Operation Midnight Climax was an MK-Ultra project in which government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA “safe houses” where drug experiments took place.

Most of the Operation Midnight Climax experiments took place in San Francisco and Marin County, California, and in New York City. The program had little oversight and the CIA agents involved admitted that a freewheeling, party-like atmosphere prevailed.

An analogy would be that of a car race where the blue car arrives the finish line faster than the red car. Here, the blue wavelength travels faster than the red wavelength.

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The following year, President Ford—in the wake of the Watergate scandal and amid growing distrust of the U.S. government—set up the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States to investigate illegal CIA activities, including Project MK-Ultra and other experiments on unsuspecting citizens.

'America’s Book of Secrets' asks the highly intriguing question: What if there is a book that serves as a repository for America’s most closely guarded secrets?

PMD is a random effect and is measured as an average value over time. At lower speeds like 10Gbits/s PMD is not significant. However, it does become an issue with increasing data rates at 100Gbits/s and beyond.

MK-Ultra also included experiments with MDMA (ecstasy), mescaline, heroin, barbiturates, methamphetamine and psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”).

Dispersionin optical fiber

Acid Tests combined drug use with musical performances by bands including the Grateful Dead and psychedelic effects such as fluorescent paint and black lights. These parties influenced the early development of hippie culture and kick-started the 1960s psychedelic drug scene.

Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, volunteered for MK-Ultra experiments with LSD while he was a college student at Stanford University.

Since multi-mode fiber has a large core diameter, it can guide many different spatial modes of light. The different modes enter the fiber and reflect off the cladding wall at different angles, which means they travel different distances, and therefore propagate down the fiber at different speeds. Because they exit the fiber at different times, the optical pulses broaden. This is called modal dispersion.

In 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story about how the CIA had conducted non-consensual drug experiments and illegal spying operations on U.S. citizens. His report started the lengthy process of bringing long-suppressed details about MK-Ultra to light.

Optical data signals are comprised of very short bursts of light, or optical pulses. When we transmit optical pulses through fiber, they broaden. This means that they become longer in duration as they travel through the fiber. If the fiber is long enough, this broadening causes the pulses to overlap and interfere with each other, which impacts the receiver’s ability to resolve the transmitted data, resulting in bit errors. This pulse broadening is due to a phenomenon called dispersion and limits the transmission bandwidth and distance. Single-mode and multi-mode fiber are each dominated by different types of dispersion.

Many of the tests were conducted at universities, hospitals or prisons in the United States and Canada. Most of these took place between 1953 and 1964, but it’s not clear how many people were involved in the tests—the agency kept notoriously poor records and destroyed most MK-Ultra documents when the program was officially halted in 1973.

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The CIA dosed the men with LSD and then—while at times drinking cocktails behind a two-way mirror—watched the drug’s effects on the men’s behavior. Recording devices were installed in the prostitutes’ rooms, disguised as electrical outlets.

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In the real world a light source is never purely monochromatic (single wavelength). Instead, it is composed of different wavelengths at varying intensities near the center wavelength, such as 1310nm or 1550 nm. This is especially true for an optical pulse carrying digital information. The wavelengths experience different refractive indexes in the glass fiber, causing the shorter wavelengths to travel faster than the longer wavelengths. The optical pulse spreads out as it travels along the fiber. This dispersion is called chromatic dispersion, and is more pronounced at higher data rates.

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MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture. Though Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the world.

The family of Frank Olson decided to have a second autopsy performed in 1994. A forensics team found injuries on the body that had likely occurred before the fall. The findings sparked conspiracy theories that Olson might have been assassinated by the CIA.

In the 1950s and 1960s—the height of the Cold War—the United States government feared that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.

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In response, Allan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), approved Project MK-Ultra in 1953. The covert operation aimed to develop techniques that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.

In a Part 2 of this series of posts, Priya described the two main types of optical fiber: single-mode and multi-mode. Now we look deeper into limitations of high-speed networks, when optical data propagates through the fiber from transmitter to receiver. We focus on fiber dispersion.

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Frank Olson was a scientist who worked for the CIA. At a 1953 CIA retreat, Olson drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD.

The CIA began to experiment with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) under the direction of agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. He believed the agency could harness the drug’s mind-altering properties for brainwashing or psychological torture.

The program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy. Sometimes the test subjects knew they were participating in a study—but at other times, they had no idea, even when the hallucinogens started taking effect.

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Under the auspices of Project MK-Ultra, the CIA began to fund studies at Columbia University, Stanford University and other colleges on the effects of the drug. After a series of tests, the drug was deemed too unpredictable for use in counterintelligence.

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After prolonged legal proceedings, Olson’s family was awarded a settlement of $750,000, and received a personal apology from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA Director William Colby.

Mike, Thank you for your kind remarks. I’m impressed with the team too. By the way, I didn’t know that you took part in the historic inception of the fiber optics industry! I’m sure you must have stories from those days. Best, Pat

The Church Committee—helmed by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church—was a larger investigation into the abuses of the CIA, FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies during and after the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

Light is an electromagnetic wave composed of a traveling electric and magnetic field. Single-mode fiber supports one propagation mode, which in turn is comprised of two orthogonal polarization modes, or states. If traveling through a perfectly cylindrical optical fiber, both polarization states would travel at exactly the same speed. However, in the real world there are stresses and manufacturing flaws in the optical fiber causing it to be non-cylindrical. These asymmetrical variations introduce small refractive index variations between the two states. Although each variation by itself is minuscule, the accumulation over tens of kilometers of fiber causes the polarization states to travel at noticeably different speeds. The light pulses then spread out in time, and have undergone polarization mode dispersion.

Single-mode fiber is not affected by modal dispersion since it supports only one mode. However it is affected by material dispersion. There are two dispersion effects specific to single mode fiber that cause the light pulses to spread out. These are chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion (PMD).

An agent named George White wrote to Gottlieb in 1971: “Of course I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

Other notable people who reportedly volunteered for CIA-backed experiments with LSD include Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist; Ted Kaczynski, better known as the “Unabomber”; and James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston mobster.

Materialdispersion

The Church Committee delved into plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. It also uncovered thousands of documents related to MK-Ultra.

Chromatic dispersion is measured in ps/nm/km. This can be read as: For every km traveled in fiber, a pulse with 1 nm wavelength spectral width will spread by 1 ps. The amount of chromatic dispersion in optical fiber varies based on the wavelength.

These revelations resulted in Ford’s 1976 Executive Order on Intelligence Activities that prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”

Pat, Just wanted to compliment your team (Priya, Vasanta and others) on the very nicely done explanations of the fiber optics basics over the years. As an old geezer who “cut his teeth” in the fiber optics industry at Corning Glass Works in the early 1980s (when the first single mode fiber order for the MCI project came in, and turned the place upside-down), it is amazing to see how far optical fiber communications technology has come. Looking forward to the next installment…. Sincerely, Mike Hartmann

A few days later, on November 28, 1953, Olson tumbled to his death from the window of a New York City hotel room in an alleged suicide.