Another surviving memo from this otherwise unreported chapter of Cold War history is from Dr. Henry Knowles Beecher, chief anesthetist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a CIA-army-navy adviser on Artichoke techniques. Beecher traveled to Germany to observe what was happening at Camp King. He was a colleague of Dr. Leopold Alexander’s in Boston and, like Alexander, was an outspoken advocate of the Nuremberg Code, the first principle of which is informed consent. And yet in one of the stranger Cold War cases of dissimulation, Dr. Beecher was a participant in secret, government-sponsored medical experiments that did not involve consent. Beecher was paid by the CIA and the navy to consult on how best to produce amnesia in Soviet spies after they were drugged and interrogated so they would forget what had been done to them.
Dr. Frank Olson returned from Germany to his office in Detrick in a moral bind, according to his Detrick colleague the bacteriologist Norman Cournoyer. “He had a tough time after Germany… [d]rugs, torture, brainwashing,” Cournoyer explained decades later, for a documentary for German television made in 2001. Cournoyer said that Olson felt ashamed about what he had witnessed, and that the experiments at Camp King reminded him of what had been done to people in concentration camps. Back in America, Olson contemplated leaving his job. He told family members he was considering a new career, as a dentist. Instead, he stayed on at the bioweapons facility, becoming chief of the SO Division for a while. He continued to work on Top Secret biological and chemical weapons programs in the CIA’s office at Detrick, Building No. 439.
Unknown to Frank Olson, the CIA was expanding its Artichoke program in new ways, including expanding its use of LSD in “unconventional interrogations” through covert means. Strapping a suspected Soviet spy to a chair and dosing him with drugs, as was done at Camp King’s Haus Waldorf, was one approach to getting a spy to spill his secrets. But the CIA wondered what would happen if an enemy agent were to be given an incapacitating agent like LSD on the sly, without knowing he had been drugged. Would this kind of amnesia be effective? Could it produce loyalty? How much, if any, of the experience would be remembered? These were questions the CIA wanted answered. The director of the Technical Services Staff, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a stutterer with a club foot, decided that the first field tests should be conducted on men from the SO Division without them knowing about it. One of those targeted for experimentation was Dr. Frank Olson.
A week before Thanksgiving, in November 1953, six SO Division agents including Frank Olson and the new SO Division chief, Vincent Ruwet, were invited to a weekend retreat at a CIA safe house in western Maryland called Deep Creek Lake. There, the men from Detrick were met by TSS director Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, a chemist. One part of the agenda was to discuss the latest covert means of poisoning people with biological agents and toxic substances, including those that had been acquired from around the globe by Fritz Hoffmann, the Operation Paperclip scientist with the Chemical Corps. The second goal was to covertly dose the six SO Division men with LSD and record what happened. After dinner on the second night, Robert Lashbrook secretly added LSD to a bottle of Cointreau. The unwitting test subjects were all offered a drink, and all but two of the SO Division officers drank the aperitif; one had a heart condition and the other abstained from alcohol. Frank Olson had a terrible reaction to having been drugged with LSD. He became psychologically unstable and could not sleep. His boss, Vincent Ruwet, who had also been dosed, described his own LSD poisoning experience as “the most frightening experience I ever had or hope to have.” The CIA had at least one of their questions answered now; covert LSD poisoning did not produce amnesia.
When Monday morning came around, Ruwet arrived for work at 7:30, as usual. Inside Detrick’s Building No. 439 he found a very agitated Dr. Frank Olson waiting for him. Olson told Ruwet that he was devastated by what had happened at Deep Creek Lake. He wanted to quit or be fired. Ruwet told him to give the issue some time and to get back to work. But when Ruwet arrived for work the following morning at 7:30, he again found Frank Olson waiting for him. Olson’s mental state had deteriorated considerably, and Ruwet decided that he needed medical help. He called Agency headquarters, in Washington, D.C., and told Robert Lashbrook what was going on. Frank Olson was privy to the CIA’s most controversial behavior modification and mind control programs. If he had a psychotic break in public he could inadvertently talk—terribly ironic, since getting a man to spill his secrets was what this LSD poisoning program was all about. Were Frank Olson to talk, the Agency would have a nightmare on its hands.