MK-ULTRA in Canada
==================

MK-ULTRA in Canada is the Canadian dimension of the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme, addressed by John Kiriakou on 19 November 2025 after the host raised a newly authorised class action in Montreal.

The occasion

The lawsuit was brought by a woman born in 1942 who was sixteen in 1958, and who, in the account put to Kiriakou, was sent by a judge into the care of the programme's Canadian administrator after being treated as a delinquent. The administrator, the host noted, has long since died.

Kiriakou's confirmation

Kiriakou did not hedge on whether it happened. "We know with 100 per cent certainty that many of the MK-ULTRA experiments took place in Canada."

Asked why, his answer was administrative rather than conspiratorial. "We asked the Canadian intelligence service to help us out. This was all anti-Soviet, anti-Chinese, you know, remote viewing and LSD and all that stuff, and they gladly helped."

Not for deniability

The host offered the explanation most people reach for: that Canada was chosen because it was remote enough to give the agency plausible deniability. Kiriakou rejected the premise before the sentence finished. "We mostly did it at home."

The correction matters to how the programme is understood. In Kiriakou's telling Canada was not an offshore laboratory chosen to put distance between the agency and its subjects; it was an allied service that agreed to participate in work the CIA was already conducting on its own citizens. The framing offered to the Canadians, that this was Cold War research against Soviet and Chinese capabilities, is the same framing that carried the programme domestically.

The programme he sketches around it

Asked to describe MK-ULTRA for viewers who did not know it, Kiriakou gave the outline he uses consistently: "it was a top secret CIA program from 1955, the origins were 1952, up to 1975, when they were caught by the Church Committee. And so what they did was things like they experimented on American citizens without their knowledge, by dosing people with LSD."

The Canadian question is therefore not a separate scandal in his account but a jurisdictional footnote to the same one, with the distinction that the victims in Montreal are suing, and the American ones largely never could.

See also

- MK-Ultra
- Church Committee
- Central Intelligence Agency
- The San Francisco bacterium release
