George Hunter White (1908 - 1975)

Born 22 Jun 1908 in Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States

Ancestors

Husband of Mildred Genevieve (Conover) White — married 16 Nov 1932 (to about 1936) in Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States

Husband of Ruth Emily (Miller) White — married 27 Jun 1939 (to before 1951) in Manassas, Prince William, Virginia, United States

Died 23 Oct 1975 at age 67 in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Lauren Hopkins [send private message]

Biography

Early Life

George Hunter White was born in Los Angeles, California on June 22, 1908. ^{[1] [2]} His parents were Lafayette Dancy "L.D." White, a Louisiana native who descended from a prominent family of physicians and plantation owners, and Hermine Brunner, the daughter of German immigrants, whose father made a significant amount of money in the lottery business. During White's childhood, his grandparents on the Brunner side went through a much-publicized court battle involving alleged domestic abuse; this resulted in George White's grandfather, Herman Brunner, living with the White family in Alhambra, California in the years leading up to his death in 1912. ^[3]

The White family continued to live in Alhambra as George White grew up. He had an older sister, Virginia, and a younger sister, Eleanor, who died from heart valve disease in 1922, at the age of 8. George attended the public grammar school and high school in Alhambra, and left the area in 1924 to attend Oregon State College, taking "commercial courses" and classes in sociology. ^[4] However, he returned to California in 1926 without earning a degree. His first post-college job was working with the Red Cross in Los Angeles. By 1930, he was recorded as living back in the family home in Alhambra with his parents and older sister, and working as a newspaper reporter. ^[5] White covered various crime beats for the San Francisco Bulletin, the City News Service in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Evening and Herald Express. These positions led to him becoming interested in being a part of the criminal justice world, rather than reporting on it. He took a job assisting a private investigator, H.H. Dolley, in 1933.^[4]

Military and Government Career

In the 1930s, George White took a job with the Border Patrol, which led to a position with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). He applied several times to be a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) -- however, he did not demonstrate the right qualifications for the job. White continued to move up in the FBN, holding posts in California, Oregon, Texas, and New York.

George White was first married in Los Angeles, in November 1932, to Mildred Genevieve Conover. ^[6] However, the marriage dissolved within about a year, and a formal divorce was granted in 1936. White married again in June 1939, to Ruth Emily Miller. ^[7] By 1940, George and Ruth White were living in New York City; on the 1940 Census, George's occupation is listed as "narcotics agent." ^[8]

White's work in the FBN in the 1930s had already gone beyond routine drug busts. He worked directly under Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of Narcotics, and was assigned to high-profile cases that allowed him to make a name for himself. In the mid-1930s, he infiltrated a drug trafficking organization known as the Hip Sing Tong, apparently achieving a level of trust with the members after having "hung around the Oriental restaurants until he was accepted as a regular."^[9] As noted in his 1975 obituary, White's overall personage and attitude led people to believe him honest and friendly ("For all his great bulk, Col. White was a wide-eyed sort of man, hale and very hearty...") ^[9] White took a "blood oath" with the Hip Sing Tong and stayed within their ranks for two years. In 1938, White and other Federal agents rounded up the group's leaders and sent over 30 Tong members to prison. As noted by Douglas Valentine in the publication Counterpunch, the Tong case "cemented White's status as the FBN's top agent, and subsequently involved him [in] its most important, secret investigations." ^[10]

George White was in the United States Army from 1942 to 1945. As noted in a memorandum in his FBI file, he attended "a British sabotage school near Toronto, Canada" during this time. In 1943, he left the FBN to begin working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA. In the OSS, White and other agents, "on a quest for truth serums," secretly added the substance tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (THCA) into food being consumed by "suspected communists, conscientious objectors, and mobsters." ^[11]

White got married for the third time on August 18, 1951. His wife was Albertine Calef, a Brooklyn-born department store worker.

In the early 1950s, White was tapped by Anslinger to work as a contractor for the CIA -- specifically, for the head of the CIA's Technical Division Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, and Gottlieb's project MK-ULTRA. ^[12] MK-Ultra was designed to be a test of the potential mind-control properties of psychotropic drugs, most notably LSD. While other scientists and CIA contractors were charged with dosing the substance through laboratories, universities, hospitals, and prisons, White's territory for his MK-Ultra assignment involved unsuspecting citizens in large U.S. cities. His first experiments were conducted at parties held by him and his wife in their apartment at 59 W. 12th Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village -- drug-laced drinks were provided to guests, and White observed how the guests behaved following their consumption.

White took this experiment to another level with the construction of "safe houses" in New York and San Francisco. This began the project of MK-Ultra known as "Operation Midnight Climax." White's "safe houses" were apartments equipped with two-way mirrors -- the plan was for a sex worker to bring her unsuspecting client back to the house, dose the client with LSD, and then complete a sexual act. White was to be on the other side of the mirror, observing the client's behavior after being drugged. A much-noted detail of these "observations" is of White using a portable toilet as a seat behind the mirror, and generally drinking to excess each night. White was also a user of the drugs he publicly decried.

Later Life and Death

In 1965, White and his wife Albertine "Tine" Calef White moved from San Francisco to Stinson Beach, California. White assumed the post of Stinson Beach Fire Department Chief. ^[13] As of 1966, he was officially retired from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Residents of Stinson Beach knew him as "Colonel White," and he spent time writing an autobiography called A Diet of Danger, which was never published. His papers show that he wrote a letter in 1970 to a psychology expert at the University of California - Berkeley, in which he described himself as working for "a rather obscure department of the government." He provided some information about the experiments with "various hallucinogens" that he had conducted, and explained his own drug use, as well. ^[14]

Also in the years following his retirement, White wrote to Harry Anslinger, and the correspondence provided what became White's most famous quotation:

“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, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

George White died of cirrhosis of the liver on October 23, 1975.^[15] The family opted not to have a funeral service.

White's obituary, published in the San Francisco Examiner on October 24, 1975, described White's death as "ending the long career of a federal agent and master spy who made Eliot Ness seem like the monitor at a church picnic." ^[9]

Albertine Calef White donated her late husband's diaries to the Electronic Museum at Foothills Junior College. Over time, a collection of White's papers was assembled; these are now housed within the Online Archive of California, at Stanford University. ^[13]

Sources

1. ↑ "California Birth Index, 1905-1995," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VLDT-LFB : 27 November 2014), George H White, 22 Jun 1908; citing Los Angeles, California, United States, Department of Health Services, Vital Statistics Department, Sacramento.
2. ↑ "California, County Birth and Death Records, 1800-1994," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGLW-KXZ8 : 18 January 2018), George Hunter White, 22 Jun 1908; citing Birth, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States, California State Archives, Sacramento.
3. ↑ "United States Census, 1910," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MVLZ-3TB : accessed 1 August 2019), George White in household of Lafayette C White, San Gabriel, Los Angeles, California, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) ED 325, sheet 17B, family 499, NARA microfilm publication T624 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1982), roll 87; FHL microfilm 1,374,100.
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1} Unclassified FBI file, George Hunter White. Unclassified date 08-17-2016. Accessed via The Memory Hole 2, https://www.thememoryhole2.org
5. ↑ "United States Census, 1930," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XCDM-Y97 : accessed 1 August 2019), George H White in household of Lafayette D White, Alhambra, Los Angeles, California, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) ED 1413, sheet 1B, line 55, family 17, NARA microfilm publication T626 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002), roll 173; FHL microfilm 2,339,908.
6. ↑ "California, County Marriages, 1850-1952," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K8JH-KL4 : 8 December 2017), George H White and Mildred Genevieve Conover, 16 Nov 1932; citing Los Angeles, California, United States, county courthouses, California; FHL microfilm 2,074,992.
7. ↑ "Virginia, Marriage Certificates, 1936-1988," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVB1-3T4Z : 10 January 2019), George Hunter White and Ruth Emily Miller, 27 Jun 1939; from "Virginia, Marriage Records, 1700-1850," database and images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : 2012); citing Manassas, , Virginia, United States, certificate 19856, Virginia Department of Health, Richmond.
8. ↑ "United States Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K7M8-NQ7 : 28 July 2019), George H White, Assembly District 10, Manhattan, New York City, New York, New York, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 31-828, sheet 1A, line 19, family 13, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 2643.
9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1 9.2} "Col. George White." San Francisco Examiner, 24 October 1975. Print edition p. 18. Accessed via https://www.newspapers.com/clip/37223094/george-hunter-white-obituary-1975/
10. ↑ Valentine, Douglas. "Sex, Drugs and the CIA." Counterpunch, originally posted 19 June 2002. Retrieved 17 January 2021. Accessed via https://www.counterpunch.org/2002/06/19/sex-drugs-and-the-cia-2/
11. ↑ Hooper, Troy. "Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD." SF Weekly. 14 March 2012, retrieved 17 January 2021. Accessed via https://web.archive.org/web/20201111221829/https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/operation-midnight-climax-how-the-cia-dosed-sf-citizens-with-lsd/Content?oid=2184385.
12. ↑ Clark, Josh. "Project MKUltra: When the CIA Tested LSD on Unsuspecting Americans." How Stuff Works. Published 25 June 2019, retrieved 17 January 2021. Accessed via https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/cia-lsd.htm
13. ↑ ^{13.0 13.1} Guide to the George White papers - online archive of California https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6k40059b/
14. ↑ "Operation Midnight Climax, 225 Chestnut Strreet, San Francisco, CA." Blog entry, dated 21 December 2012. Retrieved 17 January 2021. Accessed via http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/12/operation-midnight-climax-225-chestnut.html
15. ↑ "California Death Index, 1940-1997," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VGTG-KLC : 26 November 2014), George H White, 23 Oct 1975; Department of Public Health Services, Sacramento.

• "United States Census, 1920," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MH7D-2WN : accessed 1 August 2019), George White in household of Lafayette D White, Alhambra, Los Angeles, California, United States; citing ED 574, sheet 1A, line 6, family 2, NARA microfilm publication T625 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992), roll 118; FHL microfilm 1,820,118.

• Gross, Terry, and Stephen Kinzer. "The CIA's Secret Quest for Mind Control: Torture, LSD, and a 'Poisoner in Chief.'" Radio interview transcript, NPR's Fresh Air. Accessed via https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=758989641

• Stratton, Richard. "Altered States of America." SPIN Magazine, vol. 9, number 12, March 1994.

• Cavanaugh, Darien. "The CIA's Operation 'Midnight Climax' Was Exactly What It Sounded Like." Medium.com, 17 September 2016. Accessed via https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cias-operation-midnight-climax-was-exactly-what-it-sounded-like-fa63f84ad015

• Nofil, Brianna. "The CIA's Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control." History.com. Accessed via https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments