Chief among them was 225 Chestnut on Telegraph Hill, which operated from 1955 to 1965. There were at least three CIA safe houses in the Bay Area where experiments went on. But newly declassified CIA records, recent interviews, and a personal diary of an operative at Stanford Special Collections shed more light on the breadth of the San Francisco operation.
Accounts of what actually occurred in San Francisco have been sparse and sporadic. There have been other reports on the CIA's doping of civilians, but they have mostly dished about activities in New York City. John Marks expertly chronicled more of the operation in his 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Seymour Hersh first exposed MK-ULTRA in a New York Times article in 1974 that documented CIA illegalities, including the use of its own citizens as guinea pigs in games of war and espionage. Other San Franciscans were unsuspecting participants in a strange research program in which the government effectively broke the law in an effort to fight the Cold War. Ritchie's story is certainly peculiar, but not unique. He resigned from the Marshals Service, pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery, paid a $500 fine, and was sentenced to five years' probation. The judge went easy on him and Ritchie avoided prison. Ritchie says he had expected to get caught or killed. He awoke to a pair of police officers standing over him. When Ritchie turned around, a patron hit him over the head and knocked him unconscious. A waitress came up behind him and asked Ritchie what he was doing. But the cop had suddenly become the robber. Before joining the marshals, Ritchie served five years in the Marines and spent a year as an Alcatraz prison guard. After swallowing down the final drops, he pointed his revolver at the bartender and demanded money. Out of his skull on a hallucinogen and alcohol, Ritchie rolled into the Shady Grove in the Fillmore District, and ordered one final bourbon and soda. “I thought, 'I can get enough money to get my girlfriend an airline ticket back to New York, and I'll turn myself in.' But I was unsuccessful.” I'll just go out and get my guns from my office and hold up a bar,” Ritchie recalls. “I decided if they want to get rid of me, I'll help them. 20, 1957, Ritchie returned to his office in the Post Office Building and retrieved two service revolvers from his locker. The whole world was against me.”Īfter the day had bled into night on Dec. I got down to where I thought everyone was against me. “I remember that night very clearly, yes I do,” he said in a recent interview. As he drank his way back to Seventh and Mission, Ritchie concocted a plan that would change his life. From there, he hit a few more bars, further cranking up his buzz. Frantic, he ran away again, this time to the Vagabond Bar where he threw back more bourbon and sodas. She told him she was growing tired of San Francisco and wanted to return to New York City. His girlfriend was there, but an argument erupted. He fled to his apartment and sought comfort from his live-in girlfriend. Then he obsessed about the probation officers across the hall and how they didn't like him, either. Ritchie feared the other marshals didn't want him around anymore.
marshal excused himself and went upstairs to his office, where he sat down and drank a glass of water. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors around him. The red and green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly. They were cracking jokes and swapping stories when, suddenly, the room began to spin. Post Office Building on Seventh and Mission streets. He was drinking bourbon and soda with other federal officers at a holiday party in 1957 at the U.S. It's been over 50 years, but Wayne Ritchie says he can still remember how it felt to be dosed with acid.
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