AMKULTRA mind control and brainwashing project headed by Sidney Gottlieb began on the order of CIA Director Allen Welsh Dulles on April 13, 1953. But its techniques dated back to WWII under the direction of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron (1901-1967).

The scope of Project MKULTRA was broad, with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA’s involvement.  Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that subsequent CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973.

Some authors cite that the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual refers to “studies at McGill University” and that most of the techniques recommended in KUBARK are exactly those that researcher Cameron used on his test subjects: sensory deprivation, drugs, isolation, etc. [Alfred McCoy’s “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror” 2006].

Note: source for first section are extracted from Spartacus.

Dr. Ewen Cameron: Turning Loose a Monster

Cameron’s claim to fame was torturing and experimenting on the minds of his human subjects. For this, he became ” at least in his lifetime ” a heavy hitter. Demonstrating in spades the twisted and inverted world in which we live, in 1961 Cameron was appointed president of the World Psychiatric Association. He was also president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations.

He experimented on his human guinea pigs with various paralytic drugs, as well as electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power. His “driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case), while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems, such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression. Many suffered permanent damage from his actions. His treatments resulted in victims’ incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents. Cameron’s work inspired other goons, such as British psychiatrist William Sargant, who paralleled his work at St Thomas’ Hospital in London and Belmont Hospital in Surrey.

His abuses at McGill have been in some part revealed, and can be reviewed in this video.

In 1938, Cameron was appointed professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Albany State Medical School. It was at Albany that Cameron conducted research into sensory deprivation and memory. The Albany Medical Center was the only Level 1 trauma center and academic medical center for the 25-county region between New York and Montreal. Yet, there is almost nothing online about its history during this time period.

During WWII, Cameron began working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). However, in 1943, he went to Canada and established the psychiatry department at Montreal’s McGill University and became director of the newly created, Rockefeller Foundation-funded Allan Memorial Institute. Here, he was a key member of the Truth Drug Committee.

We know that well before 1947 he was using the “de-patterning” technique to erase patients’ memories. Cameron believed that after inducing complete amnesia in a patient, he could then selectively recover their memory in such a way as to change their behavior “unrecognizably.” In other words, Cameron was giving them a new past, rebuilding their psyche completely.

According to his research assistant, Dr. Peter Roper, “[Cameron] had a technician, one Leonard Rubenstein, who modified cassettes so there was an endless tape. It could keep repeating itself for hours at a time. If Cameron could give a positive message, eventually a patient would respond to it.” Cameron would play the tapes to his patients for up to 86 days, as they slipped in and out of insulin-induced comas.

In the late 1940s, Cameron developed his de-patterning theory. The inspiration for this was the British psychiatrist William Sargent, who Cameron considered to be the leading expert on Soviet brainwashing techniques.

They were particularly interested in “resistant sources” as test subjects. The Soviets and western allies had unlimited fodder for breaking and experimenting on the “hard cases” with the multitude of Axis POWs. Most of these captive test subjects were used up, never to be be seen again.

So well before he unethically fried the brain of his regular patients in Montreal, Cameron was brought in to rewire the brains and do “mental hygiene” on the losers of WWII. What a coinkydink. Joe Atwell and Jan Irvin dissect this aspect in the following segment at minutes 26:04 to 29:50.

The Case of Rudolf Hess

There is every indication that Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess ” who was also known as “The Conscious of National Socialism” ” flew to Scotland on a desperate-but-failed peace mission in May, 1941. (That may be an article for another day.) Upon his arrival and thereafter, he was kept in near solitary confinement until he was suicided in 1987 at the age of 93, just before he was due to be released from prison.

I suggest that Hess was reduced by Cameron and his British colleagues into a blubbering and broken man as performance art to embarrass the other co-defendants, to reinforce the “crazy Hess” narrative and to deflect away from his courageous peace mission. He was seated right next to Goering throughout the Nuremberg trials. Cameron also was tasked with removing Hess’ memory of past events. This is why, in 1946, Hess was unable to recognize his former friends and colleagues, such as Hermann Goering and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Von Ribbentrop responded by suggesting that Hess was not really Hess. When told of something that Hess had said, and he replied, “Hess, you mean Hess? The Hess we have here?” [J. R. Rees, “The Case of Rudolf Hess,” page 169]

When he came face to face with Hermann Göring at Nuremberg, Hess remarked, “Who are you?” Göring reminded him of events that they witnessed in the past, but Hess continued to insist that he did not know this man.

Karl Haushofer was then called in; but even though they had been friends for 20 years, Hess once again failed to remember him.

Hess replied, “I just don’t know you, but it will all come back to me, and then I will recognize an old friend again. I am terribly sorry.” [Peter Padfield, “Hess: The Führer’s Disciple,”page 305]

However, Maj. Douglas M. Kelley, the American psychiatrist who was responsible for Hess during the trials, stated that he did have periods when he did remember his past. This included a detailed account of his flight to Scotland. Hess told Kelley that he had arrived without the knowledge of Hitler. Hess claimed that “only he could get the English King or his representatives to meet with Hitler and make peace so that millions of people and thousands of villages would be spared.” [J. R. Rees, “The Case of Rudolf Hess,” page 168]

The reaction of fellow prisoners was confused and not so enthusiastic. Göring was amazed and upset; and while he enjoyed the frustration of the court, he demonstrated considerable resentment that he had been so completely fooled. Von Schirach felt that such behavior was not the action of a normal man; and, while he enjoyed Hess’s jest upon the world, felt that it was not a gesture expected of a good German, whose position was as important as that of Hess. Ribbentrop became quite agitated and seemed to feel such action was not possible.

He stated, “But Hess did not know me. I looked at him. I talked to him. Obviously he did not know me. It is just not possible. Nobody could fool me like that.”

Years later, clues emerged. In a letter to his wife dated Jan. 15, 1944, Hess wrote:

I have been sitting here for literally several hours, wondering what I can write to you about. But I get no further; and that I regret to say is for a very special reason. Since sooner or later, you will notice it or find out about it, I may as well tell you: I have completely lost my memory. The reason for it I do not know. The doctor gave me a lengthy explanation, but I have meanwhile forgotten what it was.

Cameron and the OSS were doing this during WWII. Cameron was suspected of having been given access to Hess starting in 1943, but for certain in 1945. Before 1943, it was the British working Hess over. Hess and other captured hardcore Germans were this crew’s guinea pigs.

In this linked video, there is a presentation entitled the “Psychiatric Enigma of Rudolf Hess” based on his mental hospital internment before Nuremberg. It’s disingenuous, but there is important evidence here that “experts” ignore.

Starting on June 26, 1942, Hess was held at a small facility called Maindiff Court. Wikipedia points out that this facility had “electroconvulsive therapy treatment” and the Gwent Specialist Substance Misuse Service on site. Hess was “treated” by John Rawlings Rees, who was director of the notorious Tavistock Clinic. He was later president of the World Federation for Mental Health. Hess’ diaries record many meetings with Rees and Henry Dicks (also Tavistock) in which Hess accused his captors of attempting to poison, drug and “mesmerize” him.

In 1945 to 1946 after working over Hess, Dicks advised the Control Commission for Germany on de-Nazification and reseached so-called “collective psychopathology of authoritarian regimes.” He was a British physician of partial Jewish decent who moved in Freudian circles and thus injected that quackery (see Sigmund Fraud: the Father of Psychoanalysis and Neurotic Charlatan) into these projects, even hypotheising that Hess and Hitler were homosexual lovers, blah, blah, blah.

As people in the audience yucked it up, we learn by sheer coinkydink that hospital records admit to giving truth serums and observing “patient” paranoia and atypical amnesia that made no sense. “Paranoid” Hess thought he was given neurotoxins in his food. He stated that he was worked over by strange glassy-eyed freakish individuals that in his so-called “paranoia” he felt were Jews. Who knows what drugs were administered to Hess, but this is not too dissimilar to what McGill’s victims described.

Where have we heard all this before? McGill? Ewen Cameron? Yes, that’s the ticket. If it wasn’t Cameron directly, it was his colleagues. We also learn at minute 43:30 that Hess, once in prison, started writing lucid, poetic letters home and demonstrated reasonable memory. Then they go into why Hess, right as he was about to be declared not fit to stand trial, suddenly proclaimed he was fine and had been pulling a ruse. But there is even logic to that when you consider he wanted to stay in the spotlight rather than go back to Cameron’s tortuous experiments.

Hess wrote to Oswald Mosley:

I have been imprisoned for four years now with lunatics, and had been at the mercy of their torture without being able to inform anybody of this. But the worst were the doctors, who employed their scientific knowledge for the most refined tortures.

I was given reports by British Consulates about the treatment of Jews in Germany according to ¦ Jews. [I was told I was being treated] “like the Gestapo treats their political enemies.”  ¦ It was typical of the Jews to claim that their enemies did what they did themselves.

Apart from the chemical that caused toothache, there was unmistakably a strong laxative and a poison that irritated the mucous membrane in the strongest possible manner. The last was responsible for my nose stopping itself up with congealed blood, that I had a hemorrhage in my mouth, and that my bowels burned like fire. The doctor could not hide his satisfaction when there were signs of a hemorrhage in my intestines.

They had been hypnotized to torture me until I became crazy and finally to kill me; to do everything in such a manner that nothing could possibly be proven and that my complaints could be explained by auto suggestion.

[Bernard Hutton’s “Hess: the Man and his Mission,” 1970 (pp.160-165)]

At the trial, Hess faded in and out. It was not overtly jest. But also remember that Hess was a consummate political infighter with a high degree of cleverness, even in his reduced state. Some of the survivors of Cameron’s mad science at McGill in the 1950s were the same way.

At minute 4:02, the diminished Hess post-Cameron can be seen in court. Starting at 7:40, there is an informative interview with his former American warden, Eugene K. Bird, who became a close friend. Bird wrote a book about Hess’ imprisonment titled “The Loneliest Man in the World” (which I’m unable to locate in .pdf, the paperback is expensive, and there’re no other videos on Youtube). He describes Hess as very introverted, isolated but lucid in his old age.

Most curiously and amazingly, after sitting slumped and disoriented through the Nuremberg trail, Hess mustered his old spirit and defiance in his closing statement before sentencing. This is highly revealing. It was as if to say to the court, as an expression of his remaining human dignity “go ahead give me your best shot.” So it appears, at least in a sense, that broken and tortured Rudolf Hess was yet one more failed experiment of the quack Dr. Ewen Cameron and the British “doctors”.