Nexus - 0206 - New Times Magazine-pages

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SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET SKELETONS The air is electric, charged with the screams that echo from behind the off-white security doors. As the attendants guide you to the lift, your feet dragging smoothly across the waxed linoleum floor, a searing pain fills your head to remind you of the high volt- age shock that was pumped through your brain only minutes before. La Your mind starts to spin as your body starts to fall. You grab hope- lessly at the air, but there is not a single sharp surface to cling on to, the smooth walls just seem to go on forever. The d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), delivered direct from the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company in Switzerland, is starting to worm it’s way through every crevasse in your mind and body. Slowly, menacingly, you get the feeling that this trip to the base- ment laboratory may be the one that finally sends you on the one- way trip to oblivion. The intensive electroshock treatment has shat- tered not only your mind, but also your will to fight. After wearing a football helmet around the sleep room for the last 22 hours, with only that single monotonous phrase that you don’t even remember a : . . . . saying playing endlessly, over and over again, tearing at your mind, you don’t care any more anyway. Maybe going crazy would free you, after all, what could be worse than what you’ve already been through. The doctor keeps telling you it’s the only way to get bet- ter. If only you could believe him. The only thing you believe in now is pain. You can’t feel anything else. Not hope, not love, noth- ing. Only pain. This was to become a regular day for patients at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada, during the CIA funded search to find a technique for breaking, reprogramming, and ultimately, controlling the human mind. Another day of torturing innocent victims in an attempt to find, and perfect, a reliable brain- washing technique. THE SUFFERING BEGINS The grim story began on July 20, 1950, when the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, wrote an open cheque for Project ‘Bluebird’, the Agency’s first full-scale behav- iour control programme. The operation’s first task, to interrogate four Japanese workers under the employ of U.S. Army Intelligence, who were suspected of having links to the Russians. None would admit to being double agents, so they were injected with alternating does of sodium amytal and benzedrine, downers, followed by uppers, just to see if it would help them to change their minds. After several episodes of experimentation with drugs to try and “loosen” the minds of North Korean prisoners of war, it was decid- ed that the addition of electro-shock treatment might make the interrogation process more successful . The Agency’s Office of Technical Services Staff (TSS) were chosen to conduct further Written by Sid Taylor secret Control Research NEXUS - 24 THE SUFFERING BEGINS Written by Sid Taylor YEAR BOOK - JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1992