Operation Midnight Climax was an MKUltra subproject, run by a Federal Bureau of Narcotics officer named George Hunter White under the pseudonym Morgan Hall, beginning in 1953 in New York and from 1955 in a CIA-rented apartment on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
The apartment was furnished to look like a bachelor's flat, with Toulouse-Lautrec posters and red curtains. Behind a one-way mirror was an observation room with a chair, a portable toilet, a supply of martinis, and recording equipment.
Sex workers were paid to bring men to the apartment and to dose them with LSD without their knowledge. White watched.
The stated purpose was to study the operational use of chemical and sexual compromise: whether a drugged man could be induced to disclose, and how such compromise could be used. There was no consent, no controls, no measurement worth the name, and no ethical review. The subjects were selected because they would not complain — men picked up in bars, who could not report having been drugged in a brothel without explaining what they had been doing there.
That last point is the mechanism, and it is the only genuinely transferable finding.
The honey trap works on shame rather than on secrets. A compromised subject's silence is not bought with money or coerced with a specific threat; it is produced by the fact that reporting the compromise means disclosing the conduct. Eisenberger's neuroimaging work on social pain establishes that anticipated social exclusion is processed on circuitry overlapping with physical threat, which is why shame suppresses disclosure more reliably than fear does — a frightened person may call for help, and an ashamed one frequently will not.
There is a supporting mechanism in the arousal literature. Dutton and Aron's bridge study demonstrated arousal misattribution: physiological arousal from one source is readily reinterpreted as attraction to whoever is present. An intoxicated, disoriented subject has arousal available for misattribution and no accurate account of its cause.
White's own assessment of his career, written to Gottlieb in 1971, is the most quoted line to come out of MKUltra: where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest.
The operation produced nothing of scientific value. It was terminated in 1965. It is in this guide because the compromise-and-shame structure it was studying is still the standard method, and because the countermeasure is the one thing that defeats it: disclosure to somebody you trust, early, at whatever cost.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Blackmail Resistance Defence