The CIA's 5 Most Mind Blowing Experiments With LSD

is a pretty sweet job title.

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CIA-Run Brothels and Drughouses

But you know what an even sweeter job title is? Official CIA Drugwhore. That was a real position (probably several, actually). Another iteration of project MK-ULTRA involved hiring prostitutes to pick up johns and return them to a CIA safe house where, without their knowledge, they would then be dosed with large amounts of LSD so that operatives could observe and record their reactions from behind one-way mirrors. This project was dubbed Operation Midnight Climax... presumably so that they wouldn't have to rebrand it as black market porno if the research didn't turn out. There were several of these CIA-run brothels--in San Francisco, Marin, New York--and at various times they had dozens of whores on government payroll. Though sadly, all free government issue drug and whorehouses were closed by the mid-60s, the research obtained there was invaluable in calculating exactly how long a man can keep a boner while being attacked by carnivorous winged mushrooms.

"Did you finish your drink, baby? Do you want to fuck me now? Do you still want to be inside of me, Larry?"

Oh, and in case you think the CIA was being at all responsible with their unfettered access to acid, whores and one-way mirrors, allow George White; the man in charge of the entire project, to describe his career, in his own words, as taken from this memo sent to his superior at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics: "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" And that is officially the scariest violence-fueled drug rant ever. He sounds like Hunter S. Thompson crossed with Conan the Barbarian. Surely he's... joking or something, right? Let's double-check this with an outside source like, say a fellow agent in Operation Midnight Climax, one Lt. Ira Feldman: "White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew. The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That's what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA." So... there you go. Operation Midnight Climax is not only verifiable, but apparently there was a man in charge of a massive, top-secret government initiative who was equal parts Jerry Garcia and Dirty Harry.

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The Nazi Involvement

This is all starting to sound like the plot to an Orwellian science fiction movie isn't it? Evil government forces using sexuality, drugs and mad science to erase the minds and personalities of innocent civilians--you throw some Nazis in there and you've got a Michael Bay movie on your hands. Oh wait... that actually happened! The precursor to project MK-ULTRA, the innocuously named

Operation Paperclip, began in 1945 when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency started actively recruiting former Nazi scientists into their burgeoning research programs. Several of these scientists had actually first been identified as Nazis when they were actively prosecuted as war criminals in the Nuremberg trials! Of course, then President Truman wasn't going to have any dirty Ratzies on his payroll and explicitly ordered that anybody officially found to have been a member of the Nazi party could not participate in Operation Paperclip. And the armed forces were totally cool with that!

"Don't worry, sir, we'll technically obey your every word! Why am I stressing the word 'technically'? Was, I? Why, no reason..."

So they promptly erased the criminal and military records of the aforementioned mad Nazi scientist war criminals, instantly clearing them of all charges. Bam! No problems here. Nazi scientists use civilians in twisted experiments to further their efforts to wipe out an entire race, and they get an all clear and a new job? And yet we at Cracked ride one little elephant naked through a middle school and all of a sudden we have to inform our neighbors when we move to a new town...

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The CIA: Mother of Hippy Culture?

Listen, we're pretty forgiving people here at Cracked. We don't like to hold grudges. We like to give the benefit of the doubt to anybody--even those sexy ladies on the corner of 24^th and Lexington that all our friends swear are actually dudes--we still give them rides in exchange for favors. We like to believe in people; that's all. So the U.S. Government hired Nazi war criminals to spearhead a worldwide campaign of uninformed, non-consensual drugging using their elite army of magicians and whores... so what? Forgiveness is a virtue given unto man by God himself. But some things cannot be forgiven. Some things are so dark, so brutal and so irredeemable that even the kindliest priest would roundhouse kick you right of the confessional if he heard you admit to them. And there's one thing that the CIA did with Project MK-ULTRA that cannot ever be forgiven. They invented hippies.

Your tax dollars hard at work.

Author Ken Kesey, widely credited with kickstarting the entire hippy movement in the early 60s, was himself a subject of MK-ULTRA's experiments. It was unknown to Kesey at the time exactly what the experiments were for, or by whom--as it's doubtful he would've been quite as stoked to join up if he'd known the government was attempting to erase his personality using Nazi science--but his participation in the MK-ULTRA drug studies was what eventually led him to start the Merry Pranksters, who first widely advocated the "mind-expanding" properties of LSD and eventually gave rise to the modern hippy. Kesey himself, of course, was a genius and a visionary, but regardless of his intentions, his actions are directly responsible for that patchouli-soaked, white-guy-bedreadlocked Birkenstock monster you can find strumming its guitar outside the public libraries of every major city on earth. Kesey began this, and the CIA began him. So, in summation: The CIA, with a little help from the Nazis, accidentally helped invent hippies while they were trying to figure out how to brainwash communists. Pour that on your granola and eat it, you zombie pinko bastards!

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Find more from Robert on Twitter, Facebook or his own site, I Fight Robots, where you can, to quote Quato, "open your miiiiind."