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10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/William Sargant.md
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@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ A parallel program was operated by Harry Bailey at Chelmsford Private Hospital i
The most carefully sourced investigation of Sargant's intelligence relationships is *Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control* (Hodder and Stoughton, 2006), Chapter 7. The book's primary source was an unnamed senior psychiatrist described as a former close colleague of Sargant, interviewed September 3, 2004. This source confirmed that Sargant acted as an informal consultant to [[MI5]], "loved doing things for the government," and discussed the advisory role openly in informal terms, but stated he was "never an official psychiatrist to either MI5 or MI6" and never signed the Official Secrets Act. The nature of the consultancy was general advisory, involving discussion of Soviet and Chinese psychiatric methods, rather than operational or classified briefings.[^1]
*Journey into Madness* (Bantam, 1988) and *Secrets and Lies* (Mainstream Publishing, 1999) make substantially more specific claims based on personal acquaintance with Sargant and with CIA officer William Buckley. These accounts describe Sargant as the institutional link between British intelligence and [[MKULTRA]], and as having been "sent by the British government in the early Fifties to evaluate MK-ULTRA," reporting back that Cameron and Gottlieb's work was "as bad as anything going on in the Soviet gulags." These accounts also claim Sargant and [[Louis Jolyon West]] co-authored CIA interrogation manuals titled "Coercive Questioning" and "Human Resource Exploitation." No copies of documents attributing these manuals to Sargant have been produced; the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual" is a documented declassified CIA document but its authorship attribution to Sargant remains sourced to these accounts alone.[^1]
*Journey into Madness* (Bantam, 1988) and *Secrets and Lies* (Mainstream Publishing, 1999) make substantially more specific claims based on personal acquaintance with Sargant and with CIA officer [[William Buckley]]. These accounts describe Sargant as the institutional link between British intelligence and [[MKULTRA]], and as having been "sent by the British government in the early Fifties to evaluate MK-ULTRA," reporting back that Cameron and Gottlieb's work was "as bad as anything going on in the Soviet gulags." These accounts also claim Sargant and [[Louis Jolyon West]] co-authored CIA interrogation manuals titled "Coercive Questioning" and "Human Resource Exploitation." No copies of documents attributing these manuals to Sargant have been produced; the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual" is a documented declassified CIA document but its authorship attribution to Sargant remains sourced to these accounts alone.[^1]
The most specifically documented intelligence-adjacent incident is Sargant's encounter with CIA officer [[Frank Olson]] at Porton Down in spring 1953. *Poisoner in Chief* (Henry Holt, 2019) reports that Olson was visiting the UK's Microbiological Research Establishment at Wiltshire and expressed distress to Sargant about CIA activities he had witnessed in safe houses in Germany. Sargant then wrote a report characterizing Olson as "deeply disturbed over what he had seen" and displaying "symptoms of not wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed." Olson died in November 1953 under contested circumstances. The chain from Sargant's report to any decision regarding Olson's death is asserted by Thomas but is not independently confirmed by declassified documents.[^1]