The CIA has a long history of intelligence failures (allegedly, their primary job), criminal conduct, political interference and countless other abusive behaviors. The CIA is incompatible with a free society, anywhere.

This Secret CIA Program Sounds Like a Conspiracy Theory. Every Wild Detail Is 100% True.

In the late 1950s, the CIA was obsessed with mind control—what it was, how to weaponize it, and how to keep it out of Soviet hands. But instead of toiling in the lab to find the answers, the agency went in a wildly different direction: renting a San Francisco apartment, cloaking it in red velvet curtains, hiring sex workers, and secretly drugging men with LSD to see what secrets they might spill.

Operation Midnight Climax, wherein agents snooped on unsuspecting “test subjects” from behind two-way mirrors as they wandered into a fake brothel, sipped cocktails laced with acid, and unknowingly became part of one of the most ethically bankrupt experiments in American history.

Yes, this all actually happened.

Last I checked, San Francisco is still a domestic city, not a foreign state. Just sayin'.

The CIA’s Operation ‘Midnight Climax’ Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

[T]he CIA's Operation Midnight Climax, a decadelong operation that began in 1953 in which the CIA recruited female sex workers to lure men into the upscale San Francisco bordello and subjected them to scientific experiments in mind control.

The women gave every “John” — as their targets were known — a hefty dose of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, in order to distort his senses and impair his judgment. In addition to LSD, the operatives sometimes used other psychotropics. Needless to say, none of the clients consented to the drugs or the experimentation.

The wall mirrors weren’t merely decorative — they were one-way portals through which CIA “researchers” studied their unsuspecting subjects under direct observation.

According to a blog for American points of interest, the CIA agents “grew fascinated with the kinky sex games that played out between the johns and the hookers.”

...The operation was entirely defunct by 1965, but it was part of a more extensive mind-control experimentation operation known as MK-Ultra — run by the chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb — that continued until 1972.

Who is the CIA, really?