Archive for ‘Brainwash – Source Material’

Interview with Dr Ronald Sandison
Friday, March 25th, 2011

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: via Phone and at Interviewee’s home
Date: 2005
Interviewee: Dr Ronald Sandison

Dr Ronald Sandison was the first British psychiatrist to use LSD clinically. Here he talks about his involvement with the drug, its effects, his thoughts on Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, R Gordon Wasson and William Sargant. At the end of the interview is a second one – much shorter, but more interesting to intelligence-watchers – in which we discuss funding for his LSD programmes in the 1950s, and debate whether he was unwittingly being used by MI5, MI6 and Porton Down as a source of information on ‘truth drugs‘.

Dr Sandison was a huge help to me when I was researching ‘Brainwash’ and we spoke many times. I thought he was a wonderful, wonderful man. He died in 2010.

The first interview here took place at his home, the second was by phone.

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How did you come to be involved with LSD?

I first went to Basel on a study group – this was about 1950, 52 – and met [Albert] Hoffman, who had restarted experimenting with LSD around 1948. By the time I was there, they were working on spiders spinning webs…

Hoffman had discovered the drug in 1938, then sat on it and rediscovered again?

That’s right, yes, you see, I have this translation here [reads from a conference paper]: ‘The medical profession has been interested in ergot…’ Another early paper, ‘14 normal people, one of whom is given LSD twice…’ What’s interesting about these are that they were not influenced by anybody else – because nobody knew what to expect. Then Hoffman went [reads on]:  ‘One subject tried to describe the state of not being in control and said “I can watch myself all the time, as if being in a mirror, and realise my faults and mental disorders. Despite my great efforts, I find it impossible to correct myself, as everything keeps slipping away and appearing at once again.” Another subject said spontaneously she was glad not to have been questioned a lot. She would not have been able to answer any of the questions either positively or negatively. One is reminded of the state of narcoanalysis, the state among others that is produced by pentothal.’

I think it was really that – people were experiencing something about themselves that they hadn’t previously known about. There was one subject who said it made her think things that were better left forgotten.

Then after that Hoffman went to the a hospital and gave LSD to a number of psychotic patients. Which he didn’t get much from. Apart from some brief work by Bush and Johnson in the States, where they gave LSD to eight psychoneurotic patients but never followed it up (and it was a rather poor paper that they wrote) we were really the first people to use LSD with psychoneurotic patients.

Why did Hoffman pick this up again?

Hoffman seemed to have this curious sort of intuition. He just said, he thought there was something in this drug, he wasn’t sure. But he never told me exactly why. I don’t think he really describes it himself. Have you come across his book? He doesn’t really go into it.

When you went to Europe, had anyone else had done anything with LSD?

No, except for Bush and Johnson in the States. They weren’t serious investigators. I learned afterwards. I think it was Charles Savage who told me that they’d said ‘Well you know we’ve got these psychoneurotic patients, we’re not quite sure what to do with them. Let’s give them some LSD and really shake things up a bit and see what happens.’ And that was really their attitude. That’s not a very scientific attitude. But they did a report that the patients seemed to have benefited. How they benefited they never described and it was a very short paper. They never showed up again, they never showed up at any of the conferences. As far as I know they never tried it again.

If they hadn’t read the German paper in 1947, how would they have heard of LSD in the first place?

I’m not quite sure how it got into America. But Sandoz was an international company and I’ve no doubt that people in New York were talking about it, and the Americans were always great at getting hold of new things.

Why were you so interested in it?

Difficult to answer that. When you’re working in a mental hospital your main problem is the enormous weight of patients. In a number of cases you’ve got the [ones that] you’d really like to do something for but you never have the time. Here was a drug which – I wouldn’t say it was a short cut to the unconscious – but it was certainly helping people to understand themselves at a deeper level. And it seemed to me that this was a worthwhile approach. And I think it was also just a curiosity about this extraordinary substance. Because it doesn’t work like any other drug. You don’t get the same results in the patient one day to the next, which would rule it out in terms of drugs where the effect is expected to be the same. At one time I compared it with penicillin and I thought let’s look at an ampoule of penicillin and an ampoule of LSD.  The effect of penicillin as far as we know is independent of what the patient thinks or does. Whereas the mood of the patient who is being given LSD is a vital factor in what happens under the drug. The co-operation between the observer and the therapist, the patient and the drug, these three, form an extraordinary combination. And the other thing that I was working on at the time was the influence of the observer.

Were there any other drugs around where the mood of the patient would affect the result?

I think the work that Shorvil and co were doing with abreactive drugs – the same applied to a lesser extent. But I think it was [different] with LSD

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Interview with Wilson Bryan Key
Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Phone (27th March 2005), Interviewee’s home in Nevada (30th June 2005)
Date: 27th March 2005 and 30th June 2005
Interviewee: Wilson Bryan Key

Wilson Bryan Key was the man who first popularised the notion of subliminal advertising. In a series of books starting in 1973 he explained how the advertising industry craftily inserted sexually explicit images into mainstream advertisements in order subliminally to persuade consumers to buy products they neither wanted nor needed. Over the course of his life he would sell over 8 million books. He died in 2008.

This is an amalgamation of two interviews with Key, the first conducted by telephone in March 2005, the second in person at his house in Nevada on June 30 that year. Both interviews have been heavily edited (Key made some extraordinarily slanderous claims, which I have cut ). In the interviews he runs through his ‘discovery’ of the subliminal deception, the origins of his theories about the technique and his controversial dismissal from an – apparently tenured – post at a university in Canada. He then moves onto his recruitment by US Special Forces, his role in the Judas Priest subliminal trial and the impact of subliminal advertising today.

I really liked Key: he was a formidable, personable, hospitable, intelligent man. At the same time, however, I was unable to stop myself wondering whether he had in fact slipped irreversibly into a fantasy world. You decide

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How did you get interested in subliminal advertising?

In the beginning I spent a big part of my life in the military. And I had a lot to do with reading aerial photographs. And in aerial photographs, if you look at it from a military perspective, wherever you see something that looks too normal, it should be there, it’s perfect, distrust that – because someone is putting one over on you. You begin to question everything.

I’d been a journalist and a feature writer, when I found myself writing four or five stories all over again I decided to get the hell out of it and get a PhD. And my life was half-way between business, advertising, public relations work and universities. I ran a market research business in Puerto Rico for about 6 or 7 years, and I was tied in with a political party… And then I needed a way to make a living so I went back to teaching. Ended up in Canada, University of Western Ontario. I was there 6 years.

What was your PhD in?

Psychology.

And your position at Western Ontario was teaching psychology?

Communications Studies. I was a tenured professor. I worked in the journalism department, sometimes in the psychology department and I even took some art classes occasionally. But my background is very un-concentrated, I wandered all over the place. I thought, when you get a tenured professorship you think, ‘Well now I’m safe. They can’t fire me any more’. Well, that’s not true.

So what happened? You discovered this subliminal business? How did that come about?

The first one was I think an illustration in Esquire Magazine, and I was lecturing to the class on this particular article, it was on one of the beatnik poets of the day. And I looked at the picture, I think it was of him, a painting of him, upside down. And there on the bookshelf behind him was an erect penis as a bookend. I walked around the table: ‘Jesus Christ! That shouldn’t be there!’ Then I started poking around and within three months I had a two foot pile of the stuff in my office. And then I got the students interested. They were delighted with this. It was almost like participating in a revolution! So I had no trouble getting material. Once I started looking for it I started, for a month or so, looking at the pages of magazines just off the edges, looking horizontally, not confronting it. I knew that they were putting something into this printing. And then I discovered the S E X business.

You see, the whole society depends so greatly on marketing, advertising, whatever you want to call it. And to assume that these people left language and pictorial communication alone? They have refined it to a degree vastly beyond what anybody suspected before. And to assume everything is the same as it is in language? Forget it! That can’t be true! They spend an enormous amount of money. These ads, some of them that I have used in these books, I was able to make a fairly good estimate of the amount that was spent: $10 million! In one of [my] books there is an advertisement featuring ice cubes in an empty glass – Johnnie Walker, I believe, and that thing was in use for at least 10 years. It’s been on the back cover of every magazine in this country and probably many others.

The advertisers know that most of it doesn’t work. But they try everything. And part of it depends on the volume of ads they put out. But when they find one that does work, demonstrably, they’ll go with it, they’ll milk it as much as they possibly can. So we tried to go in the book with these ads that were repeated immediately. And invariably when you look at these super-ads, you find subliminals.

Anything in communications studies that looks sincere, honest, straightforward, that it’s all hanging out: distrust it! Distrust it very much! Because someone is pulling your leg.

In the beginning I got a lot of help from radiologists, people who spend their lives looking at x-rays. And they again were very well-trained in being very distrustful. For example, no physician will read an x-ray of someone he is emotionally involved with, his wife, for example, or his child. Because you can’t be certain what’s there is really there: the big question is, how do you differentiate between reality and fantasy? And our society now has got to the point where it is extraordinarily difficult for us to make this differentiation.

The x-ray people were very sensitive about this because they’d have someone else read the x-ray, they wouldn’t touch it. I asked ‘Why do you do that?’ and they said it was this business of projection. It’s like looking at a Rorschach inkblot. And looking at a Rorschach inkblot, there’s nothing there. Anything you put there, you are making it up. It’s a fantasy. And that’s where a lot of my interest in this evolved.

Your suspicions were piqued by the vast amounts of money being spent on advertising by major corporations, weren’t they?

I figured at least 10 million dollars over a period of 7 years was spent printing one single advertisement. That probably cost $100,000 for one artist to do it. Now, what the hell’s going on here? They’re not playing a game. If it doesn’t work, they will know about it in 2-3 weeks. I used to work for Seagram’s. And most ads probably don’t work. At least, not dramatically. They do succeed in keeping the name out there. But if they find one that does work, that one ad for Seagram’s was used for 10 years and they spent several million dollars buying space for it. And a good ad is an ad that sells. That’s all. Nothing else matters.

I worked in advertising for a long time. And I ran a consulting firm for 10 years. Publicly, no, they can’t admit to all this. There’s a law against it! It would be dreadful!

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Interview with Monsignor Denis Faul
Monday, March 21st, 2011

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: TBC
Date: 9th November 2004
Interviewee: Monsignor Denis Faul

Monsignor Denis Faul was a prominent campaigner for civil rights in Northern Ireland. Here he talks about ‘Interrogation in Depth’ and reveals how he and his colleagues managed to discover what the British Army was up to in 1971, then get the word of the abuses out in the Press. I like his take on US interrogation techniques and Guantanamo Bay.

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Where were you at the time of Internment?

In 1971 I was teaching in a grammar school, St Barter’s (sp). I was up there for years but I was on holiday. I was applying for a place in Pomeroy which is in County Tyrone, and the Internment day was 9th August, which I think was a Monday, and on Wednesday after Mass a man came in to see me, a past pupil of mine, he was a young teacher and he said ‘I was taken away to be interned and we were brutally ill-treated’. I said ‘Where did this happen?’ He said ‘I think it was Ballykinder’. The British army stamped on them and kicked them around and put them into stress positions and treated them very, very badly. ‘Oh, it happened to everybody’, he said.

I got in touch with a colleague of mine, Fr Brian Brady in Belfast, and he’d had the same very bad reports from Belfast. So I went down to Belfast and we straight away got a number of priests together and we started recording the statements from all these people and eventually we formed a little group, the Association for Legal Justice… We got together some excellent men who worked very, very hard, set up a little office at the bottom of the Falls Road and [interviewed] everybody who was interrogated by the police or had been in and out. We gathered a terrible picture of ill-treatment over the next – well it went on for the next nine years. But then a few days went past and we were told by relatives that a number of people were missing. There was in particular a young man here, Paddy Joe Maclean, who was also a teacher and a good friend of mine and a very peaceful man. The relatives could get no trace of them.

His wife contacted you?

Yes, as far as I remember, the message came to me, probably from the wives – the relations and different ones – and we couldn’t work out where these people were. We worked out eventually that there were about 10 – I think it was 12 – and there were 2 more later on, that were missing from different parts.

I went to Belfast every day and we were collaborating together to put together this information. It was most mysterious: these ten were missing. It began to get into the Irish news, the local papers a little bit about this but not very much. Eventually then after about 7 or 8 days we found these men had arrived back into the Crumlin Road prison, which was a remand prison in Belfast and we were able then to get the whole story. Some of our staff and workers got the whole story then – had to be 16th or 17th August 1971, we began to get the story. So by about the 21st, we had the whole story

How did you get the story?

We advertised and made it known public that we were taking statements. People came to Belfast and relatives got in touch with us from different parts…it was that little committee, a number of priests in Belfast. People came up to the Falls Road and saw the group and told them. The relatives were in a state of terror and they just went to anyone to tell them. And we managed to assemble the material and find out that there was 10, I think, that were missing.

You were phoning the authorities?

Oh yes. But they would put you off. We did that, I did a lot of that. But they wouldn’t tell you about it, they didn’t seem to know themselves.

You rang up…

Yes. ‘I’m looking for Sean McKenna, where is Sean McKenna? His mother or his wife is looking for him’ (he was one of the ones from Newry and then there were two from Armagh). As you can see it was a rather confused situation, we were trying to gather a bit of information here, a bit of information there. We thought at first it was simply – since they had taken in 330 men and let out a good number of them all right, like my teacher friend who came to Mass. We thought it was just a bit of bureaucratic confusion, that these men would turn up somewhere.

Then they turned up and we found how they had been treated. Hooded, put in stress positions, and beaten up for seven days non-stop, day and night. We immediately recognised this as torture. We gathered up all the facts as best we could. Father Brady went to the ** (hotel). I also conveyed the information to Cardinal Conway but he had it already.

How did he get it?

He got it from Paddy Joe Maclean. As soon as Paddy Joe got back to the Crumlin Rd Prison, about 16th, 17 August, he wrote it all out and gave it to one of the prison officers who took it to Cardinal Conway. When I saw Conway he already had got it from Paddy Joe. He went over to see Mr [Edward] Heath. But I didn’t know that.

We went to the Sunday Times Insight Team on 24, 25 August and we gave it all to them. We thought it was a great scoop. It never appeared.

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Interview with Reverend Sam Davies
Monday, March 21st, 2011

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: TBC
Date: 2005
Interviewee: Reverend Sam Davies

Reverend Samuel Davies was the only British military padre taken prisoner during the Korean War. Here he reminisces about the camps he was held in, the alleged ‘brainwashing’ received by British and American troops, and discusses why some men broke down and made false confessions whilst others managed to resist.

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What made people confess to crimes they had not committed in Korea?

Difficult one, that. I think people at times felt that if they didn’t make sort of pretence at giving some sort of – something – they might even be killed or treated very, very severely indeed. People varied tremendously in the way they reacted to that pressure. Some were totally heroic and wouldn’t say a single word – and faced very unpleasant experiences; others gave way a little, hoping that the people at home would understand that they were under pressure. I couldn’t give the exact numbers but I think a number of the American prisoners gave way compared with – I think hardly any of the British prisoners – perhaps one or two. But there it is.

Was this the result of just plain brutality or was it something more?

I think the threat of very unpleasant, cramped imprisonment in cages: we had a young Northumberland fusilier, Kinne, who would never yield to any Chinese pressure, and he spent some time in a sort of cage with hardly room to lie down in. He wrote a book about it.

So it was just brutality?

Yes. I think the conviction in people’s minds was so strong that they were doing the utterly wrong and disgraceful thing to join in the Communist propaganda at this time. It was so strong that they would not, and could not, give way. We were – people varied tremendously about it but I think – also the threat of prolonged punishment and confinement in appalling conditions, often very cramped, was a threat some people couldn’t really live up to. Others could, and did.

In my camp we had to attend these absolutely boring lectures on Marxism-Leninism from the instructors day after day, and we were often told ‘Now, tonight you will get a pencil and paper. You must write down you appreciation of what you’ve learned’. Well, of course, we all had to do that in the officers’ camp. And we wrote a lot of verbal tripe really, which confused the Chinese. They were rather naïve and were trying to take it really seriously. We were not. We wrote a lot of verbal stuff so that nobody could really understand what was going on at all. But we had to write something and that’s how we managed to – you’d be taken down to Chinese HQ with Ding, the very able interpreter, he’d tell you what the Chinese commandant was saying and you had to account for what you had written. It was up to you to play it as coolly and stupidly as you could. And it often succeeded.

Did the Chinese/Korean interrogators deliberately target the officers? Colonel Carne for example?

[Carne] was the senior officer and the Chinese realised as far as he was concerned that he had tremendous influence. Sadly the officers and senior NCOs’ camp was isolated from the other ranks. I begged the Chinese to allow me, as the only surviving padre, to visit the other ranks. I begged them but they wouldn’t hear of it. Because they thought it was all bound up with sort of anti-communist propaganda. I was never allowed to visit them.

On Christmas day [they would present us] with special food ‘and in return we want you to sign this greetings card to our commander at the front.’ Well, of course, we all said ‘no’. Nobody in the camp was prepared to sign the greetings card.

It seems that the Chinese were being pretty sensible, separating the officers from the men?

Absolutely. The Chinese sensed that it was his [Carne’s] example and his steadfast adherence to what was the right thing to do in the face of this. They knew that his example and his leadership were immensely strong. So they wisely, from their point of view, thought to take him away completely. We never saw him again, until 19 months later.

Was there a particular trait that helped some to resist when others confessed and signed false confessions?

I think there were only one or two British prisoners who agreed to do that and they were other ranks. No single officer did – though I don’t think that’s true about the Americans. There was just something in our backgrounds. We were British and I suppose we were very proud of that. We would rather die in prison, or face death, than take part in any seditious propaganda.

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Interview with Dr David Owen
Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Via telephone
Date: 2005
Interviewee: Dr David Owen (now Lord David Owen)

This interview, with Dr David (now Lord) Owen shows a far more caring side to William Sargant – and hopefully puts paid to some of the more ‘out-there’ rumours about him and his treatments (‘he wasn’t a Doctor Sinister, you know’). Is it possible for both Sargant-haters and the Sargant-lovers to be correct? Actually, I think it probably is.

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The fact is [William Sargant] was an extremely controversial figure. He was not averse to – he was such a dominant personality that he, I mean he wouldn’t ask a patient: he would say ‘You’re better, aren’t you?’ And they would say ‘Yes, Doctor Sargant.’ And then he would put a tick. And then that particular ECT or whatever it was, was successful. A normal scientist would say ‘How are you feeling today?’ and they would say something and he would make a judgement about whether or not they were better. But Sargant would say ‘You’re better today, aren’t you!’ (laughs)

That meant that his terms as a researcher – he was not really always the best of, of the highest standard as an objective researcher. That, I think, is a valid criticism of him.

Did he think he was a researcher at all?

Well, he wrote many, many papers. He was a prolific publisher and he used every form of technique to get his view of psychiatry across. Like, you would sit in the consulting room with him and the doorknob would turn, and Sargant would say ‘He’s better!’ And I’d say ‘He hasn’t even walked through the door yet!’ And he’d say ‘Ah – but did you see the way he turned the doorknob? He’s better! That would have been very slow a week or a fortnight ago.’

This is the downside about him. What he was, was an optimist. It was said that he had a very serious depression when he was a registrar at St Mary’s. I think that the advantage of that is that he did understand what it was like to be depressed, and a lot of psychiatrists don’t understand it…

For me [working alongside William Sargant] was particularly interesting because I might well have ended up doing psychiatry. [Sargant] was very difficult to be – most people were either positive or negative about him. They aren’t in-between about Will. I consider that he was, for all his flaws and faults – and they were quite considerable ones – a great man. And I think one of the keys to his greatness, was that he understood.

As neurologists we used to deal with terrible pains and he used to say to us, ‘How often have you seen somebody commit suicide because of pain?’ Answer: practically never. Occasionally but very, very rare. ‘How many times have you seen somebody commit suicide on depression?’ Frequently. Ipso facto, according to Sargant, that explains why depression is such a bloody awful illness. ‘That is what people forget, what they don’t understand. This is a terrible, terrible thing. Absolutely demoralising, you just can’t live with it.’ Therefore, he would say, ‘OK, I take risks! In order to relieve them of the depression. I double the dose of the antidepressants, or I run the risk of slight liver thing’ (the drugs then were in those days questioned as to whether they had some adverse effects, especially on the liver.) … Some would say that that was a reason for dropping the drugs. For Sargant it was not at all. He would weigh up the effect of that with the depth of their depression. And if he thought their depression was very serious he would carry on with the drugs. Or double the drugs. And he would be quite open about it. He’d say ‘I think you have to assess this question of side effects vis-à-vis how ill and depressed they are. This is not just a question of making a judgement, “this drug has a side effect therefore I can’t use it”: if this drug has an effect that can help this person, then they should do so.’

So he was a therapeutic optimist, not necessarily a rationalist, and I think this did lead him to making some claims for the treatments. He over-claimed. And then his style in dealing with the analysts who didn’t believe you should have any physical methods… –  he would, run a sort of vendetta, I’m not sure if that’s the right word – a vitriolic denigration of the analysts, whereas most psychiatrists who support methods of physical treatment would still say, ‘Well, there’s a role for psychiatry and maybe even analysis.’ But this led to him being absolutely hated by anyone who thought psychotherapy had any meaning and value in psychiatry. He polarised opinion and probably did a little harm to physical methods of treatment by this record of over-claiming, this therapeutic optimism, and then this sort of bravado. But great men don’t come packaged neatly, do they? … And he IS the father of physical methods of treatment! …

He never brainwashed me! I remained catholic with a small ‘c’ on the treatments.

Did Sargant ever mention his work with the military, or intelligence agencies, to you?

No. I didn’t know him well enough to know that. And I never really kept up with him once I had become a politician. There were some aspects of him which I found – not my bag, really.

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