Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories The Mind-Bending MK Ultra Experiments of Dr Ewen Cameron About this episode When the Allan Memorial Institute opened its doors in 1943, its founders believed it would revolutionize mental health care. Under the direction of Dr. Ewen Cameron, however, the hospital started down a dark path – barbaric treatments, patients begging to go home, and a dark place nobody wanted to enter known as “The Sleep Room.” It would take decades for the world to learn about Cameron’s experiments – and the CIA’s part in them.
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Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 It’s 1959 in Montreal, Canada. Along a slope of Mount Royal, an imposing mansion, already nearly a century old, looms over the city. Its dark grey stone façade envelops over 50,000 square feet and reaches to the top of a 75-foot tower. Formerly a private home called “Ravens Craig,” it’s now the site of the Allen Memorial Institute, a beautiful but ominous psychiatric hospital. One of its grand doors creaks open, and a woman stumbles out. Normally, she’s well-dressed; everybody tells her she looks like a movie star, Elizabeth Taylor, to be exact.
0:50 Speaker 00 Only right now, the woman is disoriented and severely underdressed in an oversized hospital gown. Even as she trips over the hem, the slight woman manages to slip away from the isolated mansion. She’s making a run for it. Unable to follow a straight line, the woman claws her way farther up the mountain, doing whatever she can to just keep moving forward, whatever she can to escape this hospital and the debilitating treatments she’s been subjected to. But her body is too weak. Soon, she hears the nurses gaining on her.
1:29 Speaker 00 The next thing she knows, she’s back inside the Allen Memorial Institute, back under the care of its director, Dr. Ewan Cameron. At his direction, the woman is sedated and given electroshock therapy again and again, until she can no longer remember why she was even there in the first place. And she’s just one of the many patients unwittingly subjected to Dr. Cameron’s twisted brainwashing experiments, funded in part by the CIA. This is the story of Dr.
2:13 Speaker 00 Cameron and the Montreal Experiments, also known as Subproject 68 of NKUltra.
2:24 Speaker 00 Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. We'd love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts, or check us out on Instagram at the conspiracy pod. This episode includes discussions of drug use and torture. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us.
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4:53 Speaker 00 When the doors of the Allen Memorial Institute opened in Montreal in 1943, its founders envisioned it as a bastion of state-of-the-art psychiatric care. No longer will asylums be synonymous with prisons. No longer will patients live in squalor while doctors practice barbaric Stone Age treatments. Their facility will not be seen as some kind of dumping ground for family members who don't fall in line. At The Allen, patients will come and go as they please. Treatments will be in accordance with the latest scientific breakthroughs. This institute will lead with care and compassion.
5:38 Speaker 00 That's the hope, at least. And in many ways, The Allen achieves the goals of its founders, which includes the Rockefeller family. Less than a decade after the hospital is established, it is considered a world leader in mental health care. But that's because the world doesn't really know what's going on there. They don't know that in the 1950s and early 60s, disturbing experiments are being carried out at The Allen, often in secret. These treatments will ruin patients' lives for months, years, sometimes forever.
6:22 Speaker 00 So where does everything go wrong? Well, let me introduce you to the very first director of the Allen Memorial Institute, who will oversee its operations for more than 20 years. His name is Dr. Ewan Cameron. Born in Scotland, Cameron eventually settles in Montreal. That's where he's hired as a professor of psychiatry at McGill University. When the Rockefellers team up with McGill to open the Allen Memorial Institute, Cameron is selected as the man in charge. They must think, "Well, who better to run the place than the university's own pioneering expert in mental health?"
7:04 Speaker 00 Cameron has already studied all manner of mood and brain disorders, but his research focuses primarily on schizophrenia. At a time when the condition is greatly misunderstood and demonized, Cameron wants to find a cure. At face value, his ambitions do seem genuinely altruistic early in his career. But his methods are highly questionable. In one experiment, Dr. Cameron subjects patients to extreme temperatures, as high as 107 degrees Fahrenheit, for a whole hour. His conclusion?
7:46 Speaker 00 That people with schizophrenia respond to high heat the same as people who do not have schizophrenia. Not exactly groundbreaking. In a different trial, Cameron tests how dehydration affects epilepsy. His patients are given just 20 ounces of water to last an entire day. And Cameron finds that water intake does not reduce the number of seizures a person experiences. But it does cause a whole host of unrelated health problems. Acidosis, which messes with pH levels in the blood, severe weight loss. Once again, the results are pretty much what you'd expect. The ends don't justify the means.
8:29 Speaker 00 Especially when you take into account that one of his epileptic patients dies during this experiment. Oh, and by the way, this all happens before he's hired to run the Allen Memorial Institute. And before the United States CIA decides to give Dr. Cameron a bunch of money. There are different stories about how Cameron comes up with the experiments he'll carry out at the Allen in the 1950s and 60s. And they're probably all true to some degree. Here's one. In 1951, he reads a theory about brainwashing. According to influential British psychiatrist Dr. William Sargent,
9:13 Speaker 00 "The communists have supposedly unlocked the secret to manipulating the mind. The key, says Sargent, is to put the patients through intense stress. That's how you make someone more susceptible to persuasion." Which leads Dr. Cameron to an epiphany. He asks himself, when traditional therapy isn't enough, could the mind simply be wiped clean? He thinks maybe he could put his own patients through extreme stress and create a blank slate of sorts. And then he can rebuild the person from the ground up without the symptoms of mental illness. Uh, what? Okay, I'm sorry. Time out?
9:58 Speaker 00 How exactly does Dr. Cameron propose to wipe his patients' minds clean? What kind of extreme stress is he talking about? Well, that brings us to his next influence. Only, this one isn't found in a peer-reviewed journal. It's more likely that Cameron heard about this invention from a friend or even saw an ad for it, imploring him to fork over part of his paycheck. It's called the cerebraphone, and later, the dormophone. And it's meant to help its users learn new languages while they sleep. And the idea is pretty simple. A tiny record player tucked under your pillow at night
10:37 Speaker 00 repeats phrases over and over until they stick while you're unconscious. All you have to do is drift off to dreamland. And if the cerebraphone works, you wake up and voila! Suddenly, you know how to ask for directions to the nearest bathroom in French. Uh, je voudrais une, uh, uh... I guess I didn't sleep long enough to learn that part. The story goes that Cameron takes these two separate ideas, wiping the mind clean and playing tapes on a continuous loop, and he merges them into one unholy union. He calls his new technique psychic driving. Here's how it's supposed to work.
11:22 Speaker 00 For each of his patients, Cameron starts with traditional therapy sessions. That's when he assesses what he believes to be the root of their problems. Uh, side note, even though he specializes in researching schizophrenia, the majority of Cameron's patients at the Allen have more common diagnoses. Uh, most of them are women with anxiety or depression. Next, Cameron writes a script. It's a message directed at his patient that is intentionally negative. He calls out all of their fears, weaknesses, asocial behaviors, you name it. And then he records this message onto a tape.
12:06 Speaker 00 In fact, he usually makes the patient dictate the message. Or sometimes he asks one of their family members to drop by the allen and lend their voice. And then he takes the audio tape he's made and plays it for his patients on repeat. Here is an actual example of one of those messages. Gertrude, you don't get along with people. You have never gotten along with your mother. She made you do what she wanted, and you could never win out against her. You have always felt inadequate and have been jealous of other people who felt that they had it better than you. You are always trying to make other people do what you want.
12:50 Speaker 00 But even when you succeed, you don't feel good. You are forever trying to make your husband do what you want him to do because you think that he is not strong, and you try to turn the children against him. It's ruthless, hard enough to listen to one time through. And Cameron isn't just playing these messages a dozen times. He doesn't stop at a hundred or even a thousand. Dr. Cameron subjects his patients to these recordings on repeat for 10, 12, sometimes 20 hours per day for days on end. In one study, Cameron writes that participants spent 10 to 15 days listening to these tapes.
13:34 Speaker 00 That means his patients are hearing the same message played tens of thousands of times, back to back to back. And while he starts off by making the patients listen to their own voices, Cameron modifies the recordings too. The tapes-
13:51 Speaker 04 Are sped up- Slow down-
13:53 Speaker 00 Distorted- Given an echo- So a patient has to hear increasingly unsettling versions of the message too. It goes something like this.
14:06 Speaker 04 Gertrude, you don't get along with people.
14:09 Speaker 00 You have never got along with your mother. She made you do what she wanted, and you could never win out against her.
14:15 Speaker 04 You have always felt inadequate.
14:20 Speaker 00 I just, I can't even. That is crazy. In response to these tapes, the patients get, uh, angry, agitated, some feel like screaming, others say it's like hearing voices in your head. So how does he get them to stay in one place and keep listening? Usually, he drugs them or uses hypnosis. In one instance, a patient rips headphones off her head to make the messages stop. So Cameron has his assistant secure the headphones underneath a helmet, so she can't remove them again. Many patients beg Cameron to stop, like Val Orlico.
15:02 Speaker 00 She came to the Allen to treat her postpartum depression because she believed Cameron knew what he was doing. In fact, when she begins the unorthodox treatments, she idolizes him. And Cameron, in turn, doses her with LSD before subjecting her to his psychic driving tapes. She has no idea what LSD is, and he leaves this woman, this new mother, alone to navigate an acid trip while playing messages that insinuate she's done something wrong. You can't script a worse trip. Val likens her experience to the story of Alice in Wonderland.
15:46 Speaker 00 She takes some unknown substance, and then she feels like she shrinks down in size and falls into an impossibly deep hole. Only Val doesn't wind up in a fantasy world. She says it's more like descending into hell. Reportedly, Cameron does feel bad about what he's doing. At first, he realizes this all looks very, very wrong. He'll later say, quote, "One simply didn't do this sort of thing to people."
16:22 Speaker 00 But his reservations don't stop him from pressing onward. See, Cameron's theory about all this psychic driving stuff goes back to what he read about: brainwashing. He believes his treatments will induce so much stress that it will tear a person down. Or, as he puts it, "The existing personality set could be temporarily broken up." During the treatments, Cameron looks for signals, so he knows when this breaking up has supposedly been accomplished. When a patient grows distraught, when they begin to fight against hearing the tapes, he takes that as a positive sign, like he's moving in the right direction.
17:08 Speaker 00 Cameron believes this physical struggle is proof that a more desirable trait is pushing its way to the surface. He calls these "contra traits," positive characteristics that are lying dormant, waiting to replace the negative traits. It's an idea that doesn't seem to have any scientific basis. When Cameron thinks those contra traits are bubbling up, he stops playing the negative tapes, and he switches over to a new tape with a new message, a positive message. Here's another example. You can get along with people by now.
17:51 Speaker 00 You are not afraid of others, and you are very pleased to be with them. People like you, and your relationship with people is good.
18:02 Speaker 00 And who does Cameron tap to record the "nice" messages? Not his patients. For these, he lends his own voice. Cameron's experiments with psychic driving are already underway in the mid-1950s, when he catches the attention of an academic group. They call themselves the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
18:26 Speaker 00 And they want to offer Cameron funding to advance his studies. Now, if you're a longtime listener of this show, or you happen to know your CIA history already, that group's name might be setting off some alarms. Because the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology is a front. Through them, the CIA covertly channels money to fund subprojects for MKUltra. And Dr. Cameron's experiments are about to get a lot more twisted.
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20:07 Speaker 00 Before the name of Dr. Ewan Cameron crosses the lips of anybody at the CIA, the agency grows interested in one of his colleagues at McGill University. It's the early 1950s when Dr. Donald Hebb performs his experiments with sensory deprivation.
20:26 Speaker 00 First, Dr. Hebb recruits student volunteers. He offers them $20 a day, serious money for a college kid at this time, but the cash is hard-earned. Volunteers have to enter a plywood box where they lie down on a stiff hospital bed. Their eyes are covered with goggles to obscure their vision, and once the box is shut around them, the only noise they can hear is a muted buzz. It's basically a cubicle from hell, which is somewhat intentional. Dr. Hebb is studying the effects of cutting out sensory inputs.
21:07 Speaker 00 No sight, sound, or touch, all day, except for food and bathroom breaks. What he learns is that about three days in, participants start to report hallucinations. Thankfully, his experiment is completely voluntary, and the college students can tap out at any time, which they usually do as soon as the hallucinations begin. Nobody lasts more than six days. Actually, that's incredible to me. I can't believe somebody stayed in there six days. Whoa. Initially, the agency is interested in funding Dr. Hebb as part of NKUltra. But looking into his work leads them to someone else,
21:52 Speaker 00 Dr. Cameron, who is clearly more open to pushing the envelope. Cameron has also been keeping tabs on what his colleague has been up to, and apparently, he thinks it's a good start, but it could be taken even further. Cameron starts moving some of his patients into darkened rooms at the Allen. He uses earplugs and blindfolds to impair their senses and keeps them confined for much longer than six days. Cameron's sensory deprivation treatments can last over a month. Sometimes, he combines his treatments.
22:34 Speaker 00 He pairs sensory deprivation with his psychic-driving messages on loop. That way, his patients have almost no sensory input other than their own distorted voices.
22:50 Speaker 00 At this time, John Gittenger is the head psychologist over at the CIA. When they launch MKUltra, their illegal program to research mind control techniques, Gittenger oversees some of the subprojects. He sends an undercover agent to speak with Cameron to convince him to apply for funds through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the CIA's front for funding external MKUltra experiments. And what researcher is going to say no to funding, especially to someone with a genuine interest in your work and who won't be interfering?
23:31 Speaker 00 Cameron sends in his application right away, and that's how his experiments at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal in Canada become known as MKUltra's Subproject 68, one of the largest in the entire program. Now, it's very possible that Cameron doesn't know who's really behind the money. Many researchers who run these subprojects never find out they've played a role in MKUltra, or they only learn the truth years later, along with the rest of the world. And by the time it's widely known, Dr. Cameron will be dead. Nevertheless, in 1957, Cameron signs a contract with the Society.
24:16 Speaker 00 In exchange for funding, he proposes to continue his work on psychic driving, along with yet another unconventional treatment, something that makes Dr. Hebb's sensory deprivation studies look like child's play, something that Cameron refers to as "depatterning." There's a place in the Allen Memorial Institute that strikes fear in the heart of every patient. If you must walk by this particular spot, it's common practice to slide past with your back against the opposite wall. Well, that's the best way to keep as much distance as possible between you and those doors. Beyond them is the sleep room.
25:03 Speaker 00 This is where the depatterning takes place. And the sleep room got its name because here, patients are kept drugged and unconscious. Basically, they're in an induced coma. And they're forced to stay this way for extended periods of time. Uh, we're talking 21 to 22 hours per day. Waking briefly every few hours, so the patient can eat, use the bathroom, take more drugs, and so they can receive another type of treatment. Electroshock therapy, now known as electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. Modern-day ECT is performed using anesthesia.
25:47 Speaker 00 Electrodes affixed to the skin transmit a low dosage of electricity to a patient's brain. But, as with Dr. Cameron's other treatments, he practices a more severe form of ECT. He uses a special technique called Page-Russell. Instead of administering one shock at a time, Cameron shocks his patients multiple times, back to back, using a higher voltage. Even the doctors who pioneered this method would only use it once per day. Cameron's patients receive Page-Russell ECT twice, or even three times, daily.
26:30 Speaker 00 Then, they're put back to sleep. Often, Cameron combines depatterning with psychic driving. While a person is asleep, he plays those negative messages for them on repeat. And sometimes, this particular treatment can last up to two months straight. Cameron's goal with depatterning is to essentially give his patients amnesia. He wants them to forget their past, who they are, why they're even at the Allen. In fact, he writes that he wants his patients to lose, quote, "all recollection of the fact that he formerly possessed a spacetime image."
27:18 Speaker 00 In many cases, Cameron is successful. Too successful. Yes, his patients appear to lose their unwanted symptoms, but only because now they can barely think at all. They can't dress themselves, feed themselves. According to one of his patients, people in "the sleep room" act like babies. After someone comes out of the sleep room, it can take months or even years to regain normal functions and memories. Families report that their loved ones come out of the Allen forever changed. Dr. Harvey M. Weinstein, who, yes, happens to have an unfortunate name, no relation,
28:01 Speaker 00 is now a psychiatrist and a human rights scholar. But before all of his impressive work, Harvey is just a kid whose father is sent to the Allen as a patient of Dr. Cameron's. When his father finally comes home, he spends most of his time on the couch, sleeping. He can barely talk anymore. Harvey's dad, as he knew him, is gone. Looking back as an adult and a mental health professional, Harvey concedes that there may have been a part of Dr. Cameron that truly wanted to cure people. But the fact is, Cameron is carrying out experimental treatments without his patients' consent. I mean, he kind of sounds like a quintessential mad scientist.
28:46 Speaker 00 But get this. There's something about Dr. Cameron's credentials that I haven't mentioned yet. You already know that he's got this lofty position at one of the most prestigious psychiatric hospitals in the world. Well, from 1952 to 1953, while working at the Allen, he also serves as President of the American Psychiatric Association.
29:10 Speaker 00 That's not all. He also becomes president of the Quebec Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. This guy isn't exactly flying under the radar. Now, that's not to say that the people giving him these titles know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors at the Allen. But Cameron does publish papers on some of his work there. There's one from April 1958 titled, "Effect of Repeated Verbal Stimulation Upon a Flexor Extensor Relationship." When he writes verbal stimulation, he's referring to psychic driving. Playing those tapes on repeat.
29:54 Speaker 00 Well, in this paper, Cameron studies four women who are already patients of his, who are already receiving a combination of ECT and psychic driving treatments. And he decides, "Huh, well, let's spend half the day on their normal tapes and half the day on new tapes." These new tapes play the following message. Your right arm is straightening out. Your right arm feels as if you are reaching out for something. Your right arm feels stiff at the elbow, as it does when you are stretching. For six hours a day, his patients listen to this tape
30:37 Speaker 00 while electrodes measure the movement in their biceps and triceps. He's testing whether the repeated message can induce a physical response, whether he can make his patients move their arms, almost like puppets. He concludes that three out of the four patients did show slight movement in both the biceps and triceps after listening to the tapes. In another setting, under the right circumstances, this kind of experiment wouldn't seem so malevolent. But Cameron is being funded indirectly by MKUltra, a program attempting to harness the powers of brainwashing and mind control.
31:21 Speaker 00 Nah, why would they be interested in creating human puppets? We can only guess, but it probably isn't for benevolent reasons. Not to mention, MKUltra notoriously did not always get its subjects' consent before going through with experiments. Anecdotally, Dr. Cameron didn't either. His patients wanted to be cured, but they had no idea what type of treatments they'd be forced to endure. Informed consent has been codified since 1947 as a result of the Nuremberg Trials. That's when an international court tried Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of World War II.
32:05 Speaker 00 A panel of judges then worked together to create the Nuremberg Code, a set of 10 guiding principles meant to ensure we wouldn't repeat the illegal and unethical medical studies carried out by the Nazis. That code would be broken time and again, as any listener of this show is aware, but that fact is especially surprising coming from Dr. you and Cameron. After all, he was called upon as an expert psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Trials. Yeah, he was one of 10 doctors from around the world asked to evaluate Rudolf Hess.
32:48 Speaker 00 Hess had been one of Hitler's aides and served as the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, but when he got to Nuremberg, he claimed he had amnesia. Dr. Cameron examined Hess and found him mentally fit to stand trial. So, you might think Cameron, of all people, should be deeply familiar with the Nuremberg Code, that he would understand ethical experimentation requires a patient's full consent, and if they're not capable of giving that consent, their families should be consulted.
33:26 Speaker 00 But it doesn't sound like that's what happens here. In 1964, Cameron abruptly leaves his post at the Allen Memorial Institute. Nobody knows why. Now, that same year, NKUltra comes to an end. By then, the CIA has paid Cameron over $60,000 US to run his experimental procedures on unwitting patients. And then, just three years later, at the age of 65, Cameron is on a mountain-climbing trip when he has a heart attack. He doesn't make it. So he's no longer around to see what happens next.
34:05 Speaker 00 In December 1974, reporter Seymour Hersh releases an article in The New York Times unveiling some of the CIA's illegal domestic operations. That leads to congressional hearings and to the public unmasking of NKUltra. But it would take a little longer for Dr. Cameron's work in Montreal to be connected to all of this. In the summer of 1977, a Canadian man named David Orliko is reading the paper. That's how he learns the United States CIA was funding mind-control research in Montreal
34:44 Speaker 00 at the Allen, where his wife, Val, went for postpartum treatment and was never the same. And now, David and Val realize it's because she was used as a human guinea pig without her knowledge. Val isn't Cameron's only former patient who has suffered. Remember the woman I mentioned at the beginning of the episode? The one who tried to escape the Allen? She speaks about her experiences with reporter John Marks under the condition of anonymity. We know her only as Lauren G. Over the years, more and more patients come out of the woodwork.
35:26 Speaker 00 But as for Val Orliko, she has something the others don't. A spouse who's a member of the Canadian Parliament. So when the Orlikos learn the truth, Val turns to David and tells him she wants to sue the CIA.
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36:47 Speaker 00 Before Val Orlicoe was admitted to the Allen Memorial Institute, she was a book lover. She also loved to pen long letters to her friends and family. Then, at the Allen, she was subjected to hours and hours of Dr. Ewan Cameron's psychic driving tapes. For days on end. "The Nightmare," as she calls it, almost made her lose her grip on reality. She had begged them to stop, told them it was killing her, and they hadn't listened. In the years that passed, Val reckons with the fact that she can no longer concentrate enough to read books or write letters. Her favorite hobbies just aren't in the cards anymore.
37:31 Speaker 00 She and her entire family can see she is no longer the same. What happened to her under Dr. Cameron's care changed her.
37:41 Speaker 00 All this time, Val has clung to the belief that at least Dr. Cameron wanted her to get better. Well, maybe it didn't work out perfectly, but he had tried. So when she realizes all of those experiments had been funded as part of MKUltra, the tapes, the electroshock, the sleep room, she feels as though Cameron saw her as nothing more than a fly. Now, she's mad as hell, and she wants her parliamentarian husband, David, to sue the CIA's pants off. David is game, but at first, he can't help but think it's futile.
38:23 Speaker 00 How are they going to sue another government's agency and win? But then they get in touch with Joseph Rao, a famed civil rights attorney in the US. He's willing to go up against the CIA and thinks he knows how they can pull this off. First, though, he and his team reach out to some of Cameron's other former patients. Eventually, they gather eight more plaintiffs, including Dr. Harvey Weinstein, who we mentioned earlier, and they file suit at the end of 1980. Rao hopes to establish negligence. He believes they might have a shot if they can prove the CIA knew those MKUltra experiments
39:05 Speaker 00 were dangerous and funded them anyway without any real oversight. As part of the lawsuit, Rao and his junior attorney, Jim Turner, depose several key figures from MKUltra. That includes Sidney Gottlieb, the so-called poisoner-in-chief, John Gittinger, the original program officer for Subproject 68, Dr. Cameron's work, and Robert Lashbrook, who okayed the funding.
39:37 Speaker 00 At one point, Rao presses them on the death of Frank Olson. We've covered the man who knew too much on this show before. Olson was a biochemist doing top-secret military research when he was dosed with LSD during a CIA meeting. He later fell to his death from a hotel window. Officially, he jumped, but his family and many others have never bought that story. However Olson died, Joseph Rao wants to prove that the CIA should have learned their lesson. They should know by now that LSD can be harmful if misused, and yet they funded Dr.
40:18 Speaker 00 Cameron's work anyway, even though he force-fed his patients LSD in order to induce stress. Not only that, but Gottlieb and Lashbrook had personally been tangled up in the Frank Olson affair, and they still involved themselves in funding Subproject 68. Rao's team, already off to a good start, finds two more smoking guns, or what they hope will be smoking guns. One is a speech delivered by Dr. Cameron wherein he calls his own experiments "brainwashing." The second occurs when Rao catches them in a lie. The CIA has been trying to claim that it was Cameron who sought them out, not the other
41:03 Speaker 00 way around. But Gettinger reveals, "Nope, they went to Cameron and suggested he apply for funding." The case seems to be going well, but this is the CIA we're talking about, and they seemingly used every motion in the book to try to delay the lawsuit, so Rao decides he needs to lay on the pressure. He goes to the Canadian government, who so far have been open and helpful. He's hoping they can assert their diplomatic powers to move things along.
41:36 Speaker 00 That's when the case hits a snag. Around this time, another journalist reveals that Dr. Cameron had another benefactor Rao and his clients didn't know about. This other source of funding actually paid out even more than the CIA did. It was the Canadian government. The news is a devastating blow to the families involved. It's almost like they expected it of the CIA. But their own government? To make matters worse, Canada is no longer helping Rao with the lawsuit. The CIA threatens to bring up their involvement in court. Canada doesn't want to be sued, too.
42:21 Speaker 00 It's a huge mess. In the end, the lawsuit takes eight long years. It may have dragged out even longer had a new CIA director not stepped in and forced a settlement. The agency agrees to a payout of about $70,000 US per person. Later, the Canadian government also pays a settlement to 77 people, though they do not admit fault. After Cameron left the Allen Memorial Institute, things changed. His successor actually ordered an impartial review to be carried out on Cameron's experiments. That team concluded that Cameron's methods were no more effective than any other treatments.
43:06 Speaker 00 And because some of his patients had ongoing problems with memory, even a decade later, Cameron's methods, they say, should never be used again. It turns out, Dr. Cameron himself might have even agreed, were he still around. He eventually admitted that his treatments never worked. During a keynote speech in 1963, he said that none of the shock treatments, or psychic driving, or induced comas, none of it rid his patients of their unwanted symptoms for good. I should also point out that his work did not prove successful at brainwashing or mind control either.
43:50 Speaker 00 I mean, other than making three women's arm muscles a little twitchy. Officially, MKUltra never finds any effective way to control people's minds. But that doesn't mean Dr. Cameron's work isn't useful to the CIA. People will tell you there's some disturbing overlap in the techniques Cameron used on his patients and the techniques used by various governments in torture. In 1963, six years after Cameron signed his contract to accept federal funding, the CIA and the US Army distribute a training manual.
44:30 Speaker 00 It's titled "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation," Kubark being a CIA code name for itself. The document is a top-secret guide to extracting information from "resistant sources." The introduction calls it "an aid for interrogators and others immediately concerned," and claims it is based largely upon published results of extensive research, including scientific inquiries conducted by specialists in closely related subjects. And it suggests using methods such as sensory deprivation.
45:10 Speaker 00 It even mentions experiments performed at McGill University, ostensibly by Dr. Cameron. I do want to point out that the Kubark manual says the conditions of his experiments were so different that they may not apply to interrogations, but not everyone is so sure about that. Over the next few years, techniques similar to Cameron's are allegedly used to torture people in Argentina, in Chile, and in Northern Ireland in 1971. During the Troubles, the British Army carries out Operation Demetrius to target those suspected of being in the Irish Republican Army, the IRA.
45:54 Speaker 00 Over 340 people are pulled from their homes, rounded up and interred. 14 men are then transferred to a secret location where they are tortured.
46:07 Speaker 00 Their torment includes forms of sensory deprivation like being forced to wear hoods. Hence, they are now known as the hooded men. All fourteen of them are eventually released without ever being convicted of a crime, and many of them suffer for years afterward. When their story comes out, people can't help but notice the sensory deprivation methods sound familiar. They're like a sickening echo of Dr. Cameron's work in Montreal. Whether he'd anticipated it or not, some say Cameron laid the blueprint for torture.
46:49 Speaker 00 So, why did you and Cameron do this in the first place? If he got to the point where he was willing to admit to his peers that his treatments didn't work, why keep doing them? Why inflict unnecessary pain, both immediate and lasting, on the very people he was supposed to be helping? Well, there is one theory to explain his motive. The doctor may have been highly decorated. He may have headed up every major psychiatric organization at one point or another, but there was one more honor he wanted: a Nobel Prize.
47:32 Speaker 00 It turns out that not all of Cameron's colleagues thought so highly of him. Dr. Donald Hebb, whose work in sensory deprivation unintentionally inspired Cameron, said Cameron only got all of his credentials due to office politics. Hebb goes so far as to say Cameron wasn't even a good researcher. I mean, honestly, the paper he published where he tried to mind-control four women into moving their arm muscles is suspect, and not just because of what he's doing or who's funding him. Four participants is an incredibly small sample size. Even if he had gotten amazing results, that study would have been scrutinized.
48:16 Speaker 00 Its conclusions wouldn't stand on their own merit without a much larger follow-up study. So why even put his patients through the agony? Some say the torment he inflicted still reverberates through the halls of the old Allen Memorial Institute. Though the building was repurposed, it is still in use by McGill University, and it's reportedly one of the most haunted places in Quebec. There are even claims of unmarked graves on site. And the university outright denies those claims. Officially, there are no more skeletons, real or metaphorical, to be found. The truth
48:59 Speaker 00 of what Dr. Cameron did, subsidized by MKUltra, is out in the open now. And that truth is more terrifying than the thought of any poor, lost soul who might still be wandering the halls of the Allen. In the end, Cameron never got his Nobel Prize, but he did achieve the fame he was after at the cost of human dignity in destroying dozens of lives.
49:35 Speaker 00 Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today's episode include Project Mind Control by John Lyle, CBC's podcast series Brainwashed, and Eminent Monsters for the BBC. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always
50:13 Speaker 00 the truth. This episode was written and researched by Mickey Taylor, edited by Justin Sales, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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