The craziest part about the CIA's LSD brothel is that the #2 man at the Bureau of Narcotics (which became the DEA in 1975) retired and then ran CIA's brothel for several years. Let that sink in. The number #2 law enforcement leader in the country switched jobs to secretly dose American citizens with an illegal drug. Laws for thee but not for me indeed.
Second, the most eye popping factoid is that CIA installed two-way mirrors and wired their brothel to record the John's with the prostitutes. I often wondered where did Jeffrey Epstein get the idea to secretly record his elite pals frolicking with his harem of underage girls in order to blackmail them. Epstein wasn't even the first guy to come up with this idea. CIA did.
I have done LSD several times decades ago. It is the most powerful drug I have ever taken. Nobody should ever be fed LSD without knowing it. I can see how a surprise trip could flip a switch in your brain and drive you insane, if you don't know what is happening to you.
I wish most of all that CIA would scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA files and declassify them and at least tell us WHY they ran this brothel and secretly drugged Americans with LSD. If we knew their specific reasons why, at least we could then forgive and forget. As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.
>I often wondered where did Jeffrey Epstein get the idea to secretly record his elite pals frolicking with his harem of underage girls in order to blackmail them. Epstein wasn't even the first guy to come up with this idea. CIA did.
I would imagine the idea was invented around the same time as the first permanent photographs, and probably started happening in practice around the late 1800s when cameras started having exposure times measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. Blackmail is profitable, so it would make sense that photographic blackmail would happen as soon as the technology supported it.
I'd imagine this first happened quite a long time before photographs, like centuries ago. Photos definitely helped, no question, but it's far from the only form of evidence.
I think I have read some old source where this occurs. Possibly the Bible or Shakespeare. Get the mark to do their deeds while a trustworthy witness is hidden somewhere to watch.
> I wish most of all that CIA would scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA files and declassify them and at least tell us WHY they ran this brothel and secretly drugged Americans with LSD.
It would be nice to have proof, but I’m 100% certain the reason was “to see what happens”.
You might be right, because the real reasons for every bone headed CIA catastrophe is always mundane and boring in the banality of evil sense.
But by the time of CIA's LSD brothel, the CIA had already been experimenting with LSD for over ten years. Timothy Leary and the Acid hippies had already been all over the counter culture for 5 years. Everybody knew what LSD did by then. They already knew what would happen. That's why I believe the brothel wasn't an experiment, it was an operation with a defined objective.
I have heard a story that the CIA ordered a 55 gallon drum of LSD, by mistake, as part of a wider, earlier "what do psychedelics do?" research program. Then they had this stuff and everybody got to "play" with it; there was supposedly a period when LSD in the coffee was an office hazard there. Then it gradually leaked out a little further and helped spark more general interest and more manufacturing and the love children.
The appealing part of this story was the bit where Sandoz called them back and asked "did you want enough of this to light up the country?" and some ignorant bureaucrat said "that's whats on the form, ship it already." That fits my cynicism about government operations, especially unsupervised ones.
The stories about the government involvement in cocaine are less funny.
Since you mentioned huge volumes, while not the CIA, it reminded me of this [1] case of 8 people who accidentally snorted what they thought was cocaine, but which turned out to be LSD. They all survived with relatively minimal medical intervention, after taking what - trying to guesstimate from serum levels - appears to have been at least several hundred times a normal LSD dose, maybe a few thousands.
I wonder to what extent the CIA experimented with extreme doses if they sat on that much.
I'm betting more on the fact that this was an experiment that was supposed to be short and focus on the effects on John's, but rather proved that giving people a license to do lawless things does in fact make them perform these to the maximum extent.
I'd guess that a couple of sessions in everybody running the experiment saw the potential to extort, manipulate and just plain have fun drinking/drugging and doing plain old illegal things under the pretense of "experiment".
It was probably an employee retention program. "Wait you really want to go work for that new NSA thing, when you could be here watching people try to have sex while tripping off acid? Suit yourself, man."
> I wish most of all that CIA would scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA files and declassify them and at least tell us WHY they ran this brothel and secretly drugged Americans with LSD. If we knew their specific reasons why, at least we could then forgive and forget. As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.
Poisoner in Chief is a great recent book detailing the CIA's search for mind control via MKUltra and associated projects; well-researched and written.
A lot of people feel that Epstein was CIA (at least sometimes). I mentioned the CIA trafficking cocaine through Mena Airport on the earlier HN CIA thread, but I actually learned about that researching Epstein. It’s thought he and Wexner were involved in the Mena operation.
This whole series on Epstein and intelligence agencies is fascinating. This part focuses on Epstein/Mena/Clinton but it also explores ties to Trump and pre-Epstein CIA and FBI operations.
MKULTRA was about trauma-based mind control. Many techniques were employed. The world's most notorious organization never stopped trying to break, abuse, and exploit people. Forgive and forget? MKULTRA is alive and well. Cell phones, social media, mass surveillance, 5G. Technology is a weapon and the CIA has been many steps ahead for its entire existence.
> Epstein wasn't even the first guy to come up with this idea. CIA did.
Sorry, but the CIA certainly did not invent sextortion either. That idea is probably older than the steam engine and should be blatantly obvious to any human with genitals and a brain. Heck, this should even be obvious for people working at a patent office.
> scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA
assuming they haven't been deliberately destroyed.
> As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.
Also, please don't forget that times were different. I have whole book on crazy and ethically questionable research sitting on my shelf, and most of the MKULTRA shenanigans fit perfectly in there, along with a lot of the stuff that was done at the time.
One of the more memorable examples from the top of my head: In the early 1960s at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, alcoholics were injected Scoline while letting them sniff and taste some liquor. This completely blocked all muscle action, including the ability to breath[1]. The idea was to condition them to associate the panic and fear of imminent death with alcohol. This was done without the patients prior knowledge or informed consent. And have you ever even heard of that research before?
The main difference here is that the CIA had orders of magnitudes more funding and better shielding from consequences, thus the ability to take this much further.
I'm not trying to downplay MKULTRA here, what I'm trying to say is that you need to put the "What on earth were they thinking?" into a historical perspective, instead of jumping to "subverting their own government with mystery mind control" (well, foreign governments maybe, if it turns out to work; we are talking about the CIA after all).
I could easily imagine a meeting that went along the lines of "We must research this because the Russians might do so! We cannot have a mind control substance gap!", followed by "this needs to be super secret, we can't recruit volunteers.", and after throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks eventually spinning out of control because of morally corrupt people in positions with power and zero responsibilities ending up doing unethical things.
Also, if you are an organization in the US that does anything vaguely military/defense/intelligence related, I don't think you need to subvert the government to have money thrown at you (which conspiracy theories often seem to describe as the end game).
There was someone from CIA at that time interviewed for the (great) Netflix docudrama called Wormwood. He basically said something to that effect: we know this substance is powerful, we don’t know what it is, if the Russians discover that it’s a mind control serum and we know nothing about it then we are screwed.
Mix that (fairly reasonable at the time IMO) motivation with the… lackadaisical research ethics frameworks at the time, and the outcome gets much less shocking.
The CIA really bothers me, but it alone is a red herring. Congress consciously and sometimes inadvertently commissions additional organizations. All Federal agencies are created by statute, and they can autonomously create others subsidiaries and divisions. There are several organizations that are specifically in intelligence and do all sorts of messed up things for supposed national security or geopolitical purposes, and they are mostly unknown, even heads of state are unfamiliar with them not because they are secret but because theyre mostly irrelevant.
So to focus on the CIA allows the rest of it to go on unimpededed.
Its like hiring a model to act like your close friend so that your girlfriend focuses all her attention on her waiting for infidelity with that specific person and you can always disprove that there wasn't .... with her. But no further scrutiny goes on, when there should be.
intelligence agencies have too much power and independence from government. I think this is one of those things that pretty much everyone agrees with regardless of political affiliation, yet nothing gets done about it, and these entities keep growing and growing
I think it’s actually shocking how few people seem to agree with this. In particular, the speed with which most of the left pivoted to reverence for the “intelligence community” simply because it was politically expedient after 2016.
How many times did we hear breathless tirades about how the president wasn’t “respecting” the recommendations of intelligence agencies, or leaking classified intelligence. As if democratic representative of the American people was responsible to the unelected agency heads instead of vice versa.
I voted against Trump twice, but when you get to the point where not even POTUS has the right to challenge the CIA and NSA, you’re no longer living in a democracy.
> In particular, the speed with which most of the left pivoted to reverence for the “intelligence community” simply because it was politically expedient after 2016.
I think you are either confusing the Democratic center-right (whuch has always had reverence for the intelligence community and defense establishment) with “most of the left", or confusing opposing abnormally blatant political abuse of (and by political officials within) the national security apparatus with reverence for that same apparatus, or both.
Hm, I think GP is talking about how the left-of-center media in the NY Times & MSNBC called out goons like John Brennan and James Clapper for lying in front of congress about domestic surveillance and then lionized them because they were convenient enemies of Trump.
You can relabel these left-of-center outlets as center-right but that’s not a common perspective.
"Third-way Democrats" (a.k.a. "Blairites" across the pond) are an amalgam of left and right ideologies, designed to pander to both, as long as the voter is close enough to the center. Socially progressive, but just as hawkish as the right on anything else. Calling them "left-of-center" depends on which metric you're measuring - on social issues, you'd be right.
I think this is one of the great propaganda successes of the last few years for any American institution (or set of institutions, which I guess better describes the intelligence community).
That the US secret services (spy agencies) and secret police (FBI) have been able to wrap themselves in the flag and convince millions of alleged progressives that they're good and honorable and upright and sincere - and to do so so incredibly cheaply (John Brennan doesn't pay CNN to let him on prime time) - is bananas. They made Russiagate into QAnon for liberals in about 30 seconds and are now on their victory lap, laughing in our faces with the diverse woke CIA commercials [0]. In a way you have to respect it - it's like watching the Harlem Globetrotters.
I'm not convinced. The criticism against the agencies is that they grossly overstep their bounds and commit atrocities. Not that they have bad intel. Trump quite clearly saying whatever was politically expedient.
Right to challenge with what, though? The president should not have the right to commit crimes then defy any investigation; see also Nixon and Reagan (Iran-Contra). The right for anyone to be above challenge is how you get crimes like the CIA's LSD brothels.
With black budgets shielded from adequate oversight, the people working in some of these agencies have escaped the rule of law and receive funding that allows rogue behavior. To some extent this is human nature, though taxpayers should stop funding it. A 50% cut in federal spending would be a good start.
It’s thought one of the main reasons the CIA is involved in drug trafficking is to raise funds for operations without having to get congressional approval or other oversight.
Just look at the amount of heroin produced in Afghanistan before US invasion and after (hint: it's increased by orders of magnitude).
Even more: US invaded Afghanistan immediately after Taliban managed to destroy almost all heroin production. I don't think it's a coincidence.
There're reports of people who visited Afghanistan after US invasion and they reported that it feels like US army guards poppy fields. It would be very easy for US to destroy them, but they behave like they didn't care.
I think that's was the main reason for Afghanistan incursion: to kill two birds with one stone. Earn lots of money and flood Russia (which US hates) with drugs.
Nothing like invading Afghanistan the heart of poppy production with a us army. You would imagine we could shut down the production fairly easy, if that's the point.
Agree wholeheartedly. Within government, the tendency is to avoid the extremely uncomfortable discussions pushing back on questionable activities other government entities are engaged in, especially if those activities can be ascribed to some perceived good intent. Even harder if you learn of something questionable that has been going on for a long time - it's grandfathered in by both a long time in the pursuit of "good intent", and by you being a new objector when lots of people who came before you did not object.
This isn’t an “oops we didn’t structure the organization with sufficient oversight” kind problem. Nothing gets done about it because things quickly devolve into zero-sum games when nations are involved. You will certainly lose when you decide not to play. The American oligarchy decided they don’t want to lose out on juicy resources to those who will play dirty so here we are.
And from the pushback received by the previous admin, it’s looks like they don’t take kindly to getting sidelined or downsized...
They spied on congress during the Obama years, they spied on the Trump admin when he was a candidate, and then of course the embarrassing revelation that they got caught spying on allies —which is par for the course, but still.
Except that after you hire that model, you later discover she set up a multi-million-dollar per day cocaine operation to fly drugs into the country to fund her lavish lifestyle.
Alternate comment as there are at least 3 women in the man's life in this scenario:
A man couldn't decide which of his girl friends to stay with. As a test, he decided to give each woman $5,000 to see how they would spend it.
The first girlfriend went out and got herself a complete makeover. She told him, "I spend the money so I could look pretty for you because I love you so much."
The second went shopping and bought the man new golf clubs, an iPad and an 80-inch flatscreen television. She said, "I bought these gifts for you because I love you so much."
The third woman took the $5,000 and invested it in the stock market, doubled her investment, returned $5,000 to the man and reinvested the rest. She said, "I am investing the rest of the money for our future because I love you so much."
The man thought long and hard about how each of his girlfriends had spent the money, and then he decided to stay with the one with the biggest breasts.
Legislators and agencies are antagonists. Based on my participation in politics. Local, county, state, but not federal, so YMMV.
Think bureaucracy, the Deep State, ambitious climbers, technocrats, whatever.
Observing agency heads run circles around elected officials completely flipped me from "yay term limits" to "pay electeds more, give them more staff."
FWIW, I think everyone should run for office at least once. Folk understanding of politics isn't even wrong. Becoming and serving as an elected really sucks. Least of which is serving as arrow catchers for all of govts faults.
Exactly, if you want to do something truly illegal, like dosing citizens with LSD, you need shady government agencies. But so much of the shady shit the government wants now is only illegal for the government to do, so much easier just to let a private company do their data-collecting legally, and buy that.
It's surprising how many people don't know about this stuff. I've brought it up to lots of people, and they get very uneasy when I show them that it's factual.
The intelligence agencies are more or less eldritch horrors whose interests are somewhat aligned with America's.
If you're bringing up this kind of information to inform, you're only making the world a darker place. If you're bringing up the information to inspire change, you're proposing a fight against something so vast that its extents defy its own comprehension, and to-which morality is alien.
If Cthulhu is slumbering, do you want someone to risk waking him?
I disagree. I think informing people is the only way to
> inspire change
> you're proposing a fight against something so vast that its extents defy its own comprehension, and to-which morality is alien.
Yes.
> If Cthulhu is slumbering
`If`... I believe we are actively harmed by these organizations.
TBH, I can tell a part of me has a `Can't beat 'em, then join 'em` mentality, but I believe where these organizations are headed is bad for even the future of their members.
Knowing these bodies exist, and believing as I do that the aim of those at the top of these organizations is to enslave most everyone, I can't understand not fighting against them.
That said, maybe you don't believe control and slavery is the ultimate goal of those that run these organizations? Or maybe you don't think they'll achieve it?
Makes me think of this video where a man asks people on the street “do you know what day it is” on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, people get guarded very quickly, they know what day it is, they just don’t want to talk about it
Could be similar with CIA, a lot of people know they were distributing cocaine, but people are sheepish to speak freely.
I once had a conversation with a coworker once that went like this:
Me: There’s a theory that the US government remote-controlled the 9/11 airliners and crashed them into the WTC to fire up arms sales that have been slow since the Cold War ended
The popular cultural notion that airliners could be used to crash into the World Trade Center had been floating around for decades prior to The Lone Gunman. I had first come across it in 1989 or so, but I suspect it goes all the way back to 1973. It wasn't a unique or new idea.
Assassinating the president is as old as Rome, but if there was a TV show from March, 1963 where the military-industrial complex, mad at the president for not escalating Vietnam, decided to kill him by hiding a gunman in a building along his route in Dallas, We’d still be talking about it now.
I wonder what's the root cause for this truly prevalent behaviour. I find it off putting when a person is feeling uneasy and tried to evade the topic. These are serious matters
The CIA apparently launched MK Ultra because they were concerned that the Soviet Union had developed a powerful mind control drug. They had to keep up so they launched their own program to do research on mind control drugs.
If that's true and this was a weapon's program instead of some people with security clearances saying "Let's party dudes", wouldn't they have actually tried to control people's minds?
In this case, you've got a US Marshall who went from a Christmas Party to a robbery over the course of a bad trip. If you wanted a proof of concept that you could make a well connected Soviet official do something, how much better of a poc can you come up with?
I know this sounds conspiratorial and it is, but the CIA giving people LSD without their knowledge is a true conspiracy theory. I'm having a lot of trouble believing they'd just get people high, let them wander San Francisco and see what happens.
I highly recommend the 2017 Netflix documentary "Wormwood", which is a 6 hour interview with Eric Olson, the son of Frank Olson. In 1953 Frank Olson jumped out of a hospital window after he got secretly dosed with LSD by his CIA/DOD co-workers. That's how far back CIA and LSD and MKULTRA goes. We still don't know what really happened or why. It's classified top secret. But Frank Olson's son describes a pretty crazy scene in 1953, with spooks working for DoD secret chemical and biowar programs involving LSD for research on involuntary American test subjects. This was still the 50's era where the Pentagon tested A-bombs in the desert and invited crowds to watch from a distance, in order to test radiation exposure on live people. Then the CIA guys started tasting their own supply and partying with LSD. Then they gave LSD to Frank Olson in a drink.
There is still a massive classified history of CIA using LSD as a bioweapon. I hope we get to see it someday.
I’d love to be able to see it and again, at risk of spreading false conspiracy theories, I can’t figure out why they haven’t declassified it yet. I mean, the DoD has practically admitted they don’t control the skies. How much worse could the MK Ultra documents be??
I suspect that the answer is “much worse.” This makes Get Smart seem like a documentary about the best case intelligence scenario…
I wonder how many initiatives were created solely on the basis that "the enemy are doing it or already have it". I can't help but think the soviets spent a lot of time trolling the US into creating exactly what they wanted. Even if it was just to waste time. This is proably still ongoing.
It’s terrifying to think how much doomsday technology we’re amassing out of the fear the enemy might have it. Add that in to scared people and a system capable of giving people LSD without their knowledge. It turns out that giving primates weapons of mass destruction was an unbelievable mistake.
That MKULTRA's Jolly West is the guy who surfaces near Jack Ruby (of Lee Oswald fame), and Manson was visiting some clinic next door to the West's operation in SF. Talking about coincidences...
Actions like this and the Tuskegee experiments by governments are so horrifying. While I wouldn't consider myself a conspiracy theorist, it behooves all of us to have a healthy skepticism of government actions. I've gotten both of my covid shots but it's stories like this that make me more empathetic to vaccine doubters.
There is also plausibility that Epstein was connected to either a US or foreign government sex trafficking operation to blackmail high-level officials.
Appalling. Also certainly raises questions about the safety of LSD as has been recently promoted in some articles arguing for legalization posted on HN.
What makes you think this is false? I'm pretty sure this is not just a theory anymore, not for a long time. In fact, you can go read about it on the CIAs freedom of information act portal, on their own website. So it's just a "crazy conspiracy", a real one.
I think that might be the point of GP, that when people hear "conspiracy theory" they think "false", but it really means a theory about a conspiracy. This theory about a conspiracy has a lot of evidence supporting is.
Ah, you're right, I may have misread their post, if it was made tongue-in-cheek. I'm not one to assume all conspiracy theories are false, but I took their comment at face value, and I think this one is past being "theory".
Crazy) It is crazy that the CIA did this
Conspiracy) It is a conspiracy what the CIA pulled off
Theory) “ A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking
I agree. Although the story is true. We should get used to conspiracy theories being true
Second, the most eye popping factoid is that CIA installed two-way mirrors and wired their brothel to record the John's with the prostitutes. I often wondered where did Jeffrey Epstein get the idea to secretly record his elite pals frolicking with his harem of underage girls in order to blackmail them. Epstein wasn't even the first guy to come up with this idea. CIA did.
I have done LSD several times decades ago. It is the most powerful drug I have ever taken. Nobody should ever be fed LSD without knowing it. I can see how a surprise trip could flip a switch in your brain and drive you insane, if you don't know what is happening to you.
I wish most of all that CIA would scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA files and declassify them and at least tell us WHY they ran this brothel and secretly drugged Americans with LSD. If we knew their specific reasons why, at least we could then forgive and forget. As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.