March 24, 2021 • 36 mins
If George White could manipulate the mafia with an old-fashioned wartime truth serum, what could he do with something more potent? What secrets could he uncover with the full support of the CIA and a supply of LSD? The world was about to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
What do you wear when a mobster comes over for
a drink? Do you expect to be padded down to
make sure you're not wearing a wire? What if he
already knows you're a cop? Do you dress up? Maybe
a tweed suit and tie. It's hard to figure out
what mafia casual is, especially when you're a narcotics officer.
So we don't know what George White was wearing when
(00:27):
the mobster came to his door. That part wasn't in
the file. But when Sydney got leave, the CIA's chief
chemist and head of the MK Ultra drug experimentation program
pulled the confidential report on George White. This is what
it said about that May meeting. First, White took a
(00:53):
cigarette pack and began knocking out a few of the
smokes onto a table nearby. He had a vial of
liquid th hc acetate. Holding up the vial to the light,
White plunged a syringe into the top, piercing the rubber
seal and drawing the solution through the needle. Then he
pierced the syringe into the cigarette, then another. He did
(01:17):
this patiently, one at a time, making sure the solution
drenched the tobacco. Every time he finished with a cigarette,
he put it in a shot glass vertically so any
excess liquid would drain out, And once the smokes were dry,
he returned them to the pack like they've never been touched.
(01:39):
Then he put a brand new cellophane wrapper on the
box like it was unopened, like it had just tumbled
out of a dime store vending machine. White kept his
own untampered cigarettes separate. It's probably safe to say he
smoked one or two before he heard the knock at
the door. In walks August del Gracio, a k A.
(02:02):
Little Aggie. He strolls in like he's been there before.
That's because he has. Even though White and Little Aggie
are on opposing sides of the law, White the celebrated
narco agent and Aggie a made man, the two have
grown close. A few years prior, White could have arrested
(02:23):
Little Aggie in an opium bust, but he let him go.
It's a weird way to bond. But then again, White
needed sources, and Little Aggie was connected Lucky Luciano Meyer Lansky.
He knew them all. The two started hanging out, going
to each other's homes. They shared drinks, played chess, so
(02:47):
when Little Aggie came over that afternoon, it was business
as usual. They knocked a few back and made small talk.
I want to smoke, Aggie here, you're a guest. Save
them for later, Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, I'll take a smoke.
(03:13):
Listen to you. I got a guy poked outside waiting
for me, So I got maybe twenty minutes. Sure. Little
Aggie takes a drag. He feels relaxed, more relaxed than
he's ever been, and he starts to talk and talk
about infourmants he'd been forced to kill, about men he
could have murdered if White needed them to disappear, about
(03:36):
a top secret plan to use the notorious mobster Lucky
Luciano to help with the Allied occupation of Italy during
the war. Geo anything I'm telling you, I know, Loggy.
Do you repeat anything at all? It would get me killed.
You understand that I'm dead. It's a doornail, I know, Boggy.
(04:01):
You don't have to worry. You can trust me. The
fuck the funk you say that for? Say? What dead?
Is it doing nail? Why is it doingaille gotta be dead?
I don't know the one one on the cigarette. Shit,
I got it, I gotta go. I got a guy outside.
I only got twenty minutes. You've been here over two hours, Aggie. Well,
(04:26):
now it really gotta fucking go. This meeting, which George
White dutifully recorded in his diaries, was the beginning of
something big. Nine years later, this all appears in the
report that Sydney Gottlieb is looking through, and at that
(04:47):
moment got Leave decides there's no better man to handle
his top secret search for a truth drug than George White.
If George White could manipulate a mobster sworn to protect
the secrets of the Familia with an old fashioned wartime
truth serum, what could he do with something potent? What
(05:09):
secrets could he uncover with the full support of the
CIA and a supply of L s D. The world
was about to find out from my Heart radio, this
(05:50):
is Operation Midnight Climax. And I heard original podcast. I'm
Noel Brown and this is chapter two Brainwash, Part one,
Criminal Friends. What was George White up to before he
landed on the CIA's radar. It's all on the report
(06:10):
on Sydney Gottlieb's desk in ninety three, George White was
working for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. He's
been traveling the globe on all sorts of crazy missions,
from arming insurgents in Africa to finding out where, when,
and how drug smugglers are getting their illicit goods into
the US. Then one day White gets a call from
(06:32):
the head of the OSS, Bill Donovan. He's known as
wild Bill, and Wild Bill has a special request. Scientists
at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington have developed an intriguing
drug from one of the primary compounds in marijuana liquid THHC.
But this isn't just a joint in liquid form. It's
(06:55):
highly concentrated, the way dish soap promises to clean fifty
plates with one drop. A few puffs and you're gone.
In the preliminary tests, subjects given the extracts start talking freely,
divulging all sorts of information. Wild Bill has a hunch
this could be the fabled truth drug the government has
been looking for, the one the Nazis are already rumored
(07:18):
to have in their possession, and his scientists have already
experimented with how to deliver it. They've tried it as
a vapor, they've burned it over charcoal. Finally, they settled
on a solution that could be injected into cigarettes. The
method is so smart and deceptively easy, after all, what's
(07:39):
more natural than offering someone a smoke? But a wild
Bill needs to test this out, and he needs the
kind of subjects the OSS wouldn't care about, the kind
of people the os s could overlook, so he calls
George White, someone with criminal friends. Wild Bill wants to
(07:59):
know just how talkative someone with real secrets might get,
what sort of things a mobster might reveal while knowing
the cost. After all, in the mafia's line of work,
loose tongues get removed with hedge clippers, So he tells
White to expect a package. Then he tells him how
to use it, and White agrees, but before he starts
(08:29):
calling up criminals, he tries it out on himself. White
sits alone in his apartment and starts smoking a soaked cigarette,
and almost immediately he understands. George White smokes himself unconscious,
and when he comes to, he scribbles a note in
(08:50):
his diary knocked out pretty good stuff. Brother. Once White
says on a dose that seems to relax him without
causing him to become catatonic. White Nose just who to call.
A former drug dealer, Little Aggie was reformed. According to White,
(09:12):
Aggie owned a number of bridle shops in New York,
run by his brother and sisters. He ran a clean business,
allegedly supposedly the Italian mobster at a soft spot for me.
He took to dropping by my apartment evenings to play chess,
at which he was terrible. They talked, Little Aggie laughed.
(09:34):
Under the influence, he was a different man. Sure he
spoke about heroin and informants and hits and Luciano. He'd
spoken of these things before, but never in such detail,
never so freely. One part of him seemed to be
aware he was talking too much, but the other part
didn't care. So you popped him, Well, yeah, and I
(09:56):
could pop anyone else you need to meet tube Gio.
White had two observations coming out of his conversation with
Little Aggie. For one, it seemed like the marijuana had
been a rousing success. Little Aggie forgot he had a
driver waiting outside. Seemed to forget he belonged to a
very tribal organization that would kill him for saying the
(10:19):
things he told his friend Geo. But White also had
a second thought, which he shared with wild Bill. Was
the OSS really looking to get into bed with Lucky Luciano?
The least trustworthy ally possible at the time. Luciano was
in prison serving a thirty to fifty year sentence for
running the largest organized prostitution ring in America. Springing him
(10:45):
and then asking for his help offended White in a
fundamental way. Sure, he was friends with Little Aggie, but
that was to gather information. He didn't trust a mafia
man to lead the US to victory in World War Two,
so he old Wild Bill to stay away from criminal gangs.
He said, Little Aggie had told him some concerning things.
(11:06):
I don't think the OSS is gonna let Luciana out
of President Aggie. There's some very powerful people who can
make that happen to you. You ain't see. Wild Bill agreed,
and the OSS never employed him, but Luciana would come
back to haunt White later in a major way. For
(11:27):
the moment, White had more pressing issues. While Bill wanted
him to take his show on the road literally, the
OSS tasked White with continuing his reefer madness experiment in
new and creative ways. He was sent to interrogate thirty
American soldiers in Atlanta who were suspected of being closet communists.
(11:48):
White was armed with intelligence folders on each one so
we could ask leading questions. One by one, they puffed
on White's magic cigarettes, oblivious to what was inside of them.
One by one, their defiance dissolved in a puff of smoke.
Nearly all of them gave White information he didn't have
(12:12):
before he walked into the room. The effects seemed to
materialize within fifteen minutes and lasted for thirty to ninety minutes,
just enough of a window of time to climb inside
their minds and grab what he could. Part two, The
Manhattan Project. This was the end result of two billion
(12:38):
dollars spent on research and production of years of feverish labor.
Johanna's atomic power ahead of the enemy. The energy that
generates the heat of the Sun and operates the solar
system comes under the will of human kind. White visited
(12:59):
the side dentists working on the atomic bomb. The OSS
wanted to know if the lab boys would discuss classified
information under the influence. Let's just pause for a second
to acknowledge how bonkers this is someone somewhere signed off
on an experiment to give an untested solution of liquid
marijuana to the men responsible for designing the most dangerous
(13:22):
weapon in mankind? Do you really want people who can
summon the end of the world getting high in the
middle of their work day. These weren't necessarily cigarettes either.
White injected their food and drink with it, sprayed it
on tissue paper they used on their faces. Then he
and another operative tried to get information. After all, it's
(13:44):
something the enemy might do. Thankfully, no one talked. Considering
the government's track record for disposing of national security threats,
it was for the best. Throughout his travels, White was
partnered with a Harvard law grad to it from OSS.
His name is lost to redacted documents, but we do
(14:05):
know the man would later confess that no one at
the OSS would ever accept a cigarette from him again.
While Bill sent the pair across the South cigarettes at
the ready, and their styles didn't exactly mesh. George Hunter
White was reckless. He parked his car illegally wherever he wanted.
(14:26):
He used his gun as a prop to scare waiters.
One night at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, White
pulled out his twenty two automatic and shot his initials
into the ceiling of their hotel room. G h W.
(14:47):
It took him several clips. It was like he wanted
to sign his work, like he was making history and
wanted people to know. George White, rejected by the FBI,
had finally arrived. But this was just the start of
his depraved adventures, an audition for the real work that
(15:07):
would begin. When Sydney Gottlieb first pulled out his file
(15:31):
in September, the American public was introduced to a new term, brainwashing.
It was coined by a journalist named Edward Hunter, who
was writing about the dangers of the Communist Party for
the Miami Daily News. Communists in China, Hunter road, we're
using terrifying technique to turn their people into mindless, obedient robots.
(15:54):
Edward Hunter's story scared a few people, but largely passed
without notice. Then reports started circulating of Americans who were
captured during the Korean War confessing to biological warfare. A
colonel who had been shot down over Korea admitted to
war crimes, so did other soldiers. These captured Americans insisted
(16:16):
they had dropped anthrax in North Korea over civilians. Whether
that's what really happened is still debated seventy years later.
They implored the U. S Government to end the war
and signed confessions testifying to their heinous deeds. Some refused
to be repatriated. Others stood up in support of communism.
(16:39):
Would an American soldier really denounce his own country? For
those in the highest levels of government, there was a
simple explanation. Some kind of potion must have warped the
prisoners minds, Something must have happened suddenly. Edward Hunter's warning
didn't seem so hysterical. Brainwashing was a convenient explanation, and
(17:09):
it wasn't exactly Edward Hunter's idea. Hunter was a CIA propagandist,
a journalist willing and able to spread the agency's message
when the call came, and the call did come, to
communicate to Americans that the Russians and Chinese were on
the forefront of what came to be known as brain warfare.
(17:33):
According to Dominic street Field's book Brainwash, the CIA captured
two Russian agents in Ninette. They were carrying small plastic
cylinders filled with liquid. Under questioning, the Russians said these
powerful dlug We'll tell them human into zombie. They will
do whatever they are told. The really scary part, no
(17:56):
CIA chemists could identify it. Now, imagine you're the c
i A. You've just been told the enemy has mastered
the art of chemical mind control. And it wasn't just
a report. Soldiers were actually defecting. Weird drugs were turning
up everywhere. Remember this was the era of Joe McCarthy,
(18:17):
the Second Red Scare. Paranoia gripped the agency. Every single
drug available had to be rounded up and evaluated for
possible use against the United States. The effects needed to
be known. This was priority one. Alan Dullas, the CIA's director,
(18:37):
believed this operation could determine the very survival of the
United States. In fact, Dallas gave a speech in ninety
three that touched on the topic. In the past few years,
we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle
from men's minds. We might call it brain warfare. Its
aim is to condition the mind so it no longer
(18:58):
reacts on a three wheel or rational basis, but responds
to impulses implanted from outside. If we are to counter
this kind of warfare, we must understand the technique. The
Soviet Is adopting to control men's minds. For the CIA,
(19:20):
brain warfare was no hypothetical scenario. Dulles appointed Gotlieb was
the chief of the Chemical division of the Technical Services Staff,
and Gottlieb promptly got to work. His staff of CIA
and Army chemical scientists raced to evaluate drugs for their
mind controlling potential. The drugs were a new challenge for Gotlieb.
(19:41):
In the early days, CIA chemists worked on the sort
of thing you'd find in a kid's spy movie, stink
bombs and exploding cookie dough. But under Gottlieb, the work evolved.
Operating from an Army base in Fort Dietrich, Maryland, his
team brewed countless recipes of sabotage from by chilling hum
toxins too paralyzing agents. They formulated deadly liquids from shellfish
(20:05):
toxins and crocodile bile, and the herbal stuff things like
mescaline and marijuana were combed for their truth seeking properties.
No question was too outrageous. Could they dissolve a concrete
wall with a chemical? Could they induce amnesia? The projects
had code names like Bluebird because they wanted tight lipped
(20:25):
in formants to sing. Gottli was unassuming in appearance, tall, thin,
with a stutter, but he was ruthless about his work.
An absolute monster, and he ushered in a horrifying chapter
(20:45):
of American history. In ninety one, when four Japanese men
were suspected of working for the Soviet Union, Gottlieb escorted
a group of scientists to Tokyo. The team injected the
men with stimm lens and depressants until they confessed. They
were tortured without a trial, without anything resembling justice. All
(21:10):
four men were executed and dumped into Tokyo Bay. Gottlieb
repeated the protocol with twenty five prisoners of war in
North Korea. They refused to renounce Communism, they too, were executed.
(21:30):
Gottlieb would even board a plane headed for the Congo
with an unknown toxin meant to assist in the CIA
sanctioned assassination of the country's prime minister. Gottlieb wound up
throwing the substance in the river because too much time
had passed and it had grown unstable, but the prime
minister would live just another few weeks before he was
(21:52):
reported dead. The CIA denied having anything to do with it.
Dallas had officers pursuing non chemical means to hypnosis, electroshock therapy,
brain surgery, and as they worked, the CIA inched closer
to their goal of brainwashing someone, convincing someone to act
(22:14):
in a manner contrary to their nature. A CIA psychiatrist,
for example, successfully induced an office secretary into a state
of sleep. Then he told another secretary to wake her up,
and if she couldn't, she should pick up the gun
and shoot. The secretary couldn't wake up her colleague, so
(22:35):
she picked up the gun, took aim, and fired. Of course,
it wasn't loaded. While homicidal secretaries seemed like a promising start,
this kind of experimentation could only go so far. After all,
these were government employees who had agreed to be subjects.
On some level, they were complicit, They wanted to follow orders.
(23:01):
It would be another matter entirely to coerce the enemy
into confessing, and no external force seemed capable of doing that.
It had to be something chemical, something to make the
brain pliable, malleable, something that left it impressionable. Remember, Americans
(23:24):
were coming home denouncing domestic ideals, turning their backs on
the country, and the CIA wasn't just in the business
of identifying intelligence threats. They were, in many ways a
defense agency. The enemy was waging a war of neurons now,
and Alan Dallas believed the fate of the United States
of America rested on it. So that's where Sidney Gottlieb
(23:48):
found himself surrounded by psychologists looking to hack into brains
through brute force. The stakes impossibly high. He kept looking
at files, hoping to find a trace of something promising.
He rewound back to the Office of Strategic Services and
to George White, who had already been tasked years prior
with finding a truth drug and if his experience with
(24:12):
August del Gracio as any indication White had found it,
the very same drug White had spent his days arresting
people for was the same thing he was dosing people
with across the country, you know, for the sake of
democracy and a little later for fun. Part three, Meeting
(24:45):
of the Minds. Gottlieb's interest in White came at a
crucial time for the narcotics agent. There was an opening
for the district supervisor's job in New York. White was
so certain he'd be selected for duty that he started
moving into the vacant office, hanging pictures up on the wall.
He stayed there for weeks until word came in his supervisor,
(25:07):
Harry Anslinger, couldn't give him the job. New York Governor
Thomas Dewey despised White. White had stated the mafia was
trying to bribe the government to get Lucky Luciano out
of prison in order to help the Allied invasion of Italy,
which fairly directly implicated Dewey. Dewey was the one who
commuted Luciano's sentence. White had never forgotten what Little Loggie
(25:31):
had said about Luciano, and he wanted to nail someone
for it. Unfortunately, it was a bad political move. Fingering
Dewey put White in the crosshairs of some powerful people.
This won't be the last time Dewey causes problems for White,
and once again George White was denied an opportunity he
(25:52):
felt he deserved. But Sydney got leave. He had no
such concerns. To Gottlieb, George White was everything he could
ever ask, a perfect soldier for brain warfare. Not only
did White have extensive narcotics experience, he was a trained
killer beyond little Loggie, White maintained a network of underworld associates.
(26:18):
He was a conduit to a world Gottlieb wanted to exploit.
Who better to experiment on than society's unwashed masses the pimps, prostitutes,
drug dealers, users, and mafia cronies, and George White had
access to all of them. Even if the subjects found
out and wanted to complain, they'd never go to the police.
(26:39):
Silence was their universal trait. Gottlieb knew he needed White
someone to take his lab theories and test them on
the streets. Of course, one federal agency doesn't simply plunder
the employees of another federal agency without going through the
proper channels, So Gottlieb called it's boss Harry Anslinger to
(27:01):
get his blessing. Anslinger, who was busy telling the press
heroin was now the number one drug scourge in the country,
didn't have a problem with it. White had long been
among his favorite agents. He told Gotlieb if he wanted
White part time, that was fine with him. He didn't
realize the CIA would soon become White's all consuming obsession.
(27:25):
In early nineteen fifty two, Gottlieb finally met White in Washington.
It was the real life equivalent of the Emperor recruiting
Darth Vader. The CIA chemist would later describe the man
he shook hands with as gruff and loudish, but who
could turn urbane to a point of eloquence. Gottli was
experiencing the dichotomy of White for himself. Rather than sit
(27:51):
in a conference room, White suggested another way of getting
to know one another. He invited Gottlieb to accompany him
to Boston, where he was working on an investigation concerning
a small business owner and millionaire who claimed to be
working real estate but was clearly profiting from a heroin
ring connected to a New York crime family. On the
way there, they talked business. I've read about the marijuana
(28:13):
experiments you did for the U. S S. It's fascinating stuff.
I'm knocked my own ass out. You know, do you
think it's less than ideal for our purposes? You need
to tell me what your purposes are, so Gottlieb did.
He explained the agency's suspicions that the Soviets had a
truth drug in their arsenal and that the country was
(28:33):
under substantial communist threat. Some subversive action was needed, actions
sanctioned by CIA director Alan Dulles, who had the blessing
of President Dwight Eisenhower. The specifics were up to Gottlieb.
There are a lot of drugs with potential, but we
need to be careful of blowback. I mean, if someone
(28:54):
catches on you drug them, then maybe they'd go to
the police. A criminal might not no, and you know
what else, I am the police. Gotlieb and White got along.
White told Gottlieb about his frustrations over being passed up
(29:16):
for government jobs in the past, the feeling he wasn't
good enough, and Gottlieb understood the man with a club
foot had been rejected for military service. He knew the
sting of rejection. Gottlieb walked away from his encounters with
White feeling very good about his potential as a CIA consultant,
(29:37):
and that title wasn't plucked from thin air either. If
Gotlieb could actually follow through on its plan to drug
random civilians, he needed a certain distance from White. He
needed to be able to say, George White doesn't work
for the CIA, just in case things went wrong. And
this isn't exactly a spoiler but things were about to
(29:57):
go very, very wrong. A company man, Gottlieb, reached out
to his supervisors to get the necessary clearances to officially
enlist White. But the intelligence world is murky. Gotlie didn't
know that another CIA officer, James Angleton, had already contacted
White for an earlier drug project. Angleton didn't mention it,
(30:21):
and neither did White. Gottlieb would later say it was
all part of the duality of intelligence work in the CIA.
They even sneak around on one another. When Gottlieb formerly
offered White the job, White had to submit to a
CIA background check, and while he undoubtedly had a colorful past,
(30:45):
the check lasted for a very long time. One month,
two months, then six months. The CIA's personnel department seemed
to be hung up on George White, and White thought
he knew why. Couple of crew cut pipe smoking punks
had either known me or heard of me during the
OSS days and had decided I was too rough for
(31:07):
their league and promptly blackballed me. White had little love
for the starched collars of federal officers. To White, they
didn't get their hands dirty the way he did. Agents
locked themselves in offices reading reports while White was dodging
bullets and making cases. One CIA officer would later say
(31:28):
White was friends with criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers. They were
a little in awe of him, a little scared, and
a little dismissive. Officials may have delayed his application because
George White was a wrecking ball, but there was also
some reluctance in handing over full control of the drug
experiments to Gottlieb. The Office of Scientific Intelligence wanted eyes
(31:53):
on the projects, so did the Office of Security. There
were clearly people within the CIA who didn't want Gottlieb
to have the unchecked authority he wound up with. And
this part it's important to remember. The chain of command
wasn't the CIA, Gottlieb and White. This whole thing was
Gottlieb show run. However he saw fit. White only had
(32:18):
to answer to him. If gottlie was watching White, well,
who was watching Gottlieb. No one, Alan Dulles had given
him total, unrestricted freedom. There was just one wrinkle to
recruiting White. At the moment George White was sitting in jail.
(32:44):
At first, Gotlieb thought White had been caught with a
few drug samples he had innocently passed to him during
one of their meetings, but then he was told the truth.
White had actually been thrown in a cell for contempt
of court. In front of a judge, he refused to
name an informant a grand jury. White told the judge
that the last time one of his informants had been identified,
(33:05):
the man wound up dead in an alley. Gottlieb sprang
into action, getting White legal counsel. The lawyer ultimately advised
White to name the man in a closed door session.
While it's not typical to do your recruiting from a
jail cell, Gottlieb saw it as a sign of White's valor.
This was a man who couldn't be shaken from his
core values. On January one, nineteen fifty three, Sydney Gottlieb
(33:32):
made it official. George White was a CIA consultant. The
man who had resented the organization for rejecting him over
and over was now bestowed with all of its powers.
In his diary, White wrote a brief note, gottli proposes,
I'd be a CIA consultant. I agree. Think about that
(33:54):
statement for just a minute. Does it sound unusual to you,
Gottlieb proposes ib as CIA consultants. I agree. In what
could be considered his first pertinent act as a CIA consultant,
White had just written down the real name of his supervisor.
This wasn't something you were supposed to do. Dating back
(34:18):
to Camp X, White had known the value of keeping
names out of written material. It was espionage one oh one.
But just a few minutes into his role in one
of the most well guarded secrets in American intelligence, White
was scribbling names down. It was a reckless thing to do.
It broke a rule. It wasn't the only rule George
(34:39):
White was about to break next time. On Operation Midnight Climax.
In one of their first meetings, Sidney Gottlieb handed White
an ampull of LSD. This could be the key to everything,
providing White was willing to make some bold moves on
(35:01):
behalf of his country. Without knowing it, White and Gottlieb
were about to usher in the psychedelic age. White looked
at the ampule and his mind started to turn. He
put it in his pocket like a bullet loaded into
a chamber, and then he went off in search of
a target. Operation Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown.
(35:37):
This show is written by Jake Ross and editing, sound
design and mixing by Ernie indur Dat and Natasha Jacobs.
Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by
Austin Thompson and MAURICEA. Brown Show. Logo by Lucy Kingtonia
Special thanks to David Crumholtz, Vanessa Crumholtz, Ted Ramie and
(35:59):
Jason Simpson. Julian Weller is our supervising producer. Our executive
producers are Jason English and Mangesh had Ticketer. See you
next week.
What do you wear when a mobster comes over for
a drink? Do you expect to be padded down to
make sure you're not wearing a wire? What if he
already knows you're a cop? Do you dress up? Maybe
a tweed suit and tie. It's hard to figure out
what mafia casual is, especially when you're a narcotics officer.
So we don't know what George White was wearing when
(00:27):
the mobster came to his door. That part wasn't in
the file. But when Sydney got leave, the CIA's chief
chemist and head of the MK Ultra drug experimentation program
pulled the confidential report on George White. This is what
it said about that May meeting. First, White took a
(00:53):
cigarette pack and began knocking out a few of the
smokes onto a table nearby. He had a vial of
liquid th hc acetate. Holding up the vial to the light,
White plunged a syringe into the top, piercing the rubber
seal and drawing the solution through the needle. Then he
pierced the syringe into the cigarette, then another. He did
(01:17):
this patiently, one at a time, making sure the solution
drenched the tobacco. Every time he finished with a cigarette,
he put it in a shot glass vertically so any
excess liquid would drain out, And once the smokes were dry,
he returned them to the pack like they've never been touched.
(01:39):
Then he put a brand new cellophane wrapper on the
box like it was unopened, like it had just tumbled
out of a dime store vending machine. White kept his
own untampered cigarettes separate. It's probably safe to say he
smoked one or two before he heard the knock at
the door. In walks August del Gracio, a k A.
(02:02):
Little Aggie. He strolls in like he's been there before.
That's because he has. Even though White and Little Aggie
are on opposing sides of the law, White the celebrated
narco agent and Aggie a made man, the two have
grown close. A few years prior, White could have arrested
(02:23):
Little Aggie in an opium bust, but he let him go.
It's a weird way to bond. But then again, White
needed sources, and Little Aggie was connected Lucky Luciano Meyer Lansky.
He knew them all. The two started hanging out, going
to each other's homes. They shared drinks, played chess, so
(02:47):
when Little Aggie came over that afternoon, it was business
as usual. They knocked a few back and made small talk.
I want to smoke, Aggie here, you're a guest. Save
them for later, Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, I'll take a smoke.
(03:13):
Listen to you. I got a guy poked outside waiting
for me, So I got maybe twenty minutes. Sure. Little
Aggie takes a drag. He feels relaxed, more relaxed than
he's ever been, and he starts to talk and talk
about infourmants he'd been forced to kill, about men he
could have murdered if White needed them to disappear, about
(03:36):
a top secret plan to use the notorious mobster Lucky
Luciano to help with the Allied occupation of Italy during
the war. Geo anything I'm telling you, I know, Loggy.
Do you repeat anything at all? It would get me killed.
You understand that I'm dead. It's a doornail, I know, Boggy.
(04:01):
You don't have to worry. You can trust me. The
fuck the funk you say that for? Say? What dead?
Is it doing nail? Why is it doingaille gotta be dead?
I don't know the one one on the cigarette. Shit,
I got it, I gotta go. I got a guy outside.
I only got twenty minutes. You've been here over two hours, Aggie. Well,
(04:26):
now it really gotta fucking go. This meeting, which George
White dutifully recorded in his diaries, was the beginning of
something big. Nine years later, this all appears in the
report that Sydney Gottlieb is looking through, and at that
(04:47):
moment got Leave decides there's no better man to handle
his top secret search for a truth drug than George White.
If George White could manipulate a mobster sworn to protect
the secrets of the Familia with an old fashioned wartime
truth serum, what could he do with something potent? What
(05:09):
secrets could he uncover with the full support of the
CIA and a supply of L s D. The world
was about to find out from my Heart radio, this
(05:50):
is Operation Midnight Climax. And I heard original podcast. I'm
Noel Brown and this is chapter two Brainwash, Part one,
Criminal Friends. What was George White up to before he
landed on the CIA's radar. It's all on the report
(06:10):
on Sydney Gottlieb's desk in ninety three, George White was
working for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. He's
been traveling the globe on all sorts of crazy missions,
from arming insurgents in Africa to finding out where, when,
and how drug smugglers are getting their illicit goods into
the US. Then one day White gets a call from
(06:32):
the head of the OSS, Bill Donovan. He's known as
wild Bill, and Wild Bill has a special request. Scientists
at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington have developed an intriguing
drug from one of the primary compounds in marijuana liquid THHC.
But this isn't just a joint in liquid form. It's
(06:55):
highly concentrated, the way dish soap promises to clean fifty
plates with one drop. A few puffs and you're gone.
In the preliminary tests, subjects given the extracts start talking freely,
divulging all sorts of information. Wild Bill has a hunch
this could be the fabled truth drug the government has
been looking for, the one the Nazis are already rumored
(07:18):
to have in their possession, and his scientists have already
experimented with how to deliver it. They've tried it as
a vapor, they've burned it over charcoal. Finally, they settled
on a solution that could be injected into cigarettes. The
method is so smart and deceptively easy, after all, what's
(07:39):
more natural than offering someone a smoke? But a wild
Bill needs to test this out, and he needs the
kind of subjects the OSS wouldn't care about, the kind
of people the os s could overlook, so he calls
George White, someone with criminal friends. Wild Bill wants to
(07:59):
know just how talkative someone with real secrets might get,
what sort of things a mobster might reveal while knowing
the cost. After all, in the mafia's line of work,
loose tongues get removed with hedge clippers, So he tells
White to expect a package. Then he tells him how
to use it, and White agrees, but before he starts
(08:29):
calling up criminals, he tries it out on himself. White
sits alone in his apartment and starts smoking a soaked cigarette,
and almost immediately he understands. George White smokes himself unconscious,
and when he comes to, he scribbles a note in
(08:50):
his diary knocked out pretty good stuff. Brother. Once White
says on a dose that seems to relax him without
causing him to become catatonic. White Nose just who to call.
A former drug dealer, Little Aggie was reformed. According to White,
(09:12):
Aggie owned a number of bridle shops in New York,
run by his brother and sisters. He ran a clean business,
allegedly supposedly the Italian mobster at a soft spot for me.
He took to dropping by my apartment evenings to play chess,
at which he was terrible. They talked, Little Aggie laughed.
(09:34):
Under the influence, he was a different man. Sure he
spoke about heroin and informants and hits and Luciano. He'd
spoken of these things before, but never in such detail,
never so freely. One part of him seemed to be
aware he was talking too much, but the other part
didn't care. So you popped him, Well, yeah, and I
(09:56):
could pop anyone else you need to meet tube Gio.
White had two observations coming out of his conversation with
Little Aggie. For one, it seemed like the marijuana had
been a rousing success. Little Aggie forgot he had a
driver waiting outside. Seemed to forget he belonged to a
very tribal organization that would kill him for saying the
(10:19):
things he told his friend Geo. But White also had
a second thought, which he shared with wild Bill. Was
the OSS really looking to get into bed with Lucky Luciano?
The least trustworthy ally possible at the time. Luciano was
in prison serving a thirty to fifty year sentence for
running the largest organized prostitution ring in America. Springing him
(10:45):
and then asking for his help offended White in a
fundamental way. Sure, he was friends with Little Aggie, but
that was to gather information. He didn't trust a mafia
man to lead the US to victory in World War Two,
so he old Wild Bill to stay away from criminal gangs.
He said, Little Aggie had told him some concerning things.
(11:06):
I don't think the OSS is gonna let Luciana out
of President Aggie. There's some very powerful people who can
make that happen to you. You ain't see. Wild Bill agreed,
and the OSS never employed him, but Luciana would come
back to haunt White later in a major way. For
(11:27):
the moment, White had more pressing issues. While Bill wanted
him to take his show on the road literally, the
OSS tasked White with continuing his reefer madness experiment in
new and creative ways. He was sent to interrogate thirty
American soldiers in Atlanta who were suspected of being closet communists.
(11:48):
White was armed with intelligence folders on each one so
we could ask leading questions. One by one, they puffed
on White's magic cigarettes, oblivious to what was inside of them.
One by one, their defiance dissolved in a puff of smoke.
Nearly all of them gave White information he didn't have
(12:12):
before he walked into the room. The effects seemed to
materialize within fifteen minutes and lasted for thirty to ninety minutes,
just enough of a window of time to climb inside
their minds and grab what he could. Part two, The
Manhattan Project. This was the end result of two billion
(12:38):
dollars spent on research and production of years of feverish labor.
Johanna's atomic power ahead of the enemy. The energy that
generates the heat of the Sun and operates the solar
system comes under the will of human kind. White visited
(12:59):
the side dentists working on the atomic bomb. The OSS
wanted to know if the lab boys would discuss classified
information under the influence. Let's just pause for a second
to acknowledge how bonkers this is someone somewhere signed off
on an experiment to give an untested solution of liquid
marijuana to the men responsible for designing the most dangerous
(13:22):
weapon in mankind? Do you really want people who can
summon the end of the world getting high in the
middle of their work day. These weren't necessarily cigarettes either.
White injected their food and drink with it, sprayed it
on tissue paper they used on their faces. Then he
and another operative tried to get information. After all, it's
(13:44):
something the enemy might do. Thankfully, no one talked. Considering
the government's track record for disposing of national security threats,
it was for the best. Throughout his travels, White was
partnered with a Harvard law grad to it from OSS.
His name is lost to redacted documents, but we do
(14:05):
know the man would later confess that no one at
the OSS would ever accept a cigarette from him again.
While Bill sent the pair across the South cigarettes at
the ready, and their styles didn't exactly mesh. George Hunter
White was reckless. He parked his car illegally wherever he wanted.
(14:26):
He used his gun as a prop to scare waiters.
One night at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, White
pulled out his twenty two automatic and shot his initials
into the ceiling of their hotel room. G h W.
(14:47):
It took him several clips. It was like he wanted
to sign his work, like he was making history and
wanted people to know. George White, rejected by the FBI,
had finally arrived. But this was just the start of
his depraved adventures, an audition for the real work that
(15:07):
would begin. When Sydney Gottlieb first pulled out his file
(15:31):
in September, the American public was introduced to a new term, brainwashing.
It was coined by a journalist named Edward Hunter, who
was writing about the dangers of the Communist Party for
the Miami Daily News. Communists in China, Hunter road, we're
using terrifying technique to turn their people into mindless, obedient robots.
(15:54):
Edward Hunter's story scared a few people, but largely passed
without notice. Then reports started circulating of Americans who were
captured during the Korean War confessing to biological warfare. A
colonel who had been shot down over Korea admitted to
war crimes, so did other soldiers. These captured Americans insisted
(16:16):
they had dropped anthrax in North Korea over civilians. Whether
that's what really happened is still debated seventy years later.
They implored the U. S Government to end the war
and signed confessions testifying to their heinous deeds. Some refused
to be repatriated. Others stood up in support of communism.
(16:39):
Would an American soldier really denounce his own country? For
those in the highest levels of government, there was a
simple explanation. Some kind of potion must have warped the
prisoners minds, Something must have happened suddenly. Edward Hunter's warning
didn't seem so hysterical. Brainwashing was a convenient explanation, and
(17:09):
it wasn't exactly Edward Hunter's idea. Hunter was a CIA propagandist,
a journalist willing and able to spread the agency's message
when the call came, and the call did come, to
communicate to Americans that the Russians and Chinese were on
the forefront of what came to be known as brain warfare.
(17:33):
According to Dominic street Field's book Brainwash, the CIA captured
two Russian agents in Ninette. They were carrying small plastic
cylinders filled with liquid. Under questioning, the Russians said these
powerful dlug We'll tell them human into zombie. They will
do whatever they are told. The really scary part, no
(17:56):
CIA chemists could identify it. Now, imagine you're the c
i A. You've just been told the enemy has mastered
the art of chemical mind control. And it wasn't just
a report. Soldiers were actually defecting. Weird drugs were turning
up everywhere. Remember this was the era of Joe McCarthy,
(18:17):
the Second Red Scare. Paranoia gripped the agency. Every single
drug available had to be rounded up and evaluated for
possible use against the United States. The effects needed to
be known. This was priority one. Alan Dullas, the CIA's director,
(18:37):
believed this operation could determine the very survival of the
United States. In fact, Dallas gave a speech in ninety
three that touched on the topic. In the past few years,
we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle
from men's minds. We might call it brain warfare. Its
aim is to condition the mind so it no longer
(18:58):
reacts on a three wheel or rational basis, but responds
to impulses implanted from outside. If we are to counter
this kind of warfare, we must understand the technique. The
Soviet Is adopting to control men's minds. For the CIA,
(19:20):
brain warfare was no hypothetical scenario. Dulles appointed Gotlieb was
the chief of the Chemical division of the Technical Services Staff,
and Gottlieb promptly got to work. His staff of CIA
and Army chemical scientists raced to evaluate drugs for their
mind controlling potential. The drugs were a new challenge for Gotlieb.
(19:41):
In the early days, CIA chemists worked on the sort
of thing you'd find in a kid's spy movie, stink
bombs and exploding cookie dough. But under Gottlieb, the work evolved.
Operating from an Army base in Fort Dietrich, Maryland, his
team brewed countless recipes of sabotage from by chilling hum
toxins too paralyzing agents. They formulated deadly liquids from shellfish
(20:05):
toxins and crocodile bile, and the herbal stuff things like
mescaline and marijuana were combed for their truth seeking properties.
No question was too outrageous. Could they dissolve a concrete
wall with a chemical? Could they induce amnesia? The projects
had code names like Bluebird because they wanted tight lipped
(20:25):
in formants to sing. Gottli was unassuming in appearance, tall, thin,
with a stutter, but he was ruthless about his work.
An absolute monster, and he ushered in a horrifying chapter
(20:45):
of American history. In ninety one, when four Japanese men
were suspected of working for the Soviet Union, Gottlieb escorted
a group of scientists to Tokyo. The team injected the
men with stimm lens and depressants until they confessed. They
were tortured without a trial, without anything resembling justice. All
(21:10):
four men were executed and dumped into Tokyo Bay. Gottlieb
repeated the protocol with twenty five prisoners of war in
North Korea. They refused to renounce Communism, they too, were executed.
(21:30):
Gottlieb would even board a plane headed for the Congo
with an unknown toxin meant to assist in the CIA
sanctioned assassination of the country's prime minister. Gottlieb wound up
throwing the substance in the river because too much time
had passed and it had grown unstable, but the prime
minister would live just another few weeks before he was
(21:52):
reported dead. The CIA denied having anything to do with it.
Dallas had officers pursuing non chemical means to hypnosis, electroshock therapy,
brain surgery, and as they worked, the CIA inched closer
to their goal of brainwashing someone, convincing someone to act
(22:14):
in a manner contrary to their nature. A CIA psychiatrist,
for example, successfully induced an office secretary into a state
of sleep. Then he told another secretary to wake her up,
and if she couldn't, she should pick up the gun
and shoot. The secretary couldn't wake up her colleague, so
(22:35):
she picked up the gun, took aim, and fired. Of course,
it wasn't loaded. While homicidal secretaries seemed like a promising start,
this kind of experimentation could only go so far. After all,
these were government employees who had agreed to be subjects.
On some level, they were complicit, They wanted to follow orders.
(23:01):
It would be another matter entirely to coerce the enemy
into confessing, and no external force seemed capable of doing that.
It had to be something chemical, something to make the
brain pliable, malleable, something that left it impressionable. Remember, Americans
(23:24):
were coming home denouncing domestic ideals, turning their backs on
the country, and the CIA wasn't just in the business
of identifying intelligence threats. They were, in many ways a
defense agency. The enemy was waging a war of neurons now,
and Alan Dallas believed the fate of the United States
of America rested on it. So that's where Sidney Gottlieb
(23:48):
found himself surrounded by psychologists looking to hack into brains
through brute force. The stakes impossibly high. He kept looking
at files, hoping to find a trace of something promising.
He rewound back to the Office of Strategic Services and
to George White, who had already been tasked years prior
with finding a truth drug and if his experience with
(24:12):
August del Gracio as any indication White had found it,
the very same drug White had spent his days arresting
people for was the same thing he was dosing people
with across the country, you know, for the sake of
democracy and a little later for fun. Part three, Meeting
(24:45):
of the Minds. Gottlieb's interest in White came at a
crucial time for the narcotics agent. There was an opening
for the district supervisor's job in New York. White was
so certain he'd be selected for duty that he started
moving into the vacant office, hanging pictures up on the wall.
He stayed there for weeks until word came in his supervisor,
(25:07):
Harry Anslinger, couldn't give him the job. New York Governor
Thomas Dewey despised White. White had stated the mafia was
trying to bribe the government to get Lucky Luciano out
of prison in order to help the Allied invasion of Italy,
which fairly directly implicated Dewey. Dewey was the one who
commuted Luciano's sentence. White had never forgotten what Little Loggie
(25:31):
had said about Luciano, and he wanted to nail someone
for it. Unfortunately, it was a bad political move. Fingering
Dewey put White in the crosshairs of some powerful people.
This won't be the last time Dewey causes problems for White,
and once again George White was denied an opportunity he
(25:52):
felt he deserved. But Sydney got leave. He had no
such concerns. To Gottlieb, George White was everything he could
ever ask, a perfect soldier for brain warfare. Not only
did White have extensive narcotics experience, he was a trained
killer beyond little Loggie, White maintained a network of underworld associates.
(26:18):
He was a conduit to a world Gottlieb wanted to exploit.
Who better to experiment on than society's unwashed masses the pimps, prostitutes,
drug dealers, users, and mafia cronies, and George White had
access to all of them. Even if the subjects found
out and wanted to complain, they'd never go to the police.
(26:39):
Silence was their universal trait. Gottlieb knew he needed White
someone to take his lab theories and test them on
the streets. Of course, one federal agency doesn't simply plunder
the employees of another federal agency without going through the
proper channels, So Gottlieb called it's boss Harry Anslinger to
(27:01):
get his blessing. Anslinger, who was busy telling the press
heroin was now the number one drug scourge in the country,
didn't have a problem with it. White had long been
among his favorite agents. He told Gotlieb if he wanted
White part time, that was fine with him. He didn't
realize the CIA would soon become White's all consuming obsession.
(27:25):
In early nineteen fifty two, Gottlieb finally met White in Washington.
It was the real life equivalent of the Emperor recruiting
Darth Vader. The CIA chemist would later describe the man
he shook hands with as gruff and loudish, but who
could turn urbane to a point of eloquence. Gottli was
experiencing the dichotomy of White for himself. Rather than sit
(27:51):
in a conference room, White suggested another way of getting
to know one another. He invited Gottlieb to accompany him
to Boston, where he was working on an investigation concerning
a small business owner and millionaire who claimed to be
working real estate but was clearly profiting from a heroin
ring connected to a New York crime family. On the
way there, they talked business. I've read about the marijuana
(28:13):
experiments you did for the U. S S. It's fascinating stuff.
I'm knocked my own ass out. You know, do you
think it's less than ideal for our purposes? You need
to tell me what your purposes are, so Gottlieb did.
He explained the agency's suspicions that the Soviets had a
truth drug in their arsenal and that the country was
(28:33):
under substantial communist threat. Some subversive action was needed, actions
sanctioned by CIA director Alan Dulles, who had the blessing
of President Dwight Eisenhower. The specifics were up to Gottlieb.
There are a lot of drugs with potential, but we
need to be careful of blowback. I mean, if someone
(28:54):
catches on you drug them, then maybe they'd go to
the police. A criminal might not no, and you know
what else, I am the police. Gotlieb and White got along.
White told Gottlieb about his frustrations over being passed up
(29:16):
for government jobs in the past, the feeling he wasn't
good enough, and Gottlieb understood the man with a club
foot had been rejected for military service. He knew the
sting of rejection. Gottlieb walked away from his encounters with
White feeling very good about his potential as a CIA consultant,
(29:37):
and that title wasn't plucked from thin air either. If
Gotlieb could actually follow through on its plan to drug
random civilians, he needed a certain distance from White. He
needed to be able to say, George White doesn't work
for the CIA, just in case things went wrong. And
this isn't exactly a spoiler but things were about to
(29:57):
go very, very wrong. A company man, Gottlieb, reached out
to his supervisors to get the necessary clearances to officially
enlist White. But the intelligence world is murky. Gotlie didn't
know that another CIA officer, James Angleton, had already contacted
White for an earlier drug project. Angleton didn't mention it,
(30:21):
and neither did White. Gottlieb would later say it was
all part of the duality of intelligence work in the CIA.
They even sneak around on one another. When Gottlieb formerly
offered White the job, White had to submit to a
CIA background check, and while he undoubtedly had a colorful past,
(30:45):
the check lasted for a very long time. One month,
two months, then six months. The CIA's personnel department seemed
to be hung up on George White, and White thought
he knew why. Couple of crew cut pipe smoking punks
had either known me or heard of me during the
OSS days and had decided I was too rough for
(31:07):
their league and promptly blackballed me. White had little love
for the starched collars of federal officers. To White, they
didn't get their hands dirty the way he did. Agents
locked themselves in offices reading reports while White was dodging
bullets and making cases. One CIA officer would later say
(31:28):
White was friends with criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers. They were
a little in awe of him, a little scared, and
a little dismissive. Officials may have delayed his application because
George White was a wrecking ball, but there was also
some reluctance in handing over full control of the drug
experiments to Gottlieb. The Office of Scientific Intelligence wanted eyes
(31:53):
on the projects, so did the Office of Security. There
were clearly people within the CIA who didn't want Gottlieb
to have the unchecked authority he wound up with. And
this part it's important to remember. The chain of command
wasn't the CIA, Gottlieb and White. This whole thing was
Gottlieb show run. However he saw fit. White only had
(32:18):
to answer to him. If gottlie was watching White, well,
who was watching Gottlieb. No one, Alan Dulles had given
him total, unrestricted freedom. There was just one wrinkle to
recruiting White. At the moment George White was sitting in jail.
(32:44):
At first, Gotlieb thought White had been caught with a
few drug samples he had innocently passed to him during
one of their meetings, but then he was told the truth.
White had actually been thrown in a cell for contempt
of court. In front of a judge, he refused to
name an informant a grand jury. White told the judge
that the last time one of his informants had been identified,
(33:05):
the man wound up dead in an alley. Gottlieb sprang
into action, getting White legal counsel. The lawyer ultimately advised
White to name the man in a closed door session.
While it's not typical to do your recruiting from a
jail cell, Gottlieb saw it as a sign of White's valor.
This was a man who couldn't be shaken from his
core values. On January one, nineteen fifty three, Sydney Gottlieb
(33:32):
made it official. George White was a CIA consultant. The
man who had resented the organization for rejecting him over
and over was now bestowed with all of its powers.
In his diary, White wrote a brief note, gottli proposes,
I'd be a CIA consultant. I agree. Think about that
(33:54):
statement for just a minute. Does it sound unusual to you,
Gottlieb proposes ib as CIA consultants. I agree. In what
could be considered his first pertinent act as a CIA consultant,
White had just written down the real name of his supervisor.
This wasn't something you were supposed to do. Dating back
(34:18):
to Camp X, White had known the value of keeping
names out of written material. It was espionage one oh one.
But just a few minutes into his role in one
of the most well guarded secrets in American intelligence, White
was scribbling names down. It was a reckless thing to do.
It broke a rule. It wasn't the only rule George
(34:39):
White was about to break next time. On Operation Midnight Climax.
In one of their first meetings, Sidney Gottlieb handed White
an ampull of LSD. This could be the key to everything,
providing White was willing to make some bold moves on
(35:01):
behalf of his country. Without knowing it, White and Gottlieb
were about to usher in the psychedelic age. White looked
at the ampule and his mind started to turn. He
put it in his pocket like a bullet loaded into
a chamber, and then he went off in search of
a target. Operation Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown.
(35:37):
This show is written by Jake Ross and editing, sound
design and mixing by Ernie indur Dat and Natasha Jacobs.
Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by
Austin Thompson and MAURICEA. Brown Show. Logo by Lucy Kingtonia
Special thanks to David Crumholtz, Vanessa Crumholtz, Ted Ramie and
(35:59):
Jason Simpson. Julian Weller is our supervising producer. Our executive
producers are Jason English and Mangesh had Ticketer. See you
next week.
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