Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD (2012)
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Second, the most eye popping factoid is that CIA installed two-way mirrors and wired their brothel to record the John's with the prostitutes. I often wondered where did Jeffrey Epstein get the idea to secretly record his elite pals frolicking with his harem of underage girls in order to blackmail them. Epstein wasn't even the first guy to come up with this idea. CIA did.
I have done LSD several times decades ago. It is the most powerful drug I have ever taken. Nobody should ever be fed LSD without knowing it. I can see how a surprise trip could flip a switch in your brain and drive you insane, if you don't know what is happening to you.
I wish most of all that CIA would scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA files and declassify them and at least tell us WHY they ran this brothel and secretly drugged Americans with LSD. If we knew their specific reasons why, at least we could then forgive and forget. As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.
This whole series on Epstein and intelligence agencies is fascinating. This part focuses on Epstein/Mena/Clinton but it also explores ties to Trump and pre-Epstein CIA and FBI operations.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/genesis-jeffrey-epstein-bill-c...
It would be nice to have proof, but I’m 100% certain the reason was “to see what happens”.
But by the time of CIA's LSD brothel, the CIA had already been experimenting with LSD for over ten years. Timothy Leary and the Acid hippies had already been all over the counter culture for 5 years. Everybody knew what LSD did by then. They already knew what would happen. That's why I believe the brothel wasn't an experiment, it was an operation with a defined objective.
The appealing part of this story was the bit where Sandoz called them back and asked "did you want enough of this to light up the country?" and some ignorant bureaucrat said "that's whats on the form, ship it already." That fits my cynicism about government operations, especially unsupervised ones.
The stories about the government involvement in cocaine are less funny.
I wonder to what extent the CIA experimented with extreme doses if they sat on that much.
I'd guess that a couple of sessions in everybody running the experiment saw the potential to extort, manipulate and just plain have fun drinking/drugging and doing plain old illegal things under the pretense of "experiment".
I would imagine the idea was invented around the same time as the first permanent photographs, and probably started happening in practice around the late 1800s when cameras started having exposure times measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. Blackmail is profitable, so it would make sense that photographic blackmail would happen as soon as the technology supported it.
Poisoner in Chief is a great recent book detailing the CIA's search for mind control via MKUltra and associated projects; well-researched and written.
They were testing the use of psychedelics to “breakdown” subjects they wanted intelligence from.
And brothels are a great way to get intelligence and compromising information on people you’re targeting.
Maybe it had a higher success rate back then, today you can find sex with with an app, no money involved.
My suspicion is that they needed to trick people into those compromising situations.
Have you seen the Koch brothers?!
;)
Sorry, but the CIA certainly did not invent sextortion either. That idea is probably older than the steam engine and should be blatantly obvious to any human with genitals and a brain. Heck, this should even be obvious for people working at a patent office.
> scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA
assuming they haven't been deliberately destroyed.
> As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.
Also, please don't forget that times were different. I have whole book on crazy and ethically questionable research sitting on my shelf, and most of the MKULTRA shenanigans fit perfectly in there, along with a lot of the stuff that was done at the time.
One of the more memorable examples from the top of my head: In the early 1960s at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, alcoholics were injected Scoline while letting them sniff and taste some liquor. This completely blocked all muscle action, including the ability to breath[1]. The idea was to condition them to associate the panic and fear of imminent death with alcohol. This was done without the patients prior knowledge or informed consent. And have you ever even heard of that research before?
The main difference here is that the CIA had orders of magnitudes more funding and better shielding from consequences, thus the ability to take this much further.
I'm not trying to downplay MKULTRA here, what I'm trying to say is that you need to put the "What on earth were they thinking?" into a historical perspective, instead of jumping to "subverting their own government with mystery mind control" (well, foreign governments maybe, if it turns out to work; we are talking about the CIA after all).
I could easily imagine a meeting that went along the lines of "We must research this because the Russians might do so! We cannot have a mind control substance gap!", followed by "this needs to be super secret, we can't recruit volunteers.", and after throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks eventually spinning out of control because of morally corrupt people in positions with power and zero responsibilities ending up doing unethical things.
Also, if you are an organization in the US that does anything vaguely military/defense/intelligence related, I don't think you need to subvert the government to have money thrown at you (which conspiracy theories often seem to describe as the end game).
Mix that (fairly reasonable at the time IMO) motivation with the… lackadaisical research ethics frameworks at the time, and the outcome gets much less shocking.
Isn't a two-way mirror just a window?
It is a bit like bi-weekly and such
Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3710624 - March 2012 (2 comments)
Also related: Others?
The CIA's Quest for Mind Control: Torture, LSD and a 'Poisoner in Chief' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25182099 - Nov 2020 (174 comments)
The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20938279 - Sept 2019 (120 comments)
The CIA’s human experiments with mind control (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22976846 - April 2020 (48 comments)
So to focus on the CIA allows the rest of it to go on unimpededed.
Its like hiring a model to act like your close friend so that your girlfriend focuses all her attention on her waiting for infidelity with that specific person and you can always disprove that there wasn't .... with her. But no further scrutiny goes on, when there should be.
They spied on congress during the Obama years, they spied on the Trump admin when he was a candidate, and then of course the embarrassing revelation that they got caught spying on allies —which is par for the course, but still.
Even more: US invaded Afghanistan immediately after Taliban managed to destroy almost all heroin production. I don't think it's a coincidence.
There're reports of people who visited Afghanistan after US invasion and they reported that it feels like US army guards poppy fields. It would be very easy for US to destroy them, but they behave like they didn't care.
I think that's was the main reason for Afghanistan incursion: to kill two birds with one stone. Earn lots of money and flood Russia (which US hates) with drugs.
How many times did we hear breathless tirades about how the president wasn’t “respecting” the recommendations of intelligence agencies, or leaking classified intelligence. As if democratic representative of the American people was responsible to the unelected agency heads instead of vice versa.
I voted against Trump twice, but when you get to the point where not even POTUS has the right to challenge the CIA and NSA, you’re no longer living in a democracy.
I think you are either confusing the Democratic center-right (whuch has always had reverence for the intelligence community and defense establishment) with “most of the left", or confusing opposing abnormally blatant political abuse of (and by political officials within) the national security apparatus with reverence for that same apparatus, or both.
You can relabel these left-of-center outlets as center-right but that’s not a common perspective.
That the US secret services (spy agencies) and secret police (FBI) have been able to wrap themselves in the flag and convince millions of alleged progressives that they're good and honorable and upright and sincere - and to do so so incredibly cheaply (John Brennan doesn't pay CNN to let him on prime time) - is bananas. They made Russiagate into QAnon for liberals in about 30 seconds and are now on their victory lap, laughing in our faces with the diverse woke CIA commercials [0]. In a way you have to respect it - it's like watching the Harlem Globetrotters.
Right to challenge with what, though? The president should not have the right to commit crimes then defy any investigation; see also Nixon and Reagan (Iran-Contra). The right for anyone to be above challenge is how you get crimes like the CIA's LSD brothels.
There definitely were Russian agents running around having meetings with Republican-oriented organisations, e.g. https://www.npr.org/2019/05/10/721763041/exclusive-documents...
A man couldn't decide which of his girl friends to stay with. As a test, he decided to give each woman $5,000 to see how they would spend it.
The first girlfriend went out and got herself a complete makeover. She told him, "I spend the money so I could look pretty for you because I love you so much."
The second went shopping and bought the man new golf clubs, an iPad and an 80-inch flatscreen television. She said, "I bought these gifts for you because I love you so much."
The third woman took the $5,000 and invested it in the stock market, doubled her investment, returned $5,000 to the man and reinvested the rest. She said, "I am investing the rest of the money for our future because I love you so much."
The man thought long and hard about how each of his girlfriends had spent the money, and then he decided to stay with the one with the biggest breasts.
They got caught.
Nobody got in trouble.
There are at least four crimes in here, one being a crime against humanity.
The CIA is not accountable whatsoever to the legislature.
Think bureaucracy, the Deep State, ambitious climbers, technocrats, whatever.
Observing agency heads run circles around elected officials completely flipped me from "yay term limits" to "pay electeds more, give them more staff."
FWIW, I think everyone should run for office at least once. Folk understanding of politics isn't even wrong. Becoming and serving as an elected really sucks. Least of which is serving as arrow catchers for all of govts faults.
Me: There’s a theory that the US government remote-controlled the 9/11 airliners and crashed them into the WTC to fire up arms sales that have been slow since the Cold War ended
Colleague: Yeah, so?
Me: that conspiracy theory is from March, 2001
Colleague: (uncomfortable silence)
If you're bringing up this kind of information to inform, you're only making the world a darker place. If you're bringing up the information to inspire change, you're proposing a fight against something so vast that its extents defy its own comprehension, and to-which morality is alien.
If Cthulhu is slumbering, do you want someone to risk waking him?
I disagree. I think informing people is the only way to
> inspire change
> you're proposing a fight against something so vast that its extents defy its own comprehension, and to-which morality is alien.
Yes.
> If Cthulhu is slumbering
`If`... I believe we are actively harmed by these organizations.
TBH, I can tell a part of me has a `Can't beat 'em, then join 'em` mentality, but I believe where these organizations are headed is bad for even the future of their members.
Knowing these bodies exist, and believing as I do that the aim of those at the top of these organizations is to enslave most everyone, I can't understand not fighting against them.
That said, maybe you don't believe control and slavery is the ultimate goal of those that run these organizations? Or maybe you don't think they'll achieve it?
So, no different than any other part of government.
Could be similar with CIA, a lot of people know they were distributing cocaine, but people are sheepish to speak freely.
It's far to easy/comfortable to think that bad actions on behalf of the authorities that happened in the past can't happen again.
They can, and probably will on a long enough timeline.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Russell#Legal_issues
The CIA apparently launched MK Ultra because they were concerned that the Soviet Union had developed a powerful mind control drug. They had to keep up so they launched their own program to do research on mind control drugs.
If that's true and this was a weapon's program instead of some people with security clearances saying "Let's party dudes", wouldn't they have actually tried to control people's minds?
In this case, you've got a US Marshall who went from a Christmas Party to a robbery over the course of a bad trip. If you wanted a proof of concept that you could make a well connected Soviet official do something, how much better of a poc can you come up with?
I know this sounds conspiratorial and it is, but the CIA giving people LSD without their knowledge is a true conspiracy theory. I'm having a lot of trouble believing they'd just get people high, let them wander San Francisco and see what happens.
I suspect that the answer is “much worse.” This makes Get Smart seem like a documentary about the best case intelligence scenario…
Of course it is, he/she/it/they said.
That MKULTRA's Jolly West is the guy who surfaces near Jack Ruby (of Lee Oswald fame), and Manson was visiting some clinic next door to the West's operation in SF. Talking about coincidences...
I agree. Although the story is true. We should get used to conspiracy theories being true