It’s the summer of 1975. Sidney Gottlieb is happily retired,
having left his beloved eco-lodge in the US to volunteer in India treating victims of leprosy.
He’s called to the phone. It’s someone from Washington on the line, sounding extremely
unnerved. “Sidney,
they know who you are… They know what we did.” Gottlieb, who’s since been given the labels of
Dr. Death and the American Josef Mengele, wondered right then if he’d have to face the music for his,
some say unspeakably wicked actions, as the man behind the CIA’s mind control experiments,
not to mention his starring role in secret assassinations around the world. MKultra
wasn’t just about mind control, but also barbaric torture and executions, at home in the US, and
abroad. Today you’re going to hear about events you would think were just not possible in the USA.
Indeed, Gottlieb would be accused of directing extreme and highly unusual torture,
of committing psychological warfare against the American public, comprising countless
breaches of the Nuremberg Code. He’d be connected to the poisoning of a French
town when 250 people became victims of a terrifying and deadly psychosis. And the
question would be asked, had Gottlieb once ordered the assassination of one
of the CIA’s own scientists, Frank Olson? Would they have taken out one of their own?
In this video today, one of our deepest dives ever, you’ll learn the full uncensored story
about the CIA’s mind control experiments, and we’ll investigate the death of Olson,
showing how he and the poisoning of that French town could be connected in ways
that still cause great anxiety for the CIA. In 1999, a private funeral was held for Mr.
Gottlieb (then 80), whose death, some have said, was itself something of a mystery. By this time,
it was already known that he’d been at the helm when the CIA was conducting its mind
control experiments under the MKUltra program and its many, often barbaric, sub-projects.
Many of those who knew about his deeds didn’t have kind words to say even after his death.
He was called “the gentle-hearted torturer.” He’d later be called “Poisoner in Chief” in
a book about his exploits, just one of the books we’ve studied to bring you this show.
The LA Times obituary was somewhat kinder, stating that James Bond had Q and “The CIA had
Sidney Gottlieb.” Counterpunch didn’t hold back, calling him an “assassin and pimp.”
There’s been a tendency in the US to sometimes diminish the gravity and horror of CIA crimes of
the past by comparing them to Bond and other spy movies, but make no mistake, what the CIA did was
commit human rights abuses that have much more in common with the atrocities of Nazi Germany than
they do the ultra-cool 007. It was actually discovered not too long ago that the CIA’s
Allen Dulles leaned on James Bond creator Ian Fleming to portray the CIA in a positive light.
Lest we forget, even today, the Cold War actions of the CIA,
the endless crimes against humanity, are largely ignored in our culture and also,
perhaps more importantly, Western history classes. Over in the UK, the press was less kind to
Gottlieb in death. The Guardian said he was everything you could have dreamed up
about a mad scientist, but the Independent said Gottlieb was vindication to conspiracy
theorists who endorse the possibility of a dark and secret force controlling global affairs,
deep states behind partisan political theater. The paper’s obituary included the
words “evil” and “lunatic” to describe Gottlieb. The British Times really piled on the criticism,
writing, “What Gottlieb and his CIA henchmen did was only in degree different from the activities
which have sent a number of Nazi scientists to the gallows at Nuremberg in 1946.” As you’ll see
later, the Brits were hardly innocent bystanders regarding brutal physical and psychological
torture. They had their own secret torture camps. Now you have a summary, here are the details.
Strap in for what will be one hell of a ride…or should we say ‘trip.’
Gottlieb was born on August 3, 1918. His mother, according to relatives, screamed when she first
saw him. His foot was horribly twisted. He was a cripple who forevermore would walk with a limp.
Sidney was the youngest of four children, the progeny of two hardworking Jewish parents who’d
opened a sweatshop in New York and had the money for countless operations on Sidney’s club foot.
According to former schoolmates, he was “viciously harassed” in school for his disability, even after
age 12, when he could finally walk without his leg braces. He was bullied so much that he developed
a severe stutter. He had few friends, but he soon demanded respect as a talented student,
which eventually led to him receiving a doctorate in biochemistry in 1943.
The trauma of childhood likely shaped his life, as did the fact that he was rejected by the army
after being compelled to try and sign up after the Pearl Harbor attack. “I wanted to do my
share in the war effort,” he later said. He was crushed over the rejection. He wanted to fight
the Japanese. He wanted to fight the Nazis. He was Jewish, after all. Still, this makes his
later actions all that much more confounding. As the war ended, the US Counterintelligence
Corps, a precursor to the CIA, wanted to get their hands on Nazi scientists and the
valuable knowledge they could bring to the US. They especially wanted Kurt Blome, a man who’d
conducted terrifying chemical and biological warfare experiments in the Nazi prison camps.
From his experiments, Blome learnt nearly all there is to know about germs. He knew how to
spread them. He knew how fast they killed. He also knew what happens to a person’s mind
when they are forced to take large doses of the psychoactive drug mescaline. He was the enemy,
yes, but his vast knowledge was indispensable to a USA already planning war with the Soviet Union.
Biological warfare was the new threat, and the US vied to get ahead of the Soviets. The Nazis,
not held back by ethical concerns, knew all about how toxins affect the
human body. They’d conducted the tests on their many prisoners. Blome admitted to it,
but he was acquitted at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial with the help of the US.
Under the highly classified Operation Paperclip, leading Nazis went to the US
in considerable numbers, about 1,600 of them. Some of the Nazi scientists were war criminals.
They were given code names. Their biographies were re-written. As war criminals of the highest order,
their backgrounds were, as the expression went, “bleached.” They arrived at Camp Detrick, teaching
American scientists about the effects of Sarin gas. They lectured on myriad inhumane experiments.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had understood the danger of biological weapons, which is why,
in 1943, the highly secretive U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick, Maryland,
had been opened with bacteriologist Ira Baldwin acting as the scientific director. This is the
man who would take Frank Olson under his wing. Japanese scientists were also sought after.
As the war came to an end, rumors surfaced about Japan’s Unit 731, in which prisoners,
mostly from China, were dissected alive, blown up, and subjected to numerous toxic compounds. The
Japanese scientists who had worked here were also highly valuable to the US, which had a possible
war in Asia to think about as Communism threatened to spread throughout the world. It was also about
economic interests, something we’ll explain later. US agents soon found Shiro Ishii, the Japanese
scientist who’d led the biological warfare program at Camp 731, a program that resulted
in the deaths of 300,000 people. He was behind bubonic plague attacks in China and would have
been instrumental in any biological attacks against the USA had they happened as was planned.
This man had infected prisoners with plague, cholera, syphilis, and anthrax. He’d watched as
men and women were set on fire with flamethrowers. He’d injected prisoners with air to cause
embolisms, injected them with animal blood, and watched over vivisections and amputations
of prisoners in an effort to study blood loss and infection. In exchange for his knowledge and data,
the US helped cover up these war crimes. When he was discovered at his daughter's
home on January 17, 1946, he was interrogated by Camp Detrick scientists, who, according to
his daughter, begged him to tell them about his germ weapons. His reply was, “If you can give me
immunity for myself, superiors, and subordinates, I can get all the information for you.”
His wish was granted. With immunity, he took the Americans to mountain retreats and temples where
he’d hidden thousands of documents. He showed them slides of prisoners being infected with syphilis,
botulism, anthrax, and bubonic plague. These slides soon became the property of Camp
Detrick. They were a blueprint for development. With Ishii and Blome now on the American side,
as well as many of their subordinates, the US was beginning to feel confident about being
ahead of the Soviets regarding biological weapons. The US didn’t know it, of course,
but it was already way ahead. The Soviet union was reeling from its massive losses in WWII. The US,
by comparison, was in good shape. Still, the threat was there. It would be there for decades.
The Cold War was just beginning. It was a time of great tension,
a time of lies and deception and endless surveillance and spying. In 1947,
President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act into law, and with it, the CIA
was born - a secret organization predicated on protecting national security, an organization
that would soon become a law unto itself. But how do we get from virus-spreading
weapons to mind control drugs? It was partly because of the
show trial of József Mindszenty, a Hungarian cardinal and anti-communist who admitted to
crimes he certainly hadn’t committed, such as being a Nazi collaborator.
At his trial, he spoke very slowly. He looked vacant, admitting to everything thrown at him,
however outlandish. He’d actually been physically tortured for days on end by the Soviets,
but the CIA had another theory as to how strange this man had acted. His mind,
they said, had been controlled. The Soviets must have mind control drugs,
was the word being passed around among the higher pay grades of the CIA.
The question was, could chemicals make men talk during interrogations? Could chemicals destroy a
person’s mind, maybe even make them commit acts against their will? They also asked: Could you
kill a man by handing him a poisoned handkerchief or murder a woman with poisoned lipstick and make
it look like she died of natural causes? If so, what were the best toxins in the entire world?
The most deadly poisons in the world were studied and Camp Detrick scientists worked
on how they could best be delivered. Such toxins and tools had to be secretly tested.
The victims for the experiments performed by these scientists were sometimes taken from Haiti
and Guyana. A Special Operations Division (SOD) scientist named Gerald Yonetz, who’d
worked with Frank Olson to develop aerosolized anthrax, many years later, explained why, saying,
“There were no laws or rules pertaining to what we were doing…The people we used
in these experiments were of no consequence to anyone…Families, relatives, were no problem.”
This was around the time the name Albert Hoffman came up at the CIA,
a Swiss chemist who’d synthesized a powerful substance he called lysergic acid diethylamide
25 (LSD). He not only synthesized it, he took it, which wasn’t unusual in those days.
On April 16, 1943, Hoffman was working with the ergot enzyme at the Sandoz laboratory in
Switzerland when, before him, he suddenly saw “fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity
and vividness.” He was tripping, having no idea that a global counter culture would
one day be singing, “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” and blessing his name.
Three days later, Hoffman took a larger dose of 250 micrograms. He saw what he
called “grotesque” faces.” He said he “shouted half-insanely and babbled incoherent words.”
Hoffman wrote about LSD’s “astonishing effects on the human psyche.” These words got to L. Wilson
Greene at the Chemical Corps, a man who worked on psychochemical warfare, i.e., warfare of the mind.
That year, Greene wrote a paper titled “Psychochemical Warfare, a New Concept of War.”
His idea was that with a substance like LSD, you could drop it from the air and attack a town or a
small army without even firing a bullet. He wrote:
“I am convinced that it is possible, by means of the techniques of
psychochemical warfare, to conquer an enemy without the wholesale killing of his people
and the mass destruction of his property.” President Truman agreed to research this new magic
drug that could possibly help win wars without bloodshed. The CIA would head the research,
working with scientists at Camp Detrick. The CIA’s Technical Services Staff, TSS,
which developed all sorts of espionage tools, was handed money for what would become the
MK-Naomi program. The program’s goal, according to a document, was to develop a “whole arsenal
of toxic substances for the CIA.” Again, this was to include mind altering drugs,
but also lethal drugs that in some instances could be fired from dart guns and would kill in seconds.
The CIA also needed deadly pills for its own operatives, who could swallow them after being
captured. The agency wanted substances you could slip into someone’s drink that would
kill them hours later, giving agents time to escape. They wanted to know if you could make
someone terminally ill, or, at least, incredibly sick. A document unearthed many years later asked
if it was even possible to create a drug that could “induce cancer through covert means.”
They also asked, what if you could make an entire town sick or a whole battalion?
In 1950, the CIA put this into practice. The agency wanted to test what would happen if
you sprayed a bacteria infected aerosol over a city. How fast would it enter people’s bodies?
Could it be spread while remaining undetected? As their testing ground,
they chose San Francisco. The fog, they said, would help disguise the germ clouds, which
were to be sprayed through a minesweeper’s hoses. This operation was codenamed Operation Sea Spray.
On September 27, 1950, they sprayed the city with two types of bacteria,
hoping that the bacteria was harmless to humans. If people became infected, then surely a bioweapon
like anthrax would work. It worked. Around 800,000 residents were infected. Eleven people who went
to the doctor with urinary tract infections had mysterious red drops in their urine. One doctor
wrote about a “curious clinical observation.” It was a success. Spraying a city with bioweapons
became a new tool in the US’ ever growing covert ops arsenal. Years later, the CIA
would be accused of doing something similar in France, a story we’ll get to in due time.
But the CIA wanted more. It was conducting arrests and brutal interrogations all over Europe and
Asia. At its black sites, there was a continual cacophony of screams, but some men seemed almost
unbreakable. How to break them was a question for the CIA and the camp Detrick scientists.
At Camp Detrick, substances were being developed to break and kill people, but they had to be
tested in the lab first. Half a million mice were shipped in, as were tens of thousands of rabbits,
pigs, rats, goats, sheep, monkeys and other animals. Animal testing would only take the
researchers so far though, and it was soon time to test these chemicals on humans. Roscoe
H. Hillenkoetter, then director of the CIA, gave the green light to the Bluebird program.
Making captives “sing like a bird” was the order of the day. Documents show
they were “investigating the control of an individual” using the euphemism
“special interrogation techniques” rather than what it was: torture.
On January 2, 1951, a man named Allen Dulles joined the CIA as deputy director for plans.
From his first week there to his last, Dulles was a big supporter of mind control techniques.
He was obsessed with the possibility of making men talk or making them commit acts against their
natural will. He understood nuclear weapons now ruled warfare, but he also understood
the importance of psychological warfare. Dulles straightaway gave Bluebird his full
support, outlining how “drugs, hypnosis, and shock” should be used on subjects in
interrogations, writing in one memo that the program’s researchers should explore if a
person “can be made to commit acts useful to us under post-hypnotic suggestion.”
A document written by Dulles to Bluebird project leader Sheffield Edwards asks:
“Can we create by post-hypnotic control an action contrary to a person’s basic
moral principles? Could we seize a subject…by post-hypnotic control and
have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.” Hidden away outside the German city of Oberursel
there was Camp King, officially known as the 7707 the European Command Intelligence Center.
Unofficially, it was a house of torture where men from the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC),
known as “rough boys,” would sometimes freeze German prisoners to death,
among many other barbaric forms of torture seen during WWII in Germany and Japan.
A CIC officer named Miles Hunt later wrote, “The unit took great pride in their nicknames,
the ‘Rough Boys’ and the ‘Kraut Gauntlet,’ and didn’t hold back with any drug or technique … you
name it, they used it.” They also gave powerful electric shocks to prisoners.
A document later found stated “an individual could gradually be reduced through the use of
electroshock treatment to the vegetable level.” For fun, these rough boys made the Germans run
gauntlets, beating them with baseball bats. They injected prisoners with all
manner of dangerous drugs, sometimes killing them. It was a free-for-all; anything went,
but with Operation Bluebird, Dulles wanted something more refined than deadly beatings.
It was here where the project flourished, as well as at Villa Schuster, the CIA torture and
interrogation black site in Poland. Another Nazi working with the Americans was Walter Schreiber,
a man behind many human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp. There,
he’d frozen inmates to death, injected them with mescaline, and cut open people to watch
the gangrene slowly kill them. Like Blome, he was useful. He worked for the US in Germany
and was later sent to the US under Operation Paperclip, eventually ending up in Argentina.
Schreiber became a friend of the Harvard scientist Henry Beecher,
a man who wrote papers on the possibility of drugging entire towns by poisoning the water
supply or using aerosols. In the US, Beecher was lauded for being an outspoken critic
of what he said were unethical human medical experiments, but, while hidden away in Germany,
he and Nazi war criminal Schreiber together discussed novel methods of
torture. A US human rights organization later called this “stunning hypocrisy.”
Beecher was more interested in large-scale attacks than interrogations.
This poem that was found in his diary after his death:
“A shy little snail from Toulouse, Who was normally quite the recluse,
Went out on the town, And acted the clown,
Singing out ‘LSD’s my excuse.” It just so happens that the
town of Pont-St-Esprit is close to Toulouse. You’ll understand the relevancy of this soon.
He and Schreiber, who was known at Camp King as Doc Fisher, were,
according to the book Poisoner in Chief, behind some of the “most extreme torture ever taken out
by the USA.” Over in Asia, at similar black sites and still part of Operation Bluebird,
Korean prisoners were injected with concoctions that created violent reactions. It was hoped this
would reduce a person to a nervous wreck, after which he’d possibly speak the truth.
Many of the documents were destroyed relating to what went down at these torture sites,
but here’s one that relates to drug testing at a Berlin safe house:
“Examination at (redacted) clinic identified sickness…caused partial dissolution of
brain tissues. Now the (redacted) husband (redacted) is developing similar symptoms.”
In 1951, after consultation with German and Japanese scientists, a CIA memo read:
“Can we guarantee total amnesia under any or all conditions?”
“Can we alter a person’s personality? How long will it hold?”
“Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing subjects?”
The memo asked how to get deadly substances into everyday items,
such as toothpaste, wine, coffee, beer, and gum. Bluebird produced some interesting results,
but it wasn’t enough. The program needed to be taken up a notch. It was decided that someone
with a background in science should be hired to head the mind control and toxic torture programs.
On Friday, July 13, Sidney Gottlieb turned up for his first day of work at the CIA. Dulles had
personally chosen him. Like Gottleb, Dulles was born with a club foot and wore special
prosthetic shoes. It was Gottlieb’s science background that impressed Dulles, but perhaps
their disabilities made them closer. By this point, Gottlieb had been working in labs for
ten years as a chemist. When he was hired at the CIA, he became a research chemist at Camp Detrick.
Gottlieb was made head of the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff. On August 20, 1951,
he made his mark, stating Bluebird had not been expansive enough. He helped create a new program,
codenamed Artichoke, to be overseen by brigadier general Paul F. Gaynor,
a war hero and then the Chief of Research Staff at the CIA's Office of Security.
It was Gaynor who had weeded out homosexual men in the government. After joining the CIA,
he also weeded out left wingers by creating fake left-wing activist groups and getting
people to join. These people, as well as 4,000 American soldiers serving court martials,
where to be tested on. The expendables, he said, would be used to test neurosurgery, sensory
distortion, electrical shocks, and hypnosis. An Artichoke memo asked if an assassin whose
mind had been controlled would kill “a prominent [redacted] politician or,
if necessary, [an] American official.” Such words have deepened conspiracy theories
regarding the assassinations of JFK and RFK, as have many other matters you'll hear about today.
In another document, the agency elected to try this out on a man in a foreign country
that had once been an asset, but had become unreliable, in part due to heavy
drinking. He was to be drugged, hypnotized and programmed to kill. The document stated:
“After the act of attempted assassination was performed, it was assumed that the SUBJECT would
be taken into custody by the [redacted] Government and thereby ‘disposed of.’ …Whether the proposed
act of attempted assassination was carried out or not by the SUBJECT was of no great significance
in relation to the overall project.” This also brought the project home,
where Americans were tested on, not just prisoners hidden at black sites.
It was agreed that many of the test subjects would be the undesirables,
what CIA documents noted as the “weaker” and “less intelligent” elements of American society.
Gottlieb’s team used cocaine on American mental patients. They
plied students with opiates. They looked into what barbiturates, amphetamines, mescaline,
and sodium pentothal (short-acting general anesthetic) could do to a person’s body and mind.
Still, it was worse outside of the US for subjects of these experiments.
From Munich to Tokyo to Seoul, they tested different drug concoctions on prisoners,
often dumping their bodies after shooting them in the head once they got everything out of
them. A translator who went to work at a site in Japan noted that as soon as she got there,
they dragged a dead body out of the pool. A study on the matter described,
“Four Japanese suspected of working with the Soviets were secretly brought to a location
where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants and stimulants.
Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working with the Russians. They were taken
out to Tokyo Bay, shot, and dumped overboard.” They repeated the experiment in Seoul with 25
North Koreans, who, it seems, wouldn’t play ball. The document stated, “They refused and
were executed.” The same document talked about how Dulles was brought to a German safe house,
where prisoners were given “massive amounts” of drugs. These drugs had been developed by Olson
back in Camp Detrick. The report explained, “The expendables were killed and their bodies burned.”
In another memo, an Artichoke black site in Korea asked for ten subjects to “test important
new techniques.” The memo said there will not be “disposal problems after application.” This
broke every rule in the book, the book recently written in Nuremberg, so why did they do it?
It was a matter of national security, the perpetrators believed. For the most part,
they performed what they thought was their duty. The US was under threat. At home, TV and print
media continually let Americans know that. US newspapers could be prone to exaggeration
regarding this threat, sometimes saying the Chinese could now brainwash people. This was
a new expression for Americans: brainwashing. Such articles stated how the Soviets, too,
could take over someone’s mind. What’s more, there were stories stating that Americans at
home were being brainwashed, which was possibly why some supported communism. The media said
the US was now threatened by “psychic attacks.” Richard Helms, who became director of the CIA,
later said the CIA felt a “responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or Chinese.”
In 1956, a proposal that Congress should be able to monitor all CIA activities didn’t go through,
despite many American politicians suspecting the CIA was up to no
good. A CIA officer later explained what the mindset of the CIA was at the time:
“We’re at war, so anything is justified. We’re smarter than most people, we operate in secret,
we have access to intelligence, and we know what the real threats are. No one else does.”
Gottlieb was fascinated with LSD more than anything else. He learned more
about it from Harold Abramson, one of the main characters in this story. Abramson,
a clinical allergist by profession, was a leading proponent of the theory that LSD could transform
people’s minds. It was he who gave Gottlieb his first dose of LSD, after which Gottlieb
said he felt an out-of-body experience like he was inside a “transparent sausage skin.”
Gottlieb had other agents try it. He enlisted scientists at the SOD to take LSD. When the
volunteers ran out, he started spiking new CIA recruits. Sometimes, he took men to a cabin
at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland, a place that would one day see the presence of Frank Olson.
The invitation list was small. The inner circle around Gottlieb was tight. Few
people in the CIA knew about Artichoke, and only a few scientists at Camp Detrick
were on board with the secret experiments. While agents at the safe houses in Germany
and in Asia were reporting that LSD was not a reliable truth serum, Gottlieb still believed
it had great potential. In a memo, he wrote that it “must be assumed” that the Soviets were already
using it. He believed they might have perfected it, so he doubled down with the experiments.
He now realized he needed to test his thesis on normal people, including your average American,
the man and woman in the street. This would one day come back to haunt him.
In the summer of 1952, an up-and-coming artist named Stanley Glickman was in Paris in one of
the most famous literary cafes there, known to be frequented by the world’s most renowned
writers. Glickman met two men who stood out in the crowd since they were dressed so conservatively.
One of them had a limp. The group started arguing about politics,
after which the man with the limp said no hard feelings, let’s have a toast. Glickman didn’t
usually drink alcohol, but the man insisted he have a glass of Chartreuse. This guy limped to
the bar, filled the glasses, and limped back. All the men subsequently toasted and drank.
That was it. Glickman’s life changed forever. He soon started hallucinating, feeling what he
later said was a “lengthening of distance and a distortion of perception.” He began to panic, at
which point one of the men in the group menacingly whispered in his ear, “Surely a man of your many
talents can perform his own miracles. Can't you?” Glickman ran out into the street, where he walked
for days in a paranoid, hallucinatory world. The Guardian, writing about his story many
years later, said, “In the morning, he woke to intense hallucinations. The next two weeks found
him wandering the streets of Paris in a feverish haze.” Glickman said for many days he experienced
the "the pain of madness, delusion, and terror.” Remember that, because we’ll come back to
Glickman’s long trip later in the video. At one point, Glickman collapsed, after
which he was taken to the American Hospital. This hospital, which was known to work with the CIA,
gave him electric shocks. He was injected with drugs, after which his hallucinations
worsened. He checked himself out but was soon readmitted, only to be given more hallucinogenic
substances. He spent a week there until his Canadian girlfriend got him out for good.
Mr. Glickman never fully recovered. He suffered from mental health issues for decades after. He
became a recluse. It just so happened that Glickman had hepatitis, and under Gottlieb,
Artichoke researchers were testing the effect of LSD on people with hepatitis. The CIA wrote they
were said to “show a marked response to LSD.” The family of Harold Blauer, a professional
tennis player, would also one day discover how MKUltra had killed Harold. Blauer admitted
himself to The New York Psychiatric Institute in 1952 after experiencing depression. Little
did he know that this was a hospital working with the CIA. Psychiatrists at the hospital had
agreed to give mescaline to unwitting patients. Blauer was experimented on five times and said he
wanted them to stop. He was hallucinating wildly. In January ’53, they injected him with a shot 14
times the strength of the other shots. He started flailing and shouting, and then he died. One of
the assistants later said, “We didn’t know if it was dog pee or what it was we were giving him.”
Gottlieb wanted to expand even more. He wanted his drugs to be tested on the American populace
at large, and he knew that when Dulles was made CIA director in 1953, he’d get what wanted. Dulles
and Gottlieb were already very tight. Together they held some dark secrets, such as this:
On March 30, 1953, Dulles had dinner with CIA agent James Kronthal. Kronthal told him he was
in trouble. He was being blackmailed after getting himself involved in unethical sexual
activity. Dulles told him it was sad that human compulsions can get people in trouble.
The next day, Kronthal was dead. An empty vial was by his body. It’s believed Dulles, who’d
had Gottlieb work on killer potions, had given him the vial. These two men were as thick as thieves.
Top secrets were their secrets. MKUltra was so highly classified that when Dulles was succeeded
as CIA director close to the end of 1961, new director John McCone was not told about it. He
only found out about the program in 1963. Dulles signed off on Gottlieb’s plan to
use chemical concoctions to aid in what a document said was “discrediting individuals,
eliciting information, implanting suggestion and other forms of mental control.” In
part B of the plan, it said, "REDACTED.” Dulles gave Gottlieb $300,000 to start the
project. It was the most top-secret project there was. Even the cryptonyms used would
have no meaning. Its name was MK-Ultra. While it’s sometimes said Project Artichoke stopped,
it didn’t. For a time, it ran alongside MKUltra, although they melded in the end.
Gottlieb needed test subjects. He hired one of the strangest, most unethical, most obscene
men in American law and order history for his new project. His name was George Hunter White,
a narcotics detective who had hounded jazz musicians prior to the war for their drug use.
White had played a major part in destroying the life of the musician Billy Holiday.
At 200 pounds, and just five feet seven, he was known as a rather squat mad man. He often
consumed the substances he was arresting people for taking. He worked closely with the mafia,
drug traffickers and assassins. He famously drank a bottle of gin each day with his dinner. He often
visited brothels where he had women in leather tie him down, whip him and use various penetrative sex
tools on him. He’d trained at Camp X, aka, the “school of murder and mayhem.” He was a killer,
a thug, a bully, but he was good at his job. He also knew every major crook in America,
and he understood the street, unlike the rich boys of the CIA. He knew the underground
better than any Ivy League-educated CIA man. He might’ve been a sado-masochist,
but he was useful when it came to the streets. Gottlieb needed a man who’d break the law
without thinking, who nonetheless was a patriot. White fits the bill. He had
no trouble working with expendables. He was obviously delighted to join MKUltra,
later stating in a private letter to drug war czar and his former boss Harry Anslinger:
“It was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat,
steal, deceive […] and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” We missed a word
out there due to YouTube policy. Let’s just say White also said he enjoyed what we might
call getting away with serious sexual misconduct against females he hired, hounded or destroyed.
Under Operation Midnight Climax, he ran a safe house at 81 Bedford Street in New York City. By
this time, Gottlieb had arranged for money to be threaded to foundations and onto hospitals
where his LSD and other drugs were tested all over the US, but he needed something
else. The safe house was where he got it. At Bedford Street, White paid prostitutes
to take men back to a room he’d prepared for his twisted experiments. The entire
place was covered in two-way mirrors and video and audio recording equipment. When
the men weren’t looking, the women put LSD in their drinks. The man’s reaction was studied,
with the prostitute asking questions following a CIA-devised script. We’ll explain why later.
Meanwhile, White was also busy dosing his friends and his wife’s friends. At least one woman had a
nervous breakdown as a result. Years later, people would come forward and say one night,
they went for a drink and suddenly went half-mad with hallucinations. It just so happened this
usually occurred in Greenwich Village, where White prowled at night. He often pretended
to be an artist or a seaman, befriending people in bars and then spiking their drinks.
White’s date book was later used as evidence in the government MKUltra investigations. The book
outlined the fact he’d dosed many people with LSD in 1953 and 1954 just to see what
would happen. One woman was drugged at a dinner party and had to be hospitalized. Another woman,
one of White’s wife’s friends, was so messed up she was sent to a mental institution and received
psychiatric care for 35 years. An actress who lived in White’s apartment block was spiked and
ran up to the roof, where she had to be talked down. Remember, at this point in time, no one
had heard of LSD. They didn’t know about tripping. A mega-dose for people back then would literally
scare them into thinking they’d gone mad. Despite their obvious differences in upbringing,
lifestyle, and education, White and Gottlieb got along very well. They spent many nights watching
the victims lose their minds at Bedford Street. They celebrated Gottlieb’s 36th birthday together,
with White giving him a belt as a gift. They were, in their minds, working for the greater
good. The communists were trying to take over the world, they believed. They were there to stop it,
albeit in very strange ways at times. While Allen Dulles was involved with directing so-called wet
affairs (assassinations and kidnapping) and the removal of democratically elected
leaders and officials in countries such as Guatemala and Iran, Gottlieb and White were
doing groundwork for the interrogations. Let's again look at the reasons why.
In 1952, two CIA officers, John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, were shot down over
Communist China on their first operational mission. The US government denied they were
CIA operatives. China said it would release them if the US just told the truth. It didn’t,
so the two men spent the next two decades in a Chinese prison. The question for the CIA was,
what on God’s green Earth were the Chinese doing to those two men? Were
they being put through the same torture and expriements that they were perferming?
Dulles was sure these men were having their minds wiped or controlled. What if they talked? How far
ahead were the Chinese in brainwashing techniques? Then, when 7,200 Americans were released from
Communist prisons in July 1953, there was another great shock that wobbled the American spy agency.
Several US pilots had told the Chinese that they’d used biological weapons in the Korean war,
“germ bombs,” they said. The US denied it, saying their use of such weapons was about
as real as “flying saucers.” We may never know if the Chinese soldiers who’d suddenly come down with
cholera and plague were victims of Camp Detrick and the Japanese germ warfare scientists. On the
battlefield, China had given 5.8 million doses of vaccine to troops as well as handing out 200,000
gas masks, but was this propaganda? The US has always denied using such weapons. Some of those
soldiers also recanted their confessions when they got back to the US. To many,
this entire chain of events seemed fishy. True or not, the CIA, as well as American
military bigwigs, were livid that their own men would snitch like that. The question was, what had
happened to them to make them say those things? Worse, scores of soldiers were released but
refused to come home. They now supported communism. American newspapers scorned them,
saying they’d just fallen in love with Asian vixens. Newsweek said they’d been
lured with the promise of “homosexualism.” But some papers said they’d been brainwashed.
The CIA investigated this, probing the returned soldiers. 5,000 of them had petitioned the US to
end the war when they were incarcerated. There was a gap in their memory when they crossed
into Manchuria, said investigators. The soldiers denied any brainwashing or even serious torture,
which, for the CIA, only meant that the Chinese had developed outstanding drugs
that could blank certain periods from men’s minds and make them uncritical of the enemy.
Despite a lack of evidence, the CIA said Communists were “utilizing drugs,
physical duress, electric shock, and possibly hypnosis against their enemies.” The 26 men
who refused to return home after being released were called treasonous, and to be executed if
ever caught. Some did later return home but didn’t face military trials because they’d
already been dishonorably discharged. They were plain old traitors, disgraced, but had
they been brainwashed with Chinese super drugs? During Downey and Fecteau’s 20-year incarceration,
while the Chinese at the start kept them in leg irons and deprived them of sleep,
they didn’t endure the mind-bending torture the CIA thought they were. It seemed that the Chinese
were about as close to developing mind control techniques as they were to making flying saucers.
The CIA many years later admitted, “The men were never tortured physically or, after their initial
capture, beaten.” Still, prison was one hard slog for them, and it was horrific for many
other American POWs. 38% percent of them in North Korea died while they were in captivity since
conditions were incredibly grim in prison. Disease and malnutrition wiped them out. In some ways,
they were brainwashed, too, being re-educated by having to listen to lessons in Marxism for years
on end. When they arrived back in the US, Downey said if he had to describe his captivity, he
wouldn’t need a book, but only one word: “boring.” The US, though, didn’t know that at the time.
We should add that, while there’s no solid evidence the Soviets and Chinese had their
own mind control programs, it is possible the Soviets did. They were also masters of torture,
but surivors of said torture have talked about more traditional forms being used,
pins in finger nails, sleep deprivation, screams of loved ones from adjoining rooms,
that kind of thing. It’s also well-known that they were masters of assassination with poisons.
The Soviets may have also developed something called the psychotronics program, but while
evidence is scant on this - there’s only one paper on it - it’s thought the Soviets wanted to affect
brain functions using electromagnetic waves. Still, if they had an MKUltra-type program,
it must've been so secretive that all evidence of it has been destroyed or hidden. Russia runs
a tight ship where declassification and whistleblowers are concerned.
Even so, Dulles, who was sure the Soviets and Chinese were drugging people in an effort to
control minds, told Gottlieb to step things up. American men turning Commie and snitching
about biological weapons had to be the result of brainwashing. It had to be.
He gave Gottlieb the green light to purchase all the LSD in existence, which Dulles was told was
10 kilos at the Sandoz labs. It was actually only 40 grams, which was still a lot, considering 100
micrograms is enough for one dose, and 40 grams is 40 million micrograms. In the end, Sandoz said it
only had 10 grams left after the entire ordeal. The CIA paid Sandoz $240,000 for the 10 grams
and ramped up efforts to make their own LSD. That didn’t take long as by the end of 1954,
pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly was all set up to make LSD by the ton if
need be. The CIA would quickly become its main customer. At this time, of course,
no one could've predicted that the consequence of this would be the start of a hippy movement
that led some people to start becoming skeptical against government power. Exactly the kind of
world the CIA didn’t want to create. By opening Pandora’s Box, the CIA created its own enemy.
MKUltra spawned scores of other sub-projects with its new supply of LSD. A Department of Justice
investigation many years later revealed that the goal now was on testing these drugs on “unwitting
subjects in normal life settings.” It was said the CIA wanted to find out the “effectiveness
of the substances…on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American, foreign.”
$53,000, and later, $40,000 was given to the University of Washington to test the
effects of LSD on subjects. Johns Hopkins also received $492,000 in funding for “chemical
warfare agent and toxic compound studies.” Surprisingly, North American Aviation spent
$52,000 to test the powerful hallucinogen against “aircraft crew performance.”
Documents show Dr. Laurette Bender, working with Dr. Abramson, tested LSD on fourteen schizophrenic
children aged between 6 and 11, with 100 mg of LSD “daily for six weeks.” This took place at
the Children’s Unit, Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York. Dr. Alfred M. Freedman,
also working in tandem with CIA agents, did tests on “12 autistic, schizophrenic
children who were attending day school.” This was for ``medical reasons,” and unsurprisingly,
their parents were not told about the experiments. In one document, Bender wrote, “The two oldest
boys, over ten years, near or in early puberty, reacted with disturbed anxious behavior.” In
another document, she wrote, “After receiving LSD on three occasions earlier this month,
Marie ceased smiling at all and lost any interest in others her age … In the past week, she seems
to have become easily agitated.” No kidding! In Philadelphia, at Holmesburg Prison, aka
“The Terrordome,” Dr. Albert Kligman made use of a $750,000 grant for drug tests. He once famously
said when he first surveyed how many test subjects he had in this very full prison, all he saw was
“acres of skin.” He mainly tested chemicals on unwitting prisoners for large companies
but also delved into psychoactive drug testing. In subproject 39, starting in 1954 and lasting
two years, LSD was tested on 142 criminal sexual psychopaths at Ionia State Hospital
for the Criminally Insane. Years later, a newspaper headline stated,
“Patients stood in for spies in tests.” The article explained that the men were dosed and
then asked to tell the stories of their crimes. A doctor admitted, “They didn’t change their stories
one bit, not one iota.” It had been hoped this possible truth serum might make a difference.
Then there was the African American soldier named James Thornwell, who,
at his base in France, was accused of stealing some highly classified documents in 1961. He
was tortured for six weeks. At first, just the standard torture mothods of isolation, beatings,
and interrogation were used. Then, under Operation Third Chance, they dosed him with LSD. He later
said, “It felt like my head was growing larger and larger and then exploding. I thought they
could see into my head and see all my thoughts…I couldn't open my eyes, stars were erupting…I was
just going insane. I begged [the interrogator] to stop asking questions, but he wouldn't.”
They injected him with sodium pentothal and also hypnotized him. As he was in
this vulnerable state, they threatened to cut off his fingernails and penis. Declassified
files show the report said, “threatening to a permanent condition of insanity,
or to bring it to an end at the discretion of the interrogators, was shown to be effective.”
He became a drifter when he came back to the US, having numerous psychological breakdowns
and regular blackouts. “I had no life after they gave me that LSD. I lived in a twilight world,” he
said. When the truth about MKUltra came out, and he realized what they’d done to him, he sued them
for $10 million and settled for $625,000. He died in 1984 after having a seizure
in a swimming pool. Notably, in the CIA’s sub-project 47, part of the research was aimed
at finding out if certain chemicals could produce “epileptic-type seizures.” The man behind this
project was Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Emory University.
If you look at his bio online, you’d probably be shocked to learn that he was one of the
main components of drug testing for the CIA. His research was related to inducing
psychotic states in inmates at a federal prison in Atlanta and also young inmates at the juvenile
detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey. He wrote that the drug he used produced “a
model psychosis…hallucinations that lasted for three days and are characterized by waves of
depersonalization, visual hallucinations and feelings of unreality.” You heard
that right, he said three days. Then there’s the story of the
infamous criminal James Whitey Bulger, who, before he became a crime boss,
was a regular 20-odd-year-old criminal in prison who was given massive amounts of LSD for months on
end in what he was told was part of research on schizophrenia. Pfeiffer led the program.
Bulger and 19 other inmates suffered more than most since they were injected with LSD regularly
for 15 months. Bulger said he broke down. He wanted to die, later calling Pfeiffer the American
Dr. Mengele, relating to the infamous Nazi doctor. Bulger wrote that he’d be injected,
and eight or nine men would survey his reaction. He explained, “The room would
change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of
living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls… Guys turning into skeletons in front of me.
I saw a camera change into the head of a dog.” Once he was tripping, they kept asking Bulger,
“Would you kill someone?” Notably, at the time of the experiments, he wasn’t yet the killer he’d
one day become. Bulger said two of the men in the group became psychotic. He never saw them again.
Around this time, Dr. Louis Jolyon West at the Psychology Department of the University
of Oklahoma was researching if a human mind under the influence of drugs could be altered forever.
Could you rearrange a person? Make them, not them any longer? Under sub-project 43, and with $20,800
from the CIA, he tested this. Gottlieb later wrote that the experiments “yielded positive leads.”
Notably, the last man who went to see Jack Ruby in prison before he went mad was Mr. West.
According to documents and interviews in Tom O’Neil’s 20-year-in-the-making book, CHAOS:
Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, Ruby was fine before West’s visit,
but West left his cell saying Ruby just had a psychotic breakdown. Nothing
Ruby said could now be trusted, and he died of cancer, shortly after. It’s worth noting again,
the CIA worked on drugs that could cause cancer, but we can’t say if they succeeded.
West, a part of the Air Force Medical Service from 1948 to 1956, had very possibly experimented on
a man named Jimmy Shaver, an air force soldier at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. On July 4, 1954,
he was found by cops, covered in blood. He told them he didn’t know what he was doing or where he
was. He’d been in some kind of dream-like state and had no idea where the blood had come from.
Prior to police finding him, a search party looking for a murdered girl found him,
later saying he was “dazed” and in a “trance-like” state. He wasn’t drunk. He didn’t have a criminal
record, yet he’d just killed a young girl. The press reported it was like an animal had
killed her. Her legs were broken, her neck was broken, and she’d been mutilated. Yet,
this man had no history of violence. He was later sent to Jolly West,
who hypnotized him and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, the “truth serum”. It was
only found out later that Shaver, prior to going crazy on the girl that day, had been part of an
experimental medical program, now believed to have been MKUltra. The name of the doctor that treated
him had been removed from documents. Also missing were the surnames of the soldiers starting with st
and sh. All the other names were there. We still don’t know if Shaver had been
experimented on and if that was the reason why he committed the horrendous crime,
but we do know that West was the man hired to “deprogram” the soldiers who’d come back
from the Korean war after making what the US called “false confessions” about the
US using biological weapons. We also know that in 1953, West was the chief of the psychiatric
service of the air base at…drum roll…Lackland. We also know he was working for Gottlieb at that
time on MKUltra, where documents would later show he studied “techniques for implanting
false information into particular subjects … or for inducing specific mental disorders.”
In the 60s, West also worked with hippy types at his clinic in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.
He’d studied how to make what he wrote was “a fundamental change” in the “basic moral,
religious or political matters” of people. This he called “Mass Conversion.” Could you make a good
man bad? He later set up what The Intercept called a “crumbling Victorian house on Frederick Street,
where he had what was described as a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad.” This was all
paid for by Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., a CIA front organaziation.
Later, West’s name came out among MKUltra’s 80 institutions,
comprising 44 universities and colleges, and 185 researchers. Author Tom O’Neil has
linked West with Charles Manson, but he has never been able to prove Manson was
part of West’s mind-altering experiments. Only weak circumstantial evidence exists,
so it has been left as an open question. Even so, keep in mind that Manson and his friends
moved in the same circles as West when West was using hippies as test subjects.
What we do know for sure is another killer Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber,
was experimented on as part of the MKUltra program when he was an undergraduate at
Harvard University. They tried to brainwash him by attacking his ego in brutal mock interrogations.
Other participants later said they were shocked with electrodes. One man said he had “very vivid
general memories of the experience.” He explained, “I was startled by my interlocutor's venom.
I remember responding with unabating rage.” One of Gottlieb’s most treasured researchers,
when it came to trying to understand if you can shatter a mind completely, was the pharmacologist
and the director of research for the NIMH Addiction Research Center, Harris Isbell.
In the words of Stephen Kinzer in the book we’ve mentioned, Poisoner in Chief, Isbell,
and Gottlieb performed these experiments to see if you could “Blast away consciousness,
leaving a void into which new impulses or even a new personality could be implanted.”
The addiction center Isbell directed, known as the Narcotics Farm, or Narco Farm, was
the result of $4 million in funding. Frank Olson once visited to see what Isbell was doing with his
subjects. Isbell was interested in understanding addiction, but his LSD experiments had little to
do with addiction. Even so, on August 3, 1953, he wrote to Gottlieb, “I feel sure you will be
interested to learn that we are able to begin our experiments with LSD-25.” He said he tested the
substance on five men in excellent physical shape. These men, even though they were at the farm
to get off heroin, were given the purest heroin they’d ever seen in return for them volunteering
to take what were sometimes huge amounts of LSD. Prisoner Edward M. Flowers later said,
“My whole reason for going into the program was to get drugs.”
Under sub-project 73, Isbell wanted to see if LSD or mescaline could make a prisoner more
susceptible to hypnosis. When he upped the dose to 300 micrograms, three times the regular dose,
he told Gottlieb, “The mental effects…were very striking.” He said the subjects experienced
“shocks on the skin, anxiety, feelings of choking…objects were distorted and changed size.”
Marvin Williams, an addict who was also a victim of the project, later said,
“I’m not a smart guy. I don’t have much school or anything. I didn’t know what was going on. A lot
of us became pretty crazy, you know, like insane. We had to be locked up for days.”
It turned out that one of Isbell’s victims was William Henry Wall,
a former state senator from Georgia who’d become addicted to opioids. He was forevermore mentally
unstable after the experiments. He suffered panic attacks and paranoid delusions and often thought
about ending it all. His son later wrote about this in a book titled, “From Healing to Hell.”
The son said in an interview that the CIA had “permanently damaged” his father’s brain. We
can only imagine what happened to the seven prisoners Isbell used for his most extreme
experiment, in which he gave them large doses of LSD for a period of 77 days.
This kind of thing was going on all over the US. Under sub-project 5 at the University of
Minnesota, they tested drugs to see if the test subjects could beat a lie detector.
In sub-project 124 they tried to see if carbon dioxide could induce trances. Under sub-project
140 at a hospital in San Francisco, they tested LSD’s effects on thyroid-related hormones.
One drug, what declassified files called a “knockout” drug, was developed through a grant
of $531,960 from 1955 to 1961. While many of the papers included the word redacted a lot, it was
said doctors would study the “toxic cerebral states'' of terminally ill hospital patients
in the US and from that develop a drug that would “maximum levels of physical and emotional
distress.” In 1957, a CIA memorandum said that this research was in the
field of “natural toxic psychoses.” Sub-project 4 was one of the most
outstanding projects. This is when they hired a celebrity stage magician named John Mulholland.
CIA agents were often tasked with slipping hallucinogens into people’s drinks or plying
their food with deadly poisons, so they needed to learn sleight of hand. Mulholland wrote a
manual for the CIA all about misdirection and deception for the fee of $3,000.
It’s one of the only MKUltra documents that remains fully intact since the CIA
managed to destroy the vast majority of them. At this point, Gottlieb was still working on
ways to kill people and make it look like they died of natural
causes. This was still part of MKUltra. As a Camp Detrock scientist later noted,
“The CIA was always looking for ways to kill people or to make them sick. They
had various categories, ranging from making someone slightly sick to terminally ill.”
These people might end up on what was sometimes called a “disposal list,”
such as the 58 Guatemalans, whom the CIA said should be taken out by its “K-teams,” meaning
kill teams. Simple murder was sometimes not an option. Camp Detrick came in useful
if conventional ways of making the murder look self-inflicted or accidental couldn’t be found.
On September 26, 1960, one of the men to deliver a fatal dose of poison to an assassin was none
other than Sidney Gottlieb, who turned up in the Congo to meet Larry Delvin,
a CIA agent with the cover job of a consul. Gottlieb approached Delvin and introduced
himself as Joe from Paris, adding, “I’ve come to give you instructions about a highly sensitive
operation.” This special operation, part of the Health Alteration Committee work,
was to assassinate the new democratically elected Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba,
who, according to a memo sent to the CIA from Delvin, was part of “anti-west forces.”
He was certainly anti-imperialist, and supported Africanization,
which would mean western corporate interests being affected as the natural resource-rich
country tried to become more independent. They first considered using a sniper with
a high-powered rifle but settled on poison, even though an agent had written “hunting’s good here
when the light is right.” Gottlieb later told CIA agent Richard M. Bissell Jr. that he’d have
no trouble killing Lumumba with a biological agent without anyone suspecting foul play.
He first researched what diseases were common in the Congo and then chose the poison botulinum,
which can be found in improperly canned food. It was ideal, especially
as it gave an agent time to get away. One billionth of a gram will kill a
man within a few hours of ingestion. Gottlieb developed a kill kit and an antidote in case
something went wrong. The kit was made up of a vial of liquid botulinum and a hypodermic needle.
When Devlin was told about the plan, his initial response was, “Jesus Christ,
who sanctioned this?” Gottlieb said the President himself, Mr. Eisenhower. Gottlieb added, “The
details are up to you, but it’s got to be clean; nothing can be traced back to the US government.”
He then handed Devlin the kill kit, which also included poisoned toothpaste. He told him to use
the needle to inject the poison into something Lumumba would eat. He assured Devlin that he or
another assassin would have hours to get away, and Lumumba would look like he died naturally.
As Devlin was trying to figure out how he’d do it or avoid doing it, Belgian and Congolese forces
with CIA help did the job for him. He later wrote that he didn’t want to do it, that his
plan was “to stall, to wait as long as possible.” But how had the US public come to learn Lumumba,
like many left-leaning politicians in the world, was one of the bad guys?
The CIA had journalists for some of the biggest news media in the US and abroad on its payroll,
shaping the hearts and minds of the American people and others around the world. It’s uncertain
if the CIA had any influence over the publishing of a New York Times article that falsely accused
Lumumba of being a communist, as much of the American media did. The media painted him as
an enemy, but the reality was far different. Lumumba had asked the Soviet Union for help,
but only after being snubbed by the US. Like many leaders the CIA helped take out,
Lumumba wanted his country to be independent of Western corporations and their influence.
Lumumba was subsequently replaced by the cruel dictator Mobutu Sese Seko
who enriched himself while allowing the West to loot his already very impoverished nation.
Another notable case was the influence of the American multinational corporation the United
Fruit Company on South American countries and their politics.
In 1952, the government of Guatemala decided to take land from the United Fruit Company
and give it to poor landless peasants. The US, under the CIA, then kicked off a misinformation
campaign falsely calling the Guatemalan government communist. The CIA incited riots in Guatemala,
with many people being killed in the ensuing chaos. Using misinformation,
they pitted the poor against the poor. Their assets were interrogated and assassinated,
partly in thanks to those secret programs. In 1954, the CIA got rid of the democratically
elected government there, and installed a brutal military dictatorship that could work with
western, mostly US, corporations. The consequences of ousting democracies were profound. Between
the year of 1954 and 1990, more than 100,000 civilians were murdered in Guatemala by the
military regimes that followed the CIA-led coup. Even though the CIA and American government
intervened in countries where the new leaders were relatively progressive,
the narrative the CIA helped shape via the media made those progressive leaders look
dangerous. More war was needed, more intervention. As three-time Medal of Honor recipient General
Douglas MacArthur once said, “Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an
artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.”
In 1966, the New York Times published an article calling Indonesia “a gleam of light in Asia.” This
was after the utterly barbaric and highly corrupt dictator Suharto had horrifically
tortured and massacred around half a million Indonesian citizens thanks to a CIA-backed
coup. He was, at least, very welcoming to western mining and oil companies.
The CIA had earlier helped remove the leader Sukarno,
the first democratically elected President in Indonesia.
In 1975, leaked documents showed the CIA had considered assassinating Sukarno. The British
were also in on it, although it’s not known what method they were going to employ. Together,
the US and British intelligence agencies worked on discrediting him through propaganda. Later,
Covert operations chief Frank Wisner said to Al Ulmer, the head of the Far East Division,
“It’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire.” The CIA’s Richard Bissel
had Sukano down for “executive action” meaning assassination. At this time,
Gottlieb was the head of the Health Alteration Committee,
so he would have cooked up ways to kill him thanks to his Artichoke and MKUltra experience.
Still, at a Senate hearing on November 21, 1975, it was heard, “Bissell testified that the
asassinaton of Sukarno had been ‘contemplated’ by the CIA, but that planning had proceeded
no farther than identifying an ‘asset’ who might be recruited to kill Sukarno.”
Sukano’s replacement, Suharto, we now know, was one of the most brutal dictators of the
20th century, evident in the gruesome, almost unwatchable documentary film, The Act of Killing.
Still, as he tortured and murdered enemies, he had the full support of the US. The Atlantic wrote,
“U.S. embassy officials even received updates on the executions and offered help to suppress
media coverage.” The CIA helped the death squads by providing lists of people to be exterminated.
The victims were often castrated, gutted, impaled, beheaded and chopped up alive. This
was no gleam of light in Asia, but such was the power of propaganda. It should be said,
most journalists in the US were not being paid by the CIA, but many were misinformed by the CIA.
In 1955, the CIA likely helped Chinese nationalists blow up Air India Flight 300
with a timebomb. The mission’s goal was to take out the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Gottlieb was
drafted into the plan, but Zhou missed the plane by a few minutes and so wasn’t one of the 16
victims. Gottlieb then came up with a plan to add a poison to Zhou’s rice. A senate committee heard
years later that General Lucian Truscott got wind of this and put pressure on Dulles to stop it.
Gottlieb spent a lot of time on assassinations, but his mind control experiments were always
going on somewhere. There were two men who were sure they could still make them
work. One was the neurologist, some say pseudo-scientist Harold Wolf, who worked
at the Cornell Medical Center in New York. Under his Society for the Investigation of
Human Ecology, he received $140,000 from the CIA after assuring Dulles that he could brainwash
people. Wolf wrote that he would create “changes in behavior due to stress brought about by actual
cerebral damage.” He was talking about damaging people’s brains, not just transforming behavior.
Wolf explained: “Potentially useful secret drugs (and various
brain damaging procedures) will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental
effect upon human brain function and upon the subject's mood ...Where any of the studies
involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects.”
One of the first experiments involved enlisting 100 Chinese refugees and, without their consent,
drugging them with powerful hallucinogens. They were told it was part of a fellowship, but the
test was to see if they could be brainwashed and sent back to China to commit acts of sabotage.
Wolf died in 1962. The New York Times wrote a glowing obituary that stated Wolf was an expert
in headaches. At the time, the Times nor any other publication on Earth had any idea what the CIA
was doing to Americans and foreigner’s minds. Unsurprisingly, some of the worst experiments
happened in North America, specifically Canada, under Dr. Ewen Cameron.
The CIA had been impressed with the work Cameron had been doing in Montreal, in which he put people
into an induced clinical coma, after which he attempted to reprogram their minds. He
called this his psychic driving technique, which also included something called “de-patterning.”
Cameron believed he could change a person forever. This was music to the ears of the CIA,
although Cameron was, at first, thinking about curing mental illness, not creating assassins.
In one of his notes, Cameron wrote: “She is sleeping well. She is disoriented to
time and is in her second stage of de-patterning. There is no incontinence, there is no mutism,
and we are continuing this intense treatment of her until we get complete de-patterning.”
Rather than talk to patients, he said you had to stun them out of their depression or anxiety.
He would take people who likely only needed some talk therapy and hit them with electroconvulsive
shocks thirty or forty times stronger than what was usually used on mental patients.
He’d then expose them to extreme heat or put them under a bright red light for hours on end,
feeding them LSD and sometimes other drugs such as amphetamines. He was basically frying their minds,
after which he could reprogram them. The CIA liked the sound of this and
funded him through a front organization to the tune of $69,000. Cameron, who, at first,
didn’t know this money was from the CIA, assured the organization he could “re-shape” people’s
minds by putting them in this semi-comatose state from ten days to three months at a time,
during which they were given the shocks and drugs. He then fastened helmets to their heads,
and they would hear a message over and over and over, such as “I hate my mother.” He said
he used helmets locked on to their heads so people couldn’t rip them off. Earlier in his experiments,
patients had refused to hear the messages. This destroyed minds rather than fix them,
but the changes that occurred were seen as a success. In one document, he stated a success
was to take a 19-year-old graduate student and turn her into a “a woman who sucked her thumb,
talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle, and urinated on the floor.”
This was a man who’d been at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945 on the side of the Allies,
yet, his experiments were later compared to Nazi atrocities. An investigation later revealed that
“approximately 100 patients...became unwitting or unwilling” subjects to these experiments.
Families later sued, but the CIA was never made fully accountable for these crimes.
Back in the streets, George White now had a second house of horror set up in which men were dosed
and surveilled after following home a CIA-hired prostitute. The house was at 225 Chestnut Street
on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. There was so much surveillance equipment present in that house
that an agent once joked that if you spilled a glass of water, you’d electrocute yourself.
The CIA hung up pictures of dancing women on the walls. They filled the drawers with sex
toys. There were leather straps and a huge pornographic library to choose from. White
would watch the women with their client from a room next door while guzzling a martini.
These experiments ended up costing a lot of money, right down to the fancy ashtrays and silk pillows,
which were all signed off by Gottlieb. He once wrote, “Due to the highly unorthodox nature
of these activities and the considerable risk incurred by these individuals, it is impossible
to require that they provide a receipt.” It was easy enough to get the women since
White had the help of narcotics agent Ira C. Feldman, who at the time was undercover,
posing as a mobster with a string of prostitutes working under him. One day, White spoke to him,
telling him he wanted him onboard with something new. Feldman later said White explained,
“We want you to test mind-bending drugs…You’ll be doing a great deal for your country.”
White then produced some LSD, which he said was to be put in people’s drinks. He said it
“drives people nuts,” and when Feldman aired his doubts about it, White explained it was a matter
of “national security.” From then on, for every guy his girls brought to 225 Chestnut Street,
they received between $50 to $100, plus earned what Feldman later called a “get out
of jail free” card. Just call the number, and White would get the woman released.
In case you’re wondering why on Earth Gottlieb was doing any of this, he wanted to know the
effect LSD had when given to someone in a highly sexual setting. Would people talk more? Would they
act differently? A CIA psychologist admitted this years later in his testimony, saying,
“We were interested in the combination of certain drugs and sex…We looked at various pleasure
positions used by prostitutes and others.” Gottlieb later opened another safe house
outside of the city in Marin County, where prostitutes tested more than LSD. Men were
secretly daubed in itching powder, were hit with stink bombs, and were given sneezing and diarrhea
powder. One day, Gottlieb handed White a swizzle stick containing drugs. Another day, he gave him
a syringe that could inject drugs through the corks in wine bottles. An agent later admitted,
“If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco.”
On another occasion, Gottlieb gave White capsules that would release a noxious gas when stepped on.
Then Gottlieb wanted to dose a room full of people with LSD, so asked White to use a spray can that
contained LSD to be sprayed as an aerosol. White later said it didn’t work, explaining that “the
weather defeated us.” There wasn’t enough of the mist, and it just went out of the window.
Feldman said White made “Hoover look like Nancy Drew.” Feldman met Gottlieb many times,
too. He said he was nuts. “They were all nuts,” he said. One day,
he was driving with White and Gottlieb, and Gottlieb said stop the car. He then
shot a tree with a dart gun and told Feldman to return in two days. He did. The tree was dead.
The years passed, and Gottlieb became more and more concerned that information about MKUltra
would come out. The torture houses, the brain damage, the dead bodies, and what might have
really concerned Gottlieb was a story that would haunt him until the end of his life:
that of the brilliant scientist he’d once hired, Frank Olson. Olson had seen a lot, too much maybe,
including something literally and figuratively mind-blowing the CIA may have done in France.
Now, we have arrived at an important juncture in this story. You need to hear more about Frank
Olson, and you need to know what happened in France. The two might be inseparable.
First, you should know something about the CIA’s assassination manual that was drafted in 1952.
In part 2 of the “Techniques” section subtitled “Accidents,” there is talk of pushing someone in
front of a train and tampering with their car to make them crash. There is also this bit:
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more
onto a hard surface…Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows, and bridges will serve…”
In those days, a lot of people with no history of mental health issues flew from
buildings. When the Republican politician Karl Mundt was once asked how he would know
who was a communist agent in the USA, he joked, “We’ll count them as they fall out of windows.”
Now, let’s go to France. On August 16, 1951,
one of the strangest events in human history took place in a small town in France. It just
so happened that on this exact day, CIA agents and scientists from Camp Detrick,
all of whom were involved in MKUltra, were in France. One of the men was Frank Olson.
At about 10 a.m. that day, a young farmer in the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit walked into
the doctor’s office hysterically brushing bees from his body. There were no bees, and neither
were there snakes slithering over his body despite him frantically trying to hit them off.
A few hours later, residents of this town were running through the streets screaming,
crawling, and fighting monsters that weren’t there. One man shouted, “My belly is full of
snails. They are burning me to death! I am in the water!” Another man jumped out of a window,
shouting, “I’m an airplane.” He broke his legs on the landing but got right up and ran
five meters before collapsing. A girl tore off her clothes and started crawling on all fours,
making animal sounds. A woman knocked on doors, announcing she was the Second Coming, adding,
“The son of God will be here at any moment.” An 11-year-old boy tried to strangle his own
mom. People had to be tied down, but they ripped off the binds. One man bit so hard on his binds
some of his teeth came out. Another shouted, “I am now sending out radio messages everywhere.
Get me an x-ray, and you can see.” A woman contended, “Tigers are going to eat us all.
They're going to rip us to pieces!” She pointed to the ceiling and cried out, “Blood is dripping down
on everything. Can't you stop the bleeding?” Pets were dropping dead; cats and dogs. A
12-year-old ran through town screaming that he’d been to the cemetery and the
dead had risen from the graves. He shouted, “They’re coming to eat us, to eat us alive.
A French journalist wrote, “Doctors are beside themselves with work; the rumors
are wild and contradictory; fear hangs over the town everywhere. No one knows when it will end.”
It was called the apocalypse night but was actually 36 hours to three days in
total. There was nothing in modern human history with which to compare it. Investigations showed
people in the region had had food poisoning within the previous two weeks, but nothing
compared to what happened at Pont-Saint-Esprit. 250 people became severely psychotic. 30 cases led
to the victims having to have prolonged stays in mental asylums. Seven people died. Autopsy
reports talked of convulsions and “muscular spasms” leading to “cardiovascular collapse.”
This was exactly what the CIA had worked on for years. It was the vision of Henry Beecher,
the author of the LSD poem and researcher into mass poisoning
with such drugs via the air, food or water. Yet, the world was told it was the bread that
did it, despite no other cases of this scale and despite Olson and co being in France at the time.
When it was discovered in the 1970s that the CIA’s mind control people were in Pont Saint Esprit at
the time, the public was told not to believe in far-out conspiracy theories. The reason for
the madness, people heard, was fungus in the rye used, which brought on ergotism,
which can produce hallucinations. Case closed. But in 2009, the investigative journalist Hank
Albarelli, whose long and dense MKUltra book, “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson
and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments,” included an unearthed CIA document labeled:
“Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file,
inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin - tell him to see to it that these are buried.”
People asked, how was it that Olson, an aerosol delivery specialist, and Pont St
Esprit were mentioned in the same document and that the CIA was asking someone to bury that
file. Through a freedom of information request, Albarelli found a conversation that had taken
place between a CIA agent and someone from the Sandoz Chemical company. The Sandos guy had said,
“The Pont-Saint-Esprit 'secret' is that it was not the bread at all... It was not grain ergot.”
The Rockefeller Commission, formed in 1975, which we’ll talk more about soon,
after investigating CIA abuses, also said it found the names of French citizens
secretly employed by the CIA who’d made direct references to the “Pont St. Esprit incident.”
Despite this evidence, some have said it couldn’t have been LSD since LSD’s effects don’t last as
long as what happened to those people. Pont St. Esprit was called a medical mystery,
but some asked, if anyone back then knew how to develop a drug that produced such effects, it
was the CIA and Camp Detrick. Obviously, something on earth existed that caused people to experience
those things. Gottlieb and his scientists had traveled the world looking for such substances
and analyzing their potential back home. If it existed, they had it. In 1951,
under the direction of the “bleached” Nazi scientist Dr. Friedrich Hoffman,
the CIA through Camp Detrick began a quest to search the entire planet for every lethal or
hallucinogenic substance that existed. This expanded to also include animal poisons.
It was later said that from the Amazon, through the CIA front company Amazon Natural Drug Co.
(ANDCO) scientists “shipped hundreds of crates filled with hallucinogenic plants back to the
CIA and Fort Detrick.” The investigative journalists Gerald Colby and Charlotte
Dennett wrote in 1995 that Detrick scientists “fed simians food that was laced with dust from
pulverized Amazonian magic plants to see if they could be induced to kill one another.”
We might also recall the document that had been written by Dr. Carl Pfeiffer,
one of the doctors we’ve discussed who tried to break people at the prison in Atlanta. He
wrote that with drugs, he was able to produce “a model psychosis…hallucinations that lasted
for three days.” This is never mentioned in the media in relation to Pont Saint Esprit.
Then there was the MKUltra victim, artist Stanley Glickman, who you’ll remember said after he was
spiked by the limping man in 1952, in France just months after the Pont-Saint-Esprit disaster,
he was psychotic for days, not hours, which he said in a 1985 lawsuit he launched against the US
government and Sidney Gottlieb / Richard Helms. Specialist Fourth-Class Wendell L. Queen,
who later spoke to journalists, said he’d been given a shot of a liquid that gave him wild
hallucinations for 6 days, according to an article in Crime Magazine written by Mr. Alberelli.
Let’s now look more closely at Olson, whose story has to be told to fully appreciate the
extreme nature of MKUltra and the depths the CIA was willing to sink to in its effort to protect
national security and US corporate interests. We’ll just add here, that the US did effectively
win the Cold War and became the only superpower in the world. The CIA would say that was to
the benefit of the world and they did their job well. Political realists might say that you have
to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Morality, they may say, often has no place in realpolitik,
despite the rhetoric the public often hears. The behemoth of the US grew in power partly thanks to
some frankly wicked operations. But did things go too far?
On November 28, 1953, Olson flew out of what had been a closed window in his room at the Statler
Hotel. He had been sharing the room, 1018A (13th floor), with CIA agent Robert Lashbrook.
Lashbrook, not bothering to check on his friend and colleague on the sidewalk down below,
was soon found by the night manager and a cop. He was on the toilet with his head in
his hands in the same room, the curtains now flapping next to the smashed window.
The phone rang, and Lashbrook asked the pair if he could answer it. They said yes,
but after picking up the receiver, Lashbrook said it was a bad connection. Later,
the night manager went downstairs to ask the phone operator, used in hotels back then,
if there had been any calls just now from that room. She said yes, and she’d eavesdropped.
The number belonged to MKUltra specialist Dr. Harold Abramson of South Oaks Hospital on Long
Island. She said one man had said, “Well, he’s gone.” The other said, “Well, that’s too bad.”
Olson knew almost everything about MK Ultra. He’d seen it all. He’d developed many of the
drugs. He’d seen torture and death in Germany. He’d seen prisoners in Atlanta driven mad. He
was the main man at Camp Detrick when it came to “the airborne distribution of biological germs.”
If biological weapons had been dropped in the Korean War, Olson would have known about it.
He’d helped develop spray cans disguised as shaving cream and insect repellents
that contained food poison, or viruses like equine encephalomyelitis, and even
anthrax. He’d worked on a cigarette lighter that gave off an almost instant lethal gas,
and he’d developed a lipstick that would kill on contact with the skin as well as a pocket spray
for asthma sufferers that could cause pneumonia. He’d also been one of the agents who was spiked
at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland in November 1953 when Mr. Gottlieb held a retreat. On day two,
four CIA scientists from the technical services staff and five army scientists from the special
operations division of the chemical corps were offered a drink of Cointreau mixed by
sleight of hand specialist Sidney Gottlieb. All but two men had unwittingly taken LSD.
Olson was agitated in the days after. He famously went home and said to his wife,
“I’ve made a terrible mistake.” What was the mistake? Did he mean
what happened in France? Was it about Germany? Or, was it also what he’d seen in England?
In the Spring of ’53, he was invited to watch his work in action at the top-secret Microbiological
Research Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where scientists were
experimenting with LSD, sarin, and other nerve gasses. About 1,000 British military personnel,
men and women, were used as guinea pigs in these tests from 1952 to 1953,
with the Times newspaper later saying 25 died. On May 6, Olson saw what happened when a
volunteer, a 20-year-old RAF airman named Ronald Maddison, was given sarin. Some of it
was rubbed on his arm. He subsequently foamed at the mouth, collapsed, convulsed, and died.
Many years later, it was discovered that the British had tortured men at a secret
camp in England, something the Labor government had tried to cover up. They
also tortured men at interrogation centers in Germany, but not at the scale of the US.
Olson, who’d always told his family he hated seeing test animals die in the US, saw a British
psychiatrist also involved in the research, a man named William Sargant. One month later,
Olson went to see him again, this time after, according to a report, he’d “visited a CIA safe
house near Stuttgart where he saw men dying, often in agony, from the weapons he had made.”
He then went to Scandinavia and France and may have seen more inhumanity. Another report said
he’d watched the “expendables” being “interrogated to death” as they were plied with drugs,
hypnotized, and tortured to “attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”
He’d made a terrible mistake. The hotel night watchman who’d found Olson on
the floor said moments before he died, he “raised his head slightly.” The watchman explained,
“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 he died.” Olson’s friend and colleague, Norman Cournoyer,
said Olson never “pulled his punches.” He spoke his mind. He liked to talk. After returning
from his travels, he told Cournoyer, “You’d be stunned by the techniques they used…They didn’t
care whether they got out or not.” He then said, “I’m getting out of the CIA. Period.”
But by this point, Olson had made the mistake of opening up to William Sargant. Sargent noted
that Olson was “deeply disturbed over what he had seen in the CIA safehouses in Germany.”
He wrote that Olson had “displayed symptoms of not wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed.”
Sargent sent the report to his superiors, knowing it would get to the CIA. He later
said the US and UK “were joined at the hip,” and it was his duty to share such details. Olson was
later denied any further access to Porton Down after Sargent had said he was a security risk.
Olson was also deemed a “security risk” in the US. John Schwab, the SOD’s first chief,
wrote in a document in 1953: “I first learned on Monday,
November 23, 1953, from Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet that Dr. Olson had been Exposed and
was showing symptoms of reaction.” There was also a letter found in the
Camp Detrick files in 1975 by journalists at AP. In the letter, which is about Frank Olsen,
next to number four on a list it states Olson took a trip to Norway and Paris and there was
a “possible fear of security violation.” One of the sources was Lashbrook and another a Dr……
Olson had wanted out, but how to get out, knowing what he knew. What was his reaction
going to look like and could the CIA allow that? Two New York state attorneys, Stephen Saracco and
Daniel Bibb, investigated Olson’s death in the early 2000s. By this point, Olson’s son, Eric,
was sure his father had been murdered by his own people for being a security threat who would
blow the lid on far-reaching human rights abuses that, in the words of journalist Seymour Hersh,
a man that broke these experiments to the public, made the CIA look like an “American Gestapo.” The
family had already received an apology from President Gerald Ford and compensation of
$750,000, but they wanted the truth to come out. In 2001, the attorneys found documents showing
Olson had been part of a top-secret project titled Project Span. They also found a document written
by Abramson, which said the Deep Creek Lake drugging had “been to trap Olson.”
The attorneys believed that Olson may have been given LSD to see how he’d
react and if he would open his mouth about what he knew, possibly, including France.
They were contacted via Alberelli by two men claiming to be former CIA,
calling themselves Albert and Neal. The attorneys asked for documents
to prove they were indeed former CIA. The documents, according to Alberelli,
were adequate proof. Alberellli later wrote, “Skeptical at first, Saracco requested that
the official provide him with unconvertible documentation that the official had indeed
worked for the U.S. intelligence community. What he got in response left no room for dispute.”
Albert and Neal, not their real names, helped join the dots.
They explained that Olson had been murdered because the CIA was worried he’d talk. They
even named his killers. One was Pierre Laffite, a mysterious CIA assassin that the New York Times
had once called “a near‐legendary police informant and ‘special employee’ of the
narcotics bureau.” Albarelli has said Laffite was a hitman extraordinaire who did many of the
CIA’s dirtiest deeds over the years. He was known as “the pirate,” although used
many aliases. It’s also known he was a main figure in the CIA’s Midnight Climax houses.
Albert and Neal said the other man who killed Olson was “Le Grand Lydio,” who,
along with Laffite, they said was the CIA’s “Enfants Terribles.” This nickname belonged to
Francois Spirito, a powerful Corsican underworld gangster who occasionally worked for the CIA.
Later, the attorneys found a White House memorandum bearing the title “Identity
Sheet.” The document was headed with the name Frank Olson. On a numbered list,
the name Pierre Lafitte was next to number 7, and at number 8 was the word “Spiritto. Next to number
11 were the words Pont-Saint-Esprit. The document was to be sent to the then-new CIA director,
William Colby who was in Berlin. Colby, who later mysteriously died along with many other mysterious
deaths around that time, had once written about assassination, “If it's done right,
you never know how it was done, or who did it for sure. That's what professionalism is all about.”
Albert and Neal said Olson had spoken out of turn about Pont-Saint-Esprit, talking to several
colleagues and being reprimanded for it. Colby later gave a document to the Olson family stating
their patriarch had been accused of “un-American activity,” which Albert and Neal said was Olson
opening his mouth about France. Albert and Neal said the operation in France was pre-Artichoke,
run by the SOD and CIA. They said it involved contaminating food sources and using aerosols.
They wrote, “The point being, I, as an employee of the CIA, along with others, had the luck of the
draw to deal directly with Olson’s demise.” In later correspondence with Alberelli,
they talked about Lafitte working under a false name at the Statler Hotel to “keep tabs on Olson.”
After Olson had said he’d made a terrible mistake, he’d been taken to see Dr. Abramson. Albert and
Neal said Abramson had ordered that Olson be given “intensive treatment.”. They said,
“Nobody wanted to take any chances with him coming out and continuing to be indiscreet.”
They said on the night of the murder, something went wrong. Olson was unhinged. He knew they were
going to do something terrible to him. He knew what that consisted of because he’d seen it with
his own eyes. He'd developed the drugs. That’s why earlier, with his wife, Alice, he’d pushed
his food away and said, “I can't eat this food, it's poisoned.” It would be decades until Alice
realized why he’d been afraid of his food. There was supposed to be a late-night removal
of Olson from his hotel room, according to Albert and Neal, to take him to Chestnut Lodge,
an insane asylum in Maryland nicknamed “The House of Horrors” and “Psychoville.” There, his mind was
to be worked on until he stopped talking about his CIA activities. But something went wrong. Albert
and Neal said, “Olson resisted and, in the ensuing struggle, he was pitched out of the window.”
They said Lashbrook and Vincent Ruwet, Olson’s boss staying in another room,
had not been part of this murder in terms of helping with it. Albert and Neal said Olson
couldn’t be controlled. They explained, “He was scared. His arrogance was gone. He had made a bad
mistake, and he knew he was going to pay for it.” As for how Lafitte got into the room, they said he
“worked at the hotel.” Alberelli’s interview with the night manager determined Laffite was working
under the name Jean Martin. The night manager said this Frenchman would sometimes go by the name
Pierre. After Olson’s death, Pierre disappeared. Alberelli said he had evidence Lafitte went
to Florida, where he stayed with mafia kingpin, CIA-linked Santo Trafficante Jr.
A freedom of information request later told us in 1959, Trafficante Jr. was visited by none
other than Jack Ruby. Once-classified CIA Security Office files show that
Trafficante Jr. was very likely involved with the CIA’s attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro,
but let’s not go too far down that path today. You just need to understand a lot of shady
people surrounding Olson’s death. We might also add that according to
Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) documents later unearthed, Murder Inc. chief and crime
boss Albert Anastasia met Trafficante Jr. in Manhattan on October 24, 1957, in Room
1009 of the Warwick Hotel on West 54th Street, to discuss Cuban-based narcotics operations.
The FBN document stated “if Anastasia didn't get what he wanted from [Trafficante]” he said
he would reveal “certain information…concerning a 1953 Manhattan hotel murder made to look” like
something else. Olson’s name wasn’t mentioned, but it’s still quite a coincidence. What’s more,
the next day Anastasia was gunned down. No one has ever been arrested for his murder.
Alas, Albert and Neal said they would provide information, but they wouldn’t testify unless
they were released from the confidentiality agreements they’d signed with the CIA. As
they were in their 70s and 80s in 2001, it’s unlikely they’re still alive today to testify.
Manhattan’s district Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, was happy for his office to investigate the case,
but it seems he wasn’t prepared to try and free Albert and Neal from their agreement. Morgenthau
didn’t think he had a strong enough case to take to a Grand jury. Eric Olson did. He still does.
Saracco later went to room 1018A to see for himself this place he’d been talking about
for so long. The first thing that hit him was, how the hell could a man jump clean through a window?
The night manager that night thought the same thing, later saying:
“In all my years in the hotel business, 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.” Saracco later told The Guardian:
“There was a motive to kill him. He knew the deepest, darkest secrets of the Cold War.”
In the 1970s, the dirt had already started to come out. Richard Helms, as then CIA director,
ordered every last document marked MKUltra be destroyed. His expression was something along
the lines of the CIA taking a bath and washing off the filth. Journalist Seymour Hersh already
had some of the dirt, and it would stick. The CIA would never completely wash it off.
In December of 1974, MKUltra was exposed by Hersh, although not by that name,
when he published an article in the New York Times titled, “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported
in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces.” This was mostly about domestic surveillance,
but it kicked up a storm that grew much bigger. On June 11, 1975, the Rockefeller Commission,
aka, The United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States,
announced the US had been involved in “plainly unlawful” activities: torture, assassination,
toppling governments, drugging its own people.” The so-called “Family Jewels” were about to come
out, although the full report on these jewels wouldn’t be made known until 2007. William Colby,
had once summarized these documents as being the “skeletons in the CIA's closet.” But many of the
bones of those skeletons were destroyed or are still missing. We don’t have the complete picture
of the monster that the CIA was back then. MKUltra, at least in part, was exposed. While
not mentioned by that name at the start, it was reported that the CIA had been testing
“potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting subjects in the United States.” By then,
the whole world was familiar with LSD, although it was a surprise to most that
the love and peace potion and all that great music was in some ways a child of the CIA.
The New York Times later named Sidney Gottlieb as the man behind this program. It changed
the direction of his life, and perhaps led to his somewhat mysterious death.
The Olson family then made it known they were going to sue the CIA. President Ford’s
then Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Dick Cheney both said the same thing:
The CIA couldn’t be sued. It might unearth sensitive information, more sensitive than
was already known. That’s how the Olsons got their apology from Ford, and an admission from
the new CIA director Colby that “some of our people were out of control in those days.”
Gottlieb had already retired when the proverbial poop hit the fan. He had his
place in the countryside, his beloved eco cabin where he grew his own food. He was working as a
volunteer in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in India when he’d gotten the call, stating it
was all coming out and his name was top of the list. Gottlieb soon had the lawyer Terry Lenzner
working for him. It was going to be a rough ride, a bad trip, for Gottlieb from there on.
Lenzner later said, “Sid was not at all defensive about the LSD program in general, and indeed
thought it was essential to American security.” Still, the skeleton soon started looking ugly.
One time in court, Gottlieb was asked to explain a document. At the top of the document were the
words, “Health Alteration Committee.” Gottlieb looked shocked and asked to speak to Lenzner in
a private room. He admitted that this particular document was related to him having a scarf made
and given to a communist official in an Arab country. “One infected with tuberculosis,”
Gottlieb added. “He died after a couple of weeks.” The shadowy figure of Gottlieb became less shadowy
and more reviled as time went on, but he managed to stay out of prison. In 1979,
a man named John Marks who through interviews and collecting nearly a thousand MKUltra documents
through freedom of information requests wrote what was a groundbreaking book on the CIA:
“The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”
Gottlieb’s name was all over the book. He was the main man, not just a cog in a machine,
but it was later discovered he might have believed he was being made a
scapegoat for people more powerful than himself. Eric Olson and his family later visited Gottlieb,
as well as Ruwet and Lashbrook, in some ways, just to see how they acted,
to see if they’d break character. Gottlieb told Eric, “Your father and I were very much
alike…we both went a little too far, and we did things we probably shouldn’t have done.”
As Eric drove off, Gottlieb walked up to the car and asked him if he’d
had any counseling for his father’s death. Eric later said it was like
playing cat and mouse speaking to Gottlieb. He knew at that moment that Gottlieb was lying.
He’d overplayed his hand suggesting Eric needed therapy because he couldn’t accept
the truth about his father ostensibly making that decision. Eric said at that moment he
became “determined to show that he [Gottlieb] had played a role in murdering my father.”
Eric later had his father’s body exhumed. The pathologist, James Starrs, Professor
of Law and Forensic Science, said Frank Olson had been hit over the head. The injury to his
left temple was consistent with a blow, not a fall from 13 floors, and he’d somehow landed on
the floor on his back. It was also discovered that his face didn’t have lots of lacerations,
but at the time of the funeral, the Olsons had been told they shouldn’t have an open coffin
because of extensive lacerations to Frank’s face caused by his fall through the glass.
Because the body had been embalmed, when they exhumed it, it was in near-perfect condition.
Starrs, who was something of a celebrity pathologist, said Frank Olson had been
“intentionally, deliberately, with malice and afterthought, been thrown out of the window.”
As for Lashbrook, a main player in the story of Frank Olson, after drugging people for the CIA,
he became a supply teacher. After all, illegal and undercover human experimentation is not
something you can put on your resume. The writer Stephen Kinzer said Lashbrook, who had a Ph.D.
in chemistry, was bullied in his math classes, as happens sometimes with substitute teachers.
The kids would throw paper spitballs when he had his back to them, not having a clue that this man
just years earlier was a very dangerous person. On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died. He was 80. His
wife wouldn’t state the cause of death. Many people familiar with his story said it all
became too much for him. He’d tried to make up for what he’d done through volunteering,
but even at 80, he was looking at more court cases. It was never going to stop.
Seymour Hersh said before his death, Gottlieb was “a destroyed man riddled with guilt.” Eric Olson
and his lawyer had a toast, stating good reddens to a man they believed was “evil.” The lawyer
said Gottlieb had probably fallen on his sword. Gottlieb’s own lawyer at that time, Tom Wilson,
said his client had become depressed at the “endless lawsuits” and was “dispirited” when
people like Glickman had accused MKUltra and him of totally destroying his life. But it was true.
These spies, nothing like the spies in the movies, systematically destroyed many people’s lives.
The CIA was never splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds, as John
F. Kennedy had hoped before his own highly controversial assassination, but the ghost,
the spook, like a Scooby-Doo villain, did eventually have the mask ripped from its face.
But this was the CIA, and under masks, there were more masks,
and there always will be more masks, after all, this is the most secretive agency in the world.
Now you need to watch “Was President JFK Really Killed by the CIA.” Or,
have a look at “50 Insane Declassified FBI Secrets You Didn’t Know And More FBI Facts And Stories.”