The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  Dear Mrs. Olson,

  After reading the newspaper accounts on the tragic death of your husband, I felt compelled to write to you.

  At the time of your husband’s death, I was the assistant night manager at the Hotel Statler in New York and was at his side almost immediately after his fall. He attempted to speak but his words were unintelligible. A priest was summoned and he was given the last rites.

  Having been in the hotel business for the last 36 years and witnessed innumerable unfortunate incidents, your husband’s death disturbed me greatly, due to the most unusual circumstances of which you are now aware.

  If I can be of any assistance to you, please do not hesitate to call upon me.

  My heartfelt sympathy to you and your family.

  Sincerely,

  Armond D. Pastore

  General Manager

  The Olsons did phone Armond Pastore to thank him for his letter, and it was then that Pastore told them what had happened in the moments after Frank died in his arms on the street at 2:00 A.M.

  Pastore said he went back inside the hotel and spoke to the telephone switchboard operator. He asked her if any calls had been made from Frank Olson’s room.

  She said that there was just one call, and she had listened in to it. It was very short. It was made immediately after Frank Olson went out the window.

  The man in Frank Olson’s room said, “Well, he’s gone.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone said, “That’s too bad.”

  And then they both hung up.

  * The Rockefeller Commission had been created to investigate CIA misdeeds in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.

  15. HAROLD’S CLUB OR BUST!

  Eric Olson has a swimming pool in his back garden—one of the very few additions to the house made since 1953. On a hot day in August, Eric; his brother, Nils; Eric’s son, who usually lives in Sweden; Nils’s wife and their children; and some of Eric’s friends and I were sunbathing by the pool, when a truck covered with pictures of party balloons—Capital Party Rentals—pulled up in his driveway to drop off one hundred plastic seats.

  “Hey! Colored chairs!” yelled Eric.

  “You want the colored chairs?” said the driver.

  “Nah,” said Eric. “Inappropriate. I’ll take the gray ones.”

  Eric had brought a ghetto blaster down to the poolside and he tuned it to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered because the legendary reporter Daniel Schorr was going to deliver a commentary about him. Daniel Schorr was the first man to interview Khrushchev, he won three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, and now he was turning his attention to Eric.

  His commentary began.

  … Eric Olson is ready to charge, in a news conference tomorrow, that the story of a suicide plunge makes no sense …

  Eric leaned up against the wire fence that surrounded his swimming pool and grinned at his friends and family, who were listening intently to this broadcast.

  ... And that his father was killed to silence him about the lethal activities he’d been involved in, projects codenamed Artichoke and MK-ULTRA. Today, a spokesman for the CIA said no congressional or executive branch probes of the Olson case have turned up any evidence of homicide. Eric Olson may not have the whole story. The thing is, the government’s lid on its secrets remains so tight, we may never know the whole story....

  Eric flinched.

  “Don’t go there, Dan,” he muttered to himself. “Don’t go there.”

  ... This is Daniel Schorr …

  “Don’t go there, Dan,” Eric said.

  He turned to us all, sitting by the pool. We sat there and said nothing.

  “See?” said Eric. “That’s what they want to do. ‘We may never know the whole story.’ And there’s so much comfort they take in that. Bullshit. Bullshit. ‘Oh, it could be this, it could be that, and everything in the CIA is a hall of mirrors … layers … you can never get to the bottom … ’ When people say that, what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re comfortable with this because we don’t want to know.’ It’s like my mother always said, ‘You’re never going to know what happened in that hotel room.’ Well, something did happen in that room and it is knowable.”

  Suddenly, Eric is sixty years old. Decades have gone by, and he has spent them investigating his father’s death. One day I asked him if he regretted this, and he replied, “I regret it all the time.”

  Piecing together the facts has been hard enough for Eric, the facts being buried in classified documents, or declassified documents covered with thick black lines made with marker pens, or worse. Sidney Gottlieb admitted to Eric during one meeting that he had, on his retirement, destroyed the MK-ULTRA files. When Eric asked him why, Gottlieb explained that his “ecological sensitivity” had made him aware of the dangers of “paper overflow.”

  Gottlieb added that it didn’t really matter that the documents were ruined, because it was all a waste anyway. All the MK-ULTRA experiments were futile, he told Eric. They had all come to nothing. Eric left Gottlieb realizing that he’d been beaten by a truly first-class mind.

  What a brilliant cover story, he thought. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure.

  So, most of the facts were retained only in the memories of men who did not want to talk. Nonetheless, Eric has constructed a narrative that is just as plausible as, even more plausible than, the LSD suicide story.

  Collecting the facts has been difficult enough, but there has been something even harder.

  “The old story is so much fun,” Eric said, “why would anyone want to replace it with a story that’s not fun. You see? The person who puts the spin on the story controls it from the beginning. It’s very hard for people to read against the grain of what you’ve been told the narrative is about.”

  “Your new story is not as much fun,” I agreed.

  “This is no longer a happy, feel-good story,” Eric said, “and I don’t like it any better than anyone else does. It’s hard to accept that your father didn’t die because of suicide, nor did he die because of negligence after a drug experiment, he died because they killed him. That’s a different feeling.”

  And, vexingly for Eric, on the rare occasions when he’s convinced a journalist that the CIA murdered his father, the revelation has not been greeted with horror. One writer declined Eric’s invitation to attend his press conference, saying, “We know the CIA kills people. That’s old news.”

  In fact, Eric told me, this would be the first time anyone had ever publicly charged the CIA with murdering an American citizen.

  “People have been so brainwashed by fiction,” said Eric as we drove to the local Kinko’s to pick up the press releases for the conference, “so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, ‘We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.’ Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.”

  It isn’t that people aren’t interested: it’s that they’re interested in the wrong way. Recently, a theater director approached Eric for his permission to turn the Frank Olson story into “an opera about defenestration,” but Eric declined, explaining that this was a complex enough tale anyway even without having the facts sung at an audience. Tomorrow’s press conference was really Eric’s last chance to convince the world that his father was not an LSD suicide.

  There were so many ways for Eric to recount his new version of the story at the press conference. It was impossible for him—for anyone—to know how to do it in the most coherent and still entertaining way. Eric’s new story is not only no longer fun, it is exasperatingly intricate. There’s so much information to absorb that an audience could just glaze over.

  Re
ally, this story begins with the proclamation delivered by the CIA director Allen Dulles to his Princeton alumni group in 1953.

  “Mind warfare,” he said, “is the great battlefield of the Cold War, and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.”

  Before Jim Channon and General Stubblebine and Colonel Alexander came along, there was Allen Dulles, the first great out-of-the-box thinker in U.S. intelligence. He was a great friend of the Bushes, and was once the Bush family lawyer, a pipe-smoking patriarch who believed that the CIA should be like an Ivy League university, taking inspiration not only from agents but from scientists, academics, and whoever else might come up with something new. It was Dulles who moved the CIA’s headquarters from central Washington, D.C., to suburban Langley, Virginia (now renamed the George Bush Center for Intelligence), because he wanted to create a thoughtful, out-of-town campus milieu. It was Dulles who sent undercover CIA agents out into the American suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s to infiltrate séances in the hope of unearthing and recruiting America’s most talented clairvoyants to his mind-warfare battlefield, which is how the relationship between intelligence and the psychic world was born. But it was General Stubblebine who, inspired by the First Earth Battalion, proclaimed a generation later that anyone could be a great psychic, and so opened the doors wide, and Major Ed Dames joined the program, and subsequently revealed the secrets of the unit on the Art Bell show, and then all hell broke loose and, through no fault of any of the military personnel involved, thirty-nine people in San Diego killed themselves in an attempt to hitch a ride on Prudence and Courtney’s Hale-Bopp companion.

  Allen Dulles put Sidney Gottlieb in charge of the fledgling psychic program, and also of MK-ULTRA, and then a third covert mind-warfare project known as Artichoke.

  Artichoke is the program that is not fun.

  Recently declassified documents reveal that Artichoke was all about inventing insane, brutal, violent, frequently fatal new ways of interrogating people.

  Frank Olson was not just a civilian scientist working with chemicals at Fort Detrick. He was a CIA man too. He was working for Artichoke. That is why he was in Europe in the months before he died, sitting in sidewalk cafés with the men wearing long coats and trilbies. They were there on Artichoke business. Eric’s father was—and there is no pleasant way of putting this—a pioneering torturer, or at the very least a pioneering torturer’s assistant. Artichoke was the First Earth Battalion of torture—a like-minded group of groundbreaking out-of-the-box thinkers, coming up with all manner of clever new ways of getting information out of people.

  An example: According to a CIA document dated April 26, 1952, the Artichoke men “used heroin on a routine basis” because they determined that heroin (and other substances) “can be useful in reverse because of the stresses produced when they are withdrawn from those who are addicted to their use.”

  This is why, Eric has learned, his father was recruited to Artichoke. He, alone among the interrogators, had a scientific knowledge of how to administer drugs and chemicals.

  And now, in 2004, this Artichoke-created cold-turkey method of interrogation is back in business. Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, interviewed a number of CIA interrogators for the October 2003 edition of Atlantic Monthly, and this is the scenario he constructed:

  On what may or may not have been March 1 [2003] the notorious terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was roughly awakened by a raiding party of Pakistani and American commandos… . Here was the biggest catch yet in the war on terror. Sheikh Mohammed is considered the architect of two attempts on the World Trade Center: the one that failed, in 1993, and the one that succeeded so catastrophically, eight years later… . He was flown to an “undisclosed location” (a place the CIA calls “Hotel California”)—presumably a facility in another cooperative nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier.

  It doesn’t much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. Place and time, the anchors of sanity, were about to come unmoored. He might as well have been entering a new dimension, a strange new world where his every word, move, and sensation would be monitored and measured; where things might be as they seemed but might not; where there would be no such thing as day or night, or normal patterns of eating and drinking, wakefulness and sleep; where hot and cold, wet and dry, clean and dirty, truth and lies, would all be tangled and distorted.

  The space would be filled night and day with harsh light and noise. Questioning would be intense—sometimes loud and rough, sometimes quiet and friendly, with no apparent reason for either. The session might last for days, with interrogators taking turns, or it might last only a few minutes. On occasion he might be given a drug to elevate his mood prior to interrogation; marijuana, heroin, and sodium pentothal have been shown to overcome a reluctance to speak. These drugs could be administered surreptitiously with food or drink, and given the bleakness of his existence, they might even offer a brief period of relief and pleasure, thereby creating a whole new category of longing—and new leverage for his interrogators.

  See how in this scenario a slice of Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion (“harsh light and noise”) and a slice of Frank Olson’s Artichoke (“a whole new category of longing”) come together like two pieces of a jigsaw.

  On the day before Eric’s press conference, Eric and I watched old 8-mm home movies of his father playing in the garden with his children. On the screen, Frank was riding a wobbly old bicycle and Eric, then a toddler, was resting on the handlebars. Eric gazed, smiling, at the screen.

  He said, “There’s my father. Right there! That’s him! In comparison with the other guys from the CIA, he has an open face. Um …” Eric paused. “Basically,” he said, “this is a story about a guy who had a simple moral code and a naive view of the world. He wasn’t fundamentally a military guy. And he certainly wasn’t someone who would be involved in ‘terminal interrogations.’ He went though a moral crisis, but he was in too deep and they couldn’t let him out.”

  We continued watching the home video. Then Eric said, “Think of how much could have been different if he was alive to tell any of this. Ha! The whole history of a lot of things would be different. And you can see a lot of that just in his face. A lot of the other men have very tight, closed faces. He doesn’t …” And Eric trailed off.

  At some point during his investigation, Eric hooked up with the British journalist Gordon Thomas, who has written numerous books on intelligence matters. Through Thomas, Eric learned that during a trip to London in the summer of 1953 his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques.

  According to Thomas, Frank Olson told Sargant that he had visited secret joint American-British research installations near Frankfurt, where the CIA was testing truth serums on “expendables,” captured Russian agents and ex-Nazis. Olson confessed to Sargant that he had witnessed something terrible, possibly “a terminal experiment” on one or more of the expendables. Sargant heard Olson out and then reported to British intelligence that the young American scientist’s misgivings were making him a security risk. He recommended that Olson be denied further access to Porton Down, the British chemical-weapons research establishment.

  After Eric learned this, he told his friend, the writer Michael Ignatieff, who published an article about Eric in The New York Times. A week later, Eric received the telephone call he’d been waiting for his whole life. It was a real Harold Junior, one of his father’s best friends from Fort Detrick, a man who knew everything, and was willing to tell Eric the whole story.

  His name was Norman Cournoyer.

  Eric spent a weekend at Norman’s house in Connecticut. Revealing to Eric the secrets he’d been harboring all these years was so stressful for Norman that he repeatedly excused himself so he could go to the toilet to vomit.

  Norman told Eric that the Artichoke story was true. Frank had told Norman that “they did
n’t mind if people came out of this or not. They might survive, they might not. They might be put to death.”

  Eric said, “Norman declined to go into detail about what this meant but he said it wasn’t nice. Extreme torture, extreme use of drugs, extreme stress.”

  Norman told Eric that his father was in deep and horrified at the way his life had turned. He watched people die in Europe, perhaps he even helped them die, and by the time he returned to America he was determined to reveal what he had seen. There was a twenty-four-hour contingent of Quakers down at the Fort Detrick gates, peace protesters, and Frank would wander over to chat with them, much to the dismay of his colleagues. Frank asked Norman one day, “Do you know a good journalist I can talk to?”

  And so, Eric said, slipping LSD into his father’s Cointreau at the Deep Creek Lodge was not an experiment that went wrong: it was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating. And Frank failed the test. He revealed his intentions to Gottlieb and the other MK-ULTRA men present. This was the “terrible mistake” he had made. Seeing Martin Luther on the Sunday night had made him all the more determined to quit his job. Here I stand. I can do no other.

  And on the Monday morning Frank did, indeed, tender his resignation, but his colleagues persuaded him to seek psychological counseling in New York.