May 5, 2021 • 33 mins
As the walls closed in on Operation Midnight Climax, George White took lessons he’d learned from a world-class magician to explore the last uncharted frontier of the psychonaut — the general public. It’s how White would make San Francisco’s sanity disappear.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
When Sydney Gottlieb recruited George White to be the CIA's
secret weapon in the Cold War, White didn't get much training.
What would you teach a guy like White anyway? During
World War Two? He'd been taught to kill with his
bare hands, to wire explosives, to interrogate people. He could
(00:27):
have used some tips on what to do if someone
he dozed with LSD had a psychotic episode, but that
never came up. Back in ninety three, Gottlieb did want
White to attend one top secret CIA class, a class
where the teacher could impart wisdom that no one would win.
The CIA had. Gottlieb wanted White to take lessons from
(00:49):
a man who had learned his trade from Harry Houdini.
The CIA needed White to become a magician, not stage
magic where women saw it in half. Instead, White needed
a crash course in close up magic. Things like card
tricks and coins that appear behind your ears. It's more subtle,
(01:12):
more personal. Sometimes magicians call them slight of hand tricks.
A lot of people think the magician is simply moving
their hands faster than the eye can see. That's not
really true. The human hand can't move faster than the eye. Instead,
the trick is to get the eye looking elsewhere while
(01:32):
the magician executes the trick. That's the real sleight of hand,
tricking the brain. While it can take years or even
decades to master, most people can be taught the basics
of this direction fairly easily if they have a good teacher.
So Godly recruited a magician named John Mulholland. He wanted
(01:54):
Mulholland to teach CIA operatives how to use the tricks
of the magician's trade to follow through on their cove
at activities. It was a form of social engineering. How
could they divert a person's attention elsewhere? When Gottlie realized
Mulholland could teach them all of that and more, he
prepared an oath of secrecy for the magician to sign.
(02:17):
He arranged for Mulholland to arrive at a hotel in
New York City to meet with his prized operative, the
same hotel where CIA employee Frank Olsen had fallen out
of a window. And that's how one of the most
respected magicians of the era wound up shaking hands with
(02:37):
George White, setting the state for what would be White's
most audacious project yet, using the art of magic to
drug people unwittingly. This one was called MK Ultra sub
Project four. It's how George White would later make San
Francisco's sanity disappear. For I Heart Radio, this is Operation
(03:29):
Midnight Climax. I'm your host, Noel Brown, and this is
episode seven Tripping Current one a second home in. George
White needed a lifeline. His right hand man, Ike Feldman,
(03:52):
had just screwed up by turning their secret CIA funded
brothel into front page news. That year, the pair started
working with a drug kingpin named Ronaldo Red Ferrari, sort
of the Tony Montana of the day. Ferrari owned the
city's heroin business, and he ruled over San Francisco with
an iron fist cross Ferrari and he could make you vanish,
(04:15):
not magic, Vanish, but dead and bury Vanish dumped off
the Golden gate Bridge Vanish. But White and Feldman weren't intimidated.
White was still working two jobs. By day, he worked
as a district supervisor for the Narcotics Bureau, and at night,
well you know. But to keep his day job going,
(04:38):
he needed to keep making drug busts, so he did
double duty at the brothel. When he wasn't luring John's
applying them with LSD for his experiments, he used the
pad to entertain and entrapped dope pushers. And that's what
George White did with Ferrari. To convince Ferrari that his
colleague Feldman was a major player in the drug scene,
(05:00):
White started throwing elaborate parties at the address. Oddly, all
those lewed photos and tacky decorations White had put on
the walls helped his case. To anyone with an eye,
it looked cheap, tawdry, but to gangsters it seemed like
drug money couture some tasteful mafia decor. All these parties
(05:22):
did the trick. Feldman convinced Ferrari he was the real deal,
or as he put it, quote legitimately illegitimate. He paid
them sixty dollars for thirteen ounces of heroin, and as
they talked, business, microphones all over the apartment picked up
every word. Feldman helped indict Ferrari and his associates on
(05:45):
conspiracy to traffic in narcotics. It was good, solid police work,
but it also threw a wrench in White's plants. When
Feldman took the stand in April nineteen fifty six, he
had to describe as undercover work in detail, including giving
the address of the safe house to Chestnut Street. The
(06:07):
San Francisco Examiner printed the details. Oh for fox sake,
ike for White, it was no different than installing a
huge Neon sign out front that flashed the word police
at visitors for the second time in his CIA career.
(06:27):
White worried that his project was in danger of being
shut down. And if George White didn't have the blessing
and resources of the CIA, what did he have? His
pet birds, his leather working. It wasn't enough. He wanted
needed something bigger. But Sydney Gottlie, White's boss, was less worried.
(06:49):
He reassured him, after all, word hadn't really spread in
the media. Unless he'd read the Telegraph that day, you
probably wouldn't have picked up on the news at all. Plus,
as got Leap told White, the experiment was going so
well that no one at the CIA was in any
hurry to abandon it. In fact, Gottlie gave White the
(07:09):
green light to open a second safe house in the
town of Mill Valley in Marin County, far from the
city lights. But over the years White had become increasingly reckless,
and his new neighbors started to notice. Late at night
they'd hear commotion. Peering outside, they'd see men with shoulder
holsters chasing women, all in various stages of undress. One night,
(07:34):
possibly inebriated, White hidden neighbor's car. He sent got leave
the bill for the damage, another lapse in judgment, since well,
it's not a good idea to make insurance claims when
you're working on a top secret project. White had always
mixed business with pleasure. Serious investigations lived side by side
(07:55):
with hedonism for hedonism's sake. When White through parties at
the safe house, not only did he invite CIA operatives,
but he also called in friends from the Narcotics Bureau
and even San Francisco police officers. Plus there were escorts, drugs,
and booze. Lots of booze. White kept sending got leap
(08:18):
invoices for his alcohol supply, which seemed to be growing
at the rate of a small liquor store. And it
wasn't just the booze. Over the years, White had developed
reputation for experimenting with any drug, and not just on
unsuspecting civilians, on himself. Anything CIA operatives were scared of
(08:40):
was sent to San Francisco, where White would try it
out on his own. One day, got Leap set along
the canister that contained an experimental tear gas. White set
it down, Feldman activated him, and they both ran through it.
They soon collapsed in a heap of coughing and burning eyes.
(09:00):
On another occasion, gott Leap showed up with a dart
gun and went for a drive with White en Feldman.
Like a marksman. He aimed at a tree and fired.
Nothing happened, but when Feldman drove by the same tree
a few days later, it was dead. Feldman thought they
had just witnessed agent orange, the toxin that would be
(09:21):
used in Vietnam a few years later. At times, the
new safe house in Marin County resembled a novelty toy factory,
with new chemicals showing up at White store like presents
for him to play test. In one package, White and
his men found weapons grade stink bombs, and while it
sounds like a gag gift, the CIA was sincere about it.
(09:43):
Operatives wondered if a target could be ridiculed and embarrassed
for smelling bad enough, or if an extreme foul smell
could make an entire crowd disperse. The stories of the
experiments have kind of a blooper real quality. When White's
agent decided to target a small demonstration with the stink bomb,
(10:05):
he went up to a hotel room where he could
drop the tiny ampule into the crowd, but it bounced
off the window cell and spilled back into his own room.
They were itching and sneezing powders and special needles to
inject drugs through wine corks without being detected, but not
all of the ideas were so childlike, and LSD was
(10:26):
still the agency's primary concern. A plan was hatched to
finally see what an aerosolized version of the drug could
do in an enclosed room full of people. White could
experiment it with this back in New York City on
a subway car, but this would be a more potent dose.
They arranged for a big blowout, with White and his
(10:48):
agents canvassing San Francisco for party goers, promising an abundance
of booze and women. The plan was to pack people
up into their new safe house, where White planned on
dousing them in a plume of LSD. There was just
one problem. It was a very hot Californian day and
it was impossible to keep the doors and windows shut.
(11:10):
The LSD just dissipated into the air. The grand plan
to attempt a mass hallucination went out the literal window.
White and gottlieb were disappointed by these attempts, but White
still felt he was close to something with LSD. The
Chestnut Streets safe house had been compromised, and luring people
(11:33):
back to another safe house was offering diminishing returns, so
White decided to return to his roots and go back
to dosing everyday civilians. This time, though, he would have
to go out into the world and hunt them on
their turf in the field, just like a real CIA operative.
He'd had to slip them drugged without being caught, and
(11:56):
he had those skills because there was a magician on
the payroll. Part two new tricks. When Sydney gottlie was
(12:16):
getting MK Ultra off the ground, there was no such
thing as two out there or two unusual. The CIA
was determined to unlock the secrets of mind control in
any way possible, and that's how George White found himself
in the conference room of the Hotel Roosevelt in nine
taking a crash course in sleight of hand from John Mulholland. Okay,
(12:38):
now where's the card, George? Hopefully not up your ass.
Magicians don't have quite the same cache in the twenty
one century. A few have streaming shows. David Copperfield still
books Las Vegas. But before people had a surplus of
entertainment options, they came out and drove to see magicians
ply their trade on stage. Illusionists were celebrities. They also
(13:03):
lived by a code. You can't ask a magician how
they did a trick. Well, you can, but you won't
get an answer. You can find someone YouTube, of course,
and there's always speculation. Sometimes a magician reveals their secrets
out of necessity. That's how David Copperfield found himself discussing
how a disappearing act was done. He was sued after
(13:26):
a member of his audience was injured during a performance.
So how did Sydney Gottlieb convinced John Mulholland to break
the magicians omerta their code of silence? The same way
he got everything else he wanted by appealing to Mulholland's
sense of patriotism. Mulholland had earned a tremendous amount of
(13:49):
respect among his peers. Born in Chicago in eight he'd
fallen in love with magic at the age of five,
but by the time he was twenty he was working
for who enim Holland performed for small audiences in New
York City and for sultan's and kings. He toured the
world and even edited a magic journal, The Sphinx, which
(14:11):
is kind of like the New England Journal of Medicine
for conjurors, and he enjoyed teaching magic as much as
performing it. Mulholland had a library of over four thousand
magic books. He lectured on magic, he wrote books on magic.
Gottlieb had seen him perform and was struck by how
easily he could fool audience members watching his every move
(14:33):
even though he was just a few feet away. He
was a man possessed of secret knowledge, a concept the
CIA and Gottlieb could only admire. Mulholland had done work
on behalf of the country before he performed during USO tours.
He was a proud American, a trait that Gotlieb hoped
to exploit, so he got in touch with Moholland and
(14:55):
told he wanted him to write a manual and Trickery
and Deception, particular early on the most effective methods for
putting a substance in a person's drink without the mark
being aware of it, something like slipping an enemy agents
and making yes John something like that. More or less,
Mulholland was eager to assist a dapper man in his fifties.
(15:18):
He put off his other obligations and quickly got to
work on what he officially called some operational applications of
the Art of Deception. Like most CIA manuals involving espionage,
it wasn't supposed to see the light of day. While
there had always been rumors a CIA Magician's Manual sounded
to Kuki to actually exists, but in two thousand seven,
(15:42):
authors H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace found the only
known surviving copy of the complete manual. In the text,
Mulholland tutors the reader on how to execute slight of
hand for the purposes of espionage. The basic principle and
performing a trick is to do it's of the secret
actions are not observed. A trick does not fool the eye,
(16:05):
but fools the brain. Nowhere does the text mentioned the CIA. Instead,
Maholland calls operatives performers or tricksters, and they weren't drugging subjects.
They were performing tricks. Deception, he pointed out, isn't about
rapid hand movements. It's about getting the spectator to look elsewhere.
(16:27):
As outlined in the manual, one of Moholland's favorite methods
was the cigarette trick. You're at a bar. It's loud,
people are everywhere. You're George White, who want to slip
some LSD to a person's drink Unknowingly, in this case,
the bar is the stage and White is the performer.
His props aren't wands or rabbits. There are things you'd
(16:50):
expect to see, cigarettes, matches, coins, pencils. He's managing his
targets line of site, in this case primal curiosity about fire.
This is the routine for the spectator who spokes the instant.
The performer sees the spectator take a cigarette, cigar, or pipe.
(17:15):
He takes the packet of matches from his pocket, tears
off one match, and holds packet and match ready to
ignite the match. He does these things openly because what
he does can only be looked upon it as a
friendly and courteous gesture. Let me get that for you, buddy.
As soon as the spectator is ready to light up,
(17:37):
the performers should hold the matches close to the spectator
and strike the one match. The flame comes up to
their face. That's all, they're looking at the fire in
front of their eyes, and while their attention is fixated,
White is up to something else. As soon as the
spectator has a proper light, performers should begin to lean
(17:59):
back to his previous position. The left hand, which has
been held still since the match was struck. He's brought
over the mouth of the glass or cup, and the
pill dropped into the liquid. And, as Mulholland reminds the reader,
a small action will not be noticed while making a
broader gesture for which there is an obvious reason. Mulholland
(18:21):
had more tricks, pills that could be brushed off the
side of a coin into a drink, stuffing a pill
in the folds of the hand. He was fond of
a loaded pencil which had a hollow body. The trickster
would offer to give someone directions or write something down,
and when he pointed to something on the paper and
got the targets attention, the pencil would be tipped over,
(18:42):
releasing a liquid or powder into the person's drink. But
above all, Mulholland had one important piece of guidance. Looks stupid.
A person who looked alert, like they were really concentrating
would be unusual. After all, everyone in a bar is
having a good time. In Mulholland's manual, and in at
(19:06):
least four meetings with the magician, George White was taught
these finer points of delivering practically any drug he wanted, anywhere,
at any time. It gave him freedom at a time
he needed it the most. It didn't matter that Ike
Feldman had entered two Chestnut Street into the court record.
He didn't have to stay inside an apartment. He was
(19:29):
no longer in captivity. Mulholland, for his part, had no
idea what his skills were being used for. Though he
must have suspected such training could deliver drugs or even
deadly poisons to the enemy, he couldn't know his work
was being co opted by the CIA to experiment on
American citizens. He didn't know his sleight of hand would
(19:51):
be used to terrorize San Francisco and allowed George White
to practice a very dark and very sinister side of magic.
John Mulholland had been taught magic to bring joy to people.
He taught magic to George White without understanding it would
only bring fear pert three Street magic. It might have
(20:26):
been better if Pheldman hadn't been found out, if he
hadn't made the big bust and exposed the Chestnut Street address.
Maybe White would have kept his experiments to John's and
low level criminals. But he was feeling emboldened reckless. After all,
his LSD project had survived multiple people being hospitalized, one death,
(20:46):
and a relocation. He'd never even been reprimanded for anything
he'd done. So with his make believe apartment in jeopardy,
it seemed like a good time to go out into
San Francisco, armed with John Mulholland's techniques and explore the
last uncharted frontier of the psychokaout the general public San
(21:10):
Francisco nightlife in the Tenderloin District, jazz clubs, bars, restaurants,
a mix of everyone from Blue collar workers to millionaires,
all out to have a good time. Then a man
would appear easy to talk to, offered to light a
cigarette for them. Liquid would seep from the matchbook, and
(21:35):
then he blend into the background to watch what came next.
This was George White's favorite part, the shift in consciousness.
It happened in a blink. One second the world made sense,
and the next it didn't. Some stayed their eyes growing wide,
(21:57):
seeing and hearing things their brains couldn't brow, says. More
and more matches would be struck, more and more people
stumbling into a waking nightmare. Sometimes White would come to them,
sometimes they'd come to White. An old Cia trick to
attract attention in a social setting was to start playing
(22:17):
with drink coasters. An operative would seem unusually interested in them,
trying to peel them apart. Someone would come up and
ask what they were doing. You see, Heineken is doing
this promotion where they're stuffing fifty bucks into random coasters.
You gotta take them apart to find out. No kidding, no,
no kidding. Hey look here. White would have already slipped
(22:43):
a gimmick coaster into the pile, pulling out a crisp
fifty dollar bill. Money was like a flashing sign, and
he would quickly find himself the center of attention. Later,
no one would remember that anyone approached them. They would
only recall being in a group taking a sip, then
(23:03):
watching the floor fall out from under them. These were
the kinds of bars and clubs that had live entertainment bands, singers,
and one local attraction was a woman named Ruth Kelly.
Kelly was a stunning figure on stage, and White came
(23:24):
to see her over and over again. Soon he began
to wonder if Ruth Kelly might want to learn more
about White's swinging lifestyle. One night, before she went on stage,
he walked up and whispered something into her ear, something
salacious and unwelcome. Kelly rejected White. White had faced rejection
(23:45):
countless times in his life, from law enforcement agencies that
didn't need him, to wives who didn't want him. Even
the CIA job had been held up by a year's
worth of background checks. White by this point was drinking
more heavily than ever, more out of control than ever,
and so he did something that not even Sydney Gottley
(24:05):
would have signed off on. He administered l s d
out of spite. That's okay, miss Kelly. Here, let me
get that for you, and he did it just before
Ruth Kelly went on stage in front of hundreds of people.
This was something else. Kelly began her set without problems,
(24:28):
but after just a couple of songs, the acid turned
the audience faces into masks. The applause pounded her head.
Kelly could see the words she sang, she could feel
the stage floating, and somewhere in the crowd was the
face of George White, smiling with horns. Ruth Kelly finished
(24:52):
her set without betraying that her mind was split into
pieces the minute. The second she was done with her
last song, she raced off the stage and jumped into
a cab. She remained in a state of panic for days.
She didn't know what had happened, only that her psyche
seemed to explode as soon as she had rejected the
(25:13):
advances of the strange man with bright, cold blue eyes.
The psychological basis for this routine is that a small
action will not be noticed when it is done while
making a broader gesture, for which there is an obvious reason.
White never stopped. The bars of North Beach were overcome
by White and other operatives dosing people with LSD and
(25:35):
other drugs and hoping they'd stick around long enough to
have an observable reaction. Those that ran off into the
night weren't followed. No one will ever know how many
people shook it off and how many couldn't. In the
San Francisco of the late nineteen fifties, going out for
a good time give you a reasonable chance of having
your mind destroyed. White sadistics was getting stronger, and with
(26:03):
it a kind of self loathing was setting in. In
just a few short years, he would write, a good
policeman is the ultimate action arm of the legislature, the judiciary,
and the executive, the thin blue line between order and chaos.
It is time to consider the consequences of such stresses
(26:25):
upon an average human who becomes a policeman who must
not only cope with his own book of rules, but
also with the ever president, vociferous criticism from the press, citizens,
review boards, the courts, prosecutors, and even his own superiors, who,
when the heat arrives, pass it down. One day, a
(26:46):
technician walked into White safe house to checks some of
the surveillance equipment. He hadn't been expected. The only occupant
inside was George White, who was sitting in front of
the two way mirror he normally sat on the other
side of in order to monitor to the sexual escapades
in the apartment. The man looked at White, who was
clearly drunk, so drunk he didn't even seem to realize
(27:07):
the technician had arrived and thought it was better to
come back another day. And then George White held up
a gun, a revolver. The technician froze. He knew White,
but he also knew White was a drinker. White just
kept staring at himself in the mirror, like he was
waiting for the man he saw in his reflection to
(27:29):
provide some kind of answer. Then he aimed the gun
at himself, at the man in the mirror, and fired.
The technician recoiled. Then he looked and saw a white
globe had collapsed on the surface of the mirror. It
was a dummy round a piece of wax. White kept
(27:52):
staring at himself. The technician left. White remained behind, ruling
over a tiny fiefdom of safe houses. In the end,
George White hadn't won the Cold War. He hadn't exposed
the secrets of mind control. He was a man sitting
(28:15):
on a portable toilet, watching people have sex and getting high.
Maybe the only mind game being played was the one
Sydney gottlie had played on George White. He had taken
a man desperate for respect and recognition and given him
a job. No man of real moral consequence would ever
agree to to experiment on American civilians. That was Gottlieb's
(28:41):
big question, wondering if a man could be made to
do anything given the proper motivation, tools and drugs. MK
Ultra was always about altering a person's behavior. In that
moment in front of the mirror, George White may have
realized he wasn't just running the experiment, He was the experiment.
(29:06):
In every trip, there's a high, the elation, the sense
everything is so perfect and so right that the feeling
will never end. And then inevitably there's the come down
when reality intrudes. Good morning, Mr Irman, Good morning. Sometimes
(29:26):
it's because the effects of the drugs were off. Sometimes
it's because someone intervenes and breaks the spell. In three,
the CIA's Inspector General was a man named John Eyerman.
His role was to evaluate the CIA's various projects, including
ones that the CIA director might not have even been
(29:48):
aware of. As the new guy, Erman wanted to examine
everything going on in the agency. He didn't have allegiances,
not yet anyway, and the crumbs have passed approved wouls
weren't necessarily off limits to him. Earmen like looking under
the rug for those crumbs. He liked picking them up
and wondering where they had come from. One day, Earman
(30:11):
was looking at paperwork filed under god Leib's division. It
was a routine inspection when he came across an expense
report filed by George White. There was a forty four
dollar charge for a telescope, a thousand dollar bill for
just a few days worth of booze, and a modest
thirty one dollars to pay off the woman whose car
wide and damaged like a thread in a sweater. Earman
(30:36):
began tugging, and the more he tugged, the more things unraveled.
George White was writing checks to prostitutes for services rendered.
Memos detailed experimentations on unwitting subjects with LSD, sedatives, uppers, downers,
erection pills, weed, poisoned darts, and trees stink bombs. Very
(31:00):
few people within the CIA were aware of him k Ultra,
not even the new director, a man named John McCone,
who had been appointed by President John F. Kennedy. And
the more Erman read, the more alarmed he got. For
the first time in the ten years that Sydney Gottlieb
and George White had been on a psychedelic rampage, someone
(31:23):
of the CIA was finally looking into their work, and
for the first time, someone was wondering if Sydney Gottlieb
and George White were out of their fucking minds. What
they were doing was illegal and immoral. Erman wrote a
twenty four page report he would delivered to maccone. In it,
(31:44):
he reported in explicit detail the crime that was taking place,
one perpetuated by the highest levels of the CIA, and
one that was putting the freedom of citizens in jeopardy,
the very same freedoms Gottlieb insisted he was trying to protect. Suddenly,
a lot of people had a lot of questions for
(32:04):
George White, But like any great performer, he had one
final trick up his sleeve. George White was about to
make himself disappear. Operation Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown.
(32:45):
This show's written by Jake Rosson, editing, sound design and
mixing by Ernie Indra Dat and Natasha Jacobs. Original music
by Aaron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson
and Maurice Brown. Show logo by Lucy Keen Tiny Yeah
Special thanks to Enzo Salucci, Spencer Gibson, David Crumholtz, Vanessa Crumholtz,
(33:06):
Ryan Murdoch and Ted Ramy. Julian Weller is our supervising producer.
Our executive producers are Jason English and Mangesha Ticketer. See
you next week.
When Sydney Gottlieb recruited George White to be the CIA's
secret weapon in the Cold War, White didn't get much training.
What would you teach a guy like White anyway? During
World War Two? He'd been taught to kill with his
bare hands, to wire explosives, to interrogate people. He could
(00:27):
have used some tips on what to do if someone
he dozed with LSD had a psychotic episode, but that
never came up. Back in ninety three, Gottlieb did want
White to attend one top secret CIA class, a class
where the teacher could impart wisdom that no one would win.
The CIA had. Gottlieb wanted White to take lessons from
(00:49):
a man who had learned his trade from Harry Houdini.
The CIA needed White to become a magician, not stage
magic where women saw it in half. Instead, White needed
a crash course in close up magic. Things like card
tricks and coins that appear behind your ears. It's more subtle,
(01:12):
more personal. Sometimes magicians call them slight of hand tricks.
A lot of people think the magician is simply moving
their hands faster than the eye can see. That's not
really true. The human hand can't move faster than the eye. Instead,
the trick is to get the eye looking elsewhere while
(01:32):
the magician executes the trick. That's the real sleight of hand,
tricking the brain. While it can take years or even
decades to master, most people can be taught the basics
of this direction fairly easily if they have a good teacher.
So Godly recruited a magician named John Mulholland. He wanted
(01:54):
Mulholland to teach CIA operatives how to use the tricks
of the magician's trade to follow through on their cove
at activities. It was a form of social engineering. How
could they divert a person's attention elsewhere? When Gottlie realized
Mulholland could teach them all of that and more, he
prepared an oath of secrecy for the magician to sign.
(02:17):
He arranged for Mulholland to arrive at a hotel in
New York City to meet with his prized operative, the
same hotel where CIA employee Frank Olsen had fallen out
of a window. And that's how one of the most
respected magicians of the era wound up shaking hands with
(02:37):
George White, setting the state for what would be White's
most audacious project yet, using the art of magic to
drug people unwittingly. This one was called MK Ultra sub
Project four. It's how George White would later make San
Francisco's sanity disappear. For I Heart Radio, this is Operation
(03:29):
Midnight Climax. I'm your host, Noel Brown, and this is
episode seven Tripping Current one a second home in. George
White needed a lifeline. His right hand man, Ike Feldman,
(03:52):
had just screwed up by turning their secret CIA funded
brothel into front page news. That year, the pair started
working with a drug kingpin named Ronaldo Red Ferrari, sort
of the Tony Montana of the day. Ferrari owned the
city's heroin business, and he ruled over San Francisco with
an iron fist cross Ferrari and he could make you vanish,
(04:15):
not magic, Vanish, but dead and bury Vanish dumped off
the Golden gate Bridge Vanish. But White and Feldman weren't intimidated.
White was still working two jobs. By day, he worked
as a district supervisor for the Narcotics Bureau, and at night,
well you know. But to keep his day job going,
(04:38):
he needed to keep making drug busts, so he did
double duty at the brothel. When he wasn't luring John's
applying them with LSD for his experiments, he used the
pad to entertain and entrapped dope pushers. And that's what
George White did with Ferrari. To convince Ferrari that his
colleague Feldman was a major player in the drug scene,
(05:00):
White started throwing elaborate parties at the address. Oddly, all
those lewed photos and tacky decorations White had put on
the walls helped his case. To anyone with an eye,
it looked cheap, tawdry, but to gangsters it seemed like
drug money couture some tasteful mafia decor. All these parties
(05:22):
did the trick. Feldman convinced Ferrari he was the real deal,
or as he put it, quote legitimately illegitimate. He paid
them sixty dollars for thirteen ounces of heroin, and as
they talked, business, microphones all over the apartment picked up
every word. Feldman helped indict Ferrari and his associates on
(05:45):
conspiracy to traffic in narcotics. It was good, solid police work,
but it also threw a wrench in White's plants. When
Feldman took the stand in April nineteen fifty six, he
had to describe as undercover work in detail, including giving
the address of the safe house to Chestnut Street. The
(06:07):
San Francisco Examiner printed the details. Oh for fox sake,
ike for White, it was no different than installing a
huge Neon sign out front that flashed the word police
at visitors for the second time in his CIA career.
(06:27):
White worried that his project was in danger of being
shut down. And if George White didn't have the blessing
and resources of the CIA, what did he have? His
pet birds, his leather working. It wasn't enough. He wanted
needed something bigger. But Sydney Gottlie, White's boss, was less worried.
(06:49):
He reassured him, after all, word hadn't really spread in
the media. Unless he'd read the Telegraph that day, you
probably wouldn't have picked up on the news at all. Plus,
as got Leap told White, the experiment was going so
well that no one at the CIA was in any
hurry to abandon it. In fact, Gottlie gave White the
(07:09):
green light to open a second safe house in the
town of Mill Valley in Marin County, far from the
city lights. But over the years White had become increasingly reckless,
and his new neighbors started to notice. Late at night
they'd hear commotion. Peering outside, they'd see men with shoulder
holsters chasing women, all in various stages of undress. One night,
(07:34):
possibly inebriated, White hidden neighbor's car. He sent got leave
the bill for the damage, another lapse in judgment, since well,
it's not a good idea to make insurance claims when
you're working on a top secret project. White had always
mixed business with pleasure. Serious investigations lived side by side
(07:55):
with hedonism for hedonism's sake. When White through parties at
the safe house, not only did he invite CIA operatives,
but he also called in friends from the Narcotics Bureau
and even San Francisco police officers. Plus there were escorts, drugs,
and booze. Lots of booze. White kept sending got leap
(08:18):
invoices for his alcohol supply, which seemed to be growing
at the rate of a small liquor store. And it
wasn't just the booze. Over the years, White had developed
reputation for experimenting with any drug, and not just on
unsuspecting civilians, on himself. Anything CIA operatives were scared of
(08:40):
was sent to San Francisco, where White would try it
out on his own. One day, got Leap set along
the canister that contained an experimental tear gas. White set
it down, Feldman activated him, and they both ran through it.
They soon collapsed in a heap of coughing and burning eyes.
(09:00):
On another occasion, gott Leap showed up with a dart
gun and went for a drive with White en Feldman.
Like a marksman. He aimed at a tree and fired.
Nothing happened, but when Feldman drove by the same tree
a few days later, it was dead. Feldman thought they
had just witnessed agent orange, the toxin that would be
(09:21):
used in Vietnam a few years later. At times, the
new safe house in Marin County resembled a novelty toy factory,
with new chemicals showing up at White store like presents
for him to play test. In one package, White and
his men found weapons grade stink bombs, and while it
sounds like a gag gift, the CIA was sincere about it.
(09:43):
Operatives wondered if a target could be ridiculed and embarrassed
for smelling bad enough, or if an extreme foul smell
could make an entire crowd disperse. The stories of the
experiments have kind of a blooper real quality. When White's
agent decided to target a small demonstration with the stink bomb,
(10:05):
he went up to a hotel room where he could
drop the tiny ampule into the crowd, but it bounced
off the window cell and spilled back into his own room.
They were itching and sneezing powders and special needles to
inject drugs through wine corks without being detected, but not
all of the ideas were so childlike, and LSD was
(10:26):
still the agency's primary concern. A plan was hatched to
finally see what an aerosolized version of the drug could
do in an enclosed room full of people. White could
experiment it with this back in New York City on
a subway car, but this would be a more potent dose.
They arranged for a big blowout, with White and his
(10:48):
agents canvassing San Francisco for party goers, promising an abundance
of booze and women. The plan was to pack people
up into their new safe house, where White planned on
dousing them in a plume of LSD. There was just
one problem. It was a very hot Californian day and
it was impossible to keep the doors and windows shut.
(11:10):
The LSD just dissipated into the air. The grand plan
to attempt a mass hallucination went out the literal window.
White and gottlieb were disappointed by these attempts, but White
still felt he was close to something with LSD. The
Chestnut Streets safe house had been compromised, and luring people
(11:33):
back to another safe house was offering diminishing returns, so
White decided to return to his roots and go back
to dosing everyday civilians. This time, though, he would have
to go out into the world and hunt them on
their turf in the field, just like a real CIA operative.
He'd had to slip them drugged without being caught, and
(11:56):
he had those skills because there was a magician on
the payroll. Part two new tricks. When Sydney gottlie was
(12:16):
getting MK Ultra off the ground, there was no such
thing as two out there or two unusual. The CIA
was determined to unlock the secrets of mind control in
any way possible, and that's how George White found himself
in the conference room of the Hotel Roosevelt in nine
taking a crash course in sleight of hand from John Mulholland. Okay,
(12:38):
now where's the card, George? Hopefully not up your ass.
Magicians don't have quite the same cache in the twenty
one century. A few have streaming shows. David Copperfield still
books Las Vegas. But before people had a surplus of
entertainment options, they came out and drove to see magicians
ply their trade on stage. Illusionists were celebrities. They also
(13:03):
lived by a code. You can't ask a magician how
they did a trick. Well, you can, but you won't
get an answer. You can find someone YouTube, of course,
and there's always speculation. Sometimes a magician reveals their secrets
out of necessity. That's how David Copperfield found himself discussing
how a disappearing act was done. He was sued after
(13:26):
a member of his audience was injured during a performance.
So how did Sydney Gottlieb convinced John Mulholland to break
the magicians omerta their code of silence? The same way
he got everything else he wanted by appealing to Mulholland's
sense of patriotism. Mulholland had earned a tremendous amount of
(13:49):
respect among his peers. Born in Chicago in eight he'd
fallen in love with magic at the age of five,
but by the time he was twenty he was working
for who enim Holland performed for small audiences in New
York City and for sultan's and kings. He toured the
world and even edited a magic journal, The Sphinx, which
(14:11):
is kind of like the New England Journal of Medicine
for conjurors, and he enjoyed teaching magic as much as
performing it. Mulholland had a library of over four thousand
magic books. He lectured on magic, he wrote books on magic.
Gottlieb had seen him perform and was struck by how
easily he could fool audience members watching his every move
(14:33):
even though he was just a few feet away. He
was a man possessed of secret knowledge, a concept the
CIA and Gottlieb could only admire. Mulholland had done work
on behalf of the country before he performed during USO tours.
He was a proud American, a trait that Gotlieb hoped
to exploit, so he got in touch with Moholland and
(14:55):
told he wanted him to write a manual and Trickery
and Deception, particular early on the most effective methods for
putting a substance in a person's drink without the mark
being aware of it, something like slipping an enemy agents
and making yes John something like that. More or less,
Mulholland was eager to assist a dapper man in his fifties.
(15:18):
He put off his other obligations and quickly got to
work on what he officially called some operational applications of
the Art of Deception. Like most CIA manuals involving espionage,
it wasn't supposed to see the light of day. While
there had always been rumors a CIA Magician's Manual sounded
to Kuki to actually exists, but in two thousand seven,
(15:42):
authors H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace found the only
known surviving copy of the complete manual. In the text,
Mulholland tutors the reader on how to execute slight of
hand for the purposes of espionage. The basic principle and
performing a trick is to do it's of the secret
actions are not observed. A trick does not fool the eye,
(16:05):
but fools the brain. Nowhere does the text mentioned the CIA. Instead,
Maholland calls operatives performers or tricksters, and they weren't drugging subjects.
They were performing tricks. Deception, he pointed out, isn't about
rapid hand movements. It's about getting the spectator to look elsewhere.
(16:27):
As outlined in the manual, one of Moholland's favorite methods
was the cigarette trick. You're at a bar. It's loud,
people are everywhere. You're George White, who want to slip
some LSD to a person's drink Unknowingly, in this case,
the bar is the stage and White is the performer.
His props aren't wands or rabbits. There are things you'd
(16:50):
expect to see, cigarettes, matches, coins, pencils. He's managing his
targets line of site, in this case primal curiosity about fire.
This is the routine for the spectator who spokes the instant.
The performer sees the spectator take a cigarette, cigar, or pipe.
(17:15):
He takes the packet of matches from his pocket, tears
off one match, and holds packet and match ready to
ignite the match. He does these things openly because what
he does can only be looked upon it as a
friendly and courteous gesture. Let me get that for you, buddy.
As soon as the spectator is ready to light up,
(17:37):
the performers should hold the matches close to the spectator
and strike the one match. The flame comes up to
their face. That's all, they're looking at the fire in
front of their eyes, and while their attention is fixated,
White is up to something else. As soon as the
spectator has a proper light, performers should begin to lean
(17:59):
back to his previous position. The left hand, which has
been held still since the match was struck. He's brought
over the mouth of the glass or cup, and the
pill dropped into the liquid. And, as Mulholland reminds the reader,
a small action will not be noticed while making a
broader gesture for which there is an obvious reason. Mulholland
(18:21):
had more tricks, pills that could be brushed off the
side of a coin into a drink, stuffing a pill
in the folds of the hand. He was fond of
a loaded pencil which had a hollow body. The trickster
would offer to give someone directions or write something down,
and when he pointed to something on the paper and
got the targets attention, the pencil would be tipped over,
(18:42):
releasing a liquid or powder into the person's drink. But
above all, Mulholland had one important piece of guidance. Looks stupid.
A person who looked alert, like they were really concentrating
would be unusual. After all, everyone in a bar is
having a good time. In Mulholland's manual, and in at
(19:06):
least four meetings with the magician, George White was taught
these finer points of delivering practically any drug he wanted, anywhere,
at any time. It gave him freedom at a time
he needed it the most. It didn't matter that Ike
Feldman had entered two Chestnut Street into the court record.
He didn't have to stay inside an apartment. He was
(19:29):
no longer in captivity. Mulholland, for his part, had no
idea what his skills were being used for. Though he
must have suspected such training could deliver drugs or even
deadly poisons to the enemy, he couldn't know his work
was being co opted by the CIA to experiment on
American citizens. He didn't know his sleight of hand would
(19:51):
be used to terrorize San Francisco and allowed George White
to practice a very dark and very sinister side of magic.
John Mulholland had been taught magic to bring joy to people.
He taught magic to George White without understanding it would
only bring fear pert three Street magic. It might have
(20:26):
been better if Pheldman hadn't been found out, if he
hadn't made the big bust and exposed the Chestnut Street address.
Maybe White would have kept his experiments to John's and
low level criminals. But he was feeling emboldened reckless. After all,
his LSD project had survived multiple people being hospitalized, one death,
(20:46):
and a relocation. He'd never even been reprimanded for anything
he'd done. So with his make believe apartment in jeopardy,
it seemed like a good time to go out into
San Francisco, armed with John Mulholland's techniques and explore the
last uncharted frontier of the psychokaout the general public San
(21:10):
Francisco nightlife in the Tenderloin District, jazz clubs, bars, restaurants,
a mix of everyone from Blue collar workers to millionaires,
all out to have a good time. Then a man
would appear easy to talk to, offered to light a
cigarette for them. Liquid would seep from the matchbook, and
(21:35):
then he blend into the background to watch what came next.
This was George White's favorite part, the shift in consciousness.
It happened in a blink. One second the world made sense,
and the next it didn't. Some stayed their eyes growing wide,
(21:57):
seeing and hearing things their brains couldn't brow, says. More
and more matches would be struck, more and more people
stumbling into a waking nightmare. Sometimes White would come to them,
sometimes they'd come to White. An old Cia trick to
attract attention in a social setting was to start playing
(22:17):
with drink coasters. An operative would seem unusually interested in them,
trying to peel them apart. Someone would come up and
ask what they were doing. You see, Heineken is doing
this promotion where they're stuffing fifty bucks into random coasters.
You gotta take them apart to find out. No kidding, no,
no kidding. Hey look here. White would have already slipped
(22:43):
a gimmick coaster into the pile, pulling out a crisp
fifty dollar bill. Money was like a flashing sign, and
he would quickly find himself the center of attention. Later,
no one would remember that anyone approached them. They would
only recall being in a group taking a sip, then
(23:03):
watching the floor fall out from under them. These were
the kinds of bars and clubs that had live entertainment bands, singers,
and one local attraction was a woman named Ruth Kelly.
Kelly was a stunning figure on stage, and White came
(23:24):
to see her over and over again. Soon he began
to wonder if Ruth Kelly might want to learn more
about White's swinging lifestyle. One night, before she went on stage,
he walked up and whispered something into her ear, something
salacious and unwelcome. Kelly rejected White. White had faced rejection
(23:45):
countless times in his life, from law enforcement agencies that
didn't need him, to wives who didn't want him. Even
the CIA job had been held up by a year's
worth of background checks. White by this point was drinking
more heavily than ever, more out of control than ever,
and so he did something that not even Sydney Gottley
(24:05):
would have signed off on. He administered l s d
out of spite. That's okay, miss Kelly. Here, let me
get that for you, and he did it just before
Ruth Kelly went on stage in front of hundreds of people.
This was something else. Kelly began her set without problems,
(24:28):
but after just a couple of songs, the acid turned
the audience faces into masks. The applause pounded her head.
Kelly could see the words she sang, she could feel
the stage floating, and somewhere in the crowd was the
face of George White, smiling with horns. Ruth Kelly finished
(24:52):
her set without betraying that her mind was split into
pieces the minute. The second she was done with her
last song, she raced off the stage and jumped into
a cab. She remained in a state of panic for days.
She didn't know what had happened, only that her psyche
seemed to explode as soon as she had rejected the
(25:13):
advances of the strange man with bright, cold blue eyes.
The psychological basis for this routine is that a small
action will not be noticed when it is done while
making a broader gesture, for which there is an obvious reason.
White never stopped. The bars of North Beach were overcome
by White and other operatives dosing people with LSD and
(25:35):
other drugs and hoping they'd stick around long enough to
have an observable reaction. Those that ran off into the
night weren't followed. No one will ever know how many
people shook it off and how many couldn't. In the
San Francisco of the late nineteen fifties, going out for
a good time give you a reasonable chance of having
your mind destroyed. White sadistics was getting stronger, and with
(26:03):
it a kind of self loathing was setting in. In
just a few short years, he would write, a good
policeman is the ultimate action arm of the legislature, the judiciary,
and the executive, the thin blue line between order and chaos.
It is time to consider the consequences of such stresses
(26:25):
upon an average human who becomes a policeman who must
not only cope with his own book of rules, but
also with the ever president, vociferous criticism from the press, citizens,
review boards, the courts, prosecutors, and even his own superiors, who,
when the heat arrives, pass it down. One day, a
(26:46):
technician walked into White safe house to checks some of
the surveillance equipment. He hadn't been expected. The only occupant
inside was George White, who was sitting in front of
the two way mirror he normally sat on the other
side of in order to monitor to the sexual escapades
in the apartment. The man looked at White, who was
clearly drunk, so drunk he didn't even seem to realize
(27:07):
the technician had arrived and thought it was better to
come back another day. And then George White held up
a gun, a revolver. The technician froze. He knew White,
but he also knew White was a drinker. White just
kept staring at himself in the mirror, like he was
waiting for the man he saw in his reflection to
(27:29):
provide some kind of answer. Then he aimed the gun
at himself, at the man in the mirror, and fired.
The technician recoiled. Then he looked and saw a white
globe had collapsed on the surface of the mirror. It
was a dummy round a piece of wax. White kept
(27:52):
staring at himself. The technician left. White remained behind, ruling
over a tiny fiefdom of safe houses. In the end,
George White hadn't won the Cold War. He hadn't exposed
the secrets of mind control. He was a man sitting
(28:15):
on a portable toilet, watching people have sex and getting high.
Maybe the only mind game being played was the one
Sydney gottlie had played on George White. He had taken
a man desperate for respect and recognition and given him
a job. No man of real moral consequence would ever
agree to to experiment on American civilians. That was Gottlieb's
(28:41):
big question, wondering if a man could be made to
do anything given the proper motivation, tools and drugs. MK
Ultra was always about altering a person's behavior. In that
moment in front of the mirror, George White may have
realized he wasn't just running the experiment, He was the experiment.
(29:06):
In every trip, there's a high, the elation, the sense
everything is so perfect and so right that the feeling
will never end. And then inevitably there's the come down
when reality intrudes. Good morning, Mr Irman, Good morning. Sometimes
(29:26):
it's because the effects of the drugs were off. Sometimes
it's because someone intervenes and breaks the spell. In three,
the CIA's Inspector General was a man named John Eyerman.
His role was to evaluate the CIA's various projects, including
ones that the CIA director might not have even been
(29:48):
aware of. As the new guy, Erman wanted to examine
everything going on in the agency. He didn't have allegiances,
not yet anyway, and the crumbs have passed approved wouls
weren't necessarily off limits to him. Earmen like looking under
the rug for those crumbs. He liked picking them up
and wondering where they had come from. One day, Earman
(30:11):
was looking at paperwork filed under god Leib's division. It
was a routine inspection when he came across an expense
report filed by George White. There was a forty four
dollar charge for a telescope, a thousand dollar bill for
just a few days worth of booze, and a modest
thirty one dollars to pay off the woman whose car
wide and damaged like a thread in a sweater. Earman
(30:36):
began tugging, and the more he tugged, the more things unraveled.
George White was writing checks to prostitutes for services rendered.
Memos detailed experimentations on unwitting subjects with LSD, sedatives, uppers, downers,
erection pills, weed, poisoned darts, and trees stink bombs. Very
(31:00):
few people within the CIA were aware of him k Ultra,
not even the new director, a man named John McCone,
who had been appointed by President John F. Kennedy. And
the more Erman read, the more alarmed he got. For
the first time in the ten years that Sydney Gottlieb
and George White had been on a psychedelic rampage, someone
(31:23):
of the CIA was finally looking into their work, and
for the first time, someone was wondering if Sydney Gottlieb
and George White were out of their fucking minds. What
they were doing was illegal and immoral. Erman wrote a
twenty four page report he would delivered to maccone. In it,
(31:44):
he reported in explicit detail the crime that was taking place,
one perpetuated by the highest levels of the CIA, and
one that was putting the freedom of citizens in jeopardy,
the very same freedoms Gottlieb insisted he was trying to protect. Suddenly,
a lot of people had a lot of questions for
(32:04):
George White, But like any great performer, he had one
final trick up his sleeve. George White was about to
make himself disappear. Operation Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown.
(32:45):
This show's written by Jake Rosson, editing, sound design and
mixing by Ernie Indra Dat and Natasha Jacobs. Original music
by Aaron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson
and Maurice Brown. Show logo by Lucy Keen Tiny Yeah
Special thanks to Enzo Salucci, Spencer Gibson, David Crumholtz, Vanessa Crumholtz,
(33:06):
Ryan Murdoch and Ted Ramy. Julian Weller is our supervising producer.
Our executive producers are Jason English and Mangesha Ticketer. See
you next week.
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