In the World

by Richard Stratton

  The public first learned of MK-ULTRA in 1977 with the disclosure of thousands of classified documents and CIA testimony before a Senate subcommittee on health and scientific research chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. Previously, CIA director Richard Helms had ordered Sidney Gottlieb to destroy all of the MK-ULTRA files in his possession. What was ultimately declassified and made public revealed only a portion of the record. Ike Feldman was subpoenaed and appeared on a panel of witnesses, but the senators failed to ask him a single question. Sidney Gottlieb, complaining of a heart condition, testified at a special semipublic session. He delivered a prepared statement and admitted to having destroyed MK-ULTRA files. The full extent of the CIA’s activities under the rubric of MK-ULTRA, MK-NAOMI, and a host of other covert domestic and foreign operations may never be known.

  George White retired from the narcotics bureau and from his role as a CIA contract agent in 1965. The last ten years of his life he lived in Stinson Beach, California, where, known as Colonel White, he became chief of the volunteer fire department and regaled fellow drinkers in his favorite watering holes with his tales of derring-do as a secret agent for the government. Local residents remember George for turning in kids for smoking pot, for spraying a preacher and his congregation with water at a beach picnic, and for terrorizing his neighbors by driving his jeep across their lawns when he’d had too much to drink. After White’s death, his widow donated his papers, including his diaries, to an electronic surveillance museum. As information on MK-ULTRA entered the public domain, people who had known White only in his official FBN capacity were stunned to learn of his undercover role as Morgan Hall, his long employment as a CIA contract agent, and his close association with mafiosi and intelligence agents suspected of involvement in political assassinations.

  According to George Belk, a former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York, Ike Feldman quit the drug agency in the mid-1960s after a probe by the internal security division. “Feldman was the sort of guy who didn’t have too many scruples,” said Dan Casey, a retired FBN agent who worked with Feldman in San Francisco. “For him, the ends justified the means.” A DEA flack confirmed Feldman “resigned under a cloud” at a time when a number of agents came under suspicion of a variety of offenses, none having to do with secret drug-testing programs. When I interview him, Feldman asserts that he still works for the CIA on a contract basis, mostly in the Far East and Korea.

  On the day of our last interview, over lunch at a restaurant in Little Italy, Feldman tells me the CIA had contacted him and asked him why he was talking to me.

  “Fuck them.” Feldman says. “I do what I want. I never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement.”

  I ask him why he decided to tell his story after so many years of silence. “There’s too much bullshit in the world.” Feldman says. “The world runs on bullshit.

  “To make a long story short,” he sums up, using one of his favorite verbal segues, “I want the truth of this to be known so that people understand that what we did was for the good of the country.” We amble down the street to a Chinese grocer, where Feldman carries on a lengthy conversation with the owner in Chinese. A couple of young girls, tourists, want to have their picture taken with Feldman. “Are you a gangster?” they ask.

  “No,” Feldman replies with a wave of his cigar, “I’m a goddamn CIA agent.”

  As we walk on, I ask Feldman to explain how his and George White’s work for the CIA had been helpful to the country.

  “I learned that most of this stuff was necessary for the United States,” he says, “and even though it may have hurt somebody in the beginning, in the long run it was important. As long as it did good for the country.”

  I press him. “How so? How was it good for the country?”

  “Well, look,” Feldman gestures with his cigar at the throng of citizens in the streets of New York City. “We’re goddamn free, aren’t we?”

  THE ARTICLE, “ALTERED States of America,” published in the March 1994 issue of Spin magazine, immediately ignites heated controversy that still simmers and occasionally flares up all these years later over the exposure of details in Project MK-ULTRA and the CIA’s acid tests first reported in my interview with Ike Feldman. Bob Guccione calls for a news conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and asks me if Ike would agree to appear. Ike shows up dressed like a 1950s gangster and brandishing a large, unlit cigar. He tells the room full of assembled reporters that “everything in that article is all bullshit. This guy (me, sinking lower in my seat) doesn’t know shit from shinola.” And then he not only confirms the most provocative statements he made in the interview, but he elaborates and makes even more detailed and outrageous assertions about George White, the CIA’s LSD tests in New York, and later when the project was shut down after Frank Olson’s death and relocated to San Francisco under the new code-name Project Midnight Climax.

  I include the Spin article as the title piece in a collection of my magazine journalism published by Nation Books in September 2005 as Altered States of America: Outlaws and Icons, Hitmakers and Hitmen. The screenplay I write for Marc Levin and Henri Kessler, which is alternately titled MK-ULTRA and Acid Test, is said by some of the producers who read it to be the best unproduced script making the rounds of Hollywood studios and production companies. At the time, the CIA/LSD story appeared too farfetched, too bizarre and unbelievable for movie executives to wrap their heads around, more like an acid-induced fantasy dreamed up by the outlaw author and his equally conspiracy-­minded partner, Blowback director Marc Levin. Since then, with the publication of a number of books on the subject, and the 2017 Netflix docudrama series Wormwood, directed by Errol Morris, MK-ULTRA and the CIA’s involvement in domestic operations involving US citizens has undergone new scrutiny.

  One statement in particular made by Ike Feldman during the interview, and that I reported in the Spin article, remains to this day the impetus for and the focus of much of the ongoing controversy. Though ruled a suicide, Olson’s death has been reexamined as a possible CIA sanctioned murder. Ike was the first person to question the suicide verdict in print and suggest that Olson may have been thrown out of the hotel window, possibly murdered to shut him up as a security risk. Soon after the article appears in Spin, I get a phone call from the editor, Elizabeth Mitchell, to ask if I am willing to speak with Frank Olson’s son, Eric Olson. Eric read the article, and he wants to speak to me.

  Eric confides that the Olson family has long disbelieved the suicide story and lived with the haunting suspicion that men working for the government murdered their father. He asks me to put him in touch with Ike Feldman, which I do. Ike repeats his statement to Eric and elaborates, making the claim that the word at the time was that Olson had been thrown out the window to shut him up. Ike implies that none other than George Hunter White might have had something to do with Frank Olson’s demise. George had a reputation from his days with OSS as having been proficient at what is known as “wet work,” killing people for the agency.

  Eric Olson has his father’s body exhumed and arranges for a second autopsy, performed by James Starrs, professor of law and forensic science at the George Washington University National Law Center. Starrs and his forensic team examine Olson’s body for cuts and abrasions that would have been consistent with a crash through the window and find none. They do, however, discover a large hematoma on the left side of Olson’s head and a large injury to his chest. Starrs’s team concludes that the blunt-force trauma to the head and chest injury were not sustained during the fall but most likely as the result of injuries inflicted in the hotel room before Olson went out the window. Starrs pronounces the evidence “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

  Two years after the Spin article appears, in 1996 Eric Olson approaches Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office to see if they would be willing to open a new investigation. I am deposed and repeat what Ike told me to investigators from the district attorney office’s cold case unit. Investigators collect add
itional evidence, including the deposition of Robert Lashbrook, a squirrelly CIA scientist who worked on the MK-ULTRA program under Sidney Gottlieb and who was in the hotel room with Olson when he went out the window. The forensic evidence surrounding Olson’s death suggests defenestration, the act of throwing someone or something out of a window, which was a favorite method used by the CIA. The CIA’s first manual on assassination describes the procedure as “the most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.”

  Ultimately, the New York City district attorney’s office determined that there is no compelling new evidence to bring to a grand jury, and the investigation into the Olson case is closed. But the story of MK-ULTRA and the doubts about the circumstances of Frank Olson’s mysterious death refuse to die. Eric Olson sustains an all-consuming effort to bring light and truth to the facts of his father’s death. As recently as 2018, I am interviewed for a series of short documentaries on MK-ULTRA to air on the internet-based ATTN.

  WHILE I WAS working on the HBO Prison Life series, Sheila Nevins asked me to read and comment on the verisimilitude of the pilot for a dramatic series HBO was developing for TV called Oz. Set in a fictional experimental prison, Oz is to be HBO’s first production of a scripted TV series. Sheila and her boss, Chris Albrecht, had reservations about the script, given the reality of prison life as depicted in the magazine and in our documentaries. I read the script written by Tom Fontana, the creator of St. Elsewhere and one of the executive producers of Homicide, and delivered my notes.

  Prison may be one of the most difficult subjects for writers who have never experienced it to write about convincingly. In films and TV shows, prison life has largely been portrayed in lurid clichés and one-dimensional stereotypes. To begin with, it’s hard for someone who hasn’t been incarcerated to capture the universal human drama of being deprived of one’s freedom. It’s like trying to imagine what it’s like to live in New York City if you’ve never lived there and know it only through what you’ve seen on TV or in the movies. Also, so much of the prison experience is unique and depends on the character of the person forced to live in captivity. The essential adversarial relationship is not necessarily prisoner to prisoner but more often keeper to kept. The essential emotion is loneliness. Fear strikes in the hard, clanking sounds of steel bars slamming shut, and in the smell of so many men herded together in a confined space. The US prison population is overwhelmingly made up of men and women of color from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods. Whites are a distinct minority. And yet most prisons are located in rural areas where the guards are predominantly white.

  As a result of my comments, HBO hired me to work on Oz as a technical consultant. In the beginning, Fontana complained that I was trying to rewrite his scripts rather than just give him notes. But over the course of the series, Tom became less concerned with trying to shock the audience with garish clichés and more engaged in dramatizing the social issues of imprisonment in America. I was enthralled by the experience of working on a scripted TV series. It struck me as the modern-day equivalent of the nineteenth-century novel, where one is able to create a wide cast of characters and develop their stories over many years and through changes that have a deep impact on their lives.

  WHILE WORKING ON Oz, I was hired as an expert witness by the defense to consult on a case involving a particularly brutal prison homicide that took place in a lockdown control unit at the maximum-security Gunnison Penitentiary in Utah. A young white prisoner, Troy Kell, was accused of stabbing to death a black gang member named Lonnie Blackmon. As a new arrival in the control unit, Blackmon apparently didn’t fit in. He upset the daily rhythm in the unit by playing his radio too loud, yelling and complaining to the guards, and generally upsetting the other prisoners, many of whom had been classified as violent offenders and were doing life or long prison sentences. They weren’t happy to have their routines disrupted. Routine is everything in prison, particularly when one is serving a long or terminal prison sentence. Prisoners spend months and even years developing a routine as a means of doing time. Upsetting that is tantamount to some new arrival in a sedate, middle-class neighborhood suddenly turning their home into a crack house. Blackmon wasn’t showing the proper respect to his neighbors. So the white boys decided to go to the head shot-caller among the white convicts, the charismatic and calculating Troy Kell, and implore Troy as the unofficial mayor of the control unit to take care of the Blackmon disruption. Troy was at that time a handsome twenty-six-year-old who looked like a muscled-up version of James Dean. He was doing life for a senseless murder.

  Troy’s whole history is a tragic story of a young life gone horribly wrong. He grew up in a broken home outside Las Vegas. His high school girlfriend answered an ad in a local newspaper for models. When she sat for the photo shoot, she was assaulted and then stalked by the pervert who claimed to be a photographer. When she told Troy what had happened, he and some friends decided to give the guy a beating. Someone brought along a gun. The kids shot the photographer and left his body out in the desert. For days after the killing, they told their friends what they had done and took the other kids out to show them the decomposing corpse.

  Troy was eighteen when he was sentenced to life in the Nevada State Penitentiary. As a good-looking white boy, his best chance of survival as a man was to get down with the Aryan clique for protection. By the time he arrived in Gunnison on a prisoner-exchange program, Troy was a full-on tattooed convict badass, though still soft-spoken, gentlemanly, and even seemingly shy. In my meeting with the prosecutor on Troy’s case, he said he couldn’t understand why Troy and his lawyer would bother to go to trial on the murder since the entire event was captured on the prison video recorder.

  “You mean there’s video of the actual killing?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “I have it right here.” And he took a VCR tape from his desk drawer.

  Even at this early stage in my career as a documentary film producer, after the success with the Mike Tyson film, I have already adopted the default position of asking for videotape whenever it is mentioned.

  “Can I have it?” I asked.

  “It’s my only copy,” he replied.

  “Just for a few hours,” I said. “I’ll get a copy made and return it.”

  The tape of Troy Kell’s killing of Lonnie Blackmon is evidence of everything I had been writing about prison violence in Prison Life magazine, and what I have been saying on the witness stand in the courtroom when called to testify. It’s horrendous. There is a kind of macabre beauty to the choreography, often sheer brilliance in the planning and execution, as it is never random, never senseless, always the result of some real or perceived serious infraction of what is known as the convict code: an unwritten regimen of giving and getting respect. The convict code is a self-imposed dogma to control violent, caged men who have been further brutalized by their environment. Troy lived by the code: give and get respect. Respect is the currency of prison life. You fuck up, you refuse to live by the code, you refuse to respect your fellow prisoners, you disrupt the day-to-day rhythm of prison life in close confinement, and you must die. Troy stabbed Blackmon something like sixty-seven times while Blackmon was held down by another white convict, who also just happened to be out of his cell with no restraints. When I asked Troy why he stabbed Blackmon so many times, he answered, “Because I was so mad at him for putting me in a position where I had to kill him.” Perfect convict logic.

  The killing seemed to go on for a good fifteen minutes. Meanwhile the guards, who were watching it all take place on the closed-circuit video system that is recording the killing, did nothing; they merely commented that something was apparently going down in the control unit. Troy kneeled on Blackmon and stabbed him with a prison-made shank in the torso, throat, and head. At one point the shank got stuck in Blackmon’s skull and Troy has to yank it out to go on stabbing. When he finished, his jumpsuit and arms covered with blood, this usually mild-mannered, seemingly sweet yo
ung man stood up, raised his arms in a victory salute, and declared for the camera and for the other prisoners watching the killing, “Got some white power going off in here!”

  A killing like the prolonged butchering of Lonnie Blackmon in a supposedly locked-down control unit could not take place without staff complicity. I would venture to say that most prison homicides involve varying degrees of staff awareness and even assistance in setting up the killing. Certainly, that is the case in the Blackmon homicide. Bear in mind that the prisoners in the control unit where Troy and Blackmon were held are all supposed to be locked down twenty-three and a half hours a day in single-man cells. They are never to be let out of their cells unless they are handcuffed behind their backs and escorted by guards. There is never to be more than one prisoner out of his cell at a time. Those are the rules governing prisoners who are confined in segregation units. These guys are already known to be dangerous; often, they have killed before while in custody. So how does it happen that Troy manages to get out of his cell, get free of the handcuffs, get a hold of the shank, and have another convict released from his cell to help attack Blackmon, who, conveniently, also happens to be out of his cell at the same time? Ingenious planning, yes, and well-coordinated jailhouse moves by savvy convicts who are still able to wield power even when supposedly incapacitated: all that is true. But also, it couldn’t happen without a little help from the guards, who may have had their own reasons for wanting to get rid of Lonnie Blackmon.

  It’s prison life in America, and the guards and administrators have adapted as well as the convicts. In a maximum-security prison in California, guards arranged gladiator fights between members of rival gangs and then bet on the results. I reported on the California gladiator fights case in an article for Esquire called “The Making of Bone Crusher,” published in September 1999.