The works of Allen Dulles, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron M.D., and Dr. Lilly M.D. from the C.I.A. to N.I.H. to the Allen Dulles Psychiatric Hospital in 1953

Call her Lauren G. For 19 years, her mind has been blank about her experience. She remembers her husband driving her up to the old gray stone mansion that housed the hospital, Allen Memorial Institute, and putting her under the care of it’s director, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron M.D. The next thing she recalls happened three weeks later. “They gave me a dressing gown. It was too big, and I was tripping all over it. I was mad. I asked why did I have to go around in this sloppy thing. I could hardly move because I was pretty weak. I remember trying to walk along the hall, and the walls were slanted. It was then that I said, “Holy smokes, what a ghastly thing.” I remember running out the door and going up the mountain in my long dressing gown. The mountain, named Mount Royal, loomed high above Montreal. She stumbled and staggered as she tried to climb higher and higher. Hospital staff members had no trouble catching her and dragging her back to the Institute. In short order, they shot her full of sedatives, attached electrodes to here temples, and gave her a dose of electroshock. Soon she slept like a baby. Gradually, over the next few weeks, Lauren G. began to function like a normal human person again. She took basket-weaving therapy and played bridge with her fellow patients. The hospital released her, and she returned to her husband in another Canadian city. Before her mental collapse in 1959, Lauren G. seemed to have everything going for her. A refined glamorous horsewoman of 30, whom people often said she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. She had auditioned for the lead in National Velvet at 13 and married the rich boy next door at 20. But she never loved her husband and had let her domineering mother push her into his arms. He drank heavily. “I was really unhappy”, she recalls. “I had a horrible marriage, and finally I had a nervous breakdown. It was a combination of my trying to lose weight, sleep lose, and my nerves.” The family doctor recommended that her husband send her to Dr. Cameron M.D., which seemed like a logical thing to do, considering his wide fame as a psychiatrist. He had headed Allen Memorial since 1943, when the Rockefeller Foundation had donated funds to set up a psychiatric facility at McGill University. With continuing help from the Rockefellers, McGill had built a hospital know far beyond Canada’s borders as innovative and exciting. Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953, and he became the first president of the World Psychiatric Association also in the year 1953. His friends joked that they had run out of honors to give him. In 1953 CIA director Allen Dulles made a rare public statement on communist brainwashing. “We in the west are somewhat handicapped in getting all the details”, Dulles declared. “There are few survivors, and we have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques.” Even as Dulles spoke, however, CIA officials acting under his orders had begun to find the scientists and guinea pigs. Some of their experiments would wander so far across the ethical borders of experimental psychiatry (which are hazy in their own right) that Agency officials thought it prudent to have much of the work done outside of the United States.