Washington in the spring is a splendorous thing. Swooping down on a Wednesday morning, on an Air Canada flight from Montreal, one catches a glimpse of the Pentagon nestled amid lush greenery, just a stone’s throw from Arlington Cemetery, where the brave and the dead lie permanently asleep. As my ears lock and unlock, and the landing gear lowers, I think, “So this is what the hijackers saw on the morning of 9/11,” and it’s nothing like the bleak wasteland I’d envisioned. The US military powerhouse sits among stately homes and tranquil gardens, ringed by ancient oak trees and hedges like the more mundane of next-door neighbors. Can evil lurk in such a paradise?

As we do the banking, I take a look at what I think must be McLean Manor, a well-known tourist attraction for travelers to Virginia. I understand it’s not that far from CIA headquarters in Langley, which I don’t recognise. My family was McLeans, and some of us really think our story began here in Virginia, 200 years ago and long before the time of Allen Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan, the early architects of American Cold War strategy. It is not, of course. It started on a coffin ship from Ireland that made its way up the St. Laurence River to Kingston and beyond. Ah, but wouldn’t it be nice to lie in bed with wealth and power, just for once, instead of the wet boards in the bottom of one of James McGill’s immigrant ferries?

One can only dream.

On the ground at Ronald Reagan Airport, I am told that there are few hotel rooms available in Washington that weekend, as my visit coincides with the IMF conference, and thousands of protesters are already arriving, with their hotels booked. I feel like a fool for coming here anytime, with my Aeroplan miles and no hotel reservation. However, an hour later I am unpacking my backpack in a room that overlooks the White House lawn. It’s costing me US$200 for the night, but I don’t care. Tonight I will sleep next to George W. Bush himself! A terrifying thought. The war in Iraq is being planned from the building below my window. I take a photo of the Shrub’s backyard with my disposable camera. As I gaze at the thought control center of the planet, suddenly everything feels small and manageable. Confidently, I slip into sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt and head to my destination: the Homeland Security Archives, home to 60,000 pages of declassified CIA files in 17 boxes, thanks to a donation from John Marks, who bequeathed the documents to the library so that future researchers, like myself, can benefit.

True to my taste for the candid, I haven’t bothered to call ahead and tell them I’m coming to dig into the archives of MKULTRA, the infamous and mostly illegal CIA-funded Mind Control project that operated at 80 American and Canadian universities, including McGill, in the 1950s and 1960s. I just show up at the George Washington University Gelman Library. I don’t have a badge or pass, and all the signs say I need one to get in, but once I say I’m here to look at the files above at the Homeland Security Archives. After a five second phone call, I am allowed up to the seventh floor where the NSA occupies a modest office.

When I get there, I introduce myself and ask if I can browse the docs for a few hours. The secretary says it’s okay, as long as I keep my belongings, including pens and notebooks, in one of her lockers, and use only one of her pencils and paper. I have three hours before closing time. I sit down to work, going through the files on what I think are MKULTRA sub-projects that directly affected my family. Specifically, Sub-Projects 45 (related to “Production and Control of the Stress Reaction in Humans) and Project 57 (Sleep). Missing from the files for Project 149 is the CIA’s most well-known mind control project, Sub-Project MKULTRA 68, made famous by lawsuits from former victims of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s “psychic driving” experiments at McGill University’s Allen Memorial Institute. victims won their case, after a protracted legal battle, during which all Project 68-related materials were subpoenaed and are now housed in another file at the Library of Congress (or National Archives).

What I learn that day is horrible and disgusting and cannot be described in a small article. Among other things I’ve long suspected, I find Sub-Project 68 and Cameron’s crazy “Psychic Driving” experiments to be just the tip of the iceberg. The other files, and I can only read a few in the two days I have available, outline a much larger program, the truth of which has never been revealed. Cameron and his friends oversaw a vast network of other CIA research projects designed to undermine and destroy individuals and families, physically, mentally, and psychologically. Nothing like it had been seen before and therefore no one at the time was really prepared to understand the extent to which our “core values” had been overthrown by doctors and scientists operating under Cold War doctrines trained by CIA operatives whose commitment to deception was absolute and unwavering, amounting to almost a new religion.

I have 90 pages of photocopies of declassified CIA documents that describe a variety of highly disturbing research projects that occurred at McGill under the cloak of national security. Many of the details I read on these pages bring back memories I’d rather not awaken.

***

At the National Archives, a huge nude statue of Justice greets the visitor. Under it is a plaque with the inscription: “The past is prologue.”

I’m there the next day, with my disposable camera and backpack, after a nice night at the Washington Hotel. At five in the morning I had been awakened by a single robin, singing in the dark outside my window.

What is past and prologue, for me, is my childhood, lived under the shadow of MKULTRA. Through my father’s Air Force background, our family was caught in a nightmare that lasted from 1953 to 1963, the entire duration of the MKULTRA project. In the end, we were all traumatized and sick, but no one talked about it. We lived our lives in silence, like concentration camp survivors, making the best of our situation. What is the use of talking about the unthinkable and inexplicable? Only recently, thanks to the Internet and spillover effects of the Freedom of Information Act, has it become possible to think about and explain what we experienced all those years ago.

My mother would not have agreed with my being in Washington to dig up our past: in her opinion, it was always better to leave suffering buried. In the early 1960s, he suffered from severe autoimmune cholaosis, just weeks after my father returned home from being electroshocked at the Allen by one of Dr. Cameron’s most enthusiastic disciples. In later years, as her body collapsed under what doctors described as “the worst case of rampant rheumatoid arthritis ever seen,” my mother embraced the forget-and-forgive doctrine. “Let the dogs sleep” was her motto along with “Forget the bad things that happen in life, remember the good ones.” Sensible and useful advice, especially when you are very, very sick and have no other choice.

At the entrance to the National Archives, I declare my purpose. I’m there to find CIA files relating to my father, a Canadian Air Force sergeant who may have worked for military intelligence during World War II and later as well. The security staff’s eyes widen as I explain this to them. He tells me I’m in the wrong place and need to take the shuttle to the other National Archives and Records Administration building, in College Park, Maryland. That is where all Homeland Security related records are stored. I thank him and run out to the square, where the shuttle bus is about to leave. There’s a lot of traffic because of the IMF conference that weekend, but an hour later I’m telling the same story to another security person. I get the same wide-eyed look, and then they tell me I need a photo ID, say a passport, which I present. I fill out a form, take my picture, and within minutes I have a pass that allows me to go up to the Homeland Security archives. I am ushered into an office where I once again state my purpose and get the same wide-eyed response from the agent in charge who picks up the phone and asks someone on the other end to send an escort for “2600.” I’m handed another badge, marked “2600,” and a nervous young man puts me in an elevator and leads me down a long hallway.

At the end of the corridor is a large, modern, air-conditioned office space, built along the lines of a rectangular maze.