How CIA Brainwashing Became a San Francisco Treat

By Carl Austin

Image courtesy flickr

As many of you know, I set most of my novels in San Francisco.  While doing research for one of them, I happened upon a news story that I first thought was fake news.  After a little digging, I came to realize it was all too real.  The story involves an upscale townhouse just off Telegraph Hill, a bevy of beauties and an intelligence operative who was prepared to use them and drugs to advance the course of mind control technology during the height of the Cold War.

First a little background…

Ever since the waning days of World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, was obsessed with using powerful drugs to bend the minds of men.  Late in 1943, a series of field tests were initiated by George White, a former FBI agent turned OSS operative who administered a dose of concentrated tetrahydrocannabinol that had been injected into cigarettes to a known member of the New York underworld.  The objective wasn’t to get the mobster high, it was to get him to spill his guts.  The substance did indeed loosen the mobster’s tongue, only to provide Agent White with all kinds of insights into the inner working of the black market during the latter part of World War II.

Image courtesy flickr

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the experiment.  Far from it. When the OSS morphed into the CIA in 1947, one of the top items on its agenda was to continue to ferret out and turn enemy infiltrators, which soon morphed into eliminating the Red Menace of communism.  This paranoid byproduct of the Cold War took flight when western intelligence analysts noted how Soviet bloc show trials routinely produced prisoners who stood like zombies only to confess to any crime proffered by the prosecutor.  Even worse was when a flurry of American POWs who were taken prisoner by the Chinese during the Korean War readily confessed to perpetrating crimes against humanity that they clearly didn’t commit.

It wasn’t long after the war ended when the CIA began quietly recruiting academics and chemists to study the effects of pharmaceuticals to break down the resistance of prisoners as well as to try to make unwitting subjects perform tasks against their will.  Hollywood took to calling this form of brainwashing the Manchurian Candidate.  But the intelligence community knew the process as MKUltra.

Starting in 1953 with a $300,000 budget provided by then CIA Director Allen Dulles, the program was tasked with investigating the use of chemical and biological material for espionage purposes.  Among other institutions recruited to participate in the program were Columbia University and Mt Sinai Hospital in New York.  One of the substances the Agency was interested in experimenting with was LSD.  Subjects exposed to the hallucinogen included incarcerated prisoners, prostitutes and drug addicts.  But they weren’t the only guinea pigs.  At the height of the program, the CIA’s lead chemist Sidney Gottlieb dosed several of his own colleagues without their knowledge just to see what would happen.  One of them, Dr. Frank Olsen had an adverse reaction to the drug which not only caused him to have a mental breakdown but soon thereafter was implicated in his death when he fell from a hotel window in Manhattan.

Image courtesy flickr

It was largely due to this highly publicized incident that the CIA decided to move its operation from the East Coast to the West Coast.  Posing as a journalist, the same George White who gave a mobster  marijuana-laced cigarettes, rented out a townhouse at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco.  He then proceeded to deck it out with everything from Toulouse-Lautrec posters and kinky photos to a state-of-the-art surveillance system and two-way mirrors that allowed him to observe and record everything that went on in the apartment.

Codenamed “Operation Midnight Climax,” George hired several hookers who were told to work various North Beach bars in order to lure unsuspecting Johns up to what White called “the Pad.”  There the Johns were plied with sex, as well as cocktails laced with LSD.  The prostitutes who had been recruited for the operation were paid by White partly in cash and partly in chits that were a veritable get out of jail free card.  It seems that George’s clout extended to the SFPD who weren’t exactly kept in the loop by the Agency but were told not to bust his operation or hassle the girls working for him.

Image courtesy flickr

Using sex to recruit agents in the field was nothing new.  The CIA had been using Honey Traps for years to compromise foreign assets.  The difference in San Francisco was not only the addition of hallucinogenic substances like LSD, but White’s agents were giving it to unsuspecting Americans as opposed to enemy combatants.  By the time Operation Midnight Climax ended in 1965, White was no longer limiting his operatives to drugging unsuspecting subjects in the Pad.  By this point, his agents were purportedly dosing people at random in bars and restaurants as well as at a popular beach. They also started dosing their subjects with other experimental substances.  Years later, a CIA asset revealed to author John Marks, “If we were too scared of a drug to try it ourselves, we’d send it to San Francisco.”

It wasn’t until 1963 that a CIA auditor stumbled upon the operation and raised a stink.  Still, it took another two years before the operation was shut down and the Pad was closed for good.  What’s even worse is that nobody with the exception of those agents involved in Operation Midnight Climax know the full extent of the shenanigans that took place at 225 Chestnut Street.  That’s because the Agency shredded most of its MK Ultra records in the mid-1970’s.  While George White played at being a journalist, it wasn’t until 1974 when an actual journalist from the New York Times blew the lid off the CIA’s illicit domestic operations.  By then it was too late for many of the unwitting Americans who had been treated like lab rats by the Agency during this and other wide-ranging facets of MK Ultra.

Far from being apologetic, it was later reported that CIA agent George White stated, “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyard because it was fun, fun, fun.  Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, pillage and kill with the blessing of the All-Mighty?”

You can’t make up shit like this, folks. 

Image courtesy flickr

While the majority of those who were harmed by the MKUltra program received little in the way of acknowledgement let alone compensation, one victim was vindicated.  On July 21, 1975, President Gerald Ford formerly apologized to the family of Dr. Frank Olsen.  In addition to the  meeting in the Oval Office, Olsen’s wife later received $750,000 to settle her husband’s wrongful death suit.  While the government averred that Dr. Olsen had taken his own life, his family begged to differ.  To date, it was the only time the federal government officially admitted any blame for wrongdoing committed during the MKUltra program.  While it was reported that the mind control program was shut down for good in the 70's, nobody really knows for sure what takes place behind closed doors in the black budget world of international intrigue.

If you liked this webisode and love mysteries, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel and check out my Patreon site.  Next week, I’ll tell you about a little-known incident involving the San Francisco Police Department, three off-duty cops and a bag of fajitas that nearly brought the SFPD to its knees. Make sure you’re in the loop.