The agency's search for the secret of brainwashing
The apartments in New York City and San Francisco were tarted up with red draperies, dressing tables trimmed in black velveteen and Toulouse-Lautrec posters. At night, women lured men to the hideaways and fed them LSD or marijuana, while other men watched the action through two-way mirrors and tape-recorded the sounds.
Scenes from seamy bordellos? Havens for desperate voyeurs? No, these were taxpayer-financed operations of the CIA, which was experimenting with drugs during the 1950s and '60s in a project with the sophomoric code name...