Free Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD by Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain

“The frequency of bad reactions prompted White to coin his own code word for the drug: “Stormy,” which was how he referred to LSD throughout his fourteen-year stint as a CIA operative.
    In 1955 White was transferred to San Francisco, where two more safehouses were established. During this period he initiated Operation Midnight Climax, in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment. As payment for their services the hookers received $100 a night, plus a guarantee from White that he’d intercede on their behalf should they be arrested while plying their trade. In addition to providing data about LSD, Midnight Climax enabled the CIA to learn about the sexual proclivities of those who passed through the safe-houses. White’s harem of prostitutes became the focal point of anextensive CIA study of how to exploit the art of lovemaking for espionage purposes.
    When he wasn’t operating a national security whorehouse, White would cruise the streets of San Francisco tracking down drug pushers for the Narcotics Bureau. Sometimes after a tough day on the beat he invited his narc buddies up to one of the safehouses for a little “R & R.” Occasionally they unzipped their inhibitions and partied on the premises—much to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to complain about men with guns in shoulder straps chasing after women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there was always plenty of dope around, and the feds sampled everything from hashish to LSD. “So far as I’m concerned,” White later told an associate, “ ‘clear thinking’ was non-existent while under the influence of any of these drugs. I did feel at times like I was having a ‘mind-expanding experience’ but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session.”
    White had quite a scene going for a while. By day he fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night he dispensed them to strangers. Not everyone was cut out for this kind of schizophrenic lifestyle, and White often relied on the bottle to reconcile the two extremes. But there were still moments when his Jekyll-and-Hyde routine got the best of him. One night a friend who had helped install bugging equipment for the CIA stopped by the safehouse only to find the roly-poly narcotics officer slumped in front of a full-length mirror. White had just finished polishing off a half gallon of Gibson’s. There he sat, with gun in hand, shooting wax slugs at his own reflection.
    The safehouse experiments continued without interruption until 1963, when CIA inspector general John Earman accidentally stumbled across the clandestine testing program during a routine inspection of TSS operations. Only a handful of CIA agents outside Technical Services knew about the testing of LSD on unwitting subjects, and Earman took Richard Helms, the prime instigator of MK-ULTRA, to task for not fully briefing the new CIA director, John J. McCone. Although McCone had been handpicked by President Kennedy to replace Allen Dulles as the dean of American intelligence, Helms apparently had his own ideas about who was running the CIA.
    Earman had grave misgivings about MK-ULTRA and he prepared a twenty-four-page report that included a comprehensive overviewof the drug and mind control projects. In a cover letter to McCone he noted that the “concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical.” But the harshest criticism was reserved for the safehouse experiments, which, in his words, placed “the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.” Earman stated that LSD had been tested on “individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and