We’re years away from the Summer of Love; the Beatles haven’t even gone Ed Sullivan yet. Martin Luther King is a couple weeks away from marching on Washington. But we’ve had the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, oh yeah, the CIA has been running a top secret mind-control program for at least ten years.

It was called MKUltra, and under the orders of Dr. Sydney Gottlieb and the guidance Agent George White, the United States government engaged in a two-decade program to use LSD to alter and control human behavior. About a year into their efforts, they started Operation Midnight Climax, where using members of San Francisco’s criminal underworld, they set up a brothel, where they would covertly does the clients (as well as the sex workers and their associates), observe their behavior, and then report it up the chain. 

You can look all this up.

What we don’t know is much about the actual people who worked and frequented that brothel at 225c Chestnut Street. We do know that the CIA would expand the project to restaurants and bars throughout the country in the next decade, and also that in the years that followed, San Francisco became the epicenter of LSD use in America. Sin & Surveillance attempts to fill in the gaps, telling the story of fictional people involved in the project during a critical juncture in 1963.

In our version of history, Operation Midnight Climax is in trouble after John A McCone took over as CIA director after that whole Bay of Pigs thing. In an effort to save the project, Gottlieb has assembled a few of his colleagues to come out to San Francisco to evaluate the project for themselves, and told George to gather a group of sex workers and potential targets to show off to the Agency. Your character will be tangled up in this mess of sex, drugs and espionage, and how you get out is up to you.