CIA THOUGHT CAMERON'S TECHNIQUES COULD BE USEFUL IN THE COLD WAR

Ewen Cameron, the man behind the brainwashing experiments, was a
Scottish-born psychiatrist who worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital
and McGill's Allan Memorial Institute.

From 1950 to 1965 he subjected hundreds of patients at the Allan
Memorial to unorthodox treatment involving LSD, huge doses of
electroshock, drug-induced comas and tapes that they sometimes
listened to for weeks at time. One woman received the treatment
through most of her pregnancy.

Funding came from the Canadian government and the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency as part of a project called MK-ULTRA. In that Cold
War era, the spy agency thought these techniques might be useful
against the Soviet Union - perhaps LSD could be used as a truth serum,
brainwashing drug or incapacitating agent, given to prisoners or
foreign leaders like Cuba's Fidel Castro.

In the late 1980s, the CIA made an out-of-court settlement with a
handful of victims. In 1994, 77 of the patients who received the most
severe treatment were given $100,000 each in compensation from the
federal government but 254 had their claims rejected.

An appeal court gave one of them $100,000 in 2004.

Cameron died in 1967.