This was the period when senior army and CIA officers were becoming deeply alarmed at what they feared was Soviet progress toward mastering forms of warfare based on microbes. Their alarm led to creation of the Special Operations Division. Rumors about its work spread through offices and laboratories. Olson learned of it over an evening game of cards with a colleague, John Schwab, who unbeknownst to him had been named the division’s first chief. Schwab invited him to join. He accepted immediately.
Within a year, Olson had become acting chief of the Special Operations Division. His job description was vague but tantalizing: collect data “of interest to the division, with particular emphasis on the medico-biological aspects,” and coordinate his work with “other agencies conducting work of a similar or related nature.” That meant the CIA.
Olson’s specialty was “the airborne distribution of biological germs,” according to one study. “Dr. Olson had developed a range of lethal aerosols in handy-sized containers. They were disguised as shaving cream and insect repellants. They contained, among other agents, staph enteroxin, a crippling food poison; the even more deadly Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis; and most deadly of all, anthrax … Further weapons he was working on [included] a cigarette lighter which gave out an almost instant lethal gas, a lipstick that would kill on contact with skin, and a neat pocket spray for asthma sufferers that induced pneumonia.”
By the time Olson stepped down as acting chief of the Special Operations Division in early 1953, complaining that pressures of the job aggravated his ulcers, he had joined the CIA. He stayed with the Special Operations Division, which was officially part of the army but functioned as a CIA research station hidden within a military base. There he came to know the men who would soon be running MK-ULTRA, including Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy Robert Lashbrook.
In his laboratory at Camp Detrick, Olson directed experiments that involved gassing or poisoning laboratory animals. These experiences disturbed him. “He’d come to work in the morning and see piles of dead monkeys,” his son Eric later recalled. “That messes with you. He wasn’t the right guy for that.”
Olson also saw human beings suffer. Although not a torturer himself, he observed and monitored torture sessions in several countries. “In CIA safe-houses in Germany,” according to one study, “Olson witnessed horrific brutal interrogations on a regular basis. Detainees who were deemed ‘expendable,’ suspected spies or ‘moles,’ security leaks, etc., were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis, and torture to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”
* * *
AS THANKSGIVING APPROACHED in 1953, Olson received an invitation that would have puzzled anyone unaccustomed to CIA rituals. It was headlined DEEP CREEK RENDEZVOUS. Olson and eight others were invited to gather on Wednesday, November 18, for a retreat at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland. “Cabin will have atmosphere—a little bit of Berkeley and a little of Oakland,” the invitation said. There were detailed driving directions from Washington and Frederick, Maryland. At the bottom was a striking notation: “CAMOUFLAGE: Winter meeting of scriptwriters, editors, authors, lecturers, sports magazines. Remove CD [Camp Detrick] decals from cars.”
The two-story cabin at Deep Creek Lake is in what was then a forested area, perched on a steep hillside that slopes down toward a landing on the lakefront. According to the rental agency, it “accommodates up to ten persons in four bedrooms, living room, kitchen and bath—large stone fireplace, chestnut paneling, with electric range and refrigerator.” On the appointed date, November 18, Olson was waiting at his home in Frederick when Vincent Ruwet, who had replaced him as chief of the Special Operations Division, pulled up outside. They made the sixty-mile drive to Deep Creek Lake together. Other guests filtered in during the afternoon.
This retreat was one in a series that Gottlieb convened every few months. Officially it was a coming together of two groups: four CIA scientists from the Technical Services Staff, which ran MK-ULTRA, and five army scientists from the Special Operations Division of the Chemical Corps. In reality, these men worked so closely together that they comprised a single unit. They were comrades in search of cosmic secrets. It made sense for them to gather, discuss their projects, and exchange ideas in a relaxed environment.
The first twenty-four hours at the Deep Creek Lake retreat were uneventful. On Thursday evening the group gathered for dinner and then settled back for a round of drinks. Robert Lashbrook, Gottlieb’s deputy, produced a bottle of Cointreau and poured glasses for the company. Several, including Olson, drank heartily. After twenty minutes, Gottlieb asked if anyone was feeling odd. Several said they were. Gottlieb then told them that their drinks had been spiked with LSD.
The news was not well received. Even in their altered state, the unwitting subjects, now witting, could understand what had been done to them. Olson was especially upset. According to his son Eric, he became “quite agitated, and was having a serious confusion with separating reality from fantasy.” Soon, though, he and the others were carried away into a hallucinatory world. Gottlieb later reported that they were “boisterous and laughing … unable to continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversations.” The next morning they were in only slightly better shape. The meeting broke up. Olson headed back to Frederick. By the time he arrived, he was a changed man.
At dinner with his family that night, Olson seemed distant. He said nothing about his trip, could not focus on his children, and refused to eat—even the apple pie Alice had prepared as a special treat. She tried to draw him out, but he stared vacantly into the air.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he finally blurted.
“What did you do?” she asked. “Did you break security?”
“No.”
“Did you falsify data?”
“You know I wouldn’t do that. I’ll tell you later, after the kids go to sleep.”
Later, though, Olson told his wife nothing. His puzzling admission came to haunt the case. What “terrible mistake” had he made? Decades later, after a lifetime of immersion in the story of his father’s death, Eric Olson settled on an answer.
I think what happened was that at the Deep Creek meeting, they gave Frank a chance to recant. I don’t know whether he said “Fuck you!” but in any case, he wouldn’t do it. Then, when he got home, he had second thoughts. He began to realize that this could have really heavy implications for himself and his family. The “terrible mistake” was that he didn’t recant. In a broader sense, it was that he really didn’t understand the people he was dealing with. He thought his opinions would count for something. But their attitude was, “You might make this shit, but we control the operation and we don’t take any crap from scientists.” It wasn’t until the last minute that he realized what he was up against.
The weekend after the encounter at Deep Creek Lake was difficult for both husband and wife. On Sunday evening, in an effort to escape the gloom, they decided to see a movie. A new film called Martin Luther was playing at a nearby cinema. It was eerily appropriate: the story of a man stricken by conscience who decides to risk everything by proclaiming what he believes.
“If I have spoken evil, bear witness against me,” Luther tells his inquisitors in the climactic scene. “I cannot and I will not recant. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”
That scene jarred both husband and wife. “I think we made a poor choice of movie,” Alice told her husband after they returned home.
The next morning, November 23, Olson showed up early at Camp Detrick. His boss, Vincent Ruwet, arrived soon afterward. Neither was in good shape. More than four days had passed since they had been given LSD without their knowledge. Ruwet later called it “the most frightening experience I have ever had or hope to have.” His condition on that Monday was, by his own later assessment, “what you might call marginal.”
Olson began pouring out his doubts and fears. “He appeared to be agitated, and asked me if I sh
ould fire him or he should quit,” Ruwet later recalled. “I was taken aback by this and asked him what was wrong. He stated that, in his opinion, he had messed up the experiment and had not done well at meetings.” Ruwet tried to calm him. His work was excellent and recognized as such, he assured his friend. Slowly Olson was persuaded that resignation was too extreme a reaction. They parted on a hopeful note.
When Ruwet arrived for work the next day, Olson was again waiting to see him. His symptoms had worsened. Ruwet later testified that Olson was “disoriented,” felt “all mixed up,” said he had “done something wrong,” and had concluded that he was “incompetent to do the type of work he was doing.”
By this time MK-ULTRA had been underway for seven months. It was one of the government’s deepest secrets, guarded by security that was, as Olson had been told when he joined the Special Operations Division, “tighter than tight.” Barely two dozen men knew its true nature. Nine had been at Deep Creek Lake. Several of those had been surreptitiously dosed with LSD. Now one of them seemed out of control. This was no light matter for men who believed that the success or failure of MK-ULTRA might determine the fate of the United States and all humanity.
Olson had spent ten years at Camp Detrick and knew most if not all of the Special Operation Division’s secrets. He had repeatedly visited Germany. Slides and home movies he took during those trips place him at the building that housed the CIA station in Frankfurt—and that was less than an hour’s drive from the secret prison at Villa Schuster. Olson also brought home pictures from Heidelberg and Berlin, where the U.S. military maintained clandestine interrogation centers. Besides Germany, his passport shows visits to Britain, Norway, Sweden, and Morocco. He was one of several Special Operations Division scientists who were in France on August 16, 1951, when an entire French village, Pont-St.-Esprit, was mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium that afflicted more than two hundred residents and caused seven deaths; the cause was later determined to have been poisoning by ergot, the fungus from which LSD was derived. Perhaps most threatening of all, if American forces did indeed use biological weapons during the Korean War—there is circumstantial evidence but no proof—Olson would have known. The prospect that he might reveal any of what he had seen or done was terrifying.
“He was very, very open, and not scared to say what he thought,” Olson’s friend and colleague Norman Cournoyer later recalled. “He did not give a damn. Frank Olson pulled no punches at any time … That’s what they were scared of, I am sure. He did speak up any time he wanted to.”
Olson’s doubts deepened as 1953 unfolded. In the spring he visited the top-secret British Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down, southwest of London, where government scientists were studying the effects of sarin and other nerve gases. On May 6 a volunteer subject, a twenty-year-old soldier, was dosed with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions, and died an hour later. Afterward Olson spoke about his discomfort with a psychiatrist who helped direct the research, William Sargant.
A month later Olson was back in Germany. While he was there, according to records that were later declassified, a suspected Soviet agent code-named Patient #2 was subjected to intense interrogation somewhere near Frankfurt. On that same trip, according to a later reconstruction of his travels, Olson “visited a CIA ‘safe house’ near Stuttgart [where] he saw men dying, often in agony, from the weapons he had made.” After stops in Scandinavia and Paris, he returned to Britain and visited William Sargant for a second time. Immediately after their meeting, Sargant wrote a report saying that Olson was “deeply disturbed over what he had seen in CIA safe houses in Germany” and “displayed symptoms of not wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed.” He sent his report to superiors with the understanding that they would forward it to the CIA.
“There was no question of not doing that,” Sargant said years later. “We and the Americans were joined at the hip in such matters. There were common interests to protect.”
Soon after Olson returned home, he sought out his old friend Cournoyer. “He was troubled,” Cournoyer remembered years later. “He said, ‘Norm, you would be stunned by the techniques that they used. They made people talk. They brainwashed people. They used all kinds of drugs. They used all kinds of torture. They were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians—and they didn’t care whether they got out of that or not.’” In another interview, Cournoyer said that Olson “just got involved in it in a way that—he was unhappy about it. But there was nothing he could do about it. He was CIA, and they took it to the end … He said, ‘Norm, did you ever see a man die?’ I said no. He said, ‘Well, I did.’ Yes, they did die. Some of the people they interrogated died. So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people … He said that he was going to leave. He told me that. He said, ‘I am getting out of that CIA. Period.’”
* * *
FIVE DAYS AFTER being dosed with LSD, Olson was still disoriented. His boss at the Special Operations Division, Vincent Ruwet, called Gottlieb to report this. Gottlieb asked him to bring Olson in for a chat. At their meeting, Gottlieb later testified, Olson “seemed to me to be confused in certain areas of his thinking.” He made a quick decision: Olson must be taken to New York City and delivered to the physician most intimately tied to MK-ULTRA, Harold Abramson.
Alice Olson was surprised to see her husband home from work at midday. “I’ve consented to take psychiatric care,” he told her as he packed a suitcase. Soon afterward Ruwet arrived. Alice asked if she could accompany her husband on the first leg of his trip. Ruwet agreed. A few minutes later, he and the Olsons set off.
In the car, Olson became uncomfortable. He asked where they were going. Ruwet told him their first stop would be Washington, and from there they would fly to New York, where Olson could be treated. Thanksgiving was just two days away, and Alice asked her husband whether he would be home in time for holiday dinner. He said he would.
At the Hot Shoppes diner on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda, the group stopped for lunch. Olson refused to touch his food. When Alice encouraged him to eat, he told her he was afraid that he would be served food tainted with drugs or poison.
The belief that the CIA is poisoning one’s food is a classic of the conspiracy-addled mind. In most cases it may be safely filed with the belief that aliens torment earthlings by sending messages through their dental fillings. Olson, however, knew from personal experience that the CIA could indeed poison food. People with whom he worked made the poisons.
When the group arrived in Washington, their car pulled up outside an unmarked CIA building near the Reflecting Pool. Ruwet went inside. Frank and Alice Olson lingered in the car. They held hands in the back seat. Alice asked Frank to repeat his promise to return home for Thanksgiving dinner. He did. Then Ruwet reappeared and motioned for Frank to come with him. The couple said their good-byes.
As Gottlieb had directed, Ruwet and Robert Lashbrook escorted Olson to New York. Aboard their flight, Olson was nervous and talkative. He said he felt “all mixed up.” Someone, he kept repeating, was out to get him.
From LaGuardia Airport, the three of them rode by taxi to Abramson’s office in a brick town house at 133 East Fifty-Eighth Street. Alice Olson had been told that Abramson was chosen because her husband “had to see a physician who had equal security clearance so he could talk freely.” That was partly true. Abramson was not a psychiatrist, but he was an MK-ULTRA initiate. Gottlieb knew that Abramson’s first loyalty was to MK-ULTRA—or, as he would have put it, to the security of the United States. That made him an ideal person to probe Olson’s inner mind.
Olson told Abramson that ever since the Deep Creek Lake retreat, he had been unable to work well. He could not concentrate and forgot how to spell. At night he could not sleep. Abramson sought to reassure Olson, who seemed to relax afterward. Ruwet and Lashbrook picked him up at six o’clock. Later that evening, Abramson joined them at the Statler Hotel, where they had checke
d in. He brought a bottle of bourbon and several tablets of Nembutal, a barbiturate that is sometimes used to induce sleep but is not recommended for use with alcohol. The four of them talked until midnight. Before leaving, Abramson advised Olson to take a couple of Nembutal if he had trouble sleeping.
“You know, I feel a lot better,” Olson said as the evening ended. “This is what I have been needing.”
The next morning, Ruwet took Olson to visit the magician John Mulholland. According to a later report in the New York Times, Mulholland “may have tried to hypnotize” Olson, leading Olson to ask Ruwet several times, “What’s behind this?” By another account, Olson “became agitated when he thought Mulholland was going to make him disappear like one of the magician’s rabbits.” A few minutes after arriving, he jumped from his chair and bolted out of the house. Ruwet ran after him.
That night, Ruwet and Lashbrook took Olson on a stroll along Broadway. They bought tickets for a musical called Me and Juliet. During the intermission, Olson said he feared being arrested at the end of the show. Ruwet scoffed, and guaranteed “personally” that Olson would be home in time for Thanksgiving dinner the next afternoon. Nonetheless Olson insisted on leaving.
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