Rotenberg noticed that Lucie looked like she was feeling faint. He moved toward her and helped her to a sofa.
“May I have some water, please,” she said. “I haven’t had anything to drink or much to eat. And it hasn’t exactly been a restful day.”
“Oh, of course. My apologies.”
He walked swiftly to the kitchen and came back with some sausage, bread, water, and two beers. Lucie downed several glasses of water and some sausage slices before feeling a bit more like herself. Rotenberg had uncapped a beer, which he looked at intently, his hands around the small bottle.
“First of all, you need to know who I am. For a long time I worked in a law firm specializing in the defense of civil liberties in Washington, with the great lawyer Joseph Rauth. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Washington… Where Jacques Lacombe had lived.
“Not a thing.”
“Then you know even less than I thought.”
“I’m here in Canada to get answers. To try to… figure out why someone would kill to get their hands on a fifty-year-old movie.”
He took a deep breath.
“You want to know why? Because everything is contained in that film, Lucie Henebelle. Because within it is hidden the proof of the existence of a covert CIA program, which used unfortunate guinea pigs to pursue its experiments. This phantom program, the very existence of which remains unknown even to this day, was developed alongside Project MK-Ultra.”
Lucie ran a hand through her hair, brushing it back. MK-Ultra… She had glimpsed that word in Szpilman’s library, amid his books on espionage.
“I’m sorry, but… I’m completely lost.”
“If that’s true, there’s a lot I have to tell you.”
Philip Rotenberg walked toward the stove and shoved in a few more logs.
“Even in July, the nights are cool in the northern forests.”
He snapped some branches, threw in a log, and lit it with a match. He watched the fire catch for a few moments. Lucie felt abnormally cold and rubbed her forearms.
“In 1977, I was barely twenty-five. The law office of Joseph Rauth, Washington, D.C. Two men, a father and son, arrived in Joseph’s office. The son, David Lavoix, was holding an article from the New York Times, and the father seemed… troubled, absent. David Lavoix held out the clipping, which talked about Project MK-Ultra. Just so you know, the Times had sent the first shot across the bow two years earlier, in 1975, by revealing that in the fifties and sixties the CIA had conducted mind-control experiments on American citizens, mostly without their knowledge or consent. Investigative hearings were held and the American people were officially informed about the existence of this top secret project.”
He nodded toward a large library.
“It’s all in there. Thousands and thousands of pages in the archives, available to any citizen. The whole thing has long been a matter of public record—there’s nothing secret about what I’m telling you.”
Philip Rotenberg went to leaf through his documents. He quickly pulled out a copy of the New York Times from back then and handed it to Lucie.
Lucie opened the newspaper. A very long piece took up much of the front page. Certain words were underlined in ink: Dr. D. Ewen Sanders… Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology… MK-Ultra Project…
“That day, Joseph Rauth asked the humble Mr. Lavoix how his office could be of assistance. And young Mr. Lavoix answered, casual as you please, that he wanted to sue the CIA. The CIA! ‘Why?’ asked Joseph. Mr. Lavoix pointed to his father and said plainly, ‘For the mental destruction and brainwashing of a hundred adult patients in the 1950s at Allan Memorial Institute, McGill University, Montreal.’”
Behind him, the fire was spreading through the logs and the kindling crackled noisily. In the middle of nowhere, in the heart of this wild, unknown province of Quebec, Lucie felt uneasy. She finally picked up her beer and uncapped it. She absolutely had to loosen the knot in her stomach.
“Montreal, once again,” she said.
“Yes, Montreal. Still, the Times article didn’t mention Montreal, or Canada. It simply said that in the fifties the CIA had established a number of covert organizations to develop its research into brainwashing, such as SIHE, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Nothing very remarkable in that, just one more revelation about Project MK-Ultra, as we’d been used to seeing in the Times for months by then. But look here, this underlined name…”
“Dr. D. Ewen Sanders. Head of research at SIHE.”
“Ewen Sanders, that’s right. Now, according to Mr. Lavoix, a certain Ewen Sanders had been, some years earlier, the chief psychiatrist and director of the Allan Memorial Institute. The place where David Lavoix’s father, the rather passive individual there before us in the office, had gone to treat a case of simple depression and from where, long years later, he emerged with his mind entirely shot. For the rest of my life I will remember the sentence he managed to utter that day: ‘Sanders killed us inside.’”
Sanders killed us inside. Lucie set the paper down on the table. She thought of what the archivist had given her to understand: experiments on human beings, conducted by Canadian psychiatric institutions.
“So this Project MK-Ultra had covert branches in Canada?”
“Precisely. Despite the 1975 hearings, no one knew that the American invasion of the mind had reached Canada. With his Times article, and by sheer chance, David Lavoix had touched on a major element that incriminated the CIA still further, and to the highest degree.”
“So did you do it? Did you sue the CIA?”
With a gesture, Rotenberg invited Lucie to join him at his computer, on a desk near the library. He clicked through several password screens and then skimmed through his computer files. One bore the name “Szpilman’s Discoveries.” He clicked on another folder, titled “McGill Brainwashing,” and moused onto a PowerPoint file. Underneath it was an AVI video file called “Brainwash01.avi.”
“Nine of Sanders’s patients, with their families’ support, brought suit following Lavoix’s example. The other McGill patients were either dead, too traumatized, or incapable of remembering the treatments they’d been subjected to. Now listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you—it’s essential for what follows. In 1973, the CIA, informed that reporters were sniffing around their affairs, had destroyed all the files concerning Project MK-Ultra. But the CIA is, above all, an enormous bureaucracy. Joseph Rauth was convinced that some traces had to remain of such an important project, which had extended over twenty-five years and involved dozens of directors and a staff of thousands. Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Commission, we were authorized access to documents or other materials relating to research into mind control. We hired an ex-CIA operative named Frank Macley to look into it. After several weeks of investigation, he confirmed that most of the files had been destroyed by two high-ranking officials: CIA Director Samuel Neels and one of his close associates, Michael Brown. But through his persistence, Macley unearthed seven huge crates of documents relating to MK-Ultra at the Agency’s records storage facility. Crates that had gotten lost in the administrative labyrinth. More than sixteen thousand pages on which the names had been redacted, but that related in detail how some ten million dollars had been spent for MK-Ultra via a hundred and forty-four universities in the United States and Canada, twelve hospitals, fifteen private companies—including Sanders’s—and three corrections facilities.”