What Is Operation Midnight Climax?

photorandy2023

11 months ago

This is a new series of articles where I explain what various terms, catch phrases and various other confusing topics and many secret government projects and agencies are and do. If there are any subjects that the reader is interested in learning about please put them in the comment section.

The US CIA and military is filled with a history of bad decisions, deceit, and in some cases what I would classify as pure evil. One such misguided and unethical program was an appendage of Project MKULTRA under the name of Operation Midnight Climax.

ON APRIL 10, 1953, ALLEN DULLES, THE NEWLY APPOINTED DIRECTOR OF THE CIA, delivered a speech to a gathering of Princeton alumni. Though the event was mundane, global tensions were running high. The Korean War was coming to an end, and earlier that week, The New York Times had published a startling story asserting that American POWs returning from the country may have been “converted” by “Communist brain-washers.”

Some GI’s were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the Communists–a charge the U.S. categorically denied. Others were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the United States at all. As if that weren’t enough, the U.S. was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran.

Dulles had just become the first civilian director of an agency growing more powerful by the day, and the speech provided an early glimpse into his priorities for the CIA. “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies,” he told the attendees. “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” he continued. “We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”

Dulles proceeded to describe the “Soviet brain perversion techniques” as effective, but “abhorrent” and “nefarious.” He gestured to the American POWs returning from Korea, shells of the men they once were, parroting the Communist propaganda they had heard cycled for weeks on end. He expressed fears and uncertainty–were they using chemical agents? Hypnosis? Something else entirely? “We in the West,” the CIA Director conceded, “are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.” This sort of non-consensual experiment, even on one’s enemies, was antithetical to American values, Dulles insisted, as well as antithetical to what should be human values.

Allen W.Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency at an executive session of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

Fear of brainwashing and a new breed of “brain warfare” terrified and fascinated the American public throughout the 1950s, spurred both by the words of the CIA and the stories of “brainwashed” G.I.’s returning from China, Korea, and the Soviet Union. Newspaper headlines like “New Evils Seen in Brainwashing” and “Brainwashing vs. Western Psychiatry” offered sensational accounts of new mind-control techniques and technologies that no man could fully resist. The paranoia began to drift into American culture, with books like The Manchurian Candidate and The Naked Lunch playing on themes of unhinged scientists and vast political conspiracies.

The idea of brainwashing also provided many Americans with a compelling, almost comforting, explanation for communism’s swift rise–that Soviets used the tools of brainwashing not just on enemy combatants, but on their own people. Why else would so many countries be embracing such an obviously backward ideology? American freedom of the mind versus Soviet “mind control” became a dividing line as stark as the Iron Curtain.

MK-ULTRA

Three days after his speech decrying Soviet tactics, Dulles approved the beginning of MK-Ultra, a top-secret CIA program for “covert use of biological and chemical materials.” “American values” made for good rhetoric, but Dulles had far grander plans for the agency’s Cold War agenda.

MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.

Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”

Gangster James “Whitey” Bulger’s 1959 mugshot. (Credit: Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Bulger claimed he had been injected with LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid, had become one of the CIA’s key interests for its “brain warfare” program, as the agency theorized it could be useful in interrogations. In the late 1940s, the CIA received reports that the Soviet Union had engaged in “intensive efforts to produce LSD,” and that the Soviets had attempted to purchase the world’s supply of the chemical. One CIA officer described the agency as “literally terrified” of the Soviets’ LSD program, largely because of the lack of knowledge about the drug in the United States. “[This] was the one material that we had ever been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly,” the officer testified.

With the advent of MK-Ultra, the government’s interest in LSD shifted from a defensive to an offensive orientation. Agency officials noted that LSD could be potentially useful in “[gaining] control of bodies whether they were willing or not.” The CIA envisioned applications that ranged from removing people from Europe in the case of a Soviet attack to enabling assassinations of enemy leaders. On November 18, 1953, a group of ten scientists met at a cabin located deep in the forests of Maryland. After extended discussions, the participants agreed that to truly understand the value of the drug, “an unwitting experiment would be desirable.”

Doctors Harry Williams and Carl Pfeiffer conducting an LSD Experiment. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

The CIA remained keenly aware of how the public would react to any discovery of MK-Ultra; even if they believed these programs to be essential to national security, they must remain a tightly guarded secret. How would the CIA possibly explain dosing unassuming Americans with LSD? “Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general,” wrote the CIA’s Inspector General in 1957. “The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission.”

OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist who was chief of the Chemical Division of the Office of Technical Service of the CIA. Gottlieb based his plan for Project MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax off of interrogation method research under Project Artichoke. Unlike Project Artichoke, Operation Midnight Climax gave Gottlieb permission to test drugs on unknowing citizens, which made way for the legacy of this operation. Hundreds of federal agents, field operatives, and scientists worked on these programs before they were shut down in the 1960s.

History

Operation Midnight Climax started in 1954 and consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco at 225c Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA, and Mill Valley, California, as well as New York City. The safehouses were dramatically scaled back in 1963, following a report by CIA Inspector General John Earman which strongly recommended closing the facility. The San Francisco safehouses were closed in 1965, and the New York City safehouse soon followed in 1966. Operation Midnight Climax and Project MKUltra were considered to be so secretive that few people, even in the highest government positions, knew Gottlieb existed, let alone was conducting these experiments. However, some senior officers in the CIA knew enough about him to connect his work to LSD.

Objectives and methodology

Operation Midnight Climax was established in order to study the effects of LSD on non-consenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. The prostitutes were instructed in the use of post-coital questioning to investigate whether the victims could be convinced to involuntarily reveal secrets. The victims were sometimes fed subliminal messages in attempts to induce them to involuntary actions, including criminal activity such as robbery, assault, and assassination. Many of the CIA operatives involved in the experiments voluntarily indulged in the drugs and prostitutes for recreational purposes. Additionally, information from Wilmington News Journal on October 15, 1978, reports from a FOIA request that, “the spy agency purchased two pounds of Yohimbine hydrochloride… by Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, the chief aide to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.” The role of Dr. Lashbrook was to, “monitor and approve materials for Operation Midnight Climax.”

Senate investigators were told that the goals of these experiments were to study mind control and sexual behavior. More specifically, to learn about the secrets of brainwashing to gain control over enemy spies and protect U.S. agents. Other objectives included finding drugs that could incapacitate entire buildings via poisoned food, which would create “confusion-anxiety-fear,” and other symptoms such as headaches and earaches. These drugs could also have amnesia effects, which were intended for use on foreign spies following interrogations and retiring CIA agents. Another aspect they tested was the effect of combining LSD and isolation, where the subjects would be dosed and isolated for months at a time with minimal food and water.

Ethical concerns

In 1947, the CIA was prohibited on behalf of President Truman, due to fears of political abuse, from spying against American citizens, but these actions contradict the adherence to this prohibition. These acts were illegal and several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. Furthermore, the CIA operatives in charge of administering these experiments were told by superiors that the results of the experiments would be beneficial to the country. There is currently a debate over how ethical George Hunter White’s actions were, with some arguing that if his motive was to legally make people suffer, he was unethical, while others argue that if he believed that the experiments would benefit national security, his actions could be justified. The subjects of Gottlieb’s experiments also included mentally disabled children. Operation Midnight Climax was soon expanded, and CIA operatives began dosing people in restaurants, bars, and beaches along with signing up to use the drugs themselves. The extent to which this widespread exposure of the public to mind-altering drugs contributed to the rise of the counter-culture movement in the late 1950s and 1960s is unknown, although Ken Kesey has attributed his role in the genesis of the influential San Francisco Bay Area psychedelic social scene that developed in the 1960s to his participation in Project MKUltra LSD experiments at the Menlo Park, California, VA Hospital.

The CIA’s initial experiments with LSD were fairly simple, if shockingly unethical. The agency generally dosed single targets, finding volunteers when they could, sometimes slipping the drug into the drinks of fellow CIA employees. Over time these LSD experiments grew increasingly elaborate. Perhaps the most notorious of these projects was Operation Midnight Climax.

A view of the old CIA building. (Credit: Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

In 1955, on 225 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, the CIA was devoting substantial attention to decorating a bedroom. George White oversaw the interior renovations. Not much of a decorator, White had a storied career in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. When the CIA moved into drug experiments, bringing White on board became a top priority.

White hung up pictures of French can-can dancers and flowers. He draped lush red bedroom curtains over the windows. He framed a series of Toulouse-Lautrec posters with black silk mats. For a middle-aged drug bureaucrat, each item evoked sex and glamour.

George White wasn’t building a normal bedroom, he was building a trap.

White then hired a Berkeley engineering student to install bugging equipment and a two-way mirror. White sat behind the mirror, martini in hand, and waited for the action to begin. Prostitutes would lure unsuspecting johns to the bedroom, where the men would be dosed with LSD and their actions observed by White from beyond the mirror. As payment for their services the sex workers receive small amounts of cash, as well as a guarantee from White that he’d intercede when the women inevitably had run-ins with law enforcement in the future.

George Hunter White, supervisor for the New England area of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. (Credit: Evelyn Straus/NY Daily News via Getty Images)

Though the CIA piloted these safe houses as a stage for testing the effects of LSD, White’s interest shifted to another element of his observations: the sex. The San Francisco house became the center of what one writer called “the CIA carnal operations,” as officials began asking new questions about how to work with prostitutes, how they could be trained, and how they would handle state secrets. The agency also analyzed when in the course of a sexual encounter information could best be extracted from a source, eventually concluding that it was immediately after sex.

But perhaps unsurprisingly, much of White’s actions were driven by pure voyeurism: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White later said. “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

THE DEMISE OF MK-ULTRA

The CIA’s experiments with LSD persisted until 1963 before coming to a fairly anticlimactic end. In the spring of 1963, John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff, learned about the project’s “surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvoluntary human subjects.” Though the MK-Ultra directors tried to convince the CIA’s independent audit board that the research should continue, the Inspector General insisted the agency follow new research ethics guidelines and bring all the programs on non-consenting volunteers to an end.

President Gerald Ford meeting with the family of Dr. Frank Olson in 1975. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

In 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy oversaw congressional hearings investigating the effects of MK-Ultra. Congress brought in a roster of ex-CIA employees for questioning, interrogating them about who oversaw these programs, how participants were identified, and if any of these programs had been continued. The Hearings turned over a number of disturbing details, particularly about the 1953 suicide of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who jumped out of a hotel window several days after unwittingly consuming a drink spiked with LSD. Amid growing criminalization of drug users, and just a few years after President Nixon declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” the ironies of the U.S.’s troubling experimentation with drugs appeared in sharp relief.

But throughout the hearings, Congress kept hitting roadblocks: CIA staffers claimed they “couldn’t remember” details about many of the human experimentation projects, or even the number of people involved. The obvious next step would be to consult the records, but that presented a small problem: in 1973, amid mounting inquiries, the director of MK-Ultra told workers “it would be a good idea if [the MK-Ultra] files were destroyed.” Citing vague concerns about the privacy and “embarrassment” of participants, the men who crafted MK-Ultra effectively eradicated the paper record for one of the United States’ most obviously illegal undertakings. A program born in secrecy would hold onto many of its secrets forever.

Before we go into detail we must first explore the nature of Project MKULTRA. MKULTRA was started in 1953 under the direction of CIA director Allen Dulles. The program was allowed to use up to 6% of the total CIA budget and required no budget oversight or reporting. The premise of MKULTRA was to explore the use of “mind-control” drugs after alleged uses of such drugs by Communist Leadership (Soviets, Chinese and North Koreans) on U.S. POWs. The drugs included the use of LSD, Heroin, and Sodium Pentothal (Truth Serum).

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb oversaw many experiments exploring the use of LSD on often times unknowing U.S. citizens. The experiments often took a sadistic turn. Gottlieb was known to torture victims by locking them in sensory deprivation chambers while dosed on LSD, or to make recordings of psychiatric patients’ therapy sessions, and then play a tape loop of the patient’s most self-degrading statement over and over through headphones after the patient had been restrained in a straitjacket and dosed with LSD. Gottlieb himself took LSD frequently, locking himself in his office and taking copious notes.

After recruitment efforts became increasingly difficult to find volunteers of these programs the CIA sought out other means of conducting their “studies”. Operation Midnight Climax was an illegal operation initially established by Dr. George Hunter White under the alias of Morgan Hall for the CIA. The direction of this operation employed the use of prostitutes from the San Francisco area to lure men and then serve them alcohol containing large doses of LSD. These women would then fulfill their financial obligations to the drugged men under observation of CIA personnel through a two-way mirror and taped for later observation. The selection of the men focused on candidates that would be too embarrassed to present the circumstances to the public for fear of exposure themselves.

Some subjects’ participation was consensual, and in these cases, the subjects appeared to be singled out for even more horrific experiments. In one case, a selection of volunteers was given LSD for 77 days straight.

LSD was eventually dismissed by the researchers as too unpredictable in its effects. Although useful information was sometimes obtained through questioning subjects on LSD, not uncommonly the most marked effect would be the subject’s absolute and utter certainty that they were able to withstand any form of interrogation attempt, even physical torture.

In 1964 Project MKULTRA was renamed MKTRUTH and continued to operate well into the 1970s. In 1972 all documentation related to MKULTRA was ordered to be destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms, no doubt seeing public pressure weighing on the situation. This action hid the details of more than 150 individually funded programs.

In 1974, the New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story exposing the CIA’s illegal spying on U.S. citizens and how the CIA had conducted non-consensual drug experiments. His report started the lengthy process of bringing long-suppressed details about MKUltra to light.^[11] Project MKUltra came to light in the spring of 1977 during a wide-ranging survey of the CIA’s Technical Services Division. John K. Vance, a member of the CIA inspector general’s staff, discovered that the agency was running a research project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwilling human subjects.^[12] Additionally, several CIA FOIA requests revealed a collection of documents from several news sources in the late 1970s reporting information on Operation Midnight Climax.^[13]

There were a handful of newspaper articles released in the 1970s by the San Francisco examiner, Wilmington News Journal, the Washington Post, and the Washington Star revolving around these revelations and elaborated on what the CIA was doing, but they fail to include much of the motive and explicit details as the CIA never released most of the findings and the information never went public.^[14]

In 1975, President Ford set up the United States President’ Commission on CIA Activities. The purpose of this commission, which is commonly referred to as the Rockefeller Commission, was to investigate possible illegal activities being performed by the CIA. Project MKUltra, Operation Midnight Climax, and other similar projects were a part of the investigation. According to the Rockefeller Commission Report, the CIA was charged with various illegal activities such as large-scale spying on American citizens, engaging in illegal wire-taps, and aiming their illegal activities at Americans who openly disagreed with the government. As a result of these findings, President Ford signed an Executive Order in 1976 that prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”^[15] This attempted to prevent unethical projects from occurring in the future.

In 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy conducted congressional hearings investigating MKUltra. Many ex-CIA employees were brought in for questioning; Congress interrogated them about “who oversaw these programs, how participants were identified, and if any of these programs had been continued.” After the incident came to light, the United States government was compelled by their constituents to find out the reasoning for these unethical experiments on the United States citizens. As a result, four subpoenas were issued by Senator Edward M Kennedy, one by his subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. A former CIA employee, whose name is known as Walter Pasternak, was noted for “hiding from investigators” stating that he would return after 24 hours. The documents that the senate investigation committee revealed showed receipts signed by the former CIA employee for “$2,000 $100 bills that were distributed to persons involved in “Operation Midnight Climax.”” Pasternak, the CIA employee, also provided the subcommittee with an account of how the activities were in relation to the CIA-funded research group that conducted human behavior experiments. Other CIA employees who were subpoenaed were Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook and the consultant who was subpoenaed was a former Georgetown University professor, Dr. Charles Geschickter. When the hearing date came around, “all four of them made the decision independently not to testify”. The senate committee continued to investigate the issue and were able to get testimony from Pasternak, yet the information from him and others related to the project wasn’t considered the most accurate, resulting in a lack of action taken by the U.S. government against the CIA.

The CIA’s LSD experiments continued until 1963 before being shut down. In 1963, John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff, learned about the projects “surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvoluntary human subjects.” Though the MKUltra directors argued for the continuation, the Inspector General insisted the agency follow ethical research guidelines, which brought the programs testing on non-consenting volunteers to an end.

The paper records of the operation were destroyed, and during the trials, many agents claimed they could not remember details about it and there were no records for congress to verify, thus, leading to no noted convictions or justice for the CIA and individuals involved.

One possible death associated with Project MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax was the death of Frank Olson. Frank Olson was a scientist who worked for the CIA and for the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. Frank Olson allegedly committed suicide in 1953 by jumping out of the window of his hotel room in New York City. This occurred after Olson drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD while on a CIA retreat. The Olson family did not believe it was suicide and after the family announced they planned to sue the Agency over Olson’s “wrongful death,” the government offered them an out-of-court settlement of $1,250,000, later reduced to $750,000 (about $8.8 million in 2024 value ), which they accepted. The family received apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA director William Colby.

In 1994, Eric Olson had his father’s body exhumed to be buried with his mother, and the family decided to have a second autopsy performed. The second autopsy revealed injuries that occurred before he fell, causing his death to become a debate between murder and suicide

Resources

damninteresting.com, “Operation Midnight Climax.” By Shad Larsen; history.com, “THE CIA’S APPALLING HUMAN EXPERIMENTS WITH MIND CONTROL.” By Brianna Nofil; http://www.cia.gov, “Operation Midnight Climax”; en.wikipedia.org, “Operation Midnight Climax.” By Wikipedia Editors;