Faustian Bargain
For a psychiatrist of lesser ambition, running a busy department would have sufficed. But Sargant had a vision, bordering on messianic zeal. He would lead psychiatry into a new world. His weapons would include epileptic-form convulsions, induced by the drug pentetrazol and electroshock; hypoglycemic coma, produced with insulin; psychosurgery and pre-frontal leukotomy. He outlined his methods in his book, Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry. It became required reading for his growing number of medical disciples in Britain and America.
Yet even they did not suspect that Sargant, as early as 1948, had made a Faustian bargain with Britain’s two intelligence services.
MI5 is the country’s prime internal counter-espionage service. It specializes in monitoring all designated subversives and conducts surveillance on a large number of foreign diplomats and embassies. MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, plans, carries out and conducts clandestine operations and intelligence-gathering on a worldwide basis.
In the late 1940s, at the outset of the Cold War, both services urgently looked for new ways to understand, combat and overcome the medical manipulations of Soviet and Chinese psychiatrists. In Sargant they found a willing tutor.
At military bases in Britain, including one at Maresfield, near the south coast resort of Brighton, he conducted drug-related experiments on so-called “military volunteers.” Other drug experiments were performed at Britain’s most secret chemical and biological warfare establishment at Porton Down on Salisbury Plain. Again “volunteers” from military mental hospitals and from military prisons were used.
American intelligence sent observers to monitor these tests. Among them was one of the CIA’s senior biochemists, Frank Olson, and Sidney Gottlieb, the overall head of the MK ULTRA program.
The three men became close friends. On each trip they visited Sargant’s department at St. Thomas’s to study patient records. They also shared with Sargant the latest mind-altering research being carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Ultimately, as we shall see, these connections led to the 1953 murder of Frank Olson on the orders of Sidney Gottlieb.
A Fearful Place
Sargant, since 1948, had ruled supreme over the Department of Psychological Medicine at St. Thomas’s. He had established the department when he had left, “not without a degree of acrimony,” that other citadel of British psychiatry, the Maudsley Hospital, also in London.
Arriving in St. Thomas’s, Sargant found he had to create “my department virtually from scratch in a dark, dank, rat-infested basement, nicknamed ’Scatari.’”
It had one ward, a fearful place of drugged screams and troubled mumblings. It was here in the early fifties that Sargant, the son of a wealthy and staunchly Methodist family, began to experiment with what he called “heroic doses of drugs used in different combinations.”
Once he agreed to work for Britain’s intelligence services, money was no longer a problem and through U.S. drug companies he met like-minded psychiatrists.
From West he learned how the state of California had conducted psychosurgery experiments on three prisoners in 1968. Sargant met with other psychiatrists who said that “a certain percentage” of the black rioters in Detroit in 1967 had “brain damage” and that they “should be lobotomized to maintain social order.”
But, most disturbing of all, Sargant knew and approved of the “terminal” experiments the CIA had conducted on German nationals in post-war Germany.
This was the doctor whose methods would turn Anne White, a woman desperately seeking his help, into that zombie-like figure her own father saw when she emerged from the “care” of William Sargant.
For him, her depression was a chemical event. The invisible, choking substance that leaches out the spirit, he would say, was the result of some electrolytic imbalance in the brain. While he would concede that periods of depression, like flakes of snow, are not alike, “they are all formed on the template of past experience.”
To eradicate that past—however important it would be to retain for a patient—became the ultimate driving force behind William Sargant’s methods.
Despite all his outward signs of independence, he was himself held in thrall by that most secret of all places—the world of spies and those who work in counter-intelligence. It was one where action often cannot wait for certainty; where motive deception is at the center of endeavors; where techniques are designed to draw fact out of darkness; where the art of informed conjecture is the norm; where surmise is commonplace.
In St. Thomas’s Hospital, where care and doing no harm must always be the first priority, Sargant used many of the tactics of the intelligence community. In doing so he abused patients like Anne White, who trustingly put herself in his care.
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An amoral life...
His early subjects were the victims of “acute battle neurosis.” These were men who had simply cracked under the strain of a long war. They were written off as “lacking moral fiber.” But for Sargant they were ideal for his first steps into heavy sedation, drug-induced sleep, modified insulin treatment and barbiturate dosages. Not everyone approved. The sight of young men lying comatose for long periods only to be awakened for food and electroshock treatments did not sit easy with Sargant’s peers.
His destinations were mansions in the depths of the English countryside where those recovering from the dull gray years of World War II had found a new way to satisfy themselves at “swinger” parties. Many were out-and-out orgies—often attended by doctors, lawyers and pillars of their churches. |
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And there was another dark, secret side to William Sargant. He had a voracious sexual appetite that could not be satisfied by a normal relationship. Even though he had married a delightful woman named Peggy, he had made it clear he wanted no children. Whatever Peggy may have suspected, she never challenged him about the way he regularly disappeared for a weekend.
