A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (9 page)

I was able to retain a spark of life that held on tightly, even though it was programmed to give up. Only those who have walked in the shoes of the betrayed innocents can truly comprehend the horror of what I and others like me have been forced to endure. Thank God, that some of us have held on and worked at healing. The music of our souls is being painted on the canvass of our hearts and minds. You can hear it in our tears sometimes, and you can hear it in our songs of joy. You can hear it at night when everyone else is asleep and our minds keep us awake with dialogue from the distant past. I refuse to let anyone take this innocence and beauty and music from me again. That’s why it is so important for me to tell you the rest of my story.

The Agency arranged with Grandfather to start my sexual training in 1954. Being the pedophile that he was, I’m sure he thoroughly enjoyed the part they gave him in my training. By this time, he had sold the greenhouse and moved a half block away into a new brick home with a basement. It was this basement that I would come to despise more than any other symbol of my childhood. In 1954, I was still only six years old and attending second grade. I was forced to participate in a traumatizing initiation rite of manhood for my twelve-year-old brother on Grandfather’s pool table in the basement. I was to totally lose my sexual self to a new persona created that day from the trauma I was forced to endure. I stared at the swinging lamp above the pool table while the initiation was culminated, and lost myself in a haze of darkness for the next thirty years.

Grandfather gave the new part created that day the name Carlotta. From that day forward he trained her in various ways to please one particular man. He was a very wealthy man who I knew as Rocky. He contributed large sums of money to the “Cause”; consequently, whatever he wanted he got.

Grandfather would arrange to have me stay the night when he had a mind to train me. He would leave his glass eye on the bedside table and I would take his hand and follow him to the basement. Training was tedious and often I would be slapped for not doing it right. I became like an automaton, as I stared into the hole where his eye should have been, listened and followed his instructions.

Two years later my grandfather and an uncle, (Norman’s father) used the basement for their kiddy porn productions. One afternoon, I was listening to Paul Harvey’s noon broadcast on the radio with grandfather. He always sat by the window overlooking the lake and rocked and listened attentively whenever Paul spoke. To Grandfather it was almost a holy event, and anyone who dared disturb him during the broadcast would face his wrath. When the broadcast was finished he walked over to the incinerator door that was in the wall in the kitchen and motioned for me to come over. He grabbed my arm and proceeded to push my head with his other hand into the opening. I remember the smell and the heat, and I could feel my face flushing. It seemed like an eternity before he pulled my head away. He marched me down the basement stairs, and when we got next to the furnace he showed me the flames and informed me that this is where anything he stuck in the incinerator door upstairs went. Ashes, that’s what I remember. Ashes are all that would remain of me if I didn’t cooperate.

It wasn’t long till the kiddy porn photography session started. I was nowhere to be found. I had created Mary, a new personality, to take my place after the threat of burning in the inferno that I saw inside the furnace. Sometimes I would be alone and asked to pose in what I now know were provocative poses. Other times Grandfather would have some of the other grandchildren there with me. The fear he was able to produce guaranteed cooperation.

I remember two other things about that year. One is my fourth grade teacher’s name and that she wore beautiful shoes. The other is that I joined the Girl Scouts, and I had to go through an initiation ceremony where I stood on a mirror. As harmless as this was for the rest of the brownie troop, as soon as I heard the word initiation, I left and my alter Carlotta came. The rest is still a blur.

1957 was to bring with it one last baby for Momma. In December quite near my tenth birthday, my last brother was born. By age thirty-two, Momma had given birth to eight children. By Mothers’ Day, the following year, she was clinging to life from a hysterectomy.

Daddy took us all to the hospital and the sight we saw terrified each of us. Hanging from a pole was a bag of blood and another bag with clear fluids. Momma looked all white, and she managed a weak smile when he paraded us all in. I wanted to crawl up on the bed and lay my head on her shoulder, but all she could do is squeeze my hand and tell me to be a good “Little Girl.” Oh momma, why did you have to say those words? I desperately loved and missed her, but my little girl part hated her for lying there and leaving her unprotected at home.
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When momma was finally allowed to come home from the hospital, daddy had already arranged for Catholic Charities to provide help to take care of all of us kids, the cleaning, and cooking. A parade of women came in and out of our house. My first and favorite was a big black lady, just like the one on the front of the pancake box. She was kind, loving and figured out too much too fast, so daddy had her replaced with another black lady. Sofronia liked daddy’s whiskey that he kept above the cupboard. He would have a drink every morning just to get him started, and it wasn’t long before he figured out that she had been watering the whiskey. At least that’s the story he told Catholic Charities. She was probably totally flawless too. The last lady was Jezel. She was French and spoke with the most wonderful accent I ever heard. When Momma got on her feet, her services became “No Longer Needed.”

It wasn’t long after she got on her feet that Momma ran away from home for the first time. It was to begin a pattern that stayed with her through my high school years and beyond. Daddy told us that if we would only be better children, she wouldn’t run away. I remember the famous speech he gave in front of the aqua couch with the big buttons. We were all gathered around and told it was “All our fault.” I know each of us that were old enough to understand, believed him.
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Guilt was a wonderful control mechanism and daddy used it effectively every chance he got. He had such control over momma that she never had a chance. He tracked momma down at her sister’s home several hundred miles away where she thought she had escaped him. He brought her home and into the mental hospital she went.

Back in those days, a husband, with the cooperation of a doctor could have his wife committed. Our family doctor was also a personal friend with daddy. They spent a lot of time hunting and fishing together. This was useful not only in getting momma locked up, but in having no questions asked when broken bones were to be set, illnesses tended to, or pills to be dispensed.

Peter Breggin in
Toxic Psychiatry
tells how H. C. Tien,
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a Michigan psychiatrist would draw attention in the late 1970’s and early 80’s by using electroshock to obliterate and reprogram the mind of a woman to make her a more suitable housewife.
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He would utilize ECT (electro convulsive therapy) to erase memory and personality, thereby eradicating the woman’s identity; in order to reprogram it according to a “blueprint” worked out with the husband prior to the shock. Tien called his method ELT, explaining that E is for electricity, L is for love, and T is for therapy. I’m quite sure this is what daddy had hoped to accomplish with momma, but it never lasted. It certainly makes me wonder if Dr. Tien wasn’t testing out these theories under cover in the fifties for the CIA.

I’ll never forget the first time I was taken to the State Hospital to visit momma. I was still living at home with daddy and my three older brothers. My four younger siblings had been farmed out to different relatives. I was a physical and emotional wreck from the nightly molestations. My hands shook uncontrollably all of the time, and I was unable to eat or sleep. My brothers took to calling me “Jervous and Nerky.”

Daddy was bound and determined to keep me quiet, so we made a trip to the hospital. I had no realization that my mother was behind locked doors. When we were let in by the nurse and shown to a day room, there were scads of people walking around in a daze. Momma was one of them. She had undergone a series of electric shocks that left her a walking zombie. When she finally came home, so much of her memory was gone that she had to relearn my youngest brothers’ birthday, along with a lot of other personal information she had forgotten. I don’t recall anything that happened during that visit to the hospital until we left, and the nurse closed and locked the door behind us. Daddy grabbed hold of my hand and turned me around and said, “If you ever tell what’s happening at home Little Girl, you’ll end up here too.”

I believed. When it came to a threat, daddy always carried through.

In a letter to me, my brother gave me new insight into what this time of moms’ life was like. He writes, “I’m sure that you know that mom and I were very close. I was probably closer to her than any of her children. We used to talk for hours when we had a chance. She was the bravest person that I ever knew. When I was in high school mom went to the state hospital.
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I worked in the kitchen at St. Vincent’s Hospital after school. Dad always thought I worked five nights a week, but I only worked three. The other two evenings I would take a bus to the State Hospital to see mom. It was a horrible time of her life, but she didn’t want to leave. She didn’t even want to come home on the weekends they offered her toward the end of her stay. We talked for hours and hours and much of which she told me, I didn’t understand or thought that she really was a little crazy. Later I figured out that she was the sanest person I ever knew. She was terrified of the electric shock treatments that they were giving her. She looked at it as if it were a form of torture. They called it treatment. It was barbaric. How could people with any conscience scramble somebody’s brain with electricity? After her “Treatments” she would be disassociated and depressed for days, but still she
chose
to stay rather than come home. She often told me that she could at any time tell the doctors the right answers to be released, but she chose not to. Well at fifteen years old I understood little of what she told me, but later I understood a lot. That poor woman is certainly in heaven, because she went through hell on earth. I don’t know if you knew how much she hated dad. Let me tell you from what she used to say, I could not comprehend any hate that intense. It was the only emotion she had for him. She was also terrified of him. The only person that mom hated more than dad was his father. I never knew why, but she despised him more than anything or anyone in this world.”

Momma wasn’t alone in receiving electroshock to make her more submissive and alter her personality. Dr. D. Ewen Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, McGill University in Montreal, Canada was doing MKULTRA experiments with electroshock and drugs for the CIA. The CIA funded Dr. Cameron’s work through a cover organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology in New York founded by Cornell University neurologist Harold Wolff.
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Grants were made to eight universities as well as several individual researchers for mind control experiments with the Society being the CIA’s cover mechanism.
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Wolff had originally been commissioned by Allen Dulles to do an official study of Soviet and Chinese brainwashing techniques in 1953. Wolff coincidentally was treating Allen Dulles’ son for brain damage from a head wound he suffered in Korea.

Dr. Cameron had headed Allan Memorial since 1943, when the Rockefeller Foundation had donated funds to set up a psychiatric facility at McGill University. He was later elected president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953 and went on to become the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. Such a notable list of accomplishments for a heartless man whose experiments would rival some that took place in Nazi Germany. I find it very curious that he was appointed in 1945 to the American panel to examine Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg trials, and then later carried out experiments that would result in transforming patients into as Arlene Tyner reported, “virtual vegetables.”
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Cameron’s experiments funded under MKULTRA Subproject 68 were called depatterning or “psychic driving.” He combined electro convulsive therapy with chemically induced sleep therapy. The intensive electroshocks used in these experiments were not the same form of ECT used routinely in the treatment of patients suffering from depression. Both the voltage and the number of shocks administered were greatly increased. Instead of stopping after the procedure had induced one grand mal seizure, the subjects were shocked again and again until no further seizures could be elicited. According to Jim Turner, one of the lawyers for Cameron’s victims, there was no question that this was a profoundly intrusive and destructive form of electroshock, which was far different from that which was conventionally used for therapeutic purposes.
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As Peter Schrag says in his book
Mind Control
, “The heavier the technology, the more difficult it is to distinguish treatment from torture.”
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While sleeping, patients would be forced to listen to messages designed to reprogram their behavior. These messages were delivered through pillow speakers hooked to a mega-recorder with eight separate playback units enabling them to do eight patients at one time. Sometimes running wires to their legs and shocking them at the end of the message intensified the effect. In some cases he even used curare to paralyze patients that were not in drug induced sleeps, as patients hated sitting still and listening to these repetitious messages. Cameron wrote that psychic driving provided a way to make “direct, controlled changes in personality.” One of Cameron’s Canadian victims, Rita Zimmerman, was “depatterned” through a total of 30 electroshocks. She underwent 56 days of prolonged drug-induced sleep, received 14 days of negative “psychic driving,” and 18 days of positive “psychic driving.”