“I have accumulated a number of honors from my professional colleagues that have brought me a pleasurable sense of being valued,” David Gottlieb said at one ceremony. “Although I have enjoyed receiving these honors, I have often wondered why I have not been more moved by them. Perhaps it was because I see life as imperfect and destined to remain so.”
Despite the loss of his brother, Sidney Gottlieb was entering what could have been the rewarding autumn of his life. He was living close to nature. His friends admired his civic passion. He could claim the quiet satisfaction of one who devotes himself to the good of others. The past, however, always hung over him. In 1984 the CIA, facing a steady stream of inquiries, issued a public “Statement on MK-ULTRA” that did not mention his name but referred to “questionable” research experiments. “In 1983, after questions were raised within the Agency by the Inspector General about the propriety of these subprojects, they were discontinued,” the statement said. “Safeguards were subsequently promulgated through Presidential Executive Orders which have been strictly followed.”
Years later, a television reporter ambushed Gottlieb near his home, pushed a microphone into his face, and asked if he had any regrets about MK-ULTRA.
“I just don’t want to talk about it,” a haggard-looking Gottlieb said as he turned away from the camera. “It’s a right that you have and that I have. I’ve gone on to other parts of my life. That’s in my past and it’s going to stay there.”
* * *
AT FRANK OLSON’S funeral, Gottlieb had told grieving relatives that if they ever had questions about “what happened,” he would be happy to answer them. More than three decades later, at the end of 1984, they decided to accept his offer, and called to arrange an appointment. He told them they were welcome. When Alice, Eric, and Nils Olson appeared at his door, his first reaction was relief.
“I’m so happy you don’t have a weapon,” Gottlieb said. “I had a dream last night that you all arrived at this door and shot me.”
Eric was taken aback. “We didn’t come here to harm you or anyone, we only want to talk to you and ask you a few questions about my father,” he said. Later he came to marvel at what he saw as Gottlieb’s manipulative power. “Before we even got through the door, we were apologizing to him and reassuring him,” he said. “It was a brilliant and sophisticated way of turning the whole thing around.”
Inside, the encounter began with small talk. Margaret Gottlieb and Alice Olson discovered that their fathers had both done mission work in Asia, and spoke briefly about their experiences. Then Margaret withdrew. Gottlieb invited his guests into the living room. He began by telling them what had happened at Deep Creek Lake on November 19, 1953. Frank Olson and others were given LSD, he said, as part of an experiment to see “what would happen if a scientist were taken prisoner and drugged—would he divulge secret research and information?” Then he began musing about Olson.
“Your father and I were very much alike,” he told Eric. “We both got into this because of patriotic feeling. But we both went a little too far, and we did things that we probably should not have done.”
That was as close to a confession as Gottlieb ever came. He would not say what aspects of MK-ULTRA went “a little too far,” or what he and Olson did that they “probably should not have done.” Nor would he entertain questions about inconsistencies in the story of Olson’s death. When Eric pressed him, he reacted sharply.
“There was a tautness to him,” Eric recalled. “He was kind of hyper-alert and extremely intelligent. You could feel that right away. I was dealing with a world-class intelligence—and a world-class shrewdness. You felt like you were playing cat-and-mouse and he was way ahead of you. He had a way of decentering you … He had a charm that was extraordinary. You could almost fall in love with the guy. The thrust of what he did in the whole session was to say, ‘That guy Gottlieb back there did some things that I’m ashamed of, but I am not him. I moved on. I left the Agency, I went to India, and I am teaching children with learning disabilities, and I am consciousness-raising. I am not that guy.’’’
“You say that you’ve been through a change of consciousness, and that now you’re a new Gottlieb,” Eric told him. “But can’t you answer? What about the old Gottlieb? What if we arrange a reunion and rethink the whole thing and where we are in our lives?”
“Look, if you don’t believe me, there’s no reason for you to be here,” Gottlieb told his visitors. “There is no reason for me to tell you anything. I agreed to meet with you to tell you what I know.”
As the family was rising to leave, Gottlieb pulled Eric aside. “You are obviously very troubled by your father’s suicide,” he said. “Have you ever considered getting into a therapy group for people whose parents have committed suicide?”
Eric did not follow that suggestion, but it left a deep impression on him. For years he had been confused and depressed by the story of his father’s death. Only after meeting Gottlieb, however, did he resolve to bring his search for truth to the center of his life.
“I didn’t have the confidence then in my skepticism to ignore his ploys, but when he made that therapy group suggestion—that was the moment when he overplayed his hand,” he said. “At that moment I understood how much Gottlieb had a stake in defusing me. And it was also at that moment that the determination to show that he had played a role in murdering my father was born.”
Eric Olson waited another decade—until after his mother died—before taking his next step: arranging to exhume his father’s body. Several reporters stood near him as a backhoe clawed through the earth at Linden Hills Cemetery in Frederick, Maryland, on June 2, 1994.
“I don’t know if we’re going to find out what happened to my father,” he told them, “but I want to feel we did what we could do to find out.”
A forensic pathologist, James Starrs of George Washington University Law School, spent a month studying Olson’s body. When he was finished, he called a news conference. His tests for toxins in the body, he reported, had turned up nothing. The wound pattern, however, was curious. Starrs had found no glass shards on the victim’s head or neck, as might be expected if he had dived through a window. Most intriguingly, although Olson had reportedly landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured.
“I would venture to say that this hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A,” Starrs concluded. Later he was more emphatic: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”
Besides conducting the autopsy, Starrs interviewed people connected to the case. One was Gottlieb. The two men met on a Sunday morning at Gottlieb’s home in Virginia. Starrs later wrote that it was “the most perplexing of all the interviews I conducted.” Gottlieb’s account of what he had done in the period before and after Olson’s death was “at least unsatisfactory and at most incredible … My overall assessment of this interview was not at all favorable to Dr. Gottlieb or to his lack of complicity in Olson’s death.”
Probably the most unsettling, even unnerving moment in my conversation with Dr. Gottlieb occurred toward its close when he spontaneously sought to enlighten me on a matter of which I might not take due notice, so he thought. He pointedly explained that in 1953 the Russian menace was quite palpable … Listening awe-struck to him as I gazed at a picture of South African Bishop Tutu on the wall, I was emboldened to ask how he could so recklessly and cavalierly have jeopardized the lives of so many of his own men by the Deep Creek Lodge experiment with LSD. “Professor,” he said without mincing a word, “you just do not understand. I had the security of this country in my hands.” He did not say more, nor need he have done so. Nor did I, dumb-founded, offer a rejoinder. The means-end message was pellucidly clear. Risking the lives of the unwitting victims of the Deep Creek experiment was simply the necessary means to a greater good,
the protection of the national security.
Because Olson’s survivors had signed away their right to legal relief when they accepted their $750,000 compensation payment in 1975, they could not sue the CIA. Eric Olson worked closely, however, with prosecutors in New York who were investigating his father’s death. In 1999 they persuaded the city’s medical examiner to change the classification of Frank Olson’s death from suicide to what detectives call CUPPI—“Cause Unknown Pending Police Investigation.” Despite their efforts, District Attorney Morgenthau ultimately concluded that he did not have enough evidence to seek criminal indictments in the Olson case, and never presented it to a grand jury.
That hardly allayed the family’s suspicions. New tidbits kept emerging, none decisive but each one adding to the weight of circumstantial evidence. One of the most startling was an eight-page CIA manual called “A Study of Assassination,” written in 1953—the year Olson died—and declassified in 1997. It is unsigned, but a CIA officer who worked with MK-ULTRA later identified Gottlieb as the author. Some of its advice on ways to kill eerily fits the Olson case.
“The contrived accident is the most effective technique,” the manual advises. “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 … It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death … A rock or heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried, or subsequently disposed of. Blows should be directed to the temple.”
Although that and other discoveries sharpened Eric Olson’s already powerful suspicion that foul play lay behind his father’s death, he could not prove it. Recognizing that painful fact, he and his brother decided that it was finally time to reinter their father’s body. On August 8, 2002, the day before the reburial, he called reporters to his home and announced that he had reached a new conclusion about what had happened to his father.
“The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953, was a murder, not a suicide,” he declared. “This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a ‘bad trip.’ He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called ‘Artichoke’ in the early 1950s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.”
If Gottlieb has been remembered at all, it is as a supporting player in the Frank Olson drama. Actors portray him in two televised documentaries about the case. Since the producers had no photos of him during his CIA days, they had to imagine what he looked like. In the first, called CIA Secret Experiments and produced by National Geographic in 2008, Gottlieb appears dapper and white-haired as he pours LSD into Olson’s fateful bottle of Cointreau—inaccurate both because he was just thirty-five years old at the time and because, according to witnesses, it was Lashbrook, not Gottlieb, who spiked the drinks that night.
Gottlieb also makes extended appearances in Errol Morris’s four-hour film about the Olson case, Wormwood, which was released in 2017. The actor who plays him, Tim Blake Nelson, is young and exudes assertive self-confidence. Wormwood is built around interviews in which Eric Olson recounts the story of his father’s death and his lifelong search for answers. It suggests that the death could have been a murder, and that Gottlieb could have been involved.
In 2017 Stephen Saracco, a retired New York assistant district attorney who had investigated the Olson case and remained interested in it, made his first visit to the hotel room where Olson spent his final night. A video crew filmed him as he opened the door to room 1018A and stepped inside. Some furnishings had been replaced, but the room’s dimensions and layout were the same as in 1953.
“Being here now, looking at it live, just raises the question of how he could have done it,” Saracco said as he looked around the room. By his reckoning, Olson would have had to reach an extraordinary speed in a small room, dive over a thirty-one-inch-high radiator that stands in front of the window, and smash through the plate glass while ducking to avoid a window divider that is just twenty-nine inches above the radiator. Saracco wondered why, if Olson was intent on killing himself, he would try “that kind of Superman move” rather than simply opening the window and sliding out.
“If this would have been a suicide, it would have been very difficult to accomplish,” Saracco concluded. “There was motive to kill him. He knew the deepest, darkest secrets of the Cold War. Would the American government kill an American citizen who was a scientist, who was working for the CIA and the Army, if they thought he was a security risk? There are people who say, ‘Definitely.’”
* * *
FRANK OLSON WAS not the only one of Gottlieb’s victims who returned to haunt him. Once the truth about MK-ULTRA began leaking out, he became the subject of several lawsuits. He was forced to sit for days of harsh questioning. Before him lay a Shakespearean reckoning: Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them to men’s eyes.
The first hint that Gottlieb would face trouble in court came in the early 1980s, when three former inmates at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary filed a lawsuit against the CIA and its director William Casey. They asserted that in the two decades since Dr. Carl Pfeiffer used them as subjects in his drug experiments, they had been plagued by hallucinations, flashbacks, paranoia, and other psychic disturbances; charged that the government had been negligent in allowing these experiments to proceed; and asked for damages under the Federal Claims Tort Act. Although Gottlieb was not a named defendant, he would almost certainly have been called to testify if the case had gone to trial. It never did. On April 29, 1983, a federal judge dismissed the former inmates’ suit on the grounds that the statute of limitations for the crimes they alleged had expired.
Gottlieb could not celebrate that ruling. Ten days before it was handed down, he had undergone grueling cross-examination in another case. This time the plaintiffs were relatives of Velma Orlikow, a Canadian woman who had been among Dr. Ewen Cameron’s victims at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Orlikow had come to the institute for treatment of post-partum depression in 1957 and was plunged into a nightmare from which she never recovered. Years later her husband, David, a member of the Canadian parliament, sued the CIA. He charged that, at the Agency’s direction, Cameron had subjected his wife to “horrific” treatment that left her functioning “at about 20 percent of capacity,” unable to read, use a fork and knife, or recognize relatives.
To prosecute their case, the Orlikow family hired Joseph Rauh, one of America’s most combative civil rights lawyers. Rauh won an order compelling Gottlieb to submit to pre-trial questioning. During the spring of 1983, he endured three day-long sessions at the Boxwood House Motel in Culpeper, Virginia.
Gottlieb’s memory proved improbably blank. When Rauh asked him what division of the CIA he joined when he was hired in 1951, he replied, “I really can’t remember that level of detail.” Did he conduct research into the effects of electric shock? “I don’t remember.” What did he tell CIA investigators who questioned him after Frank Olson’s death? “I may be having a mental block.” Did CIA officers coach him before his congressional testimony in the 1970s? “My memory is hazy about that.” Most remarkably: What was his relationship to Richard Helms, the officer with whom he had conceived MK-ULTRA and who for twenty years was his chief patron and protector?
“I don’t remember what Mr. Helms’s job was,” Gottlieb testified. “I really don’t remember what his role was.”
Rauh was openly scornful. “What Dr. Gottlieb has done is to show a reckless disregard for human life,” he said at one point. Gottlieb’s lawyer—during these depositions he was represented by CIA attorneys, not Terry Lenzner—jumped to protest.
In this day-long interrogation and the two others that followed, Gottlieb offered a few intriguing insights. Asked the purpose of MK-ULTRA, he answered with a single reasonably accurate sentence: “MK-ULTRA was a project to investigate the intelligence potential, defensively and then later offensively, of the use of various techniques of behavior control in intelligence operations.” He admitted that he had felt “somewhat abused” and “quite angry” when the CIA declassified MK-ULTRA documents with other names redacted but his clearly legible. Pressed about the Olson case, he became indignant.
“I was very upset that a human being had been killed,” he told Rauh. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. It was a total accident. You are one of the few people to say there was anything purposeful in it.”
Gottlieb admitted that some CIA officers had been “disinclined” to use techniques he developed because “they found the idea distasteful and strange. They had moral objections.” Asked if he felt responsible for the torments Ewen Cameron had inflicted during his MK-ULTRA work, he replied, “I find it very difficult to answer that question.”
“Did you ever consider you should adopt something analogous to the Nuremberg Code?” Rauh asked him.
“We did not,” he replied.
The Orlikow case dragged on for five years and was finally settled out of court in 1988. The CIA agreed to pay the Orlikow family, and the families of each of eight other Canadians who suffered at Ewen Cameron’s hands, a total of $750,000 in compensation. It did not admit guilt or responsibility.
That was hardly the end of Gottlieb’s legal trouble. He faced another lawsuit, filed on behalf of Stanley Glickman, the young artist whose life had collapsed after he met an American with a clubfoot at a Paris café in 1952. Glickman was living in New York when revelations about MK-ULTRA burst into the news. Suddenly, for the first time in the quarter century since he drank that fateful Chartreuse, he understood what might have happened to him.
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