Plush red fabric draping the windows. Silky sheets pooling on the bed. Provocative French art on the walls, and a large, ornate mirror positioned to take it all in. The apartment at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco looked like a Hollywood set designer's fantasy of a big city brothel, and that was more or less the point — it was a set, dressed by a federal agent with very specific taste.
Behind that mirror sat the agent himself, with a dorm fridge, a portable toilet, and a pitcher of martinis, watching men who had just been slipped pharmaceutical-grade LSD they had not agreed to take. The name of the program was Operation Midnight Climax. It ran for roughly a decade, on tax dollars, during the Cold War.
The program inside the program
Midnight Climax was tucked under the wing of the newly formed CIA and hidden inside MKUltra, the agency's infamous twenty-year hunt for techniques of mind control — brainwashing, hypnosis, mind-altering chemicals. MKUltra partnered with universities, prisons, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. military, all very legit-looking, except for the sticky detail that it was essentially a giant illegal experiment on human beings who had no idea what was being done to them.
Boston gangster Whitey Bulger was one of them. Incarcerated early in his criminal career, he landed in the MKUltra experimental pools, got dosed with incredibly strong mind-altering drugs, and later talked openly about it — to the usual chorus of officials insisting the government would never do anything like that, and the rest of us saying, oh yes it would.
For Midnight Climax specifically, the CIA didn't run one wired-up apartment. It ran three: two in California, one in New York City.
The narc who couldn't be a G-man
The man who built it was George Hunter White, a journalist turned federal narcotics agent, and he deserves his own movie. In the 1930s he went undercover and infiltrated a powerhouse drug trafficking ring called the Hip Sing Tong, stayed inside the gang for two years, and took a blood oath — cementing his reputation as a man who could be counted on to keep a secret.
He wanted, badly, to be an FBI agent. He applied multiple times. The bureau apparently saw something in him that didn't match its idea of a G-man, and kept saying no. So White found his way instead to the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence agency Franklin Roosevelt founded in 1941 because he was fed up with how uncoordinated and chaotic his own government's spy work had become.
Shark repellent and truth serum
The OSS collected an unlikely roster. Director John Ford put in his time there. So did Julia Child, who among her many wartime contributions whipped up a recipe for shark repellent for the U.S. Navy — because the Navy had a real and gruesome problem with sailors becoming scooby snacks for sharks, and brass badly wanted it kept quiet. The stuff worked well enough that the Navy was still using it into the 1970s, and NASA issued it to Mercury and Gemini astronauts in case a capsule splashed down in shark-infested water. Picture the alternate history where John Glenn survives reentry and gets eaten by a great white. Thank you, Julia Child.
George White spent his OSS hours on a different specialty: sneaking truth serum into food eaten by gangsters, suspected communists, and the occasional conscientious objector who didn't care for his government's policies. Those hidden corners of the OSS — the layers of secrecy and obfuscation — are where the CIA was born.
The U.S. government spent about a decade running its own brothels and secretly feeding lab-pure LSD to men who thought they were just buying an hour of company — and the sum total of what it learned was that a man will tell you anything afterward, in the afterglow, no drugs required.
The room on Chestnut Street
A group of professional sex workers recruited by White lured unsuspecting johns to the wired love nest on Chestnut Street. There the men were dosed with LSD of the purest secret-government-lab quality, years before Timothy Leary and "turn on, tune in and drop out" entered the language. The women were paid a little extra and promised that White would help them if law enforcement came sniffing. White sipped cocktails behind his two-way mirror and took notes.
These were men out for an ordinary transaction who instead watched a hand turn into a spider, or a buzzsaw, or a rainbow. And when they came down, who exactly were they supposed to tell? It's 1955. You walk into a police station and explain that you hired a prostitute and then a talking crocodile asked you to dance, and no, you can't recall the address. Nobody was talking, and the people running Midnight Climax knew it. In that room, out of their minds, the men were teased, pleasured, manipulated and interrogated.
All of this while Richie and Potsy were sneaking out to watch the Fonz race at midnight. So much for the innocent fifties.
What a decade bought
Did any of it work? Here is the finding, purchased at enormous cost: if you want a man to spill secrets, you do not need to dose him with acid and tie him to a headboard. He'll tell you whatever you want to know afterward, in the afterglow, while you share a smoke. Somebody's great-grandmother could have handed the feds that memo for free.
By 1965 the party was over for Operation Midnight Climax. MKUltra itself hung on until 1972 — officially, anyway; plenty of people believe it never really stopped. White died of cirrhosis of the liver ten years after his brothel closed, which, given the pitchers of martinis, tracks. His widow donated his boxes of papers and files to Foothills Junior College in California, apparently without knowing what was in them. It did not take long for the government to catch on. Today those documents live in the archives at Stanford.