The man who washed brains for the CIA
The idea of unsuspecting patients being given mind-bending drugs reads like a dystopian plot line from the pages of Jason Bourne author Robert Ludlum.
But a new Netflix drama reveals how thousands of people were the victims of a CIA-funded brainwashing programme during the Cold War.
And many of these horrific experiments were carried out under the direction of Scots psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, once one of the most respected figures in his profession.
He was a president of the World Psychiatric Association but his controversial methods of treatment destroyed the lives of hundreds of patients.
The £20million 10-year mind-control programme MK-Ultra, in which Cameron played a key role, is the focus of new Netflix docu-drama Wormwood, releasedeased on Friday.
The mini-series follows the 60-year campaign to uncover the truth about the death of Frank Olson, a bioweapons expert working for the US military, played byy actor Peter Sarsgaard.
Frank plunged to his deathh from a New York hotel room in December 1953, days after being slipped LSD in his drink and suffering a nervousus breakdown.
The US government ruledd his death was suicide but his son Eric believes he was pusheded out of the 13th floor window after fter developing concerns aboutut the CIA’s programme.
After Senate hearings in the 70s into the mind-control experiments, Frank’s family received an apology from President Gerald Ford and a £ 650,000 out-of-court settlement from the CIA.
However, Eric continued to search for the truth about his father’s death and whether it was connected to Project MK-Ultra.
In 1994, the body was exhumed and a coroner noted head injuries that suggest Frank was knocked unconscious before his death.
Cameron was born in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire, and studied at Glasgow University before emigrating to the US in the 20s.
During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic
Services, a precursor to the CIA. In 1945, Cameron and two other psychiatrists were invited to the Nuremberg Trials to carry out a psychiatric evaluation of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess.
Cameron went on to become director of the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal, where his work was covertly funded by the CIA.
The agency were concerned about the brainwashing of US soldiers who had been Korean prisoners of wars and wanted to find techniques to counter it.
Cameron’s treatments included subjecting unsuspecting patients to injections of LSD, massive doses of electroshock treatments and chemically induced comas.
The psychiatrist, who died from a heart attack in 1967, believed “psychic driving” through constant pplaying of taped messages could “de-pattern” the mind and wipe out symptoms of mental illnesses.
However, the de-patterning also wiped out much of the patient’s memory, leaving them in a childlike state and unable to do basic tasks such as use the bathroom.
Earlier this year, the Canadian government reached an out-of-court settlement with the daughter of Jean Steel, one of Cameron’s patients.
Jean was admitted at the Allan Memorial Institute in 1957, aged 33, after being diagnosed with “manic depression and delusional thinking”.
She was kept in chemically induced comas for weeks and was given a series of electroshocks.
Her daughter Alison, 65, from Quebec, said: “What they did to my mother was torture. They stole my mother from me. They used her as a human guinea pig. They stripped her of her emotions.”
Activist and author Naomi Klein said in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron had been a “spectacular failure”.
She wrote: “No matter how fully he regressed his patients, they never absorbed or accepted the endlessly repeated messages on his tapes. Though he was a genius at destroying people, he could not remake them.”
Klein also claimed Cameron’s treatments had been adapted by the CIA to interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, adding: “For many prisoners, the effects of these techniques have been much the same as they were at the Allan in the 50s – total regression.”