Operation Midnight Climax
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John Kiriakou described Operation Midnight Climax in the context of explaining the CIA's progression through MK-Ultra experiments. The initial LSD-dosing program targeted CIA's own employees, who were dosed without their knowledge. Several committed suicide; one jumped from a hotel window. Headquarters then decided it was counterproductive to dose its own workforce and shifted to unwitting members of the public.

The San Francisco operation: the CIA rented a safe house and hired sex workers to go out on the street, pick up men paying for sex, bring them back to the safe house, and dose them with LSD. Agents watched through one-way mirrors and recorded the subjects' behavior. The stated goal was to assess whether LSD could be used as a mind-control tool, to break and rebuild the human mind, plant false memories, and produce controllable subjects.

Kiriakou noted that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MK-Ultra files on the same day he testified before the Church Committee, which had specifically ordered him not to destroy documents. Helms was held in contempt of Congress and fined approximately $150. Approximately fifteen percent of the documents were missed in the destruction, misfiled elsewhere, and survived.

San Francisco safe house

John Kiriakou describes the MK-Ultra effort in which the CIA recruited prostitutes to pick up clients, dose them with LSD, bring them to a safe house, and try to extract their "deepest, darkest secrets", an approach he says simply did not work, leaving subjects "jabbering incoherently and having flashbacks."

He returns to the operation whenever he is asked what the agency would rather stayed buried. Pressed in May 2026 on why the CIA would resist declassifying the surviving MK-Ultra files, he named this programme among the reasons: the agency, he said, does not want the public to know about "coming up with a program in San Francisco to hire to dose johns and see if they would cough up their innermost secrets." His verdict, again, was one word, "Ridiculous." In that telling he did not use the operation's codename.

See also

- MK-Ultra
- Church Committee
- CIA
- John Kiriakou
