The Men Who Stare at Goats (24 page)

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.

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.

Really, 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.