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From
the March-April 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 3) |
Mind-Control Part 1:
Canadian and U.S. Survivors Seek Justice
"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
By Arlene Tyner
Tyner, Arlene “Mind Control Part 3: The Blowback Effect of Brain Tampering,” Probe Magazine,
July-August, 2000
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 Camerons 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
Camerons 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 Televisions 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 CIAs 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 governments 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.
Camerons 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
agencys 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 Camerons proposal:
#1: Hes going to fry his patients. I can tell you that.
#2: Well, we wont worry about the patients. Thats his problem. I just want
to know if he can brainwash them.
#1: He just might, you know. Hes right about the memory loss with a shock like
that. You couldnt do that to volunteers.
#2: Well, should we give him the money?
#1: What have we got to lose? Its not like hes 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 Presidents 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 ACHREs 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 Armys 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 Armys 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 didnt
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
Blauers 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 Reichs
search for a "truth serum."13 These and other Nazi
experiments were intensively studied by U.S. military scientists in occupied Germany.
Under the CIAs 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 CIAs 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 wasnt 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 CIAs
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 CIAs 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 Senates 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 Stanleys claim for damages. However, Justices Brennan,
Marshall and OConnor dissented, asserting their belief that the Nuremberg
Codes 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 Camerons 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 Montreals 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 Camerons 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 Camerons 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
"Dantes 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 CSCs 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 Queens 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 Evesons 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 Carlsons, an unnamed former hospital orderly and potential
witness to prison brainwashing, and Carlsons 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 Camerons 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 Marys 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 CIAs
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 Olsons 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 Olsons 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 CIAs 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 CIAs 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 CIAs 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 DiCarlos 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 CIAs
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 DiCarlos 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 Glickmans 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 Glickmans 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 (http://members.aol.com/smartnews/fivecases.htm)
2. Survivor testimonies, however, can be found on the
Internet: (http://morethanconquerors.simplenet.com/MCF/)
3. MacLeans, 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.
(http://www.radix.net/~jcturner/anat-tofc.html)
5. Collins, In the Sleep Room (Key Porter Books,
1998), pp. 94, 101-104.
6. Joe Rauhs 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
http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln07.htm. Tape 14: "Giving testimony
regarding survival as a government mind-control victim: My testimony and the
backlash," Mullens 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. (http://home.earthlink.net/~alto/index.html)
10. Final Report of Presidents Commission on Human
Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), 1996
(http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/index.html)
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.
Martins Press, 1991).
15 "Wonder Weapons: the Pentagons 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 http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln01.htm.
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:
http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm
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
(http://www.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp)
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 Canadas
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 wont compensate women without more
proof that tests caused harm," 2/3/98; "LSD tested on female prisoners,"
2/28/98; "The case for prisons 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 mans 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 http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/ gottlieb.htm for the 3/11/99 WorldNet Daily
obituary.
52. Regarding Gottliebs bizarre plans to assassinate
Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, see Impact International, April 1999
(http://www.africa2000.com/IMPACT/gottlieb.jpg)
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: http://www.nylj.com/nyljcontent/072298dd.htm.
56. Baker, op. cit.