MKUltra: The Sleep Room - CIA Brainwashing & Dr. Ewen Cameron Pt. 3

A 26-year-old mother of five walks into a respected Montreal hospital because she cannot sleep. She has postpartum depression. The most decorated psychiatrist alive puts her into a drug-induced coma for eighty-six days, delivers more than a hundred rounds of electroshock, and loops a recording of her own voice under her pillow for weeks. When she wakes, she does not know her name, her husband, or that she has five children. She never gets a single memory back.

This was not an interrogation. It was supposed to be treatment.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel close their three-part series on MKUltra with its darkest chapter: "The Sleep Room," the story of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

By the late 1950s, Cameron was the most decorated psychiatrist in the Western world, president of the American, Canadian, and World psychiatric associations all at once. He also believed he could cure mental illness by erasing a person's mind entirely and writing a new one on top, a two-stage process he called depatterning and psychic driving. In 1957 the CIA found out, and through a front foundation tied to MKUltra, it started writing him checks.

We walk through what happened inside that hospital. The coma ward patients called the Sleep Room. Electroshock at many times the standard voltage, two and three times a day. Tape loops played hundreds of thousands of times into the ears of people who could no longer remember their own names. Sensory deprivation lasting weeks. Curare used to paralyze patients so they could not pull the headphones off. And the people it was done to: Velma Orlikow, a politician's wife who came home unable to recognize her own daughter and later said she had been treated like just a fly; Robert Logie, an eighteen-year-old sent in for a sore leg; and others whose lives simply did not come back.

But the reason this is the finale, and the reason it should keep you up, is what came after. Cameron's research did not die with him on a hiking trail in 1967. It was cited by name in the CIA's 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, exported to the dirty wars of Latin America, rewritten in 1983, and echoed almost line for line in the enhanced-interrogation program after September 11: the black sites, Abu Ghraib, and the techniques the 2014 Senate report documented in detail and concluded produced nothing. The files were burned in 1973. The recipe survived in the cabinet next door. As we record this, a class action over the Montreal experiments is moving through the Quebec courts.

This is the story of how a program that supposedly ended never really did. This is "The Sleep Room."

This is the final part of our three-part MKUltra series. New episodes drop every Mugshot Monday. Search Mugshot Mysteries wherever you listen.

SOURCES:

U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), hearings and reports on the CIA's MKUltra program, 1975 to 1976; Rockefeller Commission Report, 1975; surviving MKUltra financial records recovered under the Freedom of Information Act, including documentation of Subproject 68 funding routed through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology; Marks, J., The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control, 1979; Collins, A., In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada, 1988; the published research of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron on "depatterning" and "psychic driving," including papers in the American Journal of Psychiatry; Orlikow v. United States, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, filed 1980 and settled 1988, brought by Velma Orlikow and other former Allan Memorial Institute patients; firsthand accounts of Velma Orlikow, Robert Logie, Linda MacDonald, and other patients as documented in litigation, journalism, and CBC's The Fifth Estate reporting beginning 1980; the Montreal Experiments class action authorized by the Quebec Superior Court (Justice Dominique Poulin, July 31, 2025) against the Government of Canada, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and McGill University, with lead plaintiffs Lana Ponting and Julie Tanny; the 1986 George Cooper report to the Canadian government on Cameron's depatterning work; the CIA KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, 1963, and the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, 1983, both declassified in 1997 following Baltimore Sun reporting; documentation of CIA-linked interrogation training in Latin America and the Honduran intelligence unit known as Battalion 3-16; U.S. Department of Defense memoranda authorizing "enhanced interrogation techniques," 2002; the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, executive summary released December 2014; reporting and litigation concerning contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, including Salim v. Mitchell; obituary coverage of Donald Ewen Cameron, 1967.

DISCLAIMER:

Content warning: This episode describes nonconsensual medical and psychiatric experimentation, including drug-induced comas, high-voltage electroconvulsive treatment, sensory deprivation, chemically induced paralysis, and the psychological destruction of vulnerable patients, among them new mothers, a teenager, and, by some accounts, children and a pregnant woman. It also discusses torture, enhanced interrogation, and a death associated with the MKUltra program. Please take care while listening. Nothing in this episode constitutes medical, psychological, or legal advice.

The Mugshot Mysteries podcast is independently produced and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any individual, agency, hospital, university, government, or institution referenced in this episode, including the Central Intelligence Agency, McGill University, the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute, the Government of Canada, or the U.S. Department of Defense.

Our account is drawn from publicly available sources, including declassified U.S. government records, Congressional and commission reports, court filings and settlements, surviving financial documentation, the published research of those involved, investigative journalism, and the firsthand accounts of patients and their families. Many key MKUltra records were destroyed in 1973, and as a result figures such as patient counts, treatment totals, dates, and funding amounts vary across sources and remain incomplete or disputed. Where exact numbers are uncertain, we have tried to say so.

The allegations at the center of the ongoing Montreal Experiments class action have not been decided on the merits, and the defendants have disputed liability. A 1986 Canadian government review reached its own conclusions regarding legal responsibility. References to any person, living or deceased, are made in the context of documented history, public records, and reporting, and are not intended to defame, harass, or cause harm.

The connections this episode draws between Cameron's research and later interrogation programs reflect the documented citation of that research in declassified manuals together with the hosts' own analysis and interpretation. Characterizations of past and present United States and Canadian government policy, and of specific administrations, are the hosts' opinions and commentary, are current as of the recording date, and are not statements of established fact or legal conclusions. Listeners are encouraged to consult the primary sources cited above and to draw their own conclusions. Any third-party names and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners and are referenced under fair use for purposes of commentary, criticism, and reporting. Nothing in this episode constitutes medical, psychological, or legal advice.