MK Ultra The Fifth Estate : Season 5 Episode 3

During the Cold War, the CIA funded a series of secret brainwashing experiments at a prestigious psychiatric clinic at McGill University. No method was too bizarre, including using LSD, hypnosis, prolonged periods of induced sleep, and electrical shocks to the brain. Patients were given the treatment without explanation or consent, and even decades later complained that they had never completely recovered. In 1980, the fifth estate exposed the magnitude of the human tragedy with this episode in which two Canadians told their stories publicly for the first time. Bob Logie was admitted to Allen Memorial hospital at age 18 to treat psychosomatic leg pain. He was repeatedly given LSD as a test subject without his consent. Logie also received an experimental therapy called depatterning. He was exposed to massive doses of electroshock therapy and kept asleep for up to a month at a time. Tape messages were played repeatedly while he slept. “I feel like I’ve been completely used. I feel like my mind has been completely invaded. I suppose if guinea pigs have feelings they’d feel like I do,” Logie told the fifth estate host Adrienne Clarkson. Logie said the effect of the treatments stayed with him and that as a result anxiety built up and he couldn’t hold down a job for long. No one knows how many patients were exposed to the program of chemical and electro-shock treatments at Allen Memorial. But documents and testimony have revealed that the Montreal experiments were part of a series of psychological projects given code names such as MK Ultra and run by the CIA in a quest to understand how to brainwash people. The American spy agency launched the experiments after the Korean War, when soldiers came home criticizing the American way of life. The CIA was convinced that the Communists had found the key to brainwashing and set out on an elaborate but secret attempt to use any chemical or psychological means to discover how to work with it.