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MI6 Pays up to British Servicemen over Secret 'Mind Control'
Quote:
Three British ex-servicemen given LSD without their consent in secret military experiments in the 1950s were granted an out-of-court settlement from the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, last week.
The men, who participated in the experiment on the understanding that they were being tested for a cure for the common cold, experienced terrifying hallucinations and claimed to have suffered flashbacks many years after.
Don Webb, a former airman, told the Guardian that he was 19 when he saw "walls melting, cracks appearing in people's faces … eyes would run down cheeks, Salvador Dali-type faces".
The experiments were conducted at the government's chemical research base Porton Down in 1953 and 1954 and are thought to have been an attempt to assess whether the newly developed LSD could be used as a "truth drug" in questioning cold war spies.
At the time psychologists were investigating cases of what later became known as "brain-washing", during the Korean War, in which American PoWs held by the Chinese confessed to crimes that they had not committed, apparently believing full-well in their testimony.
Many thought at the time that the communists had used a chemical agent to hack into and tamper with subject's memories. The Porton Down experiments are now widely seen as MI6's attempt to test the potential of LSD in this respect.
"Clearly these men were duped and subjected to unethical LSD thought control experiments. MI6 should release all its documents about these trials — national secrets will not be compromised," Alan Care, the lawyer representing the three ex-servicemen, was quoted as saying in the Guardian last year.
However he later said that his requests were rejected.
The men are thought to have been awarded under £10,000 each. Mr Webb told the BBC that he felt that it was the closest to an apology he could ever expect.
"I think they grudgingly acknowledged that they did something wrong. They stick to the old maxim: never apologise, never explain," he said on Friday.
The servicemen in the experiments did not know that they had been given LSD until 50 years later.
According to the Guardian , a scientist involved in the experiments said that they were later called off after concerns that the drug could induce suicidal tendencies. An official document obtained by the newspaper was said to describe the tests as "tentative and inadequately controlled".
The LSD experiments formed part of a series of experiments held at Porton Down in Wiltshire in which a range of chemical substances were tested on humans in a "volunteers programme" which stretched more than 50 years, from 1916 to 1985. Up to 20,000 people were thought to have taken part.
Last year a former soldier Thomas Roche successfully sued the government for a violation of his human rights through experiments in the 1960s in which he was subjected to mustard gas and nerve-damaging agents.
After the case investigating the death of a serviceman at Porton Down was thrown out in 2003, Liberal Democrat MP at the time Matthew Taylor told the Telegraph that the government had been let off the hook. "We will never know who in the MoD took the decisions to press ahead with these tests, what knowledge there was of the likely risk from nerve agents and above all how many people really suffered."
Later on, psychologists attributed cases of brain-washing in China and Soviet Russia to persuasive techniques such as ideological study sessions, assumed guilt, and the encouragement of confession as an escape from either the threat of or use of physical torture.
