by Tom Swyers
“Okay.”
“That means that Edith Nowak gave birth to Janet when she was sixteen years old. Seventeen is the age of consent in New York. So if Edmund O’Neil is Janet Nowak’s father, he committed statutory rape.”
Phillip’s face grimaced in disbelief as all the color drained out of it. “Isn’t that . . . a felony?”
“Yes, a Class E felony, which is currently punishable by up to four years in prison.”
“But this happened over twenty years ago.”
“Right, and the statute of limitations is five years. So he can’t be prosecuted now. But he could have been in big trouble back in the 1990s, when this took place. He was about forty years old back then—married with a family. There would have been no defense to statutory rape for him.”
“But why wasn’t he charged?”
“The DA can’t prosecute what he doesn’t know about. Edith Nowak must have dropped out of school to have the child or maybe she was home schooled. There’s plenty of ways to slide under the radar of the DA.”
“Why didn’t Edith or her parents press for charges to be brought then?”
“Good question. I suspect there was a deal made. Looking at O’Neil’s biography on the state website, he was the superintendent at Kranston at the time. This was before he was made Commissioner of the Bureau of Prisons. I find it interesting that Edith started working at Kranston about the same time and that O’Neil was her boss.”
Phillip sat down on a stool near the workbench and peeled off his latex gloves one at a time, while he tried to process it all. He stroked his chin, then began shaking his head as he stared off into space. “What you say makes sense. But I don’t see what it has to do with me. I think this may be a waste of time.”
“It might not have anything to do with you, but perhaps we can somehow use the secret as leverage. It’s a tool to find out what’s really going on with you. Even if he can’t be prosecuted, Edmund O’Neil does not want his wife and children to know. Twenty years later, this still could cause a divorce or estrangement from the children. The disclosure would harm his professional reputation and his legacy, too. There’s really no choice, Phillip, except to pursue this lead until it ends because we’ve got absolutely nothing else to go on at this point. Zip, zero, zilch, nada.”
Chapter 18
The next afternoon, David and Phillip were sitting downstairs in David’s office trying to figure out a way to open the shop again. Christy was at school and Annie was at the first day of a two-day conference in Albany.
David’s cell rang. The caller ID flashed Julius’s name and number.
“It’s Julius!” David yelped. “Maybe he has some information for us. I’ll put him on speaker and you can listen. Just don’t say anything, so he doesn’t know you’re here, okay?”
Phillip nodded. “All right.”
“Hey, Julius, what’s going on?”
“Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. That’s what’s going on.”
“Really? What about him?”
“You know, I really got into researching this guy. I’ve never heard of him before and I’ve lived in Albany all of my life.”
“I’ve never heard of him either.”
“Well, there’s a lot of information about him on the internet. You can just Google his name. But there’s not much in the local media archives about him. Maybe it’s a chapter that people around here would like to forget.”
“How’s that?”
“His research.”
“What about it?”
“Torture is a word that comes to mind. But I think you first have to consider the historical backdrop for you to fully appreciate what I’m going to tell you about him.”
“Okay,” David nodded, even though Julius couldn’t see him, and set the cell phone on his desk.
“It appears Cameron was doing work for the forerunner of the CIA—the Office of Strategic Service or OSS—during World War II. His involvement can be traced back to around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. Some people say he worked on a truth drug committee and tried the serum out in the veteran’s hospital in Albany.”
“Do you think that’s true?”
“I don’t know for sure, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this tidbit fits in with his MO.”
“Okay, what else did you find out?”
“Allen Dulles, the future director of the CIA and an OSS American spy at the time, first met Ewen Cameron prior to the Nuremberg trials. Cameron was asked by the United States, quite possibly by Dulles, to perform a psychiatric examination of Nazi Rudolf Hess to determine if he was fit to stand trial in 1945. Cameron was briefed by Dulles before he gave Hess a psychiatric examination and determined he was sane. It was the first time the two men met. Apparently, they hit it off. Cameron achieved worldwide fame overnight by examining Hess. Then he used this notoriety as a springboard to become our go-to guy to explain and solve the German threat going forward.”
“What threat? The war was over, right?”
“Yeah, but just hear me out. I have to lay it out one step at a time. You’ll understand in a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
“At the end of the war, Cameron emerged as a self-proclaimed expert on the German culture and on the underlying causes of the war and the Holocaust. He wrote a paper entitled ‘The Social Reorganization of Germany.’ In it he identified all the problems of the German culture—the need for status, worship of order, regimentation, authoritarian leadership, and the fear of other countries. He said there was a need for a major ‘transformation of the existing cultural organization in the postwar period’ in Germany. The driving narrative at the end of the war was to do everything and anything to prevent World War II from happening again. Every good marketing campaign needs a tagline; our country’s brain trust and the defense industry used this narrative for a few years.
“The big fear posed by Cameron was that German youth who had been adolescents during the Third Reich would be the greatest threat to world peace in years to come. In a later paper, Ewen Cameron had a solution to address that threat. He suggested that each surviving German over the age of twelve should receive a short course of electroshock treatment to wipe out any remaining vestige of Nazism. In other words, he wanted to erase their memories.”
David’s eyebrows popped, “Really? Nothing ever came of that, right? We didn’t go around trying to erase the memories of Germans, did we?”
“No, not Germans. But we did it to Canadians instead.”
“You mean at the Allan Memorial Institute, where Cameron was the director?”
“Right, but you’re getting ahead of me.”
“Okay. Sorry, can’t help myself. This is wild.”
Julius continued, “Later on, in the 1940s and early 1950s, the driving narrative to support our defense budget and the defense industry shifted away from doing everything and anything to stop another World War II. Instead it focused on doing everything and anything to stop the spread of Communism. People were still trying to come to grips with how the atrocities of World War II—like the Holocaust and the murder of millions of Jews and others—could have happened. What possessed the German people to willingly engage in such inhuman behavior?
“In 1949, Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty, an outspoken anti-Communist, confessed during a trial that he engaged in espionage against the Hungarian Communist government. People speculated that he had been tortured and brainwashed by the Communists. The word ‘brainwashing’ entered the American vocabulary in a 1950 newspaper article talking about how the Chinese government forced citizens to join the Communist Party. Remember, we were in the midst of a Korean conflict and American GIs taken prisoner by the North Koreans were paraded before cameras, seemingly willingly, to denounce capitalism and imperialism. The McCarthy anti-Communist hearings were about to start in 1954. The brain trust of Ivy League boys running the country thought we were losing not only the arms race, but also the race to understand and to utilize brainwashing. That’s
when Ewen Cameron grabbed the baton and ran a record-breaking lap to try and win the brainwashing race.”
David sat stunned, shaking his head at the phone, “You can’t be serious. Brainwashing race?”
“Dead serious. Those were the times in which we lived back then and that was the atmosphere in which Ewen Cameron flourished.”
“Well, that explains why the FBI did a loyalty investigation into Cameron back in 1948. They wanted to make damn sure he was on our side.”
“Yes, that makes sense, given what happened next. Cameron went on an absolute tear, writing and speaking to build an unassailable platform in his profession. He was a social media whiz before there was any social media as we know it today. He conquered whatever media was available to him. Between 1947 and 1950, he wrote and published three books. One book in three years was quite an accomplishment back then and remains so even today. But one book per year on top of what else he was doing? I’ll bet the man never slept.
“I tried reading one of his books—Life is for Living—and it damn near killed me. It was full of anecdotes and I found it interesting on the surface. But I could not figure out the point of all of these endless observations about the challenges of life at that time. It never led anywhere. You step back from it, and the book is pure psychobabble—all two hundred and fifty-some-odd pages of it. I thought the stupid book was trying to brainwash me.”
“Maybe it should have been titled, Life is for the Brainwasher?” snickered David.
“That’s not too far from the truth, as far as he was concerned. His writing didn’t stop at the bookshelf. He was churning out professional papers too, at a furious pace. At every opportunity, he was traveling all over the country and speaking to some group of professionals in the field. He was all over the newspapers and on the radio.
“But that’s not all. During the 1950s he headed the American, Canadian, and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association, and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. He attracted a large number of postgraduate students and visiting scholars from around the world. Year after year they showered awards on him: the Adolf Meyer Memorial Award, the Samuel Rubin Award, and the Montreal Mental Hygiene Institute Award for outstanding contributions to the mental health of the Canadian people. Honorary fellowships and memberships were sprinkled all over his resume. He even had his own PR man. Yeah, you heard me right; this nut job had a PR man. Ewen Cameron was a mental health rock star.”
“On top of all this,” David interjected, “Cameron was the director of the Allan Memorial Institute, right?”
“Correct. From 1943 to 1964, Cameron was the director and a Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University. He ran his research and treatments at the Allan. An associate wrote some years later that Cameron would arrive at the Allan around 8 a.m. with dictation belts recorded several hours earlier, which kept one secretary busy typing all day. He had committee meetings in the morning, whirlwind rounds on the wards with an entourage of residents, then more meetings, lunch at the Royal Victoria Hospital, as a rule. In the afternoon, he saw private patients, making a final round of the wards before going home after 7 p.m. At home the pace wasn’t any slower. He was married in 1933, was raising a family—had three sons, and a daughter—while making the commute between Montreal and Albany or Lake Placid frequently.”
“That all seems impossible for one person. Perhaps he cloned himself.”
“Ha, you think you’re being funny. Reportedly, Cameron read science fiction every night before he went to bed. It was his lifeblood. He was a man who loved gadgets. I read that he tried to build an automatic baby feeder, like B.F. Skinner’s baby-tending box, for his own kids. I’d wager that if he could have cloned himself, he would have.”
David found this fascinating, but disturbing. “Tell me about his research.”
“It has its roots in science fiction and a gadget. Aldous Huxley wrote a dystopian science fiction novel entitled Brave New World in 1932. In the not-so-distant future, the book suggested, we would get subliminal messages played while we were sleeping. Babies born in the hospital would get messaging delivered by under-the-pillow speakers. Interestingly, after this was published some guy had the idea of making a phonograph with a timer and an under-pillow speaker to teach people to learn such things as a foreign language. Cameron asked one of his aides to contact the inventor to check it out. When the aide told him of the inventor’s claim that anything could be taught during sleep, Cameron took the idea and ran with it.
“You see, Cameron was trying to change the mindset of his subjects in his experiments through messaging. He wanted to pound his messaging into the brain—he called this ‘psychic driving’—to make it stick for good. Further, he wanted to do this in the most time-efficient way possible; like he wanted to create a mental health production line.
“The messaging was bizarre, according to patients who are still living. ‘You are a horrible mother and wife’ was given to one patient before positive messaging was instilled. Cameron got frustrated because his messaging wasn’t being accepted while the patients were awake. I’m not sure why that came as a surprise to him. It was like someone nagging you constantly, every few seconds, repeatedly, day after day, week after week. It would drive anyone crazy.
“So why not have them sleep and get the messaging that way? He invented his own messaging machine gadget, a tape recorder, that replayed the same message over and over again while the patient was sleeping.
“But if messaging via sleeping showed promise, why not have the patients just sleep all the time to get the messaging? Why not have them sleep all day long? So he drugged them up, creating sleep cocktails composed of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal and Phenergan, and other drugs. Threw in some LSD, too, to make them more apt to accept the messaging. But why stop at sleeping all day long? How about all week long? Even all month long? How about longer? And he did exactly that.
“Then, why take any chances on outside stimulation that might interfere with the messaging. Let’s make sensory deprivation chambers and make them sleep in there. And that’s exactly what he did.
“Are patients’ past memories, behaviors, and relationships getting in the way of messaging? Forget psychoanalysis. No need to waste time talking your way to a healthy mental state when you can wipe the patient’s mind clean through electroshock. He called this ‘de-patterning.’ But you had better get all the memories out to get the messaging to stick, including any memory of the torture you just put these poor people through. So you wake the people up from their endless sleep and you shock the crap out of them. The recommended voltage was usually 110 volts for that kind of therapy back then; Cameron used 150 volts. The normal dosage was a single shock lasting a fraction of a second. Cameron's shocks lasted longer, up to one second—thirty times more powerful than normal. They were zapped two to three times a day, as opposed to the more usual once a day, or once every two days. These poor people had their circuits wiped clean. It was like an Etch-A-Sketch for the mind. Their bodies forgot everything, including how to go to the bathroom, how to walk, how to eat.
“More was always better to Cameron. More messaging, more sleep, more drugs, more isolation, more shock. You could never have too much of a good thing.
“These poor unsuspecting people—mostly women—would be admitted to the Allan supposedly because they had schizophrenia, depression, or some other mental malady. Husbands, families, everyone thought these women were going to get the best medical care available in the world for whatever ailed them because, well, Cameron was the world’s leading psychiatrist at the time. But what they didn’t know was that the treatment was really based in science fiction, not in medical science.
“Cameron would do everything and anything to drive his messaging home in a time when we would do anything and everything to keep Communism from spreading. Cameron was a man of the times in a way. But I think the entire platform he created for himself in psychiatry served, in part, as a front for his science fiction
experiments. Do you know what the real kicker is to this lunacy?”
“No, what?”
“These people paid to be tortured. They thought they were paying for the best medical care available, when they were really paying for some quack to get his jollies from doing experiments he culled from comic books.”
David wished he had been taking notes. “How the heck did he get away with this?”
“Because Ewen Cameron was God. One of his former patients said she thought he was God back then and could do no wrong. In the 1950s, Cameron would go on to treat Allen Dulles’ wife, Clover, who suffered from depression, as did her mother. But I bet Clover never received anything more than Cameron-lite treatment. If Dulles, the head of the CIA under Eisenhower at the beginning of the Cold War, trusted Cameron to treat his wife, he’d trust him to treat anyone because Cameron was God to him too. That’s the image Cameron created for himself and that’s the image that everyone accepted back then. And you don’t mess with God. Cameron attracted a ton of research money because investing in God is a sure and noble thing.
“He was unstoppable. ‘There but for the grace of God goes God,’ was reportedly the chatter of nurses, junior colleagues, and underlings when Cameron was afoot doing tornado rounds at Allan Memorial. So nobody ever openly questioned God about his so-called research. Yeah, some peers questioned it privately, but taking on God wasn’t going to put money in their pockets or further their careers. So they just watched it all play out like they were waiting for an accident to happen.
“That accident didn’t happen until more than ten years later. Nobody really questioned Cameron’s status as God until the source for part of his funding was revealed, long after he died hiking the Adirondacks in 1967. In 1977, it was made public through US Senate hearings that Cameron was funded by the CIA for his work from 1957 until 1963 through a special project—code name MK-Ultra. Oh, it’s debatable whether he ever knew that the money funneled through a grant from Cornell’s Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology to his program was from the CIA. But it didn’t really matter. He had other funding through other sources, like the Canadian Government and the Rockefeller Foundation. He was going to do his brainwashing research anyway because that was the path he was on before the CIA started funding him. But once it was made public in 1977 that the CIA funded his research, all hell broke loose. You see, if someone takes money from the CIA, he can’t be God because God doesn’t do business with the devil. Everything was seen in a different light then. Cameron went from God to Lucifer in a flash and suddenly former patients surfaced with stories of torture at the hands of Ewen Cameron.”