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.
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.