Now Playing
Operation Midnight Climax: The CIA's Secret Drug Brothels
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The CIA didn't just run mind control experiments — it ran brothels. Operation Midnight Climax dosed unwitting men with LSD in San Francisco safe houses while George Hunter White watched through a one-way mirror, and Frank Olson paid the ultimate price for knowing too much.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you know who George Hunter White really was, he looks like one thing. After you know, he looks like something else entirely.
The program had a name. Operation Midnight Climax.
The key point here is the hypocrisy, and it's worth sitting with it. White wasn't just a bureaucrat who approved paperwork.
To understand how White got that license, you need to understand who issued it. Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist.
The man who came closest to breaking that silence, though not by choice, was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA scientist.
MK-Ultra wasn't confined to safe houses in San Francisco or retreats in Maryland. It reached across American institutions in ways that weren't fully understood until long after the fact.
There's one strand of the MK-Ultra story that goes somewhere the CIA almost certainly didn't intend. In nineteen fifty-nine, a young writer named Ken Kesey volunteered for a CIA-funded LSD study at a Veterans Administration hospital in California.
By nineteen seventy-three, MK-Ultra had been running for two decades. The program was winding down.
The nineteen seventy-seven Church Committee hearings exposed MK-Ultra to the American public for the first time. What they found was described as offensive, unethical, and illegal.
George Hunter White died in nineteen seventy-five. He never faced legal consequences for Operation Midnight Climax.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.