Operation Midnight Climax: The CIA's San Francisco Safe House

The Story

In the 1950s the CIA wanted to know something no laboratory could easily tell it: what would LSD do to an ordinary person who had no idea he had taken it? The agency's answer was not a hospital ward or a university study. It was a pair of apartments run by a federal narcotics agent.

The agent was George Hunter White of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. According to the National Security Archive, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who ran its MKULTRA behavior-control research, hired White to run safe houses in New York City and later San Francisco. The Archive, drawing on White's own diary, says he was already secretly dosing people with CIA-supplied LSD in January 1953, months before the arrangement was formalized that summer.

"We have records that construction was done to put in two-way mirrors." (CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Senate hearing, August 3, 1977)

The deal suited both sides. In closed-door testimony to Church Committee staff in October 1975, Gottlieb described "our funding of two safe houses at different times for the Bureau of Narcotics which the Bureau would use for meeting informants and pursuing their own business, and which premises we would occasionally use for our own meetings." Richard Helms, then a senior CIA official, described the arrangement as "using the Bureau of Narcotics as a 'cutout,'" which Gottlieb said meant removing the CIA "by one or two steps from the activity itself." In a December 1963 memo, Helms called it "eight years of close collaboration."

The Senate's Church Committee later described how the testing worked. The person running the test might pick a subject at random in a bar and invite him back to the safe house, where the drug was slipped into a drink or food. CIA personnel might watch "by using a one-way mirror and tape recorder in an adjoining room."

None of the subjects had agreed to anything. The committee found there was no medical screening, no medical staff on hand, and no follow-up. The CIA's own inspector general had noted in 1963 that the people conducting the tests "are not qualified scientific observers," and that in a number of instances "the test subject has become ill for hours or days, including hospitalization in at least one case."

The San Francisco apartment has become the most notorious part of the story. The San Francisco Chronicle has reported that it was on Telegraph Hill and operated from 1955 to 1965, and that sex workers brought men there from North Beach bars. The Church Committee's own account says the domestic testing was halted in 1963, after the inspector general discovered it during a survey.

Even then, it did not stop quietly. According to the Church Committee, the head of covert operations told the inspector general in May 1963 that he had briefed the CIA director, and that "the Director indicated no disagreement and therefore the 'testing' will continue." The project was suspended only after the inspector general's report recommended ending it.

The full story surfaced in pieces. Helms and Gottlieb destroyed most MKULTRA records in 1973, but in 1977 the CIA reported finding seven boxes of surviving MKULTRA documents. On August 3, 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner told a joint Senate hearing that the agency now had corroborating information that some of the unwitting drug testing had been carried out in safe houses in San Francisco and New York City, and that three people had been involved rather than one.

Sen. Edward Kennedy pressed for details. Asked whether two-way mirrors had been used, Turner replied: "Yes, sir. We have records that construction was done to put in two-way mirrors." Kennedy then read from the files a list of what had been bought for the San Francisco bedroom, including pictures of French can-can dancers, "three framed Toulouse Lautrec posters with black silk mats," red curtains and recording equipment. He cited documents carrying the signature of the agent running the operation, with the words "called to the operation, midnight, and climax." Asked what he concluded about what had gone on there, Turner said, "No, sir." The transcript records general laughter.

Kennedy said there was also "an enormously serious side." At the same hearing, former CIA psychologist John Gittinger testified that between about 1956 and 1961 he went to the West Coast safe house four or five times, where the agent, identified at the hearing by the alias "Morgan Hall," arranged for him to interview prostitutes about sexual habits and about drugs. Gittinger said he had no direct knowledge of how the drugs were given to unwitting subjects. White himself could not be questioned. Kennedy noted that the agent had died two years earlier.

In the years since, the San Francisco operation has been known as Operation Midnight Climax. How many people were dosed there, and who they were, has never been established. Turner told the senators that what went on inside was largely a matter of inference, and the records that might have answered the question were destroyed.