Operation MIDNIGHT CLIMAX

In the early 1950s, the CIA's Technical Services Staff began searching for a drug that could break a captured spy or guide a friendly one. Lysergic acid diethylamide, then a poorly understood new compound, became the leading candidate. To test it on people who did not know they were being dosed, the agency set up safehouses in San Francisco and New York. The program was called Operation MIDNIGHT CLIMAX.

The work was overseen by Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the Technical Services Staff and the architect of the larger MKULTRA mind-control program. The day-to-day operator was George Hunter White, a former Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent and Office of Strategic Services officer who held a contract as a CIA asset. White rented two apartments in the San Francisco Bay Area, one on Telegraph Hill and another in Mill Valley, and a third in New York's Greenwich Village.

The pattern was the same in each location. White employed sex workers through contacts from his narcotics work and paid them to bring men to the apartments. The women were instructed to slip LSD into the men's drinks. CIA officers, including Gottlieb on occasion, watched the resulting behavior through one-way mirrors and listened on hidden microphones. The subjects were unaware they had been drugged and unaware they were being recorded. They were never informed afterward.

The operation ran for roughly twelve years. White's expense reports, which surfaced decades later, describe the apartments stocked with two-way mirrors, bugging equipment, and bottles of liquor charged to the CIA. In a 1971 letter to Gottlieb, White wrote that his time on the project was "in the highest civilian service of any kind."

No accounting was ever made of how many men were dosed at MIDNIGHT CLIMAX, what happened to them afterward, or whether any were harmed. The records that did exist were ordered destroyed by then-Director Richard Helms in 1973, ahead of the wave of disclosures that became the Family Jewels.