On May 22, 1952, Dr. Schreiber and his family were flown by military aircraft from Travis Air Force Base, in California, to New Orleans, Louisiana. There, they boarded a ship bound for Argentina. When they arrived in Buenos Aires, they were taken by car to the American consulate and given documents that allowed them to stay. The arrangements were made by General Aristobulo Fidel Reyes. The air force paid for police protection for Dr. Schreiber and his family during the transition. It was important that the Schreibers’ resettlement in South America go smoothly. There were too many American officials whose reputations would never survive if the facts were revealed.
The Senate hearings never happened, and the attorney general never opened a case. In Argentina, Dr. Schreiber bought a home and named it Sans Souci (“without a care”), the name of the summer palace in Potsdam, outside Berlin, of Frederick the Great, king of Prussia. According to personal family documents, Schreiber’s final quest was to prove that he had been born a baron and was descended from Prussian royalty. “As a consequence of what the official investigation turned up, in addition to his own extraordinary meritorious achievements,” say the family documents, “Oberstabsarzt [Military Medical Doctor] Walter P. Schreiber was given ‘official’ permission to add ‘von’ to his name.” The personal papers do not say who gave this official permission. Schreiber died in September 1970 in San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Truth Serum
As Dr. Schreiber sailed for Argentina, the Operation Bluebird interrogation program at Camp King expanded to include “the use of drugs and chemicals in unconventional interrogation.” Dr. Kurt Blome was Camp King’s post doctor during this period. According to a memo in his declassified foreign scientist case file, Blome worked on “Army, 1952, Project 1975,” a Top Secret project that itself has never been declassified. Blome’s file becomes empty after that.
“Bluebird was rechristened Artichoke,” writes John Marks, a former State Department official and authority on the CIA’s mind control programs. The goal of the Artichoke interrogation program, Marks explains, was “modifying behavior through covert means.” According to the program’s administrator, Richard Helms—the future director of the CIA—using drugs was a means to that end. “We felt that it was our responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or the Chinese in this field, and the only way to find out what the risks were was to test things such as LSD and other drugs that could be used to control human behavior,” Helms told journalist David Frost, in an interview in 1978. Other U.S. intelligence agencies were brought on board to help conduct these controversial interrogation experiments. “In 1951 the CIA Director approved the liaison with Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence to avoid duplication of effort,” writes Marks. “The Army and Navy were both looking for truth drugs while the prime concern of the Air Force was interrogation techniques used on downed pilots.” Since the end of the war, the various U.S. military branches had developed advanced air, land, and sea rescue programs, based in part on research conducted by Nazi doctors. But the Soviets had also made great advances in rescue programs and this presented a serious new concern. If a downed U.S. pilot or soldier was rescued by the Russians, that person would almost certainly be subjected to unconventional interrogation techniques, according to the CIA. The purpose of Operation Bluebird was to try to predict what kinds of methods the Soviets might use against American soldiers and airmen. One of the so-called truth serum drugs the CIA believed the Soviets were most heavily involved in researching was LSD. One CIA report, later shared with Congress, stated that “the Soviets purchased a large quantity of LSD-25 from the Sandoz Company… reputed to be sufficient for 50 million doses.” Or so the CIA thought. A later analysis of the information determined that the CIA analyst working on the report made a decimal point error while performing dosage calculations. The Soviets had in fact purchased enough LSD from Sandoz for a few thousand tests—a far cry from fifty million.
For its Operation Bluebird experiments involving LSD and other drugs, the CIA teamed up with the Army Chemical Corps. The initial research and development was conducted by officers with the Special Operations Division who worked inside a classified facility designated Building No. 439, a one-story concrete-block building set among similar-looking buildings at Camp Detrick so as to blend in. Almost no one outside the SO Division knew about the Top Secret work going on inside. The SO Division was paid for by the CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), a unit within the CIA’s Clandestine Service; many of its field agents were culled from a pool of senior bacteriologists at Detrick. One of these SO Division field agents was Dr. Harold Batchelor, the man behind the Eight Ball who consulted with Dr. Kurt Blome in Heidelberg in 1947. Another SO Division agent was Dr. Frank Olson, a former army officer and bacteriologist turned Agency operative whose sudden demise in 1953 would nearly bring down the CIA. The two men were assigned to the program at Camp King involving unconventional interrogation techniques.
In April 1950, Frank Olson was issued a diplomatic passport. Olson was not a diplomat; the passport allowed him to carry items in a diplomatic pouch that would not be subject to searches by customs officials. Frank Olson began taking trips to Germany, flying to Frankfurt and making the short drive out to Camp King. In one of the rare surviving official documents from the program, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles sent a secret memo to Richard Helms and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Frank Wisner regarding the specific kinds of interrogation techniques that would be used. “In our conversation of 9 February 1951, I outlined to you the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc., and emphasized the defensive aspects as well as the offensive opportunities in this field of applied medical science,” wrote Dulles. “The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared in my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background.” Camp King was the perfect location to conduct these trials. Overseas locations were preferred for Artichoke interrogations, since foreign governments “permitted certain activities which were not permitted by the United States government (i.e. anthrax etc.).”
The next trip on record made by Frank Olson occurred on June 12, 1952. Olson arrived at Frankfurt from the Hendon military airport in England and made the short drive west into Oberursel. There, Artichoke interrogation experiments were taking place at a safe house called Haus Waldorf. “Between 4 June 1952 and 18 June 1952, an IS&O [CIA Inspection and Security Office] team… applied Artichoke techniques to two operational cases in a safe house,” explains an Artichoke memorandum, written for CIA director Dulles, and one of the few action memos on record not destroyed by Richard Helms when he was CIA director. The two individuals being interrogated at the Camp King safe house “could be classed as experienced, professional type agents and suspected of working for Soviet Intelligence.” These were Soviet spies captured by the Gehlen Organization, now being run by the CIA. “In the first case, light dosages of drugs coupled with hypnosis were used to induce a complete hypnotic trance,” the memo reveals. “This trance was held for approximately one hour and forty minutes of interrogation with a subsequent total amnesia produced.” The plan was straightforward: drug the spies, interrogate the spies, and give them amnesia to make them forget.
Another surviving memo from this otherwise unreported chapter of Cold War history is from Dr. Henry Knowles Beecher, chief anesthetist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a CIA-army-navy adviser on Artichoke techniques. Beecher traveled to Germany to observe what was happening at Camp King. He was a colleague of Dr. Leopold Alexander’s in Boston and, like Alexander, was an outspoken advocate of the Nuremberg Code, the first principle of which is informed consent. And yet in one of the stranger Cold War cases of dissimulation, Dr. Beecher was a participant in secret, government-sponsored medical experiments that did not involve consent. Beecher was paid by the CIA and the navy to consult on how best to produce amnesia in Soviet spies after they were drugged a
nd interrogated so they would forget what had been done to them.
Dr. Frank Olson returned from Germany to his office in Detrick in a moral bind, according to his Detrick colleague the bacteriologist Norman Cournoyer. “He had a tough time after Germany… [d]rugs, torture, brainwashing,” Cournoyer explained decades later, for a documentary for German television made in 2001. Cournoyer said that Olson felt ashamed about what he had witnessed, and that the experiments at Camp King reminded him of what had been done to people in concentration camps. Back in America, Olson contemplated leaving his job. He told family members he was considering a new career, as a dentist. Instead, he stayed on at the bioweapons facility, becoming chief of the SO Division for a while. He continued to work on Top Secret biological and chemical weapons programs in the CIA’s office at Detrick, Building No. 439.
Unknown to Frank Olson, the CIA was expanding its Artichoke program in new ways, including expanding its use of LSD in “unconventional interrogations” through covert means. Strapping a suspected Soviet spy to a chair and dosing him with drugs, as was done at Camp King’s Haus Waldorf, was one approach to getting a spy to spill his secrets. But the CIA wondered what would happen if an enemy agent were to be given an incapacitating agent like LSD on the sly, without knowing he had been drugged. Would this kind of amnesia be effective? Could it produce loyalty? How much, if any, of the experience would be remembered? These were questions the CIA wanted answered. The director of the Technical Services Staff, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a stutterer with a club foot, decided that the first field tests should be conducted on men from the SO Division without them knowing about it. One of those targeted for experimentation was Dr. Frank Olson.
A week before Thanksgiving, in November 1953, six SO Division agents including Frank Olson and the new SO Division chief, Vincent Ruwet, were invited to a weekend retreat at a CIA safe house in western Maryland called Deep Creek Lake. There, the men from Detrick were met by TSS director Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, a chemist. One part of the agenda was to discuss the latest covert means of poisoning people with biological agents and toxic substances, including those that had been acquired from around the globe by Fritz Hoffmann, the Operation Paperclip scientist with the Chemical Corps. The second goal was to covertly dose the six SO Division men with LSD and record what happened. After dinner on the second night, Robert Lashbrook secretly added LSD to a bottle of Cointreau. The unwitting test subjects were all offered a drink, and all but two of the SO Division officers drank the aperitif; one had a heart condition and the other abstained from alcohol. Frank Olson had a terrible reaction to having been drugged with LSD. He became psychologically unstable and could not sleep. His boss, Vincent Ruwet, who had also been dosed, described his own LSD poisoning experience as “the most frightening experience I ever had or hope to have.” The CIA had at least one of their questions answered now; covert LSD poisoning did not produce amnesia.
When Monday morning came around, Ruwet arrived for work at 7:30, as usual. Inside Detrick’s Building No. 439 he found a very agitated Dr. Frank Olson waiting for him. Olson told Ruwet that he was devastated by what had happened at Deep Creek Lake. He wanted to quit or be fired. Ruwet told him to give the issue some time and to get back to work. But when Ruwet arrived for work the following morning at 7:30, he again found Frank Olson waiting for him. Olson’s mental state had deteriorated considerably, and Ruwet decided that he needed medical help. He called Agency headquarters, in Washington, D.C., and told Robert Lashbrook what was going on. Frank Olson was privy to the CIA’s most controversial behavior modification and mind control programs. If he had a psychotic break in public he could inadvertently talk—terribly ironic, since getting a man to spill his secrets was what this LSD poisoning program was all about. Were Frank Olson to talk, the Agency would have a nightmare on its hands.
“Dr. Olson was in serious trouble and needed immediate professional attention,” Lashbrook wrote in an after-incident CIA report. Lashbrook told Vincent Ruwet to bring Olson to headquarters immediately. From there, the two men took Olson to a townhouse in New York City, at 133 East Fifty-eighth Street. There, Olson met with a doctor on the CIA’s payroll named Harold Abramson. Abramson was not a psychiatrist. He was an allergist and immunologist who worked on LSD tolerance experiments for the CIA, and he carried a Secret clearance of his own. Frank Olson told Dr. Abramson that he was suffering from memory loss, confusion, feelings of inadequacy, and terrible guilt. Dr. Abramson noted that Olson seemed to have a perfectly good memory and could remember people, places, and events easily on demand. In other words, Frank Olson’s problems were all in his mind.
The next morning, Robert Lashbrook and Vincent Ruwet took Frank Olson on another visit, to another CIA contract employee, John Mulholland, a semifamous New York City magician. Like Dr. Abramson, magician John Mulholland had a Secret security clearance with the TSS. Mulholland taught CIA agents how to apply “the magician’s art to covert activities.” One of his specialties was “the delivery of various materials to unwitting subjects.” During the visit, Olson became suspicious of what was going on and asked to leave. By the next day, Frank Olson was hearing voices. He told Dr. Abramson that the CIA was trying to poison him, which they already had done at least once. Vincent Ruwet returned to Maryland to be with his family for Thanksgiving; Abramson and Lashbrook decided to have Frank Olson committed to the Chestnut Lodge sanitarium, in Rockville, Maryland. Conveniently, the CIA had doctors on staff there.
Robert Lashbrook and Frank Olson spent one last night in New York City, in the Statler Hotel, on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street. They were given room 1018A, on the tenth floor. After eating in the hotel restaurant, Olson and Lashbrook returned to their room to have a drink and watch television. Olson called his wife for the first time since he had left home and told her not to worry—that he’d be home soon. Then he went to sleep.
At approximately 2:30 a.m. Olson crashed through the hotel window and fell more than one hundred feet to his death on the street below. According to the coroner’s report, Olson hit the ground feet first, as if standing up, fell backward, and broke his skull. The Statler Hotel night manager, Armand Pastore, heard the impact and ran outside. He found Olson lying on the pavement, still alive. His eyes were open, Pastore told the police, and he tried to say something. But no words came out, and after a few moments, Frank Olson took his last breath.
Pastore looked up to see which room Olson had come out of. He could see that one of the window shades in a room high above was sticking out, as if the shade had been down when Olson crashed through it. Pastore noted which room it might be. When the police arrived, he took them up to the tenth floor and into room 1018A, using the manager’s passkey to get inside. There, inside the bathroom, CIA agent Robert Lashbrook sat on the toilet seat in his underwear, holding his head in his hands. Lashbrook had already made two telephone calls. The first call was to the CIA’s director of the Technical Services Staff, Sidney Gottlieb, the man who had, with Lashbrook, poisoned Frank Olson with LSD a little over a week before. The second call was to the hotel’s front desk, to report Olson’s suicide. When New York City Police detective James W. Ward arrived on the scene, he asked Robert Lashbrook several questions, to which Lashbrook responded using only the words “yes” and “no.” Lashbrook did not identify himself as a CIA agent.
Dr. Lashbrook was taken in for questioning; homicide had not yet been ruled out. At the precinct, Detective Ward asked Lashbrook to empty his pockets. Among the contents were papers with addresses for Dr. Harold Abramson, in New York City, and the Chestnut Lodge sanitarium, in Rockville, Maryland. When asked about his profession, Lashbrook told Detective Ward that he was a chemist with the War Department and that Frank Olson was a scientist at Camp Detrick—and that Olson was mentally ill. Detective Ward called Dr. Abramson, who verified Lashbrook’s story, leaving out that he also worked for the CIA.
Two days later, Detective Ward submitted Case Number 125124 to his station chief. The death of
Frank Olson was determined to be a suicide. The case was closed.
If the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is right and war is the father of all things, then America’s Nazi scientist program was a nefarious child of the Second World War. Operation Paperclip in turn created a host of monstrous offspring, including Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKUltra. Before Frank Olson became involved in the CIA’s poisoning and interrogation programs, he conducted research and development of the airborne delivery of biological weapons. Olson had been working in the field of biological weapons research since 1943. He was recruited by Detrick’s first director, Ira Baldwin, during the war. After the war, Dr. Olson became a civilian scientist at Detrick. He joined the Special Operations Division in 1950 and was part of a team that covertly tested how a weaponized biological agent might disperse if used against Americans.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Olson had traveled across the United States overseeing field tests that dispersed biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters in San Francisco, the Midwest, and Alaska. Some field tests involved harmless simulants and others involved dangerous pathogens, as Senate hearings later revealed. One such dangerous experiment was conducted by Olson and his Detrick colleague Norman Cournoyer. The two men went to Alaska and oversaw bacteria being sprayed out of airplanes to see how the pathogens would disperse in an environment similar to that of a harsh Russian winter. “We used a spore,” Cournoyer explained, “which is very similar [to] anthrax, so to that extent we did something that was not kosher. Because we picked it up all over [the United States] months after we did the tests.” A third man involved in the covert tests with Cournoyer and Olson was Dr. Harold Batchelor, the bacteriologist who learned airborne spray techniques from Dr. Kurt Blome, whom Batchelor consulted with in Heidelberg. Olson and Batchelor also conducted covert field tests in closed spaces across America, including in subways and in the Pentagon. For these tests, the Special Operations Division used a relatively harmless pathogen that simulated how a deadly pathogen would disperse. A congressional inquiry into these covert tests found them “appalling” in their deception.