“Bluebird was rechristened Artichoke,” writes John Marks, a former State Department official and authority on the CIA’s mind control programs. The goal of the Artichoke interrogation program, Marks explains, was “modifying behavior through covert means.” According to the program’s administrator, Richard Helms—the future director of the CIA—using drugs was a means to that end. “We felt that it was our responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or the Chinese in this field, and the only way to find out what the risks were was to test things such as LSD and other drugs that could be used to control human behavior,” Helms told journalist David Frost, in an interview in 1978. Other U.S. intelligence agencies were brought on board to help conduct these controversial interrogation experiments. “In 1951 the CIA Director approved the liaison with Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence to avoid duplication of effort,” writes Marks. “The Army and Navy were both looking for truth drugs while the prime concern of the Air Force was interrogation techniques used on downed pilots.” Since the end of the war, the various U.S. military branches had developed advanced air, land, and sea rescue programs, based in part on research conducted by Nazi doctors. But the Soviets had also made great advances in rescue programs and this presented a serious new concern. If a downed U.S. pilot or soldier was rescued by the Russians, that person would almost certainly be subjected to unconventional interrogation techniques, according to the CIA. The purpose of Operation Bluebird was to try to predict what kinds of methods the Soviets might use against American soldiers and airmen. One of the so-called truth serum drugs the CIA believed the Soviets were most heavily involved in researching was LSD. One CIA report, later shared with Congress, stated that “the Soviets purchased a large quantity of LSD-25 from the Sandoz Company… reputed to be sufficient for 50 million doses.” Or so the CIA thought. A later analysis of the information determined that the CIA analyst working on the report made a decimal point error while performing dosage calculations. The Soviets had in fact purchased enough LSD from Sandoz for a few thousand tests—a far cry from fifty million.
For its Operation Bluebird experiments involving LSD and other drugs, the CIA teamed up with the Army Chemical Corps. The initial research and development was conducted by officers with the Special Operations Division who worked inside a classified facility designated Building No. 439, a one-story concrete-block building set among similar-looking buildings at Camp Detrick so as to blend in. Almost no one outside the SO Division knew about the Top Secret work going on inside. The SO Division was paid for by the CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), a unit within the CIA’s Clandestine Service; many of its field agents were culled from a pool of senior bacteriologists at Detrick. One of these SO Division field agents was Dr. Harold Batchelor, the man behind the Eight Ball who consulted with Dr. Kurt Blome in Heidelberg in 1947. Another SO Division agent was Dr. Frank Olson, a former army officer and bacteriologist turned Agency operative whose sudden demise in 1953 would nearly bring down the CIA. The two men were assigned to the program at Camp King involving unconventional interrogation techniques.
In April 1950, Frank Olson was issued a diplomatic passport. Olson was not a diplomat; the passport allowed him to carry items in a diplomatic pouch that would not be subject to searches by customs officials. Frank Olson began taking trips to Germany, flying to Frankfurt and making the short drive out to Camp King. In one of the rare surviving official documents from the program, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles sent a secret memo to Richard Helms and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Frank Wisner regarding the specific kinds of interrogation techniques that would be used. “In our conversation of 9 February 1951, I outlined to you the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc., and emphasized the defensive aspects as well as the offensive opportunities in this field of applied medical science,” wrote Dulles. “The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared in my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background.” Camp King was the perfect location to conduct these trials. Overseas locations were preferred for Artichoke interrogations, since foreign governments “permitted certain activities which were not permitted by the United States government (i.e. anthrax etc.).”
The next trip on record made by Frank Olson occurred on June 12, 1952. Olson arrived at Frankfurt from the Hendon military airport in England and made the short drive west into Oberursel. There, Artichoke interrogation experiments were taking place at a safe house called Haus Waldorf. “Between 4 June 1952 and 18 June 1952, an IS&O [CIA Inspection and Security Office] team… applied Artichoke techniques to two operational cases in a safe house,” explains an Artichoke memorandum, written for CIA director Dulles, and one of the few action memos on record not destroyed by Richard Helms when he was CIA director. The two individuals being interrogated at the Camp King safe house “could be classed as experienced, professional type agents and suspected of working for Soviet Intelligence.” These were Soviet spies captured by the Gehlen Organization, now being run by the CIA. “In the first case, light dosages of drugs coupled with hypnosis were used to induce a complete hypnotic trance,” the memo reveals. “This trance was held for approximately one hour and forty minutes of interrogation with a subsequent total amnesia produced.” The plan was straightforward: drug the spies, interrogate the spies, and give them amnesia to make them forget.