by David Talbot
In the end, the Korean brainwashing story itself—the seedbed of so much creeping, Cold War fantasy—turned out to be largely fictitious. Dulles made much of it in his Hot Springs speech, invoking in outraged tones the image of “American boys” being forced to betray their own country and “make open confessions—fake from beginning to end” about how they had waged germ warfare on China and North Korea. But a study later commissioned by Dulles himself—conducted by two prominent Cornell Medical Center neurologists, including Harold Wolff, a friend of the CIA director—largely debunked the brainwash panic. They rejected reports that the Communists were using esoteric mind control techniques, insisting that there was no evidence of drugs or hypnosis or any involvement by psychiatrists and scientists in the Soviet or Chinese interrogation procedures.
Most of the abuse meted out to POWs and political prisoners in Communist countries, Wolff and his colleague observed, amounted to nothing more sophisticated than isolation regimens and stress positions, like being forced to stand in the same spot for hours, and the occasional application of brute force. “There is no reason to dignify these methods by surrounding them with an aura of scientific mystery, or to denote them by terms such as ‘menticide’ or ‘brain washing’ which imply that they are scientifically organized techniques of predictable effectiveness,” concluded the Cornell scientists.
In response to the brainwashing bugaboo that the CIA itself had conjured, the agency constructed its own intricate mind control machinery that was part Orwell and part Philip K. Dick. In Hot Springs, Dulles bemoaned the fact that, unlike the ruthless Soviets, the United States had no easy access to “human guinea pigs” for its brain experimentation. But, in fact, the CIA was already subjecting helpless victims to its “brain perversion” techniques. Dulles began by feeding Soviet prisoners and captured double agents into this merciless psychological apparatus; then drug addicts, mental patients, prison inmates, and other “expendables.” By the end, Allen Dulles would put his own family members in the hands of the CIA’s mad scientists.
In June 1952, Frank Olson—a balding, forty-one-year-old CIA biochemist with a long face, mournful eyes, and a smile that revealed an upper deck of prominent incisors—flew to Frankfurt, where he was picked up at the airport and driven twelve miles north to Camp King, an extreme interrogation center of the sort that would later be known as a “black site.” Olson helped oversee the Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick in Maryland, the biological weapons laboratory jointly operated by the U.S. Army and the CIA. The top secret work conducted by the SO Division included research on LSD-induced mind control, assassination toxins, and biological warfare agents like those allegedly being used in Korea.
Olson’s division also was involved in research that was euphemistically labeled “information retrieval”—extreme methods of extracting intelligence from uncooperative captives. For the past two years, Olson had been traveling to secret centers in Europe where Soviet prisoners and other human guinea pigs were subjected to these experimental interrogation methods. Dulles began spearheading this CIA research even before he became director of the agency, under a secret program that preceded MKULTRA code-named Operation Artichoke, after the spymaster’s favorite vegetable. CIA officials later purged their files of evidence of the program, but in one of the few surviving documents, dated February 12, 1951, Dulles wrote to his ever-accommodating deputy Frank Wisner about “the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc. . . . The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared in my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background.”
It was in secret overseas detention centers like Camp King where the CIA found many of the subjects for its Artichoke interrogations: defectors, double agents, and other unfortunates from the East who had fallen into U.S. hands. Some of the captives had been delivered to the CIA by the Gehlen Organization, which for a time operated out of Camp King until relocating to Pullach. During the war, Camp King had been a Nazi interrogation center for captured U.S. and British fliers. Afterward, the U.S. military turned the camp into a stockade for notorious Nazi POWs like the propagandist “Axis Sally” and the swashbuckling commando Otto Skorzeny. But by 1948, the camp was operating as an extreme interrogation center for Soviet prisoners, a program jointly administered by an unscrupulous alliance of CIA scientists and ex-Nazi doctors who had presided over medical experiments on concentration camp inmates during the war. At Camp King, CIA scientists and their German colleagues subjected victims to dangerous combinations of drugs—including Benzedrine, Pentothal-Natrium, LSD, and mescaline—under a research protocol that stipulated, “Disposal of the body is not a problem.” More than sixteen hundred of the Nazi scientists recruited for U.S. research projects like this would be comfortably resettled with their families in America under a CIA program known as Operation Paperclip.
One of the CIA-sponsored researchers who worked on the Artichoke interrogations in Germany, a Harvard-trained physician named Henry Knowles Beecher, was brought to Camp King by the agency to advise on the best way to induce amnesia in Soviet spies after they had been subjected to the agency’s interrogation methods. Beecher, the chief of anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was an outspoken proponent of the Nuremberg Code, which forbade medical experimentation on humans without their informed consent. But he was one of many prominent American doctors and scientists who lost their moral direction during the Cold War, enticed by the generous CIA patronage that featured virtually unlimited funding and unrestricted research parameters. Lured into a world where nearly everything was permitted in the name of national security, Beecher even began drawing on the work done by Nazi doctors at Dachau.
After reading a captured Gestapo report in 1947 that indicated that mescaline could be an effective interrogation tool, Beecher set off on a decadelong search for a magical “truth serum” that would compel prisoners to reveal all, a quest that later focused on LSD and would involve unwitting subjects in Germany as well as at his own Boston hospital. Urging the government to expand its research into LSD as an “offensive weapon,” Beecher subjected his involuntary subjects to severe overdoses of the hallucinogen, despite knowing that it caused “acute panic,” “paranoid reactions,” and other trauma in his victims—a “psychosis in miniature,” he coolly observed in one government report, that “offers interesting possibilities.”
Ever since the Nuremberg trials, international legal authorities had moved to formally condemn the physical and psychological abuse of the powerless. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly emphatically stated in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The following year, the third Geneva Convention reiterated this fundamental commandment: “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” But by defining the Cold War as a ruthless struggle outside the norms of military conduct and human decency, the national security regime shaped by men like Dulles was able to brazenly defy international law. Few of those involved in CIA brain warfare expressed any ethical concerns about their work. “I never gave a thought to legality or morality,” one agency case officer readily acknowledged after he retired. “Frankly, I did what worked.”
But Frank Olson did suffer profound moral anxieties about his work, and the result was a serious crisis within the CIA itself. Dr. Olson began having serious doubts after traveling to various CIA research centers in England, France, Norway, and West Germany, and observing the human experiments being conducted at these black sites. Olson’s trip to Germany in summer 1952—during which he visited Haus Waldhof, a notorious CIA safe house on a country estate near Camp King—left him particularly shaken. Soviet prisoners were subject
ed to especially severe interrogation methods at Haus Waldhof, which sometimes resulted in their deaths. The cruelty he witnessed reminded Olson of Nazi concentration camps. After returning home to the United States, Olson began wrestling with his conscience, according to his wife and colleagues. “He had a tough time after Germany . . . drugs, torture, brainwashing,” recalled Norman Cournoyer, a Camp Detrick researcher with whom Olson had worked on projects that had once made him proud, like designing protective clothing for the soldiers landing at Normandy on D-day.
Olson and Cournoyer had also collaborated on projects that made them less proud. After the war, they had traveled around the United States, supervising the spraying of biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters. Some of the tests, which were conducted in cities like San Francisco as well as rural areas in the Midwest, involved harmless chemicals, but others featured more dangerous toxins. In Alaska—where the two men sought to stage their experiments in an environment that resembled wintertime Russia—“we used a spore which is very similar [to] anthrax,” Cournoyer recalled. “So to that extent we did something that was not kosher.” One of their research colleagues, a bacteriologist named Dr. Harold Batchelor, learned aerial spray techniques from the infamous Dr. Kurt Blome, director of the Nazis’ biological warfare program. Years later, a congressional investigation found these open-air experiments conducted by Camp Detrick scientists “appalling.”
Olson began to worry about how his airborne spray research was being utilized by the military. His wife, Alice, said that, in addition to being deeply disturbed by the interrogation procedures he witnessed in Germany, her husband was also haunted by the suspicion that the United States was practicing biological warfare in Korea. By the time he returned from Germany, Olson was suffering a “moral crisis,” according to his family, and was seriously considering abandoning his science career and becoming a dentist.
Olson’s objections to the CIA’s brain warfare research apparently began to raise alarms within the Camp Detrick bureaucracy. One document in Olson’s personnel file, dated after his return from Germany, indicated that his behavior was causing “fear of a security violation.”
In November 1953, before Frank Olson could change his life, he became one more unwitting victim of the CIA’s mind control program. A week before Thanksgiving, Olson and several other SO Division scientists were invited to a weekend retreat at a secluded CIA facility near Deep Creek Lake, a lushly forested resort area in western Maryland. The scientists were greeted by Sidney Gottlieb, the chief wizard of the CIA’s magic potion division, the Technical Services Staff. Gottlieb was one of the agency’s more unique characters, a stuttering, clubfooted biochemist whom friends described as a kind of untethered genius. Despite his infirmity, Gottlieb threw himself into such passionate, if unlikely, recreations as folk dancing and goat herding. The son of Orthodox Hungarian Jews, he rejected Judaism and spent his lifetime searching for his own form of enlightenment, experimenting with Zen Buddhism and becoming an early celebrant in the cult of LSD. Gottlieb devoted himself enthusiastically to the CIA’s mind-manipulation program, subjecting hundreds of unsuspecting Americans to experimental drugs. The CIA chemist preyed on “people who could not fight back,” as one agency official put it, such as seven patients in a federal drug hospital in Kentucky who were dosed with acid for seventy-seven straight days by a Gottlieb-funded doctor who ran the hospital’s addiction treatment program. Gottlieb also excelled at cooking up rare toxins and clever delivery mechanisms in his laboratory to eliminate people the CIA deemed political enemies. Gottlieb strongly adhered to the Dulles ethic that there were no rules in war. “We were in a World War II mode,” said a CIA psychologist who was close to Gottlieb. “The war never really ended for us.”
After dinner on the second night of the Deep Creek retreat, Gott-lieb’s deputy spiked a bottle of Cointreau and offered it to the unsuspecting Olson and his colleagues. It was the beginning of a nightmarish ordeal for Olson, which would end a week later when the scientist went crashing through the window of the tenth-floor hotel room in midtown Manhattan where he was being held by the CIA and plunged to his death. After being dosed at Deep Creek, Olson never seemed to recover; he remained anxious and confused throughout the week leading up to his fatal fall. The CIA officials who took charge of him that week later claimed they were planning to put him in psychiatric care. But instead they shuttled him around from place to place, taking him to a New York City allergist on the CIA payroll named Dr. Harold Abramson, who had conducted LSD tolerance experiments for the agency, and even to a magician named John Mulholland, who taught CIA agents how magic techniques could improve their spycraft. As the days went by, Olson became increasingly agitated, telling Dr. Abramson—not without reason—that the CIA was trying to poison him.
Shortly after Olson fell to his death from the Statler Hotel (now the Hotel Pennsylvania), someone placed a brief phone call from the scientist’s hotel room to Dr. Abramson. “Well, he’s gone,” said the caller. “Well, that’s too bad,” Abramson responded, and then the caller hung up.
Agents from the CIA’s Office of Security—the department made up of former FBI agents and cops that cleaned up the spy agency’s messes—quickly descended on the hotel, nudging aside New York police investigators. James McCord, later known for his role in the Watergate break-in, was one of the security agents who took charge of the Olson “investigation” for the CIA. The agency termed Olson’s death a suicide, the tragic end of an emotionally unstable man, and the case was buried for over two decades.
In 1975, the case resurfaced during the Rockefeller Commission investigation of CIA abuses ordered by President Gerald Ford. Olson’s widow and grown children were invited to the White House by President Ford, who apologized to them on behalf of the government. The Olson case would become enshrined in history as one of the more outrageous examples of CIA hubris and mad science. But as the years went by, the Olson family became convinced that Frank Olson’s death was more than simply a tragic suicide; it was murder.
“Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry,” the family declared in a statement released in 2002. He died, they said, because he knew too much, and he had become a security risk.
In 1994, Frank’s eldest son, Eric, decided to have his father’s body exhumed and a second autopsy performed. The team of pathologists was led by James Starrs, professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University. The panel (with one dissenter) found evidence that Olson had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head and a chest injury before his fall—evidence that was called “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” While acknowledging that his team had not found “any smoking gun,” Starrs told the press, “I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Dr. Olson went through the window on his own.”
But Olson’s children failed in their efforts to reopen the case on the basis of the new evidence. In 2012, a federal judge dismissed the family’s lawsuit against the CIA, in which they asked for compensatory damages as well as access to documents related to their father’s death. In ruling against the family, primarily on technical grounds, the judge nonetheless noted “that the public record supports many of the allegations [against the CIA], farfetched as they may sound.”
Allen Dulles was coldly efficient when it came to ridding his agency of security problems. On the night of March 31, 1953, several months before Frank Olson met his end, Dulles invited an old friend and protégé named James Kronthal to his Georgetown house for dinner. The CIA director said he had business to discuss. But it turned out that the evening’s most pressing item of business was Kronthal’s own fate.
The forty-two-year-old Kronthal was a rising star at the CIA, where his profile fit the mold for Dulles’s “very best men.” The son of a prominent New York banker, Kronthal was educated at Yale and Harvard, and served under Dulles in the Bern OSS station during the war. Before the war, he had rejected the banking career that his family had planned for him in favor of teach
ing art history at Harvard. But Kronthal brought a keen business instinct to the art trade, establishing himself in Germany during the 1930s as a broker for Goering, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders who were selling art treasures stolen from Jewish collectors. After the war, he sought to redeem himself by trying to track down the looted art pieces and return them to their rightful owners.
The slightly built, brilliant young man became a favorite of Dulles, who helped Kronthal take over the Bern station in 1947, after it became one of the CIA’s first overseas outposts. When Dulles took charge of the agency in 1953, he brought Kronthal back to the Washington headquarters, with big plans for the younger man’s intelligence career.
Kronthal wasn’t a charming extrovert like Dulles, but his superiors recognized a rare intelligence behind his reticence. Helms was one of those who shared Dulles’s admiration for the up-and-coming agent, writing that Kronthal was a “top flight intelligence officer who commands respect from his subordinates more through demonstrated knowledge and IQ than through personal warmth and affability. He is rather retiring as a person but this does not affect his leadership or firmness of purpose.”
Kronthal, whom Dulles fondly referred to as “Jimmy,” reminded the CIA director of his only son, Allen Jr., another sensitive, highly intelligent young man whose life once held so much promise. But in November 1952, young Dulles had suffered a serious head wound while fighting with the Marines in Korea, a brain injury from which he would never fully recover. For the rest of Dulles’s life, his son would rotate in and out of hospitals, sanitariums, and private nursing care, growing increasingly remote from his father. And, on that night in March 1953, Dulles would also lose Kronthal, a man the spymaster had considered a member of the family and even a possible successor.
