The Pad

To immerse himself in his CIA role, George White needed a new identity. In Greenwich Village, he set up a safehouse and became Morgan Hall, a struggling artist. But it wasn’t long before the wrong kind of people started showing up at his door — including the FBI

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
If you dig through the boxes at Stanford University, you
can find George White's autobiography. It's called A Diet of Danger,
and it's exactly as pulpy as it sounds. I am
George Hunter White, and my parents must have been clairvoyant.
I've been a hunter of men all my life. I've
had to do it because it was a vitally important job.

(00:27):
I've had to do it because I've loved doing it.
Evan wild, gruel, intense and fantastic moment of it. That's
not dedication, that's addiction. All the highlights are in the book,
tales of Turkish drug busts, Chinese opium gang initiations, encounters
with spies and killers. But the problem with the George

(00:50):
White version is he left out some important details. The
memories George White preferred to keep a secret, like this one.
It's ninety two and George White is boarding the subway.
The subway system in New York City is built to
be safe, and it is safe, but that's just the

(01:13):
train itself. Passenger behavior is different. You can get mugged, harassed, threatened,
or you can board a car with nothing amiss, no
sign of trouble, anywhere, and then you can step off
into a nightmare. There's no record of where George White
got on, but at some point in the ride, White

(01:35):
reaches into while maybe his pocket, maybe a briefcase. He
tried to erase the details. But here's what we do
know what he feels. The time is right, White sprays
an aerosol container into the air, an invisible mist. There's
not much of it, just enough to affect a handful
of people. The people in the car began to feel strange,

(01:59):
I think, uncomfortable, some panic. Odds are children were on board?
Hallucinations are inevitable. Did the walls start to bend? Did
the air change? Did people start to hear things? Maybe
they're crying or giggling or vominate. No one will have

(02:24):
any idea what happened or why. White takes notes, He
records the panic, then he vanishes. Later he'll write a
summary of the LSD experiment in his diary quote the
subway test was a success. Pleased with the results, George

(02:51):
White will do it again and again and again. He
will become a dispensary of hallucinations, a chemical, says resolute
in his search for a drug that could bend the
will of the men and women he hunted. It started
as a government assignment. It would become an obsession. That's

(03:12):
not dedication, that's addiction. For I Heart Radio, this is

(03:43):
Operation Midnight Climax and I Heart original podcast. I'm your
host Noel Brown. And this is chapter three the Pad,
Part one in the Lab. Back in nineteen forty three,

(04:06):
Albert Hoffman, the man who discovered LSD, was working as
a chemist for sand Dos, a pharmaceutical company in Basil, Switzerland.
He was born in nineteen o six, the son of
a locksmith, and considering what Hoffman wound up doing providing
a key to access hidden states of consciousness that feels appropriate,

(04:28):
Hoffman attended the University of Zurich to study chemistry and
later went to work for sand Does. He quickly became
interested in ergate, a fungus that was blamed for mass
outbreaks of poisonings as far back as the Middle Ages,
but when used judiciously and with care, it also held
considerable promise as a treatment for migraines. Attempts were being

(04:48):
made to take what was useful from ergat and leave
the harmful side effects behind, using ergotoxine, a synthetic derivative.
Hoffman produced lysergic acid diethyla or LSD in nineteen thirty eight.
Then he got sidetracked with other work. But Hoffman never
forgot LSD. He wanted to explore it more, to see

(05:12):
if it could be useful for something. On April sixteenth,
nineteen forty three, he was working with the compound when
he began to feel odd, restless, dizzy. He left work
early and went home, whereas imagination, he said, was extremely stimulated.
For over two hours, Hoffman gave himself to a cascade

(05:34):
of vivid pictures, shapes, and colors. It was a censorial experience,
one that left him with a smile on his face.
Here's what Hoffman wrote to his supervisor, Arthur Stall as
a kind of workplace accident report, shortly after his experience
last Friday, April sixte I was forced to interrupt my

(05:57):
work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon
and proceed home. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed,
I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes
with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours,

(06:18):
this condition faded away. Retracing his steps, Hoffman discovered a
tiny amount of LSD had been absorbed through his fingers
in the lab while he was working. It had hallucinogenic properties.
Being a man of science, Hoffman felt the need to
pursue this discovery, but the first dose had been accidental.

(06:39):
He didn't know how much he had taken, so he
decided to start out light, really light. He only ingested
zero point to five milligrams. Hoffman thought he was being careful,
but this was far, far too much. Oh no no.

(07:04):
In his notes, he quickly scribbled what had happened people,
my teenthe taken diluted with about ten c seas of water,
caseless saboteen o clock beginning, dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions,

(07:24):
symptoms of paraly system, desired to mouse twenty o'clock, most severe. Chris.
If his first trip was a pleasure, Hoffman's second experience
with LSD tugged at the limit of his sanity. Familiar

(07:48):
objects in pieces of furniture assumed grotesque throughout the big forms.
Your lady next door scarcely rains brought me milk and
of course drank more than two leaders. She was no
longer be shidious, witch colored mask. Hoffman felt possessed by

(08:18):
a demon, He wrote and began to scream, Terrified he
was going insane, livid he might actually die as a
consequence of the very substance he had brought into the world.
Worst of all, Hoffman recalled was the acoustic perceptions. Every
noise was realized visually. He could see sounds. Despite his trip,

(08:44):
Hoffman knew LSD held potential, provided it could be dosed properly.
Sandals engaged in a series of animal experiments, observing mice
on acid and cats who suddenly became terrified of them.
Chimpanzees abandoned their sense of social order, fish swam in
irregular patterns, spiders spun immaculately proportioned webs at low doses,

(09:06):
and sagging confused webs at higher doses. Drugs that could
produce this kind of sensation were nothing new. People have
been searching for the divine truth for thousands of years,
back to the Aztecs and Mayan's hemp and peyote were
thought to harbor secrets of the mind. Mescalin was the
first to be synthesized in a chemically pure environment. What

(09:29):
Hoffman and his colleagues at Sandoz discovered was that at
a low enough dose, as little as one millionth of
a gram, LSD could produce a different kind of euphoria,
a breakdown of the ego that acted as a barrier
between the self and the road to improvement. Hoffman had
grand ideas for LSD in treating addiction and as an

(09:50):
aid in psychotherapy. Scientists began to study it with those
hopes in mind, but there was always the risk, the
risk of euphoria giving way to psych catic attacks or
feelings of omnipotence. Like any drug, it would need to
be carefully studied and subjects would have to be observed
in controlled conditions. In the wrong hands, at the wrong dose,

(10:14):
LSD would become a nightmare without beginning or end. Hoffman
soon lost his grip on LSD, and so did the
scientific research community. By the late nineteen forties, it became taboo,
too dangerous to pursue was a legitimate medical treatment. Hoffman
took to calling it his problem child. Well, Hoffman was

(10:36):
never involved with him. K Ultra Sandoz was. In nineteen
fifty three, got Leave heard that the KGB was attempting
to buy what amounted to the world's supply of pure LSD,
obviously for nefarious purposes. It was possible that KGB had
already bought fifty million doses. In a panic, got Leave

(10:58):
dispatched one of his under links to intervene. The man
reported back that Sandoz had ten kilograms available for sale.
Remember LSD is activated in the tiniest doses imaginable. Gottlie
bought all of it before the Soviet Union could. He
spent two hundred and forty thousand dollars on the Sandos supply,

(11:19):
and then realized his operative, as good as he might
be an international espionage was extremely bad at math. Sandoz
didn't have ten kilograms. They had ten milligrams. The operative
was off by a factor of one million. That's all
they had made in the ten years since Hoffman discovered it. Still,

(11:39):
Gotti bought it all. It arrived in a barrel about
the size and shape of an oil drum, with hundreds
of thousands of doses in that barrel, a virtually unlimited
supply of nightmares that could be artificially induced. Sandoz agreed
to supply the CIA with a hundred grams a week,
fresh off their LSD production line, and it got Leave's insistence.

(12:02):
They also refused any further orders from Russia or China
and agreed to inform the CIA when anyone else inquired
about the drug. For better or worse, the CIA had
a monopoly on l s D. From Hoffman's fingers, it
went to Sandas, from Sandos to Gotlieb, and from Gotlieb
to George Hunter White. No one stopped to heed Hoffman's warnings.

(12:27):
The biggest danger, Hoffman said, was giving l s D
to someone without their knowledge in an uncontrolled setting at random,
where harmless noises can turn, Hoffman said, into torment and
a psychotic crisis would be inevitable. Part two Alias For

(12:59):
George Why to immerse himself in the CIA role, He
would have to stop being George White, and that wouldn't
be easy. For all of his training at Camp X
and the Narcotics Bureau, White still looked very much like
a cop. He had the cops stare, the cops walk,
the swagger that comes with having a gun on your

(13:20):
hip and a badge on your belt. It's a hard
thing to shake, but he did it. Like a superhero.
He developed a guy's for his CIA heroics a secret
identity at the time, White was fond of meeting his
assortment of criminals and killers at the American Museum of
Natural History to obtain information, debrief informants, or threaten them

(13:44):
with his power and influence. It was a good place
to disappear in a crowd. Inside the museum was a
section devoted to gems, named after famous financier JP Morgan,
a trustee of the museum and a frequent donor. In
honor of his contributions, the museum dubbed the Gem section
the JP Morgan Hall of Gems, or just Morgan Hall.

(14:08):
White like the sound of that, so he took it
on as Azaleas Morgan Hall. Morgan Hall was a sensitive
soul in the fiction of White's mind. He worked as
a merchant seaman clad in a peacoat, which helped explain
his calloused and weather warning steer here. But Morgan Hall
was also an aspiring artist, a painter and sculptor. He

(14:30):
was a supporter of the Beat generation, poets like Alan
ginsburg In, writers like Jack Kerouac, artists who were resisting
conservative views and taking control of the post war culture.
Later they'd be dubbed Beat Nicks after the Russian Sputnik
satellite that would go up in nineteen fifty seven. J
Edgar Hoover, that famously tolerant FBI director, said in nineteen

(14:54):
sixty that communists, eggheads, and beat Nicks were among the
country's great enemies. They were stereotyped as drug users who
wanted to reframe the status quo of America. They were
another danger to baked in moral values to the CIA
that made them expendable minds. If Beatenis were viable drug

(15:16):
experimentation candidates, Morgan Hall was in the right place. A
Fox and a Henhouse White lived at fifty nine West
twelfth Street in Greenwich Village. The Hotel Albert in the
village had been a haven for Mark Twain, Walt Whitman,
and Jackson Pollock. Bob Dylan lived in Greenwich Village. It
had an atmosphere. It was alive, thriving like minds crowding

(15:39):
together in bars, in bohemian coffee houses and street corners.
The smell of marijuana hung in the air. There was
sexual liberation. It was a perfect place for the kinds
of activities Morgan Hall like to get into, and for
the kinds of people Sidney Gottlieb wanted to dose with LSD.
Imagine a doctor or lawyer racing into a police station

(16:01):
insisting he'd been drugged. Now imagine a young man stumbling
in from the village, already presumed to be high. Most
of the time, New York would be White's home base
until early ninet. For now, at least, it was perfect.
With money he had gotten from Gotlieb in the CIA,
White rented a second apartment in Greenwich Village at one

(16:23):
Bedford Street. After all, drugging people in his own apartment
would be poor form. In writing Gotlieb. White bemoaned how
difficult it was to arrange for a lease and utilities
under an alias, how people wanted references and paperwork with
his name on them. Morgan Hall, he said, was becoming
a bit of a Jekyl and Hide situation. And while

(16:46):
he was right about that, White equipped the apartment, which
he liked to refer to as the Pad, with a
well stocked bar and plenty of paintings and sculptures to
reinforce his cover story of being a struggling artist. He
had murals painted on the walls, and there were other
kinds of decorations too, hidden microphones and two A mirrors

(17:07):
connected to an adjoining apartment he'd also rented out. This was,
in the language of law enforcement, a safe house, a
place for the CIA to conduct clandestine business under surveillance.
Here's how one observer described the place. Apartment one Sea
is disguised as an artist studio, consists of a bedroom,

(17:28):
large living room, kitchen, net, and bath. The kitchen has
been fully stocked with the best of foods, silver utensils, etcetera.
The bedroom has been decorated in a style attractive to
the feminine sex. The linen, closet and bathroom have been
completely equipped with all essentials for use of both male
and female occupants. The living room contains a well stocked bar,

(17:51):
over which has been placed a television set. A radio
phonograph combination has been purchased and will be placed to
conceal a portion of a doorway which is been cut
between apartments one Sea and one bat and at the
top of which opening will be placed an X ray mirror.

(18:11):
The report added that visitors to eighty one Bedford could
be compromised. White's comrade in this Cold War operation was
a narcotics agent named Pierre Lafitte, whom he had often
worked with on narcotics busts. Lafitte would play a much
bigger role in White's life, but for now he was
a sidekick. To celebrate their new assignment, White and Lafitte

(18:33):
took a trip to Las Vegas and tried out their
new weapon. They tripped. White had no hesitation, learning about
what he was dealing with firsthand. He would take LSD
dozens of times in his life, approaching it with an
academics attitude. He claimed a kind of immunity from its effects,
insisting that unlike virtually everyone else, he had developed a

(18:54):
tolerance Lafitte had not. He called the Vegas ex speariment
another world of visions and horrors. When the apartment had
been equipped and White and Lafitte returned from their Vegas experiment,
White gut dressed as Morgan Hall, sporting a turtleneck in beret.
Then he went hunting. White began stalking in coffee houses

(19:20):
and jazz clubs. He liked hanging out at Chumley's, a
one time speakeasy just one block from the pad. He
sat patiently at tables and bars, nodding in time with
the sounds, striking up conversations with strangers. This was his
favorite part. He had already earned the trust of mobsters.
The thrill for White wasn't duping people he already knew,

(19:41):
or leveraging the power he had over them to get
what he wanted. The thrill was in winning the confidence
of a stranger. From there, White would spin tales of
his artistic endeavors, his thoughts on politics, his experience as
at sea. It was a seduction. The climax was and sex.
It was someone who'd been a stranger hours before being

(20:03):
won over by Morgan Hall. It's easy to imagine the
words of the FBI ringing in White's ears, how he
was unfit for duty. Look at him now working for
the CIA on the new frontier of psychological warfare. Kiss
Mask j Edgar White was well read and often more

(20:25):
culturally informed than his demeanor led on. He spoke fluent,
beat nick, totally at ease, with a tone of the
counterculture movement. The people talking to White were on the
fringes of society, seamen who might be involved in the
drug trafficking trade at ports, artists who spoke with joints
dangling from their lips, as he talked and smiled, they

(20:45):
couldn't detect the animosity that simmered beneath his surface. The
Beat generation had a reputation for drug use, opioids, weed.
These people would have been terrified of George White, but
they liked Morgan Hall. Well, Jackson Pollock is wonderful. But
if you're into abstract expression uts, Yeah. Man, there's all

(21:08):
kinds of crazy shit out there. I've got some stuff,
some books. You should see back of the pad. It's
just a block away. I'm gay. If you are, I'm
always gay. Hall and his friend would walk back to
eighty one. Bedford White would not at the two way
mirror mounted over the phonograph. Beyond it in the apartment

(21:29):
was Lafitte or another colleague cradling a notebook, prepared to
observe whatever happened next. You want to drink, sure, some gin,
some ice, one ampule of LSD, and then there would
be time to sit back and watch the show. Where

(21:51):
do you buy your weed? What's your dad's name? Have
you ever been on the moon? What's your social Security number?
Try here? Where did you buy it from? You know what?
You Lucian? What about my Omansky? Are you a communist,
describe the color blue to me on your wife, your

(22:15):
girl friend, where it does utiful flowers, beautiful waterfuls. You

(22:35):
see him is born another drinks. Like a school report,
White would write down the dosage of LSD and the
subject's reaction. Were they talkative, scared, catatonic? Did they answer questions?

(23:01):
Did they abandon discretion? Did they lose their ship? He'd
take copious notes and send them all back to Gottlieb
at a post office in Washington. This was the climax,
wasn't it the moment that justified what George White was doing.
In a letter written years before, he described his thought

(23:21):
process when he finished a report. It may come as
a surprise to you, but as far back as the
O S S. I firmly believe that all information collected
in the field was sent post haste to Washington, filed
in funereal gray steel cabinets by purified acolytes. Then, so
the rumor went on Sunday, the high priests were gathered

(23:42):
a kneel and pray before these repositories of sacred writings.
The missionaries in the field were happy in their faith.
The fruit of their labors was being used to propitiate
the angry gods. White was a sarcastic son of a bitch.
By writing down the details and clinical way absolved him
of responsibility. It was for the greater good. The bureaucratic

(24:06):
forms proved it. For the first time. The CIA was
getting real, unadulterated field coverage of LSD, collected and curated
by Morgan Hall. Everything was going exactly according to plan,
well almost everything. It wasn't long before other people started
showing up the path, people like newspaper reporters, narcotics officers,

(24:31):
and an informant, not one of George White's informants, but
someone informing on George White Part three the informant. White

(24:58):
always wanted to be an fb EI agent, and even
though the agency declared him unfit for duty, it doesn't
mean they forgot about him. When White accused New York
Governor Thomas Dewey of making a secret deal with mobster
Lucky Luciano, he caught the attention of the governor. Do
He wanted to know more about the man sullying his name,
so he asked the FBI to send along some information.

(25:23):
They were all the typical biographical mentions along with something
a little more interesting. The FBI had made contact with
the liaison in New York, someone who not only knew
George White, but knew George White was up to something
at eighty one Bedford Street on behalf of the CIA.
In fact, it was a Narcotics Bureau agent, the same

(25:43):
one who wrote the description of the pad. In addition
to notifying Governor Dewey, the report went directly to FBI
Director Jay Edker Hoover, who knew all about George White,
specifically White's love of publicity for his drug busts. He
wanted to know exactly what White was up to intelligence
agencies love spying on other intelligence agencies. Here's part of

(26:05):
that report. A confidential informant of this office advised on
July one that his former supervisor in the Bureau of Narcotics,
George White, has become associated with CIA in an ultra
secret assignment. White and the CIA have rented dual apartments
at eighty one Bedford Street. In one of these apartments
has been set up a bar in quarters for entertainment,

(26:28):
while the other apartment is being used by CIA for
the purpose of taking motion pictures through an X ray mirror.
White indicated to the informant that no one in the
Bureau of Narcotics or the CIA was aware of his
apartment or his association therewith except Commissioner Harry Anslinger of
the Narcotics Bureau and top officials of the CIA. The

(26:51):
FBI and Hoover knew White was up to something, but
they didn't know what. So agents pressed the informant for
more information. They were die to know what White, the
Maverick dope buster, was doing in league with the CIA.
One agent even dismissed the informants report, saying it hardly
seemed plausible that White and the CIA were working together.

(27:13):
It didn't smell right. It wasn't White a maniac? What
function could he serve? More intelligence needed to be gathered
most discreetly. The informant continued to hang around the pad, White,
seemingly oblivious to his curiosity. He picked up bits of
information here and there. The recording equipment seemed odd, so

(27:36):
did the rumors there was drug experimentation going on. Finally,
the informant managed to get his hands on two vials
of liquid that were stored in the pad. One was
in a screw top container, one was in the same
kind of ampule used to house the LSD dosents. He
immediately forward both to the FBI, who turned them over
to their laboratory analysts. Here was proof White and the

(28:00):
CIA were up to something elicit, maybe illegal. When the
FBI got the lab report back, they found table salt.
The most talented chemists at the FBI were unable to
identify the compound, saying only that it appeared to be

(28:20):
some kind of organic material in a dilute solution of
sodium chloride or salt. The other vial had chloral hydrate.
At the time, it was a rather common sedative that
was the solution in the screw top fial. Neither one
was the smoking gun the FBI had been hoping for.
The FBI had once again underestimated George White. An FBI

(28:43):
memo advised the informant to tread carefully. White it red
had been told the FBI was sniffing around, and the
c I a likely Sydney Gottlieb told White to be
on the lookout. Leaving an ampulate deluted table salt for
the FBI chemists to examine was one way he could
give them the middle finger, the same one he'd been

(29:05):
giving them for years. White may have been clever enough
to out with the FBI, but he was still showing
signs of recklessness. Why was White discussing the fact that
he was working with the CIA with anyone? Why, as
the informant related, did White invite a newspaper reporter named
Ed Reid to the pad. That's not a very covert idea.

(29:28):
More importantly, what was White doing with the chloral hydrate
the sedative? Wasn't he supposed to be focusing on the
effects of LSD. White scribbled in his diary fleeting mentions
of sodium pentethal are barbiturate, thought to have truth, ser impossibilities,
and nembutal another sedative. He was dispensing one drug after

(29:49):
another like a pharmacist on speed. Much later, when Sidney
Gottlieb was asked to justify the work of George White,
he said that White had freedom. He could per cure
any kind of drug he wanted, not just LSD, anything, morphine, mescaline, opium, cocaine.

(30:09):
He didn't ask, and White didn't offer. Procurement and use
were up to White, at least that was Gottlieb's story.
But if White was using a sedative. Was it to
help someone come down from a bad trip or something else?
What exactly was George White doing at eight one Bedford

(30:30):
Street that was escaping the attention of both the CIA
and the FBI. And just how far away from the
mission had he departed? George White almost immediately broke off
from the mission, statement of m k Ultra, he wasn't

(30:53):
limiting himself to criminals and dealers. He released a small
amount of LSD on a New York subway car, a
microcosm of Gottlieb's dream of dozing an entire town. And
then there was the case of Linda King. Linda was
an aspiring actress with a benefactor, a man named Irwin Eisenberg.
White and Eisenberg were close friends. Eisenberg had a home

(31:16):
in Large Mountain, New York, which White visited on a
regular basis. Eisenberg was wealthy, cultured, and rich, and wanted
to help King with her acting career by making introductions
through Eisenberg. White met King. Of course, White couldn't help
with her show business aspirations, but she still liked him.
He was just the kind of friendly face he'd see

(31:37):
on a subway On September twelfth, nineteen fifty three, White
invited King to come have a drink with him at
the Pad at eighty one Bedford Street. Linda King wasn't
a killer, or a dealer or a beat nick. She
was a friend. But by the end of the night
she was seeing things unimaginable things. White made a note

(32:06):
in his diary King, he wrote, got psychotic. He had
dosed her with LSD. King was taken to Lennox Hill
Hospital and as doctor shined the light into her widened
pupils and asked her what had happened, King insisted she
had been drugged. When doctors asked by whom King could

(32:26):
only utter two words, George White. Operation Midnight Climax is
hosted by Noel Brown. The show is written by Jake Rosin, editing,

(32:51):
sound design and mixing by Ernie Indradatte and Natasha Jacobs.
Original music by Aaron Kaufman, Research and fact working by
Austin Thompson and Maurica Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla.
Special thanks to Spencer Gibson, David Crumholtz, Vanessa crum Holtz,
Ted Ramie and Jason Thompson, Julian Weller, is our supervising producer.

(33:16):
Our executive producers are Jason English and Mangesh had Ticketer.
See you next week.