Your government will, indeed, perform experiments on you if it so chooses, and while some are undertaken with Nazi-esque malevolence — like the atrocities committed in the Tuskegee Study, a 40-year operation infecting innocent Black men with syphilis — others, like Midnight Climax, out the State’s utterly twisted flirtation with mind control.
Part of the notorious MKULTRA program, Midnight Climax — every bit as lascivious as one would expect from an agency founded in duplicity — might be one of the CIA’s most revealing experiments in thought control through substances, as well as its lesser-known entrée into the business of drugs and prostitution.
And now the corporate, mainstream media has finally decided to address the abhorrent crimes committed under the green light by nefarious CIA Director Allen Dulles — who signed off on MKULTRA and, thus, its iterations, on April 13, 1953.
One part in a series on the History Channel, America’s War on Drugs, reveals in documents and interviews how the CIA paid prostitutes to entice unwitting, working-class johns with illicit sex in order to dose them unknowingly with pure LSD — acid, lysergic acid diethylamide, one of the psychedelics exploding into America’s drug scene in the 1960s — for the project known as Midnight Climax.
Amid fears The Russians might perfect mind control before the United States government could manage to do so, the CIA turned unapologetically to experiments with LSD, leaving victims none the wiser — setting up fake brothels in San Francisco and, later, Marin County, where hired prostitutes would bring the agency’s prey: the unremarkable men of the lower and working classes who would be unlikely to retaliate if anything went awry.
“The CIA was scared stiff the KGB was going to get all this LSD and come over and start dosing people,” Richard Stratton, a former hippie pot kingpin ultimately caught and imprisoned, explains of Midnight Climax for a preview of the History Channel show. “So, we bought every drop of LSD in existence at that point.
“They gave it to George White, and let George White start dosing people.”
Here CIA agent George White is separated from a prostitute and a man on acid by one glass window. #WarOnDrugs pic.twitter.com/bl3emf9SvP
— HISTORY (@HISTORY) June 10, 2017
George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent and covert captain with the CIA precursor agency, Office of Strategic Services, sought to develop or discover a substance with potential to control the minds of prisoners-of-war — a reportedly failed attempt to best the KGB — so they would reveal privy and classified information upon interrogation.
“American chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the brains behind White’s brawn,” Troy Hooper wrote for SF Weekly in 2012. “It was the height of McCarthyism in the early ’50s, and government intelligence leaders, claiming fear of communist regimes, were using hallucinogens to induce confessions from prisoners of war held in Korea, and brainwash spies into changing allegiances. What better way to examine the effects of LSD than to dose unsuspecting citizens in New York City and San Francisco?”
Stocked with booze and attempting to mimic a “French whorehouse,” rooms in the agency’s bogus brothels — replete with images of women in bondage and prints by artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec — also came complete with two-way mirrors for operatives to kick back with martinis, watch the drug-fogged sexual activity, and scribble notes on what they observed.
“It was supposed to look rich, but it was furnished like crap,” a narcotics agent and frequent visitor to one of the elaborate brothels told John Marks, who authored, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate:’ The CIA and Mind Control.
“An unsuspecting john would think he had bought a night of pleasure,” Marks penned, but would “go back to a strange apartment, and wind up zonked.”
Employing various code words and the sterile terminology to be expected of the CIA, agents recorded the encounters diligently — and although the bulk of those documents were destroyed in a purge of information on MKULTRA and Midnight Climax, seven boxes escaped the agency’s attention, surviving to provide insight into both those programs and the psychology of the agency.
One example, quoted by LewRockwell.com, states plainly,
Certain individuals [the prostitutes] would covertly administer this material [the drugs] to other people [the johns] in accordance with [White’s] instructions.
Knowing the prostitutes faced inherent risks in the operation and that the program could be derailed easily — particularly as its illegal nature might raise eyebrows around the agency and elsewhere — the CIA’s hired sex workers were not required to keep receipts or otherwise account for spent funds.
As such untenable toeing of the lines tends to do, Midnight Climax quickly devolved into an authoritarian operation, devoid of medical screening and care for its forced test subjects, and ultimately expanding to multiple brothels — and myriad drugs.
In fact, one of the first brothels set up by the CIA in New York City saw the program’s first tragedy — U.S. biological warfare specialist Frank Olson either leapt or was pushed from a tenth-story window in 1953.
Sans sufficient scientific controls and medical pre-screening, a 1976 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities asserted,
Paradoxically, greater care seemed to have been taken for the safety of foreign nations against whom LSD was used abroad. In several cases [overseas] medical examinations were performed prior to the use of LSD. The [domestic] program … demonstrates a failure of the CIA’s leadership to pay adequate attention to the rights of individuals and to provide effective guidance to CIA employees. Though it was known that the testing was dangerous, the lives of subjects were placed in jeopardy and their rights were ignored during the 10 years of testing that followed Dr. Olson’s death.
Indeed, Midnight Climax failed — and miserably, shamefully so.
No employable tactics in LSD were discovered and no efficacious counter-intelligence operations or methods were ever derived — but the program, and its parent MKULTRA certainly succeeded in ruining the lives of many of the program’s unfortunate victims.
SF Weekly reported,
Testing of unwitting individuals was suspended in 1964 [after the discovery and outrage over the program by the CIA’s Inspector General the previous year], at least officially. Still, the CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York City continued to operate for a year and a half longer. Scrutiny of the program intensified at CIA headquarters in Virginia, and subsequently the Bay Area safe houses shut down in 1965. New York City’s operation stopped in 1966. Intelligence officers conceded that the drug-testing exposed the agency to a serious ‘moral problem.’
Considering the wholly egregious manifestation of Midnight Climax — its mendacious premise, disgustingly manipulative facets, and the eagerness with which depraved operatives carried out their tasks — it’s a wonder the CIA managed to concede it had dismissed scruples to carry out these human experiments.
It must be noted that psychedelics, in themselves, are not necessarily harmful substances — it was the surreptitious slipping of LSD to victims without their knowledge and without medical screening or care which led to deleterious effects for an untold number of people which caused direct harm by the CIA.
Programs like MKULTRA might have officially ended decades ago, but given the current climate of heightened xenophobia, Red Scare-anoia, and ruthless and unforgiving domestic surveillance, it would be imprudent — if not foolhardy — to grant the U.S. government a clean slate of trust.
To wit — and to what should be the consternation of the American public and a remarkably inarguable cause for citizen vigilance — White, who died in 1975, later recalled of the odious attempts at mind control,
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?
Claire Bernish began writing as an independent, investigative journalist in 2015, with works published and republished around the world. Not one to hold back, Claire’s particular areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, analysis of international affairs, and everything pertaining to transparency and thwarting censorship. To keep up with the latest uncensored news, follow her on Facebook or Twitter: @Subversive_Pen. This article first appeared here at The Free Thought Project.
I’ll bet most Americans wouldn’t believe their own government would do such misdeeds to its own people. But they sure did the deed and no one was indicted, tried, or went to prison.
msm doing there job… for once
It is strange how the CIA used LSD to program people and gain ultimate control, while millions of “hippies” routinely took LSD to experience new and expansive horizons to free their minds. The difference was that unsuspecting minds thought they were going insane, and those who knowingly took acid saw their experiences as the ultimate beautiful “trip.”
It all has to do with your state of mind and personal expectations.
I bet the CIA usually uses fluoride.
There is a YouTube video documentary from 1978 that originally aired on MSM that exposes this exact program.
“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?” Proof of the sickest kind of psychos running things. How many are just like this? Proof also that intelligence agencies are given way too free a hand. Righteous judgement against them all is in order, but who will deliver it? Must we wait for the Almighty?
We will indeed only see justice upon the Lord’s return. Weeping and gnashing of teeth and much worse is in store for these reprobate freaks.
At what point do the people finally realize that, in America, they don’t live in the freest nation on the planet?
America is the most deceptive nation on the planet where everything from global history to the food pyramid to the justifications for war are all lies in an attempt to conceal it’s true identity as a National Corporation & NOT a free, Democratic society!
wrong, we still have had the greatest society in the past several thousand years… We have had much more freedoms than most around the world. Yes, this was a government level immoral agenda, but it was more for the profit potential for those delivering the drugs just as the drug war was………….they reason that if you did not use the drugs or the prostitutes, you would not have trouble from this anyway…..but you also can bet that soon, the test subjects were tricked into consuming the drugs for recreation and they paid for them, and were likely very programmable under the influence of those drugs……but if you think they did not do the same things in Germany, Russia and China, you are mistaken…………those paces probably forced the stuff onto prisoners and
Giving drugs to people is not in the job description for prostitutes. Perhaps they are doctor prostitutes.
Why is anyone surprised? That is why YOUR (not theirs) Constitution limited YOUR government.
Tragic and horrifying. How many thought they were losing their minds? How many suffered deleterious psychological effects? Hard to imagine but true.
if anyone thinks the program ended anywhere near 1964 you missed much. The 70’s and 80’s saw much LSD use and it was part of the drug era where people would consume many different forms of such drugs.
Our Government at the congressional level achieved legal right to do both chemical and biological testing on our citizens and some have noted that it was as if, the government always knew more about the drug distribution networks than anyone else.
the only time someone got ” busted” seemed to be when they crossed into a sanctioned dealers territory.
One can look back also to Aleister Crowley and his followers to find that the dark side was pushing LSD for a long time before the 50’s
Yet with the official plan to ” Study” this, the operatives could then actually sell the drugs for profit on the side.
The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and the brain initiative are the worst scams ever perpetrated on the American people. Former U. S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin Warns: Biochips Hazardous to Your Health: Warning, biochips may cause behavioral changes and high suicide rates. State Attorney Generals are to revoke the licenses of doctors and dentists that implant chips in patients. Chip used illegally for GPS, tracking, organized crime, communication and torture. Virginia state police have been implanting citizens without their knowledge and consent for years and they are dying! Check out William and Mary’s site to see the torture enabled by the biochip and the Active Denial System. See Terrorism and Mental Health by Amin Gadit or A Note on Uberveillance by MG & Katina Michael or Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence by Springer or Mind Control, Microchip Implants and Cybernetics. Check out the audio spotlight by Holosonics. The truth is the biochip works like a sim card. It received pulsed modulated laser beams and millimeter wave which it converts into electromagnetic waves that your brain interprets into digital images and sound. It then takes what your brain sees and hears and converts electromagnetic waves into digital and acoustic waves that a computer translates into audio and video. In other words, it allows law enforcement to see what you see, hear what you hear and communicate directly with your brain. “Former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director and now Google Executive, Regina E. Dugan, has unveiled a super small, ingestible microchip that we can all be expected to swallow by 2017. “A means of authentication,” she calls it, also called an electronic tattoo, which
takes NSA spying to whole new levels. She talks of the ‘mechanical mismatch problem between machines and humans,’ and specifically targets 10 – 20 year olds in her rant about the wonderful qualities of this new technology that can stretch in the human body and still be functional. Hailed as a ‘critical shift for research and medicine,’ these biochips would not only allow full access to insurance companies and government agencies to our pharmaceutical med-taking compliancy (or lack thereof), but also a host of other aspects of our lives which are truly none of their business, and certainly an extension of the removal of our freedoms and rights.” Google News The ARRA authorizes payments to the states in an effort to encourage Medicaid Providers to adopt and use “certified EHR technology” aka biochips. ARRA will match Medicaid $5 for every $1 a state provides. Hospitals are paid $2 million to create “crisis stabilization wards” (Gitmo’s) where state police torture people – even unto death. They stopped my heart 90 times in 6 hours. Virginia Beach EMT’s were called to the scene. Mary E. Schloendorff, v. The Society of New York Hospital 105 N. E. 92, 93 (N. Y. 1914) Justice Cardozo states, “every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body; and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent, commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages. (Pratt v Davis, 224 Ill. 300; Mohr v Williams, 95 Minn. 261.) This case precedent requires police to falsely arrest you or kidnap you and call you a mental health patient in order to force the implant on you. You can also be forced to have a biochip if you have an infectious disease – like Eboli or Aids.
Coalition of Justice vs the City of Hampton, VA settled a case out of court for $500,000 and removal of the biochip. Torture is punishable by $1,000 per day up to $2 million; Medical battery is worth $2.05 million. They told my family it was the brain initiative. I checked with the oversight board, and it is not! Mark Warner told me it was research with the Active Denial System by the College of William and Mary, the USAF, and state and local law enforcement. It is called IBEX and it is excruciating. I have had 3 surgeries at the site of the implant and need another. It causes cancer! I’ve been tortured for 8 years by Virginia law enforcement. Thousands of innocent Virginians are being tortured and murdered by criminal cops. Please help us get the word out to end these heinous atrocities. The pain is 24/7. The VA DCJS sent me a letter stating cops can get keys to anyone’s home and steal anything they please. The governor knows and takes his cut. Senator Kaine said the FBI is not involved so he can’t help. Check out Virginia’s Casual Disregard for the Constitution at forbes dot com. Check out Richard Cain’s case. They are torturing infants and children. The active denial system comes in rifle form and can murder without leaving a mark. I have had two heart attacks and am blessed to be alive. We need to make the nation aware to stop these thugs. Now a Dr. Whaley of the Medical Examiner’s office reports covering up murders by cops and selling brains for $6250 each to the NIH. Beware of Riverside and Sentara Hospital. Beware of Dr. Lawrence Chang, Pariser Dermatology, Dr. Nicole Nelson, Dr. Shaista Ahsai, and Dr. Lika in her red mercedes, and Riverside Emergency Room Physicians, and Dr. Denis Cruff, Dr. Mark Kanter and Hampton Sentara Surgeons and Tidewater Multi-specialty Group and Dr. Elizabeth Cooper. Most of all, beware of state and local police in Virginia. Please help us.