Here’s one of those facts that just seems so unbelievable, it has to be made up. It’s not: According to journalist Stephen Kinzer (via NPR), MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax got their start when the CIA approved a plan to spend $240,000 and buy all the LSD in the world. (It’s also worth noting that adjusted for inflation, that’s around $2.6 million.)

That’s not an exaggeration, either — it was literally all the LSD in existence at the time. In charge of all this was Sidney Gottlieb (pictured), a man who was called “The real Manchurian Candidate” by The Guardian in his 1999 obituary. After experimenting with things like caffeine and marijuana, Gottlieb settled on LSD as the drug to do everything from control minds to push a person into embarrassing public situations in order to discredit them. Operation Midnight Climax kind of covered all the bases.

It’s unclear just how much financing went into Operation Midnight Climax alone, but it’s safe to say, “a lot.” Because some of the financial records survived the mass destruction of other MKUltra files, some expenses issued to the CIA by field agents have been preserved — like, says The Washington Post, a receipt for a $60.50 telephone call and the attached note: “Calls made by addict prostitute while under covert observation — necessary in connection with undercover operation…”

When information about MKUltra started leaking, it kicked off a massive investigation by the government, into the government. In 1977, The New York Times reported that Sidney Gottlieb outright refused to testify unless he got a guarantee he wasn’t going to find himself on the receiving end of some criminal charges, and if there’s a suspicious thing to say, it’s that.

At the time, Operation Midnight Climax big man George H. White was already dead — according to his obituary in The San Francisco Examiner, he retired in 1966 (although other sources say 1965) and died in 1975. So how did all this information about Operation Midnight Climax come out?

White kept detailed records of his 31 years of work with first the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and then the CIA. When he died, his widow donated all his papers to a San Francisco community college, and when the investigation got those, it was like Christmas. Not only did they learn details that weren’t in any of the other documents, but White had also recorded the names of individuals like a former Narcotics agent named Ira C. Feldman. Until the discovery of his papers, it wasn’t clear just how involved some of these people were with the program. The answer, it turns out, was “very.”

When the bizarre saga that was MKUltra came to light, life on a Senate investigative committee had to have gotten a lot more interesting since — as The Washington Post reports — they were treated to testimonies by people like John Gittinger. Gittinger was a psychologist with the CIA, and according to his testimony, he was fairly regularly summoned to San Francisco by a consultant named Morgan Hall (i.e., George White), and told to evaluate sex workers while paying particular attention to their sex lives and drug use.

It’s unclear just how many sex workers were employed by White and his operation, but thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle, it is clear how they were reimbursed for their time and work. Saying they were “reimbursed” is more accurate than saying they were paid, because at least part of their compensation was in the form of “chits” that could be exchanged when they really needed something — like a get-out-of-jail free card.

Those targeted for experimentation with the combination of LSD and sex were completely random. According to SF Weekly, there were a few ways they were recruited (albeit unknowingly): Most often, the sex workers were told to just go out and pick someone off the streets. And that was the very official idea. A 1963 memo boasted: “The effectiveness of the substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign is of great significance, and testing has been performed on a variety of individuals within these categories.”

That’s a weird kind of humble brag, but there’s something important this hints at. The CIA was also carrying out their LSD experimentation internationally, and when it came to dosing someone outside of U.S. borders, that usually came with strict guidelines that said a medical examination was necessary first, in order to make sure the person didn’t, ya know, die. No such precautions were taken on American soil, though.

And sometimes, the subjects were the researchers themselves. George H. White in particular wrote quite a bit on what it was like to take LSD, noting that “‘clear-thinking’ was non-existent while under the influence of any of these drugs.”

SF Weekly says that Operation Midnight Climax definitely didn’t stay in the bedroom, it also spilled out into the real world with some devastating consequences. Sometimes, it would be as simple as White taking his work home with him, when he and his wife would invite some people over for dinner and they’d be served more than they bargained for. Some were in the wrong place at the wrong time, like Ruth Kelley. She was a nightclub singer who refused White’s advances, and who said she later found herself at the hospital coming down from an acid trip.

Then, there’s stories like Wayne Ritchie’s. He was a U.S. Marshal having a few holidays drinks with some coworkers when he started to feel really, really bad. Bright colors swirling around him escalated into feelings that everyone was secretly out to sabotage his entire life, and from there, it turned into a determination that he was going to go out on his own terms — and he’d do it by robbing a bar.

So, he did. He was arrested and sentenced to probation by a judge that had decided to go easy on him, and he’s one of the last remaining MKUltra subjects capable of speaking on his own behalf. It wasn’t until 1999 that he heard White’s name and realized what had happened to him — a hunch he says was confirmed when he looked up the date in White’s now-public diaries and found they’d been at the same party.

Frank Olson was part of a group of scientists who worked on top secret, biological warfare-related experiments at Fort Detrick during World War II. He stayed there post-war, and when he died in 1953, it was under circumstances that were more than a little suspicious. Olson jumped from an upper floor of Manhattan’s Statler Hotel, and at the time, his family accepted the official reports that it was just another tragedy. But according to The Guardian, there’s more to it — and it might be connected to Operation Midnight Climax.

Olson had just joined the CIA, and he was working with Gottlieb and another MKUltra scientist named Robert Lashbrook. Lashbrook was in the room when he jumped, and according to The Washington Post, he was staying with Olson because he’d been previously dosed with LSD and it wasn’t going well. Lashbrook was also a close colleague of George H. White, and was the one who not only ID’d Olson’s body, but he was the one who removed a single piece of paper sporting the initials “GW” and “MH” from the dead man’s pockets.

Lashbrook’s identification of the initials as White’s real name and his Midnight Climax pseudonym have been redacted from CIA documents, in spite of witness testimonies that he made the ID. In 1994, Olson’s body was exhumed, re-examined, and his cause of death was changed from “suicide” to “unknown” (via Class, Race, and Corporate Power).