President Gerald Ford meets with the family of the late Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who threw himself from a hotel window after being unknowingly dosed with LSD.
President Gerald Ford meets with the family of the late Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who threw himself from a hotel window after being unknowingly dosed with LSD.
OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX
LSD Testing on unsuspecting subjects was undertaken by the CIA as part of project MK Ultra from 1953 to about 1966. The first were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers, described as “people who could not fight back” by a CIA agent. In 1954 when the program had expanded, the first tests on the general public commenced with Operation Midnight Climax in San Francisco, California.
A number of CIA safehouses were established, and sex workers were paid to lure clients to these safehouses. These clients were unknowingly dosed with LSD or other substances and monitored from behind one-way glass. Research into sexual blackmail and mind control coincided with these experiments – sex workers were encouraged to ask high-profile men personal questions while they were under the influence of anything from marijuana to LSD, to see if they would reveal sensitive information in exchange for sexual acts.
The reach of Operation Midnight Climax was also later expanded, and soon they were dosing unsuspecting civilians in restaurants, bars, and beaches. They also began to experiment with even more potent and dangerous drugs in all varieties of settings – a CIA source stated that if they were too scared of a drug to test it on themselves, they sent it to Operation Midnight Climax in San Francisco.
The overall objective of the project related to the cold war era, attempting to use LSD and other psychoactive substances to discover secrets of the human mind, most remarkably a clear and marked interest in human mind control and hypnosis. Operation Midnight Climax was interested predominantly in those goals, as well as in discovering how to use LSD to strategically embarrass public officials as well as to interrogate spies.
In 1974, project MK Ultra along with its sub-projects which involved testing on members of the public, including Operation Midnight Climax, first came to light. Operation Midnight Climax had allegedly been shut down 8 years prior, in 1966, following a 1963 report by the then-CIA Inspector General who recommended the project be closed, describing its actions as distasteful and unethical. However, it was not revealed to the general public until 1977.
Sources:
Segel, Lawrence. "Operation Midnight Climax: Among the Greatest Medical Conspiracies of all Time would have to be Listed the CIA's Odd Experiments with LSD." Medical Post, vol. 38, no. 33, 2002, pp. 27. ProQuest, https://libweb.lib.utsa.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/docview/228822580?accountid=7122.
Holley, Joe. “John K. Vance; Uncovered LSD Project at CIA.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 16 June 2005, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR2005061502685.html.
Kamiya, Gary. “When the CIA Ran a LSD Sex-House in San Francisco.” SFChronicle.com, San Francisco Chronicle, 1 Apr. 2016, www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/When-the-CIA-ran-a-LSD-sex-house-in-San-Francisco-7223346.php.
Weiner, Tim. “Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 10 Mar. 1999, www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html.
Bettman, Otto. “History.com.” History.com, 21 July 1975, www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments.