Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  The two men returned to the Statler Hotel, leaving Lashbrook to enjoy the second act of Me and Juliet. They went to bed without incident. When Ruwet awoke at 5:30 the next morning, Olson was gone. He roused Lashbrook, who was in a nearby room, and the two of them descended to the hotel’s cavernous lobby. There they found Olson, sitting in a chair and looking disheveled. He reported that he had been wandering aimlessly through the city and had thrown away his wallet and identification cards.

  That day was Thanksgiving. A week had passed since Olson was given LSD at Deep Creek Lake. He still planned to return to his family for holiday dinner. Accompanied by Lashbrook and Ruwet, he boarded a flight to Washington. An MK-ULTRA colleague was waiting when they landed at National Airport. Ruwet and Olson got into his car for the drive to Frederick. Soon after they set out, Olson’s mood changed. He asked that the car be stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” Ruwet asked.

  “I would just like to talk things over.”

  They pulled into the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s in Bethesda. Olson turned to Ruwet and announced that he felt “ashamed to meet his wife and family” because he was “so mixed up.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Ruwet asked.

  “Just let me go. Let me go off by myself.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Well then, just turn me over to the police. They’re looking for me anyway.”

  After some discussion, Ruwet suggested that Olson might want to return to New York for another session with Abramson. Olson agreed. They drove back to Washington and made their way to Lashbrook’s apartment near Dupont Circle. Gottlieb, who had broken off his holiday plans upon hearing of the morning’s developments, arrived soon afterward. Later he reported that Olson seemed “very mentally disturbed at this time … He talked in a clear manner, but his thoughts were confused. He again talked about his incompetence in his work, the hopelessness of anybody helping him, and the fact that the best thing to do was to abandon him and not bother about him.”

  Given what Olson knew, and his state of mind, that was impossible. Gottlieb ordered Ruwet to drive to Maryland and tell the Olson family that Frank would not be arriving for Thanksgiving dinner after all. Then he drove Olson and Lashbrook to National Airport and put them on a flight back to New York.

  After landing, the two scientists took a taxi to Abramson’s weekend home in the Long Island town of Huntington. Abramson spent about an hour with Olson, followed by twenty minutes with Lashbrook. The guests then left, checked into a guesthouse at nearby Cold Spring Harbor, and adjourned for a quiet Thanksgiving dinner.

  The next morning, Abramson, Lashbrook, and Olson drove back to Manhattan. During a session at his Fifty-Eighth Street office, Abramson persuaded Olson that he should agree to be hospitalized as a voluntary patient—not committed by legal authority—at a Maryland sanatorium called Chestnut Lodge. With that decided, Olson and Lashbrook left, registered at the Statler Hotel for one last night, and were given room 1018A.

  Over dinner in the Statler’s dining room, Olson told Lashbrook that he was looking forward to his hospitalization. He mused about books he would read. Lashbrook later said he was “almost the Dr. Olson I knew before the experiment.” The two returned to their room. Olson washed his socks in the sink, watched television for a while, and lay down to sleep.

  At 2:25 in the morning he went out the window.

  * * *

  POLICE OFFICERS FROM the Fourteenth Precinct appeared at the Statler Hotel moments after Olson hit the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue. The night manager took them to room 1018A, opened the door with a passkey, and stood aside as they entered. The window was smashed out, with only a few shards remaining. Lashbrook looked up from the toilet as the officers entered.

  It was all quite straightforward, he told them. He had been awoken by the smash of breaking glass, and Olson was gone. Beyond that he had little to say. The officers considered the possibility of foul play, possibly involving a homosexual affair.

  “Would you happen to know where Mr. Olson’s wallet is?” one of them asked.

  “I think he might have lost it a couple of nights ago,” Lashbrook replied.

  “You’re going to have to come with us to the station house.”

  At the Fourteenth Precinct station on West Thirtieth Street, Lashbrook was asked to empty his pockets. He was carrying several airline tickets, a receipt for a payment of $115 signed by the magician John Mulholland, and notes with names, addresses, and phone numbers for Vincent Ruwet, Harold Abramson, George Hunter White, and Chestnut Lodge, the Maryland sanatorium where Olson was to be hospitalized. In his wallet were several security passes, including one issued by the CIA and another granting him access to Edgewood Arsenal. The officers asked him to explain.

  Lashbrook said he was a chemist working for the Defense Department, and that Olson had been a bacteriologist working for the army. Olson became mentally unstable. He had brought Olson to New York to be treated by Harold Abramson. Then, driven by inner demons, Olson had leapt through the hotel window. That was all, Lashbrook said—except for one important detail: this matter must be kept quiet for national security reasons.

  The detectives left Lashbrook alone while they checked his story. Ruwet and Abramson confirmed it. After a few more questions, the detectives told Lashbrook that he was free to leave but should appear at Bellevue Hospital later that morning to identify Olson’s body. He returned to the Statler Hotel. Soon afterward there was a knock on his door. A CIA fix-it man had arrived.

  Every secret service needs officers who specialize in cleaning up messes. In the CIA of the 1950s, those officers worked for Sheffield Edwards at the Office of Security. The cover-up he directed in the hours and days after Frank Olson died was a model of brisk efficiency.

  Immediately after Olson crashed through the Statler Hotel window, Lashbrook called Gottlieb to report what had happened. Gottlieb, in turn, dialed a secret telephone number that connected him to the duty officer at CIA headquarters. He reported that there had been “an incident in a hotel in New York City involving a death” and that it required “immediate attention.” The duty officer called Edwards and told him that “an Agency employee assigned to an eyes-only project at Camp Detrick” had committed suicide in New York.

  “The subject’s name was Frank Olson,” he added.

  Edwards gave the duty officer two assignments. First he was to call Lashbrook and tell him to move to another room at the Statler Hotel and “talk to nobody until we get someone there with him.” Second, he should immediately summon both Gottlieb and Gottlieb’s boss—“Gib” Gibbons, chief of the Technical Services Staff—to Quarters Eye, an unmarked CIA building near the Lincoln Memorial.

  Both men were waiting for Edwards when he arrived at 5:40 a.m. They told him what had happened in New York. Edwards later reported that he “questioned Dr. Gibbons and Dr. Gottlieb at some length on certain matters that had occurred prior to this incident.” He knew what he was looking for. Edwards had been a co-creator of Bluebird, which carried out experiments with psychoactive drugs beginning in 1950, before MK-ULTRA was created. Under his questioning, Gottlieb revealed a key fact: Olson’s CIA colleagues had given him LSD without his knowledge nine days before his death.

  With the calm self-assurance for which he was known at the CIA, Edwards announced how the cover-up would unfold. First, the New York police would be persuaded not to investigate, and to cooperate in misleading the press. Second, a fake career—a “legend”—would be constructed for Lashbrook, who as the sole witness would be questioned by investigators and could under no circumstances be recognized as working for the CIA, much less MK-ULTRA. Third, the Olson family would have to be informed, placated, and kept cooperative. Edwards had men to handle the first two jobs. The third was for Gottlieb: find a trusted man to break the news to the new widow. Gottlieb said he had already done so.

  “I spoke with Vincent Ruwet, chief of Detrick’s SO Division, at about three AM and asked him to go to Ols
on’s home,” Gottlieb said. “He’s probably there right now.”

  Ruwet had the awful job of telling Alice Olson that her husband had just died violently—and also to begin the process of keeping the family quiet. Light snow fell as he drove toward the wood bungalow in Frederick. Alice was overwhelmed by the news. She sobbed uncontrollably and collapsed onto the floor. When she could speak, it was to say, “Tell me what happened.”

  Ruwet told Alice that her husband had been in a New York hotel room and “fell or jumped” through the window to his death. Her screams awoke her nine-year-old son, Eric. When he appeared in the living room, Ruwet told him, “Your father had an accident. He fell or jumped out a window.” That phrase came to haunt him.

  “For years after that, I was completely stumped and dumbfounded by trying to resolve that alternative,” Eric recalled. “There’s a big difference between a fall and a jump, and I couldn’t understand how either of them could’ve occurred.”

  While Alice was being informed of her husband’s death at her home in Maryland, Lashbrook was welcoming the CIA cavalry to his room at the Statler Hotel in New York. It took the form of a single officer. In internal reports he is called “Agent James McC.” Later he was identified as James McCord, who would go on to become a footnote to American political history as one of the Watergate burglars. McCord had previously been an FBI agent specializing in counterintelligence. Making police investigations evaporate was one of his specialties.

  As soon as Edwards called McCord before dawn on November 28, he swung into action. He took the first morning plane to New York and arrived at the Statler Hotel around eight o’clock. Lashbrook had just returned from his brief detention at the Fourteenth Precinct. McCord spent more than an hour questioning him and then, around 9:30, advised him to go to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital, as the police had requested. There he identified Olson’s body. While he was away, McCord minutely searched room 1018A and nearby rooms.

  Shortly after noon, Lashbrook returned to the Statler Hotel. McCord was waiting. Over the next few hours, according to McCord’s later report, Lashbrook made a series of telephone calls and “appeared completely composed.” One call was to Sidney Gottlieb. After hanging up, Lashbrook told McCord that Gottlieb had instructed him to go to Abramson’s office at 9:15 p.m., pick up a report, and bring it back to Washington.

  That evening, Lashbrook and McCord emerged from the hotel and walked across Seventh Avenue to Penn Station. There they met another officer from the CIA’s Office of Security, who had come to relieve McCord. The newly arrived officer, identified in reports as “Agent Walter P. T.,” suggested to Lashbrook that they take a taxi to Abramson’s office. When they arrived, Lashbrook said he wished to speak to Abramson alone. The agent listened through the proverbial keyhole.

  “Upon closing the door, Dr. Abramson and Lashbrook started a discussion about security,” he wrote in his report. “Dr. Abramson was heard to remark to Lashbrook that he was ‘worried about whether or not the deal was in jeopardy,’ and that he thought ‘that the operation was dangerous and that the whole deal should be re-analyzed.’”

  Lashbrook carried Abramson’s report to Washington on the midnight train. CIA security officers in New York took care of the remaining details. The investigating police detective concluded that Olson had died from multiple fractures “subsequent upon a jump or fall.” That became the official narrative.

  “A bacteriologist from the Army biological warfare research center at Camp Detrick fell or jumped to his death early yesterday from a tenth floor room at the Statler Hotel in New York,” Olson’s hometown newspaper reported. “He was identified by a companion as Frank Olson, 43, of Route 5 in Frederick … Olson and his friend, Robert Vern Lashbrook, a Defense Department consultant, went to New York Tuesday because Olson wanted to see a doctor about a depressed state.”

  At the funeral, a barely composed Alice Olson greeted mourners as if in a daze. Among them were Olson’s closest colleagues. Two whom she did not recognize made special efforts to console her. Afterward she asked a friend who they were.

  “That was Bob Lashbrook and his boss,” the friend replied. “They both work for the CIA, you know.”

  Later that week, “Lashbrook and his boss” called Alice to arrange a condolence visit. She agreed to receive them. Lashbrook introduced himself, and then presented his boss: Sidney Gottlieb. Both told Alice that her husband had been a fine man and would be sorely missed.

  “I really don’t know why Frank did it, but I’d be glad to tell you anything I know about what happened,” Lashbrook said. Gottlieb was equally solicitous: “If you ever want to know more about what happened, we’ll be happy to meet with you and talk.” Alice later reflected on what might have been behind their visit.

  “It was probably to check me out and see whether I was handling myself and handling the situation, whether I was hysterical,” she said. “And I’m sure they left the house feeling ever so much better because I had been gracious and hospitable to them—so that I must have played right into their hands and made them feel fine.”

  Despite the successful cover-up, Olson’s death was a near-disaster for the CIA. It came close to threatening the very existence of MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb, Helms, and Dulles might have taken this as a moment for reflection. In light of this death, they could have reasoned, further experiments with psychoactive drugs should be stopped, at least on unwitting subjects. Instead they proceeded as if it had never happened. This reflected their view of how vital MK-ULTRA was. If it could provide the key to victory in a future war, something as minor as a single death would hardly be enough to derail it.

  “Conspiracy theories aside, if Frank Olson was murdered, it may have been for the simplest reason,” one study concluded more than half a century later. “Following his Deep Creek Lake experiment, Sidney Gottlieb may have found himself with a man who was so ill that it was a threat to his program’s secrecy. The death of Frank Olson may have been a means to an end, the end of the threat to MK-ULTRA.”

  Although no one outside the CIA questioned the official story of Olson’s death, inside the Agency it was a stunning event. The CIA’s general counsel, Lawrence Houston—who together with Dulles had written the 1947 National Security Act that created the Agency—spent two weeks reviewing what he called “all the information available to the Agency relating to the death of Dr. Frank Olson,” and wrote a brief memorandum summarizing his findings. “It is my conclusion that the death of Dr. Olson is the result of circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the US Government and that there is, therefore, a direct causal connection between that accident and his death,” it said. “I am not happy with what seems to me a very casual attitude on the part of TSS representatives to the way this experiment was conducted, and to their remarks that this is just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation … A death occurred which might have been prevented, and the Agency as a whole, particularly the Director, were caught completely by surprise in a most embarrassing manner.”

  Houston handed this memo to the CIA inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, an OSS veteran who had joined the CIA soon after its creation. Dulles had asked Kirkpatrick to investigate Olson’s death, but he gave him a less than fully revealing account of what had happened. Some time ago, Dulles told him, Olson had participated in “an experiment” that might have involved LSD, and this experience might have contributed to his suicide. He wanted a report but impressed Kirkpatrick with the need for discretion. Senator McCarthy and other critics of the CIA would certainly seize on this case if they suspected the truth. Besides, Alice Olson was soon to begin receiving survivor’s benefits based on the verdict of death by “classified illness,” so any other conclusion would create problems for her.

  Kirkpatrick interviewed several CIA officers involved in the case. Gottlieb was not among them. He was asked only to submit a written report, and replied with eight short paragraphs. A few sentences shed light on what he cal
led his “fairly close personal relationship” with Frank Olson. Gottlieb estimated that he had met Olson “thirteen or fourteen” times over the previous two years, at Camp Detrick and at CIA offices. He was not asked whether he and Olson had ever traveled together or what their joint projects had entailed.

  At Kirkpatrick’s request, Harold Abramson, who had known Olson for years, sought to treat him in the days before his death, and was one of the last people to see him alive, also wrote an account of the episode. Kirkpatrick underlined two passages. In the first, Abramson reports that when he met Olson on November 24, “I attempted to confirm what I had heard, that the experiment had been performed especially to trap him.” Later Abramson says that at their meeting the following day, Olson spoke of “his concern with the quality of his work, his guilt on being retired from the Army for an ulcer, and his release of classified information.”

  Although these phrases evidently intrigued Kirkpatrick, he did not probe further. On December 18 he handed his report to Dulles. It did not fix blame but included a startling recommendation: “There should be immediately established a high-level intra-Agency board which should review all TSS experiments and give approval to any in which human beings are involved.” Dulles, who knew far more about MK-ULTRA than Kirkpatrick, could not possibly agree to that. He did, however, agree to sign brief letters admonishing the director of the Technical Services Staff, “Gib” Gibbons; his deputy James Drum; and Gottlieb. “Hand carry to Gibbons, Drum, and Gottlieb,” he wrote in handwritten instructions to an aide. “Have them note having read, and return to Kirkpatrick for Eyes Only file. These are not reprimands, and no personnel file notations are being made.”

  In the first two letters, Dulles said he considered “the unwitting application of LSD in an experiment with which you are familiar to be an indication of bad judgment.” The one he sent to Gottlieb was only slightly sharper.