Speaker 1: Okay, so imagine this the ultimate Cold War well fantasy. Right,
we're talking about the perfect assassin.
Speaker 2: But not just any assassin, not someone you can just
buy off.
Speaker 1: Or threatning exactly, not someone you blackmail or you know,
coerce into submission. This is something much more frightening. A
blank slate, a completely blank slate, a person who's loyalties,
their memories, their entire identity clean, systematically wipe, clink gone. Yeah,
what's left is just this empty vessel, ready to be
programmed with a new mission, a new past, whatever their
handler needs.
Speaker 2: It's pure spy fiction. It's the premise of the Manurian candidate,
really a controllable agent who is high functioning, lethal, and
at the end of the day, completely disposable.
Speaker 1: It sounds like fiction, it does.
Speaker 2: But for Western intelligence in the early nineteen fifties, especially
the CIA, this wasn't a movie plot. This was a
desperately sought, heavily funded, and highly secret operational objective.
Speaker 1: And that, for you, is exactly where we jump into
our deep dive. Today. We are unpacking the chilling reality
behind that fantasy. We're focusing specifically on M Culture Subprojects
sixty eight.
Speaker 2: Right, These were the CIA funded mind control experiments that unfolded.
And this is the shocking part for many people at
the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada, in.
Speaker 1: Canada, not some secret black site, a respected.
Speaker 2: Hospital, a very respected hospital. And this ran from nineteen
fifty three all the way to nineteen sixty three under
the direction of an internationally acclaimed psychiatrist, doctor Ewan Cameron.
Speaker 1: What stands out immediately, and I think it's something you
have to hold on to throughout this entire story, is
the profound, just the disturbing disconnect. Yes, on one hand,
you have the intelligence objective, which we can read in
the actual d classified CIA files. They wanted a sharp,
functional asset, a weapon of precision.
Speaker 2: Someone who could carry out complex tasks, who could blend
in exactly.
Speaker 1: But the reality of Cameron's experimental process it produced functional humans, that's.
Speaker 2: The only way to describe it. Emotionally crippled, permanently disabled
subjects who were suffering from catastrophic, irreversible memory loss. They
weren't sophisticated assassins. They were they were broken people.
Speaker 1: So for this deep dive, we've stacked up some incredibly
dense and frankly disturbing material to make sure we cover
every painful angle. We're drawing heavily on legal documents, heartbreaking
patient accounts, especially.
Speaker 2: Those detailed in Ann Collins's pivotal book In the Sleep Room.
It's essential reading on this absolutely.
Speaker 1: We've also got the declassified CIA files that outline the
explicit goals of m cultural Subprojects sixty eight, and some
really rigorous historical and legal analyses like those. You find
an anatomy of atrocity.
Speaker 2: And our mission here is not just to recount the facts,
not just to list what happened. It's to uncover the specific,
granular details of how scientific ambition and desperation.
Speaker 1: Amplified by this overwhelming geopolitical fear.
Speaker 2: Right how all of that led to the utter violation
of one of the most fundamental medical ethics.
Speaker 1: Known to humanity, Premium non nosair.
Speaker 2: First of all, do no harm, a rule that doctor
Cameron just cast aside in his pursuit of what he
publicly called the holy grail of twentieth century psychiatry, a
somatic cure.
Speaker 1: It's a terrifying study in how easily institutional claim and
a greater good narrative can mask the most horrific abuse. Okay,
So let's unpack that initial environment, the atmosphere that really
provided the oxygen for this kind of horror to take
root in an institution.
Speaker 2: You have to set the stage for the early nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're talking about a period defined by intense global paranoia.
The West, and particularly the US intelligence community, was genuinely
panicked about what the Communist block was supposedly doing with psychology.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that geopolitical tension had really metastasized into what was
perceived as a mind control gap, a psychological arms.
Speaker 1: Rate, the mind control gap. I like that phrasing.
Speaker 2: Western intelligence was haunted by Cold War losses, shifts in
global loyalty, and they became deeply, deeply alarmed by the
apparent brainwashing successes they were attributing to the Soviets and
the Chinese. They saw it as this secret psychological super weapon.
Speaker 1: And they had specific examples that were fueling this panic. Right,
It wasn't just a vague fear, No, it was very specific.
Speaker 2: They were looking at these highly public, very dramatic show
trials in Hungary. The case of the Catholic leader Joseph
Cardinal men Senti is a famous one. He appeared on trial,
completely defeated, almost zombie like during his confession.
Speaker 1: To people in the West, that just didn't look like
a normal confession. It looked coerced in some new, terrifying
way exactly.
Speaker 2: That public display was deeply unsettling. But the panic it
really crystallized around the u US prisoners of war from
the Korean War. When a number of these American soldiers
collaborated or confens to war crimes, or just seemed to
adopt Communist ideology. The intelligence community couldn't reconcile this. It
didn't fit with traditional methods of coercion or torture.
Speaker 1: So they jump to a conclusion.
Speaker 2: They concluded that the Communist must have some kind of secret,
sophisticated scientific technique, a literal brainwashing mechanism that could control
minds and just flip loyalties on a switch.
Speaker 1: So the pressure to develop a counter weapon or even
their own version of this weapon became incredibly intense. It
wasn't just about catching up anymore.
Speaker 2: No, it was seen as vital for national security, a
defense against this invisible psychological threat.
Speaker 1: What's fascinating here and just chilling in retrospect, is how
the Western response mirrored the high stakes, technologically driven effort
of World War Two.
Speaker 2: You mean the Manhattan Project exactly.
Speaker 1: There was this firm, almost desperate belief that the solution
to this supposed psychological threat lay in American technology and
scientific shortcuts.
Speaker 2: A quick fix, a technological silver bullet.
Speaker 1: They wanted a psychological Manhattan Project, an instant erase button
for something as complex as human psychology. And political loyalty
is what led directly to the formation of in culture, and.
Speaker 2: In that atmosphere, that desperate quest for a technological fix
entered doctor Ewan Cameron.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and when you read his history before all this,
before nineteen fifty three, he seems like a legitimate giant
in his field, it makes his later actions almost impossible
to reconcile.
Speaker 2: His reputation was initially impeccable. He was born in Scotland
in nineteen oh one, died in nineteen sixty seven, immigrated
to North America and achieved you know, international acclaim. He
wasn't some fringe scientist working.
Speaker 1: Out of a shed, No, he was the establishment.
Speaker 2: He was foundational in the reform of psychiatric hospitals. He
championed the open door system, trying to move away from
these archaic lockdown institutions, and notably he established the world's
very first psychiatric day hospital in Montreal back in nineteen
forty six, a.
Speaker 1: True pioneer by all appear.
Speaker 2: Usual establishment figure, and to underscore his influence, in nineteen
sixty one, right in the middle of these dark experiments,
he becomes the founding president of the World Psychiatric Association
the WPA.
Speaker 1: That context is just it's vital because it highlights this
terrifying discrepancy it does.
Speaker 2: Here you have a man of immense professional standing pursuing
what he calls the holy grail, the somatic cure. But
his ambition completely overrode the most basic ethical imperative that
governed his entire profession.
Speaker 1: His research, the psychic driving and deep patterning. It was
all presented as this radical, aggressive form of psychiatric treatment.
It was meant to cure severe mental illness by completely
rebuilding the personality.
Speaker 2: But that pursuit, that desperate need to achieve the cure
needed vast, uninterrupted funding. And that's where this clandestine political
network comes in and enables the most unethical practices you
can imagine.
Speaker 1: So let's detail that funding structure, because it's a brilliant
case study in institutional denial and covert operations.
Speaker 2: Well, Cameron was working at the Allen Memorial Institute, which
again had significant public and institutional trust, and his work
was supported by substantial public funds from the Canadian government.
Speaker 1: How substantial will be talking here.
Speaker 2: Sources indicate grants estimated at up to half a million dollars,
and this is between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1: Five, which was a lot of money back then.
Speaker 2: A huge amount. But it's important to note that later
inquiry suggested that Canadian officials, while funding the institution were
reportedly not aware of the full unethical scope of what
was happening with their money.
Speaker 1: Plausible deniability or perhaps just willful.
Speaker 2: Ignorance could be either, but that plausible deniability was key.
Speaker 1: But the really toxic money stream, the one tied directly
to this blank slate assassin objective that came covertly from
the United States.
Speaker 2: Yes, this was the CIA's m Culture program. Specifically, they
were funneling money into what was designated Subprojects sixty eight.
Speaker 1: And they didn't just write them a check from Langley.
Speaker 2: Oh No, it was far more sophisticated. This CIA funding
was routed through a specially created front organization. It was
called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and
that started in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 1: So this whole elaborate system was an arbitrary It was
designed for one.
Speaker 2: Thing, maximum deniability for everyone, which raises the big question.
Speaker 1: Did doctor Cameron, the revered president of the World Psychiatric Association,
know he was being funded by the American spy agency.
Speaker 2: The sources they indicate he may not have known the
ultimate CIA source. The agency used these conduitsies front groups
specifically to create layers of separations.
Speaker 1: So if anything went wrong.
Speaker 2: If anything went wrong, the reputation of the outside researchers,
people like Cameron, would be the ones in jeopardy. The agency, meanwhile,
could maintain secrecy and legal distance.
Speaker 1: But whether he knew the final source or not, it's
almost secondary, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is the fact is that these funds facilitated a
decade of radical human experimentation rooted in the geopolitical fear
that had gripped the intelligence community. The money enabled the work,
and the work was directly aligned with the CIA's most
bizarre and desperate Cold War one.
Speaker 1: The idea that a world renowned doctor was being used
knowingly or not to achieve a spy agency's dark objectives.
That he was essentially a black ops research tool.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful statement on how state security interests can
corrupt even the highest echelons of science.
Speaker 1: And the CIA didn't want someone on the fringe. They
needed that cover of medical legitimacy exactly.
Speaker 2: They needed the rigorous institutional support that Cameron, as head
of a major institute provided. The institution itself lent credibility
to the outrageous and that allowed the most extreme experiments
to proceed under the guise of therapeutic research.
Speaker 1: Now here's where it stops being an abstract Cold War
story and becomes a horrifying violation of human rights. The
central methodology that Cameron developed it was a two part
process he called depatterning and psychic driving.
Speaker 2: Yes, and we need to spend some serious time detailing
what these terms actually meant for the human beings on
the receiving end.
Speaker 1: So let's start with depatterning.
Speaker 2: Depatterning was the annihilation phase. It was a brutal, radical
assault designed quite literally to wipe the subject's mind completely.
Speaker 1: Clean to achieve that tabula rossa.
Speaker 2: The blank slate, exactly the thing the CIA was asking for.
And then psychic driving was the attempted reconstruction, the phase
where new desirable behaviors or even entirely new personalities were
supposed to be implanted through just NonStop repetition.
Speaker 1: And crucially, this extreme regimen wasn't applied to captured spies
or political prisoners.
Speaker 2: No, and this is one of the most disturbing parts.
It was often applied to patients who had been admitted
for easily treatable issues, people seeking help for postpartum depression, anxiety,
general neurotic complaints. They came in seeking care and they
received an assault.
Speaker 1: And the assault is the right word. Let's break down
what that assault consisted of.
Speaker 2: It was comprehensive and sustain over long periods. First, patients
were subjected to chemically induced sleep. This quickly became known
by the staff simply as the sleep room.
Speaker 1: And what did that mean? The sleep room?
Speaker 2: It meant they were kept in a chemically induced coma
for weeks at a time, administered these powerful cocktails of
sedative drugs.
Speaker 1: Weeks we had to let that sink in. Not days
of rest, but staggering durations of chemical subjugation often combined
with sensory.
Speaker 2: Isolation, and we have specific documented cases that illustrate just
how extreme this was. Take Gene Steel, one of the
primary victims whose family fought for justice for years. She
was put under for a breath taking twenty nine days
and one series of treatments eight nine days, and that
was followed by an eighteen day stretch in a second series.
That's nearly seven weeks spent NonStop in a chemical twilight.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: And this relentless drug induced coma. It wasn't the only component.
It was often combined with massive electro shocks rounds of
electro convulsive therapy or ECT that went far, far beyond
any standard therapeutic levels.
Speaker 1: We should pause and explain what massive really means here.
I think most people think of ECT as a last
resort treatment for severe depression control old shocks. How is
Cameron's approached.
Speaker 2: Different Well, at the time, a standard course of ECT
for severe depression might involve say, six to twelve sessions
over a few weeks. Cameron's regime was exponentially more aggressive.
How So, it was administered alongside the drug induced comas,
often multiple times a day. The purpose was crystal clear
to induce amnesia and cognitive breakdown. The intensity and frequency
were designed for destruction, not remediation. He was using ect
as a blunt weapon to shatter the personality. It was
guaranteed to cause brain damage.
Speaker 1: So you have the comas the mass of electricity. And
then there was the experimental drug cocktail.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this included massive doses of LSD twenty five.
We know the CIA in general was fascinated by LSD
as a potential mind control tool or a truth serum.
Cameron was using it aggressively to break down the patient's
existing psychological barriers.
Speaker 1: The victim accounts here must be just horrific.
Speaker 2: They're crucial to understanding the terror of it. Consider Velma
or Leco, another victim who received LSD injections on fourteen
separate occasions. She gave testimony detailing the harrowing physical and
psychological sensation.
Speaker 1: What did she describe?
Speaker 2: She described feeling like her bones were melting during the trip. Later,
when reflecting on the disorientation and the terror of the
combined treatments, she said she felt like a squirrel trapped
in a cage. This wasn't medical intervention. It was prolonged
chemical torture aimed at total disorientation.
Speaker 1: So once the patient was utterly depatterned or you know,
as the outcome, really proved functionally disabled and suffered from
massive amnesia, then Cameron moved to the next phase.
Speaker 2: The attempted reprogramming phase, psychic driving.
Speaker 1: What did that entail?
Speaker 2: Psychic driving was dependent entirely on relentless, NonStop repetition of
verbal signals. Cameron believed that by recording these highly negative
self referential messages that echoed the patient's perceived failings and
then playing them constantly, he could clear the mental slate
for the positive programming that was supposed to come later.
Speaker 1: Can you give us a sense of what on these tapes?
The content of these messages, because they weren't just neutral phrases.
Speaker 2: No, they were deeply personally invasive and destructive. Our sources,
like the Search for the Manchurian candidate, recount the specifics.
Think about a patient, one patient who was forced to
listen to tapes saying things like you let your mother
and father treat you as a child. You don't seem
to be able to manage your children, You have not
been able to keep your husband interested sexually.
Speaker 1: My god, it's hard to even imagine being subjected to
a non stop recording reinforcing your deepest insecurities and personal failures.
Speaker 2: And the mechanism for delivering this was just as intrusive.
The tapes were played non stop through speakers that were
mounted in football helmets worn by the patients. Football helmets, yes,
to guarantee the messages were heard even when they were
barely conscious. The intensity was overwhelming, and.
Speaker 1: When patients resisted, because of course, the human mind is
going to resist that kind of annihilation. What was Cameron's
clinical response?
Speaker 2: This is where his disregard for ethics becomes just so pronounced.
The sources note that when patients naturally resisted this relentless
negative input, you know, by banging their heads against the
walls in distress.
Speaker 1: Which seems like a totally sane reaction to an insane.
Speaker 2: Situation completely, But Cameron's solution wasn't to stop the torment.
He adapted the process. He put them back into a
drug induced coma or a chemically induced sleep, guaranteeing the
continuous repetition was maintained. He made sure the brain had
absolutely no respite from the negative indoctrination. He literally medically
enforced the violation of their minds, and.
Speaker 1: They sometimes added physical pain into the mix to try
and make the psychological trauma stick.
Speaker 2: They did sources recount treatments where wires were used to
administer shocks to the patient's legs at the very end
of a negative.
Speaker 1: Message Pavlovian conditioning.
Speaker 2: Presumably yes, using pain to reinforce that negative association. So
this combination chemical subjugation, physical assault via ect, psychological torture
via relentless negative loops, and sometimes physical pain reinforcement, it
shows a complete system designed for coercive control, not therapeutic recovery.
Speaker 1: And the scale of this we aren't talking about one
or two isolated.
Speaker 2: Incidents, Oh No, this was a sustained institutional effort. The
treatment spanned a full decade from nineteen fifty three to
nineteen sixty three, and the numbers are damning. Fifty three
patients received what he called complete amnesia depatterning in just
the years nineteen fifty eight and nineteen fifty nine alone.
This was a continuous, large scale violation of medical effics
carried out in a revered institution under the umbrella of
Canadian public funding and CIA black ops money.
Speaker 1: So we've detailed this horrific process. Now let's pivot to
the ultimate goal of the people who were signing the checks,
the CIA. We need to analyze the precise strategic objective
of sub Projects sixty eight. Okay, they weren't just funding
a general psychiatric study. They were looking for a blank
slate that could be operationally useful.
Speaker 2: That's the absolutely key distinction. And the CIA documents they
reveal a mandate for precision that stands in stark chilling
contrast to Cameron's crude brute force methodology. The primary hypothesis was,
as we said, erasing the existing personality to create hyper
suggestibility the tabulaaroscigal. But the documents go deeper than.
Speaker 1: That, and the operative word for the CIA was functional.
They were not interested in human.
Speaker 2: Wreckage precisely, they were explicitly searching for chemical agents and
methodologies that would and I'm courting directly from the declassified
objectives for Subprojects sixty eight break down the ongoing patterns
of behavior more rapidly, more transitorially, with less damage to
the perceptive and cognitive capacities of the individual than the
present physiological agents Wow.
Speaker 1: That specific phrase less damage to the perceptive and cognitive capacities.
That really hammers home the chilling precision they were after.
Speaker 2: It does. A sophisticated spy or an assassin needs their
brain to function perfectly. They need judgment, coordination, the ability
to process complex information even if their foundational identity and
loyalty have been completely overwridden.
Speaker 1: Cameron's depatterning, which relied on massive trauma, was just too
blunt of an instrument for this specific intelligence need.
Speaker 2: It creates a paradox, doesn't it. They needed the memories gone,
but the operating system had to stay intact. Cameron's method
achieved the first part, but it catastrophically destroyed the second.
Speaker 1: And the CIA wasn't just observing this process from afar.
They were actively directing the research by dictating which chemical
tool should be explored to try and perfect this process.
Speaker 2: That's right. The CIA mandated the exploration of specific chemical
agents intended to quote inactivate the patient during the period
of driving while simultaneously maintaining the subject at a higher
level of activity than standard deep sedation would allow.
Speaker 1: So they wanted a kind of waking receptive state during
the psychic driving not just a.
Speaker 2: Coma, exactly a twilight state of maximum suggestibility.
Speaker 1: And the specific chemicals they listed our tane, anectine, bulbocapanine, qurr,
and of course LSD twenty five, what was the ractionale
behind this this cocktail of compounds.
Speaker 2: Each chemical had a distinct and terrifying role in the
control strategy. LSD twenty five, as we know, was for
inducing severe disorientation and weakening psychological defenses, but the others
were for physical and psychological control during that driving phase.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what about bulbocapnine.
Speaker 2: Bulbocap nine is known to induce catatonia. It would render
the patient physically immobilized, but possibly still mentally aware, making
any kind of resistance impossible.
Speaker 1: And nactineing cur Though.
Speaker 2: Unfamiliar, they're muscle relaxes or paralytics, essentially chemical restraints. They
would prevent any physical resistance like the head banging against
the helmets that we talked about.
Speaker 1: And the last one, ourtaine.
Speaker 2: Ourtaane is an anticholinergic. It's often used to manage symptoms
like tremors, but its dissociative effects were also likely of
great interest in maintaining that twilight state of consciousness.
Speaker 1: So the intelligence requirement was basically the creation of a
controllable zombie who could perform covert operations, and the chemicals
were the toolkit to ensure immobilization and maximum suggestibility during
the reprogramming phase.
Speaker 2: Precisely and you can see how Subprojects sixty eight fit
into the wider, incredibly dark scope of the entire M
culture strategy. It wasn't just about the blank slate, It
was about mastering total mind manipulation through chemical and physical means.
Speaker 1: What were some of those other goals?
Speaker 2: The overall M culture goal included the search for substances
that will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness, and even materials
that would result in physical disablement. Cameron's process was the
most aggressive, most sustained attempt at achieving this total behavioral
breakdown and subsequent controllable manipulation.
Speaker 1: So, given that sophisticated mandate for precision, the specific requirement
for minimal cognitive damage, what was the final operational outcome
when you judge it against the cia'sone metrics.
Speaker 2: It was a complete operational failure for intelligence purposes. That
the project was devastatingly effective at psychological destruction. Yes, it
produced subjects with catastrophic amnesia and functional regression, but it
failed utterly in the required second step creating controllable, high
functioning assets.
Speaker 1: The blank slate was strategically.
Speaker 2: Useless, utterly useless for intelligence purposes. The person emerging from
the treatments was mentally and functionally disabled. They required significant care.
They weren't ready for covert operations. Even Cameron himself, by
nineteen sixty three, finally had to admit in his published
work that his treatment did not work as intended.
Speaker 1: But here's the chilling connection, and this ties back to
why these methods are still so relevant today. The operational
failure to create a spy doesn't mean the techniques themselves
weren't effective in a more destructive.
Speaker 2: Sense, and that is the ultimate dark irony. While the
techniques failed to create a functional asset, they proved devastatingly
effective at identity annihilation and creating a kind of trauma
based dependency.
Speaker 1: You mean the trauma itself became a tool.
Speaker 2: Exactly the trauma induced by deep patterning, the sensory deprivation,
the chemical confusion, the personality breakdown. It resulted in a
state of extreme psychological vulnerability and sources confirmed that this
very technique, though a failure for creating assets, would later
influence and be utilized extensively in the development of sophisticated
torture and enhanced interrogation techniques used on prisoners decades later,
techniques designed specifically to achieve identity breakdown and induce learned helplessness.
Speaker 1: So the failure to create a spy doesn't diminish the
human cost, it only compounds the ethical failure. This is
where the historical data really collides with the agonizing reality
of individual lives. The consequences for the patient subjected to
deep patterning weren't abstract medical terms. They were immediate, profound,
and often irreversible.
Speaker 2: The most common, and you could argue the most devastating
clinical outcome was profound retrograde amnesia. And this wasn't just
forgetting a few recent days. Patients suffered massive life altering
memory deficits. They lost significant portions of their life history,
their sense of continuity, their personal idea.
Speaker 1: How far back are we talking.
Speaker 2: The clinical records documented that some patients lost the ability
to recall up to two full years of pre treatment memories.
Speaker 1: Two years.
Speaker 2: Think about the scope of that loss that includes memories
of raising young children, key career moments, marriages, the very
fabric of one's personal narrative, the thing that grounds us
in reality. The description in the sleep Room is heartbreaking.
Many were left virtual strangers to themselves and their families.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't just the memory of facts that was
stripped away, it was the very competence needed to navigate
the world.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, this manifested as severe functional regression and disability. Victims
lost basic life competencies. We have documentation of a patient
who owned a successful, long established business who forgot how
to run it entirely, while others forgot how to talk,
requiring them to relearn fundamental skills that they had possessed
since childhood.
Speaker 1: Imagine checking into a hospital seeking help for say, common anxiety,
and leaving unable to recall who your children are or
how to operate your own tongue.
Speaker 2: The sources confirmed they suffered severe personality deterioration. They were
left more emotionally unstable, more anxious, more damage than when
they first sought help. The depression they came in with
was replaced by a profound trauma based disability.
Speaker 1: And there were physical effects too.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, the effects were physiological as well, resulting from
the severe chemical and physical stress. Long term issues included
persistent urinary incontinence, a constant, painful reminder of the violation
they had endured.
Speaker 1: The personal stories, though, are, would truly bring this abstract
medical horror into sharp focus. Let's go back to Gene Steele,
whose daughter Alison Steele, fought for years for justice and
gave public testimony.
Speaker 2: Alison Steel recalled that her mother was never able to
really function as a healthy human being after the experiments.
She suffered from this pervasive nervousness and anxiety, and perhaps
most heartbreakingly, she lost the simple human capacity to joke
or to laugh.
Speaker 1: That wasn't just depression. That's a complete emotional annihilation.
Speaker 2: It is the doctors had succeeded in erasing her emotional self,
even if they didn't create the programmable asset the CIA wanted.
Speaker 1: And there's this detail that Elson Steele recounted that is
genuinely chilling.
Speaker 2: The preprogrammed statement, yeah.
Speaker 1: She remembers her mother suddenly randomly blurting out these seemingly
preprogrammed phrases like we must do the right thing.
Speaker 2: Relics of the psychic driving tapes buried deep in her subconscious,
manifesting under stress decades later.
Speaker 1: Those fragmented phrases are just their evidence of the structural
damage that was done to her psyche. The identity was shattered,
and these little pieces of indoctrination were just left behind,
haunting her years later.
Speaker 2: The victims themselves said it. They felt the doctors had
stripped you of your soul, leaving them emotionally crippled. The
psychological regression, particularly the loss of the ability to recognize
their own family members cemented that long term trauma, the
emotional and cognitive destruction was total.
Speaker 1: And it's so important for you, the listener, to understand
that these victims were often marginalized and really gas lid.
For years, they were struggling to make sense of this
inexplicable amnesia and these personality changes, long before the truth
of the CIA's involvement ever became public.
Speaker 2: Exactly, they were told their worsening symptoms were just their
own severe mental illness, or that these radical treatments were
necessary for their own good. The complete lack of informed
consent meant they had no framework to understand the violation.
So the trauma was compounded by institutional silence and denial.
Speaker 1: The devastation of sub Projects sixty eight was kept secret
for years, buried under these layers of CIA black funding
and institutional deference. The pursuit of justice for these victims
has been a long, painful and frankly ongoing fight against
systemic roadblocks and institutional denial.
Speaker 2: And the revelation process. It began in the United States,
not in Canada, and Culture I was exposed in nineteen
seventy five following the Church Committee investigates into intelligence abuses,
and then the nineteen seventy seven Senate hearings brought Cameron's
activities and the devastating results into public view. That was
the watershed moment, often two decades after the fact, when
many victims finally began to piece together what had actually
been done to them in a trusted psychiatric setting.
Speaker 1: And immediately the ethical breach was just undeniable, monumental. You
had the Nuremberg Code, which was established way back in
nineteen forty eight, specifically in response to horrific human experimentation
during World War Two.
Speaker 2: And that code mandated voluntary, informed consent for any human experimentation.
Speaker 1: This is a crucial point the Nuremberg Code wasn't some
obscure text. It was a universally recognized ethical standard established
by the victorious Allied powers to prevent exactly these kinds
of government sanctioned abuses.
Speaker 2: Cameron's work applied to unwitting, vulnerable patients who had often
checked themselves in for routine help. It didn't just bend
the rules, It egregiously violated this foundational, global recognized ethical principle.
Speaker 1: And yet legal accountability was nearly impossible to achieve, especially
against the CIA, which had held the purse strengths correct.
Speaker 2: The Canadian victims who attempted to sue the US government
faced monumental legal roadblocks. The CIA successfully argued that Canadian
courts simply lacked jurisdiction over the US government. A common strategy,
a very common strategy, and it was facilitated by the
project's use of that front group for funding. The agency
hid behind jurisdictional immunity and national security, and.
Speaker 1: This strategy was was buttressed by legal precedents right like
the nineteen eighty five Supreme Court case ciav. Simps.
Speaker 2: Exactly that case effectively granted the agency broad deference in
withholding information related to intelligence sources and methods, So the
CIA used every tool in its legal arsenal to minimize
exposure and liability.
Speaker 1: But eventually, after decades of fighting, a small group of
plaintiffs did manage to settle.
Speaker 2: They did. Nine plaintiffs settled with the CIA in nineteen
eighty eight, but the compensation was pitifully minimal when you
weighed against the irreparable harm A lump sum of seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Which comes out to over eighty thousand dollars each right.
Speaker 2: A settlement that was often accepted because the victims, who
were already financially and psychologically devastated, simply ran out of
energy and resources to continue fighting the legal might of
the US government.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, what was the response from the Canadian government? The
government that had provided the public funding and oversight for
the institution equally disappointing.
Speaker 2: It was an effort to distance itself from any moral
or legal responsibility. It demonstrated what the sources called a
patronizing deference to US authority.
Speaker 1: The official Canadian inquiry, the nineteen eighty six Cooper Report,
what did that find?
Speaker 2: It concluded that Canadian officials were not aware of the
full extent of the experiments. This became the basis for
their limited liability. However, the lawyer who represented the victims
later described that report as one of the shabbiest, most
mean spirited official documents ever produced.
Speaker 1: Implying that the inclusion of ignorance was either an evasion
or the result of a shallow investigation designed to protect
the government.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and the compensation offered by Canada was arbitrary and insufficient.
It created yet another layer of pain for the survivors.
How So well, in nineteen ninety two, the Canadian government
offered payments of one hundred thousand Canadian dollars, but only
to seventy seven former patients. Crucially, hundreds of others were denied.
Speaker 1: And what grounds were they denied.
Speaker 2: Often for the grotesque reason that they were deemed not
to have been depatterned enough to warrant payment. Imagine the
trauma of being told that your suffering wasn't severe enough
to count. This kind of bureaucratic cruelty just reaffirmed the
government's calculated denial of liability and.
Speaker 1: That systemic failure of accountability. Yeah, it continues today, though
in slightly different forms.
Speaker 2: Yes, Al's and Steel Jean Steele's daughter, She recently pursued
a separate legal challenge, and like many others who persist,
she quietly received a C one hundred one thousand dollars payment,
But this was usually in exchange for dropping her legal
action and signing a non disclosure agreement.
Speaker 1: So these quiet, often secretive settlements are still being used
by institutions to minimize public accountability and avoid a full reckoning.
Speaker 2: Of the past exactly. But despite the destruction of CIA records,
the assertion of jurisdictional immunity, and the Canadian government's calculated denial,
the fight is far from over. It has to be
the legacy of human wreckage demands recognition and compensation. There
is still an ongoing class action lawsuit filed in twenty
nineteen and authorized by Quebec's Superior Court. It's targeting the
Canadian institutions directly involved, specifically the McGill University Health Center
and the Canadian government. It confirms that the victims and
their families are still seeking systemic justice for this decade
of abuse perpetrated in the name of Cold War science.
So if we connect this entire history to the bigger
picture sub Project sixty eight really stands as a horrifying
and profoundly relevant case study, a case study in the
dangers of scientific hubris fueled by state security interests.
Speaker 1: The extreme pursuit of total psychological control led not to mastery,
but to the catastrophic destruction of human identity.
Speaker 2: Exactly the attempt to create the perfect weapon, the controllable assassin.
It resulted in the utter violation of every medical and
ethical constraint that was established in the modern era.
Speaker 1: And doctor Cameron's the image post revelation transformed completely. He
went from being the WPA president and allotted reformer to
being the incarnation of brainwashing.
Speaker 2: All because of that confirmed, documented CIA connection.
Speaker 1: It's a sad reflection on society that these victims who
suffered irreversible cognitive damage were so often marginalized and silenced.
They were deemed credible by and this is a quote,
nobody accept the fringe dwellers, while the institutions just closed ranks.
Speaker 2: The institutional power of the CIA and the Canadian government
ensured that the scientific abuses remained shrouded in secrecy and
denial for decades, and that just made recovery and justice
exponentially harder for everyone involved.
Speaker 1: And ultimately the project was an operational failure for intelligence purposes.
It produced no controllable, high functioning.
Speaker 2: Assets, but the underlying research, the techniques of identity annihilation
and psychological breakdown. They proved horrifyingly effective as tools of torture.
The fact that the same concepts used for depatterning sensory
isolation prolonged chemical incapacitation trauma induction that these later formed
the basis for techniques used in interrogation settings long after
the project was officially shut down.
Speaker 1: It confirms the destructive power of Camera's.
Speaker 2: Work it does, and this raises a really important question
for us to ponders as we conclude this deep dive.
The Nuremberg Code was created specifically to prevent atrocities like these.
It demanded voluntary consent. So when state security and scientific
ambition clash and accountability is systematically avoided through the destruction
of records and the assertion of legal immunity, how can
a society ensure that the imperative to treat, or perhaps
more broadly, the imperative to secure the nation never again
outweighs the basic ethical principle to do no harm.
Speaker 1: It's a question that remains painfully institutionally relevant today. You
want to know what you think. What is the responsibility
of government institutions when their funded research goes so radically
off the rails. Let us know