"Curiously, often a classic manifestation of people who are afflicted with certain psychotic disorders is the irrational fear that the CIA and FBI is conspiring to harm them. In this case, the CIA involvement is real and the covert nature of the involvement is not contested." - Orlikow v. United States (1988)(1)
Gripping survivor-centered accounts of medical atrocities committed by CIA-funded mind-control (MC) researchers during the Cold War are rarely found in traditional U.S. media.2 Neither are they the subject of emotionally powerful TV docu-dramas commonly produced for broadcast and cable television. In January 1998, the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) courageously filled this void, although the blackout on government MC history is near-total in the U.S. The Sleep Room, a gut-wrenching four-hour miniseries, depicts the true story of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s secret MKULTRA brainwashing experiments carried out in the late 50s and early 60s at Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Widespread publicity accompanying this major TV event has empowered many other Canadian survivors of nonconsensual brainwashing experiments in hospitals and prisons to come forward and seek justice in the courts (3). In Part I of the miniseries, gifted actors dramatize how vulnerable, trusting hospital patients were transformed into virtual vegetables through doses of "electroconvulsive therapy" 30-40 times more powerful than usual, sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic and paralytic drugs, and other psychological and physical tortures. Part II grippingly depicts the successful eight-year U.S. lawsuit of nine survivors, who overcame fear to confront the humiliations and frustrating delay tactics of the CIA lawyers. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a legendary Washington civil rights attorney, and his partner James C. Turner eventually prevailed for their clients. In 1988, the U.S. "national security" establishment agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $750,000 (4).
This extraordinary CBC drama was based on Anne Collins’ prize-winning 1989 book In the Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada. Collins exposed Cameron’s 1930s-1940s history of ethically unsupportable experiments on psychiatric patients. Many of the people methodically abused by Cameron had entered the Institute suffering only from mild disorders such as anxiety and post-partum depression. By the time they were released from the Sleep Room torture chamber, many had decades of memory completely wiped out. Some did not remember their children and even had to relearn bladder and bowel control. A U.S. citizen since 1941, the Scottish-born Cameron resided in Albany, New York, from which he commuted to Montreal each week. Before taking on the directorship at Allan Memorial, which is associated with McGill University, Cameron was chair of psychiatry and neurology at a medical school in Albany. He worked closely with Alan Gregg, medical-sciences director of the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided grants to found the Institute in 1943.5 As director from 1943 to 1964, Cameron achieved a worldwide reputation, serving as the first chair of the World Psychiatric Association, as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. In one barely watchable scene of institutional cruelty, Cameron is filmed delivering a speech to psychiatrists about his successes in "curing" mental illness. As he drones on, the camera switches to scenes of terrified resisting patients being captured and restrained by doctors and nurses, forcibly being dosed with drugs and high-voltage electroshock, then put to sleep for weeks at a time in a room full of beds equipped with tape recorders and football helmets.
Winner in 1998 of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s Gemini Awards in best picture and other categories, The Sleep Room touched the raw nerves of Canadian citizens. Not only did they learn their government had been the CIA’s junior consort during the Cold War against Communism, they also discovered it had secretly granted $500,000 to fund the Allan Memorial experiments. The CIA had only given Cameron $69,000 from 1957 to 1964. As the lawsuit dragged on through the Reagan presidency, Rauh was forced to expose the Canadian government’s role in helping the CIA derail the lawsuit, in complete disregard for pain and lifelong suffering of its own citizens.6 In 1992 the Canadian government coughed up $100,000 for 76 Cameron victims. To date 127 of his patients have come forward with their horror stories to seek compensation. CIA psychologist John Gittinger initiated contact with Cameron after reading his article on "Psychic Driving" in the January 1956 American Journal of Psychiatry. Gittinger persuaded Cameron to apply to the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front set up in 1955 to disburse funding for what became a huge MKULTRA network in the U.S., Canada and overseas (in collaboration with branches of the U.S. Armed Forces). The Human Ecology Fund (its name was changed in 1961) operated secretly out of Cornell University in New York City.
Cameron’s brainwashing grant application proposed to "depattern" patient behavior through the use of mega-doses of electroshock, to reprogram patients’ minds with repetitious verbal messages 16 hours a day for six or seven days, during which time the patient would be kept in partial sensory deprivation. Cameron called this technique "psychic driving." Brainwashing would be completed by subjecting patients to drug-enforced continuous sleep, sometimes as long as weeks or even months (7). The Sleep Room portrays two generations of CIA personnel as equally deadly, i.e., the 1950s Human Ecology bureaucrats who approved the funding for what were considered "terminal" experiments on non-U.S. nationals, and the 1980s CIA legal lords who maneuvered on grounds of "national security" to withhold evidence of the agency’s negligence and failure to adhere to the Nuremberg Code. The callousness of the CIA scientists is aptly captured in this fictitious dialog, where the scientists are discussing whether to fund Cameron’s proposal:
#1: He’s going to fry his patients. I can tell you that.
#2: Well, we won’t worry about the patients. That’s his problem. I just want to know if he can brainwash them.
#1: He’s going to fry his patients. I can tell you that.
#2: Well, we won’t worry about the patients. That’s his problem. I just want to know if he can brainwash them.
#1: He just might, you know. He’s right about the memory loss with a shock like that. You couldn’t do that to volunteers.
#2: Well, should we give him the money?
#2: Well, should we give him the money?
#1: What have we got to lose? It’s not like he’s doing it to Americans.
While the tone is apt, the misleading impression that neither the CIA nor Cameron were experimenting on U.S. citizens (witting or unwitting) during this era is the miniseries’ biggest flaw. According to the March 15, 1995 testimony of Claudia Mullen before the President’s Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), Ewen Cameron was the high-voltage expert in a secret team of CIA doctor-brainwashers. Mullen and Chris DiNicola Ebner told a visibly shaken group of scientists that memory-erasing electroshock, among other horrors, was regularly used on physically healthy American children in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.8 Unlucky enough to be delivered into CIA/military custody by abusive or uncaring parents, children as young as eight years old were subjected to trauma-based mind control (MC) programming to mold them into "Manchurian Candidate" spies, assassins and sexual blackmailers.9 ACHRE’s final report documented more than 4000 experiments, and anywhere from 16,000 to 23,000 unwitting victims!10 The numbers run past 200,000 when if one includes the GIs deliberately exposed to radiation from atomic bomb testing (11).
During this same era, U.S. psychiatric patients were also victimized. Harold Blauer, a patient in the New York Psychiatric Institute, died in 1953 shortly after being injected with a highly toxic dose of methyl-diamphetamine (MDA), a derivative of mescaline. Blauer had entered the hospital suffering from depression after a divorce. He had made progress solely with the talking cure. Blauer did not know that his psychiatrist, Paul Hoch, was a CIA consultant secretly under contract with the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal chemical/biological warfare lab. This contract was negotiated through the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, which allowed trusting hospital patients to be used as part of the Army’s search for "potential chemical warfare agents." The MDA was not administered for any therapeutic reason. Blauer was scheduled to be released from the hospital in a few weeks. His objections to the series of injections, which were causing him great pain and discomfort, were overridden by manipulative hospital personnel. Blauer was threatened before the fourth nonfatal dose that if he didn’t give his consent, he would be moved out of the Institute to hospital settings that displeased him. The fourth dose caused a violent reaction. The fifth killed him. The Army began its cover-up immediately, the sordid details of which are recounted in the 1987 court decision awarding the Blauer estate $707,044. The court affixed blame for Blauer’s needless death totally on the U.S. government (12).
The Blauer case reveals a direct lineage between Nazi research projects and the MKULTRA program. Mescaline was tested on concentration camp inmates during the Third Reich’s search for a "truth serum."13 These and other Nazi experiments were intensively studied by U.S. military scientists in occupied Germany. Under the CIA’s Operation Paperclip, 1600 German and Austrian scientists were secretly brought to the U.S. Some had worked for I.G. Farben perfecting Zyclon-B gas for the extermination of Jews and other doomed prisoners. Many were being investigated for war crimes when they were rescued by a government intent on using their knowledge and expertise in the Cold War against the Communist Eastern Bloc. Hundreds of chemists and other scientists were given jobs at Edgewood Arsenal, which supplied the drugs, chemicals and poisons for the CIA’s counterespionage and assassination programs during the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as covert interventions in the affairs of many Third World nations (14). Though the Cold War is over, the U.S. military/CIA bureaucracies still invoke "national security" and "plausible deniability" to hide a vast arsenal of sophisticated mind-control and psychological warfare technology.15 All of these weapons had to be perfected by means of human experimentation. Psychiatrist Colin Ross found that many areas of brain research heading in the direction of MC suddenly went "black" in the 1960s.16 His long-awaited book, Building the Manchurian Candidate: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists, will soon be published. A hint about mind-control research first surfaced in the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When J. Edgar Hoover testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, he raised the possibility President Kennedy had been killed by a programmed assassin dispatched by the Soviet Union. Alarmed, the Commission requested the CIA to produce information on Soviet brainwashing.
The resultant CIA memo (so controversial it wasn’t declassified until 1974) cryptically asserted the Soviets did not have any MC techniques or drugs "not available in the West."17 However, neither Hoover nor the CIA told the Commission that the U.S. had an operational program of Manchurian Candidates up and running since World War II! (18) The term "brainwashing" was first coined in 1950 by Edward Hunter, a CIA employee operating undercover as a journalist, purportedly to explain how American POWs in Korea were being coerced into confessing they used biological weapons.19 Newspapers played up fears that the Soviets, the Chinese and North Koreans were using a secret psychological weapon against allied soldiers. This "brainwashing" scare was a successful CIA disinformation strategy used to build support for an unpopular war.20 It also helped insulate military and university researchers from accountability for violating medical ethics and criminal laws. The prevailing anticommunist hysteria that grew to justify the MKULTRA program and its unambiguous violations of the Hippocratic Oath, the Nuremberg Code and many international human-rights covenants was aptly summarized in 1954 by former President Herbert Hoover:
It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination.... There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto accepted norms of human conduct do not apply.... If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered... We must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, more effective methods than those used against us (21). The MKULTRA program began with a proposal by Richard Helms, then the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, to fund "highly sensitive" research and development using chemical/ biological substances to alter human behavior. It was approved by CIA Director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953 and was overseen by chemist Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). The first MC programs, called Bluebird and Artichoke, were subsumed under the MKULTRA umbrella. This program came to embrace an octopus-like network with names like MK-Search (1963-1973), MK-Delta and MK-Naomi (assassination programs carried out by the Army 1953-1970).22 Between 1953 and 1963 the TSD operated 149 subprojects in 80 U.S. and Canadian universities and medical centers, and three prisons, involving 185 private researchers, 15 foundations and numerous pharmaceutical companies (23).
In 1973, with the Watergate scandal looming, outgoing CIA Director Helms ordered all MKULTRA records destroyed. He testified before the Senate’s Church Committee two years later that Gottlieb: "...came to me and said that he was retiring and I was retiring and he thought it would be a good idea if these files were destroyed. And I also believe part of the reason for our thinking this was advisable was there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and these would be sensitive in this kind of thing but that since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of the files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up questions, embarrassment, if you will."(24) Fortunately, 8,000 pages of mainly financial data escaped the CIA shredder, and were declassified pursuant to a Freedom of Information lawsuit in the 1970s filed by the Center for National Security Studies. Though woefully incomplete, these documents nevertheless became the bedrock of John Marks’ groundbreaking 1978 book, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (25).
All branches of the military sponsored MC research in collaboration with the CIA.26 Most civilian subjects were unwitting; even CIA employees and Army recruits who consented to drug and hypnosis experiments were not properly informed as to their dangers. MKULTRA clearly violated the Nuremberg Code requirement that subjects give "informed consent" to participate in scientific research: "This means that the person involved should have the legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other form of constraint or coercion." This Code was established in 1948 by the same U.S. Military Tribunal that tried 24 Nazi doctors for deadly experiments on concentration camp inmates. It was binding on the U.S. as of February 26, 1953 (27). How do we explain the hundreds of thousands of human guinea pigs callously sacrificed during the Cold War?28 As Paperclip researcher Linda Hunt concluded, "...we used Nazi science to kill our own people."29 Perhaps survivor stories can help us understand what went wrong and why our secular democracy allows huge bureaucracies of unsupervised, supersecret warriors guided only by the cult-like religion of "national security" and the obsessive search for "enemies of the state." The death of communism as a military threat has not dented the religious zeal that still inspires the military/intelligence establishment.
James Stanley, a career soldier, suffered soul murder as an Army lab rat. He was given LSD in 1958 without being warned of its dangers, as were 1000 other "volunteer" soldiers. Stanley suffered hallucinations, memory loss, incoherence, and a negative personality change. Fits of uncontrollable violence destroyed his family, and restricted his ability to earn a living. And he never knew why until 1975, when the Army invited him to participate in a follow-up study on "volunteers who participated" in LSD testing. In United States vs. Stanley,30 the Supreme Court majority decided against Stanley’s claim for damages. However, Justices Brennan, Marshall and O’Connor dissented, asserting their belief that the Nuremberg Code’s standard of informed consent applies to soldiers as well as civilians. In 1996 James Stanley finally wrangled a $400,000 settlement from the government, but no apology for having ruined his life (31). Unacknowledged civilian wreckage from unimaginably cruel brainwashing experiments continues to bob to the surface from a vast sea of still-classified, cold-war experiments. Survivors of ghoulish medical tortures or the families of deceased victims are turning up in Canadian and U.S. courtrooms today demanding compensation for a lifetime of suffering. Some Canadian plaintiffs appear to have a slight advantage over their U.S. cousins, who are severely hampered by the 1973 Helms/Gottlieb destruction of MKULTRA records. Fortunately for these survivors, paper trails are being unearthed in government, hospital and prison archives. The eminently freer Canadian press also helps build public support for MC survivors’ lawsuits (32).
Gail Kastner, now in her 60s, did not discover Ewen Cameron’s experiments were the cause of her "wasted life" until reading a newspaper story in the Montreal Gazette in 1992. She sued the Canadian government and Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital in 1999 after the government rejected her claim for damages. A "brilliant student whose domineering father checked her into the institute for depression," Kastner says that Cameron’s electroconvulsive "depatterning" treatments and insulin-induced comas for five weeks at a time are responsible for a life of screaming nightmares, recurring seizures, loss of memory, and long-term regression to an infantile state. Her husband, son and twin sister could not tolerate her bizarre behavior, i.e. "wetting the living-room carpet, thumb-sucking, babytalk and wanting to be bottlefed." Abandoned by her own family, she was rescued from homelessness by the Jewish Family Service (33). During the era of Cameron’s brainwashing regimens, psychiatrists and psychologists in other Canadian institutions were using similar methods to "treat" people haphazardly diagnosed with depression, schizophrenia or, in prisons, what was perceived as "antisocial" conduct. Dorothy Proctor was a rebellious 17-year-old when she entered the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario on a three-year term for robbery. Primed first with sensory deprivation and electroshock, she was administered LSD in 1961 by a prison psychologist, then locked into "The Hole" to endure what for her was "Dante’s Inferno."
Proctor, a Native and Black Canadian from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, calls this "mind rape." She says she was singled out for such "Nazi-style science" because she had twice escaped from the prison, bringing unfavorable publicity to the authorities there. Proctor asserts that the steady prison diet of LSD and other experimental drugs led her down the path to drug addiction for 24 years. After publishing Chameleon: The Life of Dorothy Proctor in 1994, this articulate and determined woman launched a complaint with the Corrections Service of Canada (CSC), saying she suffered permanent brain damage and hallucinations haunting her to the present day. "I was reduced to a lab rat, a monkey in a cage," she told the Ottawa Citizen (7/21/98), which has been covering the Proctor and other Canadian human experimentation cases for a number of years. A government inquiry turned up documentation (including clinical notes) that Proctor was not the only victim of involuntary prison experimentation 1960-1963. At least 23 other women prisoners were also used as human guinea pigs. Only four of these women have been found to date. And instead of complying with the CSC’s recommendation of an apology and financial compensation to Proctor, the Canadian government commissioned an "ethics study" at McGill University. Meanwhile Proctor hired lawyer James Newland and filed suit for $5 million in damages from the Canadian government, George Scott, MD, the prison psychiatrist, and Mark Eveson, a psychologist affiliated with Queen’s University (34).
While the emotional shock of The Sleep Room still electrified Canadian airways, the Ottawa Citizen published an expose drawn from interviews, archives, scientific journals and correspondence between doctors and prison officials. It found that hundreds of federal prisoners throughout Canada were used for pharmaceutical trials of untested drugs, sensory deprivation, and pain and electroshock studies. It uncovered a 1968 trial during which defendant Christine Bauman claimed that she suffered terrifying personality changes after being given LSD in 1961 at the Institute for Psychotherapy, not far from Kingston Prison where she had been incarcerated.35 Furthermore, archival materials released through the Proctor lawsuit indicate that some abuses may have begun as early as March 24, 1949, when a new electroshock machine arrived at Kingston Penitentiary. Electroshock has a history of being used as punishment in Nazi Germany and against Blacks in apartheid South Africa (36). By late 1999, additional Canadian women and men came forward to claim they were used in prison and hospital experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. A class-action suit against the prison system was filed anonymously by "Jane Doe," a 75-year-old grandmother who realized after reading newspaper stories that she was one of the 23 women who were given LSD and other terrifying "treatments" without their consent while in prison . Her lawsuit charges Scott and Eveson with assault, intentional affliction of mental suffering, and negligence. Her access to the Eveson’s clinical notes, released as a result of the Proctor suit, helped her recognize what had been done to her 38 years ago (37).
Less documented, however, are the connections of these prison experiments to U.S. mind-control funding sources. Canadian newspaper stories usually include the caveat that although prison use of LSD and "shock therapy" coincided with CIA "brainwashing" experiments at Allan Memorial Institute, no evidence has been found to link the programs. However, Allen Hornblum, author of Acres of Skin: The Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, said on a 1998 CBC radio show that some of the experiments conducted in U.S. prisons during this era were sponsored by the U.S. Army and the CIA. And he pointed out that shortly after seven Nazi doctors were hung at Nuremberg for horrific experiments on inmates at Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz and Ravensbruk, U.S. doctors were injecting plutonium and uranium into unwitting hospital patients (38). Activist Lynne Moss-Sharman does not rule out a hidden connection between the Canadian prison experiments and CIA/military brainwashing research. Moss-Sharman is the Canadian contact for ACHES-MC (Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors – Mind Control), and is herself a survivor of brainwashing experimentation during her childhood.39 The Canadian military had a close relationship with Edgewood Arsenal during the years it funded MC experiments in hospitals and prisons (40).
Moss-Sharman has been organizing support for federal prisoner Richard Carlson, who filed a civil claim in October 1998. Carlson says his use in covert brainwashing experiments from 1968 to 1974 in several Kingston-area prisons caused a lifelong psychiatric disability. According to Moss-Sharman, the authorities retaliated against Carlson going public about the prison brainwashing experiments. They unsuccessfully tried to change his status to "dangerous offender," which would have carried a mandatory life sentence for the bank robbery charge, which he is also appealing. Three people connected to Carlson have died under mysterious circumstances since he launched his brainwashing claim. They include Tony Vaitelis, the second male inmate to make claims similar to Carlson’s, an unnamed former hospital orderly and potential witness to prison brainwashing, and Carlson’s 30-year-old son. Moss-Sharman says Carlson is dangerous to Correctional Services Canada because he can name the inmates who died during the prison experiments and can describe what happened in the experimental units (41).
"Insulin shock therapy" was frequently used on Ewen Cameron’s patients at Allan Memorial. In 1999 the widow of Yuan Woo (Jean-Paul Martineau), a former Royal Canadian Air Force radar technician, went public with the story of how her deceased husband had been the unwitting subject of "insulin shock therapy" experiments in Queen Mary’s Veterans Hospital in 1953. Martineau curiously changed his name to "Juan Woo" after being discharged. As a result of medical mistreatment, Ms. Woo says, her husband developed such a morbid fear of physicians, he postponed going to the doctor until he was near death from cancer in 1996 (42). In the U.S., MC survivors and their families are hard-pressed to secure files documenting their claims, if indeed such records escaped the shredder years ago. Since 1985 all litigants have been hampered by C.I.A. vs. Sims,43 a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that undergirds the CIA’s refusal to name its contract institutions and individual researchers on grounds of "national security" (44). Only 59 CIA/military contract institutions and a handful of researchers consented to be publicly named in the 1970s when the MKULTRA program was exposed.
The most well-publicized U.S. victim of the MKULTRA experiments is Frank Olson, a biochemist who worked at the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. On November 18, 1953, Olson was given a drink of Cointreau secretly laced with LSD. He immediately became agitated and severely paranoid, a condition that lasted for days. Olson was said to have committed suicide nine days later by jumping 13-stories to his death through the closed window of a New York hotel. Members of his family did not learn he had been drugged until 1975 when the MKULTRA behavior-control program was exposed. They later received an apology from President Gerald Ford and a $750,000 settlement. However, after studying documents declassified in later years, Eric Olson believed his father may have been pushed out the window. He had the body exhumed in 1994. A group of private forensic researchers announced on the 41th anniversary of Olson’s death that both forensic and other evidence were "starkly suggestive of homicide" (45). A second skull fracture (missed in the initial autopsy) means Olson may have been hit on the head before his body went through the window. Also the lack of cuts on Olson’s body would appear to rule out the official CIA story of his "suicide."46 Armond Pastore, the hotel night manager who kneeled beside the dying Olson back in 1953, said, "I never heard of anybody jumping through a closed window with the blind down."47 Last year a New York grand jury was looking at this new evidence (48).
The first CIA brainwashing case to go before a jury took place in 1999. I learned about this civil trial through two articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer.49 This civil trial centered on the tragic life of up-and-coming artist Stanley Glickman, who says that in 1952 in a Paris cafe, MKULTRA czar Sidney Gottlieb had brought him a drink laced with LSD. Gottlieb denied doing this, despite admitting he had spiked the drinks of other unsuspecting people in the 1950s. Glickman suffered a psychological breakdown from which he never recovered. After collapsing he was rushed to American Hospital where he claimed doctors there administered electroshock therapy "via a catheter up his penis" as well as more hallucinogenic drugs (50). After learning about the CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting subjects in the 1970s, Glickman sued in 1983. His identification of Gottlieb was based on remembering that the strange man in the bar had a club foot. Using the same delay-and-attrition tactics heaped on the nine elderly Canadians in Orlikow, the CIA was able to delay the trial for 16 years. Glickman died in 1992 but his sister Gloria Kronisch continued the lawsuit. Dominick L. DiCarlo, a conservative chief judge "on loan" from the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York City, presided.
What happened next will some day be the stuff of high drama in a Sleep Room-type teleplay exposing the CIA’s 50-year history of crimes against humanity. Finally being called to account in a courtroom for overseeing a quarter-century of U.S.-style Nazi science, Gottlieb becomes ill, causing postponement of the February trial. On the eve of the March date, he unexpectedly dies. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times obituaries report that the Gottlieb family refuses to disclose the cause of his death. The online WorldNet Daily, however, reports that Gottlieb, 80, died after a "month-long bout with pneumonia." According to this story, he was admitted to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesburg on February 14, and "lapsed into a coma" on March 5 "from which he never recovered" (51). Are we overly paranoid to suspect the CIA of foul play here? Did life boomerang on the aged Dr. Strangelove? Was this enthusiastic harvester of exotic poisons and inventor of bizarre assassination delivery systems somehow silenced by same to prevent his spilling the CIA’s dirty secrets in a court of law? (52)
Anyway, the trial goes forward in late March, with the Glickman estate suing the Gottlieb estate (the claims against Helms and the CIA had been thrown out). As the lawyers near their final summations, Judge DiCarlo, 71, suddenly drops dead of a heart attack while exercising in a federal gym located next to the court. His New York Times obituary makes no mention of the controversial CIA trial (nor does the Times even cover the trial) (53). However, the New York Daily News, with more guts and pizzazz, reports that DiCarlo’s death "created a surreal scene as paramedics and a priest called to give last rites mingled with jurors preparing to decide one of the strangest cases being heard in the city."54 Goosebumps and paranoia strike again. Was this Reagan-appointed judge a victim of the CIA’s long-rumored, untraceable method of inducing heart attacks? Or was it the stress of a CIA trial that killed him? Almost on cue, Federal Judge Kimba Wood was assigned to take DiCarlo’s place, a move prejudicial to the plaintiff since she had thrown out this case in 1997. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit in 1998.55 After closing arguments, the jury deliberated for seven hours before ruling against the Glickman estate.
But the evidence of foul play goes way beyond the spiking of Glickman’s drink. His Paris hospital records show that two of his doctors had been engaged in LSD research at the time. Also, CIA files from 1952 reveal a special interest in the heightened effect of LSD on people with hepatitis. One of Glickman’s American Hospital doctors had previously treated him for hepatitis, making this once-promising young artist "the ideal guinea pig" (56) I would like to thank Lynne Moss-Sharman, Kathy Kasten, Eleanor White and Blanche Chavoustie for providing news articles and other research materials for this series.
Endnotes
1. 682 F. Supp. 77, 94 (D.C. 1988) (Civ. No. 80-3153). For a summary of the federal court cases cited in this article , see "The Law and Mind Control: A Look at the Law and Government Mind Control Through Five Cases"" by Attorney Helen McGonigle (five cases)
2. Survivor testimonies, however, can be found on the Internet: (MCF)
3. MacLean’s, 4/21/97 (p. A3) and 1/12/98 (P. 66); The Gazette (Montreal), 3/13/97 (p. A3) and 1/11/98 (p. C9); Toronto Star, 1/10/98 (p. SW10) and 1/11/98 (p. B7); Toronto Sun, 1/11/98 (TV 3); Ottawa Citizen, 1/10/98 (p. H4); CBC broadcast, "Fifth Estate," 1/6/98
4. For a history of Orlikow, see "Anatomy of a Public Interest Case Against the CIA," by Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. and James C. Turner, Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy, Vol. II (2), Fall 1990. (jcturner)
5. Collins, In the Sleep Room (Key Porter Books, 1998), pp. 94, 101-104.
6. Joe Rauh’s lifelong history of defending victims of government abuse was postumously rewarded in 1994 when President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rauh had died in 1992, the Canadian case against the CIA having been his last hurrah.
7. Rauh and Turner, op. cit.
8. A videotape of the ACHRE hearing is available from Missoulians for a Clean Environment, P.O. Box 2885, Missoula, MT 59806 (Phone: 406-543-7210). A transcript is posted at MCF. Tape 14: "Giving testimony regarding survival as a government mind-control victim: My testimony and the backlash," Mullen’s presentation to the 1997 Believe the Children (BTC) Conference can be ordered from BTC Repeat Performance, 2911 Crabapple Lane, Hobart, IN 46342. This tape also includes the BTC presentation by therapist Valerie Wolf, BCSW, ACSW, BCD, "Assessment and treatment of survivors of sadistic abuse."
9. Rappaport, Jon, Mind Control Experiments on Children, self-published book containing the supporting documentation produced by legal and medical professionals for the 1995 ACHRE hearings. (alto)
10. Final Report of President’s Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), 1996 (achre)
11. ACHRE Report, ibid., Chapter 10.
12. Barrett v. U.S., 660 F.Supp. 1291 (S.D.N.Y. 1987). See Hunt, op. cit., pp. 170, 235 for details on the Blauer case.
13 Lifton, R.J., The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986), pp. 289-290.
14 See generally, Hunt, L., Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
15 "Wonder Weapons: the Pentagon’s quest for nonlethal arms is amazing. But is it smart?" U.S. News and World Report, July 7, 1997.
16 Ross, Colin, "The CIA and Military Mind Control Research: Building the Manchurian Candidate." A lecture given at the 9th Annual Western Clinical Conference on Trauma and Dissociation, April 18, 1996, Orange County, California. Transcript and/or audiotape can be ordered from CKLN-FM, 380 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 1W7 (phone 416-595-1477; fax 416-595-0226). Transcript is posted at MCF.
17. Russell, D. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Carroll & Graf, 1992), pp. 673-674.
18. Ross, op. cit. See also George H. Estabrooks, PhD, "Hypnosis comes of age," Science Digest, April 1971, pp. 44-50.
19. Russell, Dick, op. cit., pp. 193-194. According to historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Indiana University Press, 1999), the U.S. did use germ weapons in Korea.
20. Scheflin, A. & Opton, Jr., E.M., The Mind Manipulators. (Paddington Press, 1978), p. 107.
21. Secret report to the Eisenhower White House, quoted in Hunt, Linda, op. cit., p. 263.
22. "C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to Create Involuntary Assassins," New York Times, February 9, 1978, p. 17.
23. New York Times, August 2, 1977, pp. 1, 16.
24. Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book I, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities [the "Church Committee" report], U.S. Senate (April 26, 1976), pp. 403-404. Quoted in Russell, op. cit. p. 775 (Note 12).
25 Online version of Marks’ book: lsd
25. Ross, op. cit.
27. Orlikow, op. cit., at 82.
28 Sea, G., "The Radiation Story No One Would Touch," Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1994 (radiation)
29. Hunt, op. cit., p. 268.
30. 483 U.S. 669 (1987)
31. March 6, 1996 article provided by Lynne Moss-Sharman (newspaper not identified)
32. Some examples from the Ottawa Citizen: "Debate over prison experimentation emerges from shadows," 9/28/98; "Minister demands answers on prison experiments: Solicitor general upset by Citizen account of inmates used as guinea pigs," 10/1/98; "LSD trials on inmates ‘unethical’: Ignore proposal for compensation, McGill study says," 10/31/98; "Military tested LSD on civilians: Canada funded Cold War probe into mind control," 12/7/98. From CBC Radio, "Secret experiments on Canada’s convicts," 11/9/98. From the Toronto Star: "Prisoners used for ‘frightening’ tests, new papers show," 12/18/99.
33. CBC Montreal (Ivan Slobod), 1/5/00; "Woman suing over CIA experiments," Globe and Mail, 1/6/00; ‘Hell for my family,’ Montreal Gazette, 1/11/00; "Shock treatment victim supports suit," The Daily Miner (Kenora), 1/21/00.
34. CKLN Radio (Toronto) "Shrinkrap" interviews Dorothy Proctor and lawyer James Newland, August 1998; "Inmates subdued with drugs, shock therapy, report says," Globe and Mail, 10/31/98; Ottawa Citizen: "Burden of proof on LSD inmates: Government won’t compensate women without more proof that tests caused harm," 2/3/98; "LSD tested on female prisoners," 2/28/98; "The case for prison’s LSD tests," 3/1/98; "Pay LSD victims: Reform (Party): Law and Order Party calls experiments on inmates ‘sickening’," 3/2/98; "Privacy an issue in LSD probe," 3/20/98; "LSD experiments ‘good research back then’," 7/10/98; "MPs demand inquiry into prison tests," 9/29/98; "Minister demands answers on Citizen account of inmates used as guinea pigs," 10/1/98; "Scott stalling LSD report, critics charge," 10/15/98; "LSD trials on inmates ‘unethical’," 10/31/98); "Government accused of withholding files on prison LSD testing," 12/8/99;
35. "I was in a very bad state’- LSD guinea pig says form inmate underwent dramatic personality changes," Ottawa Citizen, 9/26/98.
36. Eastgate, J., "The Case Against Electroshock Treatment," USA Today (Magazine), November 1998, p. 28.
37. "75-year-old guinea pig wants to sue," Ottawa Citizen, 12/9/99.
38. "This Morning," CBC Radio, Nov. 9, 1998. Interviewers: Avril Benoit and Rosie Rowbotham.
39. In a 1997 interview on CKLN radio, Moss-Sharman recounts her own nightmare as a child victim of CIA/military brainwashing experiments. (http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln16.htm). Also see "Mind Games: Another woman comes forward to claim the CIA used her as a guinea pig in hideous experiments," Ottawa Citizen, 9/13/97 (posted at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~alb/misc/ ottawaMindControl.html)
40. "Military tested LSD on civilians: Canada funded Cold War probe into mind control," Ottawa Citizen, 12/7/98.
41. Chronical Journal (Thunder Bay, Ontario): "Carlson gets access to prison file," 5/1/99; "Carlson case adjourns," 10/27/99; "Convicted bank robber Carlson launches appeal bid," 2/2/00. Two letters to the Canadian Human Rights Commission re: Carlson (11/9/99 from Moss-Sharman and 12/30/99 from Patty Rehn, U.S. contact for ACHES-MC) are available from the author upon request.
42. " ‘The nightmares are real’: Widow blames military for man’s suffering," Ottawa Citizen, 10/11/99; "Was Canuck in CIA experiments? Widow wants to know why hubby suffered," Sun Media, 10/12/99.
43. C.I.A. vs. Sims., 471 U.S. 159, 85 L.Ed.2d, 105 S.Ct. 1881 (1985).
44. A revealing account of the difficulties U.S. citizens encounter in making claims against the government can be found in Budiansky, Goode, Gast, "The Cold War Experiments," U.S. News and World Report, January 24, 1994.
45. Philadelphia Inquirer, November 29, 1994, B6.
46. Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1994, A4
47. The Independent (London), June 4, 1994, p. 8.
48. Baker, R., "Conspiracy: In 1952, Stanley Glickman was a promising young painter studying in Paris. Then one night he shared a drink with some fellow Americans, and his life fell apart. Did the CIA spike his drink with LSD? The Observer (Guardian Newspapers Ltd.), February 14, 1999.
49. "Case against CIA that began with ’52 encounter winds down," 4/30/99, and "Jury rejects suit alleging ’52 drugging," 5/1/99.
50. Baker, op. cit.
51. New York Times, 3/10/99 and Los Angeles Times, 4/4/99. See gottlieb for the 3/11/99 WorldNet Daily obituary.
52. Regarding Gottlieb’s bizarre plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, see Impact International, April 1999 (IMPACT)
53. "Judge Dominick L. DiCarlo, 71, Narcotics Fighter Under Reagan," New York Times, 4/30/99, C21. A 3/10/99 Gottlieb obituary written by Tim Weiner also makes no mention of the Glickman trial.
54. Daily News, April 28, 1999, p. 2.
55. Kronisch v. U.S., 150 F.3d 112 (2d Cir. 1988). Posted on New Jersey Law Journal website: ny lj content.
56. Baker, op. cit.
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