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It is August 1951 and an entire French village goes crazy. People are screaming in the streets and throwing themselves out of windows. 300 people are affected and 7 end up dead. Wild theories start circulating to explain the tragedy. 60 years later declassified documents from the United States reveal that the CIA conducted experiments on unsuspecting citizens.
Diretor: Olivier Pighetti
Original title: Un village empoisonné par la CIA? Pont Saint Esprit 1951
Diretor: Olivier Pighetti
Original title: Un village empoisonné par la CIA? Pont Saint Esprit 1951
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AprendizadoTranscrição
00:00A CIDADE NO BRASIL
00:29A CIDADE NO BRASIL
00:59A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:01A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:03A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:05A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:07A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:09A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:11A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:13A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:15A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:17A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:19A DOZENS OF LOCALS
01:21WERE SEIZED BY CONVOLSIONS
01:23LIKE IN A NIGHT OF THE APOCALYPSE
01:25REPORTS FROM THE VICTIMS
01:27ARE TERRIFYING
01:29CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:31A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:33CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:35A CIDADE NO BRASIL
01:37Impossible de fermer-la
01:39Malgré tous les calmements
01:41Les somnifères que le médecin
01:43A pu m'administrer
01:45Alors il est évident
01:47Quand on reste 21 nuits sans dormir
01:49L'esprit travaille
01:51se dressando em seu quarto,
01:54vendo o sangue que tomava do plafond
01:55de fora, vendo os tigres
01:58que bondissem sobre, os lions,
02:00os urs que vinha demorar.
02:02E então, naquele momento,
02:03criando, obviamente, por um sangue terrível,
02:06os cabos que saem da boca.
02:08Ela sempre tinha a impressão que ela tinha
02:09sua cabeça plena de cabos. Ela se arrachou
02:12como assim, para eliminar
02:14seus cabos que ela não chegava.
02:15E você se lembra de algo, mademoiselle?
02:18Não, não, senhor.
02:19Em Pont-Saint-Esprit,
02:21eles chamam isso o Cursed Bread Drama,
02:24porque todos os que foram mal
02:25amados com a carne do Brion
02:27Bacery.
02:28É a primeira vez em França
02:30que toda a cidade tem ido mal.
02:33It fez notícias em pressão.
02:35Quem perguntou?
02:36O que poderia ter causado
02:37essa coletiva coletiva?
02:41Em Pont-Saint-Esprit,
02:42os locais pancam
02:43e ninguém vai tocar o carne.
02:49Os cabos chegam rapidamente
02:51na cidade.
02:53Em total,
02:547 mortos,
02:55300 pessoas
02:56e cerca de 50
02:58admitidos
02:59para as lojas psíquiatricas.
02:59300 pessoas
03:10intoxicadas.
03:11Oh, é, é, é.
03:12Oh, é, é.
03:14Isso me lembra,
03:14me lembra um triste souvenir.
03:17Triste, très triste.
03:18Triste.
03:19Tem pessoas que estavam um pouco...
03:21Sim, eles não estavam em casa,
03:24eles não sabiam muito onde eles moravam.
03:26Tem pessoas que saiam de suas luas,
03:27até lá para fazer um pouco.
03:28Bref.
03:30Sim.
03:32Eu acho que era o pobre Puche
03:35que disse isso.
03:37O meu querido é morto,
03:39ele se colocou na porta da janela.
03:41Ele disse,
03:42olha, pessoal,
03:43eu sou uma libelula.
03:45Eu acho que ele disse a libelula.
03:47Ele não disse a irandela.
03:48Eu sou uma libelula.
03:51Eu volo.
03:52Eles eram realmente loucos.
03:55Eles não tinham visto o fogo.
03:56Eles não tinham visto o fogo,
03:58que o fogo.
03:59Alguns que se batiam,
04:01que se sentiam desfixos.
04:04Isso, eu me lembro,
04:05que era verdade.
04:07Eles se debatiam
04:08tanto que eles podiam.
04:11Eles criaiam.
04:12Oh, não.
04:13É uma horroia.
04:15É uma horroia.
04:18Os primeiros mortos foram mortos.
04:20Os investigadores pensavam
04:21que era o retorno
04:22do fogo de São Antônio.
04:23O que era o fogo de São Antônio.
04:25A doença que matou muitas milhas
04:26em Média.
04:27Os primeiros mortos
04:27causaram
04:28por um parasitismo
04:29ergo-fungus
04:30que atacou cereais.
04:36O que era?
04:37O que era?
04:37O que era?
04:37O que era?
04:37O que era?
04:38O que era?
04:38O que era?
04:39O que era?
04:39O que era?
04:39O que era?
04:40O que era?
04:40O que era?
04:41O que era?
04:41O que era?
04:42O que era?
04:42O que era?
04:42O que era?
05:02Mas as evidências despreuva essas teorias, uma por uma.
05:07Desde então, no Pont-Saint-Esprit, mais várias teorias afetadas foram surgiram.
05:32Um sac de farina, colocada em um sac de engrais.
05:40Isso teria muito bem chegado, isso.
05:43Tem um comi, e era alguém que não era muito...
05:47Ele tinha feito um pão de tudo, um pouco de...
05:52Eu, que conhecia o bem, sempre pensei que isso poderia ser apenas de ele.
05:59O produto foi colocado no boulanger.
06:02Eu disse, não, não é o boulanger que ele tinha feito.
06:06O boulanger, ele tem que ter feito um pão de tudo.
06:10Ah, você precisa saber quem.
06:14Então, não é ele, é alguém que não vai.
06:21Isso não é claro.
06:23Não é tudo.
06:28Nada é claro, e por décadas, o incidente continua inexplorado.
06:32Mas, com todas as expectativas, 60 anos depois...
06:36A new theory is proposed.
06:39Not from France, but from the United States.
06:42An American researcher in the Secret Services, Hank Alborelli,
06:50is investigating the suspicious death of a biochemist from the CIA, Frank Olson.
06:55A especialista in chemical weapons, he carried out experiments on hard drugs like LSD.
07:05He was also in France a few months before the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident.
07:10Afterwards, he kept sinking into depression, telling his wife that he'd made a terrible mistake.
07:24Hank Alborelli then made the link with the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident.
07:29Could it have been the CIA and the American army spraying LSD onto the bread?
07:34I have no doubt at all that Pont-Saint-Esprit was a U.S. Army covert experiment.
07:46Initially, I had doubts, and I think initially my doubts were motivated by wishful thinking on my part,
08:03where I didn't want it to be an experiment.
08:07You know, I just, it was hard to fathom the government doing that.
08:12Although at the same time, there were a number of research tracks that were being conducted for the book at the same time.
08:21So my being naive about what the government and the U.S. Army was capable of doing was,
08:30the threshold for that was becoming, was dwindling.
08:34Is it possible that the Americans drugged an entire village in an ally country,
08:42causing no doubt accidentally the death of seven people?
08:53Improbable.
08:54However.
08:55To understand what happened in Pont-Saint-Esprit,
09:06we need to look back at the end of the Second World War,
09:09when the level of atrocities committed by the Nazis was discovered in the camps.
09:14Notably, horrific experiments carried out on thousands of prisoners by chemists or doctors.
09:20Men lacerated, poisoned, burnt alive, exposed to radiation.
09:29The Allies hunted the war criminals from Hitler's regime.
09:33In 1946, in Nuremberg, the doctors are put on trial.
09:4322 men and one woman who experimented on human beings,
09:47who they transformed into lab rats, stand accused.
09:52The trial sets a precedent.
09:55Seven of the accused are sentenced to death,
09:5811 given prison sentences,
10:00and five are acquitted.
10:03As a result,
10:12the Americans draft the Nuremberg Code,
10:16a model which gives strict rules for experimenting on humans.
10:20Notably,
10:21the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
10:27The experiment must be designed to avoid all unnecessary suffering,
10:37physical, and mental harm.
10:40With the Nuremberg trial barely over,
10:43the winners remain cynical.
10:45The American Secret Service begins Operation Paperclip.
10:53Nearly 1,500 German scientists,
10:58including war criminals,
11:00are expatriated to America.
11:01It was a very serious game of propaganda that we were playing.
11:16It was almost a show trial.
11:25We're putting the Nazis on trial,
11:27but in fact,
11:28behind the curtain,
11:29we're doing some very nasty things ourselves
11:33to basically incarcerated people,
11:37poor people,
11:39individuals who at the time were called feeble-minded
11:42and locked up in institutions.
11:43And if you were in one of those institutions,
11:47whether you were indigent or an unwed mother
11:49or had some sort of mental incapacity,
11:53there's a good chance that you may have been incorporated
11:56in some sort of medical study,
11:58possibly for the government or not,
12:00where you would have been used and abused.
12:04Assisted by the German scientists,
12:07the Americans begin pursuing their goal of the ultimate weapon,
12:10and everything is allowed in the name of the Cold War.
12:16On the one side was the army,
12:19whose priority is to win the nuclear arms race.
12:30At the time,
12:31to test the effects of radiation on a large scale,
12:35they used their own soldiers,
12:37who were docile and disciplined.
12:40Between 1946 and 1962,
12:43between 250,000 and 500,000 men
12:47were exposed to radiation on Bikini Atoll
12:50or in the Nevada desert.
12:53They were exposed with no protection,
12:55unaware of the risks involved,
12:57and afterwards,
12:58the radiated particles were cleaned up with brooms.
13:02These images served as propaganda
13:04for an army wanting to show off its technological power.
13:07How about radiation?
13:12Do you think there's much danger from radiation?
13:14Well, radiation is the least of the worries
13:16that the men are thinking about.
13:18I think most people thought that radiation
13:20was the greatest danger, didn't they?
13:21What did they learn different?
13:22We were prior to our instructions here.
13:24We received a very thorough briefing
13:26before we even came in this close to contact with it.
13:28On the other side was the CIA,
13:33who was above all interested in psychological manipulation.
13:37Their goal was to create an infallible truth serum,
13:41wipe memories,
13:42turn humans into robots,
13:44and program them to kill.
13:45Conveniently, in 1948,
13:55a researcher in the Sandoz Laboratories,
13:58Albert Hoffman,
13:59discovers a molecule that ignites the secret service,
14:03lysergic acid diethylamide,
14:06or LSD.
14:07It's derived from the same rye fungus
14:12long held responsible for the incident
14:14at Pont Saint-Esprit.
14:18It was believed that the hallucinogenic properties
14:21of this drug
14:22were key to psychological manipulation.
14:25Fearing that the Russians
14:26would get their hands on Sandoz's samples,
14:29the Americans bought all of their stock.
14:32The discovery of LSD was a godsend for the army,
14:38who on the brink of nuclear weapons
14:39were looking for a weapon
14:41that could defeat an enemy
14:42without firing any weapons.
14:45The man who was head of this program longest
14:46was James Ketchum,
14:48shown here in uniform.
14:50He was a psychiatrist
14:51who was working for the military.
14:54As a patriot,
14:55he was prepared to push the boundaries
14:57in his research.
14:59He tested around 30 drugs,
15:01but especially LSD
15:03and the dangerous Benzalate.
15:09He treated 7,000 soldiers,
15:12hundreds of whom later sued the army
15:14because of the side effects
15:16that they still experience
15:17and attribute to these drugs.
15:21However, when questioned,
15:24James Ketchum sees things differently.
15:28I think they were very patriotic.
15:30They've not been given credit.
15:32They've been called innocent guinea pigs,
15:34which they certainly were not.
15:42They knew what they were doing,
15:44and we told them
15:45as much as we could about it.
15:47We had to limit the names of the drugs
15:52because some of them
15:54were artificially made.
15:57And if we were to give out the name,
16:00of course,
16:00that would also reveal the structure.
16:04And we were afraid the Russians
16:06would get that.
16:07They were apparently following our work.
16:09We thought they were ahead of us,
16:11but actually they weren't.
16:13and so they were watching what we did
16:16to see what they could learn and use,
16:19and they developed a similar drug later themselves.
16:22No, it was kind of Brooks.
16:24You just said you were okay.
16:24You were trying to do not joke.
16:25That I've almost done you.
16:25You were able to do this,
16:26and you wanted to do that.
16:27And we thought actually,
16:28they already did.
16:29You all know what to do.
16:30And look at that note.
16:32Sometimes it went to normal.
16:33Then it went to normal.
16:34And they put stuff up to random.
16:35So he had to explain,
16:36but there was in doubt
16:38because yeah,
16:38there was no,
16:39it was like an environment
16:39that it worked well.
16:40And all for others
16:41it sounded.
16:42And in that time
16:43didn't discuss
16:45the Brewhisz
16:47that samper
16:48A CIDADE NO BRASIL
17:18He also highlights this video of volunteers who received minimal doses of LSD.
17:30A few minutes later, they were incapable of responding to simple orders
17:35or even doing basic exercises.
17:49In parallel with the Army, the CIA was also developing its own programs,
17:55codenamed Bluebird, Artichoke, and later, MKUltra.
18:01But to carry out these programs on a large scale, they needed funds.
18:04In 1950, the Korean War gave them the ideal pretext.
18:12Some American soldiers were captured.
18:14During their detention, pilots admitted having dropped chemical weapons onto Korea,
18:22which was forbidden.
18:24The Americans claimed this was due to psychological manipulation,
18:28and the CIA took advantage of this godsend to obtain budgets that allowed them to work on brainwashing.
18:35During the Korean War, the American pilots who were captured
18:40started making apparently false confessions of germ warfare.
18:44The first question is, was it really false confessions?
18:55But then when they were brought back to the United States,
18:58the military and the military psychiatrists studied them
19:02and decided that there's mind control operations being run against Americans.
19:09So for defensive purposes, we had to study this, figure it out.
19:12Therefore, we created MKUltra.
19:15Before MKUltra was Bluebird and Artichoke.
19:18So the whole rationale is it's defensive.
19:22It's because of what the communists are doing.
19:25The problem is, the Korean War started in June 1950,
19:29and Bluebird was signed into operation by the head of the CIA in April 1950.
19:35The race is on, and there are no limits.
19:41Devastating drugs are given to animals,
19:43but it's mainly human subjects who interest the scientists.
19:50In the Edgewood camp where James Ketchum worked,
19:53soldiers are called upon more and more.
19:56They think they're testing gas masks.
19:59In reality, the canisters are filled with a toxic chemical.
20:05They were testing a whole assortment of different hallucinogens,
20:10like LSD and marijuana and things like that.
20:13And they explored other drugs,
20:15very high levels of atropine, scopolamine, benzylates, very powerful.
20:20And a lot of these soldiers ended up incapacitated.
20:25It took them a long time to recover.
20:28And while they're in recovery,
20:30the doctors cannot do any more experiments
20:32because it's basically a very small base and testing operation.
20:37In other words, they needed a new site.
20:39It's in this context of the Cold War and secret agents
20:50that on the 16th of August, 1951,
20:54the tragedy at Pont Saint-Esprit unfolded.
20:58France was suffering economically,
21:00and the Americans distrusted this ally they couldn't control.
21:04The village was under the control of socialists at the time.
21:08In the eyes of America, they were Reds,
21:11the epitome of the Soviet danger.
21:13But the mayor, Roger Castillon,
21:16doesn't believe in a foreign conspiracy.
21:22Ce que j'ai du mal à imaginer,
21:24c'est pourquoi Pont Saint-Esprit
21:26serait devenu le terreau expérimental de la CIA, voilà.
21:37Quelqu'un qui fait quelque chose, il le fait pour une raison, quoi.
21:39Donc c'est ça que je ne perçois pas bien.
21:42Donc je ne jouais pas bien pourquoi la CIA serait derrière cet événement-là.
21:52Yet American experts like Colin Ross are much more down-to-earth.
21:59Obviously that compound didn't just come in the rain,
22:04or just wasn't sitting around naturally.
22:06It was obviously organized, controlled, distributed.
22:10So whether it was actually LSD or some other compound
22:14doesn't make that much difference.
22:17Pont Saint-Esprit is actually not just this happened once in the world
22:21in a village in France.
22:23It's consistent with all the other experiments on the public
22:26that have done in the United States
22:28and done for a documented fact.
22:34To achieve their goals,
22:36would the Americans be prepared to use a whole village as a laboratory?
22:41After all, these are civilians, not trained soldiers.
22:44However, in September 1950,
22:51nearly one year before Pont Saint-Esprit,
22:54this is exactly what they did,
22:56and in their own country.
22:59Off the coast of San Francisco,
23:01the American Marines were carrying out military maneuvers.
23:04A ship approached the coast
23:06and bombarded the city
23:08with a bacteria causing
23:09Nucosomia,
23:11Ceratia marcasans.
23:13The military were testing the effects
23:15of spraying this through the air.
23:18This classified secret defense map
23:20shows the scale of the targeted area.
23:23At least 11 people were hospitalized,
23:26one of whom died of pneumonia.
23:27These are proven facts.
23:38The official documents on this have been declassified.
23:47But at Pont Saint-Esprit,
23:49the population remains skeptical.
23:52After so many different theories,
23:54a plot by the Americans just seems fanciful.
23:57The American Marines
23:59So now...
24:00So now...
24:01So now...
24:02So now...
24:02Now I don't think of it.
24:03So now...
24:04No...
24:06No...
24:07No...
24:08No...
24:08Well...
24:08So...
24:09They would not come with a piece of paper
24:11to cut in Pont Saint-Esprit
24:13to put a poison here?
24:16And that would have put the American Marines in the whole.
24:19So...
24:20So...
24:21My humble opinion,
24:23it's still an admissible joke.
24:26Porque nós fazemos algo bem ou não fazemos.
24:56Some individuals could have a bad trip if someone gave them LSD and didn't tell them about it.
25:04That's very anxiety-producing.
25:07Or if they were inexperienced and not particularly well-balanced themselves,
25:13took a fairly large dose of LSD, they could have a bad trip.
25:18How would you feel if you had a cup of coffee and started to see things going like this or like this?
25:29Brilliant colors appear on the ceiling or suddenly you felt you were out of your body and looking down on yourself.
25:39These are all things that can happen with LSD.
25:44But can these effects have a delayed onset?
25:46In Pont Saint-Esprit, the older generation remember the night of the apocalypse,
25:51where dozens of men went mad and were sectioned in a psychiatric unit because of terrifying visions.
25:57This night took place more than two weeks after the cursed bread was consumed.
26:02But again, James Ketchum admits that it's possible.
26:07Some individuals had flashbacks later in which they would go into a situation
26:13where they had been when they were taking LSD and have a flood of the same emotions
26:22and some of them anxiety-producing.
26:29In 1951, French investigators also consider LSD and call upon Albert Hoffman, inventor of the drug.
26:36On the spot, he tells the investigators that he has no doubt that the hallucinations were due to LSD.
26:43But after returning to Switzerland, he backtracks, claiming he was mistaken.
26:48The French want explanations, but public health documents from 1951 show that the expert became suddenly unreachable.
26:56We are sorry that the eminent professor has not been able to get back in touch with us.
27:06I would think if the Sandoz scientists are saying it doesn't seem to be LSD,
27:11they're just trying to cover up the fact that it's 100% for sure that LSD must have come from Sandoz,
27:17because they were the only suppliers.
27:19After months of inquiry, the French investigators were so disoriented by the number of fruitless leads
27:31that the incident at Pont Saint-Esprit falls victim to its own mystery.
27:44During this time, the experiments continued in the United States,
27:47and they reached a level never seen before in any country, including the Soviet bloc.
27:59Entire populations bore the consequence of large-scale tests.
28:05Here are some examples, again uncontested cases, that are recognized by the American government.
28:12In 1953, radioactive iodine was injected into newborns and pregnant women at Iowa University and also in Nebraska.
28:26In 1955, the CIA sprayed whooping cough bacteria off the coast of Tampa.
28:31Two died, and dozens fell ill.
28:34Also in 1955, the CIA enlisted prostitutes in San Francisco, opened two brothels and tested drugs on the clients.
28:50The sex was then filmed through a one-way mirror.
28:54In 1956, the Army released millions of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and dengue on the towns of Savannah and Avon.
29:08There were several deaths and hundreds of people infected.
29:12In 1960, in Cincinnati, the Army financed a radiation program on 90 destitute or ill inhabitants of the city's University Hospital.
29:26Some died after several weeks.
29:34In 1966, the Army tested a virus in the New York Metro, then in Chicago.
29:40The bacteria was concealed in electric bulbs.
29:44The aim was to study the spread of chemical agents on a large scale.
29:48For these experiments, the Army or the CIA funded laboratories in the most prestigious universities.
29:58Yale, Stanford, Harvard, or Columbia.
30:02They all took part.
30:04Glorified by the idea of working for the nation's defense, the researchers went crazy.
30:10Dr. Kligman in Philadelphia increases a dosage 468 times, which actually frightened Dow Chemical.
30:22They couldn't believe that a respected doctor would do that.
30:26In Washington, D.C., you had Walter Freeman, who was a very, very well-known lobotomist,
30:32who traveled around the country doing lobotomies in his car.
30:36And he would use an ice pick.
30:39He could do 15 to 20 in a day.
30:53It was just incredible what some doctors did.
30:56And very few, if any, people in the hospital or the medical community blew the whistle on it.
31:02It really was an egregious act, and it showed that the medical community was more interested in protecting its ass than in protecting the test subject and the patients.
31:16Because a lot of doctors went off the deep end and started doing things that are just inconceivable now.
31:22To express his indignation, Alan Hornblum wrote half a dozen books.
31:29A former prison guard at Holmesburg in Pennsylvania, from his first day at work over 40 years ago, he had a horrible shock.
31:37I was stunned to see scores of inmates with their shirts off strapped and wrapped in bandages and gauze tape.
31:49And I couldn't imagine that I was going into an atmosphere that was that violent.
31:54Because all of the men looked like they had just walked a saw block knife fight.
31:59They explained that it's not because of any violence, but experiments that are carried out there.
32:08Alan was the first to denounce this scandal and would lose his job as a result.
32:13It was probably the largest human experimentation factory in America, possibly the world.
32:22From 1951 until 1974, more people were probably incorporated in more experiments than any other place in the world.
32:32Drugs, viruses, cancerous cells, plutonium, sarin gas.
32:47The most toxic products were tested in Holmesburg, but also in dozens of prisons throughout the country.
32:54To condemn these experiments, Alan Hornblum found former inmates like Youssef.
33:01In 1961, this man was imprisoned for selling marijuana.
33:06He was poor, with limited education.
33:09He was offered a chance to take part in tests for a dollar a day.
33:14Since then, Youssef has had his digestive tract operated on.
33:19He has liver and skin problems and can no longer work.
33:25His first test was for a bath foam from the company Johnson & Johnson.
33:30No, she's locked up. She says, Pop, where are you?
33:33They took tape and they stuck it on your back and pulled it off, stuck it on and pulled it off until the first layer of skin came off your back.
33:40And they put six sections on my back like that.
33:53And then they took a bottle with the Johnson & Johnson bubble bath in it and put it on a patch and put the patch over the raw area.
34:02Then they took a can. I recognized that can as being from the Army.
34:08And I was like, what Johnson & Johnson's got to do with this?
34:13So he took the can and he sprayed it on my back.
34:16And when it hit my back, it was cold.
34:19But it was so toxic and like fumes, I could taste it in my mouth.
34:23And as I'm walking down, I'm getting dizzier and dizzier, dizzier and dizzier.
34:28By the time I stepped into my cell, I passed out.
34:32Boom! And my back was inflamed.
34:34And by the time I woke up that morning, I had great big blisters on my back full of pus.
34:40This rash just gets worse and worse.
34:43And it looks like when the moon come out at night, it just, it flames up.
34:48And I'd be moaning and crying and moaning and crying.
34:51My cell partners couldn't sleep.
34:54There was a second test, which would lead to an operation on his intestines.
34:58Then a third, where he had to do simple sums while drinking a colorless liquid.
35:07We goes over there, a little shot cup, and it looked like water.
35:11We drinks it. Everything became magnified.
35:14The sound, like the loudspeaker on the system, ooh, ooh, ooh.
35:20The walls look like they turn into water.
35:23You know what I mean?
35:24And like, I spent the whole time like looking around like this here,
35:28instead of doing the test.
35:30So I go back to the block in that condition.
35:33And man, I mean, I was tripping.
35:35And it was like a slow-acting drug that was in that cup.
35:39It lasts for weeks.
35:41The inmates start naming me out of limits.
35:44I had no conversation for nobody.
35:47I was scared of the inmates, and the inmates act like they was afraid of me.
35:51What you had were hundreds and hundreds of uneducated minorities, overwhelmingly black and Puerto Rican.
36:01And then you had white doctors with white lab coats, with PhD or MD after their name.
36:20And it was a recipe for abuse, if not disaster.
36:26And those prison walls are an ideal spot to do controversial experiments.
36:31Because just as those walls keep the inmates in, they also keep the public out.
36:37So no one finds out about it.
36:39Prisoners were used, but also patients.
36:46In certain hospitals, patients were steered towards the services financed by the CIA.
36:52These services carried out limitless experiments on psychological manipulation.
36:57In 1965, Karen Wetmore was only 13 when she was admitted to a hospital in Vermont.
37:08She stayed there several times in her childhood.
37:12She suffered from severe depression after falling victim to a pedophile neighbor.
37:18Admitted against her will, she was not allowed any contact with her family, being told that it was for her own good.
37:26The CIA was specifically looking for children between the ages of 13 and 18 to further dissociate.
37:36They wanted dissociative children.
37:38There's a sense of absolute and total helplessness.
37:43You're there, you're bound up, you're locked in this room.
37:48No matter how you scream, no matter what you say, no one is going to come.
37:54It does something to you, something you don't get over.
38:01The doctors went to work on Karen.
38:04They wanted to erase her memory and create a robot at their command.
38:09It took 30 years of legal battles for Karen to obtain her medical records and discover the violence of the treatments she was subjected to.
38:20It says seclusion, full cam. A cam is a straitjacket.
38:25And ties, which means they tied my arms and they tied my feet.
38:29This goes on uninterrupted day after day, week after week, February, March, April.
38:37Right up until June 21st, 1971, you sleep on the floor, on the floor, no blanket, no nothing.
38:48And my arms were secured like this, behind my back. I do remember that.
38:54It's extremely painful because it pulls on your neck, pulls on your shoulder, you can't get away from it.
39:01It is, it's maddening is what it is. Maddening.
39:05And I was naked. And I think that was part of the effort of that experiment to break me down.
39:12Everything they did was to break me down.
39:16Months in a confined room with no bearings.
39:20While her captors administered all kinds of drugs.
39:23And sometimes, electric shocks at inhuman levels.
39:27Number of shocks and the seconds that they held the shocks.
39:3930, 30, 35, 35, 35, 35.
39:43And they held it for, sustained for 40 seconds.
39:48A normal shock would be a second.
39:50Certainly not, and certainly not 30 and 35 of them.
39:55One. Not that many.
39:58Which probably is what obliterated my memory, right there.
40:01And I think that's why they did it.
40:03That's why they did it.
40:04They also said, in this treatment right here, no seizure, shock restarted.
40:12So they gave me a second one.
40:14Because they couldn't produce a seizure.
40:16So they must have done it over again.
40:18Must have repeated it.
40:19It's unforgivable.
40:21And I'm sure I wasn't the only one they did this to.
40:24I'm sure.
40:25I survived to be able to talk about it.
40:31How many suffered similar experiments?
40:41In Montreal, Canada, the CIA used a world-renowned psychiatrist to set up a factory of guinea pigs in the Allen Memorial Psychiatric Department in McGill University.
40:58This psychiatrist was Ewan Cameron, one of the all-powerful presidents of the World Psychiatric Association.
41:09In 1945, Ewan Cameron made the acquaintance of Rudolf Hess, one of the Nazis accused in the Nuremberg trial.
41:19In 1957, the CIA recruited him for their MK-ULTRA program.
41:26The Americans wanted to perfect their interrogation techniques and program a human to kill.
41:33Ewan Cameron became the mad dog of psychiatry.
41:38He put his patients in vegetative states for several weeks, while bombarding them with pre-recorded orders.
41:45Some would become incontinent, amnesiac, forgetting even who their parents were, and how to speak.
41:56The Vermont hospital where Karen Wetmore was confined was working on the same program.
42:05In the hands of the CIA doctors, she was like a rag doll.
42:09They used drugs like LSD, they used electric shock, they used chemical shock agent metrazole, which I was given in 1971, and I found that out in my medical records, which is a very brutal drug, very brutal drug.
42:31The CIA said it was excruciating, physically and emotionally, excruciating drug.
42:40I have a quote from the CIA that said that the Soviets used it in the gulags, and that a POW would say or do anything to avoid a second dose.
42:55Nice drug.
42:56They gave me 1,800 milligrams, which apparently, I don't know.
43:25Which apparently is a huge dose.
43:28And that night, I was complaining of hearing men inside my head, which was bothering me and upsetting me.
43:36And I tried to set myself on fire.
43:40The imagination of the scientists is limitless.
43:44In these images, a bull charges at a cape, shaken in front of him.
43:48A few moments later, an implant is placed in his brain, and he's released back into the ring.
43:54At each charge, he receives a shock that stops him in his tracks.
44:01Documents that are now declassified show that more sophisticated implants were tested on human subjects.
44:07There's all kinds of people who believe and people who don't believe.
44:13And it's a debate about do you believe or don't believe.
44:15I'm always interested in what are the documents saying.
44:18So the documents clearly describe implanting electrodes in people's brains, activating the electrode from a remote transmitter, and changing the person's behavior from angry, pounding the wall, sitting there just staring.
44:33Behind Karen's ear is a scar, and she doesn't know what it's from.
44:44Once my therapist really understood that I had really been experimented on by the CIA, she said to me, you know, just for the heck of it, let me look.
44:56Because we'd heard about, we'd read about, there's been information about these implants.
45:01And then I'm like, okay. And it was there, actually there.
45:06I showed you.
45:08I went to a plastic surgeon who told me it was a surgical scar.
45:12But there's nothing in my medical history, nothing in the medical record that shows any kind of problem ever behind my right ear.
45:21Or any incision, or any surgery, or anything else.
45:24But there it is.
45:25Karen has been compensated by the American government for her ordeal.
45:32But like many rare victims who speak up, for a long time, she was considered crazy.
45:38What stopped the journey down this destructive path?
45:51In 1973, while Watergate is rattling all the institutions, Richard Helms, director of the CIA, feels the winds of change.
46:05He works as a lone wolf, and hasn't informed the president of these experiments.
46:12He knows he's crossed the line.
46:14To protect himself, he orders the destruction of all documents relating to the MKUltra program and its abandonment.
46:21Two years later, in 1975, the President Gerald Ford orders an inquiry into the CIA.
46:28The Rockefeller Commission is sworn in.
46:31The task isn't simple, because at the heart of the CIA, even Richard Helms' close lieutenants know nothing about the brainwashing programs.
46:40There's a lot of goofy things that go on in a big agency like that with all that secrecy.
46:45Things can go on that you don't know about, that the people who are working for the director most closely don't know about, or that the director doesn't know about.
47:02I mean, they're keeping it quiet down there.
47:07Don't tell anybody. If it works, then we'll tell them.
47:10But, you know, in the meantime, don't get into any difficulties.
47:16I remember when they wanted to take a kitty cat and stick a microphone up its rear end and put an antenna on its ear and have him walk in,
47:33if there's a spy in a park with another one, walk over and walk around and listen in on it.
47:41You know, they tried it one time in an experiment, and a taxi came by and ran over the cat, you know, so...
47:53In reality, nothing is funny.
47:56In its haste to get rid of evidence, the CIA forgets 20,000 documents.
48:02A drop of water compared to the amount that was destroyed, but they reveal that it financed 149 programs, implicating 80 institutions, including the most respected.
48:19Called on to justify themselves, the heads of the CIA, like Dr. Lashbrook, lie and downplayed the facts.
48:28There was, of course, claims or thoughts that maybe great things could be done with hypnosis.
48:34One small project in which we had a hypnotist do some experiments primarily to see what the limitations of hypnosis might be.
48:47Can you make a person do something under hypnosis that he would not ordinarily do?
48:55Even if the head of the CIA, Richard Helms, tried to minimize the scale of the experiments, the victims' testimonies contradict him.
49:03The inquiry commissions follow, each reaching more and more witnesses, like this woman, Chris DeNicola.
49:12Her father put her in the hands of a reputed CIA doctor, Dr. Green, when she was 12 years old.
49:18His objective was to gain control of my mind and train me to be a spy assassin.
49:24Dr. Green had electrodes on my body, including my head.
49:29He used what looked like an overhead projector and repeatedly said he was burning different images into my brain while a red light flashed aimed at my forehead.
49:39In between each sequence, he used electric shock on my body and told me to go deeper and deeper, while repeating each image would go deeper into my brain and I would do whatever he told me to do.
49:53Dr. Green moved on to wanting me to kill dolls that look like real children.
49:58Then there was Claudia Mullen, admitted at age seven.
50:02In 1957 and 1984, I became a pawn in a government scheme whose ultimate goal was mind control and to create the perfect spy.
50:12All through the use of chemicals, radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, brainwashing, verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
50:27I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of my life.
50:32And the only explanations given to me were that, quote, the unjustifies the means.
50:38And, quote, I was serving my country in their bold effort to fight communism.
50:44Inquiry reports that resulted from these terrifying testimonies revealed one thing for certain.
50:49The experiments ended in disaster.
50:52In its insane quest for a robot human or a truth serum, the CIA failed.
50:58On August 3, 1995, with the revelations mounting up, then-President Bill Clinton makes a public apology.
51:06Thousands of government-sponsored experiments did take place at hospitals, universities and military bases around our nation.
51:18In too many cases, informed consent was withheld.
51:22Americans were kept in the dark about the effects of what was being done to them.
51:27The deception extended beyond the test subjects themselves to encompass their families and the American people as a whole.
51:34For these experiments were kept secret.
51:37And they were shrouded not for a compelling reason of national security, but for the simple fear of embarrassment.
51:45And that was wrong.
51:47So today, on behalf of another generation of American leaders and another generation of American citizens,
51:55the United States of America offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens who were subjected to these experiments, to their families, and to their communities.
52:08Since then, a great number of secret archives have been released to the public domain.
52:14Researchers would take an interest in this troubled period.
52:17Notably, Hank Alborelli, who worked on the suspicious death of Frank Olson, the biochemist who worked at the heart of the CIA.
52:27Since 1951, the year of the Pont Saint-Esprit incident, Frank Olson called into question the ethics of the experiments being carried out, and became depressed as a result.
52:39In November 1953, the CIA put LSD into his glass without him knowing.
52:46Nine days later, he threw himself off the 13th floor of a New York hotel.
52:52Murder or suicide, we'll never know.
52:55At the time of the investigation, Hank Alborelli found a surprising document coming from the White House.
53:02It surprisingly linked the name of Frank Olson to Pont Saint-Esprit.
53:07Why, in the middle of the Korean War, would the White House be interested in this small French village?
53:13Even better, Hank also came across a study carried out by the CIA on LSD.
53:19The document itself was a comprehensive overview or history, if you will, of LSD specifically, yes.
53:29Not on Ergot. It had nothing to do with Ergot.
53:32There was a section or a chapter, if you will, headed incident at Pont Saint-Esprit.
53:39And the first two paragraphs of that describe essentially what we've all read, you know, many times over in terms of what happened at Pont Saint-Esprit.
53:54But the remainder of that section, the rest of that page, which was about half the page and the two pages that followed, were completely blocked out.
54:05Above all was this damning document from the CIA.
54:09It dates from 1953 and has no doubt been declassified by mistake.
54:15A director at Sandoz Laboratories confirmed to a secret agent that the Pont Saint-Esprit incident was caused by LSD.
54:32Sandoz Laboratories was where Albert Hoffman worked, the man who discovered LSD.
54:38It even claimed the drug was responsible for the Pont Saint-Esprit tragedy before recanting.
54:45When I saw the document detailing the meeting between the CIA informer and the Sandoz official, corporate official, who was not Hoffman,
54:58I still haven't been able to identify that person, it became more than clear that Sandoz, of course, was part and parcel of the experiment,
55:08probably, you know, provided the drug to the Camp Dietrich personnel that were on site, and well knew about what had actually occurred at Pont Saint-Esprit.
55:27This same document states that in 1952, the source at the CIA had already explained that the cursed bread was caused by LSD.
55:37Did French authorities try to silence the affair?
55:57Several years after the drama, a head of the Victims Association was shocked at how disinterested the investigators were.
56:05J'aurais dû recevoir au moins une fois la visite d'un inspecteur. Or, jamais je n'ai reçu la visite d'un policier.
56:12Et aucune des victimes de l'intoxication ne peut prouver aujourd'hui qu'elle a reçu la visite d'un inspecteur de la PJ.
56:19Les parents d'une des principales victimes, un jeune homme de 24 ans, M. Moulin, ont demandé au juge d'instruction d'effectuer des prélèvements de viscères sur le corps de leur fils et qu'ils n'ont pas obtenu satisfaction.
56:34Pourquoi? Le juge d'instruction lui a répondu que les prélèvements de viscères ont déjà été effectués sur le corps de M. Moulin, la première victime.
56:43Nous savons maintenant à quoi nous en tenir. Ce qui était faux, puisque nous ne savons pas dix ans après à quoi nous en tenir aujourd'hui.
56:49Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
56:52Do the French have something to hide?
56:55We've interrogated former members of the Secret Services, investigated national and regional archives,
57:02as well as those from the police and the Justice Department.
57:06The files are hard to find, and many important pieces, such as reports from main hearings, have disappeared.
57:14If America revealed unwillingly some of its secrets about its participation in the poisoning,
57:25the uncertainties over the involvement of the French authorities may yet go on for some years longer.
57:31It takes 75 years for some sensitive documents to be made public.
57:37Hidden in its small streets and stone buildings,
57:43Le Pont-Saint-Esprit Drama has yet to reveal all its secrets.
57:49Therefore, limitless.
57:55Part 1 du sol em predators, Ivory.
57:59Le Pont d'application
58:02Point d'application
58:03Le Pont d'application
58:07Le Pont d'application
58:10Le Pont d'application
58:12Le Pont d'application
58:14Le Pont d'application
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