The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  I spent a lot of time at Eric’s house, reading his documents and looking though his photos and watching his home movies. There were pictures of the teenage Eric and his younger brother, Nils, standing by their bikes. Eric had captioned the photograph “Happy Bikers.” There were 8-mm films shot in the 1940s and early 1950s of Eric’s father, Frank, playing with the children in the garden. Then there were some films Frank Olson had shot himself during a trip he made to Europe a few months before he died. There was Big Ben and Changing the Guard. There was the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin. There was the Eiffel Tower. It looked like a family holiday, except the family wasn’t with him. Sometimes, in these 8-mm films, you catch a glimpse of Frank’s traveling companions, three men, wearing long dark coats and trilby hats, sitting in Parisian pavement cafés, watching the girls go by.

  I watched them, and then I watched a home movie that a friend of Eric’s had shot on June 2, 1994, the day Eric had his father’s body exhumed.

  There was the digger breaking through the soil.

  There was a local journalist asking Eric, as the coffin was hauled noisily into the back of a truck, “Are you having second thoughts about this, Eric?”

  She had to yell over the sound of the digger.

  “Ha!” Eric replied.

  “I keep expecting you to change your mind,” shouted the journalist.

  Then there was Frank Olson himself, shriveled and brown on a slab in a pathologist’s lab at Georgetown University, Washington, his leg broken, a big hole in his skull.

  And then, in this home video, Eric was back at home, exhilarated, talking on the phone to Nils: “I saw Daddy today!”

  After Eric put the phone down he told his friend with the video camera the story of the bicycle trip he and Nils had taken in 1961, from the bottom of their driveway all the way to San Francisco.

  “I’d seen an article in Boys’ Life about a fourteen-year-old kid who cycled from Connecticut to the West Coast,” Eric said, “so I figured my brother was twelve and I was sixteen and that averaged out at fourteen, so we could do it. We got these terrible heavy two-speed twin bikes, and we started off right here. Forty West. We heard it went all the way! And we made it! We went all the way!”

  “No!” said Eric’s friend.

  “Yeah,” said Eric. “We cycled across the country.”

  “No way!”

  “It’s an incredible story,” said Eric. “And we’ve never heard of a younger person than my brother who cycled across the United States. It’s doubtful there is one. When you think about it, twelve, and alone. It took us seven weeks, and we had unbelievable adventures all the way.”

  “Did you camp out?”

  “We camped out. Farmers would invite us to stay in their houses. In Kansas City the police picked us up, figuring we were runaways, and when they found out we weren’t they let us stay in their jail.”

  “And your mom let you do this?”

  “Yeah, that’s a kind of unbelievable mystery.”

  (Eric’s mother, Alice, had died by 1994. She had been drinking on the quiet since the 1960s, and had begun locking herself in the bathroom and coming out mean and confused. Eric would never have exhumed his father’s remains while she was alive. His sister, Lisa, had died too, together with her husband and their two-year-old son. They’d been flying to the Adirondacks, where they were going to invest money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed, and everyone on board was killed.)

  “Yeah,” said Eric, “it’s an unbelievable mystery that my mother let us go, but we called home twice a week from different places, and the local paper, the Frederick paper, twice a week had these front-page articles like Olsons Reach St. Louis! All across the country back then there were billboards advertising a place called Harold’s Club, which was a big gambling casino in Reno. It used to be the biggest casino in the world. And their motif was HAROLD’S CLUB OR BUST! Every day we’d see these billboards: HAROLD’S CLUB OR BUST! It became a kind of slogan for our journey. When we got to Reno we realized we couldn’t get into Harold’s Club because we were too young. So we decided to make a sign that said HAROLD’S CLUB OR BUST! and tie it to the back of our bikes, go over to Harold’s Club, and tell Harold, whoever he might be, that we’d carried this across the whole United States and we were just crazy to see Harold’s Club. So we went into a drugstore. We got an old cardboard box and bought some crayons, and we started writing this sign. The woman who sold us the crayons said, “What are you guys doing?”

  “We said, ‘We’re going to make a sign, HAROLD’S CLUB OR BUST! and tell Harold that we cycled all the way from …”

  “She said, ‘These people are very smart. They’re not going to fall for this.’

  “So we made this thing, took it out onto the streets, scuffed it up, tied it to the back of our bikes, went over to Harold’s Club, got to this big entryway—Harold’s Club was this gigantic thing, literally the biggest gambling casino in the world—and there was a doorperson there.

  “He said, ‘What do you boys want?’

  “We said, ‘We want to meet Harold.’

  “He said, ‘Harold is not here.’

  “We said, ‘Well, who is here?’

  “He said, ‘Harold senior is not here but Harold junior is here.’

  “We said, ‘That’s fine, we’ll take Harold junior.’

  “He said, ‘Okay, I’ll go in and see.’

  “Pretty soon out strides this dude in a fancy cowboy suit. Handsome guy. So he comes out and looks at our bikes and he says, ‘What are you guys doing?’

  “We said, ‘Harold. We’ve been cycling across the United States and we’ve wanted to see Harold’s Club the whole time. We’ve been sweating across the desert.’

  “And he said, ‘Well, come on in!’

  “We ended up staying for a week at Harold’s Club. He took us up in a helicopter around Reno, put us up in a fancy hotel.

  And when we were leaving he said, ‘I guess you guys want to see Disneyland, right? Well, let me call up my friend Walt!’

  “So he called up Walt Disney—and this is one of the great disappointments of my life—Walt wasn’t home.”

  I have wondered why Eric spent the evening of the day he had his father’s body exhumed telling his friend the story of Harold’s Club or Bust. Maybe it’s because Eric had spent so much of his adult life failing to be offered the kindness of strangers, failing to benefit from anything approaching an American dream, but now Frank Olson was out there, lying on a slab in a pathologist’s lab, and perhaps things were about to turn around for Eric. Maybe some mysterious Harold Junior would come along and kindly explain everything.

  Happy Bikers.

  In 1970, Eric enrolled at Harvard. He went home every Thanksgiving weekend, and because Frank Olson went out of the window during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1953, the family invariably ended up watching old home movies of Frank, and Eric inevitably said to his mother, “Tell me the story again.”

  During Thanksgiving 1974, Eric’s mother replied, “I’ve told you this story a hundred times, a thousand times.”

  Eric said, “Just tell me it one more time.”

  And so Eric’s mother sighed and she began.

  Frank Olson had spent a weekend on an office retreat in a cabin called the Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. When he came home, his mood was unusually anxious.

  He told his wife, “I made a terrible mistake and I’ll tell you what it was when the children have gone to bed.”

  But the conversation never got around to what the terrible mistake had been.

  Frank remained agitated. He told Alice he wanted to quit his job and become a dentist. On Sunday night Alice tried to calm him down by taking him to the cinema in Frederick to see whatever was on, which turned out to be a new film titled Martin Luther.

  It was the story of Luther’s crisis of conscience over the corruption of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, when its theologians claimed it was impossible for the Church to do any wrong, because th
ey defined the moral code. They were fighting the Devil, after all. The film climaxed with Luther declaring, “No. Here I stand, I can do no other.” The moral of Martin Luther is that the individual cannot hide behind the institution.

  (TV Guide’s movie-review database gives Martin Luther two out of five stars and says, “It is not ‘entertainment’ in the usual sense of the word. One wishes there might have been some humor in the script, to make the man look more human. The film was made with such respect that the subject matter seems gloomy when it should be uplifting.”)

  The trip to the cinema didn’t help Frank’s mood, and the next day it was suggested by some colleagues that he go to New York to visit a psychiatrist. Alice drove Frank to Washington, D.C., and dropped him off at the offices of the men who would accompany him to New York.

  This was the last time she ever saw her husband.

  On the spur of the moment, during that Thanksgiving weekend in 1974, Eric asked his mother a question he’d never thought to ask before: “Describe the offices where you dropped him off.”

  So she did.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Eric, “that sounds just like CIA headquarters.”

  And then Eric’s mother became hysterical.

  She screamed, “You will never find out what happened in that hotel room!”

  Eric said, “As soon as I finish at Harvard I’m going to move back home and I’m not going to rest until I find out the truth.” Eric didn’t have to wait long for a breakthrough. He received a telephone call from a family friend on the morning of June 11, 1975: “Have you seen The Washington Post? I think you’d better take a look.”

  It was a front-page story, and the headline read:

  SUICIDE REVEALED

  A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller Commission report released yesterday.*

  The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans.

  “This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered,” the commission said. “He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.”

  The practice of giving drugs to unsuspecting people lasted from 1953 to 1963, when it was discovered by the CIA’s inspector general and stopped, the commission said.

  Is this my father? thought Eric.

  The headline was misleading. Not much was “revealed”—not even the name of the victim.

  Is this what happened at the Deep Creek Lodge? thought Eric. They slipped him LSD? No, but it has to be my father. How many army scientists were jumping out of hotel windows in New York in 1953?

  On the whole, the American public reacted to the Frank Olson story in much the same way as they responded, fifty years later, to the news that Barney was being used to torture Iraqi detainees. Horror would be the wrong word. People were basically amused and fascinated. As in the case of Barney, this response was, I think, triggered by the disconcertingly surreal combination of dark intelligence secrets and familiar pop culture.

  “For America it was lurid,” said Eric, “and exciting.”

  The Olsons were invited to the White House so that President Ford could personally apologize to them—“He was very, very sorry,” said Eric—and the photographs from that day show the family beaming and entranced inside the Oval Office.

  “When you look at those photographs now,” I asked Eric one day, “what do they say to you?”

  “They say that the power of that Oval Office for seduction is enormous,” Eric replied, “as we now know from Clinton. You go into that sacred space—that oval—and you’re really in a special charmed circle and you can’t think straight. It works. It really works.”

  Outside the White House, after their seventeen-minute meeting with President Ford, Alice Olson gave a statement to the press.

  “I think it should be noted,” she said, “that an American family can receive communication from the President of the United States. I think that’s a tremendous tribute to our country.”

  “She felt very embraced by Gerald Ford,” said Eric. “They laughed together, and so on.”

  The president promised the Olsons full disclosure, and the CIA provided the family, and America, with a flurry of details, each more unexpected than the last.

  The CIA had slipped LSD into Frank Olson’s Cointreau at a camping retreat called the Deep Creek Lodge. The project was codenamed MK-ULTRA, and they did it, they explained, because they wanted to watch how a scientist would cope with the effects of a mind-altering drug. Would he be unable to resist revealing secrets? Would the information be coherent? Could LSD be used as a truth serum for CIA interrogators?

  The Olsons in the Oval Office. Eric is second from the right.

  The Olsons back at home.

  And there was another motive. The CIA later admitted that they very much enjoyed paranoid thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate, and they wanted to know if they could create real-life brainwashed assassins by pumping people with LSD. But Frank Olson had had a bad trip, perhaps giving rise to the legend that if you take LSD you believe you can fly and you end up falling out of windows.

  Social historians and political satirists immediately labeled these events “a great historical irony,” and Eric repeated these words to me through gritted teeth because he doesn’t appreciate the fact that his father’s death has become a fragment of an irony.

  “The great historical irony,” Eric said, “being that the CIA brought LSD to America, thereby bringing a kind of enlightenment, thereby opening up a new level of political consciousness, thereby sowing the seeds of its own undoing because it created an enlightened public. It made great copy, and you’ll find that this theme is the motif of a lot of books.”

  The details kept coming, so thick and fast that Frank Olson was in danger of becoming lost, swept away like a twig in the tidal wave of this colorful story. The CIA also told the Olsons that in 1953 they created an MK-ULTRA brothel in New York City, where they spiked the customers’ drinks with LSD. They placed an agent named George White behind a one-way mirror where he molded, and passed up the chain of command, little models made out of pipe cleaners. The models represented the sexual positions considered, by the observant George White, to be the most effective in releasing a flow of information.

  When George White left the CIA, his letter of resignation read, in part: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun… . Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?”

  George White addressed this letter to his boss, the very same CIA man who had spiked Frank Olson’s Cointreau: an ecology-obsessed Buddhist named Sidney Gottlieb.

  Gottlieb had learned the art of sleight of hand from a Broadway magician named John Mulholland. This magician is all but forgotten today but back then he was a big star, a David Copperfield, who mysteriously bowed out of the public eye in 1953, claiming ill health, when the truth was that he had been secretly employed by Sidney Gottlieb to teach agents how to spike people’s drinks with LSD. Mulholland also taught Gottlieb how to slip biotoxins into the toothbrushes and cigars of America’s enemies abroad.

  It was Gottlieb who traveled to the Congo to assassinate the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, by putting toxins in his toothbrush (he failed: the story goes that someone else, a non-American, managed to assassinate Lumumba first). It was Gottlieb who mailed a monogrammed handkerchief, doctored with brucellosis, to Iraqi colonel Abd al-Karim Qasim. Qasim survived. And it was Gottlieb who traveled to Cuba to slip poisons into Fidel Castro’s cigars and his divin
g suit. Castro survived.

  It was like a comedy routine—the Marx Brothers Become Covert Assassins—and sometimes it seemed to Eric as if his family were the only people not laughing.

  “The image that was presented to us,” Eric said, “was fraternity boys out of control: ‘We tried some crazy things, and we made errors of judgment. We put various poisons in Castro’s cigars but none of that worked. And then we decided that we weren’t really good at that sort of thing.’”

  “A clown assassin,” I said.

  “A clown assassin,” said Eric. “Ineptitude. We drug people and they jump out of windows. We try to assassinate people and we get there too late. And we never actually assassinated anybody.”

  Eric paused.

  “And Gottlieb turns up everywhere!” he said. “Is Gottlieb the only person in the shop? Does he have to do everything?” Eric laughed. “And this is what my mother was seizing on when she talked to Gottlieb. She said, ‘How could you do such a harebrained scientific experiment? Where’s the medical supervision? Where’s the control group? You call this science?’ And Gottlieb basically replied, ‘Yeah, it was a bit casual. We’re sorry for that.’”

  As I sat in Eric Olson’s house and listened to his story I remembered that I had heard Sidney Gottlieb’s name mentioned before, in some other faraway context. Then it came to me. Before General Stubblebine came along, the secret psychic spies had another administrator: Sidney Gottlieb.

  It took me a while to remember this because it seemed so unlikely. What was someone like Sidney Gottlieb, a poisoner, an assassin (albeit a not particularly good one), the man indirectly responsible for the death of Frank Olson, doing in the middle of this other, funny, psychic story? It seemed remarkable to me that the organizational gap in the intelligence world between the light side (psychic supermen) and the dark side (covert assassinations) has been so narrow. But it wasn’t until Eric showed me a letter his mother received out of the blue on July 13, 1975, that I began to understand just how narrow it was. The letter was from the Diplomat Motor Hotel, in Ocean City, Maryland. It read: