Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Soon after Colby took office, he was handed a thick loose-leaf book that would change the CIA forever. Inside were all the responses that CIA officers had sent to Schlesinger after he ordered them to report illegal acts they had committed or knew about. They filled 693 closely typed pages. Among them were references to “research into behavioral drugs” and “human volunteers.” Gottlieb’s name appeared once.

  “In January 1973, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, advising that he was acting on instructions from DCI Richard Helms, ordered the destruction of all records associated with drug research and testing,” one response said. “On 31 January 1973, seven boxes of progress reports, from 1953 to 1967, were recalled from the archives and destroyed. In addition, twenty-five copies of a booklet entitled ‘LSD-25: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications’ were destroyed.”

  After combing through this mass of material, which came to be known as the CIA “family jewels,” Colby delivered a summary to the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which were officially charged with overseeing the CIA. Guided by old habit, they agreed that the “family jewels” should remain secret. For the next year, Washington was increasingly consumed by the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, and his replacement by Vice President Gerald Ford. The “family jewels” remained safely tucked away.

  Several months later, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, called Colby and said he had uncovered “a story bigger than My Lai.” Hersh had learned about one of the “family jewels,” a program called MH-CHAOS—MH was the prefix for projects with worldwide reach—under which the CIA had compiled dossiers on thousands of American journalists and anti-war activists. Colby did not deny the story. On Sunday, December 22, 1974, it ran on the front page of the New York Times.

  “The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the anti-war movement and other dissident groups in the United States,” Hersh’s article began. It did not refer to drug experiments or anything else connected to MK-ULTRA. The wave of investigations it set off, however, would ultimately reach Sidney Gottlieb.

  Revelations about MH-CHAOS led members of Congress to propose establishing a special committee to investigate illegal acts by the CIA. President Ford was resolutely opposed, as were senior CIA officers. This was the first time that an outside force had threatened the Agency’s secrecy since Mike Mansfield’s failed attempts to establish a congressional oversight committee in the 1950s.

  The political climate in Washington, so protective of the CIA for so long, had decisively changed. Stories about CIA excesses were spilling into the press. Americans demanded to know more. This made it impossible for President Ford to oppose the idea of an investigation. Instead he tried to pre-empt Congress.

  “Unnecessary disclosures would almost certainly result if I let Congress dominate the investigation,” Ford wrote in his memoir. “I decided to take the initiative.” On January 4, 1975, Ford announced the formation of his own CIA commission. He wanted a bland report that would find some mischief but no great crimes. This, he hoped, would reassure members of Congress and discourage them from conducting their own investigation. He described the United States as “beset by continuing threats to our national security,” said that the CIA was “fundamental in providing the safeguards that protect our national interests,” and praised its “notable record of many successes.” Congress, he suggested, should “consider the findings and recommendations of the commission” and “avoid a proliferation of hearings.”

  To ensure that his commission produced a forgiving report, Ford chose Vice President Nelson Rockefeller as its chairman. Rockefeller was a quintessential political insider whose ties to the CIA dated back to the 1950s, when he served with Allen Dulles on the Operations Coordinating Board, a secret subcommittee of the National Security Council that was responsible for conceiving and developing covert action projects.

  Hours after Ford announced formation of the Rockefeller Commission, he met with Richard Helms, who was then serving as the U.S. ambassador to Iran. Helms knew as much as anyone alive about the history of American covert operations—including MK-ULTRA. “Frankly, we are in a mess,” Ford told him, adding that he planned to give the Rockefeller Commission a narrow mandate and to warn its members that exceeding it “would be tragic.”

  “It would be a shame if the public uproar forced us to go beyond, and to damage the integrity of the CIA,” Ford said. “I automatically assume what you did was right unless it’s proven otherwise.”

  That amounted to an assurance that, if at all possible, Helms would be shielded from accountability for the CIA’s actions on his watch. He was gratified but still uneasy. If the “family jewels” were made public, the reaction could be uncontrollable.

  “A lot of dead cats will come out,” Helms warned the president. “I don’t know everything which went on in the Agency. Maybe no one does. But I know enough to say that if the dead cats come out, I will participate.”

  All members of the Rockefeller Commission—officially the President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States—were charter members of the political elite who could be relied upon to do whatever possible to protect the CIA. Among them were General Lyman Lemnitzer, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the labor leader Lane Kirkland, whose AFL-CIO was a main conduit for CIA funding of anti-Communist trade unions abroad; Ronald Reagan, who had just completed two terms as governor of California; and C. Douglas Dillon, a former secretary of the treasury. They worked for five months. Rockefeller steered them away from sensitive matters, but even he could not contain the oddly talkative director of central intelligence William Colby. Rather than claim ignorance or poor memory, Colby gave surprisingly candid answers. In his first session he testified that the CIA had conducted LSD experiments that resulted in deaths. Later he referred to assassination plots. His candor disturbed members of the hear-no-evil commission. Afterward Rockefeller pulled him aside.

  “Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?” Rockefeller asked. “We realize that there are secrets you fellows need to keep, and so nobody here is going to take it amiss if you feel that there are some questions you can’t answer quite as fully as you seem to feel you have to.”

  The Rockefeller Commission’s report, issued on June 11, 1975, was as mild as circumstances allowed. It concluded that the CIA had carried out “plainly unlawful” operations, including spying on protest groups, tapping phones, committing burglaries, and opening mail. Stories about assassination plots against foreign leaders had begun to circulate in Washington, but the commission report said that “time did not permit a full investigation.”

  Although the report did not mention MK-ULTRA by name, it did say that the CIA had run a project “to test potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting United States citizens,” another that involved giving drugs to prison inmates, and a third in which “unsuspecting volunteers” were given LSD at two secret sites. No further investigation was possible, it concluded, because records of these operations had been destroyed and “all persons directly involved in the early phases of the program were either out of the country and not available for interview or were deceased.”

  Buried deep inside the report was a paragraph so startling that dry prose could not dilute its power.

  On one occasion during the early phases of this program, LSD was administered to an employee of the Department of the Army without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project. Before receiving the LSD, the subject had participated in discussions where the testing of such substances on unsuspecting subjects was agreed to in principle. However, this individual was not made aware that he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered. He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a C
IA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth floor window of his room and died as a result.

  The next day, articles about the Rockefeller Commission report dominated front pages across the United States and beyond. Most of them focused on new revelations about the MH-CHAOS surveillance program. The Washington Post ran four stories. One was headlined SUICIDE REVEALED.

  * * *

  A RINGING TELEPHONE woke Eric Olson at his apartment near Harvard University, where he was pursuing a graduate degree in psychology. His brother-in-law was calling.

  “Have you seen today’s Washington Post?” he asked.

  “No, why?” Olson replied.

  “There’s a story in it that you need to read right away. It’s about your father.”

  “My father? What about my father?”

  “Go out and get a copy, then call me back.”

  Olson dressed, jogged to the Out-of-Town Newsstand in Harvard Square, bought the Post, and saw the headline: SUICIDE REVEALED.

  “A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped ten floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller Commission report issued yesterday,” the story began. That sentence contained two inaccuracies: the victim was a CIA officer, not an army employee, and his “jump” was thirteen floors, since by the numbering system at the Statler Hotel, room 1018A was on the thirteenth floor. Nonetheless Eric Olson had a flash of recognition

  “It was amazing,” he said years later. “It was truly amazing. An Army scientist—that was the label, an ‘Army scientist’—was drugged in 1953 with LSD by the CIA, reacted badly, was taken for medical attention to New York, but unfortunately jumped out the window. Then you go: ‘Drugs? LSD? What?’ It was this amazing combination of enlightenment and befuddlement at the same time. Both about ‘Why are drugs now involved in this?’ but also ‘Is this my father?’ And at the same time: How many scientists were jumping out of windows in New York in 1953?”

  This story, with its lurid mix of drugs, death, and the CIA, proved irresistible. For the next several days, reporters barraged the CIA with demands to know more about the scientist who “jumped ten floors to his death” after being dosed with LSD. The Olson family called a press conference. On the day before it was to be held, Eric Olson invited the reporter Seymour Hersh to the family home in Frederick. Hersh was characteristically blunt.

  “This must be the most goddamn incurious family in the United States!” he marveled. “How you could have lived with that bullshit story for twenty-two years is beyond me.”

  At the press conference, held in the family’s backyard, Alice Olson read a statement saying that the family had decided to “file a lawsuit against the CIA, perhaps within two weeks, asking several million dollars in damages.” She insisted that her husband had “not acted irrational or sick” during the last days of his life, but was “very melancholy” and “said he was going to leave his job.”

  “Since 1953, we have struggled to understand Frank Olson’s death as an inexplicable ‘suicide,’” she said. “The true nature of his death was concealed for twenty-two years.”

  Besides announcing plans to sue the CIA, the Olson family also asked the New York Police Department to open a new investigation. Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau replied immediately, promising that his office would begin “looking into certain aspects” of the case. The New York police commissioner, Michael J. Codd, said he had ordered detectives “to look at the whole matter as to just what may have been the totality of circumstances under which Mr. Olson died.”

  Several stories about Olson’s death quoted Robert Lashbrook, who was with him in room 1018A on the night he died. “I don’t really know what I should say and what I shouldn’t,” Lashbrook told the Washington Post in a telephone interview. Then he mentioned that immediately after Olson’s death, he had called a “CIA employee” to report what had happened—and that the employee’s name was Sidney Gottlieb.

  On the same day the Post ran that interview, the New York Times also published Gottlieb’s name. It described him as “chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s testing of LSD” and quoted unnamed Rockefeller Commission investigators as asserting that he had “destroyed the drug program’s records in 1973 to hide the details of possibly illegal actions.” The Times also said that Gottlieb had been “personally involved in a fatal experiment” that led to Frank Olson’s death.

  The Rockefeller Commission previously reported the destruction of records on the LSD experiments, but did not mention Dr. Gottlieb by name. It also reported a program through the Federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Control in which the CIA had arranged to test LSD on “unsuspecting volunteers” in two programs, one in the West and the other along the East Coast. Staff sources on the Rockefeller commission said this program was also commanded by Dr. Gottlieb … [The staff] attempted to interview Dr. Gottlieb and was told by the Agency that he was unavailable. The New York Times tried unsuccessfully to reach him.

  Those stories pierced Gottlieb’s shroud of anonymity for the first time. He was gone but, to his eternal dismay, not forgotten.

  Alarm bells went off at the White House after the Olson family announced its plan to sue the CIA. A lawsuit, if allowed to proceed, would give the family, as well as homicide detectives in New York, a tool they could use to force disclosure of deep secrets. President Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Dick Cheney, recognized the danger. Cheney warned Rumsfeld in a memo that a lawsuit might force the CIA “to disclose highly classified national security information.” To head off this looming disaster, he recommended that Ford make a public “expression of regret” and “express a willingness to meet personally with Mrs. Olson and her children.”

  Ford took his aides’ advice. He invited Alice Olson and her three adult children to the White House. On July 21, 1975, they met in the Oval Office. It was a unique historical moment: the only time an American president has ever summoned the family of a CIA officer who died violently and apologized on behalf of the United States government.

  “With deepest sincerity and conviction, I hereby extend that apology … for the uncertainties and anguish experienced by the family over this extended period,” Ford said after greeting the Olsons. He said he had directed the CIA to give them whatever documents it had that might shed light on the case. Later they met with William Colby at CIA headquarters at Langley. He apologized for what he called a “terrible thing” that “should never have happened.”

  “Some of our people were out of control in those days,” Colby said. “They went too far. There were problems of supervision and administration.”

  White House lawyers offered the Olson family $750,000 in exchange for dropping its legal claims. After some hesitation, the family accepted. Congress passed a special bill approving the payment. That would have closed the case if Frank Olson had remained quiet in his grave.

  * * *

  AFTER RETIRING FROM the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb could hardly have taken a normal job. For two decades he had lived under deep cover. He had conceived and directed a mind control program with global reach, overseen extreme interrogations, concocted poisons to kill foreign leaders, and crafted tools of mayhem for spies. What job could follow that?

  With help from his old friend Richard Helms, Gottlieb quietly became a consultant to the Drug Enforcement Administration. To get the job, which was designated as “sensitive,” he had to complete an extended application. He wrote that he was fifty-five years old, stood six feet tall, weighed 175 pounds, had hazel eyes and gray hair, spoke good German and fair French, and had “top secret plus many special clearances.” In one section of the application, he was asked to summarize what he had done in his previous job.

  “Responsible for broad program involving research, development and production of equipment and software in a wide range of scientific and engineering fields, and the deployment and application
of those assets worldwide,” he wrote. “Had total responsibilities for mgmt. of funds, personnel and direction of activities.”

  Gottlieb spent seven months at the Drug Enforcement Administration, most of it preparing what its director John Bartels called “a management study on research facilities.” This interlude, which ended in May 1974, gave him time to reflect on his future. Quiet retirement was implausible. Gottlieb was still youthful and vigorous. By nature he was an explorer, a seeker, a wanderer. Government service had not made him rich, but it left him with a home in Virginia, some savings, and a pension of $1,624 per month. His children were out of high school. Both he and his free-thinking wife, Margaret, thirsted for adventure. Together they set out to imagine a new life. The leap they decided to take was unconventional, to say the least, but utterly consistent with their restless inner spirits.

  “Sid retired from government at an early age and we had to decide what to do with the rest of our lives,” Margaret Gottlieb wrote years later in an essay for her family. “With the thought that we would free ourselves from all our material things which might stand in the way of making unimpeded choices, we sold everything—house, land, cars, goats and chickens. The children took what they wanted, and we booked ourselves onto a freighter, leaving from San Francisco and heading for Perth, Australia. This trip continued, sometimes on land, sometimes by sea and sometimes by air, for two years. We were in Africa, Australia, and India, and many places in between. We were just following our noses, getting volunteer jobs wherever we were and spending as long as we wanted.”

  In India, the couple volunteered to work at a hospital in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh where lepers and other severely afflicted patients were treated. Margaret, who had been born and brought up at a mission station in Uttar Pradesh, did not adjust well. Her feelings for India were deeply conflicted. After a few months she fell ill.