BOOK REPORT: THE DEVIL’S CHESSBOARD* by DAVID TALBOT

 

DAVID Talbot’s BIOGRAPHY of Allen Dulles, head of the CIA during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies, often reads like a thriller. He sets the tone right from the start, in his prologue, where he records a remark Dulles made one autumn afternoon in 1965 as he walked with Harper’s magazine editor Willie Morris in the Washington D.C. neighbourhood of Georgetown. The former head of the CIA, 72-year old Allen Welsh Dulles mused at one point: “That little Kennedy…he thought he was a god.” (1) No further remarks of this nature were made during the remainder of their walk and the two men continued discussing the article Dulles was writing for Morris's magazine. The article concerned the failed invasion of Cuba by CIA-sponsored paramilitaries. The battalion-sized attack force was composed mostly of  Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro’s newly installed revolutionary government and who wanted to depose the communist leader. On 17 April 1961, the group launched an amphibious assault, landing 1400 men on the island nation’s south shore at the Bahia de Cochinos (“Bay of Pigs”). As the history books tell us, the operation was an unmitigated disaster and a black eye for the Central Intelligence Agency. With the Harper’s article (in the end, he never submitted it), Dulles hoped to set the record straight, as he saw it, and repair some of the damage done to the agency’s reputation by the incident. And the one person he blamed most for the invasion’s failure was the American  President, John Kennedy, who had denied last-minute U.S. air support for the endeavor. 

 

    DAVID TALBOT

THE PROLOGUE goes on to give an overview of Dulles’ time at the CIA. He was the second director  of “The Agency” (1953-61), which had been established in 1947 under the “National Security Act” by President Truman, who'd envisioned the organization as one which "correlated all intelligence and delivered reports to the President.” But Truman soon realized that “under the Cold War structure, the agency would become more than that.” Throughout his tenure in office, and in subsequent presidencies, one essential question was asked, yet never fully answered: “What is the role of a secret intelligence agency in a transparent democracy?” (Truman)

 

    ALLEN DULLES

DAVID TALBOT goes back to Dulles’ early years as a corporate lawyer in the 1920s and 30s with offices on Wall Street and, along with his brother John Foster Dulles,⁺ had a rich clientele both in the United States and abroad. During WWII Allen was station-chief in Switzerland for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), a spy agency for the Allies and the forerunner of the CIA. Noteworthy is the role Dulles and other operatives played in creating the infamous "ratlines" for escaping Nazi scientists, military strategists, and elites. Dulles was particularly proud of his involvement in keeping Reinhard Gehlen, Hilter's intelligence chief, out of the hands of the advancing Russians (who would have shot the Nazi official) as the war raveled to its close. And during the post-war years, Dulles even had him installed as West Germany's top security chief, giving the CIA a direct channel to valuable information about the Cold War scene in Europe (not-to-mention what Gehlen could reveal about Nazi Germany's security operations).   

AFTER the war, the perceived threat of international communism brought into being the CIA, and Talbot details how the agency evolved from an intelligence gathering service to one that practiced election interference, covert operations, and "executive actions". One thing I found interesting was the level of influence both Dulles brothers had on the direction American foreign policy took vis-à-vis the USSR. During the 1950s, the brothers successfully promoted a harder line against the communist state than President Eisenhower would probably have taken. Foster, as Secretary of State, handled diplomatic initiatives against the Soviets and their allies while Allen handled the covert war against the communists.

 

TALBOT shows us how the 'sausage is made' behind the scenes in government and elite circles, and partly answers the question Truman grappled with decades earlier: Just what is the role of a secret intelligence agency in a democracy? And, save for a few years following the 1975 Church Committee hearings in Congress set up to investigate CIA abuses¹ that temporarily clipped the agency’s wings, the answer is that the CIA's role in the intelligence game is to do just about anything it wants, or felt it needed, to do. Within reason, of course.

 

TWO REVELATIONS stood out for me: One I’ve mentioned—the hard line taken against the USSR that was promoted by the Dulles brothers which increased tensions in the already strained relations between America and Soviet Russia post-WWII.

The second I’d never heard before—that in early November 1963, there was a second plot to assassinate President Kennedy as he entered the campaign season. Kennedy was due to visit Chicago in a similar fashion as he would later tour Dallas. Marksmen were to be stationed along the parade route to kill the incumbent president as his motorcade drove to O’Hare Stadium for a rally. Details of the plot are sketchy, and I feel slide into the realm of “conspiracy theory”, but I don’t dismiss entirely the possibility; there are some curious coincidences between the two assassination plots, particularly their Cuban ex-pats connection....

 

N. MACHIAVELLI 1469-1527

TALBOT’S BOOK details Dulles’ personal life—his marriage, his mistresses, his relationship with his children, his friendships, and so on, and the reader is left with the impression of a man who holds great secrets pridefully, and who acts with icy rationality, seeing others as mere pawns for him to use, even those closest to him. Dulles would elevate people or sacrifice them as the situation warranted, and I see him as a psychopath, enabled and intoxicated by the secret levers of power he came to control and wield. Even after his dismissal as director of the CIA by Kennedy in 1961 following his Bay of Pigs debacle, Dulles maintained ties with many of the agency's high-ranking officers and with the expanding “deep state”, acting as an éminence grise behind the scenes, influencing CIA policy until his death in 1969. Machiavelli would have been proud.

 

Talbot structures his biography of Dulles chronologically, providing the reader with details of his many doings in the cloak and dagger business.

    BAY OF PIGS 1961

 

 SOME of Dulles’ top 10 hits might ring a bell:

👉1948: Italy: In the general elections, suitcases of cash were used to defeat the leftist Popular Democratic Front party.

👉1953: Iran: Promoted a coup in Iran to defeat the incumbent socialist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh and installed puppet ruler Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. [Blowback bigtime! c. 1979. Ed.]

👉1954: Guatemala: Successfully promoted another coup to depose the democratically elected, though left-leaning, Guatemalan President, Jacobo Árbenz. Incidentally American Sec. of State John Foster Dulles planned the coup while his brother Allen worked out the mechanics. They were quite the team!

👉1960: Democratic Republic of the Congo: Operatives handed over left-leaning Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba to opposition rebels. He was later executed. That’s one way to keep your hands clean. (Let the locals do your dirty work for you.)

👉1961: Cuba: Bay of Pigs. Oopsie!

👉1963: Kennedy assassination?

👉1963-64: Dulles is a committee member on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. Talbot makes it clear this was a case of the fox guarding the hen-house. The ex-CIA chief influenced which avenues of investigation the committee took and, funnily enough, they all led to the “Lone Gunman” and self-described “Patsy”, Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

    DALLAS 1963

TALBOT’S BIOGRAPHY takes us along a rather dark and unfamiliar ground of hidden priorities and secret alliances within government, between government and elites, and between national and international power centres. In a 2015 Mother Jones magazine interview, Talbot states:

  

“But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy [and where] you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world.” (Mother Jones)

 

HE ADDS, “I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I think that you can make a case, although I didn’t explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.” (Mother Jones) 

TALBOT goes into considerable detail around the CIA’s possible involvement in the assassination of JFK and makes it clear that Dulles' deep-seated hatred for the president after his dismissal by him in 1961 was a strong motive for the ex-CIA chief to seek revenge. JFK was loathed among the ranks of the Cuban diaspora in Miami, who never forgave him for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the contacts Dulles had in their circles after 1961 is just one of several disturbing scenarios Talbot presents that suggest Dulles and rogue CIA operatives were complicit in killing the American president.

 

"He had to be removed. [Kennedy] That’s what I think the consensus [among elites, operatives] finally was about him. And Dulles would have been the person, as the executor of this kind of security wing of the American establishment, who would have been given this job." (Mother Jones)

 

WHEN ASKED whether today's surveillance system in the United States can be seen as a legacy of the Dulles' years, Talbot concludes: 

  

“That same kind of dynamic was revived or in some ways expanded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Those guys very much were in keeping with the sort of Dulles ethic, that of complete ruthlessness. It’s this feeling of unaccountability, that democratic sanctions and regulations don’t make sense in today’s ruthless world.” (Mother Jones)

 

I'LL END HERE by recommending Talbot’s compelling and disturbing biography of a modern-day monster.

 

Cheers, Jake.

_______________________________________

 

* Great title, BTW.

 

+ Foster was Secretary of State under Eisenhower from 1953-59.

 

1.  MK-ULTRA, for example.

 

 

Talbot, David. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, N.Y., 10007. 2015. Print.

 

 

 

Movies and documentary of interest:

"Executive Action" 1973, Burt Lancaster.

"JFK", 1991, Kevin Costner. (written and directed by Oliver Stone)

"JFK Revisited: 2021, Through the Looking Glass" documentary. (written by Oliver Stone)

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE!

 

 

BOOK REPORT: THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY BY MAX BLUMENTHAL

The subtitle of Max Blumenthal’s new book is: How America’s National Security State Fueled The rise Of Al Qaeda, ISIS, And Donald Trump which suggests this book is not a pleasant one to read. It explores the web of connections that American security services, particularly the CIA and the FBI, have had with extremist Islamic groups over the past several decades. Max details how covert operations began in the 1980s with the US government secretly funding jihadist groups in Afghanistan who then waged a guerrilla war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. It details the blow-back resulting from this flawed CIA program with the rise, decades later, of Al Qaeda and ISIS whose roots lay in the blood and soil of that impoverished, war-torn country. 

Max describes the networks formed between American spy agencies and  Islamist radicals, some even operating in the United States. He notes how CIA money and covert support to Al Qaeda affiliates in Iraq, following America’s disastrous invasion, led directly to the formation of the even more extremist group, ISIS. He later explores the CIA’s connection with ISIS and other radical Islamist groups fighting in Syria's civil war, as well as highlighting the role the "White Helmets" played, and continues to play there. Blumenthal suggests the NGO may be acting as an anti-Assad shill in concord with the terrorist groups:

"Marketed to the public as a mere band of "rescuers" rushing toward the bombs to pluck helpless babies from the rubble, the White Helmets had revealed themselves as an international influence operation that lobbied on behalf of the Western governments and military-intelligence officials that conceived it to drive the regime change agenda. Indeed, the group was not born in the rubble of a Syrian conflict zone, but in public relations offices and the boardrooms of private defense contractors." (209)

Max Blumenthal

American spy agencies played a central role in all these theaters of conflict by funding splinter terrorist cells, pitting rival groups one against the other, sometimes funding and equipping both sides—all in support of the larger project of American hegemony in the Middle East. 

So, no, this is not a pleasant book to read, but it is an important one.

His first chapter, “The Afghan Trap”, is a primer on how not to win a war, revealing how America’s all-encompassing “War on Terror”, begun in the aftermath of 9/11, had its roots in the earlier involvements by the CIA and other government agencies with Middle Eastern (particularly Saudi) radical Salafist adherents. These extreme Islamists (nicknamed “the Arab Afghans”) were given training and hundreds of millions of dollars in supplies and weapons by the CIA to promote an insurgency in Afghanistan. This policy began in the Carter administration, in 1979, as a geopolitical ploy to draw the Russians "into their own Vietnam”, and to weaken the Russian polity. The operation succeeded in its larger project: In 1989 Russia withdrew its troops from Afghanistan and two years later the Berlin Wall fell.
However, blow-back came afterwards when all those highly trained and armed “freedom fighters” returned home. What was to be done with them? Unsurprisingly, as Blumenthal outlines, this “disposal problem” (28) became the problem for a number of countries as their nationals were repatriated. The “ghosts" (36) of "Operation Cyclone” (the name of the CIA’s undercover operation in Afghanistan) came to haunt Egypt, Algeria, the Philippines and Bosnia in the following decades as radical Islamist cells developed in these and other countries. Along with terrorist bombings and violence, governments themselves reacted with their own, extreme policies.* Summarizing this point, Blumenthal says: “…[T]error begets extremism [from governments] and collapses the fragile space where multi-confessional societies survive.” (38) 

Of course, the attacks on 9/11 were the most dramatic examples of blow-back resulting from these ill-conceived, cloak and dagger operations.**

"I try to see no evil, but I don't know what Hear or Say are doing."

Recently, Syria has become the latest victim of egregious CIA meddling when the agency secretly began funding  and supporting radical jihadist groups in the country in its bid to remove President Assad. These groups were judged at the time to be "more “moderate" and therefore more compliant (but who later proved to be neither.) Consequently, Syria’s civil war has been prolonged and deepened because of US interference, and blow-back came in the form of millions of Syrians forced to flee their homeland, with all the problems that entails. No doubt, there will be further repercussions resulting from the CIA’s ham-fisted operations in the future.

And that’s just the first chapter of Max Blumenthal’s meticulously detailed examination of the connections between America’s security services and radical Islamic groups. He highlights the cynical disregard for law and order and moral conduct on the part of the CIA, FBI, the US government and other actors in their pursuit of geopolitical aims. It’s a modern democracy’s dark corner and Blumenthal’s exposé shines a needed light into it.

Cheers, Jake.

*The 2001 ”Patriot Act” in the United States is one example—it was enacted to allow the President to quickly declare war, without going through the legislative process, in case of a threat to national security. It was supposed to be a one-off, but it has been renewed annually ever since, and has allowed Presidents of both political stripes to send troops around the world as they see fit—without congressional approval. Canada has a similar, if watered-down, version. Once power has been granted to a government, it's hard for it to be rescinded.

**It should be remembered that 15 of the 19 hijackers on that fateful day were Saudi citizens. Saudi Arabia remains a hotbed for Wahhabism, an extreme, traditionalist form of Islam that radicalized many of the hijackers. Max provides an interesting geopolitical context for the growth of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, by which the United States ‘turned a blind eye’ to the dangers arising from this extreme form of Islam—in exchange for a secure supply of Saudi oil!

And it should also be remembered that the mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was a Saudi, a former “freedom fighter” and an adherent of Wahhabism who was incensed over the presence of foreign troops in his country. Blow-back can come in many forms and from many sources.

    

Max Blumenthal is an American investigative-journalist and senior editor for on-line news site The Grayzone.  His is a youthful, articulate and passionate voice of dissent and scrutiny that regularly challenges the Washington consensus, calling out bad actors in government and elsewhere which, some months ago, made him the target of deep-state harassment. (See my 31 October 2019 blog post “Rants: American Reporter Arrested on Trumped-Up Charge” for details.)   

His award-winning journalism gives fresh insights into American foreign and domestic politics and attempts to uncover the truth behind the curtain of current political events.   

       

Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, Isis and Donald Trump. Verso. New Left Books, Brooklyn, NY. 2019

"Yep. That's either the North Star or a speck of fly poop on the window."

RANT: "WE LIVE IN A BROKEN WORLD."

"I really want to leave now. I really do. Really."

I REMEMBER READING ABOUT AN AMERICAN CHEMIST named Sidney Gottlieb who joined the CIA in the late 1940s as a “poison expert” and established himself as head of a psychology research team during the 1950s and early 60s in which, among other things, he and his colleagues gave unwitting subjects multiple doses of Mescaline and LSD, even methamphetamines and heroin, sometimes on daily regimes, for extended periods of time. Many of his test subjects were CIA employees, but during the years the program was in operation, Gottlieb used prisoners, mental patients, sex workers—people “who could not fight back,” as one CIA employee put it. Many were not told they were being made the subject of an experiment, nor were they given adequate information that would allow them to make informed decisions about their participation in such research.

[Interesting side note: Two of Gottlieb’s test subjects became well known personalities: Author Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as a young student willingly took LSD—then a newly synthesized drug and not yet illegal—when recruited on campus by the CIA. He went on to become an ardent proponent of the drug’s use for recreational purposes. The other subject was Ted Kaczynski, later of “Unabomber” fame. So, a 50% success rate, I guess? It should be noted that LSD’s reputation has been somewhat reprieved. Today, it is being used in some carefully monitored therapeutic treatments, and there are calls for its de-criminalization, along with other Schedule 1 drugs. Ed.]

During the 1950s, particularly following the Korean War, the perceived twin threats of Chinese and Russian communism loomed large in the minds of the American populace and in the halls of congress, and at the CIA as well. As the ground-breaking Church Committee Congressional hearings of 1975 uncovered, the spy agency during those years sidestepped legal and ethical considerations in the pursuit of techniques, practices, devices and substances that would aid them in their hidden wars with communism. “MK-ULTRA”, (“MK” being code letters signifying the CIA and “ULTRA” meaning “Top, Top Secret”) was part of a larger, umbrella project which explored a variety of interrogation methods and coercive techniques developed for use by the agency’s field operatives. One so-called research project (“Operation Midnight Climax”) operated out of a brothel in San Francisco, where agents secretly dosed clients with LSD and filmed their encounters with prostitutes through hidden cameras in the next room in order to see what effects the drug had on their behaviour.

Ted Kaczynski "Unabomber"

They hoped to use the powerful hallucinogen as a method of mind control and manipulation to be used on enemy agents, Russian spys and the like. [Incidentally, in 1945 we had our own Cold War spy scandal when a Russian embassy clerk named Igor Gouzenko defected, his face kept concealed and his new identity a secret. Igor was sure lucky to get into Canada before Gottlieb and Cameron started their operations! See picture below. Ed.] As absurd as such cowboy antics seem today, some seventy years later, it was research and projects like these that laid the groundwork for today’s “black sites”, “enhanced interrogation techniques”, water-boarding*, electroshock treatments and other forms of physical and psychological manipulation that by anyone’s definition falls under the label of torture, and flies in the face of the 1984 United Nations Convention on Torture, of which the United States is a signatory. 

"Did I take the Red pill or the Blue one?"

Gottlieb, because of his chemistry background, focused his attention on the pharmacological side of things (including poisons to be used for assassination purposes), and during his tenure at the spy agency he and his colleagues became obsessed with the idea of “mind control”. His goal was to ultimately break down a person’s will, destroy their personality through chemical intervention, and then replace the empty vessel with his own programming—like wiping a hard-drive and installing a new operating system. Fun times! Author Timothy Findlay used Gottlieb’s cold war operation as a plot thread in his 1982 novel, The Telling of Lies that I reviewed in a post last year. Of course, one of the main outcomes of this research was the finding that, while a person’s personality could be severely damaged, even destroyed using LSD and other drugs, shock therapy, sleep deprivation and so on, it was much harder to establish a functioning alternative personality in its place. 

"I'm Invisible! He can't see me! Hahaha!"

Indeed, there were a number of test subjects (how many exactly will never be known—most of the records from the MK-ULTRA project were destroyed by the CIA in 1972 following the Watergate scandal and increased public scrutiny of the spy agency’s domestic activities) who remained hospitalized and psychologically crippled for the remainder of their lives. One infamous case that did gain public notice was that of Frank Olsen, a CIA employee who was dosed with LSD at a cocktail party in 1953. A week later he fell to his death from the window of a New York hotel in an apparent suicide. (The actual events surrounding Olsen’s death remain clouded, and rumours persist he was ‘assisted’ in his defenestration because he contemplated becoming a whistleblower.)

The MK program was in operation for about a decade and a half, officially closing its doors in 1964. (Though some operations may have continued.) That year, the CIA published (presumably for internal consumption) its KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual which utilized research taken from the various MK projects. A 1997 F.O.I.A. request by the Baltimore Sun brought this shameful publication into the light of day. [Tip of the Hat to The Baltimore Sun and their fine piece of investigative journalism. Journalists were still journalists back then, doing real journalism! Ed.] 

Interestingly, in 1959, the political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate** by Richard Condon, was published. The novel depicts a returning American soldier, held captive by the North Koreans for some years and freed after the war, who, in reality, had been ‘brainwashed’ by his captors, and turned into a political puppet and killing machine whose mind could be controlled by the dastardly Orientals with the utterance of a particular word. This fictional portrayal of mind control, and a case where life would attempt to imitate art was, of course, the wet dream of Gottlieb and his researchers—to achieve robotic control over someone’s mind. It was a dream that fortunately never came to pass, but MK’s research into pharmaceuticals as aids in interrogation techniques has proved over time to be an invaluable resource for torture advocates and black site operations everywhere. 

 

Angela Landsbury Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate

I would stop my Manchurian Candidate-like rambling at this point, but I feel compelled to add a further layer to the MK-ULTRA story, with its strange and disturbing Canadian connection. (Say what?! Shut your mouth! Canadians don’t torture! Its…unCanadian.)

Ewen Cameron

Canadians and torture? Cummon. Really? Yes, really. Though I doubt the word was ever used at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, where chief psychiatrist Ewen Cameron developed his theories of “depatterning” and “psychic driving” and put them to use. With terrible consequences.

Cameron had a busy and storied career. He took part in psychiatric examinations of captured German war criminal Herman Hess, during the Nuremburg trials in 1945. There, he developed theories and concepts around what types of personalities and citizens were most beneficial in maintaining a healthy society. In addition, he advised the Allied administration there, after the war, and took part in research providing data on the characteristics of modern German society that was to be used as an aide in planning reconstruction of the country.

 

Cameron stated, "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." He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. For Cameron, the traits were contagions, and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. Cameron used his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and parent in society.¹

One of his main concerns was how to eliminate unhelpful or harmful personality traits in his patients. He reasoned that by somehow temporarily regressing their personalities back to an infantile level of development, he could then insert such training and safeguards he saw fit that would assist them, in essence, to learn proper formulations of social behaviour and personal control, thus over-riding their entrenched, anti-social behaviour patterns. Over time, he came up with a regime of drug therapies, electro-shock, induced coma and sensory deprivation techniques to achieve in his patients this ‘clean slate’ personality. The drugs he used included those his counterpart in the United States, Gottleib, used in his CIA experiments, but Cameron went further, using prolonged and dangerous levels of ECT to “depattern” as he called it, or de-couple the conscious mind from its memories—to disorient the patient to such an extent that they were receptive to his second therapy, his “psychic driving” regime of behaviour modification. A patient, after being subjected to, in some cases, dozens of ECT treatments would then be given headphones which repeated the same message over and over, even while the patient was asleep. Weeks and months of what can only be described as torture might pass in daily schedules of this kind, with Cameron noting any changes in behaviour.

Taken from E. Cameron Daily Log

At some point in the late 1950s the CIA heard of Cameron’s work in Montreal and through a “false front” foundation, funded some of his work for several years. It came as a surprise to me to learn that the Canadian government was also interested in Cameron’s work and provided funding for him as well. And this begs the question: What were the CIA and the Canadian government really after? (Additionally, I would be interested to know which branch of our government provided the funding. Was it Defence?) So, was it funding for pure research to better understand people with social pathologies? Was it to make improvements in psychological and psychiatric services? To promote new drug therapies.

Igor Gouzenko: "Yes, but can he play hockey?"

Well, since I am a cynic, I think they were really after something resembling mind control, or ways to control or influence  individuals as well as their domestic populations, and to discover new methods of coercive interrogations to pry information from uncooperative subjects (i.e. “torture”), where drugs and techniques like “psychic driving” truly came into their own. Who’s to say for sure, but I think that both Gottlieb and Cameron were blinded by their unwavering belief in the “correctness” of their research, and this caused their understanding about what they were doing to people’s lives to atrophy and fall away. Gottlieb was immersed in the environment of Cold War paranoia and McCarthyism as were—to a lesser extent—Cameron and his colleagues, and this atmosphere may have clouded their judgement. Nevertheless, the harm these two researchers, 'men of science', one a medical doctor, did to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people and their families over nearly two decades of abuse cannot be overlooked or forgotten, or the lessons learned from this period go untaught.

The child of one of Cameron’s patients discussed her mother’s treatment at the Montreal psychiatric hospital in a recent interview on CBC’s Fifth Estate:

 

Diane McIntosh's mother, Helene, spent two years in and out of the Allan. She suffered from postpartum depression after the birth of her second child and was generally depressed because her marriage wasn't working out.

"I think it's unbelievable that they would give themselves the right to affect somebody's life in that way," said McIntosh, who now lives in British Columbia.

"They must have known that those extreme experiments would have lasting effects. They didn't just change four years of her life; they changed her whole life."  (CBC “Fifth Estate”)²

My own take, for what it’s worth, is that Cameron was profoundly affected by his experience in Germany following WWII. I think his theories on social order and control, sick and healthy personalities were strongly influenced by what he saw there, and instilled in him a need to find a way to prevent the disorder he saw all around him from happening elsewhere. That’s my two bits, anyway. Cameron, incidentally, was President of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations as well as the World Psychiatric Association. He retired and lived the remainder of his life in the pleasant village of Lake Placid, New York, dying at age 65, still successfully battling occasional lawsuits from former patients and their families. He died, having lived a busy and, by all accounts, a personally rewarding life. Such could not be said for the many victims of his pride and malfeasance.

Cameron believed that breaking down a patient's minds to a childlike state — through drugs and electroshock therapy — would allow him to work from a clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed "psychic driving," which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up to 20 hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake. (CBC Podcasts “Brainwashed”)³

 

Naomi Klein states in her book, The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to MK-ULTRA were not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture.” She then cites Alfred W. McCoy: "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method.”⁴

 

And the CIA’s Gottlieb? Interestingly, he had some sort of ‘come to Jesus’ moment following his retirement from the agency in 1972, when he renounced his life’s work as being “ineffective”. He spent time in India with his wife working in a leper colony, later raising goats on his farm in rural Virginia and honing his folk-dancing skills. He also practiced meditation and was considered by those who knew him to be a sensitive, spiritual person. He, too, raised a family and lived a life that could, when seen through a certain prism, be considered rich and rewarding.

 

THE OTHER NIGHT ON TV I WATCHED THE WIFE of an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer killed recently in the line of duty speaking at a memorial for her husband. In trying to articulate, through her loss and pain, the reasons why her husband died and what factors and circumstances led to the tragic shooting that morning, why fate’s thread broke at that particular time and place, one sentence had special resonance for me when she said, “We live in a broken world.” I don’t know why I wrote this post on MK-ULTRA and the horror shows of Gottlieb^ǂ and Cameron, but this decades-old scandal is a piece of that brokenness the grief-stricken woman spoke of. It is a shard, a broken bit of existence, just one among the countless many that lay scattered across the field of our world. And it behooves us all to pick one up, regardless of whether its sharp edges may sometimes cut, and through understanding and compassion return it to its place—not to the same, exact place from where it had come. Why would you want that? Rather, we should return it to one more fitting.

 

Cheers, Jake

______________________________________________

 

 

Waterboarding c. 1900 in the Philippines

[The CBC has a new podcast series on the MK-ULTRA project and the work of Gottlieb and Cameron. I was surprised to learn there are lawsuits currently before the courts, some recently settled, that have been filed by families of the victims of Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute against the federal government for its funding of Cameron’s experiments. In addition, their lawsuits also seek compensation for the children of patients whose families were damaged or destroyed because of their parents’ treatment at the Montreal institution. They are unlikely to win their court battles, however. As an aside: there is an ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that says we must ensure that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future, suggesting that we must act with a clear understanding of how our actions will affect the future. Unfortunately, neither the effects upon their patients nor upon future generations were considered by Gottlieb and Cameron and their research teams as they performed their experiments, and the painful results of the MK-ULTRA program in the 1950s and 60s continue to be felt by survivors and their families all these years later.

That said, weasel-words, lawyer-lingo and non-disclosure agreements will ensure enough cover for those responsible to remain in comfortable retirement or painless oblivion, dead and buried, while some of their victims still walk around with parts of themselves destroyed by the thoughtless actions of those reckless men and women decades ago. Most of the patients have since gone to their graves without either acknowledgment or recompense for the criminal assaults they experienced at the hands of those they thought they could trust. Ed.]

 

* For torture aficionados, waterboarding has a long and storied history, from the oddly gentle sounding “Chinese Water Torture” to the more robust versions we have today. It’s interesting to note that the American military used this helpful technique more than a century ago during the Spanish-American war of 1898 and afterwards in their decades-long occupation and pacification of the Philippines. Also readers will be pleased to learn that the CIA’s KUBARK torture manual made its way into Latin American torture seminars where personnel, trained in some instances by CIA field operatives, utilized its helpful and proven techniques to acquire intel for their regimes. An updated version was published by the CIA in 1984, the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (HRE), a title and publication date that’s sure to please fans of dystopian literature, everywhere.

 

** And for those who like political dramas and intrigue of the highest order, see the classic 1962 movie adaptation of the Richard Condon novel of the same name  by director John Frankenheimer. [Trigger Warning: Anyone still working their way through Oedipal Complex issues might want to give this one a pass. Otherwise, Angela Lansbury is a definite MILF in this movie! Ed.]

 

ǂ Gottlieb may have had a more extensive resumé with the spy agency than just heading up his section of MK-ULTRA. It’s alleged he was involved in plots to poison Fidel Castro, for example, though all attempts obviously failed. Also, he may have been involved in some capacity with the U2 Spy Plane program. But it’s all cloak and daggers, so who really knows? Anyway, he retired from the spy biz and, happily enough, ended up raising goats in his twilight years. So, I guess he deserves a break. Right?  

 

 

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron The quote is from the book Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein, son of a former patient at “the Allan”.

 

² https://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2017-2018/brainwashed-the-secret-cia-experiments-in-canada

 

³ https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/brainwashed-mkultra

 

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

 

 

[Interesting Joe Rogen podcast clip on YouTube discussing MK-ULTRA and the book Chaos, by author Tom O'Neill. Joe discusses the book with former CIA agent Mike Baker and they review O'Neill's suggestion that the infamous killer, Charles Manson, may have had connections with the CIA and some still-active, LSD-dispensing sections of MK-ULTRA in the mid to late 1960s. In 1969, Manson and some of his followers were arrested for the infamous, ritualistic killings of several people in Los Angeles, including actress Sharon Tate. Could Manson's CIA-enabled LSD use have led to the bloody murders? Curiouser and curiouser.]

 

"I'm mad I tell you! Madmadmad!"