Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control & germ Warfare by Thomas Gordon

Author:Thomas, Gordon [Thomas, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Octavo Editions
Published: 2010-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Following the departure of Allen Welsh Dulles, a new director, John Alex McCone, was appointed by President John F. Kennedy. Gottlieb persuaded McCone to authorize further substantial payments to be channeled through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology — the CIA front organization in New York — for Dr. Cameron and other researchers at the Institute and elsewhere. The money would be spent on such lines of investigation as hypnotism, the analysis of the extrasensory perception of African witch doctors and voodoo’s potential for brainwashing. It was an unrestrained, scattershot approach in which researchers were granted total freedom from the academic restrictions and red tape their work would normally attract.

Dr. Donald Hebb, the head of the psychology department at McGill had received $30,000 from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology to continue his pioneer work in sensory deprivation. He had already received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Canadian Department of Defense. The money had been used to convert a room in his laboratory into an “isolation box” into which volunteers, who had been fully briefed as to the purpose of the test, were placed. They were encased in high-altitude flying suits and wore goggles and ear muffs. The air in the box was filtered and from time to time the subjects were exposed to a constant beeping. Each volunteer was told he could be released as soon as he pressed a panic button. No one, whether he wished to or not, had been allowed to remain in the box for extended periods. Dr. Gottlieb had tried to persuade Dr. Hebb to keep volunteers for longer periods in isolation and to give them drugs. The psychologist flatly refused to entertain the proposals. Subsequently he had been “horrified” to discover the CIA was the source of part of his funding and discontinued his research.

No such qualms affected an Agency staff researcher, Morse Allen. He had persuaded Dr. Maitland Baldwin at the National Institute of Health to perform “terminal-type” experiments. Dr. Baldwin had come to Allen’s attention after keeping an Army volunteer in isolation for forty hours. The soldier had broken down and, in Dr. Baldwin’s account, “he began to cry and sob in the most heartbreaking way.”

Dr. Baldwin agreed to cooperate with the Agency on certain conditions. The CIA would provide the volunteers and accepted that, after a week in isolation, there would be almost certainly irreparable brain damage. Dr. Gottlieb chaired a number of meetings to see how best to fund Dr. Baldwin. It was decided the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was not a suitable conduit because of the potential “terminal” nature of the research. A dead “expendable” on American soil could lead to awkward questions and expose the Society’s cover. But before a satisfactory way of funding was agreed, McCone ordered the project to be abandoned as “altogether too risky to perform within the borders of the United States.” Once more Dr. Gottlieb’s attention focused upon Dr. Cameron.

Cameron’s reports had become a vindication of what Dr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.