MKUltra And Operation Midnight Climax
Baltimore SunFrank Olson, the CIA operative whose death during Operation Midnight Climax helped brings its parent project, MKUltra, to light.
While MKUltra grouped together dozens of different CIA projects involving mind control and drugs, namely LSD, one of the few projects for which we have compelling surviving evidence is Operation Midnight Climax — and why not be at least a little bit coy when you’re using government money to pay prostitutes to drug unsuspecting victims for purposes of interrogation and mind control.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the project operated in two main cities: San Francisco and New York City. The CIA destroyed the New York files, but due to a bureaucratic snafu, the San Francisco files survived, allowing all a glimpse at this audacious project.
The operation went something like this: The CIA would secure rooms with one-way mirrors, install microphones and listening devices into the walls, and hire prostitutes. These prostitutes would then lure men back to the safe houses and dose them with LSD. The men would flip out, and the CIA operatives would study their behavior from behind the mirror, allegedly with a pitcher of martinis nearby, and interrogate the men to see how effective LSD could be as a kind of truth serum.
While the project did yield a few significant findings (i.e. men were more likely to spill secrets after the deed than before), that was about it. In fact, the main thing Operation Midnight Climax proved was how useless LSD was in loosening a person’s tongue. Indeed, the unpredictable drug was actually more likely to have the opposite effect and cause the subject to clam up.
In some cases, however, things got much, much worse.
Wayne Ritchie, a former U.S. Marshal, claims he was made a victim of Operation Midnight Climax after being dosed with LSD during a 1957 holiday party. The San Francisco Weekly wrote up his description of what happened next:
The room began to spin. The red and green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly. Ritchie’s body temperature rose. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors around him…He came unglued. Ritchie feared the other marshals didn’t want him around anymore. Then he obsessed about the probation officers across the hall and how they didn’t like him, either. Everyone was out to get him. Ritchie felt he had to escape.
Deep under the influence, Ritchie robbed a bar later that night using two service issue revolvers. He was caught, pled guilty, and, despite his otherwise clean record and the obvious extenuating circumstances, forced to resign from the U.S. Marshals office.
He would work as a painter for the next 34 years. In the 2000s, he tried suing the government but the court ultimately dismissed the case. The surviving deposition of Ira Feldman (a member of the Midnight Climax staff), however, shows the callousness with which the project operated:
[Ritchie’s attorney:] Now, all these people that you personally drugged, you never did any follow-up on them, in the sense of telling them that you had drugged them, did you?
[Government attorney:] Objection. Lacks foundation. Go ahead and answer it, if you can.
[Feldman:] Not all the people that I drugged. I drugged guys involved in about ten, twelve, period. I didn’t do any follow-up, period, because it wasn’t a very good thing to go and say “How do you feel today?” You don’t give them a tip. You just back away and let them worry, like this nitwit, Ritchie.
[Ritchie’s attorney:] When you say “let them worry,” you mean let them have a head full of LSD and let —
[Feldman:] Let them have a full head, like what happened, like what happened with this nut when he got out and got drunk.
By 1963, six years after Ritchie and plenty more cases like his, the government scaled down the sanctioned brothels after the top brass at the CIA began to change. The organization shut down the San Francisco operation completely in 1965, then pulled the plug on New York the following year.
The one prominent fact known about the New York City operation is that in 1953 government hands dosed CIA biological warfare scientist Frank Olson with LSD, who then suffered from extreme anxiety and paranoia. Nine days later, he died after falling from a 13th floor window of the Hotel Statler — some say he jumped, some say he was pushed.
Olson’s family alleged that the government killed him because he was attempting to leave the CIA for good. According to the family, Olson may have threatened to expose secrets relating to biological warfare during the Korean War. In 1976, Olson’s family settled out of court with the U.S. government for $750,000.
This case and the other extant material related to Operation Midnight Climax served as the main evidence that the morass of projects known as MKUltra ever happened.
Next, read about the government conspiracy theories that turned out to actually be true, and then have a look at the four most sinister programs the CIA ever implemented.
