George Hunter White, an agent at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and Ira "Ike" Feldman, a former military intelligence officer, who oversaw San Francisco experiments, noticed that subjects spoke far more freely when under the influence of a combination of drugs and sex.
[4][6] The safehouses were dramatically scaled back in 1963, following a report by CIA Inspector General John Earman which strongly recommended closing the facility.
[7] Operation Midnight Climax and Project MKUltra were considered to be so secretive that few people, even in the highest government positions, knew Gottlieb existed, let alone was conducting these experiments.
Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass.
[4] Additionally, information from Wilmington News Journal on October 15, 1978, reports from a FOIA request that, "the spy agency purchased two pounds of Yohimbine hydrochloride... by Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, the chief aide to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb."
Other objectives included finding drugs that could incapacitate entire buildings via poisoned food, which would create "confusion-anxiety-fear,"[5] and other symptoms such as headaches and earaches.
[11][4] The extent to which this widespread exposure of the public to mind-altering drugs contributed to the rise of the counter-culture movement in the late 1950s and 1960s is unknown, although Ken Kesey has attributed his role in the genesis of the influential San Francisco Bay Area psychedelic social scene that developed in the 1960s to his participation in Project MKUltra LSD experiments at the Menlo Park, California, VA Hospital.
John K. Vance, a member of the CIA inspector general's staff, discovered that the agency was running a research project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwilling human subjects.
[12] Additionally, several CIA FOIA requests revealed a collection of documents from several news sources in the late 1970s reporting information on Operation Midnight Climax.
The documents that the senate investigation committee revealed showed receipts signed by the former CIA employee for "$2,000 $100 bills that were distributed to persons involved in "Operation Midnight Climax.""
[17] Pasternak, the CIA employee, also provided the subcommittee with an account of how the activities were in relation to the CIA-funded research group that conducted human behavior experiments.
[18] The senate committee continued to investigate the issue and were able to get testimony from Pasternak, yet the information from him and others related to the project wasn't considered the most accurate, resulting in a lack of action taken by the U.S. government against the CIA.
In 1963, John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General's staff, learned about the projects "surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvoluntary human subjects.
"[16] Though the MKUltra directors argued for the continuation, the Inspector General insisted the agency follow ethical research guidelines, which brought the programs testing on non-consenting volunteers to an end.