FOIAWEAR — MIDNIGHT CLIMAX / Behind the Two-Way Mirror Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 046 — MIDNIGHT CLIMAX

The Agency kept safehouses. For a decade, two of them came with a bar cart, a lounge chair, and a window that was not a window.

The administrative end of it is dated 9 July 1952. A memorandum to the Assistant Directors, subject line “Safchouses”, states that “authority is hereby centralized and delegated” under the Confidential Funds Regulations, effective that month, for “the procurement of safehouses” — with an office, a room number and an extension listed as the place where “all transactions of the above nature will be initiated and handled on request.”

What some of those premises were used for came out in 1977, at a Senate subcommittee hearing on the Agency's drug and behavioural experiments, and in the reporting that followed. Under the operation's own name, Midnight Climax, the record describes houses of prostitution opened in San Francisco and New York City, where the point was not the trade but the observation:

“It actually opened houses of prostitution in San Francisco and New York City with the purpose supposedly being to secretly observe how unsuspecting male customers would react to doses of LSD and other drugs that were being administered to them without their knowledge… a CIA agent would observe from behind a two-way mirror… The United States government paid the prostitutes $100 a day as ‘informers.’”

The same file records a less comfortable line: the press account notes that a man died after leaping from a window.

The Director of Central Intelligence was asked about it. Admiral Stansfield Turner, in San Francisco in 1977, said the brothel drug experiments had ended some twelve years earlier and that such operations were not being run then. He went further than the question required:

“Here in San Francisco and some other places in the country, in the name of understanding the potential use of drugs to be used against our people and against our intelligence activities, there were apparently tests conducted on individuals without their consent… I can assure all of you that this activity is not and will not be tolerated in our systems.”

His remarks are carried in the released press file under the headline “CIA Chief Deplores CIA Brothels”, alongside the detail that three former Agency employees and a former consultant had refused to testify before the Senate inquiry into Midnight Climax.

The artwork is a 1950s section cut through the wall between the two rooms: the lounge as it was furnished — bar cart, lounge chair and ottoman, floor lamp, ashtray with a cigarette going, wall clock, framed picture, patterned rug — and, behind the mirror, the observation closet: a folding chair, a table with a reel-to-reel recorder, a microphone on a stand, a clipboard, and a pendant lamp. The dashed sight-lines show what the mirror let through.

Offered in eleven garment colours, printed as two different plates rather than one image re-toned. On the dark garments (Black, Espresso, Graphite, Navy) the linework prints as warm light greys over cream and tan rooms, so the wall and the two rooms stay legible. On the light garments (White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Light Green, Blossom, Chambray) the same rooms are drawn again as a three-ink screen plate for pale cloth — heavy black line work and halftone shading, a deep teal for the chair, ottoman and rug, and a red glow behind the lamp.

The QR code on the front opens the released document itself — the 1977 press file, “CIA Used Prostitutes To Administer Drugs”: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-01208r000100210004-6

Note: quotations above are taken verbatim from the released documents, with redactions and OCR damage not reproduced; where a passage is damaged it is paraphrased rather than quoted. The design depicts premises, not people. This is not an official publication and is not affiliated with any government or agency.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States government, or any other government or agency.