SUBPROJECT 68: THE CASE CONTINUES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100120028-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 28
• Publication Date: October 27, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100120028-1
WASHINGTON POST
ARTICLE
ON PAGE J I 27 October 1985
Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta
Subproject 68: The Case Continues
Secretary of State George Shultz is sched- associate Tony Capaccio: "We expect to be dis-
uled to meet tomorrow with his Canadian coun- cussing this issue in some detail" with Shultz at
terpart, Joe Clark, for their regular quarterly the Calgary, Alberta, meeting.
get-together. Along with acid rain, East-West Subproject 68 started in January 1957, when
relations and trade, the two will be discussing a the CIA approved a $60,000 grant to Dr. Ewen
matter that has become a sore point with the Cameron, a world-renowned psychiatrist at the
Canadians but has received little attention on Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. The CIA
this side of the border: CIA misbehavior in has insisted, in its defending against Rauh's
Canada 28 years ago. lawsuit, that it had not solicited Cameron's ap-
Using the code name "Subproject 68," the plication for the grant.
CIA funded gruesome psychological experi- But that's not the way the agency's "project
ments on Canadian citizens as part of its infa- monitor" remembered it. In a sworn deposition
mous MK-ULTRA program of brainwashing two years ago, John W. Gittinger- said he had
and mind-bending According to a lawsuit filed asked a CIA undercover man to approach
in U.S. District Court here by veteran civil Cameron and encourage him to apply for a
rights attorney Joseph Rauh, at least nine, and grant. (There is no evidence that Cameron was
possibly more than 50, Canadians were unwit- aware he was asking for or taking money from
ting CIA guinea pigs. the CIA, which used a front group.)
The suit has dragged on for five years, with Gittinger testified that he was interested in
the CIA refusing to negotiate a reasonable Cameron's work on voice-stress analysis,
settlement with the victims. In a private letter which he figured would help the CIA in its
this month to the chief of Canada's Labor studies of the stress an individual undergoes
Party, Clark wrote: "I am not satisfied with during interrogation. He admitted, however,
the slow pace of discussions in District that Cameron's application for the grant con-
Court, but this, of course, is beyond our con- tained no plans for such work.
trol." "I went along with the idea of giving him the
Sean Brady, Clark's press secretary, told our $60,000," Gittinger explained, "because that's
what he asked for. We wanted contact with him
and to know what he was doing, primarily in
the audio area."
What, in fact, was in Cameron's application
was a proposal to conduct the kind of experi-
ments that even a CIA general counsel charac-
terized years later as "repugnant." Cameron's
proposal called, among other things, for "the
breaking down of ongoing patterns of the pa-
tient's behavior by means of particularly inten-
sive electro-shocks (depatterning)."
His proposal also called for "the intensive
repetition (16 hours a day for six to seven
days) of prearranged verbal signals" while the
patient was "kept in partial sensory isolation."
Even more ominously, Cameron's application
stated: "We propose to use,LSD-25 and other
similar agents as a means of breaking down the
ongoing patterns ofbehavior."
This mention of the unpredictable hallucino-
genic drug should have been a red flag to the
CIA officials. Three years earlier, then CIA di-
rector Allen Dulles had chastised Dr. Sidney
Gottlieb, head of the Technical Services Divi-
sion, for its role in the suicide of Dr. Frank
Olson, a civilian employee of the Army. Olson
was surreptitiously given a dose of LSD in a
glass of liqueur. He leaped through a 10th-floor
hotel room window a few days later.
Gittinger testified in his 1983 deposition that
he hadn't noticed the LSD proposal in Camer-
on's application. In any case, the CIA project
monitor said it was not his job to raise ques-
tions about Cameron's testing methods. If the
CIA officials were unconcerned about LSD ex-
periments three years after being admonished
for using them, what exactly were they con-
cerned with in the Canadian venture?
One reason for exporting MK-ULTRA, Git-
tinger testified, was that association with a psy-
chiatrist of Cameron's renown would be "good
cover" for the CIA front group that gave him
the $60,000 grant.
In retrospect, Gittinger acknowledged 26
years later, in his deposition: "That was a fool-
ish mistake. We shouldn't have done it.... I'm
sorry we did it because it turned out to be a
terrible mistake."
The program, Gittinger explained, "turned
out to be something of no interest" to the CIA.
Cameron, however, wrote a thank-you note to
the CIA-front society in early 1960, saying the
grant had been "invaluable." .
C 10M United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100120028-1