The Government Program That Turned Tax Dollars into Sex, Drugs, and Two-Way Mirrors

Operation Midnight Climax represents the CIA's most depraved MKUltra subproject: government-run brothels in San Francisco and New York where prostitutes dosed unwitting clients with LSD while federal agents watched through two-way mirrors. From 1955 to 1965, narcotics agent George Hunter White ran the primary safehouse at 225 Chestnut Street in Telegraph Hill, where he would sit on a portable toilet behind a mirror, drinking from an ever-present pitcher of martinis, taking notes as men's minds disintegrated during what they thought were private encounters. The prostitutes, referred to in CIA documents as "undercover operatives," were recruited from the Tenderloin and North Beach, given federal protection, and trained in dosing techniques that would deliver 100-300 micrograms of LSD to their unsuspecting victims.

The program's documented legacy includes Wayne Ritchie, a deputy U.S. Marshal who held up a bar at gunpoint after being dosed; at least one businessman who jumped from a hotel window; and "hundreds of subjects" according to White's own records, none of whom were ever informed or compensated. Through declassified expense reports listing "liquor for operatives" and "replacement of damaged furniture," Church Committee testimony where CIA officials defended drugging citizens as "essential research," and White's own diary where he celebrated that he could "lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest," we trace how the U.S. government normalized depravity, bureaucratized violation, and turned Americans' most intimate moments into data points for operational improvement—all funded by taxpayers who were simultaneously the program's unwitting subjects and financial sponsors.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

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