George Hunter White

George Hunter White (June 22, 1908 – October 23, 1975) was an American federal agent. He was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) investigator, undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative, World War II veteran, and one of the men responsible for the capture of Lucky Luciano. He remained an FBN special agent throughout his federal service – while he was in the Army, at OSS, and the CIA, he was still operating as an FBN agent, sending regular reports on the worldwide narcotics trade to Anslinger.

While working for the Commissioner of the FBN, Harry J. Anslinger, White travelled around the world in pursuit of narcotics dealers and crime lords. During World War II, he trained undercover Allied operatives for the Office of Strategic Services on the fundamentals of counterespionage before they were deployed on missions in Europe, Asia, and Africa. He was also a federal observer for the controversial narcotics experiments by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of MK-ULTRA and Midnight Climax. During the "scientific experiment" known as Midnight Climax, White was responsible for dosing gangsters, pimps, prostitutes, and other American citizens with a variety of narcotics and drugs without their knowledge, and reporting their behaviors to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.

Historians today openly acknowledge the problematic nature of White's status as the FBN's only-ever "Supervisor at Large," being granted extreme autonomy by Commissioner Anslinger to travel around the world and pursue narcotics dealers, considering the fact that he is well-known and well-documented to have consumed – at least once – most of the narcotics he was arresting others for possession, and stories told about him through the years by the agents who worked for him, such as Charlie Siragusa and Ira C. Feldman, add complexity. The historian John C. McWilliams, while giving a presentation at the DEA museum, remarked:

"If ever there was a rogue elephant in the FBN, it was White. He was the FBN's most unorthodox agent. He was a loner who did not want to be responsible for a partner. His personality and performance both awed and perplexed Anslinger, who saw White as ubiquitous and always ready to shake hands with trouble... A maverick agent whom even Anslinger sometimes could not control, White was a man of extreme contradictions with an extraordinary propensity to attract controversy."

Notably, White also kept a picture of a Japanese soldier that he had choked to death in a frame, hanging on the wall of his apartment, where he could stare at it from anywhere in the room. However, he would tell friends who visited his apartment that the soldier was watching over him, staring at him from beyond the grave. Some historians suggest this indicates traits of undiagnosed psychopathy. The journalist Johann Hari wrote: "The personality test given to all applicants on Anslinger’s orders found that [White] was a sadist." Stephen Kinzer said:

"George Hunter White, as you say, was a narcotics agent in New York, but he was the kind of narcotics agent who not only lived at the edge of the law. He crossed over a lot. He used all the substances that he confiscated from people. His use of alcohol and narcotics was legendary, but he was also a cop who did pursue jazz figures, including Billie Holiday."

In later life, he served as the chief of the Stinson Beach Fire Department.