CIA wanted to control people's minds. So it had sex workers lure men into a fake brothel and drug them with LSD

The Cold War period saw the West and the Soviet Union trying to go against each other in almost everything. The two sides are said to have come up with secret programs and missions to gain control over the other. The CIA, the United States' intelligence agency, also has some of them under its belt, according to declassified documents released over the years. One of them was Operation Midnight Climax, which aimed to see how sex and drugs could get a target to reveal sensitive and secret information. Reports suggest that the operation ran from 1954 to 1963 and was a part of MKUltra, the agency's mind-control research program that was flagged as highly controversial. As the description suggests, its aim was to take control of the mind of a foreign adversary so that he would spill secrets of the enemy country. Popular Mechanics, reporting on the program, wrote that under Operation Midnight Climax, an apartment was turned into a brothel where men were lured, drugged with LSD, and their reactions to interrogating questions were filmed. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, says the reason the CIA started this was because the Soviet was believed to be making advances in psychological torture and brainwashing. Also Read: US sanctions 6 Indian companies over oil trade with Iran

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Kinzer says the CIA was shocked to see American soldiers returning from the Korean War confessing to war crimes and even talking about communist propaganda in a positive light. They were convinced that their "minds had been seized". So MKUltra was launched in 1953 with a similar aim. Nearly 100 projects fell under its umbrella, with most of them centred around drugs and other mind-altering chemicals. A chemist named Sidney Gottlieb helped the CIA gain access to LSD. Operation Midnight Climax, the most notorious of all of them, continues to shock the world even 62 years after it ended. Here's what went down in the brothel. Prostitutes were hired and given $100 for each man they lured into the brothel. They were given cocktails laced with LSD. Then the women threw around different types of questions at different intervals to learn at what stage the men were most likely to be at a point where their minds could be controlled. The experiment revealed that the man talked and revealed the most secrets when they were asked to stay longer, even after the sexual part of the transaction had ended. Also Read: Declassified CIA documents reveal plans to create an army of remote-controlled 'animal assassins' during Cold War

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Prostitutes lured unsuspecting men, drugged them with LSD

A CIA staffer once said, it was like a "boost to his ego" if "she wants him to stay for a few more hours." At this stage, what would he talk about? "Not the sex, so he starts talking about his business. It’s at this time she can lead him gently," he said. While those involved pushed the belief that it was a scientific experiment, Kinzer says it was far from one. “Operation Midnight Climax was not scientific at all,” he said. The writer says the men sitting behind the one-sided mirror "were not scientists, sex therapists or psychologists. They were sitting on a portable toilet, drinking cocktails out of a pitcher." The operation had little relevance for national security, Kinzer said. It soon devolved into a personal haunt for the CIA agency which indulged in sex and drugs at the San Francisco apartment. Even Gottleib is reported to have used prostitutes. Some CIA officers volunteered to be a part of the experiment, but only for the psychedelic drugs, Kinzer wrote.

In 1963, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff learned about the shocking sexual and toxic experiments being carried out by Gottlieb. He was soon forbidden from drugging innocent people without their knowledge, and this way, the project ended, including MKUltra as a whole. The top secret program became public knowledge only in 1975. A Senate hearing later revealed that dozens of universities and institutions had participated in the depraved experiment, testing drugs on unsuspecting people. How many people were affected by the experiment remains unknown because it was a top-secret program, and because Gottlieb destroyed almost all documentation linked to MKUltra.