More than half a century has passed since then, but Wayne Ritchie says he still remembers how he felt about the acid dose.
He drank bourbon and soda with other federal employees at a holiday party in 1957 at the Post Office building at the intersection of Seventh and Mission Streets. They were joking, telling each other anecdotes, when suddenly the room suddenly went round. Red and green lights on the tree turned into a wild fiery spiral. Ritchie felt his body temperature rise. His gaze glazed over and focused on the lights spreading around him.
The deputy bailiff excused himself and went upstairs to his office. There he sat down on a chair and drank a glass of water. He needed to pull himself together. Instead, Ritchie flew into a rage. He was afraid that other bailiffs did not want to be in his company anymore. Then the thought of the trainees in the gym began to haunt him and that they didn't like him either. Everyone wanted to get to him. Ritchie knew he had to run.
He fled home to seek solace from his girlfriend, who lived with him. But everything went wrong somehow. A friend was at home, but a quarrel arose between them. She stated that she was tired of San Francisco and that she wanted to return to New York. Ritchie couldn't handle the situation. In desperation, he fled again, this time to a bar, where he continued to gobble up whiskey and soda. Then he walked through several more bars, taking on the chest in each of them. When he reached the intersection of Seventh and Mission Streets, Ritchie drew up a plan that would change his life.
Today Ritchie is in his 80s and lives in San Jose. He is apparently one of the last surviving victims of the Central Intelligence Agency's operation MK-ULTRA, during which his staff from 1953 to 1964 secretly tested the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on unsuspecting Americans living in San Francisco and New York.
Seymour Hersh first exposed Operation MK-ULTRA in 1974 in the New York Times. In his article, he described the illegal actions of the CIA, including the facts of the use of American citizens as guinea pigs in military and spy control games. John Marks elaborated on this operation in more detail in his excellent 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. There have been other reports of the CIA drug-poisoning its citizens, but these are mostly related to the office's activities in New York. There were few reports of what was happening in San Francisco, and they appeared sporadically. However, recently declassified CIA documents,interviews and the personal diary of a field operative from the Stanford Special Archive Division shed more light on the scope and content of the San Francisco operation.
There were at least three operational apartments and houses in the Bay Area where experiments were carried out. The main address among them was 225 Telegraph Hill. This turnout was in effect from 1955 to 1965. The L-shaped apartment building boasted magnificent views of the coastline, and it was not far from the scandalous North Beach saloons. There, prostitutes receiving money from the state lured unsuspecting clients into an operational apartment and served these law-abiding citizens with LSD cocktails. And undercover agents, sitting behind translucent mirrors and sipping martinis, watched their every step. Recording devices disguised as electrical appliances were installed in the apartment.
Promotional video:
To put clients in the mood, the walls were decorated with photographs of women in chains who were being tortured, as well as provocative posters by French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Agents were simply mesmerized by the perverse sexual games played out in front of their eyes between clients and prostitutes. A two-way mirror allowed them to follow all the action at close range.
Behind the mirror was the stout and balding crime fighter George H. White. This extraordinary man from the Bureau of Narcotics has become a hero in newspapers, uncovering opium and heroin trafficking networks in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and the United States. Few knew that he was simultaneously working for Uncle Sam as a CIA agent. He oversaw the operation in San Francisco, playfully dubbing it the Midnight Orgasm.
"[White] was a really tough guy," said Ritchie, who regularly met him in the courts and police stations in San Francisco. “All his agents were very afraid to do anything without his permission. White flew into a rage and beat them. He was a big and tough guy."
Brain behind White's muscle was the American chemist Sidney Gottlieb. The 1950s were beginning, and McCarthyism, with its witch-hunt, was in full swing. Intelligence leaders, while professing their fear of communist regimes, used hallucinogens to extract confessions from prisoners of war in Korea, as well as brainwash spies into betraying their own people and side with the United States. And the best way to study the effects of LSD exposure was by testing the drug on unsuspecting New Yorkers and San Franciscans.
The vice lab on Telegraph Hill was called the "lair" in the leather-bound magazines of White. White's widow donated 10 boxes of his personal belongings to Foothill College in Los Altos Hills when her husband passed away in 1975 from cirrhosis. Now these magazines, letters and photographs are kept at Stanford and provide a rare insight into the life of a secret agent of the Cold War era.
Prior to joining the Bureau of Narcotics, White worked for the Office of Strategic Services. This intelligence agency during the Second World War was the forerunner of the CIA. In the 1940s, in their quest for the serum of truth, White and other FDA agents planted concentrated doses of tetrahydrocannabinol acetate in the food and cigarettes of communist suspects, military dodgers, and gangsters. The experience gained was not a prerequisite for participating in Operation MK-ULTRA, but it definitely helped.
Stanford Medical School psychiatrist James Hamilton knew White from his joint service with the Office of Strategic Services. He was part of a small group of researchers who had access to the "den." Gottlieb also visited the "den", but there was no regular medical supervision of Operation Midnight Orgasm.
And this created problems. The first CIA brothel set up by White and Gottlieb in New York had already started to go awry. American bacteriological warfare specialist Frank Olson jumped out of a 10th-floor hotel window in 1953 (or was thrown out of there), nine days after the CIA gave him LSD. When the CIA chemist, who lived with Olson in a hotel room, met with the police, they found in his pocket a piece of paper with the initials and the address of White's safe house in Greenwich Village. Operations in New York were temporarily suspended while police investigated Olson's death. Then it was resumed.
The California-born White had previously worked as a reporter for the San Francisco newspaper and was eager to return to his hometown. In 1955, Gottlieb let him go.
Apart from occasional visits from Gottlieb, White, now a "CIA consultant," was at his own discretion in disposing of safehouses in San Francisco. According to Ritchie, White's right-hand man, Ike Feldman, ran around town dressed as "an inveterate drug dealer." Ritchie adds, "He tried to play Al Capone." The Lair quickly turned into what looked like a spy club. They regularly held lunches there, "drinking eight martinis to them," White writes in his magazines. And sometimes White conducted his controversial observational studies while sitting on a portable toilet given by a friend. This was his "observation post".
What happened in the "den" obviously remained there.
Dr. John Erskine has lived near this apartment since 1954. “I had the feeling that what was happening there was absolutely none of my business. Everything was done quietly, people did not yell from the windows,”he says, standing next to the drug den.
The apartment is currently being renovated. A few months ago, a construction team pulled microphones, wires, and recording equipment out of the walls.
Ruth Kelley worked as a singer at a club called The Black Sheep. Her unexpected journey into another dimension took place right on stage.
White had an eye on the young and pretty Kelly, but she rejected his advances. According to the testimony of Frank Laubinger, a CIA officer who ran a contact program for MK-ULTRA victims in the 1980s, White or one of his people ended up giving her a dose of LSD just before the singer took the stage. "LSD certainly had an effect on her." Kelly was taken to the hospital, but when the effect of the drug ended, she felt fine, not even knowing that she had received a dose.
The agents were selected in different ways. As for the apartment on Telegraph Hill, prostitutes looked for clients in bars and restaurants in North Beach, and then brought them to the "den" for experimentation and observation. Sometimes White and his wife would have dinners, treating guests to hallucinogenic cocktails without their knowledge. City residents like Kelly, who fell into the clutches of White and his men, became victims for the simple reason that their paths crossed with White's group at the wrong time. White wrote in his diary how he slipped "acid" to unsuspecting people on the beaches, in city bars and restaurants.
There were two other outposts in the Bay Area where the CIA was conducting research with LSD and other chemicals. It was a room at the Plantation Hotel at the intersection of Lombard and Webster Streets, and 261 Green Street in Mill Valley.
The object of study could be a person of any profession and type of activity. CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick wrote about this in 1963 in a memorandum: “The effectiveness of the effects of substances on people from different levels of society, from the upper and lower levels, Americans and foreigners, is very important. and therefore experiments were carried out on a wide variety of people who fell into these categories."
However, as noted in 1976 by the Senate Special Committee on Intelligence Activities, no preliminary medical examinations were carried out. “Paradoxically, the CIA was much more attentive to the safety of foreigners on whom LSD was tested abroad. In several cases, medical examinations were carried out before LSD use (abroad), the committee reported. - The internal program … shows that the CIA leadership did not pay due attention to the rights of citizens and did not give appropriate instructions to its employees. Although the dangers of testing were well known, the lives of the test subjects were at risk and their rights were ignored for the ten years that the program continued after Olson's death.” Although it was clear to everyone that US laws were being violated, testing and inspection continued.
CIA operatives admit that they themselves experimented with LSD. In a letter to Professor Harvey Powelson, professor of psychiatry at University College Berkeley, White notes that from time to time he himself “became a guinea pig. My personal observations show that the effects of all these drugs are essentially the same, except for the strength and duration of the effect. Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate is more potent than marijuana [sic!] And LSD is more potent than tetrahydrocannabinol acetate. As for me, under the influence of any of these drugs, "mental clarity" disappeared. Sometimes I had "psychedelic sensations", but they disappeared like a dream immediately after the cessation of exposure."
Apparently, White liked the secret work he was doing. Maybe even a little too much. In a letter to Gottlieb in 1971, he wrote: “Of course, I was a very insignificant missionary, in fact a heretic, but I worked hard in the vineyards because it was interesting, interesting, interesting. Where else could an energetic American boy lie, kill, deceive, steal, rape, and rob, with a sanction from the top? This is great, bro!"
Even in the CIA, few people knew about MK-ULTRA and its secondary projects. Domestic experiments remained untested for a decade, until President John F. Kennedy, who was in dire pain over the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, forced the resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, who first approved the operation. The agency's activities in San Francisco were so classified that even the new CIA director John McCone was only informed of it in 1963, when he took office. However, the new CIA inspector general, John Earman, did not turn a blind eye to what he heard. “Many people inside and outside the agency find operations to manipulate human behavior disgusting and unethical,” he wrote.questioning even the very legitimacy of secret actions. "The disclosure of certain aspects of Operation MK ULTRA could cause a serious and sharply negative reaction in American society, as well as stimulate offensive and defensive actions in this area by foreign intelligence services."
Irman noted that numerous test subjects fell ill from the effects of psychotropic drugs, which they were secretly fed, and that if doctors opened this government activity, it would cause great embarrassment. He recommended that the safe houses be closed. However, senior intelligence officers urged the continuation of Operation Midnight Orgasm. “I share your concern and dissatisfaction with all those programs that are an infringement on the privacy of citizens and their rights. But I believe it is imperative to maintain the agency's central role in these activities,”wrote CIA Deputy Director of Planning Richard Helms at the time.
Experiments on involuntary victims were suspended in 1964, at least officially. Nevertheless, the CIA turnouts in San Francisco and New York operated after that for another year and a half. Program oversight was first strengthened at the CIA headquarters in Virginia, and then, in 1965, safehouses in the Bay Area closed. The New York operation ended in 1966. The scouts admitted that the drug experiments exposed "serious moral problems" in the agency.
The fun is over. White retired in 1965 and became chief of the fire department in the Stinson Beach area. He wrote a boastful autobiography, A Diet of Danger, in which he proudly described his escapades at the Bureau of Narcotics. But he somehow very noticeably bypassed the operation "Midnight Orgasm" in silence. The publishers rejected this book in 1971.
Lawmakers couldn't believe their ears when they learned of the CIA's covert operations. But there were very few specifics at that time.
Helms, who co-authored Operation MK-ULTRA at its early stage, succeeded McCone as director of the CIA in 1966. Before retiring in the early 1970s, Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all project documentation. A massive cleaning of the Augean paper stables took place in 1973, when Washington was at the center of the Watergate scandal. In an effort to clean up the house, the new CIA director, James Schlesinger, later that year ordered agency officials to inform him of illegal activities by the authorities. It was then that he learned about Olson's fatal fall from a window in New York, as well as about the experiments under the influence of "acid".
Hersh soon found out about the details. The controversial New York Times article by this investigative journalist exposed the CIA's massive, illegal eavesdropping and surveillance programs inside the country. The agency sifted through American mail, tapped journalists' phones, and planned contract killings. Oh yes, it also fed hundreds of civilians and military personnel with LSD - all in the name of defense. The Americans demanded answers.
Donald Rumsfeld, then Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford, and Rumsfeld's deputy Dick Cheney wanted to prosecute Hersh for divulging state secrets. But Ford did not heed their advice. He instructed a commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate intelligence misconduct. Senator Frank Church also led a congressional investigation into CIA misconduct in 1974, and Senator Edward Kennedy held a hearing on MK-ULTRA on the Health and Research Subcommittee.
Although most of the CIA's top secret programs were destroyed, an archive of 20,000 documents was preserved due to bureaucratic confusion. In 1977, the author of The Manchurian Candidate, Marx, submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act, and in response received an edited version of the surviving MK-ULTRA documents.
Then, after gaining immunity from prosecution, Gottlieb answered questions in the Senate. To gain "first-hand knowledge," he said, agents experimented "extensively" with LSD on themselves, before testing the drug on other people.
Kennedy tried to assess all this objectively. “There is a positive side to this, but there is also a huge negative side,” he said. “There must be a huge number of Americans on the East and West coasts who have been given drugs and are experiencing all kinds of physical and psychological consequences from this.”
CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner revealed that 44 colleges and universities, 15 research foundations and pharmaceutical companies, 12 hospitals and clinics, and three correctional facilities were involved in MK-ULTRA research across the country. During the operation, LSD, pain relievers and other drugs were tested.
Using a front organization, Gottlieb distributed millions of dollars in drug and drug research grants to Stanford, Berkeley, and other universities that learned of the funding at a later date. Stanford's management admitted that its professors received about 40 thousand dollars in the framework of a secret CIA program in eight years. The university has conducted several studies on the effects of the drug during interrogation, and also spent money on the creation of miniature lie detectors and other spy equipment.
Lawmakers condemned the CIA's covert activities within the country, but ultimately no disciplinary action was taken. Gottlieb and the other people behind the LSD experiments were not prosecuted or punished.
But the Senate subcommittee decided that the innocent victims of these programs should be notified. Finding them proved to be very difficult, since very few CIA documents remained.
A working group was created to find and identify victims, but despite reports of hundreds and even thousands of people subjected to mind control experiments by the CIA, only 14 people were notified.
Dr. Olson's family filed a lawsuit against the government, claiming that the scientist's death was not actually related to the LSD he had taken. She claimed that the CIA operative pushed Olson out of the window so that he would not divulge information about the CIA's secret interrogation program about the use of biological weapons in the Korean War. As a result, the Olson family agreed to an out-of-court settlement, having received compensation in the amount of 750 thousand dollars from the US government. There were other lawsuits, including those from alleged victims of CIA programs in Canada. Compensations were also paid for them.
The Vietnam War Veterans Association in 2009 filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco, in which it claimed that at least 7,800 military personnel received 400 different types of drugs and chemicals without knowing anything about it. These included sarin, amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, and LSD. Experiments on them were carried out by the military and the CIA. And last month, the association filed a class action lawsuit in a San Francisco court. The lawsuit did not contain claims for monetary damages, but was a request to overturn a Supreme Court decision of 1950, according to which the government was effectively exempt from liability under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Veterans also want to know what drugs and in what doses they received, and intend to seek treatment if their health deteriorates.
In the spring of 1999, Ritchie opened the San Jose Mercury News and read the obituary announcing Gottlieb's death. And then the inspiration came.
“I never heard that name or knew about it,” Ritchie said. “But I was attracted by the words about LSD and George White. George White was the senior drug commissioner in San Francisco in 1957, and I knew him. The article stated that he worked with CIA mind control drugs, using drug addicted prostitutes for this purpose. And then the pieces of the puzzle came together. He drugged people without their knowledge. I thought, "My God, how could he do this to me?"
Ritchie began his own investigation of the CIA's drug activities and concluded that he received a dose of drugs from the department. Ritchie filed a lawsuit against the United States and its employees, alleging that his attempted armed robbery at the bar was triggered by drugs that agents poured into his cocktail at a Christmas party.
It is clear from White's notes that he was where Ritchie was on that fateful day of the robbery. The December 20, 1957 entry reads: "Christmas Party, Press Room, Federal Building."
Ritchie's lawsuit influenced the testimony of a former agent led by White Feldman. His testimony was at times incriminating, contradictory and aggressive. “I never followed him, because it’s somehow not good to take and ask:“How do you feel today?” You can't give them a clue. You just stand on the sidelines and let them worry like that nerd Ritchie,”Feldman said in his testimony.
A district court ruled in 2005 that Ritchie had failed to prove that he had been exposed to LSD, which led to a psychopathic disorder and provoked an attempted robbery. The judge called this a "disturbing case", noting that "if this is all true, then Ritchie paid a terrible price in the name of national security." Noting that federal agents in San Francisco were doing “reprehensible things,” the judge concluded: “The vast majority of the evidence does not allow us to conclude that Ritchie received a dose of LSD. Perhaps received. But we cannot act on a whim”. Ritchie says to this day that he is shocked by the loss in this case.
Now he does not leave the house, suffering from emphysema and other ailments. Ritchie attributes all his ailments to old age and does not complain about his long and strange trip to bars. He simply believes that the government has done everything in its power during difficult times.
“They thought they were helping the country,” says Ritchie.