Dr. Cameron or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enhanced Interrogation Part I

In the annuals of declassified CIA records concerning the agency's ventures into truth serums, brainwashing and "mind control" there are any number of notorious and unsavory individuals whose particular talents were harnessed by the agency for such endeavors. This is a rogue's gallery to be sure, but one particular individual and his work have proven to be especially shocking to any number of researchers delving into this topic: Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, a Scottish born psychiatrist who became one of the most well know members of his field in the post-World War II era when he assumed major posts such as the presidency of the World Psychiatric Association. Such honors combined with his participation in the Nuremberg Trials made Cameron world famous during his lifetime but it was his radical research performed at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University that has given him everlasting infamy decades after the man's death in 1967.

Cameron

It was here that Cameron spent the remaining years of his professional life doing research under the auspices of the Human Ecology Fund, a known front for the CIA's infamous MK-Ultra experiments. These experiments have fascinated researchers for decades, at least since they first began to become public knowledge in the early 1970s. Over the years much speculation has centered around the intention and (most importantly) ultimate findings of these experiments, with the official party line denouncing them as colossal and embarrassing failures while conspiracy theorists have alleged that they were instrumental in developing a practical means of mind control. Frequently the latter take is incorporated into more grandiose plots typically involving the ever popular Project Monarch theories.

Over the course of this series I shall examine the life and times of the enigmatic Dr. Cameron as well as some of the more incredible allegations leveled against him. In the first part of this series I shall primarily focus on outlining verifiable biographical details of Cameron's life before getting into some of the more incredible stuff. Still, some of this information will be highly important when later revelations emerge. So with this in mind, let us turn our attention to the background of the man some have labeled as the CIA's version of Josef Mengele.

Mengele, who will factor into our story in the next installment

Cameron was born near Glasgow at the turn of the century.

"Ewen Cameron was born on the evening December 24, 1901, the son of Reverend Duncan Cameron, minister to the good people of Bridge of Allan, a small town some twenty miles to the north of Glasgow."

(Journey Into Madness, Gordon Thomas, pgs. 133-134)

Of course December 24 is now celebrated as Christmas Eve in various parts of the world. But before the rise of Christianity in Europe the chief winter festival (in celebration of the winter solstice) was Yule, usually dated to December 25 (though this dating likely varied greatly from region to region), for much of the mainland. One of the traditional celebrations for this festival was the lighting of a "Yule log" (typically a large block of oak-wood) on the eve (December 24) before Yule.

On an even deeper synchronistic level the location of Cameron's birth, near Glasgow, is also interesting. It was in Glasgow during 1931 that Mary Ann de Grimston, the future co-founder of the infamous Process Church of the Final Judgment (a 1960s cult that has long been linked to the mind control efforts of Western intelligence agencies, though these allegations are highly debatable), was also born. Cameron remained around Glasgow throughout his youth --he graduated from the Glasgow Academy at the end of the Great War and studied medicine at the University of Glasgow. But by the mid-20s he had apparently moved on to greener pastures and I've found nothing to indicate that he was around Glasgow at the time of Mary Ann's childhood. Still, Glasgow was considered to be one of the great centers of "applied psychiatry" (ibid, pg. 136) around this time.

the enigmatic Mary Ann de Grimston

Cameron first became involved with the U.S. intelligence community during the Second World War. It was also during this time that Cameron first forged a relationship with Allen Dulles, the future director of the CIA, who would become Cameron's chief patron within the Agency.

"While Allen Dulles brilliantly manipulated first the German generals and admiral Canaris's Abwehr from his office in Switzerland, he had received invaluable insights into the enemy's mentality from Dr. Cameron and other psychiatrists who were members of an ultrasecret committee meeting regularly in the offices of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington to assess the changing attitudes of Germany and its leaders. Dr. Cameron's insights into the German mentality made it easier for Dulles to have manipulated Himmler's Gestapo towards overthrowing Hitler, and helped him to use German liberals to spread hysteria among the population. Dr. Cameron had synthesized the techniques in documents like 'Mass hysteria in a war situation' and 'The mechanics of civilian morale and wartime pressure.' Some of Dr. Cameron's suggestions had struck Dulles as original and far-reaching --such as his proposal but after the war each surviving German over the age of twelve should receive a short course of electroshock treatment to burn out any remaining vestige of Nazism.

"In victory, Dr. Cameron had been a logical choice for the U.S. government to send to Nuremberg to establish the state of mind of Rudolf Hess. In May 1941, the deputy fuhrer had flown to Scotland with the avowed aim of convincing Winston Churchill to surrender. Hess had languished in an English prison and had been brought to Nuremberg to stand trial with other Nazi leaders, having been pronounced sane by a British psychiatrist. The Americans, like the Russians -- both were coprosecutors in the war crimes trial --insisted on their own psychiatric assessments.

"Dr. Cameron had arrived on a late autumn day in 1945 in the city that had been the nursery of Nazism. He had met Dulles for the first time and an immediate rapport developed; both found they had a suspicion of the English and a hatred of the Germans equaled only by what they felt about the Russians. Over dinner in the cavernous dining room of the Grand Hotel, Dulles first swore Dr. Cameron to secrecy, then told him an astonishing story. He had reason to believe that the man Dr. Cameron was to examine was not Rudolf Hess, but an imposter -- that the real deputy fuhrer had been secretly executed on Churchill's orders. Dulles had explained that Dr. Cameron could prove the point by a simple physical examination of the man's torso. If he was the genuine Hess, there should be scar tissue over his left lung, a legacy from the day the young Hess had been wounded in World War I. Dr. Cameron had agreed to try and physically examined the prisoner."

(ibid, pgs. 152-153)

Dulles

It should be noted that this account is more than a little suspect. Dulles, for instance, has been described as an adamant supporter of Nazism who believed strongly that the US had greatly erred by aligning itself with the Soviet Union during the Second World War in more than a few accounts I've read of the man. Gordon Thomas, one of the chief biographers of Cameron who has been quoted at length above, has been accused of sowing disinformation before such as in the case of the Olson affair. Thus, his accounts of men such as Dulles and Cameron should be taken with a hefty grain of salt. But I digress.

Cameron's rendezvous with Hess proved to not be especially productive.

"The deep sockets of Hess's blue eyes gave his pallid face the appearance of a skull. He wore an old tweed jacket and baggy trousers. He had on neither collar nor tie nor a belt around his waist --precautions against suicide attempts. His feet were encased in the Luftwaffe flying boots in which has had flown to Scotland. Prisoner and escort remained handcuffed to each other while Dr. Cameron question Hess for several hours. But when he had asked the policeman to remove the handcuffs so that Hess could be physically examined, the escort had refused, explaining he had no authority to do so. Dr. Cameron had not pressed the matter, reporting to Dulles what had happened. If the spymaster was disappointed, he kept it from the psychiatrist, who had indicated he was willing to act in an unorthodox way. No one would ever know whether Dulles's story about Hess was true or what he called one of 'my little test.' When they went their separate ways --Dr. Cameron having pronounced Hess to be clinically not insane --both had agreed they must do everything possible to protect the world from communism."

(Journey Into Madness, Gordon Thomas, pg. 153)

It would be twelve years later when Cameron and Dulles next began to officially collaborate together again (though Cameron would treat Dulles' wife Clover during the intern, presumably with milder methods than those he used at the Allan Memorial Institute), but before getting to that let us first consider the bizarre statements Hess made before the Nuremberg Tribunal alluding to a similar type of peculiarities he personally witnessed in Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Great Britain amongst prisoners and officials alike.

"... Hess's final statement before the Nuremberg Tribunal on August 31, 1946 was never finished. As it seemed he was in danger of rambling on forever, the president of the Tribunal ordered him to cut it short and history was cheated out of a bizarre tale of mystical phenomenon (or saved the dreary task of recording the paranoid fantasies of a mass murderer, depending on your point of view). But there are elements within Hess's statement that bear repeating here for they either cast doubt on the pronouncement of his sanity (and thus question his fitness to stand trial) or they are evidence that some form of mind-control was being tested on Hess while he remained a prisoner in the Tower.

Some of my comrades here can confirm the fact that at the beginning of the proceedings I predicted the following:

... That witnesses would appear who, under oath, would make untrue statements while, at the same time, these witnesses could create an absolutely reliable impression and enjoy the best possible reputation.... That some of the defendants would act rather strangely: they would make shameless utterances about the Fuhrer; they would incriminate their own people; they would partially incriminate each other, and falsely at that. Perhaps they would even incriminate themselves, and also wrongly.... All these predictions have come true.... I made these predictions, however, not only here at the beginning of the Trial, but had already made them months before the beginning of the Trial in England to, among others, Dr. Johnston, the physician who was with me...

"At this point, one would imagine that Hess was simply being realistic. It was not unusual for the Nazi defendants and witnesses to invent all sorts of stories and alibis to excuse away their crimes...; Hess may have tried to insinuate that the prosecution witnesses were all lying. The Nuremberg jurors were certainly in no mood to entertain such a notion, and that might have been the end of it except that Hess went on to say:

In the years 1936 to 1938 political trials were taking place in one of these countries. These were characterized by the fact that the defendants accused themselves in an astonishing way. For example, they cited great numbers of crimes which they had committed or which they claim to have committed. At the end, when death sentences were passed upon them, they clapped in frenzied approval to the astonishment of the world.

But  some foreign press correspondents reported that one had the impression that these defendants through some means hitherto unknown, had been put into an abnormal state of mind, as a result of which they acted as they did.

"Here Hess is obviously referring to the infamous show trials which had taken place in Stalinist Russia. It should be remembered that the Soviet Union formed one-fourth of the Nuremberg Tribunal, along with France, Great Britain, and the United States. Later on in his statement he specifically mentions the 'Moscow trial.' One imagines that this is a decidedly unwelcome tactic on the part of the defendant.

"Hess goes on to link the method used to mentally condition these Russian defendants to the acts of otherwise sane Germans caring out atrocities in the camp. His implication is that mind-control was used in a massive way to robotize the German population. He wisely drops that rather  pathetic line of approach, but then his statement takes on a strange angle all its own:

I said before that a certain incident in England caused me to think of the reports of the earlier trials. The reason is that the people around me during my imprisonment acted towards me in a peculiar and incomprehensible way, in a way which led me to conclude that these people somehow were acting in an abnormal state of mind. Some of them --these persons and people around were changed from time to time. Some of the new ones who came to me in place of those who had been changed had strange eyes. They were glassy and like eyes in a dream.... Not only I alone notice these strange eyes, but also the physician who attended me at the time, Dr. Johnston, a British Army doctor, a Scotsman.

In  the spring of 1942 I had a visitor who quite obviously tried to provoke me and acted towards me in a strange way. This visitor also had the strange eyes. Afterwards, Dr. Johnston asked me what I thought of this visitor. He told me --I told him I had the impression that for some reason or other he was not completely normal mentally, whereupon Dr. Johnston did not protest as I had expected, but agreed with me and asked me whether I had noticed those strange eyes, these eyes with a dreamy look. Dr. Johnston did not suspect that he himself had exactly the same eyes when he came to me.

The essential point, however, is that in one of the reports of the time, which must still be in the press files on the proceedings -- this was in Paris, about the Moscow trial -- it said that the defendants had had strange eyes. They had had glazed and dreamy eyes!

"This Kafkaesque monologue goes on to cover British concentration camps (implying that the Nazi camps were no worse, and that concentration camps in general must be an internationally recognized means of solving what Hess called 'incomprehensible riddles'), and then winds up with a speech in which Hess is clearly leading up to an exposition of just what exactly happened to him in the spring of 1942, prefaced by oaths to God that he will tell the truth and calling God as his witness.

"'In the spring of 1942' he begins, then is cut short. The president of the Tribunal tells him he has already used up his twenty minutes. Hess demurs, then agrees to end his statement by simply saying, 'I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Fuhrer. I do not regret anything. If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake... ' A fiery death at the stake. Hess imagined himself as heretic, or witch?"

(Unholy Alliance, Peter Levenda, pgs. 274-276)

Hess at Nuremberg

What are these "strange eyes" of which Hess speaks of and who was the mysterious Scotsman, Dr. Johnston, who attended to him? Apparently one of the countless mysteries surrounding the end of World War II as I have been unable to turn up more information on Hess's incredible statements. But certainly Scotsman Ewen Cameron would have an interest in such "strange eyes," as his later research demonstrates. Speaking of which, let us move along.

While Cameron did not officially become involved with the U.S. Intelligence community until 1957 there are indications that he was being groomed/observed for such a role years beforehand. For instance, the notorious Rockefeller Foundation provided the initial nest egg for Cameron's Canadian research before World War II had even come to an end. Several members of the Rockefeller clan, most notably David and former Vice-President Nelson, maintained close ties with the U.S. Intelligence community throughout their lives as many veteran conspiracy researchers are well aware. For the uninitiated, consider this account of Nelson Rockefeller's dabblings in the black arts of intelligence:

"As early as December 1954 and extending through December 1955, Rockefellers had served as president Eisenhower's representative on the National Security Council's operations coordinating Board (OCD), which was very much involved with CIA clandestine operations. Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett right that Rockefeller acted as 'Eisenhower's "circuit breaker," informing the president of CIA covert operations while protecting the presidents "plausible deniability" before Congress, since some operations ran afoul of American or international law...'

"Moreover, Rockefellers knowledge and approval of drug experimentation and brainwashing research went far beyond his OCB experience. Still largely overlooked in the public record is the fact that the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HCW) undertook drug experiment sponsored by the CIA when Rockefeller was department undersecretary in 1953. Many of these experiments involved CIA funding and required Rockefeller's specific approval. Also, beginning in the early 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation had been funding CIA-front groups like the Fund for Human Ecology, which was directly involved in CIA-supported behavior 'modification' experiments. Beginning even earlier, in 1943, the Foundation had been funding a psychiatric research facility, the Allan Memorial Institute in Montréal, Canada, which soon became the site of some of the CIA's most notorious and horrific psychological experiments, conducted by Rockefeller-funded Dr. Ewen Cameron."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 464-465)

Nelson Rockefeller

In general the early years of the Allan Memorial Institute were quite sinister as Cameron was not the only psychiatrist their involved in "unorthodox" experiments. The U.S. Intelligence community took notice of these doings in Canada as early as 1951.

"... The relationship dates back to June 1, 1951, and a transnational meaning of intelligence agencies and academics at Montréal's Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The subject of the meeting was growing concern in the Western intelligence community that the Communist had somehow discovered how to 'brainwash' prisoners of war. The evidence was the fact that American GIs taken captive in Korea were going before cameras, seemingly willingly, and denouncing capitalism and imperialism. According to the declassified minutes from the Ritz meeting, those in attendance --Omond Solandt, chairman of Canada's Defense Research Board; Sir Henry Tizard, chairman of the British Defense Research Policy Committee; as well as two representatives from the CIA --were convinced that Western powers urgently needed to discover how the Communists were extracting these remarkable confessions. With that in mind, the first step was to conduct 'a clinical study of actual cases' to see how brainwashing might work. The stated goal of this research was not for Western powers to start using mind control on prisoner; it was to prepare Western soldiers for whatever coercive techniques they might encounter if they were taken hostage...

"One of those at the Ritz meeting was Dr. Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill University. According to the declassified minutes, Hebb, trying to unlock the mystery of GI confessions, speculated that the Communist might be manipulating prisoners by placing them in intense isolation and blocking input to their senses. The intelligence chiefs were impressed, and three months later Hebb had a research grant from Canada's Department of National Defense to conduct a series of classified sensory-deprivation experiments. Heb paid a group of sixty-three McGill students $20 a day to be isolated in a room wearing dark goggles, headphones playing white noise and cardboard tubes covering their arms and hands so as to interfere with their sense of touch. For days, the students floated in a sea of nothingness, their eyes, ears and hands unable to orient them, living inside their increasingly vivid imaginations. To see whether this deprivation made them more susceptible to 'brainwashing,'  Hebb then began playing recordings of voices talking about the existence of ghosts or the dishonesty of science --ideas that the students had said they found objectionable before the experiment began.

"In a confidential report on Hebb's findings, the Defense Research Board concluded that sensory deprivation clearly caused extreme confusion as well as hallucinations among the student test subjects and that 'a significant temporary lowering of intellectual efficiency occurred during and immediately after the period of perpetual deprivation.' Furthermore, the students' hunger for stimulation made them surprisingly receptive to the ideas expressed on the tapes, and indeed several developed an interest in the occult that lasted weeks after the experiment had come to an end. It was as if the confusion from sensory deprivation partially erased their minds, and then the sensory stimuli rewrote their patterns.

"A copy of Hebb's major study was sent to the CIA, as well as forty-one copies to the U.S. Navy and forty-two copies to the U.S. Army. The CIA also directly monitored the findings via one of Hebb's student researchers, Maitland Baldwin, who, unbeknownst to Hebb, was reporting to the agency. This keen interest is hardly surprising: at the very least, Hebb was proving that intensive isolation interfered with the ability to think clearly and made people more open to suggestion --priceless ideas for any interrogator. Hebb eventually realized that there was enormous potential for his research to be used not just to protect captured soldiers from getting 'brainwashed' but also as a kind of how-to manual for psychological torture. In the last interview he gave before his death in 1985, Hebb said, 'It was clear when we made our report to the Defense Research Board that we were describing formidable interrogation techniques.'"

(The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, pgs. 33-35)

Donald Hebb

Sensory deprivation was but one tool that Hebb's colleague, Dr. Ewen Cameron, developed while working at the Allan Memorial Institute both before and after he received official CIA funding. Other such techniques Cameron employed included "depatterning" and "psychic driving."

"In the case of Cameron's psyche driving technique, a patient would be isolated in a room --the 'sleep room' --and would be administered some combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (what is popularly known as 'electroshock'). Sometimes the shocks given were staggeringly high, and repeated more often than is usual in a therapeutic setting. The normal voltage is usually 110 volts; 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 (and thus an average of 30 times more powerful than normal) and were done 2-3 times a day as opposed to the more usual once a day, or once every two days. Electroshock causes a major convulsion, which is then followed by several minor convulsions. Cameron's was a variation on the already intense Page-Russell method, but taken up quite a few notches to the point where his patients became disoriented and confused. This was Cameron's aim, which was the opposite of what was intended by the already controversial electroconvulsive therapy method.

"The drug regimen was equally severe: a 'sleep cocktail' was administered to the subjects -- one can hardly call them 'patients' anymore --consisting of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal and Phenergan. The subject would be awakened several times a day for the electroshock treatment and for the drug concoction. The combination kept the subject asleep day and night except for the electroshock, during which time his screams could be heard all over Ward 2.

"This treatment typically would last from two weeks to a month, with some subjects being 'treated' in this manner for over two months. In some cases, they would lose control of their bowels, be unable to feed themselves or to tend to normal bodily functions. Many tried to escape, but were always captured and brought back to their ward by the doctors and orderlies, since they were in such feeble condition that escape was impossible, groping along the walls and pathetically urinating on the floor of the corridor.

"The effect of this treatment was to cause the subject to lose their memory, usually in three stages. In the first stage, much memory was lost, but not the facts of the subject being at the clinic, knowing he is at the clinic and why, and who the doctors and nurses are. The second stage involved the loss of what Cameron called 'space-time image'; the subject would not know where he was or why he was there. Understandably, this disorientation was extremely frightening. Imagine waking up in a hospital bed and not knowing what had happened, or why, and with no one in a position to tell you since keeping you in that degree of confusion was necessary to the 'treatment.' This nightmarish and Kafkaesque state of affairs with designed, remember, by man who had once tested Rudolf Hess for sanity.

"The third and final stage of memory loss is complete amnesia. There is only knowledge and memory of the present; there is no reference to past events or feelings. Cameron proudly pointed to the stage as the one where any schizophrenia has disappeared (along, of course, with a lot more!). The mind of the subject is a blank slate. He has been depatterned.

"The CIA, satisfied with this level of progress, then asked Cameron to go to the next level: to implant new behavioral patterns in place of the old, erased ones. To do this, Cameron turned to another technique he had developed, which he called 'psychic driving.' 

"This method is, if anything, even more hellish than depatterning, and involves blasting the subject with tape recordings of verbal messages --usually specific for each subject --that played in a loop for sixteen hours a day for weeks. Normally, two tapes were used: the first was a 'negative conditioning' tape which concentrated on, obviously, the negative facts of the subject's life, continually reinforcing these unhealthy images. This would then be replaced by a 'positive conditioning' tape, also in a loop, also for sixteen hours a day for weeks, which would emphasize the desired behavior instead of the unwanted behavior of the first tape. Cameron's assistant in these endeavors -- one Leonard Rubinstein, whose salary was paid for entirely by CIA funds -- designed an enormous tape device that could play eight different tapes at the same time, thus 'psychically driving' eight subjects at once. The speakers for these tapes were placed beneath the subjects' pillows. They were inescapable, unremitting, endless; and, in some cases, augmented with the use of hallucinogens such as LSD...

"And this was not all. Cameron eventually (in 1957, and with more CIA money and official approval) turned his talents toward sensory deprivation...

"In Cameron's program, though, no one was allowed out of sensory deprivation until he said it was okay. In one particularly harrowing episode, he left a woman --who presented as simply suffering from menopause -- in  sensory deprivation for thirty-five days... and this was after a prolonged period of depatterning and 101 days of psyche driving. Cameron wrote this one off: 'no favorable results were obtained.' We don't know what eventually became of this poor woman --whom we know only as 'Mary C.' --except for a notation by a CIA official at the time that it was impossible to tell if the sensory deprivation or the psyche driving had done the most damage."

(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pgs. 227-230)

The CIA's sponsorship of Cameron continued until 1963 when he his contract was abruptly terminated amidst the backdrop of incredible events.

"At the same moment, a few hundred miles to the north in Montréal, Dr. James Monroe was paying a visit to Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allen Memorial clinic. A former Air Force officer and MK ULTRA project leader in brainwashing studies, Monroe was in charge of the funds of the Human Ecology Society, which served as the Cameron project's front. As the airwaves broadcast the news of the assassination of President Kennedy at the Clinic, Monroe stopped and made a phone call to Washington. When he returned, he told Cameron that CIA sponsorship of his program was terminated. The reader does not need to be advised that this was a strange and compelling combination of events, indicative of a deeply sinister agenda."

(ibid, pg. 288)

Indeed. What's more, some JFK assassination researchers believe that the city of Montreal may have played some role in the assassination, specifically through the person of Louis M. Bloomfield (who lived in Montreal for much of his life and was an alumni of McGill University). Bloomfield first came to the attention of many researchers via the highly controversial Torbitt Document in the late 1960s. Since then other researcher have aired their suspicions concerning Bloomfield.

"... L. M. Bloomfield, a banker in Montréal with ties to the OSS and possibly the CIA, who sat on the board of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome along with Clay Shaw. The Torbitt Document details the Bloomfield-Shaw relationship. Flammonde documented Bloomfield's various interests in Le Credit Suisse of Canada, Heineken's Breweries,  Canscot Realty, the Israel Continental Company, etc., and footnotes to Italian and Canadian newspapers. Bloomfield's links to the Meyer Lansky crime syndicate and his controlling interest in the Permindex corporation have been the subject of further recent study."

(NASA, Nazis & JFK, "INTRODUCTION: 'Furtive Winks, Flying DISCs and the Torbitt Document," Kenn Thomas, pgs. 14-15)  

Louis M. Bloomfield

There were other strange happenings unfolding in Montreal in this same timeframe (the late 1950s and the early 1960s) as we shall see in the next installment. For now I'm going to wrap things up by briefly considering the conventional legacies applied to Donald Ewen Cameron.

Mainstream histories are widely dismissive of Cameron and his research conducted under the auspices of the CIA. Cameron is typically depicted as either being a quack who happened to have the ear of CIA director Allen Dulles, a  man of whom Cameron had had a long-standing relationship with, or as an idealist blinded by his own drive to heal humanity. Clearly either scenario is rather improbable --Cameron, as noted before, was one of the most highly regarded psychiatrists in the world during much of his professional career, having served as the head of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations as well as heading the American Psychopathological Association and Society of Biological Psychiatry at various points during the 1950s. As to the latter, the incredible sadism that he displayed to his patients (of which I've only scratched the surface of) strongly argues against the depiction of Cameron as a misguided idealist bent on stopping the waste of human potential at any cost.

As to Cameron's research, it is widely depicted as a dismal failure except within conspiratorial circles, where it is at times credited with being one of the chief building blocks of "Project Monarch" and other such long theorized mind control operations. In the second installment of this series we shall examine these claims as well as striking instances of Cameron's techniques being employed (with increasing frequency) in foreign nations the U.S. Intelligence community is operating out of. Stay tuned.