A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (12 page)

An April 1972 document says, “It may be worth considering that psychokinesis occurs via an energy ‘exchange’ or communication between the experimenter and the object.”
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Then a P.S. is added explaining why it is so difficult to obtain information on this subject through FOIA requests. The P.S. says, “Would like to file with Plant Sensors File.”

The experiments that Ewen Cameron used with me were similar to what Dr. Bekhtereva was doing at the Bekhtereva Brain Institute in Leningrad.
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Instead of using radioactive isotopes, she bored tiny holes into the patients’ skulls and inserted gold electrodes (bunches of six to eight coated wires) that were each one twelfth of an inch shorter than the next. As a result, each then monitored a different level of cells. The electrodes were attached to an electroencephalograph and the researchers could see the bioelectrical exchanges between the cells. By logging these exchanges the researchers could determine where information they gave the patient was stored in the brain.
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Part of Harold Wolff’s budget for September 1960 through August of 1961 was for an apparatus for scanning EEG alpha waves for brain function studies.
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In a declassified document Dr. Bekhtereva and her institute was named as one of five “Institutes conducting ESP Research in Russia” in 1963.
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Our government knew exactly what methods were being used in brain and ESP research across the globe.

In a conversation with Dr. Bekhtereva in 1972, Henry Gris asked her what her greatest ambition in life was? She stated she wanted to “transcribe electronically the entire range of the intellectual activity of the human mind.” He then asked the question, “Once this is accomplished, would it not be feasible to feed a superior intellect into a lesser brain?” She answered that that would not be ethical.
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She later explained that she was investigating an area of the brain where nerve cells remain inactive while the human mind behaved rationally; but when man behaved irrationally this part of the brain touched off an alarm that mobilized other cells to correct the mistake. She said, “If we were to
eliminate this area via micro destruction of cells-which we can do since we know its exact location-we could turn you all into absent-minded professors.”
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The implications of this remark are staggering.

At a symposium on “Man-Computer Relations” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 1976, Dr. Adam V. Reed from Rockefeller University acknowledged the need to protect against the dangerous applications of “thought control”--turning human beings into virtual robots
via
computer brain hookups. He said this would be dependent upon progress in breaking the internal codes of the human mind.
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This statement reveals to me how Dr. Bekhtereva’s methods of electrode implantation and information retrieval could help break those internal codes. Her methods were also very similar to the experiments Dr. Wilder Penfield of McGill University performed on me sometime between 1957 and 1960.
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Dr. Penfield worked with Dr. Donald Hebb at Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) doing research on brain-damaged patients between 1937 and 1939.
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Dr. Hebb went on to become the Chairman of the Psychology Department of McGill University during the 50’s and worked closely with Canadian and U.S. intelligence. He had special CIA security clearance issued to him in the early 1960’s.
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Hebb’s study to investigate the effects of isolation on attitude change was commissioned by the Canadian Government in 1951.
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I mention this because there will be great skepticism that the esteemed Wilder Penfield would have taken part in any such experiments. It seems many doctors in Montreal were willing to be funded by covert means.

MNI was academically affiliated with McGill and located on the university’s campus. Alan Gregg had appropriated $1,232,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1932 to fund it, and Dr. Penfield was hired to run it when it opened in 1934.
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Prior to that, Penfield had received a grant to go to Madrid in 1924 from Mrs. Percy Rockefeller.
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His affiliations with the Rockefellers served him well over the years. In fact after he retired he worked for a time at the Villa Serbelloni, high above Lake Como in Northern Italy on the biography he wrote on Alan Gregg. The Rockefeller Foundation maintains the Villa.
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The memories of Dr. Penfield’s experiments on me begin with my arrival in Canada aboard a plane met by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
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There was a red carpet out for the dignitaries aboard this plane. Before we landed I was given a shot and smuggled into the country in a box. I was taken to Braehead on McGill’s campus. I had reoccurring dreams of this place for the next 30 years. I didn’t know what the dreams meant, but the impact of the dreams was so powerful that I began looking for this building every time I was driving or riding in an unfamiliar place. When I found a picture of this building on the McGill web sight, I nearly fainted. It was as if they had picked a picture out of my dreams and placed it on this sight. It is a very distinctive English Gothic building and I had remembered running down a long passageway in my dream. In 1946 a passage was constructed between Purvis Hall and Braehead. I believe I stayed here when I wasn’t being experimented on at MNI.

In one of the experiments I was forced to lie on a table with my head immobilized. It didn’t hurt, it was just very snug, and when I struggled I found I couldn’t move a muscle of my head.

Dr. Penfield said, “Sterilize the sight.”

Then he said something about the corpus callosum being malleable. He inserted an electrode into the sleeve guides that were already imbedded in my head before I got to Canada. They were invented by John Lilly and used on animals while he worked for the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Dr. Lilly first met Dr. Penfield when he took his mother to Montreal in 1942. She was suffering from a brain tumor and Dr. Penfield operated and removed it. This operation prolonged his mothers’ life by ten years. Lilly was forever indebted to this man. In 1953 he attended the International Physiological Congress in Montreal, and he made another trip in 1954 to the Montreal Neurological Institute to talk with Dr. Hebb about his human isolation techniques.
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The trip was suggested by Robert C. Morison who was Dr. Hebb’s contact at the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funded Hebb’s research program in the same years he was receiving money from the Defense Research Board of Canada. Morison was also a friend of Wilder Penfield’s.
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Maitland Baldwin, a former student of Dr. Penfield worked down the hall from Dr. Lilly at NIH.
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Dr. Baldwin also carried out experiments in isolation techniques, only his were done for the Army. He had an Army volunteer stay in a box for 40 hours until he kicked his way out crying loudly and sobbing for an hour. Baldwin agreed to do sensory deprivation experiments for the CIA if they would provide the cover and the subjects for this “terminal type” experiment. According to Anne Collins account in-
In the Sleep Room
, Baldwin pressed for an “antagonistic subject’ he could force to a total breakdown in the box, allowing however “that he would not want any other agency to know anything about this experiment unless it proved to be successful”. He went so far as to say that “anyone going through a complete breakdown would come out with somewhat lowered mental faculties.” An agency official refused the authority to do the experiments because they were “immoral and inhuman.”
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Our government employed such men with your tax dollars.

I do not remember who put the sleeve guides in or the actual procedure, I only know that the methods had been developed by Dr. Lilly while working for NIH. He also used them to experiment on Dolphins at his Communication Research Institute in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. His research there was partly to determine whether large-brained animals were as susceptible to motivational “brainwashing” by electrical means as the smaller brained monkey.
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In
Man and Dolphin
he said that his experiments had proven that electrical stimuli in specific areas of the brain could cause either intense rewarding or intense punishing experiences in a particular animal and in humans. He summarized in his Appendix by saying, “At any time an adult human being can be reduced to the childish level by changing his situation. Such a state can be induced by lack of sleep, by starvation, by torture, by isolation, by profound confinement, by drugs, by direct electrical stimulation. The original biological prototypes of learning can be reintroduced and even an adult can be forced to learn once again by means almost thoroughly beyond his control. I am speaking here of powerful means used ruthlessly with few scruples.”
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In his book
The Scientist
,
A metaphysical Autobiography
, Dr. Lilly describes the technique of electrode implantation.
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“Electrodes could be implanted in the brain without using anesthesia. During the process of implantation, there was no more pain to the animal than that of a needle prick in the scalp. Short lengths of hypodermic needle tubing equal in length to the thickness of the skull were quickly pounded through the scalp into the skull. These stainless steel guides furnished passageways for the insertion of electrodes into the brain to any desired distance and at any desired location from the cortex down to the bottom of the skull. As many sleeve guides could be implanted as were desired. Because of the small size of the sleeve guides, the scalp quickly recovered from the small hole (l mm.) made in it, and the sleeve guide remained imbedded in the bone for months to years. At any time he desired the investigator could palpate the scalp and find the location of each of the sleeve guides. Once one was found he inserted a needle were so through the scalp into the sleeve guide, down through the bone, and penetrated the dura. After withdrawing the needle, the investigator placed a small sharp electrode in the track made by the needle and pressed the electrode through the scalp, through the skull, through the dura, and down into the substance of the brain itself to any desired depth.” I feel blessed that I have been spared this memory.

I was awake while Dr. Penfield probed my brain and someone in the room recorded what was being said. Penfield said that my brain was like a tape recorder and he just needed to take me back in time. He did this by touching different spots of my brain. They kept recording the memories induced from images in my past, and later Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA used them for future programming sessions.

I find it ironic that after Dr. Penfield retired in May 1960, he would make the following remarks two months later for a conference entitled “Great Issues of Conscience in Modern Medicine.” He began his speech by dismissing the possibility that science could, or ever would be able to control the mind. He then summarized briefly his own experiments with conscious patients; and concluded that if the electric probe could not convince someone to believe anything, than brainwashing and mind-control much nonsense. He also said, “Let us take, then, the best conclusions of the past and create a working religion-a faith that will seem reasonable to all men-one they will welcome...Only an interpretation of religion suited to these times can create in the hearts of men of every nation a better conscience.”
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May God protect us all from such men of good deeds. Whether he was covering up his misdeeds, or honestly believed what he said, will probably never be known. His solution to the Cold War was that Canada and the U.S. recognize Red China. He proposed that Russian and Chinese courses be widespread in towns and universities across the continent, and that a large-scale program of exchange visits be instituted so that doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, businessmen, farmers, artists, religious leaders and athletes could meet and get to know their counterparts in the rest of the world.
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When I read a biography written by H. Jefferson Lewis on Wilder Penfield, I came across a mysterious death. Bill Cone had come to work with Penfield after they met when Cone was on a Rockefeller fellowship. They opened their own lab in the Presbyterian Hospital called the Laboratory of Neurocytology. Mrs. Percy Rockefeller funded it until they left New York in 1928 to go to Montreal.

Cone and Wilder later worked together at MNI. In 1959 Penfield found Bill Cone dead in his office. He was lying on the floor with his head on a pillow, with potassium cyanide powder on his lips and spilled on his coat.
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This seems like a very strange way to commit suicide, which is what the coroner ruled it, but very similar to the methods used by covert intelligence agencies when they wished to eliminate an uncooperative individual. Wilder Penfield many years later said this about Bill Cone, “He was loyal to my projects in a more personal way, always the Good Samaritan, the tireless, selfless physician, taking a keen delight in serving the sick. But in spite of this and his brilliant and retentive mind and his loyalty to the ideas of scientific perfection, I suppose Bill Cone never quite understood the hopes and the thinking at the back of my mind.”
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