The Scientist & The CIA Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 55 - The Scientist & The CIA
MICHAEL PARK: A content warning for this episode. It contains references to inhumane treatment and may not be suitable for all listeners.
It is 1959. At least it was. Or it is. Or it might be. You’ve no idea how long you’ve been here.
How long you’ve been here.
Where is here?
In the stories they take you with the bright light. A beam of radiant energy that pulls you from wherever and whatever state you find yourself in and deposits you among glittering surfaces, elongated, slow-moving faces with pallours of grey and machinery from the far off future.
In the stories people are scared but you don’t feel fear, you don’t feel very much of anything. Your mind allows you to process what’s going on around you but you can’t feel any of it, can’t understand the words that pour through the speakers in the walls for the hours of the days of whatever celestial body you now orbit.
You can’t feel the pokes, the prods, the syringes, the muttered exclamations in a language that is as utterly incomprehensible to you as the voice in your own head which seems to raise and lower in volume as it screams an agonised scream, and then whimpers a defeated whimper.
In your head.
Not from you. Not of you. Not by you. Somewhere else. Somewhere in a different galaxy to you.
Your heart booms. The walls pass from solid… to liquid… to gas. All the while the refrain of the speaker thrums away, the faces which warp and fade between their greys and the most vivid colours under the lights which kaleidoscope back and forth, leaving you in equal parts mesmerised and traumatised, unable to look at the most consistent thing in the room because every time you do it’s something different.
Sometimes it’s the burning of a thousand suns. Others you can see, and hear, and feel the hum of every single tiny filament, stinging your skin like buzzing hornets or flitting like millions of fireflies, refusing to come together.
You think you can feel it. Somewhere outside you there is violent whine, and a little thud. Like a little hammer hitting a little metal shell. It lights up everything in your mind, even with your eyes closed. You feel like you’re there, and then you’re not there, you’re beside yourself, you’re inside yourself. You’re everywhere and nowhere.
A dream is a dream is dream is a dream until it’s not a dream and the fantasy you once had of being taken by aliens and transported to a different world, to meet their ambassadors who give you the beautiful foods of their people and tell you about their culture, tell you how much they admire the people of earth, is nothing like you’d held in your head.
When you could hold things in your head.
Anything but the relentless voice which becomes yours, your friends, your mother’s, your father’s, your long-forgotten ancestors speaking to you through time. A hostile person?
How long have you been here?
This is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
How long would you have to stay? In a room of swirls and lights and walls that came and went. A room with a soft bed and rough material around your wrists and ankles. How long would you be restrained aboard this vessel, spinning through space, orbiting god only knows where.
What did they want with you? What could you possibly offer people from outer space? What could be so valuable that they would swoop down and take you… some time… from somewhere… from wherever you were.
Whoever you were.
It’s hard to focus for the moments that you’re awake. Those fleeting little moments when you’re alone and the walls - not steel or some glowing alien composite but… tile? Tile that seems to move in waves, or shimmer, or burst out sending little shards flying at the speed of sound towards your unprotected face.
And then stop.
Do they stop because they make contact with you, ripping the skin from your face? Do they stop because you fall unconscious? Did they stop at all? Were you ever conscious? Were they ever really there at all?
He watches you from the other side of the room, his grey face like stone, cold to your torment. Frozen from the question: is this wrong? Am I damaging my subjects?
It’s not a leap to leave your body and look through the eyes of the grey figure in the shadows. In fact, it is a leap. You feel yourself running forward, leaping through the motionless shards of tile and into the featureless body.
Your eyes are older now, your mind clearer. You’re no longer on an alien spaceship orbiting some distant world, being watched over by grey-palloured extra terrestrials.
You’re in the Sleep Room. You were always in the Sleep Room. You may have always been in the Sleep Room.
You look down at sheets of paper where a name and a photograph are appended to a set of notes. Lists of symptoms, medications, symptomatic reactions to medications, notes on what you’ve said. Notes on your interests and desires. Apparently you have stated more than once that you believe you have been abducted by aliens.
The notes suggest that this is because of your love of pulp science fiction. You search the mind that you now inhabit, shifting uncomfortably in its skin. It is also a lover of science fiction, but it doesn’t relate to your experiences.
In fact this mind, the mind of Dr Donald Ewen Cameron, spends all his spare time reading science fiction novels. It’s where he picked up some of his incredible psychiatric ideas.
His memories flood your mind. The most famous son of Bridge of Allan, a little town near Stirling. Attended Glasgow University, studied in the United States and Switzerland under eminent psychiatrists of the 1920s and 30s. Moved around Europe and the States before settling in Canada and becoming the first director of the Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, taking over old Sir Hugh Allan’s horror movie mansion on a hill overlooking McGill University in Montreal.
You were in Montreal. The Allan Institute. The Sleep Room.
It was hard to hear his thoughts over your own murmuring and the recording blasting through the speakers in the room. Not an alien language at all, not many voices but one, repeating the same message.
‘You are a hostile person.’
You remember diagnosing a Nazi, the one who had fled to Scotland in 1941, before the Nuremburg trials, finding that he suffered from hysteria and amnesia. Rudolf Hess admitted to faking the amnesia after being sentenced to life in prison.
You remember then diagnosing the German people, claiming they were predisposed to challenge world peace due to the makeup of their society and culture. It spiralled from there, with you beginning to separate societies and groups into the strong, and the weak.
The mentally ill were among the weak.
Dr Ewen Cameron: "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves – and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them."
MICHAEL PARK: But they can be helped. Like many of your peers you believe that mental illness is a societal contagion and that if it could be rooted out, if people could be reverted to a state before they became ill, if they could be depatterned, they could be reconstructed as full members of society.
You feel the man give a nod and you see through his eyes more figures move to the body on the gurney, your body. You see a syringe, you see it pierce your skin. You see nothing.
They cover your eyes. Not that it matters. Whatever swims in your veins has put you back to sleep.
Dr Cameron’s Sleep Room was a psychiatric marvel. It was believed that he could cure people from the lavish stable building of the old Allan mansion. He would use pioneering techniques and you would want to go. Because you were suffering and this man, the former President of the American Psychiatric Association, the current president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the future president of the World Psychiatric Association could help.
Would help.
Whatever it took. He could make you better.
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MID ROLL
Hi everyone, it’s Michael. If you support us on Patreon then you might well know this already but we’ve just added loads more to our tiers meaning that you can now get awesome stuff from Scotland, our side-project Sleep Stories, our composer Mitch Bain and artist Jamie Mowat, all for the same prices as our previous tiers.
If you want to support the show, this is a great way to do it and bag yourself some fun stuff to go along with it! Join us, won’t you? At patreon.com/bequietmedia
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Dr Cameron believed that he could make you better. By putting you to sleep for days, weeks, months at a time. By filling your blood with barbiturates. By administering electroshock therapy at forty times the usual level. By dosing you with so much LSD that time lost all meaning. By playing tape loops of phrases that flipped between positive and negative messages or even just white noise.
He really liked that one.
So did his funders.
Because whether he knew it or not - there was a debate on that front - this psychiatrist, raised in the sleepy town of Bridge of Allan, was one of the most important researchers in a US government funded experiment.
His work at the Allan Memorial Institute was Subproject 68, of a project codenamed MK ULTRA.
Through a shell organisation called The Society For The Investigation Of Human Ecology, the CIA was funnelling money into Dr Cameron’s research. Not because they believed he could cure mental illness… despite the support of many of his peers there was nothing in Dr Cameron’s experiments that could do that.
But they liked the way that participants, unwitting participants who were subjected to the most horrific so-called treatments without their informed consent, would become malleable. In many cases, they were reduced to a childlike state of helplessness.
The CIA believed in the power of mind control, and these were interesting results indeed.
So the Allan Institute became part of their focus, after all you couldn’t just experiment willy-nilly on American citizens, but Canadians were seen as fair game.
Whether Cameron knew where the money was coming from is a moot point since the likelihood is that he’d have been carrying out his experiments in exactly the same way. But one thing remains.
The people he experimented on without their consent, many of whom were left with worse conditions than when they were admitted to Cameron’s care, have taken up a series of lawsuits against the CIA, and the Canadian government. Some have settled, some are ongoing. The CIA has never admitted fault for funding the inhumane treatment of human beings.
And why would they? Although Cameron’s experiments never corresponded to any improvements in a patient’s mental health, they did do something important.
A document entitled "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" was issued to CIA operatives in 1963. In it was a chapter on ‘coercive counterintelligence of resistant sources’ which detailed the use of sensory deprivation, electric shocks, isolation, the disruption of routine, the use of drugs of various kinds, with various intents.
Dr Ewen Cameron, the Scottish psychiatrist who had risen to the top of his field and stood apart from all others thanks to his forward-thinking, radical treatments, pretty much wrote the book on the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods - a nice way of saying torture - used by the United States from the early sixties until they were outlawed by Executive Order in 2009.
That’s probably little consolation to Cameron’s victims, who would have entered the Sleep Room hoping to be cured of things like anxiety issues, or postnatal depression.
It is 1959. The truth was somehow worse. You’re unable to remember, but you hadn’t been taken, you’d been admitted.
Dr Ewen Cameron: "Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation - 35 days - and by repeated depatterning, and although they received 101 days of positive driving, no favourable results were obtained."
MICHAEL PARK: These faces weren’t the faces of an alien species, they were doctors and nurses, administering shots of barbiturates and psychoactive drugs into your bloodstream.
When you came here you didn’t believe yourself to be the victim of alien abduction and if you had the wherewithal to understand what was happening to you then you’d know that your mind took those moments from the pulp fiction you loved and shoved it into your conscious mind to make what was happening seem… alien.
Dr Cameron would have known. He read the same books.
Did you feel trust? Never again.
Did you feel hope? Never again.
Did you feel anything? Never again.
A Mad Scientist and the CIA had seen to that.
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You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
There is so much more to say about Dr Ewen Cameron and his dubious legacy than what we were able to in this episode. If you want to get more in-depth then check out the special series by WBUR and Endless Thread called ‘Madness’.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work at mitchbain.bequiet.media.
Jamie Mowat does amazing illustrations for us which you can see in our episode art. See more and buy prints at tidlin.com.
Scotland is supported by Chris Lingwood, Scott McCubbin and listeners like you on Patreon. You can get loads more from us for as little as two dollars at: patreon.com/scotlandhistorypodcast
You can find out more about the show and read transcripts on our website, scotlandpodcast.net and on twitter, facebook and instagram by searching Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks for listening. Look after each other, wear a mask, we’ll see you next time.