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The Window · Operation Midnight Climax

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: When the Hotel Statler opened, it had twenty two hundred
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: rooms in nineteen nineteen, that made it the largest hotel
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: in the world. Just across from Penn Station on Seventh
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Avenue in New York City, the hotel had a real
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: old school charm for decades. Guests could put their clothing
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: and shoes in a servador, essentially a special cabinet that
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: allowed items to be passed to and from rooms without
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: guests having to interact with employees. It wasn't great for tipping,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: since it eliminated the social presence of an outstretched hand,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: but the servador service was clandestine private fitting since the
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Statler was also a popular hangout for CIA operatives, including
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: one who checked out through a window. Every story you
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: read or here about Frank Olsen starts just like this
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: with his body pitching out of a tenth story win
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: dough at the Hotel Statler. It happens around two thirty
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: am on November ninety three. Olsen is a biological warfare
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: scientist working for the United States Army and the CIA,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: and he's not well. He's in the city to get treatment.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Olsen has been exhibiting suspicious behavior enough to make him
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: a security risk. So Olsen is at the Statler, but
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: he's not alone. Robert Lashbrook, sleeping in the bed nearby,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: is there to look out for his welfare. He doesn't
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: do a very good job of it, because one moment
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Olsen is in bed, the next he's going out the window. Well,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: that's not quite accurate. He goes out the window, yes,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: but first he goes through the glass pane of the window,
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: shattering it. He doesn't even bother pulling up the blinds,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: so he goes through those two. He falls for a
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: few seconds, then lands on the sidewalk below. Pedestrians crowd
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: around him, horrified. He's on his back and still in
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: his undershirt and shorts. He would soon succumb to his injuries,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: but he wasn't dead yet. After he passes, and for
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: the next seventy years, Olsen's family, journalists, and even intelligence
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: operatives will search for the words he didn't have the
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: strength to utter. Did Frank Olsen die by suicide? Was
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: in an accident? Or did the CIA's grand experiment with
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: LSD finally go too far and prompt the sanctioned execution
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: of a government employee. The information may have been on
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: the tip of Frank Olson's tongue, but he couldn't answer,
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: and if his death was indeed a homicide, that silence
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: was the whole point. Frank Olson had seemed too much
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: and was in danger of unmasking the whole affair. Olsen
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: wasn't the only death on the pavement that night. Many
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: secrets of the Cold War, of cruel and outrageous human experimentation,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: died with him. That's where Frank Olsen's story always ends,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: and where it always begins, through the window and down
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: to the pavement. In a movie, the camera would pan
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: down as he fell. Instead, it should pan back up.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: It should move past the windows and brick exterior of
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: the hotel Statler, past the curtains and flagpoles, and right
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: back into the room ten eighteen A, where Robert Lashbrook
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: is sitting bolt upright in his bed, confused, or at
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: least seemingly confused at what had just happened. When he
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: gets dressed and follows the police to the station, they'll
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: find a small slip of paper inside his pants pocket.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: The camera should zoom in on it so you can
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: see the ink stains on the paper, the indentations of
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: the pen strokes, the paper is important. According to HP Albarelli,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: the paper has a set of initials on it. G
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: W for George White, MH for Morgan Hall, White's alter ego.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: And then address one Bedford Street, where George White was
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: conducting an illicit LSD campaign just a mile and a
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: half away. Maybe Frank Olson had been there, maybe he
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: was going there. Either way, his death would change everything. Yeah.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: For I Heart Radio, this is Operation Midnight Climax and
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: I Heeart original podcast, I'm Noel Brown and this is
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: episode five The Window, Part one, a Living Nightmare. When
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: the CIA's chief chemist, Sidney Gottlieb hired George White, he
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: was looking for a psychedelic mercenary, a predator he could
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: unleash on the general population. When White sent back details
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: of his experiments in Greenwich Village, Gottlieb devoured them. But
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: those weren't enough for him. In Gottlieb's head, for America
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: to emerge victorious the Cold War, he had to know
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: everything about LSD and how it would affects people in
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: the intelligence field, starting with himself. On the surface, it
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: sounds almost ethical, Gottlieb claimed he'd administered asset to himself.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: More than two hundred times. It was like a physician
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: following his own prescribed diet, But there was a key difference.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb was a consenting subject. He knew exactly what he
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: was ingesting. But the drug works differently on people who
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: don't know they're being dosed, and as George White found out,
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: acid had an unpredictable effect on subjects. Bad trips sent
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: some people to rooftops to contemplate suicide, or landed them
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: in sanitariums LSD was a kind of psychic scalpel. In
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: the right hands, it could be beneficial. In the wrong hands,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: it was assault, and make no mistake. In November nineteen
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: fifty three, Sidney Gottlieb committed widespread assault, and even though
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: George White wasn't anywhere near the CIA retreat where it happened,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: the consequences would eventually shut down his whole New York operation.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: That weekend, Gottlieb but organized retreat at Deep Creek Lodge
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: in Maryland for some of the CIA's chemists as well
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: as those who worked for the Army's Special Operations Division.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: The two groups often worked together on various biochemical projects.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: This was a world beyond drugs, one in which the
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: CIA sought ways to kill or incapacitate enemies using biological warfare.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: If George White was a mercenary. The chemists of the
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: government supplied the weapons, and Frank Olsen was one of
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: the people who was there that weekend. As a chemist,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Frank Olsen had been recruited into the Army's Chemical Development Division,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: though he was technically a CIA employee. He studied ways
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: to weaponize germs, obscuring them in shaving creams or insect repellents.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: There was a lighter that, once flicked, would dispense a
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: lethal gas in a pocket spray that could induce pneumonia.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Olsen sometimes went to a secret Army base on Plumb
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Island off of Long Island, where chemicals too dangerous for
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: the mainland were studied. In nineteen fifty, intelligence operatives released
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: a cloud of traceable but harmless bacteria over San Francisco
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: using large aerosol hoses. They called it Operations Sea Spray.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: They wanted to see how far a chemical attack could travel.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Before long, eleven people checked into hospitals with urinary tract infections.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: The microbe wasn't as harmless as they thought. When American
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: soldiers captured in Korea confessed to using biological weapons. The
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: CIA insisted it was brainwashing. Frank Olsen believed they were
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: telling the truth, that the anther acts and other deadly
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: pathogens he brewed in his lab were being used on
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: the enemy. He knew the chemicals were in the hands
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: of the United States because he had held them in
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: his own hands. Olsen was a lab geek, a man
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: of science. He was quiet and reserved, A family man
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: with a wife and three children. He didn't have the
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: kind of callousness intelligence operatives developed over time, yet he
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: was often called to the scene of experiments that would
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: rattle his conscience. Toxic clouds were administered to laboratory animals
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: like monkeys, their bodies being added to a rising pile.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Olsen witnessed fierce interrogations in foreign countries where humans writhed
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: in pain in response to experimental chemicals that would burn
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: their eyes or disrupt their breathing before killing them. Once
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Olsen had visited a microbiological research lab at Porton Down
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: in Wiltshire, England. Volunteers had agreed to be dosed with
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: nerve gases. Olsen watched as one man collapsed in front
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: of him, foaming at the mouth before he died. Olson
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: later told a British psychiatrist named William Sergeant that he
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: had been to American and British testing sites in Frankfurt, Germany,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: and that he'd seen something awful. Sergeant recommended Olsen never
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: be allowed back to Porton Down. He was a security risk.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Anyone with a conscience was a security risk. As an
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: expert in biological warfare, Olsen had been summoned to examine
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: the fallout of a mass hysteria event that occurred in
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: the small French town of Point Saint Aspri in August.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: It's one of the strangest chapters in twentieth century history
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: and foreshadows the worst of George White's domestic exploits in
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: the years to come. Point Santa Spree is the kind
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: of small town in France people describe as idyllic. Classic
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: architecture is everywhere. A bridge made of stone extends over
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: the Rhone River, and the tiny streets act as arteries
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: for the residents to exist in a kind of suspended
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: state of simple living that sustained them for hundreds of years.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: The Bouvier family hails from here, one of their own.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Jacqueline Bouvier became Jacqueline Kennedy. That simplicity, that isolation, may
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: have been why someone turned the dream of Point Santa
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Spree into a living nightmare. A postal worker was in
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the middle of his shift when he began to feel it,
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: a sensation. He was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller as
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: the small town around him grew larger and larger. He
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: saw and felt fire raging all around him. Snakes crawled
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: up his legs and around his arms, dragging them down.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: He was descending into madness, and so were hundreds of
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: other residents. The townspeople began shrieking, crying, moaning. A man
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: was convinced he had transformed into a plane and jumped
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: out of a second story window, arms spread like wings.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: He broke both of his legs, then stood up and
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: kept running, more terrified of whatever was chasing him than
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: the pain of his broken bones. Many grew so manic
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: they had to be herded away. The postal worker was
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: brought to a hospital and put in a straight jacket.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Three teens were chained to a bed. They were fighting
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: their own demons, and nothing could soothe them. Their mettal
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: bed frames shook as they struggled. Over the next few days,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: more and more people were hospitalized or put in asylums
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: with hallucinations. One villager put it this way, I am dead,
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: and my head is made of copper, and I have
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: snakes in my stomach and they are burning me. At
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: least four people died. No one has ever conclusively proven
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: what happened in Point Santa Spree, but some blamed ergot
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: poisoning ergot, which is highly toxic, and large amounts may
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: have gotten into the bread in the local bakeries. Others
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: of theorized the CIA made Point Santa Spree one huge
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: chemical trial, which is why Olsen was in the vicinity
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: to assess the outcome. It was just another chapter, and
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: what he feared was a madness, not on the part
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: of the people, but in the corridors of American intelligence.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: George White mentioned Point Cenisprie briefly in a letter to
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: a friend in nineteen fifty four. He called it the
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: Little French Villages Stormy epidemic. Stormy was a George White
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: slang term for LSD that was the dark side of
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: intelligence work, and Olsen's mood grew darker with it. Two
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: years later, Frank Olsen was one of the employees invited
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: to Sydney Gottlieb's retreat. Gottlieb wanted to make sure the
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: CIA and the army scientists at Fort Dietrich were working
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: in tandem, that they were on the same page. But,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: and this was usually the case with Gottlieb, he had
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: another motive. He wanted to dose everyone there with LSD.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb gathered the men in the lodge and gestured for
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: his colleague Robert Lashbrook to begin pouring drinks from a
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: bottle of Quantros, an orange flavored liqueur. Lashbrook filled glasses
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: with Quantros and then, of great discretion, added an ampule
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: of LSD to each. He handed the glasses to the
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: gathered scientists, and he and Gottlieb watched as they began
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: ingesting the concoction. Within twenty minutes, the men began to
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: experience the expected early symptoms confusion, hallucinations, fear. The severed
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: and mounted heads of hunted and captured deer in the
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: lodge began to stare them down their lips moving, gentlemen,
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: I assure you what you are feeling is completely normal.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: You've all been administered a dose of LSD. Gottlieb spoke calmly,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: like he was informing a group of people to proceed
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: to a fire exit. The men went off into their
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: own corners of consciousness, grappling with the newly open borders
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: of their minds. But unlike George white seemingly random drugging
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: of Linda King and Barbara Smythe, Gottlieb took a special
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: interest in how Frank Olson reacted. He'd been earmarked as
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: a possible problem. Gottlie pulled Olson aside and began asking
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: him questions, Questions that might one day be posed to
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Olsen by enemy agents, the invisible Soviets who loomed large
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: in the American imagination of the day, Questions that might
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: wear down someone under the influence of both drugs and morality.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: What exactly was said in those hours, only Sidney Gotlieb
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: could answer, and when he was eventually asked years later,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: he wouldn't. But we know what happened. After the retreat
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: came to an end, Frank Olson returned home and Withdrew
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: his wife and children were greeted by a husband and
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: father who seemed more uncertain about his work than ever Brad.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: It was simply the accumulation of horrors Frank Olsen had witnessed,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: or maybe it was the LSD tearing down walls he
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: had erected in his mind to compartmentalize his responsibilities. Something
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: had shifted and Olsen wanted out. He went to his
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Ruett, and said he was resigning.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Ruett begged him to reconsider, not to do anything. Rash
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: ru had also phoned Gottlieb to express his concern. Remember,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Olsen was one of perhaps only two dozen people in
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: the world who had knowledge of the CIA's top secret
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: experiments like mk Ultra. For one of them to abruptly
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: announced they were finished done well, it wasn't possible. It
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: was akin to a mafia member turning up one day
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: and saying, is giving up the life. Some places don't
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: have an exit door. Gottlieb told Ruett and Lashbrook to
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: take Olson to New York City, where he saw a
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: doctor named Harold Abramson. He was an allergist who was
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: giving LSD to his patients on behalf of the CIA.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: If Olsen revealed something he shouldn't it would be okay.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Abramson was one of them. He prescribed sedatives in Bourbon,
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: but Olson's mood didn't improve. He didn't want to see
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: his family, He kept insisting he wanted to, in his words, disappear.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: They went to Long Island to see Abramson again, this
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: time at his home, then went back to New York.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: One night, Olsen wandered out into the streets, throwing away
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: his wallet and identification cards, a gesture that seemed to
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: indicate he wanted to throw away his government identity, but
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: he couldn't. Gottlieb would never allow that. They convinced Olsen
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: he would be best off in a sanitarium in Maryland
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: to get round the clock care. He seemed agreeable, if
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: you believe Lashbrook. He even seemed happy. The two men
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: planned to drive back to Maryland the next day to
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: check Olson into a facility. They got a room at
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: the Hotel Statler. They went to bed. When Lashbrook woke up,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Olsen was already on the pavement where he would never
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: regain consciousness. A flurry of phone calls followed, which the
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: hotel's telephone operator overheard. Lashbrook called Abramson's telling that Olson
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: was quote gone, not that he had died by suicide
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: or jumped or fell out of a window, but just gone.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: The authorities were called. They talked to Lashbrook, who told
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: them he awoke to the sound of crashing glass. At
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: the police station. He emptied his pockets, which had a
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: slip of paper with George White's address and initials on it.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Frank Olson's family was notified. No one told them Olson
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: had been dosed with LSD days prior to his death.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: The whole affair was documented as a suicide. Olsen had
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: either fallen or jumped out of the window. No one
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: said he was pushed. But if he had been pushed,
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: If Sydney gottlie But decided Frank Olsen had become too
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: dangerous to try and contain, and arranged for someone to
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: push him, who would it be. Certainly not Gotlei himself,
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: who was nowhere near the Hotel Statler that night, and
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: certainly not Robert Lashbrook, who was a CIA employee, not
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: a field operative, not someone with experience, nothing out of life.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: If you were Sydney Gottlieb and you needed to dispose
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: of Frank Olson, whose number would you call at his
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: federal Bureau of Narcotics Office, George White kept a photo
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: of a corpse on the wall, a real corpse. When
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: people would ask why an obvious as many people did,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: White explained that the photo was of a spy he
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: had been forced to kill with his bare hands during
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: the war. He was, after all, a graduate of Camp X,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: the school of mayhem and murder. To take a human
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: life in the name of national security was nothing to
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: be ashamed of. To White, it was something to put
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: in a frame. When Sydney Gottley decided Frank Olsen was
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: a problem, he had to have called someone. And while
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: there was no shortage of CIA assassins, Godly had few
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: men he could trust, even fewer who knew about him
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: k Ultra and the effects of LSD on the mind,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: and only one with a photo of a dead man
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: on his wall. Part two, The Coincidence. So where was
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: George White during all of this? Frank Olson's trip to
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: New York, his visits with Robert Lashbrook, his wandering the
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: city streets, and its plunge from a ten story window.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: If Sydney Gottlieb had his way, White would have been
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: glued to Olson the entire time. Got Leave had called
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: White to ask him to do exactly that, to escort
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: Olson back to Maryland and right into a mental health facility.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: The conversation got far enough along that White scribbled down
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Frank Olsen's home telephone number. But then White told Godle
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: something he had never told him before. I can't said,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: mind you, this wasn't necessarily an assignment to get rid
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: of Frank Olsen, just escorting him around at the time.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: But White said no, and the reason was something Godlie
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: couldn't argue with. George White's mother was dying, so White
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: got on a plane on November eleven nine and headed
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: straight for Carl's Bad, California. Her funeral was novemb He
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: didn't return to New York until December. That meant White
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: had missed the Deep Creek Lodge meeting, Frank Olsen's slow
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: descent into despair and his death by weeks. On both sides.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: If anyone could claim they had virtually nothing to do
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: with Olson's death, it would have to have been George White.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: But here's a recurring thing about White. He didn't need
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: to be on the scene to be involved. White could
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: put wheels in motion. He was, after all, not physically
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: present for dozens of arrests in the famous Hip Sing
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Tong drug ring case that made his career, But none
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: of those arrests would have been possible without him. So
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: if White couldn't have been around Frank Olsen in the
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: last weeks of his life, what could he have done? Hello, Pierre,
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: It's g Pierre Lafitte. The name sounds like a French
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: capper lar in a detective novel, and that wouldn't be
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: too far off. Lafitte was a narcotics agent and a
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: close ally of Whites. He was instrumental in making Whites
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: New York lsd pad a hopping social scene, recruiting guests
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: for White to dose and then watching from behind a
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: two way mirror for the effects to materialize. White trusted
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Lafitte enough to bring him into an exclusive inner circle,
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: one in which he got c I a security clearance.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: He knew a lot of the government's dirty secrets. He
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: was a world traveler, having helped White on drug excursions overseas.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Pierre Lafitte was the kind of man who might need
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: to keep track of which name he was using on
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: any given day. There was something else about Lafitte Earlier
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: that year, White had made arrangements for Lafitte to begin
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: working as a bell captain at a hotel, the Hotel Statler.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: Could it have been a simple moonlighting job. That seems unlikely.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: Just a month earlier, Lafitte had made national headlines for
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: his undercover work recovering paintings stolen from a church in Kentucky.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: This was something else White might have wanted to keep
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: watch on the drug investigation there. He might have suspected
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: hotel employees of some kind of wrongdoing. He needed a
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: pair of eyes the Statler for reasons that have never
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: explicitly been spelled out. So out of the dozens or
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: even hundreds of hotels in New York City, why did
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: Robert Lashbrook book himself and Frank Olsen into the Hotel
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Statler the night of Olsen's death? Of all the hotels
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: in Manhattan, why did those two just happen to be
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: in the one hotel. Pierre Lafitte had the freedom to
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: roam where he was a familiar face to hotel employees,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: where he could, if he wanted, unlock any hotel room
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: door that had something he wanted on the other side.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: When White had to turn down got leave because he
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: had to be in California. He asked Lafitte to keep
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: an eye on Olsen to monitor the situation. We know
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Lashbrook had White's initials and pad address, as though he
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: expected to make contact with White at some point during
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: the trip. Maybe White was expected back earlier. Then Olsen
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: died by suicide. Allegedly, it was always a strange premise
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: to begin with the idea he would launch himself through
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: a window. No matter how despondent someone becomes. They're easier ways,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: and most people would at least bother to pull up
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: the blinds. First. Decades later, Frank's son Eric Olsen would
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: walk into room ten eighteen A and see how small
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: it was, how unlikely it was that anyone could get
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: a running start to launch themselves out the window. Olsen
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: had even tracked down a long retired Sidney Gottlieb, asking
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: him what had happened to his father. Gottlieb would say
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: only that everyone, Gottlieb the CIA Olson had perhaps gone
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: too far in their search for mind control, but he
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: still insisted Olsen had died by suicide. He even suggested
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: Eric find a support group for children whose fathers had
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: taken their own lives. Eric took another approach in he
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: had his father's body exhumed so a professor of law
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: and forensic science could examine him. Eric had wanted to
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: wait until his mother had passed away before pursuing his
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: hunch that there was something amiss about his father's death
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: that Sydney Gottlieb was lying. The autopsy was a fascinating
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: look at the final moments of Frank Olston's life, articulating
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: more and more of the words he couldn't speak. It
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: revealed Olsen had a previously undis closed head injury, ahematoma
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: on the left side. He may have been struck by
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: a blunt object before landing on the pavement. Who hit him,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: not Lashbrook, probably, but someone could have opened the door
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: to ten eighteen A that night. Someone who confronted Olsen,
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: who wanted to orchestrate something that looked like a suicide.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Someone who was following a CIA manu on the Ideal
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: Methods of Eliminating a target, a document that was later
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: declassified in and described preferred method of murder. The most
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: efficient accident in simple assassination is a fall of seventy
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: five ft or more onto a hard surface, elevator shafts, stairwells,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: unscreened windows, and bridges will serve. In chase cases, it
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: before dropping him. Care is required to en No wound
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: The facts of Frank Olsen's death or that he was
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: dosed with LSD in November of nine and didn't react
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: well to it, He had already been concerned about the
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: kind of work he was being asked to do. He
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: was checked into a hotel that was very familiar to
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: the CIA, with a former Bell captain who would have
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: done virtually anything George White or Sydney Gottlieb would have
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: told him to do. It doesn't mean Pierre Lafitte murdered
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Frank Olson. It's a theory, maybe even a fanciful one,
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: And if we stopped there, maybe we could say it's
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: all a bit strange but mostly circumstantial, if we stopped there.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: Following Olson's death, White felt compelled to make sure his
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: friend and colleague Pierre Lafitte got out of town. White
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: arranged Lafitte to travel to St. Petersburg, Florida, and stay
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: at a property owned by one of White's friends, a
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: well known drug kingpin. If Lafitte had nothing to do
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: with Frank Olson's murder, why was George White so insistent
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: that Lafitte get out of the state and stash himself
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: away on the estate of a renowned mafioso for an
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: indeterminate period of time. Part three shut it down. The
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: months following Frank Olsen's death were memorable for everyone. The
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: Olsen's got repeated visits by Vincent Ruett, Olson's former boss,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: who tried to console the family. The CIA could tell
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: them only that Olsen had gone out the window. That
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: he had been dosed with LSD would not be disclosed
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: for another twenty years. When The Washington Post obtained classified
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: documents that referred to a CIA employee who had fallen
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: out of a window. The Olsen's knew immediately the story
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: referred to Frank. In nineteen five, the same year chevy
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: Chase was impersonating Gerald Ford as a clumsy incompetent, the
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: President invited the Olsen family to the White House to
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: make an apology. They accepted a financial settlement in exchange
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: for agreeing not to sue the government. Over the death.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: This was before the autopsy, before it looked more and
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: more like Olsen had been scrubbed from the world with
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: great deliberation. Of course, Sidney Gottlieb knew what had happened,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: and while his superiors the CIA were fuzzy on the details,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: they knew that Olsen's death was related to god Leave's
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: increasingly out of control LSD program. People began asking Gotleib questions,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: questions he didn't particularly care to answer. He was used
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: to autonomy, to being left to his own devices. Now
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: there was a threat of oversight. He and Lashbrook were
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: given a reprimand Lashbrook left the agency. Gottlieb stayed, but
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: the CIA's psychological warfare program had been put on notice.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb wasn't prone to panic, but in light of the
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: controversy surrounding Frank Olsen, the idea of George White drugging
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: hapless civilians all over New York City suddenly seemed unwise.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb phoned White shut it down. George said, I've only
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: just gotten started. It's we need to shut it down.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: White broke his lease at eighty one Bedford Street, where
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: he'd been doing brisk business as Morgan Hall LSD provocateur,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: and it probably broke his heart a little too. He'd
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: been at it for only six months before Godli pulled
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: the plug. It struck him as slightly unfair. It was Godlib,
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: after all, who had dosed Frank Olsen, not White. Even
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: though White had himself released countless people into the streets
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: of the city suffering from hallucinations, he'd covered his tracks well.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: He hadn't gotten sloppy and targeted a high profile government
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: intelligence operative the way Godly pad. For a time, White
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: focused on his narcotics work. He was still an employee
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: with the Narcotics Bureau, working to erase the scourge of marijuana, opium, heroin,
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: cocaine and other drugs being delivered into the country by day,
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: even as he distributed them to innocent people at night.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: But the past few months had been extremely hard on White.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: His mother had died, Frank Olsen had disrupted his LSD projects.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: For a brief period, George White seemed to submit to
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: a few feeling of melancholy. It comes through in the
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: correspondence he wrote to friends and colleagues at the time,
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: some of which resides at Stanford University. There's a sense
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: of loss, not only for his mother but for his work.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: Without the pad the CIA safe house, White was just
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: another cop. He had once again become what he had
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: always feared. Average His letters, hundreds of them, are often
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: innocuous in the extreme, speaking of travel and inquiring about
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: mutual friends. At first glance, none seem particularly incriminating, But
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: if you know about Pierre Lafitte and the Hotel Statler
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: and Frank Olsen, some passages take on a different meaning.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: In October n White wrote a letter to Garland Williams,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: one of the supervisors at the Narcotics Bureau and White's
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: good friend. It's cryptic, deliberately so and unsettling. White makes
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: two mentions of what he calls the Oldsen thing and
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: how it's behind him. Of course, he could just mean
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: the pressure over the incident was winding down. But then
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: he writes, our friend decided that his term at the
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: Statler was overextended. White seems to be referring to Pierre
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: Lafitte because he goes on to say, maybe after our
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: friend returns from his jaunt out west, he can return
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: to France for a few weeks. I suspect his moonlighting
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: work at NYC Hotels is over once and for all.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: Teen loved him in his Bellman's office. Involved or not,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: George White was profoundly affected by Frank Wilson's death. It
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: meant his work as a man possessed of secret knowledge
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: was her. People have never stopped asking questions about Frank
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: Olson's death, but they stopped asking enough in nineteen fifty
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: four for Sydney Gottleib to feel like the worst was
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: behind him. The CIA had forced him to pause mk Ultra,
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: but not to dismantle it. The CIA was able to
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: enter into a new contract with drug maker Eli Lily
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: for more LSD and tonnage quantities mass amounts. So in
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: late nineteen fifty four, a rejuvenated Sydney Gottleib traveled to
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: New York to pay a visit to his dejected friend,
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: George White. Gottlieb explained that the LSD experiment in New
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: York was done and done for good. There would be
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: no grand reopening of eighty one Bedford Street. Naturally, White
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: was disappointed. Let me ask you something, Geo. You're from California,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: aren't you born and raised? You want to go back?
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: The CIA didn't want to get rid of George White.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: They just needed to get rid of New York City.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: George White could relocate to another hip community, one bursting
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: with liberal thinkers, an entire population full of people who
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: were probably high on drugs already. We want you to
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: move to San Francisco. White was ecstatic, and then Gottlieb
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: took out a manual, one written exclusively for the CIA.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: This wasn't the assassination manual, but something new. White looked
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: down at the cover. It was an academic primer on
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: the best way to extract information using drugs and sex.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb smiled, sid this is the greatest day of my life.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: George White's climax was still ahead of him. H Operation
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown. This show is
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: written by Jake Rosson, editing, sound design and mixing by
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: Ernie Indradette and Natasha Jacobs. Original music by Aaron Kaufman.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson and Maurica Brown.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Special thanks this episode to
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: David Crumholtz and Ted Ramy. Julian Weller is our supervising producer.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: Our Executive producers are Jason English and Mangesha ticket Ter
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: See you next week.