Yes, the CIA ran a brothel in San Francisco and tested LSD on unsuspecting patrons

Claim:

The CIA once ran a brothel to experiment with LSD, a hallucinogenic drug, on its unsuspecting patrons. It called the project “Operation Midnight Climax.”

Rating:

True (About this rating?)

In the summer of 2025, a rumor spread that the CIA once ran a “fake” brothel in San Francisco, California, in order to test drugs, including LSD, on its unsuspecting patrons.

For example, on July 31, 2025, a post on Reddit said CIA staff watched drugged patients through two-way mirrors (archived):

As of this writing, the post had garnered 29,000 upvotes and 870 comments. The claim appeared earlier in July on Reddit, but also on X in January 2025.

The rumor was further relayed by a 2021 podcast, but also a 2023 article from SFGate, and an in-depth report by Popular Mechanics, a monthly magazine dedicated to gear reviews and scientific and technological advances.  

A search of news reports the CIA documented and released in 2004, old newspaper clippings, the National Security Archive at George Washington University and the archive of a 1977 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing revealed that the claim was true. In fact, the CIA effort, named “Operation Midnight Climax,” was one of 149 subprojects run under the umbrella MKULTRA project. The project had been authorized at the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., at a time when the one-upmanship between the two powers led them to explore more sophisticated and riskier ways of extracting secrets from one another. 

“The MKULTRA activity is concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior,” read a 1963 memorandum by John S. Earman, inspector general of the CIA, to then-Director John Alexander McCone. It was, in fact, a vast program in which the agency investigated various substances for possible mind and behavior control. They sought to identify a drug powerful enough to lower inhibitions in a subject in order for them to give up important and top secret information — a “truth serum” of sorts.

One of the 149 subprojects was indeed Operation Midnight Climax. It was run by George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent. White had been hired by the man who led MKULTRA, chemist Sidney Gottlieb, about whom the book “Poisoner-in-Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control” journalist Stephen Kinzer later wrote.

White set up a “safe house” in San Francisco in which prostitutes were trained to lure patrons to dose them with a mind-altering drug. “The involvement of prostitutes in the West Coast activity had to do with the MO, the modus operandi of this whole drug culture,” Gottlieb said of White’s operation. The patrons were not aware they were being drugged. 

In 1977, a hearing at the Senate Committee on Intelligence revealed more details about the San Francisco safe house White ran, and named the operation. Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, described its setup, asking then-CIA Director, Adm. Stansfield Turner, to confirm details. The transcript of the exchange read (emphasis ours):

Senator KENNEDY: With regards to the activities that took place in these safe houses, as I understand from the records, two-way mirrors were used. Is that your understanding?

Admiral TURNER: Yes, sir. We have records that construction was done to put in two-way mirrors.

Senator KENNEDY: And they were placed in the bedroom, as I understand.

[Pause.]

Senator KENNEDY: Well, we have documents.

Admiral TURNER: I believe that was in the Church [committee, which investigated in 1975 and published a report in 1976 on the agency’s abuses] record, but I don’t have the details.

Senator KENNEDY: And rather elaborate decorations were added, as I understand, at least, to the one in San Francisco, in the bedroom, which are French can-can dancers, floral pictures, drapery, including installation of bedroom mirrors, three framed Toulouse Lautrec posters with black silk mats, and a number of other red bedroom curtains and recording equipment, and then a series of documents which were provided to the committee which indicate a wide proliferation of different cash for $100, generally in the $100 range over any period of time on the particular checks. Even the names are blocked out, as to the person who is receiving it. Cash for undercover agents, operating expenses, drinks, entertainment while administering, and then it is dashed out, and then the other documents, that would suggest, at least with the signature of your principal agent out there, that “called to the operation, midnight, and climax.”

What can you tell us that it might suggest to you about what techniques were being used by the Agency in terms of reaching that sort of broad-based group of Americans that were being evidently enticed for testing in terms of drugs and others? Do you draw any kind of conclusion about what might have been going on out there in these safe houses?

Admiral TURNER: No, sir.

The exchange caused hilarity among those present. The participants only referred to the apparent brothel as a “safe house.”

(Note that the “Church” committee — named after its chair Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho — resulted in the creation of the Senate Committee on Intelligence to oversee intelligence activities and prevent further abuses.)

In other words, as men would come into the fake brothel and prostitutes would dose them without their knowledge, the two-way mirrors allowed agents to observe the patrons as they reacted to the drug. “Some of the subjects became violently ill and were hospitalized,” Sen. Richard Schweiker, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said during the hearing.

The drug was LSD, as lysergic acid diethylamide is more commonly known. LSD is a potent psychedelic drug that can alter all senses, creating auditory and visual hallucinations and disorientation.

MKULTRA ran for approximately 20 years.

Sources: