WHAT DID THE C.I.A. DO TO HIS FATHER?

For a quarter of a century, a close friend of mine, a Harvard classmate,
has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a
United States government scientist. Believing this means, in my friend's
words, "leaving the known universe," the one in which it is innocently
accepted that an agency of the American government would never do such a
thing. My friend has left this known universe, even raising his father's
body from the grave where it had lain for 40 years to test the story the
C.I.A. told him about his death. The evidence on the body says that the
agency may have lied. But knowing this has not healed my friend. When I ask
him what he has learned from his ordeal, he says, "Never dig up your
father." Then he laughs, and the look on his face is wild, bitter and full
of pain.

On Nov. 28, 1953, around 2 a.m., Armand Pastore, night manager at the
Statler Hotel opposite Penn Station in New York, rushed out the front door
on Seventh Avenue to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk in his
undershirt and shorts. "He was broken up something awful," Pastore told
reporters many years later, flat on his back with his legs smashed and bent
at a terrible angle. Looking up, Pastore could see a blind pushed through
an empty window frame high up in the Statler. The man had fallen from the
10th floor -- apparently after crashing through a closed window -- but he
was alive. "He was trying to mumble something, but I couldn't make it out.
It was all garbled, and I was trying to get his name." By the time the
priest and the ambulance came, the stranger on the sidewalk was dead.

When Pastore went up to the stranger's room -- 1018A -- with the police,
they found a man who gave his name as Robert Lashbrook sitting on the
toilet with his head in his hands. Down at reception, Pastore asked the
hotel telephone operator whether she had overheard any calls from 1018A.
Two, she said. In one, a voice had said, "He's gone." The voice on the
other end replied, "That's too bad." Lashbrook admitted making two calls
but has denied saying anything of the sort.

The high trees over the family house in Frederick, Md., were still in
darkness when Eric Olson was woken by his mother, Alice, and taken into the
living room. Upstairs, his younger sister, Lisa, and brother, Nils, slept
undisturbed. Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, his father's boss at the Army research
establishment at Fort Detrick, told Eric something bad had happened.
"Fallen or jumped" and "accident" were the words he heard as he looked
across the room at his mother, frozen and empty-eyed, on the sofa opposite.
"In that moment when I learned that my father had gone out a window and
died," Eric later wrote, "it was as if the plug were pulled from some
central basin of my mind and a vital portion of my consciousness drained
out." He was 9 years old.

When I first met Eric Olson in 1974, both of us were working on doctorates
at Harvard. Mine was in history, his in clinical psychology. What I liked
about him was his maniacal cackle. One minute he would be laboring some
abstruse point in his Southern drawl, the next his face would be alight
with a snaggle-toothed grin, and his body would be electrified by the joke
he had just slipped by me, deadpan. The laugh was an attractive and
alarming trait, because sometimes he would laugh about things that weren't
funny at all.

His Harvard research was about how to help people recover from trauma. With
the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, he had been to Man, W.Va., to interview
survivors of a disaster in which 125 people had been killed and 4,000
people made homeless when a dam burst and a wall of black water containing
coal waste swept down Buffalo Creek. He and Lifton wrote a paper that spoke
of the way sudden, violent loss left people imprinted with death anxiety
and long-term psychic numbing.

I remember Eric talking for hours in his Cambridge apartment about a
technique he had been using to help the people of Buffalo Creek. It was
called the "collage method," and it involved getting survivors to paste
together pictures, using anything they felt like clipping out of newspapers
and magazines. It seemed childish to me at first, but Eric said that for
people whose lives were in pieces anyway, collage was mysteriously
satisfying. They would work for hours in silence, he said, moving about the
floor, sticking things down, and sometimes when they had finished, they
would contemplate what they had done and start to cry.

After 75 years of psychoanalysis -- the talking cure -- here was a therapy,
Eric believed, that didn't start from words but from images. It seemed to
unfurl the winding processes of a person's unconscious and lay them out
flat on paper. Eric had been playing around with his father's camera and
making photomontages since childhood. But he didn't stumble on the power of
collage until he was in his 20's. One stoned night, he and a girlfriend got
down on their knees in her apartment and began cutting pictures out of
magazines and gluing them down. When Eric finished, the central image of
his collage was a grainy picture of a man falling head first out of a window.

On June 11, 1975, The Washington Post revealed that a commission led by
Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had discovered that "a civilian employee
of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central
Intelligence Agency test" and "developed serious side effects." After being
sent to New York with a C.I.A. escort for psychiatric treatment, the
employee jumped from a hotel window and died as a result. The Rockefeller
report added a footnote: "There are indications in the few remaining agency
records that this individual may have had a history of emotional instability."

Back in Frederick, Lisa Olson confronted Vincent Ruwet, her father's old
boss at Detrick. He had regularly visited Alice Olson, shared a drink with
her, become a trusted friend of the children. Ruwet stalled at first but
eventually confirmed that the man in the story was Frank Olson and that he
had known the details in The Post story all along.

If Ruwet had known all along, then the family had lived for 22 years in a
community of lies: families of government scientists who had kept the truth
away from a family dying from the lack of it. This culture of secrecy had
also contaminated the family from within. Alice Olson covered the whole
subject of Frank's death with a silence that was both baffling and
intimidating. Her mantra, whenever Eric would ask what really happened in
Room 1018A, was, "You are never going to know what happened in that room."

Maintaining stoic silence took its toll. By the 1960's, Alice Olson was
routinely drinking on the quiet, locking herself in the bathroom and then
coming out mean and confused. One time, when Eric returned from a year away
in India, he walked right past her in the airport. The drinking had left
her so thin and wasted that he didn't recognize her. All the time, Ruwet
had been there for her, keeping her company. It later turned out that he
had received orders from the C.I.A.'s director, Allen Dulles, to keep in
touch with her.

With their mother locked in silence, the children were left alone with
their own sense of shame about their father's death. Eric told other
children that his father had suffered "a fatal nervous breakdown," without
knowing what that could possibly mean. Thanks to The Post's revelations,
the summer of 1975 was the family's "Copernican Revolution." They gave the
exclusive on their personal story to Seymour Hersh of The New York Times,
and when he came through the door of the house in Frederick, his first
words were: "This must be the most uncurious family in the United States. I
can't believe you fell for that story for 22 years." Later, at a news
conference in the backyard at Frederick, under the big trees, the family
announced that they were going to sue the government for wrongful death.
Their ultimate purpose, they said, was to imprint what had happened to
their father in "American memory."

The news conference had immediate results. On July 21, 1975, Alice, Eric,
Nils, Lisa and Lisa's husband, Greg Hayward, were invited to the White
House. In the Oval Office, according to newspaper accounts, President
Gerald Ford expressed "the sympathy of the American people and apologized
on behalf of the U.S. government." There is a photograph of Alice shaking
the president's hand. Her face is glowing. Even so, catharsis was brief.
The meeting with the president lasted 17 minutes.

A week or so later, Eric, Lisa, Nils and two lawyers met the C.I.A.'s
director, William Colby, at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. In
his memoirs, Colby remembered the lunch as "one of the most difficult
assignments I have ever had." At the end of the lunch, Colby handed the
family an inch-thick sheaf of declassified documents relating to Frank
Olson's death. What Colby did not tell them -- did not reveal until he
published his memoirs just three years later -- was that Frank Olson had
not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a
C.I.A. employee working at Fort Detrick.

The Colby documents were photocopies of the agency's own in-house
investigation of Olson's death and like Eric's collages: a redacted jumble
of fragments, full of unexplained terms like the "Artichoke" and "Bluebird"
projects. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as
MK-ULTRA, a C.I.A. project, beginning in the Korean War, to explore the use
of drugs like LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use
in covert assassination.

The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. and Fort
Detrick scientists at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland on Nov. 19,1953,
Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. slipped LSD into Olson's glass of Cointreau.
After 20 minutes, Olson developed mild symptoms of disorientation. He was
then told the drink had been spiked. The next day, Olson returned home
early and spent the weekend in a mood that Alice remembered as withdrawn
but not remotely psychotic. He kept saying he had made a terrible mistake,
but she couldn't get him to say what it was.

On Sunday night, they went to see a film about Martin Luther. It followed
the young Luther to the moment of spiritual crisis -- Here I stand, I can
do no other" -- when he decided to take on the might of the Catholic
Church. The next day, Olson went straight to Ruwet's office and said he
wanted to resign. Ruwet told him to calm down. The next morning, he
returned to Ruwet's office and insisted that his resignation be accepted.
While Alice's memory was of Frank being in the grip of an ethical dilemma,
Ruwet told C.I.A. investigators that Olson "appeared to be greatly agitated
and in his own words, 'all mixed up."'

Ruwet and Robert Lashbrook, a C.I.A. liaison at Fort Detrick, took Olson to
New York -- ostensibly to seek psychiatric advice. But the doctor Olson
saw, an allergist named Harold Abramson, was receiving C.I.A. financing to
experiment with LSD, and his sole exercise of therapeutic attention was to
prescribe Nembutal and bourbon to help Olson sleep.

Olson was also taken to see John Mulholland, a New York magician on the
C.I.A. payroll, who may have tried to hypnotize him. Ruwet told C.I.A.
investigators that in Mulholland's presence, Olson became highly agitated.
"What's behind this?" he kept asking his friend Ruwet. "Give me the
lowdown. What are they trying to do with me? Are they checking me for
security?" "Everyone was in a plot to 'get' him," he told Lashbrook. He
begged them to "just let me disappear."

According to the documents Colby had given the family, Olson spent an
agonized night wandering the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and
identification cards. He said he was too ashamed to go home to his wife and
children, so he and Lashbrook ate a cheerless Thanksgiving dinner at a Horn
& Hardart automat in Midtown.

Late the next day, according to the C.I.A. story, it was decided that Olson
needed to be institutionalized. Yet when Olson phoned Alice that night, he
said that he felt "much better" and "looked forward to seeing her the next
day." That night, in Room 1018A, with Lashbrook in the bed by the door,
Olson was calm: he washed out his socks and underwear and went to sleep.
Four hours later, Armand Pastore found him lying on his back on Seventh Avenue.

The C.I.A.'s general counsel, called in immediately in 1953 to investigate
Olson's death, noted that the official story -- that LSD "triggered" the
suicide -- was "completely inconsistent" with the facts in the case.
Disciplinary action was recommended against Gottlieb and Lashbrook, but the
agency's director, Allen Dulles, delivered only a mild reprimand. Lashbrook
left the agency, but Gottlieb remained in senior positions for 20 more
years. He told the internal inquiry that Olson's death was "just one of the
risks running with scientific experimentation." Far from ending with
Olson's death, the LSD experiments continued for two decades.

The Colby documents left the family marooned, no longer believing that
Frank's death was a simple suicide but not knowing what to believe instead.
A photograph in People magazine in July 1975 shows each of them in the
living room in Frederick, unsmiling and not looking at one another. In
1976, after negotiations in which they traded away their right to further
civil or criminal proceedings against the government, the family received a
total of $750,000, half a million less than originally recommended by the
White House and even the C.I.A. itself.

If this was "closure," it was of an especially cursed kind. Shortly after
receiving her portion of the money, Eric's sister, together with her
husband and their 2-year-old son, Jonathan, set off by small plane from
Frederick to a destination in the Adirondacks, where they were going to
invest the money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed, and everyone on board
was killed.

In the aftermath of Lisa's death, Eric took his portion of the money and
went to Sweden to escape the accursed story. In Stockholm, he read
intensively, exploring the connection between his spatial, collage-based
theory of the mind and linguistic accounts of mental processes. He also had
a son, Stephan, by a woman he never married. If distance was supposed to
heal him, however, the cure didn't work. He "smoldered" in Stockholm and in
1984 returned to the States determined, he said, to find out the truth
"once and for all."

"Once and for all" meant returning to the hotel and checking into Room
1018A. He recalls this strange night now as a revelation. "It just hit
you," he says. The room was simply too small for his father to have gained
the speed to take a running plunge through the window. The sill was too
high and too wide -- there was a radiator in front of it -- for him to have
dived through a closed window and a lowered blind in the dark.

Eric, Nils and Alice, now recovered from alcoholism, tracked down Sidney
Gottlieb in his ecologically correct home in Culpeper, Va., where the
retired spymaster was raising goats, eating yogurt and preaching the values
of peace and environmentalism. He received them pleasantly but conceded
nothing. "I was outclassed," Eric remembers. "This was a world-class
intelligence." They also found Lashbrook, at his vine-covered stucco house
in Ojai, Calif., where they watched him twitch in his seat as he told his
version of what happened in room 1018A -- that he was awakened by a crash,
saw a broken window and an empty bed and concluded that Frank Olson had
jumped to his death.

From these encounters, Eric realized that he was up against a brotherhood
of silence and that his father had once belonged to it. It was, as one
former Detrick employee called it, "a community of saints" dedicated to
using the most fearful and secret science to defend the republic.

Frank Olson's specialty, it turned out, had been the development of
aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. With the discovery in the 1950's that
the North Koreans were brainwashing American prisoners, the Special
Operations Division at Detrick became the center for the development of
drugs for use in brainwashing and interrogation. LSD emerged as one of the
interrogation drugs of choice. Alice Olson never knew exactly what her
husband was doing -- he was, in fact, working for the C.I.A. by this time
- -- but she did know that whenever his lab tested chemical or biological
compounds on monkeys and the monkeys died, her husband would bring a testy
silence home.

One mystery -- entry and exit stamps in Frank Olson's passport, indicating
that he had been to Sweden, Germany and Britain in the summer of 1953 --
seemed to offer a crucial clue to his state of mind in the months before
his death. Through Gordon Thomas, a British journalist and author of
numerous books on intelligence matters, Eric learned that during a trip to
London his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant
psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques.

According to Thomas, who was a lifelong friend of Sargant's, Olson told
Sargant that he had visited secret joint American-British testing and
research installations near Frankfurt. Thomas's hypothesis is that the
C.I.A. was testing interrogation and truth serums there -- not on monkeys
but on human subjects, "expendables," captured Russian agents and ex-Nazis.
Thomas says that 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.

A document Eric later saw from his father's personnel file confirmed that
doubts had been raised about Olson's security clearance before his death,
possibly because of Sargant's warning. Alice Olson, who knew nothing about
the nature of his visit, did recall that when he returned from Europe that
summer, Frank was unusually withdrawn.

Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a
government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg for immoral
experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953, his son says
he believes, a naive American patriot faced up to the possibility that his
own government was doing the same thing. If the C.I.A. was in fact
experimenting with "expendables" in Germany, and if Olson knew about it,
Eric reasoned, then it would not be enough to hospitalize him, discredit
him with lies about his mental condition and allow him to slip back into
civilian life. It would be better to get rid of him altogether but make it
look like suicide. This was the truth, Eric came to believe, that lay
hidden in the collage of the Colby documents.

If Eric is right, slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was not an experiment
that went wrong: it was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating.
The trip to New York was not to manage and contain his incipient psychosis.
It was intended to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him
if necessary. Housing a possibly deranged and desperate man in a hotel room
high above Seventh Avenue was not a regrettable error of judgment. It was
the prelude to murder. If Frank Olson had realized this, his son could now
read his father's last words ("Just let me disappear") as a cry for help.

In 1997, after the C.I.A. inadvertently declassified an assassination
manual dating from late 1953, Eric Olson was able to read the following:
"The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet
or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened
windows and bridges will serve. . . . The act may be executed by sudden,
vigorous excised of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge." The
manual went on to recommend a blow to the temple to stun the subject first:
"In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject
before dropping him."

Reading this passage at the kitchen table in Frederick, Eric realized that
the word he had been looking for all his life was not "fallen" or "jumped"
but "dropped." It was, he recalled, one of the few moments when, after
nearly 50 years, he actually experienced his father's death, when the truth
he had been seeking finally took hold of him.

In allowing the Olson family to receive the ultimate sacrament of American
healing -- a formal apology from the president in the Oval Office -- the
C.I.A. tacitly acknowledged that it had committed a sin against the order
that holds citizens in allegiance to their government. Now, it seemed to
Eric Olson, that apology had been a cynical lie. It enabled the C.I.A. to
hide, forever, a perfect murder.

It is one thing to believe in a truth as painful as this. It is another to
prove it. In 1994, Eric had his father's casket raised from the ground. At
the funeral in 1953, the coffin was shut because the family had been told
that the body was broken up and that there were extensive cuts and
lacerations to the face caused by the fall through the glass. In fact, the
body had been embalmed, and it was in nearly perfect condition.

Eric stared down at a face he had last seen 41 years before. There were no
lacerations consistent with damage by glass. On further examination, the
forensic team, led by James Starrs of George Washington University,
discovered a blow to Olson's temple, on the left side, which caused a
fist-size bleed under the otherwise unbroken skin. It could not have
occurred, the pathologists agreed, after he went out the window because the
velocity of his descent would have caused more extensive trauma. While one
team member thought it could have occurred as the head hit the window frame
on the way out, Starrs and the others were certain it had been inflicted
before that. The conclusion that both Starrs and Eric drew was that someone
had knocked Olson out, either while he slept or after a struggle, and then
thrown him out the window.

Since the autopsy, Eric has pursued leads to find out who actually carried
out "the wet work" on his father. H.P. Albarelli, a writer-researcher with
contacts among retired C.I.A. agents in Florida, has found agents who say
they know the identity of the men who went into Room 1018A that night in
November 1953, supposedly to tip Olson through the window. They were not
C.I.A. men, they say, but contract killers associated with the Trafficante
mob family hired by the C.I.A. But none of the retired C.I.A. agents, men
now in their 70's and 80's, are about to come forward unless they are
released from their confidentiality agreements with the agency.

In 1996, Olson approached Manhattan's district attorney, Robert Morgenthau,
to see if his office would open a new investigation into the Olson case.
Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb of Morgenthau's "cold case" unit have
deposed Lashbrook in Ojai; they have followed up a few of the hundreds of
leads that Eric Olson besieges them with almost daily. But the Manhattan
D.A., while probably agreeable to immunity for Albarelli's sources in
Florida, has not pursued the confidentiality releases. If you talk to
Saracco and Bibb in the Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan where they
hang out after-hours, you get the impression that they don't think there's
a case to send to a grand jury. If you ask them why they don't go down to
Florida to talk to Albarelli's jealously guarded sources, they look at you
as if to say, "How do you know these people exist?"

If there isn't enough for the Manhattan D.A. to take to a jury, Eric and
his lawyer, Harry Huge, will have to bring a civil suit of their own,
claiming that the C.I.A. lied in 1976 when it secured the family's
agreement to waive further legal proceedings. Eric says he knows the truth,
but it is not the "smoking gun" kind of forensic truth that will force the
agency to go to court and be put through the discovery process. And if you
lack provable truth, you do not get justice. Without justice, there is no
accountability, and without accountability there is no healing, no resolution.

Last autumn, after nearly 25 years of our lives going in different
directions, I went to see Eric in Frederick. The family home, a ranch
house, is in a decayed state of suspended animation -- seemingly the same
carpets, same couches, same dusty jar of Vaseline in the bathroom cabinet
that were there the night Frank Olson died. Living there is worst at
Thanksgiving, the time of his death.

Eric has taken a break from his work on the collage method, and the huge
books of patients' collages now lie shut up in storage nearby. The house is
full of drafts of books on collage, as well as books about his father's
story that remain unfinished because the story itself lacks an ending. Eric
lives on foundation grants, book advances and some help from his brother
and others. He spends his days hounding journalists, the Manhattan D.A.,
anyone who will listen, with a steady stream of calls and e-mail messages
from an office just feet away from the same living room, the same chair,
the very spot where he was told by Ruwet that his father had "fallen or
jumped." That he is convinced that the word was neither "fallen" nor
"jumped," but "dropped," does not heal. Indeed, his story makes you wonder
about that noble phrase "The truth shall make you free." As it happens,
that phrase is inscribed in the entry hall of the C.I.A.'s headquarters.

Eric knows that to charge the most secretive agency of American government
with murder is to incur the suspicion that you have become deranged by
anger, grief, paranoia, greed or a combination of all four. "Eric is crazy,
Eric is obsessed," he says, mimicking his accusers. "Fine. I agree." A
maniacal cackle. "But it's not the point. The point is" -- and here his
eyes go flat and cold and relentless -- what happened in the damned room."

Just before I left, we went to the graves of his mother, sister and
brother-in-law and their child, the place where he wants his father to be
buried. When I asked him when the reburial will happen, he paused to think.
"When we know what to say," he said finally, looking down at the spare
piece of grass beside his mother's grave. "When it is over. When we can do
it right."

It takes me a while after I leave Eric to grasp one salient fact that may
make resolution difficult. For seven years, his father's bones have lain in
a filing cabinet in James Starrs's office. Only the bones -- and not all of
them -- remain intact. To get at the truth of what happened to Frank Olson,
the pathologists had to rip the skin off his limbs and tear his body apart,
macerate it and send it in chunks to various labs for analysis. In the
search for truth, Eric had to tear his father's body limb from limb.

The fact is, it will never be possible to bury all of Frank Olson again.
Now I understand why, when I asked Eric what he had learned from his
25-year ordeal, he told me that no one should ever dig up his father's
body. Now I know why my friend's wild laugh is so full of pain.