A man walking through San Francisco’s North Beach in the 1950s might have thought he was simply having a lucky night. He meets a woman. There are drinks. Eventually she takes him back to an apartment on Telegraph Hill, a place dressed to look suitably bohemian and disreputable for the neighborhood. There is alcohol waiting inside, suggestive artwork on the walls and nothing obvious to distinguish the apartment from countless other private rooms where people went to do things they preferred not to explain afterward.
The man does not know the woman is being paid by somebody else. He does not know microphones have been concealed around the apartment or that people associated with the federal government may be listening nearby. Most importantly, he does not know what has been put into his drink.
Then something begins to happen.
Colors sharpen or distort. Time behaves strangely. His thoughts become difficult to control. Perhaps he becomes frightened, euphoric or paranoid. Perhaps he becomes physically ill. He has no way of knowing how much of the substance he has consumed, what it is, how long the effects will last or whether anybody nearby will help him if something goes seriously wrong.
For the people observing him, that uncertainty is part of the experiment.
The stranger has not signed a consent form. Nobody has examined him for medical conditions or psychiatric vulnerabilities. There is no physician waiting to intervene. Once the evening is finished, he may disappear back into San Francisco without ever being told what happened to him. He is not a convicted prisoner undergoing some officially sanctioned punishment. He is not necessarily suspected of espionage, terrorism or any other crime. He may have been selected for no more meaningful reason than being available.
Years later, when senators tried to understand how the United States government had come to conduct experiments like these, even the director of the Central Intelligence Agency could not tell them how many people had been used. The records that might have supplied the answer were gone.
And the people running the apartment had worked for the government.
