Brainwashed

Someone Knows Something is the investigative true crime series by award-winning documentarian David Ridgen.  In Season 10 of Someone Knows Something, host David Ridgen investigates the sudden 2021 disappearance of Jaclyn Ferland-Smith, a Canadian expat living in Playas del Coco, a paradise veiled in rumour and fear on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. More episodes of Someone Knows Something a...

Front Burner is your essential daily news podcast that takes you deep into the stories shaping Canada and the world. In this episode you’ll hear Daemon Fairless speaking with Lisa Ellenwood. Lisa was a writer and producer on Brainwashed, but she’s also a producer with CBC’s The Fifth Estate and co-author of the book Les cobayes oubliés: l’histoire du programme MKULTRA à Montréal that comes out nex...

Host Michelle Shephard speaks to Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson from the podcast Endless Thread about their series, Madness. Like Brainwashed, Madness focusses on the CIA-funded mind control experiments led by Dr. Ewen Cameron. The hosts swap stories, compare notes and reflect on the enduring legacy of MKULTRA. To find transcriptions for episodes of Brainwashed, please click here: https://w...

MKULTRA has entered popular culture, becoming the butt of jokes, television plot points, and the darling of internet conspiracy theorists. At the very least, the secrecy that still surrounds MKULTRA, or the CIA’s post-9/11 programs, sows distrust of governments, and medical professionals. At worst, it gives credence to online conspiracies, like Pizzagate, that end up having real world consequences...

MKULTRA was supposed to have ended in the 1960s. The torturous experiments didn’t work. So why did these techniques evolve and continue to be used by American trainers throughout Latin America, and then get revived once again in the era that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks? The CIA’s Black Sites and a courtroom inside the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base may hold some of the answers. For transcripts...

After discovering that they were the unwitting victims of human experiments, nine of Dr. Cameron’s victims band together to take on a Herculean task – to make the CIA pay. How do you sue one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/brainwashed-transcripts-listen-1.5734335

Communist brainwashing, mind control experiments, a government cover up... MKULTRA sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories or science fiction. But it was real. John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, and Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief, reveal the shocking details of the bizarre and expansive secret CIA project. For transcripts of this series, please visit:...

Dr. Ewen Cameron, an internally renowned psychiatrist, was once the director of the World, American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. So how did he come to develop his controversial treatments? And what was the real purpose behind his experiments? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/brainwashed-transcripts-listen-1.5734335

The Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal was an innovative new hospital where patients sought cutting-edge psychiatric care. But instead of being helped, many were subjected to shockingly brutal experiments: massive doses of LSD or other drugs, electroshocks, and sensory deprivation. How — and why — could this be allowed to happen? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/r...

Brainwashed is an investigative series into the CIA’s covert experiments in mind control – from the Cold War and MKULTRA to the so-called War on Terror. Listen to the voices of the survivors and their families, the conscientious objectors and the lawyers and journalists who have fought to have this story come to light. Go into the hospital rooms where psychiatric patients became unwitting guinea p...