To discover all this, and as you will see, a great deal more about William Sargant has, for me, been shocking. Not just for what he did, but because I had counted Sargant as a friend. So to discover he was a monster, who managed to hide the truth about his work even after MK ULTRA had been exposed, was indeed painful.
|
To eradicate the past
|
The shock is perhaps even greater because for over 30 years I have reported on the activities of the secret intelligence world, today a $100 billion global industry employing over a million people.
I was aware of this secret world’s use of psychiatrists, psychologists, behaviorists and neurologists in mind manipulation.
I was one of the first writers to gain access to some 200,000 CIA documents on MK ULTRA, many still secret. They were passed to me by a former CIA officer who felt “guilty and ashamed” over what the agency had done.
When I was a BBC producer, Sargant had appeared on my television shows.
Under the promise not to divulge him as the source, he told me about his work for MI5 and MI6 to evaluate the activities of Ewen Cameron.
Sargant told me over dinner in his London club and later, sipping coffee in his Harley Street apartment, how much he “hated what Cameron did. The chap was totally unethical.” Cameron was then a key psychiatrist in the MK ULTRA program.
A few miles from where we sat in cozy companionship, on the other side of the Thames, William Sargant was doing exactly what Cameron had done.
Not once did he hint he was cast from the same medical mold. That he, too, conducted totally unethical experiments; that he had repeatedly flown secretly to Washington to meet with Gottlieb and other CIA chemists to exchange ideas on mind-control.
William Sargant told me nothing of this. He just wanted to focus on others. In doing so, he insisted I would not write any of what he told me about them until after his own death. It was an undertaking I would not break; it would go against my own standard of what is ethical.
Sargant died on August 27, 1988. With his death I was freed of my undertaking and slowly began to explore his background. It was not easy; he still had powerful friends in the World Psychiatric Association he had helped to establish, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
While they accepted he was an iconoclast and controversial, they tried to steer me away from his work beyond the medical papers he had written along with best-selling books. Before his death he had given me a set. They offered insights into his thinking.
But again nothing was in his writing about his own direct links to the nightmarish world of mind-control; his role in the search for new technologies to make it possible to intervene in private lives as never before.
Looking back through my notes on our many conversations, I tried to find clues to Sargant’s motives for telling me what he had. Was it somehow a desire to justify to himself his own actions? The anecdotage of an old man, even perhaps expiation?
Then Anne White contacted me. She had read a story of mine relating to Frank Olson’s death. It had contained a reference to William Sargant. It was the starting point for what you are now about to read.
