The Pad

not dedication, that's addiction. All the highlights are in the book, tales of Turkish drug busts, Chinese opium gang initiations, encounters with spies and killers. But the problem with the George White version is he left out some important details. The memories George White preferred to keep a secret, like this one. It's ninety two and George White is boarding the subway. The subway system in New York City is built to be safe, and it is safe, but that's just the

train itself. Passenger behavior is different. You can get mugged, harassed, threatened, or you can board a car with nothing amiss, no sign of trouble, anywhere, and then you can step off into a nightmare. There's no record of where George White got on, but at some point in the ride, White reaches into while maybe his pocket, maybe a briefcase. He tried to erase the details. But here's what we do know what he feels. The time is right, White sprays

an aerosol container into the air, an invisible mist. There's not much of it, just enough to affect a handful of people. The people in the car began to feel strange, I think, uncomfortable, some panic. Odds are children were on board? Hallucinations are inevitable. Did the walls start to bend? Did the air change? Did people start to hear things? Maybe they're crying or giggling or vominate. No one will have any idea what happened or why. White takes notes, He

records the panic, then he vanishes. Later he'll write a summary of the LSD experiment in his diary quote the subway test was a success. Pleased with the results, George White will do it again and again and again. He will become a dispensary of hallucinations, a chemical, says resolute in his search for a drug that could bend the will of the men and women he hunted. It started as a government assignment. It would become an obsession. That's

not dedication, that's addiction. For I Heart Radio, this is Operation Midnight Climax and I Heart original podcast. I'm your host Noel Brown. And this is chapter three the Pad, Part one in the Lab. Back in nineteen forty three, Albert Hoffman, the man who discovered LSD, was working as a chemist for sand Dos, a pharmaceutical company in Basil, Switzerland.

He was born in nineteen o six, the son of a locksmith, and considering what Hoffman wound up doing providing a key to access hidden states of consciousness that feels appropriate, Hoffman attended the University of Zurich to study chemistry and later went to work for sand Does. He quickly became interested in ergate, a fungus that was blamed for mass outbreaks of poisonings as far back as the Middle Ages, but when used judiciously and with care, it also held

considerable promise as a treatment for migraines. Attempts were being made to take what was useful from ergat and leave the harmful side effects behind, using ergotoxine, a synthetic derivative. Hoffman produced lysergic acid diethyla or LSD in nineteen thirty eight. Then he got sidetracked with other work. But Hoffman never forgot LSD. He wanted to explore it more, to see if it could be useful for something. On April sixteenth, nineteen forty three, he was working with the compound when

he began to feel odd, restless, dizzy. He left work early and went home, whereas imagination, he said, was extremely stimulated. For over two hours, Hoffman gave himself to a cascade of vivid pictures, shapes, and colors. It was a censorial experience, one that left him with a smile on his face.

Here's what Hoffman wrote to his supervisor, Arthur Stall as a kind of workplace accident report, shortly after his experience last Friday, April sixte I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed, I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours,

this condition faded away. Retracing his steps, Hoffman discovered a tiny amount of LSD had been absorbed through his fingers in the lab while he was working. It had hallucinogenic properties. Being a man of science, Hoffman felt the need to pursue this discovery, but the first dose had been accidental. He didn't know how much he had taken, so he decided to start out light, really light. He only ingested zero point to five milligrams. Hoffman thought he was being careful,

but this was far, far too much. Oh no no. In his notes, he quickly scribbled what had happened people, my teenthe taken diluted with about ten c seas of water, caseless saboteen o clock beginning, dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paraly system, desired to mouse twenty o'clock, most severe. Chris. If his first trip was a pleasure, Hoffman's second experience

with LSD tugged at the limit of his sanity. Familiar objects in pieces of furniture assumed grotesque throughout the big forms. Your lady next door scarcely rains brought me milk and of course drank more than two leaders. She was no longer be shidious, witch colored mask. Hoffman felt possessed by a demon, He wrote and began to scream, Terrified he was going insane, livid he might actually die as a consequence of the very substance he had brought into the world.

Worst of all, Hoffman recalled was the acoustic perceptions. Every noise was realized visually. He could see sounds. Despite his trip, Hoffman knew LSD held potential, provided it could be dosed properly. Sandals engaged in a series of animal experiments, observing mice on acid and cats who suddenly became terrified of them. Chimpanzees abandoned their sense of social order, fish swam in irregular patterns, spiders spun immaculately proportioned webs at low doses,

and sagging confused webs at higher doses. Drugs that could produce this kind of sensation were nothing new. People have been searching for the divine truth for thousands of years, back to the Aztecs and Mayan's hemp and peyote were thought to harbor secrets of the mind. Mescalin was the

first to be synthesized in a chemically pure environment. What Hoffman and his colleagues at Sandoz discovered was that at a low enough dose, as little as one millionth of a gram, LSD could produce a different kind of euphoria, a breakdown of the ego that acted as a barrier between the self and the road to improvement. Hoffman had grand ideas for LSD in treating addiction and as an

aid in psychotherapy. Scientists began to study it with those hopes in mind, but there was always the risk, the risk of euphoria giving way to psych catic attacks or feelings of omnipotence. Like any drug, it would need to be carefully studied and subjects would have to be observed in controlled conditions. In the wrong hands, at the wrong dose, LSD would become a nightmare without beginning or end. Hoffman soon lost his grip on LSD, and so did the

scientific research community. By the late nineteen forties, it became taboo, too dangerous to pursue was a legitimate medical treatment. Hoffman took to calling it his problem child. Well, Hoffman was never involved with him. K Ultra Sandoz was. In nineteen fifty three, got Leave heard that the KGB was attempting to buy what amounted to the world's supply of pure LSD, obviously for nefarious purposes. It was possible that KGB had already bought fifty million doses. In a panic, got Leave

dispatched one of his under links to intervene. The man reported back that Sandoz had ten kilograms available for sale. Remember LSD is activated in the tiniest doses imaginable. Gottlie bought all of it before the Soviet Union could. He spent two hundred and forty thousand dollars on the Sandos supply, and then realized his operative, as good as he might be an international espionage was extremely bad at math. Sandoz didn't have ten kilograms. They had ten milligrams. The operative

was off by a factor of one million. That's all they had made in the ten years since Hoffman discovered it. Still, Gotti bought it all. It arrived in a barrel about the size and shape of an oil drum, with hundreds of thousands of doses in that barrel, a virtually unlimited supply of nightmares that could be artificially induced. Sandoz agreed to supply the CIA with a hundred grams a week, fresh off their LSD production line, and it got Leave's insistence.

They also refused any further orders from Russia or China and agreed to inform the CIA when anyone else inquired about the drug. For better or worse, the CIA had a monopoly on l s D. From Hoffman's fingers, it went to Sandas, from Sandos to Gotlieb, and from Gotlieb to George Hunter White. No one stopped to heed Hoffman's warnings.

The biggest danger, Hoffman said, was giving l s D to someone without their knowledge in an uncontrolled setting at random, where harmless noises can turn, Hoffman said, into torment and a psychotic crisis would be inevitable. Part two Alias For George Why to immerse himself in the CIA role, He would have to stop being George White, and that wouldn't be easy. For all of his training at Camp X and the Narcotics Bureau, White still looked very much like

a cop. He had the cops stare, the cops walk, the swagger that comes with having a gun on your hip and a badge on your belt. It's a hard thing to shake, but he did it. Like a superhero. He developed a guy's for his CIA heroics a secret identity at the time, White was fond of meeting his assortment of criminals and killers at the American Museum of Natural History to obtain information, debrief informants, or threaten them with his power and influence. It was a good place

to disappear in a crowd. Inside the museum was a section devoted to gems, named after famous financier JP Morgan, a trustee of the museum and a frequent donor. In honor of his contributions, the museum dubbed the Gem section the JP Morgan Hall of Gems, or just Morgan Hall. White like the sound of that, so he took it on as Azaleas Morgan Hall. Morgan Hall was a sensitive soul in the fiction of White's mind. He worked as a merchant seaman clad in a peacoat, which helped explain

his calloused and weather warning steer here. But Morgan Hall was also an aspiring artist, a painter and sculptor. He was a supporter of the Beat generation, poets like Alan ginsburg In, writers like Jack Kerouac, artists who were resisting conservative views and taking control of the post war culture. Later they'd be dubbed Beat Nicks after the Russian Sputnik

satellite that would go up in nineteen fifty seven. J Edgar Hoover, that famously tolerant FBI director, said in nineteen sixty that communists, eggheads, and beat Nicks were among the country's great enemies. They were stereotyped as drug users who wanted to reframe the status quo of America. They were another danger to baked in moral values to the CIA that made them expendable minds. If Beatenis were viable drug

experimentation candidates, Morgan Hall was in the right place. A Fox and a Henhouse White lived at fifty nine West twelfth Street in Greenwich Village. The Hotel Albert in the village had been a haven for Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Jackson Pollock. Bob Dylan lived in Greenwich Village. It had an atmosphere. It was alive, thriving like minds crowding together in bars, in bohemian coffee houses and street corners. The smell of marijuana hung in the air. There was

sexual liberation. It was a perfect place for the kinds of activities Morgan Hall like to get into, and for the kinds of people Sidney Gottlieb wanted to dose with LSD. Imagine a doctor or lawyer racing into a police station insisting he'd been drugged. Now imagine a young man stumbling in from the village, already presumed to be high. Most of the time, New York would be White's home base until early ninet. For now, at least, it was perfect.

With money he had gotten from Gotlieb in the CIA, White rented a second apartment in Greenwich Village at one Bedford Street. After all, drugging people in his own apartment would be poor form. In writing Gotlieb. White bemoaned how difficult it was to arrange for a lease and utilities under an alias, how people wanted references and paperwork with his name on them. Morgan Hall, he said, was becoming

a bit of a Jekyl and Hide situation. And while he was right about that, White equipped the apartment, which he liked to refer to as the Pad, with a well stocked bar and plenty of paintings and sculptures to reinforce his cover story of being a struggling artist. He had murals painted on the walls, and there were other kinds of decorations too, hidden microphones and two A mirrors

connected to an adjoining apartment he'd also rented out. This was, in the language of law enforcement, a safe house, a place for the CIA to conduct clandestine business under surveillance. Here's how one observer described the place. Apartment one Sea is disguised as an artist studio, consists of a bedroom, large living room, kitchen, net, and bath. The kitchen has been fully stocked with the best of foods, silver utensils, etcetera. The bedroom has been decorated in a style attractive to

the feminine sex. The linen, closet and bathroom have been completely equipped with all essentials for use of both male and female occupants. The living room contains a well stocked bar, over which has been placed a television set. A radio phonograph combination has been purchased and will be placed to conceal a portion of a doorway which is been cut between apartments one Sea and one bat and at the top of which opening will be placed an X ray mirror.

The report added that visitors to eighty one Bedford could be compromised. White's comrade in this Cold War operation was a narcotics agent named Pierre Lafitte, whom he had often worked with on narcotics busts. Lafitte would play a much bigger role in White's life, but for now he was a sidekick. To celebrate their new assignment, White and Lafitte took a trip to Las Vegas and tried out their new weapon. They tripped. White had no hesitation, learning about

what he was dealing with firsthand. He would take LSD dozens of times in his life, approaching it with an academics attitude. He claimed a kind of immunity from its effects, insisting that unlike virtually everyone else, he had developed a tolerance Lafitte had not. He called the Vegas ex speariment

another world of visions and horrors. When the apartment had been equipped and White and Lafitte returned from their Vegas experiment, White gut dressed as Morgan Hall, sporting a turtleneck in beret. Then he went hunting. White began stalking in coffee houses and jazz clubs. He liked hanging out at Chumley's, a one time speakeasy just one block from the pad. He sat patiently at tables and bars, nodding in time with the sounds, striking up conversations with strangers. This was his

favorite part. He had already earned the trust of mobsters. The thrill for White wasn't duping people he already knew, or leveraging the power he had over them to get what he wanted. The thrill was in winning the confidence of a stranger. From there, White would spin tales of his artistic endeavors, his thoughts on politics, his experience as at sea. It was a seduction. The climax was and sex. It was someone who'd been a stranger hours before being

won over by Morgan Hall. It's easy to imagine the words of the FBI ringing in White's ears, how he was unfit for duty. Look at him now working for the CIA on the new frontier of psychological warfare. Kiss Mask j Edgar White was well read and often more culturally informed than his demeanor led on. He spoke fluent, beat nick, totally at ease, with a tone of the

counterculture movement. The people talking to White were on the fringes of society, seamen who might be involved in the drug trafficking trade at ports, artists who spoke with joints dangling from their lips, as he talked and smiled, they couldn't detect the animosity that simmered beneath his surface. The Beat generation had a reputation for drug use, opioids, weed. These people would have been terrified of George White, but they liked Morgan Hall. Well, Jackson Pollock is wonderful. But

if you're into abstract expression uts, Yeah. Man, there's all kinds of crazy shit out there. I've got some stuff, some books. You should see back of the pad. It's just a block away. I'm gay. If you are, I'm always gay. Hall and his friend would walk back to eighty one. Bedford White would not at the two way mirror mounted over the phonograph. Beyond it in the apartment was Lafitte or another colleague cradling a notebook, prepared to

observe whatever happened next. You want to drink, sure, some gin, some ice, one ampule of LSD, and then there would be time to sit back and watch the show. Where do you buy your weed? What's your dad's name? Have you ever been on the moon? What's your social Security number? Try here? Where did you buy it from? You know what? You Lucian? What about my Omansky? Are you a communist, describe the color blue to me on your wife, your

girl friend, where it does utiful flowers, beautiful waterfuls. You see him is born another drinks. Like a school report, White would write down the dosage of LSD and the subject's reaction. Were they talkative, scared, catatonic? Did they answer questions? Did they abandon discretion? Did they lose their ship? He'd take copious notes and send them all back to Gottlieb at a post office in Washington. This was the climax, wasn't it the moment that justified what George White was doing.

In a letter written years before, he described his thought process when he finished a report. It may come as a surprise to you, but as far back as the O S S. I firmly believe that all information collected in the field was sent post haste to Washington, filed in funereal gray steel cabinets by purified acolytes. Then, so the rumor went on Sunday, the high priests were gathered a kneel and pray before these repositories of sacred writings. The missionaries in the field were happy in their faith.

The fruit of their labors was being used to propitiate the angry gods. White was a sarcastic son of a bitch. By writing down the details and clinical way absolved him of responsibility. It was for the greater good. The bureaucratic forms proved it. For the first time. The CIA was getting real, unadulterated field coverage of LSD, collected and curated by Morgan Hall. Everything was going exactly according to plan,

well almost everything. It wasn't long before other people started showing up the path, people like newspaper reporters, narcotics officers, and an informant, not one of George White's informants, but someone informing on George White Part three the informant. White always wanted to be an fb EI agent, and even though the agency declared him unfit for duty, it doesn't mean they forgot about him. When White accused New York Governor Thomas Dewey of making a secret deal with mobster

Lucky Luciano, he caught the attention of the governor. Do He wanted to know more about the man sullying his name, so he asked the FBI to send along some information. They were all the typical biographical mentions along with something a little more interesting. The FBI had made contact with the liaison in New York, someone who not only knew George White, but knew George White was up to something at eighty one Bedford Street on behalf of the CIA.

In fact, it was a Narcotics Bureau agent, the same one who wrote the description of the pad. In addition to notifying Governor Dewey, the report went directly to FBI Director Jay Edker Hoover, who knew all about George White, specifically White's love of publicity for his drug busts. He wanted to know exactly what White was up to intelligence agencies love spying on other intelligence agencies. Here's part of

that report. A confidential informant of this office advised on July one that his former supervisor in the Bureau of Narcotics, George White, has become associated with CIA in an ultra secret assignment. White and the CIA have rented dual apartments at eighty one Bedford Street. In one of these apartments has been set up a bar in quarters for entertainment, while the other apartment is being used by CIA for the purpose of taking motion pictures through an X ray mirror.

White indicated to the informant that no one in the Bureau of Narcotics or the CIA was aware of his apartment or his association therewith except Commissioner Harry Anslinger of the Narcotics Bureau and top officials of the CIA. The FBI and Hoover knew White was up to something, but they didn't know what. So agents pressed the informant for more information. They were die to know what White, the Maverick dope buster, was doing in league with the CIA.

One agent even dismissed the informants report, saying it hardly seemed plausible that White and the CIA were working together. It didn't smell right. It wasn't White a maniac? What function could he serve? More intelligence needed to be gathered most discreetly. The informant continued to hang around the pad, White, seemingly oblivious to his curiosity. He picked up bits of information here and there. The recording equipment seemed odd, so

did the rumors there was drug experimentation going on. Finally, the informant managed to get his hands on two vials of liquid that were stored in the pad. One was in a screw top container, one was in the same kind of ampule used to house the LSD dosents. He immediately forward both to the FBI, who turned them over to their laboratory analysts. Here was proof White and the CIA were up to something elicit, maybe illegal. When the FBI got the lab report back, they found table salt.

The most talented chemists at the FBI were unable to identify the compound, saying only that it appeared to be some kind of organic material in a dilute solution of sodium chloride or salt. The other vial had chloral hydrate. At the time, it was a rather common sedative that was the solution in the screw top fial. Neither one was the smoking gun the FBI had been hoping for. The FBI had once again underestimated George White. An FBI

memo advised the informant to tread carefully. White it red had been told the FBI was sniffing around, and the c I a likely Sydney Gottlieb told White to be on the lookout. Leaving an ampulate deluted table salt for the FBI chemists to examine was one way he could give them the middle finger, the same one he'd been giving them for years. White may have been clever enough to out with the FBI, but he was still showing signs of recklessness. Why was White discussing the fact that

he was working with the CIA with anyone? Why, as the informant related, did White invite a newspaper reporter named Ed Reid to the pad. That's not a very covert idea. More importantly, what was White doing with the chloral hydrate the sedative? Wasn't he supposed to be focusing on the effects of LSD. White scribbled in his diary fleeting mentions of sodium pentethal are barbiturate, thought to have truth, ser impossibilities, and nembutal another sedative. He was dispensing one drug after

another like a pharmacist on speed. Much later, when Sidney Gottlieb was asked to justify the work of George White, he said that White had freedom. He could per cure any kind of drug he wanted, not just LSD, anything, morphine, mescaline, opium, cocaine. He didn't ask, and White didn't offer. Procurement and use were up to White, at least that was Gottlieb's story. But if White was using a sedative. Was it to help someone come down from a bad trip or something else?

What exactly was George White doing at eight one Bedford Street that was escaping the attention of both the CIA and the FBI. And just how far away from the mission had he departed? George White almost immediately broke off from the mission, statement of m k Ultra, he wasn't limiting himself to criminals and dealers. He released a small amount of LSD on a New York subway car, a microcosm of Gottlieb's dream of dozing an entire town. And

then there was the case of Linda King. Linda was an aspiring actress with a benefactor, a man named Irwin Eisenberg. White and Eisenberg were close friends. Eisenberg had a home in Large Mountain, New York, which White visited on a regular basis. Eisenberg was wealthy, cultured, and rich, and wanted to help King with her acting career by making introductions through Eisenberg. White met King. Of course, White couldn't help with her show business aspirations, but she still liked him.

He was just the kind of friendly face he'd see on a subway On September twelfth, nineteen fifty three, White invited King to come have a drink with him at the Pad at eighty one Bedford Street. Linda King wasn't a killer, or a dealer or a beat nick. She was a friend. But by the end of the night she was seeing things unimaginable things. White made a note in his diary King, he wrote, got psychotic. He had

dosed her with LSD. King was taken to Lennox Hill Hospital and as doctor shined the light into her widened pupils and asked her what had happened, King insisted she had been drugged. When doctors asked by whom King could only utter two words, George White. Operation Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown. The show is written by Jake Rosin, editing, sound design and mixing by Ernie Indradatte and Natasha Jacobs. Original music by Aaron Kaufman, Research and fact working by

Austin Thompson and Maurica Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Special thanks to Spencer Gibson, David Crumholtz, Vanessa crum Holtz, Ted Ramie and Jason Thompson, Julian Weller, is our supervising producer. Our executive producers are Jason English and Mangesh had Ticketer. See you next week.