The agency's search for the secret of brainwashing The apartments in New York City and San Francisco were tarted up with
red draperies, dressing tables trimmed in black velveteen and
Toulouse-Lautrec posters. At night, women lured men to the hideaways
and fed them LSD or marijuana, while other men watched the action
through two-way mirrors and tape-recorded the sounds. Scenes from seamy bordellos? Havens for desperate voyeurs? No, these
were taxpayer-financed operations of the CIA, which was experimenting
with drugs during the 1950s and '60s in a project with the sophomoric
code name Midnight Climax. The women, apparently moonlighting
prostitutes, were paid $100 for each assignment by the CIA. The
operation, conducted by CIA alchemists from 1954 until 1963, was part
of a quarter-century hunt for a psychogenic philosophers' stone. The
purpose was to discover the secret of brainwashing, to protect U.S.
agents and gain control over enemy spies. Operation Midnight Climax was disclosed last week at a Senate hearing,
adding bizarre details to the story of CIA drug research exposed in
1975 and 1976 by Government investigations. Further revelations were
provided by a cache of 8,000 heavily censored documents sifted by
Senate aides and New York Times reporters. The research began after CIA officials were horrified by Jozsef Cardinal
Mindszenty's vacant stare and mechanical voice at his 1949 treason
trial in Budapest. Drugs and mind-control techniques had long been used
by intelligence services, but the CIA feared that the Communists had
made some breakthrough. By 1953, the CIA concluded that its worries
were unfounded; still the research continued, despite some official
misgivings. Drugs were sought to incapacitate entire buildings full of people,
poison food to create “confusion-anxiety-fear,” cause headaches and
earaches, and produce amnesia in foreign spies after interrogations or
CIA agents who were about to retire. To administer the drugs
surreptitiously, CIA experimenters developed pencil-like injectors and
small spray guns. Much of the research was devoted to LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs,
which the CIA wrongly thought could be used to squeeze information from
enemy agents and discredit them by disturbing their memories or
changing their sex drives, making them either extremely over-or
undersexed. CIA-paid researchers conducted LSD experiments on prisoners at the
federal penitentiary in Atlanta, the U.S. Public Health Service
Hospital in Lexington, Ky., the New Jersey reformatory in Bordentown
and Michigan's Ionia State Hospital. Experimenters used tranquilizers and alcohol on mental patients and
staff members at the Butler Memorial Hospital in Providence. Other
scientists tried out brainwashing techniques—including isolation and
sensory deprivation—on patients at McGill University's Allan Memorial
Institute of Psychiatry in Montreal. In the early 1950s, the CIA tried to put some of its new findings to
use, sending special interrogation teams to Europe and Asia. One team
gave intravenous injections of an unidentified drug to three European
agents of dubious loyalty and questioned them for eleven days before
deciding that they were not turncoats.
