Endless Thread - Bonus: 'Brainwashed'

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

This past Spring, Endless Thread released a series called “Madness: The Secret Mission for Mind Control and the People Who Paid the Price.” If you missed it, you should go back and listen! A new series from CBC Podcasts, "Brainwashed," offers fresh perspective on the same topic: a powerful doctor who conducted disturbing, CIA-funded mind-control experiments on patients at a prestigious psychiatric hospital in Montreal. We recently talked to the host of "Brainwashed," Michelle Shepherd, for this bonus episode. We wanted to compare notes with another reporter who has gone deep on this story and swap takeaways.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like,

Why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? and, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. This show tells climate stories like a stubborn optimist because hope, innovation, and nature itself

are key to solving the challenges ahead. Follow on your favorite podcast app. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. He was one of the leading psychiatrists in the whole world. Light deprivation, shock treatment, hallucinogenic drugs, and she lost her soul. She was a pacifist, and she was disgusted and mortified that she'd been used as a guinea pig to create human weapons of war. You know, he did have the attitude that, to make an omelet, you have to crack a few eggs. And nobody's been accountable for it.

accountability is like a ghost. This past spring, Endless Thread released a five-part series called Madness, the secret mission for mind control and the people who paid the price. Maybe you remember it? It was about a powerful doctor who conducted disturbing CIA-funded mind control experiments

on his patients at a prestigious psychiatric hospital in Montreal. If you haven't heard madness yet, go back and listen. Funny story. There were some other people who were interested in telling this story. They're called the CBC, aka the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And they made a very similar show called Brainwashed, which is great. It's a new series.

It also explores the history of CIA-funded mind control experiments. And today, we're bringing you a conversation that, Ben and I had with the host of Brainwashed, Michelle Shepard. We were curious to compare notes with another reporter who've gone deep into this story and share some of our own takeaways. So, hope you enjoy. Hi, guys. Hi. How are you? We're good. How are you? Good. Do you know that we just had our Canadian Thanksgiving? I did know that because this time last year, Michelle, we were in Montreal, reporting this story a year ago today, in fact. And the weather was

exactly like it is today, at least in the Boston area, which is like horribly windy and rainy. And that was that was how we first experienced Ravens Cragg. I remember that from your podcast and it felt like beautiful, pathetic fallacy for what's a rather creepy building. Yeah, it was, it felt appropriate. So Michelle, I guess I'll just start by saying, how did you first get turned on to this story? Well, this actually came to me from one of our producers, Lisa Ellenwood, and she's at CBC at the Fifth Estate, and she's actually been doing stories on MKLtra for a while. And the Fifth Estate has been chipping out of way at this story for years. And she brought it to the podcast team and said, you know, there's so much more here.

The last story that I did just generate this flood of emails, of new relatives, of people who had never spoken before. And I had just finished a podcast with the unit on a true crime case actually. But this was really more in my wheelhouse because I'd been a national security reporter for a newspaper for about 20 years. So anything to do with, you know, the CIA had been something that I've been covering. And so it really, it really interested me. And I have to say, I don't know if you guys had the same experience, but I learned so much looking into this. And I was actually kind of embarrassed that I didn't know a lot about this history. Yeah, it's weird. I feel like I knew bits and pieces of it.

Like I was sort of like vaguely aware like MK Ultra, mind control, LSD, CIA, Cold War, like those things I can associate all of those things together. But like the actual deeper story of the breadth of this program and also the real sort of human impact of it. Like I had no idea. How did it first get on your radar to, to look into this. A former intern of ours was sort of hunting for interesting stories on Reddit

and found a lot of discussion of MK Ultra. There was specifically a post in a subgroup on Reddit called Ask Historians. And someone was wondering how MK Ultra has managed to kind of stay below the surface. You know, it was a big story at one point in time in the U.S. and now there are all these people left in its wake. And a commenter on that post mentioned Dr. Ewan Cameron specifically and talked about how renowned he was and how people were not quick to question his methods because he was this, you know, esteemed psychiatrist, head of every major psychiatry organization. And so that comment was kind of a microcosm of this larger story around how M.KKKKHA. Ultra and the damage that it caused has been, if not totally forgotten, at least kind of

pushed to the side. Yeah. Well, that kind of answers one of the other questions I had for you, which was, why did you decide to start in the Allen and focus on Dr. Cameron? Because I was like, wait, these guys are in the U.S., and yet they're focusing on the Canadian angle. Yeah. And again, I think there were so many echoes of his work that I kept sort of stuff.

stumbling across in other places. Like I'm sort of the pop culture dork, I guess, on our team. That's the official title. So, like, I kept getting really fascinated. There's a movie that came out in the 90s, House on Hunted Hill. It's actually a remake. But there are all these, like, weird parallels between that movie and Cameron's work and, like, connecting these Nazi experiments that happened at this instance.

that is the setting for this horror movie and this psychiatrist that went too far in treating his patients. Like there's even like a sensory deprivation tank in the movie. And so there are all these things that kind of kept leading back to the real story behind this part of MK Ultra. And I was just seeing it everywhere in these kind of vague echoes in pop culture. and I just became more and more interested in this story because I was sort of aware of the echoes,

but not really aware of the actual real story. And you're right. You guys obviously are way more experienced in the online world, but when we started kind of going down that rabbit hole and looking what's out there, you know, just a general starting with a Google search on M.K. Altra. Oh, my God, the world that it opens up in terms of the conspiracy theories that are out there.

One of the most ludicrous ones I saw, that we include in our last episode is when Britney Spears is in an interview and she kind of gets really odd at one point. And the threads that go past that about how, well, obviously it was mind control. Obviously, Britney Spears is part of MK Ultra. And I had no idea that it lived like that online, which is really interesting too. We're also living in this time that feels really kind of dangerous, right, in terms of how people are mixing, fact and fiction in their understanding of the world. And I don't know about Amory,

but I think at least part of my interest in doing this series was kind of redrawing those lines at the same time, right? Like figuring out what the real story was and trying to understand what the real impact of it was, not just at the time, but going forward. Yeah. We're in a new wave of conspiracy theories right now, at least in the United States.

We just did a couple episodes, Michelle, talking about QAnon, which, you know, in some ways feels far left field from MK. Ultra. But to some people, it might not. And that's the other thing about this is that a lot of what you learn about MK. Ultra, it doesn't seem possible that it was going on, that this was a government program, that it had the support of the Canadian government as well, at least as far as Dr. Cameron's experiments were. concerned. And we're also at a time globally where we need to put a lot of faith in government and in medicine. And it's just a, it is kind of a mind. How do I put this delicately? Mind fuck, I think, is the term that you're looking for, Amy. But I'm not sure we're allowed to put that into the CBC feed. So, yeah. We might try to sneak it in. I feel

Canadians can handle it. Okay. Well, that's what I'm feeling. But you know, you're right. It's such an interesting time to come out with these podcasts when we're in the midst of this pandemic. And, you know, on one hand, we've never needed to trust our governments and our doctors more. And yet, we're coming out sort of perversely with these podcasts that talk about a time when you couldn't trust them and you shouldn't trust them because it was this abuse of power in times of, fear. We had many discussions about how to frame that and how to frame what we're doing in terms of the current time. Did you guys go through those conversations, too? Well, we definitely pushed back the release of madness. It was supposed to launch in early April, and we waited a few more weeks

to kind of do our own reporting on the pandemic and what we were hearing and feeling and seeing. It's only now that I think I can fully appreciate just how. strange the timing is, the fact that we are still in this months and months and months later. Look, this is a story that really questions our ability to be skeptical about our institutions, right, in a way that's responsible. And I think we talked about this a lot. I mean, when our series came out, it was a moment where the heroes of the pandemic, And this is still true, are the medical workers, right, among many others, but are the medical workers, the people who, the doctors, the people who we are trying to put trust into in taking care of us and healing the sick and, you know, in telling us what the science is. And so it was a really weird time to put out a series that, you know, one of the, at least for us, I think one of the main takeaways was like, we should not be.

putting blind trust into institutions all the time. And we should be, you know, skeptical of some kind of hero worship, especially during the time at which Cameron was most active at the Allen. I think our impression was that a lot of people just, you know, put complete trust in him and his team and the work that they were doing. And he was making it up as he went along. So, yeah, it was a really strange time to put out to put out to put. out a series like this, for sure. But to circle back to your earlier point, I think it is so important, as you say, when we're in this conspiracy-fueled world where it's difficult to sort fact from fiction to take something that is such a darling of the conspiracy theorists and to really explain

what happened, you know, to sort of put all the conspiracies to rest and to say, well, actually some crazy things did happen, but here's the factual journalistic telling of it. Totally. Yeah. Let's go back to Dr. Cameron. What did you guys, in terms of your research and your interviews, what did you make of him and his motivations? It was tough. I mean, for me, he's a really complicated character

and was consumed by his work. And at the same time was so far off base in some of the work that he was doing. And again, just unchecked. And I think deserves to be represented as a pretty complicated person at the very least, if not an outright problematic person when it comes to his work, for sure.

What did you think of him, Michelle? It's always hard to cover somebody who you can't interview, obviously. And because so much time has passed, there weren't that many people who worked with him or people outside his family that could give us another take. I do think, though,

that Duncan Cameron, his son, you know, gave some good insight to the man beyond the profession. But I guess where I draw the line is that even if his motivation had been to get a cure for schizophrenia, and he had this driving ambition and this, you know, real desire to help people with serious psychiatric ailments, his blatant disregard for some of those patients at the Allen is just hard to overlook. Absolutely. Two things come to mind to me on this point, and one is that just about everyone we interviewed about Dr. Cameron, I asked them some form of this question that if Dr. Cameron had succeeded in curing schizophrenia or in reprogramming the brain for the better to erase harmful memories and install new happier ones that would help them live a more accomplished life from that point on.

would we remember him differently? I also think if we were to examine a lot of psychiatry and psychology and other fields of medicine, if we were to really examine the titans of those fields, I think there are probably skeletons in the closet, and that's not to tear down anyone. It's just interesting to me that if the outcome had been different for any of these people, would we have forgiven some of his methods? And I don't think the right answer is, yes,

we should. Nothing, nothing that he did was excusable. But I just think it's a question that has kind of haunted me throughout this, what we deem success and who the victims of that success are. I think, you know, largely my impression of what, what the victims really wanted was, was acknowledgement that this happened, right? Even at a very basic level, acknowledgement from the Canadian government and acknowledgement from the U.S. government that this happened and that it was wrong. Whether or not you pin it on camera

and you need to acknowledge that it happened. And that seems like that sort of process of truth and reconciliation hasn't even happened. Absolutely. And it's never just one person. I mean, it's a system that allows this to happen. And, you know, one of our episodes looks at sort of its legacy through the years and into post 9-11. And we interviewed an attorney who is representing one of the men

who were charged with the 9-11 attacks. And he had a great quote, and I'm sorry, I'm probably not can remember exactly. But he said, you know, torture is a bureaucracy. I think he said something like, it doesn't just take a, you know, a good-looking actor with someone's strapped to a chair. It takes the architects of it, those who devise it.

It takes the guy who takes out the trash. It takes the doctors who make sure the prisoner is still alive. So I think while it's very important to tell the stories like Dr. Cameron, and we both dedicated a whole episode to that, it is also really important to remember none of this happens with just the will of one individual. Yeah, that's a question I had for you, Michelle, because I feel like you've done some more kind of Guantanamo-related reporting than us. I mean, a lot more than I think this was a question that we had in doing our report.

is how clear is the line to draw from human experimentation in World War II directly to Guantanamo, continuing to today through Dr. Cameron and through the M.K. Ultra program. Yeah, there's definitely a line. It started back, as you said, in World War II, when the American government quietly brought Nazi doctors to the U.S. to learn from their experiences. and we learned that they called this operation paperclip, and that was because the files have been set aside and were put together by a paperclip. And then from there you have MK Ultra,

and even though MKLtra was a failure, the findings from that program were then incorporated into a CIA interrogation manual. And then over the years, that gets updated into another manual that we find out is used in the torture of prisoners in the 1980s throughout Latin America, and that was under CIA guidance. And then finally, if you fast forward to 9-11, and the policies that followed, this included the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. And some of those methods go right back to what Dr. Cameron was doing with his patients. So I think that's one of the reasons why I think our podcasts are so important, because you

have all these examples of the CIA or the government's trying to get people to do something against their will. And it doesn't work. But in times of fear, these experimental methods just keep evolving and coming back and then really just leaving a trail of torture victims. Well, given your experience reporting on national security and Guantanamo and the CIA, was there anything about this story that surprised you that really caught you off guard? Generally, in terms of what M.K.L.T.L. that I had no idea about. And I think you guys interviewed, Stephen Kinzer as well. He's a great storyteller. And so reading about what happened in the U.S. and the breadth of MK Ultra and having such crazy programs such as Operation Midlight Climax was a real eye-opener. I just thought

that's the kind of stuff that you read about in novels and you just dismiss as fiction. You're like, nope, that actually happened. Yeah. I loved the way you guys. touched on that. That was something that we also were like, oh gosh, do we just do a whole episode about this? You know, because it is just so unbelievable almost. And you know, I mean, to address the elephant in the room, too, the reason that we're talking is because we both did these podcasts about MK Ultra. And, you know, while we started this conversation saying it was amazing that there's little bits and pieces of MK Ultra being mentioned all over the place, you know, in pop culture all over the web. Every once in a while there's a small news story. I have to say,

and you guys probably had the same experience, we were like, what? They're doing a podcast series too? Like, it was just the weirdest coincidence. Well, and I think some of it for us had to do with just a little bit of digging into this story. And I found out about the current lawsuits that are being brought against, one of them is just being brought against the Canadian government and the Allen Memorial Institute and McGill. And the other one is a class action that is that is trying to take on the CIA as well. And it just kind of felt like this living history, you know, that this story, not that this story will ever be wrapped up or will ever have a bow on it, because it shouldn't, you know, people should know about this and continue to think about this. And clearly it will

continue to affect the lives of the victims who are still alive and their family members. But that was kind of an extra factor that this really is a living history story. that is ongoing, and we don't know how it will end. Yeah, and those lawsuits, I mean, they're just languishing now, so we'll see what happens with them. But I know the groups kind of lost a little bit of their momentum with a pandemic, you know, in terms of the protests and some of the action they wanted to take. Well, maybe as kind of a closing thought,

what do you hope people will take away from madness and brainwashed, Michelle? Well, I'll answer and then I'll ask you guys the same question. You know, I know it sounds kind of trite, but I just I just want people to really understand what happened. For this kind of story, it's just so important to hear directly from the people involved. And, you know, we're blessed with this really rich archive too. So we can hear from some historical figures that are no longer with us. And so if people can take that time and spend, you know, three hours with us, three hours with you, and really dig in, you know, especially with our two podcasts taken together, it's a really important journalistic undertaking of what can happen in times of fear and how

it's important that we have to keep, you know, our governments accountable. And again, the silly cliche of like, if you don't learn from history, it really is It's going to repeat itself. What about you guys? What do you hope people take away? I'm going to go back to my, you know, basic bro culture, pop culture stuff and just say like, there are all these references all around us all the time

in the media and culture that we consume that are trying to tell us about our history and trying to preserve our knowledge and understanding of what has happened good and bad in our history. And I think we should, as individuals and as citizens, we should be taking the next step and actually going back and exploring that and understanding better that history.

Because, like, Michelle, what you said about sort of what we do in moments of fear, right? What we did during the Cold War to kind of protect ourselves from having another World War II in what we did in the name of, offending ourselves is indefensible. Do either of you know the myth of Cassandra?

Oh, yeah, something about is their hair cutting involved? Is their hair involved? No, no, no. That's Samson. That's Samson. The myth of Cassandra has to do with not being believed, that Cassandra was a woman who was never believed by anyone. It drove her to a point of actual insanity.

And I think what I hope people take away from these series that we have done is that I really felt talking to the family members of victims that they feel like they have been waving their arms for years and that even that case against the CIA in the 1980s even though that brought more attention to what Cameron's patients went through it still ended in a settlement no one has ever told these people in a legitimate way, I believe you and I'm sorry. I hope people just believe what they hear and take it all in, but believe that this really happened, believe that people really suffered, believe that people are still suffering and are still paying the consequences of this, and that they deserve

some acknowledgement that wrong was committed and that damage was inflicted that can never be undone. So that's what I'm hoping people hear from this, that some stories sound too crazy to be believed, but they have to be. I think that's a lovely point to end it on, really. Well, Michelle, it's been so great talking to you. Yeah, thank you so much, Michelle. This was great. Thank you, guys. This was great. Next time we'll do it together instead of separate. It would be half the work. It'd be a great idea. That was our conversation with Michelle Shepard, host of the CBC podcast. podcast Brainwashed. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, go back and check

out Madness if you haven't already. Then this is kind of great timing with endless dread, don't you think, for us to be digging up the old Madness series? Yeah, digging right back down into the grave, pulling it right out. Madness, brainwashed. I think it's a really fascinating story, and it's great to hear the CBC tell it like they can do so well. We will get back to our usual programming on Friday. I hope you are all staying safe and staying home and listening to podcasts and wearing a mask. And we'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.