Speaker 1: When the Hotel Statler opened, it had twenty two hundred
Speaker 1: rooms in nineteen nineteen, that made it the largest hotel
Speaker 1: in the world. Just across from Penn Station on Seventh
Speaker 1: Avenue in New York City, the hotel had a real
Speaker 1: old school charm for decades. Guests could put their clothing
Speaker 1: and shoes in a servador, essentially a special cabinet that
Speaker 1: allowed items to be passed to and from rooms without
Speaker 1: guests having to interact with employees. It wasn't great for tipping,
Speaker 1: since it eliminated the social presence of an outstretched hand,
Speaker 1: but the servador service was clandestine private fitting since the
Speaker 1: Statler was also a popular hangout for CIA operatives, including
Speaker 1: one who checked out through a window. Every story you
Speaker 1: read or here about Frank Olsen starts just like this
Speaker 1: with his body pitching out of a tenth story win
Speaker 1: dough at the Hotel Statler. It happens around two thirty
Speaker 1: am on November ninety three. Olsen is a biological warfare
Speaker 1: scientist working for the United States Army and the CIA,
Speaker 1: and he's not well. He's in the city to get treatment.
Speaker 1: Olsen has been exhibiting suspicious behavior enough to make him
Speaker 1: a security risk. So Olsen is at the Statler, but
Speaker 1: he's not alone. Robert Lashbrook, sleeping in the bed nearby,
Speaker 1: is there to look out for his welfare. He doesn't
Speaker 1: do a very good job of it, because one moment
Speaker 1: Olsen is in bed, the next he's going out the window. Well,
Speaker 1: that's not quite accurate. He goes out the window, yes,
Speaker 1: but first he goes through the glass pane of the window,
Speaker 1: shattering it. He doesn't even bother pulling up the blinds,
Speaker 1: so he goes through those two. He falls for a
Speaker 1: few seconds, then lands on the sidewalk below. Pedestrians crowd
Speaker 1: around him, horrified. He's on his back and still in
Speaker 1: his undershirt and shorts. He would soon succumb to his injuries,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't dead yet. After he passes, and for
Speaker 1: the next seventy years, Olsen's family, journalists, and even intelligence
Speaker 1: operatives will search for the words he didn't have the
Speaker 1: strength to utter. Did Frank Olsen die by suicide? Was
Speaker 1: in an accident? Or did the CIA's grand experiment with
Speaker 1: LSD finally go too far and prompt the sanctioned execution
Speaker 1: of a government employee. The information may have been on
Speaker 1: the tip of Frank Olson's tongue, but he couldn't answer,
Speaker 1: and if his death was indeed a homicide, that silence
Speaker 1: was the whole point. Frank Olson had seemed too much
Speaker 1: and was in danger of unmasking the whole affair. Olsen
Speaker 1: wasn't the only death on the pavement that night. Many
Speaker 1: secrets of the Cold War, of cruel and outrageous human experimentation,
Speaker 1: died with him. That's where Frank Olsen's story always ends,
Speaker 1: and where it always begins, through the window and down
Speaker 1: to the pavement. In a movie, the camera would pan
Speaker 1: down as he fell. Instead, it should pan back up.
Speaker 1: It should move past the windows and brick exterior of
Speaker 1: the hotel Statler, past the curtains and flagpoles, and right
Speaker 1: back into the room ten eighteen A, where Robert Lashbrook
Speaker 1: is sitting bolt upright in his bed, confused, or at
Speaker 1: least seemingly confused at what had just happened. When he
Speaker 1: gets dressed and follows the police to the station, they'll
Speaker 1: find a small slip of paper inside his pants pocket.
Speaker 1: The camera should zoom in on it so you can
Speaker 1: see the ink stains on the paper, the indentations of
Speaker 1: the pen strokes, the paper is important. According to HP Albarelli,
Speaker 1: the paper has a set of initials on it. G
Speaker 1: W for George White, MH for Morgan Hall, White's alter ego.
Speaker 1: And then address one Bedford Street, where George White was
Speaker 1: conducting an illicit LSD campaign just a mile and a
Speaker 1: half away. Maybe Frank Olson had been there, maybe he
Speaker 1: was going there. Either way, his death would change everything. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For I Heart Radio, this is Operation Midnight Climax and
Speaker 1: I Heeart original podcast, I'm Noel Brown and this is
Speaker 1: episode five The Window, Part one, a Living Nightmare. When
Speaker 1: the CIA's chief chemist, Sidney Gottlieb hired George White, he
Speaker 1: was looking for a psychedelic mercenary, a predator he could
Speaker 1: unleash on the general population. When White sent back details
Speaker 1: of his experiments in Greenwich Village, Gottlieb devoured them. But
Speaker 1: those weren't enough for him. In Gottlieb's head, for America
Speaker 1: to emerge victorious the Cold War, he had to know
Speaker 1: everything about LSD and how it would affects people in
Speaker 1: the intelligence field, starting with himself. On the surface, it
Speaker 1: sounds almost ethical, Gottlieb claimed he'd administered asset to himself.
Speaker 1: More than two hundred times. It was like a physician
Speaker 1: following his own prescribed diet, But there was a key difference.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb was a consenting subject. He knew exactly what he
Speaker 1: was ingesting. But the drug works differently on people who
Speaker 1: don't know they're being dosed, and as George White found out,
Speaker 1: acid had an unpredictable effect on subjects. Bad trips sent
Speaker 1: some people to rooftops to contemplate suicide, or landed them
Speaker 1: in sanitariums LSD was a kind of psychic scalpel. In
Speaker 1: the right hands, it could be beneficial. In the wrong hands,
Speaker 1: it was assault, and make no mistake. In November nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, Sidney Gottlieb committed widespread assault, and even though
Speaker 1: George White wasn't anywhere near the CIA retreat where it happened,
Speaker 1: the consequences would eventually shut down his whole New York operation.
Speaker 1: That weekend, Gottlieb but organized retreat at Deep Creek Lodge
Speaker 1: in Maryland for some of the CIA's chemists as well
Speaker 1: as those who worked for the Army's Special Operations Division.
Speaker 1: The two groups often worked together on various biochemical projects.
Speaker 1: This was a world beyond drugs, one in which the
Speaker 1: CIA sought ways to kill or incapacitate enemies using biological warfare.
Speaker 1: If George White was a mercenary. The chemists of the
Speaker 1: government supplied the weapons, and Frank Olsen was one of
Speaker 1: the people who was there that weekend. As a chemist,
Speaker 1: Frank Olsen had been recruited into the Army's Chemical Development Division,
Speaker 1: though he was technically a CIA employee. He studied ways
Speaker 1: to weaponize germs, obscuring them in shaving creams or insect repellents.
Speaker 1: There was a lighter that, once flicked, would dispense a
Speaker 1: lethal gas in a pocket spray that could induce pneumonia.
Speaker 1: Olsen sometimes went to a secret Army base on Plumb
Speaker 1: Island off of Long Island, where chemicals too dangerous for
Speaker 1: the mainland were studied. In nineteen fifty, intelligence operatives released
Speaker 1: a cloud of traceable but harmless bacteria over San Francisco
Speaker 1: using large aerosol hoses. They called it Operations Sea Spray.
Speaker 1: They wanted to see how far a chemical attack could travel.
Speaker 1: Before long, eleven people checked into hospitals with urinary tract infections.
Speaker 1: The microbe wasn't as harmless as they thought. When American
Speaker 1: soldiers captured in Korea confessed to using biological weapons. The
Speaker 1: CIA insisted it was brainwashing. Frank Olsen believed they were
Speaker 1: telling the truth, that the anther acts and other deadly
Speaker 1: pathogens he brewed in his lab were being used on
Speaker 1: the enemy. He knew the chemicals were in the hands
Speaker 1: of the United States because he had held them in
Speaker 1: his own hands. Olsen was a lab geek, a man
Speaker 1: of science. He was quiet and reserved, A family man
Speaker 1: with a wife and three children. He didn't have the
Speaker 1: kind of callousness intelligence operatives developed over time, yet he
Speaker 1: was often called to the scene of experiments that would
Speaker 1: rattle his conscience. Toxic clouds were administered to laboratory animals
Speaker 1: like monkeys, their bodies being added to a rising pile.
Speaker 1: Olsen witnessed fierce interrogations in foreign countries where humans writhed
Speaker 1: in pain in response to experimental chemicals that would burn
Speaker 1: their eyes or disrupt their breathing before killing them. Once
Speaker 1: Olsen had visited a microbiological research lab at Porton Down
Speaker 1: in Wiltshire, England. Volunteers had agreed to be dosed with
Speaker 1: nerve gases. Olsen watched as one man collapsed in front
Speaker 1: of him, foaming at the mouth before he died. Olson
Speaker 1: later told a British psychiatrist named William Sergeant that he
Speaker 1: had been to American and British testing sites in Frankfurt, Germany,
Speaker 1: and that he'd seen something awful. Sergeant recommended Olsen never
Speaker 1: be allowed back to Porton Down. He was a security risk.
Speaker 1: Anyone with a conscience was a security risk. As an
Speaker 1: expert in biological warfare, Olsen had been summoned to examine
Speaker 1: the fallout of a mass hysteria event that occurred in
Speaker 1: the small French town of Point Saint Aspri in August.
Speaker 1: It's one of the strangest chapters in twentieth century history
Speaker 1: and foreshadows the worst of George White's domestic exploits in
Speaker 1: the years to come. Point Santa Spree is the kind
Speaker 1: of small town in France people describe as idyllic. Classic
Speaker 1: architecture is everywhere. A bridge made of stone extends over
Speaker 1: the Rhone River, and the tiny streets act as arteries
Speaker 1: for the residents to exist in a kind of suspended
Speaker 1: state of simple living that sustained them for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: The Bouvier family hails from here, one of their own.
Speaker 1: Jacqueline Bouvier became Jacqueline Kennedy. That simplicity, that isolation, may
Speaker 1: have been why someone turned the dream of Point Santa
Speaker 1: Spree into a living nightmare. A postal worker was in
Speaker 1: the middle of his shift when he began to feel it,
Speaker 1: a sensation. He was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller as
Speaker 1: the small town around him grew larger and larger. He
Speaker 1: saw and felt fire raging all around him. Snakes crawled
Speaker 1: up his legs and around his arms, dragging them down.
Speaker 1: He was descending into madness, and so were hundreds of
Speaker 1: other residents. The townspeople began shrieking, crying, moaning. A man
Speaker 1: was convinced he had transformed into a plane and jumped
Speaker 1: out of a second story window, arms spread like wings.
Speaker 1: He broke both of his legs, then stood up and
Speaker 1: kept running, more terrified of whatever was chasing him than
Speaker 1: the pain of his broken bones. Many grew so manic
Speaker 1: they had to be herded away. The postal worker was
Speaker 1: brought to a hospital and put in a straight jacket.
Speaker 1: Three teens were chained to a bed. They were fighting
Speaker 1: their own demons, and nothing could soothe them. Their mettal
Speaker 1: bed frames shook as they struggled. Over the next few days,
Speaker 1: more and more people were hospitalized or put in asylums
Speaker 1: with hallucinations. One villager put it this way, I am dead,
Speaker 1: and my head is made of copper, and I have
Speaker 1: snakes in my stomach and they are burning me. At
Speaker 1: least four people died. No one has ever conclusively proven
Speaker 1: what happened in Point Santa Spree, but some blamed ergot
Speaker 1: poisoning ergot, which is highly toxic, and large amounts may
Speaker 1: have gotten into the bread in the local bakeries. Others
Speaker 1: of theorized the CIA made Point Santa Spree one huge
Speaker 1: chemical trial, which is why Olsen was in the vicinity
Speaker 1: to assess the outcome. It was just another chapter, and
Speaker 1: what he feared was a madness, not on the part
Speaker 1: of the people, but in the corridors of American intelligence.
Speaker 1: George White mentioned Point Cenisprie briefly in a letter to
Speaker 1: a friend in nineteen fifty four. He called it the
Speaker 1: Little French Villages Stormy epidemic. Stormy was a George White
Speaker 1: slang term for LSD that was the dark side of
Speaker 1: intelligence work, and Olsen's mood grew darker with it. Two
Speaker 1: years later, Frank Olsen was one of the employees invited
Speaker 1: to Sydney Gottlieb's retreat. Gottlieb wanted to make sure the
Speaker 1: CIA and the army scientists at Fort Dietrich were working
Speaker 1: in tandem, that they were on the same page. But,
Speaker 1: and this was usually the case with Gottlieb, he had
Speaker 1: another motive. He wanted to dose everyone there with LSD.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb gathered the men in the lodge and gestured for
Speaker 1: his colleague Robert Lashbrook to begin pouring drinks from a
Speaker 1: bottle of Quantros, an orange flavored liqueur. Lashbrook filled glasses
Speaker 1: with Quantros and then, of great discretion, added an ampule
Speaker 1: of LSD to each. He handed the glasses to the
Speaker 1: gathered scientists, and he and Gottlieb watched as they began
Speaker 1: ingesting the concoction. Within twenty minutes, the men began to
Speaker 1: experience the expected early symptoms confusion, hallucinations, fear. The severed
Speaker 1: and mounted heads of hunted and captured deer in the
Speaker 1: lodge began to stare them down their lips moving, gentlemen,
Speaker 1: I assure you what you are feeling is completely normal.
Speaker 1: You've all been administered a dose of LSD. Gottlieb spoke calmly,
Speaker 1: like he was informing a group of people to proceed
Speaker 1: to a fire exit. The men went off into their
Speaker 1: own corners of consciousness, grappling with the newly open borders
Speaker 1: of their minds. But unlike George white seemingly random drugging
Speaker 1: of Linda King and Barbara Smythe, Gottlieb took a special
Speaker 1: interest in how Frank Olson reacted. He'd been earmarked as
Speaker 1: a possible problem. Gottlie pulled Olson aside and began asking
Speaker 1: him questions, Questions that might one day be posed to
Speaker 1: Olsen by enemy agents, the invisible Soviets who loomed large
Speaker 1: in the American imagination of the day, Questions that might
Speaker 1: wear down someone under the influence of both drugs and morality.
Speaker 1: What exactly was said in those hours, only Sidney Gotlieb
Speaker 1: could answer, and when he was eventually asked years later,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't. But we know what happened. After the retreat
Speaker 1: came to an end, Frank Olson returned home and Withdrew
Speaker 1: his wife and children were greeted by a husband and
Speaker 1: father who seemed more uncertain about his work than ever Brad.
Speaker 1: It was simply the accumulation of horrors Frank Olsen had witnessed,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was the LSD tearing down walls he
Speaker 1: had erected in his mind to compartmentalize his responsibilities. Something
Speaker 1: had shifted and Olsen wanted out. He went to his
Speaker 1: immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Ruett, and said he was resigning.
Speaker 1: Ruett begged him to reconsider, not to do anything. Rash
Speaker 1: ru had also phoned Gottlieb to express his concern. Remember,
Speaker 1: Olsen was one of perhaps only two dozen people in
Speaker 1: the world who had knowledge of the CIA's top secret
Speaker 1: experiments like mk Ultra. For one of them to abruptly
Speaker 1: announced they were finished done well, it wasn't possible. It
Speaker 1: was akin to a mafia member turning up one day
Speaker 1: and saying, is giving up the life. Some places don't
Speaker 1: have an exit door. Gottlieb told Ruett and Lashbrook to
Speaker 1: take Olson to New York City, where he saw a
Speaker 1: doctor named Harold Abramson. He was an allergist who was
Speaker 1: giving LSD to his patients on behalf of the CIA.
Speaker 1: If Olsen revealed something he shouldn't it would be okay.
Speaker 1: Abramson was one of them. He prescribed sedatives in Bourbon,
Speaker 1: but Olson's mood didn't improve. He didn't want to see
Speaker 1: his family, He kept insisting he wanted to, in his words, disappear.
Speaker 1: They went to Long Island to see Abramson again, this
Speaker 1: time at his home, then went back to New York.
Speaker 1: One night, Olsen wandered out into the streets, throwing away
Speaker 1: his wallet and identification cards, a gesture that seemed to
Speaker 1: indicate he wanted to throw away his government identity, but
Speaker 1: he couldn't. Gottlieb would never allow that. They convinced Olsen
Speaker 1: he would be best off in a sanitarium in Maryland
Speaker 1: to get round the clock care. He seemed agreeable, if
Speaker 1: you believe Lashbrook. He even seemed happy. The two men
Speaker 1: planned to drive back to Maryland the next day to
Speaker 1: check Olson into a facility. They got a room at
Speaker 1: the Hotel Statler. They went to bed. When Lashbrook woke up,
Speaker 1: Olsen was already on the pavement where he would never
Speaker 1: regain consciousness. A flurry of phone calls followed, which the
Speaker 1: hotel's telephone operator overheard. Lashbrook called Abramson's telling that Olson
Speaker 1: was quote gone, not that he had died by suicide
Speaker 1: or jumped or fell out of a window, but just gone.
Speaker 1: The authorities were called. They talked to Lashbrook, who told
Speaker 1: them he awoke to the sound of crashing glass. At
Speaker 1: the police station. He emptied his pockets, which had a
Speaker 1: slip of paper with George White's address and initials on it.
Speaker 1: Frank Olson's family was notified. No one told them Olson
Speaker 1: had been dosed with LSD days prior to his death.
Speaker 1: The whole affair was documented as a suicide. Olsen had
Speaker 1: either fallen or jumped out of the window. No one
Speaker 1: said he was pushed. But if he had been pushed,
Speaker 1: If Sydney gottlie But decided Frank Olsen had become too
Speaker 1: dangerous to try and contain, and arranged for someone to
Speaker 1: push him, who would it be. Certainly not Gotlei himself,
Speaker 1: who was nowhere near the Hotel Statler that night, and
Speaker 1: certainly not Robert Lashbrook, who was a CIA employee, not
Speaker 1: a field operative, not someone with experience, nothing out of life.
Speaker 1: If you were Sydney Gottlieb and you needed to dispose
Speaker 1: of Frank Olson, whose number would you call at his
Speaker 1: federal Bureau of Narcotics Office, George White kept a photo
Speaker 1: of a corpse on the wall, a real corpse. When
Speaker 1: people would ask why an obvious as many people did,
Speaker 1: White explained that the photo was of a spy he
Speaker 1: had been forced to kill with his bare hands during
Speaker 1: the war. He was, after all, a graduate of Camp X,
Speaker 1: the school of mayhem and murder. To take a human
Speaker 1: life in the name of national security was nothing to
Speaker 1: be ashamed of. To White, it was something to put
Speaker 1: in a frame. When Sydney Gottley decided Frank Olsen was
Speaker 1: a problem, he had to have called someone. And while
Speaker 1: there was no shortage of CIA assassins, Godly had few
Speaker 1: men he could trust, even fewer who knew about him
Speaker 1: k Ultra and the effects of LSD on the mind,
Speaker 1: and only one with a photo of a dead man
Speaker 1: on his wall. Part two, The Coincidence. So where was
Speaker 1: George White during all of this? Frank Olson's trip to
Speaker 1: New York, his visits with Robert Lashbrook, his wandering the
Speaker 1: city streets, and its plunge from a ten story window.
Speaker 1: If Sydney Gottlieb had his way, White would have been
Speaker 1: glued to Olson the entire time. Got Leave had called
Speaker 1: White to ask him to do exactly that, to escort
Speaker 1: Olson back to Maryland and right into a mental health facility.
Speaker 1: The conversation got far enough along that White scribbled down
Speaker 1: Frank Olsen's home telephone number. But then White told Godle
Speaker 1: something he had never told him before. I can't said,
Speaker 1: mind you, this wasn't necessarily an assignment to get rid
Speaker 1: of Frank Olsen, just escorting him around at the time.
Speaker 1: But White said no, and the reason was something Godlie
Speaker 1: couldn't argue with. George White's mother was dying, so White
Speaker 1: got on a plane on November eleven nine and headed
Speaker 1: straight for Carl's Bad, California. Her funeral was novemb He
Speaker 1: didn't return to New York until December. That meant White
Speaker 1: had missed the Deep Creek Lodge meeting, Frank Olsen's slow
Speaker 1: descent into despair and his death by weeks. On both sides.
Speaker 1: If anyone could claim they had virtually nothing to do
Speaker 1: with Olson's death, it would have to have been George White.
Speaker 1: But here's a recurring thing about White. He didn't need
Speaker 1: to be on the scene to be involved. White could
Speaker 1: put wheels in motion. He was, after all, not physically
Speaker 1: present for dozens of arrests in the famous Hip Sing
Speaker 1: Tong drug ring case that made his career, But none
Speaker 1: of those arrests would have been possible without him. So
Speaker 1: if White couldn't have been around Frank Olsen in the
Speaker 1: last weeks of his life, what could he have done? Hello, Pierre,
Speaker 1: It's g Pierre Lafitte. The name sounds like a French
Speaker 1: capper lar in a detective novel, and that wouldn't be
Speaker 1: too far off. Lafitte was a narcotics agent and a
Speaker 1: close ally of Whites. He was instrumental in making Whites
Speaker 1: New York lsd pad a hopping social scene, recruiting guests
Speaker 1: for White to dose and then watching from behind a
Speaker 1: two way mirror for the effects to materialize. White trusted
Speaker 1: Lafitte enough to bring him into an exclusive inner circle,
Speaker 1: one in which he got c I a security clearance.
Speaker 1: He knew a lot of the government's dirty secrets. He
Speaker 1: was a world traveler, having helped White on drug excursions overseas.
Speaker 1: Pierre Lafitte was the kind of man who might need
Speaker 1: to keep track of which name he was using on
Speaker 1: any given day. There was something else about Lafitte Earlier
Speaker 1: that year, White had made arrangements for Lafitte to begin
Speaker 1: working as a bell captain at a hotel, the Hotel Statler.
Speaker 1: Could it have been a simple moonlighting job. That seems unlikely.
Speaker 1: Just a month earlier, Lafitte had made national headlines for
Speaker 1: his undercover work recovering paintings stolen from a church in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: This was something else White might have wanted to keep
Speaker 1: watch on the drug investigation there. He might have suspected
Speaker 1: hotel employees of some kind of wrongdoing. He needed a
Speaker 1: pair of eyes the Statler for reasons that have never
Speaker 1: explicitly been spelled out. So out of the dozens or
Speaker 1: even hundreds of hotels in New York City, why did
Speaker 1: Robert Lashbrook book himself and Frank Olsen into the Hotel
Speaker 1: Statler the night of Olsen's death? Of all the hotels
Speaker 1: in Manhattan, why did those two just happen to be
Speaker 1: in the one hotel. Pierre Lafitte had the freedom to
Speaker 1: roam where he was a familiar face to hotel employees,
Speaker 1: where he could, if he wanted, unlock any hotel room
Speaker 1: door that had something he wanted on the other side.
Speaker 1: When White had to turn down got leave because he
Speaker 1: had to be in California. He asked Lafitte to keep
Speaker 1: an eye on Olsen to monitor the situation. We know
Speaker 1: Lashbrook had White's initials and pad address, as though he
Speaker 1: expected to make contact with White at some point during
Speaker 1: the trip. Maybe White was expected back earlier. Then Olsen
Speaker 1: died by suicide. Allegedly, it was always a strange premise
Speaker 1: to begin with the idea he would launch himself through
Speaker 1: a window. No matter how despondent someone becomes. They're easier ways,
Speaker 1: and most people would at least bother to pull up
Speaker 1: the blinds. First. Decades later, Frank's son Eric Olsen would
Speaker 1: walk into room ten eighteen A and see how small
Speaker 1: it was, how unlikely it was that anyone could get
Speaker 1: a running start to launch themselves out the window. Olsen
Speaker 1: had even tracked down a long retired Sidney Gottlieb, asking
Speaker 1: him what had happened to his father. Gottlieb would say
Speaker 1: only that everyone, Gottlieb the CIA Olson had perhaps gone
Speaker 1: too far in their search for mind control, but he
Speaker 1: still insisted Olsen had died by suicide. He even suggested
Speaker 1: Eric find a support group for children whose fathers had
Speaker 1: taken their own lives. Eric took another approach in he
Speaker 1: had his father's body exhumed so a professor of law
Speaker 1: and forensic science could examine him. Eric had wanted to
Speaker 1: wait until his mother had passed away before pursuing his
Speaker 1: hunch that there was something amiss about his father's death
Speaker 1: that Sydney Gottlieb was lying. The autopsy was a fascinating
Speaker 1: look at the final moments of Frank Olston's life, articulating
Speaker 1: more and more of the words he couldn't speak. It
Speaker 1: revealed Olsen had a previously undis closed head injury, ahematoma
Speaker 1: on the left side. He may have been struck by
Speaker 1: a blunt object before landing on the pavement. Who hit him,
Speaker 1: not Lashbrook, probably, but someone could have opened the door
Speaker 1: to ten eighteen A that night. Someone who confronted Olsen,
Speaker 1: who wanted to orchestrate something that looked like a suicide.
Speaker 1: Someone who was following a CIA manu on the Ideal
Speaker 1: Methods of Eliminating a target, a document that was later
Speaker 1: declassified in and described preferred method of murder. The most
Speaker 1: efficient accident in simple assassination is a fall of seventy
Speaker 1: five ft or more onto a hard surface, elevator shafts, stairwells,
Speaker 1: unscreened windows, and bridges will serve. In chase cases, it
Speaker 1: will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject
Speaker 1: before dropping him. Care is required to en No wound
Speaker 1: or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.
Speaker 1: The facts of Frank Olsen's death or that he was
Speaker 1: dosed with LSD in November of nine and didn't react
Speaker 1: well to it, He had already been concerned about the
Speaker 1: kind of work he was being asked to do. He
Speaker 1: was checked into a hotel that was very familiar to
Speaker 1: the CIA, with a former Bell captain who would have
Speaker 1: done virtually anything George White or Sydney Gottlieb would have
Speaker 1: told him to do. It doesn't mean Pierre Lafitte murdered
Speaker 1: Frank Olson. It's a theory, maybe even a fanciful one,
Speaker 1: And if we stopped there, maybe we could say it's
Speaker 1: all a bit strange but mostly circumstantial, if we stopped there.
Speaker 1: Following Olson's death, White felt compelled to make sure his
Speaker 1: friend and colleague Pierre Lafitte got out of town. White
Speaker 1: arranged Lafitte to travel to St. Petersburg, Florida, and stay
Speaker 1: at a property owned by one of White's friends, a
Speaker 1: well known drug kingpin. If Lafitte had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with Frank Olson's murder, why was George White so insistent
Speaker 1: that Lafitte get out of the state and stash himself
Speaker 1: away on the estate of a renowned mafioso for an
Speaker 1: indeterminate period of time. Part three shut it down. The
Speaker 1: months following Frank Olsen's death were memorable for everyone. The
Speaker 1: Olsen's got repeated visits by Vincent Ruett, Olson's former boss,
Speaker 1: who tried to console the family. The CIA could tell
Speaker 1: them only that Olsen had gone out the window. That
Speaker 1: he had been dosed with LSD would not be disclosed
Speaker 1: for another twenty years. When The Washington Post obtained classified
Speaker 1: documents that referred to a CIA employee who had fallen
Speaker 1: out of a window. The Olsen's knew immediately the story
Speaker 1: referred to Frank. In nineteen five, the same year chevy
Speaker 1: Chase was impersonating Gerald Ford as a clumsy incompetent, the
Speaker 1: President invited the Olsen family to the White House to
Speaker 1: make an apology. They accepted a financial settlement in exchange
Speaker 1: for agreeing not to sue the government. Over the death.
Speaker 1: This was before the autopsy, before it looked more and
Speaker 1: more like Olsen had been scrubbed from the world with
Speaker 1: great deliberation. Of course, Sidney Gottlieb knew what had happened,
Speaker 1: and while his superiors the CIA were fuzzy on the details,
Speaker 1: they knew that Olsen's death was related to god Leave's
Speaker 1: increasingly out of control LSD program. People began asking Gotleib questions,
Speaker 1: questions he didn't particularly care to answer. He was used
Speaker 1: to autonomy, to being left to his own devices. Now
Speaker 1: there was a threat of oversight. He and Lashbrook were
Speaker 1: given a reprimand Lashbrook left the agency. Gottlieb stayed, but
Speaker 1: the CIA's psychological warfare program had been put on notice.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb wasn't prone to panic, but in light of the
Speaker 1: controversy surrounding Frank Olsen, the idea of George White drugging
Speaker 1: hapless civilians all over New York City suddenly seemed unwise.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb phoned White shut it down. George said, I've only
Speaker 1: just gotten started. It's we need to shut it down.
Speaker 1: White broke his lease at eighty one Bedford Street, where
Speaker 1: he'd been doing brisk business as Morgan Hall LSD provocateur,
Speaker 1: and it probably broke his heart a little too. He'd
Speaker 1: been at it for only six months before Godli pulled
Speaker 1: the plug. It struck him as slightly unfair. It was Godlib,
Speaker 1: after all, who had dosed Frank Olsen, not White. Even
Speaker 1: though White had himself released countless people into the streets
Speaker 1: of the city suffering from hallucinations, he'd covered his tracks well.
Speaker 1: He hadn't gotten sloppy and targeted a high profile government
Speaker 1: intelligence operative the way Godly pad. For a time, White
Speaker 1: focused on his narcotics work. He was still an employee
Speaker 1: with the Narcotics Bureau, working to erase the scourge of marijuana, opium, heroin,
Speaker 1: cocaine and other drugs being delivered into the country by day,
Speaker 1: even as he distributed them to innocent people at night.
Speaker 1: But the past few months had been extremely hard on White.
Speaker 1: His mother had died, Frank Olsen had disrupted his LSD projects.
Speaker 1: For a brief period, George White seemed to submit to
Speaker 1: a few feeling of melancholy. It comes through in the
Speaker 1: correspondence he wrote to friends and colleagues at the time,
Speaker 1: some of which resides at Stanford University. There's a sense
Speaker 1: of loss, not only for his mother but for his work.
Speaker 1: Without the pad the CIA safe house, White was just
Speaker 1: another cop. He had once again become what he had
Speaker 1: always feared. Average His letters, hundreds of them, are often
Speaker 1: innocuous in the extreme, speaking of travel and inquiring about
Speaker 1: mutual friends. At first glance, none seem particularly incriminating, But
Speaker 1: if you know about Pierre Lafitte and the Hotel Statler
Speaker 1: and Frank Olsen, some passages take on a different meaning.
Speaker 1: In October n White wrote a letter to Garland Williams,
Speaker 1: one of the supervisors at the Narcotics Bureau and White's
Speaker 1: good friend. It's cryptic, deliberately so and unsettling. White makes
Speaker 1: two mentions of what he calls the Oldsen thing and
Speaker 1: how it's behind him. Of course, he could just mean
Speaker 1: the pressure over the incident was winding down. But then
Speaker 1: he writes, our friend decided that his term at the
Speaker 1: Statler was overextended. White seems to be referring to Pierre
Speaker 1: Lafitte because he goes on to say, maybe after our
Speaker 1: friend returns from his jaunt out west, he can return
Speaker 1: to France for a few weeks. I suspect his moonlighting
Speaker 1: work at NYC Hotels is over once and for all.
Speaker 1: Teen loved him in his Bellman's office. Involved or not,
Speaker 1: George White was profoundly affected by Frank Wilson's death. It
Speaker 1: meant his work as a man possessed of secret knowledge
Speaker 1: was her. People have never stopped asking questions about Frank
Speaker 1: Olson's death, but they stopped asking enough in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: four for Sydney Gottleib to feel like the worst was
Speaker 1: behind him. The CIA had forced him to pause mk Ultra,
Speaker 1: but not to dismantle it. The CIA was able to
Speaker 1: enter into a new contract with drug maker Eli Lily
Speaker 1: for more LSD and tonnage quantities mass amounts. So in
Speaker 1: late nineteen fifty four, a rejuvenated Sydney Gottleib traveled to
Speaker 1: New York to pay a visit to his dejected friend,
Speaker 1: George White. Gottlieb explained that the LSD experiment in New
Speaker 1: York was done and done for good. There would be
Speaker 1: no grand reopening of eighty one Bedford Street. Naturally, White
Speaker 1: was disappointed. Let me ask you something, Geo. You're from California,
Speaker 1: aren't you born and raised? You want to go back?
Speaker 1: The CIA didn't want to get rid of George White.
Speaker 1: They just needed to get rid of New York City.
Speaker 1: George White could relocate to another hip community, one bursting
Speaker 1: with liberal thinkers, an entire population full of people who
Speaker 1: were probably high on drugs already. We want you to
Speaker 1: move to San Francisco. White was ecstatic, and then Gottlieb
Speaker 1: took out a manual, one written exclusively for the CIA.
Speaker 1: This wasn't the assassination manual, but something new. White looked
Speaker 1: down at the cover. It was an academic primer on
Speaker 1: the best way to extract information using drugs and sex.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb smiled, sid this is the greatest day of my life.
Speaker 1: George White's climax was still ahead of him. H Operation
Speaker 1: Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown. This show is
Speaker 1: written by Jake Rosson, editing, sound design and mixing by
Speaker 1: Ernie Indradette and Natasha Jacobs. Original music by Aaron Kaufman.
Speaker 1: Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson and Maurica Brown.
Speaker 1: Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Special thanks this episode to
Speaker 1: David Crumholtz and Ted Ramy. Julian Weller is our supervising producer.
Speaker 1: Our Executive producers are Jason English and Mangesha ticket Ter
Speaker 1: See you next week.