Speaker 1: If you dig through the boxes at Stanford University, you
Speaker 1: can find George White's autobiography. It's called A Diet of Danger,
Speaker 1: and it's exactly as pulpy as it sounds. I am
Speaker 1: George Hunter White, and my parents must have been clairvoyant.
Speaker 1: I've been a hunter of men all my life. I've
Speaker 1: had to do it because it was a vitally important job.
Speaker 1: I've had to do it because I've loved doing it.
Speaker 1: Evan wild, gruel, intense and fantastic moment of it. That's
Speaker 1: not dedication, that's addiction. All the highlights are in the book,
Speaker 1: tales of Turkish drug busts, Chinese opium gang initiations, encounters
Speaker 1: with spies and killers. But the problem with the George
Speaker 1: White version is he left out some important details. The
Speaker 1: memories George White preferred to keep a secret, like this one.
Speaker 1: It's ninety two and George White is boarding the subway.
Speaker 1: The subway system in New York City is built to
Speaker 1: be safe, and it is safe, but that's just the
Speaker 1: train itself. Passenger behavior is different. You can get mugged, harassed, threatened,
Speaker 1: or you can board a car with nothing amiss, no
Speaker 1: sign of trouble, anywhere, and then you can step off
Speaker 1: into a nightmare. There's no record of where George White
Speaker 1: got on, but at some point in the ride, White
Speaker 1: reaches into while maybe his pocket, maybe a briefcase. He
Speaker 1: tried to erase the details. But here's what we do
Speaker 1: know what he feels. The time is right, White sprays
Speaker 1: an aerosol container into the air, an invisible mist. There's
Speaker 1: not much of it, just enough to affect a handful
Speaker 1: of people. The people in the car began to feel strange,
Speaker 1: I think, uncomfortable, some panic. Odds are children were on board?
Speaker 1: Hallucinations are inevitable. Did the walls start to bend? Did
Speaker 1: the air change? Did people start to hear things? Maybe
Speaker 1: they're crying or giggling or vominate. No one will have
Speaker 1: any idea what happened or why. White takes notes, He
Speaker 1: records the panic, then he vanishes. Later he'll write a
Speaker 1: summary of the LSD experiment in his diary quote the
Speaker 1: subway test was a success. Pleased with the results, George
Speaker 1: White will do it again and again and again. He
Speaker 1: will become a dispensary of hallucinations, a chemical, says resolute
Speaker 1: in his search for a drug that could bend the
Speaker 1: will of the men and women he hunted. It started
Speaker 1: as a government assignment. It would become an obsession. That's
Speaker 1: not dedication, that's addiction. For I Heart Radio, this is
Speaker 1: Operation Midnight Climax and I Heart original podcast. I'm your
Speaker 1: host Noel Brown. And this is chapter three the Pad,
Speaker 1: Part one in the Lab. Back in nineteen forty three,
Speaker 1: Albert Hoffman, the man who discovered LSD, was working as
Speaker 1: a chemist for sand Dos, a pharmaceutical company in Basil, Switzerland.
Speaker 1: He was born in nineteen o six, the son of
Speaker 1: a locksmith, and considering what Hoffman wound up doing providing
Speaker 1: a key to access hidden states of consciousness that feels appropriate,
Speaker 1: Hoffman attended the University of Zurich to study chemistry and
Speaker 1: later went to work for sand Does. He quickly became
Speaker 1: interested in ergate, a fungus that was blamed for mass
Speaker 1: outbreaks of poisonings as far back as the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: but when used judiciously and with care, it also held
Speaker 1: considerable promise as a treatment for migraines. Attempts were being
Speaker 1: made to take what was useful from ergat and leave
Speaker 1: the harmful side effects behind, using ergotoxine, a synthetic derivative.
Speaker 1: Hoffman produced lysergic acid diethyla or LSD in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: Then he got sidetracked with other work. But Hoffman never
Speaker 1: forgot LSD. He wanted to explore it more, to see
Speaker 1: if it could be useful for something. On April sixteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty three, he was working with the compound when
Speaker 1: he began to feel odd, restless, dizzy. He left work
Speaker 1: early and went home, whereas imagination, he said, was extremely stimulated.
Speaker 1: For over two hours, Hoffman gave himself to a cascade
Speaker 1: of vivid pictures, shapes, and colors. It was a censorial experience,
Speaker 1: one that left him with a smile on his face.
Speaker 1: Here's what Hoffman wrote to his supervisor, Arthur Stall as
Speaker 1: a kind of workplace accident report, shortly after his experience
Speaker 1: last Friday, April sixte I was forced to interrupt my
Speaker 1: work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon
Speaker 1: and proceed home. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed,
Speaker 1: I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes
Speaker 1: with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours,
Speaker 1: this condition faded away. Retracing his steps, Hoffman discovered a
Speaker 1: tiny amount of LSD had been absorbed through his fingers
Speaker 1: in the lab while he was working. It had hallucinogenic properties.
Speaker 1: Being a man of science, Hoffman felt the need to
Speaker 1: pursue this discovery, but the first dose had been accidental.
Speaker 1: He didn't know how much he had taken, so he
Speaker 1: decided to start out light, really light. He only ingested
Speaker 1: zero point to five milligrams. Hoffman thought he was being careful,
Speaker 1: but this was far, far too much. Oh no no.
Speaker 1: In his notes, he quickly scribbled what had happened people,
Speaker 1: my teenthe taken diluted with about ten c seas of water,
Speaker 1: caseless saboteen o clock beginning, dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions,
Speaker 1: symptoms of paraly system, desired to mouse twenty o'clock, most severe. Chris.
Speaker 1: If his first trip was a pleasure, Hoffman's second experience
Speaker 1: with LSD tugged at the limit of his sanity. Familiar
Speaker 1: objects in pieces of furniture assumed grotesque throughout the big forms.
Speaker 1: Your lady next door scarcely rains brought me milk and
Speaker 1: of course drank more than two leaders. She was no
Speaker 1: longer be shidious, witch colored mask. Hoffman felt possessed by
Speaker 1: a demon, He wrote and began to scream, Terrified he
Speaker 1: was going insane, livid he might actually die as a
Speaker 1: consequence of the very substance he had brought into the world.
Speaker 1: Worst of all, Hoffman recalled was the acoustic perceptions. Every
Speaker 1: noise was realized visually. He could see sounds. Despite his trip,
Speaker 1: Hoffman knew LSD held potential, provided it could be dosed properly.
Speaker 1: Sandals engaged in a series of animal experiments, observing mice
Speaker 1: on acid and cats who suddenly became terrified of them.
Speaker 1: Chimpanzees abandoned their sense of social order, fish swam in
Speaker 1: irregular patterns, spiders spun immaculately proportioned webs at low doses,
Speaker 1: and sagging confused webs at higher doses. Drugs that could
Speaker 1: produce this kind of sensation were nothing new. People have
Speaker 1: been searching for the divine truth for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: back to the Aztecs and Mayan's hemp and peyote were
Speaker 1: thought to harbor secrets of the mind. Mescalin was the
Speaker 1: first to be synthesized in a chemically pure environment. What
Speaker 1: Hoffman and his colleagues at Sandoz discovered was that at
Speaker 1: a low enough dose, as little as one millionth of
Speaker 1: a gram, LSD could produce a different kind of euphoria,
Speaker 1: a breakdown of the ego that acted as a barrier
Speaker 1: between the self and the road to improvement. Hoffman had
Speaker 1: grand ideas for LSD in treating addiction and as an
Speaker 1: aid in psychotherapy. Scientists began to study it with those
Speaker 1: hopes in mind, but there was always the risk, the
Speaker 1: risk of euphoria giving way to psych catic attacks or
Speaker 1: feelings of omnipotence. Like any drug, it would need to
Speaker 1: be carefully studied and subjects would have to be observed
Speaker 1: in controlled conditions. In the wrong hands, at the wrong dose,
Speaker 1: LSD would become a nightmare without beginning or end. Hoffman
Speaker 1: soon lost his grip on LSD, and so did the
Speaker 1: scientific research community. By the late nineteen forties, it became taboo,
Speaker 1: too dangerous to pursue was a legitimate medical treatment. Hoffman
Speaker 1: took to calling it his problem child. Well, Hoffman was
Speaker 1: never involved with him. K Ultra Sandoz was. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, got Leave heard that the KGB was attempting
Speaker 1: to buy what amounted to the world's supply of pure LSD,
Speaker 1: obviously for nefarious purposes. It was possible that KGB had
Speaker 1: already bought fifty million doses. In a panic, got Leave
Speaker 1: dispatched one of his under links to intervene. The man
Speaker 1: reported back that Sandoz had ten kilograms available for sale.
Speaker 1: Remember LSD is activated in the tiniest doses imaginable. Gottlie
Speaker 1: bought all of it before the Soviet Union could. He
Speaker 1: spent two hundred and forty thousand dollars on the Sandos supply,
Speaker 1: and then realized his operative, as good as he might
Speaker 1: be an international espionage was extremely bad at math. Sandoz
Speaker 1: didn't have ten kilograms. They had ten milligrams. The operative
Speaker 1: was off by a factor of one million. That's all
Speaker 1: they had made in the ten years since Hoffman discovered it. Still,
Speaker 1: Gotti bought it all. It arrived in a barrel about
Speaker 1: the size and shape of an oil drum, with hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of doses in that barrel, a virtually unlimited
Speaker 1: supply of nightmares that could be artificially induced. Sandoz agreed
Speaker 1: to supply the CIA with a hundred grams a week,
Speaker 1: fresh off their LSD production line, and it got Leave's insistence.
Speaker 1: They also refused any further orders from Russia or China
Speaker 1: and agreed to inform the CIA when anyone else inquired
Speaker 1: about the drug. For better or worse, the CIA had
Speaker 1: a monopoly on l s D. From Hoffman's fingers, it
Speaker 1: went to Sandas, from Sandos to Gotlieb, and from Gotlieb
Speaker 1: to George Hunter White. No one stopped to heed Hoffman's warnings.
Speaker 1: The biggest danger, Hoffman said, was giving l s D
Speaker 1: to someone without their knowledge in an uncontrolled setting at random,
Speaker 1: where harmless noises can turn, Hoffman said, into torment and
Speaker 1: a psychotic crisis would be inevitable. Part two Alias For
Speaker 1: George Why to immerse himself in the CIA role, He
Speaker 1: would have to stop being George White, and that wouldn't
Speaker 1: be easy. For all of his training at Camp X
Speaker 1: and the Narcotics Bureau, White still looked very much like
Speaker 1: a cop. He had the cops stare, the cops walk,
Speaker 1: the swagger that comes with having a gun on your
Speaker 1: hip and a badge on your belt. It's a hard
Speaker 1: thing to shake, but he did it. Like a superhero.
Speaker 1: He developed a guy's for his CIA heroics a secret
Speaker 1: identity at the time, White was fond of meeting his
Speaker 1: assortment of criminals and killers at the American Museum of
Speaker 1: Natural History to obtain information, debrief informants, or threaten them
Speaker 1: with his power and influence. It was a good place
Speaker 1: to disappear in a crowd. Inside the museum was a
Speaker 1: section devoted to gems, named after famous financier JP Morgan,
Speaker 1: a trustee of the museum and a frequent donor. In
Speaker 1: honor of his contributions, the museum dubbed the Gem section
Speaker 1: the JP Morgan Hall of Gems, or just Morgan Hall.
Speaker 1: White like the sound of that, so he took it
Speaker 1: on as Azaleas Morgan Hall. Morgan Hall was a sensitive
Speaker 1: soul in the fiction of White's mind. He worked as
Speaker 1: a merchant seaman clad in a peacoat, which helped explain
Speaker 1: his calloused and weather warning steer here. But Morgan Hall
Speaker 1: was also an aspiring artist, a painter and sculptor. He
Speaker 1: was a supporter of the Beat generation, poets like Alan
Speaker 1: ginsburg In, writers like Jack Kerouac, artists who were resisting
Speaker 1: conservative views and taking control of the post war culture.
Speaker 1: Later they'd be dubbed Beat Nicks after the Russian Sputnik
Speaker 1: satellite that would go up in nineteen fifty seven. J
Speaker 1: Edgar Hoover, that famously tolerant FBI director, said in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty that communists, eggheads, and beat Nicks were among the
Speaker 1: country's great enemies. They were stereotyped as drug users who
Speaker 1: wanted to reframe the status quo of America. They were
Speaker 1: another danger to baked in moral values to the CIA
Speaker 1: that made them expendable minds. If Beatenis were viable drug
Speaker 1: experimentation candidates, Morgan Hall was in the right place. A
Speaker 1: Fox and a Henhouse White lived at fifty nine West
Speaker 1: twelfth Street in Greenwich Village. The Hotel Albert in the
Speaker 1: village had been a haven for Mark Twain, Walt Whitman,
Speaker 1: and Jackson Pollock. Bob Dylan lived in Greenwich Village. It
Speaker 1: had an atmosphere. It was alive, thriving like minds crowding
Speaker 1: together in bars, in bohemian coffee houses and street corners.
Speaker 1: The smell of marijuana hung in the air. There was
Speaker 1: sexual liberation. It was a perfect place for the kinds
Speaker 1: of activities Morgan Hall like to get into, and for
Speaker 1: the kinds of people Sidney Gottlieb wanted to dose with LSD.
Speaker 1: Imagine a doctor or lawyer racing into a police station
Speaker 1: insisting he'd been drugged. Now imagine a young man stumbling
Speaker 1: in from the village, already presumed to be high. Most
Speaker 1: of the time, New York would be White's home base
Speaker 1: until early ninet. For now, at least, it was perfect.
Speaker 1: With money he had gotten from Gotlieb in the CIA,
Speaker 1: White rented a second apartment in Greenwich Village at one
Speaker 1: Bedford Street. After all, drugging people in his own apartment
Speaker 1: would be poor form. In writing Gotlieb. White bemoaned how
Speaker 1: difficult it was to arrange for a lease and utilities
Speaker 1: under an alias, how people wanted references and paperwork with
Speaker 1: his name on them. Morgan Hall, he said, was becoming
Speaker 1: a bit of a Jekyl and Hide situation. And while
Speaker 1: he was right about that, White equipped the apartment, which
Speaker 1: he liked to refer to as the Pad, with a
Speaker 1: well stocked bar and plenty of paintings and sculptures to
Speaker 1: reinforce his cover story of being a struggling artist. He
Speaker 1: had murals painted on the walls, and there were other
Speaker 1: kinds of decorations too, hidden microphones and two A mirrors
Speaker 1: connected to an adjoining apartment he'd also rented out. This was,
Speaker 1: in the language of law enforcement, a safe house, a
Speaker 1: place for the CIA to conduct clandestine business under surveillance.
Speaker 1: Here's how one observer described the place. Apartment one Sea
Speaker 1: is disguised as an artist studio, consists of a bedroom,
Speaker 1: large living room, kitchen, net, and bath. The kitchen has
Speaker 1: been fully stocked with the best of foods, silver utensils, etcetera.
Speaker 1: The bedroom has been decorated in a style attractive to
Speaker 1: the feminine sex. The linen, closet and bathroom have been
Speaker 1: completely equipped with all essentials for use of both male
Speaker 1: and female occupants. The living room contains a well stocked bar,
Speaker 1: over which has been placed a television set. A radio
Speaker 1: phonograph combination has been purchased and will be placed to
Speaker 1: conceal a portion of a doorway which is been cut
Speaker 1: between apartments one Sea and one bat and at the
Speaker 1: top of which opening will be placed an X ray mirror.
Speaker 1: The report added that visitors to eighty one Bedford could
Speaker 1: be compromised. White's comrade in this Cold War operation was
Speaker 1: a narcotics agent named Pierre Lafitte, whom he had often
Speaker 1: worked with on narcotics busts. Lafitte would play a much
Speaker 1: bigger role in White's life, but for now he was
Speaker 1: a sidekick. To celebrate their new assignment, White and Lafitte
Speaker 1: took a trip to Las Vegas and tried out their
Speaker 1: new weapon. They tripped. White had no hesitation, learning about
Speaker 1: what he was dealing with firsthand. He would take LSD
Speaker 1: dozens of times in his life, approaching it with an
Speaker 1: academics attitude. He claimed a kind of immunity from its effects,
Speaker 1: insisting that unlike virtually everyone else, he had developed a
Speaker 1: tolerance Lafitte had not. He called the Vegas ex speariment
Speaker 1: another world of visions and horrors. When the apartment had
Speaker 1: been equipped and White and Lafitte returned from their Vegas experiment,
Speaker 1: White gut dressed as Morgan Hall, sporting a turtleneck in beret.
Speaker 1: Then he went hunting. White began stalking in coffee houses
Speaker 1: and jazz clubs. He liked hanging out at Chumley's, a
Speaker 1: one time speakeasy just one block from the pad. He
Speaker 1: sat patiently at tables and bars, nodding in time with
Speaker 1: the sounds, striking up conversations with strangers. This was his
Speaker 1: favorite part. He had already earned the trust of mobsters.
Speaker 1: The thrill for White wasn't duping people he already knew,
Speaker 1: or leveraging the power he had over them to get
Speaker 1: what he wanted. The thrill was in winning the confidence
Speaker 1: of a stranger. From there, White would spin tales of
Speaker 1: his artistic endeavors, his thoughts on politics, his experience as
Speaker 1: at sea. It was a seduction. The climax was and sex.
Speaker 1: It was someone who'd been a stranger hours before being
Speaker 1: won over by Morgan Hall. It's easy to imagine the
Speaker 1: words of the FBI ringing in White's ears, how he
Speaker 1: was unfit for duty. Look at him now working for
Speaker 1: the CIA on the new frontier of psychological warfare. Kiss
Speaker 1: Mask j Edgar White was well read and often more
Speaker 1: culturally informed than his demeanor led on. He spoke fluent,
Speaker 1: beat nick, totally at ease, with a tone of the
Speaker 1: counterculture movement. The people talking to White were on the
Speaker 1: fringes of society, seamen who might be involved in the
Speaker 1: drug trafficking trade at ports, artists who spoke with joints
Speaker 1: dangling from their lips, as he talked and smiled, they
Speaker 1: couldn't detect the animosity that simmered beneath his surface. The
Speaker 1: Beat generation had a reputation for drug use, opioids, weed.
Speaker 1: These people would have been terrified of George White, but
Speaker 1: they liked Morgan Hall. Well, Jackson Pollock is wonderful. But
Speaker 1: if you're into abstract expression uts, Yeah. Man, there's all
Speaker 1: kinds of crazy shit out there. I've got some stuff,
Speaker 1: some books. You should see back of the pad. It's
Speaker 1: just a block away. I'm gay. If you are, I'm
Speaker 1: always gay. Hall and his friend would walk back to
Speaker 1: eighty one. Bedford White would not at the two way
Speaker 1: mirror mounted over the phonograph. Beyond it in the apartment
Speaker 1: was Lafitte or another colleague cradling a notebook, prepared to
Speaker 1: observe whatever happened next. You want to drink, sure, some gin,
Speaker 1: some ice, one ampule of LSD, and then there would
Speaker 1: be time to sit back and watch the show. Where
Speaker 1: do you buy your weed? What's your dad's name? Have
Speaker 1: you ever been on the moon? What's your social Security number?
Speaker 1: Try here? Where did you buy it from? You know what?
Speaker 1: You Lucian? What about my Omansky? Are you a communist,
Speaker 1: describe the color blue to me on your wife, your
Speaker 1: girl friend, where it does utiful flowers, beautiful waterfuls. You
Speaker 1: see him is born another drinks. Like a school report,
Speaker 1: White would write down the dosage of LSD and the
Speaker 1: subject's reaction. Were they talkative, scared, catatonic? Did they answer questions?
Speaker 1: Did they abandon discretion? Did they lose their ship? He'd
Speaker 1: take copious notes and send them all back to Gottlieb
Speaker 1: at a post office in Washington. This was the climax,
Speaker 1: wasn't it the moment that justified what George White was doing.
Speaker 1: In a letter written years before, he described his thought
Speaker 1: process when he finished a report. It may come as
Speaker 1: a surprise to you, but as far back as the
Speaker 1: O S S. I firmly believe that all information collected
Speaker 1: in the field was sent post haste to Washington, filed
Speaker 1: in funereal gray steel cabinets by purified acolytes. Then, so
Speaker 1: the rumor went on Sunday, the high priests were gathered
Speaker 1: a kneel and pray before these repositories of sacred writings.
Speaker 1: The missionaries in the field were happy in their faith.
Speaker 1: The fruit of their labors was being used to propitiate
Speaker 1: the angry gods. White was a sarcastic son of a bitch.
Speaker 1: By writing down the details and clinical way absolved him
Speaker 1: of responsibility. It was for the greater good. The bureaucratic
Speaker 1: forms proved it. For the first time. The CIA was
Speaker 1: getting real, unadulterated field coverage of LSD, collected and curated
Speaker 1: by Morgan Hall. Everything was going exactly according to plan,
Speaker 1: well almost everything. It wasn't long before other people started
Speaker 1: showing up the path, people like newspaper reporters, narcotics officers,
Speaker 1: and an informant, not one of George White's informants, but
Speaker 1: someone informing on George White Part three the informant. White
Speaker 1: always wanted to be an fb EI agent, and even
Speaker 1: though the agency declared him unfit for duty, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean they forgot about him. When White accused New York
Speaker 1: Governor Thomas Dewey of making a secret deal with mobster
Speaker 1: Lucky Luciano, he caught the attention of the governor. Do
Speaker 1: He wanted to know more about the man sullying his name,
Speaker 1: so he asked the FBI to send along some information.
Speaker 1: They were all the typical biographical mentions along with something
Speaker 1: a little more interesting. The FBI had made contact with
Speaker 1: the liaison in New York, someone who not only knew
Speaker 1: George White, but knew George White was up to something
Speaker 1: at eighty one Bedford Street on behalf of the CIA.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was a Narcotics Bureau agent, the same
Speaker 1: one who wrote the description of the pad. In addition
Speaker 1: to notifying Governor Dewey, the report went directly to FBI
Speaker 1: Director Jay Edker Hoover, who knew all about George White,
Speaker 1: specifically White's love of publicity for his drug busts. He
Speaker 1: wanted to know exactly what White was up to intelligence
Speaker 1: agencies love spying on other intelligence agencies. Here's part of
Speaker 1: that report. A confidential informant of this office advised on
Speaker 1: July one that his former supervisor in the Bureau of Narcotics,
Speaker 1: George White, has become associated with CIA in an ultra
Speaker 1: secret assignment. White and the CIA have rented dual apartments
Speaker 1: at eighty one Bedford Street. In one of these apartments
Speaker 1: has been set up a bar in quarters for entertainment,
Speaker 1: while the other apartment is being used by CIA for
Speaker 1: the purpose of taking motion pictures through an X ray mirror.
Speaker 1: White indicated to the informant that no one in the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Narcotics or the CIA was aware of his
Speaker 1: apartment or his association therewith except Commissioner Harry Anslinger of
Speaker 1: the Narcotics Bureau and top officials of the CIA. The
Speaker 1: FBI and Hoover knew White was up to something, but
Speaker 1: they didn't know what. So agents pressed the informant for
Speaker 1: more information. They were die to know what White, the
Speaker 1: Maverick dope buster, was doing in league with the CIA.
Speaker 1: One agent even dismissed the informants report, saying it hardly
Speaker 1: seemed plausible that White and the CIA were working together.
Speaker 1: It didn't smell right. It wasn't White a maniac? What
Speaker 1: function could he serve? More intelligence needed to be gathered
Speaker 1: most discreetly. The informant continued to hang around the pad, White,
Speaker 1: seemingly oblivious to his curiosity. He picked up bits of
Speaker 1: information here and there. The recording equipment seemed odd, so
Speaker 1: did the rumors there was drug experimentation going on. Finally,
Speaker 1: the informant managed to get his hands on two vials
Speaker 1: of liquid that were stored in the pad. One was
Speaker 1: in a screw top container, one was in the same
Speaker 1: kind of ampule used to house the LSD dosents. He
Speaker 1: immediately forward both to the FBI, who turned them over
Speaker 1: to their laboratory analysts. Here was proof White and the
Speaker 1: CIA were up to something elicit, maybe illegal. When the
Speaker 1: FBI got the lab report back, they found table salt.
Speaker 1: The most talented chemists at the FBI were unable to
Speaker 1: identify the compound, saying only that it appeared to be
Speaker 1: some kind of organic material in a dilute solution of
Speaker 1: sodium chloride or salt. The other vial had chloral hydrate.
Speaker 1: At the time, it was a rather common sedative that
Speaker 1: was the solution in the screw top fial. Neither one
Speaker 1: was the smoking gun the FBI had been hoping for.
Speaker 1: The FBI had once again underestimated George White. An FBI
Speaker 1: memo advised the informant to tread carefully. White it red
Speaker 1: had been told the FBI was sniffing around, and the
Speaker 1: c I a likely Sydney Gottlieb told White to be
Speaker 1: on the lookout. Leaving an ampulate deluted table salt for
Speaker 1: the FBI chemists to examine was one way he could
Speaker 1: give them the middle finger, the same one he'd been
Speaker 1: giving them for years. White may have been clever enough
Speaker 1: to out with the FBI, but he was still showing
Speaker 1: signs of recklessness. Why was White discussing the fact that
Speaker 1: he was working with the CIA with anyone? Why, as
Speaker 1: the informant related, did White invite a newspaper reporter named
Speaker 1: Ed Reid to the pad. That's not a very covert idea.
Speaker 1: More importantly, what was White doing with the chloral hydrate
Speaker 1: the sedative? Wasn't he supposed to be focusing on the
Speaker 1: effects of LSD. White scribbled in his diary fleeting mentions
Speaker 1: of sodium pentethal are barbiturate, thought to have truth, ser impossibilities,
Speaker 1: and nembutal another sedative. He was dispensing one drug after
Speaker 1: another like a pharmacist on speed. Much later, when Sidney
Speaker 1: Gottlieb was asked to justify the work of George White,
Speaker 1: he said that White had freedom. He could per cure
Speaker 1: any kind of drug he wanted, not just LSD, anything, morphine, mescaline, opium, cocaine.
Speaker 1: He didn't ask, and White didn't offer. Procurement and use
Speaker 1: were up to White, at least that was Gottlieb's story.
Speaker 1: But if White was using a sedative. Was it to
Speaker 1: help someone come down from a bad trip or something else?
Speaker 1: What exactly was George White doing at eight one Bedford
Speaker 1: Street that was escaping the attention of both the CIA
Speaker 1: and the FBI. And just how far away from the
Speaker 1: mission had he departed? George White almost immediately broke off
Speaker 1: from the mission, statement of m k Ultra, he wasn't
Speaker 1: limiting himself to criminals and dealers. He released a small
Speaker 1: amount of LSD on a New York subway car, a
Speaker 1: microcosm of Gottlieb's dream of dozing an entire town. And
Speaker 1: then there was the case of Linda King. Linda was
Speaker 1: an aspiring actress with a benefactor, a man named Irwin Eisenberg.
Speaker 1: White and Eisenberg were close friends. Eisenberg had a home
Speaker 1: in Large Mountain, New York, which White visited on a
Speaker 1: regular basis. Eisenberg was wealthy, cultured, and rich, and wanted
Speaker 1: to help King with her acting career by making introductions
Speaker 1: through Eisenberg. White met King. Of course, White couldn't help
Speaker 1: with her show business aspirations, but she still liked him.
Speaker 1: He was just the kind of friendly face he'd see
Speaker 1: on a subway On September twelfth, nineteen fifty three, White
Speaker 1: invited King to come have a drink with him at
Speaker 1: the Pad at eighty one Bedford Street. Linda King wasn't
Speaker 1: a killer, or a dealer or a beat nick. She
Speaker 1: was a friend. But by the end of the night
Speaker 1: she was seeing things unimaginable things. White made a note
Speaker 1: in his diary King, he wrote, got psychotic. He had
Speaker 1: dosed her with LSD. King was taken to Lennox Hill
Speaker 1: Hospital and as doctor shined the light into her widened
Speaker 1: pupils and asked her what had happened, King insisted she
Speaker 1: had been drugged. When doctors asked by whom King could
Speaker 1: only utter two words, George White. Operation Midnight Climax is
Speaker 1: hosted by Noel Brown. The show is written by Jake Rosin, editing,
Speaker 1: sound design and mixing by Ernie Indradatte and Natasha Jacobs.
Speaker 1: Original music by Aaron Kaufman, Research and fact working by
Speaker 1: Austin Thompson and Maurica Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Spencer Gibson, David Crumholtz, Vanessa crum Holtz,
Speaker 1: Ted Ramie and Jason Thompson, Julian Weller, is our supervising producer.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Jason English and Mangesh had Ticketer.
Speaker 1: See you next week.