MK-Ultra: The shocking Cold War experiments hidden by the CIA - BBC REEL
MK-Ultra: The shocking Cold War experiments hidden by the CIA - BBC REEL
MK-Ultra: The shocking Cold War experiments hidden by the CIA - BBC REEL
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 I was given a glass of Kool-Aid and so were the other children. This Kool-Aid was spiked
00:15 with LSD. It was horrible.
00:19 In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA ordered the creation of a secret program intended
00:23 to find ways of mind control. They funded an army of psychiatric institutions across
00:29 the United States and Canada to perform experiments on unsuspecting patients using psychedelic
00:34 drugs, sensory deprivation, electroshock treatment and more. The program was known by its code
00:40 name MK-ULTRA.
00:46 At the end of the Korean War, a number of freed American POWs came home seemingly brainwashed
00:51 and espousing communist propaganda. American officials suspected that the soldiers had
00:55 been subjected to what they thought were new communist mind control techniques. Alarmed
01:00 by the situation, the newly formed CIA allocated $25 million for psychiatric experiments on
01:05 human beings.
01:07 It was the most secret program ever conducted by the CIA in the United States. Patients
01:14 at psychiatric hospitals, prisoners in federal institutions and even people in the public
01:21 were given drugs without their awareness or consent and experimented upon.
01:27 Initial projects within MK-ULTRA included Operation Midnight Climax.
01:31 They established what were called safe houses where prostitutes would lure men to these
01:38 apartments. And then once the men were in the apartments, they were dosed with LSD.
01:44 And then they were basically studied by CIA scientists, usually behind a two-way mirror.
01:50 Another common practice was the hosting and observing of LSD-induced parties with live
01:55 music. These parties were called acid tests and the culture that grew out of them played
01:59 a key role in the development of the hippie and psychedelic movements a few years later.
02:05 However, some of the most damaging experiments occurred at the Allen Memorial Institute in
02:10 Montreal, Canada. There, under the direction of infamous Scottish-American psychiatrist
02:14 Dr. Ewan Cameron, unsuspecting patients, many of whom had common ailments such as postpartum
02:19 depression, were experimented on with aggressive drug cocktails and extreme techniques.
02:24 My father was a victim of Dr. Cameron. He was a 27-year-old healthy skier, canoer, very
02:33 athletic, and he had asthma. They told him if he went to the Allen Memorial, they could
02:41 cure his asthma.
02:43 My father, Charles, was a patient of Dr. Cameron's. He had a trigeminal neuralgia that's called
02:49 where there's a pain in the temple that radiates into the jaw that apparently is excruciatingly
02:54 painful. They told him that it was psychosomatic, which it's not, but in those days, what did
02:59 they know? So they sent him to a shrink. The shrink that he went to was working with Cameron,
03:05 although we didn't know. So he put my father right into the program.
03:09 I was having trouble with my parents. My father and my stepmother decided to put me in the
03:14 Allen Memorial Institute. They had no idea what went on in there. I was 16 when I was
03:21 there.
03:22 Dr. Cameron pursued a concept he called depatterning, which was meant to reduce patients to an infantile
03:27 psychological state wherein doctors could take advantage of the person's cognitive vulnerability
03:32 to attempt to rebuild their mind under the doctor's control. A popular method of choice
03:36 to achieve this was called psychic driving.
03:39 The day that my father was brought to the hospital, they immediately put him on insulin,
03:43 to put him into like an insulin coma. They took clips from the interview with the shrink
03:48 and put it on tape to run a loop under his pillow while he was put into this sleep treatment.
03:54 He also was put in an insulin coma for 36 days with a recording beside him saying that
04:05 your mother hates you over and over and over and over and over.
04:11 I was beside my bed constantly, repeatedly 250,000 and 500,000 times.
04:20 Another common method was the use of extreme Page-Russell electroshock therapy.
04:23 Page-Russell shock treatment is approximately 40 to 75 times the strength of a normal shock
04:29 treatment. So it's really designed to wipe out the memory.
04:34 He received 54 high voltage shock treatments followed by 54 grand mal seizures.
04:44 After 27 days of this, they said that they were discouraged because he still had ties
04:50 to his former life in that he was asking to see his wife. They decided to give him more
04:55 Page-Russell shock treatments and put him to sleep for another 30 days.
05:00 When patients were released from the Ellen Memorial, they and their families' lives
05:03 would never be the same again.
05:04 Well, there's a lot I could not remember after I got out of the Ellen. When my family
05:09 came, I was a zombie. I didn't even know who they were.
05:13 He never came out the same. He had a blank, blank look in his eye. He didn't know who
05:18 we were. He didn't know we were his daughters. He lost his job. We went into poverty after
05:25 he came out.
05:28 He had said in his interview with The Shrink that I was the apple of his eye. And after
05:35 he came home, he started beating me not long after.
05:40 In 1973, the MKUltra program was terminated and some of the evidence of his activities
05:45 was systematically erased.
05:47 The whole thing was basically discovered because of a whistleblower named John Marks, who wrote
05:53 the first book really about the program called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. They
05:57 were congressional hearings here in the United States in the mid-70s after it had been exposed.
06:04 And during those hearings, the CIA finally admitted that this program existed. They admitted
06:08 that it was probably not the right thing to do, but they feigned innocence.
06:14 Despite the congressional hearings and marginal interest in the subject in popular culture,
06:18 most MKUltra survivors suffered in silence, taking their trauma with them to the grave.
06:23 Today, having received no formal apology or compensation, the children of some survivors
06:28 are pursuing a class action lawsuit against the institutions they deem responsible.
06:32 The CIA knew that it was breaking every moral, ethical and legal law in the books to do these
06:40 experiments.
06:41 They all were behind it. They all knew what they were doing, but they weren't doing it
06:47 out of care or love. They were doing it out of military and political reasons.
06:52 I am on medication now because of what happened to me when I was 16. I have not had any compensation
06:59 or apology. I want everyone to know in Canada what went on in that horrible, horrible hospital.
07:11 While historians and survivors have exposed MKUltra's exploits to the world, much remains
07:16 unknown about its extent and wider impact. Given the highly sensitive nature of the program's
07:21 activity, it is likely this will remain the case for years to come.
07:24 [Music]
07:29 [End of Audio]
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