LSD, hippies, San Francisco, the CIA – What’s the story behind PROJECT MK-ULTRA?
In the 1950s the CIA tried to develop an all-purpose mind control drug. They bought the entire global stock of LSD from Sandoz labs in Switzerland and set up a number of illegal mind-control projects to secretly test on the general public. MKUltra had numerous directives or “sub-projects”, such as seeking a truth serum or the creation of the perfect assassin, or “Manchurian Candidate”. A person who could carry out an order, such as an assassination, but later have no memory of it.
They secretly tested the general public, students, hospital patients and prisoners. Some people, such as Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey, found it inspirational.
Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) retreated to his cabin, a changed man after he was reportedly subjected to tests. Ken Kesey was also affected and what followed was a massive countercultural revolution in the early 1960s California.
How much of the story should we take as gospel?
The truth in this story is stranger than the fiction used to tell it.
A Nazi doctor, Kurt Plotner, who was involved in human experimentation in the death camps of World War Two was on the CIA payroll.
“Operation Midnight Climax”. In this case the CIA set up a brothel in San Francisco and hired prostitutes to drug clients while agents filmed them behind two-way mirrors. The aim was to test these people for suggestibility, compromise them and perfect methods of information gathering.
The women gave every “John” — as their targets were known — a hefty dose of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, in order to distort his senses and impair his judgment. In addition to LSD, the operatives sometimes used other psychotropics. Needless to say, none of the clients consented to the drugs or the experimentation.
The wall mirrors weren’t merely decorative — they were one-way portals through which CIA “researchers” studied their unsuspecting subjects under direct observation. “The goal [of Midnight Climax] was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men — something of a psychedelic honeypot experiment.”
The CIA agents “grew fascinated with the kinky sex games that played out between the johns and the hookers.”
From behind the glass, CIA agents could watch, listen (usually through recording devices hidden in the electrical outlets), and drink martinis all night as they took copious notes on their “subjects.”
Operation Midnight Climax ran for ten years, from 1953 until the agency phased out the safehouses in 1963. The operation had two other upscale bordellos operating in San Francisco and another in Greenwich Village, New York City. The operation was entirely defunct by 1965, but it was part of a more extensive mind-control experimentation operation known as MK-Ultra — run by the chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb — that continued until 1972.
The Midnight Climax operation was headed by George Henry White, an underling of Gottlieb’s who loved the job so much that he installed a minifridge and a portable toilet in the observation room so he never missed a moment of action. One of White’s lieutenants, Ike Feldman, described him as a “son of a bitch,
In a note to Gottlieb, White later wrote: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”.
Believing the Soviets were pursuing mind-control techniques and medications, the CIA’s MK-Ultra program experimented with a range of psychotropic drugs and comprised some 149 separate projects. The intelligence agency was fascinated by the program’s potential applications, particularly with conducting assassinations and interrogations.
“The project’s broadest goal was ‘to influence human behavior,”
Gottlieb launched the MK-Ultra Program in 1953 under CIA Director Alan Dulles. The program was so secretive that, when John McCone took over as CIA director in 1961, he wasn’t told about it. When the MK-Ultra program shut down in 1972, Director Richard Helms, the third director to oversee the mind-control program, ordered the agency to destroy all files related to the operation. The move frustrated a Senate investigation into the operation spurred by a revelatory story in The New York Times by Seymour Hersch.
Gottlieb earned his nickname, the “Black Sorcerer,” because he “developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste, poisoned handkerchiefs, poisoned cigars, poisoned anything,” O’Neill writes.
Midnight Climax was only one program in MK-Ultra’s portfolio. Other endeavours, such as Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, and Operation Chaos, still remain in relative obscurity — decades later, their extensive psychological damage and victim counts remain unknown.
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