The Eight-Year Mission Apparently Produced Almost Nothing of Value

June 25, 2023 12:09 PM

For eight years, between 1955 and 1963, federal agents ran a hidden brothel in one of San Francisco’s poshest neighborhoods and tested LSD on unsuspecting Bay Area residents ... At the center of this wildly unethical program was George Hunter White, a former San Francisco journalist-turned-cop who became one of the biggest crusaders of America’s early war on drugs. In public, he railed against drug use and ruthlessly investigated jazz legends like Billie Holiday. Privately, however, he drank martinis by the pitcher and even used drugs like LSD and marijuana. from 'Operation Midnight Climax': The CIA mixed LSD and sex at this SF brothel [SF Gate; ungated]

Operation Midnight Climax [Medium; ungated]
Operation Midnight Climax [Wikipedia]
Operation Midnight Climax: A CIA Sex, Drugs and Surveillance Program [HowStuffWorks]
EX‐C. I. A. AIDE ASKS IMMUNITY TO TESTIFY [NY Times Archives]
FBI File on George Hunter White (PDF) [The Black Vault]

Previously: Operation Midnight Climax and In the name of Defense.

posted by chavenet (29 comments total)

You really have to wonder whether these people inadvertently kick-started The Summer of Love

The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury.[1][2] More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.[3][4]

and by not that much of an extension are responsible for a huge part of the Counterculture of the Sixties.
posted by jamjam at 1:42 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

It is very hard to even imagine this happening. I believe it did, and it's consistent with other US government abuses at the time. But still.. seriously, an LSD brothel run by the CIA? Wow.
posted by Nelson at 1:55 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

What this b*stard did to Billie Holliday should be known more widely.

Of all the crap that the CIA/FBI pulled on American Citizens, that kind of single minded vendetta against one person is still unthinkable to me.
posted by indianbadger1 at 2:07 PM on June 25, 2023 [17 favorites]

Yup. Definitely time to fire everyone in every extant spy agency and replace them with one agency that's run in the most transparent possible manner without actually exposing the names of people working undercover. JFC.
posted by sotonohito at 2:11 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The CIA mixed LSD and sex at this SF brothel...

I would expect nothing less of the CIA.

Fuckers.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:17 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

A related previously: From tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:35 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

A naive question by a Non-American: if it was supposed to be domestic surveillance on US Citizens, why was it CIA and not Hoover's FBI?
posted by Phersu at 3:34 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The CIA never cared that particular limitation of its charter. And even then, who would be briefed on this and care that it's an overstep and in a position to reign them in?

And even then, they'd just do similar wacky hijinks on friendly (but foreign) soil.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 4:24 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have it on good (personal) authority that they still don't care for that stricture. Not that you heard that from me.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:35 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

chavenet and a few others, at rare times, compel me to fetch the secret notebook.

Project Artichoke

alot of my section deals with pot and George white.
"White OSS 1943 diaries and papers some stamped secret sketches and notifications notations excuse me experimentation with marijuana May 1943 use one grand cigarette result quote not myself out on quote tries to make a spray and then he arrests Billie Holiday 1949
posted by clavdivs at 4:56 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Damn, this was like two blocks from my old apartment in SF. I only ever went up that block when I was looking for parking, and nearly never found it there. And here I thought the most noteworthy thing to come out of that neighborhood was the parrot guy!
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:50 PM on June 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

And somehow there are people who claim there is no "Deep State".

VS what Mike L said about exactly this kind of thing in his book about the Deep State. Or the congressperson who decided to mention to TFG about how the CIA getting back at people. Or .....
posted by rough ashlar at 6:53 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Frank Zappa had a theory he talked about often in the late 60s/early 70s that the CIA was behind LSD, using it to run experiments on the possibilities of mind-control etc. Guess he wasn't too far off the mark!
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:54 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Reads like real estate ad. When's the auction?
posted by a non e mouse at 7:12 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

A big surprise to me about the current psychedelic renaissance — and probably the main reason I’m inclined to regard it as a mere recrudescence rather than a true Renaissance — is that I haven’t run into any acknowledgment or discussion of what a powerful aphrodisiac LSD is.

I haven’t used Viagra or any of its fellow travelers, or anything like poppers, so I lack that standard of comparison, but if they are significantly stronger than LSD I probably wouldn’t have survived them anyway.
posted by jamjam at 7:42 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I haven’t run into any acknowledgment or discussion of what a powerful aphrodisiac LSD is.

You and I are very, very different.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:28 PM on June 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

You had your chance, Literaryhero; I waited for hours to make that comment to give someone like you a chance to make an appearance.

Whoever is writing you needs to work on their plotting skills.
posted by jamjam at 8:39 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m with Literaryhero here. I’m not saying it can’t be done, or that one couldn’t have a great experience if it were done right, but sex has never particularly been at the top of my mind on psychedelics and, well, they are pretty good vasoconstrictors, so there may be some logistical difficulties. Though of course the same goes for dopaminergic stimulants and people make it work.

But I suppose it’s set and setting like everything else.
posted by atoxyl at 9:57 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Operation Midnight Climax"

One sure sign that any government, military or espionage operation will prove a monumental (and often bloody) farce is the boss giving it a name 12 year boys would think was cool. Americans seem particularly susceptible to this.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:10 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

>A naive question by a Non-American: if it was supposed to be domestic surveillance on US Citizens, why was it CIA and not Hoover's FBI?

Well this project wasn't surveillance, it was research into mind control.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 5:27 AM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Did the CIA ever do anything that didn't suck?
posted by dis_integration at 6:14 AM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Well quite a few people got to try acid consensually (but without full disclosure of the reason for the research) on their dime, too…
posted by atoxyl at 9:07 AM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Abbie Hoffman said that his first acid trip was done with CIA LSD
posted by NoMich at 9:15 AM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ken Kesey, along with some of the other Prankster/Dead associates, first tried it volunteering for trials that were actually sponsored by the CIA.

Of course, there’s a conspiracy theory that the government pushed psychedelics in the counterculture intentionally to derail the political side of the movement.
posted by atoxyl at 11:17 AM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Eight-Year Mission Apparently Produced Almost Nothing of Value

I mean, that wallpaper is, like, wild, man!
posted by thecincinnatikid at 11:33 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

And somehow there are people who claim there is no "Deep State".

I'd be careful with this term. It was invented by the authoritarian Turkish president as a derogatory name for the independent judiciary, the civil service, the officer corps of the armed forces, etc. -- basically, any professional governmental institutions that were committed to upholding the rule of law and democratic institutions, and that stood in the way of his gaining total power.

Trump and his followers adopted it for the exact same reasons.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:30 PM on June 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

I’m not going to pretend to be a Turkish politics expert but that seems like an oversimplification of the history of the term in a country that averaged a military coup or soft coup per decade for four decades? It definitely predates Erdoğan.
posted by atoxyl at 3:35 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Trump and his followers adopted it for the exact same reasons.

While the Turkish citation is before Mike Lundgren's book on the deep state do you have proof to back up the idea that a Turkish reference is the reason? VS something that A/B tested well for an emotional reaction because Trump's history was to make vague claims to drive engagement.

Why not claim the ghost of Nixon via a seance with Dixon is the reason and Trump needed to be in the white House to get Nixon's UFO time capsule out for access to the free energy tech?
posted by rough ashlar at 6:16 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

A fascinating piece of history. There is a good book all about it: Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1985 M. Lee/B. Shlain) goes into detail about all of those funny stoner/military-industrial hijinx.

Meanwhile on the darker side, many people in the mid-20th century were confined, tortured, and dosed up with psychotropic drugs in related programs. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2019 S. Kinzer) is fairly depressing. Imagine the OSS taking over Nazi prisons and continuing to use extreme interrogation on the detainees.

Many of these details would have ended up in smoke in some furnace, except that 70s CIA chief William Colby agreed to cooperate with the Church Committee investigation into CIA practices, instead of having a private bonfire. Colby felt that the agency culture was due for reform, and that a lack of oversight had led to weird and egregious uh shit happening.
posted by ovvl at 8:59 PM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]