Spies on acid

Mitch Perry

The vast majority of early LSD research was sponsored by
the CIA’s MKULTRA program – acting through the Macy
Foundation among others.

"[LSD] had no potential whatsoever as a truth drug, but they continued to use it and even use it today at Guantanamo and other black sites mainly to frighten people and scare the hell out of them and throw them off balance."

Beginning after World War II and escalating through the early 1950s, the U.S. government launched a multimillion-dollar series of experiments in mind control and behavior modification.

It wasn't until the mid-1970s that Americans learned of such programs, which went by the names of Bluebird, ARTICHOKE and, most notably, MK/ULTRA. That's when a commission led by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and a subsequent Senate investigation revealed what our government had been up to.

In December of 2000 in this newspaper (then known as Weekly Planet), reporters H. P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly published a lengthy investigation that went beyond government reports. "The Strange Story of Frank Olson" explored the fate of a biochemist working for the U.S. Army who reportedly fell from a hotel window in New York City in November of 1953, after he had been dosed with LSD by the CIA.

Now, nearly a decade later, H.P. "Hank" Albarelli Jr. has published a book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, that he says was inspired by the positive reaction to the Planet story.

In the book, the author -- a resident of Indian Rocks Beach -- weaves a fascinating tale about the CIA's mind control programs. Albarelli told CL last month that he was inspired to write about Olson by the 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, in which author John Marks used data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to document the CIA's use of LSD on unwitting subjects.

Marks devoted one chapter to the death of Olson, reportedly a guinea pig for Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, dubbed "Dr. Death" for his involvement in programs like MK/ULTRA. Ultimately, Olson became paranoid and depressed and allegedly committed suicide by crashing through a window in a small New York City hotel room and jumping to his death.

Intrigued by that chapter, Albarelli began the research in the mid-'90s that led to his Planet cover story. "That got a tremendous amount of attention all over the world," he says, leading to more articles and then the raw materials that grew into the book.

Among the most startling episodes in his book is the story about the CIA dosing an entire small French town with LSD back in August of 1951. Albarelli says that anyone who does any type of research regarding the CIA and psychedelic drugs will come across that incident, but reviews of his book have commended him for going into greater detail than ever before. For decades, the outbreak of death and insanity in Pont-St.-Esprit was attributed to ergot poisoning (i.e., citizens eating bread that was infected with a psychedelic mold) or mercury poisoning. But Albarelli says what happened in the town was central to the fate of Frank Olson.

"He [Olson] headed up the special operations division at Fort Detrick that conducted the experiment, and after he had been demoted it came out that he had spoken indiscreetly about that experiment, and that was a large part of the reason he was placed under suspicion," Albarelli says.

In reading A Terrible Mistake, one wonders why the government, and specifically the CIA, was so into experimenting with LSD, which in the mid-'50s very few people knew anything about. Hank Albarelli Jr. says the government was "all over the map" in terms of what they thought the mind-altering drug could do.

"In 1949 the Army recommended it be used for psycho warfare, as crazy as that sounds, which is why it was used in Pont-St.-Esprit as a field test. They thought that maybe wars could be handled by chemicals rather than by bombs and guns, and it would result in less bloodshed and less destruction of property," he said. "Sort of the capitalistic dream -- you could win a war without harming any property whatsoever -- but that didn't pan out, they weren't happy with the results of the Pont-St.-Esprit experiment. They just started shifting gears immediately and thought well, we can use this drug for interrogative purposes, and that didn't turn out well at all. It had no potential whatsoever as a truth drug, but they continued to use it and even use it today at Guantanamo and other black sites mainly to frighten people and scare the hell out of them and throw them off balance."

Wait -- they still use it today? We asked Albarelli Jr. to elaborate.

He mentioned the case of Jose Padilla, best known to Americans shortly after 9/11 as the "dirty bomber." His attorneys contended that he was injected with LSD or some other drug designed to be used as a "truth serum." A spokesperson for the U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina denied that, saying it was a flu shot. In 2008, the Washington Post reported, "At least two dozen... former and current detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents... to coerce confessions. The government strongly denied those challenges."

Albarelli says that the government's belief in the '50s that LSD could be used as an effective truth serum demonstrated their ignorance about the drug. He says that the CIA also used acid in conjunction with other drugs in an attempt to create "the ideal assassin."

"When you really examine that," says Albarelli, "it's really foolish because there was never a shortage of people who wanted to be assassins."

Another incident in this extraordinary saga has a Tampa connection: At one point Santo Trafficante Jr., head of the Trafficante crime family headquartered in Tampa and Miami, met with the CIA to discuss using drugs to assassinate Fidel Castro.

All of these stories were suppressed by the government until December 22, 1974, when New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh broke the lid off, alleging that the CIA had been engaged in massive domestic spying. Hersh's coverage led President Ford to establish the Rockefeller Commission, followed by the Senate investigation led by Idaho Democrat Frank Church.

Albarelli initially thought that the commissions did a laudable job of unlocking the CIA's secrets. But now he feels they were nothing more than "dog and pony shows" because no one was ever held accountable for the crimes committed.

"I couldn't help but come to the conclusion that the so-called investigations were little more than a joke and just sort of placated the media and the public." He said that recent documents released from the Rockefeller Commission revealed a strong intent to divert attention from the Olson death by deliberately exposing MK/UlTRA but not Project Artichoke (which Olson was involved with), and that the outing of Dr. Sidney Gottleib was a part of that effort. Albarelli attributes that trickery in part to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

In 1975, Rummy was President Ford's chief of staff, and Cheney was Rumsfeld's top assistant. Albarelli praises them for a job well done.

"They were able to deflect attention away from Olson's murder and got the media to swallow whole hog the fact that he committed suicide because he was dosed with 70 mgs of LSD nine days before his death, which is by today's standard almost laughable," Albarelli maintains.

And what specifically is the "terrible mistake" of his book's title?

"Almost everything that I wrote about," he responds, but the words are specifically a quote from Olson. "He came home from the Deep Creek Lake meeting where he was dosed with LSD nine days before his murder, and his wife knew something was wrong, and the only thing he would say to her was that he had made a terrible mistake and he said he'd speak to her later about it... The event at Deep Creek Lake was really his interrogation using drugs and probably LSD to find out with why he was talking about Pont-St.-Esprit and other experiments. He had decided to leave the CIA and the Army and re-school himself as a dentist, but Olson was an arrogant, outspoken sort of guy, and the last two or three months before his departure he started talking about what he had done over the past three years under contract with the CIA, and that was just a no-no."

Albarelli is convinced that Olson was murdered as a result.

"His murder wasn't intentional; my conjecture is that he obviously was murdered in the room and that would probably qualify as manslaughter... he was thrown out the window because he tried to escape a couple of times. And that couldn't be allowed to happen."

H.P. Albarelli Jr. can be contacted through his website, www.albarelli.net.
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