiety. So let's talk about the kind of impact that these experiments had. One of the people you spoke to in your podcast, Brainwashed, is Dr. Harvey Weinstein.

That's the son of one of the patients. And I should add, too, there's no relation to the infamous Hollywood exec Harvey Weinstein. But what did Dr. Harvey Weinstein tell you about his father's treatment? Dr. Weinstein said his dad went into the Allen Memorial Institute when he was about 49 years old, and he had, you know, pretty serious panic attacks, anxiety issues. But he was in there for about three months, and when he came out, he basically couldn't function anymore. He lost his business, they had to sell the house, and, you know, Harvey talks about how his life, basically his childhood, ended when he was 14 years old. My father was someone who was unrecognizable to me or anyone

else in the family or his friends. He was someone who could not function in this world, whose perspective didn't extend beyond the next five minutes, who had no recollection of the past, and almost no recognition of the present. So his father was subjected to all of the, you know, horrible experiments. He was de-patterned. He went through the psychic driving. the psychic driving. I believe he also was given LSD. There are so many stories like this where people went in, able to function, just had kind of minor mental health challenges, and when they came out, couldn't work, couldn't read, couldn't really write anymore, couldn't concentrate. I've never been able to sleep without medication since the sleeper. I went through years and years and years of severe depressions. I dream about it, all my waking hours I think about it.

It's eating me up. Not being with my family, not being able to follow a career, not being able to study anymore, which I wanted to do very much, I would say it cost me my life. There's another former patient of Dr. Cameron's in your reporting named Esther Shire. And I should say the Fifth

Estate has interviewed several women who went to the Allenville pregnant or having postpartum depression. She was one of them. What did her treatment look like? So Esther Shire is the only person I know who was actually pregnant when she was one of the patients of Dr. Cameron. And her son, Lloyd, provided us with some of her medical documents. And it really is shocking to read it. You brought them in, right? Yeah, I did. I brought a few in here. Here's one that says, you know, on March 12th, this was 1960, One that says, you know, on March 12th, this was 1960, she was considered completely depatterned and that she is incontinent, mute and swallowing difficulty. And then there's another one that says we're stopping the treatments now because she's eight months pregnant.

And so they knew and they list all the drugs. Like, it really is shocking to imagine that there wouldn't have been more consideration for the impact on the fetus. And Lloyd, her son, he went to university and he had a pretty good life, but he always, you know, wondered what he could have been had he not, as a fetus, been subjected to all of these drugs and to these intensive electroshock treatments. These folks we've been talking about are just a few of the survivors that you and the Fifth Estate have spoken to over the past several decades. Do we know how many patients were experimented on at the Allen through Dr. Cameron's work? The CIA produced a number, I think it was 52 people who were involved in Cameron's experiments that were funded by the CIA. But the Canadian government has never provided a number of people who were subjected to de-patterning. The Canadian government eventually offered what's called ex gratia payments to people.

There was about 300 people that applied for compensation. Only 77 were compensated. So we don't know exactly how many people because the government never told us. We've been talking about the impact of these experiments at the Allen, but the impact goes beyond the patients that were being treated there too or experimented on there because the information gathered in those experiments contributed to the development of the CIA's interrogation techniques. So this work that was done in the 50s and 60s shows up in sort of a different way after 9-11 in Guantanamo Bay, right?

So the information that was gathered in the research at McGill was included in various manuals that the CIA created over the years. You know, the Kubrick Manual, the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape Manual called SEER. And it's that manual was used by two men, two psychologists named James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were hired by the CIA to develop the enhanced interrogation techniques that were used on prisoners after 9-11, the prisoners who were at the black sites around the world and at Guantanamo Bay. Some of the techniques that these psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, had in their manual included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement boxes, shackling, exposing detainees to extreme temperatures, sound, pain. How well did all that work? Well, there was a big report that the Americans did looking into interrogation at Guantanamo Bay

called the Senate Intelligence Committee Report that basically found that coercive interrogations didn't work. And so, you know, Cameron's efforts into brainwashing didn't work. Like, all of this material, you know, all of these different manuals that the CIA created, all it did was leave broken people damaged from these interrogation techniques, basically, and they didn't get the information that they needed. They discovered that prisoners will just say whatever they need to say to stop the interrogation in the works. Can you tell me about those? So one of the things I realized when I first started the work was that none of these victims were

talking to each other. And so after the Fifth Estate documentary aired, we were just inundated with calls from people who wanted to connect. So they all came together eventually in Montreal. They had a Facebook group. And at this meeting in Montreal, I think in 2018, they decided they were going to together launch a lawsuit. And Alan Stein was the lawyer who was at that meeting, and he agreed to take it on. And so let me just be clear that the people who were compensated in the program from the 90s, they had to be victims and they had to be alive and they had to be subjected to a certain level of de-patterning, basically. So family members were not compensated at the time. And if somebody died, like Velma Orlikow died before compensation, the time. And if somebody died, like Valma Orlikow died before compensation, so she didn't get it.

Some of the people I talked to too said, well, you know, our father was compensated, but the whole family was decimated by this. Like we all needed therapy. We lost our homes. We lost everything. We paid so much for the medical treatment and then our lives were destroyed. So the compensation is not adequate. So now it's not just the victims who didn't receive compensation first, but it's their children and their siblings who are looking for compensation. And then there was another group that started another lawsuit, which became a class action lawsuit with Jeff Ornstein with the Consumer Law Group. Both of those are underway now. There's a slight difference between the two. Alan Stein's lawsuit, it's only direct relatives who can be the mandators. And I think with the class action, it's a larger scope of people that can participate in the class action lawsuit. The big difference, though, is that Allen Stein decided not to sue the Attorney General of the USA, the CIA, and the class action lawsuit decided to try and sue the CIA again. So on Monday, that proposed class action lawsuit decided to try and sue the CIA again.

So on Monday, that proposed class action lawsuit hit a roadblock. Quebec's Court of Appeal upheld a lower court's decision that the U.S. government can't be sued in Canada on the rationale that the U.S. would have had immunity at the time the experiments took place. Now, the lawyer on that case, Jeff Ornstein, has said he'll pursue every legal avenue, including an application for appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada. What do you think happens next here? I think they can't really proceed with the class action until that situation is resolved. So it's just going to be a longer time before the class action is even certified. So, yeah, it's difficult for all the people who are involved in that because it is, I mean, a lot of them are older and they just want this resolved.

It really sounds like, from the survivor's perspective, it's not just about compensation but accountability. What's your sense of how they feel about how the institutions and governments involved in supporting this research have responded? The family members and victims of the experiments at the Allen, they want apologies from people. They want the Canadian government to say they're sorry and just acknowledge. Even Harvey Weinstein, who went to McGill, wrote a book about his experience, and McGill wants to just forget about it. And the Canadian government has just been dragging their heels from the very beginning. And people just want it to be acknowledged.

And they want a recognition, I guess, of the fallout from these experiments. Like it wasn't just damage to an individual person when you damage a mother of five children and she can't look after her children anymore. I mean, there were so many cases where, you know, kids went into foster care, you know, couples divorced, and the person ended up living on the street because they couldn't work anymore. And so just the generational fallout from the experiments at the Allen just, you know, carry on. Lisa, thanks so much for coming and chatting. This is remarkable work. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Lisa's writing her book with Radio-Canada's Sophie-André Blondin. It's called Les Cobayes Oubliés, l'histoire du programme MK-Ultra à Montréal, or The Forgotten Guinea Pigs, the story of the MK-Ultra experiments in Montreal. And it's coming out in March. You can also follow Lisa's work on The Fifth Estate. Their new season launches Friday, October 20th. That's all for now. on the Fifth Estate.

Their new season launches Friday, October 20th. That's all for now. This week, Front Burner was produced by Shannon Higgins, Rafferty Baker, Joyta Shingupta, Lauren Donnelly, and Derek Van Der Weyck.

Our sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron and Sam McNulty. Our music is by Joseph Chabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks for listening.

FrontBurner will be back on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.