The CIA Doctors

by Colin A. Ross, M. D.

  In an August 24, 1935 letter to Dr. Estabrooks from the Office of the Chief of Staff of the War Department, the correspondent notes communications received from Dr. Estabrooks by the Military Intelligence Division dating back to 1924. This is confirmed again in a letter from Military Intelligence Division G-2’s Colonel Percy G. Black, dated February 2, 1945. Dr. Estabrooks also corresponded with other branches of the government including: the Office of Indian Affairs (undated); the Public Health Service (May 13, 1942); the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (August 11, 1959); and the Attorney General (September 2, 1959). He also wrote to Winston Churchill, to whom William Stephenson reported.

  Dr. Estabrooks ran a symposium for the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore on April 5-7, 1963. A list of Registered Members of Symposium includes personnel from U.S. Army Intelligence, with ranks of Major and Lieutenant Colonel, and 29 M.D. physicians.

  Dr. Estabrooks was also very well connected in academia. He corresponded with Aldous Huxley, and his brother, Sir Julian Huxley. Aldous Huxley137 described a science fiction world of the future in which citizens were controlled with the drug soma in his book Brave New World. Gordon Wasson310 wrote a book on the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria entitled Soma. Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Wasson was also the contractor on MKULTRA Subproject 58, which funded an expedition to Mexico to collect hallucinogenic mushrooms. In a symposium sponsored at Colgate College by Dr. Estabrooks on April 7, 1962, Aldous Huxley gave an evening talk at 8:00 P.M. entitled “Human Potentialities.”

  Dr. Estabrooks also wrote to Dr. Wilder Penfield, the McGill neurosurgeon and coauthor of MKULTRA Subproject 62 and MKSEARCH contractor, Dr. Maitland Baldwin234.

  Estabrooks invited MKULTRA Subproject 84 contractor, Dr. Martin Orne to speak at a symposium on hypnosis at Colgate College on April 1-2, 1960. The papers presented at this symposium were later published as Hypnosis: Current Problems, edited by Dr. Estabrooks86. The title of Dr. Orne’s216 chapter in this volume is “Antisocial Behavior and Hypnosis.” In this chapter, Dr. Orne references Dr. Estabrooks’ (1943) book Hypnotism, which describes the hypnotic courier or super-spy.

  Dr. Orne’s research for his chapter in Hypnosis: Current Problems was supported by contract AF49(638) 728 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Dr. Orne’s colleague and coathor, Ronald E. Shor, Ph.D.284 is referred to as “Ron” in an August 22, 1961 letter from Dr. Estabrooks to Dr. Orne (see Appendix A). The research described in Dr. Shor’s283 chapter in the book was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, a subdivision of the National Institute of Health (MKULTRA Subprojects 36, 45, 55, 62, 117, and 125), the Public Health Service (MKULTRA Subproject 36), Air Force contract AF49(638)-728 and CIA cutout, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.

  Among the colleagues thanked in Dr. Shor’s chapter are three Members of the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Dr. Martin Orne, Dr. Ulric Neisser, and Emily F. Carota (now Emily Carota Orne). Not thanked in that particular publication is Board member Dr. David Dinges222.

  Other speakers at the 1960 hypnosis symposium included two of the other leading experts on hypnosis of the twentieth century, Dr. Ernest Hilgard and Dr. Milton Erickson. Dr. Erickson returned to Colgate College to talk at the Colgate University Symposium on Hypnosis on April 5-7, 1962. Dr. Hilgard is a member of the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. A coauthor of Dr. Orne’s94 who took over from him as Editor of the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Dr. Fred Frankel, is also on the Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, but was not invited to the Colgate Symposium.

  Other chapters in Hypnosis: Current Problems include one by Dr. Seymour Fisher, Chief, Special Studies Unit, Psychopharmacology Service Center, National Institute of Mental Health. It is implausible, because of his position, that Dr. Fisher was unwitting of CIA and military funding of mind control research.

  Dr. Estabrooks did experiments on children. These were conducted at Rome State School in Rome, New York, with the approval of the Superintendent in a letter dated December 19, 1935. Estabrooks also did experiments on children at St. John’s Orphan Asylum and the House of the Good Shepherd, run by the Utica Community Chest in Utica, New York. The Director of the Utica Community Chest, A.J. Derbyshire told Dr Estabrooks in a letter dated December 7, 1935 that he could supply fifty children age 9 to 12. This was to be facilitated by a Sister Callista.

  Dr. Estabrooks corresponded with J. Edgar Hoover about using hypnosis to interrogate juvenile delinquents and applied to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for a research grant. He also wrote to Hoover on June 8, 1936 about the possibility of combining drugs with hypnosis. In August 11, 1959 correspondence with Murray Aborn, Ph.D., Executive Secretary, Mental Health Study Section, Division of Research Grants, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Estabrooks wrote:

  By preference, I would hope to obtain the services, full-time, of a competent clinical psychologist, working with a psychiatric consultant, and a man well-versed in the use of hypnotism with children. This is a rather specialized field. There are two pediatricians in this area, both, of course, M.D.’s, who have had extensive practice in hypnosis, but they also have their regular practices. I doubt if this would be satisfactory. I am quite convinced I can obtain the clinical psychologist in question from, say, the Clinic at Johns Hopkins, from the George Washington Medical School, from the Harvard or Yale Medical Schools. He will, of course, occupy a crucial position, and should come very well recommended.

  Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Yale were all MKULTRA institutions. Given the military intelligence and academic connections of Dr. Estabrooks, and the fact that all his techniques and results were achieved in real-life simulations under BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, it is probable that his claims to have created and handled Manchurian Candidates during World War II are accurate and factual. His experimentation on children raises the possibility that he or other investigators have attempted to create Manchurian Candidates in children. Such a possibility might seem far-fetched until one considers the LSD, biological and radiation experiments conducted on children, the effects on children of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study, the fact that four MKULTRA Subprojects were on children, and the fact that hypnotic subjects described in the BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE documents include girls nineteen years of age.

  Dr. Estabrooks is the only psychiatrist or psychologist to have claimed in public that he created Manchurian Candidates.

  IV. CASE HISTORIES

  In this section, case histories are presented. All cases involve the creation of altered states of consciousness and dissociative symptoms. Palle Hardrup, Patty Hearst and Candy Jones are Manchurian Candidates. Their cases illustrate in detail how Manchurian Candidates are created, using the methods of destructive cults328, Chinese Communist interrogators, and BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE doctors.

  Mary Ray, William Jordan and William Chaffian were subjects in military LSD experiments. They experienced dissociative symptoms, including amnesia in the two men’s cases, but they were not Manchurian Candidates. Their cases illustrate the fact that many different elements of BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, MKDELTA, MKSEARCH, and MKNAOMI were designed to induce dissociative states and dissociative symptoms including amnesia. The techniques for creating Manchurian Candidates were studied as separate components of the overall process in many different experiments and projects.

  Linda MacDonald has had complete amnesia for her life before age twenty-six ever since she was depatterned by MKULTRA contractor, Dr. Ewen Cameron. The utility of such amnesia from an intelligence perspective is obvious. Subjects for Cameron’s experiments were civilian patients seeking treatment at one of the leading medical schools in North America, McGill University. Linda MacDonald’s story brings the human costs of the experiments into focus.

  Sirhan Sirhan and Mark David Chapman provide examples of the self-created Manchurian
Candidate assassin. They illustrate the point that mind control methods can be applied through self-hypnotic and self-training procedures, a possibility discussed by MKULTRA contractor Alden Sears in his Subproject documents.

  16

  LINDA MACDONALD

  Linda MacDonald was born in Vancouver on August 6, 1937. She was 56 when I interviewed her at her town house in Vancouver surrounded by books, music, a guitar and photographs of her children. She is an attractive, lively, interesting person. I didn’t see the slightest hint of any kind of mental illness in seven hours of conversation. No one in her family has ever received psychiatric treatment, other than her, and she herself has not received any treatment since 1964. She has never had a drug or alcohol problem and has never been in trouble with the law. Linda MacDonald was a victim of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s unethical, destructive mind control experiments.

  In Linda’s case, depatterning was achieved through 102 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments given to her between May 1 and September 12, 1963. Linda MacDonald and other depatterning subjects at the Allan Memorial Institute did not receive the usual amount of electricity to their brains per ECT treatment. Dr. Cameron52, 53, 55 used a technique called the Page-Russell technique in which the button on the ECT machine is pushed six times per treatment, instead of the usual one.

  Depatterning was combined with psychic driving in many patients51, 54 but not in Linda MacDonald’s case. In depatterning, tape loops were played repeatedly to patients so that they heard the same message in “250,000 to 500,000 repetitions over a period which averages 20 days”54. According to Dr. Cameron51, “The effectiveness of the procedure has been studied under a variety of conditions, among them drug disinhibition, ordinary and prolonged sleep treatment, hypnosis under stimulant drugs and after prolonged psychological isolation.”

  Linda MacDonald’s “treatment” at the Allan Memorial Institute involved intensive application of three of these brainwashing techniques; drug disinhibition, prolonged sleep treatment, and prolonged psychological isolation. These were combined with the electrical equivalent of 612 conventional ECT treatments. The amount of electricity introduced into Linda MacDonald’s brain exceeded by 76.5 times the maximum amount recommended in the ECT Guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which state that a course of ECT should consist of 4 to 8 treatments.

  Dr. Cameron’s depatterning technique resulted in permanent and complete amnesia. To this day, Linda MacDonald is unable to remember anything from her birth to the time she entered the Allan Memorial Institute in 1963. Dr. Cameron created a type of dissociative disorder in Linda MacDonald. He demonstrated what was considered to be in doubt in the BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE documents; he proved that doctors skilled in the right procedures can erase a subject’s memory.

  The Linda MacDonald who was born in Vancouver in 1937 is not the Linda MacDonald I interviewed. The Linda I talked to is a new and separate identity that was created by Linda herself, after discharge from the Allen Memorial Institute. Linda referred to herself before age 26 as if she was talking about another person, whom she referred to several times as “Little Lindy.” She said that was how it seemed to her, that her original self was another person, not her.

  After destroying Linda MacDonald’s identity and memory, Dr. Cameron allowed a new identity to evolve spontaneously outside the walls of his institution. The new identity wasn’t used for anything by Dr. Cameron, it was simply an experimental by-product discarded by him without any follow-up. At the time of discharge, Dr. Cameron gave Linda’s husband three instructions:

  1. Don’t give her back her past.

  2. Keep her away from her family as much as possible.

  3. Don’t teach her anything until she takes some initiative.

  As recorded by the nurses in her chart (see Appendix H), Linda was reduced to a vegetable state by the depatterning. She was completely disoriented, and didn’t know her name, age or where she was. She didn’t recognize her children. She couldn’t read, drive, cook or use a toilet. Not only did she not know her husband, she didn’t even know what a husband was.

  For the first few months after discharge, Linda couldn’t remember where her children were as soon as they went outside to play. She drew a map of the surrounding four blocks and put the children’s names on it to keep track of their locations. While Linda was trying to relearn basic human functions and self-care, a nanny kept track of everything for her.

  It took three to four years for Linda to recover her short-term memory fully. One of the highlights of her rehabilitation, which she did entirely on her own, was the time she announced excitedly, “Kids, look what I’m doing!” She had learned how to scramble an egg. It was not till the summer of 1964 that her husband, Tom, taught her C, G and D chords on the guitar; she had been a good guitar player before entering the Allan Memorial Institute.

  When Linda was admitted to the Allan on March 28, 1963 her children were: a boy age 6, a boy age 5, a girl age 3, and twins age 1. She bore another son in 1966. Her oldest child was born in Toronto, the second in Quebec, her third in the United States, and the twins in Quebec. Despite all these moves and household responsibilities, compounded by the fact that her twins were born premature and spent a month in incubators, she functioned well up until March 28, 1963. There were a few things she was unable to do because of her depression, but not many; for instance, she was unable to sing in a choir.

  Linda had never had any mental health problems requiring treatment until after the birth of her twins, when she developed a postpartum depression. She was treated by her family doctor, Dr. Rosenhec with Dexedrin (see a letter from Dr. Cameron to Dr. Rosenhec in Appendix H). This caused such severe insomnia that she was often up in the middle of the night vacuuming her house. It was Dr. Rosenhec who referred her to the Allan Memorial Institute.

  Judging by things her relatives have told her, and by the medical record, it appears that Linda also had a dissociative disorder prior to March 28, 1963. She had gone into a strange state several times in which she didn’t recognize people and couldn’t talk (see Appendix H), and she heard a voice talking in her head. Other symptoms and the circumstances of her collapse into the strange state in August, 1961 can’t be described because of confidentiality reasons.

  Linda also had a cult background. Her mother belonged to a group called Moral Rearmament, also called The Oxford Group. The cult had its headquarters in Switzerland. Its doctrine was one of absolute purity, honesty, love and unselfishness. According to cult routine, the day was begun with a quiet time alone with God, then each member of the family shared with the others what had been done in words and thoughts on prior days. The children went to weekly meetings downtown. Full-time members lived communally in big houses that the children visited. According to Moral Rearmament, if a girl wore a bra, she was enticing a young man.

  Information on the Oxford Group can be found on their web page at www.mra.org.uk.

  On June 1, 1951 Dr. James Tyhurst attended a CIA meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal to discuss brainwashing. Also present were Dr. Donald Hebb, unidentified CIA personnel, and O. M. Solandt, Chairman of Canada’s Defense Research Board, which funded research by both Dr. Hebb and Dr. Tyhurst at McGill. In the minutes of the meeting it says that105:

  It was pointed out that there had been a number of previous times in the history of western culture when confession was a feature. These were the period of inquisition, of Salem witch trials, and of particular sub-groups such as the revivalist sects and the Oxford Group. It is possible that study of such phenomena might give clues to the central problem.

  The problem being discussed at the CIA meeting was how to change peoples’ attitudes, beliefs, and identities. Experiments to achieve this goal were conducted under BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and MKULTRA and at McGill by Drs. Cameron, Hebb and Azima. Is it a coincidence that the CIA was interested in the mind control methods of the Oxford Group, to which Linda MacDonald belonged? Did her membership in the Oxford Group result in her being
selected for depatterning? There is now no way to know.

  Were other members of the Oxford Group or other small cults depatterned by Dr. Cameron? Did any of his depatterning patients have classified information of any kind? At least partial answers to these questions, which have never been asked before, may be sitting in the medical records department of the Allan Memorial Institute.

  Linda’s boyfriend, her future husband, didn’t like the Oxford Group. Linda said he described her as “helly-holy-helly” during her teen years. He said she alternated back and forth in three-month cycles between moral restraint, and smoking and being sexually active. The summer Linda became engaged, she went to the Moral Rearmament Canadian headquarters in Mackinaw. She was considering becoming a full-time member. She returned home to Ottawa with cult team leaders and told her mother she was planning on becoming a full-time member. Her mother blew up and dropped out of the Oxford Group, taking her daughter with her.