The Men Who Stare at Goats (25 page)

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 didn’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.

Documents reveal that Frank never saw a psychiatrist in New York. He was taken instead, by Gottlieb’s deputy, to the office of the former Broadway magician John Mulhol-land, who probably hypnotized him, and Frank probably failed that test too.

Housing a possibly deranged and desperate man in a hotel room high above Seventh Avenue no longer seemed a regrettable error of judgment. It seemed the prelude to murder.

When Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994, the pathologist, Dr. James Starrs, found a hole in Frank’s head
that—he concluded—came from the butt of a gun and not a fall from a tenth-floor window.

There were around forty journalists at Eric’s press conference—crews from all the networks and many of the big newspapers. Eric had decided—for the purposes of clarity—to tell the story primarily through the narrative of his weekend with Norman Cournoyer. He repeatedly stressed that this was no longer a family story. This was now a story about what happened to America in the 1950s and how that informs what is happening today.

“Where’s the
proof
?” asked Julia Robb, the reporter from Eric’s local paper, the
Frederick News Post,
when he had finished. “Does all this rest on the word of one man, your father’s friend?”

Julia looked around her to make the point that this Norman Cournoyer wasn’t even in attendance.

“No,” said Eric. He looked exasperated. “As I’ve tried to tell you, it conceptually rests on the idea that there are two vectors in this story and they only intersect in one place.”

There was a baffled silence.

“Are you in any way motivated by ideology over this?” the man from Fox News asked.

“Just a desire to know the truth.” Eric sighed.

Later, as the journalists milled around, eating from the buffet laid out on picnic tables, the conversation among the Olsons and their friends turned to Julia Robb, the reporter from the
Frederick News Post.
Someone said he thought it
was a shame that the most hostile journalist present represented Eric and Nils’s local paper.

“Yeah, it is,” said Nils. “It’s painful to me. I’m a professional here in town. I have connections with local people as a dentist, and I see people on a daily basis who come in and read the local paper, and that affects me.”

Nils looked over across the garden at Eric, who was saying something to Julia, but we couldn’t hear what.

Nils said, “At times you go through a phase of believing that maybe the story
is
a bunch of hooey, and that it
was
just a simple LSD suicide and
that”
—Nils glanced at Julia—“can trigger a kind of shame spiral. It’s like the feelings you’ve had in the middle of the night, at three
A.M
., when you’re trying to get to sleep and you start having some
thought
and the thought spins you into another negative thought and it kind of spins out of control and you have to shake yourself and maybe turn the light on and get grounded in reality again.”

Eric and Julia were arguing now. Julia said something to Eric and then she walked away, back to her car. (Later, Eric said to me that Julia seemed “incensed, as if the entire story made her furious in some deep way that she was completely at a loss to articulate.”)

“I mean,” said Nils, “America fundamentally wants to think of itself as being good, and that we’re fundamentally right in what we’re doing, and we have a very compelling responsibility for the free world. And looking at some of these issues is troubling, because if America does have a darker side it threatens your hold on your view of America and it’s kind of like, ‘Gee, if I pull out this one underpinning
of the American consciousness, is this a house of cards? Does it really threaten the fundamental nature of America?’”

We drifted back down to the swimming pool, and an hour passed, and then Eric joined us. He’d been in the house on the telephone. He was laughing.

“You hear the latest?” he said.

“Bring me up-to-date,” said Nils. “I’m dying to hear.”

“Julia,” said Eric, “called Norman. I just called her and she said, ‘Eric, I’m glad you phoned. I just called Norman. He says he has no reason to believe that the CIA would murder Frank Olson.’ I said, ‘Julia, thanks for respecting my wishes about not calling Norman.’ She said, ‘Eric, I’m a
reporter.
I have to do what’s necessary to get the story.’”

Eric laughed, although nobody else did.

And so I drove to Connecticut, to Norman Cournoyer’s house. I was slightly shaken by the news of the telephone call between Julia Robb and Norman. Had I got Eric wrong? Was he some kind of fantasist?

Norman lives in a large white bungalow in an upmarket suburban street. His wife answered the door and led me into the living room, where Norman was waiting for me. He pointed to the table and said, “I dug out some old photographs for you.”

They were of Norman and Frank Olson, arm in arm, somewhere in the middle of Fort Detrick, circa 1953.

“Did you tell the reporter from the
Frederick News Post
that you had no evidence to suggest that Frank was murdered by the CIA?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Norman.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Over the phone?” said Norman. “I think a journalist is making a big mistake in trying to get somebody to talk over the phone.”

“So you
do
think Frank was murdered?” I said.

“I’m sure of it,” said Norman.

And then he told me something he hadn’t told Eric.

“I saw Frank after he’d been given the LSD,” he said. “We joked about it.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said, ‘They’re trying to find out what kind of guy I am. Whether I’m giving secrets away.’”

“You were joking about it?” I said.

“We joked about it because he didn’t react to LSD.”

“He wasn’t tripping at all?” I said.

“Nah,” said Norman. “He was laughing about it. He said, ‘They’re getting very, very uptight now because of what they believe I am capable of.’ He really thought they were picking on him because he was the man who might give away the secrets.”

“Was he going to talk to a journalist?” I asked.

“He came so close it wasn’t even funny,” said Norman.

“Did he come back from Europe looking very upset?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Norman. “We talked about a week, ten days, after he came back. I said, ‘What happened to you, Frank? You seem awfully upset.’ He said, ‘Oh, you know … ’ I must admit, in all honesty, it’s just coming back to me now. He said …”

Suddenly, Norman fell silent.

“I don’t want to go on further than that,” he said. “There are certain things I don’t want to talk about.”

Norman looked out the window.

“It speaks for itself,” he said.

Eric hoped his press conference would, at least, change the language of the reporting of the story. At best it would motivate some energetic journalist to take up the challenge and find an unequivocal smoking gun that proved Frank Olson was pushed out of the window.

But in the days that followed the press conference it became clear that every journalist had decided to report the story in much the same way.

Eric had finally found “closure.”

He was on the way to being “healed.”

He had “laid his mystery to rest.”

He could “move on” now.

Perhaps we will “never know” what really happened to Frank Olson, but the important thing was that Eric had achieved “closure.”

The story was fun again.

June 27, 2004

Jim Channon faxes me his Iraq exit strategy. This is the same document he sent to the army’s chief of staff, General Pete Schoomaker, after Donald Rumsfeld had asked the general to bring “creative” thinkers into the fold.

Jim’s strategy begins:

When we left Vietnam, we did so with our tails between our legs. We were leaving at an undignified pace. In the eyes of the world that watches, the last moments are as telling as the first.

THE FIRST EARTH BATTALION SOLUTION

1. A touching and heartfelt ceremony [consisting of] mothers, children, teachers, soldiers, nurses and doctors from both sides. Where possible children will carry the actual awards (i.e., medals, trophies, small statues) of appreciation
and recognition to those [American and Iraqi soldiers] honored.

2. The ceremonial surroundings we design are themselves a gift to the future of Iraq. We recommend that a beautiful global village be built as a setting. It can showcase the kinds of alternative energy, sanitation and agricultural technology appropriate for this part of the world.

3. [The ceremony will include the giving of] gifts from other parts of the world. United Nations translators will be available to interpret those gifts. An elder might speak and a teen might speak about the promise of cooperation.

June 29, 2004

Today, sovereignty is transferred from the coalition forces to the new Iraqi government. Whoever organized the ceremony obviously chose not to implement Jim’s ideas:

Behind silver miles of new razor wire, behind high concrete barriers stronger than most medieval fortifications, behind sandbags, five security checks, U.S. armoured vehicles, U.S. armoured soldiers, special forces of various countries and private security guards, an American bureaucrat handed a piece of paper to an Iraqi judge, jumped on a helicopter and left the country.

The first thing reporters saw as they came into the sunshine from the banal auditorium where the newly sworn-in Iraqi government hailed the new era was two U.S. Apache helicopter gunships, pirouetting low in the furnace sky.

Fear of the bombers gave the occasion all the pomp of an office leaving do. It lasted only 20 minutes.