Operation Midnight Climax: A CIA Sex, Drugs and Surveillance Program

MKULTRA was led by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. In the early 1950s, Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to spend $240,000 to purchase the world's entire supply of LSD, which he brought back to the U.S. from Europe and doled out to a variety of research programs secretly sponsored by the CIA in hospitals, clinics and prisons.

According to the Rockefeller Commission Report from the mid-1970s, headed by then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller that investigated CIA activities, the initial plan for MKULTRA was to use CIA recruits as test subjects in experiments conducted under the watchful eye of a physician. But after some experiments involving voluntary participants, the agency decided to see what would happen when subjects were given LSD without their knowledge.

"Tests were begun on unsuspecting subjects in normal social situations," according to the report. "Testing originally was conducted on the West Coast. In 1961, a similar program was initiated on the East Coast."

Gottlieb sought the help of George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent who during World War II had served in the Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor of the CIA — and later worked as an investigator for Sen. Estes Kefauver's early 1950s probe of organized crime, as detailed in this 1977 Washington Post article based upon White's diary and other papers.

After getting approval from Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, White became a CIA consultant. It's unclear whether Anslinger knew that the consulting duties would involve setting up a CIA-financed bordello in an apartment in the Telegraph Hill section of San Francisco and a similar government-run brothel in New York City's Greenwich Village.

While intelligence agencies had often used female agents to seduce targets, "Gottlieb wanted to systematize the study of how sex, especially in combination with drugs, could loosen men's tongues," journalist Stephen Kinzer wrote in his 2019 book, "Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control."

In San Francisco, the CIA paid prostitutes $100 for each potential subject that they picked up at local bars and lured back to the bordello. It was located in an L-shaped apartment with a view of the San Francisco Bay, with pictures of French can-can dancers on the walls and red bedroom curtains, as well as a refrigerator that White kept filled with chilled martinis.

The men didn't know that the bordello was wired with what The Washington Post described in 1977 as elaborate electronic surveillance equipment, including four microphones disguised as wall outlets and connected to tape recorders monitored by agents in a secret observation post. The room also was equipped with two-way mirrors, which enabled agents to watch and to film what happened when the male customers went into the bedroom with the prostitutes.

"The original intention was to have a documented sound movie, you might say, so that we would know something about the behavior of people when they were administered these drugs," Gottlieb testified in a September 1977 Senate hearing.

Giving a powerful hallucinogen to unwitting subjects, of course, was a dangerously irresponsible thing to do, considering that LSD can cause effects resembling psychosis— what hippies in the 1960s referred to as a bad trip.

"At the most basic level, the lack of informed consent and the unwitting subject's lack of information on adverse effects and potential consequences is of great concern," Joseph Troiani, Ph.D., explains via email. Troiani is an associate professor of clinical psychology and founding director of the Military Psychology Program at Adler University and retired military intelligence officer, who is familiar with MKULTRA from reading open-source material that has become available.

"Mind control experiments like these, utilizing LSD (psychoactive drug), administered to individuals unbeknownst to them to see what effect it would have on them, violate all medical standards," Troiani says. "There is a parallel between the CIA's operation and the Tuskegee experiments where African Americans were lied to about being treated for syphilis. The Tuskegee experiment patients were not treated for syphilis; instead, they were given placebo treatment and monitored to see progression of illness. These actions are unethical and criminal in nature."

Operation Midnight Climax and the rest of MKULTRA ran into problems in 1963, when a staffer in the office of CIA's Inspector General John S. Earman discovered them while auditing the CIA's technical services division. The IG was alarmed by the impropriety of dosing unsuspecting people with a hallucinogen, according to the Rockefeller Commission report.

Worse yet, the IG's probe discovered that some test subjects had become ill for hours or days afterward, and that at least one had to be hospitalized.

"A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy," the IG's July 1963 report noted, adding that if the program was ever exposed it "could induce serious adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion."

As a result of the IG investigation, the CIA cut back on the drug-testing program, though between 1963 and 1967 it continued to test drugs on what the Rockefeller Commission Report described as "voluntary subjects," including prisoners at various correctional institutions. Finally, in 1967, "all projects involving behavior-influencing drugs were terminated," according to the Rockefeller Commission Report.

After Operation Midnight Climax and the rest of MKULTRA was exposed during the mid-1970s, then-CIA director Stansfield Turner described the psychedelic spy bordello as "abhorrent" and asked San Francisco for forgiveness, according to a transcript of the TV broadcast. Turner emphasized that the CIA no longer was conducting such experiments.

It's unclear what, if any, useful insights that the CIA gained from watching and listening to the drugged bordello customers. "I think the conclusion from all the activities [of MKULTRA] was that it was very difficult to predictably manipulate human behavior in this way," Gottlieb admitted in his 1977 Senate testimony.