Better Dead

by Max Allan Collins

  And when I learned that in her forties and fifties, this upbeat, smart, funny creature became occasionally violent—threatening her current husband with a knife and doing the same with a landlady—I again wondered about the impact of that acid trip and the violence she’d been in the middle of.

  After all, in the 1970s, a number of stories about unwitting subjects that Gottlieb and his crew had dosed with LSD came to light, from a guy who just sat down at a table in Paris to chat with a fellow American (Gottlieb) and got a surprise in his coffee, to one of the doctor’s coworker’ wives, who got her dose in a glass of goat’s milk. Bettie’s experience didn’t come out, but she fit the profile. Why else would someone like her suddenly have schizophrenia kick in, in her fifties?

  Fortunately, after a decade in and out of mental facilities, a grounded Bettie Page emerged to learn she had become a pop-culture icon, sparked by cartoonist Dave Stevens having used her as a character in his Rocketeer comics. When he discovered Bettie was still alive, and living in Los Angeles, Stevens took her under his wing, doing everything from helping her buy groceries to reintroducing her to Hugh Hefner, who saw to it that an agent protected her rights. Her final years were happily prosperous.

  As a friend of Hefner’s from Chicago days, I got to get reacquainted with Bettie at the Playboy Mansion in the late ’90s. I’d heard she refused to be photographed, preferring her fans remember her as she was. So I was thrilled to find she was still a beauty, with a pleasantly plump figure and her trademark black pageboy. We reminisced, but not about Bedford Street. She passed in 2008.

  As for Edward “Shep” Shepherd, I was to encounter him a number of times, and as he predicted, we became friendly, even friends, though that might be pushing it. Often he would look me up in Chicago, and we’d have a nice meal, and he’d ask about my son and I’d ask about his son and daughter. Occasionally my status as an asset of the Agency—later called the Company—would come into play, notably with Operation Mongoose, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

  Where Alice Olson was concerned, I did as Shep had instructed—she received a properly sympathetic call from me, and we never spoke again. Frank Olson’s fall from a high window, and the good graces of the CIA, seemed to have found its crack in history to drop through.

  As I write this, many of the players are gone.

  On the rare occasions when he spoke to reporters or officials, Robert Lashbrook seemed always to change his story about what happened in Room 1018a at the Statler. Sometimes he saw Olson run toward the window, other times he was woken by the crash of glass. Gottlieb’s deputy worked for the CIA for twelve years before leaving to teach high school science and math. He died in California in 2002.

  Magician John Mulholland, who performed very little after 1953, continued to work for and with the CIA until his death in 1970. Once a major figure in his field, he is largely forgotten.

  Dr. Harold Abramson continued working with the CIA on their mind control program, with an emphasis on LSD, which he continued to use on unwitting subjects. Seeking therapeutic uses for LSD, he continued his work at an insane asylum in Amityville, New York; he received national publicity when he fed LSD to fish. He died, at age eighty, in 1980.

  Through the years, Colonel Vincent Ruwet—Frank Olson’s boss, who I never met—often dropped by to see Alice Olson. Over drinks, he would lend a sympathetic ear as she described her difficulties raising three children alone. She was unaware that this family friend had been assigned by the CIA to “keep track of the wife.” Ruwet died of a heart attack at church in November of 1996.

  Ruwet’s real role in Alice Olson’s life was just one of many revelations that came out of the Rockefeller Commission, more formally known as the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States. The investigation arose from a New York Times article revealing that the CIA had been conducting illegal domestic activities since the 1950s, including opening the mail of citizens and surveillance of domestic dissidents.

  Among its findings, reported in The Washington Post on June 11, 1975, was that an unnamed “U.S. Army scientist” had taken his own life after being dosed with LSD.

  A month later, the Olson family—Alice, then fifty-nine; Eric, thirty; Lisa, twenty-nine; and Nils, twenty-six—held a press conference in the backyard of the ranch-style house I had visited twenty-two years before. They identified the “suicide” as Alice’s husband, and their father, Frank Olson. Within two weeks, the family was in the Oval Office with President Gerald Ford, who offered them an official apology. A few days later, they met with CIA director William Colby in Langley, Virginia, for lunch and another apology. The family was given what was described as the CIA’s complete file.

  And in 1976 the Olsons received a financial settlement from Congress of $750,000, on condition that all claims against the U.S. government in the death of Frank Olson be considered settled.

  The official story now was that the CIA had slipped LSD into Frank Olson’s after-dinner liqueur at a work retreat at Deep Creek Lake, to see how a scientist would behave on a mind-altering drug. Would he reveal secrets, and if so would the information be coherent? Did LSD work as a truth serum? But unfortunately Frank Olson had a bad trip and wound up taking a header out a high window.

  Seeing this from some distance—I was semiretired from the A-1 now, my son Sam running the agency and its six branches—I smelled a cover-up. This was a classic “limited hangout,” in CIA jargon, which is to say, Tell just enough of the truth to get ’em off your back. Some years later, I learned I was right—two of President Ford’s aides had advised him to “contain the Olson matter” by apologizing and settling out of court, preventing any further demands or investigation. Give them a modest payoff and a photo op with the President, and they’ll be happy.

  The two aides were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

  The presidential apology and the $750,000, which Alice divided among her children, was good enough for her. She had hit it off with the President; they had even laughed together, and she brought home a signed picture. She had never been eager to discuss her husband’s death with her children, telling them, “You are never going to know what happened in that room.” Now there was closure.

  But the publicity generated by the CIA/LSD story had stirred the pot, and the Olsons began hearing from people with stories to tell. One was Armand Pastore, the night manager at the Statler, who shared his memories and doubts. And Frank’s old friend Norm Cournoyer was another, among others from Camp Detrick and sometimes Deep Creek Lake.

  It was Cournoyer who gave my name to Eric, who was actively investigating his father’s death while putting his career as a clinical psychologist largely on hold. Eric tracked me down by phone in Boca Raton, where I was living with my second wife.

  “Mr. Heller,” he said, “this is Frank Olson’s son, Eric.”

  The unnerving thing was that once he’d identified himself that way, the similarity of his voice to his father’s put the latter’s image in my mind, so that I felt in some fashion that I was talking to the father.

  We spoke for some time, and I will admit that I was careful about what I said. I was impressed by how many pieces he had put together, and I was bursting to add missing ones. But there is no statute of limitations on murder, and five men and one woman had died under my gun in 1953 in Greenwich Village, some of it only vaguely self-defense. Also, I had a grown son and some grandchildren and a new wife I loved very much, and it’s never too late to get killed by the spooks. Somebody could still pass me my last rum cocktail, or brush against me on the street for a fatal pinprick.

  “This guy Gottlieb turns up everywhere!” Eric said at one point. “Is he the only person in the shop? Does he have to do everything?”

  We both laughed at the dark humor of that.

  And then he told me that, shortly before his mother died in 1993, he and she and his brother Nils (sister Lisa had died in a plane crash shortly after the President Ford meeting) had tracked down S
idney Gottlieb in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Gottlieb and his wife lived in a sprawling modern solar-heated home with a swimming pool at the end of Turkey Ridge Road, a dirt lane. Alice had arranged the visit by phone and Gottlieb answered their knock at once.

  “He stood there, lean, wiry, reminding me very much of Paul Newman,” Eric Olson said. “Right away he said, ‘I am so relieved to see that you don’t have a gun.’”

  “What?” I said.

  “My brother and mother and I were speechless. And then he said, ‘I had a dream last night in which I opened this door and you pulled a gun and shot me.’”

  “That must have knocked you back a ways.”

  “Mother was pale as a ghost. I said, ‘We didn’t come to harm you or anyone. We only want to talk with you and to ask you a few questions about my father.’”

  “Gottlieb always has been a clever bastard.”

  “Right! Before we were even in the door, he’d disarmed us and taken control—we were already apologizing to him!”

  Inside the house, Gottlieb’s wife, Margaret, and Alice hit it right off, both having been the daughters of missionaries in Asia.

  “But Mrs. Gottlieb seemed a little stressed by the whole occasion,” Eric said. She excused herself, and the rest of the little group sat down in the living room. “Gottlieb proceeded to tell us his version of what happened at Deep Creek Lake.”

  The mad doc’s take mirrored the official one, but when Eric and Nils pointed out the ways in which the government’s story just didn’t make sense, Gottlieb had said, “Look, if you don’t believe me, there is no reason for you to be here. Your father and I went into this type of work because we were patriotic. We cared about our country and its survival in the face of Communism.”

  Eric said to me, “He was really good at painting himself as exactly like my father. But he overplayed his hand.”

  “How so?”

  “He walked us to the door and looked right at me and said, ‘You’re obviously very troubled by your father’s suicide. Have you ever considered getting into a therapy group?’”

  I laughed. “You saw through his ‘concern.’”

  “I didn’t realize it till later, but now I can see how much Gottlieb had at stake in defusing me. He played a hand in murdering my father, didn’t he?”

  I didn’t answer right away. What flashed through my mind was every nasty fucking thing I knew about Gottlieb, who was like a James Bond villain who walked down off the screen. He had tried to kill Castro with poisoned cigars, fountain pens, and wet suits; attempted the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo via poisoned toothbrush; doctored an Iraqi general’s handkerchief with botulism toxin; performed mind control experiments on captured Viet Cong; and burned all the MK-Ultra files when he finally retired from the CIA in 1972.

  And so much more.

  “Eric,” I said. “I have advice for you but it isn’t pretty.… You need to dig up your dad. Ever hear of a guy named James E. Starrs?”

  I explained that in 1991—in part at my urging (I’d been involved with the original Huey Long case)—forensics expert Dr. James E. Starrs, of George Washington University in Washington D.C., had approached the family of Dr. Carl Weiss, Long’s presumed assassin. Starrs felt an exhumation of Dr. Weiss’s body might possibly lead to vindication for Weiss. The exhumation went forward and Starrs—with supportive evidence—presented his case for a bodyguard having killed Long. This Starrs did at the yearly meeting of the prestigious Academy of Forensic Sciences, to a positive response.

  On June 2, 1994, in Frederick, Maryland, under the supervision of Dr. Starrs, a crane unearthed Frank Olson’s concrete burial vault, from which the wooden coffin was removed and wrapped for transport to a nearby crime lab. The original autopsy report had described cuts and abrasions; the surprisingly well-preserved body showed none. But a major discovery soon followed: An unrecorded blow to Olson’s left temple had caused major bleeding under otherwise unbroken skin.

  Starrs and most of his team believed someone had sapped Olson and shoved him through the window—either in a struggle that got out of hand or as outright murder. The pathologist theorized either a hammer or the butt of a gun as the likely blunt object. Finally, he and his team concluded that the evidence from their examination—and a lengthy trip to the crime scene, utilizing computer reconstruction of the fall—was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

  The findings of the Starrs autopsy spurred a new investigation by the New York public prosecutor, and many depositions were taken, with key players like Lashbrook and Gottlieb generating new information. Ultimately, however, the investigation did not lead to a new trial; nor have civil efforts by Eric and Nils proven successful thus far.

  But on August 8, 2002, again in the backyard of the tree-surrounded 1950s ranch-style house, Eric and Nils Olson held a well-attended press conference to share findings based on years of investigation by the brothers, who—like the sons of the Rosenbergs—had given so much of their lives to this effort.

  The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953, they said, was a murder, not a suicide; LSD experimentation was just the cover story created to handle a security risk; and a 1975 cover-up of the full facts surrounding their father’s death was set in motion at the highest levels of the Ford administration.

  To date, no one from the United States government has stepped forward to contradict any of the claims put forth by the Olson brothers.

  But as the participants all slip into history and into the ground—Frank Olson’s examined remains now in a different resting place, next to Alice—any sense of closure for the Olson brothers, or the rest of us, seems less and less likely. Armand Pastore, the best witness, died in 1999; so did the most obvious villain of the piece, Sidney Gottlieb. And while I have finally come forward, in the form of this memoir, even Nate Heller can’t live forever.

  Looking back on all of it—from the father and mother who died in the electric chair to the father who fell thirteen stories to his death—I can see that Joe McCarthy was right in a way. There were dangerous foes of democracy in our government.

  They just weren’t Commies.

  I OWE THEM ONE

  Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, mitigated by the limitations of conflicting source material.

  Most of the characters in this novel are real and appear under their true names, although all depictions must be viewed as fictionalized. Whenever possible, interviews with subjects, or court and/or congressional committee appearances, have been used as the basis of dialogue scenes, although creative liberties have been taken.

  Nathan Heller is, of course, fictional, as is his A-1 Detective Agency. In some cases, I have chosen not to use real names as an indication that either a surfeit of research is available on some minor historical figure or that significant fictionalization has occurred, such as a composite characterization. Natalie Ash is a fictional character with some basis in a number of female espionage agents involved in the Rosenberg case. Shep Shepherd is similarly fictional with roots in several real people.

  For the most part, I have limited Heller to gathering information uncovered by investigators during the era depicted, although this has not been a hard-and-fast rule. Nonetheless, I at times omitted material that Heller could not have logically obtained in 1953. Nor did I attempt to cover every aspect and personality in the Rosenberg and Olson cases; part of my mission was reductive, to make complex events accessible, and perhaps encourage readers to sample some of the research material mentioned below.

  As much as possible, I like to present Heller in a role occupied by a real person (or persons) in history. Joe McCarthy frequently hired private investigators in various parts of the country, and much of Heller’s eleventh-hour inquiry into the Rosenberg case mirrors that of National Guardian reporters, including stum
bling upon the missing console table.

  The two intertwined cases examined in this novel are polar opposites in research terms. The fate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has been so much written about—and often from such biased extremes—that tackling the reading is daunting. I found indispensable two very different books, The Rosenberg File (second edition, 1983, 1997) by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, and Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case (2010) by Walter and Miriam Schneir.

  Radosh and Milton are dogged, thorough researchers who profess an objective viewpoint but are clearly in the anti-Rosenberg camp, if not rabidly so; in any case, their book is a treasure trove of data and detail. The second edition’s introduction, however—which covers material updated since the first edition—absurdly assumes the reader is already familiar with the book being introduced. Read as an afterword, however, this poorly placed introduction is effective and illuminating.

  Walter and Miriam Schneir—with their previous work, Invitation to an Inquest (1965, updated 1983)—became the premier advocates of the Rosenbergs as innocent victims of a government conspiracy. So striking was the difference between the Schneir view and the Radosh and Milton one that the two writing teams would appear together to debate the case in public.

  The Schneirs, however, responded to post–Cold War revelations about the Rosenbergs by continuing their research and admitting in print that they’d been wrong. Their slender tome, Final Verdict, puts the pieces together in a convincing manner that is intelligently gray, as opposed to their own previous black-and-white reading of the case (and the opposing one of Radosh and Milton).

  Also helpful was the very readable insider’s look at the case, Exoneration: The Trial of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell (2010) by Emily Arnow-Alman and David Alman, cofounders and leaders of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case. Key, too, was The Murder of the Rosenbergs (1990) by Stanley Yalkowsky, which includes much of the trial transcript, annotated with the pro-Rosenberg slant its title indicates.