Brain Implant Victims

[Note:1]

Excerpts:

Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A.

Alex Constantine

Portland, OR: Feral House, 1995

[…]

The moral squalor of the government’s RF mind-control program cried out for oversight, as one case history from the Los Angeles Herald[Note:2] makes clear:

A Suit Over Brain Surgery —

Man Hallucinates, Says Microwaves are Murdering Him

The subject was Leonard Kille, a talented electronics engineer. Kille was the holder of patents for inventions willed to MIT when his brain was disabled by CIA psychiatrists Vernon Mark of Boston City Hospital and UCLA’s Frank Ervin.

Kille was a co-inventor of the Land camera, named for Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation, an old boy of the CIA’s mind-control program. It was Land, in fact, who founded the Scientific Engineering Institute on behalf of the CIA. (The SEI appeared earlier in this account hosting a course on demonology and witchcraft at the University of South Carolina, and planting electrodes in the brains of human subjects.) Land’s CIA clique of “behaviorists” apparently drew their moral inspiration from the Death’s Head Order of the Waffen SS. At South Vietnam’s Bien Hoa Hospital, for example, an SEI team buried electrodes in the skulls of Vietcong POWs and attempted to spur them into violence by remote control. Upon completion of the experiments, the POWs were shot and cremated by a company of “America’s best,” the Green Berets.

Kille’s story is no less lurid. In 1966 he suspected that his wife was having an affair. She denied it. He didn’t believe her and flew into rages. A psychiatrist interpreted his anger as a “personality pattern disturbance,” and referred him to Mark and Ervin for neurological tests. They diagnosed him a mild psychomotor epileptic, and his jealousy was obviously “paranoia.” (As it happens, his wife was carrying on an affair with a boarder.) His psychiatrists described Kille as “uncontrolled,” “dangerous.” (In fact, Kille’s most violent outburst consisted of throwing tin cans at his wife—he missed her.) Kille was hospitalized and pressured into brain surgery. He refused at first, but his wife threatened divorce if he didn’t submit to his psychiatrists. The cruel irony was that she divorced him after the surgery anyway to marry her paramour.

In the operating room, four electrical strands running the length of his brain were implanted. Each strand was studded with 20 or so electrodes. It was only after surgery that Kille was asked to sign his consent with the strands in place, already zinging his brain.

Internal EEG activity was recorded. The voltage of the stimoceivers was boosted as part of Kille’s “treatment.”

Dr. Peter Breggin of the Center to Study Psychiatry, a rare ombudsman of psychiatric abuses, investigated the case and found despite the glowing reports of Mark and Ervin that the patient was “totally disabled, chronically hospitalized, and subject to nightmarish terrors that he will be caught and operated on again at the Massachusetts General Hospital.”

In 1971 an attendant found him with a wastebasket over his head to “stop the microwaves.” A sympathetic doctor at Boston’s VA hospital, where he was transferred, ordered for him “a large sheet of aluminum foil so he may fashion a protective helmet for himself. Good luck.” The VA doctors were not informed that Kille had been fitted with the electrode strands, and wrote him off as a delusional paranoiac.

“The Mass General and labs ... (are) killing all the useful cells in my brain,” he confided in a note to a VA doctor when the electrodes burned lesions into his amygdala, another “treatment.” It left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

Sweet and Ervin controlled his moods with electronic stimulation. They turned him up and turned him down, he said. The “haunting fear” left by Kille’s ordeal, a psychiatrist wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, is that “men may become slaves, perhaps to an authoritarian state.” […]

X-ray shows two deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes implanted on each side of a patient’s brain. Frontal view of eye sockets to top of skull. Above example is similar to some implants that have existed since the 1950s.   Image from “Brain Implant Offers Hope for Severely Depressed,” Michelle Trudeau, NeuroPsychiatric Reviews, May 2, 2005.

Intracerebral Radio Stimulation

and Recording in

Completely Free Patients

José M. R. Delgado, M.D.

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 147, No. 4, 1968

[…]

METHODS

Implantation of Electrodes

Electrodes were constructed and stereotaxically implanted according to methods previously described (Mark & Ervin, 1969). The electrode assemblies, which were connected to a McPherson skull plug, consisted of a plastic styled, 1.2mm in diameter, with 15 stainless steel 3mm wide contacts attached at 3mm intervals, plus one thermistor and three other contacts at the tip. Using a McPherson Type 2 stereotaxic machine (Mark & Ervin, 1969), electrode assemblies were implanted bilaterally into the anterior medial amygdala of each patient. […]

Stimoceiver

The integration of the three-channel units for radio stimulation and EEG telemetry constitutes the stimoceiver (stimulator and EEG receiver). […]

Figure 1  Two patients instrumented for intracerebral radio stimulation and recording engage in spontaneous activities (one is playing the guitar) in the psychiatric ward in the presence of the doctor (VM). Explorations of the brain can be performed for as long as necessary without disturbing the patients. […]

Clinical Applications of the Stimoceiver

1. L. K. This 35-year-old white male design engineer had experienced attacks of staring and automatisms for 10 to 12 years. […]

2. M. R. This 25-year-old white male suffered from encephalitis as an infant and a severe head injury in the Navy. [...]

3. J. P. This 20-year-old white female had a history of encephalitis at the age of 18 months. [...]

4. G. C. This 14-year-old Negro girl was brought up in a foster home and was of borderline intelligence. [...]

Figure I Patient Julia in a pleasant mood. This shows her immediately before stimulation. It is after surgery that placed implants in her head. (Eyes covered in picture to protect identity.)     Figure II Telemetered EEG tracings taken in Julia. Remotely recorded brain waves from three channels for activity deep in her brain and simultaneous with her behavior in Figure I.     Figure III X-ray of an unidentified patient with brain implants similar to Julia’s. Lateral view from lower jaw to top of skull. Large parts of the devices and surrounding wires are located at back of skull with electrodes extended forward to areas deep in the brain.     Figure IV Telemetered EEG tracings taken in Julia. Remotely recorded brain waves from three points inside her brain and simultaneous with remote-controlled electric current from the implants stimulating her brain.     Figure V Julia attacking wall after stimulation. Attack against the wall was both sudden and unexpected. Remote-controlled electrical current from the implants affected her brain and behavior.     Figure VI Telemetered EEG tracings taken in Julia. Remotely recorded brain waves from three areas down in her brain and simultaneous with her actions in Figure V.     “In addition, we were able to use the ‘stimoceiver’—the same telemetered device used to send signals and receive information from orbiting astronauts. … Attaching the stimoceiver to implanted electrodes makes it possible to record or stimulate points deep within the brain touching the electrodes, from a distance … without the use of connecting wires; and because the patient is unrestricted, this stimulation and recording can be carried out over a long period of time.”   Images and quote from Violence and the Brain, Vernon H. Mark, M.D. and Frank R. Ervin, M.D., New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Campaigns Against Racist Federal Programs

by the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology

Peter R. Breggin, M.D.

Journal of African American Men, 1:No. 3, 3-22. Winter 1995/96

[…]

The Fate of Thomas R.

In their book, Violence and the Brain (1970), and elsewhere, Mark and Ervin described Thomas R. (sometimes called Leonard K.) as a young white man largely saved from epilepsy and completely saved from violence by psychosurgery. When describing his outcome, they mention no serious side effects. He was their star patient.

The patient’s mother, Mrs. G., read my criticism of Mark and Ervin in the Boston Globe and realized for the first time what had been done to her son. She wrote to me that in reality he had been reduced almost to a “vegetable.” Thomas’s tragic story is retold in detail in Breggin and Breggin, The War Against Children.

Mark and Ervin Lose Their Funding

As a result of the anti-psychosurgery campaign, all of Mark, Ervin and Sweet’s federal funding for genetic and psychosurgical experimentation was cut off. As a long-delayed satisfaction to us, we learned this year that the Center’s campaign against the DOJ’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funding for Ervin had brought about a dramatic reversal in official government policy. A guideline entitled “Use of LEAA funds for Psychosurgery and Medical Research” was signed by the LEAA administrator, Donald E. Santarelli, on June 19, 1974. The guideline declared that any future grant applications for psychosurgery would be denied. It further stipulated that all “medical research,” unless risk-free, would be denied and referred instead to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW, now DHHS). It forbid states to use LEAA block grants to do psychosurgery or medical experimentation.

Operating on Little Black Children

As far as we know, Mark and Ervin did not perform their psychosurgery experiments on any African Americans. With more limited political aims, perhaps, another surgeon was operating on numerous black children. When I began researching the return of psychosurgery in the early 1970s, I quickly came upon the work of O. J. Andy, Director of Neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi—Ole Miss—in Jackson. He was publishing reports on multiple surgical interventions into the brains of small children, ages five to twelve, who were diagnosed as aggressive and hyperactive. Of his 30-40 patients, he wrote me in 1971, most were children.

Before the controversy hit the press, I phoned Andy, who told me he could not recall the race of any of the children. Later I contacted a civil rights attorney in Mississippi who was able to determine that most of them were housed in a segregated black institution for the developmentally disabled. The attorney got onto the wards, where the nurses told him with frustration that Andy had a completely free hand in picking children for psychosurgery.

In 1966 Andy described J. M., age nine, who was “hyperactive, aggressive, combative, explosive, destructive, sadistic.” Over a three-year period Andy performed four separate mutilating operations involving at least six lesions with implanted electrodes. The youngster was at first said to be doing well. In a subsequent 1970 article, Andy again claimed that J. M. is no longer so combative and negative. Then he added, “Intellectually, however, the patient is deteriorating.”

While Andy did not take an activist political position like Mark, Ervin, and Sweet—he did tell B. J. Mason, a reporter for Ebony, that black urban rioters “could have abnormal pathologic brains” and “should undergo tests with whatever capacity we have now.” Following world-wide publicity about his operations during the anti-psychosurgery campaign, in 1973 a committee of his peers at the university declared his research experimental. When Andy did not establish appropriate experimental protocols, he was prohibited from operating. Andy himself declared in 1980 that he had been forced to stop operating due to “sociological pressures” in his home community.

Violence Centers Throughout Urban America

In his 1973 State of the State message, California governor Ronald Reagan announced plans for the establishment of a biomedical facility, the Center for the Study of the Reduction of Violence. Supported by state and federal funds, the first center was planned for the psychiatry department at UCLA, headed by Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a flamboyant psychiatrist known for his ability to hitch himself to hot topics. An early draft of West’s proposed UCLA center described using schools in Chicano and African American neighborhoods to screen for possible genetic defects. It also mentioned the possibility of psychosurgery. The suggestion of psychosurgery for control of violence was especially menacing in California because Santa Monica neurosurgeon M. H. Brown was strongly advocating it. In a January 22, 1972 letter to the Los Angeles Times, he wrote, “It is either this [psychosurgery] or a further escalation of violence and chaos in society that does not serve the best interests of the United States.”

Meanwhile, Frank Ervin left the collapsing Boston project and came to join West at UCLA. Ervin’s arrival at this critical juncture alerted people to the center’s potential dangers. Despite denials from psychiatrists West and Ervin, the discovery of references to genetics and psychosurgery in the original proposal proved politically fatal. Opposed by the Center and a coalition of west coast reformers,3 the planned string of federal violence centers never got off the ground. [...]

3 Opposition to the violence centers was broadbased: psychologist and attorney Edward M. Opton, Jr., psychiatrists Lee Coleman and Phil Shapiro, civil rights and women’s groups, African American activists, and many psychiatric survivors, including Leonard Frank and Wade Hudson.

X-ray reveals a series of electrodes implanted in a patient’s brain. Graphic on right displays brainwave readings from electrodes noted by lines. Lateral view of upper jaw to top of skull. Above example is comparable to some implants and procedures utilized since the 1950s.   Images from “UC Researchers Create Model of Brain’s Electrical Storm During a Seizure,” Sarah Yang, EurekaAlert!, February 23, 2005.

Cold War Guinea Pigs

The Government’s Secret Experiments

Using Radiation, Mind Control,

Chemicals and Drugs on its Citizens

[cover]

The Cold War Experiments

Radiation tests were only one small part of a vast research

program that used thousands of Americans as guinea pigs

Stephen Budiansky, Erica E. Goode, and Ted Gest

U.S. News and World Report, January 24, 1994

[...]

Many of the stories of people whose lives were destroyed by mind-altering drugs, electroshock “treatments” and other military and CIA experiments involving toxic chemicals or behavior modification have been known for almost 20 years. But U.S. News has discovered that only a handful were ever compensated—or even told what was done to them. “There has essentially been no legitimate follow-up, despite the CIA’s promise to track down the victims and see what happened to them,” says Alan Scheflin, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School and an authority on cold war mind-control research. “It’s just one of the many broken promises.” A CIA spokesman last week said the agency is searching its files for radiation tests but has no plans to revisit other human experimentation.

MKULTRA. Most victims have never been informed by the government of the nature of the experiments they were subjected to or, in some cases, even the fact that they were subjects. In a 1977 hearing, then CIA director Stansfield Turner said he found the experiments “abhorrent” and promised that the CIA would find and notify the people used in the tests. Turner last week insisted that “they found everyone they possibly could find.” But internal memos and depositions taken from CIA officials in a lawsuit against the agency in the 1980s reveal that of the hundreds of experimental subjects used in the CIA’s mind-control program, code-named MKULTRA, only 14 were ever notified and only one was compensated—for $15,000. [...]

In 1955, the Army supported research at Tulane University in which mental patients had electrodes implanted in their brains to measure the LSD and other drugs. In other experiments, volunteers were kept in sensory-deprivation chambers for as long as 131 hours and bombarded with white noise and taped messages until they began hallucinating. The goal: to see if they could be “converted” to new beliefs. [...]

Brain implant is 4 mm by 4 mm with 100 tiny electrodes that read neural signals. The chip transmits the signals via cable or telemetry to computers that translate the data. Patients with the implants manage emails, draw circles with software, play video games, and control televisions using only their thoughts. Above example resembles some implants, methods, and results reported since the 1960s.   Image from “Brain Implants for Paralysis Victims,” Brian Liu, Global National, July 12, 2006.