The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Joan has disturbing memories of visiting her brother at New York Hospital, where he was subjected to excruciating insulin shock therapy, one of the experimental procedures employed on the CIA’s “human guinea pigs.” Used primarily for the treatment of schizophrenia, insulin overdoses were meant to jolt patients out of their madness. The procedure resulted in coma, and sometimes violent convulsions. The most severe risks included death and brain damage, though one study at the time claimed that this mental impairment was actually beneficial because it reduced patients’ “tension and hostility.”

  “They used insulin at New York Hospital,” recalled Joan. “I think those initiatives—God knows if they were from my father. I don’t know, but I’ve always wondered about that, because it didn’t sound like a good idea.

  “When I went to visit my brother, it was hard for me, because he kept saying, ‘Can’t you do something for me? I’m going mad.’ At the time, I didn’t know what he was getting at, or what I could do. I was just visiting him.”

  It was not until years later, when Joan read exposés about MKULTRA, that she realized how far her father had gone—even with his own son—in the name of brain research. “Once you go to the dark side, there seems to be no limit.”

  Sonny showed no signs of improvement after enduring the insulin treatments, although he did write his father a poignant letter from New York, indicating a new docility and a strong desire not to cause his family any more trouble. “Dear Father,” he wrote, “I have just understood the nature of the psychological structure that was built around me, and will work to free myself. I realize that I have not been given correct information, but will try to learn the truth anyhow. Love to you and Mother and anyone else we know. I want to be united with you all soon and will do anything convenient for you.”

  Despite Wolff’s lack of success, Dulles next reached out to Dr. Wilder Penfield, a prominent neurosurgeon at Montreal’s McGill University, whose psychiatric facility, the Allan Memorial Institute, became a major center of CIA mind control research. To Dulles’s great gratitude, Penfield agreed to consult on Allen Jr.’s case, which he continued to do until he retired in 1960.

  Like Wolff’s operation at New York Hospital–Cornell, Penfield’s academic-medical complex also benefited from its relationship with the CIA. Penfield brought in a prominent, Scottish-born psychiatrist named Donald Ewen Cameron, who had known Dulles since the war, to run McGill’s new Allan Institute for psychiatry. Cameron, who had met Dulles while consulting on the Rudolf Hess insanity case at the Nuremberg Trials, would become the most notorious scientist in the MKULTRA program. By 1957, Cameron was receiving a steady stream of CIA funding, through Dr. Wolff’s Society for Human Ecology, to conduct brainwashing experiments at McGill that would later be widely condemned as barbaric.

  Despite his impeccable credentials, Cameron saw himself as an iconoclastic innovator, pushing psychiatry to embrace the latest pharmaceutical technology and the most cutting-edge developments in the newly influential behavioral sciences. Cameron’s experiments in the Allan Institute’s notorious “Sleep Room” involved putting subjects into “electric dream” states, as one victim put it, through insulin overdoses, massive infusions of hallucinogens like LSD and other experimental drugs, and alarming amounts of electroshock therapy—a process he called “de-patterning,” to wipe the brain clean of “bad behavior patterns.” After blasting away these negative thoughts, Cameron sought to replace them with “good ones,” through what he called “psychic driving”—playing taped messages encouraging positive behavior to his nearly comatose victims for between sixteen and twenty hours a day, week after week, as they slipped in and out of consciousness. In one case, a patient underwent reprogramming in Cameron’s Sleep Room for 101 days.

  The people who came to Cameron were generally seeking relief from everyday psychological ailments like depression and anxiety, even for help dealing with marital problems. But as author Naomi Klein later wrote, Cameron’s “shock and awe warfare on the mind” brought only much deeper misery to the patients—many of them women—in his care. “Though he was a genius at destroying people, he could not remake them,” Klein observed. “A follow-up study conducted after Cameron left the Allan Memorial Institute found that 75 percent of his former patients were worse off after treatment than they were before they were admitted.”

  Cameron himself indicated that the true aim of his CIA-funded research was not to improve patients’ lives but to contribute to the Cold War effort by perfecting the science of mind control. He compared his patients to prisoners of war who were undergoing interrogation, saying that they, “like prisoners of the Communists, tended to resist [treatment] and had to be broken down.”

  Gail Kastner, a promising young McGill nursing student, was one of the victims of Cameron’s experimentation. She had come to Cameron for help with anxiety issues stemming from her relationship with her emotionally overbearing father. A tall man with pale blue eyes, Cameron exuded a paternal warmth, addressing female patients as “lassie” in his soft brogue. But in the end, Kastner would come to think of the doctor as “Eminent Monster”—he was the distinguished man in the white coat who loomed over her, as she was lit up with so much electrical voltage that she broke teeth and fractured her spine while convulsing on the table.

  Years later, Kastner told Klein what it felt like to be held in the Sleep Room. “I hear people screaming, moaning, groaning, people saying no, no, no. I remember what it was like to wake up in that room, I was covered in sweat, nauseated, vomiting—and I had a very peculiar feeling in the head. Like I had a blob, not a head.”

  Patients’ minds were made blank slates; they lost much of their memory, and thus, much of their lives. “They tried to erase and remake me,” said Kastner. “But it didn’t work.”

  Val Orlikow, a young mother suffering from postpartum depression, was another patient whose life was emptied out by Cameron. After she came home from the Allan Institute, Orlikow could not remember her husband, David, who was a member of Canada’s parliament, or their children. Her mind had been reduced to that of a toddler. She could not use a toilet.

  In the mid-1970s, after Cameron had died, the secrets of the Sleep Room and other inhumane MKULTRA research centers began to emerge, as journalists filed Freedom of Information requests and Congress opened investigations into the CIA horror chambers. Eventually, the CIA paid out $750,000 in damages to nine families whose lives were turned upside down by Cameron’s experiments—the largest settlement against the agency at the time. The agency made it seem as if its mind control experiments were isolated relics of the past. Testifying before a Senate hearing in 1977, CIA psychologist John Gittinger called MKULTRA “a foolish mistake . . . a terrible mistake.”

  But the work of Cameron and other MKULTRA scientists lives on at the agency, incorporated into a 1963 CIA torture manual titled Counterintelligence Interrogation that would be used to extract information from prisoners during the wars in Vietnam and Central America, and at black sites operated by the agency after 9/11. U.S. agencies and their overseas allies have continued to run their own versions of Cameron’s Sleep Room, where captives are subjected to similar types of sensory deprivation, electroshock, and drug overdoses, until their psychological resistance has been broken.

  Allen Dulles was fully aware of the experiments being conducted at McGill when he sent his own son there. Joan doesn’t think her brother fell into the hands of Dr. Cameron while he was a patient there. Yet, whatever was done to Sonny in Montreal was not a pleasant experience for him.

  When Allen Jr. began treatment at McGill, Dr. Wilder Penfield insisted that the young man could improve. But Sonny knew his limitations by then, and the medical regimen imposed on him only made him feel worse. “He thought my brother could do better,” recalled Joan. “But my brother was furious, because he realized he couldn’t.”

  In the end, Penfield finally admitted that Sonny was beyond even the medical wizardry of McGill. In February 1959, the year before h
e retired, the neurosurgeon wrote Dulles a letter, conceding defeat. “I wish I could help him,” Penfield told Dulles. “What a loss this mind de-railment is—to him, to his parents and indeed to the world, for he had a splendid brain.”

  After Penfield pronounced Allen Jr.’s condition hopeless, Clover continued to agonize over his care. She often confided her troubles to Mary Bancroft, who by then was living in New York. Caring for Allen Jr. was a never-ending job, Clover wrote Bancroft in November 1961. She felt “joy” at having her son “accessible,” but when he was home with his parents in Georgetown, there was “such an unbelievable amount of planning, telephoning and hi-jinks of everything connected with [his] comings and goings—engaging Georgetown [University] students [to help] etc., etc. Will not burden you with a recital.”

  In another letter to Mary, Clover wrote, “Here everything is all right and all wrong, whichever way you wish to take it. Great Allen very tense and no wonder with everything he carries, young Allen none too well, great Allen all too busy to attend to all the things I have to try to get [Sonny] to do and too pulled to pieces by it all. You know it’s always everything too much or nothing enough and me so full of fear all the time and nothing to do about it.”

  From time to time, Sonny would explode in frightening rages. After weathering one such outburst in February 1960, Clover wrote Joan, “It wasn’t exactly terrifying but almost.” She assured her daughter that there was “nothing broken,” but confessed there was a “terrific uncertainty [to] how everything is going to turn out. One of our Georgetown med. students was here and one of Father’s aides and another came up from the office. I telephoned the hospital but first they said they couldn’t come over the District line and then they said the aide would have to have half an hour for dinner before starting!”

  Allen Jr. was “endlessly patient in general,” remembered Joan. But he violently rebelled when his family tried to return him to an institution. Sometimes “it would take three people to hold him down when he would get really angry—not wanting to go back to the hospital.”

  Her sensitive, wounded son reminded Clover of her lost brother, Paul, who had found life too daunting a challenge. They had the same artistic temperaments, the same physical awkwardness. Paul had “the hands of a person who thinks and does not do,” she once wrote in her journal. “My son has them.” In 1959, Reverend John Sutherland Bonnell, a prominent New York Presbyterian minister who for a time offered young Allen pastoral guidance, informed his parents that Sonny “believes that he has latent within himself the tendency that was ‘active in Paul Todd and which led him to kill himself.’” It was one more emotional burden for Clover to bear, the fear that the family tragedy would repeat itself.

  Allen Jr. wasn’t the only family member Clover worried about. Her oldest daughter, Toddie, started to suffer from manic depression in early adulthood, a condition she thought Toddie inherited from her, and began undergoing shock treatments. It is unknown whether CIA doctors were involved in Toddie’s electroshock therapy. But Dulles was quite willing to steer suffering relatives toward MKULTRA-connected physicians.

  Lobotomies were among the more extreme mind control measures undertaken in the CIA program. At one point, Dulles arranged for his niece Edith—the daughter of his sister Margaret—to be lobotomized by a CIA brain surgeon. “She had cancer and was in great pain,” recalled Joan. “They tried lobotomy on her—all that came from my father, he was the one who suggested the doctor. It didn’t work at all, it didn’t stop the pain. It just made her odd.”

  Sometimes Clover thought that all the sadness and anxiety in her life was about to crush her. She felt that she was “walking on the bottom of the sea,” she wrote Mary in 1961. “It isn’t funny to feel all the time so impossible,” Clover told her confidante on another occasion. “I envy the manic depressives having their turn to be up.” Her husband’s secretive life—which, she suspected, continued to involve other women—and his emotional remoteness only made Clover feel more alone with her misery.

  At one low point in Clover’s life, a well-meaning CIA doctor recommended that she see Dr. Cameron. She knew Cameron from her husband’s CIA dinner parties, and for some reason always felt uneasy in his presence. But out of desperation, she agreed to have lunch with the McGill psychiatrist at the Mayflower Hotel during his next visit to Washington. Over lunch, she related her life’s many laments to Cameron—including her husband’s affairs—while he stared intently at her. After she finished, Cameron explained to her that her husband’s sexual transgressions were a natural outgrowth of his complex and driven personality, and that she must not take them personally. He suggested that she come to Montreal, where he could treat her in his clinic and help her develop a more positive outlook on her life. Clover spent days agonizing over the decision, but in the end she decided not to go. She did not know that by avoiding Cameron’s Sleep Room, she was likely preserving her sanity.

  By 1962, a newly determined Clover had taken full control of her son’s well-being. On the advice of Jolande Jacobi, her longtime Jungian analyst, she arranged to have Allen Jr. admitted to the Bellevue Sanatorium, a venerable, family-run institution on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, whose directors had strong ties to the Jung Institute in nearby Zurich and to the great man himself. After all the frustrating and harrowing treatments that Allen Jr. had been put through for the past ten years, Clover was convinced that it was time to try a softer, Jungian approach, based on talk therapy, artistic expression, and dream analysis.

  Sonny’s mother and father accompanied him on the trip to Kreuzlingen, the quiet lakeside village where the sanitarium was located. Before they left for Switzerland, Dulles wrote to Dr. Heinrich Fierz, the facility’s medical director, telling him that the family realized there was little hope for the young man. “It is a difficult case,” Dulles wrote, “and with the extent of the wound and the brain damage, we can only hope for limited results.” Dulles wasn’t even sure that he could get his son to take the flight to Switzerland. “At the last minute, he might refuse to make the trip,” he told Fierz. By that point, Sonny’s faith in the psychiatry profession—and in his father’s judgment—was extremely low.

  But Allen Jr. did move into Bellevue, and he found the facility so soothing an environment that he stayed there for over ten years. Like Hans Castorp’s “magic mountain” retreat in the novel by Thomas Mann, the Swiss sanitarium became Sonny’s refuge from a hostile world. Bellevue was built on a “beautiful, great, old estate,” recalled Joan, who often visited her brother there, and it had treated a wide range of patients over the years, including Freud’s famous case study, “Anna O” (Bertha Pappenheim). There was, Joan said, “a leisurely sort of European grace about your situation”—as long as you went on paying, she added. American institutions had a different attitude, she observed. “America is ‘You’ve got to be doing something, buddy,’ whereas in Europe, you can just ‘be.’”

  Young Dulles worked with Jacobi and some of her most promising protégés, including William Willeford, an American who had graduated from the Jung Institute. Willeford later recalled that he made a “connection” with Sonny despite his severe brain impairment, taking time to write his parents each month about his daily routine and assure them that their son “had some kind of life.” The young analyst met with Sonny’s parents once in person at the Swiss clinic. He found Clover so insistent about communicating her views of young Allen that he asked her to leave his office so he could hear her husband’s take on Sonny. But Allen Sr. had nothing of interest to say about his son, recalled Willeford. “He didn’t have any insights.” Later, Dulles passed word to Willeford that if he was interested in joining the CIA, he should let him know. Apparently Dulles had been impressed when the analyst had cut off Clover during their meeting in his office. “He liked it when I said, ‘Let’s hear what the father has to say.’”

  The work that Willeford later published revealed a strong interest in the father-son dynamic, that primal and fateful relationship that
had weighed so heavily on Allen Jr.’s life. “Whether the son comes to experience his father as Saturn eating his children, depends on the kind of father the son has and the kind of male society he is being asked to join,” Willeford wrote in one book. “But it also depends very significantly on his mother’s sense of the value of her own femininity, and on her way of mediating the values of the Father World.”

  After Sonny had been in Bellevue for some time, his father suggested that it might be time for him to return to the United States, but he recoiled violently at the idea. “Never!” he shouted. “I’m never coming home to you, ever!”

  Bellevue was his mother’s world—a humane, Jungian oasis far from the cruel science of New York Hospital and McGill University and the other institutions associated with his father’s world.

  Allen Jr. did not leave Bellevue until he heard that his father was dead. Joan eventually arranged to take him out of the sanitarium and move him to Santa Fe, where she had found her own sanctuary and was able to look out for her brother. Sonny never returned to an institution. Joan became his legal guardian. The two elderly siblings still live in Santa Fe, in the same house now, both trying to make sense of their past, in their own ways.

  13

  Dangerous Ideas

  Shortly after 9:00 p.m. on March 12, 1956, Jesús de Galíndez, a lecturer in Spanish and government at Columbia University, finished leading a graduate seminar at Hamilton Hall and headed home. One of his students offered to drive him to the Columbus Circle subway station so he could take a downtown train to his Greenwich Village apartment. He was never seen again by friends or colleagues.

  Galíndez was a charming, forty-year-old bachelor, popular with his students and attractive to women. Born to a prominent Basque family in Spain and educated as a lawyer, Galíndez was tall, slim, well dressed, and good-looking, with deep, dark eyes, and a receding hairline that added to his distinguished appearance. He emanated a warm, if somewhat melancholy, intelligence. He had the look of a man who had seen perhaps too much of the world but was determined not to be undone by it.