CKLN-FM Mind Control Series -- Part 2
Producer Wayne Morris
Interviews Dr. Colin Ross
Second in a Series of Broadcasts aired Sunday April 6, 1997 on CKLN-FM 88.1 in Toronto
[W.M. is Wayne Morris, C.R. is Dr. Colin Ross]
W.M. I am speaking with Dr. Colin Ross, a psychiatrist and researcher practicing in Dallas, Texas. Dr.
Ross, I wonder if you could just briefly describe who you are, and what your work is.
C.R. I am a Canadian by birth and training ... I went to medical school in Edmonton, Alberta and did
my psychiatry training in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I moved down here to Dallas just a little over five years ago. I am a specialist
in Multiple Personality Disorder. I have written a number of different books, and lots of research papers and so on, on that.
Right now I am working at a hospital in the Dallas area here. We have a program that we run on a contract for the hospital
... which mostly treats people with Multiple Personality Disorder and other related disorders. Most of the people we treat
describe very traumatic and abusive childhoods.
W.M. What is Dissociative Identity Disorder, and is it the same thing as Multiple Personality Disorder?
C.R. Dissociative Identity Disorder is the official new name for Multiple Personality Disorder. It hasn't
really caught on in general language ... it's a professional, technical term. In 1994 that new diagnosis was introduced. It
just replaces Multiple Personality Disorder, and the criteria for diagnosing it has changed a little bit, mainly by adding
some criteria for amnesia. But it basically means the same thing as Multiple Personality Disorder.
W.M. What does it mean when somebody has this disorder?
C.R. The basic criteria for diagnosing it are pretty straightforward. You have these different personality
states, or identities, that take turns being in control of the body. There is some sort of amnesia, or memory barrier, between
the different personality states. There are several important points to understand about this disorder. First of all, it is
not literally true that they have these different personalities. They just have these fragmented components of one personality.
Those have been referred to as different "personalities" for over one hundred years, but they are not really different personalities.
There isn't really more than one person there.
And there are several different ways you can end up having MPD. One way, which is what we think we see most of the time
clinically is where you have basically been physically, sexually, emotionally abused or neglected as a child and you create
these different identities to cope with it, and hold the memories and feelings about it, and so on. That can be, as I said,
a combination of various types of trauma in childhood, and it has to be fairly serious trauma.
And another way that you can get MPD is where it is created, either by mistake, or deliberately, by somebody else. And
that could be in bad therapy, which is all out of control and not being handled properly. And the other major way of arriving
at MPD is when you have what is called a Factitious Disorder. That means that they deliberately fake having it by deliberately
getting into the patient role to get attention, or get out of something, or for some specific purpose.
W.M. Have you seen this disorder occur due to trauma as an adult, or does it specifically happen while
a child?
C.R. Well, there are some cases reported in the literature and there is the odd case where it is trauma
that starts in adulthood, but the vast majority of times it seems to start in childhood.
W.M. We have listened to your lecture about the history of United States' mind control. You refer to
the term "iatrogenic". What does that mean?
C.R. "Iatrogenic" is just a Greek word that means "created by the doctor". So Iatrogenic Multiple Personality
is MPD that is created by mistake by a bad therapist who is using improper techniques.
W.M. How did you get involved with people suffering with DID?
C.R. I actually diagnosed my first case when I was a medical student in Edmonton, Alberta and I just
really found it fascinating and interesting and when I was doing my four years of psychiatry training in Winnipeg, Manitoba
I saw one more case, and I thought it was going to be too rare to specialize in ... but then in 1985, when I finished my psychiatry
training I diagnosed another case, and then I got some referrals and then more referrals, and then I got a reputation for
it and ended up getting lots of referrals from all different kinds of people in Western Canada and gradually switched over
to that being my specialty.
W.M. And this was when you were operating a practice in Winnipeg, or was it in Edmonton, at the time?
C.R. Winnipeg. I was a full-time University Professor of Psychiatry at the time at one of the hospitals
there.
W.M. What were your findings from working with people with DID or MPD?
C.R. Well, I have published just on working with MPD and related things, approximately sixty or so papers
in the professional literature, and I found quite a few different things. But the main theme that really goes through the
MPD literature ... that is, that people who have this diagnosis clinically have lots of other things going on at the same
time ... lots of depression, lots of anxiety, drug and alcohol problems, eating disorder, sleep problems ... so they don't
just have MPD ... they have all kinds of different symptoms. They also tend to be in the health care system for quite a long
period of time ... not all the time ... but the majority of cases are in the health care system getting psychiatric treatment
for quite a while ... on average about seven years before the MPD is diagnosed.
And the other theme that we see going all the time is childhood trauma ... that MPD arises as a way of coping with childhood
trauma. Then we just actually found out this week that a paper has been accepted at the American Journal of Psychiatry where
we assessed 103 people with this diagnosis here in Dallas about almost exactly four years ago now ... where we gave them a
whole bunch of different questionnaires and standardized tests and interviews and so on, and we followed up with as many as
we could ... about fifty-four of them ... and the reduction of all these different symptoms was really impressive and already
in the first four years of the study, twelve of the fifty-four people are integrated back into one person. They had a dramatic
and meaningful reduction, not just in the number of MPD related symptoms ... but also depression, anxiety, substance abuse,
all kinds of things. So this is a first scientifically designed treatment outcome study that really shows that good treatment
can be very helpful.
W.M. So these people you are talking about did undergo treatment with you, or other therapists?
C.R. They came to our hospital ... usually for an average of about seventeen days or so. 70% of our
people are from outside Texas, so they are from over the U.S.A. and we have had probably fifteen admissions from people in
Ontario. They would then go home, and are followed up by their therapists. So they only get about two, three, sometimes four
weeks with us. They may go into our day hospital program for a little bit as well. But basically they are followed up by therapists
all over the country.
W.M. And are these therapists in contact with you in terms of methods of therapy?
C.R. They have usually read my books, and been to some of my workshops, and are aware of my approach.
But they don't have to necessarily follow my approach.
W.M. And these other symptoms that you were talking about ... do you feel that they were also a result
of childhood trauma?
C.R. Yes. The whole package seems to be related to childhood trauma. Now we have a lot of controversy
going on in society about this ... in psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and so on ... and we need a lot more research, but
that's my understanding right now. There's a fair bit of research data that backs that up ... it's not totally nailed down
scientifically.
W.M. I am wondering from your experience working in Canada, how has the Canadian medical system responded
to your findings on MPD research?
C.R. Roughly about the same as in the U.S.A. Overall, there is a lot of skepticism, a lot of political
agitation, a fair bit of negative, hostile propaganda, and back-stabbing about it. And then there is also quite a lot of support.
Obviously, if I have had sixty professional papers published, I am getting a reasonable reception. The main difference between
Canada and the U.S.A. was that in Canada I just couldn't get the financial and clinical support to set up and run a program.
And the reason that is possible down here is that there is a private, for profit sector in the mental health system. It is
profit driven, it is a business and the hospital that I contract with is traded on the New York Stock Exchange and so on.
And since I attract the patients, there is a financial motive for the hospital to be interested in having me provide that
service. So that financial motive allows the system to set aside all of these ideological and political debates that go on
and so therefore I am able to run a program.
W.M. So for the survivors of childhood abuse that you are dealing with I guess they would have to have
access to some kind of funds to be able to undergo therapy. What is your sense of people who have undergone this in childhood
and do not have access to therapy?
C.R. The breakdown in terms of insurance coverage that we have in our program is that roughly 50% are
on Medicare which is a government disability program. They are sort of like Canadian health care system people in that their
health care is paid for by the government, and they also get disability/welfare type payments for their support. So half of
our people are insured in a way that is clearly similar to Canada. The other half have some sort of private insurance through
their employer or spouse's employer.
If you are in the one-third of people in the U.S.A. who don't have proper medical insurance, then you can't get
proper medical care, including psychiatric, and including the kind we provide. That would seem to be a reason to think that
the Canadian health care system is superior to the U.S.A. The funny thing is that if you have MPD or a related disorder, your
odds of getting treatment are actually better in the U.S.A. because there are more therapists and more programs in the U.S.A.
In Canada, even though you have universal access and universal coverage, in actual practical reality, you can't get the treatment.
You have theoretical universal coverage for MPD and trauma related disorders, but you don't have the real practical coverage
in reality. The paradox is that in the U.S.A., the higher percentage of people who could benefit from psychotherapy from all
kinds of problems resulting from their childhoods who can actually get therapy is higher in the U.S.A.
W.M. In your previous lecture, you did go into a lot of detail outlining the history of mind
control. What is the link between MPD and mind control experimentation?
C.R. How I got into this was sort of a back-door route. I didn't really have any interest in the CIA
or the military or mind control research or all of that particularly when I left Canada. Hadn't read about it, hadn't really
heard any other doctors talking about it, hadn't heard any patients talking about it. Pretty soon, after arriving in Texas
in 1992, MPD patients started talking about strange experiences that I didn't know what to make of ... it involved
either going into hospitals, some sort of research setting on a military base, and having different kinds of experiments done
on them which involved EEG machines or some kind of scientific equipment, sensory deprivation, and maybe physical spinning,
maybe hallucinogens.
And it wasn't any kind of cult or obviously wasn't just their parents or something going on in their family and
initially I thought it was just too much to believe. Then I decided I should at least look into it a little bit, and I started
basically in early 1992 doing a little bit of reading, and the more reading I did ... what amazed me was that instead of coming
to the conclusion that "well this is not possible, there is no documentation of this stuff", actually the more I read, the
more documentation I got.
All kinds of absolutely unbelievable, bizarre and unethical and harmful mind control research has been done,
in Canada and in the U.S.A. since the Second World War. And I have actually interviewed and spoken with a number
of people who have documented mind control research. Most of the patients that we hear these kinds of things from get zero
documentation that is actually real. Though I kind of disconnected my research and my study about this from the stories I
was hearing from the patients, and did it as a separate research project.
What I have done over the past five years is talked to a lot of other people in the field who are interested
in this, read pretty much everything that has been written on this, and under the Freedom of Information Act I have somewhere
in the ballpark of 6000-7000 pages of documents from the CIA which I have reviewed. I have gone to the medical school
library, and I sent my secretary to five or six different places in the U.S.A. ... go into archives and special collections
in libraries and so on ... and I have ended up now with probably more than two full four drawer filing cabinets full of documentation
on all kinds of things ... that is how I got into this. And the connection with MPD for me personally was just that my MPD
patients were the ones who started me these kinds of stories and got me interested in it.
W.M. From a therapist's point of view, how do you tell if somebody is giving you an account of actual
abuse or whether they are just fabricating something?
C.R. Well, basically, all the professional associations, including the Canadian Psychiatric Association,
who have made statements on this, and all the scientific research, completely supports the conclusion that you can't tell.
And that goes both ways ...
W.M. You cannot tell?
C.R. You cannot tell just by listening to the patient's story ... you can't tell that it is true. Also
you can't tell that it is false. In other words you can't tell without some sort of outside proof. That is proof that it really
happened, or proof that it didn't happen. What I have learned especially in the last five years, there is really no limit
to how detailed, how compelling, how full of feeling ... how detailed a bunch of memories can be and actually be totally real,
or never have happened. I have worked with people who have had really elaborate memories of all kinds of things with tremendous
amounts of detail and then we have been able to prove it never happened. You can't tell. And that's why I have tried to do
this research ... separate it off from what the patients are telling me.
W.M. What similarities have you come across within the survivor accounts and what you have discovered
in the CIA documentation about their mind control programs?
C.R. Well, basically, if you take a typically elaborate story that you will hear from one of the MPD
patients who has these kinds of memories, and you break it down into the elements or components of the mind control techniques
that are described, I have been able to document every one with one or two exceptions. All of this was carried out in a series
of programs that really began in the Second World War with what was called the O.S.S., the Office of Strategic Services ...
W.M. The precursor to the CIA?
C.R. Yeah. It was set up after Pearl Harbour when it became obvious that there was a huge problem with
U.S.A. military intelligence gathering because they were totally surprised by the Japanese ... and O.S.S. was set up in 1941
and at the end of the war it was disbanded and rolled over into the C.I.A. which was created in September of 1947 through
the National Security Act with basically the same people who had been the O.S.S. And the O.S.S. did various kinds of drug
research and mind control research, including hallucinogens ... marijuana and sodium amytal and so on ... different types
of drugs. Also, they did experiments with hypnosis ...
There is then a little bit of a gap, and then in 1951, the C.I.A. started up two programs called Artichoke
and Bluebird which ran until about 1953 and rolled over into MKULTRA which ran from 1953
to 1964. MKULTRA was rolled over into MKSEARCH which ran until 1973, and then running concurrently with MKULTRA and MKSEARCH
roughly about ten other programs were declassified. There is a little smattering of information on each of
those. You have names like MKNAOMI, QKHILLTOP, and MKDELTA ... by far the
best known and the one I have the most documents on are MKULTRA.
It involved 149 different, separate contracts at about eighty different institutions throughout Canada and the
U.S.A. In MKNAOMI, MKULTRA, and MKSEARCH, there are basically about three major blocks or types of kinds of mind
control research. About half the projects in MKULTRA, for instance, were on a sort of procurement, manufacture or
supplying chemicals ... which are mostly hallucinogens, sometimes biological warfare weapons such as bacteria or viruses,
and sometimes other kinds of chemicals for mind control research. So it was just straight contracting to
get the chemicals. An example of that would be, in 1953 one of the MKULTRA sub-projects was a $400,000 grant to Eli Lilly
which is the drug company that manufactures Prozac ... and that was for manufacturing LSD. So the first major supplier of
LSD in North America was actually the Eli Lilly Drug Company.
W.M. And there's actually evidence that the C.I.A. was responsible for the distribution of this throughout
the U.S.A. and across North America?
C.R. Yes, they used it in actual experiments, and they also turned some of it over to the military through
the MKNAOMI program. A lot of the Army mind control and drug research was done at the Edgeware Arsenal, which has
been in the news a lot recently because of a lot of sexual assault and rape of female army personnel there, and it is linked
to Fort Detrick and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland ... a little bit north of Washington, D.C.
W.M. Is this the same military base that the BBC documentary focused on about them giving very powerful
drugs to U.S. soldiers?
C.R. Yes. It was the major centre for all kinds of hallucinogen and other drug research. The
main one, or best known, is LSD, but actually the Army released a list of about 130 compounds that it tested in mind control
research. That was released in 1975. There are at least 130 drugs or compounds that they admit they were using on
experimental subjects. They admitted, in the mid-1970's, to testing LSD on at least 1500 subjects ... so if you just do the
arithmetic very roughly, they gave LSD to 1500 people, and they tested 130 drugs ... that was just the Army ... and you figure
there are four branches of the military in the U.S.A. plus the C.I.A., you are talking about a huge number of people ... potentially
hundreds of thousands of people who got at least one dose of an experimental mind control drug, usually without any kind of
adequate informed consent at all.
W.M. Who typically would these people be? Where were they drawing their subjects from?
C.R. Actually, I would just like to pop back to talking about Eli Lilly for a second just to finish
off that part of the story, then I will answer that question. LSD was discovered accidentally in 1943 by a man named
Albert Hoffman, working at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, which is a drug company. What happened was that
in the late 40's, early 50's a rumour developed that the Russians might buy up or try to buy up the entire world supply of
LSD. That is why the C.I.A. decided to contract with the drug company in the U.S.A. which manufactures Prozac, which is Eli
Lilly ... so they could have a secure North American supply. One of the things that amazed me, absolutely the most, doing
this research was to find out who the original acidheads were in North America because you would assume it would be beatniks
or criminals or musicians or somebody or other ... turns out that the original acidheads in North America were actually
the psychiatrists, and the C.I.A. and the military personnel.
In conferences that were actually sponsored by the C.I.A., I found, in books, dozens of these psychiatrists who were
some of the major drug researchers and major psychiatrists in the second half of the 20th Century ... all describing acid
trips they were on, how much they enjoyed them, how useful they thought they were, and describing using LSD to treat
all different kinds of things from alcoholism to anxiety to homosexuality which they considered to be a disease.
So they were, themselves, turning each other on and then they were using all different kinds of subjects.
The majority would be psychiatric patients who were already in treatment; army personnel; prisoners in several different prisons
in the U.S.A.; or in one project which was in MKULTRA, they actually had prostitutes that they hired through MKULTRA
and they set up safe houses in San Francisco and New York, and the prostitutes would go out on the streets and recruit people
for tricks.
The CIA people would watch the tricks through one way mirrors, monitor the sex, and the prostitutes would slip the johns
LSD and other hallucinogens, and these people were totally unaware that they were involved in any kind of government experiment,
totally unaware that they were going to get LSD at all, gave no consent whatsoever. So most of the time the subjects were
somebody who was one notch down in the power set-up ... they were either an employee of the institution where the doctor was
doing the research, they were a patient, they were somebody in the military who was loosely seen as a volunteer but they really
didn't have much choice, or they were a prisoner. Usually they were somebody who was under the control of the administration,
under the control of the doctor somehow to some extent.
W.M. Specifically, what prisons were involved in the mind control experiments?
C.R. One of the prisons was the New Jersey Reformatory at Bordentown (which is in Pennsylvania).
The investigator there was Carl Feiffer who had a lot of MKULTRA and MKSEARCH money. Besides being at the
New Jersey Psychiatric Research Institute, which is where he did the work at Bordentown, he was also the Chairman
of the Department of Pharmacology at one of the major universities in Atlanta ... Emory University. While he was
there, he conducted LSD experiments on the people in the Atlanta Penitentiary. There was a narcotics
farm in Lexington, Kentucky which was a prison. It was mainly for drug related offenders.
One of the more sinister ones was Vacaville State Prison in California. Vacaville State Prison was an MKSEARCH
site where they did drug research related to the drug, Pemoline whose trade name is Silert. It is used for Attention Deficit
Disorder in kids. They were using it to study memory enhancement drugs. That was at the same time that Donald
DeFreeze was an inmate at Vacaville. Donald DeFreeze was the head of the Liberation Army that captured Patty Hearst.
At the same time there was drug research going on at the New Jersey Reformatory in Bordentown, a man was in prison there whose
name was Louis Castille, and he was later arrested in the Phillipines on suspicion of planning to assassinate President Marcos,
and he exhibited five distinct personalities during forty different interviews conducted by the Phillipines FBI.
There was consultation from the Phillipines FBI to the American FBI in that case. Also, because he alleged he
was involved in the Kennedy assassination, there was a consultation with Gerald Ford who was on the Warren Commission.
All of this is tied into all kinds of aspects throughout the second half of the 20th Century. A very, very twisted, convoluted
history.
People who were expert witnesses for Patty Hearst, who were saying that she had been captured by the Symbionese
Liberation Army and brainwashed by them using the techniques of destructive cults were similar to the techniques of the CIA
and military mind control. Those witnesses included Robert Lifton, Margaret Singer, Martin Orne and a psychiatrist
named Joly West. Martin Orne and Joly West were top secret clearance for MKULTRA money. The funny thing about Patty
Hearst is that her new identity named "Tania" had been created using brainwashing techniques, and Patty Hearst identified
herself as "Tania" when she robbed a bank. She was convicted and found guilty, and actually sent to jail for that.
The experts in a lot of the CIA mind control programming were very aware of the possibility of creating an artificial
multiple personality through mind control techniques, and they testified that this had been done by this character, Donald
DeFreeze, who was a black criminal and petty thief. There are several strange twists in that story. One of the strange twists,
which is somewhat documented, but not completely documented, is that according to several different sources, including Patty
Hearst's autobiography as well, Colston Westbrook was an employee of the CIA and psychological expert
during the Vietnam War. He came back and got a teaching position at the University of Berkeley as a language
instructor, and then he entered Vacaville Prison under the cover of the Black Cultural Association, which was a black prisoners/inmates'
association, and he used mind control techniques on Donald DeFreeze and actually gave him his code name of Cinque, and designed
the seven headed cobra logo/symbol of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Then Donald DeFreeze was transferred from maximum security in this facility (Vacaville) to a low security facility from
which he immediately escaped and several months after that he captured Patty Hearst and used fairly sophisticated mind control
techniques on her and created a Manchurian Candidate second identity in her named "Tania".
W.M. So, unless this is all highly coincidental, then what you are saying is that the SLA was a CIA
creation.
C.R. I don't know for a documented fact that it's true, but that is what these several different books
are alleging, and they are fairly detailed and I am trying to research up on that. But it is absolutely known for a fact that
these two doctors, Dr. West and Dr. Orne, had extensive funding from all branches of military intelligence from the CIA and
had top secret clearance, and they described the process in a lot of detail by which this artificial multiple personality
was created in Patty Hearst. So that's just not my opinion and my theory, that's their opinion and their theory which they
testified to in court.
Not so much Joly West, but Martin Orne is tied in to a man named G.H. Estabrooks who
was one of probably the top ten leading experts on hypnosis in the 20th Century ... Martin Orne would probably be in the top
handful ... G.H. Estabrooks was actually a Canadian by birth, he was a Rhodes Scholar, moved into Upper State New
York, and basically spent his professional career in New York at a little college called Colgate College in Hamilton, New
York which is not too far from Buffalo. And he published starting in 1943 and going all the way up to 1971 ... very very detailed
accounts of creating Multiple Personalities during WWII for various branches of the U.S.A. military.
Basically, he called these people Multiple Personalities. He talked about the Multiple Personality literature,
and he referred to them as super-spies. The idea is that you create somebody artificially, using hypnosis and other mind control
techniques who had no multiple personality before, but now has this second identity. And the second identity is hidden behind
a memory barrier, an amnesia barrier, and there is a verbal access code that is used to call out the second identity. So,
say this person is a Marine, they will be given some kind of courier assignment to take some documents to ie. Tokyo, but G.H.
Estabrooks then calls out the second personality and sticks in some classified information into this second personality. Then
there is a switch-back to the main identity, and the person is just going on this routine trip to take documents or technical
material over to Tokyo. When he gets to the far end, he uses the example of a Col. Brown who then uses the code signal, and
the example he uses in the description is, "The moon is clear." As soon as Col. Brown says "The moon is clear", the second
identity pops out, gives the classified message. Col. Brown inserts a classified response, then the person pops back to their
regular identity, goes back to the States and thinks they have just gone on a routine assignment. But Estabrooks again says
"The moon is clear", the identity pops out, and Estabrooks gets the classified message. He describes using these people
in classified courier missions for actual operations, extensively many times during WWII.
W.M. So this is in George Estabrooks's own documentation that he is describing this?
C.R. Right. And he also describes using them for infiltration operations. His idea there is to take
somebody who is a loyal, patriotic Marine, and create in him a new identity, of a Communist, and you submerge the previous
identity of the patriotic Marine. Now this person who is a created really diehard Communist, goes and infiltrates cells or
political organizations and does whatever spy work is required. The idea is that if one of these couriers, or infiltration
agents is captured and interrogated, they actually have no idea that they are spies. They generally think they are just on
a regular mission, or they generally believe they are Communist, so they can't be interrogated and they can't be made to reveal
information so easily.
So of course they go in and do whatever infiltration operation is required, and then they come back and they are debriefed
by Estabrooks who knows how to get through to the original personality. Some of these people, according to Estabrooks, were
actually given dishonorable discharges as part of their cover. One question about that is ... is Estabrooks just telling tall
tales? I have been able to build up a lot of documentation about him, and his personal archives are still housed at this Colgate
College. I photocopied probably a pile of paper at least a foot deep.
W.M. And what did those documents reveal to you?
C.R. Well, it's all his personal papers, correspondence, background. So I have original documents now
photocopies showing that he was employed by the War Department during WWII. He marketed his ideas to every branch of Military
Intelligence in the U.S.A. There is tons of correspondence with him and all kinds of Navy, Army, Air Force intelligence people.
He did a lot of training at Fort Holobird (?) and other locations. One of the most interesting things about him was that he
corresponded pretty regularly with J. Edgar Hoover from the 1930's through to the 1960's. There is a lot
of correspondence with Hoover and there were a lot of FBI personnel who came out and visited him and attended his different
teachings, and a lot of these people talk about reading his book which came out in 1943, "Hypnotism".
In this textbook, he describes these artificial multiple personalities in a lot of detail. I have good documentation
that the CIA in Bluebird and Artichoke did pretty much the same experiments. They describe several different things.
They don't describe actual operations, but they describe real-life simulations where they are testing these people. They describe
the same things that Estabrooks is talking about where they hypnotize somebody, condition a second personality that can stand
up to a lie detector test. Also they describe having amnesia barriers and having people go on assignments where they go to
another building and rifle through some materials, take some documents and bring them back, and then have no memory of doing
this whatsoever.
In MKULTRA there was a contractor named Alden Sears who did experiments at the University of
Minnesota and the University of Denver which were very similar and there is a lot of documentation of him procuring
CIA safe houses for some of his experiments and doing demonstrations with some of these techniques for military and CIA personnel,
and creating hypnotic couriers, and so on. So there are several sets of documents that back up that this was done at an experimental
level by the CIA successfully. But I don't have documents about their use in operations.
W.M. You mentioned that there are three areas of interest in the mind control experimentation. I wonder
if you could just review those again? You mentioned drugs.
C.R. A big chunk was just the manufacture and supply of drugs, chemicals and biological weapons. Another
chunk was actually using the drugs in experiments on people to try and create amnesia, to try and create altered states of
consciousness, to test the drugs for interrogation purposes, and also to test them for detecting hypnotically programmed agents.
There was a team called The Artichoke Team, which was created as part of Artichoke. It would use different and mind control,
sensory deprivation techniques to try and figure out if somebody had been hypnotically programmed by another intelligence
agency. In other words they were trying to pick up these hypnotically controlled double agents that had been created by the
KGB, or whoever.
Then about one quarter of these research projects were just odds and ends of all different psychology, sociology experiments.
A man named R. Gordon Watson who wrote a book called "Soma: The Divine Mushroom of Immortality" which is about the toadstool
that you always see in fairtytales (a red stalk, and white cap with red flecks on it) ... that's Amenita Muscaria which is
a mushroom that was used by circumpolar shamans in northern Canada, Alaska and Sibera for centuries. So R. Gordon Watson has
called this mushroom "Soma", had an MKULTRA grant through the J.P. Morgan Company to go on an expedition to Northern Mexico
to try and find hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Just to give you an example of how all these things tie into our culture at large, G.H. Estabrook organized three or
four major symposia at Colgate College and he invited all kinds of people to them ... including Martin Orne. In two of the
different sessions organized by Estabrook, Alduous Huxley came and talked. Alduous Huxley used hallucinogens
himself, and wrote the novel, Brave New World, a science fiction book in which the government controls the people by giving
them a mind control drug called, Soma. All these things are very strangely connected to each other. Not as part of
a huge conspiracy, but because all these people knew each other, talked to each other, influenced each other.
Four of the MKULTRA sub-projects were on children and three of the investigators did not know it was CIA money,
and one did. The research projects themselves were pretty bland, and not very alarming. So the purpose there, as
stated by the CIA, was not really the research as such. MKULTRA sub-project 103 was at a children's international summer camp
in Maine. Children from all kinds of different countries would come and spend weeks through the summer. The purpose of the
research was to study how children communicate and solve problems when they don't share a common language.
The purpose of the CIA funding, which was secret, was that they wanted to establish contact with a whole bunch of foreign
national children, who were as young as eleven, because they might be of potential intelligence use in the future. In other
words, they were just interested in getting an "in" so they could make a list of these people and start figuring out who might
be a good person to recruit to find out who might be a good CIA person in the future. They were doing this to children.
W.M. You mentioned that multiple personalities are much easier to create in children, and if the military
and CIA's goals were to use multiple personalities for intelligence purposes, is there evidence of experimentation on children?
C.R. Not experimentation to create multiple personality in children directly, but there are experiments
on children that you would think were unbelievable, impossible, could never have happened ... and if you heard someone telling
you about them, you would think the person was making it up or was deluded. But actually I have the publications which describe
the research.
One example is that G.H. Estabrooks himself did experiments with hypnosis on children at two different orphanages in
northern New York State. So he did create multiple personalities experimentally, he did correspond with J. Edgar Hoover about
using hypnosis and drugs on juvenile offenders, and he did actually do some kind of research at these two orphanages, but
I don't know the exact nature of the experiments, except that it involved hypnosis in some form.
If you think this is too much to believe ... there is no way the CIA and the military would do experiments to create
multiple personality in children ... it's just too off the wall, too bizarre ... it would be helpful to know what actually
is documented, what actually was done.
One of the most revered psychiatrists, who had her obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry recently, is a woman
named Loretta Bender. She was a child psychiatrist. Interview any child psychiatrist around the country,
and they would speak highly of her contribution to child psychiatry. In a publication I have on file, as a photocopy, which
you can get at a medical school library, it is not hard to get ... she described giving LSD in dosages of 150 micrograms,
which is a big street level dose for a kid, to children aged 5-10, for days, weeks, and sometimes months in a row.
She also described giving hallucinogenic doses of psylocybin, which is the main compound in magic mushrooms, to kids
as young as five years of age. So this network of doctors whose drugs were supplied either by the CIA or the military,
or drug companies funded by them, gave massive doses of LSD and other hallucinogens to kids 5, 7, 8 years old. They would
keep them on full acid trips up to months in a row.
W.M. And this was documented in the journals at the time?
C.R. Yes, it was published in the regular medical journals. You can just go to the library and photocopy
them.
W.M. And there was no outcry in the profession against this? This sounds like torture.
C.R. No. This was just regarded as psychiatrists doing research and trying to help kids. That's the
things that is most amazing about this. You don't have to have a conspiracy theory, and really conspiracy theories
are interesting but kind of beside the point I think. The thing that is most amazing is that all this kind of stuff is just
straightforward, everyday, regular kind of activity by psychiatrists and psychologists ... it gets published, it gets presented
at conferences ... nobody comments on it or gets outraged about it ... nobody does anything about it.
Another type of research that is fully documented, if you know the references they can be found in any medical library,
there is a whole body of research on brain electrode implants. The main people who were doing that were Joly
West who was trying to set up a program in Los Angeles to do that, which was approved by Ronald Reagan, but
then got shot down by public protest. The main work was done at Tulane University in New Orleans by Robert Heath,
at Yale by Jose Delgado and at Harvard by a team that included Frank Irvine and William Sweet.
These are the major universities in the western world. What they basically did was they would stick very fine electrodes
into specific areas or centres in a human's brain, often up to 15, 20, 25 electrodes at one time, and then they would stimulate
the electrodes electrically through the wires, and that would cause the electrode to discharge which would cause that part
of the brain to fire ... Jose Delgado at Yale made a technical advance when he invented a remote transmitter box, that in
the 1960's had a range of up to 100 feet. He could push a button on the box that would transmit a signal to the electrode
which would cause a firing in the brain, and that part of the brain would get activated.
In the books and papers that are published, Delgado describes also doing this in cats and monkeys. He refers to these
monkeys as "Mechanical Toys" because he could control their body movements, control their behaviour. An example of what he
was doing with monkeys is that he had a group of monkeys, who were all in the same species, living all in the same cage, and
they have a dominant hierarchy (a boss monkey who runs the whole show, and then they have a whole bunch of submissive males
and females). In the normal set-up, the boss monkey has half the cage to himself, and all the other monkeys get to use the
other half. If they try to come and use his space, then he gets mad, angry or beats them up or threatens them ... this is
just the normal social structure of these monkeys.
What he did then was to implant an electrode in the brain of the boss monkey and when he pushed a certain button on this
transmitter box, the boss monkey became completely submissive. The other monkeys started to figure this out, and started getting
bold, and come in to his part of the cage and rough him up and not pay any attention to him. The next step in the experiments
was to put a lever in the cage where the other monkeys could get their hands on it, and when they pressed the lever it then
transmitted a signal to the electrode in the boss monkey's brain which would leave him passive. The other monkeys learned
this, and started practicing mind control on the boss monkey by pressing the lever and make him have these seizures in that
part of his brain that made him passive. They learned how to control the boss monkey ... the article shows a picture of the
other monkeys lying all around the cage, and not paying any attention to the boss monkey.
What he did then, was to do this to human beings, including children. He describes an eleven year old
boy in whose brain he put electrodes. When he pressed the right button on the box, the boy would start talking about maybe
being a girl, wanting to marry a male therapist. So they were using brain electrode implants to modify the identity, world
view and behaviour of children as young as eleven.
Robert Heath, at Tulane University, describes one case in several different publications ... the guy is referred
to as subject B-19, aged 18 or 20. He was homosexual, and they viewed homosexuality as a medical disease which needed to be
treated, so they put brain electrodes in this young man, one of which went into the area of the brain called the
septum, which is an area of one of the pleasure centres in the brain. They would push the button, cause the electrode to fire,
and he would not have a full orgasm but would be three-quarters of the way toward orgasm, would feel really really good as
a result of the button being pushed.
They studied his response, and thought they would get him to watch heterosexual pornographic films while they were pushing
the button. They were trying to switch him over to trying to be interested in women. Then they did two further things. They
set him up with a little box of his own, where he could push the button himself, and they have a chart over a three hour period
showing how many times he pushed the button himself. In one three hour period, he got up to pushing the button 1500 times
to give himself an artificial neuro-orgasm.
Then the final step they did in the research was to bring in a twenty year old prostitute to the medical school, and
had her have sex with him, and while they were having sex, they recorded the brain electrode output, because it was a two-way
communication system. They could signal to the young man's brain, or they could just use the electrodes to monitor the brain
activity that was occurring naturally. They took brain electrode activity recordings from deep inside his brain while he was
having an orgasm with this female prostitute. Then they report that over an eleven month period as a follow-up, he was mostly
heterosexual, with a few "relapses". This is just the stuff that really went on.
A guy at Harvard, who was part of the Harvard brain electrode team, was William Sweet. He was testifying at the recent
hearings by the committee set up by Bill Clinton to look at all the radiation experiments. The radiation
experiments were all intertwined and overlap with all this mind control stuff. William Sweet described injecting plutonium
into people at Harvard as part of the Atomic Energy Commission, CIA and military research and he claimed that all the subjects
there gave him informed consent. But one of the subjects named, HP-12, they referred to their experimental subjects
as Human Products with the HP designation, then they go to a series of numbers ... arrived at one of the emergency departments
at one of the hospitals in Boston which was part of the Harvard system, unconscious and unidentified. He was injected
with plutonium, obviously without giving consent, and he died without regaining consciousness and without being identified.
That didn't quite fit with the idea that everybody gave informed consent. Recently the Clinton government approved
a settlement of 4.8 million dollars for just 12 of these people who were subjects in experiments, and there are probably hundreds
and hundreds of them.
W.M. This was the outcome of the Presidential hearing on radiation experiments?
C.R. Right, and what I think, and what I am going to start lobbying for, should be another hearing on
the mind control side of things ...
W.M. And the mind control were introduced at the end of the hearings on radiation ... can you talk about
that? What evidence was introduced, and what the response was by the U.S. government?
C.R. It was a typical kind of Presidential Commission, which was like the various commissions
of inquiry that go on in Canada, where they receive all kinds of mail and correspondence, and then go all around the country
having hearings where people can testify. They had hearings in Washington and a number of people testified ... there was the
documented material that I am talking about, and then the memories of individual patients ... the stuff that they claim has
gone on, which isn't documented. The things that I know for sure went on, and that includes in Canada, were the use
of hallucinogens, implantation of these brain electrodes, massive doses of electroshock ... as in ECT treatment where you
are made to have a seizure, and electroshock to different parts of your body as part of behaviour modification. Sensory deprivation
experiments where people were kept in different chambers for long periods of time until they started hallucinating. Ewen Cameron
is the best known CIA contractor. He did psychic driving where he would make people listen to tape loops for literally hours
and hours per day, with repeated messages, trying to modify their way of thinking and behaviour. So all of these different
elements have been used and totally documented in medical school library-type journals.
One of the most bizarre experiments was done at the University of Minnesota by a man named Amadeo Morrazzi, who
had an Air Force grant for LSD research. Previously he was one of the administrative/managerial guys at Edgeware
Arsenal. Besides just giving people LSD and so on, he made use of what is known as the Ames Leaf Room. A
guy named Ames developed this room, funded by the Office of Naval Research which was heavily involved in mind control research.
The Ames Leaf Room has several different forms. It can either be a room that is built out of plywood, with all different kinds
of angles or this particular room was cubic, you would fit inside the room ... one side would have no wall at all, it was
just open and that's the side you would be facing away from, and you would be sitting inside, so you couldn't see anything
except the walls and then the entire room was lined with leaves which were glued to all the walls. So there you are in an
environment where you can't exactly see where the corners are because of all these leaves.
When you are in the Ames Leaf Room, you would put on special glasses called Aniseikonic Lenses which distort all of the
angles so the ceiling would be coming down at you, the floor would be slanting at a weird angle, one wall would be coming
in at you, one would be going the other way. The leaves on one side of the room would be all big and coming at you, and the
leaves on the other side would be kind of flat and receding, and all the different perspectives didn't fit together properly.
The subject sitting in the Ames Leaf Room has a little control mechanism set for a bar at the end of the room to try
and set it to horizontal. It shows a photograph of a person sitting there, and the bar is at a 40 degree angle. He thinks
it is horizontal. The extra twist was that while he had people sitting in the Ames Leaf Room with these weird goggles on,
he gave them LSD. That's all done on Air Force contracts. This is all weird stuff.
W.M. What, if any, has been the U.S. government's response, particularly to the mind control experimentation
testimony at the Presidential hearings?
C.R. They just kind of acknowledged and really didn't comment, or do much of anything with it.
W.M. So nothing has been done to follow up?
C.R. Nothing systematic that I know of.
W.M. I just want to go back to when you were speaking of brain implants. Have you or other therapists
come across direct evidence of brain implants in clients?
C.R. Nothing really conclusive. There is a kind of conspiracy theory literature that exists about that
... found on the internet, various publications, showing x-rays, but it is kind of vague usually, and not really absolutely
documented. I don't think that's because it is not going on, it's just that documentation hasn't been fished out yet. I haven't
myself, had a patient come in for treatment and have been able to document there is an implant in this person's brain.
W.M. So the documented evidence indicates that they are able to use implants for remote purposes, and
also to receive information from a person's brain ... is that correct?
C.R. Joly West, who was the expert witness for Patty Hearst, and was a CIA and military contractor,
and an expert on multiple personality and other things ... he actually mentions multiple personality in his CIA proposal.
He tried to set up this UCLA violence centre that was going to be funded by Ronald Reagan and Frank Irvine from the Harvard
brain electrode implant team was going to come. One of the things that was going to be done at the UCLA violence project and
also at Vaccaville State Prison under a separate administrative structure, but which got shut down by public protest, was
that they were going to implant brain electrodes in violent sex offenders, and then they were going to two things.
They were going to use the electrodes as a kind of electronic bracelet inside the person's head ... they were going to
monitor the person's location because of transmissions from the implanted electrodes, and once they had been discharged from
prison, they would know if he had gone outside of his restricted area. Also they would be able to monitor the level of the
person's sexual arousal through the brain electrodes ... so if the guy was outside his restricted area, and starting to get
sexually aroused, what they would do is then transmit a signal to him which would paralyze him. Just make him go catatonic
or stop in his tracks and not move. Then they would notify the police who would go pick him up. There is a book called, Violence
in the Brain, by two of these Harvard brain electrode people, and they discuss maybe using these kinds of electrodes for people
who are rioting ... like the Watts riots that were going on, and so on at that time. There was a whole scheme about how we
were going to control "bad people" in the population, people that we didn't like.
W.M. This is their own literature and documentation that you are getting this information from ...
C.R. This is all completely published, objective, real, it exists.
W.M. And does it go into detail about how the electronic delivery system would function ... is it by
satellite, by some kind of radio that would receive and send signals?
C.R. I don't know a whole lot about the technical side of it, but it was ... this is back in the sixties
and seventies so they wouldn't have been doing satellite uplinks at that point. It would be some sort of line of sight radio
beam. Another thing that was also documented in a journal called "Defence Electronics" July 1993 issue, there is a one page
describing technology that is under development. There is a Russian guy who specializes in this stuff, Igor Smirnoff
... basically it is technology for beaming different forms of irradiation at people's heads. There are four or five MKULTRA
projects that fiddle around with this kind of stuff. It can be either sound energy, sound percussion waves, or different types
of light and radio frequencies, all kinds of different types of energy.
Igor Smirnoff was brought over in March 1993 to a meeting in Northern Virginia that was attended by the CIA, the FBI,
I think the Defence Intelligence Agency, I think the National Security Agency and a representative from General Electronics
and a representative from one of the universities who all got together to discuss the possibility of using this technology
on David Koresh, during the Branch Davidian siege. According to the article the reason they decided not to use this
technology on him was the problem of software compatability between the Russian software and the American hardware. What happened
as an upshot of the meeting was that a firm called Psychotechnologies which is based in Virginia actually contracted
with the Russians to develop this kind of technology for possible American usage. So that is stuff which is going
on under some sort of research and development currently.
In the MKULTRA projects they also describe implanting brain electrodes in various kinds of animals, dolphins ... using
them as delivery systems for biological or chemical weapons. That's actually in the CIA material. They describe further research
to fine tune those kinds of systems that were already in successful operation.
W.M. Do you have evidence of the DIA in the mind control experiments? Have you been able to get any
evidence in DIA documentation?
C.R. For listeners who don't know what that stands for ... Defence Intelligence Agency ...
W.M. I understand that the DIA is ten times the size of the CIA.
C.R. The Director of the CIA holds only about 10% of the total financial assets of the American intelligence
community ... meaning that the CIA is really a tiny fragment of all the civilian and military intelligence in the USA. The
National Security Agency and the Defence Intelligence Agency are both quite a bit bigger. The answer to your question is yes
and no. The no part is that I don't have direct documentation of DIA mind control contracts, but it's really kind of beside
the point because all of these intelligence agencies are all interconnected with each other.
For instance the CIA had two programs, MKULTRA and MKNAOMI, and they got federal funds which they then put into MKNAOMI
and MKNAOMI then funded the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick and Edgeware Arsenal to do mind control research.
And that's the way it is with the radiation experiments too. The Atomic Energy Commission, Health, Education and Welfare,
the CIA ... all kinds of different government agencies were all interlinked, interconnected.
One of the DIA programs was called Stargate. It was a liaison between the CIA and the DIA. It was just declassified within
the last year. There was a program in December on ABC's Nightline, where Bill Gates (ed. he means Robert Gates) , who was
a former head of the CIA, and one of the guys who was the CIA person responsible for the liaison between the CIA and the military
on Stargate, and one of the guys who was a Stargate contractor ... all talking about Stargate ... which they admitted ran
right up until at least 1984 and had funding of at least $20 million which is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Stargate was a remote viewing project. The intelligence agencies, all in an interconnected fashion,
spent millions of dollars on remote viewing which is basically having psychics lie down on a table and try and see what is
going on at some location in a foreign country to gather intelligence information. A book was just published, by Michael Joseph,
which is a British branch of Penguin Books, called "Psychic Warrior" where a guy describes being one of these remote viewers.
A lot of that work was done at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. I mention that partly because if
you think creating Multiple Personality Disorder is too bizarre and strange to be real ... again, you just have to look at
the LSD, the brain implant research, some of the sensory deprivation, the Ames Leaf Room, using millions and millions of dollars
to pay psychics to spy on other countries while lying on tables in the USA. Once you have that context, then creating Multiple
Personality Disorder is kind of small ...
W.M. I understand that what was driving this was the Cold War, from the information that we have, in
the 1950's ...
C.R. That's true and not true. That's actually a disinformation set-up. The term "brainwashing" was
invented by a man named Edward Hunter who wrote a book about brainwashing in the 1950's that I have a copy of. He invented
that term and described how the American pilots and POW's in the Korean War who were captured by the Chinese and made to sign
false germ warfare confessions and were converted to being Communists had been brainwashed. The whole idea was that the CIA
and other intelligence agencies had to figure out how that happened. And Joly West, Margaret Singer, Robert Lifton who testified
at the Patty Hearst trial ... they all interviewed these returning prisoners of war from the Korean War, and became experts
on mind control, cult thought reform techniques, and so on. The idea was that, because the Communists were doing that, we
had to figure out how to combat that ... it was mainly defensive, and reactive to what the Chinese were doing.
But that's not true because G.H. Estabrooks was already doing that in WWII, way before the Korean War. So actually
there was an offensive program of mind control by the OSS and other intelligence agencies ten years before the Korean War.
The whole idea that it got started because of the Cold War is disinformation. But then it obviously got fuelled and
entrenched by the Cold War. And then the question comes, well the Cold War is over, why do we need that stuff any more? And
I think the answer is several-fold. One is, we in fact do need to have intelligence agencies. The world is not a safe place,
and for us not to be living in Siberia and living in labour camps in Siberia, we've got to protect ourselves from all kinds
of forces in the world, and it's too bad we have to have intelligence agencies ...
I have no beef with the CIA as such, or the existence of an intelligence agency, I think they are essential to
maintain freedom and democracy. But once you've got intelligence agencies, you've got the military and big budgets ... you've
got people who, like any federal bureaucrats, have to justify their budgets and their programs. You've got people who are
already into this, and you've got actual applications of it, so it will just carry on, I think, indefinitely. The fact that
the Cold War is over isn't a major item in this stopping.
W.M. You mentioned in your previous lecture that you don't blame the CIA per se but the psychiatrists
and doctors who are or were involved in this. Do you not feel that the CIA holds some responsibility in funding and allowing
the doctors and psychiatrists to operate?
C.R. Oh absolutely. These people (I mean the victims of all of this) definitely did not give informed
consent, definitely it was unethical, it was harmful, they deserve compensation and the federal government is on the hook
for that. The idea is not that I am soft on the CIA or apologetic for them it's just that ... I am basically a psychiatrist
... so my number one concern is with all the bizarre, unethical, destructive conduct by my colleagues, and the medical ethics
of it, and getting the medical profession under control. What I think needs to happen is that it should no longer be allowed
that psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors - have funding from the CIA or the military without the subjects of the research
knowing where the money is coming from, and knowing that it is not really medical research as such, that it is military intelligence,
warfare, psychological warfare, mind control research.
W.M. Some of the literature seems to suggest that Canada was offered up to supply so-called "guinea
pigs" for the U.S. mind control experiments. I am particularly referring to the Allen Memorial and McGill University in Montreal,
with Dr. Ewen Cameron. What do you think Canada's role has been in military mind control experiments?
C.R. Well, the Canadian Psychiatric Association has put out some disinformation that has been pretty
well "bought" by the Canadian public. That is that Ewen Cameron was just an isolated incident, it happened a long time ago
back in the fifties, yes, he had CIA funding, there were sort of different ethical standards back then, we wouldn't approve
it now, it was just a one time deal but he was such a great man we can overlook it. Well, that's not true because that research
completely violated the ethical standards of the time, but also it wasn't an isolated incident. Ewen Cameron wasn't the only
person at McGill at that time with CIA funding. Dr. Raymond Prince was funded through MKULTRA subproject 121 to do
anthropological psychiatry research in Nigeria. He didn't know at the time it was CIA money. Donald Hebb,
who at the time was head or chairman of the Department of Psychology there did a lot of sensory deprivation experiments funded
by Canada's Defence Research Board. When the CIA stopped funding Ewen Cameron's work, Health, Education & Welfare
Canada just picked it up. It continued this incredibly harmful, destructive, unethical research that wiped out people's memories
for their whole lives.
There is a man named Hassan Azima who was a psychiatrist who died in his early forties of cancer, who
was being groomed to be a mind control researcher who was doing LSD and sensory deprivation experiments at McGill and he was
presenting at conferences where all these CIA and military were at. He was in the loop. James Tyhurst who
in 1951 was part of a committee meeting to oversee BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE in Canada, before Ewen Cameron got his money, was
also funded by Canada's Defence Research Board. He did LSD research also at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, B.C. And a doctor
named Dr. Ross McLean who was the Director at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver - attended a CIA sponsored
LSD symposium and described giving LSD to 338 different patients at Hollywood Hospital. So there was a lot of military LSD
flowing into Vancouver, Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond did a lot of military LSD research in Saskatchewan,
and Humphrey Osmond then left and moved down to the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute in Pennsylvania which is where Carl
Pfeiffer was, which is where the Louis Castille guy was, who was over in the Phillipines and got arrested by the FBI over
there. So there have been a lot of connections with Canadian psychiatry.
A spin off of all of that ... some of the research is funded by the military or CIA or whoever ... and then gets published
and presented at conferences and talked about, and then other civilian psychiatrists who aren't directly funded by the CIA
start doing the same kind of stuff. An example of this was at Penetanguishene Hospital, which was up on Lake Huron, which
was basically a heavy duty facility for people who were criminally insane or found not guilty by reason of insanity, unfit
to stand trial. In the years about 1968-69 there were four papers published in the Canadian Psychiatric Journal which ...
you can go to any of the medical school libraries in Canada and just pull it off the shelf and read it ... a psychiatrist
named Elliott Barker, who is still alive, was working there.
He invented a little room called The Capsule which was about 8x10 feet. He would put prisoners as young as 15
years old up into their early 30's in this capsule in groups of either two or up to seven at a time, for periods of days,
up to eleven days at a time ... all naked and off and on LSD. So here were all these violent offenders, arsonists,
murderers, rapists and so on ... and he had them all in this small capsule, all naked on LSD, kind of doing rap sessions and
therapy groups with each other. The room would be monitored by other prisoners, either through video link, camera link or
through a mirror in the ceiling, and other prisoners were responsible for supplying food and so on. There was one toilet inside
the capsule, and they would be signalled to change one kind of therapy group to another by changing the colour of the light
that was shining into the room. So they were in this kind of group sensory deprivation with different coloured lights.
The idea was that this would get through their defences, and they would get to the real stuff and do real therapy. One
of the co-authors on one of these papers was an
H.M. Mason, who (it says on the bottom of the paper) was
a patient at the Oakridge facility at Penetanguishene on F-Ward. A documentary was made about it by the CBC ... I have a copy
of the video. H.M. Mason is both one of these patients who are all murderers, arsonists, rapists, and so on ... and he is
in this capsule getting LSD, and he is also a co-author of the paper. Apparently several of the former inmates lived with
Elliott Barker post discharge and this H.M. Mason, as far as I can tell, is the same guy as Hank Mason. Hank Mason is on the
website with Eliott Barker {
www.bconnex.net/~cspcc/egostate/kids.htm} for "The Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" which is just what it says ... but the President is
Elliott Barker. And this Hank Mason is identified as a founding member of the Society and has a little statement about child
abuse on the website. So it would appear that the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has had executive
members who were former violent criminals incarcerated with the criminally insane, and is run by the psychiatrist who did
all this kind of research who published in the Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal. It goes on and on and on with more
stories like this ...
W.M. What is your sense of how many Canadian centres and doctors were involved in experimentations?
C.R. Well an absolute minimum of five to ten, doctors and centres. For sure there was McGill
University, Montreal and the Allen Memorial Psychiatric Institute; Weybourn, Saskatchewan and the University of Saskatchewan;
Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver; Montreal General Hospital(?); and the same kind of stuff, apparently not funded by the CIA
or military intelligence community was going on at Penetang at Oakridge.
W.M. Is there any indication that experimentation was going on at military bases themselves?
C.R. Not documented evidence, but there are quite a few accounts by patients that are unverified.
W.M. You mentioned that some of the doctors who were involved in this research were unwitting. What
kind of funding institutes were set up to fund this kind of research of unwitting doctors?
C.R. Well these are called "cut-outs" ... a cut-out is a front funding organization. The three major
ones were the Human Ecology Foundation, the Josiah Macey Jr. Foundation, and the Geschikter Medical Fund.
W.M. So each of these would be funded from the CIA and then in turn they would fund ...
C.R. Right. And the people who were running these organizations knew it was CIA money, and often, themselves,
got grants from the CIA . One of the guys who was on the Board of the Human Ecology Foundation who reviewed grants for this
foundation, and he himself got MKULTRA funding and top secret clearance was Carl Rogers. That's kind of amazing,
because Carl Rogers was best known for client centred therapy, which is a kind of humanistic, valuing the kind of spiritual
worth of the client kind of therapy, where you have to have accurate empathy, unconditional positive regard for the person,
and generally empathy. So it's like the stereotype ... most touchy-feely psychotherapy going ... and he was actually top secret
cleared, and funding secret CIA mind control research.
W.M. There are a lot of doctors and some therapists out there that dismiss the idea of Multiple Personalities,
and one of the things that these people are saying is that "it doesn't exist" ... it is actually temporal lobe epilepsy. What
is temporal lobe epilepsy, and how is it similar to MPD?
C.R. Temporal lobe epilepsy is just a form of epilepsy that takes place in the temporal lobe of your
brain, so there is abnormal electrical discharge that causes you to have seizures. A typical temporal lobe seizure lasts for
30 to 90 seconds, you may become unconscious, or just get a kind of foggy consciousness, and you will usually fumble at one
of your buttons, or smack your lips or turn your body in a very kind of mechanistic over-and-over scene kind of motion ...
and then you pop out of it. Temporal lobe epilepsy is completely unrelated to Multiple Personality Disorder. That is just
a bogus prejudice ... and there is a bunch of research that myself and others have done that showed the symptom pictures of
temporal lobe epilepsy and Multiple Personality Disorder are completely different from each other.
W.M. Why would people be making these claims? Why the confusion?
C.R. Because they don't take accurate histories. They are very vague about what they say, and they are
just grasping at straws as a way to discredit Multiple Personality basically. The more serious criticism is that Multiple
Personality is often unwittingly created by bad therapists. Now, that I agree with, and I have testified about that in court.
But in cases where I am testifying for the patient who is suing the therapist and I am stating as an expert witness that yes
this was created by a therapist, and yes, all these memories are false, and yes, it has done all this harm.
W.M. This is a very complex issue, and one that has been hotly debated in the public ...
C.R. The main thing is that there actually is a whole bunch of science about Multiple Personality and
Dissociation ... it is not just a matter of belief. There is a big literature now ... it has flaws in it and so on ... but
there is actually a whole bunch of science ... it's not just "I believe" or "I don't believe". The curious twist in
the logic is that, actually I think in all of this documentation, the military and CIA have been creating this Multiple Personality
and using it in operations ... it actually proves that Multiple Personality is real. There are two things ... unless
they are just wasting money, they are not going to bother with the whole exercise unless you actually can create a new identity
that actually is hidden behind a real memory barrier otherwise there would be no point ...
W.M. ... that could be used operationally ...
C.R. Right. So then none of it is actually really, really real ... it's all an illusion in your mind.
There isn't literally another person in there, but nobody in the Multiple Personality field is saying that it is real anyway,
to start with. But you can create an artificial second identity and it can actually do stuff that the main part of the person
doesn't remember ... that has to be true, otherwise there would be no point in creating it for military use. That
proves two things: one, that it is possible to create Multiple Personality by mistake in bad therapy that mimics a lot of
the conditions in military or cult mind control; but also, if you have a disorder that can be created deliberately, either
by the CIA, by a destructive cult, by a therapist who doesn't really know what they are doing, or even by the person themselves,
then it is not really a big jump to imagine that it could also happen just naturally and spontaneously as a way of coping
with trauma. So the very fact that you can create it artificially, to me indicates that it can be created artificially or
on purpose, and also that it's likely to happen naturally.
W.M. Well, the other question is, how they manage to create it artificially?
C.R. I have a number of cases which describe it quite a lot of detail. There is a lot of information
about how they created "Tanya" in Patty Hearst. There is a lot of detail. There is a very good case from Denmark, a guy named
Talle Hardrup (?) who was in jail in the late 1940's and another prisoner named Bjorn Neilsen ... a whole lot of mind control
and hypnosis techniques that created this amnesic bank robber who actually went out and robbed a bank, then he went and tried
to rob another bank, shot two people, didn't get away with any money, was captured. And the net outcome of this huge trial,
with fifty witnesses,all kinds of psychiatric testimony, and so on ... the net outcome of it was that Bjorn Neilsen was found
guilty and was sent to jail even though he wasn't physically present at any of the robberies ... and Talle Hardrup was found
not guilty by reasons of insanity ... all the experts specifically said at the trial that Bjorn Neilsen used hypnosis and
other methods to create a split identity in Talle Hardrup. There are a number of cases which have actually come to trial and
there is a lot of detail on them.
W.M. What would the methods be, and what would the links be between artifically creating Multiple Personalities
and childhood trauma?
C.R. The list is several-fold. One is, you have to have good control over the person's life
first. You can't just see them for half an hour or one hour per week, and that's all that is required. In the Talle
Hardrup case, these guys were cellmates and they also worked in the same workshop. They were basically with each other constantly
for about eighteen months. If you can isolate the person from the outside world, with no contact with people who are
going to be critical of what is going on or give a different point of view ... that's helpful. These things
apply to destructive cults and also to the deliberate creation of multiple personality.
You can use all kinds of thought reform techniques, that is, get a person to study doctrines, do all kinds of meditation
exercises, chanting, hypnotic focusing exercises, internal dream imagery exercises. You get their mind into a trance state
and get them to focus on what you want them to focus on, then you actually use formal hypnosis, some form of drugs, and then
you deliberately instruct them that you want to create a second identity.
Then you figure out what is it that this person is going to be motivated by. So in the Talle Hardrup case, this Bjorn
Neilsen guy created a guardian spirit X, and whenever Bjorn Neilsen was speaking to Talle Hardrup, it was actually talking
through Bjorn Neilsen. He got Talle Hardrup to buy into that because he was into all kinds of new age stuff. Then X started
teaching him the path to enlightenment, so the biggest motivator was that he was going to get to enlightenment and if he didn't
follow the doctrine, didn't follow the rules, didn't follow all of the tests, and didn't perform adequately, then he would
lose X and lose his path to enlightenment.
That was the thing he was most obsessed with. So that was the carrot that kept him going. You have to find some sort
of carrot to keep the person going. Then you can use any different number of behaviour modification techniques which could
be punishing the person if they say what you don't want them to say, rewarding them if they say what you do want them to say.
Basically, you have to get control over the person's thoughts, over their lives. You have to set up a reward and punishment
system and steer them along the path you want, so they become some kind of robot that will repeat the doctrine you want.
If you want to create the second identity, you can use all kinds of threats or you can use actual trauma and fear.
The trauma, fear, agitation and upset drive the splitting of the mind just naturally. The human mind attempts to split or
dissociate to cope with trauma all the time, whether it be a plane crash, or a natural disaster, or sexual assault in adulthood.
The other ingredient with children is that their minds just seem to be more susceptible to this kind of splitting process.
A child tends to do that more naturally.
W.M. Are you familiar with Jennifer Freyd's work, with her theory of "betrayal trauma" which deals with
child abuse?
C.R. Actually, I wasn't going into this all here, but the main change in my thinking in terms of how
I have been working with these people clinically over the last three years, has been shifting much more toward the "betrayal
trauma" type way of looking at things ... that's not really directly related to mind control, but ... I like her theory a
lot. I agree with it.
For the listeners who don't know, Jennifer Freyd is the daughter of Pamela and Peter Freyd ... Pamela Freyd is the Executive
Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation -- they take the position that Multiple Personality Disorder is pretty bogus
and all these memories that people are recovering in therapy are all false and are the result, basically, of mind control
techniques by bad therapists. The Scientific Advisory Board of the FMSF which is a whole bunch of academics and experts
who advise the Foundation and sort of speak on behalf of it ... includes Martin Orne and Joly West who had CIA top secret
clearance; Harold Leif who is the personal psychiatrist to the Freyds also was a co-author with Robert Heath who did the brain
electrode research at Tulane which was funded by the various branches of the military and CIA.
About five of Martin Orne's co-authors or people that he thanks in publications of his going back into the 50's
in different mind control research that he did are also on the Board. Margaret Singer who interviewed the Korean prisoners
of war who had top secret clearance through the military to do that work is also on the Board. So there is quite a connection
and overlap between the FMSF people (not all of them but a group of them) and all this military mind control research.
W.M. Have you had any experience with the FMSF? I understand they have been fairly aggressive in intimidating therapists
throughout North America.
C.R. Well, I have had a bit of experience with the FMSF. I belong to the FMSF. I get their newsletter.
I've been talked about, and have written in their newsletter. I set up a workshop in Houston where I spoke for a day and a
half and Pamela Freyd, who is the Executive Director spoke for half a day. I have set up about five or six workshops with
Elizabeth Loftus who is one of the leading members of their Advisory Board. I spoke at a meeting that Stephen Ceci was at
... and he spoke after me ... he commented very favourably on my talk. He is on their Advisory Board. So I've got a lot of
contacts with some of these people which I consider to be very friendly, and I admire their work. I disagree with some of
the things a little bit, but by and large, I agree with probably over half of what the majority of the people on the FMSF
Advisory Board say. As I mentioned earlier, I have testified in court, basically much the same as any of those people would
... that here's an example of bad therapy which has created multiple personality out of nowhere and caused a lot of damage
to a person and their family.
In the FMSF "camp", not the organization itself, but in a sort of "camp" as it were, some real extremists have gone way
overboard and very inflammatory in the way they talk and everything is all black and white ... the whole multiple personality
field is totally bad and all the memories are completely false, so there's people in that camp who go way overboard. My view
on them is that if you set aside some of the really political posturing and the most rabid politics that come out, and you
just listen to the most basic message ... I agree with them.
I think it has been incredibly helpful to the field ... not just Dissociative Disorders field, or sexual trauma therapists,
but the entire mental health field. In the 1980's, there was almost zero teaching on how error-prone memory is, and almost
no teaching at all about how to think about it, what to do about it, what guidelines we need. All these guidelines about false
memories and memory not being reliable really only came out with the professional organization starting in 1994 and the FMSF
spearheaded that, so a lot of the work they have done has been incredibly helpful and I agree with it. It is simply a fact
that memory is unreliable. It's just when things get really polarized, and everyone is really insulting everyone else, it
turns into a big war and it becomes ridiculous ...
W.M. It seems that the survivors of abuse are again re-victimized by this type of argument where the
focus seems to be proving that a memory is false or not, instead of actually finding out whether abuse happened or not ...
C.R. It gets all politicized ... everybody gets very hot under the collar ... very
defensive about it. Again in the FMSF, in the membership, I am sure that there are a whole bunch of people who are actually
falsely accused. But I am sure there are also a whole bunch of people who are accurately accused, and are just trying to run
a little scam and say it's false memories. That needs to be set aside if you are trying to look at it scientifically ... what
are the issues about memory, and what is the best way to do therapy, and how do you have to balance things to have therapy
that is more beneficial than harmful. If people would get off all of the ugly politics and have more of a rational, calm scientific
discussion, it would be much better. Then you wouldn't hear the therapists saying the FMSF people are all just pedophiles
and you wouldn't the FMSF people saying the therapists are all insane.
W.M. In your opinion, how has the false memory debate affected therapy resources available for survivors
in a general sense?
C.R. It has affected it negatively ... because a lot of the therapists
have become really paranoid and there is a lot of agitation in the insurance companies and the managed care companies in the
USA about this kind of therapy now. The idea that most of the memories are false is really just a kind of basic stance of
psychiatry throughout the entire 20th century really ... it is nothing new.
W.M. How do you feel the debate has affected the way therapists deal with their clients?
C.R. Well, I think it has been beneficial and harmful at the same time. It has been beneficial because
therapists have had to get their acts together a little bit, and be more aware that memory is extremely vague and unreliable,
and you can't just take everything at face value. I have written at great length about how to strategically plan therapy so
that if you do the same thing, no matter what percentage of the memory is true or false ... most of the time you don't know
for a fact ... so it has been very helpful in that way.
But it has been very harmful in that it has just given an excuse to all kinds of people who just don't want to deal with
abuse anyway to say "ah, it's all false memory" and it has made the therapists defensive and it has taken a lot of time and
energy away from treatment onto worrying about whether you are going to get sued or not. But there are sort of opposite sides
of the same coin. You can't have therapists finally getting the message that they have to be more careful without also having
therapists who are more paranoid about being accused.
W.M. For the benefit of other therapists who might be listening, is there a way to recognize signs of
possible mind control experimentation? Are there signs that come up again and again in survivor accounts?
C.R. You mean actual military and intelligence mind control? Or ... because mind control can
be done informally and unwittingly by just a pedophile father at home ... or it can be done by any one of the known destructive
cults or it can be done as part of a military research project. It depends on which level you are talking about.
W.M. I am speaking specifically of government funded military mind control experiments ...
C.R. No. There is no kind of ... if a person comes in with a sore left elbow, that's a sure
sign. There's no kind of sign or symptom like that that will automatically clue you off ... but there is probably going to
be some sort of Dissociative Disorder, and it's not so much that you go after it ... as the person starts giving you memories
of ... it wasn't some sort of stereotyped satanic type thing in the woods ... they actually start telling you something that
sounds like medical research of some kind, experiments of some kind ... it is either at a university or a hospital or a military
base.
Really, the bad plan is to start specifically asking questions ... you have to wait for the person to start describing
that kind of stuff and if they describe that kind of stuff, you just follow normal kind of therapy procedures where you just
say, can you tell me a little more about that, or I don't quite understand this, or could you clarify that, or what does that
mean to you? Why is that important to you? How is that affecting you now? How does that tie into the problems we are working
on now? You really just handle it using basic, sensible therapy techniques. There is not a special set of strategies or techniques
for mind control as such ... these people are basically human beings who have been hurt and have problems. You need to use
the same basic therapy you would use otherwise.
My personal conclusion is that probably the majority, a vast majority of satanic abuse memories that I have heard which
involve hundreds and hundreds of babies being sacrificed ... the vast majority of that can't actually be real. Some of it
could be. But the techniques and strategies that I use in therapy with people with satanic ritual abuse memories are pretty
much identical, the same strategies with people who don't have those kinds of memories. The same applies to the military mind
control people the way I go at it. I use the same basic strategies, principles and techniques. I don't really focus on the
memories as the main problem.
W.M. In your opinion, do you think there are any links between the accounts of ritual abuse and mind
control experimentation?
C.R. Nothing documented. The link is in the mind control experts -- the people who are contractors for
the CIA and the military who understand the mind control techniques, therefore the military wants to tap into their expertise.
They also tend to be people who are experts on mind control techniques and destructive cults. But a direct connection between
the cults and the military ... the only book I know about that is a book called "Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?"
written by a man named Michael Myers, published by the Edwin Mellon Press. He presents a lot of solid documentation that is
not quite 100% conclusive, that the CIA was heavily involved in Jonestown.
W.M. You went into a fair bit of detail about that in your lecture that we recently aired ...
C.R. Just to give a little smattering of the kinds of things -- one example is that the People's Temple
run by Jim Jones, was based in Ukiah, California which is north of San Francisco, and then they moved down to the jungle in
British Guyana. Before I read this book I never really thought about how did they go about choosing that site? It turns out
that that site in the middle of the jungle in British Guyana, immediately before Jim Jones moved down there, it was the site
of the CIA Shalom Project which was a program for black, ex Green Beret military people to train mercenaries for Angola, which
obviously couldn't just be a coincidence. Then there is just a wealth of other detail connecting all kinds of things in ...
W.M. In your sense, who do you think is behind all of this?
C.R. I am not really much of a conspirary theorist ... I just think that it boils
down to the typical normal stuff that controls the rest of the world so it's got to do with the military, and the government,
and banks, and helicopter sales, and spying ... so it's no different from who runs radar, or who runs jets, or who runs anything
else ... a lot of it is just military contracting and government, big business ... I don't personally subscribe to a special
conspiracy theory like ... I don't think there is one ... from the evidence I see ... I don't think there is any one little
group of people who meet in some room in the Pentagon who are pulling all the strings on all of this. I think it is much like
the Federal government. It all kinds of little groups working at cross purposes and there is no one grand master designer
kind of thing.
W.M. The old boys' network ...
C.R. Yeah. The old boys' network is the way I describe it. One reason I think of it this way
is, there doesn't have to be one huge ... obviously there is a conspiracy in a sense in that there is secret funding of mind
control research, and there are files that are kept from the public ... but in terms of the stuff that is actually documented
... there didn't have to be that huge of a conspiracy because they just went ahead and published it in the medical literature
anyway. The conspiracy is really the sort of old boys' network, everybody just sort of looks the other way, everybody just
knows they are not supposed to comment on it kind of conspiracy. It's not that anybody has to send a memo to every
psychiatrist in North America saying "keep this secret" ... everybody kind of looks the other way, steers around it, doesn't
rock the boat, doesn't make waves.
W.M. I've just got a couple of more questions. I am wondering how a person undergoes the healing process
... who has been traumatized as a child, or has participated in the mind control experimentation. What is the process of healing?
C.R. Some people are probably too damaged to ever heal. Nobody should claim that they know how to help
everybody. Or some people are damaged and they have the ability to heal, but I am not just going to describe how that should
be done. They need to go to somebody else. But the people we work with, Multiple Personality, who all describe really traumatic
childhoods, we don't really focus on the memories as such. What we deal with is how these different personalities, working
together as a sort of inner family, are getting along with each other, or mostly not getting along with each other. We try
and get them to have more open communication in cooperation with each other. Have more of a problem-solving, strategizing
kind of approach to life instead of all this conflict and fighting and amnesia. And then we work on building up more healthy,
more flexible ways of coping with life ... and that's just in a nutshell. To describe it in detail ... that's why my book
is 400 pages long. It takes quite a while.
W.M. You mentioned, particularly in tests that you have done, a lot were able to integrate these personalities
into a kind of a whole. Is that really the goal of the healing process?
C.R. Well, it's the goal in one sense, to be ... we are just talking about people with Multiple
Personalities. The vast majority of people who were involved in mind control experiments, and the vast majority of people
who were abused as children don't have Multiple Personality. I just specialize in that little sub-group, a little island in
this whole sea of trauma ... the reason integration is a goal for them is basically it is normal and desirable to be sort
of an integrated human being. If you had a reasonably normal, healthy, happy childhood, adolescence and you have a reasonably
happy, healthy, normal adulthood ... you are going to be integrated. You are not going to have Multiple Personalities. But
the other reason is because it works better. It's not that integration is this big goal in and of itself, it's just that integration
is a way to get to the goal of far, far, far less symptoms ... much more happy, settled state internally, much better interpersonal
relationships, much better functioning in the workplace, and a huge reduction in the amount of mental health care resources
you need.
W.M. You mentioned that you are about to release a book about mind control. What specifically will the
book deal with, and when will it be published?
C.R. I am just finished the second draft of the third draft of the book ... so it's been through three
complete changes. And now the final one, I've done a pretty extensive re-write of it and I've got a little bit more information
that I am just sort of digesting and waiting to come in from one of the universities ... that I got some information from
... and I will probably go at it one more time stylistically, and then we will see if we can get a publisher to bite on it.
So I am hoping that it will be out before the end of 1997.
W.M. What specifically are you dealing with in the book?
C.R. Basically everything we have been talking about, and the main points are going to be that the US
military and the CIA have been creating experimental multiple personalities, that's an established fact because of the documentation.
The extent that those people were used in operations is still not fully known. The fact that you can create artificial multiple
personalities to me proves both that it can be created artificially and also that it is likely to arise spontaneously, and
I go into that in detail. All this other crazy mind control research ... I use that to set the context to make it believable
that multiple personality was created by the military ... because if you just hear that out of nowhere, it just seems too
much to be believed. But when you have that whole context then you realize that really it just fits in nicely. Then the other
part is to try and stimulate either a presidential commission or some sort of public enquiry into this and get the medical
ethics of it really tightened up to make sure this stuff is not ongoing. And get some recognition and compensation for the
victims. That's basically the gist of the book.
W.M. Do you have evidence of experimental brain surgery implants being done on epilepsy patients?
C.R. Well, there are two answers to that question. One is that all this documented brain electrode implant
research that I have described ... some of those patients actually had epilepsy, and in a whole bunch of them epilepsy was
kind of a phony rationale for putting electrodes in. So when you read that literature, a lot of the time they will describe
the patient as having epilepsy, and then sometimes they actually put brain electrodes in just for either psychiatric reasons
which were basically bogus reasons, or purely experimental reasons. But epilepsy is one of the rationales for putting brain
electrodes in. That is totally documented.
W.M. And would these people be informed that they were to receive brain implants?
C.R. Yeah, but the explanation for why that was scientifically justified and the informed consent procedure
was really iffy ...
W.M. What literature is available on this subject?
C.R. There is a book called "Violence and the Brain" by Vernon H. Mark and Frank R. Ervin (Sweet?),
1970-72, it is a little bit hard to get. Or if you go into ... part of the problem is that you can't do computerized medical
searches prior to 1966 ... but if you go to the medical literature in the period 1955-1970 and you look for publications by
Robert Heath, Tulane University or Jose Delgado at Yale you will find those scattered around the medical literature. Or you
just do literature searches on brain electrode implants. Then there is a huge literature on LSD. It's just a matter of going
to the library and really searching around. Or, in the book, I will reference a lot of it.
W.M. Well, I would like to thank you very much Dr. Colin Ross for joining us on CKLN. It has been very
illuminating talking to you, and I wish you all the best with your new book.
C.R. My pleasure, and thanks for doing the series on this ...
