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Did you ever hear the one about the CIA-employed sex workers who were trained to drug, bed and interrogate unsuspecting American citizens while they were unwittingly tripping on LSD as government agents secretly watched? You'd think you'd remember a story like that but Operation Midnight Climax has

Sex, Lies, and LSD: The CIA’s Untold Story of Operation Midnight Climax By Liam Ward March 31, 2023 SHARE FacebookF TwitterT PinterestP Did you ever hear the one about the CIA-employed sex workers who were trained to drug, bed and interrogate unsuspecting American citizens while they were unwittingly tripping on LSD as government agents secretly watched? You’d think you’d remember a story like that but Operation Midnight Climax has conveniently evaded the public consciousness for decades. We’re talking about tax payer-funded safe houses in the 1950s and 60s, moonlighting as brothels on American soil, where ordinary citizens were unknowingly drugged with LSD and experimented on for mind-control research. Under the covert surveillance of government agents, prostitutes were instructed to engage in post-coital questioning of the targets to explore how the combination of sex and drugs could be used together as the ultimate truth serum. The highly secretive nature of the program allowed it to go unchecked for years before it was shut down. Someone get Hollywood on the phone, we’ve got a twisted and shockingly overlooked American espionage story that’s gagging for some attention… In the 1950s, America was in the grip of the ‘Red Peril’ Russia, putting the establishment in a state of paranoia and competitive overdrive for technological advancement during the Cold War years. MK Ultra began in 1953, when the CIA decided to pick up where some WII Nazi scientists had left off. Expanding on experiments that involved mescaline and torture to elicit confessions and explore mind control techniques, the CIA were now incorporating a range of their own unique modus operandi. The program would be backed by then CIA Director Allen Dulles and run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a biochemist, and head of the chemical division of the CIA. You might say Gottlieb was the CIA’s answer to James Bond’s ‘Q’, something of a gadget man, mad scientist, and proto-hippy, with a passion for folk music and the great outdoors. He had moved his wife and two daughters to a remote cabin in Virginia in 1948 where he bred goats. But his real passion was chemistry and unethical mind control experiments; he was just what the CIA needed. Gottlieb’s first order of business was to purchase the world’s supply of LSD, from Dr. Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist who, while experimenting with a fungus, had inadvertently produced a mind-altering substance that would soon reverberate through western culture. With the LSD stash procured for 240.000 dollars (LSD would still be legal in America until 1966), it was time to dose some test subjects, the first lucky participants turned out to be Gottlieb’s colleagues, and volunteers from the CIA. This progressed to him slipping the drug into the drinks of some other unaware co-workers, all in the name of science. In 1953, during a CIA retreat in Maryland, a room full of unsuspecting employees were spiked with LSD, a “potential truth serum”. A week later, one of those employees, a scientist who was actually part of the MK ultra was dead, having fallen from a window of a hotel in an apparent suicide. LSD Lab 1968 Undeterred, Gottlieb continued his experiments and set up a system where it could be tested on willing participants in official medical trials; it was given to patients in hospitals, to soldiers in the United States army, to students at universities, and to inmates in prisons. Among the many participants of these trials in the late 1950s, some of the most notable names were, Ken Kesey author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Manson, notorious cult leader and mass murderer. Not satisfied with his medical trials and covert experiments on unknowing participants, Gottlieb decided to try a new approach to elicit subconscious control and confessions from unsuspecting targets by using a combination of sex and drugs. A psychotropic honey pot if you will, this would be titled Operation Midnight Climax. In the world of espionage, the use of sex to obtain post-coital confessions wasn’t a new tactic. Gottlieb wanted to see what results LSD would procure when added to the scenario. ‘From Russia With Love’11th April 1963 For this undercover operation George Hunter White was enlisted, described by some as a “rock-em, sock-em cop not overly carried away with playing spook,” White had been an investigative reporter for several newspapers; a lieutenant colonel during WW2 and a federal narcotics agent. This being sufficient experience, White was contracted as a CIA consultant and used the alias “Morgan Hall” to go about setting up an apartment first in Greenwich Village, New York and then in San Francisco. White had begun in New York by spiking his associates, their friends, then complete strangers he would meet in bars. But it wasn’t until the operation was moved to San Francisco that sex was added to the experiment. There, on the tax-payer’s dime, he se...

Sex, Lies, and LSD: The CIA's Untold Story of Operation Midnight Climax