LONDON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Three former British servicemen were paid compensation by MI6 Friday after the intelligence agency gave them LSD without their consent in the 1950s.
The men volunteered for experiments at the government's chemical warfare research base Porton Down, which scientists told them were intended to find a cure for the common cold.
However, the men were given the hallucinogenic drug in mind control tests, and suffered terrifying hallucinations.
The Foreign Office said MI6 had agreed the out-of-court settlements -- said to be under $17,500 for each man -- after taking legal advice.
Following the settlement, Don Webb, at the time a 19-year-old airman, told BBC Radio: "I think they grudgingly acknowledged that they did something wrong.
"They stick to the old maxim: never apologize, never explain. But I think in this case they have decided to pay some money. I think that is as near to an apology or an explanation I'll get."
The research was conducted because the U.S. and British governments believed that the Soviet Union had developed a "truth drug" to use on captured spies and servicemen. MI6 scientists decided to test LSD, which they believed was the nearest thing they had to a truth drug at the time.
Some of the volunteers at the base did not discover they had been fed LSD until some 50 years later.
Between 1916 and 1989, up to 20,000 British servicemen and women volunteered in the testing of chemical and biological weapons and defenses at Porton Down.
The LSD case is the latest in a series of legal actions that have exposed the activities of British intelligence services at the military base. In October 2005, the government was found guilty of breaching the human rights of former soldier Thomas Roche, who claimed that mustard gas and nerve agent tests in the 1960s had left him with chronic health problems.
Earlier this month, the High Court upheld an unlawful killing verdict in the case of airman Ronald Maddison, who died after the nerve agent sarin was dabbed on his arm in 1953.
