[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

agencies, and hospitals, the CIA was able to covertly run a vast mind-control research
and testing effort under the pretext of legitimate medical research.” 535 CIA-backed
researcher Ewen Cameron, based at McGill, University in Montreal, Canada conducted a
series of notorious experiments on mentally ill patients to erase their memories and build
up a new personality or behavior. Cameron placed mentally ill patients in drug-induced
comas, subjected them to electro-shock therapy, and repeatedly made them list to recoded
messages until they were “’depatterned.’” 536 Leonard also quoted from the work of a
Harvard-trained psychologist George Estabrooks, who claimed to use hypnosis for
military applications during World War Two. The CIA built on this work to try to create
mind-controlled assassins. According to Leonard, “The key to eliciting this type of
behavior appears to be to alter the subject’s perception while under trance so that the anti-
social act he is to be manipulated into committing does not appear to be anti-social and
therefore does not appear to violate his personal moral code.” 537 The subject presumably
would also have no memory of the hypnotic suggestion or even of the assassination.
While it is known the CIA conducted this research, Leonard takes it a step farther:
that it succeeded in creating such assassins and that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of them.
Leonard surmised that Oswald came to the attention of U.S. intelligence during his
Marine Corps service in Japan, and may have been subjected to mind control
experimentation then. He later would go on an intelligence mission to the Soviet Union
by posing as a defector. Leonard theorized an “intentionally induced schizophrenia and
535 Leonard, 8.
536 Leonard, 7.
537 Leonard, 17-18.
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