Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  A CROWD OF reporters pushed toward George Kennan, one of America’s most celebrated diplomats, as he stepped off a plane at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin on September 19, 1952. Kennan was then serving as ambassador to the Soviet Union, always a challenging post but especially so during the early Cold War. He began by offering a few bland observations about U.S.-Soviet relations. Then a reporter asked him about his daily life in Moscow. That set him off.

  “Don’t you know how foreign diplomats live in Moscow?” he snapped. “I was interned here in Germany for several months during the last war. The treatment we receive in Moscow is just about like the treatment we internees received then, except that in Moscow we are at liberty to go out and walk the streets under guard.”

  Soviet leaders could not abide what they called “slanderous attacks” comparing their country to Nazi Germany. They declared Kennan persona non grata, putting an end to his posting in Moscow. Many in Washington saw him as a martyr to truth. Some wondered, however, why such a gifted diplomat would have spoken such undiplomatic words.

  Kennan told friends in the State Department that he had become intensely frustrated with restrictions the Soviets had placed on him, and “blew my top.” Richard Davies, who had been his deputy in Moscow, had another explanation. He reported that Kennan had been “under enormous psychological pressure” because he believed he had failed in his mission to ease the Cold War, that he was looking for an escape, and that he spoke provocatively in Berlin knowing that his words would probably lead the Soviets to expel him.

  Inside the CIA, a darker theory emerged. Officers who were looking for techniques of mind control already believed the Soviets were ahead of them. They took the Kennan case as proof. That he had simply spoken impulsively, or had planned his comments for a preconceived purpose, seemed to them implausible. Their fixation on LSD led them to another conclusion.

  “Helms thinks they may have dosed George Kennan with the drug,” the CIA security chief, Sheffield Edwards, told a colleague afterward. “He’s convinced it’s the only reason Kennan would have acted the way he did.”

  Gottlieb, in his drive to imagine every possible use of LSD, had already come up with the idea of surreptitiously dosing unfriendly foreign leaders. If those leaders could be made to behave strangely in public, he reasoned, they might lose popularity or fall from power. Like many other ideas that shaped MK-ULTRA, this one was based on fears of what Communists might be doing. Kennan’s case seemed to offer proof that a new kind of psycho-war was beginning.

  No evidence ever emerged to support the hypothesis that Kennan was drugged. Nonetheless it seized minds inside the CIA. Allen Dulles was a member of the little-known Psychological Strategy Board, which coordinated American “psychological warfare” campaigns, and after he shared his suspicion that Kennan had been drugged, the board decided to begin monitoring American politicians for “signs of a changed personality,” and to detain and test any who behaved suspiciously.

  The CIA’s first mind control projects, Bluebird and Artichoke, were highly classified, but MK-ULTRA was the most secret of all. The number of people who knew even its general outlines was exceedingly small. They included Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and the handful of scientists who worked for him at the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff; his official supervisor, “Gib” Gibbons, head of the Technical Services Staff; his true boss, Richard Helms, to whom he reported on sensitive matters; the deputy director for plans, Frank Wisner; the chief of the counterintelligence staff, James Jesus Angleton; one outside contractor, the New York LSD maven Harold Abramson; members of the Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick, numbering fewer than a dozen; and Allen Dulles. Dulles knew the fewest details. Helms did not tell him everything because, according to a later Senate investigation, he “felt it necessary to keep details of the project restricted to an absolute minimum number of people.” This was obedience to the unspoken rules that shaped CIA culture.

  “Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset,” the novelist Don DeLillo wrote in describing this culture. “In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It could impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing … The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination. The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late … There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored.”

  Just outside the inner MK-ULTRA circle were several CIA officers close enough to the truth to inquire or complain. Among them were Sheffield Edwards, chief of the Office of Security; Marshall Chadwell, chief of the Office of Scientific Intelligence; Morse Allen, who continued to run the Artichoke program even after MK-ULTRA was launched; and Paul Gaynor, a retired brigadier general who had preceded Allen as director of Artichoke and went on to head the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. They sensed Gottlieb’s spreading authority and, as one memo from Allen to Gaynor suggests, did not approve.

  Sometime during the fall of 1953, Mr. Sidney GOTTLIEB made a tour of the Far East for reasons unknown, but undoubtedly in connection with business of TSS … GOTTLIEB gave out samples of psychedelic drugs and ran some tests on various people out there using this drug. It is not definitely certain that it was LSD, nor do we know the details Mr. GOTTLIEB used in describing the chemical, but this appears to be the likely chemical. GOTTLIEB is also reported to have given some of the chemical to some of our staff officers in the [redacted] with the idea that the staff officer would place the chemical in the drinking water to be used by a speaker at a political rally in the [redacted] …

  It has been reported that chemicals, pills, or ampules having a psychedelic effect have been passed around to some of our people in [redacted], and whether these were handed out by GOTTLIEB or other TSS people is unknown … [Redacted], recently returned from Germany, said he heard of staff officers who had been given the chemicals and used them on subjects during interrogations … [Redacted] recently received information that the [redacted] have been working for TSS secretly on a project known as MK-ULTRA at the [redacted], apparently testing work on drugs and drugs in combination with hypnosis. Details are lacking …

  In 1942, OSS was attempting to study drugs which might be useful in the interrogation of prisoners of war. Connected with these experiments was one Major George H. White … It appears that White or someone else by the name of White has currently been picked up by TSS and is engaged in doing secret work on drugs at an apartment in New York City which TSS has hired for White … We are also informed that any effort to tamper with this project, MK-ULTRA, is not permitted.

  As MK-ULTRA spread into ever darker reaches, the men involved in it had to consider the possibility of a leak or other security breach. What might happen if one of the initiates had an attack of conscience or change of heart, was captured by enemy agents, or slipped into alcoholism or some other pathology that might loosen his tongue? This concern brought them back to their long-standing interest in induced amnesia. They originally hoped to use it to wipe away the memory of agents who had been programmed to commit crimes. Now they began to imagine another use: as a way to make CIA officers forget what they had done.

  In mid-1953 a retired CIA officer underwent brain surgery in Texas. Since he was to be placed under anesthesia, CIA practice required that his doctors and nurses be vetted in advance. As an added precaution, the CIA sent an officer to be present at the surgery. He returned with bad news. While the patient was in a semi-conscious state, he talked uncontrollably about his former job and “internal problems” at the CIA. He knew nothing about MK-ULTRA, but the example was frightening.

  “Some individuals at the Agency had to know tremendous amounts of information,” a CIA officer la
ter said in explaining this problem. “If any way could be found to produce amnesia for this type of information, it would be a remarkable thing.”

  * * *

  IN THE FALL of 1953 Gottlieb traveled to East Asia to monitor the interrogation of prisoners who had been dosed with LSD—known at the CIA as P-1. When asked years later whether he had been “witness to the actual operation of interrogation with P-1” in Asia during this period, he replied: “The answer is yes.” He became impatient when asked if the interrogations were committed on “unwitting subjects.”

  “There is nothing such as a witting P-1 interrogation,” Gottlieb said. “The very nature of that kind of interrogation is unwitting. So when you ask, ‘Was there any administration of P-1 in interrogations other than unwitting?’ that’s kind of an oxymoron.”

  During breaks from interrogation sessions at which he dosed prisoners with LSD at CIA “safe houses” in Asia, Gottlieb took folk dancing lessons. He pursued this passion seriously. His wife shared it. “Sid got back from Manilla [sic] a week and a half ago, and the novelty of having him home has not worn off yet,” Margaret reported in a letter to her mother in early November. “His trip was very successful and, to him, very exciting. He enjoys all of life’s experiences to the full, and this one was so new to him and he had so much to see and absorb that he came back just about ready to burst. He spent almost all of his free time learning some native Phillipino [sic] dances and getting the right costumes to do them in. Our hobby is still dancing the dances of all countries and teaching them to others.”

  In that same letter, along with a weather report and news about a swimming party she was planning for her children, Margaret confided that her husband had told her something startling. He had returned from Asia with doubts about his work. Twenty-eight months after joining the Agency, he told his wife that he might quit.

  “Sid is considering a new idea these days,” Margaret wrote. “He thinks that he would like to stop his career for a while and get an MD with the emphasis on psychiatry, and then do research in that field with maybe some private practice to keep us in bread and butter. This, of course, would take five or six years, and whether or not we could swing it is doubtful … Sid says that most people don’t know what they really want to do with their lives until they get to be about our age but by then they are tied down with responsibilities and also kind of in a rut and so they go along the way they have started because they are afraid to stop and start over again. This is a big step to take at this late date and it will take nerve to do it, but I would really like for him to at least try to do it.”

  Leaving MK-ULTRA would not be as simple as leaving a normal job. Gottlieb and his officers were part of a deeply secret fraternity. They could think of themselves as scientists working to defend their country, but they were also torturers. They believed that the threat of Communism justified all they did. Other Americans, though, might disagree. A leak from MK-ULTRA would expose deep secrets. If anyone who knew those secrets were to be stricken with doubts, or wanted to drop out, the result could devastate the CIA.

  For a time this fear was hypothetical. Suddenly it erupted into terrifying reality. As Gottlieb pondered his future, one of the other MK-ULTRA men reached his breaking point.

  7

  Fell or Jumped

  Glass shattered high above Seventh Avenue in Manhattan before dawn on a cold November morning. Seconds later a body hit the sidewalk. Jimmy, the doorman at the Statler Hotel, was momentarily stunned. Then he turned and ran into the hotel lobby.

  “We got a jumper!” he shouted. “We got a jumper!”

  “Where?” the night manager asked him.

  “Out front, on the sidewalk!”

  A small crowd had already gathered around the body when the night manager arrived. Others rushed over from Pennsylvania Station, across the street. The victim, clad only in underwear, had landed on his back. Blood was gushing from his eyes, nose, and ears, but he was still alive. For a moment he seemed to try to speak.

  “It’s okay, buddy, we’ve called for help,” the night manager told him. “Just hold on. You’ll be okay.”

  The night manager knew those words were untrue. He wiped blood from the dying man’s face, and was grateful when a priest appeared, carrying a Bible. Two police officers followed close behind.

  “Jumper?” one of them asked.

  “I guess,” the night manager replied. Later he recalled that as an ambulance was arriving, the victim “raised his head slightly, his lips moving. His eyes were wide with desperation. He wanted to tell me something. I leaned down closer to listen, but he took a deep breath and died.”

  The night manager peered up through the darkness at his hulking hotel. After a few moments, he picked out a curtain flapping through an open window. It turned out to be room 1018A. Two names were on the registration card: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook.

  Police officers entered room 1018A with guns drawn. They saw no one. The window was open. They pushed open the door to the bathroom and found Lashbrook sitting on the toilet, head in hands. He had been sleeping, he said, when “I heard a noise and then I woke up.”

  “The man that went out the window, what is his name?” one officer asked.

  “Olson,” came the reply. “Frank Olson.”

  “And you say you didn’t see Mr. Olson go out the window?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t think of going down to check on Mr. Olson?”

  “I looked out the window. I saw him lying there. There were people running from the station. What could I have done? I could see that he had help. I thought it best to wait here.”

  The night manager, who overheard this conversation, was suspicious. “In all my years in the hotel business,” he later reflected, “I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.” Leaving the police officers, he returned to the lobby and, on a hunch, asked the telephone operator if any calls had recently been made from room 1018A. Yes, she replied—and she had eavesdropped, not an uncommon practice in an era when hotel phone calls were routed through a switchboard. Someone in the room had called a number on Long Island, which was listed as belonging to Dr. Harold Abramson.

  “Well, he’s gone,” the caller had said. Abramson replied, “Well, that’s too bad.”

  To the first police officers on the scene, this seemed like another of the human tragedies they see too often: a distressed or distraught man had taken his own life. They could not have known that both the dead man and the survivor were scientists who helped direct one of the U.S. government’s most highly classified intelligence programs.

  Early the next morning, one of Olson’s close colleagues drove to Maryland to break the terrible news to the dead man’s family. He told Alice Olson and her three children that Frank “fell or jumped” to his death from a hotel window. Naturally they were shocked, but they had no choice other than to accept what they were told. Alice did not object when told that, given the condition of her husband’s body, family members should not view it. The funeral was held with a closed casket. There the case might have ended.

  Decades later, however, spectacular revelations cast Olson’s death in a completely new light. First the CIA admitted that shortly before he died his colleagues had lured him to a retreat and fed him LSD without his knowledge. Then it turned out that Olson had talked about leaving the CIA—and told his wife that he had made “a terrible mistake.” Slowly a counter-narrative emerged: Olson was disturbed about his work and wanted to quit, leading his comrades to consider him a security risk. All of this led him to room 1018A. His story is one of MK-ULTRA’s deepest mysteries.

  * * *

  FRANK OLSON, A child of Swedish immigrants, grew up in a lumber town on Lake Superior. Chemistry was his way out. He was a dedicated though not brilliant student, earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1941, mar
ried a classmate, and took a job at Purdue University’s Agricultural Experimentation Station. He had enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to help pay his college costs, and soon after the United States entered World War II he was called to active duty as a lieutenant and ordered to report to Fort Hood, in Texas. He was in training there when, on December 26, 1942, he received a fateful call from Ira Baldwin, who had been his thesis adviser at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin had just been drafted into the war effort and assigned to begin urgent research into biological warfare. He wanted Olson, who had studied aerosol delivery systems at Wisconsin, to join him. At Baldwin’s request, the army transferred Olson to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. A few months later, the Chemical Corps took over nearby Camp Detrick and established its secret Biological Warfare Laboratories there. Olson was one of the first scientists assigned to Detrick. Construction was still underway when he moved in.

  At Camp Detrick, Olson began working with the handful of colleagues who would accompany him throughout his clandestine career. One was Harold Abramson, who on the morning of Olson’s death a decade later would receive the cryptic message “Well, he’s gone.” Others included ex-Nazis who had been brought to the United States on Operation Paperclip contracts. For a time they worked on aerosol technologies—ways to spray germs or toxins on enemies, and to defend against such attacks. Later Olson met with American intelligence officers who had experimented with “truth drugs” in Europe.

  “Just as we speculated about the atom bomb project—you have friends who are physics majors and they all go to Los Alamos—we knew when we came here,” Alice Olson said years later. “All the wives said they must be working on germ warfare.”

  Olson was discharged from the army in 1944 but hardly noticed the change. He remained at Camp Detrick on a civilian contract and continued his research into aerobiology. Several times he visited the secluded Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, which was used for testing “living biological agents, munitions, and aerosol cloud production.” He co-authored a 220-page study entitled “Experimental Airborne Infections” that described experiments with “airborne clouds of highly infectious agents.” In 1949 he was one of several scientists from Camp Detrick who traveled to the Caribbean island of Antigua for Operation Harness, which tested the vulnerability of animals to toxic clouds. The next year he was part of Operation Sea Spray, in which dust engineered to float like anthrax was released near San Francisco. He regularly traveled to Fort Terry, a secret army base on Plum Island, off the eastern tip of Long Island, which was used to test toxins too deadly to be brought onto the U.S. mainland.