Ira Feldman

Ira "Ike" Feldman was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent and assistant to George White who served as the primary procurer of subjects for the CIA safehouse drug testing program. A muscular but very short man, whom even the 5'7" White towered over, Feldman tried even harder than his boss to act tough. Dressed in suede shoes, a suit with flared trousers, a hat with a turned-up brim, and a huge zircon ring that was supposed to look like a diamond, Feldman first came to San Francisco on an undercover assignment posing as an East Coast mobster looking to make a big heroin buy. Using a drug-addicted prostitute named Janet Jones, whose common-law husband stated that Feldman paid her off with heroin, the undercover man lured suspected drug dealers to the safehouse and helped White make arrests.¹

Army and intelligence career

By his own account Feldman was drafted into the Army in 1941, showed an unusual facility for languages, and was sent to a special school in Germany where he became fluent in Russian; he later attended the Army language school at Monterey, California and learned Mandarin Chinese. He worked in Military Intelligence in Europe, where he first heard stories of George White's OSS exploits, and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. In the early 1950s he served in Korea, working for the CIA under Army cover. After leaving the service he settled in California and bought a chicken ranch before White, then the Federal Bureau of Narcotics district supervisor in San Francisco, recruited him into undercover narcotics work around 1954 and 1955.²

The safehouse operation

As White's deputy in the safehouse operation, Feldman recruited prostitutes for John Gittinger's behavioral studies and for the unwitting drug testing program. White and Feldman set up a system whereby they provided Gittinger with all the prostitutes the psychologist wanted, paying the women with "chits" that could be redeemed for favors, typically getting arrests dismissed. For these "dry runs," Feldman and White would entice men to the apartment with prostitutes, where an unsuspecting john would be drugged.¹ Feldman adopted the alias "Joe Capone," a junk dealer and pimp, to work the North Beach demimonde and steer marks to White's apartment on 225 Chestnut Street, where the visitors were served cocktails laced with LSD as part of Operation Midnight Climax and watched through a two-way mirror. "I always wanted to be a gangster," Feldman later told an interviewer. "So I was good at it." He paid the women $50 to $100 a night to bring johns to the safehouse, yet insisted, "I was no pimp."²

Interviews and litigation

In old age Feldman gave a series of unusually candid interviews, describing himself as in his seventies, five foot three, and resembling "Danny DeVito playing the Penguin." He claimed to be still working for the CIA on contract in the Far East and Korea, and maintained that he had "never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement."² He was a named defendant in Wayne Ritchie's suit against the government, brought by a former deputy U.S. marshal who alleged the CIA had dosed him with LSD in 1957. Ritchie's case rested heavily on Feldman's deposition, taken on July 30, 2002, in which Feldman made what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit described in 2006 as "a series of incriminating, contradictory and combative statements" about his role in the program. Of the test subjects Feldman said he "didn't do any follow-up, period," because "you don't give them a tip; you just back away and let them worry, like this nitwit, Ritchie."³ The court ultimately ruled against Ritchie, finding he had not proved he was dosed.³