“The Sleep Room”
Sargant’s Sleep Room was modeled on the one Ewen Cameron had created in the Allan Memorial Institute as part of the MK ULTRA program.
At the back of Sargant’s department was a dormitory with six single beds. Each bed was a foot apart and a low-wattage bulb provided sufficient light for the nurses to be able to see.
At the institute, Sargant had seen Cameron’s patients “lying inert or sometimes whispering unintelligibly. When it was time to feed them they were spoon-fed. When it was time to go to the toilet they were placed on a commode and then lifted back into bed.”
Injected with Largactil (Thorazine) and Seconal to keep her in a drugged sleep, Anne was placed in the Sleep Room. There she received doses of other drugs, Amitriptyline and Nardil.
This was what life was like for her over the ensuing weeks.
“I don’t ever remember being taken to a bathroom or lavatory, although that must have happened. Unfortunately I was so drugged up that every time I stood, I passed out, because my blood pressure dropped into my boots. I don’t remember talking to any patients. I could just see the next bed but no details. When I reached the point that the medication wouldn’t keep me asleep, however much they gave me, I lay in the dark with virtually no auditory input. I think I remember listening to tapes. But I can’t be sure and that may be something which is a false memory.”
It was not a figment of her drugged mind. Sargant, like Cameron, had devised a system where all patients in the Sleep Room received endless instructions on a tape loop. They were played through a recorder placed under each pillow.
Sargant had balked at Cameron’s proposal that he should use the system operating at the Allan Memorial Institute. There patients received their messages through adapted football helmets strapped to their heads.
There was another link between Sargant and Cameron: Leonard Rubenstein. He worked for MI5. At the Allan Memorial Institute he ran the “research and behavioral laboratory.” There he created the tape loops. He had flown to London to show Sargant how they should be fashioned.
I traced Rubenstein to his home in Hammersmith, London. I wanted him to explain how he, with no medical qualifications, had been allowed to work on seriously ill patients. When I started to question him, he hung up the phone. When I called back I was informed the line was no longer in service. I then discovered Rubenstein still has links to MI5.
“A Blurred, Pounding Emptiness”
In between lying in the Sleep Room, Anne White was wheeled to a treatment room for electroshock.
She later discovered she had been given 26 brain-damaging bi-lateral shock “treatments.”
Each time, the electrodes were attached to her temples and the current was turned up to roughly the power required to light a 100-watt bulb—far brighter than all the lights in the Sleep Room.
The only protection against the grand mal seizure which followed was the muscle-relaxant drug she received.
When she awoke back in the Sleep Room her head throbbed with pain. “My mind felt like a blurred, pounding emptiness.” She began to feel “like a zombie.”
But despite this harsh regime, the spirit of resistance still flickered in Anne’s mind. She demanded a halt to the treatment.
The nurses in the Sleep Room consulted with Sargant. Suddenly, Anne recalled: “I was placed in a small room by myself. I was left to my own devices while I went through a week of barbiturate withdrawal. The nurses hardly bothered with me. I was the one who had dared to challenge the system. I felt I was being punished.”
Truth emerges
Eric Olson (left), son of murdered CIA researcher Frank Olson (right), has made it a lifelong crusade to explore the circumstances that led to his father’s death in November 1953. As the elder Mr. Olson was a chemist involved in analysis of chemical agents for military and intelligence use, he was vulnerable to the suspicions and deceit of the program’s coercive mindset. Eric is providing “a laboratory for the conversion of the secretive ... system that led to” his father’s death, bringing it into the open network of the World Wide Web. For information visit www.frankolsonproject.org.
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