Guerrilla History - *Unlocked* Intelligence Briefing- MK Ultra ft. Michelle Shephard

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Vanguard tier and above will get instant access to all episodes.  Half of the episodes will be made available to the public after a week or two, while the others will remain patreon-exclusives (though they will be opened up to members of the Comrade tier after a couple weeks). This Intelligence Briefing was an early release on patreon, and is a bit different format than usual.  Our topic today is MK Ultra, and after we have a brief chat back and forth about the CIA's mind control project, we include an interview Henry conducted with Michelle Shephard on The David Feldman Show (a twice weekly podcast hosted by a leftist comedy writer, which Adnan and Henry regularly feature on, and Breht has been a guest on several times).  Michelle is a Canadian journalist who recently created the CBC podcast miniseries Brainwashed, about MK Ultra with a focus on the Canadian component of the project.  If you enjoy that interview, subscribe to The David Feldman Show wherever you get podcasts (and check out his website at https://davidfeldmanshow.com/) and follow him on twitter @david_feldman_.  Also, subscribe to Brainwashed on your podcast app of choice, and follow Michelle on twitter @shephardm.   Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions on patreon (https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory) make the show possible to continue and succeed!   To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find all the information regarding these shows, and contribute to them, by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.   Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.      

You don't remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing. For those of you who are not on our Patreon, intelligence briefings are little bonus episodes

that we put up on our Patreon. Half of them stay Patreon exclusive, and half of them, like this one, are delayed before they go out on our public feed. And pretty much what these episodes are, are the three of us. I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, and Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-hosts of the Red Menace podcast. We put these episodes together just basically as an informal chat between the three of us

of our thoughts on different historical events and then put them out there. This one's going to be a little bit different than the majority of them. It's going to be on M.K. Ultra, the CIA brain. brainwashing mind control experiments that were being done, but we're also going to include a clip from a different show at the end of an interview that I conducted a few weeks ago. So this will be a little bit different than our typical intelligence briefing format, but we hope that you enjoy it. So without further ado, MK Ultra, guys, what do we think about MK Ultra? What was MK Ultra? Does anybody want to address that?

Sure, I can start. I think some, most perhaps people have a vague idea. of MK Ultra. They've certainly heard it probably in popular culture, which is just a set of experiments, basically, that the CIA did, I think starting in 1953, going through the 60s, and then officially formally ending in 1973. So about two decades in which they would do a bunch of different things to people, sometimes with consent, oftentimes without, in which they would try experimental drugs, psychological forms of torture, and these were all done with the singular overriding goal of more effectively fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and it can't be divorced from that. And it was also in a lot of ways an extension of the criminal

experimentations that went on in concentration camps during the Nazi reign. And Operation Paperclip, which is related somewhat to this, was a program that the CIA conducted in which they took a lot of the Nazi intellectuals and scientists who had committed those crimes, often changed their names, gave them cover, brought them over into the U.S. And so one way that I think about the Nazi defeat during the Second World War was not that, as so many Americans learned, the U.S. defeated the Nazis, but rather that the U.S. absorbed the Nazis. And MK Ultra was one project that came out of that absorption. It was really building off of those prior Nazi experimentations. And it was equally as cruel and immoral. It targeted, especially early on, people that were mentally ill, people that were drug addicts, people that were sex workers, people as one, I think CIA agency officer put it, who couldn't

fight back. And so it was disgraceful. And we look at MK Ultra and we're fascinated by it, right? And I think that is the overriding feeling people take as like. this perplexing fascination that this could even happen and how they went about it. But I don't think we should lose sight of how brutally immoral, illegal, and just depraved these things were. And they were violations of the very Nuremberg laws, right, the treaties that the U.S. signed. The U.S. has a long history of not listening to treaties and international agreements.

And this is another in that step where they did things that under Nuremberg laws were internationally prohibited. They didn't care. And last thing I'll say is, you know, these documents, many of these documents were destroyed in a CIA purge as these things started to become known. So really what we know of MK Ultra is a relatively small amount of what actually happened. Most of those documents were gone and destroyed. We'll never have access to them and we'll never know the full dimensions of this rotten criminal project of the CIA. Adnan? Well, I think Brett summarized it very, very well. And covered a lot of ground. All I would add to his remarks about it are maybe two basic points.

One is to emphasize even further the point he made about continuities between state fascism and its techniques under the Nazis with U.S. prosecution of the Cold War and the absorption of those techniques to say that going forward we see the same kinds of programs and techniques being resurrected in the global war on terrorism and that all of these things that were supposed to have been suppressed, put aside, you know, with light, democratic light shown upon them, you know, so that there could be accountability and so on, were easily dispatched when there was a new rationale for the security surveillance state and its interlocking connections with the military in the military industrial complex with the prison system, the carceral state, that these,

you know, are abiding power formations within the state, and they look for these opportunities where they can reassert control. And there's such continuity between what we see in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. And what I find really disturbing is the way in which which the debates about the ethics and morality of this were conducted with so little historical perspective as if, well, this is a unique situation. And so we need to really weigh the pros and cons in these exigent emergency circumstances. And this is always the logic. We're always in the emergency. And the point is, is that there's such a long history of these techniques that you really can't just situate them and say, oh, this is a situation that warrants it because of these

unique circumstances because they're clearly always trying to use these. And the danger here is that when these are brought back and developed, is that they will extend beyond the narrow remit that is being used to justify it because that is the logic of state control in these circumstances. So that's one kind of major point. I think the second point that I would want to emphasize about this is also the historic intersection and appropriation of institutions of academic research and scientific and medical communities to state control and U.S. Empire. And this is really something quite disturbing because we tend to think of these institutions

as dedicated to a humanistic or liberal project of knowledge for its own sake. that these are valuable so that we can know and understand one another better, make improvements in society, and employ this research and its outcomes for the service of humanity. This is what justifies all of the effort that goes into it. And yet we see that so often, not in the U.S., in Israel, in Nazi Germany, you find that regimes have deployed the willing participation. of academic scholars, medical professionals, researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and even anthropologists in U.S. Empire and in military expansion and control. There were controversies in the late

2000s when it became apparent that the CIA was trying to recruit anthropologists and was sponsoring anthropological research to, you know, help out in the war on terror. What they quickly learned is that it was impossible to fight these insurgents who were embedded in a social fabric in a foreign society to be able to counter them without having local knowledge on the ground and that ethnography and anthropology could be potentially useful in trying to penetrate into tribal society. or local village cultures, and that there were some anthropologists who were willing to consult with U.S. armed forces in order to achieve those ends. And so this is an important thing to remember

about M.K. Ultra is that the way in which it hijacked and perverted what we would consider the true humanistic purposes behind academic knowledge and research. Yeah, Adnan, I want to add something onto what you just said. So, as you said, they had what they were claiming were ostensible academic scientific reasoning behind the implementation of project MK Ultra. This was done in multiple projects at the same time period. And so I just want to run through a little bit of information for the listeners. We might cover some of these in the future, but just to get it out there, MK Ultra, as Brett said, most of the documents have been destroyed. But even with the documents that are still available, we have.

documentation on at least 150 individuals that were subjected unwittingly to trials of experiments, including things like LSD dosing without them knowing, hypnosis trials, sleep deprivation studies, electroshock therapy, psychological torture. We have documentation of at least 150 individuals that went through this. And the vast majority of the documents were destroyed immediately after the program ended. We can imagine that there was many more involved in this study. There was at least 162 subprojects within MK Ultra. There was at least 80 institutions that were involved in MK Ultra. There was at least 185 researchers who are participating in MK Ultra. So to think that the number of people that were involved in terms of being

experimented on was only 150 is a drastic oversight on people's view. Because a lot of the times when you look at the numbers, they'll only list the 150 individuals that we have confirmation on. But just given the numbers of the scale of this project, we know that it's much larger. But even with that, this perversion of science was not unique to M.K. Ultra. And I know many of the listeners, of course, the listeners, the guerrilla history are not going to be representative of the general population. But the general population might think to themselves, hey, there's no way the U.S. government could be experimented. unwittingly on U.S. citizens? Well, let me tell you, M.K. Ultra went on for 20 years. But the Tuskegee syphilis studies, which we might talk about, went on for 40 years.

There was over 400 African-American, mostly men, sharecroppers. There was over 400 of them that once they contracted syphilis, they were allowed to rot and die by the U.S. government in the name of science. That went on for 40 years, well after the advent of penicillin, which is still the gold standard treatment for syphilis. We also, at the same time, had the radiation studies, which is not nearly as well known as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, but it was even much larger than this. The radiation studies went on for almost 30 years, and there was over a thousand individuals who were enrolled in these studies. I have some numbers in front of me because I have done

research on this in the past, but there was 18 individuals, at least again, a lot of the documents were destroyed for the radiation experiments. But over the course of almost 30 years, there was 18 individuals who were injected with plutonium during hospital checkups because they wanted to see what the effect of localized radioactive material inside an individual would do. 7501 pregnant women in Nashville were given radioactive iron pills or radioactive iodine cocktails because they wanted to see what would happen to unborn children that were exposed to radiation or there's many other ones that I can run through and as I said we may do this some other time but I just want to give you the most disgusting of these experiments 57 at least 57 developmentally disabled or challenged

children were fed radioactive oatmeal and this project was sponsored co-sponsored by quaker oats yes the company that your oatmeal in your kitchen is probably made by They co-sponsored a study where they were feeding developmentally disabled children radioactive oatmeal because they wanted to see what would happen if our food supply was contaminated with radiation. In no way was MK Ultra an isolated experiment. This is something that is long-held policy of the United States. We're talking about multiple, multiple administrations with governments of each party in control. And this is something that was carried on for decades.

And for decades after that wasn't released into. into the public. We didn't know about most of these until the 90s. It's obscene. Anyway, I'm getting carried away here. I want to pitch it back over to Brett and Auden after I, so I can take a deep breath for a second, but also because the interview that we're going to be dropping onto the end was hosted by me. So I want to make sure that the guys get plenty of plenty of time in this episode as well. But the last thing I'll say before I let them just go back and forth between each other, is that if you're interested in the radiation experiments, and again, we might do a deeper dive into this into the future, there's an excellent

book called The Plutonium Files by Eileen Wellsome, highly recommended. It's one of my favorite books, and it makes me absolutely disgusted to read, but it's absolutely fascinating. In any case, Brett Adnan, I'll let you chat for however long you feel for about, you know, the context of mk ultra uh the connections of mk ultra with american security state uh apparatusies afterwards and then at the end will drop in the interview that i conducted with michel shepherd yeah i would just say first and foremost henry i think you're giving voice and an emotional thrust to just how fucking brutal and criminal this stuff actually was i tears were welling up in my eyes as you were talking because of just the amount of of human suffering that didn't need to happen you know

know, for somebody who's pregnant, that's their whole life. You know, that's their baby. They want that the best for their kid. And then it's just an experiment to the U.S. government. The CIA is the organized crime branch of the American ruling class. And the things they did before and after M.K. Ultra are, there's no break. It's continued. What did they do before they killed Fred Hanton?

Well, it was the FBI this time, but they drugged him, right? All of, there was hundreds of attempts on Fidel Castro's life, for example. So this is tied up with. with people rising up to try to take control of their own economies. Another example was one I read about was a mentally ill person in Kentucky was given high doses of LSD for 174 days in a row. Now, if you have the best psychological stability in the world and get 174 days straight of LSD, you're going to break down. And this is somebody who had nobody helping them, nobody advocating for them, no ability to consent. They're already dealing with mental illness and anybody who has struggled with any form of mental illness knows how hopeless and lonely and grinding those states can be.

And then you throw on top of it without them even knowing a hardcore drug like LSD, it is unforgivable. And then Adon's point was great about the continuation into the realm of the war on terrorism. One of the things, and we all know about like waterboarding and the euphemism, what was it, enhanced interrogation techniques is just torporing. torturing people. One of the things they did to suspected terrorists, many of whom weren't even terrorists, we now know, was put them in big semi-truck trailers with no light, you know, so you didn't know if it was day or night. And they would pump hardcore like dark metal, a music at ear splitting volumes for days on end. What does that do to a human being? You know, human beings, they're the playthings of the American government. And every crime the CIA

committed is a crime that we can lay at the feet of the U.S. Empire. And another thing, thing that Adnan said that's incredibly important to remember is the constant need for enemies, right? It was so the Soviet communists. And then it was Islamic terrorists. And today, what are they trying to do? Well, you have a little bit of like Antifa and domestic stuff, Black Lives Matter, but really China, authoritarian China, the new Cold War 2.0. The American Empire needs an enemy for many reasons, not the least of which is to continue the profitability of weapons, manufacturers, and defense contractors, but also to continue to justify the presence of U.S. hegemony and imperialism the world over. So, you know, these experiments, they never stop. They always come back home, right?

They're tested on people here in the U.S. There is no like, oh, we're protecting American bullshit excuse to fall back on you, brutalized Americans and Canadians and countless other people around the world for these projects, most of which didn't even amount to anything that you could sustainably use carrying forward. And so the angle. and the heartbreak and the sadness that, you know, Henry gave voice to, I think is the human response to this criminal behavior. And it will only stop when the entire government and the CIA are dismantled and brought down to ashes and something new is built upon them. I cannot agree more. And Henry, I so much appreciate that you got emotional because this is something that,

we should be emotional about if you don't have the conscience that is offended and disgusted by, you know, these programs and the human casualties and suffering that they've caused, you know, then you don't have the ethics in the heart, really, that's required. Just to add to what Brett mentioned about the need for an enemy and the sort of twisted logic of constantly finding ways to justify these programs is that, you know, it seems to result from fear and paranoia that's so easy to whip up. So in the 1950s, 60s, it was the, you know, so-called Manchurian candidate and the mind control that was imputed to the others in their authoritarian and totalitarian systems, you know, that they would, that they, that they, that they,

they, you know, enforce this on their citizens and that they had developed techniques that could undermine our democracy, right? And it sounds a little familiar, too, with the interference in our domestic political process and imputing this to outside agents having a nefarious and conspiratorial influence. But that becomes the basis for counter, so-called countermeasures that are actually just measures that they want to take, that they extend these inhuman treatment of people. And so that's something that we have to watch very carefully, is that there's very much a projection to the other, the threat and the danger, and all, we're just responding to this.

And we have to then deal with these circumstances that may mean temporarily we have to put aside our ethics, you know, and do so wringing our hands, moral qualms, and this is what makes us better than the others because they just go ahead and do it, but we're going to sit here and have a little bit of a debate and then go ahead and do it anyway. I think that's the hypocrisy that we have to really challenge and confront. And then just the last thing about connecting the common humanity of people, very often when this is done in a far away country, depleted uranium armaments are used, or you have so-called collateral damage, and that's rationalized because these are people who are of a different country,

you have a different culture or religion and far away. And we think, well, you know, that could be justified in these circumstances, but of course we would never sanction this on our own people. The point is that when you sacrifice common humanity and allow U.S. foreign policy and U.S. empire to engage in these nefarious and illegal and awful practices, There's no way you can draw the boundary and demarcate it. It just means that you will have to accept, ultimately, the eroding of those kinds of standards in your own domestic sphere as well,

because the foreign and the domestic are actually intimately connected in the logic of the state. And so we should make sure, as leftists, as people who care about human dignity and human rights and social justice and equality, is to value, human beings, wherever they are, fully, equally. And that's the safest and best principle that we can act on. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. And it's not by any means the first or the last time the U.S. was willing to, you know, use American citizens or Canadians or whatever for their own experimentations. There were plans brought to JFK, for example, about the possibility of blowing up an American airliner and then blaming Castro as a pretense to invade. And these things go all throughout CIA and American government history.

And, you know, it also is worth at least just thinking of what we don't know. So we know in just this one case, we only get a relatively small amount of documents, which by happenstance where they were logged in the wrong place, I think, the wrong building. 20,000 of these documents survived, but the vast majority of them were completely eradicated. Well, the CIA learned, among other things, how to better prevent that information from ever getting out. So what has happened since then? What's happening right now that we don't know about that our tax dollars are our funding, that our American government is participating in, that's brutalizing human beings all across the planet, whether at home or abroad?

And that's the other thing about just having that deep human connection that Annan was talking about is if they can make you dehumanize people, then they can do things to them that you will find justifications for. They can make you think that Japanese people are, you know, inferior or automaton's and kamikazis that aren't really human. They can blow up little Japanese children with nukes and, you know, hundreds of millions of Americans will come up with some bullshit excuse for it. And the same goes for China or anywhere else. And then we also see, I mean, it's not even, it's almost beyond pointing out the moral hypocrisy of the U.S. government, but the government that says it's for democracy and freedom that always points to other countries human rights violations. sometimes legitimately, sometimes not, as if there is any moral high ground for the U.S. government to wag their moral finger at anybody whatsoever.

The U.S. government, in many ways, is a continuation of elements of the Nazi regime. It is a fascist state in so many ways. Maybe for upper middle class white Americans, the fascist sting doesn't really hit them, but certainly for marginalized, poor, people of color, this has always been a fascist state. And the CIA is one of the main instruments that the U.S. government uses abroad and obviously we see it at home to carry out its will to develop techniques to brutalize and dominate and exploit people in perpetuity and that's that's kind of what we're dealing with and i know it's not a lot it's not insightful to to say how terrible the CIA is but

to bring these details to the forefront and to show just what they've done and and only just to begin to imagine what they have done since and are currently doing it really drives the point home and I think it needs to be common sense, not only on the left, but hopefully on the entire American population at some point, that these institutions are rotten from the inside out. There's no reforming the CIA. There's no reforming the FBI and the American government. You know, these are rotten to the core. We need to dismantle these structures and build something new atop them. There is no other way through, in my opinion.

I would just encourage our listeners to check out our first episode if you haven't listened to it. Yet, with Vijay Prashat on his book, Washington Bullets, that detailed the U.S. assassination programs, the disruption of third world social justice and liberation movements, and the central role that the CIA has played in undermining a more just order in the post-Cold war, or during the Cold War and into the post-Cold War period, where you can see how something like M.K. Ultra is just one component or aspect of a broader program that the U.S. government has enacted in the world to the detriment of humanity. Anything that either of you guys wants to add before we bring it into the interview that we're going to drop into the end. Well, in that case, then we're going to wrap up this portion of our intelligence briefing

for guerrilla history. If you're hearing this on our public feed and you like this kind of format of episodes, do check out our Patreon. We are going to be putting up roughly two intelligence briefings a month on there, one of which will be a Patreon exclusive, and then one will be like this where it's delayed before going on to the public feed. Adnan, how can our listeners find you on social media? Well, they can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, 1-S-A-I-N. And I would love it if people would check out my other podcast that I co-host. It's called The M-M-A-J-L-I-S, and it deals with the Middle East, Islamic World, Muslims, Islamophobia, these kinds of topics. If you're interested in them, check us out.

Brat, how about you? Yeah, Rev. red menace and now guerrilla history are all at revolutionary left radio.com. And I'd also urge anybody listening if you haven't already by the time you're hearing this, check out me and Adnan's conversation on Sufism. It's one of my favorite conversations we've had on RevLeft in a while, and it's really fascinating deep dive into elements that the left doesn't explore as much as they should. So if you haven't checked that out yet, definitely check that out. Excellent. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995. I also have a

Patreon where I write about science and public health. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Huck 1995. And I guess I'll pitch the Patreon for guerrilla history as well, since I didn't mention it. And this is going to be on the public feed. But you can find our Patreon for guerrilla history at patreon.com forward slash gorilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Now we're going to swing it over to the interview that I conducted a couple of weeks ago on a different show with Michelle Shepard. And I want to take. just a moment to encourage the listeners to cross-pollinate and find other independent left media. We're a small show right now. We're trying to grow it. There's a lot of other shows out there that

also put out a lot of really good content. And one of the ones that Adnan and I are really regularly involved with. And Brett, you've been a guest a couple of times, is the David Feldman show. So David Feldman is a leftist comedy writer, award-winning comedy writer, and he's crazy. He does two eight-hour shows a week where he interviews comics and professors and basically whoever I feel like because I bring on a guest every week onto the show. So you definitely should check out if you're a leftist and you like the more comedic side of things, check out the David Feldman show. It's on all the podcast players. You can find it on YouTube. follow David on Twitter at David underscore Feldman underscore.

But a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview Michelle Shepard. Michelle Shepard's a journalist in Canada who recently put together a podcast that if this episode interested you, you should all check out. The name of the podcast is Brainwashed, and it was produced by the CBC as well as the CBC's program, The Fifth Estate. And Brainwash takes a look at MK Ultra with particular focus on the, Canadian aspect of MK Ultra, which is something that isn't really covered. Many other places, the Canadian aspect of MK Ultra is really under the table in most regards. So I'm going to drop

that episode on here. Give it a listen. Give Brainwash to listen if you like the interview and you can follow Michelle on Twitter at Shepard S-E-P-H-A-R-D-M on Twitter. Read her work. She's excellent. She does a lot of work at Guantanamo. And yeah, give her a follow. So that'll do it for this intelligence briefing of guerrilla history. Now you're going to hear the interview that I conducted with Michelle Shepard. Solidarity. Let's go to Let's go to Let's go to

Michigan, where Henry Huckamacki, immunobiologist, is standing by. And I understand you have an amazing, I'm just going to sit back and listen and watch. I can't wait for this. Hi, Henry. Hello, David. Yeah, this is going to be a great interview. I can assure you of that. So I guess I'll do a quick lead in and then introduce the guest.

Do you want me to play the opening montage? I'll have you play that in just a second. Let me lead us in first. So as you and most of the listeners probably know by now, I've got my own history podcast. So I'm always on the lookout for other history-related content to consume, whether that's books or articles or other podcasts. And a few weeks ago, I came across a podcast series, a short podcast series, six episodes that was put together by the CBC and Canada and the Fifth Estate on Project MK Ultra.

It's called Brainwashed, and it was excellent. I knew a fair amount about MK Ultra before I started listening to it, but there was a lot of aspects of the project that I was completely unfamiliar with, especially the Canadian aspects of it, which we'll get into. So I went and contacted one of the journalists who was in charge of this project, Michelle Shepard, and, yeah, she agreed to join us today. So we're going to be talking with Michelle Shepard. there she is, about MK Ultra and the Project Brainwashed.

Welcome, Michelle. It's nice to have you here. Thank you. Thanks very much for inviting me. So I guess before we get into the questioning itself, David, why don't you hit that clip? And this is just a brief montage of different moments from the series. During the night, they'd wake us up and give us another half glass of pills. The room became very distorted.

and I thought my bones were all melting. Well, I was hallucinating, and they kept telling me you're getting smaller and smaller, and they kept bringing me back in time and asking me all kinds of questions. It was just an absolute nightmare. I was absolutely crying for hours and hours and hours, I mean, really from deep inside of me. I was in a comatose state for 72 consecutive days, and in order to get me into that state, I had over, 109 electro-convulsive shock treatments.

Their objective was to wipe my memory. I suffered. I suffered like you. Yeah, so that was a brief montage with some of the individuals that were enrolled unwittingly into MK Ultra. So, Michelle, again, thanks for coming on to the show. before we start talking about mk ultra why don't you is a and i'll give you uh your your due diligence at the end and talk about some of the other projects and books that you've written and whatnot but how do you get involved in putting together a journalistic project like brainwash this must have

been a huge undertaking yeah uh it was i mean just just by way of background uh it was uh actually a newspaper reporter at the journalist for 21 years. And since 9-11, I've covered national security issues. And I had this really amazing beat that I'm not sure exists anymore in journalism, but I was able to be a foreign quilt. And then in 2018, I left to become an independent reporter. And at that point, I started doing podcasts. and really, really enjoyed podcasts as a form of long-form journalism.

So, CBC, as you mentioned, CBC Fifth Estate is their investigative documentary television series. And they had actually been following stories on MK Ultra really since the 1980s. I mean, they broke some of the first Canadian stories that were happening. But the last story they did, it's amazing that's been going on so long, but the last story that they did in 2017 generated such a response. and they had so many new people come forward that they went to the podcast department and said, you know, do you think there's something here

that we could do? And at that point, they connected with me. And for me, it was really wonderful because my kind of knowledge of national security issues really starts around 9-11. You know, I think I still remember standing, you know, at Ground Zero in New York that night as, you know, parts of the building were still falling,

falling and really not knowing anything about al-Qaeda and in the sort of you know 20 years since then I've learned a tremendous amount but I didn't know the history to some of these national security issues and that's what was so fascinated about mK ultra this this rich history that you know like you I'd sort of heard little bits and pieces but I never I never knew the scope of it and I didn't know the Canadian connection which is so ironic I mean I'm Canadian you know so much this happened in Montreal, which is, you know, five hours from where I live in Toronto. And meanwhile, I'd been, you know, flitting around the world, doing all these national security stories and not realize this huge one that was right in my backyard.

Yeah, and I do want to mention that in regards to your international correspondence, you really have done a ton of work on Guantanamo, and I hope that we can bring you back on to talk about that at some point in the future. But let's talk about, so we've been mentioning MK Ultra, for the listeners that are unaware of MK Ultra. What was MK Ultra? Well, it was a CIA program that began during the Cold War and this sort of state of paranoia where basically the U.S. and CIA in particular believed that the communists were able to brainwash people. And they were looking at American POWs who were in Korea and saying things that

they couldn't believe there was any way that they would say it unless they'd been brainwashed. So it was a massive, massive covert program that began in the 50s. And it involved multiple different experiments in the U.S., Canada, as you've mentioned, in Europe as well, and parts of Asia. And the whole idea behind it was to try and harness this power of mind control. And it's kind of the stuff that you hear of fiction or conspiracy theories. But when I went back and looked into what was being done, it was quite remarkable. because the majority of the experiment subjects were unwitting participants. Certainly in Canada, one of the biggest projects was in a Montreal psychiatric hospital.

And these were people who came into the hospital with, you know, ailments that we know now as anxiety or postpartum depression, a lot of it, women. And they would pay to go into this sort of cutting-edge treatment that they could get there. And they became these kind of unwitting guinea pigs. and they had unbelievable experiments conducted on them with massive amounts of drugs, electroshock therapy. I can get into the details if you want of the actual projects

that were being done in Montreal. They had these... Sure, sure. They really Orwellian names. There was a doctor there, Dr. Ewan Cameron, who was sort of the head of it. And he had kind of this two-stage process that he believed through drugs

and electroshock therapy, piece, he would, what he called de-pattern a person. And it meant his idea was that he could bring you back to this infantile state where you couldn't remember anything. You had to relearn basically how to walk and use the washroom. And once he de-patterned you, he would do something called psychic driving. And I mean, these terms are so Orwellian. And psychic driving involved playing recordings over and over and over thousands of thousands of times in the night when it would sleep in the day. And it would try to reprogram your brain. None of it worked. I mean, all these, these poor patients came out really tremendously broken people. And what we found in the podcast was, I mean, it was so long ago,

but we're talking to their children and grandchildren. And it was really generational trauma. I mean, they're really quite traumatized today. Yeah. So you mentioned you and Cameron, and I want to circle back to him. But first, let's talk about another character. And I have a reason for asking us. So Sydney Gottlieb is somebody that people that are really familiar with MK Ultra would be familiar with, but people that are maybe vaguely aware of the project are not, they might not have never, might not have ever heard the name Sydney Gottlieb before. And the reason I'm bringing this up is a kind of personal connection is that Frank Olson, who we might bring up in the conversation as well, was born about five miles away from where I was born. His town of

1,500 people was like 5 miles away from my town of 4,000 people that I was born in. So who was Sydney Gottlieb and why was he called the Poisoner in Chief? Yeah, I mean, we could have done the whole podcast on Sydney Gottlieb. And if people haven't read, there's a book called Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer, which I will be shocked if it doesn't get made into a movie at some point or a documentary. He was the chief chemist of the CIA and just absolutely he was kind of the architect of M.K. Ultra. And Stephen Kinser's book is fascinating with, I mean, we only sort of touched a little bit on Gottlieb in our podcast. So there's a lot more details in there.

But he had a couple projects that really were hard to fathom. And there were so many sensational parts of MK Ultra that I had no idea about. but the one we highlight this one in the podcast that Sydney Gottlieb was in charge of was something that the CIA called well actually I'll hold the name because it's so ridiculous but it was it was a project in which they wanted to find out the effects of LSD and sexual activity and how that could somehow contribute to brainwashing or mind control And so they gave prostitutes for sex workers in San Francisco. They gave them LSD so they could slip them to their clients without them knowing.

And then through a two-way mirror, they would actually watch the interactions. And apparently Sidney Gottlieb, you know, the architect, the chief chemist was the guy behind. They were watching this all. And the CIA called it Operation Midnight Climax. Yeah. When we heard that one, I was like, oh, this is the stuff that if you saw it in a movie, you'd laugh it out. But I actually am fascinated myself by Cindy Gottlieb.

I want to look more into him after reading his book. He's really interesting. As I said, we only kind of touched on him in the podcast because we dealt mainly with the Canadian connection. But, yeah, a fascinating character. I don't know what drove him and he's got quite an interesting history. Yeah, and Operation Midnight Climax, like you, it was something that I had not heard of before listening to the podcast,

in your case, making the podcast. listening to it. And yeah, that was of all of the hair-brain schemes I've heard of the CIA doing, that was certainly most entertaining ones from the reader or listeners' perspective. But let's move on. As you said, M.K. Ultras generally viewed as a entirely American project, something that the U.S. government perpetuated. They conducted it on American citizens for the U.S. national security apparatus. But that wasn't really. really necessarily the entire truth of the case. And this is something that, as you said, your podcast really focuses on and something that

I was completely unaware of before, which is that the Canadian government was intimately intertwined in Project MK Ultra to an extent far beyond what I would have even guessed if you had told me that they were going to be operating within the framework of MK Ultra. What was the Canadian government doing in MK Ultra? What was this sort of agreement that they had in place and then maybe talk about a little bit of the follow-up in terms of the lawsuit that was brought by Canadian citizens and et cetera.

Talk about the Canadian impact of MKLTRA. Yeah, I mean, like you, I didn't know this connection and that feels more embarrassing as a Canadian to say that. And it's such an interesting comment too on, you know, Canadians versus Americans. We can have a whole separate discussion on that. But we tend to, you know, it's easy up in the north to sort of look down our noses to some of the abuses that happen in the, in the U.S.

But here was a case where, yes, while M.K. Alter was run by the Americans, by the CIA, and that what was happening at the Allen under Dr. Cameron was funded through a front organization by the CIA. What was later discovered was that the Canadian government actually provided even more funding. And one of the first meetings that happened that kind of looked at the parameters of M.K. Ultra actually happened in Montreal, in Montreal, Quebec, and Canada, and involved various Canadian government officials.

So this was kind of, when news came to light finally that this had happened through some amazing journalism in the U.S. It was about 1977. John Marks wrote a book on this. The New York Times also covered it. And this is when it first came to light. You know, the Canadian connection wasn't, really was the Americans. It was looking at the Americans. And for many years, that was the focus.

There was actually a case that the Canadians brought against the CIA in Washington, in a U.S. court. They won a settlement out of court. So the focus had never really been on the Canadians. And they kind of got, you know, in a way, various Canadian governments have been able to kind of sidestep any blame for it. But what's happening now, and what was kind of the impetus of this, of the podcast, too, why it's still relevant, is that many of the children and grandchildren and the very few survivors who are still around and their siblings and spouses, there's actually two lawsuits that they're now bringing against the Canadian government. They're both in various stages. I think with the pandemic has pushed some of it back, but they're just trying to get some accountability from

the Canadian government. And, you know, it's so heartbreaking. We laugh about some of the projects like we're talking about Operation Midnight Climax, and there's just such perversity and laughable parts of this. But, you know, what we did in the podcast and what we spent a lot of time, you know, talking to were some of these relatives. And it's really devastating to see how it's ruined so many lives. You know, when you lose a parent to this kind of trauma,

it really is generational. So it's those survivors, their children, that are now trying to get, you know, of course, it's a lawsuit, so there's money involved, but it's not about the money. It's all they want is an apology, really. An apology and some promise that this sort of activity won't happen again. In regards to these lawsuits, one of the more infuriating things for me was the tactic that both the CIA and kind of the Canadian government as well were taking of basically trying to run the clock out,

not on terms of statute of limitations, but in terms of the lives of the people that were involved, whether that was the individuals prosecuting the case, whether that was the individuals that were trying to seek compensation or even just get an apology, as you said. Can you talk a little bit about how long drawn out this process was? Because it really did, it was evident that that was the tactic that they were taking is we're just going to wait for all of these people to die off.

And then we can get away without ever having to basically, we apologize for what we did or give any sort of compensation or even acknowledge that we were in the wrong here. I mean, I think, you know, sadly, that's very typical of governments when they fight these kind of lawsuits. And you see that not just in this case, but others, you know, especially when you have, you know, governments only having a set term. They're really just looking for what happens at that time.

In the case with the, in the U.S. with the CIA, I mean, it took over eight years. And they were not only trying to outlast the survivors, and they did. but also the very legendary lawyer that was fighting at Joseph Rao, who just sounded like quite an incredible, incredible figure. We were lucky enough to interview his junior partner on the case, who now was quite elderly himself, and he really painted an incredible picture of this civil rights champion, and it was quite clear that the CIA was kind of trying to run the clock out on him, too.

We have some archive tape of him basically saying that. But, you know, you see that. You mentioned earlier Guantanamo. And yes, that was many years of my life covering stories there. I think I've made 27 trips now to Guantanamo and counting. But there was a case of a famous Canadian who was held there. Our only Canadian who was a child when he was incarcerated. And I did a book and a film on him.

So it's been a big part of my reporting. career. But there's a case, too, where both in civil suits in Canada and also the American challenges against the convictions in Guantanamo, he's just kind of running the clock. And, you know, for most of these cases, it's lawyers take these on pro bono, you know, and it's really, like, I really admire these lawyers that, you know, associated with the, you know, ACLU or other bodies that take these cases on because it's pretty thankless work. And when you're at the government, you kind of have endless, endless resources, right? You have taxpayer dollars to keep your cases going and they don't want to set precedents and

they don't want to settle. So they tend to go on for quite some time. One of the other things that I thought was particularly interesting that basically an entire episode of the podcast was devoted to. And it's something that I've kind of thought about in the back of my mind and my previous readings on mk ultra but never was really focused on is that while mk ultra itself was a complete failure of a project i mean they were trying to reprogram people's minds and and basically brain control them or mind control them and this this was an utter failure but despite the fact

that mk ultra was a failure and its stated goals the project did have a lasting impact on the security apparatus in the united states including the tactics that they used and you draw a through line in the podcast, which was something that I thought was very well done, a through line from the tactics and kind of work that they were doing within M.K. Ultra to the torture that was being done in Abu Ghraib, for example. Would you be able to talk, you know, a little bit about kind of this throughline of the tactics that were used in this failed project and how that, how that shaped the tactics of the U.S. security apparatus going forward? sure i mean that was another kind of revelation for me because you know as i mentioned this

had sort of been my my recent career covering issues of national security and and i did a lot of work um not just in guantano but but also on the um the CIA black sites and what was brought in the interrogation techniques that were brought in that were known as the enhanced interrogation tactics that techniques that i think you know now most people are comfortable saying was a form of torture. I was torture. And yet it was funny because I think it was Obama

that first had that kind of speech that we actually called one of, titled one of our podcast episodes, we tortured some folks. And it was just, you know, gave that sort of speech where he just said yes, we did it. Just that phrase always stuck with me. We tortured some

folks. Felt odd. But I think, you know, in his messaging, when I was reporting at that time, I kind of was going along with it. It was like, these were unprecedented times. You know, this was such a time of fear. And I remember that. You know, I remember covering 9-11 and being in New York and coming back to Canada and

thinking, you know, the anthrax scare and thinking, oh, this is something like we've never experienced before. So this was a terrible mistake in a time of fear. And it was an aberration and it won't happen again. And so what was kind of eye-opening, perhaps in an I-E, way, I'll admit, you know, not knowing this before, but reaching back into M.K. Haltrow and realizing the enhanced interrogation techniques, the torture that happened there, you can

draw that line from what was happening in the 50s. And one of the themes we tried to bring out in the podcast was, this is what happens in times of fear. Like, times of fear are very, very dangerous in terms of politics. Because I think various governments, you know, will enact policy. that in other times we'd be more aware of or less willing to accept. But certainly after 9-11 was one of those times. I'm not old enough to remember the Cold War, but you look back and the Cold War was one of those times.

So that was when military and medicine come together in times of fear, you get things like this. So M.K. Ultra was an attempt to do brainwashing. As you said, it didn't work. And yet some of the experiments worked their way into what was known as the Clark Manual. And then that was sort of an in-house CIA document that then evolved into another document that was used in the 1980s in Latin America. And it was used to torture detainees then and prisoners then under CIA watch. And then from that, you know, there's a few other stages, but then eventually you get to after 9-11. And you get to what happened with the psychologists, the two psychologists who were paid handsomely by the CIA to,

devise these new interrogation techniques and they reached back into these these lessons that we you know we know don't work but essentially you know my mind control and brainwashing it's being able to manipulate someone into saying what they don't they don't want to say and that's really what they were trying to do with these these techniques and you know the bottom line is is I know there's been much debate about that but they don't work you know and many of the interrogators that I've spoken with, you know, put all the legal and ethical and all those considerations, moral considerations aside, it just doesn't work. I mean, people just, when they're tortured, they just say what you want, you want them to say. Yeah, as you said, completely ineffective.

And this is just a brief aside from my side. You don't have to respond to this. I don't want you to get in trouble. But, you know, you mentioned Obama's, we tortured some folks. And this, sadly is a theme of governments, not just the U.S., but governments everywhere, when there's something that they did wrong that comes to light. They always, almost always, there's a few exceptions, but typically they'll just brush it off without really acknowledging that that was something that took place over the case of years, if not decades. And that allows them that they can operate.

Again, you don't have to respond to this if you don't want, But it allows them to operate in a way that they know that if they do something similar and that comes out in the future, that is the culture that they've instilled is that these sorts of activities, they get brushed off when it comes to light years later, whether that's the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, whether that's the radiation experiments that took place in the United States, where they were irradiating people or giving women, pregnant women, radioactive iodine cocktails to see what would happen to the children that were irradiated or feeding. Mentally challenged children, radioactive oatmeal to see what the effect of eating or radiated foods were. We have many examples of things like these coming to light. And the result is always maybe an acknowledgement, but typically it's just brushing it off as this is in the past, let bygones be bygones. And then later on you find out that the people that brushed off did things that they then later were brushed off. It's really kind of a frustrating and sickening tactic that's been done for forever, essentially. But, yeah, as I said, you don't have to respond to that.

I don't want you to get in trouble. Like, it's not, I mean, I think that that was kind of the thrust of what we were saying at the end. You know, your takeaway from the podcast is, you know, without accountability, things do happen again. And, you know, that's, I think, for a lot of the survivors of this, that's what they're looking for. They're, you know, you can't, obviously, you can't bring back loves ones. You can't, you know, repair a life that's been broken by this. this, but at least if there's an acknowledgement, then history won't repeat itself. And it does. And, you know, sometimes when we talk about, you know, we always talk about sort of the government

and sort of big terms. But I think in times of fear, too, like as a public, we hold some responsibility too, because, you know, it shows in scary times, every, we, no matter what side of the political divide you're on, you're looking for strength and leadership. And so, I think a lot of decisions get made in that. And, you know, there's not, the government is not full of, like, evil, torturous people. You know, some of these decisions on lower levels, you know, some people actually think they were doing the right thing. So I think as, you know, as a community, and that's not to excuse anything that's done, but I think as a, you know, as a public, we hold some responsibility too, to, you know, demand accountability and to really question the motives and the effectiveness of the policies. that come in. Yeah, I agree entirely. So we've just got a couple of minutes left. So on the

MK Ultra front, do you have, I know there's probably a lot of listeners who, as I said, we're tangentially aware of MK Ultra, but for listeners that listen to this conversation and became more interested in MK Ultra, perhaps they've even listened to brainwashed to get a little bit more further enmeshed in the story and want to have even more to consume, what would you suggest for reading for listeners that really want to know more on this front? Yeah, well, the Stephen Kinzer book that I mentioned is great Poisoner-in-Chief. It's pretty recent. I think it was out maybe last year or the year before. Historically, John Mark's book on MKLcher was kind of the first Bible about what happened and it holds up today. Those are two excellent reads. And then one of

lovely character who we interviewed who has the unfortunate name of Harvey Weinstein and he's every time we interviewed me said I introduced myself as Harvey Weinstein not that one but Dr. Harvey Weinstein

is an amazing amazing man who his father was at one of the patients in Montreal and he became a psychiatrist himself and he's written a book on what happened with his father. So I would say those three are great starting places. Excellent. So Michelle Shepard is an award-winning journalist, author, filmmaker,

who's covered issues on terrorism and civil rights since 9-11. She's reported for more than 25 countries, has done extensive reporting on Guantanamo. As you said, what, 27 times you've been there and counting? Yeah. And has written two books, Guantanamo's Child, the Untold Story of Omar Cadeer. and the decade of fear reporting from terrorism's gray zone. Michelle, before we let you go, what are you working on right now? Oh, well, I have a film that I'm just a documentary that I'm just finishing up on a teenager I met in Mogadishu, Somalia 10 years ago.

It's actually turned into a bit of a film about journalism, stories we tell and who gets to tell them. It's really actually made me think a lot about, forced me to think a lot about my past career. and I have a couple more podcasts in the works. Great. Listeners, make sure you look up brainwashed, look up Michelle Shepard's work. And thanks for coming on the show, Michelle.

It was excellent. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Thanks. Thank you so much. During the night, they'd wake us up and give us a other half glass of pills. A room became very distorted, and I thought my bones were all melting. Well, I was hallucinating, and they kept telling me,

you're getting smaller and smaller and they kept bringing me back in time and asking me all kinds of questions. It was just an absolute nightmare. I was absolutely crying for hours and hours and hours. I mean, really from deep inside of me. I was in a comatose state for 72 consecutive days. And in order to get me into that state, I had over 109 electro-convulsive shock treatments. Their objective was to wipe my memory. I suffered, I suffered like young.