The CIA Guide to Ruining Someone's Life: Part 2

An American Secret and the Edge of Madness

“Murder is not morally justifiable. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”
-CIA manual on assassination, 1953

“We have no answer to the moral issue.”
-Richard Helms, Head of CIA Clandestine Services, on Project MKULTRA, 1964

Decades before the Bush administration and early on in their careers, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were faced with the task of dealing with a cover-up in the White House. The Rockefeller Commission in 1975 exposed for the first time that Frank Olson, an Army biochemist, had died in 1953 after being dosed by the CIA with LSD. The Olson family had been completely unaware of the CIA’s role. The White House was concerned regarding a potential wrongful death lawsuit from the family. Cheney wrote to Rumsfeld on July 11, 1975: “there are serious legal questions that will have to resolved concerning the Government’s responsibility, the possibility of additional compensation, and the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit.” Instead of providing the family with the full story, Cheney recommended that the President diffuse the situation by meeting “personally with Mrs. Olson and her children to offer an apology on behalf of the Government.” Another memo to Rumsfeld warned that at “trial it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement or judgement reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover-up the activities of the CIA.” The Department of Justice argued at the time that the existing death benefits in place were enough and that Olson had been “injured ‘in the course of his official duties’ and, therefore, the family is entitled to survivors’ benefits and nothing more.” After reviewing documents provided to them regarding the case, the family came “to believe that Frank Olson was killed by the CIA.” As explained in a memo to the CIA Director on August 11, “Their theory is bottomed on the assumption that Frank Olson was a security risk…the file seems to be more concerned about security than how Olson actually died.”

There was also the matter of conflicting accounts regarding his death. Olson had been scheduled to be sent to a psychiatric hospital, Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland and the institution was notified of the cancellation following his death. Staff member Dr. Robert W. Gibson remembered receiving a call from what he thought was CIA officer Robert Lashbrook: “The man said that during the night, he had awakened and that his friend was standing in the middle of the room. He started to say something to him and as he did, Olson ran and hurled himself through the window. He said that he had died from the fall, and therefore, they would not be coming.” Lashbrook’s official account that he had written for the Agency in 1953 instead had Lashbrook sleeping through the entire incident, awakened by the sound of breaking glass. Lashbrook denied Gibson’s account; however, given the strange circumstances, Gibson remained convinced of his memory and remembered wanting to give the caller psychiatric assistance for having witnessed his colleague’s death. “This was such an extraordinary incident that it had to have been Lashbrook calling me,” he said. “There couldn’t be a coincidence like that.”

The Olson family met President Gerald Ford on July 21, 1975 and they later accepted $750,000 in compensation from the U.S. Government, giving up their right to pursue any further lawsuits related to Frank Olson’s death. Frank’s son Eric had initially been told in 1953 that his father “jumped or fell” to his death and this made little sense to him even as a nine-year-old given the inherent contradictions between those two words. He spent the ensuing decades trying to discover the truth of what happened on the thirteenth floor (often mistakenly referred to as the tenth floor given the room number 1018A) of the Statler Hotel in New York on November 28, 1953. In the years that followed, Eric was disturbed to find a declassified CIA manual, written the same year as his father’ death, describing the following assassination technique:

For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [redacted] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness,” no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to ensure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

The Student

In October 1952, Stanley Glickman, an American student living in Paris, France was drinking coffee at the Select Café. Wanting to become an artist, he had recently succeeded in placing one of his works at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A group of Americans approached him, offering him a drink, and he refused. After repeated attempts, he relented and after drinking the liqueur handed to him, he soon began experiencing “a sense of unusual powers, a warping of distance, a melding of colors, and difficulty in speech.” The Americans took Glickman to a hospital, where according to him he was treated with drugs and a series of electroshocks. His girlfriend signed him out of the hospital a week later and he suggested she return to Canada, telling her that she would ruin her life if she were to stay with him. In the ensuing ten months, he lived as a recluse, fearing being poisoned again, until his parents brought him back to the United States. There he lived out the rest of his days in an apartment in Manhattan, running an unprofitable antiques shop, never painting again and never pursuing another relationship. According to one account of his life, “Just getting through each day seemed a challenge. He would walk his two big red dogs Charlie and Gent, and, after they died, a smaller black one called Kuma. Even in an area known for street characters, he cut a striking figure, with his shock of white hair and a red-and-black silk scarf, knotted like a cravat. But most of the time, he just sat on his step with a cup of coffee…Nobody knew for sure who he was. No neighbor ever entered his apartment.”

Glickman believed that he had been dosed with LSD by the CIA. His experience had been extreme and as Dr. Oscar Janiger, an early proponent of the drug, explained, “LSD favors the prepared mind.” Glickman remembered one of the American men had walked with a limp. As Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Agency’s efforts in unwitting drug experiments with LSD at the time, had a club foot since birth, Glickman suspected he had been behind the incident. Bringing a lawsuit against Gottlieb and others in the CIA in the 1980s, Glickman alleged that he had been drugged “as part of the CIA program to test, on unwitting persons, the effects of L.S.D. as a potential weapon, a program initially named ‘Bluebird,’ later renamed ‘Artichoke,’ and ultimately named ‘MKULTRA.’” In attempting to dismiss the claim, the U.S. Government claimed in part that it had “not waived its sovereign immunity for batteries committed before 1974.” The lawsuit continued into the 1990s even after Glickman’s death, with a court ruling in 1998 that a case against Gottlieb could proceed. This trial ended with Gottlieb’s death on March 7, 1999. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh visited Gottlieb in his final days. “It was very strange. Gottlieb was living as if he was in an ashram in India…He was trying to absolve himself, to expiate…He was a destroyed man, riddled with guilt.”

In The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks commented that he had been approached by numerous individuals in writing the book claiming to have been drugged by the CIA. It was impossible in his estimation to determine which cases were real or imagined. “Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this whole technique,” he wrote, “is that anyone blaming his aberrant behavior on a drug or on the CIA gets labeled a hopeless paranoid and his case is thrown into the crank file. There is no better cover than operating on the edge of madness.”

The Good Guy Who Failed as a Bad Guy

On December 20, 1957, Wayne Ritchie, a Marine Corps veteran and deputy U.S. marshal, was attending a Christmas party for law enforcement officials at a federal office building. Drinking throughout the evening, he became to experience symptoms not normally associated with alcohol. He began to feel extreme paranoia: “I became depressed and was overcome with a sense that all my friends and acquaintances had turned against me,” he recounted. He left the party and hatched a plan to obtain money for his girlfriend to purchase a plane ticket to New York City, something she had once jokingly requested. He found his two service guns at home, drove to a bar and demanded the contents of their cash register. In his delusional state he was easily distracted and hit over the head by a patron and knocked unconscious. Regaining consciousness, he tearfully requested if the responding officer could spare a bullet to save the government the hassle and money of his case. The San Francisco Chronicle titled his foray into lawlessness as “Good Guy Fails as Bad Guy” two days later. For Ritchie, never having previously run afoul of the law, for four decades the incident remained a period of momentary insanity with no explanation.

In the decade prior to the Ritchie incident, George Hunter White was working as an undercover operative with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, attempting to break up drug trafficking rings in countries such as Iran, Turkey, France, and Italy. He had for years wanted to join the CIA and Project MKULTRA provided him with that chance. In previously working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s predecessor, White had already participated in the search for a truth serum to use on prisoners of war or captured spies. He was known by his colleagues for wanting to have a good time and he let nothing stand in his way. After an interrogation in a New Orleans hotel room, a lawyer recalled White laying on a bed, taking out his pistol and shooting “his initials into the molding that ran along the ceiling. He used his .22 automatic, equipped with a silencer, and he emptied several clips.” While the search for a truth serum then had been unsuccessful, he never shied away from using the drugs himself, once downing a vial of cannabis indica and passing out. Approached by Sidney Gottlieb in June 1952, White was an ideal candidate to field test drugs for which their potential usefulness in an espionage context were unknown. The CIA had worked up a plan for the testing to occur in a New York safehouse. White’s diary recorded that Gottlieb had proposed he “become a CIA consultant—I agree.” Gottlieb also met that September with one of White’s special assets, Pierre Lafitte, for a training session at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, where Lafitte had worked undercover as a bell captain, giving him access to over 1,000 rooms in the building. In October, over dinner White and Lafitte were informed that they would be provided with LSD by Dr. Harold Abramson to run experiments out of their safehouse, and submit monthly reports via a mail drop or through Robert Lashbrook, Gottlieb’s deputy, during his New York visits.

Gottlieb remembered White conducting “a good number of experiments on people he encountered in his professional work, criminals, narcotics dealers, gangsters...He told me a number of times that the sessions yield a fair amount of useful information, some very useful information.” Named MKULTRA Subproject 3, it was described in official documentation as testing drugs on those on the “fringes of the narcotics business...From time to time White gives drugs to these unaware individuals through drinks, cigarettes, and perhaps food...On one occasion [Sidney Gottlieb] Chief, Chemical Division did take some LSD from Dr. Harold Abramson to White; this White could have gotten from Abramson directly.” White surveilled clubs and bars for his intended targets, bringing them back to the apartment and dosing their drinks with LSD. “Gloria gets the horrors…Janet sky high,” White wrote in his diary. He also recorded when Gottlieb’s deputy would visit, contradicting Lashbrook’s later denials: “Lashbrook at 81 Bedford Street—Owen Winkle and LSD.” White used the pseudonym Morgan Hall, but he was so careless in its use that the FBI quickly discovered his true identity and the nature of his work for the CIA. Rather than expose their knowledge to the CIA or attempt to halt the illegal activities underway, the FBI kept the matter quiet to protect their informant and sent samples of drugs in White’s possession to the FBI lab for analysis. The lab wrote back on August 31, 1953: “Specimen Q1 was found to contain a fairly concentrated solution of chloral hydrate, which is a sedative and hypnotic.”

White’s recklessness knew no bounds, making him perfect for the assignment. “White supposedly killed some Japanese spy with his bare hands while he was on assignment in Calcutta. He used to keep a picture of the bloody corpse on the wall in his office,” recalled fellow FBN agent Ira “Ike” Feldman. White, still on loan to the CIA, brought Feldman on to assist with the project in 1954. Feldman was told the CIA “were worried [the KGB] might dump it in the water supply and drive everybody wacky. They wanted us to find out if we could actually use it as a truth serum.” He recalled meeting White for the first time: “He was a big, powerful man with a completely bald head. Not tall, but big. Fat. He shaved his head and had the most beautiful blue eyes you’ve ever seen.” Feldman was much like White and fit in well with the ethos of the CIA, according to a former FBN agent who had worked with him: “Feldman was the sort of guy who didn’t have too many scruples. For him, the ends justified the means.”

According to Feldman, Frank Olson’s death was the catalyst for closing the New York operation and moving it to San Francisco. White decorated the new CIA safehouse in San Francisco to his liking, sending invoices to the Agency for apartment decorations including Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can-can dancer and photos of shackled women in black stockings. “It was supposed to look rich, but it was furnished like crap,” said a former narcotics agent. Feldman was tasked with paying prostitutes $100 a night to lure men for testing LSD and other drugs provided by the CIA. White had the room bugged with microphones connected to tape recorders behind a false wall and watched the proceedings behind a two-way mirror, taking notes while sitting on a portable toilet, which he also expensed to the Agency. White facetiously called the assignment Operation Midnight Climax when requesting reimbursement. Through this work they intended to learn if subjects could be coerced to provide information through substances rather than violence. “As George White once told me,” said Feldman, “‘Ike, your best information outside comes from the whores and the junkies. If you treat a whore nice, she’ll treat you nice. If you treat a junkie nice, he’ll treat you nice.’ But sometimes, when people had information, there was only one way you could get it. If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer. If it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people.” White made no secret of who he was working with, billing the CIA once for $60.50 in telephone calls with the description: “Calls made by addict prostitute while under covert observation — necessary in connection with undercover investigation.”

White continued to be unafraid to test on himself the substances being sent from Washington, DC, wanting to see what the effects were before using them on strangers. Once provided with a fountain pen gas gun, he enlisted Feldman to shoot him to test its effects. White began coughing with his eyes watering and turning red; it turned out they were testing the prototype for Mace. On another occasion, driving in Muir Woods, Sidney Gottlieb asked them to stop the car. Pulling out a dart gun, he shot a nearby eucalyptus tree and within two days the tree had died, losing all of its foliage; they later learned the drug was a precursor to Agent Orange.

Their work on MKULTRA also led them to being involved in one of the many attempts by the CIA of neutralizing Fidel Castro. Meeting with White and CIA Director Allen Dulles, Feldman recalled a plot to “soak his cigars with LSD and drive him crazy. George called me in because…one of my whores was this Cuban girl and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.” As framed by the CIA, this was a more subtle form of sabotage compared to assassination: “You neutralize someone by having their constituency doubt them.” On another occasion, they attempted to test an aerosolized version of LSD in a party setting at the safehouse. The test was a failure as participants refused to keep the doors closed due to the hot weather. Out of desperation, one of the CIA men took the aerosol can of LSD and began testing it on himself in the bathroom; however, as another officer later testified: he did not get high.

White’s brothel operated with impunity for years, attracting “a variety of hoodlums, politicians, millionaires and working men to the CIA experiment,” according to a source on the project. White also experimented with dosing individuals out in public, his diaries pointing later investigators to at least 15 cases. One had been dosed as she was working at a bar and managed to finish her shift. She later went to the hospital for treatment and swore off alcohol. Another experienced a “bad trip” and once informed by investigators of the CIA’s involvement, threatened to sue the Agency for invasion of privacy, but that lawsuit never materialized.

In 1999, Wayne Ritchie was reading an obituary of Sidney Gottlieb when he was shocked to discover a possible explanation of his experience being drugged in 1957. He wept when he called his brother with the news, feeling as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Following the incident, he suffered from depression for six years, experiencing flashbacks and nightmares. He ended up working as a house painter for 34 years, retiring on a pension and Social Security. “His self-esteem was destroyed,” wrote his psychiatrist, “and his lifestyle changed from that of an outgoing, cheerful and ambitious marshal to that of a guilt-ridden, self-depriving, subdued house painter, with recurrent suicidal urges.” He launched a lawsuit against the Agency and Ike Feldman, who was among the few MKULTRA participants still alive at the time. Ritchie’s case was bolstered by a diary entry by George White: “home flu — xmas party Fed bldg Press Room.” The lawsuit established this note referred to the same day and location of the incident, and Ritchie’s counsel attempted to explore whether Feldman had dosed Ritchie with LSD by himself that evening. Feldman seemed particularly displeased being brought into the lawsuit, never admitting guilt outright but making odd statements during his deposition regarding how they administered LSD to unsuspecting victims:

[Ritchie’s attorney:] Now, all these people that you personally drugged, you never did any follow-up on them, in the sense of telling them that you had drugged them, did you?

[Government attorney:] Objection. Lacks foundation. Go ahead and answer it, if you can.

FELDMAN: Not all the people that I drugged. I drugged guys involved in about ten, twelve, period. I didn’t do any follow-up, period, because it wasn’t a very good thing to go and say, “How do you feel today?” You don’t give them a tip. You just back away and let them worry, like this nitwit, Ritchie.

[Ritchie’s attorney:] When you say “let them worry,” you mean let them have a head full of LSD and let —

FELDMAN: Let them have a full head, like what happened, like what happened with this nut when he got out and got drunk.

[…]

[Ritchie’s attorney:] And were there ever prostitutes that you gave [LSD] to to give to other people?

FELDMAN: I imagine there were. I don’t remember what they were doing off times.

[Ritchie’s attorney:] Didn’t you have a great reputation as having a lot of whores?

FELDMAN: Whores, just like you too. You are a whore master, too. I was working for Uncle Sam. I was doing more than you were doing, Buster.

In perhaps the most important moment of the trial, Feldman’s lawyer interrupted his testimony as he again alluded to Ritchie’s case being similar to their drug experiments:

FELDMAN: I didn’t say anybody had suffered, I didn’t say anybody suffered. The bird, like this guy, who saw snakes coming out, he deserved to suffer. He had eight or ten drinks and then goes out and gets a couple of guns and tries to hold up someone. And then he waits —

MS. KENNEY [defendant’s counsel]: Mr. Feldman —

MR. BENDER [plaintiff’s counsel]: He is answering the question. I object to your doing that at a critical time like this. You have some nerve to interrupt that witness now. That’s horrible.

MS. KENNEY: He appears to be spacing out.

MR. BENDER: He is not spacing out. You may be spacing out because of the testimony he is giving.

After this point, Ritchie’s lawyer was unable to get any further useful testimony out of Ritchie and the case was dismissed due to a lack of evidence. “This is a troubling case,” the appellate judge concluded in 2006. “Although we affirm the judgment against Ritchie, we think it is quite possible that everything Ritchie says happened did happen — that Ritchie was drugged by his own government, and suffered great personal and financial hardships as a result…we know some people were drugged; the government admits as much. Ritchie’s allegations of Cold War drugging by the CIA may thus be true, even though he could not prove them to the satisfaction of the district court. If Ritchie’s claims are indeed true, he has paid a terrible price in the name of national security.”

George White, who died in 1975 before the MKULTRA revelations were made public, could not have been prouder of his work with the Agency, writing to Gottlieb:

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? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!

The Scientist and Point-Saint-Esprit Revisited

In 1973, Gottlieb ordered the destruction of the MKULTRA records, against the objections of the records staff. CIA Director Richard Helms, soon leaving the Agency, approved and agreed with Gottlieb that the project was best forgotten. They neglected to destroy the financial records, which surfaced as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and led to congressional hearings. Gottlieb escaped being punished for unlawful destruction of records when he was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. Appearing under a pseudonym before the U.S. Senate in 1977, he testified from a separate room hidden from television cameras, citing health issues. A TV news crew decided to follow Gottlieb and captured footage of him playing tennis without any obvious ailments. In 1984, the Olson family met with Gottlieb to find answers. “Oh my God,” he uttered in greeting them. “I’m so relieved to see you all don’t have a gun.” Eric Olson later realized the manipulation that was being preventively employed: “He was not the master of mind control for nothing.”

While the documents related to the Olson case available in the 1970s had presented a narrative of a suicidal Frank Olson, plagued by personal problems, who had jumped through a window after going insane following a LSD dosing at the hands of Gottlieb and Lashbrook, the documents that have surfaced since then paint a different picture that Olson had been a problem for the Army and Agency prior to the LSD incident.

First there was the matter of Olson being a security risk. A memo to the CIA Inspector General revealed: “After the incident in [Europe] and subsequent statements made by Olsen [sic] to unauthorized personnel in the field and at his post, Lovell was livid and confronted Schwab.” Both Stanley Lovell and John Schwab were Olson’s superiors in his Army division. Olson had told a colleague “that he was worried that he was telling and giving away secrets,” which was relayed later to his son Eric. A July 1975 letter found in the Detrick personnel files of Olson included the following: “Trip to Paris and Norway in 1953(?) and possible fear of security violation.” These revelations brought to mind Olson’s questioning of his friend and supervisor Vincent Ruwet in the days before his death: “What’s behind all this? What are they trying to do with me; are they checking me for security?” One aspect never addressed in any of the official accounts is why an employer had the right to hold an employee for psychiatric treatment against his will. While event the official accounts from participants in the Olson mention his desire to be left alone and be let to “disappear,” the undercurrent of Olson’s treatment was that he had secrets that were too important to be exposed.

A declassified CIA document featured the subject line: “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin — tell him to see to it that these are buried.” David W. Belin, executive director of the Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA misdeeds, did just that, ensuring that Olson’s death received cursory coverage in the final report issued in 1975, which noted that “LSD was administered to an employee of the Department of the Army without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project…He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth floor window of his room and died as a result.” Belin and the report authors thought it important to include the following caveat: “There are indications in the few remaining Agency records that this individual may have had a history of emotional instability.”

An undated draft White House memo in the Ford White House archives with the subject of “Frank R. Olson” also contained the reference: “Pont Saint Esprit incident (Olsojn) [sic].” Olson’s work had included developing aerosol sprays for the delivery of incapacitating or deadly chemicals. The Pont-Saint-Esprit incident had been a joint Army-CIA experiment entitled Project Span, as revealed in A Terrible Mistake by H.P. Albarelli Jr., in which aerosol spraying had been attempted but failed miserably. The insertion of LSD into food products such as bread was found to be effective. Dr. Henry K. Beecher, a consultant for the CIA and Army, who met with Frank Olson in France and Germany, and was in France at the time of the Pont-Saint-Esprit outbreak, once described the potency of LSD as follows:

[dosages] so small that one can calculate that the water supply of a large city could be disastrously and undetectably (until too late) contaminated with quantities apparently readily available...It should not be a difficult trick to sink a small container of [LSD] near the main outlet of water storage reservoirs, and the container arranged to ‘excrete’ a steady flow of the material over a period of many hours or days…Needless to say, much more work needs to be done. We need to know, for example, if ordinary chlorination of the water will oxidize the lysergic acid derivatives. Evidently the heat required to bake bread does not.

George White provided further confirmation that Pont-Saint-Esprit had not been the victim of naturally occurring ergot poisoning as officially claimed. In 1954, he wrote of receiving a letter from Edmond Bailleul, who in 1952 after taking over the Central Narcotics Office of the Sûreté Nationale in France was reported to have had “great affection” for White despite demanding “close supervision of any FBN activity in France.” White relayed that while Bailleul had bragged to him about several things, he had kept quiet on the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident and “Stormy,” which was White’s code name for LSD. “Naturally he wrote nothing about that little French village’s Stormy epidemic. I suspect that is in everybody’s past where it belongs.” White also confirmed Lafitte’s role as an undercover bellman at the Statler Hotel, which had begun in August/September 1953. After Olson’s death, Lafitte had “decided that his term at the Statler was overextended” and would possibly return to France. White commented: “I suspect his moonlighting work at NYC hotels is over once and for all”; White’s wife "loved him in his little bellman’s outfit.” White was interested in speaking with Gottlieb about a move to San Francisco: “with the Olsen [sic] thing…behind us the time might be right to make the jump.” After Olson’s death he remarked, “Lashbrook apparently had no qualms about bouncing right back a month later” to the next project.

Albarelli revealed that while the CIA had designs on testing LSD in the reservoir of an American city, the incident in France went so poorly, injuring hundreds and resulting in deaths, that the plans were abandoned. The French press later questioned why such a test would have been run by the U.S. government on a small village in France. The U.S. Army, however, was no stranger to testing on U.S. soil when it came to what were thought to be harmless chemicals, later confirming in its official history of Fort Detrick that American cities were subjected to several experiments from 1943 through the 1960s, including:

In one such test, travelers at Washington National Airport were subjected to a harmless bacterium. Traps were placed throughout the facility to capture the bacterium as it flowed in the air. Laboratory personnel, dressed as travelers carrying briefcases, walked the corridors and without detection sprayed the bacterium into the atmosphere.

In the New York Subway, a light bulb filled with the same harmless bacterium was dropped on the tracks. The organism spread throughout the system within 20 minutes. Traps and monitoring devices showed the amount of organism—if it were one of the predictable, dangerous organisms, could have killed thousands of persons. No one was injured or became ill as a result of the test.

In San Francisco, a U.S. Navy ship, equipped with spray devices operated by Fort Detrick personnel, sprayed serratia marcescens, a non-pathogenic microorganism that is easily detected, while the ship plied the San Francisco Bay. It spread more than 30 miles to monitoring stations.

A jet aircraft equipped with spray devices, flew a course near Victoria, TX, and the harmless bacterium was monitored in the Florida Keys.

While these experiments were portrayed as harmless, the 1950 San Francisco experiment in particular is now known to have caused 11 hospitalizations and one death. “While some may argue that these were dangerous and thoughtless experiments from the private citizen’s standpoint,” the U.S. Army’s official history explained, “it proved how helpless the United States would be if an enemy were bent on causing problems.”

Eric Olson never stopped searching answers, having his father’s body exhumed in 1994 and a new autopsy performed. James Starrs from George Washington University found blunt-force trauma to Olson’s head and a large injury on his chest; one of his team members dissented from this conclusion, but Starrs believed the evidence was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” The same year, Eric testified before Congress that he had located one of Gottlieb’s former TSS employees who “confirmed that the members of that small group all believed that my father was murdered.” Later in the decade, he approached the U.S. District Attorney of Manhattan, who reopened a murder investigation, only to close it in the early 2000s before reaching a grand jury due to a lack of evidence and deaths of the key players. In 2011, Norman Covert, retired public relations officer of Fort Detrick, wrote of the Frank Olson case that “despite several investigations, some skeptics, including his sons Eric and Nils, continue to believe Dr. Olson’s death was part of a CIA conspiracy. His work with the CIA was a clandestine research effort, separate from his Fort Detrick duties, with the goal of developing LSD as a covert weapon.” The brothers filed a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages and access to documents they had been denied. In part because of the settlement made in 1976, the suit was dismissed in 2013, with the judge noting that “the skeptical reader may wish to know that the public record supports many of the allegations [in the family’s suit], farfetched as they may sound.”

It was unexpectedly and indirectly through Dick Cheney that Eric Olson would find answers. Cheney had never forgotten about the Olson case, even decades later working in the Bush White House. In early 2002 after the events of 9/11, Cheney was interested in “working the dark side” as he put it and was interested in the topic of how blowback from illegal activities had been successfully minimized in the past. He tasked a researcher, whom Eric referred to as “Deep Creek,” to look into the hidden Olson files and he made several discoveries, including that Vincent Ruwet, Olson’s friend and supervisor, had contacted the CIA’s Office of Security about Olson’s security violations. Olson was referenced in the files as a “dissident” and his “terrible mistake” was that at the time of his being dosed with LSD, he failed to recant his dissenting view of Agency activities. Finally, “Deep Creek” learned that Olson was poisoned before being thrown out of the Statler Hotel’s thirteenth floor window. All of this information was relayed by the source to Eric Olson through journalist Seymour Hersh, who made what he called a “one-in-a-million bank shot.” Hersh luckily asked the right source, “Deep Creek,” who “had all sorts of high level jobs with CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Joint Chiefs. [He] comes from a very distinguished military family. It turns out he’s the only guy who could have answered the question I put to him.” Despite initially being a skeptic, Hersh came to agree with Eric that the CIA had killed his father, referring to the operation as being part of a mechanism of handling domestic dissidents. However, he was unable to obtain additional information that would protect his source. “If I publish what I knew, I make somebody into a Snowden,” Hersh said in the documentary Wormwood.

Following her husband’s death, Alice would receive visits from Ruwet to have a drink with her around the same time that her husband would have returned home from work each day. The family later found out through a release of documents that this was a conduit through which the CIA could “keep in touch with [the] wife.” Ruwet become commanding officer from 1964 until his retirement in 1966 of Camp Detrick, which by then had become a permanent installation known as Fort Detrick. Ruwet’s testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1975 several times referenced Frank Olson’s concern before his death that he had committed a “security break” and offered a cryptic apology to Alice: “Something that has troubled me for 22 years is the fact that, while I never recall having told Mrs. Olson anything that was flatly untrue, I did allow her to think things that were not true. I would like to have that put on the record that I do regret it.”

As part of the CIA Inspector General’s investigation into Olson’s death, investigators interviewed George White on December 21, 1953 who apparently was treated as a suspect who provided “less than satisfactory” answers. “White said that he was in Carlsbad and Los Angeles on dates in question,” they noted. “He maintained that he knows nothing about the whereabouts of ‘Martin’ on same dates...However, he did confirm that ‘Martin’ had been an employee (bellman) at both the Roosevelt and Statler hotels in the past.” Lafitte, also known under the pseudonym Martin, was a “stocky, balding man in his fifties” who spoke with a French accent. While telling his story to a magazine about foiling a painting theft in 1952, he admitted his underworld connections: “At the time…I was on close terms with a group of New York hoodlums.” In June 1952, Lafitte had been recruited as an asset of the CIA, White writing in a letter: “Expecting to be at CIA only a day, Lafitte was held over for a few days. I hope to hell they know what they are in for. I suspect even to that crew that he’s one of a kind.” Gottlieb described him as follows: “I’m not even sure he exists in the epistemology of the CIA. He gives whole new meaning to the label ‘spook.’ It’s widely known that he worked with George [White] in New York and San Francisco.” With another White House memo identifying Lafitte and Spirito as being tied to the Olson case, Albarelli pieced together through confidential sources that Lafitte and a drug trafficker named Francois Spirito had participated in the murder of Frank Olson. When Albarelli asked how they gained access to Olson’s hotel room, Norman Covert replied: “Lafitte worked at the hotel and had ready access. It could not have been easier.”

In addition, Ike Feldman confirmed what he had heard from colleagues on Olson’s death in a documentary film: “The source that I had was in the New York City Police Department, it was Bureau of Narcotics Agents, and it was the CIA agents themselves, they all said the same, that he was pushed out the window, that he didn’t jump. People who wanted him out of the way said that he talked too much and he was telling people about the things that he’d done, which was an American secret.”

The reality of the outcome may have explained Lashbrook’s flippant attitude in describing in a 1986 deposition how the LSD was administered to the Deep Creek Lake participants using one dosed bottle along with a regular bottle of liqueur:

LASHBROOK: There were two Cointreau bottles.

Q: You shifted them around so only the people—

LASHBROOK: Sure.

Q: —who you wanted to have [the LSD], had it?

LASHBROOK: (Witness nods his heads up and down).

Q: Is that right?

LASHBROOK: One in your left lapel, one in your right lapel. Yes, of course.

Q: Was that meant as a joke?

LASHBROOK: Okay.

Q: I don’t think it's very funny when somebody dies as a result of something you did. You may think it’s funny, but I don’t.

Eric Olson was left with the knowledge of what happened to his father, but only that, since no had ever been brought to justice in the ensuing years for his father’s death or any activities connected to MKULTRA. He discovered his “problem was no longer epistemological, about knowing, or about uncertainty, or doubt, as it had been for six decades. My problem now was much harder. It was ontological. It was about how one lives with what one knows—that the death of one's father was intended by one's government—and absorbs, or writes off, the cost of having lived so long in the dark.” Said Olson to Hersh, “I’ve been tortured about this for 40-some-odd years…It ruined my life.”